The Backlash Mission

Chapter 19

Honor.

The word echoed over and over again through Kanai's mind as he sat alone at his booth in the Shandygaff. A five-letter curse; a two-syllable question which had no answer. Honor. Honor.

Honorhonorhonor—

Stop it! Shaking his head violently, he snapped the mental loop. The philosophy of his ancestors wouldn't help him now, either as a source of advice or as a refuge from action. What was about to happen was taking place in Denver in the year 2461; and he, Kanai, was the man who would have to live with his decision... or would have to die with it.

Across the room, Briller was talking quietly with one of Nash's other henchmen near the doorway to the bar's anteroom. The tip had come down about two hours ago, as nearly as Kanai's reading of events could place it, and for almost an hour now they'd been poised and ready. An obvious sucker trap... and it wasn't hard to guess who it was for.

Damn you, Lathe, he snarled once to himself. I told you to call me here. Not to come in person.

And come he would—Kanai had no doubt of that. The news of Security's bungled net operation was all over town, and if Quinn didn't know any better than to try a standard net on blackcollars, he did have enough brains to set up those horribly expensive tracers on all of the bar's fiber-op phone lines.

And Lathe, of course, would know enough to anticipate that.

If only Kanai had thought to give the comsquare his home phone number. But Quinn almost certainly had that line monitored by now, as well. So Lathe would come to the Shandygaff in person.

And would walk right into Briller's trap.

So where did Kanai's loyalty lie? With Bernhard and the rest of the team? In that case, honor required him to merely sit here and allow Lathe to fight on his own, to win or lose as his skill and the universe allowed. If Kanai declined to assist him further, perhaps the strains between Bernhard's team and the rest of the city could yet be smoothed over.

But if there was indeed a higher loyalty Kanai was being called to...

Chong slipped inside the main room, conferred briefly with Briller. Once, their eyes flicked to Kanai in his booth; and then Chong headed back through the anteroom to the troops Nash had stationed outside. They were keeping an eye on him, all right, the bar's enforcers and the Security spy both.

Watching to see which path Kanai would take: that of life, or that of suicide.

Or rather, that of life or that of seppuku.

And put that way, there was really no doubt as to which path was the honorable one. Kanai was a blackcollar, first and foremost, and to allow another blackcollar to go unaided to his death would be a betrayal of everything he knew to be right. And if the attempt cost him his life, he would at least be able to face his ancestors without that added shame tarnishing his soul.

But before he died he would claim a single personal satisfaction: he would eliminate the tripledamned Security agent who had placed him in this position. He'd deduced the other's identity long ago, but until now it had been a matter of complete indifference to him how Quinn kept track of Denver's shadow government. But no longer. It would be his final gift to Bernhard's team, and perhaps the most fitting response he could make to Quinn's insulting invasion of his home this morning.

He was easing a shuriken out of his belt pouch, concentrating on keeping his movements invisible to those watching him, when his tingler suddenly came on.

He froze as the message came through: Kanai: Lathe and Skyler approaching Shandygaff. Safety level?

"Damn," he breathed viciously. Tingler frequencies were unusual ones, and the short range of the devices made them hard to tap into, but Nash and his people undoubtedly had something set up for the occasion. Probably they had no real knowledge of blackcollar combat codes, but the very existence of a message told them all they really needed to know.

And indeed Briller had already reacted, drawing his pistol from his pocket and holding the weapon muzzle-up by his cheek. His eyes sought out and met Kanai's in silent warning.

Kanai met his gaze coolly... and deliberately reached to his tingler. Lathe: Trap/encirclement in area. Escape imperative.

Acknowledged. What about you?

There was no time for a reply as Briller belatedly swung his gun down and brought it to bear.

Dropping sideways onto the seat, Kanai rolled to the floor beneath his table as Briller's flechette shattered the privacy plastic behind him. There were yelps of surprise and anger from the nearer patrons as the big enforcer corrected his aim and fired again. Under the table, Kanai curled into a fetal position with his back to his opponent, letting the flexarmor beneath his shirt absorb the blow and deflect the shot. The projectiles couldn't penetrate the tough material, but on the other hand the sheer kick of the shots and the flexarmor's stiffening action as it spread the impact around could throw off his own counterattack, possibly fatally. The timing here had to be precise.

Another flechette ricocheted off his back... and Kanai made his move.

He rolled onto his back, left hand sending a shuriken spinning in Briller's direction. It was a lousy shot from a lousy position and it missed completely, but it served its purpose of forcing Briller to break off his own attack and duck. In the momentary breathing space, Kanai tucked his legs to his chest and kicked up as hard as he could at the table towering over him. With a splintering of torn wood, the fastenings holding the slab of wood to its center post broke, and the tabletop flipped over to rest on its edge against the metal column.

Landing there just in time to catch Briller's next shot squarely on its polished surface.

Briller must have realized at that moment that he was dead, but he made a game try of it anyway. By the time Kanai had his battle-hood and gloves on and had poked his head over his impromptu shield, the big enforcer had sidled around the edge of the room toward the massive bar, trying to get a shot around Kanai's tabletop without simultaneously exposing himself to the blackcollar's shuriken.

But now that his head and hands were protected, Kanai had little to fear from the other's gun—or from anyone else's, as a shot glanced off his shoulder from behind him. Twisting, he spun a shuriken off in that direction, then turned back to send another star toward Briller. The big man spat in pain as the shuriken caught him in the right shoulder; he emptied his gun in blind fury. Kanai ducked out from his shelter and sprinted through the hailstorm toward the anteroom.

He'd expected a larger reception committee to be lying in wait in the anteroom, and was therefore vaguely surprised to find only two people there. "Kanai!" Nash snarled toward him, swinging his flechette pistol around to center on the blackcollar's stomach.

"Give it up, Nash," Kanai told him, eyes flicking over the little man's shoulder to the coatcheck girl and the tiny pistol in her hand. Paral-dart gun, probably—more useless against him than even the flechette pistols. "Your quarry's been warned," he continued, drawing out a shuriken. "He's probably half a klick away by now."

"And you're the one who warned him, I suppose?" Nash bit out. "Damn you, Kanai—"

"Sorry about this, lady," Kanai said to the coatcheck girl. He raised his shuriken—

And then everything happened at once.

Across the room the door slammed open and a pair of black-clad men leaped in. Simultaneously, a brilliant flash lit up the room from behind Kanai and a chunk of wall by the door exploded into superheated vapor and brick fragments. Kanai spun around, just in time to see Nash's "flechette" gun blaze a second laser blast toward the intruders. "Watch it!" he snapped reflexively. The disguised laser swung in his direction—

And there was the chaft of an airgun, and Nash collapsed to the floor, his last shot burning a black groove in the rug in front of him.

"Nice shooting," Lathe said, breathing a bit heavily. "Does this mean you've officially joined our side?"

Kanai turned as the coatcheck girl lowered her pistol, her expression simultaneously furious and scared. "Damn you, you dimbos," she snapped at Lathe and his companion, a blackcollar Kanai didn't recognize. "What did you think you were doing, coming back here? Nash's lice are all over the mall, just waiting for you."

"Oh, we know," Lathe said, glancing into the bar itself. "We came in to talk to Kanai... and to see whose side you were on."

"I'm on my side—no one else's," she bit out. "Damn you, anyway, for doing this to me."

"If we can talk about this somewhere else," Kanai put in, eying the main room doorway, "they'll be pulling themselves together in there anytime now. You mind getting the hell out of here?"

"You coming with us?" Lathe's companion asked the woman, raising an eyebrow.

"What choice do I have?" she growled, gesturing sharply at the prone figure of Nash. "If I don't, he'll have me strapped over a firepit the minute he wakes up."

"Oh, well, that's easy enough to fix," Kanai said. His shuriken was still in his hand; raising it, he hurled it down squarely into the little man's throat.

The woman inhaled sharply. "You—"

"He was a Security spy, and I was going to kill him anyway," Kanai told her calmly. "All right—your job's safe again. Now can we get out of here?"

But Lathe was still looking at the woman. "Your choice," he said.

For a second more she eyed them in silent indecision. Then she gave a sharp nod. "Back here," She motioned to them, stepping back from the counter. "There's a hidden trapdoor back here, leads a few blocks away—"

She broke off to fire a burst of paral-darts through the doorway. "The company's getting restless,"

Lathe agreed, taking a long step and vaulting over the counter. "Let's go."

The other blackcollar followed; with a deep breath and underlying misgivings, Kanai joined them.

The girl pushed aside a rack of coats and sent a hard kick against the wall there, and a small square of flooring popped up a millimeter or two. A knife appeared in her hand, and she pried the square up, revealing a handle. She tugged, and the tiling around the handle cracked into a rectangular shape and lifted up. "Down the stairs and along the tunnel," she instructed, gesturing. "I need to grab a couple of things and then set up the self-destruct."

"Right." Lathe's fingers found his tingler: Backup: Pull out. Escaping via rathole. Rendezvous at point beta.

Acknowledged.

Kanai took another deep breath and followed Lathe down the stairway. He hoped to hell the comsquare knew what he was doing.

—

The stairway led a dozen meters beneath Denver's streets to a complex and ancient-feeling warren of ceramic-walled tunnels. With the blackcollars' penlights throwing odd reflections from the frequent puddles of stagnant water underfoot, they traveled along in silence, all of them apparently aware that Security could conceivably have scattered audio sensors in the tunnels.

The woman was clearly familiar with the territory, guiding them through the maze without hesitation. Fifteen minutes later they came to a more modern-looking metal ladder disappearing upward through a broken section of roof. The woman headed up, and a minute later they were all standing around a dimly lit basement smelling strongly of mildew and neglect.

"Sorry about the mess," she apologized, stepping to a rickety set of stairs and shining Lathe's light briefly onto a white square set into the wall there. "We should be safe here for a while—long enough for Security to shift the search somewhere else, anyway."

Kanai moved to her side, glanced up the stairs at the closed door there, then flashed his own light on the white plate. Fifteen or twenty barely visible black threads were set into it, leading off in all different directions. "What's this?" he asked.

"Passive intruder alert," the woman told him. "The monofilaments are anchored upstairs to doors and windows and whatnot. If anyone comes in, the thread is pulled out of the plate. Looks like no one else has been by here since the last time I was in. Not surprising."

"Interesting system," Lathe commented, removing his flexarmor battle-hood. "Sounds like the sort of thing that an organization with more ingenuity than funds would come up with."

She gave the comsquare a long look, but then shrugged. "You're right on that one. Being the last surviving member of a resistance group is hardly a money-making proposition—and we were never exactly rich even at our strongest."

"Your group being...?"

"Torch, of course. What else?"