"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?"
Chapter 20
Her name was Anne Silcox, and she wasn't anything like what Caine had expected.
Outwardly, she didn't seem especially out of the ordinary. Her voice and manner of speech were normal enough, her face and body language tense but under reasonable control. Nowhere was there any obvious display of the holy fire Caine would have looked to find in a member of such an avowedly fanatical group.
But then he'd already learned a lot on this mission about discrepancies between theory and reality.
"I wish I knew what happened to the rest of them." Silcox shook her head. Her eyes made their fourth quick search of the unfurnished living room, as if she wasn't ready yet to put complete faith in Lathe's assurances about the safe house's security. "I was only seventeen when they disappeared, and hardly in the inner circle. All I know is that it wasn't something unexpected, because they set me up in the Shandygaff specifically to keep an eye on things in the absence of better information sources."
Her eyes flicked from Lathe's face to Caine's and Hawking's, then settled onto Kanai's. It was a tendency Caine had already noted in her, perhaps a need to connect with the familiar in such an unfamiliar situation.
Beside Caine, Lathe shifted in his seat. "That's not much to go on," he told her. "Do you know anything about their contacts here—communications with the criminal hierarchy, perhaps?"
Her eyes were still on Kanai. "All I know is that they occasionally had doings with blackcollars—both the ones here and some from other areas. Kanai could probably tell you more about that."
Lathe shifted his own gaze to Kanai. "You never mentioned other blackcollars."
The other shrugged. "I've heard reports, mostly through Torch, of other teams operating east and south of here, but I've never met any of them. You have to remember that long-distance travel is pretty severely restricted. As to dealings with the crime lords, if Torch did any of that I never heard about it. Frankly, I doubt it—their goals wouldn't mesh very well."
Lathe nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps. I presume Bernhard handled your contacts with Torch—do you know whether or not he was in touch with them at the time Anne says they closed up shop?"
"Possible, but I don't know. Bernhard isn't big on telling us everything he knows."
"Occupational hazard," Caine murmured.
If Lathe heard the remark he didn't show it. "Did Torch have any standard records caches?" he asked Silcox. "Hard copies, computer files, even a dummy program on someone else's machine? Anything that might give us a clue as to what happened to them?"
She shook her head. "All I was was a walking eavesdrop in the Shandygaff. No one would have trusted me with stuff like that."
"All right, then," Lathe said. "Let's switch to exactly what you've learned in the last five years. Any idea when the Ryqril started taking such an active interest in Aegis Mountain? Surely they haven't been trying to break in since the war ended."
"No, that's been a recent development," she said. "I started hearing rumors about it a year ago from smug-runners who were annoyed at how the extra security around there was interfering with their runs westward."
"The same time we snoggered them out of the Novas," Hawking pointed out. "Maybe they decided they needed to play catch-up again."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Caine asked.
"Means they're hoping to find more of our technology to steal," Lathe said. "Makes sense, I suppose.
There could very well be something left in Aegis they didn't get elsewhere from us after the war—"
"Wait a second," Caine cut in. "Why should they care about the thirty-year-old technology of a race they've already beaten?"
Lathe turned a strange frown on him. "You're serious?" the comsquare asked. "How did your teachers miss that one?"
"Maybe I was absent that day," Caine returned archly. "If it's not a state secret...?"
"The Ryqril are technological imbeciles," Lathe told him. "That's a literal, medical term—no insult implied. The whole race is incapable of creating new technology on their own beyond a fairly low level. It's probably the main driving force beyond their constant attempts to conquer their neighbors, in fact—it's one of the few ways they've got to advance their technological level."