The Kassa Gambit (7 page)

Like he could trust her; like she was on his side. Always it was “I” or “the Department” or “the League.” Never “we.” Never himself and another, partners and equals, peer to peer.

A subtle slip, but his life had become a pirouette on the razor’s edge, and subtlety had become the only flavor left.

Trudging down the crater’s edge to the alien ship, he resolved not to make any more mistakes.

Melvin screamed something, but the wind took it.

Kyle turned his helmet mike on. “No point in radio silence now, people. But consider this a crime scene. Don’t touch anything. Do I make myself clear?”

Melvin’s voice rattled in his ear. “We’re not bio-sealed! How do you know it’s safe?”

Prudence answered, the voice of spacer wisdom. “Melvin, we can’t get sick from aliens. For crying out loud, we can’t even eat native plants.”

Everything the human race had, they’d brought with them from Earth, or made since then. Life was a complex orchestra, and one wrong note made it incompatible. It wasn’t just the molecular composition of proteins: it was the shape they folded into. Sometimes the local flora was poisonous, but usually it was just inert, like eating cardboard. The dreaded space-plague was a feature of science fiction, not reality.

Kyle added his own reasoning, trying to reassert control from that one foolish moment he’d let it slip. “If they had a biological attack vector, they would have already used it. None of the colonists were dying from disease.”

Even while he spoke, a thousand warnings rattled through his mind. There were so many ways this could end in death: automated defense systems, a wounded but still living pilot, a booby trap, or just industrial hazard. What if the fuel source was toxic? What if the ship was on fire, internally, and about to explode? What about radiation?

He worried about these things, but he didn’t stop walking. Curiosity and the proverbial cat. Thinking about cats made him think about Prudence, so delicate and reserved in repose, but feral in movement.

He turned to look at her, coming down the slope after him with Jorgun in tow.

“The locator doesn’t read any signal other than the distress beacon,” she said over the radio. “There’s no distortion in our communications. And the snow hasn’t melted. This wreck is cold.”

She had done more than just think about the dangers. She had looked for them.

“Good,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Quite brave of you to assume it was safe.” She was mocking him again.

“No, it was stupid. I’m tired. Don’t let me make any more stupid mistakes.”

Melvin was still standing at the top of the crater, holding a rifle. She wasn’t making mistakes.

“This whole expedition is stupid,” she told him. Floundering in the snow, she leaned on the big Jorgun for support, let him help her through the drifts. Kyle was seized with a completely unreasonable pang of jealousy.

“Then why are you down here?” he asked.

The two of them had caught up to him, close enough that he could see her face.

“I had friends here,” she said softly.

“I have friends on Altair,” he answered. Not that it was strictly true. He had comrades, acquaintances, and enemies. But he was loyal to Altair’s millions of citizens in the abstract, in the sense of duty to the innocent, even if he wasn’t personally attached to any of them as individuals. “Imagine Altair like this. Imagine fifty million targets, not fifty thousand.”

“You have a fleet.”

She put a lot more stock in Fleet than he did.

“Altair would be down by one patrol boat if it weren’t for your assistance. Unless you’re volunteering to be admiral, I’m not sure we should rely on Fleet.”

Jorgun laughed. “Admiral Prudence! Does that mean I get to be a captain?”

Kyle wanted to laugh with him. The image of this slight young woman in full regalia shouting at lines of hardened spacers was incongruous. But the facts were more incongruous.

How had Prudence known how to defeat the mines?

She returned his suspicion. “I can’t take the credit. I’m sure you would have figured it out on your own.” Suave, even dismissive. She had saved his life, and he couldn’t even thank her for it, because she thought he was playing a game. That he was pretending to have asked for help, to make a radio record that looked like he hadn’t already known what to expect.

But that was absurd. The League would never broadcast its own incompetence as a cover-up. How could she be so sophisticated but not understand that basic fact? Unless she was playing deep, making cover stories for herself. If she kept accusing him of conspiracy, it meant she wasn’t the conspirator.

He closed his eyes in weariness. Too much double-dealing, too many possibilities and secrets. Over the years it had worn at him, grinding him down, stripping away everything that was not deception or counterdeception. Here, in the presence of aliens and beauty, in the shadow of violence and strength, it was too much.

He envied Jorgun. For the giant, everything was as it seemed. Too stupid to be suspicious, he could trust—and be trusted. No wonder Prudence had picked him. The perfect tool for the perfect operative.

“Are you all right?” She managed to make her voice sound like real concern.

“I’m tired.” In so many ways. “Let’s see if there’s a body.”

The three of them cautiously advanced on the shattered cockpit. Well, the two of them. Jorgun strode up to it eagerly, while Prudence and Kyle followed.

“Don’t touch anything,” he warned the giant again.

Jorgun peered inside, and shook his head. “I don’t think this is a Dog-Man ship.”

Kyle pushed up against Jorgun, trying to gently shove him out of the way. He might as well have pushed on a tree. Instead, he settled for slipping in front, and leaned his helmet forward to stare into the alien vessel.

Again, Jorgun asked the simple and the obvious. “Where does the pilot sit?”

There wasn’t a chair. The cockpit was a welter of unfamiliar dials and levers all along the edges, but there was no central chair.

“Maybe he doesn’t sit.” Prudence reached with her hand, inside.

“Don’t touch anything,” Kyle repeated automatically. Like she was a child. Or a green recruit.

She didn’t bother to retort to his pettiness. “Put your hand in there, Commander.”

Chastised, he did so. Their arms together, hands almost touching.

“What do you
not
feel?” she asked.

Dumbly, he shook his head. What he wanted to feel was her hand in his, her warmth and smoothness. But through the insulation of the suit, he couldn’t feel anything at all.

“That’s right. No grav field.” She seemed to think that was significant. Maybe to a spacer, it was.

But Kyle saw something that was significant to a cop.

A blue stain, on the cockpit floor. On the glass. More on the control panel resting on the snow.

“Who flies without passive grav-plating? Even in a tactical craft.” Prudence was shaking her head in disbelief.

“Who has blue blood?” Kyle asked her, pointing to the stains.

She stared down at the little patches of color, silenced.

Jorgun had been thinking his own thoughts. Now he leaned over both of them, reached deep into the cockpit, grabbed part of the floor, and pushed.

It spun, floating freely, a wheel within a wheel. An outer track remained stable, and in the contrast, the pattern leaped out at them.

Eight resting places. Eight kickplates. Eight legs.

Kyle glared at the big man, his suspicion flaring out of control. How could simpleness have seen what they had missed?

Prudence explained, her eyes sparking with secondhand pride. “That’s what he does, Commander. He sees patterns. That’s why he’s on my crew. He can plot a multihop course more efficiently than a computer. They used to call it idiot savant. He’s not stupid. He’s just wired different than the rest of us.”

“Like you told me, Pru, we all have our own special talents.” Jorgun smiled.

“Tell me what you see, Jor.”

Kyle could tell from her voice that she already knew the answer. But she was letting him go as far as he could. Pushing him gently.

“Eight.” Jorgun announced, but then fell silent. That was all it meant to him, but Prudence nodded in agreement.

“Eight places to put your feet. Whoever flew this ship had eight feet. The absence of passive grav-plating tells us they don’t suffer from inertial sickness. And that they’re strong—that fusion nozzle must be capable of at least two or three G acceleration. They could stand up through that acceleration, spinning around, looking for visual contact—that’s why there’s so much glass. Which tells us they have impossibly good eyesight, too.”

“Who has eight feet?” Jorgun asked, confused.

“Nobody we know,” she said.

“Fleet needs to see this.” Kyle found himself hoping that authority would know what to do about it.

“The
okimune
needs to see this.” Prudence used the old word for the collective human realm, the sum total of civilization, wherever and whatever it might be. A normal person would have said “the world,” meaning his own planet; a sophisticated person would have said “Altair,” the biggest society around. But Prudence thought in wider terms. Like an outsider.

For the first time in his life, Kyle felt provincial, a country rube fresh off the farm. The feeling wasn’t pleasant, but the novelty of it was astounding.

“Fleet first,” he said. “We can’t just put this on the evening news. Can you imagine the panic?”

“Maybe people should be panicking.”

He stared at her. “How would that help?”

She waved her hand, in no particular direction, indicating the ruined world around them. “How did this help?”

“Running scared won’t make it better. You know that.” Was this their plan? To plunge every world within a hundred hops into mindless terror? Oppression always followed fear, like rain after the lightning. He’d studied enough history to know that.

“We don’t know that, Commander. We have no idea what we are up against. This wreck could be the blow that frightened them off, made them retreat in such a rush they only stopped to grab the pilot. Or it could be such an inconsequential prick that they haven’t even noticed it’s missing yet. Maybe running scared is the only thing anybody can do. Maybe Altair is already dead.”

“What about Jelly?” Jorgun’s face was creased with worry and concern. The death of civilizations meant nothing to him, only the death of individuals. Kyle was struck by the difference. There were no individuals for him to mourn. Only the ideal of community, not the fact of it.

“I’m sorry, Jor. We haven’t found her yet. I don’t think we will.” She broke the news to him while he had this shiny new toy to distract him, like a mother to a child.

The giant puzzled over her words, his lower lip trembling, but he did not cry. Like a boy trying to be a man. Kyle started to reach out to comfort him. Like a father, he stopped.

Let the boy show his strength. Let him grow into it.

“Did they take her?” Jorgun asked. “Did they take Jelly?”

But this child would never grow any taller.

“No, Jorgun.” Kyle used his most reassuring voice. “They didn’t take her. They didn’t take anyone.” There had been no reports of sightings from any of the refugees. The attackers had been as insubstantial as ghosts. Bombs from the sky, but no follow-up; destruction, but no looting.

It was inhuman. But that was the point.

“I’m fucking freezing up here.” Melvin, complaining again over the radio. “What the fuck are we gonna do?”

“Can you fit this in the cargo bay?” It was the first thing Kyle could think of.

Prudence stared at him. “How? We don’t have any loaders here. Are you going to fly it in? And then fix my ship when it decides to melt down or self-destruct?”

“If it blows up in the ship, wouldn’t that be bad?” Jorgun didn’t get sarcasm.

“We can’t leave it here. If this beacon turns off, how the hell can we find it again?” Kyle waved his hands at the blizzard. It was getting worse. In a few hours the alien ship would be buried under clean white snow. The evidence would be lost. A cop’s worst nightmare.

“That’s not my problem.” Prudence cradled the rifle, like its weight was unfamiliar in her hands. “If your Fleet can’t find one dead fighter craft on a planet’s surface, what good will they be against a host of live ones?”

That wasn’t the point. He was sure Fleet had the ability to find this ship again, if they really wanted to. It might take days or weeks, but they could just scan the entire continent with short radar.

The point was that he didn’t know if he could convince them to try. What if they didn’t take him seriously? What if they brushed him off as delusional? A snow-vision by an exhausted cop, a flighty girl, and a simpleton.

“Screw Fleet. What if those aliens come back and find
us
?” And a paranoid stoner. Even filtered through the helmet speakers, Melvin’s whine was annoying.

Kyle would be laughed out of the prosecutor’s office if this was all he could offer in a criminal trial. Altair Fleet would need half as much reason to ignore a League officer.

While he was trying to think of another plan, he saw her move. Subtly, out of the corner of his eye, the casual swing of her hand. But she was dropping something in her pocket, not the other way around. She was taking, not leaving.

He let it slide. Better not to confront her now, in the snow, with her men and so many guns. Better not to let her know he knew at all.

“Then what do you suggest?” he said, giving her the chance to advance whatever plot she and her unknown bosses were trying so hard to make happen.

“That arctic research station has a transmitter. If we give them a ride out, maybe they’ll let you have it. And we can drop it off here on our way.”

“What if the beacon fails in the next five minutes?”

“We can have the autopilot backtrack by dead reckoning. For a short trip, it should get us close enough.”

She’d prepared for everything. Shown him just enough, channeled his every step. He could wreck her plans, search her pockets and seize whatever she’d had to steal to make this whole scheme fly.