Trial by Fire: Chapter Three

Off-base sector, Barnard’s Star 2 C

    The doors of the private maglev car closed abruptly, terminating the outraged cries of the reporters. Once Caine and Ensign Brahen had found seats as far from their rescuer as politeness allowed, Heather Kirkwood tapped her outsized palmcomp. A gentle hum arose, as did the car, floating up an inch or so before they felt the smooth acceleration that would carry them toward the end of the civilian sector’s rail spur.

    Brahen eyed Heather again, and then Caine. “She’s your ex-wife?”

    “No, no. Ex-girlfriend.” Caine managed to suppress a shudder at the notion that he might ever have married Heather Kirkwood.

    Who had turned toward Caine. “So, it seems there was a nice reception waiting for you, now that you’ve decided to stop playing soldier. Surprised?”

    Caine leaned back. “Not really. It was just a matter of time before the local stringers and hack-journalists found me.” Which was only a partial truth. That they knew Caine was on Barney Deucy was only mildly surprising. Knowing when and where he would emerge from the naval base was somewhat disturbing. What was alarmingly suspicious, however, was the sheer number of reporters on the platform: way too many. Barney Deucy was an infamously dull news post. The entire system typically had one-fifth the number of correspondents that had accosted the two of them.

    “Okay. But that doesn’t explain why she“–Ensign Brahen gestured at Heather without looking at her–”came all the way from her high-profile job on Earth. Just following a deductive hunch?”

    “Oh, it wasn’t guesswork for Heather. She knew she’d find me here.”

    “How?”

    Heather twirled a golden lock with a desultory middle finger. “Yes, how did I know to find you here, darling?”

    “You picked up my trail on Mars just a day or two after I left. Easily done, since I was seen by quite a few people at Nolan Corcoran’s memorial. And I’ll bet you learned that I’d been attacked in my room by a pair of Russian servicemen–despite attempts by both the Commonwealth and Confederation officials to hush it up.”

    “So far, so good.”

    “But all your leads came to a dead end: you found I’d been shipped off planet. No word where, no reason why. So you checked to see if any other persons of interest had been on Mars at the same time as me, and then left the same time as I did.”

    Heather smiled. “And what a crowd of luminaries I turned up. Two World Confederation consuls, two Nobel prize-nominated scientists, India’s top computer whiz, the late Admiral Corcoran’s kids–commando son Trevor and brainy daughter Elena–and, last but not least, Richard Downing, affiliate of America’s two recently deceased heroes, Corcoran and Senator Tarasenko. Who were old Annapolis chums. Who both employed Downing at different times to do–what, exactly?” Heather’s smile was wide and bright. Her eyes were every bit as predatory as the ambulance-chasers they’d just eluded.

    Caine ignored the all-too-accurate intimation that Downing was up to his neck in clandestine activities. “Now here’s the tricky part,” he resumed, picking up the explanation to the wide-eyed Brahen. “Having traced all these people to Mars, Heather knows she’s on the trail of something interesting. She finds indications that all of us have shifted out-system, but the transit logs indicate that there were no shift carriers outbound from Earth at the right time. But at some point, she makes–or is helped to make–the incredible intuitive leap which tells her I have left the system by other means.”

    “I didn’t need any help coming to that conclusion, thank you very much,” Heather retorted, chin elevating slightly. “Ever since you announced the existence of exosapients at the Parthenon Dialogs, some of us in the press have speculated that maybe not all of the exosapients are primitive. That maybe the focus on the aborigines of Dee Pee Three is just a stalking horse to take our attention away from contact with much more advanced exos.”

    Her concluding sentence did not end on as firm a note as it had begun. She doesn’t have any facts, just hunches. She hasn’t been told about our group’s travel to the Convocation. Caine continued narrating Heather’s journalistic adventures to Brahen. “Of course, Heather’s right. A special shift carrier was, in fact, waiting to take us out-system,” A half-lie, since the shift carrier had been “special” because it belonged to an alien species. “But where had we gone, and why? Alpha Centauri is the most developed system, and would be a logical first stop for all the missing VIPs, no matter their ultimate destination. But instead, Heather somehow deduced that we would wind up at the most closely controlled piece of real estate in human space: The Pearl, here on Barney Deucy.” Seeing the slightly theatrical nature of Heather’s smug answering smile, Caine knew she was trying to act knowing, confident, but had not reasoned it out this way at all. “Or,” he added, “a helpful informant aimed her inexplicably but confidently at the base here. She never learned how the informant knew, but that didn’t stop Ms. Kirkwood from booking herself on the first out-bound shift-carrier.” Heather’s smiled faltered as Caine asked her, “Is that about right?”

    Heather recovered quickly, though. She shook her head; long gold tresses swept from side to side. Her extraordinary–and, Caine knew, artificially–lavender eyes engaged him for a full second before she spoke. “I heard rumors that the coldsleep had damaged your memories, Caine. But evidently it didn’t affect your intellect, or your ability to be aggravating, to push my buttons. Occasionally.” She leaned back; on the surface, it was simply a shift to a more relaxed posture. Somehow, Heather made it the inviting recline of a courtesan. “So–have you missed me?”

    “Haven’t had the time to miss much of anything, Heather.”

    “My, my, you never used to wake up this testy. But I suppose sleeping through fourteen years could make one a little more arch than usual.”

    “Or maybe I just woke up with a decreased tolerance for reporters.”

    Heather remained quiet for a second. “Such a semicivilized insult. But I suppose we’ve both grown old and boring. Which reminds me, are you in touch with any of your friends from the Independent Interplanetary News Network?”

    Caine managed not to roll his eyes. “Oh, yeah, all my IINN ‘colleagues’ who loved me so much.”

    He felt Brahen’s eyes move sideways to study him. “Actually, sir, ward-room scuttlebutt says you were a pretty successful–”

    Heather tossed a bang aside. “Oh, he was very successful, Ensign. A bit too successful, actually. You see, he didn’t go to the news networks: they went to him. On bended knee.”

    Caine made himself laugh. “You still don’t mind a bit of exaggeration if it makes for a more evocative story, do you, Heather?”

    “And I never will. You see, Ensign Brahen”–her sudden inward lean and facetiously intimate tone were Heather’s most antagonistic provocations yet–”when I was at IINN, the senior editors were big fans of Caine’s first book, and his way with words. And then they discovered he was good on camera, even though he was shy about being in front of one.”

    “That wasn’t shyness. That was aversion.”

    “See? He is good with words. So there he was, on an open-ended contract, free to come and go as he pleased, allowed to snatch up the choicest research projects involving the Pentagon or the cloak-and-dagger types a few miles away in Langley.

    “But of course, not all of us girls and boys who had worked and sweated and lied and slept our way up the ladder were happy when Caine became the darling of the aging news chiefs who rediscovered, in their near-senility, that journalism was still about informing the public. As if it ever had been. But Caine Riordan was the perfect salve for their pangs of career-end guilt: a bona fide public intellectual who was self-effacing, honest, energetic, eloquent, even charming. And the rest of us could only look on in envy.”

    “Or hatred,” added Brahen, fixing Heather with her own assessing gaze. “Sounds like you still haven’t figured out exactly how you feel about your old boyfriend, Ms. Kirkwood.”

    Heather leaned back with a clap of her hands. “Bravo! Rising to the bait at last, are you, Ensign?”

    Judging from Marilyn Brahen’s lowering brows, Caine suspected he’d better steer the conversation back to the original topic. “Heather, you already know I’m not in touch with anyone in the media. That’s the first place you’d try to pick up my trail.”

    “One of the first. I tried tracking down your family, but no contact there, either.”

    “Never had much to be in contact with. Less now.” As in “zero.”

    “What about your college friends? You had a pretty close circle of them from your undergrad years. If I remember correctly.”

    “You do–and you’ll leave them out of this. As I have. I keep a low profile so that people who knew me can’t contact me. It might not be–healthy–for them.”

    Heather leaned back with a frown. “So the rumors are true.”

    “What rumors?”

    “That what you know is worth killing for.”

“The Pearl,” Barnard’s Star 2 C

    Martina Perduro turned away from her commplex with a sigh. “Damn it. I didn’t even know we had half that many reporters in the civilian sector. And of course we just happened to send Riordan right out into the midst of them.”

    Trevor watched the monitors, tracking the progress of the blip that denoted the private maglev car which had whisked Caine away from the journalists and protesters. “Don’t worry, Admiral. Riordan can handle the press.”

    “Handle them? He was one of them, wasn’t he?”

    “No, ma’am, not really.” Trevor tapped the monitor as the interactive maglev-system diagram flickered uncertainly, then reasserted. “He just took some freelance reporting gigs to make ends meet in lean times.”

    “What did he do for a living?”

    “Different things. Worked for Jane’s Defense Weekly as an analyst for a while, then wrote books. Consulted, too. Defense and intelligence: all the major three-letter agencies. A few others, besides.”

    Perduro made a huffing noise. “I know those consultancies and their fees. How ‘lean’ could the times have been?”

    “Pretty lean, because Caine has a serious flaw when it comes to working for the government.”

    “Which is?”

    “Well, he has this real bad habit of telling the truth.”

    “Ah.”

    “Yeah. So he had an irregular career because he was always willing to wonder out loud about the so-called experts’–and his own–methods of analysis, and about the conclusions derived from them.”

    “So he got in trouble for doing his job properly?”

    “Yep, particularly when his observations ran afoul of Ancient Agency Traditions. One time, he pointed out that age stratification in the intelligence organizations was crippling their counterintelligence analysis. Specifically, the generation gap had senior experts unaware that contemporary ciphers were incorporating pop-culture memes and semiology–which the under-thirty junior analysts could have recognized and decoded in their sleep. Caine wound up getting two supreme recognitions for that discovery.”

    “Which were?”

    “Well, first he got a huge consultancy bonus.”

    “And the second?”

    “They let him go. Never hired him back. Buried the files and findings.”

    “So he was the proverbial prophet, unwelcome in his own land.”

    “Well, there’s that–but frankly, he’s also not your typical beltway type.”

    “How so?”

    “Admiral, have you ever worked with a polymath? A real polymath?”

    Perduro smiled. “I served under Nolan Corcoran–remember?”

    “Touché. But Dad–well, he liked managing people. Not Caine.”

    “Strange. He doesn’t seem antisocial.”

    “He’s not, Admiral, but, well, you know how artists don’t work best in groups?”

    “Sure.”

    “Yeah, well, that’s kind of how Caine works, too. He’s a team player, but he often does his best work independently. Probably because he doesn’t think like most of the team.”

    Perduro picked up a hardcopy report printed on the light blue letterhead of the Med-Psych section. “‘Subject Riordan evinces unusual balance between right and left lobe thought; demonstrates real-time syncretic problem-solving. Does not alternate between data intake and revision of situational contexts, but engages in both processes simultaneously.’”

    Trevor raised an eyebrow. “Ma’am, if you had all that psych-eval data on Caine already, why ask me for my extremely inexpert assessment?”

    “For the reason I indicated before, Captain: to get a human perspective that isn’t all numbers and graphs and psychobabble. Thankfully, what you just shared confirms most of what the so-called experts have observed.”

    Trevor shrugged, turned to check the real-time rail system diagram for the progress of the private maglev car that was carrying Caine–and jerked forward to scrutinize the screen. “Admiral–” he started.

    “I see it, Captain. Where the hell did that other car come from? Where’s its transponder code? And what in blazes is it doing on the same track?”

    And then the screen went dead. A moment later the security monitor feed blacked out also–followed by every light in the room.

    Perduro punched the button to call the Duty Officer just as he came through the door and the red emergency lighting began to glow. “Admiral, we’ve got a widespread blackout on all–”

    The power came back up, the lights flickering sharply before their luminance stabilized.

    Perduro rounded on the hapless D.O. “Mr. Canetti, what the hell is happening on my base?”

    “Ma’am, I don’t know.”

    “Admiral,” murmured Trevor. As Perduro turned toward him, he pointed to the security monitors and the maglev tracking screen. They, alone of all the electronic devices, were still dark.

    “Son of a bitch,” Perduro breathed.

    “Came in to tell you about those systems in particular,” Ensign Canetti blurted into the silence after her profanity. “Those systems went down first. And they went down hard.”

    “Okay, so get the techs on it. What went wrong, and where?”

    “That’s just it, Admiral. We don’t know. The whole maglev tracking system–and the station and platform monitors–just seem to have, well, disconnected.”

    Trevor looked up sharply at the young ensign. The system had just “disconnected?” Where had he heard that before? Trevor jumped out of his chair, made for the doorway in the long, gliding leaps made possible by Barney Deucy’s low-gee environment.

    “Trevor, where the hell are you going?”

    “Admiral, we don’t have a lot of time. That kind of ‘disconnection’ is exactly what happened when the airlock on Convocation Station failed and almost sent Caine and one of the friendlier exosapients into hard vacuum. Similar electronic failures enabled a number of the other assassination attempts made against Caine, like the one at Alexandria.”

    “So where are you going?”

    “To the last station stop on the maglev line.” He looked at the D.O. “Do you have the main comms back yet?”

    “Only the hard-wired system, sir.”

    “As soon as you can, get a message to the Shore Patrol to meet me at the last station on the civilian branch of the maglev line.”

    Perduro stood, frowning. “Why there?”

    “Admiral Perduro, correct me if I’m wrong, but the track into the civilian section only extends a dozen meters or so beyond the final station. And they use that extension as a kind of shunting track: they leave cars there, or send them back the other way.”

    Perduro’s frown deepened. “That’s true.”

    “Then it’s also like a dead-end canyon. Once there, the only way out is to come back along the stretch of track that the rogue car has already entered.”

    Perduro swallowed. “Putting Riordan between a speeding rock–”

    “–and the very hard place at the end of the tunnel, Admiral. So with your leave–”

    “Get the hell out of here, Captain. I’ll have the SPs meet you at the last station if I have to find them and drag them there myself.”

Off-base sector, Barnard’s Star 2 C

    Heather reclined again. “So, Caine, about these secrets of yours–”

    Riordan looked out the windows, saw three amber lights pass in quick sequence. “Stop the car. Now.”

    “I don’t take orders from you, Caine, and I–”

    “Stop the car now or you won’t hear another word from me.”

    Heather frowned, modulated a control on her palmcomp’s screen. The car began to slow. “And I won’t hear another word if I let you out, either.”

    “I’m not getting out. Ensign Brahen is. Those yellow lights we just passed mean we’re within a few hundred meters of a maintenance siding. She’s getting out there.”

    “Not exactly the safest place to leave an innocent child, Caine.”

    “Any place is safer than here with you,” Riordan snapped back, waving down the ensign’s inarticulate sputtering.

    “Sir!” Brahen finally shouted, “I’m not going to leave you with this–”

    “Ensign, there’s only one thing you’re going to do, and that is to follow my orders.”

    “But, sir–”

    “Don’t argue with him, little princess,” cooed Heather, who smiled broadly when Ensign Brahen’s fists balled up. “The grown-ups are going to talk about secrets, now. Secrets that would complicate your poor little life if they entered your poor little ears at this early stage of your poor little career.”

    Some combination of the taunting tone and probable truths coming out of Heather’s mouth caused Marilyn Brahen to turn very red. “Ma’am, when I get back to the Pearl, I am going to make it my personal quest to find anything–anything–irregular or illegal in your actions while on Barnard’s Star Two C. And if I find something, heaven help me, I’ll–”

    Heather brought the car to an abrupt stop. The ensign almost fell face down on the floor of the car. “Oops! So sorry! You were saying? Oh, but wait–you have to leave!” She pushed another control on her palmcomp; the maglev’s door hissed open. A grimy, half-meter-wide access shelf, lit by a single blue-white LED lamp, was revealed. “Out you go, sweetie!” Brahen did so, fists still clenched, eyes hard. Heather pushed the control. The door shut and the car began moving again. She tossed her bangs, surveyed Caine for a long moment. “Well, well, alone at last. Time to spill your secrets.”

    Caine shook his head. “I promised to keep talking, Heather. Nothing more.”

    “Oh! A challenge! But not a very hard one. Because if you don’t give me the leads I want, I will locate your old friends, ask them what they know.”

    “Which is less than nothing.”

    “Oh, I’m aware of that. But I also know that you’d probably do just about anything to protect them. And according to what you’ve said, a well-publicized research visit from me could be almost as unhealthy for them as if you had contacted them yourself.”

    Caine made himself remain calm. “I always knew you were a hard-nosed investigator, Heather. But when did you add extortion to your bag of tricks?”

    “One has to be ready to use any leverage available. Particularly when it comes to you, Caine. You don’t leave many loose ends.” She paused, became sly, but no less serious. “And I’m sure that’s why you were recruited to begin with.”

    “‘Recruited’?”

    “Don’t play innocent with me, Caine. It’s more than just an aversion to publicity that still had you sitting on the full story of what happened at Dee Pee Three and dishing out ‘no comments’ like they were party favors. After which you and a bunch of world-class movers and shakers disappeared into thin interstellar air for about a month. And now here you are on Barney Deucy, but not a hint of your high-profile pals. So I’ve got to wonder, what were you all doing, light-years away from where you belong?”

    Caine didn’t change his expression, couldn’t afford to. She may not have been told about the Convocation, but she’s on the scent. Careful, now.

    Heather leaned forward. “I know you’re not alone in this, Caine, that you’re not an independent actor. You’re covering for someone. But I’ll disappear–right now, forever–if you just tell me who they are.”

    Damn, she was a manipulative monster, but she was good. Caine raised one eyebrow, “‘They’?” he echoed. “There is no ‘they.’ I’m just a researcher doing my job.”

    “And I’m the Tsarina of all the Russias. Look, even if you can’t tell me what’s really going on, don’t insult me with that ‘I’m just a researcher’ bullshit.” Heather seemed genuinely frustrated, now. Her Northern New Jersey accent and diction was starting to bleed through. “Honey, they yanked you out of an icebox that you never agreed to enter, sent you on a top-secret research assignment almost twenty light-years from Earth, and then put you up as the main attraction at the Parthenon Dialogues–all achieved despite numerous attempts to kill you. And you want me to believe that you’re still just a ‘researcher,’ no permanent strings attached? Horseshit.”

    Caine smiled. “You were ever the charmer, Heather.”

    “And you, Caine, still don’t know who your real friends are.”

    His smiled widened. “You mean, ‘friends’ like you?”

    “You could at least show me a little gratitude. I did rescue you from those underemployed hacks back at the maglev station.”

    “Rescue me? From those ambulance chasers who you fed an ‘anonymous tip’ so that they’d accost me as soon as I emerged from The Pearl? So that I’d feel some subconscious gratitude, and be more pliable, when you serendipitously ‘came to my rescue’? Nice try. Better luck next time.”

    “Knowing you, probably not.” Heather leaned forward. “But I’m not depending on luck. I have facts. For instance, fact: you had twenty-four/seven access to both Nolan Corcoran and Arvid Tarasenko.”

    “So, having a close professional association with those two men automatically makes me–what? Their devoted servitor?”

    “I’m not sure what it makes you, Caine. But you’re more than just a researcher when your employers start hiding your work behind some pretty dark curtains of secrecy.”

    “Well, that’s hardly surprising, Heather. After what I discovered on Delta Pavonis, they had to give me pretty high security clearances. At least until Parthenon was over.”

    Heather smiled. “No, that’s what you’d like me to believe. But you’re telling the tale a little bit backward, aren’t you, Caine?” She leaned forward. “They had to give you those clearances and bring you into their shadowy world before sending you to Dee Pee Three. You needed access to classified files, rank equivalents, and actual authority to get the job done there. All of which indicates that you were some kind of operative for them. And you’re still working for whoever is in charge now.” Heather frowned, thinking. “I’d bet a week’s salary that Tarasenko’s primary successor is Richard Downing. Some say he was the one who summoned that group of VIPs to Mars, where he just happened to be attending Nolan Corcoran’s memorial service. Coincidence?”

    “Why don’t you ask Downing?”

    “I would have, except, by the time I arrived, he’d been on a preaccelerating Earth-bound shift-carrier for two weeks, the one that finally shifted out a few days ago. But here’s what I don’t understand, Caine. Why should you be so loyal to them–to Downing, Corcoran, Tarasenko, whoever–given what they’ve done to you? And taken from you?”

    A faint vibration started ascending through Caine’s feet, buttocks, abdomen as a gentle down-spinning hum arose and the arrival tone chimed. Saved by the bell. He smiled at Heather. “Our stop? So soon?”

    Heather was frowning down at her palmcomp’s control screen. “Faster than I intended, actually.”

    Caine’s smile did not change. “Thanks for the ride, Heather.” He rose, noticed a sudden bloom of red light beyond the window at the rear of the car. The track warning light had flashed for a moment, then died suddenly. The green light–signaling a clear track–did not replace it.

    “If you leave now, Caine, you leave me no choice but to contact your friends.”

    “Heather,” said Caine, watching for the green–or red–light to reappear, “the track signals are malfunctioning and we’re at the dead-end of this spur. You need to get out of this car. Now.”

    “I think you’ve got the situation reversed, Caine. I don’t have to leave, you have to stay. Assuming you want your friends to remain safe.”

    Neither track status light had reilluminated, and Caine felt a faint, growing tremor rising up through the center of the floor, where the car had settled on the rail.

    One quick look at Heather’s stubbornly rigid jaw told him she wouldn’t listen to reason in time. He turned toward the door, spotted the emergency exit panel. He smashed it with his elbow and hit the red panic-release button.

    As the door was rammed back into its recess by the sudden discharge of a compressed-air cell, Heather reared up. “What the hell are you doing, Caine?”

    “We have to go, Heather,” he shouted, grabbing toward her. “Right now!”

    Heather’s reflexes were extremely swift but perfectly wrong. As Caine closed with her, she swung back, bringing up her legs and kicking, hard.

    With his focus entirely upon getting her out of the car, Caine didn’t realize what Heather was doing until her spiked heels jabbed sharply into his abdomen like a double-barreled nail-gun. With a grunt, he found himself stumbling backward, falling as his heel caught on the rim of the exit. He landed half in the car, half out the open door–

    –and discovered a palmcom shoved into his face, red recording light on, a bizarre tableau around him. He had fallen out at the feet of yet another crowd of shouting protestors. Each brandished a placard emblazoned with a crucifix being menaced by “little-green-man” aliens, who had also sprouted satanic red horns and black tails.

    The girlish reporter who was leaning over him stuck her palmcom down so energetically that it bumped his lips. As she began her oblivious mantra–”Mr. Riordan, Mr. Riordan. Janel Bisacquino, Reuters Interstellar”–Caine scrambled to get his legs back under him, to get back into the car, to get Heather out–

    But the reporter grabbed his shoulder as he rose, causing him to stumble farther away from the maglev car as she chattered into his ear, “Is it true that you were abducted by aliens on Delta Pavonis Three?”

    “Heretic!” one of the protesters yowled over her shoulder from the lee of a long kiosk that paralleled the platform.

    Caine shook off the reporter’s hand, spun toward the open doorway of the car–beyond which Heather stood, her features softening into uncertainty–

    With an up-dopplering screech, another maglev car shot out of the transport tube and rammed into Heather’s half-size rental–just as Caine grabbed the reporter and dove for the ground.

    The metallic shriek of the impact seemed to propel debris savagely outward, heat-hissing shards of metal and plastic corkscrewing over the two of them even as they fell. Screams arose from the protesters. One had gone down, hands clutched to a face shredded by a wave of shattered glass from the kiosk. Others, panicked, fled wildly. One journalist who had evidently been hidden behind the placards was fleeing with the mob. Another was already getting footage of the crash, as well as the blood gushing from the face of the wounded protester. Ms. Bisacquino looked at the smoking ruin of the two cars–a pair of crushed tin cans forever fused and frozen in some savage mating frenzy–her mouth open, mute, and motionless.

    “Come on,” said Caine, as the flash-heated synthetics in the cars began to smolder. “We’ve got to get off this platform.”