M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

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 His news was a few weeks out of date.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.