The Blackcollar (8 page)

"Don't worry about it," Lathe assured him, stroking his dragonhead ring gently. "You'll have it."

Closing the hotel door behind him, Caine tossed his bag the length of the room to land on the bed. All the anger, frustration, and—
yes, admit it
—the contempt had drained out of him on the ride back to Capstone. Mordecai had been no more talkative than he had been earlier in the day, and if he was friendlier it would have taken a micrometer to measure it. Maybe that had been for the benefit of hidden microphones, but Caine doubted it. The smaller man just didn't like him. In all fairness, Caine couldn't blame him. Dhonau's rash pledge of cooperation, inefficacious though it was, would still get the blackcollars in trouble if Galway found out about it. If, hell—
when.

Sighing, Caine went to the bed and began to unpack his bag. Dusk was falling outside; there wasn't much else he could do today except try to think up a new approach. Probably a waste of—

The thought coasted to a halt, and he stared down at the clothes he had dumped onto the bed.

His pills were missing.

"Damn," he muttered, searching in vain through folds and sleeves. How had he forgotten—? Then he remembered: the blackcollars had packed for him. Swallowing another curse, he went over to the phone and dialed for the directory.

Mordecai, it turned out, was one of the thirty percent of nongovernment Capstonians who had private phones. The blackcollar answered on the sixth ring. "Yes?" he said, and his face immediately went neutral. "Oh. What is it, Rienzi?"

Caine explained the problem, feeling obscurely gallant for not mentioning whose fault it was. "I can't find any phone listed for the lodge. Do you know any way to get in touch with them?"

"Yeah—by car or by foot." Mordecai exhaled noisily.

"Meet me at the east gate in thirty minutes; I'll drive you back up there."

"No, that's all right," Caine said hastily. "Look, I can probably get a refill in town somewhere—"

"It's no trouble. Wouldn't want you put out on our account. East gate, thirty minutes." The screen blanked.

Scowling, Caine scooped up his coat and left.

The drive into the mountains was quiet agony. Mordecai never actually used the word "stupid," but Caine knew he was thinking it. It was a relief when they finally pulled up at the lodge.

Lights were blazing through the curtains from the main hall, and as they walked to the door Caine could hear loud, slightly raucous voices. The homemade liquor was flowing freely tonight.

Reaching for the door handle, Mordecai turned to Caine and put a forefinger to his lips. Frowning, Caine nodded. Mordecai pushed open the door and they stepped into the babble of voices.

The room was deserted.

Caine looked at Mordecai, swallowing his questions, to find the blackcollar studying his face. Whatever he saw seemed satisfactory, and he nodded to the long table they'd eaten dinner at. Moving silently to its edge, Caine glanced over its top and then squatted and peered at its underside. Five cassette players were fastened there, playing their hearts out.

He stood up. From a door across the room Mordecai beckoned. Caine joined him, and the voices faded away as the blackcollar led them through a maze of darkened halls and down long stairways. They were, Caine judged, a good fifty meters underground when they reached a dim passage. At the far end, lit by two small lights, was a double door.

"Welcome back," a voice behind them said suddenly. Instantly, Caine spun around, arms snapping into a karate defense stance as he tried to pierce the gloom.

The voice chuckled. "Nice reflexes," it said, and a big, black-clad figure slid noiselessly from a darker alcove into the dim light. Pushing back his non-reflective goggles with one gloved hand, Skyler grinned at Caine and shifted his attention to Mordecai.

"Good." Mordecai nodded toward the double door. "Let's go, Caine."

They walked through into a large, well-lit room... and Caine stopped short in astonishment. The room was full of blackcollars! Blinking as his pupils adjusted to the light, Caine gave the room a fast scan. No mistake—there were at least a hundred men, maybe more, all dressed in tight-fitting black outfits like Skyler's. Most were checking their equipment or carrying boxes to the far end of the room, where two large monorail cars waited; others were in the final stages of dressing. Caine was still staring when someone stepped to his side. "Sorry we had to pull that stunt with your medicine to get you back here on the sly. But the collies have ears everywhere."

Caine turned to face him, noting in passing that Mordecai had vanished. He almost didn't recognize the newcomer, even though he wasn't yet wearing headgear and goggles. "Lathe?" he asked in disbelief.

Lathe smiled wryly. "So I'm told."

Caine could hardly believe the change in the man. His beard had been trimmed down to a neat fringe; it and his hair had been dyed back to their original dark brown. Even more striking, though, was the new determination in his face. For the first time Caine could see past the lined skin to the blackcollar spirit underneath. An involuntary shiver went down his back. "You've changed since this afternoon," he managed. "About fifteen years' worth."

Lathe smiled again, his eyes not leaving Caine's face. "Most of those years were superficial. Idunine in small doses does wonders for muscle and bone."

"So you
did
get Idunine. I hoped you had, but I had doubts..."

"My senility?"

Caine nodded. "It was a good act." He looked around the room.
"All
of it was. I can't believe you managed to fool everyone for so long."

"Thirty years." Lathe glanced around, then turned back, all business again. "Come over here and get suited. We've got a flexarmor outfit that should fit you."

He led the way toward a bank of lockers. "Where are we?" Caine asked as they passed a humming bug stomper, one of five or six he could see spaced around the room.

"The old tube station under Hamner Lodge," Lathe told him. "Been unused since the end of the war. We started uncaching our equipment and moving it here about five years ago, after the collies got tired of dogging our every move. The track between here and Capstone is still good, and we've put our own power supplies into those two monorail cars. Here we are."

They had stopped before an open locker, and on Lathe's order Caine began to strip. "I hope that stuffs all it's cracked up to be," he commented, eyeing Lathe's own flexarmor dubiously.

"It is," Lathe assured him as Caine put on a soft one-piece suit of underwear. "It'll stop most non-explosive handgun projectiles, including some that'll throw you a meter backward from the impact alone. It goes rigid under that kind of punch, by the way, spreading the impact around. A clean hit with an antiarmor laser will get through, but the usual antipersonnel settings will just take off the top layer."

"So the
second
shot gets through?"

"The average gunner only gets one," Lathe said calmly.

Caine swallowed. "Oh."

"Understand, though, that this isn't medieval plate armor," the other continued. "For hand-to-hand combat you're on your own. Punches and kicks are too slow to make it go rigid."

Great. "Thanks for the warning."

Lathe apparently heard something in his tone. "You should consider yourself lucky we even had an outfit you could wear," he said, a bit tartly. "A lot of the boys going into combat tonight won't have anything but plain black cloth and maybe a flexarmor vest."

"How come?"

"Because most of the kids are just that: kids. We recruited them during martial arts classes a few years back—right under Galway's nose, as a matter of fact. They've been training with us ever since."

There was something in the old blackcollar's voice that made Caine pause in the act of fastening on a short-sleeved bodysuit. "It was pretty rough, wasn't it?" he asked. "All the ridicule and disrespect... I don't think I could've taken it."

"A lot of us couldn't," Lathe muttered. "That's what kept the guerrilla war going so long. They wouldn't give up the fighting."

"Whereas you knew when to quit?"

For a second Caine thought he'd overstepped a fine line. But the anger only flickered across Lathe's face without staying there. "We didn't give in, we just changed tactics. Those of us who could." He made a sound that was half sigh, half snort. "Let me tell you a story.

"About seven hundred years ago, back in Old Japan on Earth, there was a lord named Kira who tricked an enemy into shaming himself. The enemy, Asano, committed suicide, the customary response for shame in that culture. Asano's forty-seven samurai warriors were supposed to follow suit, but instead they disbanded and dropped out of polite society. They lost their wives, families, and friends, and were treated with contempt by everyone. Naturally, Kira decided they were harmless.

"And then, one winter morning, all forty-seven suddenly appeared at Kira's palace. They overpowered the guards, captured Kira and killed him. Only then did they fulfill their duty and commit suicide themselves."

He fell silent. Caine, not knowing what to say, concentrated on his dressing. Aside from its exotic material, the suit was standard commando design, with built-in knife sheaths on forearms and calves and square pouches on the front of each thigh and behind the belt buckle. All were empty, a fact he found a bit curious. "How does it feel?" Lathe asked.

Caine took a few steps and tried a series of karate punches and kicks. The flexarmor was remarkably supple. "Feels fine," he reported.

"Good. Grab the gloves, battle-hood, goggles, and also the coat and pants you wore here, and we'll get going."

"What about weapons?"

"You don't get any," Lathe told him, cutting off his protests with a raised hand. "I know, I know, you're combat trained to the hilt and can use any weapon this side of Chaparral. But to us, you're a dangerous amateur who'd do more damage to himself with our kind of weaponry than to the enemy."

Caine felt a flash of anger. "Look, Lathe—"

"No,
you
look." Lathe jumped back and from a long sheath on his hip withdrew two thirty-centimeter-long wooden sticks connected at one end by a few centimeters of black plastic chain. Gripping one stick, Lathe proceeded to whirl the other around his head and body in a bewildering pattern, occasionally snapping the sticks so that one whipped out and back in a barely visible blur. Caine swallowed—he'd never before seen a
nunchaku
handled with such lethal skill. "Okay, I'm convinced—for close-range work. But for long-range you'll need guns, and I hold a marksman rating."

Lathe brought the sticks together and slid them back into their sheath. "Jensen!" he called across the room. "Give me a target!"

A blond-haired man nodded and broke a piece of plastic board off the crate he'd just opened. Glancing around, he tossed it toward a relatively empty section of floor.

His attention on the board, Caine saw only a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye—but there was no missing the sharp
thwok
as the board jumped in midair like a scorched bat. Jensen retrieved the board and spun it in a lazy arc back to Lathe. "We seldom use guns," the comsquare said quietly, extracting the deadly looking black throwing star from the plastic and slipping it back into one of his thigh pouches. "They're too easy to track."

Caine got his tongue working. "All right. I'm convinced."

"Good. Then there's just one other thing I want to say." He turned and locked eyes with Caine. "I still don't know whether you're really who you claim to be or a spy sent to betray us... but if you do, I swear your friends won't be able to stop me from killing you. Understand?"

Caine forced himself to return Lathe's gaze. "Yes. And I won't betray you."

Lathe held his eyes another second, then nodded curtly and stepped back. "All right. Let's get moving."

The last few wispy clouds had been blown away by the time they left the lodge, and the stars were blazing down with a brilliance Caine had never seen from Earth. He hardly noticed them, though; there were more important things on his mind.

The van was crowded. Along with Lathe and Caine were Mordecai, Dawis Hawking, and a wizened old blackcollar Lathe identified as Tardy Spadafora. The latter, who was driving, followed Mordecai's earlier route into the city. But as they approached the Hub, he made a slight detour, stopping near the gray wall. When he started up again, he and Caine were alone.

Minutes later, they coasted to a halt twenty meters from the brightly lit east gate. Setting his teeth, Caine took the heavy briefcase by Spadafora's seat and got out, striving for nonchalance as he walked toward the floodlights. His coat and pants concealed all of his flexarmor outfit except his boots—which looked enough like current styles to go unnoticed—but it still took an eternity to reach the nearest of the two outside guards. Handing over his ID, he waited another eternity for the Security man to look it over and give the signal. Seconds later, Caine was inside the Hub.

Autocabs were routinely kept at the Hub's gates during low-demand hours, so Caine had no trouble with transportation. Following his instructions, he arrived a few minutes later at a cul-de-sac ending by the wall. The apartment buildings lining the street were dark, most of the tenants apparently having turned in for the night. A missing light by one of the outside stairways was creating a large wedge of shadow, and Caine stepped into it to await developments.

"Any trouble?" a voice murmured from the darkness, and Caine nearly wrenched his neck spinning around. Lathe crouched a bare meter away; behind him, Mordecai and Hawking were rising to their feet.

"No—none," Caine said. "I left my outerwear under the seat, okay?"

"Fine. I'll take that," Lathe said, pointing to the briefcase. "Call an autocab, will you?"

Caine handed over the case and triggered his hailer, wondering only briefly why he hadn't simply been told to keep the cab he'd arrived in. Clearly, Lathe didn't want to leave too clear a trail through tonight's events. Looking back down the street, he could see approaching headlights.