M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“I’ll get the lander out,” she told them. “We can use it as a forklift. But there’s still going to be a lot of heavy lifting.”

Garcia groaned as if she had just kicked him in the stomach. “I don’t get paid enough for this. Oh wait, that’s right, I don’t get paid!” Prudence gave him room and board, but he’d chosen a percentage of all their deals instead of a salary. Lately they hadn’t been making a lot of deals.

“I’m sorry, Garcia, but think about it. This place is the dullest, most uninteresting planet we’ve ever visited. It practically screams, ‘Nothing to see here!’ This has got to be a clue.”

“It’s a clue, all right.” Kyle’s face was grim. “If I were in charge of Fleet, I’d order a planetary bombardment based on nothing more than that clerk’s bad attitude.”

Garcia always had to snipe at other people. “But you’re not in charge of Fleet.”

“No, I’m not,” Kyle retorted. “So we need more evidence, and for that we need a plan. In the meantime, we have to act like we know what we’re doing. Jorgun, you and Garcia start lifting, and I’ll go think of a plan.”

Garcia spluttered while Jorgun and Kyle laughed. Somehow Jorgun had understood Kyle was joking. Prudence wished she could trust him so instinctively, assume that he would always do the right thing, the noble thing, the good thing.

She envied Jorgun’s simple faith in people.

It took them seven hours to empty the ship. The lander did most of the work, carrying the sealed crates twenty meters to the unloading zone, but human muscle had to put everything on the lander and then take it off. They were limp with exhaustion, even Garcia, who had worked harder than she had guessed he was capable of. Either he was motivated by Kyle’s example or he had figured out that they couldn’t get off this accursed planet until the job was done.

Prudence hadn’t done any lifting, but she was as exhausted as they were. Seven hours of making the lander dance had drained her. The craft was intended to travel from orbit to ground and back. It was bulky, slow to respond, and unequipped with mirrors or side-viewing cameras. One wrong twitch of the controls and it would crash into her ship like a drunken cow. One really wrong twitch and it could crush one of the men. Through the mass of the vehicle, she wouldn’t be able to feel it, wouldn’t notice the resistance of a human body being pulped against unyielding ground or hull. The knowledge sat on her shoulders and whispered terrible things in her ears, until she wanted to weep with tension. But tears would only blur her vision. So she didn’t.

She was as grateful as the men when she tucked the lander into its bay for the last time.

“Now what?” Garcia flopped on the loading ramp, a bottle of whiskey in one hand. Surprisingly, he hadn’t opened it until they were done.

“I send the signal, and we see what these machines do.” She pressed the button on her pocket comm unit, telling the Ulysses to broadcast the message to the spaceport.

Kyle borrowed Garcia’s bottle for a drink. “Think of it as a free show. The ballet of the machines.”

“What’s a ballet?” Jorgun had opened a hot-drink, and was waiting for it to warm up.

“A very boring evening,” Kyle answered.

Garcia laughed and took his bottle back. “Join us, mon capitan .” He took a swig before offering it to her.

For a change, she did. The whiskey burned her throat, but once it was down the hatch it felt warm inside. She was so tired of cold planets.

A rumbling sound. From the spaceport came a squat ground car, a massive box on six wheels with protruding fangs of steel. It wheeled up to the stack of crates, drove around them three times, and then sat thinking for two minutes.

“You weren’t kidding,” Garcia said. “This is boring.”

The machine finally creaked into action again. Driving its forks under a stack of crates, it lifted them carefully, backed up, and drove off.

Before it came back, a different one showed up. Prudence could tell the difference because this one had a bent headlight frame. The new machine instantly made a selection, grabbed a stack of crates, and left.

“That’s pretty damn clever.” Kyle was impressed.

Garcia wasn’t. “Another reason not to employ a workingman.”

“Somebody’s got to maintain those machines, Garcia. Wouldn’t you rather be paid to fix machines than move crates?” Kyle sounded like an ad for an Altairian educational institution.

“Not everybody is cut out to fix things,” Garcia said cryptically.

It took Prudence a second to realize who he meant. Jorgun was sitting quietly, obviously tired, sipping his drink. It occurred to Prudence that he must be enjoying having done an equal share of the work. For once, he had been just another one of the guys, doing the same job.

“Me, now,” Garcia continued, “I’m cut out for drinking.”

Kyle got up and walked over to the crates. Pushing one that was on top, he moved it to a precarious balance. Coming back to the ship, he winked. “I guess that means I’m cut out for making trouble.”

The first machine returned, and stopped, almost as if it were affronted. After a brief moment of staring, it raised its forks and slid them under the offending crate, picking it up by itself. Then it trundled off.

Garcia snickered. “Maybe you need to find a new career.”

Ignoring the barb, Kyle went out and moved another crate. Coming back, he pointed to Jorgun’s drink container. “Are you done with that?”

“Yeah, I was going to throw it away.” He stood up to go into the ship.

“Let me have it. And get another one, okay?”

“Sure.” Jorgun smiled and handed over the empty can. “Do you want one, Garcia?”

“Bring me one of the black ones.”

Prudence sighed. The black drinks were mild stimulants. When Garcia started mixing them with his booze, he could drink for hours without passing out, getting more and more irrational. On those binges Prudence preferred to stay awake as long as he did. “Bring me one too, please,” she called out.

Jorgun came back before any of the machines, passing around his bounty.

The second machine trundled up. It stared at the uneven pile of crates with a little eye, no larger than a data pod, attached to a rod sticking up from the middle of the machine.

Kyle slipped up to the machine and dropped the empty can over the sensor.

There was a gentle rattle as the sensor spun in a circle. Then a red light on the body of the machine lit up, and the engine turned off.

Garcia rolled on the ground, shrieking in laughter. “You killed it! With a plastic can! Who needs Fleet when we have cans?”

In the foggy light, it was hard to tell, but Prudence thought Kyle might be blushing. “It was a bit of a letdown,” he admitted. “Somehow I expected … more.”

“Aren’t you breaking a law?” she asked. “I thought we agreed we were just going to look around.”

“The clerk said monks only come out when there’s a problem. So let’s make a problem. It’s either that or go home empty-handed.”

“If we could get Jor to drink faster, we could conquer the whole planet.” Garcia collapsed into howls of laughter again.

Jorgun blushed, but he finished his can in one pull.

“Better let me do it, Jor. We only need one lawbreaker here.” Kyle took the can from him.

When the other machine returned, it ignored the disabled one. While it was glaring at the crates, Kyle disabled it the same way, with exactly the same result.

Prudence consulted her pocket comm unit. “We don’t have clearance to take off. We’re grounded until that cargo is in the warehouse.”

Kyle shrugged. “Then we wait.”