Fire With Fire

The pilot smiled. “Yeah, I heard about your welcoming committee this morning. So now you’re ready to return the sentiments?”

“Something like that.” Caine pointed at the horizon, now clearly sprouting low rectangular silhouettes in the middle of wide, squared clearings. “Is that-what do they call their base anyway?”

“Site One: how’s that for an imaginative name? Typical bureaucrats. Yeah, that’s it up ahead.”

“Looks like they’ve cleared a lot of the forest at that wide point.”

The pilot was stretching to get a better look. “A whole hell of a lot more than I’ve seen-or heard about.”

Well off to the north, nestled up against the skirts of the low hills on that side, were what appeared to be a cluster of towers. “Know anything about those?”

The pilot shook his head. “Not a clue.”

“How long until we land?”

“They’ll be talking me toward a vertipad any second now.”

Caine thought for a moment. Then: “You’ve made a mistake; you need to come around for another pass.”

“Sir, we’re right on-”

“I know what the instruments say. But I’m telling you: we’ve made a mistake; you need to circle around for another landing approach.”

The pilot’s frown became a study in strained patience. “Sir, even if I knew what the hell you’re talking about, please remember that this is a vertibird: we don’t make ‘approach runs,’ so I would never need to circle around for another landing attempt.”

“Today you need to.”

The beginning of the comchatter from Site One’s ground control was on general speaker. “Commonwealth Zero-Tango-Niner; you are correctly vectored for transition to vertical landing at Pad Two, coming to a range of ten kilometers at my mark. And…mark.”

“Site One ATC, this is Commonwealth flight 0T9. I roger your telemetry, and am requesting confirmation for-”

Caine made a throat-cutting gesture with his right hand. The pilot sighed, snapped off the transmitter. “Sir, what now?”

“Tell him you don’t trust the gimballing servos on your thrusters; you want to make a runway landing, not vertical.”

“Look, sir-”

Caine pulled out the magic ID card that Downing had given him: this might be the one chance he’d get for close aerial reconnaissance of the site.

The pilot looked over at the card-bored and a little annoyed-and had started to look away when his eyes grew wide, and he looked back. Quickly. As his eyes went through a high-speed back-and-forth scan of the ID and clearance card, his lips slowly dilated and contracted through the cycle of a soundless “Wow.”

“Charlie Whiskey Zero-Tango-Niner: please say again. Your last transmission broke up.”

The pilot turned the transmitter back on. “Site One ATC, I’m having problems reading you. Am also showing orange lights on the thrust vectoring panel: I’ll need to skip transition to vertical. Requesting emergency access to runway one.”

“Negative, CW 0T9-you do not have authorization for-”

“Site One ATC, your commo is breaking up. Please say again.” He let the increasingly anxious ground controller get about half way through his denial for the runway landing request before speaking right over the top: “Site One ATC, I am no longer reading you. Please be advised: I am coming about bearing 235 true for approach to Runway One. Please signal ‘all clear’ by setting runway approach lights to strobe mode. CW 0T9 out.” The pilot snapped off the transmitter, banked the plane into a long, left-sweeping curve toward the towers, which now showed themselves as a cluster of girder frameworks. “Do you think they’ll buy it?”

Caine leaned forward to get a better look at what appeared to be a quarry at Site One’s extreme northern perimeter. “Can’t say that I care.”

Within five minutes of landing, Caine was being ushered into a room of uncompromising opulence. As he set his A-frame down next to the auto-closing door, he was careful not to scratch the wood-paneling. Is it ebony? No, apparently not. High overhead, descending from a vaulted ceiling reminiscent of Louis 14th enameled and gold-leafed grandeur, were two immense chandeliers. At the far end of the room was a dark wood desk large enough to pass as a small mesa. The man behind it-spare, trimly mustachioed, adjusting a data-link viewing monocle-waited: no motion suggested that he was prepared to close the distance to Caine, nor that he was even going to come around the end of his desk. So that’s the way it’s going to be-

Caine took his time walking the length of the salon, studying its various appointments. By the time he reached the desk, the man behind it seemed less composed. Maybe he wasn’t used to waiting for his guests to approach, or maybe he had hoped that this guest would be indefinitely detained by a prior engagement with a bullet.

“Welcome to Site One, Mr. Riordan.”

“Thank you, Mr.-?”

“Helger, Louis Helger. I am the Co-Administrative Manager of this joint facility.”

“A ‘joint facility’?” That was another-and worrisome-new terminological twist: in another half year, CoDevCo would probably push out the EU altogether.

Helger shrugged. “Very well: technically, Site One is a European Union colony with a full partnership extended to the Colonial Development Combine. However, we consolidated administrative operations when I arrived eight months ago. Too much duplication of effort, other inefficiencies. That is all behind us.”

“I see. But which of the partners do you work for, Mr. Helger?”

“I am an EU employee, Mr. Riordan, but I also have a history of employment with CoDevCo.”

“Oh? What kind of history?”

“Not that it is any business of yours, but I retired as the Regional Manager for Nordic operations, after having served as an Associate Product Manager for the prior eight years.”

“Impressive.”

Helger’s shrug seemed less genuine than his small, satisfied smile. “It was thought that as we moved toward joint operations here on Delta Pavonis Three, it would be best to appoint a person who also had extensive experience with CoDevCo project management.”

“Well, that was clearly achieved. And the other half of your credentials are, I’m sure, equally impressive.”

Helger’s face went protectively blank. “What other credentials are you referring to?”

“Your prior experience as an EU administrator, of course.”

Helger’s face did not change. “Mr. Riordan, I regret that I do not have time for a casual chat-”

You mean you don’t want to admit that the first day you worked for the EU was the day you stepped onto the tarmac at the Dee Pee Three Downport.

“-so I must ask that we constrain our discussion to official matters. Firstly, I have now received your dossier-”

Obviously. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have let me set foot in your little fiefdom.

“-and I must say I am somewhat puzzled: who, exactly, do you represent?”

“Officially? No one.”

Helger was clearly not prepared for such a frank admission. “Then how did you get this rather sweeping writ of cooperation from the European Union?”

“That was a courtesy, provided at the request of Senator Tarasenko, head of the United States Congressional Committee on Strategic Space Initiatives.”

“So you are an official representative of the US government? And not the Commonwealth in toto?”

“Neither. I am not a representative of any one government, which is why the other Commonwealth nations- as well as the EU-were willing to accept me as a general observer.”