The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  The visions of Heaven were out there, if only a man could stare hard enough to see it. No one could, of course. It was optically, mathematically impossible. But that didn’t stop people from trying.

  The domes would be transparent at night, and Kyle would get his picture. Then he could go home again.

  The foreman was scarred, ugly, and one-eyed, but that eye was keen. He barked out corrections and derisions with uncanny accuracy. Kyle wondered why boot camp always felt the same, no matter what boot you were learning to wear.

  “Nobody dies on my watch.” The foreman was adjusting Kyle’s suit. “It detracts from my bonus. Your helmet’s too small, man. Get another one.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kyle shuffled over to the equipment table and found a helmet with a larger number printed on the collar ring. When he got back to his place in line, the foreman was waiting for him.

  “Don’t sir me. This ain’t Fleet. You’re just an idiot on the wrong end of a shovel, and I’m the guy handing out shovels. That makes me smarter than you, but it don’t make me a sir.”

  “Fair enough,” Kyle said with a grin.

  “Yeah, yeah, yuck it up. They all do, the first day. We’ll see how much you’re laughing at the end of the shift, when just raising your nose to sneer at me feels like lifting a two-ton hopper. No, you idiot, the other way.” The foreman reached out to twist Kyle’s helmet into the locking ring.

  “Sorry … I’m not used to space suits.” On Kassa they had only worn them for warmth.

  “I can see that, man. And I can see you ain’t Fleet, either. I don’t care. You ain’t from here, you ain’t staying here, and you got a sob story an hour long. And I don’t care. All I care about is that you’re clocking out in six hours with all your parts attached.” He raised his voice, shouting so the rest of the workers could not fail to hear him even through their suits. “That goes for all of you. Stop thinking you can do this. You’ve been in sims—I hope, and if not, it’s too late to tell me now—but real heavy G ain’t like a sim. It don’t go away after half an hour. It tugs at you all the time, drags at every fiber of your being, sucks you down like the dying pull of Earth herself. It is your enemy. Forget that for one microsecond and you’ll be a debit in my paycheck. So stop thinking you can do this job. And start focusing on surviving it.”

  It was only seventeen percent over Terran standard. Kyle had tried the sim, doing deep knee bends in a gravity-enhanced chamber, and while it felt ridiculously uncomfortable, he had passed the medical exams.

  “Every step you take is a fifth harder. Every drop you fall is a fifth longer. Everything you pick up is a fifth heavier. All them fifths add up fast, in ways your idiot brains didn’t evolve to handle. You can’t operate by instinct out there. Every single action has to be consciously evaluated before you do it. You will burn calories you didn’t know you had. You will strain muscles they ain’t even named in the medical vids. If you try to act like you’re in normal G, your suit’s air-cracker will not be able to keep up oxygen production, and you will pass out. This is for your own good. An unconscious idiot is cheaper than a dead one. We can fix your air, but we can’t fix your heart if it bursts a chamber.”

  The idea that he could die of heartbreak struck Kyle as unlikely. If that were possible, then walking off the Ulysses for the last time should have killed him.

  “Now get your arses into the air lock. We’re gonna shut the door and flood it with kelamine. If you start throwing up in your suit, that’s ’cause you didn’t seal it properly. You can thank us for saving your life after you clean out your suit.”

  The suits were different from Prudence’s. Heavy opaque rubber instead of the clear thin plastic he had expected. He didn’t know if that was because they needed to be stronger, or if the rubber was just cheaper. The suit was impregnated with heavy salts to block radiation, but so was the glass faceplate of the helmet, and it was transparent. On the other hand, there wasn’t much value in being able to see through these suits. They didn’t contain slender dark-haired girls with intense black eyes.

  The air lock cycled, lights going from green to yellow. Nobody threw up, which Kyle took as a good beginning. Then the lights went red, and the outer door creaked open.

  Climbing down a short set of stairs, he took each step carefully. The foreman was standing to the side, watching the new recruits critically. Kyle stepped out of line to join him.

  “Why kelamine?” he asked.

  “We used to just use a stinker, but one day we got a jackass with anosomia. Couldn’t smell a thing, and didn’t think to mention it until it was too late. The kelamine means we don’t gotta rely on you idiots to tell us something’s wrong. Plus, it washes off the suits easier.”

  Kyle debated asking if it was cheaper, too, but decided not to.

  “See that one?” The foreman pointed to a young man who had taken the last two steps in one go. “That jackass is gonna get somebody killed. Go ride his arse and keep him in line. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” Kyle agreed. The foreman had an impressive sense of judgment. He seemed to already know what every member of his team was capable of.

  Kyle shuffled over to join up with the young stallion. “Hey, slow down a second. Give an old man a break.”

  The kid turned and stared at him through his glass bubble, trying to see if Kyle was ribbing him.

  “The foreman teamed us up,” Kyle explained. “This is my first time out here. How about you?”

  “Yeah,” the kid agreed. “But I did a lot of time in the sims. I’ll be okay.”

  Kyle hadn’t asked. The kid must be pretty nervous to volunteer so much information. People always led with what they were trying to hide.

  They climbed onto an open-bed truck with the rest of the squad. The foreman came by to make sure everyone was hanging on to a safety strap. Then he shouted to the driver, and the truck rolled forward, jiggling heavily over every bump. Kyle watched the alien landscape bouncing by for as long as he could stand it. The rocks were almost all the same dull gray, with only the occasional streak of brown or black. Wind had shaped the landscape, carving out pillars and valleys, smoothing craters and building drifts, but after the first five minutes it was just a bunch of rocks.

  The truck descended into a valley, rock walls rising up and spreading away.

  “Why don’t they use grav-cars?” he asked his young companion.

  “Cost. The extra Gs makes them burn too much fuel.” The kid had done his homework.

  “Where are you from?” Kyle regretted asking it immediately. On Baharain, people didn’t like to talk about their past, and Kyle had no particular desire to discuss his own. But he liked this kid.

  The kid hesitated, but talked anyway. He would learn some expensive lessons about trust, if he stayed in this cesspit long enough. Hopefully the lessons wouldn’t be fatal.

  “Kassa. We got attacked. I used to cut trees, but my dad said we’d need hard currency to make it through winter.”

  The effluent of war. Refugees.

  “I heard about that,” Kyle said, feeling like a heel for lying. “But you’ll pull through.”

  “If they don’t come back. Dad says why would they, but nobody knows why they came in the first place.”

  “Is anybody sending help?” His news was a few weeks out of date.

  “Altair Fleet is there, but they don’t do much. Just hang around in deep space, looking for secret nodes. Other planets have sent food and stuff, but we don’t need that. We need a fleet of our own.”

  That surely couldn’t be what the League wanted to hear. They wanted the worlds cowering under their thumb, not arming themselves for resistance.

  “Fleets are expensive,” Kyle said. It was a perennial political football on Altair. Fleet never seemed to provide anything except prestige. Not everyone felt that was worth paying for. Kyle’s experience as a cop had convinced him that the reason Fleet had nothing to do was because it existed. Just like detectives had a lot less to do when there were regular
patrols by beat cops. If Fleet didn’t exist, then Altair would pretty quickly find out why they needed it.

  He imagined there was a lot of crowing and finger-pointing going on right now, back on Altair. The people who voted for Fleet would be bragging about their prescience. He wasn’t ready to join them, though. Not until he was sure Fleet could actually help.

  Not until he was sure whose side Fleet was really on.

  The truck rattled around a corner, exposing a vast but shallow crater. The road crept along a lip of the crater. Men and machines labored below. Kyle goggled at them, stunned by the improbable sight.

  “What are those?”

  His knowledgeable young guide answered. “Crawlers. The company’s secret weapon.”

  The crawlers were large, compared to men, but small on the scale of starships and earth-moving equipment. The other companies used massive bulldozers and ore transports the size of houses, or sometimes the size of entire apartment buildings. These machines seemed almost delicate in comparison. Only five meters high and ten wide, they looked like animated bowls carrying ore from place to place. What shocked Kyle was how they moved.

  On eight legs. Like insects, stepping gingerly from place to place, moving in unnatural gaits with their own sense of purpose.

  The wheel was as old as Earth, tried and tested by the ages. Improved by tracks and rails, it could go anywhere. The only technology that had superseded the wheel was gravitics. Wings, hovercrafts, and jet propulsion had all fallen by the wayside. Not every planet had an atmosphere suitable to aerodynamics. Not every planet had an atmosphere.

  But they all had gravity, and they all had surfaces. Gravitics and the wheel had carried man to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Why change?

  “How are you supposed to drive one of those things?” Kyle had mastered several versions of the ground car, with various numbers of wheels from two to twelve. He couldn’t imagine what kind of controls would be needed for legs.

  “That’s the trick,” his companion said. “You don’t. They drive themselves. They’re robotic. That’s why they can justify paying us less. No human can operate those bloody machines, so they don’t have to pay for skilled labor.”

  No human could design those bloody machines.

  The image of the spinning disk flashed through Kyle’s mind.

  Eight resting places. Eight kickplates. Eight legs.

  Would anybody else make the connection? Would anyone on Altair think of this distant mining camp and its eight-legged robots? Probably not, because no one on Altair had any reason to. They were thinking about hairy monsters from the dark, not technological beings who made machines in their own image. But that might change when they found out their prime minister had a twin who played with spiders’ toys.

  The foreman was right. After five hours of heavy G, Kyle could feel the weight of his eyebrows pulling on his face. The thought of lying down and taking a nap wasn’t refreshing. He knew that his ears would try to stretch to the ground, his lips would slide off his teeth and into his jowls, his tongue would fall back into his throat and suffocate him, if the effort of lifting his chest with every breath didn’t. Lying down would just be giving in to the gravity.

  Instead, he pointed his laser at a gleaming patch on the ground. Human brains were good for something. In a matter of minutes he had learned to distinguish between dross and value, with an accuracy the dumb robots could never match. One color of laser for inert material that needed to be hauled away to the dump, and another for ore to be fed into the refinery. That was tiring enough. He couldn’t imagine wielding a real shovel in this environment.

  The mechanical spider that towered over him waltzed to his signal, lowering itself over the spot and biting into the earth with black iron jaws. Fangs of shining steel jackhammered from its lips, cracking the ground into rubble, while knobby teeth chewed and swallowed. When the beast was full, it waltzed off to the appropriate destination while he sought out the next target.

  So many legs in motion could not be described any other way than waltzing. The contrast between the elegant dance and the slavering feast sickened Kyle. He was tired of contrasts. He wanted something in his life to be pure and simple, without silver linings or feet of clay. He wanted something to be straightforward, without hidden depths or secret angles.

  The spider-machine stood, began its waltz. Two steps and it faltered, like a dancer losing the beat. Years of paranoia moved Kyle before he was conscious of the danger. His puny biological brain, so adept at recognizing patterns, sent him stumbling backward on a tangential line for no logical reason.

  He collided with an iron post. The leg of another spider, too close behind. His own machine put down legs at random, confused, while the choreographed waltz transformed into senseless flailing. The machine toppled under its momentum, falling with unnatural acceleration.

  The side of the beast slammed into the ground where Kyle had been standing. Ore spilled from the top, flowing over him, knocking him to the ground under its weight.

  He rolled with the blow. Better to be crushed under weight than to tear his suit trying to escape. Broken limbs could be healed, but the atmosphere would poison him in minutes.

  Voices yelling. Hands at his suit, digging him out.

  “Is your suit still sealed?” The foreman held Kyle’s helmet between his hands, shouting at him, demanding attention.

  Kyle focused his eyes on the virtual display projected onto his faceplate. Warning beacons flashed in red. Belatedly, an alarm began to beep. Underneath it he could hear a rushing hiss. The air felt heavy and dense in his face. The foreman must have seen the answer in his face.

  “Earth-fire! Can you stand?” The foreman wasn’t panicking, so Kyle didn’t either. He stood up, shocked that nothing was broken. From his left shin white vapor spewed forth. Kyle stared at it stupidly, but the foreman was already kneeling, swatting at the plume of precious air.

  The hissing stopped. A few seconds later the alarm bell shut off. The air still felt dense and confining.

  “What’s your pressure say now?”

  Kyle tore his attention away from the patch on his shin, and looked at the display. “A hundred and twenty-seven percent.”

  “Okay, good. Can you walk? Don’t worry about the patch. It’s stronger than the suit. But you gotta move, show us if there are any other ruptures about to blow. Do it while you still have over-pressure. The blowback will keep the atmosphere out. You’ll be fine.”

  Kyle took an experimental step. Nothing bad happened. He could see men crowding around the wreckage. He could see his young companion, paralyzed by horror, standing next to the offending spider.

  His spider. The kid had steered his beast too close, and Kyle’s had become confused and lost its footing.

  “Earth-damned model sevens.” The foreman gave in to swearing, which meant the danger must be past. “These bastards get in each other’s way. Only happens when they’re trying to stand up. I know they have an upgrade module. Heard it went through quality testing. Ought to have all these units retrofitted. Take another step, man. Tell me where it hurts.”

  “I’m fine,” Kyle said. Bruised and battered, but not broken. He could still wiggle his fingers and toes.

  The foreman walked around him, visually checking for damage to the suit. “Okay, go ahead and vent your over-pressure. I’ll plug in another emergency canister, just in case. Take these patches. If anything starts spurting, slap one on it.”

  Kyle wasn’t sure he was in a state to be slapping anything, but he took the patches. They felt comforting in his hand. He spoke the command word and a jet of vapor shot out of the side of his neck.

  His face no longer felt like invisible hands were pressing on it.

  “You okay?” The foreman was asking about his mental state this time.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” Kyle forced himself to breathe through his nose. “I’m okay. But my spider’s down.”

  The foreman shrugged. “Forget that piece of shit. Go back to
the truck and sit down. The shift’s almost over, anyway. If you get woozy or anything, trip the alarm. Don’t let yourself go to sleep, though. That will trip the alarm too. I’ve got your suit’s vital sensors jacked to mine, so just kick back and take it easy. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” Kyle agreed. That was pretty much all he was capable of at the moment.

  “I’m sorry.” The kid had come over, close enough that Kyle could see his blush. Kyle wondered how the vid industry was managing, since apparently the League had hired all the best actors and turned them into assassins.

  But that was paranoia talking. The kid wasn’t necessarily trying to kill him. The accident could have been caused by someone else, remotely messing with the spider’s programming. Really, any of a number of people here could be trying to kill him.

  It was even conceivable that it had merely been bad luck.

  He waved the kid off, unable to deal with the turmoil of suspicion. Stumbling to the truck, he thought about how the puzzle pieces fit together. From the too-early tip, to the twin prime minister, to Radii Development Corp. The stray threads kept popping up all over the place, and when he tugged on them, things exploded, caught on fire, or fell on his head.

  Maybe the only puzzle, then, was why he kept tugging.

  But when he closed his eyes, all he could see were visions of Altair in ruins, its beautiful cities shattered and lifeless like the smoking husks of towns on Kassa.

  THIRTEEN

  Party Shoes

  Jandi only made her wait three days. By then, early vid recordings from Kassa were all over the network. Garcia was frantic, wailing about the opportunities they were missing all day, and drinking himself into a coma every night. But Prudence didn’t have a destination yet.