Teguh stopped. “What you talking about, Caine?”
“Face the facts, Teguh. Whatever is going on today, the Arat Kur keep finding us because of me. This last time they flew right past the two squads we sent running away as decoys, didn’t even seem to know they were there. But me? They can find me in any building, under any car, in any culvert. We’ve lost three men finding that out. Men we should never have lost at all.”
“Yeah, but we got four of their ROVs.”
“Teguh, listen to me: forget kill ratios. This is not a battle of our choosing. Hell, it’s not even a battle, it’s a—a rabbit hunt. The Arat Kur ROVs are the hounds and somehow, they’ve got my scent.”
“Look, don’t go thinking the world revolves around you, heh? Don’t go bule-crazy, like you did after the kempang. This is just bad luck, and by tomorrow—”
Caine looked at him. “By tomorrow, we’ll all be dead. I’m not bule-crazy, Teguh, not this time. And you know it. You just don’t want me to leave. And I don’t want to, either.”
“Shit, you think you so important I care whether you leave?” But Teguh’s eyes and the set of his mouth told a very different story.
Caine put a hand on his shoulder. “My Indonesian brother, you helped me get my head—well, out of my ass, after the kempang. But today, it’s you who refuses to see what your brain already knows.” Caine waved at the ruined ROV and the streets behind them. “They are after me, Teguh. You know it; you’ve seen it. I want to stay, but I can’t. Maybe they put some kind of transponder in my food when I was on the Arat Kur ship. Or maybe I walked through some kind of nanite-dusted trap that actually works. I don’t know how they are tracking me. I only know this: they can find me wherever I go, and the only other people they’ve attacked today are the ones who got in their way. So you have to get the hell away from me, and I’ve got to go down this hole and hope that they can’t follow me into a tunnel. Who knows? Maybe it will block or at least degrade whatever signal they’re using to track me.”
Teguh shook his head and looked like he might start to cry. “This isn’t right, Caine. You should stay with us.”
Caine put his other hand on Teguh’s other shoulder. “It wasn’t right what happened to all those people at the kempang, but we had to accept that, too.”
Teguh looked away, reached up, patted Caine’s right hand. “You a good man, Caine. You come find me when this is all over. We’ll find some beer. We’ll talk.”
“We will,” Caine nodded, removing his hands and pushing the cistern-cover aside. “Now, get out of here.”
“Hey,” Teguh retorted as he began trotting away down the wreckage-strewn street, “you gone now. I don’ have to take your orders anymore!”
“You never did,” Caine whispered at the receding back of his Indonesian brother. Then he clambered down into the cistern.
“Spooky Hollow” restricted area, north of Perth, Earth
Once inside the underground garage that concealed the mobile command trailers, Downing began returning the salutes of the Australian soldiers guarding the largest one: the one that they had taken to calling Spookshow Prime. Only special personnel with insanely high clearance were allowed within ten meters of it, let alone inside.
Downing walked up the stairs to the overpressure hatch of Spookshow Prime, went in, sealed it and felt the atmosphere change beginning: slightly more rich in oxygen, a slightly flinty smell, and—despite being on the west coast of Australia—a slightly higher level of humidity. The green light illuminated over the inner door. Downing went in.
The three junior Dornaani at the monitors nodded faintly as he passed, returning their nods. Entering the combination conference rooms and living quarters at the rear of Spookshow Prime, he found Alnduul sitting in what looked like a meditative pose before a holosphere that showed the area around Jakarta.
“Greetings, Richard Downing. Is there news from the World Confederation Council?”
“Yes, and it’s not good.” Downing sat heavily. “There’s been no contact from the Arat Kur to reopen a dialogue, not even when we paved the way with questions about prisoner exchanges and increased humanitarian aid. So the primary means of carrying out Case Timber Pony—the diplomatic mission—has been scrubbed. Without at least an invite from the invaders, we can’t initiate talks in Jakarta without them becoming suspicious. Which means we have no way to get a diplomatic mission into, or at least close to, their HQ.”
Alnduul laced his fingers together slowly. “So the Arat Kur have not explained their lack of interest in further communication?”
Downing shook his head. “Not a word. The intel brain trust suspects a combination of factors, but Arat Kur uninterest is not high among them. Rather, the preferred theory is that the increasing violence and bitterness of the Javanese insurgency is making the Hkh’Rkh not only more aggressive on the battlefield, but at the planning table. That they are dead-set against any further discussion of terms.”
“It would not be uncharacteristic of the Hkh’Rkh to make their continued cooperation with the Arat Kur contingent upon an unwavering demand for Earth’s unconditional capitulation.” Alnduul stared back down into the holosphere. “Of course, there may be an advantage to such a situation.”
“You mean that there are even greater rifts opening up between the Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh leadership?”
“Just so.”
Downing could tell that Alnduul’s following silence was intended to be significant. And he understood the unspoken implication. “You still think we went too far by destroying so much of Indonesia’s warehoused foodstuffs and increasing the ferocity of the insurgency, don’t you? And that if we had been more moderate, the unrest would not have flared into a bitter guerilla war that is now keeping the invaders from the negotiations table?”
Alnduul drew his fingers through the air like streamers in a molasses-slow wind. “Perhaps. The rapid increase in the desperation of the island’s population did accelerate the rate at which initially uncoordinated acts of resistance coalesced and intensified into a nationwide insurgency. And that, in turn, has accelerated the speed with which the Hkh’Rkh have become harsh, belligerent, and unmanageable. But I still maintain that this may prove to be a superior outcome insofar as completing Case Timber Pony is concerned.”
“How so? Our best chance of carrying out Timber Pony has just been eliminated.”
“I am by no means as certain of this as you are. I have never been convinced that the ploy of inserting a disguised assault team was the most attractive—or promising—method of executing the plan. It was, to use a human idiom, a piece with too many moving parts. If one failed, the machine would not function when needed. Consequently, the vulnerability to both routine mishaps and competent enemy screening were too great to ensure acceptable odds of success.” Alnduul paused. “I know you are reluctant to pass the responsibility—and risk—of completing the mission to individuals, Richard Downing. I am, also. But with the primary delivery alternative canceled, we have little choice but to ensure that all the assets remain within striking distance.”
“Of course, this means we will have to insert special data into the infiltration unit updates to try to nudge our remaining delivery assets in the right direction.”
“You are sure that Captain Corcoran and Major Patrone would not obey a direct order to move into greater proximity to the target?”
Richard shook his head. “They would not, and we have no way to embed such an order in the updates, let alone know if they received it.”
“Then you are correct. We must embed data that entices them to collapse on the target area. But we must take more extreme measures in the case of Caine Riordan. Look.” Alnduul gestured into his extraordinarily lifelike holosphere of the coastal shallows north of Jakarta. A filament-thin spindle of green light twirled and shone, moving slowly away from the perfectly rendered landmass. Two other spindles—one yellow, one cyan—were still on the landmass, one at the western edge of the city, the other on the east. Alnduul pointed to the
green spindle. “Riordan.”
Richard frowned. “He didn’t run until we ensured he was trackable by the Arat Kur.”
Alnduul seemed to feel the veiled accusation in Downing’s tone. “True. But we had to act as we did. If, as you suspect, he had become part of the resistance, that presented two dangers to his participation in Case Timber Pony. Firstly, he could have been killed either in combat or in prison, unless he was captured by the Arat Kur.
“Secondly, even if he was captured and survived, as an active insurgent, his diplomatic status would have been revoked, thereby eliminating his unique access to the enemy headquarters. Logically, therefore, his resistance activities had to be terminated and we had only one such method at our disposal: making him intermittently detectable to the Arat Kur. Enough to convince him to desist his actions, but not enough to lead to his death.”
“I will point out that it may have almost come to that on one or two occasions.”
“Richard, like his namesake Odysseus, Riordan is not easily deterred from his plotted course of action. Consequently, balancing the threat levels necessary to effect a change in his behavior is a delicate and difficult task.”
Downing folded his hands. “And Riordan didn’t react as you predicted, either. Rather than surrendering himself to the Arat Kur without any mention of his guerilla activities, now he’s actually trying to leave Indonesia. Despite the danger of crossing the fifty-kilometer maritime limit.”
“Which is why we must once again make him detectable to the opposition. That they may herd him back in the direction of the target.”
Richard’s lunch moved unpleasantly in his stomach. “And once again, he could be killed.”
Alnduul’s nictating lids cycled once, slowly. “It is possible, but unlikely. The blockade enforcement units are expected to search any questionable boats and investigate before resorting to overt force of any kind.”
“The key words there are ‘expected to.’ I don’t like that risk. Where are our other delivery assets?”
Alnduul gestured to the other two spindles of light in his holosphere. “Captain Corcoran and Major Patrone continue to collapse on the target area, but not so steadily or directly that we may be sure they will be in sufficient proximity. And they do not have Riordan’s unique access to the target. So we must take this step. We must have every asset as proximal as possible.”
Downing rubbed his forehead. “Yes, I know. Particularly since none of them is even under our bloody control. Not even in contact. Hardly the way the plan was supposed to go.” Understatement of the century. Case Timber Pony has been cocked up ever since the Arat Kur EMP strike enabled all my assets to give me the slip . . .
“And yet, Richard, you foresaw that the assets might move in the needed direction even if left to their own devices. As occurs now.”
“Yes, but the accuracy of that conjecture is less the result of psychological insight than it is dumb luck. They could have done anything, once they were out of my control.”
Alnduul’s mouth twisted very slightly, his fingers drooped a bit. In a human, his would have been a wan, rueful smile. “Do you truly believe that any plan involving the behavior of sentients can be so reliably controlled?”
Downing scoffed at the thought. “Evidently not.”
Alnduul gestured at the holosphere. “And yet, here are the assets, moving in generally the right direction.” His mouth-twist became more pronounced, “Sometimes, Richard, we are most in control of situations when we cease trying to force our direction upon them. Rather than struggling to shape the flow of gathering currents, it is often better to simply be carried by and work with them.”
“So we’re playing at judo, now?” Downing grinned crookedly. “Dōmo arigatō, sensei.”
Alnduul’s innermost eyelid nictated. “I am not well acquainted with that language, but I believe the correct response is Dō itashimashite.”
Downing looked away before his smile widened. Bloody alien wiseacre.
Chapter Thirty-One
Off Ringit, Pulau Seribu/Thousand Islands, Earth
The gap between the burlap cover and the wicker rim of the basket in which Caine lay provided a clear, if narrow, view of the sleek Arat Kur interceptor as it shot past, heading northwest. Trailing slightly behind, two bulky Hkh’Rkh tilt-rotors, their under-wing pylons bristling with weapons pods, slowed and half transitioned to vertical, turning around the boat in a lazy circle before reangling their props for level flight and roaring after the interceptor.
Caine breathed again, instantly regretted it. The thin littering of fish around him—the false cargo with which he had been told to cover himself—had not been fresh when the boat left Pakis ten hours ago. A day in the hot equatorial sun had not improved their aroma. Or, by dint of close association, his.
The burlap cover came back. A dark, wizened face framed by wispy white hair poked halfway into the basket. At first Caine couldn’t be sure if he was staring back at a man or a woman, but the voice left no doubt. It was—incongruously for Malays and Indonesians—a gravelly bass. “Hai bro’. Lagi ngapain?”1
Caine smiled, was careful to extend his right hand, and replied, “Senang berjumpa dengan anda, Pak.”2
The Indonesian—Javanese by the accent—started back with genuine surprise, but also a smile. A stream of fluid bahasa gushed out of him, half of it aimed at the dozen or so persons sheltering in the shade of the starboard gunwale.
Caine shook his head as several of them murmured polite greetings. “Maafkan saya,”3 he apologized. “English?”
The old man displayed a stained and profoundly incomplete set of teeth. “Sure, sure, I’m speak of English. I name is Sumadi. Hey, bro’, where your coming from?”
“Pakis.”
“No, no, brudda. I mean where your from for real?”
“America.”
“Yah. Thought so. And where your going?”
A new voice spoke from the railing of the top deck of the pilot house. “He’s going over the side.” The English was almost completely unaccented.
The people who had gathered around Caine shrank back from him, opening a path to the unusually tall Indonesian looking down into the afterdeck, his face fully shaded by one of the ubiquitous rural kaping wicker hats that reminded Caine of a pointy upended wok.
The old man raised an imploring hand. “Now, Captain—”
“Do you know what you have there, old man?”
“No, but—”
“That’s your death, standing right beside you. Trust me, those aircraft that just went overhead are looking for him.”
“What? How you know that?”
“I just know. Haven’t seen that kind of activity since they found smugglers working out of Toboali from the other side of the fifty-kilometer limit. My guess is if they even suspect that this bule’s dockside friends smuggled him on board this hull in a basket of fish, it could be the death of us. So over he goes.”
The old man was about to renew his protest. Caine put a hand on his arm, scanned the horizon, saw a number of irregular green bumps scattered in the west. “No, Pak Sumadi: just put me over with one of the wooden cargo plats. If it floats, I’ll make my own way.”
But this only doubled Sumadi’s entreaties to the “captain.” “See? Such a polite bule. How can you do this?”
But the moment Caine had spoken in English, the man at the railing evidently stopped listening to the old man. He leaned forward, very still for five seconds. “Pak Sumadi, that bule may be polite, but he is also a magnet for death. For sure, the exos are trying to find him—and we’d better not be around when they do.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I know him,” He called over his shoulder. “Syarwan, ’Ranto.”
Two men came out of the rear door of the pilot house, both wearing broad kapings and carrying AKs. The captain’s height became more, rather than less, peculiar as Caine noted that all three of them were equally tall. And of very similar build. Indeed, they
might be brothers, or even—
—Damn it. Clones. The realization must have shown on his face. The “captain” reached out for and received an AK from his comrades, started down the stairs to the afterdeck. “Oh, yes, I know him. Don’t you, Pak Sumadi? Imagine that face without the beard, all scrubbed clean, in nice clothes that don’t stink of fish. Don’t you recognize him?”
Apparently the denizens of the afterdeck didn’t make the connection to the pictures of Caine that had surfaced some months after Parthenon. Then again, they didn’t look like they had much of an opportunity to follow the news too closely. Tattered clothes, frayed kapings, not a one of them who couldn’t desperately use another five kilos of body mass. They were refugees, subsistence fisher-folk, deckhands who worked for food and a safe place to spread their straw mats. The Arat Kur invasion and its near-famine aftermath had already created close to a third of a million of these maritime itinerants and was generating more all the time. Living and working on decaying pinisi two-masters and rusted-out trawlers, they were the workforce for a strange amalgam of patriots and black marketeers who rendezvoused with small craft that dared to cross the fifty-kilometer no-sail zone, or to pick up cargoes that had been covertly deposited on the dozens of small islands that nearly straddled the blockade line.
They backed away from the man approaching with the AK. “Strange you don’t recognize him,” the captain continued. “Then again, you never saw him as closely as I did.” He pushed his kaping farther back on his head. The smile it revealed was not pleasant.
A needle-sharp icicle sprinted from Caine’s hindbrain down to his coccyx, but even so, he couldn’t keep from smiling at the fatal irony of the moment. To have come so far, only to die at the hands of someone who—by all the odds in the universe—he should never have encountered again. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you since I was on Mars. You were bodyguarding for the corporate rep who came to Nolan Corcoran’s memorial.”
“That wasn’t me,” explained the smooth-faced clone. “That was one of my genetic brothers.”
Trial by Fire Page 36
