Lathe met him at the lab's door, an odd expression on his face. "Any luck?" the comsquare asked.
"None," Caine told him. "Looks like we're going to have to get into the main machine upstairs after all."
"Maybe, maybe not. Come take a look at this."
Frowning, Caine stepped past him into the room... and stopped short with surprise.
Another twenty or more bodies were inside, most of them lying in cots but a few slumped over lab tables. The lab tables themselves...
"What the hell were they doing in here, anyway?" Caine asked. "Place looks like a robotless genetics assembly line."
"It does at that," Lathe agreed. "I'd expected to find what was left of Torch on this level, because they'd have come to the med section to fight against their poisoning. But it looks now as if they were set up here from the very beginning."
"That long?" Caine frowned.
"The indications are here. But hang on to your teeth—the real kicker is over here."
Lathe led the way around one of the long tables to a cluttered desk squeezed between a pair of chemassemble machines. A man lay across the papers and disks there, looking for all the world as if he'd settled down for a short nap and never awakened. A ledger-type book sat open before him, and it was to the heading on the left-hand page that Lathe silently pointed. Caine leaned over and read it...
"PRODUCTION SCHEDULE," was written there in a bold, firm handwriting. "DOSAGES OF
WHIPLASH PER DAY FOR A WEEK ENDING..."
"Whiplash?" Caine frowned. "What the hell is—
He stopped abruptly. "Are you thinking," he asked the comsquare slowly, "the same thing I am?"
"We won't know for sure without a real test," Lathe cautioned. "But it's just barely possible we've found a shortcut to the end of the mission."
Caine snorted gently. "Only if you believe in miracles," he said. "I gave those up about the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus."
"Nothing wrong with accepting miracles that come your way," Lathe murmured.
Something in his tone made Caine look up at him. The comsquare's face was tight, his eyes focused on infinity. "What's wrong?" Caine asked.
"Oh... nothing. Nothing I can do anything about, anyway." Lathe took a deep breath, released it slowly. "You just reminded me that Project Christmas is being activated about now back on Plinry."
"Project Christmas? What's that?"
"Ask me another time," the other advised. "Come on, let's get back and find the others. And see if we can come up with a safe way to figure out just what the hell this little Christmas present of Torch's really is."
Chapter 36
It was three in the morning, and Haven was collecting his gear for another sortie outside the equipment shed, when the scout ship from Earth reached Plinry orbit and sent its prearranged radio signal... and from the outer parts of Capstone, Dayle Greene activated Project Christmas.
Haven paused, listening as three distant explosions came faintly to his ears: one each from the Hub's eastern, southern, and western gates, Greene's signal to him and the nine other hidden blackcollars that the climax of the operation had begun. The blasts weren't particularly powerful, Haven knew, certainly nothing that could actually bring the gates down. But Security under Hammerschmidt's command was eminently predictable, and within minutes the Hub's forces would be racing to the wall to prepare for invasion.
Which would leave the Chimney virtually undefended against the blackcollars arrayed against it.
Undefended, that is, except for a cadre of Ryqril guards and four multimegawatt lasers.
Haven gritted his teeth and eased out onto the roof. The whole thing was coming down a few days ahead of the anticipated schedule, but his force was really about as ready as it ever would be. The only question still hanging over them was whether or not the lasers had been adequately dealt with...
and unfortunately there was only way to find out.
Security's reaction began as the blackcollar sidled to the corner of the equipment shed and carefully laid out his equipment. In the near distance cars started up and roared off toward the wall, and as Haven unfolded his sniper's slingshot he saw a spotter craft southward shoot off to the west. The spotters were a potential problem, he knew, but one they would just have to live with. At least the rows of Corsairs sitting on the ground at the 'port would be out of the way soon, assuming that the scout pilot up there played his role properly.
And if he did, Haven knew, odds were good those Corsairs would blast him out of the sky. The blackcollar winced once, then put the thought firmly out of his mind. Some of the blackcollars waiting silently nearby would likely be dead within the hour, too, and dwelling on either possibility was counterproductive.
He had just set a large, silvery ball into his slingshot's pouch when the city lit up around him.
Dropping flat to the roof, he eased a goggled eye around the shed in time to see one of the wall-top lasers swivel upward and fire.
He grinned tightly. The drone pods the scout pilot was dumping out by the hundreds over the city were perfectly harmless, but the Ryqril had no way of knowing that. The laser swiveled fractionally, fired again; a second later the other three joined in the battle as the cloud of falling pods came within their respective ranges. Aiming, firing, reaiming—all of them operating at blinding electrical speed.
Or rather, two of them were, the ones at the back corners of the Chimney. But the two nearer ones, the ones that he, O'Hara, and Spadafora had spent over a week pelting with radioactive putty...
They were slow. Incredibly slow. The kind of slow that could only mean they were being aimed and fired manually. In other words, Hawking's damn crazy trick had actually worked.
Haven took a deep breath and set his slingshot brace against his arm. Slow against distant specks in the sky would still be fast enough to vaporize blackcollar commandos trying to scale the Chimney wall. One last shot... and if it wasn't perfect all the rest would have been for nothing.
He waited with forced patience, watching the laser's movements for just the right moment, and as the weapon twisted upward and paused momentarily he let the pellet fly. Through his binoculars he saw it hit squarely in the middle of the exposed gimbal mechanism—
And squeezed his eyes shut as it flared with blue-white light.
There wouldn't be any direct damage, of course—the hullmetal gimbal ring was designed to withstand attacks by other high-power lasers, and Haven's simple thermite bomb would hardly even strain its heat sink. But high-power lasers didn't splatter molten metal all over the place—molten metal that the laser's own heat sink would help solidify. And with the weapon on manual control, it was likely to sit in virtually that same position long enough for the metal to congeal.
It was doubtful that the laser's operator even realized anything was wrong with the gimbals until the first of the grappling-equipped ropes caught on the wall next to the weapon and he tried to lower its aim. Haven held his breath as the laser strained against the strands of metal bracing it into its upward position... but the delicately balanced mechanism had been designed for speed, not power, and it struggled in vain. A quick glance at the Chimney's next corner showed the other laser had similarly been rendered helpless.
And a quarter of the enclave's perimeter wall was suddenly defenseless.
Reaching for his tingler, Haven tapped out a quick message. But the ground troops had already figured out that their keyhole was clear and four more ropes snaked their way to the top of the wall.
Spadafora, O'Hara: Stay on backup, Haven signaled; and with one last quick assessment of the ground situation he headed back for the stairs at a dead run.
By the time he reached the dangling ropes and climbed up the Chimney wall, the other blackcollars had gone down the inside, and from the sounds and laser flashes coming from the enclave the battle was in full swing. "Situation?" Haven asked Charles Kwon, the latter stretched out under the disabled laser with a sniper's slingshot in hand.