The Kassa Gambit

ELEVEN Slivers

Going back to Altair felt like a very bad idea. Prudence did it anyway.

Garcia had filled the Ulysses with anise seeds. Zanzibar made fantastic spices but lousy packaging. The whole ship stunk of sickly-sweet licorice. Garcia had spent the entire four days in node-space trying to convince her to spread the rumor that Zanzibar had been bombed, and this would be the last shipment of anise Altair would ever get.

She told him to spread it himself. But of course no one would believe Garcia. He couldn’t spread butter on toast without people checking their pockets to see if they had been robbed.

There were hailed the instant they came out of the node. Normally it took a few minutes for the signal to travel out to the node from Altair. For the call to come so quickly, it had to be local. Somewhere out there in the dark hovered Fleet. Running silent, invisible to her sensors. Prudence muttered a futile prayer of commiseration for them. A terrible duty, sitting quietly in a ship full of anxious, edgy spacers, waiting for death to fall out of a hole and eat you. She wondered how much they had been told. Did spiders haunt their nightmares now?

The Ulysses answered automatically, identifying itself, keeping a twitchy gunner from firing—this time. It was only a matter of probability before some comm glitch got an innocent ship vaporized.

Her news was now two weeks old. Catching up on the political broadcasts, she was surprised at how calm things were. But independent verification still hadn’t come back. It would be another week before the first wave of free-traders from Altair could return, bringing with them pictures and eyewitnesses and casualty lists.

Altair spaceport gave her an entry vector and a landing berth assignment without any trouble. She’d been half-expecting a seizure order. On a whim, she typed in a news-search for the dreaded Lieutenant Kyle Daspar. Was he enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame as a heroic rescuer?

A single headline appeared.

League Officer Assassinated by Terrorists.

A picture of a smoking building. A vid interview with the ambulance tech, talking about how the body had been burned beyond recognition. An official statement from the League, lamenting the loss of a good man and darkly hinting that Something Must Be Done. She clicked off the monitor and looked away.

She told herself the numbness she felt was because of the danger. The League had killed Kyle because of the alien ship. And that meant they would kill her, too, if they knew what she knew. How could she trust that he had not given her up before he died? Why wouldn’t he?

She remembered his eyes, pleading with her to not reveal their secrets to the Phoenix.

The alien threat was the least of her worries. There wouldn’t be any arrest warrants waiting for her when she landed. The League was playing for keeps. They would send an assassin to come at her in the middle of the night, with a needle that would make it look like natural causes. Or maybe they’d let her load a cargo and leave, with a bomb planted in the shipment. A fiery bomb, like the one they had killed Kyle with.

In her nightmares the fire always followed her, consuming guilty and innocent alike, burning in her footsteps as fast as she ran.

A rational part of her mind tried to argue. One dead man out of thousands on Kassa, and you didn’t even like him. He was working for the enemy, anyway. One less League officer should be a cause for celebration.

But she could not escape the recollection of his voice, demanding justice for the Kassans he had never met.

“No. It’s not good enough,” he had said, and she had agreed with him.

Whatever twisted rationalizations had kept him in the League had not destroyed him completely as a man. So the League had finished the job. She was not fooled by the babble about terrorists. The only resistance to the League she had ever seen on Altair was talk.

Not that it mattered. If there was an anti-League, by the time it bombed its way to the top, it would be indistinguishable from the League. When the political process was carried out by daggers hidden under cloaks, it didn’t matter who won. The end was always the same.

A crematorium for the Other. The enemies of the state. The losers. The nightmare returned, all the worse for being a waking memory.

She concentrated on breathing. This was not Strattenburg. This planet was not choking in overpopulation. The only infection here was fascism, not eugenic madness. Power and empire were their goals, not a pogrom against those the State named undesirables. There was no reason to think otherwise.

But as she watched the green planet sparkle below, she could not shake the specter of death.

“Be careful.” She tried to warn her crew, but it was futile. Melvin was stoned into near-unconsciousness, Jorgun could not understand, and Garcia could not obey. He took risks automatically, like a fish breathes water. Her advice was wasted.

And hypocritical, given her intentions. If the League was at the stage where they simply killed the people that threatened them, then visiting Rama Jandi would put both their lives in danger. She was going to do it, anyway.

“Can I come with you?” Jorgun asked. All she had accomplished with her warnings was to scare him. Normally Altair was one of the few ports of call she could let him roam freely. In idle moments she had considered writing a spacer’s guide to planets, rating them according to how many hours you could let a simpleton walk around unescorted before he would stumble into trouble. Altair had been the top of her list. Kassa had been second only because a person could get lost in those ridiculous forests.

Having that sense of safety taken away hurt physically, like a punch to the kidneys.

“Sure,” she answered. The fear of entangling him deeper was overridden by the recognition that she would be more worried every second he was out of her sight.

Walking out of the spaceport in broad daylight, in the middle of crowds, she nonetheless found herself instinctively hiding in his shadow. Circling around him, using him like a shield against the sniper she imagined on every rooftop. Cold, but not cruel. She had to be their first target. They would know that shooting him would only alert her. Surely they understood she was the dangerous one.

If they killed her first, Jorgun would stand dumbly over her body while they reloaded.

The people in the crowd didn’t know that. They gave way to Jorgun’s size unconsciously, flowing around the rock instead of trying to move it. With his shades on, he looked intimidating. He looked like a bodyguard. Could she trust that the League had done its homework?

“Can we go see a cartoon?” her protector asked.

“In a bit,” she muttered. Standing in front of a public net console, she tried to stop dodging invisible bullets and focus on typing. She hadn’t wanted to search for Jandi from her ship’s computer, in case they were watching. But the public console was anonymous. Not that the locals used it. Virtually every person on Altair had a comm unit in their pocket. She vaguely remembered some government program that distributed them to the financially disadvantaged. And yet they still provided free public consoles.

It was ironic that the only time she had ever used one was when she wanted to avoid precisely the government that had made them possible.

The first search result was a recorded appearance speech by Jandi, on some daytime babble-fest vid channel. The host, Willy Billy, looked like his normal topic of conversation was which celebrity was snubbing who, but for this broadcast he’d put on his Serious Face.

“You’re saying, Dr. Jandi, that the aliens aren’t dangerous?”

Jandi was an old man, small, stooped, and wreathed in a great white mane.

“I’m saying there aren’t any aliens. I’ve studied nonterrestrial biology for sixty years. We have no