M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

Crawling on the ground, he picked out the silhouette of the buggy. As much as he wanted to, he could not stand and run, because then he would lose sight of the buggy. As if he could run blind across broken ground, anyway.

The shadow from before, from on top of the hill, flashed through his mind. It had been to the right. This creature had come from the left. There was another one out there, still stalking him.

Scrabbling on all fours knees, dipping his head to keep the buggy in sight, he battered his hands and knees without mercy. It was the longest seven meters of his life.

Crawling into the buggy, he flicked on the exterior headlights. They would give away his position, yes, but without them he simply could not drive. On their brightest setting they revealed only outlines. He could avoid boulders, but crevices would be invisible to him. He would be lucky to survive the first kilometer.

He was still owed some luck. But he wasn’t sure he deserved it.

After five minutes he stopped and turned out the lights. Closing his eyes was unbearably hard. Forcing himself to count to one hundred was the most terrifying thing he had ever done.

When he opened them again, he could almost see. If he drove slowly enough, he would not need the lights. The lights would kill him. Driving too slowly would kill him. Wrecking the buggy would kill him.

There were a lot of ways to die out here, but all of them were the same, in the end. A spider standing over you with shining fangs. Kyle thought about what spiders did with things they caught.

Bobby might have been the lucky one.

But he wasn’t. Kyle’s damned luck held out. Gradually he drove faster as his vision returned, and nothing sprang out of the darkness on him. He found a road, and picked a direction at random. After a kilometer he thought to turn the buggy’s navcom back on. It told him he had chosen correctly. It even warned him about upcoming curves and rough spots.

Damned luck.

Pulling up to the same air lock he and Bobby had left, he was too tired to be worried. The authorities wouldn’t give him any trouble. Dejae-2 couldn’t afford to let people know he had killer spider guards. Instead, he would send an assassin, somebody who had to work outside the system. That meant Kyle had a little time.

It also meant that he had to ditch the fake persona he had been living under. He didn’t think he could even risk going back to his hotel. His documents opened the air lock, but they also marked his presence outside the dome, and every person who returned after the spider died would surely be investigated by Dejae’s agents. He drove in, waited for the scrubbers to cycle the air, and drove out the other side. At least he didn’t have to present a credit stick to pay a fee. All the air locks let you in for free, a reasonable safety precaution. That just meant they charged you double to get out.

Parking the buggy behind a rowdy bar, he left the keys in it. Maybe someone would do him a favor and steal it. He dropped his old documents into a curbside trash disintegrator, and shoved his pressure suit in after it. The machine choked on it, but after a few well-placed kicks it fired up again and shredded the suit. Kyle idly reflected that you could probably shove a body down the damn thing.

All he had left were the clothes on his back, two credit sticks, his original Altair ID papers, and the data chit in his pocket. Bobby had died so Kyle could get a vid of a man in a mask.

Kyle consoled himself with the fact that he would probably die over the same useless vid. Then he found a cheap, cheap hotel room and gave up one of his credit sticks.

Seven hours in the heavy G had drained him, leaving him brittle like a rag wrung dry and left in the sun to parch. He should have collapsed into unconsciousness as soon as his head hit the disposable foam pillow. But the memory of the young man struggling under the spider would not leave him. That should have been him; would have been, if not for Bobby’s heroics. In the grand scheme of things it was just another casualty of the Kassan war, but this one had been on Kyle’s watch. He had never lost a member of his squad before. He didn’t understand how to deal with it.

Only the inescapable fact that escaping from this planet would be impossible, and therefore he would soon join Bobby in death, let him finally sink into sleep.

In the morning he did the only thing he could. It would be what they expected, of course. But he didn’t have a choice. Five minutes in a convenience store and he was deep brown, staining his face with some cheap cosmetic intended to preserve skin in the harsh recycled air, but undoubtedly chemically inert and useless. Then he went down to the docks, to try and find a ride home. A tramp freighter would be his only hope. They would search the passenger liners, like the one he had come on. Not that he could afford a luxury ticket, anyway.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of tramp freighters on Baharain. He wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t dare consult an official registry or government information kiosk to find out. Instead, he went from bay to bay, looking through the windows to see if there was a ship outside. He was tired, anxious, and angry. That’s how they caught him by surprise.

He heard a voice behind him. Soft and yet hard, familiar and yet exotic. Fear bit into his belly like the spider, his stomach muscles contracting involuntarily. He spun, knowing what he would see.

The perfect operative. Always right behind him. Prudence eyed him suspiciously, something glittering in her right hand, while her massive soldier reached out to grab Kyle’s shoulder.

Kyle struck, sinking his fist into Jorgun’s gut. The man was huge, but Kyle would not die without a fight. Jorgun fell like a tree to the ground.

The giant stared up at him in anguish, and burst into tears.

She nearly killed him.

Stepping deftly forward, the mordant knife shielded behind her body, she was already in motion. The name came to her from ancient fairy tales. Wight . A dead man, returned from the grave to seek vengeance. He looked the part, disheveled and haggard, his eyes dull and flat. His face was the wrong color, his hair untrimmed.

He couldn’t be a supernatural undead monster, of course. He was just an ordinary, living monster, sent here by the League to intercept her. Covering their bases. She had stumbled too deep into the web, and now they had caught her.

But not without a fight. Not without cost to themselves. With her left hand extended, covering her approach, she moved into killing range.

“I’m sorry,” Kyle said to Jorgun.

“Why did you hit me?” Jorgun whimpered through childlike sobs.

Kyle’s face was a mask of confusion. Unconsciously Prudence stopped, waiting for the answer.

“I thought you were someone else,” Kyle said, shrugging helplessly.

She tapped him on the chest with her left hand. She could have used her right hand, delivered the fatal blow. She could have gutted him from sternum to throat in one smooth, easy sweep. But she didn’t.

What kind of wight apologized? What kind of assassin attacked bare-handed?

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“Kyle Daspar. The real one.” He grinned lopsidedly at some private joke. “Who the hell are you?”

“That’s an idiotic question.”

“And yours wasn’t?” He swayed a little, as if he were dizzy.

“When I left Altair, you were dead. Burned in your bed. So, no, my question was not idiotic.”

“They missed me. Bungled it, like they always do. And now here you are, to finish the job.”

On the edge of her vision, two men approached. Wearing uniforms of gray and blue. Station security.