“There are ten of us,” Dora persisted.
Riordan smiled. “So we’ll draw straws. In the meantime, I’ll brief you on what I know of our mission during the preacceleration toward our first shift. That way, when everyone is awakened, we’ll be ready for an update and can hit the ground running. And once we’re done, we should be able to get back home to Earth a lot faster than before.”
Tygg frowned. “How?”
“Just before we left Sigma Draconis, I heard talk about the Republic setting up an express service using one or two of the captured Arat Kur shift carriers. With their greater range and reduced turnaround time, travel back to Earth should be reduced from six shifts to four, and only twelve weeks, total.”
“That’s still a long time,” Dora complained, “even from Delta Pavonis.”
Riordan just nodded: every day was a long time when you hadn’t seen your soulmate in nine months and hadn’t seen your son in — well, forever. “It will be good to get home,” he sighed. “We’ve been away too long.” He hung his head and laughed. “As I count it, I now owe my son Connor fourteen birthday presents. And his mother a proper proposal.”
Noticing the sudden silence, Caine looked up, discovered an oddly changed scene. Bannor, Tygg, Peter, Miles, and Karam were staring at the floor, faces wooden; the rest were staring at them, baffled.
“What is it with you guys?” Dora leaned forward. “Did someone die?”
Rulaine looked up, quick and hard. “Shut up.”
Dora blinked, frowned, opened her mouth.
“Just shut up, Dora.” He turned to Caine — who, seeing Bannor’s eyes, had the sudden sense that he might vomit: he’d seen eyes like that before. At funeral homes and intensive care wards.
“What is it?” Riordan asked. “What haven’t I been told?”
“Look,” started Bannor, hands opening into an appeal. “I didn’t know — none of us did — that you didn’t know about it. Not at first, and then—”
“That I didn’t know about what, goddamn it?” Riordan held his voice level, wasn’t sure if he’d be able to manage that measure of self-control again.
“Caine, if you go back to Earth, you won’t find her — Elena — there.”
Riordan’s thoughts spun off on their own, uncertain, inchoate. “Not on Earth? Why?”
Bannor opened his mouth, then looked away. Peter Wu took up the tale. “Commodore, back in Jakarta, after we took the Arat Kur headquarters, how much do you recall right after Shethkador shot you in the back with his environmental suit’s manipulator arm?”
Riordan frowned. “I–I don’t remember much. I remember falling. I remember most of you were there. I remember Elena screaming, her brother Trevor trying to call in a med-team. I remember feeling that arm sticking out of my back…”
The arm that was no longer attached to Shethkador’s faux environmental suit when Caine had confronted him again at Sigma Draconis, where the Ktor was still masquerading as a cold-planet entity calling itself Apt-Counsel-of-Lenses, and where—
— Apt-Counsel rolled closer to the platform. Caine watched for the angle of the manipulator arm, saw that it had not been replaced. And saw that the other arm was missing as welclass="underline" a prudent precaution…
But what if the other arm hadn’t been removed as a prudent precaution? What if—?
“Shethkador shot Elena with the other arm a moment after you fell in Jakarta.” It was Rulaine’s voice again: bitter, tight, hating every word. “She was turning when he shot her. It hit her in the spleen, and a piece of the arm lodged in her spine. The two of you were assessed; our docs thought they might be able to save you, tried, had to ice you so that the Dornaani could work their medical magic later on.
“But they didn’t spend one second wondering if they could save Elena; she would have been dead within the hour. The Dornaani offered to mend her if they could, and our docs turned her over to them. They put her in one of their own ICU cold cells and took her away. At first, we thought Downing must have told you when they woke you up. We never guessed—”
“No, the son of a bitch never told me. Of course, he never tells me anything, never commits to anything.” Riordan didn’t remember getting to his feet. “But that’s going to change next time I meet him. Or he won’t walk away from that meeting.”
Riordan wasn’t paying attention to his tone of voice, wasn’t even bothering to choose his words. When he looked around the room again, he had paced halfway across the ring of chairs. The other nine were sitting up very straight; O’Garran had grown pale, Dora looked like she was ready to run, Tina’s eyes were wide.
Tygg’s voice rose behind him. “Caine, I was with Trevor when they took Elena away. Downing was right to do it. There wasn’t any other choice.”
“Maybe not. But he could have left me on Earth to be with her, to take care of Connor. And he sure as shit had the choice to tell me about it when they yanked me out of my cold cell.”
Rulaine’s voice dragged like a lame dog, moving in a direction it had to go, but wanted very badly not to. “I’m not sure Downing really had a choice then, either, Caine.”
“Why? Was he under some kind of gag order?”
“He didn’t have to be under any order, Caine. He simply had to read the strategic tea leaves.”
Riordan turned. “What sort of bullshit are you talking, Bannor?”
“No bullshit; straight, hard facts, Caine. Come on, think it through. First of all, they needed you at Sigma Draconis. Downing knew that, and he was right. If it hadn’t been for you, would we have found out that the Ktor were human? More to the point, would we have learned it in time to keep that bastard Shethkador from tricking us into bombing the Arat Kur out of existence? You were the linchpin that day, Caine; your presence was the indispensable variable.”
“Bullshit.”
“You can say ‘bullshit’ all you want, and wear that combination of real and false modesty all day long, but you know I’m telling the truth. You smelled the lie that Shethkador was peddling; you pieced it together. That was the moment we stepped back from xenocide, Caine — and not a moment before. And you’re going to tell me Downing wasn’t right to have you there? But he had to have you in that room undistracted by the knowledge that your lover was frozen on death’s doorstep light-years away, and your son was a veritable orphan.” Bannor, seeing Riordan paralyzed by the terrible truth of his words, stopped abruptly, hung his head to stare at his tightly clasped hands.
It was Phil Friel who broke the silence with a sigh. “And within twenty-four hours, you were meeting with Yiithrii’ah’aash. And within another four, we were being scraped together into this legation. So when was Downing supposed to tell you, Caine? Was there ever a reasonable moment, a moment when you didn’t need all your attention and faculties, both for yourself and for the mission?” He paused. “I don’t know Downing, but withholding this information doesn’t sound like something he chose to do: it sounds like something he had to do. And then the rush of events did the rest.”
Riordan did not remember returning to his seat, was not sure how long he’d been sitting there before he looked up and said, through a tight, parched throat, “I’d like to be alone.” And then he was lost again: lost in one image after another of Elena, occasionally interspersed with the one photo he’d ever seen of his son Connor.
Out of the silence, as if happening at the other end of a long tunnel, he vaguely heard a chair leg scrape on the floor, then Dora’s voice. “Hey, you.”
It was Karam who answered. “Me?”