M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“Call me Kyle. I don’t think dead men have ranks.”

“You can call me Captain,” she said. In case he might be getting silly ideas.

“Of course, Captain.” He said it with an exaggeration of his bureaucratic obsequiousness. She was surprised how much it hurt to hear that tone again.

Jorgun made a mockery of her formality anyway. “Do you want me to look at the cargo lists, Pru?” He was trying to do his job, the one thing he was good at.

“I’m sorry, Jor, but we don’t have any.” Normally he would examine all the destinations, fees, and expected returns, and put the stops in the best order. It was called the “Traveling Salesman” problem. Computers could solve it, of course, but it was a pain to enter all the parameters and assign the right weightings. Jorgun could do it instantly, and besides, he enjoyed it.

“Garcia said if we didn’t get a cargo soon, we’d be landed.” Jorgun probably didn’t know what landed meant, but he was upset anyway.

“Garcia is drunk,” Prudence pointed out. “Don’t worry about it, Jor. We’ve got a lot of money from—” She stopped, not wanting to mention Kassa. “We still have lots of money.” Now she was telling outright lies. “We have enough.”

“Enough to get us back to Altair?” Kyle wasn’t so easily fooled.

“Us? You can take a commercial liner back.” Landing on Altair with the renegade dead League officer-turned-betrayer as her cargo would be equivalent to suicide.

He didn’t argue. “Just get me in and out of Monterey. I’ll take care of the rest. It’s not your problem, Prudence. But I appreciate the help. Altair appreciates it.”

“I’m not doing it for Altair.” She bit her lip. Why did she have to keep reacting to him?

“Nonetheless, we appreciate it.” He couldn’t seem to stop smiling. It was so very different from the last time he had stood on her bridge. “Dejae went through a lot of trouble to hide his planet of origin. That means there’s a good chance they kicked him off. If he left enemies on Monterey, we might find some friends.”

“And if not?”

Kyle’s smile turned wry. “Everybody has enemies.” That was closer to the man she remembered.

She tried to keep that man in mind over the next three days. She wanted to remember that Kyle could be false. He’d demonstrated the ability to lie convincingly, wearing a cover persona for years at a time. He was a dangerous man. Not just because he was strong and trained in combat by the police force, but because he was emotionally capable of extreme dedication. She had been mistaken in thinking he was not as hard as a soldier. He was stronger than that. The years of obedience had not left him dulled and useless. They had not killed his passion.

Right now he seemed passionate for justice. That was a goal she could identify with, despite the attendant danger. Justice was never free, and sometimes it could be quite expensive. If Kyle had to sacrifice her and her crew for the sake of Altair, he would do it. But she was prepared to run that risk.

What she was afraid of was what came after. Once he had achieved his goal—or figured out it was unachievable—what would he do then? What direction would all that pent-up passion take? A man like that, with so much energy, so much life to recapture, might do almost anything.

What he did for now was to fit seamlessly into her crew. He played cards with Garcia and vid games with Jorgun. He took his turn in the galley, without being asked, making a credible casserole out of the random contents of their freezer.

And he kept his distance from her, never pushing, never crowding. But sometimes, when he didn’t think she noticed, she caught him staring at her.

Jorgun was happy with their new crew member. She was a little surprised to see him playing his favorite vid game, Starfighter, with Kyle. It was one of the things Jorgun and she shared. Garcia had no interest in any activity that didn’t result in exchanges of wealth, and Melvin had been unable to take the game seriously. He’d get stoned and fly around in spirals grooving on the pretty lights instead of shooting the targets.

“I like playing with him,” Jorgun explained, when she asked him about it in private. “He doesn’t have to let me win.”

She had developed a careful habit of losing approximately every other game when she played with Jorgun. The game was too similar to the sims she ran to practice her flying skills, so her reflexes were completely dominating if she didn’t rein them in. But she hadn’t realized Jorgun could tell. All those years she had fought to get others to not underestimate him, and she’d being doing it herself.

The shame mixed with the jealousy to form a biting hole in her stomach, much like Garcia’s absurd chili recipes always did.

“I’m sorry, Jor. I just thought it would be more fun that way.”

“You always ask me who won the last one, and if I say you did, then I win.”

Stupid of her. Of course he had detected the pattern.

“But Kyle is funny to play with. Sometimes he flies into things by accident. I keep telling him not to fly so fast, but he always forgets. And he doesn’t get mad when he loses, like Garcia does.”

The litany of Kyle’s perfections exasperated her. She wanted to pretend that she was angry at him for ingratiating himself with the simpleminded member of her crew, worming his way into her affairs through the weakest link, but down the passageway she could hear Garcia laughing with him over one of his stupid police stories.

She took three steps in their direction before she realized what she was doing. Annoyed, she turned around and went to the bridge instead.

There she could drown her tiny fears in oceans of dread, staring at the node-charts for hours and trying to guess where the spiders came from. Where they would go next. Where they might be, even now, descending on some helpless world trapped in their web.

It was impossible to fear the sparkling blue and white jewel that slowly filled the vid screen on the bridge. Solistar was a beautiful planet, and if it hadn’t been for the star’s unfortunate tendency to belch out random storms of radiation, it would have been a friendly one.

As it was, the planetary network warned them never to go outside without heavy rad-protective clothing, and then made sure they understood by displaying twenty-seven commercials in a row for various forms of it. Kyle had never considered the merits of designer rad-suits, and now that he was exposed to them, he found himself severely underwhelmed.

“At least it’s safe,” Garcia grumbled. “Not even the spiders would want this place.”

“We don’t know that,” Prudence countered. “It has a breathable atmosphere. That’s worth something.” The source of that air, single-cell life-forms in the oceans, had evolved immunity to the occasional bursts of silent, invisible death, by the virtue of being absurdly simple. But complex, multicellular creatures like human beings fell apart in an astounding variety of creative ways after one or two exposures.

“Do we know what the spiders breathe?” Kyle asked. On Baharain they hadn’t cared about the toxic atmosphere.

“No,” Prudence conceded. “But it has to be oxygen. Everything breathes oxygen.”

“Baharain doesn’t have oxygen. And the spider I saw wasn’t wearing breathing equipment.” Between the darkness, the terror, and the flash of the plasma explosion he hadn’t gotten a very good look, but he distinctly remembered seeing the creature’s fangs. “I saw its teeth.”

“Spiders don’t breathe through their mouth.” Prudence could be amazingly contrary when she wanted to. “Maybe it had oxy feeders plugged into its trachea.”