Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

Bannor looked up. “Are you casting me as Lucifer?”

“Hell, no — to coin a phrase. How could I do that to someone who’s been my guardian angel?”

Rulaine’s lips crinkled; for him, that was a broad smile. “I’m not reading Paradise Lost , anyway.”

“Oh? Which one, then?”

“ Comus .”

“So, a journey into a mysterious forest where temptation lurks. Thinking of our current travels?”

“No, thinking of how the title character reminds me of the Ktor.” Bannor settled back, a gentle, if clear, message that his interest in banter had waned beside his interest in the verse.

Caine settled back in his own chair. Ben Hwang might be the chattier and more intimate of the two men, but Bannor was calmer and well-grounded. And a walking contradiction. His dossier was as filled with combat commendations as it was with examples of how, despite his academic brilliance, he was a poor fit for conventional learning environments. Rulaine’s brief Ivy-League career began its final, precipitous decline on the last day of what had been his favorite class, an advanced Shakespeare seminar. When asked what he had done instead of showing up for the final exam, Rulaine calmly reported that he had elected to spend the time rock-climbing. Alone. When pressed to explain this choice, he responded that while he found great pleasure and value in both the substance and form of the Bard’s plays, he simply could not abide rote memorization of passages, which had been a required component of the final exam. When the academic review board suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t presume to judge the pedagogy of his august and much-published professors, Bannor shrugged and replied that while his instructors might be excellent scholars they were poor educators. After offering a further, provocative enlargement upon that opinion, his absences mounted, his GPA plummeted, and he was summarily dismissed. But Bannor’s fateful, final words had even made it into his Army dossier (although they were buried deep): “most of my professors can’t see the wider forest of meaning because they’ve become obsessed with a few mostly meaningless trees.”

Peter Wu poked his head into the common room. “O’Garran tells me that Gaspard is awake and asking questions. Imperiously.”

Bannor shut his book: an annoyed thunderclap. “Does he ask questions any other way?”

“Occasionally.” Ben’s tone was noncommittal. He rose. “Let’s go see the Great Man.”

Bannor grimaced. “I’d rather spend another few hours on the flight simulator.” He did not rise.

“C’mon, let’s go,” coaxed Caine. “It’ll be more fun than crashing during an unpowered landing. Again and again. Bannor.”

Bannor glared at Riordan. “That’s a low blow. If accurate.”

Caine smiled. Of all the distractions that he and his five conscious fellow travelers had shared during their journey, the flight simulator had been the most useful and the most frustrating. An actual training sim used by the Commonwealth space forces, it was realistic in all regards but one: feel. Karam Tsaami, an accomplished transatmospheric pilot, had tried his hand at it early on. He crashed twice, landed in a heap three times, and then finally put the delta-shaped lander on the ground with only a few nicks and scratches. “It’s bullshit,” he’d pronounced as he pushed away from the controls.

“Why? Because you crashed it?” Hwang’s tone had been almost impish.

“No, Mr. Nobel-Winner Wiseass, not because I crashed it. It’s because you can’t feel anything.”

“You mean, like the crushing impact when you stick it nose-first into the ground?” Peter Wu’s deadpan rejoinders were becoming his trademark.

Tsaami glared at the Taiwanese tunnel rat whose cool competence and valor in Jakarta had ensured that he, too, would be recruited into IRIS. “Wu, has anyone ever told you that you are one hell of a funny guy? Because if they have, they’re liars. Look: this simulator isn’t even a good approximation of instrument flying. This is like — like flying a drone. But drones have all sorts of expert systems, which uneducated idiots call ‘AI,’ to compensate for minor stability issues. This thing”—he jerked a thumb at the console—“is the worst of both worlds. You’re flying an authentically unstable platform but without the real ‘feel’ of being in it. And you’re relying on controls that are less sensitive than a drone’s.”

Caine had been curious. “Then why do they use it as a trainer?”

Karam shrugged. “Look, there’s a lot of details to flying, particularly in a lander. This sim is fine for most spaceside maneuvers. They’re a piece of cake if you can do some basic math or know how to tell the computer to do it for you. Atmospheric flight is trickier, but, unless you’re in dirty weather, it’s still pretty straightforward as long as you don’t try to pull any fancy moves. But reentry? Or fast climb to low orbit? That’s where the job gets a lot harder because that’s where things go wrong most frequently, and you don’t get a lot of warning when they do.”

“Odd, then, how all those quaint twentieth-century space capsules managed to land without computer control. Or without any controls at all.” Hwang couldn’t keep the bait-happy smile off his face.

“Yeah, real odd,” Karam retorted, “since reentry and landing was all they were designed to do. Put them in the right place, at the right angle and speed, and they’ll land. But a platform with lifting surfaces and designed to be capable of launch, landing, and flight in both space and in atmospheres? Those increased capabilities mean increased complexity.”

Bannor had put a hand on Karam’s shoulder. “Ben’s baiting you. He knows all that.”

“Yeah?” Karam sounded dubious. “He’s just annoyed that I like Wu’s food better. Sound about right to you, Pete?”

“Peter,” corrected Peter Wu.

“Yeah, yeah, sure— Pete . But Ben’s just jealous of your cooking, don’t you think, Pete ?”

Wu sighed. “Yes, I’m sure that’s it.”

That had been another welcome distraction during the outbound trip: the dueling regional cuisines of China. Wu was Taiwanese. Ben Hwang had dual citizenship, China and Canada, and had grown up eating authentic Szechuan in Vancouver, before living in Canton as a student. The cooking wars between the two men had become twice-weekly events. But before long, it was obvious that while Ben Hwang was more knowledgeable in the different nuances of the many regional cuisines and use of ingredients, Peter Wu had that unquantifiable gift for knowing — just knowing —the moment when the meat had been seared enough, the leeks wilted enough, the peppers sliced finely enough. The final, almost pitiable, conferral of victory upon Wu had come when Ben Hwang had been discovered making a midnight raid on the leftovers of Peter’s cooking, even though the refrigerator was still well-stocked with his own.

Caine rose to his feet to respond, along with the others, to O’Garran’s summons.

Bannor remained seated. Kept reading. Conspicuously.

Ben motioned. “C’mon.”

“You can’t make me go.”

Caine had the sudden impression of Bannor as a quietly intransigent four-year-old. “I can make you go.”

“Yeah? How?”

“Miles O’Garran, your brother-in-arms, is in there with Gaspard. Alone. And you won’t do your part to rescue him?”

Bannor glared at Riordan, sighed, put down his book, and rose. “That wasn’t fair. Lead on.”

* * *

It took Gaspard a moment to notice that Caine and the others had entered the room.

Miles O’Garran came over quickly. “So, am I off-duty, now?”

“Uh…yes. Sure.”