Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

With Thanks to:

Bob Eggleton, artist extraordinaire, creature designer/consultant on the water-strider, and all-around great guy and friend;

Gerald Nordleyand Stephanie Osborne, for their generous and expert input on both the planetological and biological forces that would bear upon the possibility of life on tidally locked worlds.

And Dedicated to:

My late father, John Patrick Gannon, whose love of intelligent, exacting science fiction was a powerful legacy to me. Although his interest in alterity was not very broad, it was very, very deep, and put down enduring roots in my soul as a child and in my life as an adult.

Weightless, Caine Riordan escorted the Slaasriithi ambassador to the exit of the free-floating habitation module in which they had met. Nearing the docking hatch, the slender exosapient raised one gibbonlike arm to steady its zero-gee drift and raised the other to lift a tendril-fingered hand in farewell.

Caine returned the wave as the ambassador disappeared into its diplomatic shuttle and wondered, Will I ever get used to being the point man during first contacts? It didn’t seem likely, not when every new species presented him, and humanity, with yet another disorienting surprise. In the case of the Slaasriithi, the surprise had been in their appearance. Not because they were ghastly — they weren’t — but rather, because they were unnervingly familiar. Tightly furred, wasp-waisted, and with a roughly tetrahedral head perched atop an abbreviated ostrich neck, the Slaasriithi were identical to the primitive beings Caine had met on Delta Pavonis Three two years ago. But Ambassador Yiithrii’ah’aash had denied kinship between his race and that one — sort of. Leading Riordan to conclude that there was only one constant when conducting a first contact: each day ended with more questions and mysteries than it had begun.

As the hatch whispered closed, a muffled thump drew Caine’s attention to the opposite end of the module: his own retrieval shuttle had completed its hard dock. A voice emerged from the speaker: “Sorry about the bump, Commander Riordan.” The voice was mature, matter-of-fact — not one of the young, nervous pilots that predominated here in the recently pacified Sigma Draconis system. The Arat Kur locals, driven all the way back from their invasion of Earth, had put up a stiff fight before conceding. In consequence, there were now slightly fewer young pilots in the fleet, and those who remained were no longer quite so brash as they had been when they arrived. In short, they had grown up.

But this shuttle-jockey sounded as if he had grown up quite some time ago. He expanded upon his brief apology: “Guess I’m getting a bit rusty.”

“Hardly felt the bump,” Caine lied politely. “Can I get out of this tin can, now?”

“No, sorry, sir. Another half hour and the xenomicrobiologists will be done with the quarantine protocol.”

“I’m not ‘sir.’ Just ‘Caine.’”

“Uh…not to seem contentious, sir, but it says right here on my orders that you are a full commander, USSF.”

“Really? I wasn’t when I left the shift-carrier this morning.” Although, for all I know, Downing has put me back on the active duty roster. Again.

“Well, sir, I wouldn’t know anything about that. All I know is what I read in my orders.”

“Fair enough. They keep changing my status back and forth so fast, I’m not sure of my title from day to day.” Or whether I’m a soldier, an intelligence operative, an envoy to exosapients, or just a civilian again. “What about you? Navy?” Caine was slowly drifting back down toward the deck: the pilot of the retrieval craft had imparted a slow rotation to the module. As Caine’s toes made contact, the whole world seemed to be sliding subtly, but perpetually, sideways: the Coriolis effect from the spin.

The shuttle-jockey corrected him. “No, sir. I’m not Navy. Commonwealth Survey and Settlement Office.”

“You have a name?”

“Karam Tsaami.”

Caine, in the course of his travels, met a lot of people whose names were unusual cultural mash-ups, even for this day and age. Still, this was one of the more peculiar combinations. “So you’re, uh, Finno-Turkish?”

“By way of Toronto, yes.” Tsaami’s tone was distinctly wry. “And unless I’m mistaken, sir, you’re the guy who reported first contact with the natives on Delta Pavonis Three at the Parthenon Dialogs two years ago.”

Yes, the same natives who paradoxically, even impossibly, are dead-ringers for the Slaasriithi I just met with. “That was supposed to remain a closed-room debrief.”

“Yeah, well, the story even reached me out where I was ferrying, er, special payloads. In the Delta Pavonis system.”

“Special payloads?” Although officially civilians, a lot of SSO jockeys ferried covert operators around the colonies beyond Alpha Centauri. “Spend a lot of time at Delta Pavonis?”

“It’s been my home, on and off, for the past three years.”

Three years? The pilot’s voice suddenly seemed familiar. “ Hey, aren’t you the guy who flew me out to the illegal CoDevCo facility on DeePeeThree?”

Karam Tsaami sounded pleased. “Yep. That was me. Been a long road since— Hold up. I’ve got incoming commo, highest priority.” The ten-second pause felt like ten minutes. “Commander, we’re going dark. Admiral Lord Halifax has called the fleet to battle stations. An Arat-Kur shift cruiser just popped in-system. ETA fifty-five minutes.”

“And we’re going to hide?”

“Commander, given our size, our best chance in a shooting war would be to become invisible. But since we can’t do that, we’re going to remain a motionless and inconsequential speck while enemy scanners are filling up with weapons-hot bogeys. So yes, we’re going dark. Right now.”

The speaker’s glowing green indicator winked off. Then the module’s lights did the same, leaving Riordan alone in the gently rolling darkness.

Except that, squinting, Caine now noticed a small red light, blinking alongside the hatch through which the Slaasriithi ambassador had exited. Riordan pushed off the floor, drifted to the hatchway: nothing but the aft airlock beyond it. So did the light indicate a pressure leak? A compromised seal?

No, he realized, leaning closer, that’s the activation light for an external commo jack. So was someone actually outside the module, trying to reach him? Caine punched the manual activation stud. “Hello?”

“Commander Riordan, is that you?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Bannor Rulaine, sir.”

It made no sense that Bannor, a friend from the war, was floating just outside the airlock. To the best of Caine’s knowledge, the ex-Green Beret should still have been babysitting an enemy agent back on the flagship, a liquimix battle rifle aimed at the Ktor bastard’s midriff. “Bannor, what the hell are you doing out there?”

“Well, sir, I’m doing what our boss Mr. Downing told me to do: watch over you. I’m not alone. Miles O’Garran is here, too.”