Spinning a hundred and eighty degrees, Mordecai bent at the waist and snapped his right foot out in a back kick toward the other's head. The pistol went off with the crack of compressed air, the needles washing over Mordecai's back and legs. He spun back around, hand poised to grab the gun if necessary, but between the kick and the ricochets from Mordecai's flexarmor, the officer was down for the duration.
And down the hall, the alarms began blaring.
"Damn," Mordecai muttered as he leaped over the desk. From the elevator end of the hall there was a shout, and he glanced over to see the duty officer collapse over his desk, a shuriken protruding from his temple. Ignoring the sounds starting to come from the other end of the hall, Mordecai snatched his battle-hood and gloves from his tunic and got them on, studying the controls for the armory door as he did so. It looked like the same system as they'd found downstairs at the elevator, with a proper ID check all that was required for access.
At least until someone downstairs sealed the door by remote control.
A splatter of needles bounced off his goggles and battle-hood, and he looked up to see four Security men racing like kamikazes directly toward him. "Cameras!" he snapped.
"Already taken out," Pittman shouted from behind him.
"Good," Mordecai called back. "Get over here when it's clear." A new wave of needles washed over him, and with a convulsive leap, the blackcollar cleared the desk and landed in front of his attackers, nunchaku lashing out.
Three more seconds and the men were scattered broken around him. Someone down the hall stepped imprudently into view and started shooting. Mordecai sent him crashing to the floor with a spinning shuriken as Pittman slid to cover at the desk behind him. "I've got the elevator locked up here," the youth reported, breathing a bit heavily. "I got both cameras I could see pointed this direction."
"Good." Mordecai jerked his head toward the armory door. "Same trick as downstairs—get busy. I'll try to keep the collies away from you while I spring the others."
"Right. Good luck."
"You too." Nunchaku and shuriken at the ready, Mordecai sprinted down the hallway.
Chapter 27
Hatred, Lathe and the others had continually warned their trainees, was a subtle poison that did the hater more harm than it did his victim. Caine knew that, agreed with the philosophy behind it... and yet, when it came down to the wire, he found all the logic in the universe didn't do him a damn bit of good.
He hated General Quinn. Hated the man with a passion. And more than that, felt good about hating him.
It wasn't just the fact that the general had beaten them—wasn't even the fact that he'd beaten them so decisively. Instead, it was the increasingly apparent fact that the bastard was determined to gloat over his victory.
Somehow, Caine had always expected to be treated with some measure of respect when he finally lost to the enemy. Quinn, obviously, was determined not to give him even that much.
Was in fact even going out of his way to twist the knife. Seated across the conference room from Caine and three of the blackcollars, an uncomfortable-looking Galway beside him, he turned his monologue once again to the subject he'd already talked to death: Pittman and his treachery.
"He wasn't just recently suborned, you know," the general said, crossing his legs casually as he sent his gaze around at the four prisoners facing him. "He's been your double agent for, what, six months now, Galway?"
Galway shrugged. "Something like that," he said. Unlike Quinn, the prefect didn't seem to be getting any special pleasure out of this.
"He's been very useful, too," Quinn said, "and not only regarding this mission. We'll be able to take that snake school of yours apart as soon as we debrief him fully and get a squad of commandos out to Plinry."
Caine bit down hard on his tongue, knowing full well that that was the kind of reaction Quinn was looking for but not giving a damn. The cameras in the room would be recording all their expressions and body language for later analysis, and he knew he should be sitting as passively as Lathe, Skyler, and Jensen beside him. But he couldn't. He'd trained with Pittman, had worked side by side with him, had risked his life with him... and the realization that he'd been so wrong about the other's character was more than he could bear.
"Of course," Quinn went on offhandedly, "the Ryqril might consider leaving your people alone for a while if we knew what your mission here was—keep their paperwork and records clean, you know.
It had to do with Aegis Mountain, didn't it?"
"Why don't you go to hell?" Lathe suggested conversationally. "You're just wasting our time here, Quinn, and you know it. We're not giving anything away free, and your chances of getting it without our cooperation range from slim to zero."
Quinn snorted. "And you're of course sticking to your ridiculous offer of information for the release of your teammates? Don't make me laugh, Lathe."
The comsquare shrugged. "Suit yourself. So, Galway: enjoying your visit to the homeworld?"
The prefect remained silent, and Caine shifted his eyes from the two seated officials to the knot of three Security guards lounging four meters away by the room's door. Standing there with no special alertness—no lasers or other heavy weaponry, their paral-dart pistols still in their holsters—it was a breakout begging to happen. And Caine could almost cry with frustration... because as vulnerable as the guards looked, they might as well have been in an armored bunker a klick away. Seated naked on bolted-down chairs, hands cuffed behind their backs and ankles hobbled by twenty centimeters of chain, he and the blackcollars were about as helpless as Caine could imagine being. About the only other thing Quinn could have done would have been to chain them bodily to their chairs, and it was slowly becoming apparent that the general's failure to do that was, along with the sloppy guard arrangement, a deliberate touch designed to tantalize his prisoners.
Caine didn't know about the others, but for him the gambit certainly worked. And it made him hate the bastard even more.
Lost in his own thoughts, he was startled when Galway abruptly got to his feet. "If you'll excuse me, General," the prefect said, "I'd like to get back to the situation room, see if there's any word on Mordecai."
"Sit down, Galway," Quinn said coldly. "You've spent a lot of your time here foam-mouthing about how these blackcollars of yours were unstoppable and unbreakable. Well, you were wrong about the first, and you're damn well going to watch while I prove you wrong about the second, too."
Skyler stirred, his ankle hobbles clinking as he did so. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you, Quinn?" he said dryly. "You know, I'll bet that if I walked over there and started beating your head in, half your subordinates would line up outside that door to buy tickets to the show."
Quinn glowered at him. "Perhaps we ought to experiment—but with you as the subject. What do you think of th—"
The last word was cut off by the abrupt blaring of alarm horns outside in the hallway. "What the hell?" Quinn snarled, turning to look at the door. "Sergeant, find out what's going on out there."
"Yes, sir." One of the guards reached for the door— It happened so quickly that if Caine's eyes hadn't already turned back to the blackcollars he would have missed it completely. Without warning, Skyler suddenly dropped out of his chair onto his back, knees tucked tightly against his chest.
Almost before he'd even hit the floor, Jensen was also in motion, throwing himself full-length onto the big blackcollar as if attacking him. He landed with his belly on Skyler's feet—
And with a convulsive shove, Skyler kicked the other over his head to crash into the knot of guards.
The Security men didn't have a chance. Bound hand and foot and without any balance to speak of, Jensen still tore into them like a tiger into sheep. His head, knees, and feet became blurs as he knocked the guards to the floor, jabbing them to death with short but vicious blows even as they struggled impotently to escape.