Trevor pitched his chin at them. “Welcoming committee. With weapons hot, I’ll bet.”
“That assumption is incorrect, Commander. We transmitted the codes Mr. Downing furnished to us when he boarded. I believe your craft will rendezvous with you in approximately thirty minutes.”
Trevor frowned, looked askance at the ceiling. “Don’t you mean, ‘rendezvous with us’?”
“No, Commander, I do not.” There was a distant rumble—and suddenly, the starfield seemed to shift a bit. “We have detached your pod for autonomous operations; it will now maneuver to the rendezvous. As soon as you have transferred to your own craft, and your pressurized cargo containers have been deployed for pick-up, this module will automatically return to our ship. It has been a pleasure meeting all of you.”
Caine smiled at the ceiling. “I hope our paths cross soon again.”
“It is difficult to foresee the circumstances which might permit that. And yet, stranger things have occurred.” There was a long pause, so long that at first they thought Alnduul had departed without his customary salutation. “There is a datum I believe you should all have—but particularly you, Commander Corcoran.”
Trevor started, looked up. “Me?”
“Yes. It concerns your father.”
“Uh . . . yes?”
Caine heard the hesitation in Alnduul’s voice: he’s breaking rules; he’s not supposed to reveal this.
Alnduul’s voice was slow, deliberate. “The organism you found in your father’s chest was not the cause of his death at Sounion .”
Trevor gaped. “What? But—how do you know that?”
“Because we introduced the organism into his body to assist him. It did not malfunction.”
“You—?”
“Enlightenment unto you all, gentlemen.”
Trevor turned red. “Damn it, you had better enlighten me some more, you—”
But the almost inaudible carrier signal was gone: Alnduul had departed.
Chapter Fifty-One
MENTOR
Debarking from the Russlavic Federation shuttle inside one of the Pearl’s subsurface hangars, Caine found himself mere meters away from military hardware he’d only read—and written—about. Downing impatiently gestured for him to catch up, leading them towards a bank of gray, yellow-stenciled elevators beyond the security scanning pad. “I am scheduled to brief and be debriefed in ten minutes,” he tossed over his shoulder, “then back up here to catch a clipper to the outbound shift-carrier Borodino. If I miss it, I’ll have a thirty-day wait.”
Personnel in Federation gray-green and Commonwealth blue-black mobbed the three of them with scanners, sniffers, and snoopers, reprising a similar dance of detection that had swirled around the trio when they had first transferred to the shuttle just over an hour ago.
Downing went to the smallest elevator, ran his security fob over the sensor. The door opened and, hand extended, he urged Caine and Trevor to enter.
Caine stepped forward—and stopped. For the briefest moment, he felt—what? A profoundly sharpened awareness of his surroundings: edges seemed more crisp, sounds more clipped. Time itself seemed to narrow down into a tunnel of many rings, rather than a pervasive, shapeless flow. Yet it all felt more like a premonition than an experience, as if these sensations were important only because they presaged the moment to come—
Caine backed away from the open elevator. “No,” he said.
Trevor blinked, then stared. “Caine, are you—are you okay? Problems from the decompression, again?”
“No. I—I think we should use the stairs.”
Downing, still holding the elevator open, was studying him: Caine could feel the assessing gaze. “It’s six flights down, you know.”
“I didn’t know. But the exercise will do us good.”
“Caine, are you quite—?”
Caine, feeling foolish, shook his head and yanked open the door to the staircase. Maybe Trevor was right; maybe it was all some after-effect of having nearly been vacced a few hours ago.
But it sure hadn’t felt that way.
He started down the stairs.
CIRCE
The tall man, who wore his sunglasses even in this dim room, made a gesture of annoyance and leaned back. To his left, a small cube with one open side emitted vapors and a pungent, musky stench. Near his right hand, a bowl of olives stood forgotten.
“This is most inconvenient,” he murmured.
His assistant, unsure if the utterance had been meant for him, or was simply his superior thinking out loud, asked, “You mean, that Riordan chose not to enter the elevator?”
The man paused as if mildly surprised to rediscover that he was not alone in the room. “No. It is not his failure to enter that troubles me. It was his reason.”