“So who’s trying to kill Riordan, do you think?”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” But with any luck, Caine will pick up where he left off with Elena fourteen years ago, and my sister will want to do the same. Which even makes sense on the chronological level, since his time in cold sleep has allowed her to catch up to his greater age. And then, once Opal has gotten over Caine, and started to move on, maybe then I’ll—
“Captain Corcoran, are you paying attention?” Perduro’s voice startled him. Trevor almost blinked as his awareness returned to the gray-walled office.
“Sorry, Admiral. I was thinking about your question.”
“Of course you were. But how about it, Captain? Who do you think is trying to kill Riordan? The megacorporations, maybe? He certainly ruined their attempt to dig up alien artifacts on Delta Pavonis Three.”
Trevor drummed his fingers slowly on the arm of his chair. “Admiral, the various assassination attempts on Riordan might not all originate from the same source. And not all of the sources might be—familiar—to us.”
“You don’t have to tiptoe around the topic, Trevor. Downing highlighted the possibility that exosapients have suborned our own people to carry out covert actions on Earth. I suppose it’s also implicit that some of the efforts could have involved both megacorporate and exosapient assets. But there’s been no clear motive for such collusion, and absolutely no hard evidence of it.”
“That is correct, Admiral, although—” And then, motion on one of Perduro’s monitors caught Trevor’s attention. He pointed. “Admiral, is that Caine, next to that maglev?”
Perduro waved a desultory hand behind her. “Yes. Part of the charade of his being an officer. A four-minute command. To conduct a security check in the civilian sector, with our youngest shavetail, Ensign Brahen, as his ‘unit.’”
“Well, Admiral, that little bit of theater might be veering towards hard-edged reality.” He pointed more forcefully.
Perduro turned—and her eyes widened. Riordan was ringed by a posse of reporters, backed by a mob waving placards and trying to decide just how ugly it wanted to become.
“Damn it! I should have been watching—”
“No one else is on real-time oversight?”
“For a joyride to the civilian sector?” snapped the admiral, but she turned red as she said it. Coming from the same service ethos, Trevor could read her mind: “My watch, my fault.” At that moment, a small maglev car—a private rental—pulled up, and after a moment’s time, Riordan and Ensign Brahen entered it.
“Was their escape in that little car part of the plan?” asked Trevor.
“No. Not part of my plan, at any rate.” Perduro punched a virtual stud on her desktop-screen. “Duty Officer, get me the Shore Patrol.”
Chapter Three
The doors of the private maglev car closed abruptly, terminating the outraged cries of the reporters. Once Caine and Ensign Brahen had found seats as far from their rescuer as politeness allowed, Heather Kirkwood tapped her outsized palmcomp. A gentle hum arose, as did the car, floating up an inch or so before they felt the smooth acceleration that would carry them toward the end of the civilian sector’s rail spur.
Brahen eyed Heather again, and then Caine. “She’s your ex-wife?”
“No, no. Ex-girlfriend.” Caine managed to suppress a shudder at the notion that he might ever have married Heather Kirkwood.
Who had turned toward Caine. “So, it seems there was a nice reception waiting for you, now that you’ve decided to stop playing soldier. Surprised?”
Caine leaned back. “Not really. It was just a matter of time before the local stringers and hack journalists found me.” Which was only a partial truth. That they knew Caine was on Barney Deucy was only mildly surprising. Knowing when and where he would emerge from the naval base was somewhat disturbing. What was alarmingly suspicious, however, was the sheer number of reporters on the platform: way too many. Barney Deucy was an infamously dull news post. The entire system typically had one-fifth the number of correspondents that had accosted the two of them.
“Okay. But that doesn’t explain why she”—Ensign Brahen gestured at Heather without looking at her—“came all the way from her high-profile job on Earth. Just following a deductive hunch?”
“Oh, it wasn’t guesswork for Heather. She knew she’d find me here.”
“How?”
Heather twirled a golden lock with a desultory middle finger. “Yes, how did I know to find you here, darling?”
“You picked up my trail on Mars just a day or two after I left. Easily done, since I was seen by quite a few people at Nolan Corcoran’s memorial. And I’ll bet you learned that I’d been attacked in my room by a pair of Russian servicemen—despite attempts by both the Commonwealth and Russlavic Federation officials to hush it up.”
“So far, so good.”
“But all your leads came to a dead end: you found I’d been shipped off planet. No word where, no reason why. So you checked to see if any other persons of interest had been on Mars at the same time as me, and then left the same time as I did.”
Heather smiled. “And what a crowd of luminaries I turned up. Two World Confederation consuls, two Nobel-prize-nominated scientists, India’s top computer whiz, the late Admiral Corcoran’s kids—commando son Trevor and brainy daughter Elena—and, last but not least, Richard Downing, affiliate of America’s two recently deceased heroes, Corcoran and Senator Tarasenko. Who were old Annapolis chums. Who both employed Downing at different times to do—what, exactly?” Heather’s smile was wide and bright. Her eyes were every bit as predatory as the ambulance-chasers they’d just eluded.
Caine ignored the all-too-accurate intimation that Downing was up to his neck in clandestine activities. “Now here’s the tricky part,” he resumed, picking up the explanation to the wide-eyed Brahen. “Having traced all these people to Mars, Heather knows she’s on the trail of something interesting. She finds indications that all of us have shifted out-system, but the transit logs indicate that there were no shift carriers outbound from Earth at the right time. But at some point, she makes—or is helped to make—the incredible intuitive leap which tells her I have left the system by other means.”
“I didn’t need any help coming to that conclusion, thank you very much,” Heather retorted, chin elevating slightly. “Ever since you announced the existence of exosapients at the Parthenon Dialogs, some of us in the press have speculated that maybe not all of the exosapients are primitive. That maybe the focus on the aborigines of Dee Pee Three is just a stalking horse to take our attention away from contact with much more advanced exos.”
Her concluding sentence did not end on as firm a note as it had begun. She doesn’t have any facts, just hunches. She hasn’t been told about our group’s travel to the Convocation. Caine continued narrating Heather’s journalistic adventures to Brahen. “Of course, Heather’s right. A special shift carrier was, in fact, waiting to take us out-system,” A half-lie, since the shift carrier had been “special” because it belonged to an alien species. “But where had we gone, and why? Alpha Centauri is the most developed system, and would be a logical first stop for all the missing VIPs, no matter their ultimate destination. But instead, Heather somehow deduced that we would wind up at the most closely controlled piece of real estate in human space: The Pearl, here on Barney Deucy.” Seeing the slightly theatrical nature of Heather’s smug answering smile, Caine knew she was trying to act knowing, confident, but had not reasoned it out this way at all. “Or,” he added, “a helpful informant aimed her inexplicably but confidently at the base here. She never learned how the informant knew, but that didn’t stop Ms. Kirkwood from booking herself on the first outbound shift-carrier.” Heather’s smiled faltered as Caine asked her, “Is that about right?”