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Qui
But too late. Mordecai's right hand was a blur as it swung upward at his face beneath the goggles.
Caine caught a faint flicker of light on metal... and even as the Security men belatedly surged forward Mordecai collapsed in a heap on the ground.
"Medic team!" Qui
Caine tensed, watching Lathe out of the corner of his eye for the signal that would mean taking action. But no signal had come by the time the massive shackles had been fastened around his forearms. Lathe, in fact, seemed almost in shock by what Mordecai had done... and slowly Caine came to the dark realization that this wasn't a ruse after all.
"Well?" Qui
"Paralyte shock," the other said, drawing out a hypo and tugging at the mag-lock shackles enclosing Mordecai's arms. "Get these off him, someone—I have to give him a shot."
"No chance he's faking?" Galway put in as one of the Security men moved to obey.
"None at all. Yes, all the way off. Thanks." Pulling off the blackcollar's right glove, the medic jabbed his wrist with the hypo. "We've got to get him to the hospital immediately, General—I've got him stabilized, but that won't last long. He's taken an overdose of a paralyte drug, like getting shot repeatedly by a paral-dart pistol."
"So counteract it," Qui
"But there's no way to tell out here which specific drug he's taken," the medic interrupted him. "All the antidotes are poison unless the corresponding paralyte is already in the system. Injecting the wrong antidote would kill him almost instantly."
Qui
"Just a minute," Pittman said hesitantly, stepping over toward the group around Mordecai. The Security men let him pass—
And it was only then that Caine realized with a shock that the other's arms hadn't been shackled.
"Pittman?" he asked. "What—?"
"I'm sorry, Caine," Pittman said, his voice low, his eyes avoiding contact. "Galway, Mordecai's carrying a cassette you'll want to have."
"Pittman!" Colvin gasped. "You lousy, stinking traitor. Why in the name of hell—?"
"Because I had no choice!" Pittman snapped tautly over his shoulder as he knelt down beside Mordecai's still form. "None at all. If you damn me, damn the Ryqril, too—they're the ones who did this to me." His hand reached under the civilian shirt hiding Mordecai's flexarmor, emerged with a small cassette.
"Yeah, I'll damn the Ryqril, all right," Colvin snarled, taking a step forward before the Security men at his side stopped him. "But whatever money they offered you that you couldn't resist—"
"Shut up!" Pittman yelled, jumping to his feet and spi
Galway stepped in front of him, deftly plucking the cassette away. "Settle down, Pittman," he said, and even through his own haze of agonized disbelief Caine could hear something like regret in the prefect's voice. "It's over now. It's all over."
"Only for now," Lathe said softly. His voice was almost calm... but there was death in his eyes.
"Only for now. But there'll be another reckoning, Pittman. I swear it."
Overhead, a shadow caught Caine's eye: the flying ambulance had arrived. It settled to the pavement next to Mordecai as the paramed inside flung open the rear doors and rolled a stretcher out to the waiting Security men. "You three—get in there with him," Qui
"But then there won't be room for me," the medic protested.
"You've already said there's nothing you can do for him out here, haven't you?" the general retorted.
"So ride in front. You'll be there in five minutes anyway."
The medic grimaced, but apparently knew better than to argue. He got in beside the pilot as the Security men and paramed squeezed in with Mordecai and closed the rear doors. The ambulance lifted into the night sky, and Qui
"Don't worry," Lathe told him, still in that same soft voice. "None of us is going to die until we've taken care of you."
"I'm sure," Qui
Numbly, Caine let himself be led over to the barricade. Pittman a traitor, Mordecai near death... and Lathe captured. What would come next he didn't know, but it almost didn't even matter.
For Caine, the universe had already been shattered beyond repair.
Chapter 25
It was a curious sensation, Mordecai thought, to be helpless.
Curious, and thoroughly unpleasant. Every small motion of the ambulance made him feel in danger of sliding off the stretcher, even though he knew they'd strapped him securely in place. Overhead, the dome light had been dimmed, for which he was thankful: with his eyes paralyzed open the glare could have quickly become painful. It would have been nice to be able to see the city below, but his head was pointed straight up and all his peripheral vision could pick up was reflections of the ambulance's own interior from the side windows.
About all he could do was listen. And he did.
"Easy as breezy, wasn't it?" one of the Security guards remarked from beside him. "I guess blackcollars aren't so tough to handle when you know they're coming."
"All guerrilla forces are like that," another responded. "They're long on nerve and short on numbers, and once you get them pi
"Yeah, well, I wouldn't get too confident if I was you," the paramed put in. "I helped treat some of the guys that came in after the Rialto Street fiasco—"
"Watch your mouth," the first Security man growled.
"A fiasco's a fiasco," the paramed insisted. "And these same blackcollars did a complete medical runthrough on them."
"Yeah, but they could move then," someone said, and Mordecai sensed dimly that he'd been poked hard in the chest. "This one's not—"
"Hey, what's that?" the third Security man interrupted. An arm reached over Mordecai's face to his chest, reappeared with a small, flat disk. "Didn't you guys search him?"
" 'Course we did—got all his stuff right back there in that bag. How the hell did we miss something so—"
And with a crack! of released gas pressure, the belly-bomb disintegrated into a cloud of flying needles.
Exquisite pain jabbed into Mordecai's cheeks, and he tensed, dimly aware that for the first time since injecting himself with paralyte he could tense. A tingling sensation flooded his system, as, around him, the startled oaths and shouts of the others came to an abrupt halt. Muscles trembling slightly, he fumbled at the straps holding him down and managed to release the clasps. Taking a deep breath, he sat up and looked around him.
His four companions sat slumped in their seats, faces contorted in death into surprise or horror, depending, Mordecai supposed, on whether or not they'd realized in time what had been done to them. For his own part, he could sympathize most with the outrage clearly visible on the face of one of the Security men. Paralyte antidotes had been deliberately designed to be lethal so as to prevent potential targets from doping themselves up with antidote before being shot; it was unlikely the creators of that policy had ever realized how it could be used against them.