The Backlash Mission

Chapter 9

It was nearly ten when Colvin and Braune returned with the team's new clothes. Pittman, still keen on trying to find transportation, headed out alone shortly afterward on that errand. Privately, Caine considered it a likely waste of time, but was willing to let him indulge it for a short while, anyway.

Leaving his own house-hunting route with Colvin and Braune so that Pittman would be able to catch up later, Caine and Alamzad headed out.

And ran straight into delayed culture shock.

Caine had been raised in Grenoble, Europe, and his Resistance tutors had exposed him to even larger cities during his training. But none of that had prepared him for Denver at full blast.

It was incredibly crowded, for starters—crowded not only with pedestrians but also with all kinds of vehicles. Caine had seen traffic of such ferocity only once before, in the government sector of New Geneva. Alamzad, born on Plinry after its fall to the Ryqril, was clearly and thoroughly dazzled by it all.

The pedestrians they passed among were almost as bad a shock as the cars. The young people, especially, showed an incredible range of clothing style and demeanor, in sharp contrast to the drab outfits and almost universal sullenness Caine had always noticed in the teenagers of Capstone.

But perhaps strongest of all was the sense of antiquity that gradually grew as they wandered about the city. Denver felt old, its years somehow permeating even the newest of its buildings. Like an old man being kept physically young by Idunine, Caine thought once—and that realization prompted bitter comparisons. Plinry had been nearly destroyed by the Ryqril; on the other side of Earth, old Geneva was a blackened ruin.

Denver had hardly been touched. And Caine found himself resenting the city its good fortune.

They had been searching for nearly two hours without finding any place that had the combination of accessibility, safety, and space Caine was looking for when a familiar voice called to them. A

familiar voice, from a distinctly unfamiliar car. A minute later he and Alamzad were inside.

"Where did you get this?" Caine asked Pittman, looking around the aged but neat interior.

"I bought it," Pittman told him, voice tight with tension. Fighting the local traffic was clearly taking its toll. "I found a place that resells cars the owners don't want anymore. You have any luck out here?"

"Not so far." Caine shook his head. "What'd you use for money? One of our diamonds?"

"Indirectly. There was a jewelry store a block from this place, so I went there first, sold the diamond, and then went back and talked the car dealer down to that amount of cash."

"What did he say when you didn't have an ID?" Alamzad put in.

"He didn't ask for one. I get the feeling cash on the counter bypasses a lot of official regulations around here."

They reached a corner and turned right. "Where are we going?" Caine asked.

"I passed an old house on the way here that looked promising," Pittman said. "As long as you haven't found anything, I thought it'd be worth a closer look."

Then suggest it—don't decide it. With an effort, Caine swallowed the words unsaid. Command discipline and individual initiative, Lathe had often warned, could easily become mutually exclusive.

The best blackcollar comsquares worked hard to walk that thin line.

And in this case, it paid off. The house Pittman took them to was perfect.

"Probably been abandoned for months," Caine guessed, eying the broken windows, darkened gaps in the siding, and wild hedges gradually taking over the small front yard. "Wonder why it hasn't been torn down."

"A lot of the houses along here aren't in much better shape," Alamzad pointed out. "Could be no one's noticed."

"Maybe." Caine grunted. "Let's go inside."

The front door was locked, but not seriously so. Alamzad got it open while Caine and Pittman, the latter waving an official-looking note stick, stood near the sidewalk making house-inspection-type comments for the benefit of anyone watching. Inside, the house was in slightly better shape, though Caine had doubts about the stairs to the second floor, and in ten minutes he was satisfied. "Some blackout covers for the windows and I think we'll have it," he told the others. "Let's go get Braune and Colvin and load the gear into the car. We'll move in after dark tonight when we won't be so conspicuous."

"What do we do in the meantime?" Pittman asked as they locked up and went back to the car. "Try and hunt up the vets you want?"

"Or look for Torch?" Alamzad added.

Torch. Fanatics. Caine's lip twitched as he remembered Lepkowski's warning about such allies. But at least now he understood why the local resistance had gone that way. If Denver was at all representative, North America hadn't suffered from the war nearly as much as Europe had, and with life under the Ryqril essentially business as usual, there was little incentive for ordinary citizens to get interested in their overthrow. "I think just looking around would be a waste of time," he told the others. "We'll need to attract their attention, and that'll take preparation. For now I think it'd make more sense to go take a look at our target."

"Our target?" Pittman asked, his voice oddly tight as he slid into the driver's seat and gripped the wheel.

"Well, the place we need to get into, anyway," Caine amplified. "Let's get moving; we've got a long day yet ahead of us."

—

The satellite image of Denver skittered across the display screen in a standard scan pattern: northwest corner working down to southeast corner, then kicking back to the top again. "Damn it all," General Quinn ground out between clenched teeth. "Damn and damn and damn."

That makes number eight, Galway added to his mental tally, being careful to sit perfectly still in his chair. The mood Quinn was in now, even the slightest hint that Galway was about to speak might trigger a preemptive explosion. He'd argued strongly against Quinn's plan to put a tracer aboard the car they'd given Pittman, pointing out that Caine would surely go over the vehicle with a bug stomper at his earliest opportunity. The satellite-detectable infrared-reflective paint around the edge of the car's roof had been a reasonable compromise... except that the satellite had now completely lost the damn thing eight times since Pittman had driven it away.

A motion caught the edge of Galway's eye: a foolhardy aide venturing into blast range with a sheaf of papers. "General?"

"What?" Quinn growled, eyes still on the display.

"I have the analysis of Postern's first stop this morning."

"Go on."

"Assuming he didn't park more than two blocks from his objective, it's eighty-two percent probable that he did indeed go to 7821 North Wadsworth. Two of the three people at the twoplex there—Raina Dupre and Karen Lindsay—brought in a truckload of oil shale from the Miniver depot late last night."

"Um. Yeah, that would have come down Seventy-two. The timing work for Caine to have hitched a ride with them?"

Galway cleared his throat. "If you'll remember, sir—"

"I know what he told you, Galway," the other cut him off. "I'll run my own checks, if you don't mind."

Galway pursed his lips and shut up.

"I've got someone checking on that now," the aide said. "Background dump shows nothing that would indicate subversive leanings by any of the three. Probability that the rendezvous was somehow prearranged is below point one percent."

"Keep digging. Double-check all relatives and previous employers for any connection to Torch. And put a couple of men in the immediate neighborhood, just in case we need a fast reaction."

"Yes, sir." The other turned and left.

Fat lot of good two men'll be against Caine, Galway thought. But something else Quinn had said...

"I thought Torch was supposed to be dead," he ventured.

"It is," Quinn said. "Haven't heard from them in five years—haven't seen any of their leaders for nearly that long. Doesn't mean a damn thing when you're dealing with fanatics."

Galway grimaced with painful memory. Plinry's blackcollars, apparently harmless for thirty years...

until the right opportunity came along.

"There!" Quinn barked, jerking forward to jab a finger at the display. The view had stabilized, and in the middle, centered within a red circle, was a tiny white rectangle. "Adams? You on it?"

"Yes, sir," one of the techs across the room replied. "Feeding the LockTight program now."

"It'd better work," Quinn warned darkly.

"It should," the other said.

"Then we've got you, Caine," the general muttered under his breath. "We've got you for good."

Galway exhaled carefully, the knot in his stomach slowly relaxing. The gamble was finally working.

"Looks like they're leaving the city," he commented. "What's out there they might be interested in?"

"You name it." With his tracking system functional again, Quinn was almost civil. "There are at least a dozen targets in the mountains, depending on how ambitious Caine feels. Everything from oilshale miners to Aegis Mountain itself. Pity your spy hasn't been able to find that out."

"He will," Galway replied. Aegis Mountain. The name had figured prominently in the orientation files the prefect had been skimming for the past few days—a symbol, he'd thought more than once, for Denver as a whole. Surely Caine wouldn't even consider tackling the place.

Or would he?

On the display the marked car was still heading west. Galway gave Quinn a sideways look, wondering whether or not he should share his sudden intuition that Aegis was Caine's target. Not, he decided. Quinn would surely reject the suggestion out of hand, and would then be that much slower to come around if Caine made a move in that direction. No, for the moment it would be better to just watch and be ready. Besides, it was Lathe, not Caine, who was the real miracle worker, and Lathe was eight long parsecs away. They could afford to give the enemy some extra rope.

Settling back, he turned his full attention to the satellite view. And tried to ignore the vague tightness in his gut.