M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“It’s not that kind of puzzle, Jor. But we can go get you one from the store.”

Outside, they waited for the cab. The cab would take them to her ship, where she would wait some more. Prudence tried to pretend that she was in a node. Those days of enforced waiting never bothered her. They were like vacations from the world. There was nothing that could touch you, and nothing you could do about it. The node was safe.

Kyle Daspar’s death had proved that Altair wasn’t.

Baharain was an ugly planet. No wonder Dejae had left it.

The atmosphere was toxic. Not merely oxygen-free, but actually poisonous. The gravity was heavy, the days were short, and the solar radiation was carcinogenic. As if to celebrate these ugly features, the domed cities were smelly, squat, and dark.

The planet was rich in heavy metals and closely placed to a node. A hundred thousand people made a living out of these two slightly less ugly features. If you could call artificial light, air, and gravity a living.

Next to metals, immigrants were Baharain’s chief exports. People came to work, saved their credits, and left as soon as they could. A suitcase full of gold or palladium would fund retirement on any planet.

Kyle sank into this stream of economic adventurers without a splash. Asking questions and getting answers proved to be more difficult. People here were suspicious of everyone and everything, and with good reason. Kyle had learned that at least one planet used Baharain as its penal system. Crimes were punished by fines measured in kilos of metal, which amounted to years of servitude. The offenders were shipped off to Baharain to earn their redemption, die, or give up and accept permanent banishment. While Kyle could see the advantages for the locals, it was rather an impolite way to treat the rest of the galaxy. Sweeping your trash into your neighbor’s yard wasn’t very neighborly, even if it was historically commonplace.

Suffering under the peeling, drab dome, watching men and women trudge from their hovels to their pits, Kyle wasn’t sure how many of the men he’d sent to prison on Altair would switch places with these poor drudges. Prison was just another society. Some men took to it, and some didn’t. Some were better once they got out, and some weren’t.

It was hard to think of Prudence as one of those eternal wanderers, floating without connection from place to place. Was she a criminal, banished from her home? Or had she sent herself into exile, fleeing guilt or shame or simple dissatisfaction? It hardly mattered if she were really from a distant world or not. Star-farer or secret agent, she was cut off from her past just as irrevocably. She could never return to the life she had left. He wondered if she remembered that old life, the way he sometimes remembered his life before the League.

The wretches on Baharain didn’t think about their past lives. They barely remembered their own names. None of them remembered Veram Dejae. He crawled through the restaurants and bars, looking for a crack in the wall of ignorance and disinterest. He hadn’t bothered with official channels. That had been done before, with no result. Rica had given Kyle a copy of the previous investigator’s reports. What passed for a government on Baharain was a collection of corporations, and they were not interested in discussing where Veram Dejae had come from.

But he certainly hadn’t come from here. Only the poorest or most negligent parents would try to raise a child on this sorry excuse for a planet. Dejae was too healthy, too smart, too tall to have grown up in this stultifying environment.

There were no clues to be found in the nooks and crannies of these domes. But Kyle had learned how Dejae worked. The secret would be in plain sight.

The first step was to find out how Dejae’s money got delivered. Baharain had its own credit system, but nobody took their sticks off-world. They took sticks of precious metals instead. Barbaric, but effective, and harder to trace than even Altair’s anonymous credit sticks.

He spent three days in dirty clothes and week-old stubble trawling the spaceport. The ships that wouldn’t offer him passage at any price had to be the ones carrying cash payments. The one going to Altair—a beefy freighter three times the size of Prudence’s little ship—had to be Dejae’s. Even Kyle’s Altairian accent couldn’t get him on that ship.

There was no hope of finding out what or who had loaded the ship, of course. Merely asking could prove to be dangerous. Instead, Kyle watched who came to unload it.

The majority of the cargo seemed to be machine parts. Altair’s highly skilled workforce and advanced technological infrastructure made plenty of those, and a world like Baharain would need them. The bulk of the parts went to a mining corporation called Radii Development Corp.

One area the local government did pay attention to was corporate filings. For good reason—they charged companies to file them, fined companies for not filing them, and collected a fee from anyone who wanted to look at them. Kyle paid without complaint. It seemed morally less objectionable than bribing an official to give him the information on the sly, like he would have had to do on any other world.

What he learned was the same thing he’d heard on the street. RDC was an interstellar conglomerate, like all the major players on Baharain, but about fifteen years ago it had started pulling ahead of the competition.

Scouring years of business records reminded Kyle of why he had never been able to stomach forensic accounting. At least the street criminals were living people, however broken. Corporate lawyers were like zombies. They said as little as possible, took as long as they could to do it, and lied without even realizing it. Kyle began to hate them more than he hated juicers. At least the juicers had fun while eating their own souls.

Eventually he managed to find out why RDC was winning the game. They had adopted a policy of automation, replacing more and more workers with automated equipment. An unobvious choice, given how cheaply human beings could be hired. The business vids debated the wisdom of RDC’s course, suggesting that the cost of development and maintenance of the machinery would eat into their profit margin more than their increased production would grow it.

The records seemed to indicate they were right. RDC was taking market share, but not making any more money. Yet RDC went on deploying automation, year after year. This was exactly the kind of uninteresting mystery Kyle was looking for.

The other fact that he learned from the government database was a detail too old and trivial to filter up from street gossip. Fifteen years ago RDC had acquired a new chief executive officer, from off-world.

Kyle couldn’t find any pictures of the man, but he didn’t need one. He already knew what the chief executive officer of RDC looked like, because he’d already met him once. Five years ago, on Altair. In a sporty ground car. Making an illegal turn.

A shower, a shave, and a fresh suit later, Kyle went to renew that acquaintance.

RDC’s corporate headquarters were more impregnable than the Fleet War Room on Altair. Kyle didn’t make it past the secretaries.

Personnel made him fill out forms and said they’d get back to him, but generally they didn’t hire security officers without a recommendation. Investor Relations wouldn’t talk to him until after he purchased at least a thousand shares. Public Relations was willing to talk, but after two hours he knew less than when he’d walked in the door. The only thing he got out of the day was an offer to work as a miner, for about two-thirds the going rate.

He took it. He was running low on leads and credits. And it had another advantage.