Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

Veriden’s teeth might have been clenched as she muttered, “Agreed.” She rose to leave.

“Ms. Veriden, one other matter.”

She turned back toward Riordan. “Yes?”

“I’d like to combine your professional efforts with those of my team, when and if the ambassador permits it and circumstances dispose you to be willing to do so. This legation will be strongest when all its security assets are pulling in the same direction.”

Her expression was equal parts incredulous and amused. “Are you serious?”

“You might say I’m deadly serious, Ms. Veriden, since it is our shared responsibility to deal with matters of life and death. And frankly, I know high ability and intelligence when I see them.”

She folded her arms. “You’ve probably figured out that I’m not much of a team player. And I don’t like taking orders.”

“I’ve noticed. I also observe that you do take orders even if you don’t enjoy it, and that you have skills which make you a valuable addition to any team, even if you are mostly working on your own.”

Veriden opened the door, paused on the threshold. Her mumbled response sounded more like a confession. “I’ll think about it.”

Once the door closed behind her, Bannor shook his head. “Caine, you’re the boss — but her? Really?”

“She’s difficult, yes. But she’s damned good.” Bannor rubbed his chin briskly. Caine had learned what that gesture meant: the ex-Green Beanie didn’t want to be insubordinate, but there was some issue he really wanted to raise. “You’re worried about something besides her sunny disposition?”

“Yeah,” Rulaine admitted. “Gaspard’s assistant Dieter got nervous and talkative after today’s mishap with the local wildlife. Seems this isn’t the first time that Ms. Veriden went off cowboying on her own and became an embarrassment to her employer.”

“So she’s ruined operations that got in the way of her own special brand of problem-solving?”

“Oh, that too, but I was thinking more about her political, er, forthrightness.”

Caine nodded. “Go on.”

“One of the reasons she never finished college or even a certificate program was because she always took the administration to task and made herself persona non grata in record time. Maintained a few vlogs — some directly, some via aliases — that are about as inflammatory as you can get before becoming a ‘person of interest’ to security agencies.”

“Whose security agencies, specifically?”

“Take your pick. She’s pretty much an equal-opportunity anarchist.”

Hwang’s eyebrows went high. “She’s a genuine anarchist?”

Rulaine waved a dismissive hand. “A figure of speech, but apt. Can’t find a single bloc or nation that she trusts or even considers acceptable. All her sympathies are with resistance movements, underground organizations, and what activists dub ‘post-national collectives.’ And you know what that means.”

Hwang looked from Bannor to Caine and back to Bannor. “Well, I don’t know what that means. So please add a caption.”

Rulaine shrugged. “The megacorporations have a long history of mining antigovernment organizations for support. They throw a lot of money at them: sometimes directly, sometimes through plausibly deniable proxies.”

Hwang screwed up his face. “And do these groups really join forces with the megacorporations? They’re far more autocratic than nation-states.”

Caine shook his head. “It’s not a direct alliance. But the megas aren’t really looking for cocombatants against ‘the tyranny of nations.’ They’re just funding grassroots resistance to national authority.” He turned back toward Bannor. “But do you really think Dora’s been a megacorporation’s agent provocateur ?”

Rulaine shrugged. “No way to know. Dieter tells me that Gaspard has complained to DGSE that even her classified dossier is threadbare. Lots of gaps in her timeline. Lots of arrows pointing to sealed case files and intelligence summaries.”

Ben Hwang’s palmcomp buzzed. He glanced at it, rolled his eyes. “The Great Man has summoned the two of us. He wants that classified summary he put off.”

“And he wants it right now, I’ll bet.”

“No. He wants it an hour ago. When should I tell him we’ll be there?”

“An hour ago,” Caine sighed. “Let’s go.”

Karam Tsaami, his head half into the avionics interface bay on the bridge of the TOCIO shuttle, nearly knocked off the top of his skull when a female voice murmured, “Hey,” not half a meter behind him. The resulting occipital thwack literally made his vision swim — and made his uninvited visitor chuckle.

Determined to show just how little enthusiasm he had for being a source of slapstick humor, Karam yanked his torso out of the bay, ready to tear the head off whatever damn fool had—

He discovered Dora Veriden watching him with a sardonic smile. “You always that graceful?”

“No,” Karam grumbled, rubbing the back of his head and unsuccessfully trying to remember what choice cascade of insults he had been preparing to unleash. “Sometimes I’m really clumsy.”

Veriden grinned, flopped down into the copilot’s couch, avoiding the various screens and protuberances of the half glass/half “steam” cockpit. And Tsaami realized, she knows her way around flight controls.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “you are clumsy. And sometimes you’re really stupid, too.”

Karam stared at her. “You’re welcome.”

“Huh?” she replied.

“Well, I figure that tracking me down on the shuttle so you can insult me is your own special way of saying thanks for my chasing after the monster that was trying to eat you earlier today.”

He had intended his tone to indicate that his comment was as ironic as hers. But Dora’s considerable brows met in a descending vee. “Didn’t ask for your help, and didn’t want it. Which is part of why I’m here: you were damned stupid chasing after that thing. It could’ve eviscerated you.”

“Yeah, well, it seemed like you could use a hand. Or at least a diversion. So I—”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about: that was really stupid. If I need your help, I’ll ask for it. But your macho button got pressed and out you charged, making just that much more trouble for me . Because then I had your safety to worry about, too.”

“Hey, I was safe enough. You were its only target, and I’ve heard through the grapevine why that was. But secondly, I didn’t charge out there because of machismo,” he asserted half-truthfully. “I’ve been shuttling people back and forth to new planets and new colonies for ten years now. When they run into trouble, I go help. It’s that simple. It’s reflex: not duty, not machismo. Get it?” Karam almost believed the whole spiel himself. Damn, I’m good .

Dora Veriden frowned. “Okay, fair enough. Because you’d have been pretty disappointed if you were motivated by hopeful chivalry.”

“You mean because of the peculiar way you show gratitude?”

“No: I mean because I don’t usually walk on your side of the sexual street.”

Karam felt his eyebrows come down, then jump up. “Oh.” He shrugged: not like that was a big deal, or would have influenced his actions one bit.

“Oh,” he repeated and felt like an idiot. They sat in the pilot and copilot couches in silence for almost half a minute. It felt like half an hour.

“Look,” Dora started as suddenly as their semi-conversation had stopped, “I came here to explain something to you. And only to you.”

“Are you asking me to keep it a secret?”