Charles Gannon - Fire With Fire

The next day, Caine found a note on his pillow suggesting dinner at her suite, that night. He could not have been happier, but wondered how she planned to evict her father, whom she was visiting on Luna.

The answer presented itself the next morning when Nolan Corcoran and Richard Downing began their interview by announcing that their time was limited: they were Far Side-bound. Then they turned the tables and asked the first question of the day: was Caine a writer or a patriot first? Caine had never thought about that before but was not long in doing so: as he told them, words gave birth to nations and held them to account, but writing itself never was, and never could be, the equal of lived hopes and ideals.

He could not recall all of their conversation, but they ultimately told him what he had come to learn, on the promise that he would only share select parts of it. They wondered at the ease with which he agreed to the secrecy. He wondered if, strange as it seemed, he might not be falling in love.

Which he cautiously intimated to Elena during a call later that day. Experience told him that a woman courted so quickly will back off, yet he was strangely certain she wouldn’t. And she didn’t.

So with wine and rose and steaks in hand, he arrived early to surprise her, to cook dinner for the young woman whose name-Elena Corcoran-had started to sound like music to him. But as he reached out to affix the rose to her door, the world went black.

“Caine? Caine?”

Richard’s voice seemed very far away as Caine returned the bottle and the photograph, and mentally saw how the dominoes set in motion by both the romance and abduction had fallen. Elena’s thirteen-year-old son was very likely Caine’s child. And Nolan had undoubtedly known that, if not beforehand, then shortly after. It would have been simplicity itself for him to get a sample of the baby’s DNA and compare it to Caine’s.

But that still left the question of why : why would Nolan play such dire games with his own family? How could anything-even IRIS-be so important that he felt compelled to take these terrible steps?

Caine looked down into the box and saw that there was one last object in it; another photograph. But this image was not of a person: it was of the lunar surface. But no, it wasn’t the Moon: on closer inspection, it was- Oh. Of course.

Next to him, Trevor was staring at the bottle and the old picture of his sister; he had obviously connected the dots and done the math. His voice was choked: “Why? Why would Dad choose to do all this?

Caine shook his head. “He didn’t choose to do it; he had to.” He held out the last picture to Trevor. “Look.”

Trevor stared, frowned. “What is this? A mining site on a planetoid?”

“Not exactly. Give the photo to your uncle. He’ll know what it is.”

“Why?”

“Because, except for the ‘mining site,’ I’ll bet he’s seen images of it before.”

Richard took the picture, studied it, frowned. “You know, this does look familiar, rather like the images Nolan brought back from…” Then Downing went very pale. “Bollocks, this is the Doomsday Rock-the one that Nolan intercepted. Except-this one shows empty mooring points for a set of mass drivers.”

Trevor was still frowning. “So what? Dad was mission commander; of course he would have kept a visual souvenir. Hell, they catalogued every meter of its surface before they-” And then the color bled out of Trevor’s face, too.

Downing nodded. “Yes. They catalogued every meter of its surface before they used nuclear charges to bump it off course. And only nuclear charges. They didn’t have a mass driver with them: there wasn’t enough lead time to use it.”

Trevor was hoarse. “Meaning that the missing mass drivers were used to push it towards us.”

Downing nodded. “The Doomsday Rock was not a natural event: it was an attack. Some extraterrestrial power visited the Solar System and surreptitiously shifted the trajectory of a rock in the Kuiper Belt to swing in toward Earth and blast us back to the Bronze Age.”

Caine suppressed a shiver: there was no other possible explanation. Even if a terrestrial nation had been suicidal enough to conceive of the plot, none of them could have carried it out: at that time, humanity hadn’t had the ability to send major missions beyond Saturn. “So that’s what led to the creation of IRIS. It also explains how Nolan was so certain that an FTL drive could be built: the Doomsday Rock was proof that we had extrasolar neighbors who could get into and out of our system at will.”

Downing nodded. “He also knew that the threat of an exosapient attack wasn’t simply hypothetical: he had already fended one off, himself.”

Caine rubbed his chin. “Yeah, which means that whoever weaponized a chunk of stone into the Doomsday Rock almost certainly learned that their attack had been foiled.”

Downing kept nodding. “And so they would have to surreptitiously try to find out what had gone wrong. And who was responsible.”

Trevor added the final piece. “Which they couldn’t do by just by sitting at the edge of our space. And we all know who had legal access to our system besides the Dornaani.”

Caine felt his skin grow very cold. “That would be our good friends the Ktor, in their role as Auxiliary Custodians.”

Downing frowned. “Which makes it likely that they are somehow connected with the faceless adversaries that Nolan code-named ‘Circe.’” He stared at the tabletop. “I wonder: do you think the Ktor might have had a direct hand in the deaths of Nolan and Tarasenko, and in some of the other ‘odd events’ we’ve been unable to explain?”

Caine shrugged. “Could be. But how would they recruit agents among us in the first place, or even establish contact? As Thandla discovered, they’ve got a radically different biology: hell, their natural environment is so cold that we can’t even make use of the same planets. So how are we a threat to them? Why would they hate us so much?” Caine shook his head. “No: it still doesn’t add up. Something’s missing.”

“I’ll tell you what else is missing.” Trevor’s voice and eyes were hollow. “The reason why my Dad never told any of us why Elena was clinically depressed after she returned from the Moon. Or who Connor’s father was. He knew answers that could have saved all of us-but particularly Elena-a lot of grief.”

Caine nodded. “Yes, Nolan knew-but he had to keep those facts to himself.”

“Oh, c’mon. At least he could have told Elena.”

Richard shook his head. “Trevor, Elena is the one person Nolan absolutely could not tell about Caine. We can predict the course of events if she had learned the truth: Elena would want Caine removed from cold sleep. Your father refuses. She asks him how he can expect his own grandson to grow up without a father-and why is it so important to keep Caine in cold sleep, anyway? What was Nolan to say then? That even if Caine was cooperative, he couldn’t be released without a huge, smoke-screening story to throw the news jackals off his scent? That any detailed questions about Caine would have led back to, and unraveled, IRIS?”

Trevor frowned, ground his molars, and then turned sharply towards Caine. “So,” he snapped, “are you going to marry my sister?”

Caine blinked-and became aware of the scent of Opal’s shampoo on his shirt collar. At precisely the same moment, a memory-Elena moaning, sway-backed, hanging on to the bedposts as they moved together-tumbled newfound into his mind. “Hell,” Caine rasped, trying to fight his way out of the conflicting sense-memories, “would Elena even want to marry me? Besides, I have to straighten things out with Opal first.”