He'd landed with his face turned uselessly toward the bar's outside wall, but he could hear the running feet coming toward him. The footsteps came to a halt, and he was pulled the rest of the way through the door and turned onto his back. A half dozen hard faces were looking down at him, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a couple pairs of hands unfastening his coat and throwing it open. Other hands attacked the civilian clothing beneath the coat, unfastening it as well and deftly maneuvering the shirt and slacks off his paralyzed limbs and tossing the clothing to someone outside his field of view. They took his nunchaku and slingshot from their respective sheaths, removed the knives from his forearm and calf sheaths and the shuriken from their thigh and belt pouches, and took his tingler from his wrist. Then, clad only in his flexarmor and the undersuit beneath it, he was lifted and hurried down the alley in the direction from which the ambushers had come. There was the muffled sound of a vehicle door opening, and he was shoved unceremoniously into the back of some kind of van.
Waiting for him there was Prefect Jamus Galway.
"Caine," Galway said gravely as the door closed again behind him and the vehicle lurched forward. The prefect's face was strangely somber as he gazed down at his trophy, with no hint of triumph or even satisfaction that Caine could see. "My apologies for all this. If it makes it any easier, let me assure you that we have no intention of killing or even hurting Lathe and the others. They're far too valuable to us as they are."
Too valuable. To us. With his face still paralyzed, Caine couldn't reply. It was, he reflected, probably just as well.
The first Security man staggered and collapsed, the impact of Lathe's nunchaku penetrating his helmet to stun the skull and brain underneath. The comsquare brushed against the second blinded man as he fell, who responded by spinning that direction and firing another blast of paral-darts. Lathe ducked beneath the shot and swung his nunchaku into the back of other's leg, toppling him on top of his friend.
Two more men were charging in behind them. One had already been blinded, and as Lathe swung his nunchaku around in a half circle and cocked it again beneath his arm Spadafora sent a fourth paint pellet past his head to splatter over the other's faceplate. Lathe made a crouching leap over the tangled bodies of the first two attackers and slashed his nunchaku across the third Security man's gun arm, sending his weapon spinning off across the nearby tables, then slammed a kick to his stomach that folded him up and dropped him to the floor.
The fourth Security man was firing off random rounds, clearly in hopes of hitting something, when Lathe's nunchaku slammed across his yellow-coated faceplate with a force that flipped him halfway over before he hit the floor.
Two more Security men were charging through the door, this pair already firing before they'd even made it inside. Lathe spun around to put his back to them, letting the salvos scatter off his flexarmor as he snatched out a pair of shuriken. His spin brought him back around to face them, and he hurled the stars hard into their kneepads.
Their guns wobbled off target as they fought for balance. Ducking beneath the weapons, Lathe took one of them down with his nunchaku and the other with a sweep and a heel-kick as he hit the floor.
He had just delivered a knockout blow with his nunchaku to the last man when his tingler came to life: outside clear. "Let's go," he called back to Spadafora. "Caine?"
There was no answer. "Caine!" Lathe called again, digging for his own tingler. Caine?
Outside, the reply came. Coming around to front.
Acknowledged, Lathe sent as he got to his feet and looked around. Aside from the downed Security men, everyone else in the bar seemed to have been untouched by the brief battle. "Sorry about the trouble," he said, nodding to the bartender and waiter.
There were two unmarked Security cars parked by the front of the building. Spadafora headed directly to the closest and pulled open the door, leaning halfway inside as he studied the interior. Mordecai was standing between the two cars, a shuriken ready in each hand, his head moving back and forth as he watched for trouble. Two more armored men lay sprawled unconscious at his feet. "Where's Caine?"
Lathe asked him.
"Here," the younger man called as he came jogging into sight around the side of the building. "Sorry—I thought we were going out the back."
"Change of plans," Lathe said. "Spadafora?"
"Looks clear," the other called, still leaning into the car. "Not picking up any tracers, and I don't see any booby traps."
"Good enough," Lathe said. "Everyone in."
He got into the front passenger seat, the other two blackcollars climbing into the back, as Caine slid in behind the wheel and started the car. "Where to?" he asked as he pulled out onto the road again.
"Guardrail Tavern," Lathe told him. "Now we can go meet Tactor Shaw."
Tactor Kieran Shaw, chief of the Khala blackcollars, wasn't at all what Judas had expected.
Lathe and Spadafora certainly weren't huge men, but they were at least a bit bigger than average, with a calm but almost tangible presence that made them seem even larger. Mordecai, the smallest member of the Plinry contingent, was noticeably shorter than the other two, but he had even more of a sense of coiled-spring danger about him than the others. Even Caine, paralyzed on his back in an alley, had nevertheless managed somehow to maintain a sense of dignity during the brief time Judas had seen him back there behind the bar.
Shaw, completely bald and shorter even than Mordecai, seemed neither dangerous, charismatic, nor dignified. Considering this was a man who'd achieved the second-highest rank in the blackcollar hierarchy, it was a severe disappointment. "You certainly took your time getting here," he said almost peevishly as they were escorted into a windowless room in the electronics manufacturing plant where the Khala blackcollars had apparently set up shop. "You get lost? Or couldn't you wait until you got here to find yourself a drink?"
"We stopped by a bar on the west side to try to get the lay of the land," Lathe said. His voice was civil enough, but Judas could see in his face that he wasn't overly impressed by the man, either. "Trolling for Resistance or criminal elements is part of the standard procedure."
"For the record," Spadafora put in helpfully, "we never actually drank anything."
"For the record," Shaw said, his voice going a little fussier, "stirring up Security is always a bad idea.
Especially when there's no reason for it. Considering the present situation, it was an extremely bad idea."
"Our presence here alone would have stirred them up," Lathe pointed out. "I doubt the incident at the bar changed things one way or the other."
"I'm glad you're so confident about that," Shaw said stiffly. "Which then leads us to point number two.
Namely, what the hell are you doing here in the first place?"
"You told General Lepkowski—"
"I told Lepkowski about the Khorstron Tactical Center so that he could pass on the information to the Chryselli," Shaw cut him off. "I never intended for him to blab about it all over the TDE. I especially never intended for him to invite a bunch of wild cards to drop in and get in the way."
"I apologize for the misunderstanding," Lathe said, his voice starting to take on a little acid of its own.
"The fact remains that we're here, and we're going to take the tac center. You can either help us or stay out of our way."
Shaw's eyes narrowed. It had probably been a long time, Judas guessed, since anyone had talked to him that way. "Who do you think you're talking to, Comsquare?" he demanded. "I'm the senior blackcollar officer here. More than that, this is my world. I decide what happens or doesn't happen on Khala."
"Our branch of the TDE military no longer exists in any formal sense," Lathe countered. "Our ranks—