Fire with Fire(10)

Caine’s eyes widened, then became very narrow. “Oh. I get it. If I don’t shape up, then you stick me back into the freezer?”

Downing shrugged. “Let’s not let it get to that point, shall we?”

Caine stared at him, yanked the leads off the sensory suit and stalked out of the sim chamber.

A moment later, Nolan entered from the sim operator’s booth. “Well, that went well.”

Downing pulled off the virtual gloves with which he had controlled the actions of one of the two terrorists in the cargo bay. “Caine won’t be a safe operative, Nolan. He refuses to learn.”

“Is that what’s bothering you—or that he not only won, but pretty much broke your sim?”

Downing thought about it. “Both, probably. He certainly made me feel a right dolt: I designed a sim to force him to choose between his mission and his conscience. Instead, he turns it around so that the outcome winds up reinforcing his belief that he can always stop to save orphans and stray kittens. Mark my words, Nolan: that attitude is going to get him killed. Besides, he’s too damned smart for his own good.”

“Look, Caine’s clever and he’s got a lot of breadth, but he lacks expertise and real field experience. And he’s not a genius at everything, you know. Hell, taken separately, no one of his abilities is really that jaw-dropping.”

Downing looked at Nolan, having heard the hanging tone. “Except . . . ?”

Nolan shrugged. “Except that, because he tends to avoid preconceptions, he can constantly integrate almost everything he knows to solve problems. You and I see a screwdriver; Caine not only sees a screwdriver, but a weapon, and a lever, and a straight-edge, and a counterweight, and ad infinitum. Polymaths don’t try to do that; it’s just how their brains work.”

Downing returned his virtual reality goggles to their protective case. “So when we included the netting in the sim, we gave him a tool we weren’t aware of.”

“Right. And that couldn’t have happened with the old sims, where there was a lot of restriction regarding how many items in the environment were manipulable. But now, everything in the environment is available. So Caine didn’t break your sim: he just saw a solution none of the programmers—including you—anticipated.”

Downing grabbed his dataslate, started making notes. “I still say he’s not right for the mission.”

“You mean, you’re still pissed he got the better of your sim.”

Downing rounded on Nolan. “No, I’m pissed that he’s got a better soul than he should. He’s too decent a bloke for this shite, and you know it.”

“‘Too decent’?”

“Of course. You saw the end of the sim: sooner or later, Caine’s fine moral sensibilities are going to get him killed.”

Corcoran leaned back, his eyes assessing. “Rich, I can’t tell if you resent him or admire him.”

Downing stared at his superior. “Nolan, I not only admire Riordan; I envy him. He isn’t up to his neck in the lies that we peddle, that we live. And that’s why he can’t be trusted: because he won’t jump into the cesspool with the rest of us.”

Nolan smiled. “Well, he can be trusted to do the right thing, can’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s predictable. You can work with that.”

Nolan smiled and left Downing sitting speechless, mouth open—partly at his superior’s easy sagacity, and partly at his ruthless pragmatism.

* * *

When they arrived at Epsilon Indi five days later, Downing accompanied Nolan to the pinnace that would ferry him to the Earth-bound shift-carrier Commonwealth. The retired admiral put out his hand. “So long, Rich. Have you settled on a code name for Riordan, yet?”

Downing shook Corcoran’s wide, strong hand. “Yes. He’s ‘Odysseus’—who wound up getting lost and not coming home, you might recall. Not exactly an auspicious code name. Although it could well be prophetic.”

Nolan smiled. “Odysseus was a proto-polymath, though. How does The Odyssey begin? ‘This is the story of a man who was never at a loss.’ We could do worse, I think.”

Downing frowned. “It would still be better if we sent a professional operative.”

“I would if I could, Rich. But that won’t work on Delta Pavonis Three. If, as we suspect, the megacorporations are trying to conceal the evidence of sentients there, they’ll be alert for interference. They probably have dossiers on all our professional operatives, or could sniff out a new one. Either way, they’d clean up their act before our agent gets to see what’s really going on. But they won’t know that Caine is a covert operator, or foresee his intents, for quite a while.”