Fire with Fire(9)

More shots whined off the containers that covered his route to the hanging access panel. Once there, he reached out for a spool of cargo netting affixed to the bulkhead. He uncoiled it, opened the carabineer clip, snagged a section of netting with it, and snapped the clip closed around his own belt. As the two thugs started to move and the boy started to whimper, Caine sucked in a deep breath and jumped over to the control pad: he punched the button that opened the cargo bay doors and sprinted toward the child.

At the other end of the hold, a small wedge of stars and a sliver of blue—Delta Pavonis Three—appeared, widening rapidly. Shots were already barking after Caine’s heels: startled by his unexpected charge, the terrorists didn’t have him in their sights—yet. But Riordan’s attention remained fixed on the boy, whose round, terrified eyes had turned away from the yawning spacescape and outrushing debris and were now fixed upon his own. Pleading.

Caine finished his short sprint to the boy just as the outbound hurricane intensified into the full, ferocious suction of hard vacuum. He dove, caught the boy by the arm as they were swept off the deck and pulled out toward space.

The two terrorists, screaming, shot past them, arms flailing to grab something—anything—to arrest their fatal tumble outward. Caine closed his nostrils tightly, slapped his hand over the boy’s face, pinching his nose shut. They too were almost through the bay doors and into the void—

—when the cargo netting snapped straight out to its limit, humming like an immense, just-fired bowstring. Caine jackknifed at the waist, but held on to the child. He felt as though his own belt might cut him in two—

But then the netting’s inevitable return flex began, pulling them away from the widening panorama of airless death even as the cyclone diminished, the bay’s air almost fully spent. Caine looked over his shoulder: when they had retracted all the way to the bulkhead, he would have to quickly close the bay and cycle the interior access doors so that—

—the world faded to gray. Its sounds ended more sharply, as if someone had turned them off. The temperature and pressure extremes faded back to norm within seconds as Caine reoriented himself, wondering what had caused the simulation to terminate so abruptly.

Around him, the sensory suit sagged with uncommon suddenness: the sensa-gel in which it was immersed was being speed-purged from the simchamber. What the hell is goi—?

The hatch behind Caine opened with a breathy hiss and Downing’s voice—sharp, unpleasant—was audible even through the full-enclosure headphones. “Riordan, get out here. Now.”

Caine complied, but without any particular rush: you may be my trainer and handler, Downing, but you don’t own me.

But before Caine had his second leg all the way out of the simulation pod, Downing was acting very much like he did own his impressed recruit. “Mr. Riordan, would you care to tell me what the hell you were doing at the end of the simulation?”

“Uh—completing the mission.”

“‘Completing the mission’? Do you even know what your mission was?”

“To retake the shuttle and get down to Delta Pavonis Three.”

“Yes. And you jeopardized that by stopping to rescue the boy.”

“Look, I’m not going to ignore an opportunity to save a kid, even if it means adding a little more risk.”

“‘A little more risk’? Is that how you’d characterize the harebrained stunt you pulled in the cargo bay? The objective here was to retake the shuttle so you could continue the mission. Period. Saving the boy was an unnecessary risk. Even saving the other passengers would simply have been a happy byproduct. You have failed, Mr. Riordan—failed to learn that the mission always comes first. That was the test.”

“Huh. I thought the test was to do the best job possible.”

“‘Doing the best job’ means minimizing risk. This time, it meant sacrificing innocents.”

“But I didn’t have to: I found a way to save both the boy and the mission.”

“That’s a sim. In the field, those instincts will get you killed.”

Caine yanked off his virtual reality helmet. “Fine. So I flunk. Go get some other student. Please.”

MENTOR

Downing pushed down his annoyance. “Caine,” he said calmly, “you know you can’t just walk away from this job. You’re too much of a security risk, given everything we’ve told you.”

Caine folded his arms. “So how will you ensure my continued cooperation? Threaten to withhold information about my one hundred missing hours?”

Downing shook his head. “That would not be effective enough.”