The Kassa Gambit by M. C. Planck

weather, the suits, the plexiglass of the faceplate, his body thrilled at the intimate proximity. She was beautiful, in a thin, unusual way, but that wasn’t it. He’d been close to pretty women before.
    It was her attitude, her deep confidence masked by extreme caution. She thought about everything before she did it, treated every act like a carefully chosen move in a chess game. It was a way of life he had learned to embrace, once he had gone undercover against the League. A game where one wrong move could spell detection, disaster, and death.
    He wondered if the stakes were as high for her as they were for him.
    She was waiting for him, patiently. Waiting until he realized he had to go first. She already had committed her crew. She couldn’t join them, stand there in a tight knot where a single burst of auto-fire could kill them all.
    So he had to go up there. He had to put himself at risk. And if the crew were just mooks, if they were expendables hired to die with him, whose only role was to get him to commit himself, then he would be dead in the next thirty seconds. Either the enemy lying in wait would blast him out of existence, or she would cut him down with a spray of needle-sized bullets from the mag rifle he’d given her.
    Regretfully, he wished he’d only borrowed one rifle from the Launceston.
    He didn’t have a choice. He had become used to doing things without choices, but it was difficult to pull away from her, to have to walk forward without seeing her face. If he was going to die, he wanted to see the face of the person who killed him. Or maybe he just wanted to see her face. Too tired to puzzle out the difference, he trudged forward mechanically, continuing on his chosen course long after he’d forgotten why he’d chosen it.
    When he got up to where the other two were standing, he knew he was going to live. The wreckage in front of him changed everything.
    The ship was small, no more than ten meters long. Battered and cracked like a child’s toy dropped from the sky, but still in one piece. It looked like a bizarrely elongated snowflake: six fat tubes stacked together hexagonally on the inside, and outside a ring of six thin tubes. At the rear was what had to be a fusion nozzle. At the front was a glass pod, like a huge insect eye, multifaceted and staring, shattered on one side. The vessel was still and quiet, but it radiated menace.
    Not the menace of a warship, even though it almost certainly was one. The Launceston was far more intimidating, with its bristling gunports and racks of missiles. But the Launceston was solid and sleek, every surface polished and smooth. This ship was like a spider web’s nightmare, the struts and spars that held it together as gnarled and lumpy as wood, unsettlingly organic in their texture.
    Alien.
    The word came to mind, unwelcome but undeniable. The ship in front of them shrieked it in the sheer incomprehensibility of its design.
    In all the centuries since Earth, on all the planets and moons intrepid explorers found and conquered, mankind had never met its equal. Or even the equal of an ant colony. Life was common enough: simple bacteria, plants, the occasional mollusk. But nothing organized. Nothing social.
    Man stood alone as a sentient race, looking into the mirror of the universe and seeing only his own reflection. A miracle without explanation, a blessing of no competition or a curse of loneliness, depending on your point of view. Was it improbable that no other planet had been climatically stable enough long enough to make society, or was the improbability that Earth had? Philosophers argued, scientists washed their hands of the insolvable, and ordinary people relaxed in the knowledge that the closet was empty: there was no bogeyman hiding in the dark.
    But here the broken eye of alien intelligence stared back at him. And it was hostile. First Contact had come in the form of a lethal attack.
    Jorgun shouted above the wind, childish wonder in his voice.