Fire With Fire

Downing rounded on Nolan. “No, I’m pissed that he’s got a better soul than he should. He’s too decent a bloke for this shite, and you know it.”

“‘Too decent’?”

“Of course. You saw the end of the sim: sooner or later, Caine’s fine moral sensibilities are going to get him killed.”

Corcoran leaned back, his eyes assessing. “Rich, I can’t tell if you resent him or admire him.”

Downing stared at his superior. “Nolan, I not only admire Riordan; I envy him. He isn’t up to his neck in the lies that we peddle, that we live. And that’s why he can’t be trusted: because he won’t jump into the cesspool with the rest of us.”

Nolan smiled. “Well, he can be trusted to do the right thing, can’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s predictable. You can work with that.”

Nolan smiled and left Downing sitting speechless, mouth open-partly at his superior’s easy sagacity, and partly at his ruthless pragmatism.

When they arrived at Epsilon Indi five days later, Downing accompanied Nolan to the pinnace that would ferry him to the Earth-bound shift-carrier Commonwealth. The retired admiral put out his hand. “So long, Rich. Have you settled on a code name for Riordan, yet?”

Downing shook Corcoran’s wide, strong hand. “Yes. He’s ‘Odysseus’-who wound up getting lost and not coming home, you might recall. Not exactly an auspicious code name. Although it could well be prophetic.”

Nolan smiled. “Odysseus was a proto-polymath, though. How does The Odyssey begin? ‘This is the story of a man who was never at a lack.’ We could do worse, I think.”

Downing frowned. “It would still be better if we sent a professional operative.”

“I would if I could, Rich. But that won’t work on Delta Pavonis Three. If, as we suspect, the megacorporations are trying to conceal the evidence of sentients there, they’ll be alert for interference. They probably have dossiers on all our professional operatives, or could sniff out a new one. Either way, they’d clean up their act before our agent gets to see what’s really going on. But they won’t know that Caine is a covert operator, or foresee his intents, for quite a while.”

“So we hope.”

Nolan’s smile widened as he waved. “I’ll miss your sunny optimism, Rich. Don’t waste any time getting back to Earth.”

Downing returned the wave and wondered when Caine Riordan might be able to make such a return trip himself.

If ever.

Part Two

Delta Pavonis and Junction systems

June-October, 2118

Chapter Three

ODYSSEUS

A humid wind snapped at Caine’s pants as he started down the mobile airway-stairs toward the tarmac. But even the tinted plexiglass roof-tube was unable to defeat the thick yellow heat of Delta Pavonis: it almost smote him back into the spaceplane-which was where he wanted to go, anyway.

His shirt started to stick as the humidity rose to meet him, and Caine suddenly realized that covert operatives-even those as new and unprepared as he-didn’t stop, dumbstruck, as they debarked on a new planet. Which meant that at this particular moment, he certainly didn’t look like a covert operative-and that was good. But, if he stood there any longer, he’d start to attract undue attention-and that was bad. So Caine breathed in the thick, musky air, and began a loose-jointed descent of the stairs: first rule of tropical weather-don’t fight against it; go with it.

A stubby, sunburned man with a flattop of bristly hair was waiting for him on the tarmac, hand extended. “You Riordan, Caine Riordan?”

“That’s me,” replied Caine. “Pleased to meet you.”

A full head shorter than Caine, the other man smiled and pumped his hand with the excessive vigor of a membership officer for a failing Shriner’s lodge. “I’m Brinkley. Downport Ops Manager.”

Caine nodded. “Thanks for coming to pick me up.”

Brinkley snorted. “I should be thanking you: anything to get me away from my damned desk.” Brinkley extracted his hand from Caine’s, swept it at the buildings in the distance, then around at the tropical foliage hemming them in on all sides. “Welcome to Downport, Mr. Riordan.”

At first, Caine couldn’t tell if the grandiose gesture was ironic or genuine. But then Brinkley began gathering himself for another grand pronouncement-

There was a splintering blast behind Caine’s right ear. A spatter of microscopic lances cut into that side of his neck: needle-fragments from the plexiglass roofing, which had been holed by a single bullet.

Caine dove into a prone position, his sternum thumping against the sun-softened tarmac, his heart thumping behind it. Goddamnit: a sniper? Here? Already? For a moment Caine couldn’t think-and then he heard Downing reciting one of the mantras of his recent training: “If you’re too scared to think, get to cover. Then think.”

So-cover. Find cover. Caine scanned his surroundings: two klicks of cleared ground in all directions. No cover except the spaceplane. That meant there was only one option: a double-fast low crawl behind the air-stairs and then-

But Brinkley was laughing, rising from his casual crouch. “Don’t let the yokels spook you: it’s nothing personal.”

Caine remained prone, looked up at him, and then at the bullet hole in the plexiglass. “Seems pretty personal to me.” Caine’s teeth chattered once; he gritted them into immobility and regained enough control to speak. “Who are these ‘yokels’?”

“Outbackers. Neo-Luddites, mostly. Want to discourage further colonization. Every week or so, one of ’em wanders down here, takes a potshot at a spaceplane or a new colonist. Then they fade back into the hills to hunt whatever critters they’re hunting up there.” Brinkley’s smile was a little less amused as he nodded toward the blood Caine could feel trickling down toward his collar. “Gotta say that they put this round a little closer than usual. They must really like you.”

Caine tried to smile back, thought: you have no idea how much they like me-since you have no idea who just shot at me. That was not a hunter’s rifle. There was no report. And at more than a mile’s range, it put a perfect four-millimeter hole in the plexiglass. Meaning that this was the work of an assassin with a silenced high-velocity weapon, not some backwoods renegade with an antique bolt-action rifle.

As Caine rose up, so did a tiltrotor from the small, squat skyline to the north of the spaceport. The tiltrotor’s lazy movements matched Brinkley’s bored drawl. “They won’t find the shooter. Never do. Stupid game, if you ask me.”

Except this time it’s not a game. But you’re right about the tiltrotor not finding anything. By now, a professional will have moved well away from the firing position. And will then go to ground for hours, maybe days. That’s the SOP. Or so Downing told me.

Brinkley gestured toward the edge of the tarmac: through the heat-shimmer, Caine could make out a boxy, dull-green silhouette. “It ain’t a limo, but it’ll do. Say, are you going to be all right? Do you need anything?”

Yes. I need to know whether that shot was meant to drop me or warn me. But either way, a