Marque of Caine Read online

  The screen went black as she turned back toward Caine. “So what’s the rush with this physical?”

  “Might be traveling in a few weeks. Beyond quarantine control.”

  Her smile became knowing. “Given what I’ve read about you, I’ve got to ask: how far beyond quarantine control?”

  “I wish I knew,” Riordan answered honestly. “But if and when I get the green light, I need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

  “Well, you will be, although given your exam request’s priority code, you were never going to be waiting in a line.”

  “I’m very fortunate in my friends,” Caine said with what he hoped was a winning yet modest smile.

  “I’ll say. If I had friends like that, I’d—” The commplex toned its readiness. “About time,” Brolley groused, and turned back to inspect it.

  And frowned more deeply than she had before.

  Riordan felt cool currents of concern creeping up his neck. “What is it?”

  Brolley didn’t answer. Instead she strode toward him and said, “Lift your left pant leg, please.”

  Caine complied.

  She kneeled down, examined his tibia and calf. Her frown deepened. “Other leg, please.”

  Caine obeyed and reflected that the last time he’d had both pants legs up this high, he had been fourteen, preparing to wade through his parents’ flooded basement.

  Brolley leaned back, looked up. Her eyes were as focused and sharp as the scalpels on one of the nearby trays. “Which is the leg injured late in 2120? You know, during the incident you can’t discuss, on the planet you can’t reveal?”

  He wiggled the left one. “If you know that much, don’t you have enough clearance for me to talk about the ‘incident’?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” She examined his leg even more closely, as if she was hunting for microorganisms. “I have your complete medical history, but a lot of the situational details are redacted. All those records tell me is that you sustained a very severe fracture of the left tibia just under three years ago.” She looked up. “There is no sign of it. And I mean no sign. I could run the scan again, but it’s going to show the same thing.”

  The hairs on the back of his neck rose in response to the certainty of her tone. “Why?”

  “Because none of the things that should be in your scans are showing up.”

  “Such as?”

  Brolley sighed, stood, and stepped back to look him over. “Such as the lung damage from the spores on that same world. When you got home and cleared the quarantine exit exam, the med-techs were already surprised at how little scarring remained on your lung tissue. Now it’s gone.

  “Same is true with your older, even more serious wounds, the ones you sustained during the liberation of Jakarta.” She glanced at her palmtop. “Let’s see: ‘Lacerations of the right latissimus dorsi, the right lung, and the liver. Splintering fracture of T5 vertebra.’ Which, thanks to the Dornaani who were with you, all healed. A miracle, our doctors said.” She leaned closer. “They were wrong. The real miracle is that now, there’s no indication you were ever wounded. No place where the bones reknitted, no scar tissue in the muscle or at the wound site on your back. Your T5 looks showroom new. Your liver is fully regrown, no sign of damage.”

  A chill moved up his torso. “But how—?”

  “I’m not done. The wound to your arm from the assassination attempt on Mars? Like it was never there. Same with two minor bone breaks from playing sports as a kid.”

  The cold front that had moved up Riordan’s torso now penetrated his bones, but not due to the unnerving exam results. It was because he knew what had caused them.

  “And those are only the gross deviations from what we should see,” Brolley continued. “There’s also freakishly low dental wear. Your age-normal gum recession has disappeared. Even the bone and muscle wear that starts changing your shape after a few decades in a gravity well are absent. Your endocrinology looks like that of a twenty-year-old: adrenaline, endorphins, entire lymphatic system is textbook for a young adult male.

  “But here’s the weirdest of all—and we would never have detected it without the baseline we took after you picked up some rads while you were stranded off Barney Deucy. Today’s telomere test came back abnormal, but not the way we’d expect. The chains are longer than they were. By four sigma shifts.” She sat and shook her head. “These results—there’s no way to explain them.”

  “There is,” Caine corrected quietly.

  Brolley’s surprise doubled. “How?”

  Caine nodded toward her palmtop. “Look at the entries for the respiratory trauma caused by the exobiotic spores on the planet I can’t mention.”

  Brolley frowned, scanned. “Yes? What am I looking for?”

  “Does it say how I was treated?”

  “Er, just that the Slaasriithi used a therapy they translated as a ‘theriac.’”

  Riordan nodded, felt like he was outside himself. “I presume you are familiar with that word?”

  Brolley had to think. “That’s from classical references. Not scientific. Some honey-based mixture that was supposedly a poison antidote.”

  Riordan shook his head, felt like he was looking out of someone else’s eyes. “There’s another definition.”

  “There is?” Brolley entered the word into her commplex, waited a moment, then looked up, her eyes wide. “A cure-all? You think—?”

  “I think that when the Slaasriithi used the term ‘theriac,’ they were not using it incorrectly or fancifully.”

  Brolley leaned back on her exam stool. “Commodore—Caine, this has to be repor—”

  “Suppressed.” Riordan could barely believe the word had come out of his mouth. Just a day ago, he’d damned IRIS, and then Yan and her ilk, for doing what he was now suggesting. “Sit on it for a few weeks. After that, it’s in your hands.”

  “My hands?” Brolley’s laugh was ironic but genuine. “You of all people know that the powers-that-be are not going to allow me to decide what to do with this information. And if they did, suppressing it is the last thing I’d do.”

  “Then you’d better get ready for everyone with a terminal disease, or a crippling injury, or encroaching dementia, to come lining up at your doors like it’s the new Lourdes.”

  Brolley bit her lip. The healer in her was clearly at war with the pragmatist. “Yeah. You have a point. A whole mess of points, actually. But even so, it’s not up to me to hold back this information. This has to be—”

  Caine leaned toward her. “If you share this, they won’t let me leave Earth. Ever again.”

  Brolley’s eyes searched his, probably looking for any hint of deceit or exaggeration. After two long seconds, she sighed, looked away. “All right. What’s so important about this next trip of yours?”

  Caine told her. With admirable brevity, he thought.

  Brolley’s frown was back, deeper and more frustrated than ever. “Well, that’s just great. So now I’ve got to choose between preventing you from retrieving the love of your life—”

  “—and mother of my son—”

  Brolley closed her eyes. “—or withholding information on what may prove to be a ground-breaking panacea.”

  Riordan nodded. “But only until I’m out-system.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, eyeing him. “Out-system and away from our labs, our ability to use you to help replicate—”

  “Christa, did you hear how you just phrased that: ‘our ability to use you’? That’s the other thing I’m worried about: becoming a lab animal.”

  “Caine, I’m sorry, but whatever is in you—if it can be isolated—could change everything.”

  “You have no idea how many times before and after the war I heard some variation of the phrase ‘if you do this, it could change everything.’” Riordan closed his eyes. “You already have a pint of my blood and plenty of other samples. That should get you started.”

  “And then? Caine, I hate to be blunt, but what if you get killed
on this mission? Should Earth lose this unique opportunity just because you die in some accident?”

  Riordan met her stare. He saw Elena’s eyes. He looked away, toward the window: it was Elena’s eyes, not his, that he saw reflected there. Even after shutting his eyes, he still saw Elena’s. “Christa, the Slaasriithi had a major debate over using the theriac. They had lots of restrictions against doing so.” He opened his eyes. “Now I understand why.”

  “You mean, because we’re not ready for it?” She was frowning again.

  “Well, are we? And more to the point, who’s to decide that? And how hastily? For instance, what if your research shows that it will cost a billion credits a dose. Who gets it? Based on what criteria?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not my decision. That’s why I have to send it up the tree.”

  “And you will. I am just asking you to keep it under wraps for a few weeks. At most.”

  “Yes—until you’re out of our reach.”

  “And isn’t that my right?”

  Brolley shook her head. “Caine, I don’t know if I can agree. What this could mean—”

  “May be wonderful. May be a disaster. May be something we won’t be able to replicate, no matter how hard we try and how much we spend. But you can be sure of this: when you submit this report, the powers-that-be are going to put this under wraps and sit on it for months. Because they’re not going to act until they learn if the theriac can be extracted from my samples and until they have some idea about how it works.”

  “And if there’s none in your blood, or if we can’t figure it out from what we find there, we’d need you here. For research.”

  Riordan leaned back. “Listen to yourself, Christa. You may mean that in a humane context, but tell me: how many of your colleagues would be tempted to suggest vivisection if all other experimental avenues prove fruitless?”

  The color drained out of Brolley’s face. “Shit.”

  Caine held in a sigh of relief. “You know I’m right. You know they’d recommend that, given what’s at stake.”

  She was motionless, her face pinched, for several long seconds. Then she nodded. “I can’t deny it. Most wouldn’t, but some would. And a lot of those are the power players. That’s how it is in research. Ruthlessness and monomania tend to get promoted fastest. And then run roughshod over human rights and social wisdom almost every time. Okay. I agree. But I’m not sure I can give you the blackout period you need.”

  A new wave of cold passed through Riordan. “Why not?”

  “Because your exam results are already in the system. They get centralized before they are sent to me, not the other way around.”

  “And you can’t get to the central records and delete or hide them for a while?”

  “I’m a doctor, not a hacker. Sorry.”

  Riordan thought. “When you get unusual results like this, and you want to confirm them before they get passed on to other doctors or institutions, what happens?”

  Brolley frowned. “I delay authorization of release if the results are incomplete or need further review by a specialist. Which I could easily justify, given how whacky these results are. I could claim that I was researching precedents and trying to schedule you for a second set of comparative tests. That would keep the results under the rug for a while, but would create another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How do I clear you for your trip if I can’t release the results of your physical?”

  Riordan thought back to the various examinations he’d been subjected to over the years. “Except for when I’ve returned from beyond the CTR quarantine line, all I ever see is a report that my physical was passed.”

  Brolley shook her head. “That’s a general physical, like the kind you are given before participating in a sport or entering service. You got the works, today. There’s no way to hide that.”

  “Okay, but can we change the order in which you conducted the two levels of physical?”

  Brolley folded her arms. “‘Conducted the two levels of physical?’ I only conducted one, and you know it.”

  Caine shoved off the exam table. “Let’s say I came in here to simply get a general physical. Which I could have chosen. In the course of that, you would have noticed the absence of my scars. That would then have prompted the complete physical. But it would have occurred after you had given me a clean bill of health on the general physical.”

  Brolley raised an eyebrow. “So now you’re asking me to lie about performing two physicals?”

  Caine started removing his shirt. “You can perform the general physical now, if you like.”

  She waved for him to stop. “No, no. I already know you are in very—well, impossibly—good health.” She nodded. “I’ll report that you passed a general physical. That will clear you for travel.”

  “Great. And thank you. This means a lot to me.” Caine shook her hand, headed for the door.

  Brolley called after him. “I can’t guarantee how long I can keep the full results under wraps, though. So don’t waste any time.”

  “I won’t. You can count on that.”

  Brolley smiled, waved. “Well then, nice meeting you. And bon voyage.”

  Caine returned the smile and the wave, and exited at a brisk pace. Now more than ever, he had to leave as quickly as possible.

  Or he was never going to get off Earth at all.

  * * *

  As soon as the door closed and Riordan’s footsteps faded from hearing, Christa Brolley went to her desk, tapped the screen.

  The commplex brightened. “Ready,” it affirmed.

  “Voice grade only. Encrypt and scramble. Connect to secure contact number fourteen.”

  “Connecting.” A pause. “Secure contact number fourteen requires authorization code.”

  “Submit code.”

  “Submitting. Contact established.”

  A new voice answered: the audio filtering made it sound like a drunk talkbot. “Sign is ginger blossom.”

  “Countersign is cherry ale. Subject examination is complete. Am forwarding results by live courier. Require temporary removal of report from central records. Can you comply?”

  “We can comply. When did the subject depart?”

  “One minute ago.” She couldn’t keep from asking, “Am I done now?”

  “Negative. Further instructions may follow. Disconnect so we can purge record of this contact.”

  “Disconnecting,” confirmed Christa Brolley, who severed the link, powered down the commplex, and, elbows propped on her desk, leaned her head forward into her trembling hands.

  Chapter Ten

  JULY 2123

  WASHINGTON D.C., EARTH

  The approaching aircar’s body was coated with smartpixel laminate; it was a restless canvas of ever-changing and eye-gouging ads. Downing’s two new guards stared at the clearance code the vehicle was sending to the taller one’s dataslate, watched as it was checked against and matched the travel permit code they’d received twenty minutes earlier. She turned toward Richard. “That’s your ride, Director Downing.” Although it was a statement, the rising tone at the end made it sound like a question.

  Downing affected to stare at the aircar in surprise. “It’s not what I was expecting either, Ms. Oruna. I just hope it flies better than it looks.”

  She smiled. “Enjoy your time out of the box, sir.”

  “I shall indeed,” he answered cheerily, presenting his wristlink to the other security officer. The man swept a control wand over the government-issued wearable as the vehicle landed, kicking up dust and grit. “Your perimeter constraint is deactivated, Director Downing. It reactivates in three hours. Don’t be late, sir.”

  “I don’t dare,” Richard answered as he walked toward the vehicle, one of its gull-wing doors rising. “I’m told this carriage turns into a pumpkin after that.”

  The male guard stared, either unfamiliar with the reference or too glum to care. Agent Oruna grinned with one side of her mouth.
<
br />   Downing made his way around the far side of the dark-windowed aircar, waved as he slipped into it.

  As the door closed, he turned to the solitary passenger. “I take it this is one of your cars, Captain Weber?”

  David Weber—who, in a room full of big men would still have stood out as an especially big man—shrugged with what Downing presumed to be his good shoulder. “In a manner of speaking, Director.” He aimed his voice at the audio pickup. “Q-command, commence route.”

  The air car’s reply was closer to normal speech than most airtaxis, one of the telltale signs that it only looked like a public conveyance. “Commencing trip to Capitol Mall. ETA: four minutes.”

  Downing watched as the office building that was actually a safe house dropped away, shrank, and became just another glimmering tile in the mirror-windowed architectural collage that was Chantilly, Virginia. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”

  “Well, Mr. Downing, you are still a director.”

  Downing exhaled a weak laugh. “In name only, Captain, in name only.”

  Weber shook his head. “Not to all of us, sir.” The gray-green eye on the right side of his face was hardly more expressive than the patch where the left one should have been. That cyclopean gaze softened a moment later. “Besides, sir, we have a mutual friend.”

  “Which one, Captain? Rinehart? Sukhinin? Phalon? Seaver, even?”

  “I suppose I should correct my statement, Director Downing. We have quite a few mutual friends. Better you don’t know which one made today’s ride possible. Now, what can I do for you?”

  That was Weber—a.k.a. The Patch—to a tee: discreet, formal, businesslike, and more heart than he was usually willing to show. Bloody hell, he could have been English. “I need some requests—which are in fact requirements—processed quickly.”

  “I can help with that, Director. Do they concern Commodore Riordan?”

  Downing could not keep from smiling. “In fact, they do. Shall I transmit them to your wristlink?”