Trial by Fire - eARC

by Charles E Gannon

  A faint vibration started ascending through Caine’s feet, buttocks, abdomen as a gentle down-spinning hum arose and the arrival tone chimed. Saved by the bell. He smiled at Heather. “Our stop? So soon?”

  Heather was frowning down at her palmcomp’s control screen. “Faster than I intended, actually.”

  Caine’s smile did not change. “Thanks for the ride, Heather.” He rose, noticed a sudden bloom of red light beyond the window at the rear of the car. The track warning light had flashed for a moment, then died suddenly. The green light—signaling a clear track—did not replace it.

  “If you leave now, Caine, you leave me no choice but to contact your friends.”

  “Heather,” said Caine, watching for the green—or red—light to reappear, “the track signals are malfunctioning and we’re at the dead-end of this spur. You need to get out of this car. Now.”

  “I think you’ve got the situation reversed, Caine. I don’t have to leave, you have to stay. Assuming you want your friends to remain safe.”

  Neither track status light had reilluminated, and Caine felt a faint, growing tremor rising up through the center of the floor, where the car had settled on the rail.

  One quick look at Heather’s stubbornly rigid jaw told him she wouldn’t listen to reason in time. He turned toward the door, spotted the emergency exit panel. He smashed it with his elbow and hit the red panic-release button.

  As the door was rammed back into its recess by the sudden discharge of a compressed-air cell, Heather reared up. “What the hell are you doing, Caine?”

  “We have to go, Heather,” he shouted, grabbing toward her. “Right now!”

  Heather’s reflexes were extremely swift but perfectly wrong. As Caine closed with her, she swung back, bringing up her legs and kicking, hard.

  With his focus entirely upon getting her out of the car, Caine didn’t realize what Heather was doing until her spiked heels jabbed sharply into his abdomen like a double-barreled nail-gun. With a grunt, he found himself stumbling backward, falling as his heel caught on the rim of the exit. He landed half in the car, half out the open door—

  —and discovered a palmcom shoved into his face, red recording light on, a bizarre tableau around him. He had fallen out at the feet of yet another crowd of shouting protestors. Each brandished a placard emblazoned with a crucifix being menaced by “little-green-man” aliens, who had also sprouted satanic red horns and black tails.

  The girlish reporter who was leaning over him stuck her palmcom down so energetically that it bumped his lips. As she began her oblivious mantra—“Mr. Riordan, Mr. Riordan. Janel Bisacquino, Reuters Interstellar”—Caine scrambled to get his legs back under him, to get back into the car, to get Heather out—

  But the reporter grabbed his shoulder as he rose, causing him to stumble farther away from the maglev car as she chattered into his ear, “Is it true that you were abducted by aliens on Delta Pavonis Three?”

  “Heretic!” one of the protesters yowled over her shoulder from the lee of a long kiosk that paralleled the platform.

  Caine shook off the reporter’s hand, spun toward the open doorway of the car—beyond which Heather stood, her features softening into uncertainty—

  With an up-dopplering screech, another maglev car shot out of the transport tube and rammed into Heather’s half-size rental—just as Caine grabbed the reporter and dove for the ground.

  The metallic shriek of the impact seemed to propel debris savagely outward, heat-hissing shards of metal and plastic corkscrewing over the two of them even as they fell. Screams arose from the protesters. One had gone down, hands clutched to a face shredded by a wave of shattered glass from the kiosk. Others, panicked, fled wildly. One journalist who had evidently been hidden behind the placards was fleeing with the mob. Another was already getting footage of the crash, as well as the blood gushing from the face of the wounded protester. Ms. Bisacquino looked at the smoking ruin of the two cars—a pair of crushed tin cans forever fused and frozen in some savage mating frenzy—her mouth open, mute, and motionless.

  “Come on,” said Caine, as the flash-heated synthetics in the cars began to smolder. “We’ve got to get off this platform.”

  Chapter Four

  Off-base sector, Barnard’s Star 2 C

  The last station’s collision klaxon began hooting as Trevor reached the outer gate area. The emergency access portal dilated and spat out a torrent of panicked humanity. Fighting against the outflow of bodies, the stink of panicked sweat and the choking fumes of smoldering plastic, he pushed his way toward the station’s long, narrow platform—

  —and entered a tableau of chaos. He smelled smoking metal and saw the rapidly thinning crowd clustered around the main exit, with a few of the rearmost changing direction toward the portal Trevor had just used. No sign of the Shore Patrol—the wireless comm channels had not reactivated yet—and only a handful of people were still on the platform itself, most of those wounded or just rising from where they had taken cover—

  Caine swayed up into Trevor’s field of view at the far end of the station, just a few meters away from the mauled remains of the two maglev cars. As he reached down to help a young woman back to her feet, Trevor saw movement a few meters farther down the platform.

  From the shadows near a bank of ticket dispensers lining station’s far wall, a tall, lean, knot-muscled man emerged with a knife in his right hand, drawn back for an overhand slash. Trevor took a long leap down to the platform level, yelling “Caine, behind you!”

  But Caine was already changing his direction of movement. In the same instant that he released the arm of the young woman he had helped up, his turn accelerated into a fast pivot, spinning him fully around. His right arm cocked back even as his left arm rose swiftly—

  —and caught his attacker’s descending forearm. Caine’s imperfect but serviceable rising block pushed the down-slashing knife-hand up and out of the way. Without any break in motion, Riordan closed the distance with a quick step and his already-cocked right hand came forward like a pile driver. The heel of his palm rammed into his assailant’s face, just beneath the nose. Blood spurted, the knife wobbled, the man staggered back a step—

  Caine’s momentum carried him through a sideways stance and into a fast, left-foot forward-shuffle. As he did so, he drew his right knee up high and, in a blur, shot that leg out straight as his torso leaned back.

  Caine’s step-through side kick caught the reeling attacker in the sternum. The man crashed backward into the ticket machines and then down to the ground, groaning faintly. By the time Trevor reached Riordan two seconds later, the platform was empty except for the two of them and the corpse of one protester whose chest had been transfixed by two lengths of blackened metal.

  Trevor put out an arm to steady the suddenly swaying Caine, looked down at his would-be murderer. “I guess Opal was a pretty good karate teacher.”

  Caine rose, glanced at Trevor. “Oh. You knew about her giving me lessons back on Mars, then?”

  “Damn it, Caine.” Corcoran sighed. “Everyone knew.” He gestured toward the prone attacker. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Based on prior experience,” muttered Caine, straightening up, “I’d say that was an assassination attempt. Two of them, actually.”

  “Yeah, but how—?”

  “Trevor, ‘how’ doesn’t much apply to the attacks we’ve been dealing with since Alexandria. Nor do the words ‘impossible’ or ‘unimaginable.’ Because whoever is behind them has trump cards that we didn’t even know were in the deck.”

  Trevor heard movement behind them. The first members of the Shore Patrol trotted through the emergency portal, weapons out. Trevor waved them over, pointed down at the feebly moving attacker, then leaned closer to Caine. “Guess you’ve got eyes in the back of your head, seeing him coming at you.”

  “The reporter I helped up saved me, I think. She saw him over my shoulder, and I saw her eyes move. But also, I had this feeling—” Caine stopped.<
br />
  Trevor waited while the Shore Patrol hauled the attacker to his feet and dragged him toward the exit. “What do you mean, ‘I had a feeling’?” he muttered.

  Riordan shook his head. “I don’t know how to say it. Just before he got to me, it felt as though the whole universe was no longer fluid; like I was a small cog in the middle of a very fast, but very stiff and very big machine.”

  “And that—feeling—warned you that some guy was about to carve you up from behind?”

  “No, just that something nearby was—was, well, wrong somehow. So I defended the place I was most vulnerable: behind me, where I couldn’t see.”

  Trevor grabbed Caine’s arm and started moving him toward the exit. “Man, I know twenty-year veterans who don’t have reflexes like that. Didn’t think you had them, either.”

  “That’s because I don’t have them. I wasn’t following a fighting instinct, Trevor. It was more like a—a premonition.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it sure as hell saved your bacon. And we sure as hell have to get back to the Pearl.”

  Caine nodded. “Absolutely. Because there’s one additional thing that needs to be reported, and quickly.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The guy who attacked me was on the first platform, too. He threw a bottle at me, then ran like hell.”

  “What? But how could he know you were going to stop here or—?”

  “I don’t know, Trevor. And I don’t know how he managed to sprint through four kilometers of tight tunnels to get here before my maglev. Or how he went from religious zealot to…” Caine’s voice trailed off.

  Trevor watched the S.P.s shackling the attacker to a restraint bar. “How he went from being a zealot to—what?”

  Caine swallowed. “A madman. No, that’s not right: a killing machine. He was a wild-eyed screamer when I saw him at the first station. But here—” Caine turned to look over his shoulder. Trevor followed his gaze.

  The hollow eyes of Caine’s would-be assassin had been following them steadily, calmly, empty of reason but full of a lethal, insatiable hunger.

  Off-base sector, Barnard’s Star 2 C

  The CoDevCo special services liaison who oversaw corporate operations on Barnard’s Star Two C stared at the last, frozen image that had been pirated from the maglev security system: Riordan and Corcoran hurrying away from the crash site. The liaison’s jaw worked unevenly; his face grew steadily more red.

  His mounting fury was defused by a slow, steady voice from behind, which ordered as much as intoned, “Calm yourself.”

  The liaison turned toward the man whom he served, at the behest of his superior CoDevCo Vice President R. J. Astor-Smath. Although having worked under this tall, sunglass-wearing man for almost three months, he still knew almost nothing about him, other than that he had a profound penchant for olives. “I do not know how you can be so calm. Two failed attempts in the course of a single minute? This is preposterous.”

  “Riordan is not as easy to kill as he might seem to an unprofessional observer. He may lack training, but he reasons quickly and has almost infallible instincts in a crisis.”

  “So you consider today’s outcome less than disastrous?”

  The tall, sun-glassed man leaned back in his seat with a sigh. “I find it interesting how many of you, when watching a plan go awry, are so blinded by your frustration that you are unable to learn from what you have witnessed.”

  The liaison mastered his annoyance at the man’s customary, languid arrogance, in part because it was his job to do so, and in part because the man was usually—and infuriatingly—accurate in his observations. “And what was to be learned from what we witnessed today?”

  “Why, that it was good fortune that today’s attempts were failures. Your superior’s ill-advised machinations to encumber Riordan by focusing the interest of the press upon him has produced troublesome results—precisely as I warned. Riordan is now an item of journalistic attention and scrutiny. Kill him, and inquiry will follow. And that inquiry would result in closer investigation of a variety of phenomena which you—and I—wish to remain merely puzzling anomalies in the minds of our adversaries.”

  “Such as Tarasenko’s and Corcoran’s heart attacks?”

  “Those too, yes, but the failed attempt to assassinate Riordan in Alexandria is of greater concern to me. There, we left them with too many unsolvable puzzles. If your news services, or intelligence communities, are repeatedly agitated by such mysteries and ‘baffling coincidences,’ they will eventually begin to consider explanations that they now dismiss as not merely improbable, but impossible. This would be a grave development for us. We wish our opponents to remain complacent, content to follow the forensic pathways to which they are accustomed, which their science deems ‘rational.’”

  “If Riordan were to die because of a very conventional knife in his chest, that would not raise any such suspicions.”

  The tall man shook his head, took a green olive from a small bowl located at arm’s length. “All of you think too linearly. To you, the universe is comprised of infinite rows of dominoes, each ready to be tapped and set in motion. Yet you assume that each row is almost entirely independent from the others.” He chewed into the olive as if he had never tasted one before, and sighed. “But a few of you do see the truth of it: that the dominoes are arranged in sweeping curves that intersect, spread, double back, terminate each other, or engender new vectors, new events. So, if you eliminate Riordan in a place where the press is present or has ready access, there is an excellent chance that you may set other, deleterious events in motion.”

  The tall man evidently noticed the uncertainty creasing his liaison’s brow. He deigned to explicate. “A society’s entrenched attitudes and predilections are balanced upon a broad cultural fulcrum: they are robust and stable, but if pushed and stressed far enough, they tip and change—often becoming the opposite of what they just were. If you kill Riordan in an inexplicable accident—the kind you persistently pressure me to create through my Reifications of quantum entanglement and uncertainty—our adversaries are likely to detect that pattern. Their present tolerance for unconnected coincidences could convert into a fierce resolve to get answers, no matter the cost, and no matter how strange those answers might be.

  “And they just might succeed. Not all of our opponents see the universe in the simplistic one-cause, one-effect paradigm that most of you are trapped within.” The man nodded at the frozen image of Caine, fleeing the platform, looking over his shoulder. “He is one who sees more expansively, more completely. Nolan Corcoran, his companion’s father, was another.”

  The liaison folded his arms. “Let us presume all you have said is true. It is also true that you yourself have asserted that Riordan may now be able detect the onset of your Reifications—which must be why he detected today’s attacker. He felt you ‘push’ our man. Add all this to your observations that Riordan is particularly hard to predict, and that now, he is likely to depart for Earth before we do. Taken together, these things put us on the brink of failure. Riordan might soon slip beyond our collective grasp.”

  The tall man stopped chewing an olive and smiled—an expression which reminded his assistant of a tiger baring its teeth. “Riordan might slip beyond your grasp. But not mine.”

  “The Pearl,” Barnard’s Star 2 C

  The first thing Caine saw when the door to the secure debrief room opened was Admiral Martina Perduro sitting at the other end, her body as still as a graven idol’s, her face as pale and immobile as a slab of sun-weathered oak. Caine snapped his best salute a second after Trevor did.

  Perduro waved them to chairs. As soon as they crossed the threshold, she touched her dataslate. The doors sealed and the breathy whirr of a white-noise generator rose up from the peripheries of the room. Then she indicated the screens around her. “I’ve got all the technical reports on today’s nonsense with the maglev cars. None of which can explain the failures in the system. But I’m guessing you two have heard s
imilarly “impossible’ reports on prior occasions. You particularly, Commander Riordan.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The assessments are very reminiscent of those Mr. Downing shared with me regarding the after-action reports from the assassination attempts you dodged at Alexandria and the Convocation Station: circuits uncoupling, polarities reversing, breakers tripping, computer controls being overridden without any evidence of hacking.” She tossed down her dataslate and passed a hand across her brow. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

  Caine shrugged. “It never does, ma’am. And we never even have leads as to who’s behind these incidents.”

  Perduro arched forward. “Well, at least we’ve got a lead this time.”

  “You mean, the attacker?”

  The admiral scoffed, surprised. “No, Heather Kirkwood—who, if rumors hold any truth, may have had both personal and professional motives to set you up, Caine.”

  Caine made sure that his differing opinion did not come out as a contradiction. “Admiral, I know it might seem that way, but I think Heather may have been a patsy as well.”

  “Why? Because whoever she was working for was willing to kill her, too? Commander Riordan, after a mission, covert operators frequently prevent security leaks by eliminating any free-lancer they hired to carry it out. ‘Burning assets,’ it’s called.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am familiar with that concept.”

  “And according to your report, Kirkwood was attempting to extort highly classified information.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So how does that not add up to the following scenario: she tries to extort information from you, she fails, and her handlers kills both of you to cover up their identity and interest in those particular secrets?”

  Caine nodded. “I agree it looks that way, Admiral, but I’ve got information that problematizes the hypothesis.”