Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

Rulaine leaned back against the smooth, metallic wall of the Third Silver Tower. “You see, Ms. Veriden, it’s not just about honor and fellowship and brotherhood. It’s about survival, too. You tend the bonds that keep you strong, and not just for yourself or your fallen friend, but for the morale, the sense of unity, that binds the whole unit.” He folded his hands, leaned forward, stared at the oval fusion of machine and plant that held Riordan. “And you tend them most, well, punctiliously, at times like this.”

Veriden physically started when Rulaine used the word “punctiliously.” “You’re not just a grunt, are you, Major?”

Bannor shook his head. “Ms. Veriden, that question is wrong in so many ways, including the mere asking of it, that I don’t know where to begin.”

She frowned. “Yeah. I guess that was pretty shitty. Sorry. Didn’t mean it that way.”

Rulaine resisted the urge to ask, “Then just how did you mean it?” and instead speculated that Dora Veriden probably had a long history of putting her foot in her mouth. She did not have a winning way with people and seemed uninterested in improving the related skill sets. Of course, she was a solo operator, so maybe that lack of reliance upon, or even toleration of, other people was a professional advantage. She wouldn’t have been the first field agent whose specialization had been driven by inborn predispositions and personality traits. He turned toward her. “So did you come to keep me company?” As if.

She actually seemed a bit abashed. “No. I’ve got some news.”

“Oh?”

“Thanks to our forensics fan Peter Wu, Ben Hwang found some weird critter in a hermetic cell sealed inside Macmillan’s right boot. Turned to goo the moment he breached the little chamber.”

Bannor nodded. “Like the one you found on Danysh’s body, after the shuttle crashed?”

“Just like that one. Hwang tried to get it into a sealed container, evacuate the air. Didn’t do it in time; after an hour, it was paste. Just like the other one.”

“What else?”

“We found one live clone. We’re delaying the debrief until you give input.”

“No more wounded? Just one alive and the rest dead? That’s pretty peculiar.”

Veriden shook her head. “Not so peculiar when they kill their own. Seven or eight were maimed or incapacitated by the rockets; a few by gunfire. All stabbed in the heart. Real professional, too.”

Bannor nodded. Professionals, indeed. He would have liked to tell Veriden that the moment O’Garran saw the corpses of the two enemy leaders — one by the shuttle, the other in the clearing — he’d identified them as Ktor. But Veriden wasn’t cleared to know that the Ktor were humans, yet. And might never have that clearance. But the charade of Ktor being subzero, ammonia-based worms was beginning to wear perilously thin. “Debriefing that clone should be very revealing,” Bannor observed.

“Should be,” Veriden observed with a nod, “as well as tracking down all the serial numbers on all the equipment. But we already know what ship he, and that armored shuttle, were from: the Arbitrage .”

Rulaine frowned. “Isn’t the Arbitrage a CoDevCo shift-carrier? Their newest?”

Veriden nodded. “It is. Which is going to make questioning the clone all that much more interesting.”

A long silence passed. The distant hum of the medical monitors at Riordan’s bedside — or would that be podside? — was the only sound.

Veriden sighed, leaned forward so her head was parallel with Rulaine’s. “That’s all the news I’ve got to report.”

“Thanks.”

More silence. Then: “Okay, aren’t you going to ask me?”

Here it comes . “Ask you what?”

She sounded gratifyingly annoyed. “Ask me when I became a part of IRIS? Shit, when I dropped that little secret on you just before we left the clearing you barely blinked.”

“Were you hoping I’d go slack-jawed or do something equally melodramatic?”

“Damn it, you’re a hard case.” She moved to leave.

“There is one thing I’d like to know.”

She stayed put. “Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you tell me at the start? Why didn’t you tell any of us?”

Pandora sighed, leaned back. “Because I was only supposed to tell Riordan. Well, Downing, too — I was recruited after he’d left Earth — but who knew things would happen so quickly? Or that I’d wake up inside Slaasriithi space, instead of at Sigma Draconis?”

“Yeah, well, since the rules of the game had changed, and we traveled together for a few weeks, don’t you think you might have been able to slip it in somewhere along the way?”

“No, because the whole damn mission was so irregular and last-second that there was no way to separate the crazy stuff going on from the hinky stuff.”

“What ‘hinky stuff’?”

“Hinky stuff like the way I woke up, checked the legation records, and discovered that the secure EU shuttle that was supposed to transfer all our cold cells to Yiithrii’ah’aash’s ship had last second ‘engine trouble.’ Hinky like there was a TOCIO shuttle that just happened to have been cleared for operations and was on call, but without any particular flight order pending. Hinky that most of the personnel who staffed the legation were transferred as corpsicles, so there was no way for Downing to eyeball and debrief them, or to see if they acted in the flesh as they were written on paper. And then we lost Buckley, which might or might not have been a result of his being a saboteur, or running afoul of one.”

“So, now I understand why you chased after the response team Caine led to rescue Buckley: to protect Riordan. But at least Buckley doesn’t seem to be part of the conspiracy.”

“Yeah, as it turns out. But that’s hindsight. So, to answer your question about why I didn’t announce my credentials: after all that, and not having a crystal ball, I figured I’d better play it cool.”

“And not tell Caine. Or anyone else.”

“Precisely. Look: Riordan’s okay, I guess, but he’s not a pro. If I had just sidled up to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m on your side,’ and showed him my credentials, he might not have even believed me. Actually, that would have been the most professional thing he could have done, because he’s not experienced enough to pick out a genuine solo operator from a crowd. Don’t give me that look, Rulaine. Yeah, I know Caine’s got good instincts. But he’s been pretty lucky, too. Given his lack of training, he could have been dead three or four times if he didn’t think quickly on his feet.”

“Thinking quickly is a skill in itself.” Bannor offered the rebuttal more out of loyalty to Riordan than conviction in its accuracy.

“Well, yeah, sure, it is. But that skill wasn’t the one Riordan had to have if I was going to tip my hand and tell him I was on his team. Because if he had believed me, then he would probably have given me away to the real traitors in the group.”

“How so?”

“By changing the way he behaved toward me.”

“In what way?”

“See? This is what I mean: you’re a professional field operator, but you still don’t get it because you’re just a striker. My world is different. And here’s how Riordan would have messed up my world: if I had revealed my identity, he’d probably become careless in ways he wouldn’t realize. He’d start showing an unwonted trust in me, casual speech, relaxed body language, all that. If an enemy pro had infiltrated our team, he or she would spot those changes, and so, would have sniffed me out. Or Caine would have been too careful, would start distancing himself from me — and again, a rival pro would have sensed that overcompensatory reaction and I’d be fingered. So my motto in these cases — better safe than sorry — meant not revealing who I was.”