The Backlash Mission

Chapter 3

One of the biggest problems Lepkowski and the Plinry blackcollars had faced with their year-old businessmen's shuttle, Caine knew, had been that of maintaining proper security while civilians were aboard the new starships. It wasn't a trivial matter; with the tool of loyalty-conditioning at Security's disposal, the government could theoretically slip saboteurs through even the finest screening procedures. The danger had eventually been at least minimized by completely sealing off a section of the Novak exclusively for civilian passenger use.

Which sounded rather cramped to most people... because most people didn't have any real feel for just how big the Novak really was.

Certainly Caine's four teammates didn't, expecting confinement to a special section of their own away from both crew and other passengers, neither of which knew of their presence. Caine had watched with secret amusement as they first learned what a "small private section" really meant.

After the cramped homes most of them had grown up knowing in nongovernment Capstone—and the even tighter conditions at Hamner Lodge—the Novak was almost like a luxury vacation by comparison.

A vacation that ended three days out from Earth with the arrival of Lepkowski for their final briefing.

"The shuttle will be coming into Denver from the west, on this vector," the general told them, indicating a path west by north over the Rockies on the detailed map he'd brought for them. "Your drop pods will be jettisoned here, about twenty-five klicks from the edge of the mountains and civilization."

"A bit of a stretch, isn't that?" Stef Braune asked dubiously.

"We did nearly thirty on Argent," Caine told him. "And that was without any tailwind assistance."

"These are mountains, though," Doon Colvin pointed out. "That means strong and often dangerous air currents to fight."

"How dangerous?" Caine asked. Unlike any of the others—including Caine—Colvin had had a lot of private experience with hang gliders.

Colvin shrugged. "Depends on the mountains and the weather at the time. Could be a relatively minor annoyance or an immediate catastrophe or anything in between."

Lepkowski and Caine exchanged glances. "Can you drop any closer to the metro area?" the general asked.

Caine shook his head. "Too much of our path's going to be visible on Security's radar as it is. I want to be on the far side of these mountains here and here when we swing around to follow this road. We need to draw their first countermove to the wrong place if we're going to have time to lose ourselves in Denver before they realize their mistake."

Alamzad cleared his throat. "Not to push or anything, Caine, but as long as we're all together now anyway... how about breaking down and telling us just what we're supposed to do once we get there?"

Caine could feel Lepkowski's eyes on him. "Sorry," he said, looking at each of his team as he spoke.

"But this is too important a mission to take any risks whatsoever with. It's not that I don't trust you," he added, "but there's always a chance Security might snatch one of you... and even psychor conditioning techniques can be broken with the right kind of pressure."

None of the four liked it—that much was obvious from their faces. But they accepted it without further argument.

—

Some of that same faith was also in evidence later on in a different part of the starship, but in this case the participants had a good deal more experience on which to base it. Seated together with his own four-man team, Lathe ran through the details of Caine's plan. "...so we'll drop approximately three klicks back and one up from their drop point," he finished, marking the spot on his copy of Lepkowski's map. "Colvin seemed to think we'd have some trouble with winds, but I don't see us having any choice."

"How about dropping from an entirely separate shuttle?" Chelsey Jensen suggested. "If we go first we could be on the ground near Caine's landing site and keep track of them that way."

"Doubt if Lepkowski could finagle loads well enough to justify two shuttles," Dawis Hawking said, shaking his head. "Besides, two obvious drops might stir up Security more than we can really afford."

"That's the clincher," Lathe agreed. "Security's used to us doing things one way now, and keeping the illusion that we're still following that pattern is the way to buy us some time."

"Which we're going to be on short enough rations of as it is," Rafe Skyler said with a shake of his head. "Lathe, this is about as crazy a scheme as I've ever seen you tackle. No matter what shape Aegis Mountain's in, Caine's got about zero chance in a thousand of getting inside. With or without us playing backstop for him."

Lathe shrugged. "Perhaps. All right—probably, even. But I don't think it's completely hopeless.

Anything people can get out of other people can get into. It's largely a matter of locating those other people."

"And hoping the Ryqril haven't already set up shop in the base," Jensen murmured.

Hawking snorted gently. "It wouldn't be the first time blackcollars have planned to invade a Ryqril stronghold."

"Not even the first time this year," Jensen said archly. "That is, if Christmas is still on schedule."

"It is," Lathe said. "The point is that we've got an awful damn lot to gain if we do somehow manage to pull this off."

"Yes," the fifth blackcollar, Mordecai, said quietly, the first time he'd spoken since the meeting began. Lathe studied the other's dark face for a moment; but, characteristically, the small man added nothing more to his single word of agreement.

It was enough, though. Mordecai didn't talk much, but his support carried a lot of weight on a mission of this sort. "Well, who wants to live forever, anyway?" Skyler shrugged. "Any idea what we can expect in the way of opposition?"

"The government center's here," Lathe told him, tapping a spot wedged between the southwestern edge of Denver proper and a ridge the computer had labeled Hogback. "Originally a separate town named Athena, apparently full of support personnel and families for Aegis during the war. It was a logical spot for the collies to set up shop, and they seem to have done so."

"Where's the Ryqril section?" Hawking asked, frowning at the photo.

"Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be one," Lathe said. "At least there's no separately fortified enclave within Athena."

"Which are two ways of saying the same thing," Skyler rumbled. "Bad sign, Lathe—if the cockroach spawn aren't there, they've got to be somewhere they consider safe."

"Such as Aegis Mountain?" Jensen suggested.

"Well, yes, the logic does seem to lead us that way," Lathe admitted. "But I'm not ready to carve it in stone quite yet. There may be other rat holes in the area the Ryqril have found and appropriated.

We'll just have to wait and see."

That was, unfortunately, the bottom line for nearly everything about the mission. Still, Lathe had to admit they'd managed on a lot less up-front data on other missions. This time, at the very least, they knew their target city still existed.

—

And finally, it was time to go.

For Caine, it was with an odd feeling of displaced deja vu that he followed Lepkowski to the hanger where the specially equipped shuttle was waiting: displaced, because the last time he'd been the greenest of Lathe's team, the one from whom the fine points of strategy and tactics had been withheld. This time—

This time he was the leader, the man in charge of it all. The man with both the authority and the responsibility for other men's lives. A sobering thought; but down deep he had to admit that it was exhilarating, as well.

The shuttle was a standard ground-to-orbit craft, with one important design difference. Attached to each side, at both fore and aft positions, were two pairs of drop pods, shaped like truncated cones three meters tall. Each pod would hold up to four men.

It was Braune who asked the obvious question as Lepkowski led the way toward the forward pair of pods. "What're the ones in back for?"

"Decoys," Lepkowski said over his shoulder. "We drop them a klick or two before yours go."

"Won't they draw more attention?" Pittman asked.

"If you're scope-visible at the time it's not going to make any difference if we drop one pod or sixty."

The general shook his head. "This way the enemy's response at least gets diluted a little."

Inside, the pods were a maze of cables, straps, and bars. Caine settled himself into the starboard one with Pittman, Braune, and Alamzad, leaving Colvin to himself in the supply pod on the other side.

"All set," he told Lepkowski after everyone was strapped into place. "Seal us up and let's get going."

"Good luck," Lepkowski said... and then the thick door swung shut, plunging them into darkness.

The waiting's always the hardest part, Caine told himself; but in this case good management on someone's part had minimized that annoyance. Caine's eyes had barely adjusted to the faint glow of the pod's luminous instruments when he felt the subtle vibrations of someone boarding the shuttle...

and then another, and another. The Earthbound passengers, heading groundside. Caine wondered briefly if they would face an angry Security grilling on arrival, but put that concern out of his mind.

None of them were in any way connected with the impending illegal entry into Ryqril-owned territory, and Security wasn't likely to pick on them once that fact was established. Caine hoped not, anyway.

It was perhaps a quarter hour after the footfalls had ceased when the pod gave a jerk and Caine's stomach abruptly tried to climb up his esophagus. "Going down," Braune murmured in a conversational tone that almost succeeded in covering up his nervousness.

"Down but not out," Caine replied, eyes on the altimeter. The shuttle pilot, he knew, would be dropping the pods at five klicks... almost there...

A dull thud, more felt than heard, made him start against his straps before he realized it was the decoy pods breaking free. "Here we go," he told the others... and with a wrench they were suddenly in free fall.

Someone hissed something under his breath. A second later gravity returned with twin jolts as Caine popped the drogue and main chutes. "Get ready," he said as their flight smoothed again. "Five seconds to breakout... three, two, one—

He wrenched the control, and the pod's walls split from floor to ceiling, the floor disintegrated, and the four men were flung apart into the darkness as the wall sections they were strapped to caught the inrush of air and separated. Caine got a dizzying glimpse of stars above and black ground below; and then, with a snap of spring-loaded connectors and a hiss of compressed air, the pod section above him unfolded into a hang-glider wing. For a second he felt himself slipping sideways as the glider leveled itself, and then he was flying smoothly over the landscape far below.

His second experience with blackcollar drop pods. Eventually, he supposed, one got used to the ride.

Licking his lips briefly, he made a quick scan of the visible sky. Off to his left were two starless blotches that could be other gliders. "Report, Colvin," he said into the short-range mike curving along his cheek.

"I think I can see everyone," Colvin's voice came in his ear. "You're all below and ahead of me."

"UV beacons in turn," Caine ordered. "Pittman... Braune... Alamzad... me."

"Yeah, you're all more or less together," Colvin reported. "Zad, you don't seem very steady, though.

You having trouble?"

"I don't know." Even through the radio Alamzad's tension was clearly audible. "Either I've got a loose connection somewhere or the damn wind direction keeps changing."

"It's the wind," Pittman put in. "I've got some of that, too, and you're closer in to the mountain than I am."

Mountain? Caine peered into the darkness. Sure enough, there was a sharp peak looming off to his right that he hadn't noticed before. Shielding from Security's radar, for sure, but as a sudden eddy current bucked his glider he began to wonder if the protection was going to be worth it. If the winds decreased their flight range badly enough—

"I'm going down!" Alamzad snapped abruptly. "A downdraft of some kind. Trying to pull up—"

"No!" Colvin barked before Caine could respond. "Ride it—pull up and you'll stall."

"Too late," Alamzad said with a hissing sigh of resignation. "I'm going down. Hope I can find a clearing or something."

For a long second Caine's mind seemed to freeze. Down in unknown territory, far from any sort of populace to disappear into....

The moment passed, his Resistance and blackcollar training driving logic and calmness into his mind. "Alamzad, turn on your UV," he ordered. "Colvin, there should be a road somewhere nearby angling southeast into Denver. Can you see it?"

"Got it. Zad, goose your glider a little bit—if you can thread those two humps ahead of you, you'll at least land on a downslope in sight of the road."

"Okay," Alamzad said tightly. "Where do I go after I'm clear?"

"Follow the road southeast," Colvin told him. "It starts to switchback up through the mountains there, I think, and the farther up we get the less climbing we'll have to do. Caine, what should I do?"

"Get as far along the road as you can," Caine said. "Pittman and Braune, go with him. Try and stay together." Below, the faint purple glow of Alamzad's ultraviolet beacon had successfully cleared the mountain peaks and was weaving like a drunken moth as the other searched for a landing site.

"Alamzad, there looks to be a gap in the trees east of you. If we can make it that far, we'll be fairly close to the road."

The significance of the pronoun wasn't lost on the others. "I'll stay with you," Pittman volunteered immediately. "Three men in mountainous territory are safer than two."

"Thanks, but no. You're as likely to end up in an even more inhospitable place. Besides, I want you three to have the supplies repacked for backpacking when we reach you."

A crash of breaking branches in their earphones stifled any further comments. Caine held his breath.... "I'm down," Alamzad said. "Afraid the glider's shot."

Caine let out his breath quietly. "They're of limited use on the ground anyway," he said. The other's UV was still glowing; turning carefully, Caine prepared to join him. "Get going, everyone—we'll meet you up the road. And go easy on radio usage."

"Good luck," Colvin said, and then there was silence. Licking his lips once, Caine set his teeth together and started down. They were definitely off to a great start.

—

Floating along on the strong breeze two kilometers above, Lathe listened long enough to confirm all of Caine's team had landed safely before switching back to the blackcollars' frequency.

"Suggestions?" he asked.

"Not much choice, is there?" Jensen said. "We dump the silent backstop role and go get them out."

"Out of what?" Hawking countered. "About all we can do at this point is hold their hands as we all slog along together."

"Seems to me," Skyler rumbled, "that we need to either help them get to Denver quickly, or else set up a diversion to pull Security off their backs while they find their own way there."

Jensen snorted. "That'd be one double hell of a diversion. Even once they're all together they'll be a good twenty klicks from the edge of town."

"Good point," Lathe agreed. The discussion had given him time to put his own thoughts in order and decide on their best course. "All right—transport it is. Let's make for civilization and see about borrowing a car."

The radio went silent as the five blackcollars settled down to squeezing all the distance possible out of their hang gliders. Caine, Lathe had a sneaking suspicion, wasn't going to like this a bit, but injured pride was low on the priority list at the moment. Eyes scanning the blackness around him for the Security flyers that must surely be on their way, he steered toward the lights just beginning to show through gaps in the mountains. And hoped to hell he didn't fly into anything solid on the way.