M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

A shudder of dismay ran through her spine. Jandi had prepared her for double-dealing, some criminal smuggling of tech and weapons. But Kyle was describing a partnership. How could a man turn against his own species? She grimaced in disgust.

“You don’t look very surprised,” Kyle said, surprised.

“The spider-ship we found—it was made on Baharain. Or at least, the cockpit glass was. I stole a piece, had it analyzed.” Distressingly, Kyle didn’t look surprised at that. With effort she returned her attention to the screen. “Why is Dejae wearing a mask? Was this at a party or something?” It looked like the kind of extravagance Cinderella’s would love to sell.

“No, he was home alone. When a servant came to the door, he took the mask off .”

“Wearing a mask while alone?” That sparked her memory. She’d spent the three hops from Altair reading through the cube Jandi had given her, out of idle curiosity. Now she tapped at the screen, trying to pull the data up.

“Damn.” The cube was in her stateroom, on a private hookup. “I need to check something in my cabin.”

Kyle eyed his pile of filthy clothes. “Where’s your washer?”

She waved at the back of the hall distractedly. Was he going to walk around in that towel all day?

“Maybe you could get some pants from Garcia’s locker.”

“Are you serious?” Kyle shook his head. “Have you seen the clothes that guy wears?”

Prudence felt that rather missed the point that he wore clothes, instead of bathroom accessories. But Kyle was already stuffing his into the machine next to the shower.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Apparently he didn’t see anything wrong with walking into her private stateroom while practically naked. Where was the standoffish, proper gentleman that had stalked off her ship on Kassa?

His face was still gray with fatigue, but the light was back in his eyes. There was something else, something odd about his mouth. Prudence finally realized he was trying to repress a smile.

She had to find out why. “What did you mean, in the port? Who did you think I was?”

He looked at her with those black eyes, a gaze so intent she could feel it on her face. “From the instant I came out of the node at Kassa, people have been trying to kill me, in a variety of unusual ways. I thought you were one of those people. An operative; an agent. But Jorgun … he’s not faking it. It’s not an act. And that means you can’t be acting, either.”

“But you were.” He had been lies and contradictions from the moment she saw him. No, before that, when he was just a voice on the Launceston .

“Yes. I am a double agent. I’ve been one for five years, so long I thought I had forgotten how to be anything else.”

“If you don’t work for the League, then who do you work for?”

He shrugged. “We don’t have a name. We’re just people that don’t like the League. I didn’t even know there were any others, when I started. I didn’t know there were people like you.”

“I’m just a tramp freighter captain,” she said, feeling defensive. Jandi’s lecture about heroism echoed in her head. “That’s all.”

“I know,” he answered, and now he could not hold back the smile. “You’re exactly what you appear to be.”

It had been a long time since a nearly naked man had smiled so openly at her. And she still had her clothes on.

Going into her stateroom, she left the door open.

“Dejae obviously isn’t quite what he appears.” She tried to steer her thoughts back to the topic at hand. “I was told he came from Baharain, but I don’t believe that.”

“He’s only been here about fifteen years. He’s been on Altair about ten. I mean, the other one … you know what I mean. But yes, both of them are from somewhere else.”

She tapped through the cube, searching. The cube was dense, packed with academic information, and not particularly user-friendly. But “private masks” yielded up a single entry.

“Monterey.”

Kyle shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Neither have I…” She skimmed through the entry. “A dome world, unknown population, but estimated to be small. Very private … it was originally a religious retreat, funded by a wealthy industrialist. Founded about two hundred years ago.”

“What does that have to do with spiders?”

She started paging through node charts.

“It’s only three hops from Kassa. And they’re dead ones, so no traffic.” A dead hop was a system without a colony, a lifeless and uninhabited star. People tended to avoid those for the same reasons you avoided dark alleys. There was no one there who could help you if you got into trouble, and if there was anyone there, they were probably the source of your trouble in the first place.

“Could the spiders be using Monterey as a base?”

She linked her screen into the ships’ network, and through that to Baharain Traffic Control.

“There’s a liner listing Monterey as part of its itinerary, within the last two weeks. Monterey is only two hops from here, through a large colony called Solistar. I can’t imagine the spiders are squatting on a system right next to a heavily populated world, and nobody has noticed.”

“There are bloody spiders squatting on this world, and apparently nobody has noticed.” Kyle’s face was black with anger.

She waited, letting him unload the burden at his own pace.

“I got a kid killed.” He sighed, biting his lip in shame. “He survived the attack on Kassa, came all the way out here to make a paycheck for his family, and I went and fed him to the Earth-damned spiders anyway.”

It must have happened while he was taking those pictures.

“Should we go after them?” Jandi would die of shock if she brought him a whole alien, rather than a mere artifact. Actually, he probably would have a heart attack. Maybe she would just show him a leg or two.

“No,” Kyle said. “I don’t know how many there are, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t poke Dejae’s security net again and expect to leave this planet alive. I’m not sure we can get out of here as it is. And it’s no use going back to Altair. These pictures aren’t enough.” His lips tightened in pain, the jaw underneath set in mulish anger. Those pictures had come at a high cost.

“Then…” But she already knew the answer.

“We’re going to Monterey.”

Garcia had gone straight to a bar and started drinking. Prudence could hardly complain. She’d told him to act normal.

“Buy a bottle of whiskey from the bartender,” she instructed Jorgun over the comm link. “Tell Garcia he can have it when he gets back on the ship. Don’t let him trick it away from you, Jor. Just hold it high in the air, where he can’t reach it.”

She was still trying to get clearance to launch when her pied piper came on board dragging his rat. Garcia was cursing savagely, but he pulled himself together when he walked past the open door to Prudence’s cabin. Kyle was in there, still hunched over the data console.

“You don’t have any pants on, man.” Garcia seemed to be asking for confirmation. He must have been drinking hard.

Kyle looked up from the screen in surprise.

“Oh. Right.” He ducked out of the room and headed aft to the shower.

“That man didn’t have any pants on,” Garcia shouted down the passageway to the bridge. “I leave you for one lousy minute and you get naked with the League!”

“Jor, give him the bottle,” Prudence shouted back.

Kyle came onto the bridge, finally dressed. He was going to be a problem that couldn’t be solved with a bottle of free liquor.

“So how long will it take?” He sounded like a man in a hurry.

“It’s a three-day hop from here to Solistar, and another five to Monterey. That doesn’t count in-system travel time. And we’ll have to dock at Solistar. We need fuel and cargo. If we show up at Monterey with an empty hold, they’ll be suspicious. So make yourself comfortable, Lieutenant. It’s a long trip.”