"Yeah, I'll damn the Ryqril, all right," Colvin snarled, taking a step forward before the Security men at his side stopped him. "But whatever money they offered you that you couldn't resist—"
"Shut up!" Pittman yelled, jumping to his feet and spinning around. The hand gripping the cassette arched over his shoulder to throw—
Galway stepped in front of him, deftly plucking the cassette away. "Settle down, Pittman," he said, and even through his own haze of agonized disbelief Caine could hear something like regret in the prefect's voice. "It's over now. It's all over."
"Only for now," Lathe said softly. His voice was almost calm... but there was death in his eyes.
"Only for now. But there'll be another reckoning, Pittman. I swear it."
Overhead, a shadow caught Caine's eye: the flying ambulance had arrived. It settled to the pavement next to Mordecai as the paramed inside flung open the rear doors and rolled a stretcher out to the waiting Security men. "You three—get in there with him," Quinn instructed a knot of guards as Mordecai was lifted inside.
"But then there won't be room for me," the medic protested.
"You've already said there's nothing you can do for him out here, haven't you?" the general retorted.
"So ride in front. You'll be there in five minutes anyway."
The medic grimaced, but apparently knew better than to argue. He got in beside the pilot as the Security men and paramed squeezed in with Mordecai and closed the rear doors. The ambulance lifted into the night sky, and Quinn turned his attention back to the rest of them. "I trust none of you will be foolish enough to try anything so unnecessarily melodramatic," he said, almost conversationally.
"Don't worry," Lathe told him, still in that same soft voice. "None of us is going to die until we've taken care of you."
"I'm sure," Quinn said. "Lieutenant, call in the transports. And instruct the interrogation department to prepare for fresh subjects."
Numbly, Caine let himself be led over to the barricade. Pittman a traitor, Mordecai near death... and Lathe captured. What would come next he didn't know, but it almost didn't even matter.
For Caine, the universe had already been shattered beyond repair.
Chapter 25
It was a curious sensation, Mordecai thought, to be helpless.
Curious, and thoroughly unpleasant. Every small motion of the ambulance made him feel in danger of sliding off the stretcher, even though he knew they'd strapped him securely in place. Overhead, the dome light had been dimmed, for which he was thankfuclass="underline" with his eyes paralyzed open the glare could have quickly become painful. It would have been nice to be able to see the city below, but his head was pointed straight up and all his peripheral vision could pick up was reflections of the ambulance's own interior from the side windows.
About all he could do was listen. And he did.
"Easy as breezy, wasn't it?" one of the Security guards remarked from beside him. "I guess blackcollars aren't so tough to handle when you know they're coming."
"All guerrilla forces are like that," another responded. "They're long on nerve and short on numbers, and once you get them pinned down they fold."
"Yeah, well, I wouldn't get too confident if I was you," the paramed put in. "I helped treat some of the guys that came in after the Rialto Street fiasco—"
"Watch your mouth," the first Security man growled.
"A fiasco's a fiasco," the paramed insisted. "And these same blackcollars did a complete medical runthrough on them."
"Yeah, but they could move then," someone said, and Mordecai sensed dimly that he'd been poked hard in the chest. "This one's not—"
"Hey, what's that?" the third Security man interrupted. An arm reached over Mordecai's face to his chest, reappeared with a small, flat disk. "Didn't you guys search him?"
" 'Course we did—got all his stuff right back there in that bag. How the hell did we miss something so—"
And with a crack! of released gas pressure, the belly-bomb disintegrated into a cloud of flying needles.
Exquisite pain jabbed into Mordecai's cheeks, and he tensed, dimly aware that for the first time since injecting himself with paralyte he could tense. A tingling sensation flooded his system, as, around him, the startled oaths and shouts of the others came to an abrupt halt. Muscles trembling slightly, he fumbled at the straps holding him down and managed to release the clasps. Taking a deep breath, he sat up and looked around him.
His four companions sat slumped in their seats, faces contorted in death into surprise or horror, depending, Mordecai supposed, on whether or not they'd realized in time what had been done to them. For his own part, he could sympathize most with the outrage clearly visible on the face of one of the Security men. Paralyte antidotes had been deliberately designed to be lethal so as to prevent potential targets from doping themselves up with antidote before being shot; it was unlikely the creators of that policy had ever realized how it could be used against them.
The trembling in his muscles was fading now, as was the stinging in his cheeks. Reaching to the lighting control board, he killed the lights in the compartment and looked out the windows, trying to get his bearings. They were over Athena now, clearly, and his inner ear told him they were starting to descend as well. Only a couple of minutes left. Pressing against the window, he searched quickly for the rooftop landing pads that would mark the hospital and—with luck—the Security building.
There... there... and there. Three of them. One was directly ahead, almost certainly the hospital, and he quickly scanned the other two buildings for clues as to which would be Security. The plainer tenstory one, he decided; the taller and fancier one would probably be the central government building.
A tempting target for one of his limpet mines, perhaps even for some more serious attention if they happened to wind up with a little extra time. Fixing the locations of both in his mind, he turned in the darkness to the dead Security man nearest his height and build and began to strip off his uniform.
The ambulance cushioned to a landing on the hospital roof, and almost before it was down the medic was out and running toward the rear. Mordecai had the doors open by the time he arrived and was industriously grappling with the back end of the stretcher. "Get the other end," he snapped to the medic. The other got a foot up into the compartment—
And folded over as Mordecai jabbed him in the belly.
The blackcollar gave him a surreptitious push to aid his momentum into the compartment, his attention on the four orderlies who'd abruptly burst from the observation corridor alongside the landing pad, shoving a gurney ahead of them as they hurried toward the ambulance. Easy to take out; but someone else might be watching the proceedings from elsewhere along that corridor, and he couldn't afford to trigger the alarm too soon. Fleetingly, he wished Lathe had opted to take this part of the plan himself—the comsquare was so much better at this kind of deception.
"Hurry up!" he called to the orderlies, tugging the stretcher half out of the ambulance. "We're going to need more help right away."
"What the hell?" one of them gasped, peering inside at the unmoving bodies. "We were told only one casualty—"
"You were told wrong," Mordecai snapped. "Come on—get moving."
Three of them raced back into the corridor for more gurneys. The other helped load the stretcher—and the blanket-swathed Security man Mordecai had loaded onto it—onto the gurney and headed inside with it. The medic was starting to recover from the stomach jab; with everyone else temporarily out of eyeshot, Mordecai took the opportunity to lean into the ambulance and knock him out more thoroughly. He'd just completed that task when the pilot finally finished his shutdown procedure and strode back to see what was going on.