The Caledonian Gambit: A Novel

by Dan Moren

  “Simon.”

  Kovalic looked up to meet the ice blue eyes, the skin around them crinkling in an imitation of a kindly grandfather.

  “Something’s on your mind. I’ve known you long enough to see that much. Is it Brody’s brother?”

  After the kid had been sick all over the engine room, Kovalic had escorted him—well, dragged him—out into the corridor and then to the nearest head where he’d promptly been sick all over again. Kovalic hadn’t said anything, just handed him some paper towels when he was finished and waited while he cleaned himself up.

  “I’ve been there when people died,” Eli had said, his tone almost combative. Then it faltered. “But not like that.”

  It was a fact of life—everybody encountered death sooner or later—but Kovalic wasn’t unsympathetic. He wouldn’t have wished that particular experience on anybody. Still, if the kid hadn’t exactly bounced back by the time they’d gotten back to Commonwealth space, he at least didn’t seem to be succumbing to shock. He’d make it.

  “He did a good job,” said the general. “Better than we expected by far. Quite a resourceful young man.” He eyed Kovalic significantly.

  Kovalic raised his eyebrows. “Indeed,” he said neutrally.

  “So, if it’s not Brody’s brother or the mission, what’s bothering you?”

  The leather of the chair creaked as he leaned forward and put the glass down on the general’s desk. “Eamon Brody or one of his men may have pulled the trigger on Jim Wallace, but the people at CID who buried the op—they let him die. I want to know what we’re going to do about them.”

  “Immediately? Nothing.”

  “That’s not—”

  The general held up his hand. “I said ‘immediately.’ We’re in this for the long game, Simon. Thanks to the reports on Wallace’s data chip we know that the entire mission was personally overseen by Aidan Kester, CID’s Deputy Director of Operations. And,” he said, with a faint smile, “we have proof just in case it ever becomes necessary.”

  Kovalic grimaced. “Small comfort for Jim Wallace.”

  “Agreed. But it will have to do for now. Anything else to report?”

  Reclaiming his glass, Kovalic turned it around in his hand. “There’s one more thing—but it’s probably nothing.”

  “As I recall, that was what you said before I sent you to Haran,” said the general dryly. “Where you managed to uncover that not only had the Illyricans compromised the Commonwealth’s entire planetary intelligence network, but they’d also quite neatly suborned CID’s own station chief. So you’ll pardon me if I don’t easily dismiss your hunches.” He raised his glass in an ironic salute.

  “It’s something that Brody said—Eamon Brody, I mean. When I asked him why the Illyricans wouldn’t just rebuild their gate, he said ‘if they can.’” Kovalic shook his head, feeling the slight buzz of the bourbon warming his brain. “Maybe it was just an idle remark,” he hesitated, “but I don’t think so. I think he knew something. He wouldn’t have gone to those lengths to just inflict a temporary setback on the Illyricans. I read his profile and I met the man; he had a cause and he’s—he was—ready to die for it.”

  The old man frowned, then drummed his fingers on the desk. “Pretty thin,” he said at last. “But I’ll talk to some of my sources and see if they have anything.” He touched a pad on the desktop, rapidly keyed in a note on the holographic screen that appeared, and then dismissed it with a flick. “Anything else, captain?”

  Kovalic picked the bourbon back up off the desk, downed the rest of it, and got to his feet. “No, sir.”

  “Then you and your team have earned yourselves some well-deserved rest, Captain Kovalic. The SPT can stand down.”

  “Thank you,” Kovalic said with a nod. He turned and made for the door, but as he reached for the handle he realized he had forgotten something. He looked back at the general. “Actually, there was one more thing.”

  The old man was cupping his tumbler in both hands and staring at one of the paintings on the wall, an abstract piece with splotches of color against a pure white background, but he looked up and smiled when Kovalic addressed him. “Yes?”

  “I was asked to give you a message.”

  “Oh?”

  “From Major Shankar.”

  “Dear old Jagat,” murmured the old man. “How is he?”

  “Well enough, but he had some strong words for you. The Illyricans don’t know exactly where you are, but they clearly know you’re somewhere in the Commonwealth, and he didn’t really beat around the bush in terms of what happens if they do find you.”

  “An IIS Special Operations Executive team, I should think,” said the general, with a rueful smile. “I should know—I sent any number of them on similar assignments in my day.”

  “He also wanted me to give you a bill for some property damage.”

  The general snorted. “Still harping on about the burns on his carpet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It wasn’t even that nice a carpet!” Hasan al-Adaj shrugged and raised his glass again. “Thank you for the message, captain. Always nice to hear from old friends.” His eyes went this time to the white marble bust in the corner, and Kovalic saw an expression on his boss’s face that he had only seen there a handful of times. It was one he preferred not to remember, all the more so because he’d seen it in the mirror more than once.

  It was the look of a man who could never go home again.

  “Sir.” Kovalic opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  Eli didn’t like his new shirt. For one thing it was itchy, despite assurances to the contrary by the salesman who’d sold it to him. It was also too heavy for the current season on Terra Nova; the collar was already sticking to the back of his neck in the humid air. Hopefully I won’t be staying long enough for it to be a problem.

  His legs dangled off the edge of the outdoor patio, his arms and chin resting on the lower rung of the railing. Below his boots lay thirty feet of empty air, which gave him a nice view of the mountain jungle growing below. And that’s all there was: jungle. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t another living soul within miles of this little retreat. They’d had to take a sub-orbital flyer here from the Terra Nova spaceport—he’d survived the trip with only a modicum of wracked nerves—and past a certain point, the signs of civilization had vanished beneath the dense canopy of foliage. He’d asked Kovalic about it, but the soldier had just said that the old man liked his privacy.

  The tall leafy trees buzzed with life, everything from the hum of insects to the squawks of what Eli hoped were birds. There hadn’t been a lot of indigenous wildlife on Caledonia or in the arctic regions of Sabaea, and that about summed up Eli’s experience with non-shipboard life. One time he’d seen a mouse aboard the Venture—the maintenance crewman he’d reported it to had just chuckled and said that somehow they always managed to find their way into the stores.

  He was so deep in thought, trying to remember the last time he’d encountered a truly wild animal, that he didn’t notice the footsteps behind him until Kovalic was right at his shoulder.

  “Brody.”

  He looked up at the soldier towering over him. The heat didn’t seem to bother the man at all, though perhaps that jacket was more breathable than it looked. Eli moved to get up but Kovalic motioned him to stay where he was, then took a seat next to him, threading his own legs through the railing.

  “Everything go all right?” asked Eli, more for sake of conversation than anything else.

  “Just a formality. I already filed my report, but there were a few things I deemed wiser not to commit to the permanent record.”

  “Your boss …” Eli said slowly. “He’s Illyrican, isn’t he? High class, too—I recognized the accent the first time we met, though it took me a while to place it. I knew a guy in the academy who sounded like that. Plus,” he added, jerking a thumb back toward the office, “that sculpture in there. It’s not just decorative, is it?”

&nb
sp; The look on Kovalic’s face was half impressed, half trying to conceal the fact he was impressed. “You’re right—he is Illyrican. But he left the Imperium a while back and has the full backing of the Commonwealth Executive.”

  Eli grunted, giving him a sidelong look. “I’m still not sure I entirely understand what you do.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “What?”

  Kovalic smiled ruefully. “You held up your end of our deal, and we’ll honor ours. You can, I don’t know, go sit on a beach for a few years, all on the Commonwealth’s dime.” The implicit alternative hung in the humid air.

  “Or?” said Eli finally.

  “Or you can do something with the rest of your life.”

  “Doesn’t sitting on a beach drinking count as ‘something?’”

  Kovalic hesitated, looking out over the treetops. “Look, I know it couldn’t have been easy to see your brother like that.”

  The smile evaporated from Eli’s face. Her white lab coat was soaked through. And I stood their slack-jawed as she blew her brains out. “From what I’ve seen, I’m not sure I like what you do, Kovalic.”

  “I’d be worried if you did.”

  Eli rubbed at his eyes, trying to scrub away the image in his head and replace it with one of waves lapping gently at his feet. It just didn’t seem real, though. Sometimes you could just picture your future, what it would be like, but this time Eli just felt like he was watching a vid of somebody else’s life. Not that he could imagine how Kovalic’s life went, for that matter, but something about that reassured him. At least I know it probably wouldn’t be anything like I expected.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Eli slowly. “You want me to give up a free ride for some undefined promise of ‘doing something?’”

  “If you can just walk away now, well, more power to you. But I’ve been where you are now, and if you think all that idleness is going to be anything other than replaying that moment in your mind, well …” he trailed off.

  Eli stared at his feet over the edge. There was a brief sensation of vertigo, of falling down into the greenery that lay below, and he sucked in a lungful of air and grabbed the railing until it bit into his hands. He screwed his eyes shut. “I’m not much good to anybody right now,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “There’s help for that, if you’re willing. I saw what you did on that ship and I’m convinced that you can get over it. More than that, I think you need to.”

  His eyes still closed, Eli remembered what it had felt like to lose himself in flying. Not just on the jump-ship, but every time he’d slid into a cockpit over the past fifteen years. It was like putting on your favorite outfit and feeling like you were unstoppable. It made you grin uncontrollably, like you’d just kissed the girl of your dreams. It made your breath catch, like you were riding the galaxy’s best roller coaster. And more than all of that, it was an undeniable part of what made up Eli Brody. He couldn’t give it up any more than he could have parted with an arm, or a leg, or a witty comeback. That’s why you can’t see yourself on that beach.

  He sighed and opened his eyes again. “All right. But I need something from you.”

  Kovalic raised an eyebrow and waited.

  “You promised I’d be able to look after my sister.” He shook his head. “But I can’t go back to Caledonia, not after all this.” Practicalities aside, there was just too much tied up with the whole place. Even the thought of it made his stomach ache—he’d had enough of bloody Caledonia. But Meghann … the ache traveled up from his stomach until it wrapped around his heart. He couldn’t abandon her, not again.

  “Eamon’s gone,” said Eli, and he mostly managed to not twitch at the words. “I’m all the family she has left, and I need to make sure she’s okay.”

  “I understand. I’ll make sure everything is taken care of.” He hesitated. “It won’t be easy, but I think we could probably even arrange an opportunity to go see her. If you wanted.”

  Eli faltered, remembering the way she’d shrunk away from him. She doesn’t know me anymore. “Maybe.” I’m not sure I could take that again. But even as he thought about it, there was a pang in his chest. It wasn’t all about him. Anyway, somebody had to tell her Eamon wasn’t coming back. “Eventually.”

  “Agent Rhys probably wouldn’t mind seeing you either,” said Kovalic, grinning.

  He couldn’t escape a faint smile. There hadn’t been a lot of time for goodbyes, and Eamon’s death had cast a pall over everything, but they’d still had a moment together before going their separate ways. “Come and see me sometime,” she’d said. “I’ll buy you dinner.” She’d poised on tiptoes, brushing a kiss on his cheek; a less shell-shocked Eli probably would have had a sharp response, but all he’d managed was a smile and a nod. And then she’d been gone, and only the whisper of the kiss had remained.

  “Anyway,” Kovalic continued. “Like I said, we can figure something out. If you want to stay.”

  A bitter laugh escaped Eli’s throat. “I must be crazy.” He turned to Kovalic. “You really believe it? You, Tapper, Page—you really think three people can make a difference?”

  “Three people? Not a chance. Four, though …”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Somewhere there are probably monks who toil away in solitary cells to single-handedly bring their life’s work to fruition. But for those of us out here in the wider world, producing a book is a team effort—and this one is no exception.

  First and foremost, my thanks to my tireless agents, Joshua Bilmes at JABberwocky and Sam Morgan, now at Foundry, without whose constant guidance and encouragement this book would have languished on a hard drive somewhere, collecting digital dust.

  Thanks, too, to my editor Jason Katzman and the rest of the team at Talos Press, for making sure that the final product lived up to the highest of standards, from stem to stern. Sebastien Hue’s gorgeous cover art seems to be plucked directly from the world of the book, and Rain Saukas did a wonderful job laying it out to great effect.

  I started writing this book more than eight years ago, and it’s gone through many a revision along the way. Jason Snell, Brian Lyngaas, Glenn Fleishman, Anne-Marie Gordon, and Keith Bourgoin all read early versions and offered invaluable insights. Special thanks to Serenity Caldwell, who spent more time with this manuscript than any reasonable person should have to. Gene Gordon contributed his physics and science prowess where my own knowledge fell short, and Iain MacKinnon generously provided his Gaelic expertise. Any errors in the final work are mine and mine alone.

  A big thanks to all my friends at The Incomparable, Relay FM, and the Fancy Cats for their unflagging support. Much-needed writerly solidarity came from Myke Cole, Antony Johnston, Helene Wecker, David J. Loehr, John Moltz, Jeff Carlson, and Adam Rakunas.

  To Kat, who probably didn’t realize what she was signing up for when she started dating a writer, but who has handled everything from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs with grace and good humor, mere words hardly seem sufficient—but they’ll have to do. Thank you so much, love.

  Finally, I would not be anywhere without the love and support of my entire family, who imparted their collective passion for books, language, and learning to me from the very beginning. I’m unbelievably lucky to have them, and I’ve always counted them as one of the best parts of my life. I could not have done this without them.