“Thanks.”
More silence. Then: “Okay, aren’t you going to ask me?”
Here it comes. “Ask you what?”
She sounded gratifyingly annoyed. “Ask me when I became a part of IRIS? Shit, when I dropped that little secret on you just before we left the clearing you barely blinked.”
“Were you hoping I’d go slack-jawed or do something equally melodramatic?”
“Damn it, you’re a hard case.” She moved to leave.
“There is one thing I’d like to know.”
She stayed put. “Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you tell me at the start? Why didn’t you tell any of us?”
Pandora sighed, leaned back. “Because I was only supposed to tell Riordan. Well, Downing, too — I was recruited after he’d left Earth — but who knew things would happen so quickly? Or that I’d wake up inside Slaasriithi space, instead of at Sigma Draconis?”
“Yeah, well, since the rules of the game had changed, and we traveled together for a few weeks, don’t you think you might have been able to slip it in somewhere along the way?”
“No, because the whole damn mission was so irregular and last-second that there was no way to separate the crazy stuff going on from the hinky stuff.”
“What ‘hinky stuff’?”
“Hinky stuff like the way I woke up, checked the legation records, and discovered that the secure EU shuttle that was supposed to transfer all our cold cells to Yiithrii’ah’aash’s ship had last second ‘engine trouble.’ Hinky like there was a TOCIO shuttle that just happened to have been cleared for operations and was on call, but without any particular flight order pending. Hinky that most of the personnel who staffed the legation were transferred as corpsicles, so there was no way for Downing to eyeball and debrief them, or to see if they acted in the flesh as they were written on paper. And then we lost Buckley, which might or might not have been a result of his being a saboteur, or running afoul of one.”
“So, now I understand why you chased after the response team Caine led to rescue Buckley: to protect Riordan. But at least Buckley doesn’t seem to be part of the conspiracy.”
“Yeah, as it turns out. But that’s hindsight. So, to answer your question about why I didn’t announce my credentials: after all that, and not having a crystal ball, I figured I’d better play it cool.”
“And not tell Caine. Or anyone else.”
“Precisely. Look: Riordan’s okay, I guess, but he’s not a pro. If I had just sidled up to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m on your side,’ and showed him my credentials, he might not have even believed me. Actually, that would have been the most professional thing he could have done, because he’s not experienced enough to pick out a genuine solo operator from a crowd. Don’t give me that look, Rulaine. Yeah, I know Caine’s got good instincts. But he’s been pretty lucky, too. Given his lack of training, he could have been dead three or four times if he didn’t think quickly on his feet.”
“Thinking quickly is a skill in itself.” Bannor offered the rebuttal more out of loyalty to Riordan than conviction in its accuracy.
“Well, yeah, sure, it is. But that skill wasn’t the one Riordan had to have if I was going to tip my hand and tell him I was on his team. Because if he had believed me, then he would probably have given me away to the real traitors in the group.”
“How so?”
“By changing the way he behaved toward me.”
“In what way?”
“See? This is what I mean: you’re a professional field operator, but you still don’t get it because you’re just a striker. My world is different. And here’s how Riordan would have messed up my world: if I had revealed my identity, he’d probably become careless in ways he wouldn’t realize. He’d start showing an unwonted trust in me, casual speech, relaxed body language, all that. If an enemy pro had infiltrated our team, he or she would spot those changes, and so, would have sniffed me out. Or Caine would have been too careful, would start distancing himself from me — and again, a rival pro would have sensed that overcompensatory reaction and I’d be fingered. So my motto in these cases — better safe than sorry — meant not revealing who I was.”
Rulaine nodded slowly. “Okay, I get it. But I have to tell you: between that strategy and your, well, winning ways around people, I was half-convinced you were our traitor.”
She nodded back. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Sure. Figure it out, genius: I wanted to be the one that no one trusts. I wanted any spoken or unspoken suspicion centered on me. Because if it was, then everyone else isn’t so worried about someone watching them — including the real traitor. Humans, even pros in my field, tend to have that blind spot; they presume that someone who is under scrutiny is too worried about proving their own innocence to be watching anyone else. Problem was, Macmillan didn’t give me much to go on. Probably the only thing he ever did that would have incriminated him I wasn’t on hand to see.”
“Which was?”
“When he sabotaged Riordan’s filter mask. I’m guessing he did that right after we crashed. During our salvage work, we had to take off our masks to keep them from getting soaked. I’ll bet in all the activity, and then the confusion after Hirano was attacked by those pirhannows, he had plenty of opportunity to take care of Riordan’s mask. It was a shrewd plan: let Caine sicken by degrees, weaken the group by taking out our leader — who we’re not likely to leave behind — and freeze us in place. But the water-striders ruined it. Suddenly we had mobility independent of effort. But Macmillan never tipped his hand after that.”
“Where’d you learn your fieldcraft?”
“Officially? I spent some weeks in training with the DGSE at Noisy-le-Sec, but mostly at the School of Hard Knocks.”
“Starting in early childhood, if Mr. Gaspard is correct.”
“He is, although the bastard has no right to talk about it.”
“It doesn’t sound as though you like your employer very much. Well, your ostensible employer.”
“Oh, he’s my real employer, all right. I took his coin and I took IRIS’ and didn’t much mind; I deserved them both, and more besides. But no, why should I like him? He’s a prissy classist manbitch who thinks the world was better off when everyone who doesn’t share his complexion was safely under the administration of colonial masters.”
“Gaspard?”
“Sure. Part of the postwar wave of NeoImperialists.”
Rulaine scratched his head. “I’m not even sure what that refers to.”
“That’s because you were on the counterinvasion fleet to Sigma Draconis. Those of us who lagged behind, even by a few weeks, got an earful of rhetoric about how humanity could no longer afford the inequities and inefficiencies which had plagued humankind for so long. So what’s their answer? Any country that they felt couldn’t pull its weight or hadn’t been able to create an orderly government was essentially put on probation.”
“Probation?”
“Yeah; as in, ‘fix your shit or we’re coming in and fixing it for you.’ Coño, if that’s how it was going to be, why the hell did the Western powers ever leave their colonies? They lost almost two centuries of fun oppressing, raping, and exploiting.” Her terribly bright smile was as bitter and vitriolic as Bannor had ever seen on a human face.
He shrugged. “Then what’s your answer? If we do get into another scrap with our new interstellar neighbors, and that seems likely, then how do we get everyone mobilized, working toward the common goal of speciate survival?”
“I don’t know, but you sure as shit don’t accomplish it by taking away some of your own peoples’ national sovereignty!”