The Blackcollar Series

by Timothy Zahn

Presumably the reaction would remain at nonlethal levels. But if not…well, that was something he needed to know, too.

  Caine was in the lodge dining room, studying the orbital maps of Denver Lepkowski had run off for him, when Chelsey Jensen came in with the news.

  “Galway wants me?” He frowned at the blackcollar, feeling his stomach tighten within him. “Why?”

  Jensen ran two fingers through his blond hair. “All he’ll say is that he wants to take you and your team into the Hub for some routine questions before you leave for Earth.”

  Caine grimaced. “Nothing like having secrets from the opposition, is there?”

  Jensen shrugged. “Galway’s always been good at reading minds,” he said. “It’s just one of the things we have to put up with.”

  “Yeah. Do you think I should go?”

  “Up to you. But he’s already got your team.”

  “Right,” Caine said, getting to his feet. In the past year or so Jensen had developed almost an obsession with personal loyalty, and it wouldn’t do at all for Caine to seem ready to abandon his teammates to the wolves. “Would you ask someone to take these to my room, please? No sense giving Security a head start on where we’ll be dropping.”

  “Sure.” Jensen accepted the stack. “Watch yourselves, and good luck.”

  Galway was standing beside one of two cars as Caine walked down the sloping dirt road to where the prefect had parked. The second car, he noted, had three of his new teammates in back and two men in Security gray-green in front. The fourth trainee sat in the back of Galway’s car.

  “Caine.” Galway nodded as Caine walked up to him. “I presume Jensen told you what I wanted.”

  “Yes. And it’d better not take too long.”

  “I understand. Preparations to go offworld and all must have you pretty busy.”

  Caine suppressed a grimace. “More to the point, Lathe will take action if we’re in the Hub too long.”

  “Two hours at the most,” Galway said equably. “Shall we go?”

  Seated beside Pittman, behind Galway and a Security driver, Caine maintained a cool silence through the sixteen-kilometer drive to the edge of Capstone, Plinry’s capital city. The others did likewise; but as the cars began threading their way through the city streets toward the Hub, Galway half turned in his seat to send appraising looks at his two passengers. “You’ve both made remarkable progress these past few months,” he commented. “That blind-man combat, especially, must be a real killer to get through, and you both did quite well on it.”

  Caine’s hands, folded in his lap, curved into a blackcollar signal: no noise. Pittman made the proper interpretation and remained silent.

  Ahead, the gray wall that marked the edge of the Hub had become visible, its brooding presence a symbol both of the Ryqril domination and—to Caine—of the limits to the aliens’ power. Lathe’s blackcollars had gotten over that wall once—gotten over it despite its sensors and automatic defenses and human guards. When the need arose, he knew, they’d get over it again.

  The private pep talk helped. Caine found his heartbeat nearly normal as the metal-mesh gate closed behind them.

  Galway turned around again. “I understand you’re heading out in a few days,” he said. “Any particular part of Earth you’re making for?”

  “Antarctica,” Caine told him. “The Hollick-Kenyon Plateau, specifically. If you wanted to make small talk, we could have done that at the lodge.”

  “True, but there are other things we couldn’t have handled there. New photos of you, for example, plus fingerprint and retinal patterns. For our records.”

  “And for export?”

  Galway’s lip twitched in a grim smile. “The Ryqril are very interested in you, Caine—in all of you,” he amended, eying Pittman. “They just love to read about the progress you’ve been making.”

  Caine didn’t reply.

  The five trainees were taken one by one into the interrogation room Galway had set aside for the purpose. Each was fingerprinted, ret-shot, and photographed with quiet efficiency by Ragusin as Galway, for his part, kept up a steady stream of questions. Mostly, this worked out to be a monologue, a result the prefect had more or less expected from Caine and three of his teammates. With the proper stress analysis, answers to even innocuous questions could sometimes yield valuable information, and the standard approach was thus to ignore the interrogator as much as possible. Caine knew that, and Galway knew he knew it, and it made the whole exercise rather a waste of time…except that Galway expected the fifth interview to run somewhat differently than the first four had.

  And he wasn’t disappointed.

  “You are leaving with the Novak in five days, aren’t you?”

  Seated at the ret-scan machine, lips tightly compressed, Woody Pittman nodded once. The gesture was rich in nonverbal emotion, and Galway felt a twinge of sympathy for the boy’s position. But the prefect had a job to do, and his personal feelings about what the Ryqril had done to Pittman couldn’t be allowed to get in the way. “I gather you’re going to Earth. Any idea where?”

  “North America,” Pittman said. “We’ll be riding the shuttle down toward Denver, but Caine said we’ll be dropping off before it lands.”

  Galway called up a file map on the room’s display and gave it a quick scan. A useless gesture; there were far too many targets in the Denver area that a spy or saboteur might find interesting. “Any idea whether your mission goal is in that area?” he asked. “Or could you just be staying in the area long enough to collect identification and lose any pursuit?”

  Pittman shook his head. “Caine hasn’t told us anything at all. Nothing; so you can quit trying to rephrase the question. He takes Lathe’s lectures on secrecy very seriously.”

  Galway sighed. “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.” He thought a moment, watching as Pittman’s face was photographed and, for good measure, layer-scan-printed as well. “Has Caine mentioned any special equipment? Or have you had any out-of-the-ordinary training?”

  Again, Pittman shook his head. “There isn’t a thing more I can tell you until we’re on Earth, Galway. Maybe not even then.”

  “All right,” Galway said, giving up. Pittman wasn’t likely to be holding out on him, after all. Though with the boy’s lack of loyalty-conditioning Galway could never be a hundred-percent sure of that.…“I’ll set you up a contact in the Denver Security office—use the code name Postern to identify yourself when you call.”

  Pittman nodded and stood up. “Anything else?”

  “Not right now. Good luck.”

  The boy’s face twisted in a sardonic smile and he left the room, Galway catching a glimpse of the guard falling in beside him as the door swung shut. Sighing, he tapped the intercom. “Escort all the blackcollar trainees out of the Hub,” he instructed the desk man.

  “Caine’ll want to be taken back to the lodge.”

  Galway snorted. “Tell him he can find his own way up there. We’re not running an autocab service here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Galway signed off and turned his attention back to the map of Denver, peripherally aware that Ragusin had moved to look over his shoulder. “You see anything obvious?” he asked his aide.

  “Not offhand,” Ragusin admitted. “There’s an awful lot there.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Well…why don’t you go down and make sure Caine and company don’t make any trouble on their way out. I’ll head over to my office and give the Ryqril a call. Tell them another team’s going to be hitting Earth soon.”

  It wasn’t a pleasant duty; and for several long minutes after he’d signed off Galway stood at the large window beside his desk, gazing out at the Hub as he let the tension of that contact work itself out through trembling muscles. He didn’t hate humanity’s conquerors, of course; the loyalty-conditioning he’d undergone at the age of eighteen had permanently eliminated that emotional response to the Ryqril. But the conditioning didn’t block fear…and Galway feared the rubber-skinned ali
ens more than anything in the universe. Not only for what they could do to him personally, but also for what they’d already shown themselves capable of doing to whole worlds.

  To his world.

  Lifting his eyes, Galway looked past Capstone’s buildings to the Greenheart Mountains, where even thirty-six years after the Ryqril Groundfire attack the vegetation was still nowhere near its prewar lushness. Plinry had come close to dying in that attack, and it would be another generation at least before the planet could survive anything comparable.

  And if the blackcollar training camp became too much of a threat to the Ryqril…

  Galway shuddered. No, he couldn’t simply pass on information about Caine to someone else and then forget about it. He had a highly vested interest in making sure every team Lathe and Lepkowski sent on its way was neutralized, and neutralized fast. Involuntarily, as if seeking one final cathartic shiver, his eyes slipped back to Capstone, and the Hub, and the tall black wall rising like a truncated mountain from near the center of the government section. The Ryqril Enclave. The impregnable town-within-a-city-within-a-city from which the real rulers of Plinry sent their orders to puppets like Galway. The place where the decision to obliterate the blackcollars—and perhaps the entire planet along with them—might someday be made.

  And all that stood between Plinry and that decision was a competent Security prefect doing his job.

  Turning away from the window, Galway stepped back to his desk and, with fresh determination, got to work.

  “Backlash.”

  Lathe said the word quietly, almost reverently, fingers playing over the red-eyed dragonhead ring on his hand. Two hours ago his ambitions had been of a small, comfortable size; he’d felt himself lucky just to have a training center and men of Caine’s and Pittman’s caliber with whom to work. But if Backlash was once again available, there was suddenly no limit to what he could accomplish.…

  With an effort, he forced both mind and eyes back from the visionary future to the reality of the man facing him. “What are his chances? Really?”

  Lepkowski shook his head. “I don’t know,” he told the comsquare. “I’d bet heavily that the formula was in the Aegis secrets file during the war. But after that point I can’t even hazard a guess. I suppose it could still be lying around in there gathering dust—it’s nothing the Ryqril would be especially interested in rooting out.”

  “Nor your average resistance team, either,” Lathe mused. “Even mainline military people might not realize how heavily the blackcollar project hinged on the drug.”

  Lepkowski cocked an eyebrow. “Or else they simply didn’t think the blackcollars were worth bringing back.”

  Lathe smiled grimly. “Can’t hurt my feelings that easily, friend—I like being underestimated, remember?”

  Lepkowski grinned in return, a smile of shared memories. Then he sobered. “Caine won’t like being interfered with, you know.”

  “I sort of expected that.” Lathe thought a moment. “Well, we’ve got five days to come up with something clever.”

  “And remember that that something clever shouldn’t interfere with or compromise Project Christmas,” the general said.

  “Oh, hell,” Lathe muttered under his breath. Project Christmas had been in the works for so long he hadn’t immediately made the—obvious, now—connection. “That does complicate everything, doesn’t it?” he admitted. “Though in some ways it actually might work to our advantage. Well, we’ll just have to make double-damn sure Christmas comes off without a hitch.”

  Lepkowski waved a hand. “We’ve been in worse spots with tighter tolerances—and as you say, we’ve got five days. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

  Chapter 3

  ONE OF THE BIGGEST problems Lepkowski and the Plinry blackcollars had faced with their year-old businessmen’s shuttle, Caine knew, had been that of maintaining proper security while civilians were aboard the new starships. It wasn’t a trivial matter; with the tool of loyalty-conditioning at Security’s disposal, the government could theoretically slip saboteurs through even the finest screening procedures. The danger had eventually been at least minimized by completely sealing off a section of the Novak exclusively for civilian passenger use.

  Which sounded rather cramped to most people…because most people didn’t have any real feel for just how big the Novak really was.

  Certainly Caine’s four teammates didn’t, expecting confinement to a special section of their own away from both crew and other passengers, neither of which knew of their presence.

  Caine had watched with secret amusement as they first learned what a “small private section” really meant. After the cramped homes most of them had grown up knowing in nongovernment Capstone—and the even tighter conditions at Hamner Lodge—the Novak was almost like a luxury vacation by comparison.

  A vacation that ended three days out from Earth with the arrival of Lepkowski for their final briefing.

  “The shuttle will be coming into Denver from the west, on this vector,” the general told them, indicating a path west by north over the Rockies on the detailed map he’d brought for them. “Your drop pods will be jettisoned here, about twenty-five klicks from the edge of the mountains and civilization.”

  “A bit of a stretch, isn’t that?” Stef Braune asked dubiously.

  “We did nearly thirty on Argent,” Caine told him. “And that was without any tailwind assistance.”

  “These are mountains, though,” Doon Colyin pointed out. “That means strong and often dangerous air currents to fight.”

  “How dangerous?” Caine asked. Unlike any of the others—including Caine—Colvin had had a lot of private experience with hang gliders.

  Colvin shrugged. “Depends on the mountains and the weather at the time. Could be a relatively minor annoyance or an immediate catastrophe or anything in between.”

  Lepkowski and Caine exchanged glances. “Can you drop any closer to the metro area?” the general asked.

  Caine shook his head. “Too much of our path’s going to be visible on Security’s radar as it is. I want to be on the far side of these mountains here and here when we swing around to follow this road. We need to draw their first countermove to the wrong place if we’re going to have time to lose ourselves in Denver before they realize their mistake.”

  Alamzad cleared his throat. “Not to push or anything, Caine, but as long as we’re all together now anyway…how about breaking down and telling us just what we’re supposed to do once we get there?”

  Caine could feel Lepkowski’s eyes on him. “Sorry,” he said, looking at each of his team as he spoke. “But this is too important a mission to take any risks whatsoever with. It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he added, “but there’s always a chance Security might snatch one of you…and even psychor conditioning techniques can be broken with the right kind of pressure.”

  None of the four liked it—that much was obvious from their faces. But they accepted it without further argument.

  Some of that same faith was also in evidence later on in a different part of the starship, but in this case the participants had a good deal more experience on which to base it. Seated together with his own four-man team, Lathe ran through the details of Caine’s plan. “…so we’ll drop approximately three klicks back and one up from their drop point,” he finished, marking the spot on his copy of Lepkowski’s map. “Colvin seemed to think we’d have some trouble with winds, but I don’t see us having any choice.”

  “How about dropping from an entirely separate shuttle?” Chelsey Jensen suggested. “If we go first we could be on the ground near Caine’s landing site and keep track of them that way.”

  “Doubt if Lepkowski could finagle loads well enough to justify two shuttles,” Dawis Hawking said, shaking his head. “Besides, two obvious drops might stir up Security more than we can really afford.”

  “That’s the clincher,” Lathe agreed. “Security’s used to us doing things one way now, and keeping the illusion that we
’re still following that pattern is the way to buy us some time.”

  “Which we’re going to be on short enough rations of as it is,” Rafe Skyler said with a shake of his head. “Lathe, this is about as crazy a scheme as I’ve ever seen you tackle. No matter what shape Aegis Mountain’s in, Caine’s got about zero chance in a thousand of getting inside. With or without us playing backstop for him.”

  Lathe shrugged. “Perhaps. All right—probably, even. But I don’t think it’s completely hopeless. Anything people can get out of other people can get into. It’s largely a matter of locating those other people.”

  “And hoping the Ryqril haven’t already set up shop in the base,” Jensen murmured.

  Hawking snorted gently. “It wouldn’t be the first time blackcollars have planned to invade a Ryqril stronghold.”

  “Not even the first time this year,” Jensen said archly. “That is, if Christmas is still on schedule.”

  “It is,” Lathe said. “The point is that we’ve got an awful damn lot to gain if we do somehow manage to pull this off.”

  “Yes,” the fifth blackcollar, Mordecai, said quietly, the first time he’d spoken since the meeting began. Lathe studied the other’s dark face for a moment; but, characteristically, the small man added nothing more to his single word of agreement.

  It was enough, though. Mordecai didn’t talk much, but his support carried a lot of weight on a mission of this sort. “Well, who wants to live forever, anyway?” Skyler shrugged. “Any idea what we can expect in the way of opposition?”

  “The government center’s here,” Lathe told him, tapping a spot wedged between the southwestern edge of Denver proper and a ridge the computer had labeled Hogback. “Originally a separate town named Athena, apparently full of support personnel and families for Aegis during the war. It was a logical spot for the collies to set up shop, and they seem to have done so.”

  “Where’s the Ryqril section?” Hawking asked, frowning at the photo.

  “Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be one,” Lathe said. “At least there’s no separately fortified enclave within Athena.”