Yeah, and if pigs could fly— But Caine only nodded: “A damned shame.”
Brinkley nodded back, then jerked his head toward the hydrogen-burning Rover now only ten meters away. “C’mon; let’s get out of the heat.”
And off of this shooting range. But Caine only said: “Fine by me.”
* * *
Downport had the look of a well-established paramilitary compound: a lot of high-quality prefab; about a dozen permanent buildings; twice that number in various phases of construction. Neatly stacked rows of modular containers radiated out from several cruciform warehouses. Vehicles were plentiful, worn but well maintained, a smattering of new ones mixed in. The people had the same look: a bit worn, but fit and active, always on the move, dressed in practical, loose-fitting tan and khaki trail clothes, all wearing hats—sombreros, ten-gallons, panamas, outbacks—according to taste or cultural origin. Always in pairs or larger groups, always talking, always immersed in their purpose. Rapid expansion, American style. But it still wasn’t a city, or even a town: certainly nothing which could swallow you up and conceal you. So this was not a place in which Caine could elude an assassin for more than a few hours.
Brinkley resumed his stream-of-conscious narration, nodding proudly around him as he drove. “We’ve got about eighty-nine thousand settlers on Dee Pee Three, now. Mostly from Earth. A lot of Amexicans. Good workers. Hey: I don’t mean anything by that. They’re just good workers, y’know? Lot of new buildings going up, lot of new settlers coming in. A lot heading into the frontier, though. Some pretty feisty animals out there. Some of them are good eating. I mean, that’s what they say. But you never heard that from me. I’ll tell you, though, it can get pretty tiresome, eating the same old prepackaged meals.”
Caine glanced at the outré foliage that was peeking over the surrounding roofs. “So the wildlife here is edible?”
“Some, but it’s hard to know which animals are safe to eat, or rather, which parts of them. Easy to make a mistake. Some of the bigger animals make the same mistake with us. But they’ll try just about anything once.”
Just great. The jungle didn’t sound like a very good hiding place either.
Brinkley hadn’t paused for breath. “So it’s pretty dangerous in the brush. Hey: if you’re going in there, you’ll want a gun. Nothing too fancy, mind you. But I can lend you something better than the museum pieces the Neo-Luddites use.”
“Thanks: I’d appreciate that.” But Caine didn’t hear his own words; he was busy confronting a grim deduction. So: no way to run, no place to hide. And, if the last update on CoDevCo was right, any further delay puts lives—exosapient or otherwise—at risk. Meaning I’ve got to stick with an already busted mission. Great.
And, paradoxically, that meant his only remaining option was to head directly towards his enemies. Downing had provided him with the means of exerting considerable political leverage over the Colonial Development Combine, more commonly referred to as CoDevCo. So if they had sent this morning’s sniper, Caine could probably compel them to back off—but only if he could get close enough to talk privately with CoDevCo’s local leadership, to strike an unspoken bargain that would give him the safety of an equally unspoken cease-fire.
Caine felt himself sink into—and then past—the odd calm that arises after accepting a course of action that might end in one’s own death. “Mr. Brinkley, have any of your personnel catalogued the wildlife, examined their physiology, anatomy?”
The silence that ensued was not promising.
“You have a staff xenozoologist, right?”
“Uh—we have a xenobiologist: same thing?”
“Not exactly. Listen: didn’t you have a zoologist by the name of”—Caine scanned down his palmtop—“by the name of Janel Bisacquino on your staff?”
“Oh, yeah, sure—but she shipped out four months ago. Science guys from further down the Big Green Main pulled rank and got her transferred to Zeta Tucanae.”
Great. And since Bisacquino’s transfer wasn’t mentioned in Caine’s mission packet, it meant that his briefing materials were so outdated as to be almost useless. But Brinkley—garrulous and incautious—showed every sign of being precisely the sort of unwitting intelligence asset who would fill in all the relevant blanks—if given the chance to talk. So Caine urged him to continue: “Do you know if they have any zoologists where I’m going?”
“Up there? Don’t know. Doubt it. The Euros have left most of the science and infrastructure to us, I’m afraid.”