—

The objective was the Agriculture/Resources building, and he made it in just over forty minutes.

Made it to the outside, at least. It took him another ten minutes to scale two floors, find a window that could be opened without leaving any traces, and climb eight flights of steps to the roof.

The stairs ended in a large equipment shed that also contained the building's elevator machinery and a handful of neatly racked maintenance tools. Sliding his pack onto the floor, Haven took a quick look around and then stepped out the shed door onto the roof proper. A couple of blocks away the Security building—not surprisingly—still showed lights; beyond that the flitting lights of spotters indicated Hammerschmidt had finally gotten annoyed enough to call in his air power. But none of the spotters were close enough to bother him. Moving cautiously anyway, Haven went to the corner of the shed and looked around it.

Barely a block away, the black wall of the Ryqril Enclave rose brooding into the sky.

The Chimney, the blackcollars privately called it, and it was as different from the Hub's gray walls in its defensive philosophy as could be imagined. The Hub's wall, rich in sensors and induction fields, was designed to detect intruders and attacks, relying mainly on human forces to counter arty such threat. The Ryqril had no such humanitarian pretenses: their wall was deliberately designed to kill.

Haven let his eyes trace along the nearest of the slightly inward-sloping edges to the heavy laser mounted atop the structure. Sensor-aimed and -fired, the lasers were reputed to have line-of-sight antiair capability, and all four firing together were thought capable of taking out small craft in low space orbit. Aimed down along the wall, they wouldn't have the least bit of trouble vaporizing a mere human being.

The Ryqril took their own safety very seriously.

Haven returned to the shed and rummaged in his pack, and a minute later was back outside with his sniper's slingshot, a small flat case, and a set of light-amp binoculars strapped around his face.

Through the binoculars the wall-mounted laser looked even meaner, its heavy-duty gimbal platform and sensor cones adding a cold efficiency to the picture. The blackcollars hadn't been able to sneak anyone into the work parties who'd built the wall thirty years back, but they'd watched carefully from afar as the lasers were being mounted, and Haven knew that throwing anything substantial at the laser or its sensors would be an invitation to a brief round of target practice.

However...

Setting the slingshot brace against his left forearm, Haven opened the flat box and drew out a marblesized sphere with the consistency of soft putty. He loaded it into the sling and drew back to fire, and as he did so it occurred to him that if he survived it this mission would likely cost him a bout with cancer somewhere down the line. But it was hardly worth worrying about at the moment. Aiming carefully, he let fly.

A good shot; possibly even a great one. At high power, the binoculars showed the pellet—now badly deformed—sticking just at the juncture of the metal laser base and the ceramic wall. Directly over one of the electronic feeds from the autotarget mechanism.

Which line, if Hawking knew what he was talking about, was now being slowly degraded by the radiation from the chunk of plutonium embedded in the putty. Whether it would damage the system sufficiently over the next week or so was a separate question, of course. Hawking hadn't known the answer to that one.

But at least his threshold for the Chimney's motion sensors had apparently been correct. No alarms hooted into the night, no Ryqril on foot or in Corsairs came to see who was shooting things at their precious hideaway. Haven considered sending a second chunk of poison to join the first, decided against it, and retreated back into the shed. Tomorrow night would be soon enough to continue the attack.

He spent the rest of the night erecting a false wall behind the elevator machinery, making it from a cloth hanging that was stiffened and color-camouflaged with one of the last cans of chameleon dye in the blackcollars' arsenal. Moving his gear inside the cubbyhole, he got his airpad inflated and set up for what might be a long stretch of housekeeping. By the time the elevators began bringing the building's employees to their jobs, he was fast asleep.

Project Christmas had begun.

Geoff Dupre arrived home precisely at seven o'clock, and to Caine, at least, he was something of a surprise. Raina's description of his job as a computer systems troubleshooter for the city's vast water retrieval network had somehow led Caine to expect a large yet quiet, intellectual man. He was unprepared for the spirited off-key singing interspersed with tuneless whistling from the hulk who came through the back door. Came through the door, and froze at the sight of five oddly dressed strangers grouped around his wife and friend.

"Your wife's unhurt," Caine said into the suddenly brittle silence. "We're only going to be here a few more hours, and as long as you behave there's nothing to be afraid of."

Dupre sent his gaze to each of the team in turn, then locked eyes with Caine. "Who are you?" he asked, his voice deep but surprisingly calm. "What do you want?"

Raina broke in before Caine could answer. "They're blackcollars, Geoff. They hijacked our truck out on Seventy-two—"

"Just hitched a ride, actually," Lindsay put in. "Caine here let me deliver the truck intact."

"Probably only to avoid stirring up attention." Dupre snorted.

"And also because we're not here to steal," Caine told him. "Whatever we need from you, we'll pay for it."

Dupre considered that. "May I sit down?"

Caine waved him to a sturdy-looking chair. The other lowered himself into it and again looked around the group. "Idunine must be cheap wherever you come from," he commented. "All right, then. What do you want from us?"

"For the moment, just shelter," Caine said. "And perhaps some information. Did you fight in the war?"

Dupre shook his head. "I have vague memories of it, but I was only three when it ended."

"Father? Older relatives? You know anyone who fought?"

A frown creased Dupre's forehead. "Not in Denver. My father lives in Sprinfielma, out near the east coast. No one talks about the war much here. At least not to me."

Caine pursed his lips. "Are there any veterans' groups you know about? Aboveboard or otherwise?

The phone directory doesn't list anything obvious."

Dupre shrugged his massive shoulders. "I don't know about anything like that."

Dead end. If Aegis Mountain's emergency escape route had not, in fact, been collapsed when the base went silent, one of the men who'd been stationed there might be able to show them to its exit.

But only if that hypothetical person could be found.

The others were looking at him expectantly. "I guess we'll have to find the old vets ourselves, then," he said, trying to sound confident. "In the meantime"—his eyes flicked to Braune and Colvin—"you two'd better get started. You have money?"

Colvin nodded. Their Plinry marks, Caine had quickly discovered, wouldn't pass as local currency, and he'd had to appropriate all the cash Raina and Lindsay had had on hand. It wasn't a lot, but it would do at least for the clothing they needed. After that... well, they'd simply have to get creative.

"Off you go, then," he told the other two. "Watch yourselves."

They left. "I expect we'll be out of your lives by tonight," Caine told Lindsay and the Dupres.

"Sooner if we can manage it."

"You expect us to believe that?" Dupre asked quietly. "We aren't stupid, you know. We know what blackcollars are like."