Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission

by Timothy Zahn

  "Ungh," Galway grunted in acknowledgment. Making noise wasn't likely to be a problem for at least a few more minutes; his tongue still felt like a long-dead animal.

  Quinn was apparently made of sterner stuff. "Damn them all," the general ground out hoarsely.

  "Damn them—damn that Pittman, especially. Who's that—Major O'Dae? What's the situation, Major?"

  "Not too bad, sir—I think they've outsmarted themselves." The major whispered a quick summary of events both inside and outside the Security building. Galway listened with half an ear, most of his attention on getting his muscles going again after nearly a half hour of paralysis. Still, if the major was reading things correctly, the situation did indeed seem to be under control at the moment.

  A circumstance that struck him as suspiciously odd.

  "...we've taken fifteen injured men downstairs to the infirmary already—mostly head wounds, I gather, from what I could see of the bloodstains. Haven't had a report from down there lately, but most of the casualties apparently had good heartbeats, so my guess is they're doing all right—"

  "Yes, fine," Quinn broke in, swearing under his breath as he gingerly massaged his calf muscles.

  "Never mind the wounded for now. You're sure the blackcollars are in the safe room?"

  "We've been over the entire floor, General," O'Dae assured him. "There's nowhere else they could be."

  "Could they have disguised themselves as Security men and gone down with your litter teams?"

  Galway asked, forcing the words out past his still-wooden tongue.

  "No, sir," O'Dae said, sounding both confident and a little indignant. "No one but the injured have left the floor—we've made damn sure of that."

  "Then perhaps—"

  "And they were injured, all of them," O'Dae added, "unless you're suggesting the blackcollars cracked their own skulls for blood to dab themselves with."

  "You did have medics up here making sure it was real blood, then?" Galway persisted, something in him unwilling to let go of it.

  "I'm sure they did," Quinn cut in before O'Dae could reply. "Where the hell would they get fake blood from, anyway? Give my people a little credit, Galway—they're not stupid. All right.

  Major—how do you intend to blast the bastards out?"

  "Uh... I've got two heavy laser cannon coming up from the emergency bunker, sir," O'Dae said, sounding suddenly doubtful. "Sir... we didn't actually have medics on the scene here—we just loaded the wounded on stretchers and took them down to the infirmary. Maybe we'd better check and make sure—"

  "Make sure about what?" Quinn snarled. "That they weren't blackcollars in disguise? You said you looked at all their faces, didn't you?"

  "Well... yes, sir. But if they could somehow have smuggled in fake blood... couldn't they have had disguise kits, too?"

  "Oh, hell," Galway muttered as an unpleasant tremor twisted his gut. "General... the whole setup for our ambush came from Pittman."

  "Hell!" Quinn barked suddenly into the hush. "Bloody, krijing hell! Major—guard team to the infirmary. Now. And alert the exit guards to watch for a break."

  "Sir—?"

  "Do it, damn you," Quinn snarled. "Don't you see? They set this capture up themselves."

  O'Dae gulped and spoke urgently into his mike, a look of incomprehension on his face.

  He was too late. By the time the guard team reached the infirmary all they found was a handful of wounded Security men and unconscious medics... and from the exit the guards were ominously silent, as well.

  —

  The general alarm came through on the Security van's radio five minutes into their mad drive toward the fence and freedom. "Great," Caine muttered.

  "They had to catch on eventually," Lathe said from behind the wheel. "Frankly, I didn't think we'd get even this much of a head start. I guess the limpet mines Mordecai planted rattled them more than we expected."

  Caine looked at him, wincing in spite of himself at the comsquare's horrible "head wound" and the

  "blood" coating his face. "I suppose I should be grateful that you told at least some of us about this one," he gritted, putting as much sarcasm into the words as he could. "It's an improvement over Argent, anyway."

  Lathe sighed, rubbing ineffectively at the makeup on his face. "I'm sorry, but it had to be done this way."

  "Why? Because I couldn't be trusted to react properly when Pittman betrayed us? What about the rest of you? You ought to have been as angry as I was."

  "Perhaps. But since Pittman was your teammate, you and the others would naturally have been expected to react the most strongly. You, particularly, were the one Galway was watching closest—I don't know whether you noticed that." The comsquare shrugged fractionally. "Besides which, Pittman had to be able to say in complete honesty that you didn't suspect him when he made his phone calls. They were almost certainly analyzing his voiceprint patterns, and any lies would have been picked up on immediately."

  Caine turned away and glowered out the windshield. Once more Lathe had played fast and loose with both the game and his own allies... and once more the fact that logic was on his side didn't help a damn.

  Lathe turned a corner, and a few blocks ahead Caine saw the fence at Athena's perimeter. "I hope you have some way to get through the Security troops they're bound to have at the gate up there," he said tartly. "It'd be a shame to waste a perfectly good double agent getting into a place you can't get out of."

  "I've got a plan," Lathe said evenly.

  "One that takes the lasers up on Green Mountain into account?"

  "If you'll notice," Skyler's voice came from the crowded compartment behind him, "we've been taking a route that gives us minimum exposure to those lasers."

  "Which probably wasn't necessary," Lathe added. "I doubt the lasers can be set to shoot at ground targets inside the fence—too much danger of misfires or enemy mischief. But there was no point in taking chances."

  "What about when we hit the fence proper?" Anne Silcox asked, a noticeable tremor in her voice.

  "We're not going to try and bluff our way past the guards, are we?"

  "Not with the word already out," Lathe assured her. "Actually, I'm rather hoping the lasers will react to an attempt to ram the fence from the inside."

  Caine took a deep breath against the butterflies beginning to congregate in his stomach. "I trust you're bearing in mind that Anne is still wearing all our flexarmor."

  "Against those lasers?" Jensen grunted from the van's rear. "That bandage over her hair will protect her about as much as the flexarmor will. Lathe—we've got company coming. One of the spotters is swinging around in this direction."

  "Has he got us fingered?"

  "I don't think so, no. He's turning pretty casually, as if he's just coming in for a closer look. But if we don't want him to spot the grand exit, we'd better get out fast."

  "Right. Next corner—everyone get ready to climb out."

  The next corner turned out to be a short two blocks from the fence and what could now be seen to be a heavily guarded gate. Skyler herded the others into the relative concealment of an arched doorway in the cross street while Lathe and Hawking worked together at the driver's side of the van. A

  moment later they were finished, and as the two blackcollars jumped clear the vehicle lurched forward and sped off toward the gate.

  "Make yourselves invisible," Lathe murmured as the two blackcollars joined the others under the arch. "And cross your fingers."

  "It's veering off line," Colvin pointed out tensely as the vehicle vanished from sight beyond the buildings across the street from their shelter. "It was starting to shift toward the other lane."

  "A little of that'll be all right," Hawking assured him. "As long as it hits the fence somewh—yowp!

  There goes the spotter."

  It was, Caine thought, the understatement of the evening. The aircraft screamed past them at streetlight level, chasing after the empty van like a mad Valkyrie.

  "Everyone
across the street—up against the building over there," Lathe snapped.

  They'd barely reached the other side when there was a crash of metal on metal from around the corner as the van plowed into the fence—

  And without warning the entire landscape lit up like the inside of a sun and there was a thunderous explosion.

  Followed immediately by darkness and unearthly silence. Cautiously, Lathe took a look around the corner. "Come on, everyone," he said, and disappeared around the building at a dead run.

  Ahead, the scene by the fence was stomach-churning impressive. Torn metal lay scattered everywhere, some of the pieces barely recognizable as being from the van or the spotter, others too distorted for even that much identification. At least five meters of the fence were gone or crumpled; the concrete around the crash site—what of it was visible—was blackened and blistered. Of the guards that had been standing at the gate there was no sign at all.

  "What happened?" gasped Anne Silcox, running beside Caine.

  "Looks like Lathe was right," he told her. "The van must have triggered the defense lasers when it rammed the fence. I guess the spotter was too close and got caught in the blast—either that or the laser got it directly."

  "My God." She shook her head, as if not believing it.

  "I'm sure Torch has done things equally messy," Lathe commented from her other side. Caine looked across at him, struck by the intensity in his voice. "It's part of any war, guerrilla or otherwise... and if you're really determined to be a part of it, you'd better get used to this sort of thing."

  She glanced at him, then turned silently away. Caine caught Lathe's eye, nodded at the fence. "You have some special magic to keep the lasers from frying us?"

  "Shouldn't need any magic," the comsquare said. "I doubt the things are set for antipersonnel applications. Too wasteful, not to mention dangerous—all the more so now with all the sensors in the area having been fried. The only real question is whether or not we'll make it to the cars waiting in the next block before Quinn recovers enough to send out more troops."

  Apparently Quinn was indeed adequately shocked; or perhaps he believed the escapees had perished in the blast. Whatever the reason, the cars were well away from Athena and driving sedately north before fresh spotters belatedly appeared in the night sky.

  Chapter 29

  The spotters were still buzzing around the city—mostly far to the south of their quarry—when Lathe pulled the car into an alley and shut off the lights. "What're we doing here?" Caine asked, his stomach tensing again. He'd had enough surprises for one night.

  "I need to make a quick phone call," the comsquare replied as the second and third cars pulled up behind them. "Ms. Silcox, I'd like you to accompany me. Pittman, come up here and get behind the wheel, just in case a fast exit is required. Caine, you stay with him; I'll have the rest of them spread out in loose shield formation."

  "It might help if we knew exactly what kind of trouble you were expecting to run into here," Caine told the comsquare in a low voice as the others began clearing out of the van.

  "No trouble anticipated," Lathe assured him. "Just a precautionary measure. Really."

  "Right," Caine muttered under his breath. He and Silcox got out as Pittman went around and climbed into the vacated driver's seat. Caine listened as the footsteps faded into the night... and for the first time since their capture he was alone with Pittman.

  For a long moment neither man moved or spoke. Then Pittman took a deep breath. "Whatever you're going to say to me, I wish you'd go ahead and get it over with."

  "All right," Caine said. His eyes flicked over the younger man's face, noting the tension lines there—lines he'd never really paid attention to before. "You've been playing this game for quite a while, I understand. Why?"

  "You mean how did the Ryqril force me to—?"

  "No, I mean why did you go to Lathe instead of simply playing along with them?"

  Pittman turned to face him, a vaguely bewildered look on his face. "What the hell else was I supposed to do? Betray all of you for real?"

  "Why not? Whatever they had on you must have been a real sun-cruncher for them to trust you so fully." Caine frowned, a sudden thought striking him. "Unless they thought they'd gotten you loyaltyconditioned?"

  Pittman snorted. "Galway's not stupid enough to try something that obvious. It takes fifteen days to condition someone that thoroughly, and if they'd tried keeping me out of circulation that long they might just as well have phoned Lathe and announced their intentions."

  Caine nodded. He knew all that, of course, but for a moment he'd dared to hope Pittman might have stumbled on a way to break the Ryqril's loyalty-conditioning technique. "Then back to question one: why didn't you simply play on Galway's side?"

  Pittman dropped his eyes, turned back to face the windshield. "Because I couldn't," he said simply.

  "You're my friends; my comrades-in-arms, if you want to get sentimental about it. I couldn't betray you, no matter what it cost."

  He swallowed, and Caine saw his jaw muscles tighten momentarily. "What is it going to cost?" he asked quietly.

  "With luck... nothing. At least, that's what Lathe's promised me."

  "And you trust him to come through?"

  Pittman turned back to face Caine, a wry smile on his lips. "Why not? You do."

  Caine snorted. "That's hardly an apt comparison. I never get to choose whether to trust him or not."

  "Sure you do. You don't have to put up with all of his high-handed finagling—not really. You could go to him right now, tell him he's pulled one too many fast ones at your expense and that you're taking off. But you're not going to, and we both know it. Why not?"

  "Because he's the best tactician I've ever known, I suppose," Caine said, almost grudgingly.

  "Because—hell, I don't know why."

  "In other words, because you trust him to get the job done right, with the least hazard to your own skin... and you're smart enough to prefer getting bruises on your pride to watching your teammates die around you."

  Pittman broke off abruptly. Caine studied his face for a long moment, then snorted. "Yeah, I guess you're right. We both trust him... and we both hate it."

  Pittman shrugged fractionally. "It beats getting killed with dignity. I guess. The hell with it." He nodded toward the alley mouth. "Who do you suppose he's calling? Quinn?"

  "I sure hope not. This town's going to heat up enough as it is without him waving red gloves under someone's nose."

  "Yeah. Well... maybe he's just calling Reger. Someone safe, anyway. That would be a change."

  "It would be nice," Caine agreed heavily. "But somehow, I doubt it."

  —

  Kanai had just finished his dinner, and was wondering without any real enthusiasm what he should do for the rest of the evening, when the phone twittered.

  He paused, turning to look at it, his hand falling to his shuriken pouch. There were perhaps a dozen people who might be calling him, most of them mad at him, none of them anyone he really wanted to talk to. Glaring at the phone, he willed it to shut up.

  But the person on the other end was persistent... and Kanai had been the blackcollars' contact man too long to easily ignore a phone call. With a sigh, he picked up the handset. "Yes?"

  "Kanai?"

  The blackcollar squeezed the handset with sudden pressure. "Lathe?"

  "Right. Your line being tapped?"

  "Certainly not," Kanai answered, automatically giving the old blackcollar code response for yes.

  "Okay. I want to talk to Bernhard—let him know how things went tonight. Can you arrange that?"

  "Probably," Kanai said cautiously. How things went tonight? A smokescreen for Security's benefit, or was Bernhard working some sort of game behind his back? "When do you want to talk to him?" he asked Lathe, forcing his voice to remain casual.

  "There's a street six blocks north of last night's popbox—we'll be at a house two blocks west of that intersection. Got that?"

&
nbsp; "I think so." Popbox—that had to be the place they'd popped up out of Anne Silcox's tunnel.

  Visualizing a map of Denver... "Yes, I know where it is. You want me to bring Bernhard there tonight?"

  "Affirmative. Alone, of course."

  "Of course." Translation: no Security tails. Possible, but only if he worked fast. "We'll be there shortly."

  "Good. Oh, and you might tell Bernhard that Anne Silcox will also be here."

  "Right," Kanai said, stomach tightening with sudden uncertainty.

  The line went dead, and for a couple of heartbeats Kanai stared unseeing at the instrument. Anne Silcox? But that was impossible—less than twenty-four hours ago Bernhard had indicated he would be turning her over to Quinn.

  "Damn," Kanai hissed between his teeth. Something strange was happening here, and whatever it was, he already didn't like it. Gathering up his gear, he grabbed a coat and slipped out the door.

  —

  The Security man at the monitor bank shrugged helplessly. "I'm sorry, Prefect Galway, but there's nothing more I can tell you. There were four high-power comm-frequency laser pulses in each of these three directions, each pulse consisting of the single word 'Christmas.' We've got the source pinpointed to an area a short way out into the mountains, but until and unless General Quinn releases the spotters from search duty over Denver, there's nothing I can do about looking for it."

  Galway clenched his jaw with frustration. "And if the damn thing is mobile, it could be packed up and back in someone's garage before we find it."

  "I'm afraid that's about right," the officer agreed.

  "Damn." Galway stared at the star images displayed on the monitors, his eyes shifting among the three superimposed circles. At the end of one of those vectors was the mysterious spacecraft that had been skulking out there ever since Lathe's team had landed on Earth. Clearly, it was the intended recipient for the unauthorized message; just as clearly, at least to Galway's thinking, the message itself had come from Lathe. A prearranged signal to action... but action of what sort? One way or another, it'll all be over soon, Lathe had said, referring to the consequences of Pittman's actions.