Blackcollar: The Blackcollar

"All right," he said slowly. "But I must have your word of secrecy. My life's on the line here."

Someone off to the side snorted. "Ours aren't?"

"I only meant—"

"We're well aware of the danger," Dhonau said. "There's a bug stomper going behind you."

Caine turned his head. Sure enough, off in the corner sat the squat mushroom shape he'd seen so often at furtive Resistance meetings on Earth. Turning back to face Dhonau, he steeled himself. "All right. My name is Allen Caine. I'm a member of Earth's Resistance and I need your help."

No excited murmur ran through the group, only here and there was there so much as a thoughtful nod. Dhonau's face remained impassive. "Can you prove it?"

"I don't know. I was hoping to find General Avril Lepkowski here—one of our leaders, General Morris Kratochvil, was going to give me a letter of introduction for him. I don't suppose Galway lied about his being dead?"

Dhonau shook his head. "Sorry Lepkowski fried with his senior staff under New Karachi during the Groundfire attack. Do you have that letter with you?"

"Unfortunately, things went sour." Caine described the raid on the Resistance hideaway and his own escape to Plinry. "Without the proper papers I can't get into the Plinry archives. I was hoping the underground here could help me."

"Uh-huh." Dhonau looked thoughtful. "I notice you've carefully avoided mentioning why you want in the archives. What's in there that's so important?"

Caine took a deep breath. The culmination of years of preparation, the knife-edge on which the freedom of Earth blanced—he'd been told often enough how important the secret was. But he had no choice now but to tell them. "Out there, somewhere," he said, nodding skyward, "there's a great treasure hidden. Five Nova-class starships. Fueled, armed, and ready to fly."

Again there were no murmurs, but this time the silence was due to shock. Dhonau recovered first. "You must be joking," he said, his voice strangely tight.

Caine shook his head. "I agree, it sounds impossible. Here's what happened.

"The TDE was turning out vast numbers of warships in the early years of the war. In early 2424 someone in the High Command had the bright idea of hiding some fully armed and crewed warships in one of the systems near the battle front. The plan was to let the Ryqril sweep past—they were going to, anyway—and then suddenly pop up with this assault force right in the middle of their supply vectors."

"Wouldn't have helped much," someone muttered.

"Nothing would have," Dodds, sitting next to Lathe, countered.

"Well, we'll never know for sure," Caine said. "The five ships were delivered on schedule by special skeleton crews, who hid them and then returned to Earth. The convoy that was carrying the regular crews ran into a Ryqril ambush and was completely destroyed, though we're sure the Ryqril never knew just what they'd done. Anyway, with the incredibly tight secrecy around the project the report of the incident didn't get to the right people until it was too late. The Ryqril had already passed and it would have been nearly impossible to get crews through the front. All records on Earth were destroyed before the Ryqril victory, and everybody who knew where the ships were hidden is dead now, so the handful of officers who knew about the project gave up on it until about seven years ago."

"Duplicate records exist on Plinry?" Skyler asked.

Caine nodded. "General Kratochvil located a former Rear Admiral who'd been based on Plinry. The ships' location is hidden in one of the mundane, non-military records in the archives. It's in a special code, overlaid on the wording of the record."

"Go on," Dhonau prompted.

"No. The rest has to remain secret."

"I see." Dhonau scratched his chin. "What were your plans once you had the information?"

"The original plan was for me to return to Earth, still as Alain Rienzi. The Resistance was supposed to recruit all the old starmen that they could find, steal some ships, and try to get to the Novas before the Ryqril figured out what they were doing. Now—" he shrugged uncomfortably— "I'm not sure what I'll do."

"Speaking of Alain Rienzi," Dhonau said, abruptly changing the subject, "how come you're able to masquerade as him?"

"Oh, he really exists—aide to a TDE Senator, son of a well-co

"That's impossible."

Hawking's flat tone left no room for argument. Caine tried anyway. "I don't know how it was done, but—"

"Look, Caine, you can't tamper with the plastic on a collie ID. I've seen yours, and I've tried it on others. And as for getting into an ID computer file u

"Well, it obviously was done." Caine felt anger rising within him and forced it down. "If it was impossible I wouldn't be here. They would've nabbed me right at the New Geneva 'port."

"All right, at ease, everyone," Dhonau's voice cut in. "Vale, Haven—escort Caine back to the other room. We need time to discuss this," he added to Caine. "We'll let you know our decision shortly."

Caine stood up, but his muscles were strangely tense, and he didn't trust himself to speak. So he simply nodded and left. The door closed solidly behind him.

For a few moments the room was silent as the assembled blackcollars considered Caine's words. Stroking his dragonhead ring gently, Lathe glanced surreptitiously around him, trying to judge the others' thoughts. His own mind was racing with possibilities.

Dhonau spoke first "Comments?"

"I think," Skyler said slowly, "the first order of business is Caine's credentials. Hawking, were you overstating your case?"

"Nope. It's probably possible to get into a collie ID computer, but not without someone finding out."

"Before he got off the planet?"

"Easily. The most likely explanation is that the Ryqril had broken the Resistance leaders by then and let Caine go, hoping he'd lead them to the ships."

"But if they're on to him, why didn't Galway let him into the Records Building?" O'Hara objected. "The collies should've been falling all over themselves giving him what he wanted."

Beside Lathe, Dodds shifted slightly in his seat. "There's one other possibility," he said. "The Resistance may have pulled a very sophisticated trick with Caine. It's possible he's a clone of Rienzi."

Dhonau's eyes narrowed. "Explain."

"Within a couple of years after the war's end it should have been possible to guess which of the collies were likely to hold onto position and power. The Rienzi family sounds like a prime choice. All that would be needed would be to obtain a scratch sample of skin from a newborn Rienzi baby, make a clone from it, and raise the resulting child under Resistance supervision. He'd have the same fingerprints and retinal patterns, and the few months' age difference would be undetectable."

"Where was Security while the sample was being taken?"

"Bound to be loose in the first couple of years," Lathe pointed out. "It was on Plinry, certainly."

"Maybe," Dhonau grunted. "Anyone know whether cloning techniques had advanced that far by the end of the war? Dodds?"

"They were working on it a lot, I'd heard," Dodds said. "I know they'd finally broken the instability problem, but whether the method was ready to use I don't know. But I'd say the chances are good that it was."

"Let's let that pass for now," a big black man named James Novak said. "Even if the Ryqril are on to this, we can stay a jump ahead of them. What I want to know is whether five Novas are really worth going after."