Upon hearing this fact, Jared had accessed the recorded file to hear the voice of the man he was supposed to have been. He’d heard Boutin’s voice before, on voice recordings that Wilson and Cainen had played for him; the voice on those recordings was the same as the one on this one. Older, creakier and more stressed, but there was no mistaking the timbre or cadence. Jared was aware just how much Boutin’s sounded like his own, which was to be expected and also more than a little disconcerting.
I’ve got a strange life, Jared thought, and then glanced up to make sure the thought hadn’t leaked. Seaborg was still examining the sled and gave no indication of having heard him.
Jared walked through the collection of sleds toward another object in the room, a spherical object slightly larger than the sleds itself. It was a piece of interesting Special Forces skullduggery called a “capture pod,” used when Special Forces had something or someone they wanted to evacuate but couldn’t evacuate themselves. Inside the sphere was a hollow designed to hold a single member of most midsized intelligent species; Special Forces soldiers shoved them in, sealed the pod, and then backed off as the pod’s lifters blasted the pod toward the sky. Inside the pod a strong antigravity field kicked in when the lifters did, otherwise the occupant would be flattened. The pod would then be retrieved by a Special Forces ship located overhead.
The capture pod was for Boutin. The plan was simple: Attack the science station where they had located Boutin, and disable its communications. Grab Boutin and stuff him into the capture pod, which would head out to Skip Drive distance—the Kite would pop in just long enough to grab the pod and then get out before the Obin could give chase. After Boutin’s capture, the science station would be destroyed with an old favorite: a meteor just large enough to wipe the station off the planet, which would hit just far enough away from the station that no one would get suspicious. In this case it would be a hit in the ocean several miles off the coast, so the science station would be obliterated in the ensuing tsunami. The Special Forces had been working with falling rocks for decades; they knew how to make it look like an accident. If everything went to plan, the Obin wouldn’t even know they had been attacked.
To Jared’s eye, there were two major flaws in the plan, both interrelated. The first was that the Skip Drive sleds could not land; they wouldn’t survive contact with Arist’s atmosphere, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be steerable once they were in it. The members of 2nd Platoon on the mission would pop out into real space on the edge of Arist’s atmosphere and then perform a near-space skydive down to the surface. Members of 2nd Platoon had done it before—Sagan had done it at the Battle of Coral and was none the worse for wear—but it struck Jared as asking for trouble.
The method of their arrival created the second major flaw in the plan: There was no simple way to extract the 2nd Platoon after the mission was completed. Once Boutin was captured, the 2nd’s orders were ominous: Get as far away from the science station as possible, so as not to die in the scheduled tsunami (the mission plan had thoughtfully provided a map to a nearby high point that they figured should—should—stay dry during the deluge), and then hike into the uninhabited interior of the island to hide out for several days until Special Forces could send a clutch of capture pods to retrieve them. It would take more than one round of capture pod retrievals to evacuate all twenty-four members of the 2nd that would be on the mission, and Sagan had already informed Jared that he and she would be the last people off the planet.
Jared frowned at the memory of Sagan’s pronouncement. Sagan had never been a big fan of his, he knew, and he knew that was because she was aware from the start that he’d been bred out of a traitor. She’d known more about him than he had. Her farewell when he was transferred to Mattson seemed sincere enough, but since he’d seen her at the cemetery, and been returned to her command, she’d seemed genuinely angry with him, as if he actually was Boutin. On one level Jared could sympathize—after all, as Cainen noted, he was more like Boutin now than he was like his older self—but on a more immediate level Jared resented being treated like the enemy. Jared wondered darkly if the reason Sagan was having him stay behind with her was so she could take care of him without anyone knowing.
Then he shook the idea out of his head. Sagan was capable of killing him, he was sure. But she wouldn’t unless he gave her a reason. Best not to give her a reason, Jared thought.