Blackcollar: The Blackcollar

by Timothy Zahn

  "We're way behind their shock fronts, too," Kwon mused. "Thirty years late, but we could follow the original script and hit their materiel shipments."

  "Hmm. The Chryselli." Dhonau looked thoughtful. "What does anybody know about them?"

  There was a short silence. "The TDE sent a mission to talk with them a couple of years into the war," Lathe offered at last. "General Lepkowski was in charge of it, before he took over the war theater here. I had a brother aboard his ship." He said this last with complete confidence, only Dodds knew it wasn't true, and Lathe could trust him to control his face.

  "What are they like?" Novak asked.

  "Short, dumpy things—like giant hairballs on legs, Paul described them. Warm-blooded, oxygen-breathers—I forget the rest. Anyway, Lepkowski was supposed to talk them into coming into the war on our side."

  "Obviously, he failed," O'Hara said dryly.

  "Yes, but not because they didn't see the danger. They just weren't ready for war yet and figured they would do better to build up their defenses while the Ryqril were busy stomping us."

  "Helpful types."

  Lathe shrugged. "You can hardly blame them. Even now, after forty years' head start, they're barely holding their own against the Ryqril, if news reports are to be believed."

  "If things really are balanced out there, five Novas would be a force worth taking seriously," Kwon commented.

  "Agreed," Dhonau said. "Alternatively, if we decide the Chryselli aren't worth helping directly, we could pull the ships into Earth orbit, say, blast as much Ryqril hardware as possible, and try to precipitate a revolt. Just having the ability to break the isolation they've put our worlds into would be a big help."

  "Just remember that they'll have hunters on our tail from day one," Chelsey Jensen cautioned, running his fingers through his mop of gray-blond hair. "So don't get any ideas about massed assaults—five Novas together would leave a wake-trail six parsecs long."

  "That's no problem," Skyler said, "unless you're partial to big space battles. Even skulking around individually the ships would be well worth having. I say we go with it."

  The discussion trailed off into silence. "Other comments?" Dhonau said. "No? All right, then, who's in favor of taking the mission?"

  Technically, Lathe knew, the vote was unnecessary. If he and Dhonau, the two comsquares, agreed on a course of action, the others were duty-bound to obey their orders. Nonetheless, he was pleased to see the vote was unanimous. Pleased, but not surprised. They'd all been waiting for something like this for a long time.

  Dhonau nodded to Vale and Haven, who went into the next room and brought Caine in. Lathe watched the youth's face carefully. It was under good control, letting only a hint of his tension show through. Dhonau waited until he was seated before speaking.

  "We've talked things over, Caine, and have decided to give you whatever help we can."

  "Great. Thank you very much." Caine leaned forward in his chair. "Then if you can just get me in touch with the underground here, I'll—"

  "Whoa! Hold on!" Dhonau held out a wrinkled hand. "There isn't any underground on Plinry. There's just us."

  Caine's jaw dropped fractionally. "No underground? But that's impossible. I mean, your people are discontented, especially the youth. Don't they hate the Ryqril enough to fight back?"

  "Probably. But resistance movements form around natural spark points. If those points don't make any moves, the populace usually won't, either." Dhonau glanced around the room. "I'm afraid that's what's happened here. Our one effort to hold martial arts classes was too little too late, and nothing came of it."

  "I see." Caine's voice was coldly polite. "May I ask how you intended to help me, then?"

  "I thought we'd ask the collies to let us go in to study our old military records. Legally, we're allowed to do that."

  Caine shook his head. "That hasn't got a chance," he said harshly. "Galway knows we've been together today. He'd know you were asking that on my behalf, and he'd wonder why. And the minute he gets suspicious it's all over."

  Dhonau scratched an ear. "Well... I wasn't sure myself it would work. But don't worry—we've got a few more days to figure out something. Look, why don't you and Mordecai go on back to Capstone now, instead of waiting till later. I've had your bag packed, so you can leave right away. We'll kick ideas around another day or two out here. Let's see... why don't you plan to meet Skyler at that bar three days from today. Say, two-thirty?"

  Caine hesitated, then shrugged and nodded heavily. "All right." He stood up and glanced around the room, and it seemed to Lathe that pity was the predominant emotion in his half smile. "Whatever happens, I appreciate your help."

  Mordecai rose from his place on the floor and went forward. Caine nodded again and the two of them left the room.

  "I think we've disillusioned the poor boy for life," O'Hara murmured.

  "He'll get over it," Dhonau said grimly. "If the Ryqril are on to him we'll have to hit while they're not expecting it. We move tonight—full alert; modified plan Delta."

  Lathe sat up a bit straighter, muscles tightening briefly before he consciously relaxed them. Around the room the others were reacting similarly, with amazing results. Years seemed to fall from their faces; their eyes were locked on Dhonau in anticipation. Lathe had the sudden mental image of a jungle cat the instant before its attack.

  "Vale, you'll go to Capstone immediately and play Paul Revere." Dhonau's voice had taken on a whiplash texture; no longer a decrepit old man, but a blackcollar comsquare giving orders. "O'Hara, you're Bait leader; Skyler, you're Liberator; Kwon, Haven, and Novak, you're handling Assault. I'll take Swatter duty myself. Lathe, you'll go into the Hub with Caine. Questions? Jump-off's in—" he consulted his watch—"four hours, at twenty-five hundred exactly. Collect your teams and get moving."

  Dodds was standing by the window of his room when Lathe slid silently through the door and closed it behind him. "I rather expected you to show up," Dodds said, without turning.

  "I'm not surprised. You probably also know what I'm about to ask you to do."

  Dodds glanced once at the humming bug stomper and then turned to face Lathe. "You can explain it anyway, if you'd like."

  Lathe did so. "Well?"

  Dodds smiled crookedly. "If I refuse, who else would you get? Of course I'll go."

  "Good. Be sure to hang back until all the shooting's stopped. I'll set you up in a non-combat position with Haven—spotter or something. Can you fly a Corsair?"

  "Yes. But I'll need to know the system before I lift."

  "Don't worry about it," Lathe assured him, stroking his dragonhead ring gently. "You'll have it."

  CHAPTER 6

  Closing the hotel door behind him, Caine tossed his bag the length of the room to land on the bed. All the anger, frustration, and—yes, admit it—the contempt had drained out of him on the ride back to Capstone. Mordecai had been no more talkative than he had been earlier in the day, and if he was friendlier it would have taken a micrometer to measure it. Maybe that had been for the benefit of hidden microphones, but Caine doubted it. The smaller man just didn't like him. In all fairness, Caine couldn't blame him. Dhonau's rash pledge of cooperation, inefficacious though it was, would still get the blackcollars in trouble if Galway found out about it. If, hell—when.

  Sighing, Caine went to the bed and began to unpack his bag. Dusk was falling outside; there wasn't much else he could do today except try to think up a new approach. Probably a waste of—

  The thought coasted to a halt, and he stared down at the clothes he had dumped onto the bed.

  His pills were missing.

  "Damn," he muttered, searching in vain through folds and sleeves. How had he forgotten—? Then he remembered: the blackcollars had packed for him. Swallowing another curse, he went over to the phone and dialed for the directory.

  Mordecai, it turned out, was one of the thirty percent of non-government Capstonians who had private phones. The blackcollar answered on the sixth rin
g. "Yes?" he said, and his face immediately went neutral. "Oh. What is it, Rienzi?"

  Caine explained the problem, feeling obscurely gallant for not mentioning whose fault it was. "I can't find any phone listed for the lodge. Do you know any way to get in touch with them?"

  "Yeah—by car or by foot." Mordecai exhaled noisily.

  "Meet me at the east gate in thirty minutes; I'll drive you back up there."

  "No, that's all right," Caine said hastily. "Look, I can probably get a refill in town somewhere—"

  "It's no trouble. Wouldn't want you put out on our account. East gate, thirty minutes." The screen blanked.

  Scowling, Caine scooped up his coat and left.

  The drive into the mountains was quiet agony. Mordecai never actually used the word "stupid," but Caine knew he was thinking it. It was a relief when they finally pulled up at the lodge.

  Lights were blazing through the curtains from the main hall, and as they walked to the door Caine could hear loud, slightly raucous voices. The homemade liquor was flowing freely tonight.

  Reaching for the door handle, Mordecai turned to Caine and put a forefinger to his lips. Frowning, Caine nodded. Mordecai pushed open the door and they stepped into the babble of voices.

  The room was deserted.

  Caine looked at Mordecai, swallowing his questions, to find the blackcollar studying his face. Whatever he saw seemed satisfactory, and he nodded to the long table they'd eaten dinner at. Moving silently to its edge, Caine glanced over its top and then squatted and peered at its underside. Five cassette players were fastened there, playing their hearts out.

  He stood up. From a door across the room Mordecai beckoned. Caine joined him, and the voices faded away as the blackcollar led them through a maze of darkened halls and down long stairways. They were, Caine judged, a good fifty meters underground when they reached a dim passage. At the far end, lit by two small lights, was a double door.

  "Welcome back," a voice behind them said suddenly. Instantly, Caine spun around, arms snapping into a karate defense stance as he tried to pierce the gloom.

  The voice chuckled. "Nice reflexes," it said, and a big, black-clad figure slid noiselessly from a darker alcove into the dim light. Pushing back his non-reflective goggles with one gloved hand, Skyler grinned at Caine and shifted his attention to Mordecai.

  "Good." Mordecai nodded toward the double door. "Let's go, Caine."

  They walked through into a large, well-lit room... and Caine stopped short in astonishment. The room was full of blackcollars! Blinking as his pupils adjusted to the light, Caine gave the room a fast scan. No mistake—there were at least a hundred men, maybe more, all dressed in tight-fitting black outfits like Skyler's. Most were checking their equipment or carrying boxes to the far end of the room, where two large monorail cars waited; others were in the final stages of dressing. Caine was still staring when someone stepped to his side. "Sorry we had to pull that stunt with your medicine to get you back here on the sly. But the collies have ears everywhere."

  Caine turned to face him, noting in passing that Mordecai had vanished. He almost didn't recognize the newcomer, even though he wasn't yet wearing headgear and goggles. "Lathe?" he asked in disbelief.

  Lathe smiled wryly. "So I'm told."

  Caine could hardly believe the change in the man. His beard had been trimmed down to a neat fringe; it and his hair had been dyed back to their original dark brown. Even more striking, though, was the new determination in his face. For the first time Caine could see past the lined skin to the blackcollar spirit underneath. An involuntary shiver went down his back. "You've changed since this afternoon," he managed. "About fifteen years' worth."

  Lathe smiled again, his eyes not leaving Caine's face. "Most of those years were superficial. Idunine in small doses does wonders for muscle and bone."

  "So you did get Idunine. I hoped you had, but I had doubts..."

  "My senility?"

  Caine nodded. "It was a good act." He looked around the room. "All of it was. I can't believe you managed to fool everyone for so long."

  "Thirty years." Lathe glanced around, then turned back, all business again. "Come over here and get suited. We've got a flexarmor outfit that should fit you."

  He led the way toward a bank of lockers. "Where are we?" Caine asked as they passed a humming bug stomper, one of five or six he could see spaced around the room.

  "The old tube station under Hamner Lodge," Lathe told him. "Been unused since the end of the war. We started uncaching our equipment and moving it here about five years ago, after the collies got tired of dogging our every move. The track between here and Capstone is still good, and we've put our own power supplies into those two monorail cars. Here we are."

  They had stopped before an open locker, and on Lathe's order Caine began to strip. "I hope that stuffs all it's cracked up to be," he commented, eyeing Lathe's own flexarmor dubiously.

  "It is," Lathe assured him as Caine put on a soft one-piece suit of underwear. "It'll stop most non-explosive handgun projectiles, including some that'll throw you a meter backward from the impact alone. It goes rigid under that kind of punch, by the way, spreading the impact around. A clean hit with an antiarmor laser will get through, but the usual antipersonnel settings will just take off the top layer."

  "So the second shot gets through?"

  "The average gunner only gets one," Lathe said calmly.

  Caine swallowed. "Oh."

  "Understand, though, that this isn't medieval plate armor," the other continued. "For hand-to-hand combat you're on your own. Punches and kicks are too slow to make it go rigid."

  Great. "Thanks for the warning."

  Lathe apparently heard something in his tone. "You should consider yourself lucky we even had an outfit you could wear," he said, a bit tartly. "A lot of the boys going into combat tonight won't have anything but plain black cloth and maybe a flexarmor vest."

  "How come?"

  "Because most of the kids are just that: kids. We recruited them during martial arts classes a few years back—right under Galway's nose, as a matter of fact. They've been training with us ever since."

  There was something in the old blackcollar's voice that made Caine pause in the act of fastening on a short-sleeved bodysuit. "It was pretty rough, wasn't it?" he asked. "All the ridicule and disrespect... I don't think I could've taken it."

  "A lot of us couldn't," Lathe muttered. "That's what kept the guerrilla war going so long. They wouldn't give up the fighting."

  "Whereas you knew when to quit?"

  For a second Caine thought he'd overstepped a fine line. But the anger only flickered across Lathe's face without staying there. "We didn't give in, we just changed tactics. Those of us who could." He made a sound that was half sigh, half snort. "Let me tell you a story.

  "About seven hundred years ago, back in Old Japan on Earth, there was a lord named Kira who tricked an enemy into shaming himself. The enemy, Asano, committed suicide, the customary response for shame in that culture. Asano's forty-seven samurai warriors were supposed to follow suit, but instead they disbanded and dropped out of polite society. They lost their wives, families, and friends, and were treated with contempt by everyone. Naturally, Kira decided they were harmless.

  "And then, one winter morning, all forty-seven suddenly appeared at Kira's palace. They overpowered the guards, captured Kira and killed him. Only then did they fulfill their duty and commit suicide themselves."

  He fell silent. Caine, not knowing what to say, concentrated on his dressing. Aside from its exotic material, the suit was standard commando design, with built-in knife sheaths on forearms and calves and square pouches on the front of each thigh and behind the belt buckle. All were empty, a fact he found a bit curious. "How does it feel?" Lathe asked.

  Caine took a few steps and tried a series of karate punches and kicks. The flexarmor was remarkably supple. "Feels fine," he reported.

  "Good. Grab the gloves, battle-hood, goggles, and also the coat
and pants you wore here, and we'll get going."

  "What about weapons?"

  "You don't get any," Lathe told him, cutting off his protests with a raised hand. "I know, I know, you're combat trained to the hilt and can use any weapon this side of Chaparral. But to us, you're a dangerous amateur who'd do more damage to himself with our kind of weaponry than to the enemy."

  Caine felt a flash of anger. "Look, Lathe—"

  "No, you look." Lathe jumped back and from a long sheath on his hip withdrew two thirty-centimeter-long wooden sticks connected at one end by a few centimeters of black plastic chain. Gripping one stick, Lathe proceeded to whirl the other around his head and body in a bewildering pattern, occasionally snapping the sticks so that one whipped out and back in a barely visible blur. Caine swallowed—he'd never before seen a nunchaku handled with such lethal skill. "Okay, I'm convinced—for close-range work. But for long-range you'll need guns, and I hold a marksman rating."

  Lathe brought the sticks together and slid them back into their sheath. "Jensen!" he called across the room. "Give me a target!"

  A blond-haired man nodded and broke a piece of plastic board off the crate he'd just opened. Glancing around, he tossed it toward a relatively empty section of floor.

  His attention on the board, Caine saw only a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye—but there was no missing the sharp thwok as the board jumped in midair like a scorched bat. Jensen retrieved the board and spun it in a lazy arc back to Lathe. "We seldom use guns," the comsquare said quietly, extracting the deadly looking black throwing star from the plastic and slipping it back into one of his thigh pouches. "They're too easy to track."

  Caine got his tongue working. "All right. I'm convinced."

  "Good. Then there's just one other thing I want to say." He turned and locked eyes with Caine. "I still don't know whether you're really who you claim to be or a spy sent to betray us... but if you do, I swear your friends won't be able to stop me from killing you. Understand?"

  Caine forced himself to return Lathe's gaze. "Yes. And I won't betray you."