by Timothy Zahn
Skyler was still holding the bag that had been over Dorfman's head. Giving it a quick look, he dropped it on the floor and climbed back onto the van's roof, refastening his pulley to the second line as he did so.
The fire was very definitely getting closer. He took a moment to survey the area, noting with approval that Kanai and Hawking had sent their first set of released prisoners rising upward on their lines as well.
Making sure he had enough slack, he gathered his feet beneath him, ran the three steps the van's roof allowed, and leaped back to the next van.
The prisoner here was a young woman named Bryna Estrada. Skyler ran through the sign/countersign routine with her, got her hood off after the same fight that Dorfman's had put up, and secured her to his remaining line. Wrapping a protective arm around her waist, he keyed the take-up reel.
They rose together over the street, the superheated air around them cooling somewhat as they ascended over the flames now lapping against the sides of the vans. They reached the level of the roof where Skyler had set up his mortar; and as the line tightened into an uphill angle, they began to slide back down again toward safety.
Anne and Flynn were busy at the other two anchor points, helping disconnect other former prisoners from their lines, as Skyler brought himself and Bryna to a more or less soft landing in front of his mortar. "End of the line," he told her, popping them free. "Stairway's in that shed over there—wait inside until we're all assembled."
"Right," she breathed, and headed across the roof.
Skyler turned back to see Kanai and Hawking ferrying the last two released prisoners to safety.
"Anything?" he called.
"No," Kanai called.
"Likewise," Hawking seconded.
"Okay," Skyler said. "Let's get to the stairs—"
And with a sudden screaming blast, a Security patrol boat dropped straight down from the sky to a hovering stop at the edge of their roof.
"Halt," a voice boomed from the fighter's loudspeaker. Moving with deceptive effortlessness, the vehicle spun horizontally around, bringing the full range of its forward weaponry to bear on the group now frozen in place on the roof. "Stand where you are—"
And then, just as the craft completed its swiveling turn, another grappling line shot out from somewhere below them. The grapple slapped firmly onto one of the stubby wings, snapping taut as the mortar's takeup reel kicked in.
The patrol boat had far too much mass and engine power for such an attack to have much effect. But in the confined space where the pilot had settled his craft, in the middle of the roiling air currents created by the fire below it, a small nudge was all it took. The boat tipped slightly forward and to the side as the take-up reel yanked at its wing, its nose dipping as it lurched a couple of meters forward. There was a brief grinding noise as it slammed into the side of the building; and then, with a surge of engine power, it snapped the cable, fatally overcorrected, and slid sideways out of their view. A second later, with a horrible crunch of tearing metal, it crashed into the flaming street below.
"Let's go," Skyler shouted to the Phoenix people still standing frozen in place, most of them staring at the spot where the patrol boat had been. "Kanai?"
"Come on," Kanai said, grabbing one of the youths by the arm and pulling him bodily across the roof.
Hawking and Flynn started toward the others, but with Kanai's action the spell was apparently broken.
Skyler bringing up the rear, they made it to the stairs.
With their building having presumably been identified, Skyler had expected Security to make some lastditch attack to stop them. But apparently the disarray the blackcollars had sowed was too widespread for anything like quick action. They met no opposition on the stairs, and a few minutes later were in the alleyway behind the building, where a line of four cars was waiting.
"Into the cars," Skyler ordered them. Catching up with Dorfman he grabbed the boy's arm and steered him to the vehicle at the back of the line. "Come on, come on—get in," he called to the rest as he half guided, half pushed Dorfman into the back seat. "Hawking? Get them settled and then get back here—
you're driving this one."
"Give me a hand here, will you?" Hawking called back as he helped one of the others into the car. "This one's pretty woozy."
"On my way," Skyler called back. "Sit tight," he told Dorfman, closing the car door and running over to Hawking.
Dorfman was still sitting there, alone, when the other three cars roared off into the night.
* * *
Bailey had very much not wanted to be the last one to arrive at the conference room. Unfortunately, he was.
"Sit," Daasaa said quietly, indicating the far side of the table from where he and Halaak were seated.
"Yes, Your Eminence," Bailey said. Poirot and Ramirez, he noted sourly, had thoughtfully left the seat between them empty, thereby putting Bailey in the middle where he could bear the brunt of Ryqril attention. "My apologies for my tardiness."
Neither Ryq replied, but merely waited in silence until he had seated himself. "Now," Daasaa said, his eyes glittering. "Ex'lain."
Bailey took a careful breath. "They outsmarted us, Your Eminence," he said reluctantly. "I wish it were otherwise. But it's not."
"That is not su'icient," Halaak growled. "There is a traitor. Who?"
"No one betrayed the mission, Your Eminence," Bailey said. "At least, no one in this room."
"Yet they identi'ied the s'y yae 'lanted," Daasaa pointed out. "How did they dae that?"
"I don't know," Bailey admitted. "Something he said or did, I suppose, or maybe something about his appearance that gave him away."
Beside Bailey, Ramirez stirred. "It seems to me that we know one likely candidate for traitor, Your Eminence," he said. "General Poirot is the one—"
"I did not betray the mission," Poirot bit out angrily. "And let me remind you that of all of us in this room, I'm the one who's been under the most complete observation. How could I possibly have communicated anything to the blackcollars without half of Athena knowing about it?"
"There is reason to General 'Oirot's argunent," Daasaa agreed. "What o' yae, Lieutenant Ranirez?"
"I couldn't have had anything to do with this, Your Eminence," Ramirez said, his voice steady. "I didn't even know about Colonel Bailey's spy until after the blackcollars left him behind."
"Those rogue spotters claimed to be from your office," Poirot accused.
Ramirez glared at him— "They weren't rogue," Bailey put in before he could say anything. "That was why I was late, Your Eminences. I was getting the full transcript of the pilots' interrogation."
"Yae ha' it?" Daasaa demanded.
"Yes, Your Eminence," Bailey said, pulling a set of papers from his folder and handing it across the table.
For a few minutes Daasaa and Halaak poured over the report in silence. Bailey waited, listening to his thudding heart and wondering if Poirot and Ramirez were sweating as much as he was. He rather expected they were.
At last, Daasaa looked up. "There is no sign they rere traitors," he agreed grudgingly. " 'Ery rell. Let us exanine hor the 'lackcollars o'tained the s'otter 'ekencies." He looked at Poirot. "And General 'Oirot's authorization code."
"Actually, it wasn't General Poirot's personal code," Bailey said. "It was simply a general authorization which any of a thousand people would have access to, both here in Athena and in Boulder."
"And rich o' these thousand is the traitor?" Halaak demanded.
"I'm afraid we don't yet know," Bailey had to admit. "But we do know now that it was definitely Anne Silcox who was the one ordering them around. We've started an analysis on who in Athena or Boulder might have crossed paths with her in the past few months."
Daasaa made a strange sounding rumbling noise. "Dae yae know all o' Silcox's novenents in that 'eriod?"
Bailey winced. "No, Your Eminence, we don't."
"Then such analysis is unlikely to 'e 'ery usekhul, is it?"
"Probably not," Bailey conceded.
"Meanwhile, we also need to worry about what else this spy of theirs has told them," Ramirez said. "Isn't there some way to tell who else they've hit with this damned Whiplash?"
"We're still analyzing the tests we ran on General Poirot," Bailey said. "So far, we haven't found any detectable changes in his biochemistry."
"That's handy," Ramirez muttered.
"For someone," Bailey agreed grimly, looking back at the Ryqril. "And we can't just suspend or lock up all the possibilities, either—we don't have enough alternates to step into their places. Everyday operations would grind to a halt."
"I expect we're going to have to run everyone in the government through a second round of loyaltyconditioning,"
Poirot said. "Myself being first, of course," he added, looking at Ramirez.
"That rill not hel' us now," Halaak growled. "It rill take tae long."
"Actually, time may not be as short as we thought," Bailey said, bracing himself. Given the mood the Ryqril were in, there was no way to predict how they were going to react to this particular bit of news.
"It appears that our missing blackcollar did indeed come to Denver this morning."
The two Ryqril exchanged looks. "Yae are certain?" Daasaa asked.
"Yes," Bailey said, on solid ground for a change. "The various recordings clearly show all five blackcollars were present during the rescue, the four from Plinry and Kanai."
"Then he is not in Aegis," Halaak rumbled.
"Aegis?" Poirot echoed, turning startled eyes on Bailey.
"No, Your Eminence, he's not," Bailey confirmed, throwing a warning look at Poirot as he silently cursed Halaak's careless tongue. He'd worked very hard to make sure the fact that they knew about Aegis's back door stayed strictly between the three of them. Now, Poirot and Ramirez knew it, too.
"'Erha's that neans they no longer need the 'ase," Daasaa said, his tone suggesting the kind of fate that Bailey could expect if the opportunity to get into Aegis had slipped through their fingers.
"I'm certain they'll need to go back in," Bailey said quickly. "Whatever the blackcollars came here for, this rescue couldn't have been more than just a little detour. They're still going to need whatever resources are in there."
"'Erha's," Daasaa said again. "Re shall see."
* * *
They'd found some food, and they'd had some rest; and now Foxleigh stood beside Jensen at the end of the road. "So this is what you came all this way for?" he murmured, his voice hushed with a reverence he hadn't realized he could still feel. "This is what you hiked through the wilderness and fought bears to get to?"
"This is it," Jensen confirmed. "Why? Don't you think it'll deliver a sufficiently big bang?"
Foxleigh took a deep breath as he looked up at the sleek fighter stretched out in front of them, crouched on its landing skids like a mountain lion preparing to spring. "No, I think a functional Talus-6 interceptor will pack all the bang you could possibly want," he assured the blackcollar.
And with that, Foxleigh's moment of reverence vanished. Even an advanced fighter was, after all, only a tool. A simple means to an end. "What exactly are you planning to do with it?" he asked, running a hand over the coating of dust to expose a hand-lettered word written on the underside missile rack.
"What do you think I want with it?" Jensen countered, giving him an odd look.
"There's more than one possibility." Foxleigh pointed to the word he'd uncovered. "See this?"
Jensen craned his neck. " 'Gotterdammerung'?"
"It's the old Germanic version of 'doomsday,' " Foxleigh explained. "A composer named Richard Wagner wrote about fourteen hours of opera about it." He tapped the metal. "The point is that there are enough kilotons packed away in here to make sure the Ryqril never take anything out of the mountain except radioactive slag."
"I'm not destroying Aegis," Jensen said firmly. "It's resisted the Ryqril too long for us to just blow it up."
"Then what are you doing?" Foxleigh persisted. "You think a single fighter dodging Corsairs over North America is going to do anyone any good?"
"Depends on what you mean by any good," Jensen said. "What does any of this have to do with you, anyway?"
"I just want to make sure you're not going to blow up the fighter and the base with me still in it,"
Foxleigh said, backpedaling quickly. The last thing he wanted to do was start Jensen wondering. Not until they had the Talus prepped, anyway.
"Don't worry about it," Jensen assured him. "As soon as I'm sure I won't need extra hands, you'll be heading for home."
"I appreciate that," Foxleigh said. As if he intended to do anything of the sort. "You have any idea how to prep this thing?"
"Not really," Jensen conceded. "But I'm sure the procedural manuals are on file around here somewhere."
"Probably," Foxleigh agreed. "Let's go find them."
* * *
"So Kevin's still a prisoner?" Anne asked, her tone flat and dark and accusing.
"I'm afraid so," Skyler said, not any happier about it than Anne was. "I don't know why they picked him, unless it was because they already had a look-alike on hand."
"Instead of looking for someone to blame," Reger spoke up from his usual seat in the corner, "you might try a little gratitude that Skyler was able to identify the substitution so quickly. If he hadn't, we'd probably all be in Athena right now."
"I know," Anne said, lowering her eyes. "I just ... you're sure it wasn't Kevin?"
"I'm positive," Skyler said. "He knew the password, and he could easily have passed as the man in the photo you showed us. Security's mistake was that they weren't as confident as they should have been and tried to hedge their bets."
"You mean the hoods?" Reger asked.
Skyler nodded. "Poirot must have thought that once we did the password check we might be too rushed to take them off, especially given how solidly the things had been taped in place. That would have postponed any close-up exam for a while, maybe even until we were back here or someplace equally vulnerable to a surprise attack."
"Only they also wouldn't want their spy traveling blind," Hawking added. "Hence, the trick hood."
"Which looked opaque from the outside but was reasonably transparent from the inside," Skyler finished. "Fortunately, we were expecting something like that and checked all the hoods. The one calling himself Dorfman was the only one who flunked."
"So how do we get him out?" Anne said, clearly not impressed by the blackcollars' on-the-spot detective work. "And Rob's still missing, too."
"I don't know how to answer that," Skyler conceded. "I doubt they'll be foolish enough to try this baitand- raid stunt again."
"You did get into Athena once before," Flynn reminded him.
"Different time, different circumstances," Skyler said. "We'd never be able to pull off something like that again."
"So what you're saying is that they're stuck there?" Anne demanded.
"Anne," Reger said warningly. "It wasn't Skyler's fault."
Anne took a deep breath, and Skyler could see the counterargument flickering across her eyes. If the blackcollars hadn't come blasting into town ... "I know," she said at last, her voice suddenly very tired.
"I'm sorry, Skyler."
"I'm sorry, too," Skyler said. "It's never easy to lose comrades."
"But don't forget that these aren't necessarily lost," O'Hara added. "As long as they're alive, there's always hope."
"Which almost makes it worse," Anne said. "If they were dead, there would at least be some closure.
This way ..." She shook her head. "Never mind. The point is that five of them are free. I should be content with that." She got to her feet. "I should also be helping Kanai get them settled. Good night, everyone."
"Good night," Skyler said for all of them.
Anne stepped to the doorway. There she paused, turning to touch eyes with each of them. "And thank you," she said.
Turning again, she left the room, clo
sing the door behind her. "Some people are never satisfied,"
Hawking commented.
"You can add me to that list," Skyler said as he slumped tiredly in his chair. The rescue had worked, pretty much exactly the way he'd planned it. He should be content. Hell, he should be ecstatic.
But he wasn't.
"I wonder how Jensen's spending his evening," O'Hara murmured.
Skyler grimaced. Jensen. One more failure to chalk up to his leadership, except that this failure had the potential to blossom into a full-bore disaster. "We'll find out tomorrow," he said. "Flynn, did you get Trapper off all right?"
"He was fine when he headed out from here," Flynn confirmed. "Though of course he'll probably find Security waiting on his doorstep, who may or may not buy his story about being abducted at knifepoint."
"Maybe we can do something for him after we corral Jensen," Skyler said. Dorfman, Jensen, and now Trapper. The far end of this plan just kept throwing off loose ends.
"Assuming the whole town isn't already locked up in Athena," Flynn murmured.
"If they are, they are," O'Hara said firmly. "Focus on what can be changed, not on what can't." He lifted his eyebrows at Skyler. "Good advice for all of us," he added.
"I never said otherwise," Skyler replied evenly.
"So when are we heading out?" Hawking asked.
"About noon, I think," Skyler said. "That should get us in by midafternoon."
"Cutting it a bit thin, aren't you?" Hawking suggested. "After we get to Shelter Valley we still have to hike to the back door and then walk the rest of the way to the base itself."
"I know," Skyler said. "But Trapper said afternoon is when the traffic that direction is the heaviest."
"And it isn't particularly heavy even then," Flynn said. "We might want to use Trapper's secondary route, the one that meanders around through a few other small towns before getting to Shelter Valley."
"That might throw the bloodhounds off the trail a bit," O'Hara agreed. "But it'll also cost us more time."
"Command decision time, Skyler," Reger said.
Skyler looked across the room at the window, heavily curtained against the possibility of prying eyes.
