General Kratochvil might have been reading Caine's mind. "I'm afraid your orientation has come to an abrupt end, Allen," he said. "We're moving things up drastically. All the cards have unexpectedly fallen into place, and you're going to be leaving for Plinry in just under twenty hours."
Caine's mouth felt a little dry. "I thought I was going to have to replace Alain Rienzi first for a few weeks."
"So did we," the general said, "but it turns out that's not going to be necessary. Rienzi left yesterday on a private vacation and doesn't seem to have told anyone where he was going. It was the perfect opportunity, and we decided to take it."
So much for the rest of his training... but if he wasn't going to be spending much time with government people he could probably get by without it. "You've got Rienzi tucked away?"
Marinos nodded. "Picked him up this morning. No problems." He gestured to an envelope on the table. "There's his ID—suitably altered, of course—and the rest of your stuff."
Caine picked up the package, careful not to bump the mushroom-shaped "bug stomper" which sat in the table's center, electronically blanking out any nearby monitoring devices. Opening the envelope, he withdrew a blue ID, a wallet containing both government and personal credit plates and several hundred marks in crisp TDE banknotes, and an unconfirmed ticket for the distant world of Plinry. "The ticket is basically just a reservation," Marinos explained. "You'll need to have your ID checked at the 'port before you can board."
The face on the ID was long and a bit thin, framed by a carefully coiffured mass of brown hair—a clean-shaven replica of Caine's own. But there were also a set of thumbprints and retinal patterns sealed under the supposedly tamper-proof plastic—and those patterns were duplicated in a heavily guarded computer system