Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

“When you say ‘close contact,’ are you including that arm-spike Shethkador fired into my back in Jakarta? The one that would have done me in if it hadn’t been for Dornaani surgeons? Because, I’ve got to tell you, that kind of ‘close contact’ is a little too close for my tastes. Don’t want to repeat it.”

“We — and significantly, Alnduul — will not allow that to happen.”

Vassily opened his hands in appeal. “Understandable. But if you will not go, you know what will happen, of course.”

Caine felt his stomach sink. “You’ll send someone else.”

Sukhinin shrugged, his expression a hang-dog acceptance that life was inherently unfair. “Of course.”

Riordan pushed back from the holotank, disgusted. “I guess I don’t have a lot of prep time.”

Downing’s eyes were sad, apologetic. “No, you don’t. Let’s get started.”

Strapped into one of the forward acceleration couches in a Commonwealth armored pinnace, Caine glanced back toward the cargo section where Tlerek Srin Shethkador and Miles O’Garran’s security detachment were waiting. Downing was alongside Riordan, studying the feed from the forward sensors. “Do we have a visual yet?”

Downing shook his head. “No, but it’s still early.”

Caine rubbed his hands, felt chilly despite the constant twenty degrees centigrade maintained inside the armored pinnace. “You know, I’m surprised the Ktor agreed to have me come aboard. My prior exchanges with them haven’t exactly been pleasant, and I just outed Shethkador — and therefore, all of the Ktor — as humans a couple of days ago. I doubt I’m on their ‘favorite Earth-folks’ list right now.”

Downing’s smile was faint. “True, but it’s of no consequence. You’ll go aboard, present your credentials, participate in whatever ridiculous minuet of courtesies and verbal fencing they elect to impose, and be present long enough to see Shethkador aboard to the satisfaction of this Olsirkos Shethkador-vah.”

“Sirs,” the copilot called into the passenger compartment, “I have a visual of Ferocious Monolith . Feed three, if you want to take a look.”

“Very good, Lieutenant,” called Downing, who pulled the screen into a position where both he and Caine could study it.

Riordan wasn’t convinced he was looking at a shift-carrier at first. It did not have the distinctively freight-train modular appearance of all human and most Arat Kur shift-capable craft. It was shaped rather like a thickened Neolithic arrowhead, a wide, flat delta shape, with a notch separating the warhead from the after part that would be lashed to the shaft. There were no rotating habitats in evidence, and further surface details were hard to discern because, unlike any other spacecraft Riordan had ever seen, its surface was dead black. Truly dead black , Caine realized as he looked for reflections and found none. “I think that hull is designed to absorb light,” he muttered.

Downing nodded. “The same sort of effect we’ve noticed with the Dornaani. But this is a damned odd hull design. How do they maintain gravity equivalent in crew quarters? And if that large section aft of the widest part of the delta-shape houses their engineering decks, then how the devil do they shield themselves from the output?”

Answers started presenting themselves. Caine pointed to a pair of transverse seams that had appeared close to the center of the arrowhead. “Something is separating from the hull; a whole band of it is lifting up.”

“No,” corrected Downing after a moment, “that band of hull is splitting apart along the ship’s centerline, dividing into two equal halves that are moving out from its axis.”

Caine squinted and then understood what he was looking at. “Those two halves, at the end of those extending pylons: those are the rotational habitats.”

Which now underwent a further transformation. The two faces of each segment began to split apart and open like a jackknife. They ultimately unfolded into two hinged, mirror-image halves, the top and bottom faces joined at a one-hundred-twenty-degree angle of incidence. They began to spin around the ship’s long axis.

“That’s a pretty impressive piece of engineering,” Downing murmured.

“I don’t think they’re done showing off, though,” commented Caine, who had noticed movement back along the notch that divided the ship into its forward and aft sections. “Look.” From the section behind the notch, fins or sails were extending outward.

Downing frowned. “What the devil—?”

“Sirs!” exclaimed the copilot. “Intruder energy output is spiking, neutrinos increasing sharply. I think their engines are—”

But Caine didn’t hear the rest. The fins or sails were becoming a kind of black parasol around the stern of the ship, screening the forward personnel and cargo section from the aft engineering decks.

As the parasol continued to expand outward like a skirt, the copilot reported, “We are no longer in the line of the emissions, sir, but they continue to spike. We can detect the bloom around the edge of that…that stingray’s peacock tail.”

Downing glanced at Caine. “A peacock-tailed stingray: seems as good a description as any.”

Caine shrugged. “Better than anything I’d have come up with.”

Downing grinned crookedly. “I thought you were a writer.”

Caine tried to return the grin, but couldn’t get past the irony of who had whisked him out of that career, thereby destroying it. “Yes, well, two guys from IRIS put an end to that about fifteen years ago, now— Richard .”

Downing looked like he had swallowed his tongue. Or wanted to. “Caine, I—”

Caine shook his head. “Sorry, Richard. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to joke about that. But what’s done is done. I’m where I need to be, I guess, and we work well together. Let’s leave it at that, yeh?”

Downing nodded, avoided Caine’s eyes by focusing intently on the screen. “Look at the thermal image overlay.”

Caine did, and frowned. “Damn, with all the energy their power plant is putting out, that flimsy parasol ought to be white-hot by now. The neutrinos alone should be cutting straight through—”

Downing shook his head. “No. It’s not just a shield. Look how its rim temperature drops off rapidly, even down where the parasol emerges from the hull. And it’s not just a radiator, either.”

Caine felt his eyebrows rise slightly. “Advanced thermionic materials?”

Downing shrugged. “What else makes sense? Whatever that parasol is made of, it not only absorbs heat but eliminates it, probably by converting it directly into electricity. And it’s doing so at efficiency levels that are at least an order of magnitude greater than anything we have. It’s a damper, shield, and power-reclamation system all in one. A pearl of great price.”

“Yes, and another bit of purposeful bragging,” Caine added. “A ship with a system like that is going to have a much better power-to-mass ratio than ours or the Arat Kurs’.”

Downing nodded. “To say nothing of higher operating efficiency and better ready power levels.”

Caine sighed, leaned back. “So they’ve shown us that they can put a tiger worth of hurt in the body of a housecat. But there is one significant drawback to their dominance display.”

Downing smiled. “They’ve shown us how much higher we need to be able to jump if we want to match them. Although I must say that is a high, high bar.”

Caine shrugged. “Which means we’d better get hopping.” He stood into the zero-gee without remembering to be careful — and discovered that, finally, it was starting to become second nature. “Let’s request approach instructions and get this over with.”