M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“He’s a waiter, Prudence. Not a stranger in an alley. If the suits never make it back to the company, the restaurant will be liable.” Kyle felt odd trying to convince her to act like a civilized person. He was used to thinking of her as the sophisticated one.

“We’ll have to be home before midnight,” she said. “Or risk turning into pumpkins.”

“It will be safe until morning, Prudence.” Kyle wondered what a pumpkin was.

“But not after. If Garcia gets drunk in an alley, he could wake up in trouble.”

Obviously she wasn’t worried about that. The buildings were all safe, with steel roofs and thick rad-glass windows. It would be illegal to deny someone shelter, and the suit company made deliveries. Garcia would be fine.

If they were on the run from agents of the League, however, those niceties might not apply. Kyle looked wistfully after the disappearing suits, but it was too late.

“Are you buying, Pru?” Garcia was focused on more immediate matters. Much more immediate.

“Food, yes. Booze, no.”

Garcia frowned, and went back to studying the menu, obviously trying to factor in the constraint of cost against alcoholic effectiveness.

“I take it you didn’t find a particularly profitable cargo,” Prudence said wryly.

“No,” Garcia mumbled, distracted by the menu. “Contract shipments. Sealed, no less. The skanky bastiches don’t allow speculation. You fly in with a prepackaged load or not at all. And you’re not even allowed to know what you’re carrying.”

“Unfriendly skies,” Prudence muttered, shaking her head.

Kyle didn’t know much about interstellar commerce, but he could recognize a racket when he saw one. “Every planet around here seems to have its node traffic tied up pretty tight. Isn’t that kind of unusual?”

“It’s not very attractive to free trade,” Prudence agreed. “Most places want new faces to stay in port for a day or so, to make sure there isn’t a warrant on their tail. But Baharain and Solistar don’t seem to want honest independents. They don’t seem to want independents at all.”

“If they tried an outright ban on unregistered ships, there would be quite a fuss, wouldn’t there?” Freedom of travel was one of the universal rights, inherited from the ancient fear of being trapped on a dying world. Baharain required a license to trade, but they couldn’t stop ships from just visiting. “But by making things unprofitable, they’ve made the independents think avoiding this sector was their own idea.”

Prudence narrowed her eyes. “So the thicker the web, the closer we are to the center.”

“You should have been a cop.” Kyle wondered why she was glaring at him, until he realized he’d said that thought out loud. “I mean, if Monterey is even more restricted, we’ll know we’re getting warmer.”

“Great, then we can go home now.” Garcia looked up from his menu. “Because Monterey is as tight as a bar tab at closing time. I’ve been talking to people while you two were sightseeing. This sealed-cargo crap has been going on so long nobody’s even curious about it anymore. There isn’t a stray credit to be made out of that node. And since Monterey doesn’t connect to any other nodes, it has to be the end of the line.”

“That’s not quite true,” Prudence corrected him. “It goes through two dead hops to Kassa.”

“Are we going back to Kassa?” Jorgun asked hopefully.

“Not right now.” She patted his hand, distracting the big man.

Kyle forced himself to stop watching her slender, ivory fingers. “This next hop could be dangerous, Prudence. Maybe we should leave some of the crew behind.”

Garcia snorted dismissively. “You’re not stranding me on this microwave oven of a planet. And if you leave dummy here, he’ll take his hat off and cook his brain.”

Jorgun reached up to his head with both hands, stricken with shame. “I forgot where my hat is.”

“Jor, it’s okay. Garcia, shut the … shut up. Nobody’s getting left behind. We’re just transporting goods. It’s our job. If we do our job, nobody will look twice at us.”

“And the uniform here? What’s his job?”

“Security,” Prudence answered, before Kyle could say anything. “He’s recently retired from Altair police, so we took him on as a security officer. It’s a standard chair. Nothing suspicious in that.”

“Chair?” Kyle wasn’t sure what she meant.

Garcia laughed. “Yeah, he’s convincing because he’s so damn familiar with space travel.”

“It means a seat on the bridge,” Prudence said. “Any decent-sized passenger liner has a security officer at the bridge level. The point is, it’s not unusual for a ship to have someone with your qualifications as part of the crew.”

“Is he going to take my chair?” Jorgun was having a miserable night.

“No, of course not, Jor. You’re nav.” Her hand rested comfortingly on his shoulder.

Kyle watched her easy familiarity, wondering what it would feel like.

Jorgun recovered quickly, pulling out his sunglasses and putting them on with a grin. “Except when I pretend to be captain.”

“Maybe you should stop pretending.” Garcia was back to grumbling. “You couldn’t make any worse choices than the current one.”

Prudence ignored him. “We better not play that game on this next stop, Jor. I think I can handle it.”

Kyle didn’t ask, but Prudence explained anyway. “Sometimes it’s easier if they think Jorgun is the captain. As if the size of the man was more important than the size of the ship.”

In Kyle’s opinion, their next stop would require every trick up their collective sleeves. But Prudence obviously wasn’t going to expose Jorgun to a charge of fraud. On a place as regulation-obsessed as Monterey promised to be, innocent games could be dangerous.

“Did you hear anything about spiders?” Kyle asked Garcia. He’d listened in while Prudence had talked with her fellow captains, but all they seemed to care about was the safety of node travel and the prices of cargo. The concept of war and planetary devastation didn’t seem to connect with them. Maybe the rank-and-file spacers had a different view.

“I heard it laughed about. Nobody around here takes Altair Fleet very seriously. They figure Kassa was some kind of retaliatory raid by another colony. All this talk of spiders is dismissed as fancy-pants in gold braid justifying their pensions.”

A compelling enough excuse. Few planets cared to maintain a fleet, and this explanation would only reinforce their self-identified wisdom.

Prudence frowned. “If they want to stir up panic, why aren’t the local news services backing the official story? Especially here, where they have more control.”

“Because they don’t want panic here,” Kyle explained. “Panicked people want to change things. They don’t want change, because everything’s already going according to plan. They want misdirection away from this sector.”

She put it in her own words. “The web only trembles where the spider isn’t.”

The restaurant had rolled up its front walls, exposing the indoor tables to the open air. Solistar took full advantage of the brief twilight, while it was safe to be outside but not yet bitterly cold. Without a blanket of vegetation, the naked face of the planet froze in the dark and burned in the day.

On a vid screen hanging on the wall inside the restaurant, a comedic skit was mocking Altairian panic. One of the characters was plotting to make a fortune selling insecticide, while the other one kept trying to demonstrate his giant-sized bug-swatter.

The placidness of Solistar society, the absolute lack of concern, was unnerving. In the stillness, Kyle imagined the spider so close he could hear it breathing.