M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“Shut up, Garcia,” she repeated. Despite his protestations, he didn’t go running after Jorgun to stop him. Instead, he stared at the zoomed image on the display.

“That guy hasn’t been eating well.” Trust Garcia to notice something like that. He never missed a meal.

Carefully they watched the display, looking for clues. They heard the boarding hatch open. They heard Jorgun’s shouted welcome. Then, and only then, the man relaxed, his shoulders sagging. With his hands raised, he stumbled toward the ship.

Behind him, faces appeared, peering out of the foliage. Scared, tired, hungry faces.

Prudence met the man at the boarding hatch. Standing at the top of the gangway gave her power, rendered him a supplicant at the foot of the throne. A simple trick, but it had worked on more than one dockside petty official.

“Thank Earth you’re here,” the man said.

“Captain Prudence Falling, of the Ulysses, ” she introduced herself. The formalities were there for a purpose. They gave structure to the negotiations, reminded everyone exactly where they stood. “And you are?”

“Brayson James.” There was no argument in his voice, only despair. “A pumpkin farmer. Or I was. Until we were attacked.”

“Attacked by who?” Garcia whispered fiercely from where he was hiding behind a bulkhead. “It freaking matters, don’t you think?”

It did matter, rather a lot. Knowing which planet launched the attack would tell them where to flee. “By who?”

Brayson shrugged.

“Burn Earth if I know. The bombs just fell out of the air. No warning. If I hadn’t been out in the field, trying to fix an irrigation line, I’d be dead with the rest of my family. They dropped a bomb right on my house, Captain. They aimed for us.”

“And those people?” Some of the crowd coming out of the woods were carrying weapons, but they no longer looked dangerous.

“Refugees and survivors. We haven’t eaten right for a week. Too afraid to go near town for any supplies that might be usable. They didn’t leave right away, Captain. They stayed and hunted us for days. We only figured it was safe now because you weren’t already dead.”

“Nice that you were thinking of us,” she said, but without heat. She would have done the same in their shoes. “You set the beacon?”

“Yes. And the seven before it. This is the first time a bomb didn’t fall out of the sky on it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Someone in the crowd answered with a shout. “Get us out of here!”

The Ulysses was a freighter, not a passenger liner. Its life support couldn’t keep a hundred people alive for the four-day trip through node-space to the next colony, let alone the long journey to Altair.

“I can’t take you to off-planet,” she said carefully. Unhappy crowds were not prone to listening to reason.

But Brayson stared at her, his face set into ugly hardness, like badly poured concrete that could never be smoothed over. “We’re not running away. And we’re done hiding. Take us to the capital.”

The Launceston came out of node-space fast, silent, and ready for anything. Regulations called for battle stations when exiting any node, since one was necessarily blind to local conditions on the other side, and “surprise” was a dirty word in military-speak.

Lieutenant Kyle Daspar had his own reasons to expect shenanigans. Following up on an anonymous tip wasn’t really what an up-and-coming police detective with political connections was supposed to be doing. But his orders came from on high, and plenty of hints had been dropped about how it might be important to the League, so there had never been a chance of saying no. His instincts told him there were unseen angles to the situation. And he didn’t like surprises any more than the military.

The trip had been miserable. Three nodes and twelve days out from Altair, on a small ship with six angry soldiers. They looked down on him for being a civilian, they despised him for being a League officer, but they hated him because their captain did. And their captain hated him for a perfectly good reason: the papers Kyle carried from the League gave him command of the ship.

You can’t make a captain a servant on his own ship, not even a patrol boat the size of the Launceston . Not without making him hate you and everything you stand for. The heavy-handed blundering of the League was its own worst enemy.

But the League had other enemies. Some of them were political, like the Alliance, the chief opposition party despite its sheer ineffectiveness. Some of them were vocal, like the vid celebrities and their talk shows, although equally ineffective. But some of them were secret: deep, dark, and biding their time, working from within to expose and destroy.

Like Lieutenant Kyle Daspar.

But that was a thought too dangerous to dwell on for a man as deeply undercover as Kyle was.

“Orders, Commander?” Captain William Stanton had been icily formal from the first instant his gaze had lighted on Kyle’s armband, back in the Altair spaceport. Kyle had hoped the man would at least swear out loud while reading the orders that had seized his ship, but he had been disappointed. Stanton had simply become colder. If Stanton had made an outburst, Kyle could have forgiven him, and then at least they could have had a human interaction. But the captain was too well trained. He folded up the orders precisely, handed them back to Kyle frostily, and proceeded to follow them literally.

That was part of the problem. Too many people followed orders without raising enough fuss. Furious that Stanton was going to make the trip unbearably difficult for him, Kyle had leapt into his role and played the tin horn to the limit. Theoretically, he meant to push Stanton to the point of rebellion, since making enemies for the League was part of his secret mission statement.

So much contempt crammed into the tiny confines of a patrol boat made for a very miserable trip indeed.

“Contact Kassa spaceport and get clearance to land.” Kyle could hardly admit he had no clue what to do next. All the tip had said was “Go to Kassa.” He still had a million kilometers before he had to come up with a new plan.

“Sir,” said the comm officer, “there’s no radio traffic from Kassa. Not even a navigation beacon.”

“What? That’s a violation of code, isn’t it? They can’t turn off their nav beacons.” Kyle was disgusted by the thought that he had come all the way out here to write somebody a maintenance ticket.

But Captain Stanton’s disgust had a more immediate target: Kyle. He could see it written all over the man’s face. It was an active kind of disgust, not the passive contempt he’d come to take for granted.

“Do you have something to say, Captain?”

Stanton answered in precise, clipped tones, each word carefully enunciated. “I believe the commander does not understand the full import of comm’s data.”

Kyle translated that in his head, from military language to ordinary speech. I think you’re a fucking idiot. And I hate you. Idiot.

“Feel free to fill me in, Captain.” It must be something important for Stanton to have brought it up at all, instead of just letting Kyle make a fool of himself.

“There’s no radio from the colony. None at all.”

“Why would they be trying to talk to us? They don’t know we’re here.” That was the point of coming in silent, wasn’t it?

Gritting his teeth in frustration, Stanton tried again.

“Commander. There is no radio traffic on the planet. No one down there is talking to each other.”

A blip appeared on the console in front of Kyle. He didn’t know much about spaceships, but he knew what that blip meant.