"Once more into the breech, as the poet said," Lathe commented, his eyes on Caine as he moved into position behind Spadafora. "You all right?"
"Of course," Caine said, his pounding heart belying the confident words. He'd done drop-pod insertions twice now, both of them more or less successfully. He might have even enjoyed doing it a third time.
Leave it to Lathe to suddenly change the rules on him.
"Get ready," Lathe said. The light turned red— "Go."
Mordecai slapped the release, and the shuttle bay was suddenly filled with a swirling windstorm as the drop door swung down into its usual ramp configuration. Caine grabbed his safety line, struggling for balance as his legs were nearly swept out from under him. The deck shuddered; and suddenly, out the open back, he saw the drop pods that had been fastened to the shuttle's outer hull go tumbling into the night behind them. "Drop pods away," Mordecai announced, peering out into the darkness. "Attitude and trajectory look good."
Lathe nodded. "Four minutes."
"Four minutes," Spadafora repeated, kneeling down beside the winch and unreeling a few meters of slender cable fastened to a large and very wicked-looking barb-nosed harpoon. Unfastening the harpoon from its harness, he carried it to a launcher attached to the floor just in front of the drop door and loaded it in.
Caine gazed out at the churning slipstream, counting down the seconds to himself as he visualized the drop pods' path. They would be popping their chutes about now, he knew, slowing their descent toward the ground below. Another minute, and their onboard timers would trigger their controlled destruction, blowing open the floors and breaking their walls into sections, each of which would sprout wings and turn itself into a self-leveling hang glider.
It would look exactly like the last two times he and the blackcollars had clandestinely landed on Ryqrilcontrolled worlds. Just like Skyler and his team should be doing on Earth at this very moment, in fact.
Only here on Khala there wouldn't be any infiltrators riding those hang gliders, just eight sensor-realistic dummies strapped beneath the wide, gray-black wings. Eight make-believe blackcollars, apparently intent on sneaking into Khala right under Security's collective nose.
And with luck, that would be where Security's collective nose would be pointing for the next half hour or so.
"Thirty seconds," Lathe called from beside the launcher.
Spadafora moved back into position on his side of the winch and got his secondary line in hand. Caine did the same, checking one last time to make sure his main safety cable wasn't near anything it could get caught or tangled on. Resettling his harness comfortably across his shoulders and thighs, he made sure his goggles and gas filter were securely in place. It was going to be like a hurricane when they hit the air out there.
"Here we go," Lathe said, flipping up a protective panel on the launcher and resting his gloved hand on the glowing red button beneath it. "Harpoon in five ... three, two, one."
He pressed the button; and with a burst of compressed air the harpoon blasted out the open hatch. It disappeared downward into the night, the slender attached cable from the winch reeling out madly behind it.
Caine felt his hand curl into a fist. Theoretically, Lathe had picked a landing area that would be clear of people or livestock or homes or anything else that would be instantly killed or destroyed by the harpoon's impact. But mistakes sometimes happened....
He had half expected the harpoon's impact to be transmitted along the cable into something he might feel. But he was still waiting when Lathe turned his head toward them. "It's down," he called. "Go."
And in a single smooth motion, Spadafora unhooked the safety line that fastened him to the shuttle wall, snapped the large carabiner ring of his secondary line around the unreeling cable, and leaped out into the night.
Lathe was right behind him, then Mordecai; and then it was Caine's turn. Setting his teeth firmly together, working the two cables as he'd practiced on the trip, he popped his first line from the wall, attached his second to the cable, and jumped.
For the first few dizzying seconds he actually slid upward with the momentum he'd been given by the shuttle's own forward motion. Then friction and air resistance and gravity dragged him to a halt, and a moment later he was sliding downward with increasing speed.
He gripped his line with one hand and waved the other against the air in an effort to keep himself facing the direction he was moving. The broken clouds overhead were blocking most of the starlight, but there was enough getting through to show the ground rushing up toward him.
He couldn't see the three blackcollars anywhere below him. Was that simply because of the lightabsorbing coats they were all wearing? Or had their connection lines somehow failed, dropping them off the cable to their deaths? And if theirs had failed, wouldn't his likely do so as well? He took a deep breath, trying to stay calm.
And exhaled that breath in a huff as the ring above him suddenly seemed to catch, sending his feet swinging upward and his harness digging into his thighs as the deceleration dragged at him like a fighterturn G-force. He caught a glimpse of figures on the ground beneath him, the urgently flashing purple marker lights at the rear of the harpoon—
And then, with welcome anticlimax, he slid to an almost gentle stop with his feet safely on the ground.
Lathe was already at his side. "Everyone clear," the comsquare ordered, grabbing Caine's upper arm in a steadying grip with one hand as he slashed a knife through the connecting line with the other. Spadafora, Caine saw, was standing beside the harpoon, his hand poised over an opened control cover. Half guiding, half dragging Caine a few steps away, Lathe gestured to Spadafora.
The other pressed the control; and with a sizzle of high-voltage current, the cable still unreeling from the distant shuttle evaporated in a puff of acerbic smoke.
"I guess you were right," Spadafora said. "It isn't any harder going down."
"What about the harpoon?" Caine asked, eyeing it dubiously. It had buried a good two-thirds of its length into the ground and didn't look like it was going to be coming out any time soon.
"We leave it," Lathe said, pulling off his goggles and battle-hood and stowing them in his coat pockets.
"Besides, they'll figure it out anyway as soon as the hang gliders are down." He pointed south. "If we're on target, there should be a town about a klick down the hill."
"How big a town?" Caine asked.
"Big enough to have some cars lying around waiting to be borrowed," Lathe assured him.
"Plus a few public phones," Spadafora added.
"Right," Lathe agreed. "We'll want to contact Shaw as soon as possible, make sure he's ready to receive.
I'll do that while you three find a car." He looked at his watch. "If we hurry, we should be in Inkosi City in a couple of hours."
"There they go," Khala Security Prefect Daov Haberdae said, nodding at the long-range telescope display. "Right on schedule."
"Yes," Galway murmured, frowning at the indistinct hang gliders as they sorted themselves out from the scattering wreckage of the shattered drop pods.
"Dae yae ha' ratchers on the gro'nd?" Taakh asked.
"We have watchers all over the area, Your Eminence," Haberdae assured him. "Whenever and wherever they come down, we'll have them covered."
"Excellent," Taakh said.
"I just hope Prefect Galway's right about them being of some use," Haberdae added under his breath.
"I've got a lot of men and resources tied up in this."
With a supreme effort, Galway ignored him. Haberdae didn't like Galway's plan. He hadn't liked it right from the very beginning, and hadn't been at all shy about saying so. The fact that Taakh's support of the operation meant that neither Haberdae nor anyone else on Khala got a vote in the matter only made it worse.