Fire With Fire

and fro inside. Opening it, Downing discovered another, smaller box and momentarily suspected a monstrous practical joke. But then he saw the envelope on top, with “Richard” scrawled across it in Nolan’s distinctive handwriting. He opened it and read:

Dear Richard:

If Caine Riordan is still alive, please give him the smaller, enclosed box. Except for one additional photograph, it holds the contents of the bag he was carrying when he was apprehended outside my suite in Perry City. Those contents should help him regain the one hundred hours he lost on Luna.

If Caine is dead, then you must open the box. Handle the contents as you see fit.

I wish I was there to help you with the coming troubles. I also apologize for not sharing all the secrets that I was privy to, but the photograph I added to Caine’s box will provide adequate explanation, I think.

Your Friend,

Nolan

Downing stared at the card, felt grief, resentment, and confusion all at the same time. But mostly, he simply missed his oldest friend-even more than he felt curiosity.

He handed the inner box to Caine. “It’s for you,” he said.

ODYSSEUS

Caine opened the box cautiously.

And found himself staring down at an old bottle of red wine-Chateauneuf-du-pape, to be precise. Alongside it was a desiccated rose and a photograph of a young woman who looked very familiar-because, he realized, it was Elena, when she was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-

The memories came unevenly, yet so quickly that he gasped. Luna. 2105. Buying a rose, a bottle of wine- Chateauneuf-du-pape-and porterhouse steaks: all outrageous extravagances on the Moon. All purchased because he had been surprised by joy in a place and at a time he could not have expected it.

The young lady he met while waiting in line for coffee only introduced herself as Elena, at first. She was not much older than a college kid, but she had an unwavering gaze, and a peculiar species of certainty, of intensity, that soon had him forgetting that this was a young woman with whom he should not become involved.

That prohibition against involvement arose not merely because she was eleven years his junior, but because, midway through their conversation, she shared her full name, thereby revealing that she was the daughter of the man he had come to Luna to interview: Nolan Corcoran.

Caine should have avoided her, but he couldn’t. At their second chance encounter-which they both carefully engineered-Caine tried to adopt a casual demeanor, but instead she fixed him with her green green green eyes. He was not able to look away from them during the four-hour lunch that he had originally resolved to be the last forty- five minutes he would ever spend with her.

The memories were scattered, incomplete, ragged in places, but he did recall meeting her that night for a glass of wine. In the course of discovering that they had eerily similar tastes in most everything-from food to art to novels to films-Caine did the next thing that he promised himself he would not do: he gave her a poem he had written about her earlier that day. And in return, she gave him herself. Which led to mutual embarrassment over the speed with which they had become intimate. Which they resolved by becoming intimate again. And then again.

The next day, Caine found a note on his pillow suggesting dinner at her suite, that night. He could not have been happier, but wondered how she planned to evict her father, whom she was visiting on Luna.

The answer presented itself the next morning when Nolan Corcoran and Richard Downing began their interview by announcing that their time was limited: they were Far Side-bound. Then they turned the tables and asked the first question of the day: was Caine a writer or a patriot first? Caine had never thought about that before but was not long in doing so: as he told them, words gave birth to nations and held them to account, but writing itself never was, and never could be, the equal of lived hopes and ideals.

He could not recall all of their conversation, but they ultimately told him what he had come to learn, on the promise that he would only share select parts of it. They wondered at the ease with which he agreed to the secrecy. He wondered if, strange as it seemed, he might not be falling in love.

Which he cautiously intimated to Elena during a call later that day. Experience told him that a woman courted so quickly will back off, yet he was strangely certain she wouldn’t. And she didn’t.

So with wine and rose and steaks in hand, he arrived early to surprise her, to cook dinner for the young woman whose name-Elena Corcoran-had started to sound like music to him. But as he reached out to affix the rose to her door, the world went black.

“Caine? Caine?”

Richard’s voice seemed very far away as Caine returned the bottle and the photograph, and mentally saw how the dominoes set in motion by both the romance and abduction had fallen. Elena’s thirteen-year-old son was very likely Caine’s child. And Nolan had undoubtedly known that, if not beforehand, then shortly after. It would have been simplicity itself for him to get a sample of the baby’s DNA and compare it to Caine’s.

But that still left the question of why: why would Nolan play such dire games with his own family? How could anything-even IRIS-be so important that he felt compelled to take these terrible steps?

Caine looked down into the box and saw that there was one last object in it; another photograph. But this image was not of a person: it was of the lunar surface. But no, it wasn’t the Moon: on closer inspection, it was- Oh. Of course.

Next to him, Trevor was staring at the bottle and the old picture of his sister; he had obviously connected the dots and done the math. His voice was choked: “Why? Why would Dad choose to do all this?

Caine shook his head. “He didn’t choose to do it; he had to.” He held out the last picture to Trevor. “Look.”

Trevor stared, frowned. “What is this? A mining site on a planetoid?”

“Not exactly. Give the photo to your uncle. He’ll know what it is.”

“Why?”

“Because, except for the ‘mining site,’ I’ll bet he’s seen images of it before.”

Richard took the picture, studied it, frowned. “You know, this does look familiar, rather like the images Nolan brought back from…” Then Downing went very pale. “Bollocks, this is the Doomsday Rock-the one that Nolan intercepted. Except-this one shows empty mooring points for a set of mass drivers.”

Trevor was still frowning. “So what? Dad was mission commander; of course he would have kept a visual souvenir. Hell, they catalogued every meter of its surface before they-” And then the color bled out of Trevor’s face, too.

Downing nodded. “Yes. They catalogued every meter of its surface before they used nuclear charges to bump it off course. And only nuclear charges. They didn’t have a mass driver with them: there wasn’t enough lead time to use it.”

Trevor was hoarse. “Meaning that the missing mass drivers were used to push it towards us.”

Downing nodded. “The Doomsday Rock was not a natural event: it was an attack. Some extraterrestrial power visited the Solar System and surreptitiously shifted the trajectory of a rock in the Kuiper Belt to swing in toward Earth and blast us back to the Bronze Age.”

Caine suppressed a shiver: there was no other possible explanation. Even if a terrestrial nation had been suicidal enough to conceive of the plot, none of them could have carried it out: at that time, humanity hadn’t had the ability to send major missions beyond Saturn. “So that’s what led to the creation of IRIS. It also explains how Nolan was so certain that an FTL drive could be built: the Doomsday Rock was proof that we had extrasolar neighbors who could get into and out of our system at will.”

Downing nodded. “He also knew that the threat of an exosapient attack wasn’t simply hypothetical: he had already fended one off, himself.”

Caine rubbed his chin. “Yeah, which means that whoever weaponized a chunk of stone into the Doomsday Rock almost certainly learned that their attack had been foiled.”

Downing kept nodding. “And so they would have to surreptitiously try to find out what had gone wrong. And