Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar - The Judas Solution

The car made one final turn and braked to a halt. Four doors opened and closed as the Security men made their exit, and then all was silence.

Lathe gave it a fifteen count, then dug to his tingler. Mordecai—report.

Inside Security perimeter, the reply came promptly. Clearly, the other had made it through okay.

Estimate fifteen to twenty in ambush formation—eight more in backstop position.

Lathe nodded to himself. So he'd been right. Security expected the others to pop out of the subway at the allegedly secret Thirteenth Street exit and were hoping to nab them as they did so. Clear to exit? he signaled.

Clear.

Lathe found the trunk release and popped the lid. Easing it open a crack, he looked outside.

He was facing away from the main ambush ring, looking back toward the mall half a kilometer away.

The eight-man rear guard was positioned a dozen meters behind him, a thirty-degree arc of protection standing silent vigil behind the row of parked Security cars, waiting alertly for the missing blackcollars to appear.

Only they were facing the wrong way.

He opened the trunk a few centimeters more and looked up at the sky. The spotters hovering overhead wouldn't be making that same mistake, of course, at least not to the same degree. Still, he would bet heavily that their attention was currently split between the subway exit and the area west of the mall where he and Mordecai had disappeared. Theoretically, parked Security cars should be of little interest to anyone at the moment.

Time to find out whether or not that was true. Giving the rear sentry line one last look, he opened the trunk just far enough to roll out, pulling the lid mostly shut again as he landed on hands and knees on the pavement. Dropping to his belly, he crawled quickly out of sight beneath the car.

"Pleasant ride?" Mordecai murmured as Lathe joined him. The smaller man was working industriously at one of the throwing knives he'd wedged into the car frame earlier to serve as a handhold.

"A little bumpy," Lathe told him. "You?"

With a final tug, the knife came free. "I've had worse," Mordecai said, slipping the weapon back into its thigh sheath. "How do you want to work this?"

Lathe crawled to the side of the car where he could get a better look at the Security cordon. It was a fairly standard containment formation: four men in each of four clusters, the nearest of them about twenty meters away, crouching behind small bushes and parked vehicles at the edge of a narrow and mostly empty parking area. The focus of their semicircle was a large storage shed fastened against the rear of what seemed to be a hardware store on the other side of the lot.

The hunters' equipment was something of a hardware store in its own right. Two of the men in each foursome sported paral-dart rifles, the third carried a flechette rifle, and the fourth had one of the snubnose laser rifles that had once been Security standard issue. Each man also had a couple of grenades in a sling carrier at his belt. Everyone wore visored helmets and protective vests.

Mordecai crawled up beside him. "Is that the exit?" he asked.

"Up through the ground and out the shed," Lathe confirmed. "You don't see Galway anywhere, do you?"

"Not in this group," Mordecai said. "Were you expecting him to show up personally for the capture?"

Lathe shrugged. "I thought he might."

"Galway's not that stupid," Mordecai said. "Did you notice the grenades?"

Lathe nodded. "Concussion, most likely. No one's wearing enough armor for them to risk frags."

"Still shows they're pretty serious," Mordecai said. "I presume we'll be doing a standard cannonball with the two nearest groups?"

"Cannonball with those, steamroller with the others," Lathe confirmed.

"Taking out the flanking laser gunners first?"

"Yes," Lathe agreed reluctantly. Ideally, he would have preferred to neutralize the entire bunch with hands and feet and nunchaku, minimizing the risk of killing any of them. With Whiplash, enemies like these were also possible future allies.

But two shots with those lasers could punch through their flexarmor, and they couldn't afford to let anyone get that second shot. "Of course, once we're finished we'll still have that sentry line behind us to deal with," he reminded Mordecai.

"Plus the spotters overhead," Mordecai said.

"True." Lathe rubbed his cheek. "Maybe Shaw will have some ideas."

Right on cue, his wrist tingled. At exit. Situation?

Lathe slid two fingers beneath his sleeve. Sixteen-man Security trap cordon—eight-man rear guard—

one or more spotters in air.

Weaponry?

Paral-darts, flechette rifles, lasers, grenades.

There was a short pause. Take out cordon—get laser to me.

Lathe cocked an eyebrow at Mordecai. "He is a tactor," Mordecai pointed out. "I assume he knows what he's doing."

"We can hope," Lathe agreed. Acknowledged, he sent. Attack in ten.

Acknowledged. Laser to me in thirty.

Giving him and Mordecai a whole twenty seconds to deal with the rest of the cordon, Lathe noted wryly.

The man was too generous. "Ready?" he murmured.

Mordecai had already shuffled across to the other side of the car. "Ready," he murmured back.

Pulling out two shuriken and his nunchaku, Lathe counted down the rest of the seconds; and as his mental clock reached zero, he rolled out from under the car, got to his feet, and headed silently toward the nearest group.

With their attention the other direction, the Security men never saw him coming. But someone in one of the spotters obviously did. He'd covered only half the twenty-meter gap when suddenly everyone gave a sort of simultaneous group twitch and spun around.

Lathe's first shuriken took out the closer of the two laser gunners, catching him in the narrow gap between helmet visor and the top of his chest armor. The second, more distant target fell with the other throwing star buried in the same place. A cluster of paral-darts bounced off Lathe's shoulder, while another cluster and a high-velocity flechette whistled past without even touching him. The rest of the gunners, taken by surprise and clearly rattled, were firing wildly.

Given time, they would undoubtedly correct their aim. Lathe had no intention of giving them that time.

A second volley of paral-darts caught him in the stomach; and then he was in the middle of his target group.

He took out the first of the remaining three men with a side kick to the other's chest, the power of the blow against his armor sending him crashing hard onto the pavement. The second man swung his gun sideways toward Lathe's head; dropping into a one-legged crouch, Lathe slammed his fist into the man's thigh in a punch that paralyzed the muscle and likewise dropped him to the ground. The last man sent a final burst of paral-darts uselessly at Lathe's back before the blackcollar's nunchaku swung around and slammed into his helmet.

One group down; one to go. Lathe snatched up the laser rifle still gripped in the dead gunner's hands, using the momentary pause in the action to check out Mordecai's progress. The other blackcollar had likewise taken out his first batch and was sprinting toward his next set of targets. With the borrowed laser rifle in his left hand and his nunchaku in his right, Lathe turned and headed toward his own second group.

They were holding their ground, he noted with a touch of professional admiration. Two of the men had dropped to one knee, the third standing behind them in a standard volley formation. As Lathe started toward them, they opened fire.

The flechette gunner was good, his first shot catching Lathe squarely in the chest. The impact staggered him, slowing his charge and throwing off his balance as the flexarmor went rigid to absorb the blow.

The gunner's second shot was nearly as well centered, this one bouncing off his abdomen and impeding his charge even more. Then, as his third shot also connected, the gunner shouted something to his companions.