The Blackcollar Series

by Timothy Zahn

  “I was thinking more of our using it to get up,” O’Dae growled. “Are the spotters up and in place?”

  “One hovering in view of each side of the building. They can’t see much, though—they’re keeping their distance.”

  Cowards. Still, as long as they prevented anyone from sliding out a window on a rope, it didn’t much matter how far back they were. “Still no response from the gas flood system, I take it?”

  “No, sir. I think they must have disabled it at the same time they took out the cameras.”

  O’Dae grimaced. He’d been holding out hope that someone had just left a switch turned off in the control room or something. And without the floor’s remote defenses to rely on, there was only one way to preempt any escape attempt. “Order the commando squad to get ready,” he told the other. “I’ll lead the first wave in myself.”

  The man’s lip twitched, but he nodded. “Yes, sir. Do you want the medics along with them?”

  “No—stretcher teams will be called up when a given area’s clear, but the medics themselves will wait in the infirmary. We’re going to have a lot of casualties to take care of, and I don’t want to risk any of the medics too close to the fighting.”

  “Yes, sir.” The other paused, listening. “All right, Major; the squad’s ready anytime. Armed, armored, and they’ve been shown pictures of all the blackcollars up there. Including Mordecai and Pittman.”

  “Good.” O’Dae sure as hell didn’t want one or more of the blackcollars donning Security uniforms and walking blithely out through the front door. “We’ll attack as soon as I get up there.”

  The elevator slowed, came to a stop. “Get ready,” O’Dae murmured, his voice sounding oddly hollow as it echoed inside his armored faceplate. The door slid open, and he threw himself out of the car to land in kneeling position three meters down the hallway, laser rifle raised and ready.

  Anticlimax. No laser beams lanced out, no one hurled any of those damned throwing stars at them, no one even looked out of any of the rooms or cross corridors to see what was happening. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the bodies scattered down the hallway, it would have been easy to believe nothing at all had happened here.

  The motionless, unnaturally twisted bodies. O’Dae looked once, then turned his eyes quickly away, stomach churning inside him. “O’Dae to monitor,” he called into his mike. “Laser fire still going on down by the elevator shaft?”

  “Negative, sir,” the reply came in his ear. “Lasers have stopped firing and have been moved…looks like to the southeastern corner of the floor.”

  The safe room, of course. O’Dae’s lip twisted into a grim smile. Yes, the blackcollars would have the brains to hole up there when their timetable was disrupted—nowhere else on five could hold out against laser fire for long.

  Which meant O’Dae’s hunch had been correct—they were expecting to be rescued. “Double the guard on the building’s entrances,” he ordered into his mike. “An assault could come at any time.”

  “Yes, sir. Is it clear enough to send litter teams up there?”

  O’Dae scanned the hall once more. “Yeah, go ahead and send the first team up—second commando wave can follow them.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Though at the moment it was still an open question as to whether or not the casualties were beyond the medics’ help. “Harison, Peters—check this group for survivors,” O’Dae ordered, gesturing around them. “Tag anyone who’s alive for the stretchers. The rest of you’ll come with me down the hall and make sure they haven’t left a rear guard to ambush us.”

  Carefully, he set off, his men flanking him. The first two rooms they checked were empty, the third had two bodies lying in it…and the fourth had a survivor.

  He was just getting gingerly to his knees, hands cradling his head, as they entered. “Who—? Oh, God; you’re here,” he said hoarsely.

  O’Dae stepped forward and caught the man’s arm as he started to weave again, helped him into a sitting position. “How do you feel?” he asked, eyes darting briefly to the sloppily tied bandage covering the back and side of the other’s head and the blood that was still dribbling out from beneath it.

  “Lousy,” the other groaned. “Dizzy. I got the bleeding stopped…must have fainted again. Can I sit down?”

  O’Dae started to tell him he was sitting, thought better of it. “Why don’t you lie down instead?” he suggested. “The stretchers’ll be here in a minute to take you downstairs.”

  “Okay,” the other sighed. Already he was beginning to fade again. Beside him lay the medkit he’d apparently managed to get down from the wall; bunching up another of the kit’s bandages, O’Dae made a pillow for the other’s head and laid him down on it. Almost as an afterthought, he took a moment to study the other’s face. Young, smooth, almost feminine—a fresh recruit, probably, or else someone whose family could buy more Idunine than they either needed or deserved.…

  Resolutely, O’Dae turned his eyes away. Whoever he was, he definitely wasn’t one of the blackcollars. “What are you all standing around here for?” he snapped at the rest of the squad grouped around him. “Let’s get back to business.”

  They stepped back into the hall and continued on their cautious way. Behind them, barely audible through their armor, came a noise, and O’Dae turned around as a stretcher team emerged from the elevator and moved to the first of the crumpled bodies. “One in here, too,” he called to them, pointing toward the room he’d just left. Their officer waved in acknowledgment, and O’Dae turned away with an odd feeling of relief. Hunting escaped prisoners could be highly unpleasant duty, especially if there was shooting to be done, but he would take it over stretcher carrying any day of the month. At least with prisoner hunting it was the enemy who usually got hurt, not his fellow Security men.

  And some of the enemy were going to be hurt tonight. O’Dae was going to make damn sure of that.

  Gripping his laser tighter, he hurried to catch up with his men as, behind him, the second wave of commandos arrived.

  Chapter 28

  GALWAY’S HEAD HAD FALLEN forward in such a way that the door was out of his sight, and his first clue that the rescuers were at hand was the tingle of a needle in his arm as paral-drug antidote was injected. “We’ll have you out of here in a minute, sir,” someone murmured in his ear. “Please be as quiet as possible—we think the blackcollars are holed up in the safe room across the hall, and we don’t want them to know we’re here until we’re ready to blow them out of there.”

  “Ungh,” Galway grunted in acknowledgment. Making noise wasn’t likely to be a problem for at least a few more minutes; his tongue still felt like a long-dead animal.

  Quinn was apparently made of sterner stuff. “Damn them all,” the general ground out hoarsely. “Damn them—damn that Pittman, especially. Who’s that—Major O’Dae? What’s the situation, Major?”

  “Not too bad, sir—I think they’ve outsmarted themselves.” The major whispered a quick summary of events both inside and outside the Security building. Galway listened with half an ear, most of his attention on getting his muscles going again after nearly a half hour of paralysis. Still, if the major was reading things correctly, the situation did indeed seem to be under control at the moment.

  A circumstance that struck him as suspiciously odd.

  “…we’ve taken fifteen injured men downstairs to the infirmary already—mostly head wounds, I gather, from what I could see of the bloodstains. Haven’t had a report from down there lately, but most of the casualties apparently had good heartbeats, so my guess is they’re doing all right—”

  “Yes, fine,” Quinn broke in, swearing under his breath as he gingerly massaged his calf muscles. “Never mind the wounded for now. You’re sure the blackcollars are in the safe room?”

  “We’ve been over the entire floor, General,” O’Dae assured him. “There’s nowhere else they could be.”

  “Could they have disguised themselves as Security men and
gone down with your litter teams?” Galway asked, forcing the words out past his still-wooden tongue.

  “No, sir,” O’Dae said, sounding both confident and a little indignant. “No one but the injured have left the floor—we’ve made damn sure of that.”

  “Then perhaps—”

  “And they were injured, all of them,” O’Dae added, “unless you’re suggesting the blackcollars cracked their own skulls for blood to dab themselves with.”

  “You did have medics up here making sure it was real blood, then?” Galway persisted, something in him unwilling to let go of it.

  “I’m sure they did,” Quinn cut in before O’Dae could reply. “Where the hell would they get fake blood from, anyway? Give my people a little credit, Galway—they’re not stupid. All right. Major—how do you intend to blast the bastards out?”

  “Uh…I’ve got two heavy laser cannon coming up from the emergency bunker, sir,” O’Dae said, sounding suddenly doubtful. “Sir…we didn’t actually have medics on the scene here—we just loaded the wounded on stretchers and took them down to the infirmary. Maybe we’d better check and make sure—”

  “Make sure about what?” Quinn snarled. “That they weren’t blackcollars in disguise? You said you looked at all their faces, didn’t you?”

  “Well…yes, sir. But if they could somehow have smuggled in fake blood…couldn’t they have had disguise kits, too?”

  “Oh, hell,” Galway muttered as an unpleasant tremor twisted his gut. “General…the whole setup for our ambush came from Pittman.”

  “Hell!” Quinn barked suddenly into the hush. “Bloody, krijing hell! Major—guard team to the infirmary. Now. And alert the exit guards to watch for a break.”

  “Sir—?”

  “Do it, damn you,” Quinn snarled. “Don’t you see? They set this capture up themselves.”

  O’Dae gulped and spoke urgently into his mike, a look of incomprehension on his face.

  He was too late. By the time the guard team reached the infirmary all they found was a handful of wounded Security men and unconscious medics…and from the exit the guards were ominously silent, as well.

  The general alarm came through on the Security van’s radio five minutes into their mad drive toward the fence and freedom. “Great,” Caine muttered.

  “They had to catch on eventually,” Lathe said from behind the wheel. “Frankly, I didn’t think we’d get even this much of a head start. I guess the limpet mines Mordecai planted rattled them more than we expected.”

  Caine looked at him, wincing in spite of himself at the comsquare’s horrible “head wound” and the “blood” coating his face. “I suppose I should be grateful that you told at least some of us about this one,” he gritted, putting as much sarcasm into the words as he could. “It’s an improvement over Argent, anyway.”

  Lathe sighed, rubbing ineffectively at the makeup on his face. “I’m sorry, but it had to be done this way.”

  “Why? Because I couldn’t be trusted to react properly when Pittman betrayed us? What about the rest of you? You ought to have been as angry as I was.”

  “Perhaps. But since Pittman was your teammate, you and the others would naturally have been expected to react the most strongly. You, particularly, were the one Galway was watching closest—I don’t know whether you noticed that.” The comsquare shrugged fractionally. “Besides which, Pittman had to be able to say in complete honesty that you didn’t suspect him when he made his phone calls. They were almost certainly analyzing his voiceprint patterns, and any lies would have been picked up on immediately.”

  Caine turned away and glowered out the windshield. Once more Lathe had played fast and loose with both the game and his own allies…and once more the fact that logic was on his side didn’t help a damn.

  Lathe turned a corner, and a few blocks ahead Caine saw the fence at Athena’s perimeter. “I hope you have some way to get through the Security troops they’re bound to have at the gate up there,” he said tartly. “It’d be a shame to waste a perfectly good double agent getting into a place you can’t get out of.”

  “I’ve got a plan,” Lathe said evenly.

  “One that takes the lasers up on Green Mountain into account?”

  “If you’ll notice,” Skyler’s voice came from the crowded compartment behind him, “we’ve been taking a route that gives us minimum exposure to those lasers.”

  “Which probably wasn’t necessary,” Lathe added. “I doubt the lasers can be set to shoot at ground targets inside the fence—too much danger of misfires or enemy mischief. But there was no point in taking chances.”

  “What about when we hit the fence proper?” Anne Silcox asked, a noticeable tremor in her voice. “We’re not going to try and bluff our way past the guards, are we?”

  “Not with the word already out,” Lathe assured her. “Actually, I’m rather hoping the lasers will react to an attempt to ram the fence from the inside.”

  Caine took a deep breath against the butterflies beginning to congregate in his stomach. “I trust you’re bearing in mind that Anne is still wearing all our flexarmor.”

  “Against those lasers?” Jensen grunted from the van’s rear. “That bandage over her hair will protect her about as much as the flexarmor will. Lathe—we’ve got company coming. One of the spotters is swinging around in this direction.”

  “Has he got us fingered?”

  “I don’t think so, no. He’s turning pretty casually, as if he’s just coming in for a closer look. But if we don’t want him to spot the grand exit, we’d better get out fast.”

  “Right. Next corner—everyone get ready to climb “out.”

  The next corner turned out to be a short two blocks from the fence and what could now be seen to be a heavily guarded gate. Skyler herded the others into the relative concealment of an arched doorway in the cross street while Lathe and Hawking worked together at the driver’s side of the van. A moment later they were finished, and as the two blackcollars jumped clear the vehicle lurched forward and sped off toward the gate.

  “Make yourselves invisible,” Lathe murmured as the two blackcollars joined the others under the arch. “And cross your fingers.”

  “It’s veering off line,” Colvin pointed out tensely as the vehicle vanished from sight beyond the buildings across the street from their shelter. “It was starting to shift toward the other lane.”

  “A little of that’ll be all right,” Hawking assured him. “As long as it hits the fence somewh—yowp! There goes the spotter.”

  It was, Caine thought, the understatement of the evening. The aircraft screamed past them at streetlight level, chasing after the empty van like a mad Valkyrie.

  “Everyone across the street—up against the building over there,” Lathe snapped.

  They’d barely reached the other side when there was a crash of metal on metal from around the corner as the van plowed into the fence—

  And without warning the entire landscape lit up like the inside of a sun and there was a thunderous explosion.

  Followed immediately by darkness and unearthly silence. Cautiously, Lathe took a look around the corner. “Come on, everyone,” he said, and disappeared around the building at a dead run. Ahead, the scene by the fence was stomach-churning impressive. Torn metal lay scattered everywhere, some of the pieces barely recognizable as being from the van or the spotter, others too distorted for even that much identification. At least five meters of the fence were gone or crumpled; the concrete around the crash site—what of it was visible—was blackened and blistered. Of the guards that had been standing at the gate there was no sign at all.

  “What happened?” gasped Anne Silcox, running beside Caine.

  “Looks like Lathe was right,” he told her. “The van must have triggered the defense lasers when it rammed the fence. I guess the spotter was too close and got caught in the blast—either that or the laser got it directly.”

  “My God.” She shook her head, as if not believing it.

 
“I’m sure Torch has done things equally messy,” Lathe commented from her other side. Caine looked across at him, struck by the intensity in his voice. “It’s part of any war, guerrilla or otherwise…and if you’re really determined to be a part of it, you’d better get used to this sort of thing.”

  She glanced at him, then turned silently away. Caine caught Lathe’s eye, nodded at the fence. “You have some special magic to keep the lasers from frying, us?”

  “Shouldn’t need any magic,” the comsquare said. “I doubt the things are set for antipersonnel applications. Too wasteful, not to mention dangerous—all the more so now with all the sensors in the area having been fried. The only real question is whether or not we’ll make it to the cars waiting in the next block before Quinn recovers enough to send out more troops.”

  Apparently Quinn was indeed adequately shocked; or perhaps he believed the escapees had perished in the blast. Whatever the reason, the cars were well away from Athena and driving sedately north before fresh spotters belatedly appeared in the night sky.

  Chapter 29

  THE SPOTTERS WERE STILL buzzing around the city—mostly far to the south of their quarry—when Lathe pulled the car into an alley and shut off the lights. “What’re we doing here?” Caine asked, his stomach tensing again. He’d had enough surprises for one night.

  “I need to make a quick phone call,” the comsquare replied as the second and third cars pulled up behind them. “Ms. Silcox, I’d like you to accompany me. Pittman, come up here and get behind the wheel, just in case a fast exit is required. Caine, you stay with him; I’ll have the rest of them spread out in loose shield formation.”

  “It might help if we knew exactly what kind of trouble you were expecting to run into here,” Caine told the comsquare in a low voice as the others began clearing out of the van.

  “No trouble anticipated,” Lathe assured him. “Just a precautionary measure. Really.”

  “Right,” Caine muttered under his breath. He and Silcox got out as Pittman went around and climbed into the vacated driver’s seat. Caine listened as the footsteps faded into the night…and for the first time since their capture he was alone with Pittman.