Carefully he drew the combat knife from its sheath. The heavy tungsten-steel blade was blued, muting all reflective highlights. Transferring the Copperhead to his left hand, Kane gripped the knife in his right, waiting and watching the sentry.
The man wasn’t looking in his direction at the moment, but he would eventually. The pile of shale would conceal Kane as long as he remained motionless, but he had to cross that open space and get into the ditch if he wanted to take the sentry down without blasterfire.
The sentry turned in Kane’s direction, his eyes shifting slowly past the heap of broken rock and sweeping beyond it. He turned to look in another direction. Like a coiled spring, Kane rushed from around the rock pile, crossed the open space and down into the shadows of the ditch.
It was only four feet deep, and he went down flat on the bottom of it. He belly-crawled forward, along the base of the wall. When the sentry started to turn in his direction again, he froze. He had learned long ago that at a distance, especially at night, what did not move merged into the terrain. The sentry’s eyes passed over him again. The man was looking for invaders in obvious hiding places, not in places with no apparent concealment within spitting distance of his position.
The sentry turned away again, and Kane rose from the depression and climbed up the opposite bank. His back pressed against the wall, he slid carefully along until he was directly beneath the sentry. He waited in the night shadows until he heard the grate of shoe leather against stone, then his left arm snapped up, slapping the barrel of the Copperhead against the man’s ankles.
In midstep, the sentry stumbled and lost his balance as his legs entangled. He fell right into Kane’s waiting arms. The rifle clattered and slid into the ditch. The man groped for it, but he didn’t have time to reach it or cry out before Kane pressed the barrel of the Copperhead against his throat.
His polycarbonate-shod knee slammed into the small of the sentry’s back and arched him forward against the pressure of the blaster barrel. The point of the razor-keen, double-edged knife in Kane’s right fist plunged between two ribs, sinking deep.
Kane maintained the pressure on the knife. The man clawed at the barrel of the Copperhead. From writhing lips, he husked out three half-gagged words, “Sec man! Sec!”
The sentry’s body convulsed briefly, then went limp, and Kane slowly lowered the deadweight to the ground, pulling the knife free. Gingerly, with the metal-reinforced toe of a boot, Kane prodded the man over onto his back. Blood, black in the wavering light of the night sight, flowed over the edge of the ditch. The man was scrawny, sharp featured, lank of hair and limb. His hands were callused, the fingers blunt and short nailed. He looked around forty years of age, which probably made him closer to twenty-five.
All in all, he looked like typical outlander trash. His use of the archaic “sec man” label marked his origins in the wild hinterlands beyond the villes. Only people raised far from the influence of the secure cities still applied that obsolete term to the Magistrates.
Kane started to push the body down into the ditch, then he froze and leaned forward, staring at the outlander’s face. His hair covered a transceiver plug in his right ear, and his shirt collar had concealed the miniature microphone affixed to his throat. His hissed “sec man” hadn’t been an insult but a warning.
Dropping back into the ditch, Kane pulled the corpse with him, then climbed out on the opposite side, taking cover again behind the pile of shale. He heard nothing from the other side of the wall. Resheathing the knife, he waited for the count of sixty, then tapped out the move-up-carefully signal on the microphone.
It occurred to him that Reeth may have abandoned the Cliff Palace either when an alarm was activated or the Vulcan-Phalanx gun was triggered, and he had left a single guard behind to alert him to the identity of the intruders. Kane was able to half convince himself that was Reeth’s strategy.