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"Good. Braune, go with him and get a box or two."
They left. Caine waited until the sounds of their footsteps had faded down the hall, then stepped to the i
Five seconds later all four were sprawled in their seats, fully conscious but unable to move. Stepping to the consoles, Caine gave them a quick scan and settled down to work. By the time Braune and Dupre came looking for him he had found a complete map of the water retrieval system and was halfway through printing a copy. "Any trouble?" he asked Braune, eying the long, flat box cradled under the other's arm.
Braune shook his head. "But we'd better get moving," he said, glancing at the sprawled figures.
"There are at least another five to ten people wandering around the building."
"Right. Almost ready." Caine looked at Dupre, who was staring at his paralyzed colleagues with a mixture of horror and fascination. "Dupre, I'm afraid you're going to have to join them," he told the man, drawing the paral-dart gun from his pocket once more. "Lie down and get comfortable."
Dupre's jaw tightened visibly, but he obeyed without argument. Caine sent a cluster of paral-dart needles into the man's shoulder and then, after a moment's hesitation, returned the gun to his pocket.
The gun's unfired shots would tell them later which of the plethora of paralyzing drugs was being used locally, a bit of knowledge that would be crucial if they ever needed to counteract its effects themselves. Virtually all antidotes to paralyte drugs were highly toxic unless the corresponding drug was already in the bloodstream.
A minute later the last of Caine's requested maps was finished, and he and Braune began their withdrawal. Luck was with them; they saw no one as they made their way down the corridors, out to their car, and across the lot to the fence. The guard's eyes held impotent rage as Caine opened the gate and rejoined Braune. Leaving the gate open, they drove off into the night.
—
The same woman as on the previous night was sitting in the coatcheck window when Lathe and Skyler came into the Shandygaff bar, her makeup still far too heavy for Lathe's taste. "Good evening," he nodded to her, gesturing toward the main room. "Mr. Charm in tonight?"
"Who?" she frowned.
"The short lad with the itchy palms and the mobile guardhouses," Skyler amplified.
"Oh—Mr. Nash. The guardhouses' names are Briller and Chong, if you're interested." She cocked her head. "What did you do to Chong last night, by the way?"
"Who, us?" Lathe asked i
She studied him for a moment, then shrugged slightly. "It doesn't matter, I guess. All three are here tonight, if you really care, wandering around inside somewhere. And, uh, Mr. Kanai is also here.
Shall I have a waiter take you to him?"
"We'll find him," Lathe assured her. On his wrist, his tingler came to life as Skyler covertly tapped out a message: Kanai: Lathe and Skyler are here.
Kanai; Bernhard's with me. Come back; booth four, seventy-five degrees from entrypoint.
"Talk to you later," Lathe said to the girl. Skyler was already through the door; lengthening his stride, the comsquare caught up. Angling to the right, they headed through the tables until they spotted Kanai.
"Good evening," Kanai said as they slid into the booth. "May I present Commando Jorgen Bernhard.
Comsquare Damon Lathe; Commando Rafe Skyler."
Bernhard nodded in turn, his eyes cool. "From...?"
"Most recently, Plinry," Lathe told him.
The other's eyebrows rose at that, but if he was overly impressed he hid it well. "I see. A long way from home, then. All the more reason why you need our help."
" 'Need' may be too strong a word," Lathe said. "But we certainly could use it."
"You're pretty confident for a couple of strangers who don't even know how this city operates,"
Bernhard returned. "You need our help, all right. The only real question is whether or not you're worth risking our position over."
"Kanai said the same thing," Lathe said. "If you're trying to inflate your fee, consider the point made."
A tight smile flicked across Bernhard's face. "If you're expecting me to take offense, you're wasting your time. I've been insulted by people far more skilled at it than you." He folded his hands into a double fist on the table in front of him, his dragonhead ring glinting as he did so. "Let's get down to business. You want a list of high-ranking military people who were here during the war, correct?"
Lathe nodded. "More specifically, I'm interested in those people who were with the Aegis Mountain contingent."
Bernhard's face didn't change, but for just a second his clenched hands seemed to tighten. "Why Aegis?" he asked carefully.
"Why not? It was the major installation in this part of the continent, so it's reasonable to assume the top of the cut would have been assigned there."
Bernhard snorted. "Don't. We had as many dimbos at all levels as any other base I've seen."
"Ah—so you were in Aegis, too," Lathe said. "Good. You'll know who the best people were, then."
Bernhard's face hardened. "Sure. They're the ones who stayed behind to run the krijing machines when the gas attack began and the rest of us ran like geldings."
"Gas attack?" Skyler frowned. "Aegis was supposed to be proof against that sort of thing."
"It was," Bernhard said quietly, eyes focused somewhere else. "We think a neutron warhead must have cracked a fault line and taken out the gas sensor and filtration system in one of the ventilation tu
"Someone should have noticed the ventilation sensors weren't registering—" Skyler began.
"I know that!" Bernhard snapped. "We were busy fighting an invasion at the time."
He stopped abruptly, and for a moment the only sound in the booth was the muffled background hum from the rest of the room. "Sorry," he muttered at last. "It still hurts, sometimes."
Lathe nodded. "We've all got memories like that. So... you ran interference for the evacuation?"
"Such as it was." Bernhard shook his head. "I don't know what the idiot in charge thought he was doing—if the gas was seeping into the base, he should've realized the air outside would be rancid with the stuff. Even with the masks enough got into most people's skin to affect them. I don't think more than fifty out of the eight hundred we got out lived more than six months afterward."
Skyler grunted. "Sounds like Denver itself was damn lucky."
"It was a pretty heavy gas," Kanai said. "Stayed in the valleys around Aegis for the most part. But you're right—the Ryqril could easily have destroyed the city if they'd wanted to."
Lathe shifted his eyes to the oriental. "Were you in the base, too?"
Kanai shook his head. "I was on bodyguard duty in Athena. They were using us a lot for guard and civilian-control work at the end."
"Really?" Skyler asked, cocking an eyebrow. "Seems a waste of talent."
"What else were they going to do with us?" Bernhard returned sourly. "The war was lost, pure and simple. Why save us for guerrilla activity that would never take place when they had the immediate problem of crowd control?" He snorted and swore under his breath.
Lathe felt his own jaw tighten in sympathetic response. The Plinry blackcollars had taken their own share of contempt after the war from a populace who understood neither their abilities nor their limitations. But the military people of Aegis and Denver ought to have had more sense. "I know how you feel," he said to Bernhard. "You just have to keep remembering that it's that selfsame underestimation that's let us survive this long in enemy territory."