Blackcollar-The Judas Solution

by Timothy Zahn

  "She's right, as far as she goes," he conceded. "All those we've tried it on have gone straight back to their jobs."

  "We can't get anything from them?" Skyler asked. "If not cooperation, at least some information?"

  "There are a couple who occasionally slip us a little something," Anne said. "But only a little, and it's never anything really useful."

  "Of course, none of them has access to anything really high up anyway," Kanai added. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying."

  "Until when?" Anne countered. "Until we get to someone who'll blow the whistle on us with his superiors instead of cowering in his cubicle trying desperately to pretend nothing's happened to him? If you think Security's interested in us now, just wait till you see what happens then."

  "Seems to me that Security's reaction is kind of moot at this point," Hawking offered.

  "Yes, thanks to you," Anne said, glaring at Skyler again. "What in the world did you think—?"

  "You know," Reger interrupted, "maybe we should sit down, nice and quiet, and take this from the top. Skyler can start it off by telling us where Lathe's lurking and what he's up to this time."

  "Actually, Lathe isn't here," Skyler said. "He got invited to Khala to break into a Ryq tac center."

  Anne blinked. "He got what?"

  "Let's sit down," Reger repeated, more firmly this time. "Discuss this like civilized men and women."

  Anne snorted. But she stalked over to a chair beside Poirot's couch and dropped into it. "Fine," she said. "I'm sitting."

  "Thank you," Reger said, pulling up a chair to the other side of the couch and sitting down. "You were saying, Skyler?"

  "We got word that the Ryqril were building a new tac coordination center on Khala," Skyler said, pulling up a third chair equidistant from Anne and Reger and signaling O'Hara, Hawking, and Kanai to remain standing on guard. "It seemed way too tempting a target to pass up."

  "Sounds like a trap," Anne muttered.

  "Of course it's a trap," Skyler agreed. "Which just makes the whole thing that much more intriguing. At any rate, Lathe took a team there to see if we can turn it to our advantage."

  "Enough of an advantage for a final victory?" Anne countered. "That is what you meant about this being the last hornets' nest we'd ever need, isn't it?"

  "What do you mean, victory?" Reger echoed, frowning. "As in throwing the Ryqril out of the TDE?"

  Skyler shrugged. "Basically."

  Reger shook his head. "That's impossible."

  "Lathe doesn't think so," Skyler said. "Between us and the Chryselli, we've got the Ryqril in a pretty tight place right now. A big enough push in the right direction might just do the trick."

  "The right direction being this Ryqril tac center, I presume," Reger said, his eyes settled into a sort of distant stare. "So why are you here?"

  "Because chaos in one place is less impressive than simultaneous chaos in two widely separated places," Skyler told him. "The idea is—was—for us to help you and Phoenix and your loyalty-conditioned moles turn this city upside down."

  Anne shook her head. "It's not going to happen," she said. "The system here is just too set and stable. Nobody wants to rock the boat."

  Skyler rubbed his chin, gazing at Poirot's sleeping face as he tried to think. Lathe was the tactical genius of the group, and the plan he'd worked out for the Earth part of the operation was a typically solid piece of work.

  Unfortunately, it had assumed a thriving Phoenix and a large number of Whiplash-treated moles. Without that, it wasn't going to work.

  Which meant they needed a Plan B. Only at this point, Skyler didn't have one. And he wasn't at all sure he could come up with one.

  "For myself, I'm not convinced the moles are as resistant to the idea of rebellion as Anne believes," Kanai put in. "Perhaps each one merely thinks there's nothing he or she personally can do."

  "Maybe if they knew they weren't alone but that they had allies," Reger agreed. "Possibly even allies in high places." He gestured at Poirot.

  Skyler pursed his lips. That was why he'd brought the general here, after all.

  But if Poirot also wasn't willing to cooperate, the secret of Whiplash's existence would be broken the minute he stepped foot inside the Athena government center. Was that a risk they wanted to take right now?

  Anne was obviously thinking along the same lines. "I don't think any of you has the slightest idea what Security can do when they're genuinely panicked," she warned. "If they find out about Whiplash, they'll turn this entire district inside out."

  Abruptly, Skyler made his decision. "It's a risk," he agreed. "But this is war. Risks are part of the job."

  "Then let's quit wasting time," Reger said firmly. "Get the Whiplash out, and let's do it."

  * * *

  With a start, Caine snapped awake.

  He held still in his bunk, maintaining the slow, steady breathing of a sleeping man. The cell was still dark, he could tell through his closed eyelids, and the faint background hum of the base's generator filled the room, its murmur effectively blanketing any sounds there might have been of stealthy footsteps or stealthier breathing.

  But Caine had gone through all of Lathe's wearying and sometimes—he'd thought at the time—stupid blindfolded training exercises. As a result, he had sensory resources that had probably never even occurred to his captors. Effectively both blind and deaf, he focused instead on the patterns of moving air brushing across his face and neck and hands.

  There was someone standing at the end of his bunk.

  Carefully, he opened his eyes to slits. A big man was standing there, little more than a black shadow set against the faint light coming in through the open cell door. For a moment the man just stood there, doing something with the bunk supports. Once, he turned his head slightly, and Caine caught a profile of his face and the misshapen silhouette that showed he was wearing either infrared or light-enhancement goggles.

  The man finished whatever he was doing and headed toward the other side of the room. As he moved away from the bunk, unblocking the view of the door, Caine saw that there was a second man standing framed in the doorway. From the lack of visible arms in his silhouette, he was probably holding a paral-dart pistol in a two-handed grip, pointed in Caine's direction.

  And though the light out there was too faint for any genuine shadows, there was enough subtle movement against the background light to show there was at least one other backup man somewhere out of sight. Sleeping or not, they weren't taking any chances with their prisoner.

  The intruder reached the bathroom area and stopped at the shower enclosure, and Caine suppressed a smile as he finally understood what was going on. The watchers in the monitor room had apparently been annoyed at Caine's earlier blockage of two of their three cameras, and had decided to take advantage of the nighttime hours to remedy the situation.

  Perfect.

  Because Caine could easily fix things back again in the morning. The only trick would be to wait just the right amount of time before "discovering" the reactivated cameras so that they wouldn't suspect he'd been awake tonight.

  And if they thought they'd sneaked in once without waking him, they might be willing to try it again.

  Yes, he decided. This had definite possibilities.

  The Security man finished his work and left, closing the door soundlessly behind him.

  Caine was still considering his options when he again drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 6

  The air intake that Torch had used to create their back door into Aegis Mountain lay several kilometers to the northwest of their landing position. Jensen was pretty sure he could find it, but he knew better than to head directly there. If Security or the Ryqril succeeded in catching them, he didn't want their travel vector pointing directly toward their goal. Instead, he led Flynn due west, keeping a couple of ridges north of the highway that ran past the Ryqril base, watching for a good spot to start veering north.

  They were perhaps two h
ours away from first light when he finally found it.

  "Well, this is fun," Flynn groused as they waded ankle-deep through the icy rushing water of the creek. "You wilderness instructors are always talking about the marvels of running water as a way to hide your trail. You never mention how slippery these creek beds are. How far upstream are we planning to go?"

  "Not too far," Jensen said, peering off to their right. Halfway to the eastern horizon, he could see the faint blue-violet grav light of several aircraft crisscrossing the sky, clearly searching the likely landing area from the evening's drop. He hoped it was just standard surveillance, and not an indication that Skyler or one of the others had been caught.

  He hoped, too, that they didn't take it into their minds to extend their search farther west.

  "How far is not too far?" Flynn persisted. "The reason I'm asking is because if I remember the maps right, this stream will take us too far to the east of our target."

  "You're right, it will," Jensen agreed. "The trick is going to be with the timing and placement of our departure. You see, the problem with the running water trick is that everybody knows it. That means that if, say, a pursuing Ryqril chase squad tracks us to this creek, they'll know we've gone one of two directions. All they have to do is split up and try to find the spot where we left the water."

  "So we look for a rocky area where our tracks won't show?"

  "No, because they know that one, too," Jensen said. "They'll stop at every such likely spot and search the area where the rocks quit, looking for the spot where we would have had to take to softer ground."

  Flynn pondered that a moment. "So, what, the goal is just to keep them busy running down blind alleys until we've built up a decent lead?"

  Jensen smiled. "Actually, I had something a little classier in mind. I'll let you know when I find it."

  Fifteen minutes later, he did.

  "Here we go," he said, the water swirling around his boots as he pointed to their left.

  "Here we go where?" Flynn asked, clearly bewildered as he looked at the wide patch of open mud that stretched eight meters from the edge of the creek to the trees beyond. A few patches of grass poked out of the mud, and a few leaves and bits of bark and rotted wood were scattered around, but aside from that the mudflat was pretty much empty. "We cross that and we'll leave tracks a toddler could find."

  "O ye of little faith," Jensen said reprovingly, slipping his pack off his shoulders and pulling out his grapple and a length of slender line. "Watch and learn."

  He fastened the grapple to one end of the line and draped the rest in a loose coil across his left forearm. Holding the line half a meter below the grapple, he swung the hook in a slow vertical circle, studying the row of trees bordering the far side of the mud flat. What he needed was a sturdy branch at least three meters from the ground, and he had exactly one chance to nail it. If the grapple didn't catch and he had to drag it back to himself through the mud, they would have to go on and try a different spot. Picking a likely looking branch, he aimed at its intersection with the trunk and sent the grapple on its way.

  Years of practice paid off. The grapple arced almost lazily through the air and dropped neatly into the notch between branch and bole. Pulling back carefully on the line, he felt the hooks dig themselves solidly into the wood.

  "Very nice," Flynn complimented him. "I hope you're not expecting us to do a group Tarzan swing."

  "Not to worry," Jensen assured him, handing him the rope. "Here—keep some tension on it."

  Flynn took the line, draping it over his arm as Jensen had and holding the grapple end firmly. Jensen backtracked a few steps down the creek, studying the vegetation and terrain on their right. Across from the mud flat the ground rose sharply from the creek bed, cresting into one of the many ridges that wrinkled this part of the world. Fortunately, despite the angled ground, there were several trees situated only a meter or two back from the edge of the water. Picking the one directly across from where he'd hooked the grapple, he pulled out a shuriken and hurled it into the trunk three meters off the ground, burying it vertically nearly to its center.

  Flynn was gazing thoughtfully at the throwing star as Jensen rejoined him. "Okay," the boy said. "But how do we anchor it?"

  "We don't," Jensen said. "I do. Give me the rest of that line, but keep tension on the grapple end."

  Flynn handed back the coil. Stepping to the edge of the stream, Jensen tossed a loop of the line over the embedded shuriken, dropping it between the sharpened points where it could lie against the nonsharp center. "Ah," Flynn said, nodding, as Jensen pulled on his end of the rope and took in the slack. "But wouldn't a branch work better? This way we're going to have to leave the shuriken behind."

  "True, but if we used a branch we'd probably leave some rope burn behind that would indicate the direction we'd gone," Jensen explained as he pulled the rope tight around the shuriken. "This way, there's no burn, and they're just as likely to conclude we used the shuriken to haul ourselves up into the trees and over the ridge and are doubling back east toward civilization. That's if they even lift their eyes high enough from the creek to spot the star at all, which I'm guessing they won't." Wrapping the rest of the line around his waist, rappel-style, he braced himself and nodded. "Go."

  Flynn leaped upward and caught the taut rope now stretching between the shuriken and the grapple. For a moment the line sagged as the sudden weight tried to pull Jensen off his feet. The blackcollar got his balance back and leaned hard against the strain, and the rope once again tightened. Flynn was already on the move, rapidly walking hand over hand over the mudflat. He reached the other side and pulled himself into the tree. "Clear," he called softly.

  Unwrapping the rope from his waist, Jensen tied a loose, multiple knot in the end, making sure he had enough line left over to make it all the way across the mud. Then, again swinging it over his head, he threw it to Flynn.

  The other caught it and wrapped it a couple of times around another thick branch, this one on the far side of the tree, and braced himself. "Go," he called.

  Leaping upward, Jensen caught the rope. Thirty seconds later, he was across the mud and crouched in the branches beside Flynn. Taking the loose end from the boy, he gave the line a little slack, then flicked his wrist to send a ripple wave through it toward its shuriken anchor. The wave hit the shuriken and popped the line free; yanking his end hard, Jensen whipped the whole line over the mud to catch in the branches of their tree.

  "See?" he murmured as they gathered in the rope and freed the grapple. "Piece of cake."

  "Cake wasn't exactly the word that came to mind," Flynn countered dryly. "But it did work."

  "Which is really all that matters," Jensen pointed out. "Besides, considering the crazy moves Mordecai's been teaching you, you're hardly in a position to point any fingers. I'll finish with the rope; you get going down the far side of the tree and see how we get out of here. And watch where you step."

  The first hundred meters of terrain turned out to be considerably rougher than they'd had to cross thus far, and more than once Jensen wondered if they should backtrack to the creek and look for a clearer route. But by the time the stars in the east began to fade into the approaching dawn, they had made it through and into a much clearer area.

  "How much farther are we going?" Flynn asked as they crossed another, narrower stream and started up yet another slope.

  "Let's get over the top here and see what's on the other side," Jensen said, pointing upward. "Must have had some bad storms come through this past winter—see how many trees have had their lower branches bent over nearly to the ground. We'll find one big enough to hide both of us and wait out the daylight."

  "Sounds good," Flynn said. "Too bad we don't have any entrenching tools."

  "Well, we weren't exactly planning an excursion outside the bounds of civilization this way," Jensen reminded him.

  "Weren't we?" Flynn asked, a slight edge to his voice.

  Jensen gave him a long, cool loo
k. "Are you implying something, Trainee Flynn?"

  And because he was looking at Flynn and not where he was going, he stepped around a scraggly pine and got a full three steps into the small clearing beyond before he spotted the bear.

  "Freeze!" he hissed, braking to a sudden halt.

  But it was too late. With a roar, the bear reared up on its hind legs, its paws stretching threateningly toward the sky. Jensen had just enough time to notice a small cub bolting away across the clearing; and then, with a thud he could feel ten meters away through the ground, the bear dropped back to all fours and charged.

  "Get out of here," Jensen snapped to Flynn, reflexively snatching out a shuriken and hurling it at the bear's head. But a weapon tailored to penetrate rubbery Ryqril skin was no match for fur and thick bone. Instead of collapsing, the bear merely roared in pain as the throwing star buried itself in its forehead and paused to bat at the irritant with a paw. The shuriken popped free and spun off into the matted leaves covering the ground, and the bear resumed its attack.