M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

They had to wait three hours. Garcia fell asleep on the landing ramp, despite the cold. Jorgun brought out some blankets, giving one to Prudence and draping another one carefully over Garcia’s chubby body. Then he sat on the ramp with a portable screen and headphones, watching a cartoon.

Prudence and Kyle drank stimulants, and waited. There was something comforting about being together without talking. It felt like he was accepting her, without asking for anything. Like being herself and being there was enough.

Just when she felt ready to talk, when the silence had stretched on to where she was comfortable and ready to open a tiny window into herself, a light flared in the distance.

A transporter descended on them from the air, cutting through the fog with powerful headlamps. It was smaller than Prudence’s lander, hardly bigger than an air car. To shrink the gravitics to that size had to be outrageously expensive.

“Showtime,” she whispered, and Kyle blinked awake. She hadn’t noticed when he’d dozed off, but he was instantly alert. He woke up without moving, without reacting until he understood what the situation was. The reserve frightened her, because she recognized it. That was the way she always woke. It made the easy confidence of the last three hours feel irresponsible.

A man got out of the transporter. In the brief and incurious glance he aimed at them, they could see that he was wearing a simple mask of purple silk. It was plain compared to the extravaganza Dejae had worn in Kyle’s pictures.

“Hey,” Prudence shouted at him. Grabbing Jorgun’s portable screen, she tapped it into the local network. “Hey, we’ve been waiting on your damn clearance. The cargo’s right there, but it won’t clear us. I should charge you for the downtime.” She stomped over to him, hiding her nervousness with anger. “Damn it, clear us already.”

She held the screen out to him, expectantly.

He looked at her. Angry, shamefaced, annoyed, unperturbed—who could tell through that mask? When he turned away and stepped toward the machines, she moved to intercept him.

“Damn it, I’m serious. You can see the cargo’s all there. Clear us for takeoff already. I’m not going to wait while you fool around with your stupid machines.”

Kyle came up behind her, his too-casual stroll a beacon of threatened violence and anger.

The monk might have rolled his eyes, or glared, or something else entirely. Prudence found the lack of a human face or voice disorienting.

He reached out for her screen, tapped it a few times, and it turned green.

“Thank you,” she mumbled. She didn’t know what to do next. That was as far as her plan had taken her.

“You got a voice, buddy?” Kyle could sound like a real low-life thug, when he wanted to. “The lady was talking to you. Say something.”

“If you compel me to summon law enforcement, you will be extremely unhappy with the result.” The monk’s voice was blurred and distorted, filtered through electronics.

“Not as unhappy as you,” Kyle said. In his hand was the pistol Prudence kept hidden on the bridge of the ship. She’d hired Kyle as security, and then not told him a damn thing about her security procedures, plans, and backups. Apparently he’d figured some of her tricks out by himself.

The monk looked down at the wide barrel of the weapon. The mask could not conceal his reaction this time. His authority deflated like a pricked balloon.

“I want some answers, and I’m willing to kill for them. You understand this, right? You understand that I know about the spiders, I saw the dead on Kassa, and I will blow your fucking head off without hesitation.”

This wasn’t the “look around” plan that they had agreed on. But Prudence didn’t say anything. She wanted those answers too.

“If you injure me, an automatic alarm will dispatch law enforcement. You understand they will not hesitate to kill you, correct?” The monk was trying to put on a brave front, but even through the electronic distortion she could detect his quaver of fear.

“You understand if they show up while we’re talking, you’ll be the first one dead, right?” Kyle shot back.

The monk nodded, his mask rustling softly.

“Good. Then as long as we understand each other, let’s have a little talk. But first—get rid of this.” He reached up and tore the mask off, in one quick action, before the monk had time to flinch.

Prudence almost fainted. In the background she could hear Garcia swearing in shock. Incredibly, Kyle’s gun hand didn’t move a centimeter, even though she knew he had to be as stunned as the rest of them.

Standing in front of them was a visibly terrified Veram Dejae.

But this one was half the prime minister’s age.

“Another Dejae!” Kyle barked sardonically. “Where do they all come from? Is there a factory somewhere?”

The monk said nothing.

“There is … not twins, but clones,” Kyle stuttered in disbelief. “There aren’t two Dejaes. There’s a whole planet of them!”

“Cloning isn’t possible,” Prudence objected. It was one of those technologies that was always just around the corner. Every time they made an advance they discovered another critical detail they had overlooked. Like the minotaur’s maze, there were always more corners ahead.

“Impossible for you,” the monk said.

She was impressed that he could manage a sneer even while his lower lip trembled in fear.

Kyle glared suspiciously. “What do you mean, for us?”

“Our process only works on our genetic code. It won’t work for you.”

“What are you talking about? You’re as human as I am.”

Prudence understood. She explained aloud, so that the monk would know he couldn’t get away with half-truths.

“He means they did it the hard way. By trial and error. They don’t know how to clone humans, they only know how to clone Veram Dejae. Brute force, not science.”

Prudence knew she had scored a direct hit, because the monk didn’t say anything.

Kyle shrugged his shoulders again. “But why? Why even bother?”

“Why not?” snapped the monk. “The First Master, the original Dejae, recognized himself as the ultimate expression of genetics. Why not reproduce? Why not fill the galaxy with the best human, instead of with random genetic trash?”

The arrogant insanity broke something in Garcia, who stopped swearing and bolted into the ship. Prudence could not tell if his flight was in horror or rage.

“And the aliens? What part do they play in this lunatic scheme? Who is master, man or spider?” Kyle leaned in closer, with increasing menace.

The monk didn’t retreat. His megalomania was greater than his fear. “Dejae is master, of course. Man is alone, and Veram Dejae is alone among men. The creatures you fear so much are merely our tools.”

“But they weren’t good enough.” Prudence was thinking out loud. “You tried to brute-force their design, too, and it didn’t work. You knew the spiders couldn’t take the galaxy by strength alone. So you sent clones out into the okimune, to control RDC, and Altair, and Earth knows where else.”

Poor little gods. Like the cargo-handling machines, none of their creations could quite live up to their expectations. Everything they made was only a shadow of the genius they had claimed for themselves.

“But why? What is all of this for?” Kyle still didn’t understand.

Prudence did. Kyle could not see it. But she had seen Strattenburg, and after that her eyes had been opened to the depths of narcissism that still lived in men’s souls. Prudence could comprehend the scope of their plan, the madness that made different a capital crime. She had seen it firsthand, breathed the wreath of murderous genocidal smoke.