The Kassa Gambit Read online

  “Not even a warning, if it will leave a record. You have to … forget. You never saw me.”

  Kyle had manufactured an excuse. One that sounded good to himself. Mumbled something about state secrets or mistresses. Pretended it was okay for a politician to make a minor mistake and cover it up by threatening murder.

  “I won’t forget you, Officer Daspar.”

  And Dejae hadn’t. A week later Kyle had been reassigned. A month later, the first promotion, one of many. After a year, the invitation to become a League member.

  Surreptitiously Kyle had scanned every news article, crime log, and database he could find. Careful not to let even a whisper drop to his fellow officers, he had run his own private investigation. And come up empty-handed. No murders, no smuggling, no embezzlements had surfaced. No foreign dignitaries had gone missing, no off-world treaties suddenly signed. He had never found a whiff of a hint for why Dejae had to not be seen that day, in that place.

  But he had discovered just how powerful the League was. Just how deep it had its claws into Altair government. Still in investigation mode, he went along with the League’s requests. Fixing parking tickets and the like, little things, tests to see how deep his loyalty ran. Those malfeasances didn’t bother him. They weren’t done out of fear, merely part of his undercover act. He wanted to see where all of this led.

  He knew he was on to something really important after the second year. After Veram Dejae was elected prime minister of Altair.

  And now, three years later, he was still unraveling the threads. This little blue data pod might be one of them. If it wasn’t, then he wasn’t stealing anything valuable from the kid. If it was, then Fletcher did not want to find the spider on the end of that thread.

  So many rationalizations. They had become habitual now. He hated that about himself. The only way he could cope was to add it to the ledger he kept in his head. The list of crimes that the League would someday be held to account for.

  Bitter memories to bear while trudging through the cold snow. But they had reached the ship now, and he had to put his public face back on. Smiling at the girls, he helped them through the air lock.

  “We need to get settled in, quickly. Dr. Sanders is in bad shape. We have to get her out of here fast.” Subtly herding the girls, keeping their minds off the data pods, he guided them to the ship’s lounge. It had enough chairs and couches to seat them all. A more comfortable journey than the cargo hold, where the larger groups of refugees had ridden on hard metal floors.

  “Will she be okay?” Brenna kept asking if things were going to be okay.

  “We have some medical facilities back at the capital.” An ambiguous answer, but the most hopeful he could offer.

  Prudence stalked off, turning back into the captain now that she had passengers onboard. He watched sadly. With the Phoenix here, he would lose his hold over her. If he tried to keep her ship commandeered, Rassinger would just wind up running it. So he would let her go, and she would fade out of his life, into the background of faces and events that streamed past him without really touching him. He would go on alone, as always.

  It was what was best for her and her crew. They had to run far, far away, before they got entangled in this web of treachery. Especially now that Rassinger was on the scene.

  Rassinger. Of all the rotten luck. Why couldn’t his ship have beaten them here? Then the mines would have paid their respects to District Leader Rassinger, and the universe would be a better place.

  But of course, it wasn’t luck. Rassinger had shown up on cue to collect his shiny prize. Sure, there probably was a diplomatic meeting waiting for him on Bierze. They would have made their cover story airtight. And the disinterest he’d shown in the disaster—Rassinger was the perfect man for that. Anyone who knew him would have no trouble believing the man was prepared to sail on by.

  Then, ever so conveniently, the Ulysses had located the biggest discovery of all time, and turned it over to District Leader Rassinger. On a snow-covered platter. The League would make hay with this. Bales and bales of it, stacked to the barn roof. In the panic of an alien attack, money would flow into the government’s hands. They’d double the Fleet. They’d recruit scared young men from off-world, men who wanted to fight aliens but weren’t citizens of Altair. Men whose first loyalty would be to the government, not to the people.

  And they would pass laws, laws intended to block spies, to increase security, to protect. Laws that gave the government power to do things in a hurry, and in secret. Laws that would be carried out in dark rooms at the end of silent corridors.

  Rassinger and his ilk would be there, in those rooms. The League’s thugs would be creeping through those corridors. The fist that reached out to strike the alien threat would never unclench, and Altair would suffocate in its grasp.

  But there was a flaw in their plan. Lieutenant Kyle Daspar.

  Someone on Altair had dispatched Kyle out here, before the attack had taken place. They needed him here for something. That gave him power. And they had known in advance. That meant the aliens had been negotiated with.

  Politics.

  This was an arena Kyle could hope to affect. A war was beyond the scope of any one man to significantly influence. But a secret only needed one voice to expose it. If Kyle could find the League’s link to the aliens, he might be able to avert the war.

  Even if he couldn’t, he could at least destroy the League. If Altair had to fight for its survival, he might at least give it a chance to preserve what it was fighting for. To remain free, and democratic. To remain Altair.

  Assuming he could survive his own private battle with the League. Which made him realize he’d been thinking of Prudence as an innocent, not as an operative. If she was working for the League, he might see her again after all.

  But the thought was not comforting. There were only two conditions under which he would be exposed to such a skilled operative a second time. The first condition was if she was trying to kill him.

  The second condition was if he was trying to kill her.

  Settling into a chair next to Fletcher, he leaned back and closed his eyes. Maybe if he pretended to sleep, they wouldn’t pester him with questions. But he didn’t have to pretend.

  After so many hours on the ship, after so many flights, he could tell now when they broke atmosphere. It was a subtle difference. Spaceships were always humming and vibrating, always alive under your touch. But in space the animus was internal, the turbulence of air no longer drowning out the heartbeat of the generators and the breath of life support. He fancied that he could feel a difference in acceleration, even through the passive grav-plating of the deck. The ship no longer weighed down by earthly concerns, but floating free under its own power. He could see why Prudence preferred being in space. It was insulating.

  Sheltered in the comfort of vacuum, he fell asleep.

  At first he didn’t know what woke him. The rest of the passengers were asleep, too, lulled into unconsciousness by warmth. The room was silent and still.

  But they were going down. Sinking back into the grasp of the world, the fears and demands of others clutching at them, pulling them down.

  He rubbed his eyes, still gray with fatigue. It had only been forty minutes. Not long enough.

  But too long for Dr. Sanders. He’d seen enough dead bodies to know, even from across the room. The old white-haired scientist was sleeping next to her, his arm across her body. Kyle let him sleep. A few more minutes of peace.

  He got up and went to find the bridge.

  Prudence sat in her chair, alone. Kyle looked around for Jorgun, automatically. He had become that accustomed to the giant’s presence.

  “I sent him to bed,” Prudence said, without looking around to see who had come in. Showing that he could not sneak up on her. A spider demonstrating her total control over her web. He wondered if she had tagged him, put some kind of local radio tracker on his clothes at some point. Or if the ship had internal sensors that could distinguish ind
ividuals.

  Or perhaps it was just her superb operative training.

  “Now what?” he said, because he couldn’t help himself.

  She looked at him then.

  “Now we’re going to offload these people, and then I’m going to turn my ship off and get some sleep. What else did you have in mind?”

  What had he meant? So much more than that. More than just the next few hours, the next few days. More than just the aliens and the coming war. He had meant the future, beyond all that.

  He had meant what would happen between them.

  The realization was startling. He had come to depend on her in the last day, not just to fly the ship, but to make decisions. Like at the wreck, checking for radiation. Or misdirecting Rassinger. Even while he had thought of her as the enemy, he had relied on her strength and ability. Taken it for granted.

  “You’re not going to get involved with … Rassinger’s mission.” He didn’t know himself if it was a statement or a question.

  “No,” she said, looking away again. “I’m going to collect my pay and get out of here.”

  “These people will need help. Off-world help. That means lots of transport. There’ll be work for you here.” Why was he trying to change her mind? Selfishness. He wasn’t prepared to let her disappear from his life.

  “We’ve done enough. Every time we come here, Jorgun will ask for Jelly. And every time, I’ll have to tell him all over again. No amount of transport fee is worth that.”

  Her voice was bitter, but Kyle almost laughed at her. He had seen through her. So much effort wasted, so many futile precautions. Prudence had bound herself to nothing planetside. Her concerns were only for her ship.

  But the crew was part of the ship, and the crew was human. And they did not have the iron discipline of their captain. They had become contaminated by the ground, and now they laid their burdens on her secondhand.

  Kyle knew exactly how she felt. All of the relationships in his life were secondhand, too.

  He gave her what freedom he could. “I’ll sign a blank voucher. You can fill in the amount. But if you ask for too much, they might ask questions. I don’t think you want that.” The blank voucher would earn him plenty of questions, too, difficult ones; but Prudence had earned it, regardless of what it might cost him. She was what he had sworn to protect from the League: the good and the innocent. Even if she was the only person he could name who fit both criteria.

  He put his hand on the back of Jorgun’s chair to steady himself. He had momentarily forgotten that she was a mercenary sent to destroy him in some Byzantine and nefarious plot. He was too tired for this, emotionally and physically drained from the last few days. The last few years, even.

  Again she looked at him, with those dark eyes asking questions all by themselves. “That’s generous of you. And by extension, Altair. Will your government be as generous to Kassa?”

  He shrugged, honestly. “I don’t know, Prudence. I’m a cop. I don’t even work for the planetary government, just a city.”

  “And the League.” Whispered. He wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement.

  “And the League,” he agreed, because he had to.

  Silence between them. Stretching painful, and complete.

  “Who was Jelly?” he asked. Not just to hear her voice again, but because he wanted to know.

  “A local girl. She suffered from Tay-Sachs disease. The condition is treatable, but the medicine is delicate. It has to be prepared fresh on a daily basis. It needs complex machinery. It requires electricity.”

  Outside, the refugee camp below them was lit only by fire.

  He wanted to say he was sorry, but the words sounded trite and inadequate. He didn’t know her well enough to share her grief. “Was that why she got along with Jorgun? Because of the disease?”

  Prudence’s voice was so cold, so far away. “Yes. Complications, from childhood. They were alike in that way. Not … perfect. Not candidates for your League.”

  The League preached strength. The League had tried to make terminations of abnormal pregnancies a requirement, not just an option. Kyle had never been a parent, never even thought about being a parent. He didn’t used to have a position on the issue. Now he had another crime to add to the list.

  Automatically, he pretended to defend them. “It wasn’t the League that killed her. This wasn’t the work of the League.” Even as he said it, the crashing realization that he might be wrong rattled him. Maybe there weren’t any coincidences. Maybe he was supposed to get here first in the Launceston and absorb the mines, thus clearing the way for the Phoenix. The mines that had been left to make sure no one else found the alien ship before Rassinger. Maybe the only unexpected factor was Prudence Falling’s survival.

  He had been prepared to accept that the League was taking advantage of this, but he hadn’t gone so far as to suspect them of arranging the attack.

  Breathing heavily, he tried to order his thoughts. If she was an operative, then this was a test. He had to defend the League’s reputation, to maintain his own cover. And if she was innocent, then it was even more important to defend the League. So that she would go away. Far, far away where they couldn’t find her. In a war between aliens and imperial politics, a tramp freighter captain would be crushed like a blade of grass under the feet of mighty gladiators.

  “The League…” he started, but she cut him off.

  “Spare me your rhetoric. I know my place. Now get off my bridge.”

  He went. It was what he had wanted. The best possible result. She would be safe, his cover was intact, everything was going according to plan.

  Then why did walking away from her feel like surrender, all over again?

  SEVEN

  Running

  She had thought it would get easier, but four days in the cocoon of node-space only made it worse.

  Surprisingly, they had let her go. “They” being the Phoenix, of course. Kassa didn’t have any way of stopping her. Short of guilt, which they had certainly tried. But she had explained that they needed things from off-world to survive the next few months. Things that Fleet would not be bringing. And Fleet wasn’t going to be eager to share the news about what had happened here. They’d want to lock everything down until they knew exactly what was going on—and that could take a very long time.

  So she had offered to go out and spread the word, tell every captain she met what Kassa would buy. The tramp freighters would swarm to Kassa, like flies to a corpse. They would overcharge, but they would bring the necessities of life. And the sooner they got started, the cheaper it would be for Kassa.

  In any case, there was little more the Ulysses could do for them. The various pockets of refugees had radio contact now and the most isolated groups had been brought into larger settlements. The Phoenix had lent Kassa its launches, so they had functioning aircraft. All she had left to offer was convenience, not survival. The Kassans had believed her, and let her go without resentment.

  But Garcia had been livid enough to invade the bridge while they were lifting off.

  “Are you insane? We know exactly what Kassa needs. We could charge premium prices. For crying out loud, Pru, I’ve spent days crawling through stinking dockside bars trying to ferret out good cargoes, just to keep us floating. This kind of information could make us rich!”

  She took his outrage with a grain of salt, since she happened to know he enjoyed hanging around in those stinking bars. After all, that’s where she’d originally found him.

  “We are not going to get rich off of Kassa’s disaster, Garcia.”

  “At least tell me you’ll sell that list.” He was whining, which was unlike him. Usually he blustered or threatened when money was involved. Prudence decided he was developing a conscience. Given his past, it was almost certainly a painful process.

  “We’re going to do everything we can to prevent anybody else from getting rich off it, too. The news goes out on a public broadcast as soon as we reenter normal space.” It
was the best thing she could do for Kassa. The more freighters that knew about it, the less any of them could gouge.

  Melvin had been next, paging her from the gunnery console.

  “The laser’s still broken, Pru.” He said it like it was her fault. Melvin had become increasingly volatile since his exposure to the wreck. “We’re unarmed. What if we get attacked?”

  What good would a stupid mining laser do? They had been lucky the first time. Just a dumb mine. If they met a real combat ship—even one of those little fighters—they would die in the first pass.

  “We won’t be attacked, Melvin. There will be Fleet swarming through all the hops between here and Altair.”

  Garcia rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath. “Assuming they haven’t already destroyed Fleet.” She’d told him about the alien wreck. She had to; he was part of her crew. He deserved to know.

  “What if they’ve already blown up Fleet?” Melvin asked, his voice rising.

  She snapped at him through the microphone. “Then we’re better off running, instead of waiting here for them to come back and finish the job.”

  Silence from the intercom. He’d turned it off, the most insulting thing he could imagine. That being cut off from him was a relief to everyone else was not the sort of thing Melvin would understand. He couldn’t bear to be unheard, so he assumed no one could bear to not hear him.

  Garcia walked out, and left Prudence with Jorgun. For a moment she wished she was still arguing with Melvin.

  “Will we come back and see Jelly?” Jorgun asked.

  She had already told him the truth, but he kept asking. She could not determine how much he understood, whether he was in denial or simply expressing his grief, holding on to her memory with the only thing he had left. In either case, there was only one thing she could do now.