The Blackcollar Series

by Timothy Zahn

  And suddenly, the lights all went out.

  Lowering the laser, Jensen looked around him. A solid twenty-or thirty-block region had been blacked out, and the nearest light was a good two blocks away. Not perfect, but there were ways of setting up power substations that wouldn’t have let him get even this much.

  “Did you do that?” Waldemar whispered as Jensen rejoined him.

  “Yes. Is the rope ready?”

  The Argentian pressed it into his hands, and Jensen confirmed by touch that the knot was properly done. “Good. When I give the word toss one of those grenades off the roof.”

  Rising to a crouch, Jensen took the loop in one hand, making sure the rope’s other end was securely held under one foot. His eyes were adjusting to the faint wash of light from elsewhere in the city, and he’d mentally fixed his target’s location before shooting out the lights, anyway. Twirling the loop, he aimed…. “Now!” he stage-whispered to Waldemar, and threw the rope.

  Jensen had hated lasso practice back in his trainee days. It had been taught by plainsriders from Hedgehog, and being inferior in anything to a Hoggy had been particularly galling. But despite that—or perhaps because of it—he’d become the best roper in his unit; and as Waldemar’s grenade flashed, momentarily knocking out all nearby light-amps, he saw his loop land neatly over the sturdy-looking chimney vent sticking up from the building across the street.

  “Okay,” he whispered, pulling in the slack, “we’ve got a bridge down to that four-floor place. I’ll tie this end down and well get going.” From his pack he produced a wristband attached to a small pulley. “Put this on your left wrist, pulley side up,” he ordered, and headed back to the stairway shed with the coil of rope.

  No sounds were audible from either stairway as Jensen swiftly lashed the rope to a vertical support at one of the main stairwell’s inner corners. That was ominous; either the Radix people were putting up a better fight than Security had expected or else something special was being planned for those on the roof. Tightening the rope, he gave the sky a quick scan and hurried back to the parapet.

  Waldemar was kneeling tensely by the low wall when Jensen returned. “Any reaction from below?” the blackcollar asked as he checked the wristband and locked the pulley over the line.

  Waldemar’s silhouette shook its head. “But they’ve got to have seen the rope,” he hissed.

  “Not necessarily.” Jensen relieved him of the laser and picked up a grenade; arming the latter. “It’s thin and dark against a black sky, and the grenade you threw at the same time should have temporarily blinded them.” Rising halfway to his feet, he hurled his grenade back over the opposite side of the roof. “To keep them guessing,” he explained as the blast echoed dully. “Slide up here onto the parapet and get ready.”

  Waldemar obeyed. Slinging his pack back on, Jensen picked up the last two grenades and lofted them into the street below. The laser went back into his right hand as he gripped the strap joining the wristband to the pulley with his left…and as the grenades flashed he leaped, pulling both men off the roof. Swaying like a twin-bob pendulum gone berserk, they slid down the rope.

  Four seconds, Jensen estimated the trip would take; four dangerous, make-or-break seconds. Fighting the swinging motion by pure reflex, he held the laser ready, waiting tautly for the blast of darts that would show they’d been spotted. But no such attack came…and then they were over the roof, dragging their feet to kill their speed. Waldemar was new to the technique and promptly flipped over so that he was traveling backwards, bending double as the rope dipped toward the roof. Jensen let go while he still had his balance, braking to a halt in a half dozen quick steps. The gamble had paid off; and if he could now retrieve enough of his rope to try it again on the next building over, they might get out of this yet. Digging out a shuriken, he turned back toward the Radix building and took aim.

  And from behind him came a flash of laser light, stabbing past his arm to slice the rope a bare meter away. Simultaneously, there were a handful of flat cracks, and the roof erupted in thick white smoke.

  There was no time to curse, much as Jensen felt like doing so. Twisting to his right, he dropped the laser and snatched out his gas filter, jamming it tightly over his nose and mouth. They’d been waiting for him, obviously, probably out of sight behind the building’s stairway shed. A trap only a blackcollar was likely to wander into—and like a professionally trained idiot, he’d done just that.

  Ahead of him another laser flashed, lighting up the smoke like the inside of a light tube. Jensen hurled the shuriken he was holding, heard a metallic clank as it ricocheted. Dropping into a crouch, he made himself as inconspicuous as possible and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do.

  Obviously, they still had some hope of taking him alive—otherwise they would have shot him down as he dangled helplessly from the rope. And that might prove to be a bigger mistake than they knew, because by laying down a sleep-fog they had effectively blinded everyone on the roof. Even infrareds and light-amps would be of limited use, especially if they kept overloading their scanners with reflected laser fire. If he could just figure out a way to use that to his advantage.

  The soft hum of a flyer interrupted his thoughts. Looking up, he could make out just a hint of blue-violet grav light approaching from the west. Coming in very low….

  There were times when stupid chances were the only ones available. Standing upright again, Jensen ran for the stairway shed.

  His movement didn’t go unnoticed. Before he had taken two steps three lasers had opened fire, two of the beams brushing his chest and arm. But here again the thick fog worked in his favor, scattering away much of the light and leaving something his flexarmor could handle without much trouble. For an instant the heat of the beams burned a path of clear air, and Jensen caught a glimpse of bulky helmets and armor. Doubling his speed, he kept moving, trying to take advantage of his attackers’ momentary blindness.

  It was a short reprieve. Within a second or two the smoke again exploded with light as laser fire crisscrossed his chest. Gritting his teeth, Jensen twisted aside, hoping he was still going the right direction. Above, the flyer’s hum was getting louder.

  He almost missed the shed completely, his outstretched hand brushing it as he ran past. Skidding to a halt, he felt around, located the door. It was locked.

  Behind him came the faint sound of something moving swiftly toward his head. Spinning around, he threw his left arm upward in a block and countered with a kick to his attacker’s midsection. The other went down with a crash; and, as heavy footsteps converged on him, Jensen snatched out his nunchaku. Blinking sweat from his eyes, more acutely conscious of his blindness than ever, he shrugged off his pack and began swinging.

  The battle was short but furious. Jensen caught at least two of the attackers with what were probably disabling blows, despite their armor, and took nothing worse than a few bruises in return. Swinging his nunchaku in a wide arc to keep any others at bay, he stepped back to the stairwell door and snapped a kick at the lock.

  The panel shattered, and behind Jensen pandemonium suddenly erupted. At least five laser beams caught him squarely in the back, feeling like a giant welding torch beneath the flexarmor. Jensen gasped…but his body was already moving, his legs bending and straightening convulsively, his hands finding purchase on the edge of the shed roof, his arms pulling him up and over to sprawl atop the structure as the lasers continued to blast at the doorway below.

  For a moment he lay on his side on the shed roof, breathing as hard as he could through the gas filter and waiting for the pain in his back to ease. He had only seconds before his dazzled opponents discovered he had not, in fact, gone into the stairway and reached the obvious conclusion. Pushing himself up into a crouch, he looked upward. The flyer’s gravs were more visible now, and Jensen was able to make out the craft’s landing skids and lower fuselage. It was drifting slowly toward him, and for the first time he noticed a quiet spraying sound. His nunchaku
was still in his right hand; shifting his grip, he took one of the sticks in each hand, the chain stretched taut between them. Distances were impossible to judge accurately in the fog, and the extra twenty centimeters of reach the nunchaku provided might be crucial. Bracing himself, Jensen watched the light move closer. A few more seconds—

  Abruptly, the flyer twitched. Simultaneously, two laser beams shot at Jensen from below. He’d been spotted.

  The blackcollar didn’t hesitate, but jumped upward with all his strength, hoping fervently the flyer was still where it had been when the scattered laser light cut it off from his view. For a long moment he floated in glowing mist…then, abruptly, he was above the fog, and hovering squarely above him was the flyer. Almost out of reach…and at the top of his arc Jensen’s arms whipped up, catching the flyer’s left landing skid with the nunchaku chain.

  For a second he dangled there, taking stock of the situation. The flyer was like the ones used as spotters by the collies on Plinry; the underside loading hatch and one of the side doors would be accessible from his skid. Behind the hatch a wide nozzle was directing a rain of heavy-looking droplets to the roof below. An adhesive spray, probably, designed to immobilize all combatants. Twisting up, the blackcollar hooked his legs around the skid, and a moment later was crouching under the boat’s left-side door. The crew was undoubtedly aware of his presence, and Jensen had to move fast before they figured out what to do about it. Reaching up, he got a firm grip on the recessed door handle, and with all the speed and strength he could muster began smashing his nunchaku into the window at the door’s right.

  Boats of this size had never been meant for heavy combat, and their windows weren’t designed to take that sort of punishment. His third blow sent hairline cracks through the thick plastic, and his seventh smashed it completely. Standing upright on the skid, his left hand still on the outer handle, he reached in through the broken window and groped for the lock mechanism.

  Abruptly, the craft bucked under his feet, twisting and bouncing as the pilot finally reacted. But the maneuver was just a little too late. Jensen had a solid grip now, and all the bouncing would do would be to keep the boat’s crew from interfering with him. The boat twisted right, then left as he found the inside handle, strained to release it; and then, as the boat dipped sideways and his feet slid off to dangle in midair, he popped the catch. The door flew open, and as the boat leveled off again the blackcollar swung himself inside.

  They were on him instantly—three of them, unarmored, apparently trying to overwhelm him by sheer numbers. Under normal circumstances an easy fight—but Jensen was tired and hurt, and it took ten or fifteen seconds to beat them into unconsciousness. Ten or fifteen seconds too long…for as he turned toward the pilot, he saw the wild, white eyes staring at him out of a face of sheer terror. And beyond the pilot the distant city lights tilted crazily in the windscreen.…

  They hit the side of the building with a cacophony of grinding metal and a shock that sent Jensen hurtling through space toward the broken nose of the boat. He never felt the impact of his landing.

  A hundred kilometers south of Calarand, the storm had broken with full force. Lightning flashed almost continuously across the black sky, accompanied by solid sheets of rain and hail that ranged from droplet-size to as big as a fist. None of the latter had hit Kwon yet, but he knew it would just be a matter of time.

  Sprawled on his stomach at Kwon’s feet, Hawking gave no indication he was even aware of the storm. His face glued to the telescope in front of him, his hand resting lightly on its focusing knob, he hadn’t moved for at least ten minutes, ignoring completely the water that was undoubtedly pouring in under his poncho. Kwon admired the other’s calmness under such rotten conditions; though he himself was perfectly willing to die for his comrades, some of these preliminaries drove him crazy.

  “It’s averaging about two meters too far north,” Hawking’s voice came faintly between thunderclaps.

  Peering into the lightning-wracked sky, Kwon located the tiny dot fluttering at the other end of his kilometer-long molecular filament. Directly below the kite the top of Cerbe Prison was visible, the rest of it hidden behind an intervening hill. That the prison staff was unaware of the intruder overhead was practically a given; with no metal in either the kite or the device dangling from it, the prison’s radar would show virtually nothing, and the rain and hail effectively neutralized sonic and pulsed-laser sensors. A good thing, too, because this could take a while….Experimentally, Kwon took a step to his right and let half a meter of filament run from his reel. The wind at ground level was generally blowing due east, but the kite had found a layer of air with a slight northern component mixed in. The random thunderstorm-sized gusts didn’t help, either. “How’s that?” he asked Hawking.

  “Whatever you just did, reverse it,” the other answered. “It’s going farther north.”

  “Right.” Blowing a drop of water from the end of his nose, Kwon touched the proper control on his reel and brought a meter of filament back in. He was just preparing to move back to his left when a snapped command stopped him in mid-step.

  “Hold it! You’re right on target!”

  Kwon froze, carefully bringing his weight back onto both feet. “All right,” Hawking murmured, “we’re almost there. It’s swinging right over the turret. Countdown: three…two…one…drop!”

  And Kwon touched the release, letting the spool spin freely on its nearly frictionless bearings. Deprived suddenly of the line’s tension, the kite should fall pretty nearly straight down—

  “Bull’s-eye!” Hawking crowed. “Okay; reel in slowly.”

  Kwon eased off on the release, letting the wind give the kite some lift again. If Hawking’s gadget had hit the prison roof solidly enough, the four catches on its underside should have released, freeing it from the kite. “Kite’s rising,” he informed Hawking, watching the distant dot carefully.

  “Beautiful.” Hawking backed away from his telescope and scrambled to his feet. “Take a look; I’ll bring in the kite.”

  Handing over the reel, Kwon gingerly got down in the muddy grass and eased up to the eyepiece. Dead center in the field of view was a hemispherical knob sticking up from the prison’s main building—the comm laser turret for Cerbe’s secure link to the outside world. Now, sitting directly over it, was another roughly hemispherical shape, this one wispy and insubstantial in the lightning flashes. Its bubblelike appearance was not illusion; the device consisted solely of a thousand hair-thin optical fibers arranged with their inner ends pointing radially toward and away from the turret and their outer ends gathered into a horizontal bundle at the base. “This thing really going to work?” he asked, looking up just in time to catch a large drop in his eye.

  “Sure.” Hawking was reeling in the filament at about half speed and studying the hills to their right. “Comm lasers always have wide apertures, to minimize dispersion over long distances. No matter what direction they point it, some of the fibers will intercept a little of the beam and funnel it to our receiver—ditto for incoming beams. Absolutely trivial and nearly undetectable.”

  “Unless they spot the receiver.”

  “They won’t.” Shifting his grip on the reel, Hawking pointed to the right. “The pirated beam should hit somewhere on one of those two hills. Once the receiver’s in place, we can put the actual listening post ten klicks away if we need to.”

  “If you say so.” Kwon got to his feet, brushed the worst of the mud off his pants, and glanced westward. “Looks like the storm’s easing up—most of the lightning’s already passed over. Let’s get the receiver planted before their sensors start working again, eh?”

  “Right. Here, you bring the kite in the rest of the way; I’ll handle the scope.”

  Kwon grinned in the darkness as he accepted the reel back again. Hawking’s nervousness where his equipment was concerned was legendary. “Not a bad night’s work,” he commented. “Vale says Haven and O’Hara are finally ready, you and I have a tap i
nto the collies’ gossip line, and Skyler and Novak will have Jensen back by breakfast.”

  “Things are finally moving our way,” Hawking agreed, his telescope cradled like a baby in his arms. “About time, too.”

  Off to the east, the thunder rumbled restlessly.

  CHAPTER 22

  CAINE GLANCED UP AS Lathe entered the blackcollars’ room, then returned his gaze to the map he was studying. Something about the way Lathe closed the door made him look up again, and this time he saw the comsquare’s expression. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “They got Jensen,” Lathe said quietly.

  “Dead?” Mordecai, sitting near the door, looked as relaxed as always; but his voice made Caine shiver.

  “I don’t know.” Lathe mopped at his forehead with the towel draped across his shoulders. “Skyler called about five minutes ago, and Dan caught me as Bakshi and I were leaving the range. The collies apparently raided the Millaire HQ a short time before they arrived. The Security cordon was just being taken down, and they had to sneak into the area on foot. No indication anywhere as to whether Jensen was dead or just captured.”

  “Could he have gotten away?” Caine asked.

  Mordecai shook his head. “The Security cordon would’ve still been up.”

  “Right,” Lathe agreed heavily. “The timing’s too good for coincidence. They wanted Jensen and they got him.” Dropping into the chair across from Caine, he stared off across the room.

  “What’s Skyler going to do?” Mordecai asked after a short pause.

  “He wants to stay and try to find him. I told him yes.”

  It was Mordecai’s turn to stare into space. “We’ll have to pull someone back here from Hawking’s house to help with guard duty, you know.”

  “True. But after tomorrow O’Hara and Haven will be available again.”

  “Or they’ll be dead,” Caine muttered.

  “In which case we’ll have lost, anyway.” Mordecai shrugged. “All right. I suppose it won’t hurt to let Skyler operate down there a day or two. Might even take some of Security’s attention off us here.” He cocked an eyebrow.