The Blackcollar Series

by Timothy Zahn

  Reger had betrayed them.

  “You can’t escape,” an amplified voice boomed from somewhere, its point of origin lost among the echoes from the surrounding buildings. “This is General Quinn, Lathe. Raise your hands and surrender—all of you—or we’ll burn you where you stand. Look up if you don’t believe we can do it.”

  Caine risked a glance upward. Hovering perhaps a hundred meters above them was a long, shark-shaped aircraft, reflected gray light showing the weapons pods on either side of its fuselage. The firepower that had taken out their vans…and could just as thoroughly take them out as well.

  Tactics, strategies, contingencies—all his training seemed to swirl together into a useless, half-gelled mess. Behind him, he could sense Colvin and Alamzad crouching just inside the van’s doors, waiting for a lead they could follow. Waiting for him to take action.

  And he couldn’t. There was nothing he could think of to do that wouldn’t mean their instant death.

  His first command…and he’d failed.

  From around the van a quiet voice broke into his anguish. “Do as the man says, Caine,” Mordecai said. “But don’t give up hope.”

  Swallowing hard, Caine slowly lifted his hands over his head.

  The man in charge of the operation was, at least, no fool. Neither the men at the barricades nor the fighter overhead made the slightest move until all ten of their prisoners were out in the open. Only then did a new group of Security men step forward, several of them lugging pairs of heavy-duty mag-lock forearm shackles. A lump rose in Caine’s throat at the sight of the shackles…a lump of déjà vu and the painful realization that this time, at least, history would not be repeating itself.

  And then the group came close enough for faces to be distinguished…and the mag-lock shackles were suddenly forgotten. “Galway!” Caine gasped.

  “Caine.” The perfect nodded gravely. His eyes swept the group, found Lathe; but it was another man who brushed by him and faced the comsquare.

  “Comsquare Lathe, I’m General Quinn,” the other said in a grimly satisfied voice. “You’re hereby informed that the agreement between General Lepkowski and the Ryqril is no longer in force, at least insofar as you and your men here are concerned. You are in open rebellion against the Ryqril Empire and its authorized government, and are therefore subject to imprisonment and appropriate punishment for your actions—”

  “Spare us the official speech, General,” Lathe cut him off. His voice was calm enough, but Caine sensed a hint of steel beneath it.

  Apparently the general did, too, and for a moment his triumphant expression slipped a bit. But he recovered quickly. “I see that bravado remains part of a blackcollar’s arsenal.” He sneered. “I suggest you don’t bother trying to impress me with your stoicism. From now on, I’m the one who decides your fate, and I’ve always found a particular satisfaction in breaking people who pretend they can’t be broken.”

  “No,” Mordecai said quietly. “You’re wrong.”

  All eyes turned to the small blackcollar. “Wrong about what?” Quinn demanded.

  “That you decide our fate,” Mordecai told him calmly…but there was something about his face that sent a shiver down Caine’s back. “You have only the power we grant you. I choose not to give you any at all.”

  Quinn inhaled sharply, perhaps suddenly understanding what was coming. “Guards!” he snapped.

  But too late. Mordecai’s right hand was a blur as it swung upward at his face beneath the goggles. Caine caught a faint flicker of light on metal…and even as the Security men belatedly surged forward Mordecai collapsed in a heap on the ground.

  “Medic team!” Quinn shouted back toward the barricades. “The rest of you—get those shackles on them. This might be a trick.”

  Caine tensed, watching Lathe out of the corner of his eye for the signal that would mean taking action. But no signal had come by the time the massive shackles had been fastened around his forearms. Lathe, in fact, seemed almost in shock by what Mordecai had done…and slowly. Caine came to the dark realization that this wasn’t a ruse after all.

  “Well?” Quinn snorted impatiently as the medic crouched by Mordecai’s still form, instruments humming softly.

  “Paralyte shock,” the other said, drawing out a hypo and tugging at the mag-lock shackles enclosing Mordecai’s arms. “Get these off him, someone—I have to give him a shot.”

  “No chance he’s faking?” Galway put in as one of the Security men moved to obey.

  “None at all. Yes, all the way off. Thanks.” Pulling off the blackcollar’s right glove, the medic jabbed his wrist with the hypo. “We’ve got to get him to the hospital immediately, General—I’ve got him stabilized, but that won’t last long. He’s taken an overdose of a paralyte drug, like getting shot repeatedly by a paral-dart pistol.”

  “So counteract it,” Quinn growled. “We’ve got antidote—”

  “But there’s no way to tell out here which specific drug he’s taken,” the medic interrupted him. “All the antidotes are poison unless the corresponding paralyte is already in the system. Injecting the wrong antidote would kill him almost instantly.”

  Quinn grimaced, but nodded curtly. “All right, get the ambulance here, then. I’m damned if I’m going to let him get away from me.” He turned to the others. “The rest of you move over toward that barrier while we wait for the transport.”

  “Just a minute,” Pittman said hesitantly, stepping over toward the group around Mordecai. The Security men let him pass—

  And it was only then that Caine realized with a shock that the other’s arms hadn’t been shackled. “Pittman?” he asked. “What—?”

  “I’m sorry, Caine,” Pittman said, his voice low, his eyes avoiding contact. “Galway, Mordecai’s carrying a cassette you’ll want to have.”

  “Pittman!” Colvin gasped. “You lousy, stinking traitor. Why in the name of hell—?”

  “Because I had no choice!” Pittman snapped tautly over his shoulder as he knelt down beside Mordecai’s still form. “None at all. If you damn me, damn the Ryqril, too—they’re the ones who did this to me.” His hand reached under the civilian shirt hiding Mordecai’s flexarmor, emerged with a small cassette.

  “Yeah, I’ll damn the Ryqril, all right,” Colvin snarled, taking a step forward before the Security men at his side stopped him. “But whatever money they offered you that you couldn’t resist—”

  “Shut up!” Pittman yelled, jumping to his feet and spinning around. The hand gripping the cassette arched over his shoulder to throw—

  Galway stepped in front of him, deftly plucking the cassette away. “Settle down, Pittman,” he said, and even through his own haze of agonized disbelief Caine could hear something like regret in the prefect’s voice. “It’s over now. It’s all over.”

  “Only for now,” Lathe said softly. His voice was almost calm…but there was death in his eyes. “Only for now. But there’ll be another reckoning, Pittman. I swear it.”

  Overhead, a shadow caught Caine’s eye: the flying ambulance had arrived. It settled to the pavement next to Mordecai as the paramed inside flung open the rear doors and rolled a stretcher out to the waiting Security men. “You three—get in there with him,” Quinn instructed a knot of guards as Mordecai was lifted inside.

  “But then there won’t be room for me,” the medic protested.

  “You’ve already said there’s nothing you can do for him out here, haven’t you?” the general retorted. “So ride in front. You’ll be there in five minutes anyway.”

  The medic grimaced, but apparently knew better than to argue. He got in beside the pilot as the Security men and paramed squeezed in with Mordecai and closed the rear doors. The ambulance lifted into the night sky, and Quinn turned his attention back to the rest of them. “I trust none of you will be foolish enough to try anything so unnecessarily melodramatic,” he said, almost conversationally.

  “Don’t worry,” Lathe told him, still in that same soft voice. “None
of us is going to die until we’ve taken care of you.”

  “I’m sure,” Quinn said. “Lieutenant, call in the transports. And instruct the interrogation department to prepare for fresh subjects.”

  Numbly, Caine let himself be led over to the barricade. Pittman a traitor, Mordecai near death…and Lathe captured. What would come next he didn’t know, but it almost didn’t even matter.

  For Caine, the universe had already been shattered beyond repair.

  Chapter 25

  IT WAS A CURIOUS sensation, Mordecai thought, to be helpless.

  Curious, and thoroughly unpleasant. Every small motion of the ambulance made him feel in danger of sliding off the stretcher, even though he knew they’d strapped him securely in place. Overhead, the dome light had been dimmed, for which he was thankful: with his eyes paralyzed open the glare could have quickly become painful. It would have been nice to be able to see the city below, but his head was pointed straight up and all his peripheral vision could pick up was reflections of the ambulance’s own interior from the side windows.

  About all he could do was listen. And he did.

  “Easy as breezy, wasn’t it?” one of the Security guards remarked from beside him. “I guess blackcollars aren’t so tough to handle when you know they’re coming.”

  “All guerrilla forces are like that,” another responded “They’re long on nerve and short on numbers, and once you get them pinned down they fold.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t get too confident if I was you,” the paramed put in. “I helped treat some of the guys that came in after the Rialto Street fiasco—”

  “Watch your mouth,” the first Security man growled.

  “A fiasco’s a fiasco,” the paramed insisted. “And these same blackcollars did a complete medical run-through on them.”

  “Yeah, but they could move then,” someone said, and Mordecai sensed dimly that he’d been poked hard in the chest. “This one’s not—”

  “Hey, what’s that?” the third Security man interrupted. An arm reached over Mordecai’s face to his chest, reappeared with a small, flat disk. “Didn’t you guys search him?”

  “’Course we did—got all his stuff right back there in that bag. How the hell did we miss something so—”

  And with a crack! of released gas pressure, the belly-bomb disintegrated into a cloud of flying needles.

  Exquisite pain jabbed into Mordecai’s cheeks, and he tensed, dimly aware that for the first time since injecting himself with paralyte he could tense. A tingling sensation flooded his system, as, around him, the startled oaths and shouts of the others came to an abrupt halt. Muscles trembling slightly, he fumbled at the straps holding him down and managed to release the clasps. Taking a deep breath, he sat up and looked around him.

  His four companions sat slumped in their seats, faces contorted in death into surprise or horror, depending, Mordecai supposed, on whether or not they’d realized in time what had been done to them. For his own part, he could sympathize most with the outrage clearly visible on the face of one of the Security men. Paralyte antidotes had been deliberately designed to be lethal so as to prevent potential targets from doping themselves up with antidote before being shot; it was unlikely the creators of that policy had ever realized how it could be used against them.

  The trembling in his muscles was fading now, as was the stinging in his cheeks. Reaching to the lighting control board, he killed the lights in the compartment and looked out the windows, trying to get his bearings. They were over Athena now, clearly, and his inner ear told him they were starting to descend as well. Only a couple of minutes left. Pressing against the window, he searched quickly for the rooftop landing pads that would mark the hospital and—with luck—the Security building.

  There…there…and there. Three of them. One was directly ahead, almost certainly the hospital, and he quickly scanned the other two buildings for clues as to which would be Security. The plainer ten-story one, he decided; the taller and fancier one would probably be the central government building. A tempting target for one of his limpet mines, perhaps even for some more serious attention if they happened to wind up with a little extra time. Fixing the locations of both in his mind, he turned in the darkness to the dead Security man nearest his height and build and began to strip off his uniform.

  The ambulance cushioned to a landing on the hospital roof, and almost before it was down the medic was out and running toward the rear. Mordecai had the doors open by the time he arrived and was industriously grappling with the back end of the stretcher. “Get the other end,” he snapped to the medic. The other got a foot up into the compartment—

  And folded over as Mordecai jabbed him in the belly.

  The blackcollar gave him a surreptitious push to aid his momentum into the compartment, his attention on the four orderlies who’d abruptly burst from the observation corridor alongside the landing pad, shoving a gurney ahead of them as they hurried toward the ambulance. Easy to take out; but someone else might be watching the proceedings from elsewhere along that corridor, and he couldn’t afford to trigger the alarm too soon. Fleetingly, he wished Lathe had opted to take this part of the plan himself—the comsquare was so much better at this kind of deception.

  “Hurry up!” he called to the orderlies, tugging the stretcher half out of the ambulance. “We’re going to need more help right away.”

  “What the hell?” one of them gasped, peering inside at the unmoving bodies. “We were told only one casualty—”

  “You were told wrong,” Mordecai snapped. “Come on—get moving.”

  Three of them raced back into the corridor for more gurneys. The other helped load the stretcher—and the blanket-swathed Security man Mordecai had loaded onto it—onto the gurney and headed inside with it. The medic was starting to recover from the stomach jab; with everyone else temporarily out of eyeshot, Mordecai took the opportunity to lean into the ambulance and knock him out more thoroughly. He’d just completed that task when the pilot finally finished his shutdown procedure and strode back to see what was going on.

  “What the hell?” he gasped, staring at the view inside.

  “He had a doomsday gas bomb,” Mordecai growled. “I was the only one who got to the oxygen in time.”

  The man hissed between his teeth and took a quick step back from the open door. “Damn,” he muttered. “What kind of gas—hey! You’re—”

  Taking a long step toward him, Mordecai slammed a reverse roundhouse kick to the side of the pilot’s head. The man went down without a sound. Mordecai was starting to scoop up the unconscious form when the corridor door behind him banged open. “Hey, you!” a voice shouted. “What, was that—?”

  Most people, Mordecai had learned long ago, didn’t expect to be attacked while they were still talking, and he was on the three orderlies before they knew what was happening. Five punches later they were sprawled on the rooftop with the pilot.

  Carefully, he scanned the windows in the corridor for any witnesses. No faces showed that he could see. Jogging forward to the cockpit, he opened the door and peered inside at the control panel. It was, fortunately, just like the one he and Lathe had looked at briefly the day before. With another quick glance at the corridor windows, he slid into the cockpit and gingerly took the controls.

  He brought the gravs to life first, making sure they were set in neutral mode. Flipping on the autopilot, he keyed in a high-speed course due east. The gravs glowed brighter and the ambulance began to lift, and as he hopped out he reached in to flick off the aircraft’s running lights before slamming the door closed. A dark mass barely visible behind the gravs’ violet glow, it headed off across the city.

  Slipping through the doorway into the still-deserted corridor, he looked about for the elevator. Somewhere on the street down there, he’d have to find a car to steal.

  The transport was just making its approach to the Security building when word came through of the runaway ambulance. “What do you mean, stolen?” Galway growl
ed. “How could it have been stolen?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” The transport’s copilot shook his head. “But the hospital says they didn’t send it out, and it isn’t answering its radio. Wait a moment—there’s more coming through.…They’ve found the pilot unconscious on the hospital landing pad, General.”

  Beside Galway, Quinn swore bitterly. “Damn that stupid medic. Is the ambulance still within range of the Green Mountain lasers, lieutenant?”

  “No, sir, it’s well outside the Athena perimeter now, heading east across Denver.”

  “What did you mean about the medic?” Galway frowned.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Quinn snorted. “He must have gotten a telemetry reading from the hospital and found out what antidote to give Mordecai. And then given it.”

  “Galway?” Pittman called from across the cockpit aisle. “What’s going on?”

  The prefect turned to look at him. “It looks like Mordecai’s managed to make a break for it,” he told the youth. “He’s stolen his ambulance and is heading to somewhere in Denver.”

  Pittman’s eyes widened, and for a moment his lips moved wordlessly. “Oh, no,” he breathed at last. “Oh, hell. Galway—General Quinn—you’ve got to protect me. You’ve got to. I’ve earned that much, damn it—”

  “Protect you from what?” Quinn cut in. “Mordecai’s to ground and gone by now—he sure as hell isn’t coming back here.”

  “Maybe,” Pittman said, eyes darting around as the transport set down on the rooftop pad. “But maybe not. He may just have gone for reinforcements.”

  “What reinforcements?” Quinn scoffed. But his eyes had narrowed. “Some remnant of Torch? Or someone else?”