Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar - The Judas Solution

He was asleep before he hit the ground.

It had taken some ingenuity and several trips with the drag carts, but Foxleigh and Jensen had finally managed to fuel and prep the Talus. "Next step is to figure out how to get it into one of the aircraft lifts,"

Foxleigh said as they coiled the last cables and hoses clear. "There are a pair of upper-level launch bays to the east and west. Which ones were you planning to use?"

"We won't need the launch bays," Jensen told him. "Or the elevator, either."

Foxleigh stared. "You mean ... straight out the main entrance? But isn't there a Ryqril base set up there?

Adamson told me there was."

"Oh, there's a base, all right," Jensen said. "A big one, too. That's the whole point."

"What whole point?" Foxleigh retorted. "In case you haven't noticed, Ryqril bases always include large, nasty antiaircraft lasers. You won't get fifty meters before you get vaporized."

"Ah, but this base runs right up against the side of the mountain," Jensen said. "Going out through the front door will actually put me inside the defenses."

"Really," Foxleigh murmured. "Adamson never mentioned that part."

"He probably never got close enough to see that part," Jensen said. "The Ryqril are touchy about visitors."

"I see," Foxleigh said. Yes; it would do nicely. "Of course, they've got other weapons in there besides the antiaircraft lasers. Once you're in, you very likely won't be coming out again."

"I wasn't intending to," Jensen said quietly. "This one's for Novak and all the rest who've died at Ryqril hands."

He turned back to face the Talus ... and as he did so, Foxleigh slipped his hand inside his jacket and drew his gun. "Actually, there's going to be a small change—"

He'd never seen a blackcollar move before. Had never dreamed that a human being could move that fast.

An instant later he found his gun hand pointed toward the ceiling, his arm locked above his head between Jensen's two hands, the blackcollar facing him with their noses no more than ten centimeters apart.

And he had no idea how he'd even gotten into that position.

"I'm disappointed, Toby," Jensen said, his voice dark and cold as he gazed into Foxleigh's face. "Not surprised, really. But disappointed."

"I wasn't going to hurt you," Foxleigh insisted.

"No, of course not." Sliding his left hand along Foxleigh's right wrist, the blackcollar deftly plucked the gun from his hand and stepped back. "We wondered about this gun, Flynn and I," he said, turning the weapon over in his hand as he inspected it. "I was hoping you were just some war veteran who'd been hiding out all this time."

"I am," Foxleigh said, rubbing his elbow where Jensen had overextended it. "My name's Lieutenant Samuel Foxleigh, TDE Air Defense."

"Of course," Jensen said. "Let me guess: you flew Talus interceptors."

"As a matter of fact, I did," Foxleigh said, fighting to keep his voice steady.

"And you ended up out here how?"

"I was shot down in the final battle," Foxleigh said, his gaze drifting to the fighter looming over them. "I hurt my leg when I bailed out, but I was able to make it to Shelter Valley. Doc Adamson patched me up; but as soon as it was clear that we'd lost and the Ryqril were landing in force to set up shop, he knew I couldn't stay there."

"Why not?"

"The town was too small," Foxleigh said. "Everyone knew everyone else, and there were two or three Adamson didn't trust to keep their mouths shut under pressure. So he took me up to the cabin and asked Toby to put me up for a while."

"So there was an actual Toby?"

"Adamson's uncle," Foxleigh said. "He'd moved up to the cabin about ten years earlier to get away from what he called the irritations of civilization."

"Not much of an escape," Jensen pointed out. "He was, what, a whole two hundred meters out of town?"

"But everyone knew to leave him alone," Foxleigh said. "Actually, the cabin's location was a compromise with the rest of his family, who were adamant about him not disappearing off somewhere into the wild and maybe dying in an accident without them even knowing about it."

"And then you showed up," Jensen said. "He must have been thrilled."

"Thrilled isn't the word for it," Foxleigh said ruefully, remembering the long and heated discussions.

"But Adamson promised it wouldn't be for long, just until the Ryqril and their collaborators finished the census we knew they'd be taking of the mountain areas. Once that was over, I could move back down to Shelter Valley, and eventually to Denver."

"So what went wrong?"

"What do you think?" Foxleigh retorted. "The Ryqril decided to stick that damned sensor pylon at the edge of town. That meant Security could be popping in at any time to check on the thing. Worse, it meant everyone would be on file somewhere, which killed any chance for me to slip into town and pretend I'd always been there."

"So you and Toby became permanent roommates?" Jensen suggested.

Foxleigh swallowed. "Only for a while," he said quietly. "Three months later he caught pneumonia and died."

"Leaving you his cabin and his name."

"Everyone in town already knew about old Toby the hermit," Foxleigh said. "But no one outside the Adamson family had seen him recently enough to remember what he looked like. It seemed the perfect place to hide."

"Temporarily, anyway," Jensen said. "Only you seem to have made it permanent."

Foxleigh felt his stomach tighten. "I guess I just got used to it."

Jensen shook his head. "Lie number two," he said.

Foxleigh frowned. "What?"

"That was lie number two," Jensen said. "Lie number one was in your story somewhere, though I'm not sure exactly where. But this was definitely number two. You want to try again?"

Foxleigh sighed. "All right," he said. "The fact is that I wanted to stay near the mountain. I knew it was locked down, but I thought someday I might be able to find a way back in."

"To do what?"

"Basically, to do exactly what you're planning," Foxleigh said. "I wanted to take a fighter and do as much damage as I could to the Ryqril before they caught up with me." He squared his shoulders. "And I'll guarantee I'm a better pilot than you are."

"No doubt," Jensen agreed. "So what exactly do you want?"

"What I just said," Foxleigh told him. "Let me take the Talus out into the Ryqril base."

"Sounds reasonable," Jensen said. "The answer's no."

He said it so calmly that for a second the word didn't register. When it finally did, it hit Foxleigh like a slap in the face. "What do you mean, no?" he demanded.

"I mean that before you pulled this I might have been interested," Jensen said, hefting the gun. "Now, your currency's all been burned."

"I wasn't going to shoot you," Foxleigh insisted again, his stomach churning. This was his last, his very last chance. "I just wanted to make sure you'd listen."

"And if I didn't, you had the final argument?" Jensen shook his head. "Sorry, Toby. Or Foxleigh, or whatever your real name is."

"It's Foxleigh."

"Whatever." Jensen gestured back toward the elevator. "Come on. You're going home."

Silently, they made their way back down to the Level Nine storage room where they'd first entered Aegis Mountain. Sitting Foxleigh down on one of the crates, Jensen poked around for a few minutes and came up with a short length of thin cord. "I'm going to tie your hands together," he told Foxleigh as he set to work. "It'll make some parts of the trip a little tricky, I'm afraid, but a former fighter pilot should be able to make do."

"What about the rope ladder?" Foxleigh asked. "I can't climb it this way."

"The housing on the sonic Torch set up at the base of the shaft has a couple of sharp edges on it," Jensen told him. "I damn near sliced my hand open on one of them on our way out last time. A little work and you should be able to cut yourself free."