Free The Kassa Gambit by M. C. Planck

to find the missing puzzle piece. Even if they did, they would just assume it had been lost in the snow.
    Let them put on their stage show. She would play whatever part they wanted, and wait until they shooed her off for the main act. She had her own breadcrumb now. She could pick up the trail after they stopped watching her.
    Cycling through the air lock, she took off her helmet and breathed the warm, familiar air of her own ship.
    “How long before we’re airborne?” Kyle was in a hurry.
    She was, too. “Thirty seconds after the air lock door opens.” The sooner they got to the end of this charade, the sooner she could get him off her ship.
    And out of her life. She didn’t like his contradictions. She didn’t like the way part of her kept wanting to trust him, to turn to him for support. She didn’t like the way his unflappable confidence laid over constant tension, like a tiger perpetually ready to pounce even while it purred. She didn’t like the way it made her feel.
    Not because it made her nervous. But because it made her lonely.
    Unzipping the suit, she encountered a problem. How to empty the suit pocket without his noticing? And she couldn’t leave it here—he could come back and search the suit locker while she was on the bridge.
    The instant she paused, he turned away. Like he was giving her privacy to undress. It was silly. It was just a space suit, and in any case, spacers hardly expected privacy even for showers. Ships were just too small for such formalities.
    It was silly, but it was also touching. Again it sparked uncomfortable feelings. She wasn’t used to being treated like a woman. She was used to being treated like a captain.
    It was easy to pocket the sliver of glass while his back was turned. So easy she almost felt guilty.
    “Liftoff in thirty. Be ready,” she snapped at her crew. Running down the passageway, retreating to her citadel of power, where she could mask her feelings in the necessity of command. Where she could be in control again.
    “Melvin, get a reading on that arctic station.” Barking over the intercom while she powered up the gravitics. The ship felt heavy under her fingers, the weight of snow tangible.
    “It’s not working. Fuck, something’s wrong. Somebody sabotaged the radar!” Melvin slipped back into panic. Maybe he’d never left.
    “Calm down, Melvin. It’s probably just ice clogging the detector vanes. We’ll go orbital and let it cook off.” The boiling point of water in a vacuum was zero. Latent heat from the vanes would melt the ice, and space would do the rest. They could go straight up without losing their position, and then come back down to find the arctic station. A few minutes above the atmosphere and the Ulysses would shake off the touch of the planet.
    But space had its own touch. As soon as they were clear of the sheltering blanket of air, the comm beeped insistently.
    “ Ulysses, confirm. This is the Phoenix, hailing the vessel Ulysses .”
    The Phoenix didn’t have to identify itself. The comm station did that, signaling in large red letters that it was an Altair Fleet cruiser.
    “Fleet’s finally here,” Prudence muttered, and put her hand on the comm switch.
    “Wait.” Kyle’s voice leapt across the bridge to stop her.
    Turning in her chair to face him, she waited.
    “Don’t tell them about seeing the alien ship.”
    What kind of game was this? Why show her the evidence, and then tell her to keep quiet? Surely her role in their plot was to validate the alien attack. She would play the straight man, the hardened spacer veteran on the evening news talking with wide-eyed excitement about the aliens. An independent witness, interested only in the truth. A seed of rumor, spreading fear and panic.
    And now Kyle warned her to silence?
    “They’ll interrogate you. This whole thing’s a cluster fuck, Prudence. There’s dead people everywhere, and an impossible alien warship. Nobody knows what to do. So they’ll do everything.