Fire With Fire-eARC

by Charles E Gannon

  Caine leaned forward. “I heard you and Nolan mention Case Leo Gap once. What is it?”

  Downing shook his head. “You don’t need those details, yet; you only need to be familiar with the code name.”

  Trevor leaned back, frowning. “A damn odd name, too. ‘Leo Gap’? What’s it about, a lion’s hole?”

  “No, the pass that Leonidas defended against Xerxes: Thermopylae. Had that battle gone the other way, the Hellenic world would have ended—and ours would never have arisen.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Richard, I get the resonances with our current situation: I just forgot the name of the Greek commander. Who had a hell of a fight on his hands, as I recall. How many of the Greeks actually survived?”

  Downing hesitated. Into that silence, Caine inserted a recitation:

  Tell them in Lacedaemon, passerby,

  That here, obedient to their word, we lie.

  Trevor looked at him. “That many, huh?”

  Downing stood. “I’ve got about thirty minutes left before my clipper leaves. Any unfinished business?”

  Trevor nodded. “Yes. Well, I mean, I think so.” He picked up the box from the seat beside him. “As I was hustling to join you two on Alnduul’s ship, Elena ran me down and gave me this. She says my father entrusted it to her about a year ago, and told her, ‘Give it to Uncle Richard at the right time.’”

  “‘The right time’? What does that mean?”

  “Elena asked Dad the same thing. He told her that the box would become very important if we were ever on the brink of ‘fighting a war like no other.’ She thought that the recent events probably satisfy that condition. I tend to agree with her.”

  “As do I.” Downing received the box from Trevor: it was cumbersome, with something weighty thumping to and fro inside. Opening it, Downing discovered another, smaller box and momentarily suspected a monstrous practical joke. But then he saw the envelope on top, with “Richard” scrawled across it in Nolan’s distinctive handwriting. He opened it and read:

  Dear Richard:

  If Caine Riordan is still alive, please give him the smaller, enclosed box. Except for one additional photograph, it holds the contents of the bag he was carrying when he was apprehended outside my suite in Perry City. Those contents should help him regain the one hundred hours he lost on Luna.

  If Caine is dead, then you must open the box. Handle the contents as you see fit.

  I wish I was there to help you with the coming troubles. I also apologize for not sharing all the secrets that I was privy to, but the photograph I added to Caine’s box will provide adequate explanation, I think.

  Your Friend,

  Nolan

  Downing stared at the card, felt grief, resentment, and confusion all at the same time. But mostly, he simply missed his oldest friend—even more than he felt curiosity.

  He handed the inner box to Caine. “It’s for you,” he said.

  ODYSSEUS

  Caine opened the box cautiously.

  And found himself staring down at an old bottle of red wine—Chateauneuf-du-pape, to be precise. Alongside it was a desiccated rose and a photograph of a young woman who looked very familiar—because, he realized, it was Elena, when she was perhaps twenty-four or twenty—

  The memories came unevenly, yet so quickly that he gasped. Luna. 2105. Buying a rose, a bottle of wine—Chateauneuf-du-pape—and porterhouse steaks: all outrageous extravagances on the Moon. All purchased because he had been surprised by joy in a place and at a time he could not have expected it.

  The young lady he met while waiting in line for coffee only introduced herself as Elena, at first. She was not much older than a college kid, but she had an unwavering gaze, and a peculiar species of certainty, of intensity, that soon had him forgetting that this was a young woman with whom he should not become involved.

  That prohibition against involvement arose not merely because she was eleven years his junior, but because, midway through their conversation, she shared her full name, thereby revealing that she was the daughter of the man he had come to Luna to interview: Nolan Corcoran.

  Caine should have avoided her, but he couldn’t. At their second chance encounter—which they both carefully engineered—Caine tried to adopt a casual demeanor, but instead she fixed him with her green green green eyes. He was not able to look away from them during the four-hour lunch that he had originally resolved to be the last forty-five minutes he would ever spend with her.

  The memories were scattered, incomplete, ragged in places, but he did recall meeting her that night for a glass of wine. In the course of discovering that they had eerily similar tastes in most everything—from food to art to novels to films—Caine did the next thing that he promised himself he would not do: he gave her a poem he had written about her earlier that day. And in return, she gave him herself. Which led to mutual embarrassment over the speed with which they had become intimate. Which they resolved by becoming intimate again. And then again.

  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.”

  Trevor nodded. “Yeah. Okay. And given your—uh, situation—with Major Patrone, I don’t envy you your lady problems right now.”

  “Me neither,” sighed Caine. “But I’m thinking that maybe Elena got over me long ago. She didn’t seem bothered by Opal—and she sure didn’t seem interested in my company.”

  Now Trevor smiled. “Oh, brother—and I guess that’s almost literally true, now—you don’t know how to read my sister just yet. Yeah, she was dodging you, but probably because seeing the two of you post-corpsicle lovebirds together was making her crazy.”

  Downing took a very deep breath. “Which brings up a touchy subject. About Major Patrone, Caine. Your relationship with her is not exactly a chance event. She works for me.”

  “I know that.”

  “Caine, I mean she has always worked for me—every second of your time together.”

  Caine glared at Downing, felt his open hands becoming fists, and didn’t really care what happened next. “So tell me, Richard: is there any part of my life that you didn’t fuck with?”

  MENTOR

  Downing was beginning to worry that he might have to physically defend himself when Trevor intervened. “Hold on, Caine. Much as I hate saying so, this scheme with Opal sounds like it came from my dad. Am I right, Uncle Richard?”

  Downing’s first impulse—to defend Nolan, to take the heat as he always had—faded. What is the use, here, in this moment, with these people? He swallowed, nodded: “It was Nolan’s plan. I didn’t like it.”

  Trevor frowned. “I hate saying so, but Dad knew what he was doing recruiting a woman to be your guard, Caine. That would be the only way to control Elena once she learned you were back.”

  “Huh?” said Caine.

  Downing nodded. “Yes, I see what you mean. Knowing Elena, if Caine had shown up again unattached, I suspect she would have read your father the riot act and become thoroughly—and quite vocally—unmanageable.”

  “Hell, she’d have called a press conference just to flip him a bird,” drawled Trevor.

  “Er…yes, probably so. But if she saw Caine already in the company of another lady, then—”

  “Yeah,” interrupted Trevor, “that’s my point: Elena’s a class act. She wouldn’t go barging in under those circumstances. I’ll bet that’s just how Dad set it up.” Trevor’s certitude sounded suspiciously like a lament: these were hard—very hard—things to learn and hear about an idolized father.

  Downing suppressed a sigh: he had known this side of Nolan for over twenty years, and even that didn’t make today’s revelations any easier to hear. But it all made sense now, particularly Nolan’s understated pessimism about Caine and Opal’s long-term prospects as a couple. He’d never wanted a permanent connection between them, because then Caine and Elena could not be reunited. Meaning he had used Opal miserably.

  Trevor was apparently reflecting on the uneven ethics of his father, as well. “Given all the family secrets Dad kept from us, and all the shady crap he pulled, I guess I’m no longer so surprised that he had you sneak his body onto that government clipper for out-shift to another system.”

  Oh Christ; how did Trevor learn that? “Trevor, I—”

  But Trevor wasn’t listening. “I get the charade of the cremation and the memorial: an empty casket would have prompted a lot of questions. But why didn’t Dad tell us he had found a way to be buried outsystem, Richard?”

  Downing closed his eyes and hated each of the four words separately, ferociously, before he uttered them: �
�I cannot tell you.”

  Trevor frowned. “You mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean I cannot tell you anything about it.”

  Trevor sat open-mouthed for three very long seconds. “Damn it, Uncle Richard, you are going to tell me where my own father’s body is, and why it’s there, or so help me, I’ll—”

  “Trev. Please. I can’t tell you about how your father’s body was ultimately handled because I don’t know.”

  Trevor, who was half out of his seat, stopped. “You don’t—?”

  Downing looked away. “It was all arranged after his death. It wasn’t his—or my—idea.”

  “Then whose idea was it?”

  Might as well tell him. “The Dornaani.”

  “The—?” Trevor fell back in his seat. “What the—what the fuck do they want with Dad’s body? And why the hell did you give it to them?”

  “Trevor, I don’t know what they want. But they—well, they seem to revere your father. And he wanted to be buried among the stars. And they made it clear that they would both see to that request, and also be—indebted—to us if we granted them the honor of doing so.”

  “So you traded away Dad’s body for some alien goodwill? What are you, Richard, a fucking monster? He was your friend—your closest friend!”

  Downing felt his eyes start to burn. “Yes, he was, Trevor. And this is what he’d have wanted. And you know it.” Trevor’s stare had gone from cold to arctic, and was dropping toward absolute zero. “Trev, please understand: I wanted to tell you about your father, but the President ordered it kept quiet.”

  Trevor’s eyes did not change. His voice was emotionless. “Is there more on the day’s agenda, sir, or are we done? Caine and I are due to report for our own debrief and then training.”

  Downing sighed. “Yes, we’re done.”

  Trevor rose quickly; Caine took a moment longer. Downing made his way to the door, shook hands with Caine—who seemed, if not sympathetic, at least accepting—and then extended the same hand tentatively to Trevor. Who took it, but with even less warmth than Caine had.