by Timothy Zahn
Both attackers were on their feet now, flanking the window and flailing away at the glasstic with their nunchaku. Kanai loaded another pellet into his slingshot, trying to watch everywhere at once for the inevitable counterattack.
His tingler gave first warning: Bandits coming around north side. A second later they were there: three of them, encased in heavy body armor, with flechette repeaters at the ready. Two came around the corner into military kneeling stances, their repeaters laying down an inaccurate but intimidating fire. The third stepped between them, a scud grenade clutched in his hand.
Amateurs. Behind his gas filter Kanai’s lip twisted with contempt. Scud-grenade needles were a danger even to flexarm. Or at sufficiently point-blank range, and armored as they were the defenders were essentially invulnerable to the throwing stars and nunchaku of their attackers…and their blatant overconfidence was going to kill all three of them. The man with the grenade armed it and swung his arm back for an underhand throw—
And Kanai’s tiny pellet slammed into his wrist.
Without hurting him, of course, through all that armor. But the impact was more than enough to knock the grenade from his casual grip and send it to the ground.
Kanai didn’t see the thing go off; even at his distance he wasn’t taking chances with scud needles against his goggles, and he kept his face pressed into the grass until the deadly sleet had spent itself against the trees around him. When he again looked up, all three armored defenders were lying motionless on the ground. Shining his eyes to the broken window, he was just in time to see the second of the two black-clad men disappear inside the mansion.
Kanai: inside backup, his tingler signaled. Getting his feet under him, he sprinted across the lawn. The roof chain gun remained unfocused; those who should have been manning it were apparently busy elsewhere. Replacing his slingshot in its sheath as he ran, Kanai drew his nunchaku and prepared his mind and reflexes for the shift from long-range to close-in fighting.
But for the moment, at least, the fighting was over. Four bodies decorated the floor near the window, their weapons scattered about even more randomly. All four faces were familiar: street lice, the cheapest and most expendable part of Reger’s organization. Put into the attackers’ path for the sole purpose of slowing them down…which meant the real soldiers were farther in, waiting. Senses alert, Kanai headed inward.
To find the “real soldiers” hadn’t done any better than their amateur counterparts. Kanai passed three more bodies, two of them still with deathgrips on their guns. All three had clearly been shooting from cover…and all three now carried shuriken in vital spots. Shifting his nunchaku, to his left hand, Kanai drew out a pair of his own throwing stars—just in case—and continued on.
The sound of voices reached him half a hallway from the room where the trail ended. Conversational voices—calm, even, incongruous amid the carnage. Reaching the room, Kanai looked in.
It was a tableau he’d seen time after weary time before in the last few years. The two black-clad men stood at apparent ease a few meters from their middle-aged target victim, the five additional bodies silently staining the carpet around them showing their casual stance for the illusion it was. The attackers were always the same, the minor bodies might as well be; it was only the target victim who ever changed.
At least, Kanai thought, this one isn’t begging.
Manx Reger wasn’t begging. Standing by his bed, a dressing gown thrown haphazardly on, he spoke with the calm tones of a man who has already prepared himself for death. “So I’m overreaching myself, am I?” he was saying to the leftmost of the men confronting him. “Has it occurred to you, Bernhard, that you may be overreaching yourself?”
“I do what the contract calls for, Reger,” Bernhard told him coldly. “No more, no less. Right now my job is to tell you our client thinks you’re eating too much of the black-market business in this territory.”
“Your ‘client,’ eh? Sartan, I suppose? Again?”
Bernhard ignored the question. “So now I’ve told you. I suggest you do something about it.” His hand curved in signal and both black-clad men began moving back.
A cautious frown creased Reger’s forehead. “You mean…that’s it?”
“I was told to cut back your ambitions,” Bernhard said quietly. “How I do that is my choice. Though if I have to come back the results are likely to be more permanent.”
“Ah. In other words, Sartan doesn’t feel up to a full-scale war yet, is that it?” The older man snorted. “Well, let me return his favor with a little advice. No one’s succeeded in fencing Denver up as his own private preserve for over two hundred years. Not in peacetime, not during the war, not in thirty years of Ryqril occupation. If Sartan thinks he can do it he’s going to get himself buried—and if you get too closely tied to his muzzle you’ll go the same way.” He glanced at Kanai, and even across the room Kanai could see the aura of age around those eyes. With regular Idunine doses, Reger’s middle-aged appearance meant nothing, of course, any more than Kanai’s lithe body showed its own six decades. How old was Reger, anyway? Old enough to have been trying for control of Denver’s underworld himself in the days before the Ryqril threat? Possibly. Maybe even probably.
Not that it mattered. The world had changed thirty years back, and it was Bernhard and Kanai who knew how to operate in it now. Reger and his kind were the dinosaurs, doomed to ultimate extinction.
“I’ll give Sartan your words of wisdom,” Bernhard told the older man, his tone lightly sarcastic. “Just don’t make us come back.”
Another hand signal passed, and Kanai headed back the way he’d come, ready to clear out any new threats Reger’s men might have set up. But whatever firepower still existed in the mansion was apparently still too shaken to offer fresh resistance. The three black-clad men made their way back outside and into the woods surrounding Reger’s now slightly damaged property. Kanai sensed, rather than saw, the four backups withdrawing with them, and all seven men arrived at their hidden cars at the same time.
“Well?” one of the backups asked.
“He’ll fall into line,” Bernhard said tiredly, pulling goggles and battle-hood off and massaging the bridge of his nose. “And once he does; all the little quarter-mark operations on this side of Denver should follow.”
“At which point,” someone else commented, “we’ll have something real to play with.”
“Or Sartan will,” Bernhard said with just a hint of reproval. “Sartan’s in charge of this, not us. Never forget that.”
A minute later they were all heading toward the sprawling metropolis of Denver to the southeast. In the back seat, leaning against the right-hand door, Kanai stared moodily out the windshield as the first drops of rain began to fall. So the big consolidation scheme was working. The promise of a better future…and all they had to do to achieve it was continue to be the most elite strong-arm force the criminal world had ever known.
What a level, he thought, for blackcollars to sink to.
The universe seemed to agree with his assessment. Outside, the sky rained down bucketfuls of tears against the car. Tears for the shamed warriors.
Chapter 1
“THE BLACKCOLLAR FORCES ARE the elite warriors of this upcoming conflict of ours—the best chance the Terran Democratic Empire has of surviving the Ryqril war machine being launched against us.”
For no particular reason the words flashed through Allen Caine’s mind as he stood alone in the darkness. Words of hope, spoken originally by the TDE’s chief military head at the first Special Forces Training Center commencement in 2416. The hope had been short-lived, of course. Two years later the war had begun: thirteen more and Earth itself had finally surrendered to the humiliation of Ryqril occupation troops and puppet governments.
And as for himself, Caine wasn’t feeling especially elite at the moment. Nor, for that matter, much like a warrior.
So much for the wisdom of the past.
A faint scraping noise reached his ears,
snapping his mind back to the immediate problem at hand. Somewhere between four and ten men—seven, he thought, from the sounds—were out there in the sparse woods, closing in on him with lasers and flechette guns at the ready. Against such firepower Caine’s own shuriken, nunchaku, and slingshot didn’t seem like a hell of a lot.
Especially considering his opponents weren’t blind.
Automatically, before he could relax them, his eyes strained against the opaque goggles. Damn you, Lathe, this is ridiculous, he thought once. Taking a quiet breath, he forced, his mind to relax and concentrate.
He had four of his opponents firmly placed: two ahead and to the right, one behind and also on his right, one dead ahead. The other three weren’t so certain, but he at least knew they were somewhere to his left. Whether they knew exactly where he was or not wasn’t clear; but it was clear some of them were getting too close for safety.
And blinded as he was, Caine’s only hope was to take the initiative before they tripped over him.
Carefully, making no sound, he dipped his left hand into his thigh shuriken pouch and drew out a stack of five stars. He shifted one to his right hand, took a deep breath…and rose suddenly to his knees, hurling four of the stars rapid-fire at his known targets.
All four stars were away before the shout of discovery came from his left. Caine sent his fifth shuriken in the direction of that voice and dived into a forward roll just as a flechette gun opened up. The darts missed him completely, and the gun’s sound gave him yet another target. Ending his roll on his knees, he scrabbled a shuriken from his belt pouch and threw it. Someone gurgled and Caine again hit the ground.
And froze, listening. The woods had gone silent. Had there in fact been only six, not seven, attackers?
Abruptly, Caine’s tingler came on: Bandit bearing twenty-five degrees, under cover.
So there was a seventh man…but for the information to help him, Caine now needed to remember which way was north. Kinesthetic memory would have that, if he could relax his mind enough for the proper psychor technique to draw it out. There?…there. Twenty-five degrees east of that…there. Ten degrees left of dead-on. Sliding a finger under his right sleeve, Caine tapped out his own tingler message: Specify bandit’s cover.
No response. Probably a small bush, Caine decided. Large trees seemed to be rare in this area, and a bush would at least provide the visual protection a sapling wouldn’t.
Visual protection from a blind man. Though a thick enough bush would also provide some protection against the throwing stars, too. Caine was just reaching for the release strap of his slingshot when a sudden sound barely a meter away threw him into instant, violent reaction.
Ducking his head, he shoved off the forest mat into a flat somersault, rolling on his shoulders and kicking straight, out at the unseen figure his ears, had said was in front of him. His heels caught something solid, knocked it backward. He leaped after it, snatching his nunchaku from its hip sheath and swinging it toward the sound of the crash. The thirty-centimeter hardwood stick, swinging like a buzz saw from its plastic chain, connected with a hollow thud…and as Caine drew a three-pointed shuriken into a push-knife grip, a shrill whistle split the air. Caine slid off his goggles, blinking in the sudden sunlight, and looked down at his opponent as he got to his feet.
Rafe Skyler was a big man to begin with, and with the heavy armor he was wearing he looked positively monstrous. “I think I’m glad I couldn’t see you,” Caine told him. “You look like a giant sculpture of a beetle.”
Skyler chuckled as he got easily to his feet. “A lesser man might take that as an insult,” he commented, unsnapping his helmet and lifting it off for examination. On the top was a flaming-red mark a few centimeters across. “Good shot,” he said approvingly. “Clean hit, with enough force to break even a Ryq’s skull.” Craning his neck, the big man looked down onto his chestplate and the twin red marks left there by Caine’s heels. “Nice,” he said.
“Of course,” a voice behind Caine added, “ideally you shouldn’t have let him get that close.”
Caine turned, feeling the rush of mixed emotions that always, on some level, accompanied his interactions with Damon Lathe. A blackcollar commando commander—comsquare for short—doyen, of the remaining blackcollars on Plinry, Lathe had saved Caine’s life at least twice and had succeeded in pulling the younger man’s first Resistance mission to success out of what had been wet ashes indeed.
On the other hand, he’d also lied to Caine on several occasions, sent him around the red-herring track more times than Caine cared to remember, and had virtually reduced him to pawn status on that same mission. And to top it off, for the past seven months Lathe had been the one running Caine through Plinry’s brand-new floating blackcollar academy.
Which had included a lot of this brand of tooth-grinding test.
Stepping to Caine’s side, Lathe glanced over Skyler’s armor. “Not bad,” he said. “You also got three fast kills and two slow ones with your shuriken. The last one, though, you nearly missed. Let’s go to the lodge and run the tapes.”
Skyler was looking upward. Caine followed his gaze, found the tiny black dot hovering far above. “Smile for Security’s cameras,” Skyler suggested.
Caine considered sending an obscene gesture instead, decided not to bother. Replacing his shuriken in its pouch, he followed Lathe back through the trees as, all around him, the “dead” returned to life to await the next victim.
It was really rather sobering to see the performance on tape.
Seated before the screen, his mind replaying his own memories as he watched, he listened to Lathe’s running critique. “…here you lost half a second in the backward underhand throw.…Good roll, but he should by rights have nailed you on his next shot.…Skyler may have been too quiet to hear, but you should have sensed his approach.…Late, but a good takedown anyway.”
The tape ended, and Caine uncurled his fists. “So what’s the verdict?” he asked. “Are you graduating us now, or do I have to wait until the next time the Novak heads for Earth?”
Lathe set his elbows on the desk in front of him, fingering the ring he wore on the middle finger of his right hand as he gazed into Caine’s face. Caine’s eyes dropped to the ring: a silvery dragonhead, its batwing crest curving back over the knuckle, its ruby-red eyes proclaiming its owner to be a blackcollar comsquare. A symbol of ability, dedication, and sheer fighting power…and for Caine, a symbol too of what he intended to do with his new skills.
“You’d like to wear the dragon, wouldn’t you?” Lathe asked into his thoughts.
“Not without earning it,” Caine told him.
Lathe shrugged fractionally, his eyes still on Caine’s. “We could grant you a special exception, provided we could find an unused ring to fit you.”
“What good would that do?” Caine snorted. “I want to be a blackcollar, not just dress like one.”
Lathe pursed his lips. “If we had any Backlash, you’d be the first to get it. You know that.”
Caine nodded. Backlash—the code name for the drug that had been the heart of the whole blackcollar project. Given in a tailored dosage pattern, it permanently altered a man’s neural chemistry, effectively doubling his speed and reflexes in combat situations. Backlash, and Backlash alone, had allowed the blackcollars to successfully pit their low-tech, low-profile weaponry against the more sophisticated Ryqril equipment and, in many cases, come out ahead. Shuriken and nunchaku passed detectors set for lasers and high-metal projectile guns without raising a ripple; Backlash speed and blackcollar marksmanship turned them into deadlier weapons than they had any right to be.
But there was no Backlash on Plinry, and no indication that it still existed anywhere else in the TDE…and if that was true, the first generation of blackcollars would also be the last.
Lathe was speaking again, and Caine snapped his attention back to the blackcollar. “But without it, you and your team are about as ready as we can make you,” the older man said. “So if y
ou want to talk to Lepkowski about travel arrangements, this is the time to do so.”
Caine licked his lips briefly. The moment he’d been aiming at for the past year…the moment when he would leave the relative safety of Plinry and strike out on his own against the Ryqril puppet government on Earth.
But there was no way he was going to show his private uncertainties before Lathe. “Good,” he said briskly, getting to his feet. “Is the general still here?”
“He will be for another two hours. Then a shuttle’s due to take him back up.”
Caine nodded. “Okay. See you later.”
General Avril Lepkowski’s room at Hamner Lodge was small and sparsely furnished, as befit a man who’d spent perhaps a total of six days there in the past year. A cot, a desk and pair of chairs, a computer with scramble/code capability—brought down from one of the Nova-class warships Lathe and his blackcollars had dug out of decades-old storage from under the Ryqril collective snout a year earlier—and, of course, one of the ubiquitous “bug stompers” that seemed to sprout around the lodge and environs exactly like what their mushroom shapes suggested. Caine eyed the device dubiously as he entered the room. At the moment a good bug stomper was supposed to be proof against all known electronic monitoring devices, but that was bound to change someday. Unfortunately, no one would immediately know when that happened.
“Be with you in a minute, Caine,” Lepkowski said, eyes on something tracking across his display. Nodding silently, Caine took the chair beside the desk, from which the screen was out of view. Whatever Lepkowski was working on, it was probably none of Caine’s immediate business…and both Lathe and Lepkowski were very big on the compartmentalization of secrets. If you didn’t need to know, you weren’t told. And you didn’t ask twice.
A minute later the older man sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Damn them all back to hell,” he muttered.
