M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

All of them felt it. Garcia took refuge in his glass, drinking a local concoction called araq . The waiter had sold Garcia on it by swearing three shots would leave an ordinary man incapacitated for three days. Prudence withdrew into herself, silent and unreachable, just when Kyle needed her most.

Only Jorgun was immune, complaining about his dinner like a cranky child one minute, laughing at the vid the next. As Prudence struggled to moderate the big man’s flittering emotions, Kyle began to see the comfort Jorgun gave to her. The simple giant required her, by virtue of his handicap, to focus on the here and now, the immediate and concrete. The cloying danger of imagined spiders could not compete with the pressing disaster of fried protein cakes stamped in the wrong shape.

Kyle dealt with his anxiety the only way he knew how, by fixing other people’s problems. He bullied the waiter into hand-cutting a new slab of protein to the five-pointed stars that Jorgun wanted.

“You’ll spoil him,” Prudence complained.

But she didn’t send the new cakes back.

Five days of Kyle and she was ready to scream in frustration.

She seriously considered taking him to bed, just to put an end to her fantasies. He was a man, no different from any other. He had a life back on Altair, family and friends, a place to live and a job to do. He wasn’t going to walk away from all that to live on her ship and fulfill her childish dreams of romance, marriage, and family.

But alone in her stateroom, with the lights out, she kept remembering him sitting on the edge of the bunk in a towel.

When the alarm started beeping, signaling that they would be dropping out of node-space in a few minutes, she breathed in relief. The unknown dangers of a possibly spider-infested planet would torture her less than this unmanageable desire.

The entrance was anticlimactic.

An automatic beacon logged her ship’s name and assigned them a berth in the spaceport. That was it. No bullying, warnings, gossip, or even advertisements.

“They don’t have any cartoon channels,” Jorgun complained.

Kyle leaned over Jorgun’s console and brought up a screen.

“Tourist information … one page. Wow. They don’t have anything.”

“Of course not.” Prudence was studying her sensor readouts. “There’s no sightseeing, because there’s nothing to see. The atmosphere is breathable, but opaque.”

“You mean cloudy?” Kyle stared at the reddish, featureless blob on the main screen.

“No, opaque. The atmosphere is not transparent to light. So the surface of the planet is always dark.”

“Earth-fire,” Kyle muttered under his breath.

Prudence shared the sentiment. Of all the places to live, this was the worst she’d ever seen.

“A great place to play hide-and-seek,” Jorgun said.

Kyle and Prudence stared at each other. A great place to hide an entire alien fleet, if you wanted to. A whole surface of a planet under a blanket.

“We’ll have to land with just GPS and radar. Traffic Control already gave us a vector that will take us straight to the spaceport.” She ran it through her own navcom. “A clean one, too. They didn’t stint on computers.”

As an experiment, she nudged her controls. The new course would cost her a little fuel and force her to orbit the planet once instead of landing directly. After only a few minutes, she was rewarded with a screeching siren.

“Warning! Course is not optimal. Unauthorized flybys of the planet are forbidden. Please correct your course and disable all radar imaging hardware.”

So the neglect was illusionary. Someone down there was watching their every move.

The comm screen presented her with an option to view the relevant subsection of the local law code. Idly, she tapped it open. Instead of a welter of legalistic gibberish, there was a simple declaration.

You are not anointed to view the face of the Divine.

“Look at this,” she said to Kyle.

He came over to her console, leaning comfortably close. “Holy crap … what the Earth does that even mean?”

“Local regulations are the super-cargo’s department.” She tapped the screen again, sending the image to Garcia’s console.

Garcia thought it was funny. “You want me to interpret this?”

“If doing your job isn’t too much trouble.”

“It’s pretty obvious, el capitan. The value of religious rules is that you can’t question them. They don’t want you looking around, and they don’t want to explain why. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe they don’t want you to find their super-secret alien base. But hey—that’s just a guess.”

She kept them on the straight and narrow after that. The ten-hour trip from node to base dragged on, a hundred times worse than the five days they had spent going through the node. Those days had been drifting in perfect safety, where nothing could touch them. This felt like a long, slow fall onto a bed of knives.

The spaceport was absolutely dismal. The atmosphere wasn’t any more dangerous than a heavy fog, so they didn’t get a gangway tube like on Baharain. Instead, she landed on a concrete platform illuminated by arc lamps, and she and her crew had to walk the fifty meters to the squat, gray building. Of course it was gray. Why paint it when it would always be in the dark?

It took them fifteen minutes of wandering around the warehouse-like structure to find a clerk. He seemed put out that they would disturb him from the vid he was watching.

“Where do we unload?” Prudence demanded.

“Didn’t you read the regs? There’s a spot marked on yer landing pad. Yer bleeding responsible for transferring yer cargo inside the painted lines. After that, the machines will take care of it.”

“Machines?”

“Yes, Captain, machines. They’ve got an automatic cargo handling system here. It breaks a lot, but that’s not yer problem. Just get yer cargo inside the lines.”

Prudence was flustered. Her crew weren’t longshoremen.

“What if we wanted to hire some help?” Kyle asked.

“Ha.” The clerk snorted derisively. “You’d have to go back to Solistar for that. None of these bloody monks is going to lift a finger for yer.”

“These monks? So you’re not from Monterey?” Kyle made his interrogation sound like idle conversation.

The clerk stared at them. “Do I look like a monk?”

“We don’t know what monks look like,” Kyle answered.

“That’s the bleeding point, innit?” The clerk laughed at them. “If you know what I look like, I can’t be a monk. The masks, see? You do know about the masks? Tell me you at least know about the masks.”

Kyle grinned good-naturedly, accepting the ribbing. “The monks wear masks all the time, right?”

“Bloody yes. Even when they’re doin’ it, right? Or so they say. Not that anybody’s ever seen two monks doin’ it. Not that anybody’s ever seen a female monk. They hide ’em, don’t they. But who cares? Who wants to do it with a bird in a mask? Probably as ugly as a fish.”

“What if we wanted to see a monk? I mean, talk to one.”

“Then you need to see a brain-fixer, don’tcha? What would you want to do that for? They don’t come out here, and you can’t go in there. Better for everybody, innit?”

Prudence intervened. “Surely they must come out to the spaceport sometimes?”

“Only when there’s a problem. And I get paid to see there ain’t no problems, don’t I? So no. They don’t.”

The clerk pushed the button on his screen, starting the vid up again, and went back to ignoring them. Out of ideas, Prudence and her crew wandered back to their ship.