by Timothy Zahn
“Which are two ways of saying the same thing,” Skyler rumbled. “Bad sign, Lathe—if the cockroach spawn aren’t there, they’ve got to be somewhere they consider safe.”
“Such as Aegis Mountain?” Jensen suggested.
“Well, yes, the logic does seem to lead us that way,” Lathe admitted. “But I’m not ready to carve it in stone quite yet. There may be other rat holes in the area the Ryqril have found and appropriated. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
That was, unfortunately, the bottom line for nearly everything about the mission. Still, Lathe had to admit they’d managed on a lot less up-front data on other missions. This time, at the very least, they knew their target city still existed.
And finally, it was time to go.
For Caine, it was with an odd feeling of displaced déjà vu that he followed Lepkowski to the hanger where the specially equipped shuttle was waiting: displaced, because the last time he’d been the greenest of Lathe’s team, the one from whom the fine points of strategy and tactics had been withheld. This time—
This time he was the leader, the man in charge of it all. The man with both the authority and the responsibility for other men’s lives. A sobering thought; but down deep he had to admit that it was exhilarating, as well.
The shuttle was a standard ground-to-orbit craft, with one important design difference. Attached to each side, at both fore and aft positions, were two pairs of drop pods, shaped like truncated cones three meters tall. Each pod would hold up to four men.
It was Braune who asked the obvious question as Lepkowski led the way toward the forward pair of pods. “What’re the ones in back for?”
“Decoys,” Lepkowski said over his shoulder. “We drop them a klick or two before yours go.”
“Won’t they draw more attention?” Pittman asked.
“If you’re scope-visible at the time it’s not going to make any difference if we drop one pod or sixty.” The general shook his head. “This way the enemy’s response at least gets diluted a little.”
Inside, the pods were a maze of cables, straps, and bars. Caine settled himself into the starboard one with Pittman, Braune, and Alamzad, leaving Colvin to himself in the supply pod on the other side. “All set,” he told Lepkowski after everyone was strapped into place. “Seal us up and let’s get going.”
“Good luck,” Lepkowski said…and then the thick door swung shut, plunging them into darkness.
The waiting’s always the hardest part, Caine told himself; but in this case good management on someone’s part had minimized that annoyance. Caine’s eyes had barely adjusted to the faint glow of the pod’s luminous instruments when he felt the subtle vibrations of someone boarding the shuttle…and then another, and another. The Earthbound passengers, heading groundside. Caine wondered briefly if they would face an angry Security grilling on arrival, but put that concern out of his mind. None of them were in any way connected with the impending illegal entry into Ryqril-owned territory, and Security wasn’t likely to pick on them once that fact was established. Caine hoped not, anyway.
It was perhaps a quarter hour after the footfalls had ceased when the pod gave a jerk and Caine’s stomach abruptly tried to climb up his esophagus. “Going down,” Braune murmured in a conversational tone that almost succeeded in covering up his nervousness.
“Down but not out,” Caine replied, eyes on the altimeter. The shuttle pilot, he knew, would be dropping the pods at five klicks…almost there…
A dull thud, more felt than heard, made him start against his straps before he realized it was the decoy pods breaking free. “Here we go,” he told the others.…and with a wrench they were suddenly in free fall.
Someone hissed something under his breath. A second later gravity returned with twin jolts as Caine popped the drogue and mainchutes. “Get ready,” he said as their flight smoothed again. “Five seconds to breakout…three, two, one—
He wrenched the control, and the pod’s walls split from floor to ceiling, the floor disintegrated, and the four men were flung apart into the darkness as the wall sections they were strapped to caught the inrush of air and separated. Caine got a dizzying glimpse of stars above and black ground below; and then, with a snap of spring-loaded connectors and a hiss of compressed air, the pod section above him unfolded into a hang-glider wing. For a second he felt himself slipping sideways as the glider leveled itself, and then he was flying smoothly over the landscape far below.
His second experience with blackcollar drop pods. Eventually, he supposed, one got used to the ride.
Licking his lips briefly, he made a quick scan of the visible sky. Off to his left were two starless blotches that could be other gliders. “Report, Colvin,” he said into the short-range mike curving along his cheek.
“I think I can see everyone,” Colvin’s voice came in his ear. “You’re all below and ahead of me.”
“UV beacons in turn,” Caine ordered. “Pittman…Braune…Alamzad…me.”
“Yeah, you’re all more or less together,” Colvin reported. “Zad, you don’t seem very steady, though. You having trouble?”
“I don’t know.” Even through the radio Alamzad’s tension was clearly audible. “Either I’ve got a loose connection somewhere or the damn wind direction keeps changing.”
“It’s the wind,” Pittman put in. “I’ve got some of that, too, and you’re closer in to the mountain than I am.”
Mountain! Caine peered into the darkness. Sure enough, there was a sharp peak looming off to his right that he hadn’t noticed before. Shielding from Security’s radar, for sure, but as a sudden eddy current bucked his glider he began to wonder if the protection was going to be worth it. If the winds decreased their flight range badly enough—
“I’m going down!” Alamzad snapped abruptly. “A down-draft of some kind. Trying to pull up—”
“No!” Colvin barked before Caine could respond. “Ride it—pull up and you’ll stall.”
“Too late,” Alamzad said with a hissing sigh of resignation. “I’m going down. Hope I can find a clearing or something.”
For a long second Caine’s mind seemed to freeze. Down in unknown territory, far from any sort of populace to disappear into.…
The moment passed, his Resistance and blackcollar training driving logic and calmness into his mind. “Alamzad, turn on your UV,” he ordered. “Colvin, there should be a road somewhere nearby angling southeast into Denver. Can you see it?”
“Got it. Zad, goose your glider a little bit—if you can thread those two humps ahead of you, you’ll at least land on a downslope in sight of the road.”
“Okay,” Alamzad said tightly. “Where do I go after I’m clear?”
“Follow the road southeast,” Colvin told him. “It starts to switchback up through the mountains there, I think, and the farther up we get the less climbing we’ll have to do. Caine, what should I do?”
“Get as far along the road as you can,” Caine said. “Pittman and Braune, go with him. Try and stay together.” Below, the faint purple glow of Alamzad’s ultraviolet beacon had successfully cleared the mountain peaks and was weaving like a drunken moth as the other searched for a landing site. “Alamzad, there looks to be a gap, in the trees east of you. If we can make it that far, we’ll be fairly close to the road.”
The significance of the pronoun wasn’t lost on the others. “I’ll stay with you,” Pittman volunteered immediately. “Three men in mountainous territory are safer than two.”
“Thanks, but no. You’re as likely to end up in an even more inhospitable place. Besides, I want you three to have the supplies repacked for backpacking when we reach you.”
A crash of breaking branches in their earphones stifled any further comments. Caine held his breath.…“I’m down,” Alamzad said. “Afraid the glider’s shot.”
Caine let out his breath quietly. “They’re of limited use on the ground anyway,” he said. The other’s UV was still glowing; turning carefully, Caine prepared to join him. “G
et going, everyone—we’ll meet you up the road. And go easy on radio usage.”
“Good luck,” Colvin said, and then there was silence. Licking his lips once, Caine set his teeth together and started down. They were definitely off to a great start.
Floating along on the strong breeze two kilometers above, Lathe listened long enough to confirm all of Caine’s team had landed safely before switching back to the blackcollars’ frequency. “Suggestions?” he asked.
“Not much choice, is there?” Jensen said. “We dump the silent backstop role and go get them out.”
“Out of what?” Hawking countered. “About all we can do at this point is hold their hands as we all slog along together.”
“Seems to me,” Skyler rumbled, “that we need to either help them get to Denver quickly, or else set up a diversion to pull Security off their backs while they find their own way there.”
Jensen snorted. “That’d be one double hell of a diversion. Even once they’re all together they’ll be a good twenty klicks from the edge of town.”
“Good point,” Lathe agreed. The discussion had given him time to put his own thoughts in order and decide on their best course. “All right—transport it is. Let’s make for civilization and see about borrowing a car.” The radio went silent as the five blackcollars settled down to squeezing all the distance possible out of their hang gliders. Caine, Lathe had a sneaking suspicion, wasn’t going to like this a bit, but injured pride was low on the priority list at the moment. Eyes scanning the blackness around him for the Security flyers that must surely be on their way, he steered toward the lights just beginning to show through gaps in the mountains. And hoped to hell he didn’t fly into anything solid on the way.
Chapter 4
CIVILIZATION, IN THIS CASE, was a small town nestled among the mountains flanking the road, separated from Denver itself by the massive eastern-slope peaks that ran right to the edge of that city. As Lathe had often found with mountain towns, this one had no clearly defined edge, its houses dribbling off into hills and brush in relatively isolated ones and twos.
It was near one of these more secluded residences that they came down, landing along a dirt road and ditching their gliders in the woods flanking it. “Now what?” Skyler asked after the supply packs had been sorted out. “We walk up to the door and ask to borrow an autocab hailer?”
“Something like that.” Lights showed in three of the house’s windows, Lathe noted, but no driveway guidelights were on. So the family probably wasn’t expecting any company. “Mordecai, you’re outside backup; Hawking, check for signs of a vehicle; Jensen, go watch the far end of the drive.”
With murmured acknowledgments the group split up. Skyler at his side and Mordecai a few paces behind, Lathe headed through the trees toward the lights. Something above to the west caught his eye, and he turned just as two distant blue-violet lights vanished behind some mountain. “A mite slow on the uptake,” Skyler murmured. “Collies should’ve had patrol boats up there half an hour ago.”
“Maybe we took them by surprise,” Lathe said, knowing full well how unlikely that was. Galway would have sent word of Caine’s imminent arrival via a Ryqril Corsair, and the Novak’s multiplanet circle had taken nearly three times the four days in which a Corsair could have made the direct flight. “Maybe they want to watch us for a while,” he told Skyler. “Try and see what Caine’s up to before grabbing him. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d tried that game.”
“And lost it,” Skyler agreed. “Well, lead on.”
The house was single-story, reasonably nice but probably no more than lower-middle-class if Plinry standards were at all applicable. The blackcollars could have broken in in any of a dozen ways, but Lathe preferred to try the polite approach first. Stepping up to the door, he knocked.
There was a short wait, during which time an entry light went on and a shadow passed over the inner side of the door’s spyhole. Eventually, the door opened a crack and a man peered out. “Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you,” Lathe said, “but we’re lost and need some information.”
The man’s eyes dropped briefly to the Plinry-style clothing hiding the blackcollars’ flexarmor. “Sorry,” he said, his voice abruptly tight. “I don’t think there’s anything I can—”
“I’m sorry, too,” Lathe said, slipping the ends of his nunchaku into the gap. Simultaneously, Skyler leaned on the door; and a moment later the two blackcollars were inside.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lathe told the man, whose face had gone gray. Beyond him, sitting together in a conversation room, were a woman and small girl. The woman looked as terrified as her husband, the girl’s face rapidly heading the same way. “Really,” Lathe assured them all. “We aren’t going to hurt you. All we need is some information”—he glanced at the man’s clothes—“and something less conspicuous than what we’re wearing. Is this everyone who’s in the house?”
The woman caught her breath, but before anyone could speak Lathe’s tingler came on: Young man in back room—approaching with crossbow.
Skyler’s response was to drift toward the hallway exiting from the conversation room. The woman’s eyes widened as they followed him. “Ask him to put down his crossbow and join us,” Lathe told the father. “He’s only going to get himself hurt.”
The other licked his lips. “Sean?” he called, voice cracking a bit. “Better do as he—”
And with a karate-type shout, a teenager bounded into the room, crossbow leveled and tracking toward Lathe. He fired—
And the bolt dug itself into the rug a bare meter in front of him as Skyler’s nunchaku snapped out and down onto the front of the weapon, knocking it toward the floor.
The boy froze, and for a handful of heartbeats the room was as silent as a tomb. Then Skyler stepped forward and plucked the weapon from Sean’s nerveless fingers. “Aren’t allowed firearms or lasers, I gather,” he commented conversationally, examining the crossbow briefly before leaning it against the wall behind him. “Nice. Not really intended for close-range work, though.”
“Blackcollars,” the father whispered, his eyes on the nunchaku dangling casually from Skyler’s hand. “You’re blackcollars.”
“Don’t make it sound like a crime,” Lathe admonished him. “Now—”
“I’m sorry, sir—I’m sorry,” the man all but gasped, almost cringing before the comsquare. “I didn’t mean—that is—”
“Relax,” Lathe told him, flicking a glance at Skyler. The other blackcollar shrugged minutely, Lathe’s puzzlement mirrored on his own face. Over the years Lathe had seen a lot of reactions to him and his fellow blackcollars, but instant and abject terror was a new one. “All we want are some clothes, some transportable food if you’ve got it, and some maps.”
“Maps?” The father blinked, surprise momentarily eclipsing the fear. “Why do you—? I’m sorry—of course we’ve got maps. They’re, uh, in my desk—in there.”
Lathe nodded permission and he sidled off, Skyler falling in quietly behind him. Shifting his attention to the others, Lathe tried a smile. “Relax. Please. We just need a few things, and then we’ll be gone.” He paused as his tingler again came on: Two bicycles and snow-track vehicles in garage; no car.
That was going to be inconvenient. Lathe eyed the teenager, still standing like a condemned man in the middle of the room. A bit shorter than Lathe, but otherwise about the same build. “Sean, go get me some of your clothes,” he told the other. “A complete outfit, like you’d wear for a night on the town.”
The boy gulped and hurried from the room, and Lathe returned his attention to the woman. “We’re going to need a car,” he told her. “Any idea who around here might have one?”
“We don’t own a car,” she whispered. “There aren’t too many in town.”
Pursing his lips, Lathe nodded and tapped at his tingler: Jensen: locate central town lights?
Visible. Estimate two klicks away. Small group half klick away.
Acknowledged.
“What’s the group of buildings half a kilometer down the road?” he asked the woman.
“It’s just a marketing area,” she said. “A couple of stores, a bar, a restaurant. Mostly for people traveling on the highway.”
And a likely spot to find transportation. Jensen, Hawking: head for half-klick lights; quiet scout of area; will rendezvous there.
As the blackcollars acknowledged, Sean came back, his arms full of clothes. Lathe was busy trying them on when Skyler returned with the father and a fistful of paper. “Maps of Denver and some of the mountain areas, a two-year-old restaurant guide, and a five-year-old almanac,” the big blackcollar reported. “Should at least give us a start.”
“Good.” Lathe glanced at the maps. Roads, city and town boundaries, some general business and commercial information—a good supplement to the topographic maps Lepkowski had provided. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to return these,” he told the father, sliding the papers into his pack. “But we can pay for them.”
A frown creased the other’s forehead. “I don’t understand.”
“I said we’d pay for what we’re taking.”
“No, I meant…surely you’ve got better maps than these old things.”
Lathe frowned in turn…and suddenly a piece seemed to fall into place. “Skyler, see if you can find at least a coat or something that fits you. Go show him what you’ve got,” he added to the father, putting an edge on his voice.
The other gulped and led Skyler away. Lathe regarded the mother thoughtfully. “You’ve seen other blackcollars in town, I take it?”
She shook her head quickly. “We haven’t seen anything,” she almost whispered. “No one. I mean, we’re just working people around here.”
Lathe pursed his lips and turned away. Lying through her teeth, obviously—telling him what she thought he wanted to hear. Given a little time, he could probably get past that to the truth, but time was a commodity in short supply just now.
Skyler and the father came back, the blackcollar wearing a nondescript coat over his Plinry clothing. “A little tight, but it covers well enough,” he told Lathe, flexing his arms experimentally.