"Welcome back," a voice behind them said suddenly. Instantly, Caine spun around, arms snapping into a karate defense stance as he tried to pierce the gloom.
The voice chuckled. "Nice reflexes," it said, and a big, black-clad figure slid noiselessly from a darker alcove into the dim light. Pushing back his non-reflective goggles with one gloved hand, Skyler grinned at Caine and shifted his attention to Mordecai.
"Good." Mordecai nodded toward the double door. "Let's go, Caine."
They walked through into a large, well-lit room... and Caine stopped short in astonishment. The room was full of blackcollars! Blinking as his pupils adjusted to the light, Caine gave the room a fast scan. No mistake—there were at least a hundred men, maybe more, all dressed in tight-fitting black outfits like Skyler's. Most were checking their equipment or carrying boxes to the far end of the room, where two large monorail cars waited; others were in the final stages of dressing. Caine was still staring when someone stepped to his side. "Sorry we had to pull that stunt with your medicine to get you back here on the sly. But the collies have ears everywhere."
Caine turned to face him, noting in passing that Mordecai had vanished. He almost didn't recognize the newcomer, even though he wasn't yet wearing headgear and goggles. "Lathe?" he asked in disbelief.
Lathe smiled wryly. "So I'm told."
Caine could hardly believe the change in the man. His beard had been trimmed down to a neat fringe; it and his hair had been dyed back to their original dark brown. Even more striking, though, was the new determination in his face. For the first time Caine could see past the lined skin to the blackcollar spirit underneath. An involuntary shiver went down his back. "You've changed since this afternoon," he managed. "About fifteen years' worth."
Lathe smiled again, his eyes not leaving Caine's face. "Most of those years were superficial. Idunine in small doses does wonders for muscle and bone."
"So you did get Idunine. I hoped you had, but I had doubts..."
"My senility?"
Caine nodded. "It was a good act." He looked around the room. "All of it was. I can't believe you managed to fool everyone for so long."
"Thirty years." Lathe glanced around, then turned back, all business again. "Come over here and get suited. We've got a flexarmor outfit that should fit you."
He led the way toward a bank of lockers. "Where are we?" Caine asked as they passed a humming bug stomper, one of five or six he could see spaced around the room.
"The old tube station under Hamner Lodge," Lathe told him. "Been unused since the end of the war. We started uncaching our equipment and moving it here about five years ago, after the collies got tired of dogging our every move. The track between here and Capstone is still good, and we've put our own power supplies into those two monorail cars. Here we are."
They had stopped before an open locker, and on Lathe's order Caine began to strip. "I hope that stuffs all it's cracked up to be," he commented, eyeing Lathe's own flexarmor dubiously.
"It is," Lathe assured him as Caine put on a soft one-piece suit of underwear. "It'll stop most non-explosive handgun projectiles, including some that'll throw you a meter backward from the impact alone. It goes rigid under that kind of punch, by the way, spreading the impact around. A clean hit with an antiarmor laser will get through, but the usual antipersonnel settings will just take off the top layer."
"So the second shot gets through?"
"The average gunner only gets one," Lathe said calmly.
Caine swallowed. "Oh."
"Understand, though, that this isn't medieval plate armor," the other continued. "For hand-to-hand combat you're on your own. Punches and kicks are too slow to make it go rigid."
Great. "Thanks for the warning."
Lathe apparently heard something in his tone. "You should consider yourself lucky we even had an outfit you could wear," he said, a bit tartly. "A lot of the boys going into combat tonight won't have anything but plain black cloth and maybe a flexarmor vest."
"How come?"
"Because most of the kids are just that: kids. We recruited them during martial arts classes a few years back—right under Galway's nose, as a matter of fact. They've been training with us ever since."
There was something in the old blackcollar's voice that made Caine pause in the act of fastening on a short-sleeved bodysuit. "It was pretty rough, wasn't it?" he asked. "All the ridicule and disrespect... I don't think I could've taken it."
"A lot of us couldn't," Lathe muttered. "That's what kept the guerrilla war going so long. They wouldn't give up the fighting."
"Whereas you knew when to quit?"
For a second Caine thought he'd overstepped a fine line. But the anger only flickered across Lathe's face without staying there. "We didn't give in, we just changed tactics. Those of us who could." He made a sound that was half sigh, half snort. "Let me tell you a story.
"About seven hundred years ago, back in Old Japan on Earth, there was a lord named Kira who tricked an enemy into shaming himself. The enemy, Asano, committed suicide, the customary response for shame in that culture. Asano's forty-seven samurai warriors were supposed to follow suit, but instead they disbanded and dropped out of polite society. They lost their wives, families, and friends, and were treated with contempt by everyone. Naturally, Kira decided they were harmless.
"And then, one winter morning, all forty-seven suddenly appeared at Kira's palace. They overpowered the guards, captured Kira and killed him. Only then did they fulfill their duty and commit suicide themselves."
He fell silent. Caine, not knowing what to say, concentrated on his dressing. Aside from its exotic material, the suit was standard commando design, with built-in knife sheaths on forearms and calves and square pouches on the front of each thigh and behind the belt buckle. All were empty, a fact he found a bit curious. "How does it feel?" Lathe asked.
Caine took a few steps and tried a series of karate punches and kicks. The flexarmor was remarkably supple. "Feels fine," he reported.
"Good. Grab the gloves, battle-hood, goggles, and also the coat and pants you wore here, and we'll get going."
"What about weapons?"
"You don't get any," Lathe told him, cutting off his protests with a raised hand. "I know, I know, you're combat trained to the hilt and can use any weapon this side of Chaparral. But to us, you're a dangerous amateur who'd do more damage to himself with our kind of weaponry than to the enemy."
Caine felt a flash of anger. "Look, Lathe—"
"No, you look." Lathe jumped back and from a long sheath on his hip withdrew two thirty-centimeter-long wooden sticks connected at one end by a few centimeters of black plastic chain. Gripping one stick, Lathe proceeded to whirl the other around his head and body in a bewildering pattern, occasionally snapping the sticks so that one whipped out and back in a barely visible blur. Caine swallowed—he'd never before seen a nunchaku handled with such lethal skill. "Okay, I'm convinced—for close-range work. But for long-range you'll need guns, and I hold a marksman rating."
Lathe brought the sticks together and slid them back into their sheath. "Jensen!" he called across the room. "Give me a target!"
A blond-haired man nodded and broke a piece of plastic board off the crate he'd just opened. Glancing around, he tossed it toward a relatively empty section of floor.
His attention on the board, Caine saw only a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye—but there was no missing the sharp thwok as the board jumped in midair like a scorched bat. Jensen retrieved the board and spun it in a lazy arc back to Lathe. "We seldom use guns," the comsquare said quietly, extracting the deadly looking black throwing star from the plastic and slipping it back into one of his thigh pouches. "They're too easy to track."