The Blackcollar Series

by Timothy Zahn

  Landing there just in time to catch Briller’s next shot squarely on its polished surface.

  Briller must have realized at that moment that he was dead, but he made a game try of it anyway. By the time Kanai had his battle-hood and gloves on and had poked his head over his impromptu shield, the big enforcer had sidled around the edge of the room toward the massive bar, trying to get a shot around Kanai’s tabletop without simultaneously exposing himself to the blackcollar’s shuriken.

  But now that his head and hands were protected, Kanai had little to fear from the other’s gun—or from anyone else’s, as a shot glanced off his shoulder from behind him. Twisting, he spun a shuriken off in that direction, then turned back to send another star toward Briller. The big man spat in pain as the shuriken caught him in the right shoulder; he emptied his gun in blind fury. Kanai ducked out from his shelter and sprinted through the hailstorm toward the anteroom.

  He’d expected a larger reception committee to be lying in wait in the anteroom, and was therefore vaguely surprised to find only two people there. “Kanai!” Nash snarled toward him, swinging his flechette pistol around to center on the blackcollar’s stomach.

  “Give it up, Nash,” Kanai told him, eyes flicking over the little man’s shoulder to the coatcheck girl and the tiny pistol in her hand. Paral-dart gun, probably—more useless against him than even the flechette pistols. “Your quarry’s been warned,” he continued, drawing out a shuriken. “He’s probably half a klick away by now.”

  “And you’re the one who warned him, I suppose?” Nash bit out. “Damn you, Kanai—”

  “Sorry about this, lady,” Kanai said to the coatcheck girl. He raised his shuriken—

  And then everything happened at once.

  Across the room the door slammed open and a pair of black-clad men leaped in. Simultaneously, a brilliant flash lit up the room from behind Kanai and a chunk of wall by the door exploded into superheated vapor and brick fragments. Kanai spun around, just in time to see Nash’s “flechette” gun blaze a second laser blast toward the intruders. “Watch it!” he snapped reflexively. The disguised laser swung in his direction—

  And there was the chaft of an airgun, and Nash collapsed to the floor, his last shot burning a black groove in the rug in front of him.

  “Nice shooting,” Lathe said, breathing a bit heavily. “Does this mean you’ve officially joined our side?”

  Kanai turned as the coatcheck girl lowered her pistol, her expression simultaneously, furious and scared. “Damn you, you dimbos,” she snapped at Lathe and his companion, a blackcollar Kanai didn’t recognize. “What did you think you were doing, coming back here? Nash’s lice are all over the mall, just waiting for you.”

  “Oh, we know,” Lathe said, glancing into the bar itself. “We came in to talk to Kanai…and to see whose side you were on.”

  “I’m on my side—no one else’s,” she bit out. “Damn you, anyway, for doing this to me.”

  “If we can talk about this somewhere else,” Kanai put in, eying the main room doorway, “they’ll be pulling themselves together in there anytime now. You mind getting the hell out of here?”

  “You coming with us?” Lathe’s companion asked the woman, raising an eyebrow.

  “What choice do I have?” she growled, gesturing sharply at the prone figure of Nash. “If I don’t, he’ll have me strapped over a firepit the minute he wakes up.”

  “Oh, well, that’s easy enough to fix,” Kanai said. His shuriken was still in his hand; raising it, he hurled it down squarely into the little man’s throat.

  The woman inhaled sharply. “You—”

  “He was a Security spy, and I was going to kill him anyway,” Kanai told her calmly. “All right—your job’s safe again. Now can we get out of here?”

  But Lathe was still looking at the woman. “Your choice,” he said.

  For a second more she eyed them in silent indecision. Then she gave a sharp nod. “Back here.” She motioned to them, stepping back from the counter. “There’s a hidden trapdoor back here, leads a few blocks away—”

  She broke off to fire a burst of paral-darts through the doorway. “The company’s getting restless,” Lathe agreed, taking a long step and vaulting over the counter. “Let’s go.”

  The other blackcollar followed; with a deep breath and underlying misgivings, Kanai joined them. The girl pushed aside a rack of coats and sent a hard kick against the wall there, and a small square of flooring popped up a millimeter or two. A knife appeared in her hand, and she pried the square up, revealing a handle. She tugged, and the tiling around the handle cracked into a rectangular shape and lifted up. “Down the stairs and along the tunnel,” she instructed, gesturing. “I need to grab a couple of things and then set up the self-destruct.”

  “Right. “Lathe’s fingers found his tingler: Backup: Pull out. Escaping via rathole. Rendezvous at point beta.

  Acknowledged.

  Kanai took another deep breath and followed Lathe down the stairway. He hoped to hell the comsquare knew what he was doing.

  The stairway led a dozen meters beneath Denver’s streets to a complex and ancient-feeling warren of ceramic-walled tunnels. With the blackcollars’ penlights throwing odd reflections from the frequent puddles of stagnant water underfoot, they traveled along in silence, all of them apparently aware that Security could conceivably have scattered audio sensors in the tunnels.

  The woman was clearly familiar with the territory, guiding them through the maze without hesitation. Fifteen minutes later they came to a more modern-looking metal ladder disappearing upward through a broken section of roof. The woman headed up, and a minute later they were all standing around a dimly lit basement smelling strongly of mildew and neglect.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she apologized, stepping to a rickety set of stairs and shining Lathe’s light briefly onto a white square set into the wall there. “We should be safe here for a while—long enough for Security to shift the search somewhere else, anyway.”

  Kanai moved to her side, glanced up the stairs at the closed door there, then flashed his own light on the white plate. Fifteen or twenty barely visible black threads were set into it, leading off in all different directions. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Passive intruder alert,” the woman told him. “The monofilaments are anchored upstairs to doors and windows and whatnot. If anyone comes in, the thread is pulled out of the plate. Looks like no one else has been by here since the last time I was in. Not surprising.”

  “Interesting system,” Lathe commented, removing his flexarmor Battle-hood. “Sounds like the sort of thing that an organization with more ingenuity than funds would come up with.”

  She gave the comsquare a long look, but then shrugged. “You’re right on that one. Being the last surviving member of a resistance group is hardly a money-making proposition—and we were never exactly rich even at our strongest.”

  “Your group being…?”

  “Torch, of course. What else?”

  Chapter 20

  HER NAME WAS ANNE Silcox, and she wasn’t anything like what Caine had expected.

  Outwardly, she didn’t seem especially out of the ordinary. Her voice and manner of speech were normal enough, her face and body language tense but under reasonable control. Nowhere was there any obvious display of the holy fire Caine would have looked to find in a member of such an avowedly fanatical group.

  But then he’d already learned a lot on this mission about discrepancies between theory and reality.

  “I wish I knew what happened to the rest of them.” Silcox shook her head. Her eyes made their fourth quick search of the unfurnished living room, as if she wasn’t ready yet to put complete faith in Lathe’s assurances about the safe house’s security. “I was only seventeen when they disappeared, and hardly in the inner circle. All I know is that it wasn’t something unexpected, because they set me up in the Shandygaff specifically to keep an eye on things in the absence of better information sources.�
�� Her eyes flicked from Lathe’s face to Caine’s and Hawking’s, then settled onto Kanai’s. It was a tendency Caine had already noted in her, perhaps a need to connect with the familiar in such an unfamiliar situation.

  Beside Caine, Lathe shifted in his seat. “That’s not much to go on,” he told her. “Do you know anything about their contacts here—communications with the criminal hierarchy, perhaps?”

  Her eyes were still on Kanai. “All I know is that they occasionally had doings with blackcollars—both the ones here and some from other areas. Kanai could probably tell you more about that.”

  Lathe shifted his own gaze to Kanai. “You never mentioned other blackcollars.”

  The other shrugged. “I’ve heard reports, mostly through Torch, of other teams operating east and south of here, but I’ve never met any of them. You have to remember that long-distance travel is pretty severely restricted. As to dealings with the crime lords, if Torch did any of that I never heard about it. Frankly, I doubt it—their goals wouldn’t mesh very well.”

  Lathe nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps. I presume Bernhard handled your contacts with Torch—do you know whether or not he was in touch with them at the time Anne says they closed up shop?”

  “Possible, but I don’t know. Bernhard isn’t big on telling us everything he knows.”

  “Occupational hazard,” Caine murmured.

  If Lathe heard the remark he didn’t show it. “Did Torch have any standard records caches?” he asked Silcox. “Hard copies, computer files, even a dummy program on someone else’s machine? Anything that might give us a clue as to what happened to them?”

  She shook her head. “All I was was a walking eavesdrop in the Shandygaff. No one would have trusted me with stuff like that.”

  “All right, then,” Lathe said. “Let’s switch to exactly what you’ve learned in the last five years. Any idea when the Ryqril started taking such an active interest in Aegis Mountain? Surely they haven’t been trying to break in since the war ended.”

  “No, that’s been a recent development,” she said. “I started hearing rumors about it a year ago from smug-runners who were annoyed at how the extra security around there was interfering with their runs westward.”

  “The same time we snoggered them out of the Novas,” Hawking pointed out. “Maybe they decided they needed to play catch-up again.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Caine asked.

  “Means they’re hoping to find more of our technology to steal,” Lathe said. “Makes sense, I suppose. There could very well be something left in Aegis they didn’t get elsewhere from us after the war—”

  “Wait a second,” Caine cut in. “Why should they care about the thirty-year-old technology of a race they’ve already beaten?”

  Lathe turned a strange frown on him. “You’re serious?” the comsquare asked. “How did your teachers miss that one?”

  “Maybe I was absent that day,” Caine returned archly. “If it’s not a state secret…?”

  “The Ryqril are technological imbeciles,” Lathe told him. “That’s a literal, medical term—no insult implied. The whole race is incapable of creating new technology on their own beyond a fairly low level. It’s probably the main driving force beyond their constant attempts to conquer their neighbors, in fact—it’s one of the few ways they’ve got to advance their technological level.”

  Caine stared at him. It was such an unbelievable statement…and yet, now that it was in front of him, a lot of other things began to make sense. The gamble the Ryqril on Argent had taken—and ultimately lost—of trying to beat the blackcollars to the hidden Novas was suddenly a lot less foolish than it’d seemed to him at the time. With their forces bogged down in a standoff with the Chryselli, an influx of new weaponry could have made a real difference in that war. “I gather,” he said slowly, “that’s why Security is still using the old-style aircraft and equipment designs that we know how to deal with.”

  Lathe nodded, the frown still on his face. “It’s risky, certainly, but even when you know how to disable an aircraft, that doesn’t mean you can pull it off in actual practice. The Ryqril can copy any technology they can steal, of course, so they’re not stuck using the actual thirty-year-old crates.”

  “You really didn’t know?” Hawking broke in. “It was common knowledge among the TDE hierarchy even before the main conflict started.”

  “There was a lot my teachers seemed to forget,” Caine told him, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice. Once again, the Resistance leaders he’d trusted so fully had withheld important information from him, and while this one didn’t hurt as badly as the first of those revelations had, back on Argent, it hurt enough.

  “Maybe they simply forgot to mention it,” Kanai suggested hesitantly. “Or else the information was lost somehow—”

  “No,” Caine said flatly. “They kept it from me on purpose. After all, I was being trained to hate the Ryqril—why tell me anything that might make their actions understandable?”

  Kanai fell silent. Hawking busied himself studying a corner of the room, and even Lathe looked uncomfortable. Turning to Silcox, Caine saw to his annoyance that even her expression had softened a bit.

  And the last thing he wanted right now was sympathy from a stranger. “You were telling us about the Ryqril and Aegis Mountain,” he reminded her tartly.

  Her face went back to neutral. “As I said, they’re apparently trying to get in without bringing the mountain down on top of them—and from what I hear, that’s not going to be an easy trick.”

  Lathe nodded. “It’ll be loaded with doomsdays all the way down the tunnel. All right—change of subject. How was the rest of Torch supposed to contact you when and if they came back to Denver?”

  She shrugged. “They’d send someone to the Shandygaff or call me at home, I guess. It’s not just crime bosses that go to the bar, you know.”

  Lathe exchanged glances with Hawking, and it wasn’t hard for Caine to read their thoughts: Silcox wasn’t going to be a lot of help. “Well, I think both home and the bar are going to be off-limits to you from now on,” the comsquare told her. “If you like, you can stay here—we’ve got other safe houses we can use.” He stood up.

  “Wait a second,” Silcox said, scrambling to her feet as well. “That’s it? I get you out of the Shandygaff, blow my cover there to hell and gone, and you’re just going to say goodbye? The hell you are. Whatever you’re involved in here, you’ve just hired yourself a new recruit.”

  “Look, I appreciate the offer, but—”

  “But nothing,” she said, and for the first time Caine caught a glimpse of the fire buried beneath the ashes. “Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m good with a gun, I can scrounge anything you could possibly want—probably better than Kanai here can—and even without Torch I know how to get good information from anywhere in town.”

  Lathe sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but to be brutally honest you’re as likely to get in our way as you are to help us. And we already have our own information sources, thanks.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” she shot back. “From what I hear you lost a couple of your outriders already.”

  “A couple of what?” Hawking asked as he and the others followed Lathe toward the door.

  “Your informants and helpers. The people who ferried Caine out of the mountains and got you your explosives.”

  Caine froze in midstride. “What? Who? What are their names?”

  Silcox cocked an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t know? Well, well.”

  “Who are they?”

  She seemed taken aback by Caine’s explosion. “Geoff and Raina Dupre and Karen Lindsay. Security took them in for questioning this afternoon.”

  A cold hand closed around Caine’s stomach, and he mouthed a silent curse. He’d hoped to convince them someday that he and his team were people they could trust; instead he’d gotten them arrested. “Lathe, we’ve got to get them out.”
>
  “What do they know?” the comsquare asked quietly.

  “About the mission? Nothing at all. But I got them into this mess, and it’s my responsibility to get them out.”

  Lathe studied him for a long moment, shifted his gaze to Silcox. “Are they associated with Torch in any way? Or with any other resistance group?”

  “The names aren’t familiar,” she said.

  “It’s nothing like that,” Caine said impatiently. “They’re just ordinary people that I got snarled up in this.”

  Slowly, Lathe shook his head. “I’m sorry, Caine, but I don’t think it would be feasible. Getting into Athena at all, let alone pulling anyone out, would be a major undertaking. We simply don’t have the resources or the time. I’m sorry.”

  Caine stared at him, unable to believe his ears. “Lathe, we’re not talking about blackcollars here, or even soldiers who went into action knowing the risks. These are civilians—people who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. We can’t just abandon them.”

  “We have no choice,” Lathe said flatly.

  For a long moment the two men locked eyes. Then, blinking sudden moisture from his eyes, Caine turned away. He couldn’t, in all honesty, argue with the logic, but that didn’t make the decision easier to bear.

  The blackcollar forces are the elite warriors of this upcoming conflict.…The ancient words echoed in his mind, sounding more than ever like a hollow mockery.

  It was Silcox who eventually broke the silence. “Well?”

  “I suppose you’ve made your point,” Lathe said dryly. The annoyance of civilians caught in the grinder was obviously already forgotten. “All right. Temporarily, anyway, you’re hired. You can still use this house as HQ; we’ll drop by periodically to get whatever information you’ve picked up.”