The Kassa Gambit Read online

  “R and R delivery. Boss thought you might like to have some fun.” Kyle grinned and jerked his thumb in Prudence’s direction.

  The older soldier glanced at Prudence, and she arched her shoulders back, exposing an immodest amount of cleavage. Surprised, the guard hesitated. Kyle took advantage of his distraction, stepping in close and bringing the butt of his splattergun swinging up in a vicious arc into the soldier’s jaw. The man fell against the wall and slid to the floor.

  The young one finally stopped staring and started to move. Prudence stepped forward and held the knife at his throat, threatening him. But she had forgotten it had no pressure. The soldier brushed against it, unknowing, and his throat opened under the invisible edge of the knife. Blood sprayed over her and him and the corridor and he stumbled and fell.

  Lying on the ground, clutching his throat and losing consciousness, he stared up at her. She remembered the look in his eyes when he had heard Kyle’s words, and felt nothing.

  “Come on.” Kyle pulled at her arm and they ran. Behind them a door opened and voices shouted.

  Another elevator. It had a red flashing light and did not open to Kyle’s touch. He fumbled through the utility belt, trying card after card until one opened the doors. Inside she found the symbol they had been searching for.

  Next stop: Engineering.

  The elevator doors opened on a short hall with thick blast doors at the end of it. She knew Kyle’s cards would not open this. With the knife she cut a circle in the door itself, ignoring the latch. Kyle kicked the circle and the slab fell into the room. Without hesitation he dived through the hole, rolling on the other side. She heard the splattergun fire once.

  Carefully, avoiding the hole’s razored edges with her exposed flesh, she stepped through. Kyle chased the engineers into a storage locker, shouting and swearing and waving the splattergun like a cattle prod. There were no bodies on the floor. He must have fired over their heads.

  While she threw levers on the main consoles, she wondered on his choice of actions. In a battle for their lives, for the lives of all humanity, he had fired a warning shot. Because he could. Because for this minute he could accomplish his goals without killing. Even if thirty seconds from now he would have to slaughter them like sheep, for this instant he could spare them.

  The subtle vibration of the ship, the living deck beneath her feet, stilled and quieted as she killed the main engine.

  With the engineers locked away, Kyle went to the ruined door and took up a firing position. Buying her time.

  She studied the vast engine room. The heart of all gravitics systems was its inertial mass, a colossal lump of heavy metal surrounded by circuitry. The electronics twisted the atoms, turning their inertia into motion. Gravity and acceleration were the same thing to mathematicians and metal. The heavy core would fall upward with the force of a hundred Gs.

  A honeycomb of steel pillars radiated out from the mass. The skeleton of the ship. All of the decking, the hull, the outer skin and armor, rested on these pillars. The mass pushed on the pillars and moved the ship. This was the simple design that had carried man through space for hundreds of years. It was practically foolproof.

  In this monstrous ship the inertial mass was at least a thousand tons of dense metal, a dull barrel shape welded into the center of the room. Nothing she, or heavy artillery, could do to it would appreciably matter. The acres of circuitry were independently wired. The controls were double and triple backed up.

  Practically foolproof.

  She stepped off the platform surrounding the inertial mass. There was no grav-plating here. It would only complicate the thrust calculations. Pushing off from the deck, fighting to control the turmoil in her stomach, she sailed up to one of the great pillars that held up the rest of the ship.

  It was huge, a meter around. With the knife blade she cut a small hole in the side of the gleaming metal. As she had expected, the tube was hollow. Ten-centimeter-thick walls, but hollow. And why not? Steel was stronger in that shape. These columns could easily support the hundred thousand tons of vessel above them.

  She traced a circle around the pillar. All the way around, meeting up at the other side. Kicking off to the next pillar, she did the same, carefully choosing the angle of the cut.

  Kyle fired from the doorway. Time was running short.

  From pillar to pillar she went, deftly touching them with her atomic edge. Kyle fired again, and she heard return fire from down the corridor.

  A dull thump and the screech of a thousand nails on steel. They had thrown a grenade. It must have missed the hole in the door and bounced back at them, because Kyle was still alive. She knew because she could hear his gun firing rapidly.

  She finished the last pillar. The mass still rested on its base, anchored in place by power lines and control circuitry and simple inertia. The pillars hung stately, unmoved. From five meters away it was impossible to see the hairline cracks.

  Kicking to the floor, she crawled out on the deck, and gravity claimed her again. She ran to a service hatch, cut off the sealing lock, and threw it open.

  Kyle sprinted to join her, tossing aside the empty gun, but before he jumped pell-mell down this hole she grabbed his arm. Steering him away, to the other side of the engine, to a different service hatch. This time she cut through the metal of the door, leaving the latch in place. No door-lock sensor would give them away here.

  Kyle leapt and she followed. The hatchway was shallow, only a meter. Somehow he had lost his jacket. Squatting, cramped, bundled together, she felt the warmth of his body through the fabric of her shirt. And resented that millimeter of separation.

  Voices from above. The soldiers had freed their engineers.

  Muffled shouting. The soldiers yelled at them to surrender, but they were at the wrong service hatch. The ruse would buy her and Kyle at most thirty seconds. She spent those precious seconds kissing him. Vibrant, fiery life burned through the fatigue and fear and pain, making her head swim with elation. She had never really felt alive, before. She could not bear to think of losing it now.

  Dejae’s voice—there was no way of telling which one it was, or any point in trying—barked orders.

  “Full thrust! We have a node entrance to make, and your foolish cowardice has cost us velocity.”

  “Hey.” A voice from above. Instinctively she and Kyle looked up. A soldier stood at the lip of the hatch, pointing a gun down at them.

  Outside, the whine of the generators as they were brought back on line.

  “Hey,” the soldier shouted to his fellow mercenaries. “Over here!”

  The ship … trembled.

  Metal screamed. The soldier looked up in shock, but that was all he had time for. A thousand tons of metal fell upward with the force of a hundred Earths. The inertial mass pushed on the pillars of the ship. And the pillars, cut to the bone, buckled, slipped, and tore.

  The heavy metal core fell through the dainty tubes like a stone through moss. Shot through the center of the ship, smashing everything in its path. Debris and shrapnel whirled in its wake, and the soldier above them disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flame.

  Alarms shrieked and died. The lights went out. The only sound left was the whoosh of air rushing out into space.

  Prudence cut beneath her feet, heedless of disabled alarms and dead power lines now, like a vicious parasitic worm eating its way through the dying ship. They dropped another level into networks of tubes and feeder lines sporadically lit by flickering emergency lights. Prudence led Kyle outward, toward the skin of the ship, trusting to her instincts in the darkness. He followed, trusting her.

  At the escape pod hatch, they met another soldier banging on the door, trying to hurry it open.

  “This cab’s ours,” Kyle said, grinning like a lunatic. “Go find another one.”

  Looking at them in horror, the soldier fled. Prudence and Kyle tumbled into the pod and she pushed the release button. It shuddered, knocking them to the floor, and blew itself free of the sh
ip.

  Through the thick glass of the porthole they could see the great ship budding spores as pods evacuated it.

  Prudence sat in the pilot’s chair and overrode the automatic controls. The node parameters were burned into her brain from hours spent trying to fly the Ulysses through them in the optimal path, shaving hours and then minutes from each successive approximation.

  The pod wasn’t supposed to be flown. It had life support for a week, long enough that if you had to abandon ship while already in a node you’d still be alive when you came out the other side. Dirty, cramped, and possibly homicidal after spending all that time in a tiny room with twenty people, but still alive.

  But it couldn’t enter the node on its own. It didn’t have enough mass for that. And its limited gas propulsion system would never undo all the velocity that was hurling them into deep space. A glance at the vector readings and she knew that nothing could. They were closer than she had thought, already past the turnaround point even for the fusion boats. And they were still on course.

  The dead hulk of the carrier was going to go through the node anyway. And the spider fleet would follow it. There were no other choices left. For anyone.

  Least of all for Kyle and Prudence. She pushed the pod into maximum thrust, rocketing up the side of the ship. If they hit debris or another pod, they would die. If they attracted the attention of the fusion boats that were trying to rescue the other pods, they would die. If she miscalculated a velocity or a mass number, they would die. If she twitched her hand at the wrong time …

  Kyle stood behind her, stroking her hair. Waiting for her to be done. Waiting for her, like he had done since he had met her.

  She looked at the ship’s hull streaking past her and made a guess. Slowed their velocity. Nudged the pod to start drifting toward the giant corpse.

  They floated past the prow of the ship. A used-up party popper, shredded and dark. She pushed the pod in front of the ship, and hit the brakes, adjusting. Watching the solar vector readout like a hawk, waiting for the right instant. When it came, she accelerated again.

  And now she was done. They would enter the node just ahead of the corpse behind them, riding in its mass envelope, but with enough velocity to not be sucked back into it, where the resulting chaos would convert them to cosmic radiation. Unless she had calculated wrong, in which case they would hit the node too soon, like a water balloon on concrete and thus becoming a slightly different kind of cosmic radiation.

  Kyle did his part now. Leaning forward, he tapped at the pod’s comm console, recording a message.

  “Virus attack. Shut down all external comm. Validation is Captain William Stanton, service number ZFX86332.”

  He put it on auto-repeat, and turned the broadcast power to full. Then he set it on a timer, to start in four days.

  “I memorized his number when I was trapped on his ship. Yes, I hated him that much.”

  And then he was done.

  They had done everything they could, for the fate of the galaxy.

  Kyle opened the supplies cabinet and broke out the drinking water. Wetting a soft cloth bandage from the medical kit, he dabbed at her gently, sponging the blood off. It ran in watery red lines to the drain in the floor. The water from the sponge mixed with her tears, as she wept for all of the things she had lost. Jorgun. The Ulysses. Garcia. Jandi, who would be dead by now, by the League’s hand or the indifference of heartless nature. Her family, on Strattenburg. Who would always be dead.

  Whose ashes were now scattered irretrievably to the void. Whose voices had faded with every year, with every hop. The memory of them had protected her at first, kept her whole and sound while she ran and ran, but each new face she interacted with, only to abandon and never see again, had stolen a piece of that memory, until she had only tatters left. Tatters that could not keep out the cold. And nothing new to sew into a vibrant, living whole.

  She looked up at Kyle’s face. Battered and bruised, swollen with red and black lumps. When he grinned at her there was a tooth missing.

  She reached out and touched his jaw, stroking it lightly with her fingers, trying to convince herself he was real.

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  Through the portholes she could see the stars turn into rainbow streaks. They would live.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Then they found they had not done everything they could. There were still things they could do, for each other.

  Very good things.

  EPILOGUE

  The second battle of Kassa was almost as one-sided as the first had been. Altair Fleet, cautious to the point of paranoia, took no chances, and heeded the voice of Cassandra when it came crying to them from the depths of space. Without comm each ship had to fight alone, a single unit instead of a complex whole. But they were ships run by human beings. They adapted.

  The robotic fighters were confused, diverted, and crushed in detail. The destroyers were pounded into submission. The captured crewmen talked, telling everything, but they didn’t have to. After the first mask came off, Fleet already knew everything they needed to know.

  Dejae—the prime minister one, that is—escaped them at the very end. They found him at his desk, wearing a beautiful mother-of-pearl mask with elegant diamond studding and a small, neat hole drilled through the forehead. The needle pistol was still in his hand.

  The monks’ intelligence network was impressive. When Fleet dropped out of the sky on Monterey, they were prepared. Garcia’s voice greeted them, his drawl deeply amused at the ironies of fate and happenstance.

  “Admiral, the new Dejae Prime asked me to give you a message. Mistakes were made. They see that now. And they would very much like to make a deal. They’ve hired me to talk for them, as they’re scared pissless of you.”

  Fleet responded by sending troop transports instead of fusion bombs. On the way down, they noticed that the main landing pad was cluttered with biological life-forms.

  Two dozen naked old men, handcuffed and cowering. They hid their faces, not their bodies, which was pointless since everyone already knew what they looked like.

  When Fleet mentioned this curious oversight, Garcia had an answer for them.

  “Dejae Prime apologizes for the refuse littering the landing site. He suggests that a brief pulse from your fusion engines should clear the pad.”

  Barbaric, but blood called for blood. In a flash of light the previous administration of Monterey ceased to be a trouble to anyone. A new era in monk-human relations began, under the unlikely but inevitable governorship of Garcia Mendezous.

  The first rule Garcia imposed was the loss of the masks. Never again could the monks hide their nature from humanity. They would not be destroyed; their pipettes and flasks could continue to produce what they had come to think of as their children. But from now on they would have to walk with naked faces among men and each other.

  Altair assumed the cost of rebuilding Kassa and reparations for the dead. In exchange they gained the secrets of robotics, extending the strength of their feet without increasing their payroll. From anyone but Altair’s point of view, it wasn’t a particularly fair deal, but nobody was heard to complain.

  Prudence was offered an admiralty, the head of the scout division. Stanton begged her to take the job, sending her a personal comm from his hospital bed where he was recovering from radiation burns. When she turned it down, they offered her a captaincy and a scout boat. When she turned that down, they bought her a new freighter, a University Exploration commission, and threw in a tax-free trading license to boot.

  She was in the process of turning that down, until Kyle caught up with her. Weeks of high-level meetings and state functions had kept him away. She didn’t mind. It was her turn to wait for him.

  Even though she had been waiting for him her whole life. She just hadn’t known his name before.

  “I don’t want a ship, Kyle. I’ll stay here, with you. Altair needs you as much as I do.” They had promoted him to the head of Inter
stellar Intelligence Agency, a new organization charged with rooting out the leftover League cells scattered through the sector.

  He picked her up in his arms, spun her around, laughing.

  “They don’t need me. A stuffed shirt could do this job now. I resigned this morning, Prudence. I came to tell you: I’m coming with you.”

  Table of Contents

  Half Title

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Half Title

  Chapter One: Falling

  Chapter Two: Secrets

  Chapter Three: Bonds

  Chapter Four: Discoveries

  Chapter Five: Records

  Chapter Six: Separations

  Chapter Seven: Running

  Chapter Eight: Home

  Chapter Nine: Speculations

  Chapter Ten: Crumbs

  Chapter Eleven: Slivers

  Chapter Twelve: Miners

  Chapter Thirteen: Party Shoes

  Chapter Fourteen: Stakeout

  Chapter Fifteen: Revelations

  Chapter Sixteen: Fire

  Chapter Seventeen: Anvil

  Chapter Eighteen: Hammer

  Chapter Nineteen: Shattered

  Epilogue