Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar - The Judas Solution

Without that, it wasn't going to work.

Which meant they needed a Plan B. Only at this point, Skyler didn't have one. And he wasn't at all sure he could come up with one.

"For myself, I'm not convinced the moles are as resistant to the idea of rebellion as Anne believes,"

Kanai put in. "Perhaps each one merely thinks there's nothing he or she personally can do."

"Maybe if they knew they weren't alone but that they had allies," Reger agreed. "Possibly even allies in high places." He gestured at Poirot.

Skyler pursed his lips. That was why he'd brought the general here, after all.

But if Poirot also wasn't willing to cooperate, the secret of Whiplash's existence would be broken the minute he stepped foot inside the Athena government center. Was that a risk they wanted to take right now?

Anne was obviously thinking along the same lines. "I don't think any of you has the slightest idea what Security can do when they're genuinely panicked," she warned. "If they find out about Whiplash, they'll turn this entire district inside out."

Abruptly, Skyler made his decision. "It's a risk," he agreed. "But this is war. Risks are part of the job."

"Then let's quit wasting time," Reger said firmly. "Get the Whiplash out, and let's do it."

With a start, Caine snapped awake.

He held still in his bunk, maintaining the slow, steady breathing of a sleeping man. The cell was still dark, he could tell through his closed eyelids, and the faint background hum of the base's generator filled the room, its murmur effectively blanketing any sounds there might have been of stealthy footsteps or stealthier breathing.

But Caine had gone through all of Lathe's wearying and sometimes—he'd thought at the time—stupid blindfolded training exercises. As a result, he had sensory resources that had probably never even occurred to his captors. Effectively both blind and deaf, he focused instead on the patterns of moving air brushing across his face and neck and hands.

There was someone standing at the end of his bunk.

Carefully, he opened his eyes to slits. A big man was standing there, little more than a black shadow set against the faint light coming in through the open cell door. For a moment the man just stood there, doing something with the bunk supports. Once, he turned his head slightly, and Caine caught a profile of his face and the misshapen silhouette that showed he was wearing either infrared or light-enhancement goggles.

The man finished whatever he was doing and headed toward the other side of the room. As he moved away from the bunk, unblocking the view of the door, Caine saw that there was a second man standing framed in the doorway. From the lack of visible arms in his silhouette, he was probably holding a paraldart pistol in a two-handed grip, pointed in Caine's direction.

And though the light out there was too faint for any genuine shadows, there was enough subtle movement against the background light to show there was at least one other backup man somewhere out of sight. Sleeping or not, they weren't taking any chances with their prisoner.

The intruder reached the bathroom area and stopped at the shower enclosure, and Caine suppressed a smile as he finally understood what was going on. The watchers in the monitor room had apparently been annoyed at Caine's earlier blockage of two of their three cameras, and had decided to take advantage of the nighttime hours to remedy the situation.

Perfect.

Because Caine could easily fix things back again in the morning. The only trick would be to wait just the right amount of time before "discovering" the reactivated cameras so that they wouldn't suspect he'd been awake tonight.

And if they thought they'd sneaked in once without waking him, they might be willing to try it again.

Yes, he decided. This had definite possibilities.

The Security man finished his work and left, closing the door soundlessly behind him.

Caine was still considering his options when he again drifted off to sleep.

The air intake that Torch had used to create their back door into Aegis Mountain lay several kilometers to the northwest of their landing position. Jensen was pretty sure he could find it, but he knew better than to head directly there. If Security or the Ryqril succeeded in catching them, he didn't want their travel vector pointing directly toward their goal. Instead, he led Flynn due west, keeping a couple of ridges north of the highway that ran past the Ryqril base, watching for a good spot to start veering north.

They were perhaps two hours away from first light when he finally found it.

"Well, this is fun," Flynn groused as they waded ankle-deep through the icy rushing water of the creek.

"You wilderness instructors are always talking about the marvels of running water as a way to hide your trail. You never mention how slippery these creek beds are. How far upstream are we planning to go?"

"Not too far," Jensen said, peering off to their right. Halfway to the eastern horizon, he could see the faint blue-violet grav light of several aircraft crisscrossing the sky, clearly searching the likely landing area from the evening's drop. He hoped it was just standard surveillance, and not an indication that Skyler or one of the others had been caught.

He hoped, too, that they didn't take it into their minds to extend their search farther west.

"How far is not too far?" Flynn persisted. "The reason I'm asking is because if I remember the maps right, this stream will take us too far to the east of our target."

"You're right, it will," Jensen agreed. "The trick is going to be with the timing and placement of our departure. You see, the problem with the running water trick is that everybody knows it. That means that if, say, a pursuing Ryqril chase squad tracks us to this creek, they'll know we've gone one of two directions. All they have to do is split up and try to find the spot where we left the water."

"So we look for a rocky area where our tracks won't show?"

"No, because they know that one, too," Jensen said. "They'll stop at every such likely spot and search the area where the rocks quit, looking for the spot where we would have had to take to softer ground."

Flynn pondered that a moment. "So, what, the goal is just to keep them busy running down blind alleys until we've built up a decent lead?"

Jensen smiled. "Actually, I had something a little classier in mind. I'll let you know when I find it."

Fifteen minutes later, he did.

"Here we go," he said, the water swirling around his boots as he pointed to their left.

"Here we go where?" Flynn asked, clearly bewildered as he looked at the wide patch of open mud that stretched eight meters from the edge of the creek to the trees beyond. A few patches of grass poked out of the mud, and a few leaves and bits of bark and rotted wood were scattered around, but aside from that the mudflat was pretty much empty. "We cross that and we'll leave tracks a toddler could find."

"O ye of little faith," Jensen said reprovingly, slipping his pack off his shoulders and pulling out his grapple and a length of slender line. "Watch and learn."

He fastened the grapple to one end of the line and draped the rest in a loose coil across his left forearm.

Holding the line half a meter below the grapple, he swung the hook in a slow vertical circle, studying the row of trees bordering the far side of the mud flat. What he needed was a sturdy branch at least three meters from the ground, and he had exactly one chance to nail it. If the grapple didn't catch and he had to drag it back to himself through the mud, they would have to go on and try a different spot. Picking a likely looking branch, he aimed at its intersection with the trunk and sent the grapple on its way.