Trial by Fire - eARC (46 page)

“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 the other 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?”

Caine smiled, was careful to extend his
right
hand, and replied,
“Senang berjumpa dengan anda, Pak.”

The Indonesian—Javanese by the accent—started back with genuine surprise, but also a smile. A stream of fluid
behasa
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.
“Mafkan saya,”
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 that—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 that came to Nolan Corcoran’s memorial.”

“That wasn’t me,” explained the smooth-faced clone. “That was one of my genetic brothers.”

“So you were the one at the meeting right before the Parthenon Dialogs. With Ruap and Astor-Smath.”

“That’s right.”

Caine looked at the muzzle of the AK. It suddenly looked a lot wider than 7.62 millimeters. “And are you still working for Ruap?”

“I wasn’t really working for him then. I’m from CoDevCo’s Optigene division.”

“So you were working for Astor-Smath.”

The barrel lowered a centimeter. “When you’re a clone, you don’t ‘work for’ anyone. You’re just a slave with no place to run to.”

“What do you mean, no place to run to?”

“I mean no country or colony will have us. We’re not immigrants, because we’re not nationals anywhere else. We don’t have our own records, and the megacorporations won’t disclose anything about any genetic manipulation or viral latencies that might make us different from naturally conceived humans. Which has every nation convinced that we’re either monsters, murderers, or Typhoid Marys.”

Caine looked around the boat: stained deck planking, weather-and-brine-bleached fixtures, oily plumes of incompletely combusted biodiesel chugging out of the engine-access deck-hatch. “And so you live on the margins.”

“That’s our only choice when we go ‘rogue,’ as CoDevCo likes to call it. And in the past week, a lot of us have started doing just that: sneaking out of the corporate compounds. By the hundreds, maybe by the thousands. But we’ve
got
to run away. Why the hell are
you
here?”

“The invaders brought me to Jakarta. From orbit.”

“And they just let you go? To hide in a basket of fish?”

The whole story was too long. “I escaped. Had I stayed, I think they were preparing to do to me what it looks like you’re preparing to do to me.”

“Which is what?”

“Punch my ticket.” Caine looked at the AK.

The clone seemed surprised by the frank statement. “You look like you’re used to guns,
bule
.”

“Ought to be. When I escaped, I joined up with the resistance.”

“You—?” The clone looked more closely at Caine. “Yeah, you
had
to escape, didn’t you—after you kicked Ruap’s tooth out? You’re The Dentist, aren’t you?”

How does he know—?

“Don’t look so surprised. Not a lot of
bules
fighting with the resistance, although there are plenty of you in-country.” The AK sagged, half-forgotten. “One of them gave me these rifles. A Russian, I think. In some kinda uniform, but no patches.”

Because, like the other elusive foreigners I’ve heard rumors about, they want to stay invisible.
“Yeah, I’ve heard there are some unusual tourists hiding in Java’s jungles, these days.”

The clone just nodded, then glanced over the gunwale to the northwest. “But Dentist or no,
bule
, you still have to go over the side.”

Caine’s stomach seemed to sag down into his intestines. “I’ve get to get out of Indonesia.” He stopped before adding
because the invaders were following me, somehow
. Hearing that, the clones might shoot him and toss him overboard without pause. But on the other hand—

Caine turned and looked back at the Indonesians huddled in the shade; a few tentative smiles answered his glance. The black marketeers who’d smuggled him aboard in Pakis had told him he was shipping out on a fishing boat, not a blockade dodger. The kind of ship that weaved in and out of the
pulaus
that straddled the fifty-kilometer maritime limit. They hauled those few people and objects that got smuggled into or out of Java, and now, some of those smuggled people were in danger because of him. The clone was right: he did have to go over the side.

“Listen, Dentist,” the clone emphasized, “you—and we—might not live long if we don’t get you into the water. Now.”

Caine nodded, headed toward the gunwale, looking for life jackets.

“Not that way,” the clone muttered. He turned and shouted toward the pilot house. “’Ranto, get him some gear. Syarwan, come about to due west, best speed.” Back to Caine. “You can’t get over the limit, not if they’re looking for you. And obviously they are. So you’re going to have to sneak back, hide out if you can.”

Caine found the courage to nod at his own death warrant. “Better than having all of us blown out of the water here.”

The clone smiled. “Okay. Now, do you know where you are, where you need to go?”

Caine looked at the sun, glanced toward the small islands scattered in a one-hundred-twenty-degree arc from southwest to northwest. “We’re about fifteen klicks east of the northern extents of the Pulau Seribu—the Thousand Islands.”