M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“I think I better handle this, Captain. It might be politically sensitive.” That was the most hint he dared to give.

Stanton paused, but only briefly. “Comm, give the commander a line.” Although it was what Kyle had hoped for, it still bothered him that even the suggestion of politics could scare off a Fleet officer so easily. Stanton went back to abusing his console, trying out new strategies.

Kyle went over to the comm officer’s console and accepted a headset.

“ Ulysses, acknowledge. This is the Altair Fleet vessel Launceston, demanding acknowledgement.”

“And hello to you, too, Captain.”

A woman’s voice. Subtly exotic, with an accent he could not place. Cool, but inviting; assertive, but not aggressive.

Oddly tongue-tied, Kyle fell into a bad imitation of Fleet-speak. “Negative, Ulysses. This is Lieutenant Kyle Daspar, League officer and temporary commander of the Launceston. ”

The voice hardened. Some part of Kyle, deep in the back of his mind, regretted that. “Acknowledged, Commander. This is Prudence Falling, captain and owner of the Ulysses. We’re glad you’ve finally shown up.”

His knowledge of Fleet jargon deserted him. “What do you mean?”

Apparently his ability to speak like an intelligent adult had gone with it.

“We’ve got a disaster on our hands, Commander. Perhaps you noticed? I’ve spent the last sixteen hours ferrying refugees, but there’s more broken here than I can fix. We need a hospital ship.”

“What happened down there, Captain? Give me as many details as you can.”

The voice paused. “Why don’t you come down and see for yourself?”

She was a suspicious one, all right. From one clue she had deduced that there was something important he wasn’t telling her. She was wasted as a freight-hauler; she should have been a detective.

“We are currently under attack ourselves, Captain. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

The voice turned curt and direct, ignoring his implication. No more gamesmanship. “A mine?”

“Seven of them, actually.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” A hint of real pity. “We were only tracked by one.”

How could a freighter escape a military-grade mine? Even to Kyle that seemed unlikely. “Then why are you still alive?”

“It malfunctioned. Gave us a miss.” Just the lightest hint of amusement. Not a chuckle. That voice would never chuckle. But she appreciated the irony of his question.

Every bone in Kyle’s cop body twinged. This was the point in an ordinary interrogation where he would sit down next to the subject, shake his head sadly, put his hand gently on their shoulder, and quietly explain that lies would only make it worse. Much, much worse.

But this interviewee could not be intimidated. Kyle wasn’t looming over her, with the power of the State and a few burly beat cops behind him. Whatever truth she was hiding, he would have to lure it out of her.

“Your luck seems providential. Remarkably so, wouldn’t you agree, Captain?”

She surprised him, giving up without a fight. “I would agree. My engineer fired on the mine, with a mining laser defocused to a meter spread. But that seems far less likely a source of miracles than a malfunction. I should also note it evaded several decoys, which I was assured were fully effective against all known targeting systems.”

For a tramp freighter, the Ulysses sounded remarkably well armed. It was like stumbling onto a murder scene and finding a hot-dog seller loitering in the area with a grenade launcher hidden in his cart. It tended to make one suspicious.

But the comm officer had been listening in with one ear, and had found something interesting enough to intrude on their conversation. “ Launceston comm here, Captain. What model were those decoys?”

She answered him immediately, the bond between spacers obvious now that she was talking to a real one. “Nonstandard. Not from Altair, but Fleet grade. Supposed to work on gravitics, thermal, radio, and cosmic ray detection. I don’t have any better specs for you.”

“What evasive action did you take, Captain?”

“Random vector generation. But it didn’t help. Running silent didn’t either. We never figured out how it was tracking us. And then it just stopped trying.”

“After the laser? But you can’t crack the hull on a lifeboat with that kind of spread, let alone a mine.” The comm officer hounded down the stray fact, cutting past all the boring, unhelpful, well-behaved ones. Kyle watched the officer worrying it like a bulldog, trying to squeeze out the answer by brute force.

“What’s missing?” Kyle asked, trying to help. “How can a laser stop a mine without breaking through its armor?” He had no idea what the answer was. He just knew it was the right question.

The comm officer silently counted on his fingers, eliminating possibilities. He started over, on the other hand, and then froze.

“Tracking. Captain, it has to be an optical tracking system. That’s why all the other mines came after us when we turned on the fusion engine—we were the brightest thing in the sky. That’s why the decoys failed—they don’t look like us. And that’s how the Ulysses escaped—it blinded the mine.”

Stanton spoke up, his voice coming to Kyle both through the headset and from across the bridge. “Captain Falling, could you give us an estimate on your laser’s output?”

A brief pause before she answered. “Twenty megawatts.”

“Acknowledged, Captain.” The delay was a clue that there was something interesting in her answer; the dryness of Stanton’s reply confirmed it. That they were trying to hide this from Kyle just made it all the more interesting.

Stanton cut his link to the conversation, and addressed his bridge. “Gunnery, calculate luminosity for a twenty-meg beam at one meter, and then tell me how wide we can get and still match it.”

He took off his goggles to face Kyle. “Commander, I have a plan. I intend to make a vector directly for one of the mines. At the last minute we will disable it with laser fire. This will allow us to slip through their screen. Do I have your permission to proceed?”

Kyle suspended his call to the Ulysses, also. He didn’t want the enigmatic Captain Falling in this part of the conversation. “And if the laser doesn’t work?”

Stanton didn’t even bother to shrug. “Then we die. In six minutes, instead of twenty-one.”

“Don’t you think you’re staking an awful lot on a brief conversation with a woman you’ve never met?”

The contempt was back, deep in Stanton’s eyes. Obviously, he felt no mere police officer could understand or appreciate the fraternity shared by all true spacers. But Kyle was unable to dredge up any sympathy. Kyle had plenty of experience with the alleged fraternity of professions, from cops to robbers to politicians and every shade in between. It had left him severely unimpressed with unwritten codes of honor.

“Do you have any other suggestions, Commander?”

If this was what the League had sent him for, then the woman was a League agent trying to save his life. Unless she was a plant, sent to make sure he died. He had enemies in the League—everyone in the League had enemies—and one of them could have arranged this, given the woman this clever story to lure them into making the wrong choice.

He hated having to make decisions without adequate evidence, but in this case, it was easy. There weren’t any other options.

“No, Captain, I do not. You may proceed at your discretion.”

“Then find a place to hang on, Commander. You have thirty seconds.”

Kyle retreated from the bridge, fleeing to his private stateroom. Over the intercom he asked the comm officer to let him know when the last possible moment to launch a report capsule would be. Strapping himself into a chair, he tried to compose what might be his final message.