Fire With Fire

down. Using the armrest controls, Caine snapped on the pod’s small external viewscreen while watching the last seconds of clear transmission from his bug aboard the Tyne’s bridge.

“Sir,”-the sensor officer, again-“we’ve located Mr. Riordan’s transponder signal-but we’re losing it.”

“Losing it?”

“Yes sir; best guess is that he’s-”

“Aboard the pod. Yes, of course. Engineering, clear your board for an emergency counterboost. Communications, hail the Commonwealth and-”

But Caine didn’t hear the rest: over the captain’s shoulder, he saw the second engineer frown and pull a microdisk out of his breast-pocket. He slipped it into his station’s dataport and grazed his index finger across the control panel before anyone even noticed.

Still visible in the pod’s viewscreen, the Tyne’s massive engine decks flickered unevenly, flashed, then erupted into a burgeoning sphere of blue-white plasma that whited out the screen.

The buffeting hit as the image of space came back; Caine tried to resist a sudden wave of nausea, most of which was not due to the rough ride. He hadn’t saved the Tyne or its eight hundred passengers and crew. He himself wasn’t going to be in much better shape: even now there were enough rads sleeting through him to cost some hair, and the pod was tumbling out of the Junction system’s ecliptic. But Caine’s burgeoning pangs of guilt and misgiving froze, paralyzed by the ominous hum of cryogenic suspension machinery coming to life all around him: the gurgling of the blood exchange system, the slow hum of the unfolding catheters and colonic cleansing waldos, the snipping of the disrobing shears, the sigh of the approaching hypodermic. His body would be subjected to a gruesome variety of IV violations, but only after an initial dose of synthetic morphine had drifted him off into a dreamless sleep.

The needle slid efficiently but sharply into his left forearm. As Caine felt the opiating warmth leap along his veins, he let himself look outward and flow into the stars, carried along by a sudden, drugged impulse toward the poetic: From our small green island in the heavens, we steer our ships into black depths. And as we veer and tack from one star to the next, we have chased a question as old, as fundamental, as our fascination with the night skies: “Are we alone?”

And he, Caine, homeward bound to his island in the archipelago of systems now navigated by humans, was returning with the answer to that question.

Unfortunately, Downing and IRIS might never have the opportunity to extract that answer from Caine, or from the data crystals in his shielded Thermos. It was, after all, entirely possible that the assassin’s allies would be the first to reach his tumbling lifepod. If anyone ever did.

Which was, Caine conceded as he slipped deeper into the unnatural calm of a morphine haze, a most unsettling prospect.

Part Three

Earth

March-April, 2119

Chapter Eleven

MENTOR

Richard Downing took his customary seat on the west end of the conference table, which afforded the best view of the white dome of the Capitol building. It was only the first day of spring, so the light was fading fast, sliding down the spectrum from yellow to a tired amber that glowed weakly off the wind-rippled surface of the Reflecting Pool. No sign of the cherry blossoms yet: it had been a cold winter. Twice, snow had shut down the city, to the predictable delight of the children.

Before Downing had finished settling in, the door opened, knob banging into the precisely dented wood paneling behind it: Nolan Corcoran’s usual entrance. Crossing the room, he tossed his deck-coat into a chair, kept moving in a broad arc around the table and toward Richard, smile growing as he came.

His “Good to have you back, Rich” was accompanied by the usual hearty handshake-but there was a subtle thread of tension in the greeting.

Downing smiled. “It’s good to be back. I presume you’ve already read the reports.”

“Scanned them on the suborbital from Jakarta. Lucky thing you reached Junction in time to handle Riordan’s retrieval personally.” Corcoran moved toward his seat at the east end of the table. From there, he could look out at the Lincoln Memorial, now a gold-rimmed box of black shadow. “So, Caine’s going to be okay?”

“Physically, yes. Psychologically-well, Riordan is less resilient this time.”

Corcoran frowned. “Less resilient? To what?”

“To the neural and mental traumas of being rapidly processed-again-out of long duration cryo-suspension. His recent experience of time is not as a steady flow, but as a disjointed set of abrupt, often painful changes. For instance, he enters coldsleep in 2105 with his two parents still alive; he comes out in 2118, and they’re both dead.”

Corcoran avoided Downing’s gaze: he looked at the floor, then out at the Lincoln monument. Downing had the distinct impression that Nolan would not have been able to look full into the statue’s solemn marble face.

Downing continued. “Clinically, Riordan’s reorientation was normative, but one thing puzzled me: do you have any idea why the psychologists inserted so many probes of Caine’s first short-term memory loss into the initial sessions?”

Nolan glanced up from under his hand. “What? No, no idea; frankly, I didn’t notice.”

And indeed, maybe Nolan hadn’t noticed-but then again, maybe he had. It was as if the measurements of Caine’s memory had been designed to surreptitiously assess where his earlier, lunar memory loss began and ended, with an a priori presumption of about one hundred hours. So, had Nolan expected a one-hundred-hour memory loss from the outset? If so, had Nolan instructed his Taiwanese contacts to do more than just ship Caine back to the US after they had swapped him out of their cryocell and into an American model, fourteen years ago? Had they taken “therapeutic” steps to ensure this greater memory loss?

Downing stopped: steady, old boy. Look very carefully at where these inquiries are taking you: toward the notion that Nolan not only took premeditated steps to deny Caine information about what happened during his last one hundred hours on Luna, but that he kept me in the dark about doing so. But what would possibly-?

Nolan’s voice severed that troubling line of thought: “While we’re on the topic of Caine’s cold sleep, I’ve been wondering if his memory loss might have been caused by the kind of cryo-suspension the Taiwanese used. Or maybe it was the rapid shift between their system and ours.”

Downing managed not to flinch: so has Nolan started reading my mind, now? “That shift-is that why they held Caine for about a month after cold-sleeping him on Luna?”

Nolan nodded. “The pharmacology of the pre-toxification approach is radically different from ours. They had to purge their chemicals out of him before ours could go in. It took about two weeks between partial rethaw and full resleep.”

“Ah.” Nolan’s comments about Taiwan’s controversial pre-toxification cryotechnology were accurate, and Caine might very well have spent two weeks having his fluids exchanged. Or, Caine might just as easily have spent two weeks in a drugged stupor, inhabiting a twilit land where the mental fogs induced by serotonin derivatives were intermittently pierced by lightning strokes of electro-convulsive “therapy” sessions.

Nolan leaned forward, his smile a little wider but less relaxed. Downing knew what that signified; the admiral wanted to get off the topic of Caine’s memory loss: “Any other concerns regarding Mr. Riordan?”

Downing folded his hands. “Riordan has every reason to hate us-and to distrust us. I’m uncomfortable with our decision to let him present his own findings at the Parthenon Dialogs. He could decide that an international