The Kassa Gambit (25 page)

But not without a fight. Not without cost to themselves. With her left hand extended, covering her approach, she moved into killing range.

“I’m sorry,” Kyle said to Jorgun.

“Why did you hit me?” Jorgun whimpered through childlike sobs.

Kyle’s face was a mask of confusion. Unconsciously Prudence stopped, waiting for the answer.

“I thought you were someone else,” Kyle said, shrugging helplessly.

She tapped him on the chest with her left hand. She could have used her right hand, delivered the fatal blow. She could have gutted him from sternum to throat in one smooth, easy sweep. But she didn’t.

What kind of wight apologized? What kind of assassin attacked bare-handed?

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“Kyle Daspar. The real one.” He grinned lopsidedly at some private joke. “Who the hell are you?”

“That’s an idiotic question.”

“And yours wasn’t?” He swayed a little, as if he were dizzy.

“When I left Altair, you were dead. Burned in your bed. So, no, my question was not idiotic.”

“They missed me. Bungled it, like they always do. And now here you are, to finish the job.”

On the edge of her vision, two men approached. Wearing uniforms of gray and blue. Station security.

She let the knife collapse into a harmless medallion.

“Are you done?” she said loudly. Bending over, she picked up Jorgun’s sunglasses and put them on his face, hiding his red-lined eyes.

“What’s the trouble here?” The thick security guard was the first to speak, his voice challenging, like a dog daring you to pet it.

“No trouble, officer.” She tried to smile sweetly, but under the circumstances, she didn’t think it came off very well. “Just a crew dispute. I don’t allow violence on my ship, so they had to wait for port to settle it.”

“We don’t allow violence here, either, spacer.” The thick one wanted a fight.

The skinny one just wanted to make fun of someone. “Why’s the big guy crying like that?”

“He’s ribbing me,” Kyle answered. “Said I punched like a girl, so he might as well cry like one.”

The skinny guard guffawed, satisfied with a target of scorn. Kyle reached down and offered his hand to Jorgun. With the glasses on, Jorgun looked like a grown-up. He took Kyle’s hand and stood up, grinning weakly.

“That was funny,” Jorgun said.

“Sure it was.” Kyle clapped him on the back. “Just a couple of tough guys, we are. Sorry, officer, it won’t happen again.”

“Show me your IDs. All of you.” Chubby was angry at being disappointed.

Kyle reached into his back pocket, pulled out a card, and handed it to the officer. Prudence stood perfectly still, waiting to see what would happen when he ran it through his scanner.

The officer glared at Kyle.

“There isn’t a date of arrival for you. Why don’t you have a date of arrival stamped in your file?”

Kyle shrugged and looked over his shoulder, at the hatch that led to the ship.

“Guess the system hasn’t updated yet. I mean, come on, I just walked through that door.”

The guard grunted and handed the card back. He turned to Prudence, took the card she extended.

“I’m logging a complaint on your file, Captain. Any more of this crap and you’ll be fined.”

“Yes, officer.” She’d started out disliking this planet. Five minutes on the ground had brought that to a full boil of hatred.

The three of them waited, doing nothing, while the security team wandered off.

“Back to the ship,” she ordered.

“I can’t check out.” Kyle objected. “They monitor every person in and out. You’ll have to sneak me out in a cargo container.”

As a smuggler, the man was a complete failure.

“Come here.” She grabbed his arm and dragged him through the hatch.

Inside the tube-way she banged on the comm panel until the screen lit up.

“Hey,” she said, before the tired-looking girl on the other end could speak. “You didn’t register my crewman. He just disembarked, walked through the hatch with us, but your damn machine didn’t take his ID swipe.”

“Ma’am, the machines don’t—”

“He’s right here. Look, here’s his ID.” She held his arm up so the camera could see the card in his hand. “There’s a fine for this crap. I’m gonna make sure you pay it, unless you fix this right now.”

Prudence’s conscience twinged when she saw the girl was too tired to even complain.

“Swipe it again, sir.”

Kyle obeyed, playing the part of slack-jawed hayseed to perfection.

“Okay, you’re clear now. Sorry for the trouble, Captain.”

Prudence wanted to thank her, but she couldn’t break character. If the girl knew that Prudence had just got what she wanted, she might become suspicious.

“Stupid machines,” she grumbled. It was the closest she could come to an apology.

The screen clicked off.

“Damn, Pru,” Garcia said from the ship’s hatch. “I thought that dude was dead.”

If Garcia had spoken seven seconds earlier, they would have all gone to jail. But it wasn’t luck. Garcia was naturally adept at conspiracy.

“So did I.” She stared at Kyle.

“He hit me,” Jorgun offered helpfully. “But then he said he was sorry.”

“Maybe we should, you know, set the record straight.” Garcia brought his right hand out from behind his body, revealing the splattergun he was holding. “It’s not like anybody is gonna be looking for the corpse.”

“Put that away, Garcia,” Prudence demanded. With this angle of fire, he was as likely to kill her and Jorgun as he was to hit Kyle.

“I thought we were against the League.” That was a surprise, coming from Garcia. She hadn’t realized he cared one way or another.

Kyle laughed. “Then why are you volunteering to finish their job? You won’t even get paid for it.” He was arguing for his life, but he didn’t seem to be trying very hard.

“Nobody’s going to kill anyone,” Prudence said. Kyle had stopped fighting when Jorgun had started crying. That earned him a chance to explain. “Kyle is going to take a shower. Garcia, you’re going to take Jorgun into the city and buy him a puzzle. Then you’ll start looking for a cargo.”

“We can’t transport out of here.” Garcia knew they didn’t have a license.

“Pretend you don’t know that. Act like you’re here for a legitimate reason, for crying out loud. Act normal.”

“What are you going to do, Pru?” Jorgun asked her.

“I’m going to get a stateroom ready for Kyle.” One with a drop-bar on the outside sounded like a good idea.

She and Kyle swiped their IDs again, indicating that they were returning to the ship. Stupid machines.

While he showered, she went through his pockets.

Only two items looked interesting. The blue pod from Kassa, and a data chip. She plugged the chip in, but it was encrypted.

“What’s the keyword?” she asked him as soon as he stepped out of the washroom. He was wearing only a towel around his waist. She could see bruises on his chest, and a nasty scrape on his shin.

She could also see the breadth of his shoulders, the tight muscles of his belly, the bulge of his thighs. He was solid. Dense, even.

He was definitely her type.

She stood up from the screen, stepped away from it, making room for him to type in the key. Keeping her orbit at a safe distance.

“The password is ‘twin.’ I only encoded it because the camera made me.” He tapped the keyboard, and the screen blossomed with a vid. “I don’t have any secrets left, Prudence. I’m out of money and time. I’m out of secrets.”

She didn’t believe him. People had secrets they didn’t know they had. No one ever ran out of them.

“What are we looking at?” He had paused it on a man in an artistic, tribal mask. It was as dull as a tourist’s home vid.

“Not much, I’m afraid. I thought it would be a picture of Veram Dejae.”

The man in the photo looked about the right size and shape for that.

“Why on Earth would the prime minister of Altair wear a mask like that?”

Kyle grinned lopsidedly. “I didn’t say it was a picture of the prime minister. I said it was a picture of Dejae … one of him, anyway.”

She glared at him from across the room.

“There’s two,” he explained. “Five years ago I almost arrested one for making a wrong turn, while the other one was making a public speech on the other side of the city. Now I’m trying to figure out why Dejae needs to hide his twin brother.”

“The twin is on Baharain?”

Kyle tapped the screen, and the vid zoomed back to the beginning. A glassy dome set in wind-shaped rocks. “He’s head of RDC, the largest and most productive mining concern on the planet. He also has a hobby. A nasty, vicious hobby.” His face was bitter and hard.

“What?” Prudence asked, unsure of what to expect. Had Dejae inflicted those bruises?

“He keeps pets. Spiders, to be exact. Two-meter-tall spiders that kill people that get too close to his dome.”

A shudder of dismay ran through her spine. Jandi had prepared her for double-dealing, some criminal smuggling of tech and weapons. But Kyle was describing a partnership. How could a man turn against his own species? She grimaced in disgust.

“You don’t look very surprised,” Kyle said, surprised.

“The spider-ship we found—it was made on Baharain. Or at least, the cockpit glass was. I stole a piece, had it analyzed.” Distressingly, Kyle didn’t look surprised at that. With effort she returned her attention to the screen. “Why is Dejae wearing a mask? Was this at a party or something?” It looked like the kind of extravagance Cinderella’s would love to sell.

“No, he was home alone. When a servant came to the door, he took the mask
off
.”

“Wearing a mask while alone?” That sparked her memory. She’d spent the three hops from Altair reading through the cube Jandi had given her, out of idle curiosity. Now she tapped at the screen, trying to pull the data up.

“Damn.” The cube was in her stateroom, on a private hookup. “I need to check something in my cabin.”

Kyle eyed his pile of filthy clothes. “Where’s your washer?”

She waved at the back of the hall distractedly. Was he going to walk around in that towel all day?

“Maybe you could get some pants from Garcia’s locker.”

“Are you serious?” Kyle shook his head. “Have you seen the clothes that guy wears?”

Prudence felt that rather missed the point that he wore clothes, instead of bathroom accessories. But Kyle was already stuffing his into the machine next to the shower.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Apparently he didn’t see anything wrong with walking into her private stateroom while practically naked. Where was the standoffish, proper gentleman that had stalked off her ship on Kassa?

His face was still gray with fatigue, but the light was back in his eyes. There was something else, something odd about his mouth. Prudence finally realized he was trying to repress a smile.

She had to find out why. “What did you mean, in the port? Who did you think I was?”

He looked at her with those black eyes, a gaze so intent she could feel it on her face. “From the instant I came out of the node at Kassa, people have been trying to kill me, in a variety of unusual ways. I thought you were one of those people. An operative; an agent. But Jorgun … he’s not faking it. It’s not an act. And that means you can’t be acting, either.”

“But you were.” He had been lies and contradictions from the moment she saw him. No, before that, when he was just a voice on the
Launceston
.

“Yes. I am a double agent. I’ve been one for five years, so long I thought I had forgotten how to be anything else.”

“If you don’t work for the League, then who do you work for?”

He shrugged. “We don’t have a name. We’re just people that don’t like the League. I didn’t even know there were any others, when I started. I didn’t know there were people like you.”

“I’m just a tramp freighter captain,” she said, feeling defensive. Jandi’s lecture about heroism echoed in her head. “That’s all.”

“I know,” he answered, and now he could not hold back the smile. “You’re exactly what you appear to be.”

It had been a long time since a nearly naked man had smiled so openly at her. And she still had her clothes on.

Going into her stateroom, she left the door open.

“Dejae obviously isn’t quite what he appears.” She tried to steer her thoughts back to the topic at hand. “I was told he came from Baharain, but I don’t believe that.”

“He’s only been here about fifteen years. He’s been on Altair about ten. I mean, the other one … you know what I mean. But yes, both of them are from somewhere else.”

She tapped through the cube, searching. The cube was dense, packed with academic information, and not particularly user-friendly. But “private masks” yielded up a single entry.

“Monterey.”

Kyle shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Neither have I…” She skimmed through the entry. “A dome world, unknown population, but estimated to be small. Very private … it was originally a religious retreat, funded by a wealthy industrialist. Founded about two hundred years ago.”

“What does that have to do with spiders?”

She started paging through node charts.

“It’s only three hops from Kassa. And they’re dead ones, so no traffic.” A dead hop was a system without a colony, a lifeless and uninhabited star. People tended to avoid those for the same reasons you avoided dark alleys. There was no one there who could help you if you got into trouble, and if there was anyone there, they were probably the source of your trouble in the first place.

“Could the spiders be using Monterey as a base?”

She linked her screen into the ships’ network, and through that to Baharain Traffic Control.

“There’s a liner listing Monterey as part of its itinerary, within the last two weeks. Monterey is only two hops from here, through a large colony called Solistar. I can’t imagine the spiders are squatting on a system right next to a heavily populated world, and nobody has noticed.”

“There are bloody spiders squatting on
this
world, and apparently nobody has noticed.” Kyle’s face was black with anger.

She waited, letting him unload the burden at his own pace.