Fire with Fire: Chapter Two

ODYSSEUS

    Caine frayed another wire end, cursed, and glanced up at the training area’s control booth. “Do you have to keep distracting me while I try to memorize this circuitry?”

    Downing nodded down at him. “It’s part of the training. If you ever need to jury-rig a command override, or cut a control circuit, you will probably be in a loud, chaotic, and very dangerous environment.”

    Caine looked around as buzzers shrieked and lights flashed erratically. “At least you left out the dangerous parts.”

    “In this scenario, the hatch just to your left — the one you’re trying to bypass now — opens directly to space. And you are not wearing a spacesuit.”

    “Well, that’s not a big deal, since the vacuum is just make-believe.”

    “That’s a dangerous assumption, Caine.”

    “But this is just training. You wouldn’t –”

    “I suggest you work while we talk. A tight schedule such as ours means we have to train you using the fastest form of operant conditioning: negative reinforcement. So failures will result in unpleasant consequences.”

    Caine found that the hatchway seemed slightly ominous, now. He started stripping the next wire more vigorously. “Yeah, but this is a training exercise –”

    “And, as I said, part of it is to train you to perform tasks while being distracted. So, as you work, I will continue answering the questions you asked about IRIS. To continue, the Institute’s primary mandate is to reduce our home system’s vulnerability to hypothetically hostile exosapients.”

    Caine twisted the exposed wires. “If the exosapients have a technological edge, you’d be winning a victory just to get them to land on Earth itself.”

    Downing paused. “And how would that be a victory?”

    “Hell, it’s better than having them exterminate us from orbit.” Caine looked for the green lead, found it snuggled behind the red one: good thing I’m not color blind. “Look: if alien invaders beat us in space, they could stay in Earth orbit and play ‘drop the rock’ until they’ve battered us back into the Stone Age. Of course, if they’re genocidal, they’ll do that anyway — and none of this matters.”

    “Wouldn’t mass landings be as bad as bombardment?”

    “You won’t be facing mass landings unless their technology is way, way beyond ours.” Caine fumbled the multitool: it grazed across two leads, imparted a mild shock. “From what you told me earlier, the projected development of FTL craft predicts that they’ll remain big, expensive, and therefore, rare. That means our adversary can only bring limited forces. Unless they’re godlike.”

    “Very well — but I still don’t see how having them establish a beachhead is a victory for us.”

    Caine looked up at the control booth. “Are you familiar with the Vietnam War?”

    Downing stared down: there was a split second of uncertainty in his responding nod.

    Caine shrugged. “The Vietnamese were utter underdogs: inferior tech, lack of air supremacy, unable to strike at their opponent’s homeland. But they won the war, despite losing every major battle.” Caine twisted two wires together, realized he had only half the job done but had used almost three-quarters of his available time. “They understood that when your enemy is large and technologically superior, you want him in your territory, because — if you are still the true master of your own countryside — his invasion force will become your hostage.”

    “Perhaps — but in our scenario, an invader’s orbital fire could reduce our cities to rubble first.”

    Caine shook his head. “Not if they intend to rule us rather than exterminate us. So, if they want to avoid a ‘final solution,’ you dangle the prospect of capitulation — or even collaboration — under their noses while preparing to strike at them.”

    “And with their superior technology, how do you propose to get close enough to strike at them?”

    Caine glanced up. “By getting — or prepositioning — forces inside their beachhead. And don’t give me that doubting-Thomas look: there are always methods of infiltrating forces through ‘secure perimeters’ or ‘impassable’ borders.”

    “Such as?”

    “Well, if we don’t take the story too literally, the tactic of the Trojan Horse still has merit.” Caine quickly stripped the insulation off the last two wires. “Look: if people — exosapients or otherwise — want something from you, sooner or later, they’re going to want to meet with you — on what they believe to be their turf.”

    Downing nodded. “And that’s how you get inside, get close enough to deliver the first, crippling blow.”

    Caine nodded back. “That’s the way you get inside. Hey, I’m almost done here.”

    “Yes. But unfortunately, you have just run out of time.”

    Red lights flashed and spun; a klaxon howled next to Caine’s ear. The hatchway beside him wrenched open with a high-speed hiss. But instead of finding himself sucked out into space, Caine was slammed backwards by a lateral geyser of water.

    And, as the roaring flume bounced him off the mock-up bulkheads — which Caine discovered were just as hard as real ones — he thought: Well, shit.

 

---

 

MENTOR

    Nolan edged into the control room as the orderlies were helping a bruised and waterlogged Caine limp out of the test chamber. “How’d it go?”

    Downing snatched up his dataslate. “A brilliant success and a dismal failure. Riordan effortlessly spewed out a number of completely novel — and potentially game-changing — strategic insights, but botched the main task: a simple circuitry bypass job that many of our average trainees learn in half the time.” Downing shook his head. “I’m afraid Caine’s genius must be of a very narrow sort.”

    “Oh, Riordan isn’t a genius. I mean, he is, but that’s not what makes him useful to us. And that’s not why he excelled at one task while botching another.”

    Downing looked up. “Then what was the cause?”

    “Interest versus boredom.”

    “I beg your pardon?”

    “Caine was interested in your strategic brainstorming but bored by the circuitry test.”

    Downing reared back in his seat. “Well, isn’t that simply awful for him. I will try to create an amusing vignette involving the circuitry next time.”

    Nolan smiled. “It can be challenging working with a true polymath. We don’t see many in our line of work, mostly because they lack either the depth of interest to become world-class experts at any one thing, or the ability to maintain a brutally narrow field of focus. Or both.”

    “Hmm. That doesn’t sound like a polymath; that sounds like a dilettante. Or a spoiled brat.”

    Nolan shrugged. “In some cases, they are both. But for most polymaths, that’s just how they’re wired. The intensive detail work that intrigues most field-specific geniuses is usually suffocating for them.”

    “So that’s why Riordan can’t memorize the circuitry?”

    “Maybe. Or maybe he’s just bad at it. Or maybe he’s subconsciously responding to the inconsistency between what we’ve been telling him about the mission versus what we’ve been training him for. We assure him that he’s being sent to Delta Pavonis Three just to look around, ask some questions, gather some evidence: nothing dangerous at all. But then we spend most of our time teaching him how to hotwire bulkheads, crack security codes, recognize counterintelligence agents, and a dozen other field craft skills that you only need when the work gets risky.”

    Downing folded his arms. “Well, he should understand that even though we believe the job will be easy, we are preparing him to survive and succeed in the event the job becomes hard.”

    “Look, Rich, you don’t have to convince me. And I suspect that after today, it won’t be so difficult to convince Caine, either. But if you don’t engage his interest, or his self-preservation instincts, you’d better prepare for more frustration: polymaths do not tend to be good rote learners.

    “So why in bloody hell is a polymath any good for us?”

    Nolan smiled. “Because, if sufficiently interested or motivated, a true polymath can learn almost anything. They don’t see the world as a big pile of discrete facts and figures. They see it as a matrix of paradigms and interrelated data. Hell, sometimes they find a solution to a problem in one field of knowledge by applying the established principles of another field.”

    “Ah,” exhaled Downing with mock reverence, “a Renaissance man.”

    Nolan shrugged. “That term may be increasingly accurate.”

    “Why?”

    “Because in the Renaissance, broadly integrative thought was at a premium; empirical method was in its infancy. Now, with the tools of measurement so highly refined, we produce lots of narrow specialists but fewer expansive thinkers.”

    “Well, I doubt expansive thought is going to help Mr. Riordan when he gets into the field.” Downing rose. “And that time is approaching all too quickly. With our luck, Caine’s op could come apart before it’s started, probably before he even debarks from the shuttle down to Dee Pee Three…”

 

---

 

ODYSSEUS

    Caine squinted through the gloom of the generic shuttle’s cargo bay. On its far side, he could see the partial silhouettes of the two terrorists who would surely resume their attack soon.

    Why the terrorists had been on the shuttle, and what they were after, was not clear and probably never would be. Their attempt to hold the bridge crew hostage had apparently devolved into a firefight which ended up blasting out the flight deck windows and exposing friend and foe alike to hard vacuum.

    Caine had heard that much over the comm system before the carnage had spiraled out into the small ship’s passageways. As one of the last persons out of the portside passenger compartment, he moved away from the general rush toward the escape pods, since that was also the route to the bridge. Shortly afterward, a sudden increase in gunfire and screams from the bow confirmed his instincts against heading forward. Continuing aft toward the cargo bay, he hoped to find something there that might serve as a weapon.

    Finding the bay access doors closed, he had presumed he was the first to enter, but as he stepped inside and hit the reseal button, he caught sight of hurried movement to his left. He dove to the right, behind a cargo-heaped plat, just before a flurry of handgun shots spattered it and the bulkhead behind him.

    And so here he was, pinned down by the very terrorists he had been hoping to elude. He had no time to wonder what the terrorists were doing in the cargo bay, or why the overhead lume panels suddenly failed, leaving only the red glow of the emergency lights. Whether or not the battle for control of the shuttle continued was equally unknown. But, at the moment, it was also wholly extraneous: he was in a cavernous hold, alone and unarmed, facing two very armed and dangerous enemies.

    Scanning, he saw nothing but the freight and tools common to a cargo bay. Wait: common tools. Caine scuttled over to a power tool bench-box, found a pneumatic wrench. It was typically used for unbolting containers, or affixing modular cargoes to plats like the one he was sheltering behind. But with a slightly undersized bolt snuggled into its socket –

    Caine inserted an undersized bolt, adjusted the wrench’s torque and pressure settings to maximum, and popped up. Before the two terrorists could react, he snapped the trigger of the wrench sharply: it emitted a curt blast and sent the puny bolt caroming off boxes well to the left of the terrorists. However, the bolt made a sound passably akin to a ricochet.

    Caine ducked down a moment before his enemies’ return fire sent two rounds thumping into his cover. Well, since they’re not charging at me yet, they at least think it possible that I have a real gun. And until they decide to test that possibility, I can look around.

    Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see, and almost none of it was useful. There were numerous spools of reinforced cargo netting on the floor and affixed to the bulkheads, most of it made of variable-elastic polymers: tough as nails yet lots of give. There was also a liberal scattering of containers, boxes, packing materials, lashings, c-clamps, carabineer clips, spare parts, and just plain rubbish. But Caine detected one notable detail: a circuitry-access panel was hanging askew at the near side of the door. The terrorists had obviously cracked it open to bypass the lock-outs that restricted access to the doors into and out of the cargo bay — including the bay doors themselves. That was probably why they had come down here: their job was to secure key cargos and get local control over the bay doors for off-loading.

 

---

 

    Studying the locations of the nearby containers and boxes more carefully, Caine also realized that he had a mostly covered route back to that panel. There was a single, exposed gap, but it was only half a meter wide. The two terrorists wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to hit him if he rolled, low and fast, across that open space. And once at the door’s control keypad, Caine could open the main entry back into the shuttle, open the bay doors on his way out, and reseal the entry behind him. Heh. Let’s see how those two bastards like getting sucked out into hard vacuum…

    Caine flinched as the main entry opened. A young boy — no more than nine — ran in, shouting as he did, “Hello? Anyone? We need help! We’ve almost taken back the bridge but we –”

    “Get down!” shouted Caine at the same moment that one of the pirates’ guns spat.

    The boy fell forward sharply, as if someone had swung a bat into his kneecaps. He shouted in pain, then terror as dark blood began leaking out of a through-and-through wound in his left thigh. “Help me!” he screamed in Caine’s general direction. A moment later, the two terrorists rose up slightly, training their guns carefully on the approaches to the boy.

    Caine felt his molars grind together: he could sneak over to the controls using the boxes as cover, trigger the bay doors, and then help retake the shuttle. But that would kill the boy, too. Or he could run to help the boy and get shot to pieces.

    Or maybe there was a third option –

    Caine quickly scanned the lashings on the plat in front of him and snatched off the biggest carabineer clip he could find. “I’m coming!” he shouted at the boy, tossed up a piece of trash — and was then moving across the open gap toward the control panel even as two shots barked at the fluttering piece of paper he had lofted.

    More shots whined off the containers that covered his route to the hanging access panel. Once there, he reached out for a spool of cargo netting affixed to the bulkhead. He uncoiled it, opened the carabineer clip, snagged a section of netting with it, and snapped the clip closed around his own belt. As the two thugs started to move and the boy started to whimper, Caine sucked in a deep breath and jumped over to the control pad: he punched the button that opened the cargo bay doors and sprinted toward the child.

    At the other end of the hold, a small wedge of stars and a sliver of blue — Delta Pavonis Three — appeared, widening rapidly. Shots were already barking after Caine’s heels: startled by his unexpected charge, the terrorists didn’t have him in their sights — yet. But Riordan’s attention remained fixed on the boy, whose round, terrified eyes had turned away from the yawning spacescape and outrushing debris and were now fixed upon his own. Pleading.

    Caine finished his short sprint to the boy just as the outbound hurricane intensified into the full, ferocious suction of hard vacuum. He dove, caught the boy by the arm as they were swept off the deck and pulled out toward space.

    The two terrorists, screaming, shot past them, arms flailing to grab something — anything — to arrest their fatal tumble outward. Caine closed his nostrils tightly, slapped his hand over the boy’s face, pinching his nose shut. They too were almost through the bay doors and into the void –

    – when the cargo netting snapped straight out to its limit, humming like an immense, just-fired bowstring. Caine jackknifed at the waist, but held on to the child. He felt as though his own belt might cut him in two –

    But then the netting’s inevitable return flex began, pulling them away from the widening panorama of airless death even as the cyclone diminished, the bay’s air almost fully spent. Caine looked over his shoulder: when they had retracted all the way to the bulkhead, he would have to quickly close the bay and cycle the interior access doors so that –

    – the world faded to gray. Its sounds ended more sharply, as if someone had turned them off. The temperature and pressure extremes faded back to norm within seconds as Caine reoriented himself, wondering what had caused the simulation to terminate so abruptly.

    Around him, the sensory suit sagged with uncommon suddenness: the sensa-gel in which it was immersed was being speed-purged from the simchamber. What the hell is goi –?

    The hatch behind Caine opened with a breathy hiss and Downing’s voice — sharp, unpleasant — was audible even through the full-enclosure headphones. “Riordan, get out here. Now.”

    Caine complied, but without any particular rush: you may be my trainer and handler, Downing, but you don’t own me.

    But before Caine had his second leg all the way out of the simulation pod, Downing was acting very much like he did own his impressed recruit. “Mr. Riordan, would you care to tell me what the hell you were doing at the end of the simulation?”

    “Uh — completing the mission.”

    “‘Completing the mission’? Do you even know what your mission was?”

    “To retake the shuttle and get down to Delta Pavonis Three.”

    “Yes. And you jeopardized that by stopping to rescue the boy.”

    “Look, I’m not going to ignore an opportunity to save a kid, even if it means adding a little more risk.”

    “‘A little more risk’? Is that what you call that harebrained stunt in the cargo bay? The objective here was to retake the shuttle so you could continue the mission. Period. Saving the boy was an unnecessary risk. Even saving the other passengers would simply have been a happy byproduct. You have failed, Mr. Riordan — failed to learn that the mission always comes first. That was the test.”

    “Huh. I thought the test was to do the best job possible.”

    “‘Doing the best job’ means minimizing risk. This time, it meant sacrificing innocents.”

    “But I didn’t have to: I found a way to save both the boy and the mission.”

    “That’s a sim. In the field, those instincts will get you killed.”

    Caine yanked off his virtual reality helmet. “Fine. So I flunk. Go get some other student. Please.”

 

---

 

MENTOR

    Downing pushed down his annoyance. “Caine,” he said calmly, “you know you can’t just walk away from this job. You’re too much of a security risk, given everything we’ve told you.”

    Caine folded his arms. “So how will you ensure my continued cooperation? Threaten to withhold information about my one hundred missing hours?”

    Downing shook his head. “That would not be effective enough.”

    Caine’s eyes widened, then became very narrow. “Oh. I get it. If I don’t shape up, then you stick me back into the freezer?”

    Downing shrugged. “Let’s not let it get to that point, shall we?”

    Caine stared at him, yanked the leads off the sensory suit and stalked out of the sim chamber.

    A moment later, Nolan entered from the sim operator’s booth. “Well, that went well.”

    Downing pulled off the virtual gloves with which he had controlled the actions of one of the two terrorists in the cargo bay. “Caine won’t be a safe operative, Nolan. He refuses to learn.”

    “Is that what’s bothering you — or that he not only won, but pretty much broke your sim while he was at it?”

    Downing thought about it. “Both, probably. He certainly made me feel a right dolt: I designed a sim to force him to choose between his mission and his conscience. Instead, he turns it around so that the outcome winds up reinforcing his belief that he can always stop to save orphans and stray kittens. Mark my words, Nolan: that attitude is going to get him killed. Besides, he’s too damned smart for his own good.”

    Nolan smiled. “Don’t let it bother you, Rich.”

    “Easy for you to say; he didn’t just outsmart you at your own game.”

    “Look, Caine’s clever and he’s got a lot of breadth, but he lacks expertise and real field experience. And he’s not a genius at everything, you know. Hell, taken separately, no one of his abilities is really that jaw-dropping.”

    Downing looked at Nolan, having heard the hanging tone. “Except for what?”

    Nolan shrugged. “Except that he can constantly integrate almost everything he knows to solve problems. That’s what polymaths really excel at, because when they look at the world, they see more variables than fixed values. You and I see a screwdriver; Caine not only sees a screwdriver, but a weapon, and a lever, and a straight-edge, and a counterweight, and ad infinitum. They don’t try to do that; it’s just how their brains work.”

    Downing returned his virtual reality goggles to their protective case. “So when we included the netting in the sim, we gave him a tool we weren’t aware of.”

    “Right. And that couldn’t have happened with the old sims, where there was a lot of restriction regarding how many items in the environment were manipulable. But now, everything in the environment is available. So Caine didn’t break your sim: he just saw a solution none of the programmers — including you — anticipated.”

    Downing grabbed his dataslate, started making notes. “I still say he’s not right for the mission.”

    “You mean, you’re still pissed he got the better of your sim.”

    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.