Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar - The Judas Solution

Foxleigh looked back along the mostly straight tunnel behind them. "Oh," he said, and kept going.

The far end of the tunnel opened up into a fifty-meter-long storage room. Foxleigh hobbled inside, panting in the stale air and gazing at the dusty crates waiting patiently to be opened by people who were long dead. All of them except him.

After thirty years, he was finally back inside Aegis Mountain.

"Sorry about the mess," Jensen said. He was breathing a little heavily himself. "Maid's day off."

"I figured," Foxleigh puffed back. "What now?"

"We'll look around a little," Jensen said, wincing as he tried to rub his side through the thincast, an exercise Foxleigh knew from personal experience to be a complete waste of time. "Then we'll rest a while, maybe get something to eat."

"We could have done that at my cabin," Foxleigh pointed out. "What exactly are we here for?"

Jensen sent a gaze around the dusty chamber. "For thirty years the Ryqril have been the ones dealing out death and destruction," he said, his voice suddenly as dark and cold as Aegis itself. "It's about time we showed them that we can do that, too."

"And how much death and destruction exactly are we talking about?"

"Enough." For a moment Jensen just stood there, his eyes unfocused as if gazing across a long line of ghosts from the past. Foxleigh watched him, his heart thudding unpleasantly. For the first time, he realized, he was seeing past Jensen's layer of control and civilization to what lay beneath it. The man was ready to kill.

He was more than ready to die.

And as that realization sank in, Foxleigh became acutely aware of the pistol pressed against his side beneath his shirt. If he had to use it ...

Abruptly, Jensen shook his head, a quick doglike water-shedding movement. "Sorry," he said, his voice back to normal. "Memories."

"I have a few of those myself," Foxleigh said. "So when does this all death and destruction happen?"

"Tomorrow night," Jensen told him. "But we can start the prep work right away."

"Or at least after that rest and meal you mentioned?"

"Sure," Jensen said. "Come on, I'll take you to the medical area. The lighting's better, and there are lockers of emergency rations we can raid." He smiled, his veneer of civilization back in place. "It's a lot cleaner too."

"That's certainly the important thing," Foxleigh said, forcing a lightness into his voice that he didn't feel.

"Lead the way."

Shaw's blackcollars had apparently begun arriving early that morning. By the time Lathe took Judas down to their underground staging area there were a good fifty of them present, busily uncrating and organizing various pieces of equipment.

"Looks like we're getting serious," Judas commented as they passed a pair of gray-haired men uncrating a group of flat, one-by-two-meter rectangular body shields. The staging area itself, he now recognized, was another part of the city's former subway system. "I hope this doesn't mean Shaw's taken over the planning again."

"Don't worry, he hasn't," Shaw's voice came from behind them.

Judas turned, his face warming. The tactor was striding toward them, one of the body shields hanging from his left forearm. "Sorry," he apologized. "I meant—"

"Here—try it on," Shaw interrupted, sliding his arm out of the shield's straps and offering it to Judas.

It was considerably heavier than Judas had expected. "Antilaser?"

"Alternating layers of reflective and ablative material to first scatter the light and then diffuse it," Shaw said. "The reflective parts are also highly heat-conductive, so the laser has to basically evaporate the whole layer to get to the next one."

Judas nodded. "What's this?" he asked, touching a thick metal ribbon coiled tightly against the lower left edge of the shield.

"More heat-conductive material," Shaw said. "It gets unrolled behind you to act as a heat sink."

"Must be really conductive," Judas said, eyeing the ribbon dubiously.

"It's the same stuff they used to layer on starfighters to protect them against Ryqril laser cannon." Shaw looked at Lathe. "But I can tell you right now that they're not going to get you across fifty meters of open ground."

"They won't have to," Lathe said. "I understand the sensors in our target fence post are pretty well gone?"

Shaw nodded. "Got the report this morning," he said. "He'll keep plugging pellets against it for the rest of the day, though, just to make sure."

"So we're going tonight?" Judas asked carefully.

"Tomorrow night," Lathe said. "We've still got some other prep work to do tonight."

"Plus a set of dress-rehearsal drills," Shaw added.

"Sounds good," Judas said, a shiver running up his back. Barely three days on the ground, and already they were nearly ready to attack a major Ryqril base. Fast, clean, and—hopefully—successful.

Of course, it was no longer the small infiltration force Galway had envisioned when he'd set this scheme in motion. Still, as long as they made it inside maybe the size of the force wouldn't matter.

"You'll be picked up at your house at four-thirty this afternoon," Shaw said. "Be ready in full combat gear."

"I will," Judas said.

"And your pickup will be at five," Shaw added, looking at Lathe.

"We'll be ready," the comsquare assured him.

Shaw nodded and moved off. "Why the different times?" Judas asked.

"Because we're going to different locations," Lathe explained. "Mordecai and I are on the initial assault team; you'll be with interior penetration group."

"Won't the assault team be coming in, too?" Judas asked, frowning.

Lathe smiled grimly. "Some of us will," he said. "Others ... won't."

A strange sensation bubbled through the pit of Judas's stomach. Up to now, this whole thing had played through his mind almost as if it was a bizarre adventure game played on a city-sized board with living pieces. Even the carnage he'd seen in the aftermath of Security's casino trap had seemed distant and vaguely unreal.

But suddenly that unreality had evaporated. These were real men, going in against real Ryqril with extremely real weapons.

And the Ryqril would use those weapons with all the skill they possessed. Galway—and Haberdae—

would make sure of that.

For many of the men assembled here, today would be their last full day alive.

"I understand," he managed. "I'll be ready."

"Good," Lathe said. "Now get over to that corner and tell Comsquare Bhat I said to start checking you out on the special equipment you'll be using."

"All right," Judas said. "What about you?"

"I need to go talk to Shaw," Lathe said. "We still have a few details to work out." He looked across the staging area at the other blackcollars, a strangely wistful look on his face. "Because win, lose, or die, tomorrow is the night."

Earlier that day, as he had every day of his captivity, Caine had run himself through an exercise regimen consisting of some of the martial arts katas he'd been taught back on Earth during his Resistance combat training. The workout, while certainly nothing spectacular, had nevertheless run up a good sweat, necessitating a shower in his transparent stall.

But unlike the previous days, when he'd finished drying off and flipped his wet towel over the edge of the stall, this time he made sure it landed in such a way as to neatly block the spy camera hidden there.

And with that, the stage was set. It would have been nice to disable the bedpost camera as well, but Security had sneaked in last night to clear and regimmick that one as he'd hoped they would, and he couldn't keep changing the paper over the lens without them eventually getting wise to the game.

Besides, with the shower camera halfway across the room from his bed, there was a chance they'd be slightly less alert when they came in tonight to clear it.