The Kassa Gambit (26 page)

“I got a kid killed.” He sighed, biting his lip in shame. “He survived the attack on Kassa, came all the way out here to make a paycheck for his family, and I went and fed him to the Earth-damned spiders anyway.”

It must have happened while he was taking those pictures.

“Should we go after them?” Jandi would die of shock if she brought him a whole alien, rather than a mere artifact. Actually, he probably would have a heart attack. Maybe she would just show him a leg or two.

“No,” Kyle said. “I don’t know how many there are, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t poke Dejae’s security net again and expect to leave this planet alive. I’m not sure we can get out of here as it is. And it’s no use going back to Altair. These pictures aren’t enough.” His lips tightened in pain, the jaw underneath set in mulish anger. Those pictures had come at a high cost.

“Then…” But she already knew the answer.

“We’re going to Monterey.”

Garcia had gone straight to a bar and started drinking. Prudence could hardly complain. She’d told him to act normal.

“Buy a bottle of whiskey from the bartender,” she instructed Jorgun over the comm link. “Tell Garcia he can have it when he gets back on the ship. Don’t let him trick it away from you, Jor. Just hold it high in the air, where he can’t reach it.”

She was still trying to get clearance to launch when her pied piper came on board dragging his rat. Garcia was cursing savagely, but he pulled himself together when he walked past the open door to Prudence’s cabin. Kyle was in there, still hunched over the data console.

“You don’t have any pants on, man.” Garcia seemed to be asking for confirmation. He must have been drinking hard.

Kyle looked up from the screen in surprise.

“Oh. Right.” He ducked out of the room and headed aft to the shower.

“That man didn’t have any pants on,” Garcia shouted down the passageway to the bridge. “I leave you for one lousy minute and you get naked with the League!”

“Jor, give him the bottle,” Prudence shouted back.

Kyle came onto the bridge, finally dressed. He was going to be a problem that couldn’t be solved with a bottle of free liquor.

“So how long will it take?” He sounded like a man in a hurry.

“It’s a three-day hop from here to Solistar, and another five to Monterey. That doesn’t count in-system travel time. And we’ll have to dock at Solistar. We need fuel and cargo. If we show up at Monterey with an empty hold, they’ll be suspicious. So make yourself comfortable, Lieutenant. It’s a long trip.”

“Call me Kyle. I don’t think dead men have ranks.”

“You can call me Captain,” she said. In case he might be getting silly ideas.

“Of course, Captain.” He said it with an exaggeration of his bureaucratic obsequiousness. She was surprised how much it hurt to hear that tone again.

Jorgun made a mockery of her formality anyway. “Do you want me to look at the cargo lists, Pru?” He was trying to do his job, the one thing he was good at.

“I’m sorry, Jor, but we don’t have any.” Normally he would examine all the destinations, fees, and expected returns, and put the stops in the best order. It was called the “Traveling Salesman” problem. Computers could solve it, of course, but it was a pain to enter all the parameters and assign the right weightings. Jorgun could do it instantly, and besides, he enjoyed it.

“Garcia said if we didn’t get a cargo soon, we’d be landed.” Jorgun probably didn’t know what landed meant, but he was upset anyway.

“Garcia is drunk,” Prudence pointed out. “Don’t worry about it, Jor. We’ve got a lot of money from—” She stopped, not wanting to mention Kassa. “We still have lots of money.” Now she was telling outright lies. “We have enough.”

“Enough to get us back to Altair?” Kyle wasn’t so easily fooled.

“Us? You can take a commercial liner back.” Landing on Altair with the renegade dead League officer-turned-betrayer as her cargo would be equivalent to suicide.

He didn’t argue. “Just get me in and out of Monterey. I’ll take care of the rest. It’s not your problem, Prudence. But I appreciate the help. Altair appreciates it.”

“I’m not doing it for Altair.” She bit her lip. Why did she have to keep reacting to him?

“Nonetheless, we appreciate it.” He couldn’t seem to stop smiling. It was so very different from the last time he had stood on her bridge. “Dejae went through a lot of trouble to hide his planet of origin. That means there’s a good chance they kicked him off. If he left enemies on Monterey, we might find some friends.”

“And if not?”

Kyle’s smile turned wry. “Everybody has enemies.” That was closer to the man she remembered.

She tried to keep that man in mind over the next three days. She wanted to remember that Kyle could be false. He’d demonstrated the ability to lie convincingly, wearing a cover persona for years at a time. He was a dangerous man. Not just because he was strong and trained in combat by the police force, but because he was emotionally capable of extreme dedication. She had been mistaken in thinking he was not as hard as a soldier. He was stronger than that. The years of obedience had not left him dulled and useless. They had not killed his passion.

Right now he seemed passionate for justice. That was a goal she could identify with, despite the attendant danger. Justice was never free, and sometimes it could be quite expensive. If Kyle had to sacrifice her and her crew for the sake of Altair, he would do it. But she was prepared to run that risk.

What she was afraid of was what came after. Once he had achieved his goal—or figured out it was unachievable—what would he do then? What direction would all that pent-up passion take? A man like that, with so much energy, so much life to recapture, might do almost anything.

What he did for now was to fit seamlessly into her crew. He played cards with Garcia and vid games with Jorgun. He took his turn in the galley, without being asked, making a credible casserole out of the random contents of their freezer.

And he kept his distance from her, never pushing, never crowding. But sometimes, when he didn’t think she noticed, she caught him staring at her.

Jorgun was happy with their new crew member. She was a little surprised to see him playing his favorite vid game, Starfighter, with Kyle. It was one of the things Jorgun and she shared. Garcia had no interest in any activity that didn’t result in exchanges of wealth, and Melvin had been unable to take the game seriously. He’d get stoned and fly around in spirals grooving on the pretty lights instead of shooting the targets.

“I like playing with him,” Jorgun explained, when she asked him about it in private. “He doesn’t have to let me win.”

She had developed a careful habit of losing approximately every other game when she played with Jorgun. The game was too similar to the sims she ran to practice her flying skills, so her reflexes were completely dominating if she didn’t rein them in. But she hadn’t realized Jorgun could tell. All those years she had fought to get others to not underestimate him, and she’d being doing it herself.

The shame mixed with the jealousy to form a biting hole in her stomach, much like Garcia’s absurd chili recipes always did.

“I’m sorry, Jor. I just thought it would be more fun that way.”

“You always ask me who won the last one, and if I say you did, then I win.”

Stupid of her. Of course he had detected the pattern.

“But Kyle is funny to play with. Sometimes he flies into things by accident. I keep telling him not to fly so fast, but he always forgets. And he doesn’t get mad when he loses, like Garcia does.”

The litany of Kyle’s perfections exasperated her. She wanted to pretend that she was angry at him for ingratiating himself with the simpleminded member of her crew, worming his way into her affairs through the weakest link, but down the passageway she could hear Garcia laughing with him over one of his stupid police stories.

She took three steps in their direction before she realized what she was doing. Annoyed, she turned around and went to the bridge instead.

There she could drown her tiny fears in oceans of dread, staring at the node-charts for hours and trying to guess where the spiders came from. Where they would go next. Where they might be, even now, descending on some helpless world trapped in their web.

SIXTEEN

Fire

It was impossible to fear the sparkling blue and white jewel that slowly filled the vid screen on the bridge. Solistar was a beautiful planet, and if it hadn’t been for the star’s unfortunate tendency to belch out random storms of radiation, it would have been a friendly one.

As it was, the planetary network warned them never to go outside without heavy rad-protective clothing, and then made sure they understood by displaying twenty-seven commercials in a row for various forms of it. Kyle had never considered the merits of designer rad-suits, and now that he was exposed to them, he found himself severely underwhelmed.

“At least it’s safe,” Garcia grumbled. “Not even the spiders would want this place.”

“We don’t know that,” Prudence countered. “It has a breathable atmosphere. That’s worth something.” The source of that air, single-cell life-forms in the oceans, had evolved immunity to the occasional bursts of silent, invisible death, by the virtue of being absurdly simple. But complex, multicellular creatures like human beings fell apart in an astounding variety of creative ways after one or two exposures.

“Do we know what the spiders breathe?” Kyle asked. On Baharain they hadn’t cared about the toxic atmosphere.

“No,” Prudence conceded. “But it has to be oxygen. Everything breathes oxygen.”

“Baharain doesn’t have oxygen. And the spider I saw wasn’t wearing breathing equipment.” Between the darkness, the terror, and the flash of the plasma explosion he hadn’t gotten a very good look, but he distinctly remembered seeing the creature’s fangs. “I saw its teeth.”

“Spiders don’t breathe through their mouth.” Prudence could be amazingly contrary when she wanted to. “Maybe it had oxy feeders plugged into its trachea.”

In Kyle’s opinion, she had spent way too much time studying spider anatomy over the last few days. She kept leaving pictures of various horrible eight-legged monsters on the data screens, and it was creeping everyone out.

“They’re not actually spiders, Prudence. They just look like them. They have eight legs and fangs. Other than that, we don’t know much.”

“Except that they’re immune to tetrodotoxin.” Prudence had looked up the name of the stuff that made Baharain poisonous. You didn’t even have to breathe it—just getting it on your skin could be fatal. “And we can assume they are more resistant to radiation than we are. That fighter-craft wasn’t shielded very well.”

“Then how do we kill them?” Garcia was exasperated. “You’ve ruled out air, poison, radiation … what’s left?”

“A plasma bomb works pretty well.”

Kyle hadn’t meant to sound so bitter.

Garcia matched his bitterness, and raised him by a gallon of bile. “Maybe we have some, then. I’ll just check the cargo manifest … oh, look. We don’t have a cargo manifest. Because we don’t have cargo.” The man seemed less concerned about the fate of millions than he did about the percentages he wasn’t making.

But Kyle knew it was an act. Everybody wore a persona like a space suit, designed to insulate them from the cold emptiness of life. Most people lived in that suit so long they forgot it was on, like Garcia had. Mercenary profiteering was the only way Garcia knew how to deal with the world.

“We don’t have plasma bombs,” Jorgun said, confused. “I don’t remember those being on any cargo list.”

Kyle had to revise his cynical conclusion. Not everyone wore a fake persona.

“We disguised them as cuckoo clocks,” Garcia said. His voice was laden with withering scorn, but Jorgun was as oblivious to that as he was to sarcasm.

“I don’t remember any cuckoo clocks.”

Garcia lashed out. “Do you even know what a cuckoo clock is, you big dummy?”

“Garcia!” Prudence barked at him, and Garcia bit back whatever comment he was about to add.

“No, but I know it was never on the cargo list.” Jorgun knew something was wrong, but he stuck to his guns. The kid—because it was impossible to think of him any other way than as a child—was brave.

“There weren’t any clocks, Jorgun.” Kyle couldn’t stop himself from playing the protector. “Garcia’s just upset. He’s afraid of the spiders, and he doesn’t know what to do.”

“Garcia is upset because he’s made one commission in eight hops. Garcia is upset because instead of carrying cargo, we’re carrying a criminal who can’t even pay his own fare. Garcia is upset because that flaming planet is probably crawling with spiders, and we’re flying straight towards it.” Talking about himself in the third person robbed Garcia’s rant of vitriol. Jorgun was smiling again by the end of it.

“You can get us a transport for Monterey,” Prudence said. “No passengers, though. And try to get something low on mass. We need to be nimble.”

“Can I ask the brain trust here a question?”

“Sure, Garcia,” Prudence said. Kyle was amazed at her patience.

“If we don’t find spiders on Solistar, why are we going to go looking for them on Monterey? Isn’t the point to
avoid
being eaten by spiders?”

Prudence answered before Kyle could.

“Can you guess how much Fleet would pay to know where the spiders’ base is?”

It wasn’t the answer he would have given.

“Information is the best cargo, Garcia.” Prudence smiled at the angry man. Kyle felt like getting angry himself. He wanted her to smile at him like that. “Its mass-to-value ratio is infinite.”

“There’s no profit in being dead,” Garcia grumbled, but he deflated like a balloon with a pinhole in it. Kyle had seen the trick done once. You stuck a piece of clear tape on the balloon, and then you could poke it with a needle and it would slowly shrink, instead of popping. Prudence was a magician, and her crew were her props. Spending days trapped in a bubble of unreal space on a tiny, fragile habitat made management a survival skill. Fleet accomplished it with discipline; corporate liners relied on the promise of money; but the captain of a free-trader had only her wits to work with.