Fire with Fire: Chapter Three

Part Two

Delta Pavonis and Junction systems
June–October, 2118

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 little more cross-wind and that bullet would have gone straight through my right eye.

    Brinkley droned on. “Listen, I’ve got a medkit in the car. We’ll put a compress on those nicks. They’re not too deep. Day or two and you won’t even feel ‘em –”

    True — because I might be dead by then, without ever knowing who pulled the trigger. Probably somebody working for the Colonial Development Combine’s planet-rapers, but Downing said there could be other players in this game. But they — whoever “they” are — shouldn’t know I’m on Delta Pavonis, or even who I am. But instead, I step straight off the spaceplane and into someone’s waiting crosshairs.

    And Brinkley still droned on. “Yep; we’ll have you fixed up good as new. And we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. To the extent that’s possible, of course. Sure don’t want folks like yourself taking home bad reports. Hey, who’d you say you work for?”

    “I didn’t.”

    Brinkley had walked a step ahead, was trying to catch Caine’s eye. “Of course, I understand if you can’t say who you work for. We get that all the time. A lot of covert ops passing through. Every once in a while, our pilots have to ferry super spooks into or out of the bush. Incognito commandos, I call ‘em.” Brinkley smiled wider, seemed to be expecting a sign that Caine appreciated his clever nomenclature.

    Caine just kept walking, kept his eyes on the low skyline of the settlement, and kept hoping it was big enough to get lost in for a while. Long enough, at least, to decide his next move. From all appearances, the mission had been compromised — so what should he do? Call it busted and catch a shuttle to the next outbound shift-carrier?

    No: not acceptable. Even if there hadn’t been any lives depending on the success of his mission, retreat was simply not an option. The next shift-carrier wasn’t due to leave for at least three weeks. And even if he could hop on one this very second, what would stop an assassin from following him? So retreating only made him an easier target.

    Meaning, by process of elimination, that he had to drop out of sight until he could come up with a better strategy. And if he couldn’t “get lost” in the colony itself, then in the jungle — which, ironically was the source of the reports he’d been sent to investigate.

    Brinkley nudged his elbow. “C’mon, you can tell me. They sent you here to find them, right?”

    Caine forced his face to remain unsurprised as he echoed, “What do you mean, ‘find them’?”

    Brinkley looked over his shoulder furtively — even though the closest person was still over a hundred meters away. He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “You know; them. The xeno-chimps. The ‘locals.’”

    Caine smiled, but thought: this just gets better and better. I step off the shuttle and — after a quick little welcome bullet — the first guy I meet asks me if I’m here to conduct a secret investigation into reports of xenointelligence. Aren’t secret missions supposed to remain — well, secret?

    Brinkley was still looking expectantly at Caine. Who stumbled over the requisite lie he should have told readily: “I’m — I’m here to investigate reports that the Colonial Development Combine has been breaking the local resource exploitation laws.” It wasn’t a complete lie, but it had sounded — and felt — awful.

    Oblivious, Brinkley was pouting. “Well, I guess it’s more important to investigate CoDevCo than a bunch of fool rumors about xeno-chimps. Hell, it’s about time the Commonwealth did something about the Euros’ high-handed corporate partners. You out here from the States?”

    Again, Caine couldn’t utter the easy lie, the easy “yes.” Instead, he muttered, “Not directly.”

    “Have a good trip?”

    “Sure. A bit long, though.” Yeah, thanks to being stuck in cold sleep, about thirteen years too long. But who’s counting?

    Brinkley nodded. “Yeah, a six-month trip from Earth is a long haul. Seems a shame, too. You look up in the sky at night and you think, ‘that should be a fast, straight run.’”

    “I beg your pardon?”

    “Look at the night sky while you’re here. Locate Alpha Centauri — you’ll find it crowding Omicron Ursa Major, like a bright new eye in the head of the bear. Sol is there, too — right behind Alpha Centauri. So, as seen from this system, all the major green worlds are pretty much on a straight line: here, Alpha Centauri, Earth. It could be two hops — ten weeks — to Earth, if the Wasserman drive only had a little more shift range.”

    Yeah, and if pigs could fly– But Caine only nodded: “A damned shame.”

    Brinkley nodded back, then jerked his head toward the hydrogen-burning Rover now only ten meters away. “C’mon; let’s get out of the heat.”

    And off of this shooting range. But Caine only said: “Fine by me.”

    Downport had the look of a well-established paramilitary compound: a lot of high-quality prefab; about a dozen permanent buildings; twice that number in various phases of construction. Neatly stacked rows of modular containers radiated out from several cruciform warehouses. Vehicles were plentiful, worn but well maintained, a smattering of new ones mixed in. The people had the same look: a bit worn, but fit and active, always on the move, dressed in practical, loose-fitting tan and khaki trail clothes, all wearing hats — sombreros, ten-gallons, panamas, outbacks — according to taste or cultural origin. Always in pairs or larger groups, always talking, always immersed in their purpose. Rapid expansion, American style. But it still wasn’t a city, or even a town: certainly nothing which could swallow you up and conceal you. So this was not a place in which Caine could elude an assassin for more than a few hours.

    Brinkley resumed his stream-of-conscious narration, nodding proudly around him as he drove. “We’ve got about eighty-nine thousand settlers on Dee Pee Three, now. Mostly from Earth. A lot of Amexicans. Good workers. Hey: I don’t mean anything by that. They’re just good workers, y’know? Lot of new buildings going up, lot of new settlers coming in. A lot heading into the frontier, though. Some pretty feisty animals out there. Some of them are good eating. I mean, that’s what they say. But you never heard that from me. I’ll tell you, though, it can get pretty tiresome, eating the same old prepackaged meals.”

    Caine glanced at the outré foliage that was peeking over the surrounding roofs. “So the wildlife here is edible?”

    “Some, but it’s hard to know which animals are safe to eat, or rather, which parts of them. Easy to make a mistake. Some of the bigger animals make the same mistake with us. But they’ll try just about anything once.”

    Just great. The jungle didn’t sound like a very good hiding place either.

    Brinkley hadn’t paused for breath. “So it’s pretty dangerous in the brush. Hey: if you’re going in there, you’ll want a gun. Nothing too fancy, mind you. But I can lend you something better than the museum pieces the Neo-Luddites use.”

    “Thanks: I’d appreciate that.” But Caine didn’t hear his own words; he was busy confronting a grim deduction. So: no way to run, no place to hide. And, if the last update on CoDevCo was right, any further delay puts lives — exosapient or otherwise — at risk. Meaning I’ve got to stick with an already busted mission. Great.

    And, paradoxically, that meant his only remaining option was to head directly towards his enemies. Downing had provided him with the means of exerting considerable political leverage over the Colonial Development Combine, more commonly referred to as CoDevCo. So if they had sent this morning’s sniper, Caine could probably compel them to back off — but only if he could get close enough to talk privately with CoDevCo’s local leadership, to strike an unspoken bargain that would give him the safety of an equally unspoken cease-fire.

    Caine felt himself sink into — and then past — the odd calm that arises after accepting a course of action that might end in one’s own death. “Mr. Brinkley, have any of your personnel catalogued the wildlife, examined their physiology, anatomy?”

    The silence that ensued was not promising.

    “You have a staff xenozoologist, right?”

    “Uh — we have a xenobiologist: same thing?”

    “Not exactly. Listen: didn’t you have a zoologist by the name of” — Caine scanned down his palmtop — “by the name of Janel Bisacquino on your staff?”

    “Oh, yeah, sure — but she shipped out four months ago. Science guys from further down the Big Green Main pulled rank and got her transferred to Zeta Tucanae.”

    Great. And since Bisacquino’s transfer wasn’t mentioned in Caine’s mission packet, it meant that his briefing materials were so outdated as to be almost useless. But Brinkley — garrulous and incautious — showed every sign of being precisely the sort of unwitting intelligence asset who would fill in all the relevant blanks — if given the chance to talk. So Caine urged him to continue: “Do you know if they have any zoologists where I’m going?”

    “Up there? Don’t know. Doubt it. The Euros have left most of the science and infrastructure to us, I’m afraid.”

    “I thought you had a good relationship with the European Union settlement.”

    “We did. Well, I guess we still do. But they grabbed a second site that the international survey posted as off-limits. Prime real estate, too: big island, nice sheltered valley with a deep river opening out into a long ocean inlet. Great weather up there in the northern archipelago: more moderate than down here. That island was our first choice, you know, but the Colonial Authority put us here, instead.”

    “And then the European Union just grabbed the island?”

    “Yeah — well, no, not exactly. Their first settlement is just a few dozen klicks south of us here. Nice facility they were building there.”

    “Were building?”

    “Yeah. I mean, it’s still there, but then CoDevCo got involved. When they arrived, they were already partnered with a new EU administrator, and ran their own survey. After that, it was like the EU forgot those poor folks down in Little Leyden even existed. All the Euro supplies are earmarked for Shangri-La, now.”

    “Where?”

    “That’s the name — well, the nickname — they gave to the island that they claim-jumped. Our pilot should have you up there by nightfall — and you can depend on him: he’s had ‘special passengers’ like you before.” Brinkley actually winked. “Hey: you’ll also be the first person from here to see their new airstrip, expanded for spaceplanes. I tell you, CoDevCo’s going to out-build us one day, despite our –”

    “Mr. Brinkley.”

    “– uh, yes?”

    “Why have we stopped?”

    “Oh. Right. We’re here. Let me show you around. Hey, you’re going to need a hat. Do you have a hat? I’ve got an extra. You can even borrow it for your trip.”

    “Thanks, but –”

    “Don’t mention it. My pleasure. Now, before you go, let me show you around Downport. It’s not your average colony town — and do you know why?”

    Caine did not know why. But he was quite sure he was about to find out.

    In agonizing detail.