The Kassa Gambit

“We’re unarmed! Don’t shoot!”

He hugged her, covering her. Waited for the storm of needles.

Someone else came into the room.

“What made you think the spider would show mercy?” he said, in Veram Dejae’s voice.

“I knew you were controlling it remotely.” Kyle’s answers were all that could save them. He forced himself to let go of Prudence, to turn around and face the clone.

The Dejae wore a mask, a glittering affair of gems and gold, but it could not hide his annoyance. “How did you deduce this?”

“I saw a spider, on Baharain. When you let the machine drive, it walks smoothly and quickly. When you have to make it do something intelligent, it moves like a robot.”

“Intriguing. Stand away from her.”

Kyle obeyed, instantly.

More men came into the room, looking shocked.

“Strip them. Bind them. Put them on the ship. Can you handle that?” The Dejae’s voice was dangerously casual.

“Yes, sir.” The new leader leapt to obey. But as he and his men approached Kyle, they were careful not to block the spider’s line of fire.

“I wanted to do it all with robots,” the Dejae explained to Kyle, while two men tore his clothes off and a third glared at him from behind a rifle barrel. “I was outvoted. I was told that human judgment was still invaluable. When I find servants who can successfully carry out a simple task like killing two unarmed men and a girl, I’ll consider changing my opinion.”

“Good help is hard to find,” Kyle agreed. He realized he was trying to keep the Dejae talking, so it would think of him as human. A wasted effort. The clone already thought of Kyle as human. That was the problem.

The men wrapped his wrists in sticky tape. Like the idiots they were, they bound his hands in front of him, not behind his back. But he wasn’t going to do anything. Being naked was a kind of binding on its own.

The men moved to Prudence, ripped the clothes from her body. Kyle tried not to look. He could not bear to see how beautiful she was.

Kyle offered more from his dwindling supply of facts. “We’re wanted on Monterey, for questioning.” When he had nothing left to give, they would kill him.

“You do get around. But you can relax for a few days. We have some business to deal with before we return home.”

They marched them past the bodies, his feet squishing in the blood. They dragged them through the blasted air lock, threw them to the floor of their fusion transport. He caught Prudence awkwardly as she fell. She lay in his arms like a sack of potatoes.

Men stood around them, glaring. The Dejae ignored them, his spider marching at his side. At least the Dejae was not going to let them rape her.

Yet.

Kyle wondered if the Dejae would keep her for himself. Kyle began to hope he would. It would be better for her.

The ship moved underneath them.

“Target is cleared for attack,” the Dejae said from the bridge. A wall-sized screen showed the Ulysses drifting in space as they accelerated away from it. The freighter did not look as ungainly as Kyle had feared. With the cargo hold shorn off, it looked like a dragonfly, lumpy and angular but rendered delicate.

Lights sparkled around the Ulysses, and then steam as its air was vented from a thousand holes. At the same time a dark, tubular shape streaked through the screen’s vision. A fighter, making a close pass.

In its wake the Ulysses came apart in pieces, like shredded lettuce. The main generator exploded, a ball of flaming gas welling up from the remains. When it cleared, there was nothing left. The corpse of the Ulysses had been dismembered and cast upon the void.

With Jorgun’s body. And Kyle’s dreams of home and family. And maybe Prudence’s soul.

She still had not spoken, not a gasp, not a whisper.

Ridiculously, he feared for her state of mind.

NINETEEN Shattered

She took comfort in the feel of his body against hers. Insanity, yes, but it was the only comfort left. She could not speak to him. Even if she trusted her voice, even if she could talk without revealing the medallion hidden in her mouth, there was nothing to say.

Like a rabbit caught in headlights, she remained perfectly still, staring at nothing. The men leered and whispered terrible things, but acknowledging them would only make it worse.

It would be bad enough as it was. They had already taken almost everything from her. Her ship. Her crew. Her family, past and present. Soon they would take her dignity, and then they would take Kyle away and kill him.

Of all of these losses, Kyle seemed the greatest. She had not had time to be with him. Their life, the hopes and dreams it promised, was not just cut short. It had never begun.

She had never even kissed him.

All the sacrifices she had made had been in vain. All the time she had spent dismantling her defenses to let Kyle in had been wasted. All her efforts had been futile. Jandi had been right. But to think on that was to surrender to self-recrimination. And there was no room for that. Grief squeezed out all other emotion, and spilled over her body, coating every sensation with a glaze of unreality.

With nothing else to do, she watched the main vid screen. They were approaching another ship. She could judge its immense scale by the tiny fighters buzzing around it. An opening appeared in the squat, tubular behemoth. A carrier, then: a ship that bore other ships as cargo, like a chinchilla fish carries its babies in its mouth. The fusion boat that had captured them did not seem equipped for node travel, nor could those little fighters manage a node on their own. They lacked the mass necessary to create a stable bubble in the node.

Before they had captured her ship, the gravitics display had told her of the existence of this one massive vessel, and of dozens of other smaller ships, probably a screen of destroyers. In a fair fight, Altair might stand a chance.

But of course they had their secret weapon. The carrier would paralyze her prey and release the swarm to feed. Altair Fleet would be rendered helpless for hours, while the spiders bled them with sprays of steel needles at near-relativistic speeds. Even the idiotic robotic fighter pilots would be capable of total victory in such a one-sided battle.

A warning from Prudence, and Altair could crush this monster under its heel. But in silence, its poison would destroy a foe ten times its size. The remnant of Altair Fleet would be loyal to Dejae and afraid to move. While it did nothing the clones would build more ships, extending their web across the sector until they could defeat planetary fleets without cheating. In a hundred years Altair would be a sea of Dejaes, and the sky would be blotted out with their ships. Then they would be unstoppable. The entire galaxy would be wiped clean of humanity and replaced with Dejae.

It might be an improvement. Presumably the Dejaes treated each other better than ordinary people did. Under the rule of clones, there might not be any more Strattenburgs.

Remembering the frightened young monk on Monterey, she knew it was a false hope. The clones were not better people than people.

The boat shuddered as clamps seized it. Its gravitics whined and died, and she could feel the lock cycling as the air pressure subtly changed.

“Take them to holding. In one piece.” The Dejae spoke the order to his men, and swept out.