by Timothy Zahn
Lathe nodded. "Four minutes."
"Four minutes," Spadafora repeated, kneeling down beside the winch and unreeling a few meters of slender cable fastened to a large and very wicked-looking barb-nosed harpoon. Unfastening the harpoon from its harness, he carried it to a launcher attached to the floor just in front of the drop door and loaded it in.
Caine gazed out at the churning slipstream, counting down the seconds to himself as he visualized the drop pods' path. They would be popping their chutes about now, he knew, slowing their descent toward the ground below. Another minute, and their onboard timers would trigger their controlled destruction, blowing open the floors and breaking their walls into sections, each of which would sprout wings and turn itself into a self-leveling hang glider.
It would look exactly like the last two times he and the blackcollars had clandestinely landed on Ryqrilcontrolled worlds. Just like Skyler and his team should be doing on Earth at this very moment, in fact.
Only here on Khala there wouldn't be any infiltrators riding those hang gliders, just eight sensor-realistic dummies strapped beneath the wide, gray-black wings. Eight make-believe blackcollars, apparently intent on sneaking into Khala right under Security's collective nose.
And with luck, that would be where Security's collective nose would be pointing for the next half hour or so.
"Thirty seconds," Lathe called from beside the launcher.
Spadafora moved back into position on his side of the winch and got his secondary line in hand. Caine did the same, checking one last time to make sure his main safety cable wasn't near anything it could get caught or tangled on. Resettling his harness comfortably across his shoulders and thighs, he made sure his goggles and gas filter were securely in place. It was going to be like a hurricane when they hit the air out there.
"Here we go," Lathe said, flipping up a protective panel on the launcher and resting his gloved hand on the glowing red button beneath it. "Harpoon in five ... three, two, one."
He pressed the button; and with a burst of compressed air the harpoon blasted out the open hatch. It disappeared downward into the night, the slender attached cable from the winch reeling out madly behind it.
Caine felt his hand curl into a fist. Theoretically, Lathe had picked a landing area that would be clear of people or livestock or homes or anything else that would be instantly killed or destroyed by the harpoon's impact. But mistakes sometimes happened....
He had half expected the harpoon's impact to be transmitted along the cable into something he might feel. But he was still waiting when Lathe turned his head toward them. "It's down," he called. "Go."
And in a single smooth motion, Spadafora unhooked the safety line that fastened him to the shuttle wall, snapped the large carabiner ring of his secondary line around the unreeling cable, and leaped out into the night.
Lathe was right behind him, then Mordecai; and then it was Caine's turn. Setting his teeth firmly together, working the two cables as he'd practiced on the trip, he popped his first line from the wall, attached his second to the cable, and jumped.
For the first few dizzying seconds he actually slid upward with the momentum he'd been given by the shuttle's own forward motion. Then friction and air resistance and gravity dragged him to a halt, and a moment later he was sliding downward with increasing speed.
He gripped his line with one hand and waved the other against the air in an effort to keep himself facing the direction he was moving. The broken clouds overhead were blocking most of the starlight, but there was enough getting through to show the ground rushing up toward him.
He couldn't see the three blackcollars anywhere below him. Was that simply because of the lightabsorbing coats they were all wearing? Or had their connection lines somehow failed, dropping them off the cable to their deaths? And if theirs had failed, wouldn't his likely do so as well? He took a deep breath, trying to stay calm.
And exhaled that breath in a huff as the ring above him suddenly seemed to catch, sending his feet swinging upward and his harness digging into his thighs as the deceleration dragged at him like a fighterturn G-force. He caught a glimpse of figures on the ground beneath him, the urgently flashing purple marker lights at the rear of the harpoon—
And then, with welcome anticlimax, he slid to an almost gentle stop with his feet safely on the ground.
Lathe was already at his side. "Everyone clear," the comsquare ordered, grabbing Caine's upper arm in a steadying grip with one hand as he slashed a knife through the connecting line with the other. Spadafora, Caine saw, was standing beside the harpoon, his hand poised over an opened control cover. Half guiding, half dragging Caine a few steps away, Lathe gestured to Spadafora.
The other pressed the control; and with a sizzle of high-voltage current, the cable still unreeling from the distant shuttle evaporated in a puff of acerbic smoke.
"I guess you were right," Spadafora said. "It isn't any harder going down."
"What about the harpoon?" Caine asked, eyeing it dubiously. It had buried a good two-thirds of its length into the ground and didn't look like it was going to be coming out any time soon.
"We leave it," Lathe said, pulling off his goggles and battle-hood and stowing them in his coat pockets.
"Besides, they'll figure it out anyway as soon as the hang gliders are down." He pointed south. "If we're on target, there should be a town about a klick down the hill."
"How big a town?" Caine asked.
"Big enough to have some cars lying around waiting to be borrowed," Lathe assured him.
"Plus a few public phones," Spadafora added.
"Right," Lathe agreed. "We'll want to contact Shaw as soon as possible, make sure he's ready to receive.
I'll do that while you three find a car." He looked at his watch. "If we hurry, we should be in Inkosi City in a couple of hours."
* * *
"There they go," Khala Security Prefect Daov Haberdae said, nodding at the long-range telescope display. "Right on schedule."
"Yes," Galway murmured, frowning at the indistinct hang gliders as they sorted themselves out from the scattering wreckage of the shattered drop pods.
"Dae yae ha' ratchers on the gro'nd?" Taakh asked.
"We have watchers all over the area, Your Eminence," Haberdae assured him. "Whenever and wherever they come down, we'll have them covered."
"Excellent," Taakh said.
"I just hope Prefect Galway's right about them being of some use," Haberdae added under his breath.
"I've got a lot of men and resources tied up in this."
With a supreme effort, Galway ignored him. Haberdae didn't like Galway's plan. He hadn't liked it right from the very beginning, and hadn't been at all shy about saying so. The fact that Taakh's support of the operation meant that neither Haberdae nor anyone else on Khala got a vote in the matter only made it worse.
And the Ryq hadn't been shy about making that clear, either. Nor, apparently, was he interested in starting now. "I ha' seen Lathe in action," Taakh said in response to Haberdae's quiet comment, taking a step closer to the prefect. "The 'lan rill rork."
Haberdae grimaced. "Yes, Your Eminence," he said, his voice neutral again. Loyalty-conditioning permitted a man to offer suggestions to a Ryqril, or in certain circumstances to even argue with them.
But no one argued with khassq-class warriors. Not if they wanted to stay alive.
"Looks like they're splitting into two groups, sir," one of the techs at the monitor panel spoke up.
"Yae ha' 'oth directions co'ered?"
"Everything is covered, Your Eminence," Haberdae said. His voice was properly respectful, but beneath it his patience was clearly strained. "From that altitude, they have a maximum range of maybe thirty kilometers. We've got fifty klicks covered, in every direction—"
"Something's wrong," Galway interrupted him, the back of his neck starting to tingle as he stared at the silhouettes of the hang gliders.
"There's nothing wrong," Haberdae growled. "My people
have them covered."
"They're not there," Galway said, his vague apprehensions suddenly becoming certainty. "Those are decoys."
Haberdae turned to the control board. "Vaandar?" he demanded.
"Sensors clearly show a person hanging under each of those gliders," the tech assured him.
"The sensors are wrong," Galway insisted, swiveling to the communications section of his panel and keying a switch. "Because that's all they're doing—hanging. They're not controlling the gliders.
Dispatch? Get me fifty men—"
"Hold it," Haberdae snapped, grabbing the armrest of Galway's chair and giving a yank that brought him rolling back from the board. "You already have all the men you're entitled to for this operation. You do not have authority to grab any more without my permission." He looked at Taakh. "Isn't that right, Your Eminence?" he added.
"The gliders aren't under control," Galway said, carefully pronouncing each word. "They're decoys.
Lathe and the others got off somewhere else."
"Rhere?" Taakh demanded.
"Exactly," Haberdae seconded. "We've had the shuttle under surveillance the entire way."
"Except where it dipped into the Falkarie Mountain foothills," Galway reminded him. "There were a nearly two minutes where the sensors were blocked."
"And the ground observers had visual contact the whole time," Haberdae countered. "They would have seen any parachutes."
"Then they didn't use parachutes," Galway insisted. "Look, Prefect, I don't know how they did it. All I know is that they're not with those gliders."
"Ha' yae other e'idence?" Taakh asked.
Galway braced himself. "No evidence, Your Eminence. Just my experience with the way Lathe does things."
"Then 'Re'ect Ha'erdae is correct," the Ryq said. "Yae nay not rekest his other nen."
And there would be no appeal, Galway knew. Not with Taakh. "As you command, Your Eminence," he said. "In that case, may I be excused for a few minutes? The gliders won't land for at least another half hour, and I have some other matters to attend to."
Taakh inclined his head. "Yae nay go."
"Thank you," Galway said. Standing up, he headed for the door.
"Don't you touch my people," Haberdae warned.
"I wouldn't think of it," Galway assured him.
No, he wouldn't touch any of Haberdae's precious Security men, he thought grimly as the door sealed itself behind him. Not even the ones who were currently doing absolutely nothing except lounging around Inkosi City's main entry roads, as if Lathe would be foolish enough to enter a city along such obvious routes.
But then, Haberdae's Security men were hardly the only resources available. There was an entire government's worth of bureaucrats and tech workers scattered around the city, all of them loyaltyconditioned, none of them under Haberdae's legal jurisdiction. If Galway could get them out onto the streets and highways in the next half hour—all the streets, not just the obvious entry points—maybe they could spot the incoming blackcollars in time to get Judas and the special ops team in position to intercept them.
Picking up his pace, he hurried down the brightly lit corridor. With luck, maybe he could still pull this off.
CHAPTER 3
"So has anyone been inside the mountain since we left?" Skyler asked as they drove eastward along the winding road toward Reger's estate.
"Anne and I went in a couple of times in the first few months," Kanai said. "We wanted to see if there was any more information on Whiplash we might have missed earlier."
Skyler nodded, thinking of the irony of it all. The old Torch resistance organization had spent its last days in Aegis Mountain, working to develop a drug capable of breaking the hitherto unbreakable Ryqril loyalty-conditioning. And they'd succeeded, only to succumb to the residual chemical warfare contamination in the base before they'd even had a chance to use it. "Was there?"
"Not that we could find," Kanai said. "We were able to get a couple other sections of the base operational, though, complete with heat and power. We got one of the elevators running, too."
"I hope you didn't go near the main command level," Hawking warned.
"And risk bringing the entire mountain down on us?" Kanai snorted gently. "Give us a little more credit than that, Commando Hawking."
"I'm sure he was just asking," Skyler assured him. "But you haven't been inside lately?"
In the reflected glow of the headlights, Skyler saw Kanai's lips compress briefly. "As I say, we've had some differences of opinion. I'm mostly working with Reger these days."
"What kind of differences?" Skyler pressed.
"Perhaps it would be best if we wait until ..."
He trailed off.
"What is it?" Skyler asked, looking out the windshield.
"That's the road to Reger's estate," Kanai said, pointing ahead to a road branching off to the right.
"Those two houses on either side of the intersection have their porch lights on."
"And they shouldn't?" Skyler asked.
"All the houses on that road are owned by Reger's people," Kanai said. The car came up to the road, and he drove past without slowing. "The porch lights are never lit unless something's wrong."
"Any other ways in?" O'Hara asked.
"There's an access road along the west side of the estate," Hawking said. "It'll bring us right up to the sensor keyhole Jensen and I put in."
"Unless Reger's closed it up," Skyler said.
"I don't believe he has," Kanai said. "No one but a blackcollar would be able to sneak in along it anyway."
"Okay, get us back to that road," Skyler said. "You and Hawking know the system and grounds best—
you'll go in through the keyhole. O'Hara and I will give you some lead time, then we'll come in the front door."
It took Kanai a few minutes by back street and other people's access roads to return them to the western edge of the Reger estate. Maneuvering the car around the worst of the potholes, he came to a halt a few meters from the outer fence, a simple-looking wire-mesh design, two meters tall, that probably looked like any number of other property-line fences in this part of the mountains. "Electrified, no doubt,"
O'Hara commented as the four blackcollars approached it.
"Yes, but not seriously," Hawking assured him. "Jensen cranked back most of the juice so that he could run pressure sensors along the top without the current blinding them."
"Another good reason to leave the fence alone," Skyler said, pulling on his battle-hood and gloves as the others followed suit. "O'Hara?"
O'Hara stepped to his side, and together they eased their way cautiously forward until they were about a meter from the fence. There was no obvious reaction from either the fence or the environs. Turning to face each other a meter apart, they settled into wide horse stances, knees bent, hands cupped thigh high in front of them. "Kanai?" Skyler said, looking back at the others.
Kanai nodded and started forward at a slow jog, picking up speed as he came. He reached Skyler and O'Hara and leaped forward and upward.
And as he did so, the two blackcollars caught the undersides of his boots in their cupped hands and pulled convulsively upward, hurling him toward the night sky. He flew to the top of the fence and did a neat high jumper's roll over the top, continuing the roll and twist and landing in a crouch on the other side.
Fifteen seconds later, Hawking was beside him. "You've got fifteen minutes to get through the grounds and check out the house," Skyler told them. "After that, O'Hara and I drive up to the front door like we owned the place."
"We'll be ready," Hawking promised. Touching Kanai on the shoulder, he gestured, and together they slipped away into the night.
* * *
"This is completely outrageous," Manx Reger growled, his eyes blazing as he glared at Poirot from the middle of the large overstuffed chair where the two Security men standing to his right and left had planted him. "It's also completely illegal."
"That's good, coming from a crime boss,"
Poirot countered. "Let me ask one more time: What's in the shipment your friends dropped tonight?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Reger said stiffly. "And as for being a crime boss, I deny that categorically."
"Of course you do." Poirot turned to the door as Bailey came into the room. "You have everyone?"
"I think so," Bailey said. "There were two more hiding in shielded guard holes. We've put everyone together in the dining room."
"Make sure they stay quiet," Poirot warned.
"We will," Bailey assured him. "I also heard from the spotters. They say a car's gone down the access road west of the estate and stopped by the fence there. Four men got out, and they think two of them must have gotten through the fence somewhere and come onto the grounds. Only two got back into the car, anyway."
Poirot scratched his cheek. Suspicious couriers checking out the estate before making their delivery? Or was it standard procedure to bypass the house and deliver the contraband to a hidden cache somewhere else on the grounds?
He looked at Reger, but the other's face wasn't giving anything away. "Put a couple of our plainclothes men outside," he told Bailey. "Tell them to keep out of the light. Maybe the sight of some roving guards will make our gate-crashers happier."
Bailey nodded and repeated the orders into his comm. "What about the two in the car?" he asked.
"Let them be," Poirot told him. "Sooner or later, I'm sure they'll come to see us."
* * *
"Five minutes," O'Hara said.
Skyler nodded. So far, whoever had taken over Reger's estate hadn't come to check out this car sitting on the road along the western fence. Either inattention or overconfidence, and either was likely to cost them. "I'm thinking we'll just go straight in, play stupid, and take it from there," he said.
