The Blackcollar (37 page)

"Nothing important," Skyler said, coming up stiffly on Caine's other side. "Our first truck was loaded with flammable liquid and rigged to spray the stuff to the front and rear. Spadafora parked it between us and the tower and set it off. It puts up a wall of flame about fifty meters long and maybe ten high at the peak. Discourages enemy movement, besides scrambling infrareds."

"Is Spadafora okay?"

"Oh, sure. Tardy's a born pyromaniac—he's set more firescreens than the rest of us put together. He just hitched a ride with the next truck through. Consider it insurance against the Ryqril changing their minds."

The freighter they entered was considerably larger than the one they'd left Plinry in and at least ten years younger. Skyler seemed to know the internal layout, and got the three of them to the bridge without any obviously wrong turns.

Already there was a small crowd present. Besides Lathe, Bakshi, and Tremayne, Commander Nmura and three of his men were there, the latter running a rapid check on the ship's control equipment. Tremayne was seated at the communications console, while Lathe and Bakshi, the latter sporting a laser pistol in addition to his
nunchaku,
had blackcollar communicators out. Finding an unoccupied corner at the rear of the bridge, Caine leaned against the wall and waited, heart thumping loudly in his ribs.

The liftoff came a few minutes later and was so smooth that if Caine hadn't heard the order he might have missed it. For a few seconds the 'port lights and the still-burning firescreen were visible on the visual displays, but Nmura was clearly in a hurry to get out of range of ground antiaircraft defenses, and the landscape beneath them was quickly blurred by speed and altitude into a featureless mass. On other displays the stars grew sharper as the freighter rose above Argent's atmosphere. Casually, Caine rested his hand on the butt of his laser and forced himself to relax.

"Orbit achieved," one of the starmen reported, his face buried in a sensor hood.
"Chainbreaker II's
right behind us; no sign of pursuit."

"That won't last long," Nmura said, turning to Lathe. "I need to know where we're going now, Comsquare."

Lathe nodded to Caine. "Okay, Caine. This is it."

"Not quite yet," Caine said. He slid his laser from its holster. "First there's one more government agent to neutralize."

The normal hums of a spaceship bridge where thunderous in the sudden stillness. Lathe spoke first, his eyes on Caine's face as if refusing to acknowledge the laser pointed at his chest. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded.

Caine ignored the question. "Everyone stay out of my line of fire," he ordered through dry lips. "If you'll consent to being tied up and sedated, Lathe, you'll get a chance to defend yourself at a trial. Otherwise I'll kill you right now. Which will it be?"

"Caine, you'd better have one damn good explanation for this," Skyler warned, his hand hovering near the hilt of one of his knives.

"Lathe's a spy," Caine said. "I don't have proof—yet—but the pointers are all there. How else could everything he pulled always work without a hitch?" He gestured minutely with the laser. "Well, Lathe—you going to let Bakshi and Nmura tie you up?"

"Oh, for—Caine, you've lost your mind. But if it'll make you feel better, all right." Lathe raised his hands shoulder-high—and leaped.

The move was abrupt, without any telegraphing whatsoever—but Caine had expected it, and before Lathe had crossed half of the three-meter gap separating them he dropped to one knee and fired. An instant later he dived to the side as the blackcollar's momentum sent him hurling past to crash into the corner. Sliding to the floor, he lay still.

The silence that returned was a darker thing than had been there seconds earlier. Caine remained crouched on the floor, laser ready, watching the blackcollar for signs of motion. Lathe lay in an almost fetal position on his side, his right arm curled back over his head while his left draped partly over the crinkly-gray rift in his flexarmor that the laser had opened across his chest. Even from a meter away Caine could smell the acrid stink of burnt flesh.

Muscles trembling with reaction, Caine got to his feet, replacing the laser in its holster, and turned to face the horrified stares of the others. "All right," he said, as casually as possible. "I guess we're ready to go now."

Moving like a man in a dream, Skyler detached himself from the group by the control consoles and went over to crouch by Lathe's still form. His hands touched the charred flexarmor, gently probed beneath the battle-hood for the carotid artery. He held the pose a moment before rising with some difficulty to his feet, and Caine decided it was a good thing much of the other's expression was still hidden behind his goggles. "Caine—" he began, his voice deadly.

"He condemned himself," Caine interrupted him. "I claim the same evidence he applied against Fuess and his friends: he attacked first." Deliberately, he turned his back on Skyler and stepped to where Nmura sat, frozen-faced, at the helm. "Commander, I have two sets of space-time coordinates for the Novas. Can this computer handle an orbit calculation from that?"

Nmura nodded, his expression uncertain.

"All right." Carefully, Caine unlocked the mental vault he'd set up an eternity ago and drew out the precious numbers. It felt strange, as if part of him resisted the action. "First position set: standard solar/galactic coordinate system...."

The figures took less than a minute to recite, and within half a minute the computer had done the orbit calculation, extrapolated it thirty-three years forward in time—with all known perturbations taken into account—and displayed both the current location and a choice of three courses from the freighter's own position.

"Yeah, that's somewhere in the Diamond, all right," Caine commented, studying the numbers. "Start off aiming somewhere to one side—we don't want our course extrapolated."

Nmura nodded and reached toward the communications board. "I'll have to give
Chainbreaker II
a preliminary course," he explained.

"Don't bother," a soft voice said from behind them. "No one's going any farther tonight."

There was something in the tone that discouraged hasty movement. Slowly, keeping his hand away from his pistol, Caine turned around. Standing well back from the group, his drawn laser leveled, was Bakshi.

There is a point where the human mind loses its ability to respond emotionally to stress; where successive shocks elicit diminished reactions or none at all... and as he gazed at Bakshi's stony expression, Caine sensed their group had reached that point. His shooting of Lathe was still too fresh for any reaction but confused numbness.

"What are you doing, Serle?" Tremayne growled, the question sounding inane in the stillness. Standing to his right and slightly behind him, Caine could clearly see the tightness in the Radix leader's neck and shoulders.

"Skyler, move closer to the others," Bakshi ordered, ignoring Tremayne. "Keep your hands at chest level—remember that my reflexes are as good as yours. And don't block my view of Caine's gun hand."

Peripherally, Caine saw Skyler obey, stepping to within half a meter of Caine's right shoulder before stopping. "Who are
you
planning to kill?" he asked Bakshi sarcastically.

"No one needs to die," Bakshi said in the same soft voice. "There'll be amnesty for everyone who participated in this mission, including Caine and your blackcollars, provided you surrender peacefully. Commander Nmura, inform the other freighter you'll both be landing back at Brocken on this orbit."

"If I refuse?" Nmura said stiffly.

"Staying out here won't do them any good—they don't know where the ships are yet," Bakshi reminded him.

"You traitor." The words came out of Tremayne's mouth with a bitterness Caine hadn't realized a human voice could achieve. "You lousy,
murderous
traitor."

"Send the message, Commander," Bakshi said. His eyes and laser, Caine noted, were firmly fixed somewhere to the left, past the console where Nmura sat. It puzzled him—and it clearly irritated Tremayne.

"Look
at me, damn you!" the Radix leader snarled suddenly. "Or haven't you got the stomach to face me?"

The barest hint of a smile twitched Bakshi's lips, and he shook his head minutely. "Sorry, Ral, but at the moment you're not any danger to me. Commando Mordecai is a different story."

"Mordecai?" Tremayne glanced to his left.

Caine turned his own head more slowly. The best hand-to-hand fighter that ever lived, Lathe had once called him; but standing motionless in Bakshi's line of fire, a head shorter and twenty-five kilos lighter than the Argentian, he looked merely old. "You overestimate me, Comsquare," he murmured, echoing Caine's thoughts.

"I don't think so. Fuess, McKitterick, and Couturie were no blackcollars, but they were damn good fighters. I have a great deal of respect for anyone who could take them as easily as you did—far too much to take my eyes off you."

"So you knew they were fakes all along," Caine said slowly. "And vice versa, of course. A pity Mordecai didn't kill them more leisurely."

"It wouldn't have helped you," Bakshi said. "They never knew about me. I reported directly to the Ryqril."

"To the Ryqril." Tremayne's voice was quiet, almost calm. But his face was pale, and the one eye Caine could see burned with hatred. "Betraying your own race for a lousy—what's the going rate these days? Still thirty pieces of silver a person?"

Bakshi sighed. "I don't expect you to understand, but I was trying to help."

"Of course. Without traitors we couldn't
possibly
have functioned."

"You couldn't have
survived,"
Bakshi snapped, his icy veneer cracking for a second. With a visible effort he regained his control... and when he spoke again there was infinite sadness in his voice. "Don't you see," he said softly, almost pleadingly, "that the Ryqril could never have let an effective underground function this close to the Chryselli battle front?"

"So you chose emasculation for us, did you?" Tremayne spat.

"It was that or mass destruction. Apostoleris had the Calarand and Millaire HQs infiltrated from top to bottom. You could have been wiped out in a single night if the Ryqril had ordered it. The outlying Radix cells would have been dealt with even more harshly—whole towns killed, probably, to make sure of getting everyone. Is that what you wanted for Argent, Ral? Really?"

Tremayne exhaled loudly. "There are worse things than dying for a cause you believe in. Living as someone's tame pet, for instance."

"I didn't think you'd understand," Bakshi said, his voice weary. "And get your hand away from your laser. You wouldn't even clear the holster with it."

"No." Tremayne's voice was even. "I'm not accepting Ryqril charity anymore. Let's see if your spineless toadying left you enough guts to gun me down."

"Ral," Bakshi began warningly—

And a chunk of silver light flashed across the room from Caine's right, catching Bakshi's gun arm at the wrist and knocking it to the side.

The impact wasn't all that great; Bakshi kept his grip on the weapon and would have had it back on target in half a second. But for Mordecai half a second was all the time in the world.

His spinning kick sent the laser clattering off the bridge wall with the sharp
crack
of breaking bone. Bakshi countered with an ineffective kick toward Mordecai's stomach and leaped back a meter, landing in combat stance. Mordecai was on him instantly, and for a few seconds the two men stood nose to nose, arms flashing in attack and counter with sudden speed. They broke apart for a moment, and Caine could see a bright line of blood trailing from Bakshi's tightly compressed lips before the Argentian threw himself forward in a final desperate attack. Mordecai stood his ground... and with one more flurry of punches it was over.

Tremayne, breaking out of his momentary paralysis, finally yanked out his laser. His eyes seemed uncertain of the proper target, though, flicking between Bakshi's crumpled form and the corner where Lathe had risen to his feet. "You can put that away," Lathe advised him grimly. "It's all over now. Nmura, give the other ship a course and get us moving before the Ryqril realize they've lost the ball."

"Uh... yes, sir." Caine glanced around in time to see a thoroughly confused-looking Nmura turn back to his console.

Lathe walked over to Bakshi, trailing flakes of charred flexarmor and the odor of burnt flesh as he did so, and squatted down to check briefly for a pulse. Rising to his feet, he faced Tremayne, the latter still clutching his laser. "It's all over," he repeated. "Unless you have doubts that Bakshi was really a spy, of course."

Slowly, Tremayne slid the pistol into its holster, his eyes glancing at the gash in Lathe's flexarmor. "Just another of your little tricks, huh?" he said bitterly. He shot an angry look back at Caine. "I suppose Caine's laser was specially rigged or something?"

Lathe shook his head. "It was just as deadly as yours—Bakshi wouldn't have been fooled by anything else. I'm wearing a double thickness of flexarmor, with a thin slab of raw meat between to give off the right smell. If Caine had somehow missed and got my head instead I'd be dead now." He had his gloves off now; tiredly, he wiped his forehead.

"We're on our way, Comsquare," Nmura spoke up. "Course heading about ten degrees from target."

"You could have told me," Tremayne growled. "Or didn't you think I could be objective where treason from my own top lieutenant was concerned?"

Lathe gave him a long look. "Your objectivity wasn't in question," he said quietly. "It was your loyalty I wasn't sure of."

Tremayne stiffened, but the explosion Caine had expected didn't come. "I trust you can explain," he said, his tone icy.

"Do you remember the ambush Security laid for us in Calarand, the day I went into Henslowe? The car that stopped us was prepared with four of the heavy-duty mag-lock shackles.
Four,
not three. You and Bakshi were the only ones in the garage that morning, the only ones that knew Caine would be going along. We were in a closed van, so Security's spotters couldn't have counted us, and I'd made sure no one else had been in the garage. So one of you was a spy, and we had to give that one a chance to hang himself. This is what we came up with."