Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar: The Blackcollar

Blazing down from a clear blue sky, the mid-morning sun seemed to be making only token effort to drive away the cold snap that had interrupted spring for most of central Europe. Tightening his collar against the northerly wind blowing off Lake Geneva, Allen Caine picked up his pace a bit. It would have been nice to ride at least part of the way, but only the uninformed waited for autocabs in eastern New Geneva on Victory Day. Most of the vehicles had been preempted early in the day to take government officials to the stadium for the annual rally celebrating the end of the Terran-Ryqril war. Caine had half expected the cold to keep participation to a minimumloyalty-conditioning didn't extend to anything as trivial as rallysbut there would be several Ryqril there and New Geneva's officials clearly knew which side of their bread should stay off the carpet. Already Caine had heard the muffled roars of two cheers, and he was a good three kilometers from the stadium. An amazingly unashamed display of hypocrisy, he thought bitterly; and at this, the twenty-ninth year of such pageantry, one of the longest lived. A visiting stranger would have concluded the Terran Democratic Empire had won the war.

The streets at this end of town were bustling with business as usualthe common people treated Victory Day with sullen indifferenceand Caine had no trouble blending into the throng. He'd only come to New Geneva two weeks agoa slightly late twenty-sixth birthday present, he considered the tripbut already he felt like a native. Like every other group of people on Earth, this one had its own characteristic gestures and mannerisms, the learning of which had been Caine's most recent task. Combined with his clean-cut appearance, such preparation would permit him to pass, if necessary, as a student, a rising young executive, orif he trimmed his beard in the proper fashiona member of one of the city's semi-professional guilds. Of course, it wasn't really a question of whether or not he could pass muster on this side of the city, but since he wouldn't be crossing to the government end for some weeks yet, he wasn't especially worried. Presumably he'd be prepared for that by then.

His clothes were a bit on the thin side, but Caine arrived at his destination before he was too badly chilled. Sandwiched between two bars in a lower-middle-class part of town was a small tape-and-book store with faded volumes of Dickens and Heinlein in the front window. Entering, Caine stood just inside the door a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the relative darkness. A few meters away, lounging by his cash register, the store's proprietor eyed him. "Getting any warmer out there?" he asked.

"Not really," Caine replied, glancing around the store. Three or four other men were browsing among the shelves. Looking back at the owner, he raised his eyebrows. The other gave a fractional nod and Caine moved off down one of the two aisles, pretending to study the titles as he did so. Taking his time, he worked his way to the back. There, half hidden behind a wide shelf, was a door with a faded "Employees Only" sign taped to it. Waiting until all the customers were facing away from him, Caine slipped silently through the door and into the cluttered stockroom beyond. He squatted down in the middle of the old tile floor and gave a gentle push on one of the tiles. Clearly, he was expected; the two-meter square of concrete floor pivoted open without resistance. He stepped into the pit, his feet finding the wooden stairs there. Crouching down, he let the concrete block rotate shut above him; and as he did so a metal bar slid silently across its underside, locking the trap door in place. Turning, Caine headed down the dimly lit stairway.

A short hallway awaited him at the bottom of the stairs; and at the end of the hall was a door. Opening it, Caine stepped through into a dark room. The door closed itself behind him.

And abruptly a blinding light flashed on. He threw an arm up to protect his eyes and took an involuntary step backward. "Who are you?" a voice demanded.

Caine's response was immediate. "I'm Alain Rienzi, aide to Senator Auriol," he snapped. "Get that damn light out of my face!"

The spotlight winked out and other, more muted lights came on. Through the purple blob floating before his eyes Caine could dimly see three men and a woman seated around a low table. "Excellent," one of the men said, fiddling with a shoebox-sized gadget. "No hesitation, no recognizable 'liar's stress,' and just the right amount of arrogance. He's ready, Morris."

Another man nodded and gestured to Caine. "Sit down, Allen," he said in a gravelly voice.

Caine took the indicated chair and looked around at the others, and as his eyes recovered, his heart began to beat faster. This was no routine meeting; the four people facing him were probably the top Resistance leaders in all of Europe. The man with the box was Bruno Hurlimann, a former captain in the Terran Star Force; the second man was Raul Marinos, who'd been planning and executing sabotage operations against the government and even the Ryqril's own military bases for most of the past twenty-nine years; the woman was Jayne Gibbs, a former member of the long-since dissolved Parliament; and "Morris" was General Morris Kratochvil himself, the last commander of Earth's final defense efforts. None of them looked their proper ages, of course; despite government controls, enough bootlegged Idunine was getting to the Resistance via the black market to keep even the ninety-two-year-old Kratochvil at the biological equivalent of forty. Caine had met all four of them at one time or another, but he'd never seen them together in one place. Something important must be happening.

General Kratochvil might have been reading Caine's mind. "I'm afraid your orientation has come to an abrupt end, Allen," he said. "We're moving things up drastically. All the cards have unexpectedly fallen into place, and you're going to be leaving for Plinry in just under twenty hours."

Caine's mouth felt a little dry. "I thought I was going to have to replace Alain Rienzi first for a few weeks."

"So did we," the general said, "but it turns out that's not going to be necessary. Rienzi left yesterday on a private vacation and doesn't seem to have told anyone where he was going. It was the perfect opportunity, and we decided to take it."

So much for the rest of his training... but if he wasn't going to be spending much time with government people he could probably get by without it. "You've got Rienzi tucked away?"

Marinos nodded. "Picked him up this morning. No problems." He gestured to an envelope on the table. "There's his IDsuitably altered, of courseand the rest of your stuff."

Caine picked up the package, careful not to bump the mushroom-shaped "bug stomper" which sat in the table's center, electronically blanking out any nearby monitoring devices. Opening the envelope, he withdrew a blue ID, a wallet containing both government and personal credit plates and several hundred marks in crisp TDE banknotes, and an unconfirmed ticket for the distant world of Plinry. "The ticket is basically just a reservation," Marinos explained. "You'll need to have your ID checked at the 'port before you can board."

The face on the ID was long and a bit thin, framed by a carefully coiffured mass of brown haira clean-shaven replica of Caine's own. But there were also a set of thumbprints and retinal patterns sealed under the supposedly tamper-proof plasticand those patterns were duplicated in a heavily guarded computer system not ten kilometers away. "You're sure my prints and patterns have made it into the government's records?" he asked Marinos.

"It's all been taken care of," the other said, his offhand tone belying the difficulty of what must have been one hell of a job. Broaching Ryqril security was no joke.