by Timothy Zahn
The clerk smiled as he approached. “Yes, sir?”
“Alain Rienzi, traveling to Plinry,” Caine said through stiff lips. He fished out his ticket/reservation and Rienzi’s ID, watching the clerk’s face as closely as he dared.
There was no visible reaction. “Yes, sir,” the other said, sliding the ID through a slot on his console. “If you’ll just put your thumbs against the plates and look over here….”
This was it. Unlike the simple visual check the Security man at the outer fence had done a few hours earlier, Caine was now in for the complete thing. His retina patterns and thumbprints would be compared to those on Rienzi’s ID, and also checked against the main computer records. If Marinos hadn’t performed the miracle of changing those files, it was all going to end right here.
A flicker of light, almost too fast to see, touched his eyes and the plates felt warm against his thumbs. The clerk touched a button and Caine held his breath…and on the console a green light winked on. “All set, Mr. Rienzi. Now, which account is this to be charged to?”
It was an anticlimax, though a welcome one, and Caine began to breathe again. Keeping his expression neutral, he handed over Rienzi’s personal charge plate. The clerk inserted it in another slot, and in a few seconds the machine disgorged an official ticket, his ID and charge plate, and a small magnecoded card. “What’s this?” Caine asked, frowning at the latter.
“Medical form, sir,” the clerk told him. “Apparently there’s something in Plinry’s environment that may give you some trouble. You can have the prescription filled at that window over there.”
Caine was about to ask how in hell anyone knew what kind of pills he might need on Plinry, but caught himself in time. Clearly, government personnel had their medical records on file, and the computer must have compared Rienzi’s profile to Plinry’s conditions and made a fast diagnosis. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Boarding will begin in ten minutes.”
It took nearly fifteen for the druggist to fill the prescription, and so Caine was able to go immediately from there into the boarding tunnel, bypassing the bored guard who would probably never know how close he’d come to a promotion. The little vial of pills rattled uncomfortably in his pocket and Caine wondered what he should do with them. It was unlikely that his own medical quirks were close enough to Rienzi’s for the drug to be worth anything to him. On the other hand, it was conceivable that Marinos had replaced all of Rienzi’s records—in which case the pills might be all that would keep him alive on Plinry. He would just have to hang onto them and hope that whatever it was wouldn’t kill him without lots of obvious symptoms first.
Disease, however, was likely to be the least of his troubles. So far his attention had been concentrated on getting out of New Geneva and onto a spaceship before the Resistance came apart like a house of cards. Now, with that much nearly accomplished, he was able to focus on the staggering problems still facing him. Without the forged authorization papers Kratochvil had planned to give him, it was unlikely the government officials on Plinry would let him near the records he needed. And without a letter of introduction it could be equally difficult to get any cooperation from Plinry’s underground. His only hope lay in the chance that General Lepkowski was indeed in charge of the underground. If he could convince Lepkowski he was a colleague of Kratochvil’s, he might get some help. And once he got the information…Caine shook his head to clear it. There was no point in looking that far ahead; there were too many impossibles facing him as it was. He was just going to have to take things one at a time.
He emerged from the boarding tunnel onto the pad where the passenger ship—a converted pre-war freighter, from its appearance—was waiting. Shifting his grip on his suitcases, he paused and looked around him. The pad was built up from ground level, and large parts of the city, the lake, and the surrounding mountains could be seen. But even as Caine glanced around at the scenery, his eyes turned almost magnetically to the southwest. There, seven kilometers away, was the blackened region where old Geneva had been. Caine shuddered, once, and headed again for the ship. The Ryqril, he knew, played this game to win.
CHAPTER 2
FIRST CONTACT HAD OCCURRED in early 2370 when a TDE exploration ship stumbled on a Ryqril outpost some two parsecs from the Terran colony world Llano. Within ten years there was regular communication between humans and the tall, leathery-skinned bipeds, and various trade agreements were being planned. The Ryqril seemed strangely reticent in matters concerning themselves or details of their empire, but this was generally chalked up to normal shyness; and the rumors that the aliens were fighting a war of conquest on their far frontier were never checked out.
Forty years later, the situation abruptly changed. Efforts at “normalization of relations” between the two races—efforts the Ryqril had been dragging their paws on—were suddenly abandoned, and new intelligence probes finally uncovered the truth. The Ryqril had indeed been fighting a war, and had won it nearly twenty years previously. All indications were that their post-war rearmament was nearly complete, and that their next target was to be the Terran Democratic Empire.
Preparations were started immediately, but it was largely an exercise in futility. The TDE controlled twenty-eight planets; the Ryqril one hundred forty. Nevertheless, there was no question but that the TDE would go down fighting.
And fight it did. Eight years passed from the revelation of its sitting-duck status to the outbreak of all-out war, and in that period mankind designed, built, and tested an impressive array of new weaponry; everything from handguns to huge Supernova-class warships. Though it had never fought with an alien race, the TDE had had enough internal squabbles in its history to have learned something of space warfare, and countless pre-war skirmishes with the Ryqril gave human forces the chance to hone their skills. But the situation was still hopeless, and in its desperation mankind was forced to rethink accepted military theory, including such basic concepts as what exactly defined a weapon.
The blackcollars were the result.
Caine had always been interested in the blackcollars, but there had been little information available to nongovernment citizens on Earth. Now, locked for ten days into a spaceship with a good collection of history tapes, he had the time to satisfy his curiosity.
The tapes were a disappointment, however, telling him little he didn’t already know. The blackcollar program, he was informed, had begun in 2416, two years before the war, and had continued up until Earth’s surrender. Besides the heavy combat training, which was strongly rooted in the ancient Oriental martial arts, blackcollars received a version of the same psychor mental conditioning Caine himself had had. Strangely enough—or so he thought at first—the tapes made no mention of the various drugs used, in the training, which he understood had been the crux of the project. At least three had been used: ordinary Idunine, which in small quantities kept muscles, bones, and joints youthful while allowing the warrior’s appearance to age normally; an RNA derivative to aid memory development, enabling training time to be cut drastically, and a special drug code-named “Backlash” which was reputed to double a blackcollar’s speed and reflexes. The result was a soldier who could fit into any crowd, who could not be identified except by a complete physical and biochemical exam, and who could theoretically even hold his own in an unarmed fight with a Ryq. Dangerous opponents…and perhaps, Caine decided, that was why the tapes were incomplete. The information was clearly aimed at the lower-ranking government members, and the upper echelons had apparently decided to play down any danger the surviving blackcollars might pose. The conclusion was not a heartening one: if the blackcollars were still considered a threat, it was likely that any still left on Plinry would be so well hidden he might never find them.
Caine was the only passenger getting off at Plinry, which turned out to be the third stop of a seven-planet loop. But Plinry was a fueling ’port, and so Caine was spared the experience of a shuttle landing. Instead, he remained str
apped down in his cabin while ship gravity was slowly withdrawn and replaced by the genuine thing. Finally, with little more than a gentle bump, the liner was down.
It took only a few minutes for Caine to make his way to the exit ramp, where the captain and cabin attendant were waiting to see him off. Perfunctory good-byes were said; and then Caine was walking down the ramp, eyes darting in an effort to see everything at once.
He was at one end of a large glazed-surface field, clearly designed for a great deal of traffic. Off to his right were a half dozen spaceships, most of them medium-sized freighter types, and a few official-looking VTOL aircraft. To his left, farther away and separated from the rest of the ’port by a wire-mesh fence, was a sight that made his stomach turn. Squatting in neat rows were at least thirty Corsairs, the long-range scout/fighters that formed the shock front of the Ryqril war machine. At one to three crew and four support personnel per craft, that meant the aliens had a garrison of two hundred in this one part of Plinry alone. A hundred meters past the Corsairs was another fence, a sturdier-looking one, which encircled the entire ’port, forming a barrier between the glaze-surface and the sparsely wooded grassland beyond. Directly ahead of him was a complex of several buildings, clearly the ’port’s administrative and maintenance center. One of the buildings appeared to be a hangar; another—near the Corsairs—looked like a barracks.
And waiting at the foot of the ramp were two men in gray-green uniforms.
Caine’s heart skipped a beat, but he continued down without pausing. A Corsair could have made the trip from Earth in a little over four days, he knew, and if the government had succeeded in breaking the Resistance leaders quickly enough all of Plinry could know about him by now. But once again there was nothing to do but keep walking.
The taller of the two men took a step forward as Caine approached. “Mr. Rienzi?” he asked. When Caine nodded, he went on, “I’m Prefect Jamus Galway, head of Planetary Security; this is Officer Ragusin, my aide. Welcome to Plinry, sir.”
“Thank you. Do you always come out to the ’port to greet tourists?”
Galway gave a smile that was well on its way to becoming a simper, and that smile told Caine more than anything the prefect could have said. It was not the kind of smile given by a Security head to a suspected rebel, but rather the kind given by a rank-conscious politician to an official whose influence was likely greater than his own. Caine’s cover was still intact.
“Actually, Mr. Rienzi,” Galway said, “I do make a practice of welcoming first-time visitors and explaining some of the services we have here. It saves time for everyone involved.” He gestured toward the buildings. “If you’re ready, I’ll escort you through customs. After that, perhaps you’ll ride into Capstone with us for a routine identity check.”
Caine nodded easily. He’d passed Earth’s scrutiny without trouble; Plinry’s wasn’t likely to be more thorough. “Certainly, Prefect. Lead on.”
The customs check was little more than a formality. Besides his clothing, Caine had brought only a pocket videocorder, a few spare cassettes, and the pills he’d been given at the New Geneva ’port. Everything was quickly cleared, and minutes later Caine and Galway were riding in the back seat of a Security patrol car toward the city of Capstone. Ragusin, who seemed to be the strong silent type, was driving.
Preoccupied with other matters, Caine hadn’t yet paid any attention to the planet itself, and as he gazed out the window he was surprised by both the differences from and the similarities to his own world. As on Earth, the predominant color of vegetation was green; but Plinry’s green was shaded more toward blue, and there were also an unusual number of plants that favored yellow, purple, and even orange. The smaller, ground-hugging flora was impossible to see clearly from a moving car, but looked too broad-leaved to be grass; the trees and shrubbery, in contrast, tended to look like tan stag horns liberally draped with Spanish moss. Winging their way among the trees were several small creatures which looked too streamlined to be birds. “Nice planet you have here,” Caine commented. “Very colorful.”
Galway nodded. “It wasn’t always that way. When I was a boy most of the plants were shades of green and blue. The more wildly colored ones didn’t show up until after the war—mutations from something in the Ryqril Groundfire attack, I’m told. Most of them will probably die out eventually.”
Caine turned back to his window, a shiver running up his back. There had been no regret or hostility in Galway’s voice as he spoke of the Ryqril’s devastation of his world. As if he were on their side…which he was, of course. No one worked in the TDE government without first undergoing loyalty conditioning. Whether the conditioning actually changed the subject’s attitudes or merely rendered them powerless was an open question among the uninitiated, but the basic fact remained: in neither word nor action could a conditioned person go against the authority of the Ryqril. They couldn’t be blackmailed or bribed—only outsmarted or outgunned. And Caine didn’t have any guns.
They were into the outer parts of the city now, a region which seemed to be middle class or a bit higher. Residential and business districts were mixed together indiscriminately, unlike the pattern Caine had often seen on Earth, and he asked about it.
“Vehicles are fairly rare on Plinry,” Galway explained. “Even the more well-off among the common people need to live within walking distance of their work and shops. Actually, out here in the newer areas home and work are relatively well separated. Farther in, in the poorer parts of the city, people often live and work in the same building. Of course, things are different in the Hub. We have a fair number of autocabs, so you should have no problem getting around.”
“The Hub, I take it, is the government center?”
“Yes, and most government families live there, as well.” He pointed out the front of the car. “You can see some of the main buildings from here.”
The structures were no more than a few kilometers away, Caine estimated, which made the tallest only a dozen or so stories high. Not exactly skyscraper class, but they still towered over the two and three-floor buildings Caine could see around him. Capstone, it appeared, was a very flat town.
As Galway had indicated, the city was becoming progressively more lower class as they traveled inward. Houses became scarcer as nearly all business buildings included a floor or two of apartments. There were more people on the walkways than had been visible farther out, too, and they looked shabbier. It was hard to read expressions at the speed they were making, but Caine thought he saw unfriendliness and even hostility in the occasional glances sent at the Security car. That was a good sign—if the people had come to respect the government his chances of finding a useful underground would have been negligible.
The car turned a corner, and a block ahead Caine saw a gray wall cutting across their path. A metal-mesh gate sat across the road, flanked by two guards in the same gray-green uniforms Galway and the driver were wearing. One of them approached the car as it rolled to a stop. “IDs, gentlemen?” he said briskly.
All three, including Galway, handed over their cards. After a quick perusal he returned them and gestured to a third guard behind the mesh, who promptly disappeared behind the wall to his left. The gate slid open, closing again once the car had passed through. “New recruit?” Caine asked, nodding back toward the gate.
“Not at all,” Galway answered. “Our security checks are done by the book here.” There was a touch of pride in his voice.
It was only a short drive to the five-story building labeled Plinry Department of Planetary Security. Galway and Caine got out at the main entrance and went inside, leaving Caine’s luggage in the car with Ragusin. Two floors up they entered a small room equipped with two chairs, a table and phone, and a device Caine remembered from the New Geneva ’port. “If I may have your ID, Mr. Rienzi…thank you. Would you please sit here and put your thumbs on the plate?”
Again the brief flicker of light touched Caine’s eyes. Galway tapped a switch and nodded at Caine. “
You can relax now, sir. I’m afraid it’ll be another few minutes—one of the city’s computers broke down yesterday and the other two are under a heavy load.” He remained standing by the machine, as if his presence might encourage the computer to work faster.
“No problem,” Caine said easily. “No reason why routine security checks should have a high priority.”
Galway seemed to relax a bit. “I’m glad you understand. Tell me, are you staying on Plinry long?”
“Just ten days, until the next flight heading back to Earth. I have to get back to work then.”
“Ah, yes—the captain radioed that you were from the Senate. Aide to Senator Auriand, or something equally important.”
“Auriol,” Caine corrected automatically. “Yes, I’m one of his aides. It’s really a minor post, but Dad thought this would be a good way to get some experience in politics.”
“Your father’s in government work too?”
“Yes. In fact, he’s been in politics since the end of the war. Started out as Councilor in Milan and is now Third Minister for Education.”
“So you were prepared at an early age, I gather?”
Prepared—a euphemism for loyalty-conditioned. The conversation was taking an uncomfortable direction. “When I was five,” he replied curtly, dropping the temperature in his tone a few degrees. A senatorial aide shouldn’t have to put up with questions like that.
Galway got the message and back-pedaled rapidly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rienzi—I didn’t mean to get personal. I was just curious.” He stopped abruptly, and Caine could almost hear him casting around for a safer topic of conversation. “Are you here on business or just for a vacation?”
