The Kassa Gambit

“Put me through to a data channel. I’ll transmit the list. And Wels … don’t keep this a secret. Tell everyone on your list. The long list. This is a humanitarian crisis, not a monopoly-profit opportunity.”

She thought of something else that might be more motivational.

“There’ll be plenty of profit for everyone. Especially if you’re willing to take future-payment vouchers.” Anybody who had the cash to lend could make a profit both on delivery and interest. Welsing was the kind of guy who always seemed to have a lot of cash.

“You don’t want a window?” He was asking if she wanted him to sit on the information until she had time to cut a few deals.

“No, Wels. I don’t think I’m going back there. It was…” It was too much to ask of Jorgun. “I’ve seen enough.” It was too much to ask of her. Kyle might still be there, with his damnable papers and smoky black eyes. “I’m not giving you a window, either. I’ve got a dozen calls to answer, and I’ll be handing out the list to everyone.” The comm station had kept adding them while she had been talking to Welsing.

“Understood, Pru. I’ll spread it around too. Humanitarian, like you said. Um, hate to chat and run, but I need to get some pants on. There’s a bellboy at the end of the hall now, and he doesn’t look amused.”

Probably he just wanted to fill his hold with the prime cargos before the local vendors raised the prices. Welsing wasn’t the kind of guy who worried about bellboys.

“Fair enough, Wels. Although I regret this comm was only audio.”

“Honey, you have the taste to appreciate the unadorned human form. Not like these prudes on Altair. But call me later, we’ll do something naked.”

“Prudence out,” she answered, rolling her eyes at his salaciousness. Constant repetition tended to rob it of effectiveness.

“Welsing out,” and he was gone.

Sighing, she pushed another button at random.

EIGHT Home

Kyle walked into his empty apartment and shut the door. Nothing greeted him, not even the apartment’s computer. He’d programmed it to not announce his comings and goings.

Almost two weeks in the presence of the insufferably pompous Rassinger had flayed his patience to the bone. But he had learned things. He was certain, now, that Rassinger had expected to find the alien wreck. He was pretty sure that Rassinger had not expected to find Kyle.

What he didn’t know was whether his tip had been a setup to get him killed, or a lead from a competing faction of the League. Or possibly even from an anti-League agent. And he didn’t know why Rassinger was out there looking for alien spaceships.

After only one day, the Phoenix had loaded the wreck into its hold, and bolted for home. Kyle had begged a ride, partly to spy on the odious Rassinger, but also because he could accomplish nothing more on Kassa. The locals finally had enough government established that they resented his influence.

Rassinger had tried to hide the wreck from him, sealing off the cargo bay and posting armed guards. Kyle found it disturbing that the district leader trusted Fleet personnel more than he trusted a fellow League officer. One with a sterling reputation, no less. True to that reputation, he had not even tried to breach Rassinger’s security cordon.

Instead, he’d bowed and scraped, flattered and obeyed. It was sickening.

Back on Altair, the Phoenix had vanished into the depths of a Fleet dock, discharging him like a bad sneeze along the way. He appreciated it. Security was tight, and the newsvid hounds had missed him. They found Rassinger and the captain of the Phoenix, through their various inside contacts, and ambushed the two officials with cameras and microphones. To little effect, since those two exalted individuals could cry “No comment” and push through the pack of slavering reporters with impunity. But a lowly functionary like Kyle would have found his private credit history accessed, and investigative snoops threatening to broadcast those indiscreet trips to the topless bar unless he gave them the scoop now.

Not that there were any such trips. He’d lived his cover twenty-four and seven. After the traffic stop incident, he hadn’t really felt like a man, anyway. The urge had shriveled up and slunk away to hide.

It was back now, in full insatiated force. The cool, slim figure of Prudence Falling haunted his nights. Her ambiguous status only added fuel to the fire.

Was she a carefully placed operative or just a freelance captain in the wrong place at the wrong time? All he knew for sure was that she didn’t like Rassinger. That made him like her, of course, but it wasn’t quite enough. It didn’t mean she was on his side.

If she was working for the League, and found out his true mission, she’d kill him without blinking. If she wasn’t working for the League, then just the armband he wore would drive her as far away as star-flight could take her. Either way, Prudence Falling was going to be nothing but a memory for him.

Or possibly a lead. After checking his console for taps, snitches, and worms, he put out a few discreet inquiries. Starship travel schedules, sandwiched in between commodity prices. If anybody was watching, they’d think he was merely trying to profit off of his insider knowledge of the situation on Kassa.

Prudence’s ship had left only a few hours before the Phoenix had dropped in- system. A wise move for her, and what he had expected, but he still felt the pang of disappointment.

She hadn’t gone back to Kassa. The log showed her heading out another one of the twelve nodes that fed Altair. That wealth of connections combined with an innocuous ecosphere had quickly marked Altair out for local supremacy in this sector of nodes. Life had been easy and good for a hundred years.

Maybe too easy. Altair had stopped making hard choices a long time ago. The future looked like it was going to require some.

He corrected himself; she hadn’t gone directly to Kassa. There were ways to get there other than the shortest route. Unwilling to trust the computer with such a sensitive inquiry, he printed out a node-chart and checked the routes by hand. She could still reach Kassa with seven extra hops.

So now he knew no more than when he had walked in the door.

The cupboard still had a few beers in it. Beer was old, old as Earth. Even on Earth it had been old. People liked that about it. They liked those little things that tied them to the past. People who couldn’t spell “Earth” without blushing, people whose sense of history extended no deeper than last season’s ball-game playoffs, would wax eloquent about the virtues of their favorite brand of beer, about how true its recipe was to the original, brewed by blind Tibetan monks in a stone castle a thousand years before electricity was invented.

Not that anybody even knew what a Tibetan monk was, really. Half the sources said they were religious zealots, and the other half said they were super-soldiers with magic powers. Whatever beliefs they had held, whatever principles they had lived and died for, were dust now. Dust on a planet no one even remembered how to find. All that was left of them was a name, a few stories, and beer.

Kyle popped the tab off the bottle, and waited the five seconds necessary for the contents to chill to the preset temperature. You could adjust it, if you wanted to, but Kyle left it at the factory default. It was his little homage to the wisdom of the monks. Presumably they knew what temperature beer tasted best at.

He told the house audio system to play something. It picked a recording at random, which just happened to perfectly match his mood. The guitar was a one-man instrument, played by skill and subtlety. More impressively, it was analog. Thus, no two performances could ever sound exactly the same. The iconography was irresistible.

Of course, his mood for the last five years had not changed. He was always alone, always in the dark, always brooding. Once he’d convinced the audio system to stop playing popular tunes delivered by advertising agencies, it had quickly learned to restrict itself to the solitary lament of classical guitar.

He had never heard a live guitar performance. He wasn’t sure anybody on Altair even knew how to play one. The irony of appreciating an analog instrument, with its necessary unpredictability, through a digital recording, which was inflexibly unchanging, was not lost on him. It was just one of the many, many injustices he could do nothing about.