The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  Just as she started thinking how nice it was that he had called to warn her, he went on.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “Now why do you think I would, Welsing?” She tried not to sound too exasperated. It was his nature, after all.

  “Because you left out of here to Carnor, about two weeks ago. And whatever spooked Fleet came here from Carnor, on a patrol boat named the Launceston.”

  Damn. She’d passed through Altair with her shipment of threshing machines, now rusting in an abandoned Kassan wheat field. Since she had to log a flight plan with Fleet, her destination would be a matter of record. Fleet felt it was a public service to keep track of the free-traders, and to let everyone know what they were up to. Everyone but the free-traders probably appreciated it.

  She was intending to broad-beam her news, anyway. No point in not telling Welsing. She sighed, not because she didn’t enjoy talking to Welsing, but because she hated telling this story. “Wels, you better send the girl out.”

  “No can do, Pru, it’s her room. Hang on a second.” Screeching, the sound of something soft being thrown as violently as possible, and then the slam of a door.

  Welsing came back on the line. “Okay, Pru, I’m standing in a hotel hallway with no pants on, but I’m alone. Spill.” His voice started out aggravated, but by the end of his first sentence he had returned to his smoothest charm.

  “Maybe later would be a better time?” she said, unable to resist teasing him.

  “Nonsense. Now that I’ve been reminded of your stunning beauty, how could I possibly settle for that doxy? Just your voice is more sensuous than a dozen Vegas showgirls stark naked in a vat of butter.”

  She had to make a face at that. Jorgun laughed at her, although he couldn’t hear what Welsing had said. Jorgun had his own headset on, and was watching something on his console. Probably the last few weeks of cartoons.

  Normally he wouldn’t notice anything outside of his cartoons. The atmosphere of tension must be getting to him, too.

  “Real butter, Pru, not the synthetic stuff.” Welsing was filling the silence. If she let him go on, he’d start describing the showgirls. “Vegas” wasn’t a real place, just a slang term for high-class glitz and glamour, but she had no doubt his mind was full of very concrete images.

  “It’s not nice, Wels. But there’s profit, if you’re fearless. Kassa colony was bombed into the Stone Age. Thousands dead, no machinery, and winter coming on. They need stuff, a lot of stuff. I have a list.”

  The inevitable response. Swearing, then the question. “Earth-fire! By who?”

  “Nobody knows.” The lie got harder every time she repeated it. “But … Fleet has plenty of reason to be on alert.”

  Welsing was a blowhard, but he wasn’t stupid. “Why did you say ‘fearless,’ Pru?”

  “If nobody knows why they came, nobody knows if they’ll come back. I don’t want you blaming me when a war-fleet drops out of the sky on your pizza delivery.”

  “Damn, Pru. Damn.”

  “Put me through to a data channel. I’ll transmit the list. And Wels … don’t keep this a secret. Tell everyone on your list. The long list. This is a humanitarian crisis, not a monopoly-profit opportunity.”

  She thought of something else that might be more motivational.

  “There’ll be plenty of profit for everyone. Especially if you’re willing to take future-payment vouchers.” Anybody who had the cash to lend could make a profit both on delivery and interest. Welsing was the kind of guy who always seemed to have a lot of cash.

  “You don’t want a window?” He was asking if she wanted him to sit on the information until she had time to cut a few deals.

  “No, Wels. I don’t think I’m going back there. It was…” It was too much to ask of Jorgun. “I’ve seen enough.” It was too much to ask of her. Kyle might still be there, with his damnable papers and smoky black eyes. “I’m not giving you a window, either. I’ve got a dozen calls to answer, and I’ll be handing out the list to everyone.” The comm station had kept adding them while she had been talking to Welsing.

  “Understood, Pru. I’ll spread it around too. Humanitarian, like you said. Um, hate to chat and run, but I need to get some pants on. There’s a bellboy at the end of the hall now, and he doesn’t look amused.”

  Probably he just wanted to fill his hold with the prime cargos before the local vendors raised the prices. Welsing wasn’t the kind of guy who worried about bellboys.

  “Fair enough, Wels. Although I regret this comm was only audio.”

  “Honey, you have the taste to appreciate the unadorned human form. Not like these prudes on Altair. But call me later, we’ll do something naked.”

  “Prudence out,” she answered, rolling her eyes at his salaciousness. Constant repetition tended to rob it of effectiveness.

  “Welsing out,” and he was gone.

  Sighing, she pushed another button at random.

  EIGHT

  Home

  Kyle walked into his empty apartment and shut the door. Nothing greeted him, not even the apartment’s computer. He’d programmed it to not announce his comings and goings.

  Almost two weeks in the presence of the insufferably pompous Rassinger had flayed his patience to the bone. But he had learned things. He was certain, now, that Rassinger had expected to find the alien wreck. He was pretty sure that Rassinger had not expected to find Kyle.

  What he didn’t know was whether his tip had been a setup to get him killed, or a lead from a competing faction of the League. Or possibly even from an anti-League agent. And he didn’t know why Rassinger was out there looking for alien spaceships.

  After only one day, the Phoenix had loaded the wreck into its hold, and bolted for home. Kyle had begged a ride, partly to spy on the odious Rassinger, but also because he could accomplish nothing more on Kassa. The locals finally had enough government established that they resented his influence.

  Rassinger had tried to hide the wreck from him, sealing off the cargo bay and posting armed guards. Kyle found it disturbing that the district leader trusted Fleet personnel more than he trusted a fellow League officer. One with a sterling reputation, no less. True to that reputation, he had not even tried to breach Rassinger’s security cordon.

  Instead, he’d bowed and scraped, flattered and obeyed. It was sickening.

  Back on Altair, the Phoenix had vanished into the depths of a Fleet dock, discharging him like a bad sneeze along the way. He appreciated it. Security was tight, and the newsvid hounds had missed him. They found Rassinger and the captain of the Phoenix, through their various inside contacts, and ambushed the two officials with cameras and microphones. To little effect, since those two exalted individuals could cry “No comment” and push through the pack of slavering reporters with impunity. But a lowly functionary like Kyle would have found his private credit history accessed, and investigative snoops threatening to broadcast those indiscreet trips to the topless bar unless he gave them the scoop now.

  Not that there were any such trips. He’d lived his cover twenty-four and seven. After the traffic stop incident, he hadn’t really felt like a man, anyway. The urge had shriveled up and slunk away to hide.

  It was back now, in full insatiated force. The cool, slim figure of Prudence Falling haunted his nights. Her ambiguous status only added fuel to the fire.

  Was she a carefully placed operative or just a freelance captain in the wrong place at the wrong time? All he knew for sure was that she didn’t like Rassinger. That made him like her, of course, but it wasn’t quite enough. It didn’t mean she was on his side.

  If she was working for the League, and found out his true mission, she’d kill him without blinking. If she wasn’t working for the League, then just the armband he wore would drive her as far away as star-flight could take her. Either way, Prudence Falling was going to be nothing but a memory for him.

  Or possibly a lead. After checking his console for taps, snitches, a
nd worms, he put out a few discreet inquiries. Starship travel schedules, sandwiched in between commodity prices. If anybody was watching, they’d think he was merely trying to profit off of his insider knowledge of the situation on Kassa.

  Prudence’s ship had left only a few hours before the Phoenix had dropped in-system. A wise move for her, and what he had expected, but he still felt the pang of disappointment.

  She hadn’t gone back to Kassa. The log showed her heading out another one of the twelve nodes that fed Altair. That wealth of connections combined with an innocuous ecosphere had quickly marked Altair out for local supremacy in this sector of nodes. Life had been easy and good for a hundred years.

  Maybe too easy. Altair had stopped making hard choices a long time ago. The future looked like it was going to require some.

  He corrected himself; she hadn’t gone directly to Kassa. There were ways to get there other than the shortest route. Unwilling to trust the computer with such a sensitive inquiry, he printed out a node-chart and checked the routes by hand. She could still reach Kassa with seven extra hops.

  So now he knew no more than when he had walked in the door.

  The cupboard still had a few beers in it. Beer was old, old as Earth. Even on Earth it had been old. People liked that about it. They liked those little things that tied them to the past. People who couldn’t spell “Earth” without blushing, people whose sense of history extended no deeper than last season’s ball-game playoffs, would wax eloquent about the virtues of their favorite brand of beer, about how true its recipe was to the original, brewed by blind Tibetan monks in a stone castle a thousand years before electricity was invented.

  Not that anybody even knew what a Tibetan monk was, really. Half the sources said they were religious zealots, and the other half said they were super-soldiers with magic powers. Whatever beliefs they had held, whatever principles they had lived and died for, were dust now. Dust on a planet no one even remembered how to find. All that was left of them was a name, a few stories, and beer.

  Kyle popped the tab off the bottle, and waited the five seconds necessary for the contents to chill to the preset temperature. You could adjust it, if you wanted to, but Kyle left it at the factory default. It was his little homage to the wisdom of the monks. Presumably they knew what temperature beer tasted best at.

  He told the house audio system to play something. It picked a recording at random, which just happened to perfectly match his mood. The guitar was a one-man instrument, played by skill and subtlety. More impressively, it was analog. Thus, no two performances could ever sound exactly the same. The iconography was irresistible.

  Of course, his mood for the last five years had not changed. He was always alone, always in the dark, always brooding. Once he’d convinced the audio system to stop playing popular tunes delivered by advertising agencies, it had quickly learned to restrict itself to the solitary lament of classical guitar.

  He had never heard a live guitar performance. He wasn’t sure anybody on Altair even knew how to play one. The irony of appreciating an analog instrument, with its necessary unpredictability, through a digital recording, which was inflexibly unchanging, was not lost on him. It was just one of the many, many injustices he could do nothing about.

  In the middle of the night, he was able to answer one of his numerous questions. When the bomb went off, blasting through the ceiling of his bedroom and incinerating his bed, he immediately understood that Rassinger had not expected to find him on Kassa alive.

  The district leader was destined to be disappointed yet again. Kyle had developed the habit of sleeping anywhere but his bedroom. Usually it was the couch, but he also had a polyfoam mattress in the study.

  This was not as irrationally paranoid as it might seem. Kyle had his reasons, gleaned from a murder investigation several years ago. An assassin had rented the room below the victim’s apartment, set a directed charge on a timer, and departed for parts unknown. By the time the bomb went off, the trail was already three months cold. The chances of catching a man in his bed at 3:00 A.M. were reasonably good. Not good enough for any normal assassin, who got paid only on a successful job, but good enough for an organization that had a very long-term view, plenty of money to spend, and a powerful need to be completely insulated from any taint of illegality.

  An organization like the League, for instance.

  Of course, they could have just blown out his whole apartment. But the chance of collateral damage was high, and that meant a bigger investigation. They could flood his rooms with a neurotoxin with a short half-life. But that level of sophistication pointed fingers of its own. A simple shaped charge, within the skill set of any amateur chemist, a dozen credits’ worth of electronics, and a forged identity on a rental agreement were too generic to point anywhere.

  Sometimes the most sophisticated method was the simplest. The League had precious few virtues, but a crude appreciation for effectiveness was one of them. This trick had been used enough times that the city government had considered imposing real-time identity checks for apartment rentals. Naturally, the legislation never made it past the “under consideration” stage.

  Lying on his couch, watching the flames in his bedroom, he wondered what he should do. The internal fire control system was spritzing the blaze, and would eventually win its battle of chemistry. But police units had to be already en route.

  Hopefully they would be loyal to the force, and not Rassinger’s faction. Otherwise they might decide to finish the job before starting their investigation.

  His comm unit started ringing. Struck by the sheer incongruity of it, he answered.

  “Kyle? Are you okay?”

  A friendly voice. Or rather, the voice of a friend. Sergeant Baumer was far too bald, thick, and beady-eyed to be friendly. But he was honest, clean, and still tolerated Kyle from the patrols they had shared before the League had taken over Kyle’s career.

  Flicking on the unit, Kyle answered. “Help me, Baumer. I’m badly burned … passing out. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” He tossed his comm unit into the bedroom, where the flames quickly devoured it.

  It was a long shot. Baumer might or might not get the reference, and he might or might not be in a position to act on it. One of Kyle’s first days on the job, Baumer had been tasked by the others to vet the new kid. A med comm call had come in, and Baumer had let his face sink into the most wretched seriousness. He’d driven like a maniac to the apartment building, a seedy retirement den, and sprinted out of the car with Kyle close behind. At the building’s entrance he pulled Kyle away from the elevators.

  “They can’t be trusted, man, and it’s a matter of life and death!”

  After the first three flights of stairs, Baumer had collapsed, holding his ankle and cursing like a vid star. Kyle bounded up the next eight flights, his heart pounding, the fire in his lungs fueled by the desire to be a hero, the good cop, the man his father had expected. The locator led him to the apartment door, opened it for him, and he rushed inside.

  Dolores McNabtree was ninety-seven years old, a little senile and a lot crabby. Lying on her kitchen floor, she hissed at him like a wounded cat.

  “What took you so long? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Don’t just stand there, you young fool! Bring me my walker!”

  He carried the aluminum walker the three feet from the wall to the old lady. Then he picked her up with one hand. It took him another fifteen minutes to escape her constant nattering. He finally had to fake another emergency call. By the time he got out of her apartment, the musty smell had rubbed off on his new uniform.

  Baumer was sitting at the foot of the stairs, laughing his ass off. Dolores called in at least once a day. Sometimes three times a day, if her equally geriatric daughter failed to visit her.

  “How do you know it’s not a real emergency?” Kyle appreciated a good joke as much as the next man, but he wanted to learn.

  The answer was simple. Whenever Dolores got bored and lonely, she would hold her breath
until her medical monitor freaked out. Despite her age, she could hold her breath like a champion—the current record was three minutes and fifteen seconds. The way you knew it wasn’t a real emergency was because of the unique combination of elements: a “not breathing” call, after two in the afternoon, from Dolores’s med unit.

  The lesson was that you had to learn your beat. You couldn’t let a machine do it for you.

  Kyle started packing a pillowcase with the things he might need. Papers, credit sticks, a change of underwear, that sort of thing. Not his service pistol. It had a GPS tracker in it. The police liked to know where all their people were. That was why he was using a pillowcase, too. All of his luggage had GPS trackers in them. So many ways to foil thieves; so many inconveniences when a man wanted to disappear.

  The police were taking an unusually long time to appear. Kyle tossed his pistol into the smoking room—the fire was out now—and retreated to the study. Hiding in the shadows of his own apartment. If they came in with IR goggles, it wouldn’t matter.

  Finally the door swung open, unlocked by a police override. As he had hoped, Baumer stepped through it first.

  “Kyle?” he called, softly.

  Kyle made a softer sound, tapping the door he was half-hidden behind. Baumer flicked his eyes that direction, and then let in two more men.

  Firefighters, not medics, which was odd. But they weren’t wearing League armbands, which was a relief.

  They closed the door behind them. The firefighters went straight for the ruined bedroom. Baumer let them go and then slipped over to Kyle.

  “What on Earth is up, Kyle?” He kept his voice at a whisper.

  That was a good question. But Kyle had one of his own. “Can you trust them?”

  “Yeah. I told the ambulance team it was a potentially dangerous situation, and made them wait for the fire squad. Heck, it’s even a fire. So I got my nephew in here. He’ll play along, and so will his partner. But any second now those boys are gonna figure out there isn’t a body in there.”