Blackcollar: The Blackcollar

Boats of this size had never been meant for heavy combat, and their windows weren't designed to take that sort of punishment. His third blow sent hairline cracks through the thick plastic, and his seventh smashed it completely. Standing upright on the skid, his left hand still on the outer handle, he reached in through the broken window and groped for the lock mechanism.

Abruptly, the craft bucked under his feet, twisting and bouncing as the pilot finally reacted. But the maneuver was just a little too late. Jensen had a solid grip now, and all the bouncing would do would be to keep the boat's crew from interfering with him. The boat twisted right, then left as he found the inside handle, strained to release it, and then, as the boat dipped sideways and his feet slid off to dangle in midair, he popped the catch. The door flew open, and as the boat leveled off again the blackcollar swung himself inside.

They were on him instantly—three of them, unarmored, apparently trying to overwhelm him by sheer numbers. Under normal circumstances an easy fight—but Jensen was tired and hurt, and it took ten or fifteen seconds to beat them into unconsciousness. Ten or fifteen seconds too long for as he turned toward the pilot, he saw the wild, white eyes staring at him out of a face of sheer terror. And beyond the pilot the distant city lights tilted crazily in the windscreen.

They hit the side of the building with a cacophony of grinding metal and a shock that sent Jensen hurtling through space toward the broken nose of the boat. He never felt the impact of his landing.

A hundred kilometers south of Calarand, the storm had broken with full force. Lightning flashed almost continuously across the black sky, accompanied by solid sheets of rain and hail that ranged from droplet-size to as big as a fist. None of the latter had hit Kwon yet, but he knew it would just be a matter of time.

Sprawled on his stomach at Kwon's feet, Hawking gave no indication he was even aware of the storm. His face glued to the telescope in front of him, his hand resting lightly on its focusing knob, he hadn't moved for at least ten minutes, ignoring completely the water that was undoubtedly pouring in under his poncho. Kwon admired the other's calmness under such rotten conditions, though he himself was perfectly willing to die for his comrades, some of these preliminaries drove him crazy.

"It's averaging about two meters too far north," Hawking's voice came faintly between thunderclaps.

Peering into the lightning-wracked sky, Kwon located the tiny dot fluttering at the other end of his kilometer-long molecular filament. Directly below the kite the top of Cerbe Prison was visible, the rest of it hidden behind an intervening hill. That the prison staff was unaware of the intruder overhead was practically a given, with no metal in either the kite or the device dangling from it, the prison's radar would show virtually nothing, and the rain and hail effectively neutralized sonic and pulsed-laser sensors. A good thing, too, because this could take a while. Experimentally, Kwon took a step to his right and let half a meter of filament run from his reel. The wind at ground level was generally blowing due east, but the kite had found a layer of air with a slight northern component mixed in. The random thunderstorm-sized gusts didn't help, either. "How's that?" he asked Hawking.

"Whatever you just did, reverse it," the other answered. "It's going farther north."

"Right." Blowing a drop of water from the end of his nose, Kwon touched the proper control on his reel and brought a meter of filament back in. He was just preparing to move back to his left when a snapped command stopped him in mid-step.

"Hold it! You're right on target!"

Kwon froze, carefully bringing his weight back onto both feet. "All right," Hawking murmured, "we're almost there. It's swinging right over the turret. Countdown: three... two... one.. drop!"

And Kwon touched the release, letting the spool spin freely on its nearly frictionless bearings. Deprived suddenly of the line's tension, the kite should fall pretty nearly straight down—

"Bull's-eye!" Hawking crowed. "Okay, reel in slowly."

Kwon eased off on the release, letting the wind give the kite some lift again. If Hawking's gadget had hit the prison roof solidly enough, the four catches on its underside should have released, freeing it from the kite. "Kite's rising," he informed Hawking, watching the distant dot carefully.

"Beautiful." Hawking backed away from his telescope and scrambled to his feet. "Take a look, I'll bring in the kite."

Handing over the reel, Kwon gingerly got down in the muddy grass and eased up to the eyepiece. Dead center in the field of view was a hemispherical knob sticking up from the prison's main building—the comm laser turret for Cerbe's secure link to the outside world. Now, sitting directly over it, was another roughly hemispherical shape, this one wispy and insubstantial in the lightning flashes. Its bubblelike appearance was not illusion, the device consisted solely of a thousand hair-thin optical fibers arranged with their i

"Sure." Hawking was reeling in the filament at about half speed and studying the hills to their right. "Comm lasers always have wide apertures, to minimize dispersion over long distances. No matter what direction they point it, some of the fibers will intercept a little of the beam and fu

"Unless they spot the receiver."

"They won't." Shifting his grip on the reel, Hawking pointed to the right. "The pirated beam should hit somewhere on one of those two hills. Once the receiver's in place, we can put the actual listening post ten klicks away if we need to."

"If you say so." Kwon got to his feet, brushed the worst of the mud off his pants, and glanced westward. "Looks like the storm's easing up—most of the lightning's already passed over. Let's get the receiver planted before their sensors start working again, eh?"

"Right. Here, you bring the kite in the rest of the way; I'll handle the scope."

Kwon gri

"Things are finally moving our way," Hawking agreed, his telescope cradled like a baby in his arms. "About time, too."

Off to the east, the thunder rumbled restlessly.