The Blackcollar Series

by Timothy Zahn

  “Don’t play cutesy with me, Kanai. You tell Bernhard that this time he’s gone too far. Your krijing blackcollars have no business making trouble in my territory, damn you. I’m deducting the medical costs for my boys from Sartan’s cut—you can figure out how to pay him back. And I want my car back, intact. You got that?”

  “Reger—”

  “And if you pull anything like this again, you’ll have a full-scale war on your hands. Sartan can count on it.”

  “Reger, listen—”

  The line went dead. Kanai stared at the phone for half a dozen heartbeats more before folding it back up, a hard knot beginning to form in his stomach. It was impossible—no blackcollars were out in northwest Denver making trouble for the hell of it.

  At least none of Bernhard’s team were.

  Kanai thought about that for a long minute. Then, opening the phone, he punched for Bernhard’s secure line.

  The comsquare answered on the third buzz. “Yes?”

  “Kanai. We’ve got new blackcollars in town.”

  A brief pause. “How do you know?”

  Kanai recounted his one-sided conversation with Reger.

  “Could this just be the setup for some kind of elaborate trap?” Bernhard asked when he’d finished. “He’s been sulking ever since we slapped his nose a month ago.”

  “I doubt it. He’s smart enough to pull something like that, but he doesn’t strike me as being actor enough to foam-mouth that convincingly.”

  Bernhard hissed between his teeth. “Great. Just great. Where the hell could new blackcollars have come from? Never mind. Wherever they’re from, we’ve got to track them down before they trigger a flash fire that’ll crash everything. I’ll alert the rest of the team, see if we can find a trail. Reger give any hint as to where they might have gone?”

  “Only that they apparently took one of his cars to travel in.” Kanai pursed his lips. “Bernhard, what chance they’ve been brought in by one of the other bosses as a counter to us?”

  “And stumbled into Reger’s territory by mistake?” Bernhard swore softly under his breath. “I hope to hell that’s not it.”

  “Yeah. Well…we meeting at the usual place?”

  “We are; you aren’t. Whatever’s going on, I don’t want you away from the contact phone. New data could come in; the damn blackcollars themselves might even get your number and call.”

  “Okay.” Kanai looked at his watch. Three-fifteen a.m. “The usual emergency comm setup?”

  “Right. I’ll check with you periodically for nonemergency news. Sit tight and watch your back.”

  “Sure. Good hunting.”

  Carefully Kanai folded the phone and replaced it on his nightstand. Just as carefully, he stepped to the window for a cautious look outside. Pure reflex, and faintly ridiculous besides—the sensor web around his house would have picked up any intruder long before he became visible.

  Any normal intruder, that is. Could a blackcollar team circumvent the web?

  Kanai shivered. Were the new blackcollars indeed merely another set of hired hands? Or could they still be fighting the Terran-Ryqril War? And if the latter, what would they think of the course Kanai and his fellows had taken?

  It doesn’t matter what they think, Kanai told himself fiercely…and knew it was a lie. To see his own self-disgust reflected back by the eyes of those who had not shamed themselves would be a humiliation he wasn’t prepared to face.

  If they came for him now, and offered him the choice, he wondered if he would have the nobility and the courage to perform the seppuku of his ancestors.

  No one moved in the street outside. Letting the edge of the curtain fall, Kanai went to his closet and began to dress.

  The bar closed at three a.m. sharp, and the half-dozen remaining customers had staggered out by three-oh-five. It was another half hour before the barman emerged, locked the door behind him, and trudged toward the single remaining car in the lot. Lathe let him get within two steps of the vehicle before rising from his concealment on its far side. “Good morning,” he said conversationally. “You remember me, I trust.”

  The barman froze, and in the faint starlight Lathe could see the other’s mouth working soundlessly. “I see you do,” the comsquare nodded. “Phelling, wasn’t it?”

  Phelling finally got his vocal cords unstuck. “What do you want with me? I got nothing against you.”

  “Maybe we’ve got something against you,” Skyler suggested, coming up on Phelling from behind. “You and this Reger character.”

  Phelling seemed to shrink. “Oh, sh—look, sir, I don’t have anything to do with him—really.”

  “You just act as fingerman?” Lathe suggested.

  “What? Hey, took, I had to call his people in when you came on with that smuggler slidetalk.”

  “Maybe,” Skyler said darkly. “Maybe you were just looking forward to shooting down a couple of helpless strangers.”

  “No! No, I swear—”

  “And at any rate,” Skyler interrupted, “you’re the only one available to use as an object lesson.”

  Lathe gave that a few seconds to sink in. “Unless you want to tell us where we can find Manx Reger, that is,” he said.

  Phelling turned wide eyes on the comsquare. “I told you—I’m not part of his organization. If he’s not home I don’t know where he could be. You’ve gotta believe me.”

  “No, we don’t,” Lathe said. “But for the moment we’ll settle for his home address.”

  Phelling opened his mouth, closed it again. “His…home address? But…you’ve been there. I mean, you tore up the place a month ago, didn’t you?”

  Lathe exchanged glances with Skyler. Their first positive confirmation that there were indeed other blackcollars operating in Denver. Doing…what?

  For the moment, the question would keep. “Let’s just say we’ve been out of touch with the other blackcollars in town,” he told Phelling. “The hows and whys don’t concern you. What concerns you is that we want to talk to Reger and you’re going to show us the way.”

  Phelling had apparently gotten stuck half a statement back. “You trying to get in touch with the other blackcollars—is that it? Hell, that’s easy. Their contact man Kanai goes to the Shandygaff Bar in Central Denver on Tuesday nights to wait for new business—”

  “We’ll get to them later,” Lathe cut him off. “Right now, all we want is Reger. Let’s go.”

  Phelling licked his lips. “I…yeah, sure, I’ll take you there. Sure. The place isn’t a secret.”

  “Good.” Lathe sent a brief tingler message, and a minute later Hawking drove their appropriated car into the lot. “Get in,” Lathe told Phelling as Skyler opened the front door. “Let’s have your keys first.”

  Wordlessly, the barman handed them over and climbed in, Skyler getting in behind him. Lathe tossed Phelling’s keys to Mordecai as he and Jensen emerged from their backup concealment. “No memory slips, Phelling,” the comsquare warned, sliding in behind Hawking.

  A minute later the two cars headed southeast into the night.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN THE CAT’S AWAY, the ancient adage ran through Taurus Haven’s mind, the mice will play.

  The cat being Prefect Galway, of course. It was now just five days since the hidden port spotters had seen Galway sneak aboard a Ryqril Corsair and disappear into the sky. Bound for Earth, presumably, and certain to arrive before the Novak. If the collies there opted for the heavy-handed approach…

  Haven put the thought firmly from his mind. The best way to help Lathe now, he knew, was to do his job properly. And to make sure the rest of the mice did theirs.

  The other mice being Capstone’s unemployed and increasingly frustrated youth…and Haven had to admit that this little mob scene Dayle Greene had set up was the finest peaceful demonstration Plinry had ever seen. The crowd gathered around the Hub’s floodlit east gate numbered at least six hundred, perhaps one in ten holding a sign or lighted torch against the black of night. Th
ey were being quiet, for the most part, listening as their spokesman brandished their list of grievances and called on the guards lined up inside the mesh gate to come out and accept the paper.

  None of the Security men had taken him up on the challenge. Nor, Haven thought as he studied the half-hidden faces behind the mesh, did any of them look as if they intended to.

  His tingler came on: Hammerschmidt approaching in car. Haven grinned tightly and began working his way unobtrusively toward the front of the crowd. They’d read Hammerschmidt correctly, all right, down to the last decimal. Galway would never do anything so stupid as coming out of the Hub to face down a mob, but his second-in-command had always had more idiot pride than was good for him. Hammerschmidt would come out, all right; with luck he’d at least have enough brains to bring a carload of troops out with him.

  The assistant prefect’s car arrived at the gate a minute later, and a short but animated argument seemed to take place between Hammerschmidt and the guard captain. The captain apparently lost, and Hammerschmidt’s driver maneuvered the car to point at the center of the gate. The mesh slid open just enough to pass the vehicle, closed immediately behind it. Capstone’s Security men had had a mob get past the wall once before and were clearly not interested in repeating the experience.

  The crowd seemed to shiver like a thing alive as the car rolled toward it. Easy, Haven cautioned. Don’t spook them. But the crowd’s leaders had been carefully coached, and no one moved as the vehicle came to a halt a few meters from the crowd’s edge. The back doors opened and Hammerschmidt and a laser-armed Security man stepped out, the latter gripping his weapon tightly. “All right,” Hammerschmidt bellowed. “What the hell do you slime think you’re doing?”

  He was answered by the deep-throated twang of a large catapult a block south. All Security eyes jerked toward the sound, just in time to see a load of loose garbage arc neatly over the wall into the Hub. Trash-throwing had become a popular pastime among Capstone’s youth in the past few days, a deliberate thumb in Security’s eye. And from Hammerschmidt’s expression, it looked as though he’d about had enough of it. “Over there!” he’d snapped, pointing south as he scrambled back into the car. The other man joined him and the driver started to swing around—

  And the crowd surged forward. An instant later the car was surrounded by a solid wall of shouting people.

  The buildings around them lit up with flickers of light, and screams of pain mixed with those of anger as the gate guards opened up with their lasers. Set at low power, Haven hoped, but he had no time to worry about it. He was in position now, directly behind two of the blackcollars’ trainees, who were pounding flat-palmed on Hammerschmidt’s window and screaming at the top of their lungs. A better distraction Haven couldn’t have asked for. Ducking down, he wove through the gap the trainees had formed between their legs and slid onto his back under the car.

  It was a cramped fit, but Haven had practiced on mock-ups at the lodge and his motions were quick and sure. Pulling the quick-release package on his belt, he spilled onto the pavement six “question marks”—fifteen-centimeter hooks with thermite self-welding connectors at the ends. He grabbed two, tore off the safety covers, and touched them firmly to the car’s frame about shoulder width apart. There was a sharp hiss as the primer ignited, and abruptly the narrow space under the car flickered with blue-white light. Haven held the hooks steady for the three or four seconds it took for the fire to burn down. Then, scooping up two more, he wiggled down toward the rear of the car and implanted them a meter behind the first set. The screams of the burn victims were getting louder, he noted uneasily, and through the pavement he could feel the pounding of feet as the crowd peeled itself open before the laser beams. If the car was freed too soon…

  The flames died and Haven moved forward again, stripping the last two question marks and jamming them into the outer parts of the frame. The running feet had become a stampede now, and looking toward the gate he could see occasional glimpses of the wall as his human screen melted away into the darkness.

  The last two question marks burned out. They would need another few seconds to solidify properly, but Haven couldn’t afford to wait. Hiking up on his elbows, he eased his upper arms snugly into the first set of hooks. His legs went into the second set; and even as he grabbed the third set with his hands the car jerked into motion, swerving around toward the gate. Gritting his teeth, Haven pressed against the frame, hoping to hell the bodywork overhang and shadow would give him adequate concealment.

  The car darted through the gate and skidded to a halt, jamming Haven’s arms painfully against their supports. For a moment Hammerschmidt and the captain conversed—Hammerschmidt’s voice was too muffled for Haven to understand, but he sounded furious—and then the car was in motion again, heading through the largely residential outer parts of the Hub toward the official buildings near the center. For another kilometer or two there would be virtually no other traffic, which meant that here was where Haven had to get off.

  He had his opportunity at the next corner as the car stopped to let some cross traffic pass. He wriggled out of the hooks and eased slightly to the side where he would be safe from both wheels and the rear set of question marks. Flattening himself against the pavement, he mentally crossed his fingers…and the car drove off, leaving him lying safely in the middle of the road.

  Fortunately, no one else was coming; equally fortunately, Hammerschmidt’s driver apparently wasn’t watching his mirrors. Haven lay motionless until the car had cleared another block, then sprinted for the cover of the nearest building. There he took a moment to orient himself and listen for signs he’d been observed. Keeping to shadows as much as possible, he headed down the empty streets back toward the wall.

  The distant twang of another catapult shot and the nearer splock of newly arrived garbage came right on schedule and gave him his final bearings. The trash had made it two full blocks inside the wall—the trash, and the tightly wrapped backpack that had gone over with it. Stepping carefully, Haven retrieved the heavy bundle, stripping off the filthy covering and settling the pack onto his shoulders as he faded back into the shadows. Faint cries reached his ears from distant parts of the wall—the multiple demonstrations that should, for the next hour, hold Security’s attention outward.

  He had just that long to reach his objective.

  The objective was the Agriculture/Resources building, and he made it in just over forty minutes.

  Made it to the outside, at least. It took him another ten minutes to scale two floors, find a window that could be opened without leaving any traces, and climb eight flights of steps to the roof.

  The stairs ended in a large equipment shed that also contained the building’s elevator machinery and a handful of neatly racked maintenance tools. Sliding his pack onto the floor, Haven took a quick look around and then stepped out the shed door onto the roof proper. A couple of blocks away the Security building—not surprisingly—still showed lights; beyond that the flitting lights of spotters indicated Hammerschmidt had finally gotten annoyed enough to call in his air power. But none of the spotters were close enough to bother him. Moving cautiously anyway, Haven went to the corner of the shed and looked around it.

  Barely a block away, the black wall of the Ryqril Enclave rose brooding into the sky.

  The Chimney, the blackcollars privately called it, and it was as different from the Hub’s gray walls in its defensive philosophy as could be imagined. The Hub’s wall, rich in sensors and induction fields, was designed to detect intruders and attacks, relying mainly on human forces to counter any such threat. The Ryqril had no such humanitarian pretenses: their wall was deliberately designed to kill. Haven let his eyes trace along the nearest of the slightly inward-sloping edges to the heavy laser mounted atop the structure. Sensor-aimed and -fired, the lasers were reputed to have line-of-sight antiair capability, and all four firing together were thought capable of taking out small craft in low space orbit. Aimed down along the wall, they woul
dn’t have the least bit of trouble vaporizing a mere human being.

  The Ryqril took their own safety very seriously.

  Haven returned to the shed and rummaged in his pack, and a minute later was back outside with his sniper’s slingshot, a small flat case, and a set of light-amp binoculars strapped around his face. Through the binoculars the wall-mounted laser looked even meaner, its heavy-duty gimbal platform and sensor cones adding a cold efficiency to the picture. The blackcollars hadn’t been able to sneak anyone into the work parties who’d built the wall thirty years back, but they’d watched carefully from afar as the lasers were being mounted, and Haven knew that throwing anything substantial at the laser or its sensors would be an invitation to a brief round of target practice.

  However…

  Setting the slingshot brace against his left forearm, Haven opened the flat box and drew out a marble-sized sphere with the consistency of soft putty. He loaded it into the sling and drew back to fire, and as he did so it occurred to him that if he survived it this mission would likely cost him a bout with cancer somewhere down the line. But it was hardly worth worrying about at the moment. Aiming carefully, he let fly.

  A good shot; possibly even a great one. At high power, the binoculars showed the pellet—now badly deformed—sticking just at the juncture of the metal laser base and the ceramic wall. Directly over one of the electronic feeds from the autotarget mechanism.

  Which line, if Hawking knew what he was talking about, was now being slowly degraded by the radiation from the chunk of plutonium embedded in the putty. Whether it would damage the system sufficiently over the next week or so was a separate question, of course. Hawking hadn’t known the answer to that one.

  But at least his threshold for the Chimney’s motion sensors had apparently been correct. No alarms hooted into the night, no Ryqril on foot or in Corsairs came to see who was shooting things at their precious hideaway. Haven considered sending a second chunk of poison to join the first, decided against it, and retreated back into the shed. Tomorrow night would be soon enough to continue the attack.