"...The screen in front of each of you will display a brief summary of each of the steps I've just outlined," the instructor concluded his presentation, waving his hand over his podium toward the rows of equipment-laden tables in front of him. "If you have any questions tap the 'help' key; if that still doesn't do it, tap the 'signal' key and someone will come to your work station. Any questions? All right, then. Get to it, and remember that the future of communication on Qasama may depend on you."
Shifting his eyes to the screen attached to the work table, Daulo suppressed a grimace and picked up a circuit board and a handful of components. He hadn't really expected to be given a missile casing and told to load a warhead onto it... but assembling telephone circuitry was hardly what he'd hoped for, either. "Not wasting any time getting us to work, are they?" he murmured.
He glanced to the side in time to see Akim's shrug. "They're paying all of us quite well," he pointed out.
Daulo gritted his teeth and plugged the first component into the circuit board. He'd been trying to pique Akim's curiosity about Mangus itself ever since being ushered off the bus, and had yet to make any impression on the man. Akim was on the trail of a female offworlder, and he clearly had no intention in being distracted from that single-minded path. "At least it explains why they don't bother hunting down their previous workers," Daulo commented, trying another approach. "If everything they do here is this simple-minded it's just as easy to teach a new group from the beginning."
Akim glanced up and around, and for a moment Daulo hoped he might argue the point. But he merely nodded. "Inefficient, to some degree, but not overly so," he said, and returned his attention to his own circuit board. "Certainly helps spread a little extra wealth around to Azras's poor."
"Right," Daulo muttered under his breath. "Obolo Nardin is just as noble as all creation."
"If I were you," Akim said coldly, "I'd try and forget my village prejudices and concentrate on the task at hand. Do you see anyone here who could be the woman in disguise?"
With a sigh, Daulo gave the room a careful scan, the image of Jin getting into Radig Nardin's car rising up to haunt him. "I don't think so."
"Keep an eye out," Akim told him. "They may occasionally rotate workers between groups."
Daulo nodded and turned back to his work.
It was perhaps an hour later when he suddenly noticed Akim had stopped working and was gazing straight ahead into space. "Something?" he asked.
Akim turned sharply to look at him. "Something's wrong," he whispered hoarsely. "There's—" he licked his lips, eyes darting all around him. "Don't you feel it?"
Daulo leaned close, fighting against the sudden dread rising in his throat. Akim's barely controlled panic was contagious. "I don't understand. What is it you're feeling?"
Akim drew a shuddering breath. "Treachery," he said, hands visibly trembling. "There's... treachery here. Don't you feel it?"
Daulo threw a quick look around the room. So far no one else seemed to have noticed them, but that wouldn't last long. "Come on," he said, getting to his feet and gripping Akim's arm. "Let's get out of here."
Akim shrugged off his hand. "I can manage myself," he snarled, standing up unsteadily.
"Whatever you want," Daulo gritted. The door they'd come in by was all the way at the back of the room; much closer was another exit near the front podium. Taking Akim's arm again as the other staggered slightly, he headed that way.
The instructor intercepted them as they got to the door. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "The exit is back that—"
"My friend is sick," Daulo cut him off. "Is there a lavette out there somewhere?"
The other seemed to draw back, and Daulo took advantage of his hesitation to push past. Outside was a corridor he hadn't seen on their way into the building, with a heavy-looking door at the far end. Halfway toward it was the lavette he'd hoped for; guiding Akim through the door, he all but pushed the other down onto a cushion in the lounge section.
For a long moment neither man spoke. Akim took several slow, deep breaths, checked his fingers for signs of trembling, and after a bit rose and studied his face in the mirror. Only then did he finally look Daulo in the eye. "You didn't feel it, did you?" he demanded. "You didn't feel anything in there?"
Daulo spread his hands, palm upwards. "You'll have to be more specific," he said.
"I wish I could." Akim leaned back toward the mirror, gazed deeply into his own eyes. "I felt—well, curse it all, I felt treason. There's no other way to put it; I felt treason. Whether it makes any sense of not."
It didn't; but it almost didn't matter. Whatever the reason, Akim had finally been jolted out of his indifference toward Mangus, and it was up to Daulo now to fan that flame. "I don't understand," he admitted, "but I trust your instincts."
Akim threw him a baleful glance. "Instincts be cursed," he ground out. "There's something wrong in this place, and I'm going to find out what it is."
He started toward the door. "You going back in there?" Daulo asked carefully. "I mean, considering what just happened—"
"I'm fully under control now," the other said stiffly. "As far as you're concerned, I just had a bad reaction to something I ate for breakfast. Understand?"
The instructor was watching from just outside the assembly-room door when they emerged from the lavette. He accepted Akim's suitably embarrassed explanation and escorted them back to the room and their tables. Returning to his work, Daulo stretched out his senses to the limit, trying as hard as he could to pick up the feeling Akim had described.
Nothing.
What was perhaps worse, Akim could apparently no longer sense it, either. Grim-faced, he sat at his table and worked on his circuit boards, without even a mild recurrence of his earlier reaction.
Which meant either that whatever it was had passed... or that it had never been there in the first place.
It was, Daulo decided, probably the oddest sunset he'd ever seen. Ahead, the sun was invisible below the level of Mangus's outer wall, while overhead it still sent multicolored light patterns across the shimmering canopy. "I wonder if that thing keeps the rain out," he commented, twisting his head to gaze upward out their window at it.
"Why else would it be there?" Akim growled from his bed.
To keep Jin's people from seeing in. But he couldn't tell Akim that. "You still bothered by what happened in the assembly room this afternoon?" he asked instead, keeping his eyes on the canopy.
"Wouldn't you be?" the other snapped. "I behaved like a fool in public, and then couldn't even discover why I'd done so."
Daulo pursed his lips. "Could it have been some chemical they use in the manufacturing process?" he suggested. "Something that might still have been evaporating from the circuit boards?"
"Then why didn't anyone else react? More to the point, why wasn't it still there when we came back into the room? And it wasn't still there."
Daulo chewed the inside of his cheek. "Well, then... maybe it was something meant for me, something you got caught in by accident."
Behind him, Akim snorted. "Back to your paranoia of Mangus wanting to keep villagers out, are we?"
"It fits the facts, doesn't it?" Daulo growled, turning to face the other. "A stream of gas, maybe, designed to make me feel frightened and leave on my own?"
"It wasn't fear I felt."
"Perhaps you're braver than I am. And then when you reacted instead of me, they may have panicked and shut it off."
Akim shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense. You're talking something far too sophisticated to be used in what amounts to a telephone assembly plant."
"And how do you know those were telephone circuit boards we were putting together?" Daulo countered.
Akim's forehead creased. "What else would they be?" he asked.
Daulo took a deep breath. "Weapons. Possibly missile components."
He'd expected at least a snort of disbelief and scorn. But Akim merely continued looking at him. "And what," the other said quietly, "would give you that impression?"
A cold shiver ran up Daulo's spine. He knows, was his first, horrible thought. The Shahni are in this with Mangus—the cities really are preparing for war against the villages. But it was too late to back out. "Rumors," he said through stiff lips. "Bits of information, pieced together over the months."
"As well as suggestions from the Aventinian spy?" Akim asked bluntly.
"I don't know what you mean," Daulo said as calmly as possible.
For a half dozen heartbeats the two men stared at each other. "You slide dangerously close to treason, Daulo Sammon," Akim said at last. "You and the entire Sammon household."
"The Sammon family is loyal to Qasama," Daulo said, fighting a trembling in his voice. "To all of Qasama."
"And I, as a city man, am not?" Akim's eyes flared. "Well, let me tell you something, Daulo Sammon: you may think you love Qasama, but any loyalty you possess pales against mine. We of the Shahni's investigators have been trained and treated to be totally fair in our dealings with Qasama's people. Totally fair. We cannot be corrupted or led astray from what we see as our duty. And we do not show prejudice, to anyone on our world. If you remember only one thing about me, remember that."
Abruptly, he got to his feet, and Daulo took an involuntary step backward. But Akim merely walked past the two beds and seated himself at the writing desk. "So you think we've been assembling parts for missiles, do you?" he said over his shoulder as he picked up the phone and turned it over. "There ought to be one quick way to settle that."
Daulo stepped over and crouched down beside him as Akim pulled a compact tool kit from his pocket and selected a small screwdriver. There were, Daulo noted, about a dozen screws holding the bottom of the phone to the molded resin top. "Why so many fastenings?" he asked as Akim got to work.
"Who knows?" Akim grunted, getting the first one loose. "Maybe they don't want anyone messing around with his phone unless it really needs fixing."
Akim was working on the last screw when Daulo first noticed the odor. "What's that?" he asked, sniffing cautiously. "Smells like something's burning."
"Hmm. It does, doesn't it." Frowning, Akim lifted the phone to his nose. "—uh-oh."
"Did we ruin it?"
"Sure smells that way. Well... the damage is probably already done." He got the screw free and carefully pulled the bottom plate out.
Just inside the plate was a circuit board—the same board, Daulo saw immediately, that they'd been working on all day. All the same components, plus a tangle of connecting wires, plus—
"What are those things?" he asked, pointing to a row of slightly blackened components. "We didn't put those on our boards."
"No, we didn't," Akim agreed thoughtfully. He raised the board to his nose again. "Whatever they are, they're where the smell is coming from."
A knot began to form in the pit of Daulo's stomach. "You mean... we tried to take the phone apart, and they burned themselves out?"
Akim held the board closer, peering at it from different angles. "Take a look," he said, lifting a bundle of wires and pointing beneath it. "Right there. See it?"
Daulo tried to remember what that component was. "A capacitor?" he hazarded.
"Right. And there—" he pointed beneath it "—is what releases its stored current into that section of the circuit."
The knot in Daulo's stomach tightened an extra turn. "That's... right over one of the screw holes."
"Uh-huh," Akim nodded. "And now that we've got it open, it's clear that screw doesn't help hold the phone together at all." He looked up at Daulo. "It's a self-destruct mechanism," he said quietly.
Daulo had to work moisture into his mouth before he could speak. "Any way to find out what those burned-out components are supposed to do?"
"Not now. Not this set, anyway." Akim gazed at the board another moment, and then put it back into the phone and picked up one of the screws. "I'll have to find out where they finish this part of the assembly and get in there." He paused, a strange look flashing across his face. "You know... phones manufactured in Mangus have been the most advanced on Qasama for the last two or three years. They're very popular among top city officials."
"And the Shahni?" Daulo asked.
"And the Shahni," Akim nodded. "I've got one on my desk..." He took a deep breath. "I don't know what we've got here, Daulo Sammon, but whatever it is, I need to check it out, and quickly."
"Are you going to call for reinforcements?"
Akim gave him a sardonic look. "Over these phones?" he asked pointedly.
Daulo grimaced. "Oh. Right. Well... look, it probably wouldn't take more than an anonymous tip to the right person to get me thrown out. If you want to give me a message, I'll make sure to deliver it to Moffren Omnathi in person."
"Even if Radig Nardin decides to make sure you never try to enter Mangus again?" Akim asked.
Daulo licked his lips, remembering the toughs who'd attacked him and Jin. "And what do you suppose they'll do to us if they find out we know about their phones?" he countered.
Akim set the phone back on the table and stood up. "I'm a representative of the Shahni," he said flatly. "They wouldn't dare harm me."
There was no response Daulo could make to that. "Were you planning to try and find that extra assembly room tonight?" he asked instead.
Akim hesitated, looking out the window. "It's getting late... but I don't remember them saying anything about us being confined to quarters in the evenings." He turned back to Daulo. "I suppose you want to go, too?"
"If I may. Unless you don't trust me."
Akim looked at him steadily. "To be perfectly honest, no, I don't. I don't think you're the innocent bystander you try to appear, and until I figure out just what the game is you're playing I'm not going to like having you at my back." He snorted gently under his breath. "Unfortunately, if you're working against me I risk just as much by leaving you here where I can't watch you."
Daulo grimaced. "Is there anything I can say or do to convince you I don't oppose you?"
"Not really."
"Then I guess you'll have to make up your mind on your own. Bear in mind that I can't come with you and stay here at the same time."
Akim's lip twitched. "True." He inhaled deeply. "All right, then. Come on, let's go."
It was something of a surprise to Jin to awake and find herself still alive.
She took a moment first to listen with her eyes closed. Silence, except for the hum of distant machinery or forced air venting. No sounds of breathing except her own.
Which meant that, along with leaving her alive, they'd left her alone.
Opening her eyes, she found herself in a small room, perhaps three meters by four, bare except for the thin mattress on which she was lying and a somewhat thicker sitting cushion in one corner. Set into the ceiling was an air vent, too small for anything larger than a cat to get through; on one wall was a metal door.
Carefully, she got to her feet. There was no dizziness, no pain except for a mild ache from the bruise where she'd allowed her head to hit the floor. And no way to know how long the stuff had me under, either, she reminded herself grimly, wishing she'd thought to start her clock circuit before going under. Stepping to the door, she pressed her ear against it and activated her audio enhancers.
The faint sound of cloth on skin came from outside, followed by a cough.
At least they thought enough of me to lock me up, she thought, feeling a little mollified. Even recognizing on an intellectual level that her supposed feminine weakness was greatly to her advantage, it still somehow rankled to be so casually treated by her opponents.
Whoever these opponents were.
She frowned as the memory of that last overheard conversation came back to her. Obolo Nardin had known about the shuttle crash—had known she was an offworlder and that she'd been staying with the Sammon family in Milika. Had the Shahni made that information public? Or was Mangus in fact a government operation? Neither option was especially attractive.
And yet... unless the drug they'd been blowing in her face had thoroughly scrambled her memory... hadn't they also been openly worried about the risk of having an agent of the Shahni in their midst?
Which implied they were hiding something from the Shahni. But how then did they know things only the Shahni were supposed to know?
Could Mangus be some kind of chip in an internal power struggle among the Shahni themselves? One side's jealously guarded effort, perhaps, to come up with a way to fight back against the Cobra Worlds?
Cobra Worlds. Cobras. Mangus. Mongoose...
God above.
For a long moment Jin just stood there, rooted by horror to the spot. God above. It'd been staring her right in the face the whole time, and she'd managed to completely miss it. Mongoose...
Angrily, she shook her head, the movement sending a stab of pain through her bruise. It still wasn't too late to redeem her error... assuming that she could get out of this room. Gritting her teeth, she crouched down and examined the door's lock.
It was instantly obvious that the room hadn't originally been designed to hold prisoners. The door had been locked by the simple expediency of removing the inner knob mechanism and welding a metal plate over the resulting opening.
Moving back from the door, she gave the room a quick but careful scan. There were no hidden cameras that she could find, though there could still be subsurface microphones buried out of sight in the walls. Those could be dealt with, though. A more pressing problem would be to find something she could use to bend back the metal covering the lock. Pulling off one shoe, she experimented with the heel. Not ideal, but it would do. Taking a deep breath, she wedged the heel beneath the edge of the plate with one hand and activated her other hand's fingertip laser.
It was easier than she'd expected it to be; clearly, the man assigned the job of securing the door hadn't wanted to make a career of the task and had used a soft metal that he could spot-weld in place in a couple of minutes. It took Jin even less time than that to free three of its edges and soften the rest enough to pry it back from the hole. Waiting for it to cool was the hardest part, but the door itself was a fair heat sink, and within a few minutes she was able to get close enough to see into the opening.
Inside the door was the minor maze of wiring and equipment: an electronic lock. She knew a dozen quick ways of dealing with such a device, ranging from frying it with her arcthrower to slagging it with her antiarmor laser. Unfortunately, most of them tended to be extremely noisy, and the last thing she could afford right now was for the guard outside to hit whatever panic button he was equipped with.
Fortunately, there were more subtle approaches available to her. The solenoids and deadlock bolt of the actual mechanism were easy enough to locate; easing a finger into the hole, she found the bar that blocked the deadbolt in place when the lock was engaged. Pushing it out of the way with one finger, she teased the deadbolt back with two others...
There was no click, just a slight inward movement of the door as it was suddenly freed to swing on its hinges again. Straightening up, Jin slipped her shoe back on and licked her lips. This was it. Activating her omnidirectional sonic to interfere with any microphones that might be operating, she got her fingernails on the door edge and pulled it open.
The two guards standing with their backs to her probably weren't even aware the door behind them had opened before she dropped them where they stood with a blast from her sonic. Gripping the door jamb, her own head ringing from the sonic's backwash, Jin leaned out into the hallway and looked around. No one was in sight; and from the level of light coming in a window down the hall, it was already early evening out there. She'd slept the whole day away... Gritting her teeth, she bent to the task of disposing of the unconscious guards.
The next door down the hall turned out to be a small washroom, its size indicating it had been designed for use by one person at a time. Carrying the guards inside, she propped them up in such a way that they would help wedge the door once she closed it. Her trainers had warned them repeatedly that the duration of sonic-induced unconsciousness varied so wildly between people and situations that it couldn't be relied on, but with nothing around to secure them with, she would just have to hope that they wouldn't wake up too soon.
Her next stop was the window down the hall. The sun was indeed well down past Mangus's western wall, though its light was still sending a rainbow of color across the canopy overhead. More importantly, the view outside told her that she was still in the building she'd first been brought to that morning.
Which gave her a very good idea of where she ought to start her investigation...
There were still a handful of people roaming around the building, but in the relative stillness their footsteps carried clearly to her enhanced hearing, and she found it an easy task to elude them. It took her several minutes and a few false turns, but eventually she made it to the hallway leading to the ornate door of Obolo Nardin's office-cum-throne room.
There hadn't been any guards outside the door when she'd been first brought before Obolo, and there weren't any now, either. Which implied either very good electronic security on the entrance itself, or else human guards waiting out of sight behind some of the hanging curtains inside. She was just starting around the corner to check out the door when another set of footsteps caught her ear and she ducked back.
It was Radig Nardin.
Jin gnawed at her lip. The messenger who'd taken her to Obolo earlier had announced their arrival on an intercom set beside the door and they'd been admitted by someone inside. But given Qasama's culture, it seemed unlikely that the son of Mangus's director would have to go through such a routine. On a sudden hunch, she clicked her optical enhancers to telescopic and focused on the door.
Radig stepped up to the panel, tapped six buttons on a keypad she hadn't noticed before, and opened the door.
Jin was gliding down the hallway toward the closing door before it occurred to her on a conscious level that sneaking into Obolo's office right on Radig's heels might be an unnecessarily stupid risk to take. But she kept going. Obolo presumably had a perfectly adequate communications system available in his office, and if he and Radig needed to speak in person, perhaps it would be worth listening in on.
She reached the door unseen and repeated Radig's code on the keypad. Too late, she wondered if the system might also be sensitive to fingertip pattern... but Obolo hadn't bothered with extra refinement, and with a quiet click the door unlocked.
She opened it just enough to slip through, closing it again behind her and moving immediately to the cover of the nearest hanging curtain. The room seemed hazy, and she nearly choked on her first breath. Chemical smoke, she realized, remembering the unnatural glow in Obolo's eyes earlier. Presumably one of those wonderful mind-stimulating drugs. Keying in her audio enhancers, she slid off her shoes and moved out cautiously in Radig's wake.
Two guards were near the door, hidden from view behind a pair of curtains. Pinpointing them by the sounds of their breathing, Jin moved silently past on her bare feet. Radig's footsteps were easy to follow, and she was within a single curtain of Obolo Nardin's cushion throne when they came to a halt. Squatting down behind the curtain, Jin held her breath.
"My son," Obolo's voice said, his tone oddly grating in Jin's ears—the vocal equivalent, perhaps, of the drug user's shining eyes.
"My father," Radig greeted the elder Nardin in turn. "I've brought you the manifest of the latest shipment. Unloading has already begun; transfer of the special components to the assembly building will begin as soon as it's dark and all the temporary workers are properly confined in their houses."
The familiar shisss-click of a magdisk into a reader... Obolo grunted. "Good. Have they begun work on the second computer system yet?"
"They're still setting it up," Radig told him. "They estimate it'll be ready in about two days."
"Two and a quarter," Obolo said with casual certainty. "They consistently underestimate the actual time they'll need."
"Perhaps this time—" Radig stopped as a ping came from the work table.
"Obolo Nardin," Obolo said. Something inaudible even to Jin's enhanced hearing... "Command," he bit out angrily. "Specified recorder; last playback."
More inaudible speech... but even without visual cues, Jin could sense a sudden tension on the other side of the curtain.
As Radig clearly also did. "What is it?" he asked tautly when the voices had stopped.
Obolo took an audible breath. "The Shahni agent who came in with Daulo Sammon has found the key to the Mongoose Project."
"The Shahni—? You know for certain that's what he is?"
"If I hadn't already, his last conversation with Daulo Sammon confirmed it." Obolo's voice was settling down, drifting almost toward boredom. "His reaction this morning to the subliminals was actually all the proof I needed."
Radig seemed to be having trouble catching up. "You say he knows? How?"
"He was pushed into the discovery by Daulo Sammon, as it happens. There was some fantasy about missile production here, and it goaded the agent into disassembling the phone. Perhaps you were right; perhaps we should have removed the villager right at the beginning."
"But the phone's self-destruct—"
"Worked properly, of course. But you don't suppose for a minute that that really helped, do you? Destroyed evidence is as intriguing to such people as undestroyed evidence."
Radig cursed. "We'd better get some guards to their complex right away."
"Why?"
"Why?" Radig echoed in disbelief. "Because if he gets that information to his superiors—"
"He can't." Obolo was almost glacially calm. "Mangus is sealed for the night, and I've had all outside phone contact except that from this building shut off since he betrayed his identity this morning. Quiet, now, my son, and let me think."
For a moment the painful thudding of her own heart was all Jin could hear. It had happened, her worst fear about this whole penetration: Daulo was in deadly danger. Her legs trembled with the urge to leap out of concealment, cut both Obolo and Radig in half with her antiarmor laser, and get herself and Daulo out of here...
"Yes," Obolo said abruptly. "Yes. You will assemble a small force, my son—four men—and take them to the assembly building. The agent's next step will be to try and find some of our special components in undamaged form to take out of Mangus with him."
"How will he know—"
"He'd have seen the final assembly room door this morning when he and the villager left their own area in reaction to the subliminals. He'll remember it and go there first."
"I understand. Do you wish them killed there, caught in an act of burglary?"
Jin's hands twitched involuntarily into combat position: little finger pointed straight out, thumb resting on ring-finger nails... "Of course not," Obolo snorted scornfully. "That would merely bring others from the Shahni to investigate why one of their preconditioned agents would stoop to simple thievery. No, my son, bring them back here, alive and unharmed."
"We will eventually kill them, though, won't we?" Radig asked, almost pleading. "A Shahni agent's training won't allow—"
"Of course we won't kill them," Obolo said evenly. "We will do nothing. It'll be the offworlder spy who'll handle that task for us."
The door to the assembly building was locked, but an unusual-looking tool from Akim's kit took care of it in short order. "Now where?" Daulo whispered as they slipped inside.
"That room we saw when I—" Akim pursed his lips. "You remember—at the end of the hallway the instructor tried to keep us out of?"
"Right," Daulo nodded, glancing out the window beside the door. At Akim's insistence they'd taken a leisurely, roundabout route here from their housing complex, and the earlier twilight had faded now into deep dusk. "What do you want me to do?"
Akim stepped past him to relock the door. "You might as well stay here," he said, not sounding entirely happy with the decision. "This is the door any visitors would be most likely to use. If you see anyone coming, give a whistle."
"A whistle?" Daulo frowned.
"Whistles carry as well in a building as shouts do with less chance of being heard from outside," Akim explained briefly. "Watch carefully."
And he was gone. Daulo listened as his footsteps faded down the hallway, trying to ignore the gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. So Jin had been wrong all along. It wasn't missiles... or was it? There was still that walled-off section of Mangus that none of their instructors had even referred to.
But then what was all this business with the phones?
The tap on the window barely ten centimeters from his face nearly threw him across the hall in reaction. God above! He staggered, trying to regain his balance—tried to shape unsteady lips for a whistle—
"Daulo!" The whisper was barely audible through the glass. His whole body trembling, Daulo moved back to the window.
It was Jin.
Taking a shuddering breath, Daulo stepped to the door and unlocked it. "Jin—God above, but you startled me—"
"Shut up and listen," she growled, brushing past him to peer out the window. "Obolo Nardin's on to you and your Shahni friend. Radig Nardin's gone to assemble a guard force to come here and pick both of you up."
Daulo felt his mouth drop open. "Over here? But how did they know we were coming here?"
"Obolo deduced it. He seems to be running on one of those mind-expanders you Qasamans are fond of." Jin turned back from the window. "No sign of them yet— Radig must figure there's no hurry. Where's your Shahni friend?"
"Miron Akim's down the hall." He pointed. "And he's not exactly a friend."
"Go get him anyway—he's dead too if Radig catches him here. If we can hide you somewhere until you can get out of Mangus—"
"Wait a second, we've got to talk first. I think you were wrong about the missiles. They're playing some sort of game with the phone instead."
She hissed between her teeth. "It's no game, Daulo. My guess is that they're systematically planting bugged phones all over Qasama."
"Bugged?" Daulo frowned.
"Equipped with microphones. Listening devices."
"God above," Daulo murmured. Phones manufactured in Mangus are very popular among top city officials, Akim had said. And among the Shahni, as well. "But even with microphones in the phones... God above. The long-range phone system."
Jin nodded grimly. "That's it, all right. Your marvelous detection-proof underground waveguide has been turned against you. It's tailor-made for this sort of thing."
Daulo clenched his teeth hard enough to hurt. She was right. With virtually every phone in the Great Arc linked through the natural waveguide beneath the planet, it would be childishly simple for any phone conversation to be picked up, duplicated, and the copy routed via that same waveguide back here to Mangus.
With the villages west of Azras one of the few areas immune to that surveillance. One reason why they'd tried so hard to keep him out of Mangus? "Milika's in danger," he murmured.
"All of Qasama's in danger," Jin retorted. "Don't you get it, Daulo? Once this system's completed—if it isn't already—Mangus will have access to practically every communication and data transfer on the planet. And that kind of information translates directly into power."
Daulo shook his head, forehead tight with thought. "But only if they can sift out the specific information they're looking for. And the more microphones they've got planted, the more they'll have to sort through to get it."
Even in the dim light he saw something flicker across her face. "I've got an idea how they might be handling that," she said, her voice heavy with reluctance. "For the moment, though, there's a rather more immediate threat to us: I think they're trying to build themselves an army among their temporary workers. Did Miron Akim have some kind of reaction this morning? I heard Obolo Nardin mention it."
"Yes—said he felt treason in the assembly room. We left for a few minutes, and he was fine afterwards."
"Presumably because they turned the thing off. You ever heard of subliminals?"
Daulo gritted his teeth. Treason... "Yeah," he breathed. "If you mix a mild hypnotic gas with subaudible vocal messages, you're supposed to be able to create minor attitude changes in a person."
"We don't use anything like that on Aventine, but the theory's known well enough," Jin nodded. "Is it something common here?"
"I've only heard of it being used as a last-try method with chronic criminal types. It's not supposed to be all that effective." Abruptly, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. "Of course—the temporary workers. That's why they keep hiring new men; they're trying to run as many of Azras's people through their conditioning as they can."
"Azras and Purma both," Jin grunted. "On the way in this morning I saw some loaded busses heading back to Purma. They're rotating their work force between the two cities, maybe hoping neither city will notice what they're doing."
"Yeah. You think they've found a way to make subliminals powerful enough to force people into treason?"
"I don't know," Jin shook her head. "I hope all they're trying to do is sow discontent among the cities' poor. Given your current political climate, even that might be enough."
Daulo nodded, feeling cold all over. "God above. We've got to get this to the Shahni."
"No kidding—and may I suggest as a first step that you go collect your friend and we all get out of here? Radig Nardin could arrive any minute now, and if he finds us we probably won't have any choice but to kill them." She stooped again to look out the window.
Daulo shivered. The way she just automatically assumed who would win such a faceoff... "Yeah. Okay, I'll go get—"
"Too late." Peering out the window, Jin hissed a curse between her teeth. "They're coming."
Stupid, Jin bit out silently at herself. Yes, it'd all been information the Shahni were going to need; and yes, Daulo was the best person to give it to them. But she still should have gotten him and Miron Akim out first.
Clenching her teeth, she looked around the entrance hallway. There was nothing here she could use to fight with; nothing that might realistically allow Daulo to defeat five alert men without killing them. And it had to be Daulo who did all the fighting; if Akim found out Daulo had been talking to her he would probably have the entire Sammon family up on treason charges.
Her eyes fell on an electric socket. Unless, she amended, no one actually sees who it is fighting them...
Radig's men were almost to the door now. "All right," she muttered to Daulo. "Get back there—across the hallway—and cover your eyes. Cover them good."
"Then what?" Daulo asked, moving obediently to the spot she'd indicated and raising his forearm across his eyes.
"With luck, you'll grab their full attention when they come in and they won't have a chance to see me. So I wasn't here—you understand? If anyone asks, you took them all out by yourself." Her enhanced hearing was picking up footsteps outside now. "Get ready; here they come."
She flattened herself into the corner behind the door, keying her targeting lock to the electrical outlet and raising her right fingertip to the ready position...
And abruptly, the door was flung open.
"Well, well," Radig Nardin said sardonically, sauntering into the entrance hallway. "What have we here? —one of our trustworthy employees overanxious for tomorrow's work to begin? Put your stupid arm down, Daulo Sammon—"
And as the last of the guards stepped across the threshold, Jin squeezed her eyes shut and fired her arcthrower.
Even through closed eyelids the flash was dazzlingly bright. Someone gasped, someone else bit out an oath—and then Jin was in their midst.
It was no contest. Temporarily but totally blinded, facing a sighted opponent with Cobra servos behind her punches, the five men went down like randomly flailing target dummies.
The last thud of a falling body was still echoing in Jin's ears when she heard the gasp from Daulo's direction. "God above," he breathed. "Jin—you—"
"No; you did all this," she snapped at him. The door was still open; throwing a quick look outside, she caught its edge with the tip of her foot and swung it closed. "Don't forget that—it could cost you your life."
Daulo took a deep breath. "Right." He swallowed and tried another breath. "You'd better get going—Miron Akim's sure to have heard all of this."
"I know." Jin hesitated. There was so much more she needed to tell him, but for now they'd run out of time. "You and Miron Akim had better do the same. If you can get out of Mangus before they realize you haven't been captured, you ought to have a good chance."
"What about you? Aren't you leaving with us?"
"Don't worry, I'll be right on your tail," she assured him. "There's something else I have to check out first, but then I'll be heading for Azras with you. Or behind you, anyway—we don't want Miron Akim seeing me."
Daulo clenched his teeth. "Right. Good luck."
"You too. Remember not to use any of the phones in Azras." The faint sound of running footsteps could be heard from down the hallway now. "And be careful," she hissed. Opening the door, she took a quick look around and slipped outside.
Again, the nearby area was deserted. Moving around the corner, where she'd be out of sight when Daulo and Akim left, she crouched down against the building and made a more leisurely scan of the area. There was occasional movement near the center of the black wall dividing Mangus in half, as well as some quiet activity around the housing complex backed up to the wall. Otherwise, nothing. Keying her optical enhancers for telescopic, she focused on the wall.
It was too tall for her to jump—that much was quickly obvious. Half again as tall as the three-story housing complex near it, it was at least a meter beyond her leg servos' capabilities. She'd been taught a lot of climbing techniques, but all of them assumed some kind of hand and foot grips in the surface to be scaled, and a quick study of the wall didn't look especially promising.
Which left ladders, grappling hooks, or the armored gateway. The first two would require equipment she didn't have. The third, on the other hand...
It was the obvious way for her to get in, and for a long moment she seriously considered it. Radig Nardin had mentioned a transfer of material, and if they were going to open the gate anyway, all she had to do was properly disguise herself and walk on in.
Except that her disguise kit was twenty kilometers south of Azras in Daulo's abandoned car. And anyway, if her suspicions were right, Obolo Nardin would hardly have trusted the secret to more than a handful of his closest family members. A stranger—any stranger—would be caught instantly.
A movement from her right caught her eye: Daulo and his companion, walking with forced casualness in the general direction of the gateway she and Radig had entered Mangus by that morning. For a second she wondered if she should perhaps sneak on ahead and help clear the way.
But if and when their escape was discovered, the evidence Jin needed to get could literally go up in smoke. And besides, Daulo had a new protector now. She could only hope that the Shahni picked competent people for their agents.
Taking a deep breath, she headed at a crouching run across the compound toward the wall.
The courtyard of the housing complex was bustling with quiet activity, the intermix of voices including those of women and children as well as men. Must be the permanent workers, Jin decided as she crept carefully along the roof. Members of Obolo Nardin's family, if the Milika pattern held here; the trustworthy ones, who could be relied on to ignore odd sounds that might come from beyond the wall towering over them.
Though presumably they wouldn't ignore odd sounds coming from directly over their heads. No one seemed to have noticed any noise from her jump up to the roof, but now that she was silhouetted against the overhead canopy all anyone in the courtyard below had to do was look up... Gritting her teeth, Jin crouched down a little more and concentrated on keeping her footing.
But she reached the far side of the complex without incident, to find that she hadn't gained as much of an advantage as she'd hoped to. Her rangefinder put the top of the wall at eight meters away and six meters up, and from a standing start—on uncertain footing—it was going to be close. Stepping back a pace, she checked her balance and jumped.
She made it with scant centimeters to spare, her nanocomputer jackknifing her horizontally to let her absorb the impact with her legs as she slammed into the smooth ceramic. Her fingers lunged forward, locked hard over the edge, and for a few moments she hung there motionlessly, listening for any sign that she'd been seen. But the compound remained quiet. Pulling herself up into a prone position atop the wall, she looked down over the edge.
And found she'd been right.
A cold chill shivered its way up her back. Mangus, she thought to herself, bitterness at her stupidity bringing a knot to her stomach. Mangus. Mongoose. An utterly obvious and natural name for a group seeing itself as the Qasaman answer to the Cobra threat. She and Kruin Sammon had both caught the name's significance, even to the point of having an argument about it... and in all of that fuss both of them had still managed to miss one small fact.
The fact that no one on Qasama had any business naming such a group mongoose in the first place... because no one on Qasama had ever heard the hated demon warriors referred to as Cobras.
Until now.
The Troft ship below was only about half visible, its long neck disappearing into a Troft-style maintenance building while a squat siege-tower unloader partially blocked her view of the main drive nozzles at the aft end. But enough was showing for her to see that the usual inkblot/sunburst indicators of ownership and demesne identification were missing.
There were figures moving down there—mostly Trofts, but a handful of humans as well. If the Trofts hadn't bothered to remove the equivalent identity marks from their clothing... but a quick telescopic examination showed they had. Something on the oddly shaped residential building across the compound from the ship, then? She shifted her attention to it—
And without warning there was a hooting of alarms from behind her.
Reflexively, she flattened herself to the top of the wall, biting back a curse as the human half of Mangus seemed to explode with light. Her light-amps automatically shut off in the glare; clenching her jaw, she kicked in her audio enhancers to compensate. Her opponents had the edge in sheer numbers, but if she could spot their positions before they started shooting, she might be able to eliminate them before they could do her too much damage.
Trained responses took over from the momentary panic... and it was only then that she realized that the floodlights weren't being directed at her. In fact, the placement of many of them—fastened to the wall a meter below her—had actually wound up leaving her in relative shadow. Lifting her head a few centimeters, she keyed her optical enhancers to telescopic and scanned the compound for the focus of the commotion.
It wasn't hard to find. Daulo and Akim, the latter limping slightly, were being half dragged away from the outer gate by an escort of six armed men.
Jin ground her teeth savagely. I should have gone with them, she told herself bitterly. For a long minute she watched the group walk toward the administrative center, a hundred wild schemes for saving them rushing tornado-like through her mind. Then, with a shuddering breath, she forced her emotions aside. All right, girl, knock it off. Calm down and think it out.
Daulo and Akim had been captured. All right. Obolo Nardin would know soon that they were on to his secret; but then he'd already suspected that much, anyway, Furthermore, since neither man had escaped or otherwise breached Mangus's security, there was no reason for Obolo to panic. Which meant that the inevitable interrogation would presumably be handled in a relatively leisurely fashion, and also that the Troft ship down there wouldn't be sent scurrying prematurely off to space with its cargo only half unloaded.
Until, that was, Obolo discovered his offworlder spy had escaped.
Damn.
Jin chewed at her lip, trying hard to come up with an alternative... but there wasn't one. Not if she wanted Daulo to live past the next hour or so. And the whole idea wasn't as crazy as it looked at first glance, anyway. Obolo was smart enough, but for all his chemically-stimulated mental abilities, he still lacked one crucial fact... and as long as he thought Jin was just an ordinary Aventinian, she and Daulo would have a chance.
The floodlights bathing the compound were still on, but the activity at the gate was dissipating now as the prisoners and their escort marched down the road toward the administrative center. Sliding along on her belly, Jin eased forward until she was between two of the wall-mounted lights. The ground directly below wasn't exactly dark, but it was as good as she was going to get. Taking a last look around, she slid off the wall to hang for a second by her hands, and dropped.
And gasped in shock as the impact of landing sent a stab of pain up through her left knee.
"Damn!" she hissed under her breath, rolling awkwardly over to a sitting position and clenching her leg tightly. For a long and terrifying minute she was afraid the vaunted Cobra equipment had failed her, that she'd actually succeeded in spraining or even breaking the joint. But finally the pain began to ease, and in another minute she was able to scramble carefully to her feet and start limping toward the administrative center.
She hadn't yet figured out how she was going to cover that much floodlit ground without being seen, but fortunately that problem solved itself. She'd taken only a few steps before the lights abruptly cut off, plunging the compound again into darkness. Excitement's over, folks; go to bed, she thought, increasing her speed to a sort of syncopated trot. Now if the freshly relaxed security extended to the doors of the administrative center...
Surprisingly, it did. Even more surprisingly, it also extended to the lower levels of the building where her cell was located; though once she thought about it it was obvious that any preliminary interrogation of their new prisoners would be taking place upstairs in Obolo's throne room. She hoped Daulo would remember to leave her out of whatever story he and Akim told them.
The guards she'd stunned were still lying unconscious in the washroom where she'd left them. Retrieving them, she treated each to another blast from her sonic as a precaution and then carried them back to their posts. A quick study of the cell door; then, raising her fingertip lasers, she burned a spectacular but shallow arc part of the way around the lock area. Not too much, she warned herself. Your theoretical rescuer didn't get very far, remember. When Obolo sent someone to check on her—as he eventually would—there had to be a plausible explanation as to why the guards had been knocked unconscious but Jin still a prisoner. Whatever conclusion Obolo came to, it ought to be possible to bend it to her own ends. She hoped.
A minute later she was back in her cell, relocking it behind her via the exposed mechanism. Replacing the metal plate over the opening was somewhat trickier, but by softening it first with her lasers she was able to smooth it back without leaving any major stress wrinkles to show it had once been off.
And after that there was nothing to do but wait. We'll let the offworlder spy kill them for us, Obolo had told his son. Jin had no idea how he planned to do it; but if he wanted to do it properly he would need to at least have Jin in the same room with Daulo and Akim before they were killed.
She hoped to God that Obolo would want to do it properly.
"In the name of the Shahni," Akim intoned formally, "I hereby charge you with treason against Qasama. All here are released of vows of loyalty to others and ordered to surrender to my authority."
A fine speech, Daulo thought; delivered with just the right combination of command and righteous anger.
It would undoubtedly have sounded even better if he and Akim hadn't been on their knees with their hands manacled behind them.
Seated on his cushions, Obolo Nardin raised a bored eyebrow. "You maintain your dignity well, Miron Akim," he said in a raspy voice. "So. You have said the required words. Now tell me the reason for which you charge my household with treason."
Akim's lip twisted. "Or in other words, what do the Shahni know about your treachery? Don't be foolish."
Obolo chuckled humorlessly. "Better and better. Now you seek to plant doubt within me as to whether any of my plans are known outside the walls of Mangus. Unfortunately, your attempts are useless. You forget that I know exactly what the Shahni know of me... which is nothing at all."
There was a flurry of movement behind them. Daulo risked turning his head away from Obolo Nardin, received a slap from one of his guards for his trouble. But not before he saw that it was an unsteady Radig Nardin who was being helped into the room. He focused on Obolo again, but if the other man was concerned over his son's health, it wasn't visible. "Well, Radig Nardin?" he asked. "You were sent to detain them. Why did you fail?"
Radig passed the two prisoners, throwing acid looks at them as he did so. "They ambushed me, my father. One of the guards who was with me may not survive the night."
"Indeed?" Obolo's voice was cold. "Were five then not enough against two?"
Radig refused to shrivel under his father's gaze. "No, my father. Not when they were armed with devices of offworld origin."
Daulo felt his stomach knot up. "Explain," Obolo ordered.
Radig nodded to one of his men, who stepped forward and made the sign of respect. "We found severe burns on and around an electrical socket in the hallway where Master Nardin was attacked," he told Obolo. "Clearly the source of the bright flash that was used against him."
"Indeed." Obolo shifted his eyes to another man standing by. "Bring the offworlder woman." The other nodded and hurried out.
Beside him, Daulo felt Akim stiffen. "What is this about an offworlder woman?" he asked cautiously.
"We have the Aventinian spy you've been seeking," Obolo told him calmly. "She's been our prisoner since morning."
Akim seemed to digest that. "Then perhaps your activities this evening can yet be overlooked," he suggested slowly. "The Shahni are very anxious to find and interrogate this spy. If you release her to me, I'm sure any other problems between you and the Shahni can be... worked out."
Daulo held his breath... but Obolo merely smiled. "You disappoint me, Miron Akim. The lie saturates both your face and your voice. However—" He raised a finger "—I'll grant you this much: you'll have your chance to interrogate the spy before we kill her."
Akim didn't reply.
"And you, Daulo Sammon," Obolo said, turning his eyes on Daulo. His shining eyes, Daulo noted, feeling a tightness in his throat. Jin had been right; the man was high on mind stimulants. "What is your interest in Mangus?"
Daulo considered fabricating a lie, decided it wasn't worth the effort. "The same interest any rational Qasaman would have in a nest of treason," he bit out. "I came to find out what you were doing here, and to stop you."
For a long moment Obolo continued to gaze at him. "You aren't yet defeated, are you, Daulo Sammon?" he said at last. Thoughtfully. "Your friend there is, though he hopes against hope for rescue. But you are not. Why? Is it simply that you don't realize what's at stake here?"
Daulo shook his head silently.
"Answer!" Radig snarled, taking a threatening step toward him.
"Peace, my son," Obolo told him calmly. "Whatever secret Daulo Sammon thinks he possesses, it'll be ours soon enough." Abruptly, he leaned over toward his table and touched a button. "Yes?"
The voice was unintelligible from where Daulo knelt, but even so he could hear the nervous excitement in it. A tight smile tugged at Obolo's lips... "Interesting, though not entirely unexpected. Alert all guard posts and have a full sweep made of the grounds."
He leaned back into his cushions and glanced up at Radig. "As I said, my son, Daulo Sammon's secret is now ours. It seems the woman wasn't the sole survivor of her spacecraft's destruction."
Radig's hand strayed to the grip of the pistol belted at his side. "She's gone?"
"Her associate was fortunately not that competent," Obolo told him, eyes drifting to Daulo again. "Or perhaps he was sent on an errand. Did she tell him through the door that you needed aid?"
"If you're suggesting I would associate myself with an offworlder spy—" Daulo began.
"It hardly matters anymore," Obolo cut him off coldly. "Except possibly to you. You may be able to buy yourself a painless death if you can tell us where the other offworlder is."
A shiver ran up Daulo's spine. "I don't know what you're talking about," he growled.
Obolo shrugged. "As I said, it hardly matters."
For a minute the room was silent. Daulo concentrating on steady breathing, trying to stay calm. Could Jin have lied to him about being the only survivor? No, she wouldn't have done something like that. Whatever was going on—whatever evidence Obolo's men had found or thought they'd found—Jin was in control of the situation. His life, and Akim's, and possibly the entire future of Qasama—all of them were in her hands now.
It was a strangely comforting thought. More strange yet was the complete lack of resentment accompanying it.
There was the sound of an opening door back behind the curtains. This time he resisted the urge to look around at the approaching footsteps; and a minute later Jin and her escort came into his view.
Her appearance was a shock. Hunch-shouldered, almost visibly trembling as she was half led, half dragged toward Obolo, she looked like nothing more than a simple farming girl being hauled toward terrifying matters totally beyond her understanding. It was as if the Jin Moreau he'd come to know had never existed, and for a horrible moment he wondered if they'd gotten to her with one of their drugs.
And then he caught a glimpse of her eyes as she flinched back from Obolo...
Unfortunately, Obolo saw it, too. "Your act is amusing but useless, woman," he said, voice dripping with contempt. "I'm perfectly aware you're not a helpless Qasaman female. You many start by telling me who you are."
Slowly, Jin straightened up, the aura of fear dropping away from her like a dark robe. "Not that it's any of your business," she said evenly, "but my name's Jasmine Moreau."
Beside him, Daulo felt Akim react. "You know her?" he murmured.
"We know her family," Akim muttered back. "They are... rather deadly."
Daulo glanced up at the guards towering over them. "Good," he murmured.
Akim snorted gently.
Obolo's eyes flicked to Akim, back to Jin. "I recognize the family name from our histories," he told her.
"The family name is important on Aventine, too," Jin returned. "Which means they'll eventually be coming to look for me."
" 'Eventually' is a long time." Obolo's eyes suddenly narrowed. "Where's your accomplice?" he barked at her.
Jin remained unshaken. "Well beyond your reach," she said calmly. "Somewhere on his way to Azras by now, I'd imagine."
"Leaving you—a woman—to die?" Obolo snorted.
"Women die approximately as often as men do," Jin said icily. "Once per customer. I'm ready to take my turn at it if need be. How about you?"
Obolo seemed taken aback, and Daulo fought to hide a grim smile. Obolo's experience, his secret information network, his expanded mental abilities—none of it could have quite prepared him to face someone like Jin Moreau. Possibly for the first time in years, the man was actually flustered.
But he recovered quickly. "My turn at the cup of death will not be for some time," he snarled. "Yours, on the other hand, will be very soon now. If your companion is lurking about Mangus, we'll root him out quickly enough. If instead he's truly run away... he'll return far too late to help you."
Abruptly, he turned to look at Daulo and Akim. "Take them to the north chamber," he ordered their guards. "Her as well," he said, gesturing back at Jin. "Chain all three together, where they may share a last half-hour together." His lips curled back in a sardonic smile. "You see, Miron Akim, I keep my word. You will have your chance to interrogate your prisoner. Before she kills you."
The north chamber turned out to be a cozy corner of the curtain-walled maze that was Obolo's throne room. "Quite a mouse track you have here," Jin commented to Radig as he supervised the chaining of her ankles to Daulo's and Akim's. "I'll bet someone who knew what he was doing could hide out for hours without being spotted."
Radig threw her a glower. "A feeble attempt, woman. Your companion isn't here."
"You sure?" she asked blandly. The more she could get them chasing each other in circles, the better.
But he just ignored her, and a moment later left with the other guards. Well, it was worth a try, Jin told herself, and turned her attention to Daulo.
To find him glaring bitterly at her. "So," he growled. "It seems Moffren Omnathi was right—you did come here to spy on us. We took you in and healed your wounds... and in return for our hospitality you lie to us."
The tirade was totally unexpected, and for an instant she stared at him in confusion. But only for an instant. In her peripheral vision, she could see Akim watching them closely... "I'm sorry, Daulo Sammon," she said with cool formality. "I regret having had to deceive your family. If it helps any, I never planned to involve you or anyone else on Qasama with my mission."
"That mission being...?" Akim put in.
"I suppose it doesn't matter anymore if I tell you," she sighed, looking around the curtain walls surrounding them. No sounds of breathing; no body-sized hot spots showing on infrared. Which meant Obolo was relying on more sophisticated electronic methods of listening in on the private moments he'd so graciously granted his prisoners. Smiling grimly to herself, Jin activated her omnidirectional sonic. "My mission," she said quietly, turning back to Akim, "is essentially the same as yours: to stop Obolo Nardin and Mangus."
"Indeed," Akim said coldly. "So once again you reach down from the sky to interfere in matters that are ours alone."
"Can we forget politics for a minute and concentrate on the problem at hand?" Jin growled. "Or don't you understand just what Obolo Nardin's got going here?"
"He's tapping into Qasama's communications network," Akim shrugged.
Jin stared at him in disbelief. "And that doesn't worry you?"
"Of course it does," he said, eyes steady on her face. "But the scheme is self-limiting. Yes, he can listen into the Shahni's conversations, and that certainly must be dealt with. But you have to realize that the more communications he copies, the longer it's going to take him to find the ones he wants. At the rate he's making and distributing these phones, his entire system will eventually collapse under its own weight. If it hasn't already done so."
Jin shook her head. "I wish it were that simple, but its not. You see, he doesn't need to sift all these conversations and data transfers by hand. He can do it with computers."
"With computers?" Daulo frowned. "How?"
"It's very simple. All he has to do is have the computers scan each conversation for preprogrammed words or names—"
"And he then has to listen personally only to the ones containing those words," Akim interrupted her. "Credit us with a little sophistication, offworlder—the method is well known. But for the scope you accuse Mangus of indulging in—" He shook his head. "Perhaps you don't realize just how much information is transferred around Qasama in a single day. It would take computers far more advanced than any available on Qasama to handle it all."
"I know," Jin said quietly. "But Obolo Nardin's computers didn't come from Qasama. They came from the Troft Assemblage."
For a half dozen heartbeats the others just looked at her, Daulo with his mouth hanging open, Akim only marginally less thunderstruck. Daulo found his voice first. "That's insane," he hissed.
"I wish it were," Jin said. "But it's not. There's a Troft ship parked right now in the other half of Mangus."
"Which you can't show us at the moment, of course," Daulo growled. "How convenient."
Jin flushed. Daulo was carrying this hostility act entirely too far. "I'll see what I can do later to remedy that—"
"And what," Akim interrupted her, "would the Trofts stand to gain from such a deal?"
Jin turned back to him. "I don't know how much you know about the Trofts, but they're not the monolithic structure you might think. The Assemblage is basically nothing more than a loose confederation of independent two- to three-system demesnes in constant economic and political rivalry with each other."
"Like the villages and cities of Qasama," Daulo muttered under his breath.
Jin glanced at him. "Something like that, yes. My guess is one of those demesnes has decided humans are more of a threat than we're worth, and is trying to do something about it."
"By helping Obolo Nardin gain political power?" Akim frowned.
"By uniting Qasama," Jin corrected quietly. "And then using your world as a war machine against us."
Akim's eyes flashed. "We don't need alien help to hate you, offworlder," he bit out. "But we don't make war under alien orders, either."
"If Obolo Nardin succeeds, you may not have much say in it." A sound caught Jin's ear. "Someone's coming," she hissed, shutting off her sonic.
A second later the curtain was pulled aside to reveal Radig and a handful of men. Radig looked rather annoyed, Jin noted; at a guess, his eavesdropping on their discussion had been something less than successful. "You—offworlder—put these on," he snarled, throwing her a tangle of male clothing. The same clothing, she saw, that she'd worn as a disguise that morning in Azras. "And then what?" she asked as one of the guards stepped forward to unshackle her.
He ignored the question. "That one—" he pointed at Akim "—will be coming with us to the assembly building. You, on the other hand—" he smiled chillingly at Daulo "—we'll keep alive a little longer. Though you probably won't like it."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Jin demanded.
"Get undressed!" Radig snapped.
"Tell me what you're going to do to Daulo Sammon."
One of the guards stepped forward, raised his hand to slap her—
"No!" Radig stopped him. "She's to remain unmarked." He glared at Jin as the guard reluctantly stepped back. "And you ought to be thankful my father doesn't want your body to show evidence of any other activities, either. Otherwise we would be postponing your execution by a few hours."
Jin glared right back at him. "You would have found it surprisingly unrewarding," she said evenly. "What are you going to do to Daulo Sammon?"
"Interrogate him, probably," Akim spoke up grimly from beside her. "They're still looking for your companion, remember?"
Jin glanced at Daulo's expression. "I've already said he's beyond your grasp," she told Radig.
"Get undressed," the other repeated coldly. "Before I allow my men to forget my father's orders. All of his orders."
For a long moment Jin seriously considered letting them try it. But this wasn't the time or the place for that kind of a confrontation. Swallowing her anger, she changed into the other set of clothes, doing her best to ignore the watching eyes.
It seemed darker, somehow, out in the compound, and it took Jin most of the short walk to the assembly building to realize that it was because the housing complexes were now completely dark. The timing was no doubt deliberate; whatever Obolo and his son had planned, they wouldn't want any witnesses around to see it.
The suspense didn't last long. "Let me explain what's going to happen," Radig said in a conversational tone as the two men holding Jin's arms positioned her in front of the building's entrance. "You, a spy and enemy of Qasama, were trying to steal our technology. Fortunately for Qasama, this alert Shahni agent—" he waved at Akim, held by two burly guards a few meters in front of her "—was here to stop you. Unfortunately for him, you were also armed." He nodded to one of Jin's guards and the man reached a gloved hand into his holster to produce a standard Qasaman projectile pistol. "He shot you, but you managed to kill him before you died. A pity."
"And you then put the gun in my hand to get my fingerprints on it?" Jin asked coldly, watching the pistol being held at her side. The second he raised it to shoot she would have to act...
"Ah—something else you don't know about Qasama," Radig said sardonically. He nodded again, and to her surprise the man with the gun pressed the weapon into her hand, keeping his own gloved hand around hers in a firm controlling grip. "Our science is quite advanced in such matters—more so, obviously, than yours. Here it's possible to prove from a careful residue analysis that a specific shot was fired by a specific gun held in a specific hand. Therefore, each of you will have to fire the fatal shots yourselves. With our help, of course."
"Of course," Jin said sarcastically. A reddish haze seemed to be stealing across her vision, and for a second she wondered if they'd decided to risk drugging her after all. But it wasn't that kind of haze... and after a moment she realized what it was.
It was fury. Simple, cold-blooded fury.
A good Cobra is always self-controlled, the dictum ran through her mind... but at the moment none of those platitudes seemed worth a damn. Daulo had looked quietly horrified as he'd been led off for his interrogation; Radig's own self-satisfied expression here and now was in sharp contrast as he choreographed his double murder... and it occurred to Jin that up till now Mangus had been gaining all the benefits of treason without having to pay any of the costs.
It was time for the balance to be evened up a bit.
A third guard was moving up to Akim's side now, pressing his pistol into the other's clearly unwilling hand. Consciously unclenching her teeth, Jin activated her multiple targeting lock, keying for the centers of the three guards' foreheads. "I presume it's almost time," she said coldly, glancing at Radig before focusing on Akim. "Tell me, Miron Akim: what's the penalty for attempted murder on Qasama?"
Radig snorted. "Don't try to scare us, woman—" he snarled, taking a step toward her.
"Miron Akim?"
"This is more than simple murder, Jasmine Moreau," Akim replied, his eyes on Radig. "It's murder combined with treason. For that the penalty is death."
"I see," she nodded. "I trust, then, you won't be too upset if I have to kill some of them?"
One of the guards snorted something contemptuous sounding. But Radig didn't even smile. Stepping to her side, he grabbed the barrel of the pistol in her hand and brought it up to point directly at Akim. "If you're waiting for your companion to save you, wait for him in hell," he snarled, eyes glittering with hatred. "In fact, I almost hope he's watching. Let him watch you die."
Jin glared straight back, twisted her right arm free of the hands holding it, and slammed the gun across the side of Radig's face.
He flopped over backwards onto the ground without a sound. The guard holding Jin's left arm spat a curse, but he'd gotten no farther than tightening his grip on her arm before she turned partly around in his direction to slam the pistol against his head. The grip abruptly loosened; and even as the guard to her right threw his arms around her shoulders, she twisted back that direction to swing the weapon into his face. Simultaneously, her left hand whipped up, swept across the group around Akim—
Her peripheral vision caught the triple sputter of light as her nanocomputer fired her fingertip laser, and she turned back just in time to see the three guards drop like empty sacks to the ground.
Leaving Akim standing among the carnage. The pistol they'd meant him to kill her with still gripped in his hand. Not quite pointed at her...
For a long moment they stared at each other. "It's all over, Miron Akim," she called softly, the haze of fury evaporating from her mind. The hand holding the pistol was noticeably trembling now. "May I suggest we get out of here before these men are missed?"
Slowly, the pistol sagged downward; and after a moment, Akim stooped and laid it on the ground, his eyes on her the whole time. He flinched slightly as she stepped toward him, but didn't back up. "It's all right," she assured him quietly. "As I said earlier, we're on the same side here."
He licked his lips and seemed to finally find his voice. "A demon warrior," he said. A shiver abruptly ran through him. "A demon warrior. Now it finally makes sense. God in heaven." He took a shuddering breath. "On the same side, you say, Jasmine Moreau?" he said with a hint of returning spirit.
"Yes—whether you believe it or not." She risked a glance around the compound. He hadn't tried to jump her by the time she looked back at him. "If for no other reason than because Obolo Nardin wants both of us dead. So which will it be?—you want to join forces, or would you rather we tackle Obolo Nardin's private army separately?"
Akim licked his lips again, glancing down at the three dead men around his feet. "I don't really have much of a choice," he said, looking her firmly in the eye. "Very well, then, Jasmine Moreau: in the name of the Shahni of Qasama, I accept your assistance in return for my own. Do you have a plan for getting us out of Mangus?"
Jin breathed a quiet sigh of relief. "A plan of sorts, yes. But first we're going to have to go back into the administrative center. Or I have to, anyway."
He nodded with far too much understanding for her taste. "To rescue Daulo Sammon?"
She gritted her teeth. "His family saved my life, long before they knew who I was. No matter what Daulo Sammon thinks of me now, I owe them his life in return."
Akim looked back at the administrative center. "How did you plan to get him out? More of the same firepower you just demonstrated?"
"Hopefully less of it." Jin grimaced, locating Radig's unmoving form. "I'd hoped to persuade Radig Nardin to tell me where they'd taken him. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like he'll be up to talking for a while."
"He'll be on the lowest level," Akim said thoughtfully. "Probably in a corner room. An airtight one, if possible."
Jin frowned at him. "How do you know?"
He shrugged. "Historical precedent, coupled with the nature of the drugs used in the kind of interrogation they're probably doing. Drugs that are reported to be extremely unpleasant, incidentally. The sooner we get him out, the better for him."
Jin bit her lip. "I know. Unfortunately, there's something else we have to do first."
"Such as?"
"Such as getting our escape route set up. Come on."
The hard part wasn't taking the high road for the second time that night, jumping from ground to housing complex roof to the top of the wall. The hard part wasn't even inching along the wall on her stomach, leaning precariously down to cut the power cables linking the spotlights and splice them together into a makeshift rope.
The hard part was wondering the whole time whether Akim would still be waiting down below when she finally finished the chore.
But he was. Evidently, she decided as she carefully pulled him up, Shahni agents were not as fanatic as she'd feared they might be. A true fanatic would probably have preferred death to dealing with a perceived enemy of Qasama.
She got him up and spreadeagled in a safe if not entirely comfortable position atop the wall, and for a long minute he gazed in silence at the Troft ship below. "May God curse Obolo Nardin and his household," he spat at last. "So you were telling the truth after all."
"Keep your voice down, please. You know anything about Troft ships besides what they look like?"
He shook his head. "No."
"Me, neither. Which could be a problem... because that's where we're going to hide out for the next day or two."
He didn't fall off the wall, or even gasp in stunned astonishment. He just turned a rock-carved face to her. "We're what?"
She sighed. "I don't much like it either, but at the moment we're slightly low on options." She waved back toward the administrative center. "As soon as they find out we're gone, they'll turn their half of Mangus upside down looking for us. And since they're already scouring the countryside between here and civilization for my theoretical accomplice, going outside the wall isn't going to be any safer. What's left?"
"If we're discovered here, it will be Trofts we'll have to fight," Akim said pointedly. "Will you be as effective a warrior against them as you would be against Obolo Nardin's men?"
Jin snorted, the image of her father battling the target robots in the MacDonald Center's Danger Room flashing through her mind. "We were designed to fight the Trofts, Miron Akim," she told him grimly.
"I see." Akim exhaled a thoughtful hiss. "I suppose it really is our best chance, then. All right, I'm ready."
"Yes, well, I'm not. First I've got to go back and get Daulo Sammon, remember?"
"I thought perhaps you'd changed your mind." Visibly, Akim braced himself. "All right, then. Tell me what you want me to do."
He didn't think much of the idea—that much was evident from the play of emotions across his face as she explained it. But he didn't waste any time arguing the point. Unlike Daulo, Akim didn't seem particularly disturbed by the thought of taking orders from a woman. Perhaps he'd had experience with female agents of the Shahni; perhaps it was simply that he knew better than to let pride get in the way of survival.
A moment later she was moving silently through the darkness toward the administrative center as, behind her, Akim pulled the cable back up. At least this time, Jin knew, she wouldn't have to worry about him leaving before she returned.
She hit the wall a little harder this time, rekindling the ache in her left knee. For a moment she hung by her fingertips, gritting her teeth tightly as she waited for the pain to subside.
"You all right?" Akim asked softly from half a meter in front of her.
"Yeah." Pulling herself up, she rolled onto her stomach facing Akim and took the end of the cable/rope from him. "Knee got hurt in the crash and hasn't totally recovered yet. How about you?"
"Fine. Any trouble?"
"Not really," Jin replied, trying not to pant. Even before that last leap over from the housing complex, the jog from Daulo's interrogation cell with the boy in fire-carry across her shoulder had worn her out far more than it should have. A bad sign; it implied she was getting too tired to give her servos as much of the load as they were capable of. "You were right about him being on the lowest level," she said as she began pulling Daulo up. "Obolo Nardin thoughtfully left a pair of guards outside his door to mark the spot for me."
"Did you kill them?"
Jin's cheek twitched. "I had to. One of them recognized me before I could get close enough."
Akim grunted. "They're all parties to treason. Don't forget that."
Jin swallowed. "Right. Anyway, I found Daulo Sammon strapped to a chair with a set of tubes in his arms and smoke curling around him from a censer under his chin."
"Was he alone?"
"No, but I was able to stun the interrogator without killing him. Okay, here he comes. I'll take his weight; you protect his head."
Between them, they got Daulo up on the wall, draping his limp body over it like a hunting trophy across an aircar rack. "Any idea what they might have used on him?" she asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as Akim peered closely at Daulo's slack face. The boy was so quiet...
Akim shook his head slowly. "There are too many possibilities." He took Daulo's wrist. "His heartbeat's slow, but it's steady enough. He should be able to simply sleep the drugs off."
"I hope you're right." Notching her light-amps to higher power, Jin gave the Troft side of the compound a quick scan. "Did you see any activity over there while I was gone?"
"No. Nor on the other side, either."
Jin nodded. "Hard to believe our escape still hasn't been noticed, but I suppose we should be grateful for small favors."
Akim snorted gently. "Perhaps Obolo Nardin expected his son to disobey the order about leaving you untouched."
"You're a cheery one," Jin growled, shivering. "Well, there's no point in postponing this. Watch his head again, will you, while I flip him over the side?"
A minute later Daulo was down, half lying and half slouching at the base of the wall. "Your turn," Jin told Akim. "Don't step on him."
"I won't. How will you get down?"
She felt her stomach tighten. "I'll have to jump," she said, trying not to think about what had happened the last time she'd tried that stunt. "Don't worry, I can manage it."
Akim's eyes were steady on her. "That last jump from the housing roof—you didn't make it by very much."
"I'm just getting a little tired. Look, we're wasting time."
He gazed at her another moment, then pursed his lips and nodded. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he wrapped it around the cable and held on there with both hands. Rolling off the wall top, he slid down to the ground in a military-style controlled fall. Waving once to her, he knelt and began to untie Daulo from the cable.
This is it. Dropping her end of the cable to fall beside Akim, Jin lowered herself over the edge to hang by her fingertips. Knees slightly bent, she set her teeth and let go. The ground jumped up to meet her—
And she clamped down hard on her tongue as a hot spike jabbed up through her left knee.
"Jasmine Moreau!" Akim hissed, dropping to the ground beside her.
"I'm all right," she managed, blinking back tears of pain as she lay on her back clutching her knee. "Just give me a minute."
It was closer to three minutes, in fact, before she was finally able to get to her feet again. "Okay," she breathed. If she consciously turned over to her servos the job of keeping her upright... "I'm fine now."
"I'll carry Daulo Sammon," Akim said in a voice that allowed for no argument.
"Okay by me," Jin said, wincing as she eased back down to a sitting position. "I'll let you carry the cable, too, if you don't mind. But first we have to figure out how we're going to get into that ship."
Akim looked over at it. "Security systems?"
"Undoubtedly." Jin adjusted her enhancers to a combination telescopic/light-amp and made a slow sweep of the unloading tower nestled up to the ship's stern. "Looks like the twin horns of a sonic motion-detector over the doorway there," she told Akim. "As well as a—let me see—yes; there's also an infrared laser sweep covering the loading ramp and a fifteen-meter wedge of ground in front of it."
"What about that one?" Akim asked, pointing at the maintenance building. "The one the craft's nose is buried in."
"Probably something similar." Jin glanced back along the wall behind them. "More motion detectors and monitor cameras over the gateway to the other half of Mangus. A reasonably layered intruder defense."
"Can you defeat it?"
"If you mean can I destroy it, sure. But not without setting off a dozen alarms in the process."
"Well, then, what can you do?"
Jin gnawed at her lip. "It looks like our only chance will be to approach the ship from the side. If I can get on top of it, there'll probably be a way to get through the coupling between the unloading tower and the ship proper."
Akim considered that. "That almost sounds too easy. Except for a demon warrior, of course."
"No, their security wasn't planned with demon warriors in mind," Jin said dryly. "On the other hand, they haven't been totally stupid, either. You can't see it, but for about thirty meters out from the side of the ship there's a crisscross infrared laser pattern running a few centimeters off the ground."
"Can you see it well enough?"
"Seeing it isn't what I'm worried about. The problem is that the pattern of crisscrosses changes every few seconds."
Surprisingly, Akim chuckled. "What's so funny?" Jin growled.
"Your Trofts," he said, the chuckle becoming a snort of derision. "It's nice to know they're neither omniscient nor even very clever. That laser system is a Qasaman one."
"What?" Jin frowned.
"Yes indeed. Perhaps Obolo Nardin deliberately gave it to them to keep a little extra control over the bargain."
"Meaning there's a weakness in the system?" Jin asked, heart starting to beat a little faster.
"There is indeed." He pointed toward the ship. "The pattern changes randomly, as you noted; but there are between three and six one-meter-square places in every system of this sort where the lasers never touch."
"Really?" Jin looked back at the ship. "Doesn't that sort of negate the whole purpose?"
"There's a reason behind it," Akim said, a bit tartly. "It gives those using the system places to mount monitor cameras or remote weapons. The gaps are normally set far enough back from the edge to be useless to the average invader... but of course, you're hardly an average invader."
"Point." Bracing herself, Jin eased to her feet. A flicker of pain lanced through her knee as she did so; she tried hard to ignore it. "Okay. Wait here until you see me wave to you from the top of the tower ramp over there. Don't move until then, understand?—I don't want you wandering into range of the detectors by mistake before I figure out how to shut them down."
"Understood." Akim hesitated. "Good luck, Jasmine Moreau."
Akim had been right: the gaps were indeed there, though she had to spend a few tense minutes out in the open watching the lasers go through their paces before she had all four of the spots identified. The pattern led like meandering steppingstones back toward the ship itself, with distances between them that under normal conditions would have been child's play for her. But with her knee the way it was, it wasn't going to be nearly that easy.
But then, it wasn't as if she had any real choice in the matter. Clenching her teeth, she jumped.
Akim had said the gaps would be a meter square each; to Jin they'd looked a lot smaller. But they were big enough. Pausing just long enough at each point to regain her balance and set up the next leap, she bounded like a drunken kangaroo through the detection field. The second-to-last jump took her to within three meters of the ship's hull; the last took her to the top of the stubby swept-forward wing.
For a long minute she crouched there, watching and listening and waiting for her knee to stop throbbing. Then, standing up again, she made her way aft along the wing, passing over the blackened rim of the starboard drive nozzle to the forward edge of the unloading tower.
The tower, like the ship, was of Troft manufacture, and the two had clearly been designed to mate closely together. But "closely" was a relative term, and as she approached it Jin could see that the metal of the tower proper gave way to a flexible rubberine tunnel half a meter from the entryway cover. Rubberine was inexpensive, flexible, and weatherproof, but it had never been designed to withstand laser fire. A minute later, Jin had sliced a person-sized flap in the soft material; a minute after that, she was inside the tower.
Inside the tower... and standing on the threshold of a Troft ship.
The emotional shock of it hit her all at once, and her mouth was dry as she stepped through the vestibule-like airlock into the ship. Inside a Troft ship, she thought, a shiver running up her back as she paused in the center of the long alien corridor. A Troft ship... with Trofts aboard?
Her stomach tightened, and she held her breath, keying her auditory enhancers to full power. But the ship might have been a giant tomb for all the activity she could detect. All of them ashore? she wondered. It seemed foolish... but on the other hand, if Troft shipboard life was anything like what she'd experienced on the way to Qasama, the crew was unlikely to spend their nights here by choice. And if there were only two or three duty officers aboard, they'd probably be all the way forward in the command module.
It was a good theory, anyway, and for now it would have to do. Returning to the airlock, she went back out into the loading tower.
She'd half feared the controls to the approach-detection system would have been routed to the command module, but it turned out the Trofts had elected convenience over extra security. All those long hours of catertalk classes were paying off now; scanning the labeled switches, she figured out the procedure and shut off the system.
Akim was on his feet against the wall, Daulo already hoisted onto his back, when she stepped out into the cool night air and waved. He headed toward her at a brisk jog, and a minute later had reached the ramp. "Is it clear?" he hissed as he started up.
"Far as I can tell," she whispered back. "Come on—I don't want the security system to be off any longer than it has to be."
A handful of heartbeats and he was beside her. "Where to now?" he puffed, pulling back from her attempt to take Daulo's weight from him.
"Forward, I think, at least a little ways," she told him. "We need to find an empty storeroom or something where we won't be getting any company."
"All right," he nodded. His eyes bored into hers. "And when we're settled and have time to talk, you can tell me exactly why you came to Qasama."
The confrontation was fortunately postponed a few minutes by the necessity of covering their trail. Switching the motion detectors back on was the work of five seconds; trying to seal the hole Jin had made in the rubberine took considerably longer and with far less success. She was able to use her lasers to fuse the edges back together, but the procedure left shiny streaks that stood out all too well against the duller background material. Roughing up the shiny parts with her fingernails helped some, but not enough, and eventually she gave up the effort. As Akim pointed out, anyone coming in through the tunnel would probably be more concerned with his footing than with watching the walls, anyway.
The ship was still quiet as they started down the long central corridor. Jin had hoped to hide them in an empty storeroom where they could be assured of privacy, but it was quickly apparent that that plan would have to be altered. Most of the rooms they found along their way were locked down, and the few that were open still had a fair assortment of scancoded boxes guardwebbed to walls and floor. Akim pointed out at one stop that even with the boxes there was enough room for the three of them; Jin countered with the reminder that the Trofts would probably be coming in to continue their unloading in the morning.
So they kept going. Finally, in the forward part of the main cargo/engineering section, just aft of the ship's long neck, they found an unlocked pumping room with enough floor space for at least two of them to lie down comfortably at the same time. "This ought to do, at least for now," Jin decided, glancing around the vacant corridors one last time before shutting the door behind them. "Let me give you a hand with Daulo."
"I've got him," Akim said, lowering the youth to a limp sitting position against one wall. "Is there a light we can turn on?"
The glow filtering in from the corridor was enough for Jin's light-amps to work with. Locating the switch, she turned on the room's wall-mounted lights. "We shouldn't leave them on long," she warned Akim.
"I understand," Akim nodded, giving the room a quick once-over.
"Do you see anything we can use as a pillow?" Jin asked, lowering herself carefully to the deck beside Daulo.
Akim shook his head. "His shoes will do well enough, though." Stooping down, he removed Daulo's shoes and leaned awkwardly over the unconscious youth.
"I can do that," Jin offered, reaching over.
"I'm all right," Akim said tartly, avoiding her hands. The motion threw him off balance, and he had to drop one hand to the deck to catch himself.
"Miron Akim—"
"I said I was all right," he snapped.
"Fine," Jin snapped back, suddenly fed up with it all.
Akim glared up at her as he slipped the shoes beneath Daulo's head. "You'd be advised to show more respect, offworlder," he growled, moving back and sitting down across the room from her.
"I save my respect for those who've earned it," Jin shot back.
For a long moment he and Jin eyed each other in brittle silence. Then Jin took a deep breath and sighed. "Look... I'm sorry, Miron Akim. I realize my personality grates against your sensibilities, but right now I'm just too tired to try and fit into the normal Qasaman mold."
Slowly the anger faded from Akim's face. "Our worlds would have been enemies even without the razorarms, wouldn't they?" he said quietly. "Our cultures are just too different for us to ever understand each other."
Jin closed her eyes briefly. "I'd like to think neither of our societies is that rigid. Just because we're not the best of friends doesn't mean we have to be enemies, you know."
"But we are enemies," Akim said grimly. "Our rulers have shown it in their words; your rulers have shown it in their actions." He hesitated. "Which makes it very hard for me to understand why you saved my life."
Jin eyed him. "Because you're not the Shahni and their thirty-year-old words, and I'm not the Aventinian Council and their thirty-year-old actions. You and I are right here—right now—facing a threat to Qasama that both of us want to stop. We are not enemies. Why shouldn't I save your life?"
Akim snorted. "That's a false argument. We're extensions of our rulers—no more, no less. If our rulers are at war, we are, too."
Jin chewed at her lip. "All right, then. If I'm such a threat to Qasama, why didn't you call Obolo Nardin's men while I was off rescuing Daulo Sammon?"
The question seemed to take Akim by surprise. "Because they would have killed me along with you, of course."
"So? Aren't you supposed to be willing to die for the good of your world? I am."
"But then—" Akim stopped.
"But then what?" Jin prompted him. "But then the threat Mangus represents would remain hidden?"
Akim's lip twisted. "You're subtler than I'd thought," he said. "You fight me with my own words."
"I'm not trying to fight you," Jin shook her head wearily. "Not verbally or any other way. I'm simply trying to point out that you're doing exactly what you're supposed to: you've evaluated the potential threats to Qasama, you've figured out which of those threats is the most immediate, and you're throwing every weapon you possess at it." She smiled wryly. "At the moment, I'm one of those weapons."
He smiled, too, almost unwillingly. "And I one of yours?" he countered.
She shrugged. "I could hardly stop Obolo Nardin on my own, even if I wanted to. Besides, he's one of your people. Dealing with him should be your business."
"True." Akim glanced around at the metal walls surrounding them. "Though dealing with him from here may prove difficult."
"Don't worry, we'll get out all right," Jin assured him. "Remember, Obolo Nardin seems to be very big on mind-expander drugs, which means he'll be thinking about this very logically. If we aren't in his half of Mangus—and he'll be able to confirm that pretty quickly—then he'll have to assume we got out somehow. It's a solid fifty kilometers back to Azras and we're on foot, so he knows we can't possibly be there before midday tomorrow—today, I mean. Then we either have to contact the Shahni by phone—"
"Which he would know about instantly."
"Right. And since he knows we know about his rigged phone system, he knows we'll have to try something else instead." And now came the crucial question. Jin braced herself, trying to keep her voice casual. "So. Are there any radio systems in use on Qasama? Big ones, I mean, not like the little short-range things the Sammon family uses inside their mine."
She held her breath; but if he noticed anything odd in her voice or face he didn't show it. "The SkyJo combat helicopters have radios," he said thoughtfully. "But the nearest ones we could get to are in Sollas."
Her heart skipped a beat. "There aren't any at Milika?" she asked carefully. "I'd assumed your people would come in by helicopter when you heard about the supply pod."
"We did, but those SkyJos have since been sent into the forest to guard your spacecraft's wreckage."
Jin began to breathe again. "I see. And of course, Obolo Nardin will know all that," she said, getting back on the logic of her argument. "So he'll know that we'll have to go all the way to Sollas to find any kind of assault force to hit him with. How far is that by car?"
"Several hours. And more time after that to assemble a force and get it back here, especially since we can't use the phone system. Yes, I see now where you're heading. You think Obolo Nardin will feel secure enough not to panic and begin destroying evidence of his treason?"
"Not for at least the next half day, no. Face it; he's got too much to lose if he cuts and runs when he doesn't have to. Not to mention the fact that if he pulls up stakes here he also loses his best chance of finding us before we can talk. I doubt he'd do that without a specific and imminent threat swooping down toward him." She shrugged. "Now, if another day goes by without him catching up with us, then he probably will start worrying. But by then his search parties ought to either be back home or spread out too thin to bother us. And Daulo Sammon will hopefully be back on his feet, too."
Akim looked down at Daulo. "I hate the thought of hiding here while Obolo Nardin has full freedom to operate," he admitted candidly. "The damage he could do to Qasama... but I also see nothing better for us to do."
"Well, if something occurs to you, please don't hesitate to speak up," Jin told him. "I might have more of this tactical military training than you do, but you know the planet far better than I ever will."
He grimaced. "Most of it, perhaps. But apparently not enough. Tell me, how did your people discover Obolo Nardin's treason?"
Jin snorted gently. "They didn't. They knew there was something wrong with Mangus, but they got their conclusions almost completely backwards."
She described the satellite blackouts and the missile-test theory the Qasama Monitor Center had come up with. "Interesting," Akim said when she'd finished. "I hope you aren't suggesting the Trofts have given Obolo Nardin advanced weapons, too."
"No, I don't think they'd do anything like that," Jin shook her head. "Trofts never give anything away for free, and certainly not to a human society that's still considered a threat. They'll be keeping a very tight control over what Obolo Nardin gets, and any technology that could conceivably be used against them won't be on the list."
"Hence the security around this ship," Akim nodded. There was an odd note of disappointment in his voice. "Yes, I suppose they would be careful about such things. I take it that it wasn't Obolo Nardin who was knocking out your satellites, then?"
"No, it was the Trofts playing games with them. Trivial to do, too, from close range. They probably sneaked up behind the one they needed to knock out and left a remote chase satellite slaved in orbit to it. That way they could remotely arrange blackouts to cover both landing and liftoff and still leave no hard evidence of tampering when our ships came by to pick up the recordings."
Akim snorted gently. "Yes, your ships. Odd. We've watched them come by for many years, Jasmine Moreau. In the early days we prepared for attack each time we spotted one, wondering if this would be the one that would bring warriors down to the surface. Then we discovered the satellites, and began correlating your ships' movements against them, and realized what you were actually doing. But still we watched... and two weeks ago, when the long-expected invasion actually came, we missed it entirely." He eyed her. "I trust you appreciate the irony of it."
Jin shivered. "I gave up on irony when my companions were killed."
His expression was almost sympathetic. "We didn't shoot your spacecraft down, Jasmine Moreau," he said quietly.
"I know."
"The Trofts?"
She nodded. "You appreciate irony, Miron Akim? Try this one: given that they never came out to investigate, I don't think they even knew who and what they'd hit."
He frowned. "They attacked without knowing what they were attacking?"
"It was probably some kind of automated hunter/seeker missile patrolling the airspace, programmed to hit anything flying too close to Mangus. We must have just happened to arrive at the same time one of their ships was landing or lifting; they surely wouldn't have missiles flying around the area all the time."
"Uncontrolled weapons." Akim spat. "And they consider themselves civilized, no doubt."
Jin nodded. "There are things Trofts won't do... but some of the things they will do are pretty disgusting. We'll have to try and scramble the controls for launching the missiles before we leave the ship or any helicopters you send will be shot out of the sky before they get past Purma."
"Shall we go do that now?"
Jin glanced down at Daulo's slack face. "No. There'll probably be Trofts on duty on the bridge, and we don't want to risk starting anything right now. Tomorrow night, when Daulo Sammon's recovered and you and I have caught up on our sleep, we'll give it a try."
Akim stifled a yawn. "All right. Should one of us stand watch?"
Jin shook her head. "Just lie down against the door, if you don't mind. As long as we're alerted the second anyone tries to get in, I'll be able to deal with them."
"What about you?" Akim asked, sliding across the floor to parallel the door. "There's not really enough room for all of us to lie down."
"Don't worry about me," Jin yawned. "I used to sleep sitting up all the time when I was a girl. I should be able to recover the technique."
"Well... all right." Reaching to his feet, Akim pulled off his shoes and slid them beneath his head as he stretched out on his back against the door. "But if you have trouble sleeping, let me know and we can trade off partway through the night."
"I'll do that," Jin promised. "Thank you, Miron Akim. Goodnight."
For a moment his dark eyes bored into hers. "Goodnight, Jasmine Moreau."
Reaching up, Jin flicked off the light. The room fell silent, and for a long while she just sat there in the darkness, feeling utterly drained in body, mind, and spirit. Two weeks, Akim had said, since Jin's "invasion" had begun. Two weeks, now, she'd been marooned on this world.
And with an almost shocking suddenness, the end of it was upon her.
With an effort of will, Jin activated her optical enhancers and looked over at Akim. His eyes were closed, his body limp, his breathing slow and steady. Sleeping the sleep of the righteous. And why not? she thought, almost resentfully. After all, she'd done her best to convince him that there was nothing for them to do but sleep for the next half day or more. This was the eye of the storm, the lull before embarking on what he surely knew would be a long and perilous journey to Azras to sound the alarm.
Except that, with any luck at all, it wouldn't be.
Two weeks. Eight days for the Southern Cross, six days for the Dewdrop. Fourteen Aventinian days were... Briefly, she tried to make the conversion to Qasama days, but her brain wasn't up to it and she gave up the effort. It was close, though; the two planets' rotation periods didn't differ by more than an hour or so.
Which meant that the rescue team could be here almost any time.
We'll listen for your call at local sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight, Captain Koja's supply pod message had said. If you can't signal, we'll come down and find you.
How long would they wait before landing and beginning a full-scale search? Not more than a day, surely. Especially once they confirmed that the shuttle's crash site was being guarded by military helicopters. Twelve hours in orbit, no more, and they'd be coming down.
And when they did...
Jin shivered. We aren't enemies, she'd told Akim. And she'd meant it. Whether he liked it or not, they really were allies in this battle to tear Obolo Nardin's sticky fingers off Qasama. The landing team, though, was unlikely to see things that way.
Which meant she had to get in touch with them before they landed. Probably within the next day. Almost certainly before it was safe for Akim and Daulo to leave.
Her stomach knotted at the thought. What would they think, she wondered uneasily, when she abandoned them here tomorrow evening and made her solitary escape from Mangus? Would they understand that all this really hadn't been a cold-blooded scheme to trap them here out of her way? Would they believe her when she repeated that this was still the safest place for them to wait for their own reinforcements to arrive?
And would either understand if she had to kill someone in order to get access to one of those helicopter radios out at the shuttle crash site?
Probably not. But ultimately, it didn't much matter. Whether they understood or not, it was something she had to do. As much for Qasama's safety as for her own.
With a sigh, she turned off her optical enhancers and tried to sink into the darkness surrounding her. Eventually, she succeeded.
She woke abruptly, and for a moment just sat there in the darkness, heart thudding in her ears as her fogged brain tried to figure out what it was that had startled her so thoroughly out of a deep sleep. Then it clicked, and she surged to her feet, stifling a groan as pain lanced through sleep-stiffened joints and muscles.
"What is it?" Akim hissed.
"Trouble," Jin told him grimly, keying in her optical enhancers. Akim was sitting up now, a hand dabbing at his eyes as he grabbed his shoes; Daulo was still stretched out in sleep. "That deep drone you can hear sounds very much like a pre-flight engine test."
Akim's eyes widened. "A what?" he demanded, jamming his shoes on and scrambling to his feet.
"A pre-flight engine test," she repeated, squatting down beside Daulo and shaking his shoulder. "Daulo Sammon?—come on, wake up."
"What time is it, anyway?" Akim asked. His groping hand found her arm, squeezed with painful force.
"Take it easy," she growled, shrugging off his hand and checking her nanocomputer's clock circuit. The readout stunned her: they'd been aboard the ship barely seven hours. "Only about mid-morning," she said.
"Mid-morning? But you said—"
He was interrupted by a sudden gasp from Daulo. "Who is it?" he croaked.
"Shh!" Jin cautioned him. "Relax—it's Jasmine Moreau and Miron Akim. How do you feel?"
He paused, visibly working moisture into his mouth. "Strange. God above, but those were bad dreams."
"Some of them may not have been dreams," Jin told him. "Do you feel up to traveling?"
Clenching his teeth, Daulo pushed himself into a sitting position, a brief spasm flicking across his face. "I'm a little dizzy, but that's all. I think I'll be all right if we don't have to go too far or too fast. Where are we, anyway?"
"Inside the Troft ship." Jin turned to Akim, noting with relief that he seemed to have recovered his balance. "I'm going to make a fast reconnoiter outside," she told him. "See if I can figure out just what's happening."
"I'll come with you," the other said.
"It might be better if you stayed here with—"
"I said I'll come with you."
Grimacing, Jin nodded. "All right. Daulo, you stay here and get all the kinks out of your muscles. We'll be back in a couple of minutes."
The corridor directly outside the door was deserted, though the sounds of activity coming from all directions indicated that that was probably a very temporary condition. "Where to?" Akim hissed in her ear as she stepped out.
"This way," she whispered back, leading the way back to the ship's central corridor. Glancing both ways along it, she started forward at a fast jog. "We need to find a room with a full-sweep monitor," she added as he caught up and matched her pace, "and most of those'll be in the neck and command module."
"You're certain?" he snarled. "As you were certain that Obolo Nardin wouldn't be reacting until tomorrow?"
She glanced back over her shoulder at his tightly hostile face. "So maybe I overestimated Obolo Nardin's nerve," she growled. "Or maybe the Trofts decided the odds of us getting recaptured weren't all that good and decided to offload and run before your people caught them here."
"Or maybe—"
And barely three meters ahead, a door slid open and a Troft stepped into the corridor.
The alien was fast, all right. His hand went instantly to the gun belted against his abdomen, closed on the grip—
And Jin leaped across the gap, one hand grabbing the gun to lock it in place as the other jabbed hard against the Troft's throat.
The alien dropped with no sound but a muffled clang. "Come on," Jin breathed to Akim, looking over at the door the alien had emerged from. Port drive monitor station, the catertalk symbols read. "Here we go," she muttered to Akim, and jabbed at the touchplate. The door slid open onto a roomful of flashing lights and glowing displays and a second Troft seated in a swivel chair in front of them.
The alien was just starting to turn around toward the door as she took a long step forward. It was doubtful he ever knew just what had hit him.
"Bring that other one in," Jin whispered to Akim, glancing around to make sure there was no one else in the room. Akim already had the unconscious Troft halfway through the door, leaning over to throw one last look each way before he let the panel slide closed. "Are they dead?" he asked, letting the limp form drop to the deck with a shudder.
"No," she assured him. "They'll be out of action for at least an hour, though. Better leave that alone," she added as Akim gingerly picked up the Troft's laser. "Those are extremely nasty weapons, and I don't have time to teach you how to use it properly. Right now you'd be as likely to damage yourself with it as shoot anyone else."
Reluctantly, he let the laser drop onto the Troft's torso, and Jin turned her attention to the control boards. Somewhere here had to be... there it was: Monitor camera selection. Now if she could find a camera that covered the rear loading hatchway, or even outside... there. "Here goes," she said, tentatively touching the switch.
The central display shifted to a fisheye view that seemed to be coming from somewhere near the starboard drive nozzle. At one edge was a corner of the loading tower's ramp; at the other was the gateway to the human half of the Mangus compound. In the center about a dozen people were running motorized load carriers both ways between the gateway and the ship.
Akim spotted it first. "They're not unloading," he said abruptly. "The carriers leaving the ship are empty—see?"
"Yeah," Jin agreed, stomach tightening into a hard knot. "Damn. Perhaps you were right after all, Miron Akim. Obolo Nardin's apparently packing his alien gadgetry onto the ship and deserting Mangus."
Akim swore under his breath. "We can't let him escape," he said. "With those alien computers he'll be able to set up somewhere else in the Great Arc and continue his treason."
"I know." For a half dozen heartbeats Jin watched the display, trying to think. "All right," she said at last. "Wait here; I'm going back to get Daulo Sammon."
"And then what? Everyone out there is armed; and even if we could get past them all, there's still no way we could call for reinforcements in time."
"I know." Stepping to the door, she slid it open and glanced out. Again, no one was in sight. "We'll have to do something else. Like take over the ship."
Daulo was waiting when she reached the pumping room, pacing restlessly around the cramped space. "What's going on?" he demanded as she slipped back into the room.
"It looks like Obolo Nardin's preparing to leave," she told him, giving him a quick once-over. "How are you feeling?"
"I can make it. What do you mean, leaving?"
"Just what I said. He's got his people loading stuff onto this ship right now."
"And the aliens aren't stopping him?"
"Hardly. They're helping him. Shh!"
A double set of hurrying footsteps passed by out in the corridor. "But how are we going to get off before they leave?" Daulo hissed.
"We're not." The corridor was quiet again. Sliding it open a crack, Jin looked out. "Okay, looks clear. If we meet any Trofts, let me handle them."
They slipped out and headed forward. "Where are they all?" Daulo hissed, glancing around as they jogged.
"A lot of them are probably in the stern, helping with the loading," Jin murmured back. "Most of the rest will be busy back in the engineering rooms or up front in the command module."
The latter being where they were headed. It didn't seem a good idea to worry him with that.
They reached the port drive monitor station without incident, collected Akim, and continued on. "Stay at my sides," Jin warned the two men as they neared the end of the neck. "If I have to shoot it'll probably be straight ahead or behind, and I don't want you getting in the way."
They left the neck and entered the flat-steeple command module beyond it. Jin had been braced for an immediate battle; to her mild surprise, again there was no one in sight. "How many aliens are we going to be up against?" Akim muttered.
"Probably thirty to fifty in a ship this size," Jin told him, trying to remember what little she knew about Troft ship layouts. The bridge ought to be near the top of the command module, just below the sensor blister. A collision door slid open at their approach—
And they found themselves in a spacious monitor intersection.
It was a design, Jin remembered, peculiar to Troft ships. A circular area seemingly carved out of the intersection of two major corridors, its walls were covered by monitor screens and displays. In its center, a wide spiral stair led to the level above. "I think we're here," Jin murmured to the others. "Now stay behind me and—"
"Stop, humans!" a flat, mechanical voice shouted in Qasaman from behind them.
Jin spun around, dropping into a crouch at the base of the stairway and shoving Akim and Daulo to either side. A flash of light and heat sliced the air above her, and an instant later her nanocomputer had thrown her in a flat dive to the side. She rolled up onto her right hip, left leg sweeping toward the Troft as he swung his own weapon toward her. She won the race, barely, and the corridor lit up with the blaze of her antiarmor laser. She was on her feet in an instant, sprinting back to the stairway. "Follow me up," she snapped at Akim and Daulo, leaping onto the stairs and starting up them five at a time. Whoever was up there couldn't possibly have missed hearing the ruckus, and she had to get to them before they sealed off the bridge.
And for one heart-stopping second it looked like she was going to be too late. Even as she came around the last turn of the staircase she looked up to see a heavy blast hatch starting to swing down over the opening.
Her knees straightened convulsively, hurling her in a desperate leap straight up. Her hands caught the rim of the opening, barely in time—
And she gasped with pain as the rubberine rim of the hatch slammed down on her fingers.
For a long second she hung there, vision wavering with the agony in her hands, mind frozen with the realization that she was completely and utterly helpless. The triggers to her fingertip lasers were out of reach, her sonics useless with a metal hatch blocking them, her antiarmor laser impossible for her to aim. Servo strength... Pressing upward with the back of one hand did nothing but send a fresh wave of pain through her fingers like an electric shock—
Electric shock!
Her mind seemed to catch gears again; and, gritting her teeth, she fired her arcthrower.
There was no way to tell if the random lightning bolt actually hit anything; but the thunder was still echoing in her ears when the pressure on her hands abruptly eased a little. Again she shoved upward, and this time it worked. Arm servos whining against the strain, the hatch swung open; simultaneously, she pulled down hard on her other hand, launching herself up and through the opening.
They were waiting for her—or, rather, those who hadn't been leaning on the hatch in the path of the arcthrower blast were waiting for her—but it was clear they didn't really understand what it was they were facing. Even as she shot out of the hatchway like a cork from a bottle, the room flashed with light as a crisscross of laser fire sliced through the air beneath her.
There were five of them in all, and they never got a chance to correct their aim. Jin reached the top of her arc, head coming perilously close to banging against the ceiling, and her left leg swung around in a tight crescent curve across the crouching Trofts, antiarmor laser spitting with deadly accuracy.
By the time she landed, stumbling, on the deck, it was all over.
For a moment she just sagged there, teeth clenched against the throbbing pain in her fingers. The ceramic-laminated bones were effectively unbreakable, but the skin covering them had no such protection, and it was already turning black and blue with massive bruising.
"Is it all right?" a muffled voice called tentatively from behind her.
She turned to see Akim poke his head cautiously over the level of the deck. "Yeah," she grunted. "Come on, hurry up. We've got to close this place off."
Akim came all the way in, followed closely by Daulo. "What happened to your hands?" Daulo asked sharply, stepping forward to take one of them.
"They tried to slam the door on us. Never mind that; you two get that hatch closed and sealed, all right?"
They moved to obey, and she moved past the line of smoldering Troft bodies to give the control boards a quick scan. A dull thud from behind her signaled the closing of the hatch, and a moment later Akim stepped to her side. "I don't hear anything that sounds like an alarm," he commented quietly. "Is it possible they didn't have time to call for help before they died?"
Jin frowned at one of the displays, which was showing the same outside scene she and Akim had watched earlier from the port drive monitor station. She wouldn't have thought it possible... but on the other hand, this craft was clearly built more along the lines of a small freighter than a warship. If there hadn't been laser alarms built into the corridors, perhaps there weren't any on the bridge, either. "It looks like they didn't," she agreed, gesturing to the display. "They're certainly not showing any signs of panic out there."
"Which means we have some time," Akim nodded. "That's something, at least."
"Only if we move fast," Jin said grimly. "I doubt that hatch will hold them for very long once they realize what's happened." A vague, half-formed plan was beginning to take shape in her mind... and unfortunately, she wasn't going to have enough time to work out all the details in advance. "You two stay here; I'll be back as soon as I can."
"Where are you going?" Akim frowned, his voice dark with suspicion.
"To try and put a wrench into Obolo Nardin's plans. Seal the hatch after me, and don't open it again until I signal—three knocks, two knocks, four knocks; got it?" She turned back toward the hatch... paused at the odd expression on Daulo's face. "You all right?" she asked.
He tried twice before he got the words out. "You shot them down in cold blood."
She glanced down at the dead Trofts. "It was self defense, Daulo Sammon," she bit out. "Our lives or theirs, pure and simple."
But the words sounded strangely hollow in her ears; and even through the agony in her hands she could feel a twinge of guilt. Her grandfather, in very similar circumstances, had only destroyed his enemies' weapons... "And anyway," she snarled abruptly, turning her back on him, "whoever's running this operation needs a good object lesson. They're going to learn that fiddling around with human beings' lives is a damn costly proposition."
She stepped to the hatch and unsealed it. Or, rather, tried to. But her fingers seemed dead on her hands, and Daulo had to come over and do it for her. "Can you tell us what you're planning?" he asked quietly.
"I'm going to try and short-circuit Obolo Nardin's escape route." She paused for a moment, listening. If anyone was in the monitor intersection, he was keeping quiet about it. "I'll be back as soon as I can."
The monitor intersection was still deserted, but Jin knew it wouldn't be that way for long. Slipping through the collision door, she left the command module and headed aft down the neck, taking long loping strides that gave adequate speed while still allowing her time between steps to listen.
She was about halfway down the neck when she heard approaching footsteps, and she risked taking another two strides before ducking into one of the rooms lining the corridor. Standing just inside, her ear pressed against the door, she listened as four Trofts hurried past. Have they realized they've got intruders on their bridge? she wondered uneasily. But it wasn't a question she could afford to dwell on. Daulo and Akim wouldn't have been any safer anywhere else... and anyway, the Trofts would surely try to get their bridge back intact before resorting to anything violent.
She waited until the footsteps had faded completely before opening the door and slipping out. Luck continued to be with her, and she reached the end of the neck without encountering any more Trofts. She stepped from of the neck into the large cargo/engineering section with a sigh of relief—here, at least, she would have room to maneuver if it came to a fight. And with many of the Trofts presumably working back here...
She paused as a sudden idea struck her. Interfering with the loading back there was all well and good... but if she could cut down the opposition at the same time...
She retraced her steps to the base of the ship's neck. Sure enough, the edge of a blast door was visible right where the cargo/engineering section began. The manual control for it had to be nearby... there. Hauling on the lever, she watched as the heavy metal disk slid silently across the corridor, cutting her off from the front of the ship. If the door was connected to an automatic alarm...
But no sirens or horns went off. Must be tied into the decompression sensors instead, she decided, looking for a way to seal the door. There was of course no lock; but she still seemed to be unobserved, and a two-second burst from her antiarmor laser did an adequate job of spot-welding it. The welds wouldn't hold longer than a half-hour or so, even if they were trying not to completely destroy the door in the process. But if she was lucky, a half-hour would be all they'd need.
She continued on into the cargo/engineering section, switching from the main corridor to a smaller—and hopefully less traveled—parallel one. Staying alert, she headed back toward the aft entryway and the loading tower there.
With voices and drones and clangings coming from all around her, her audio enhancers were all but useless; but even so, she heard the Trofts well before she saw them. They were talking, and with all the noise around them they were talking loudly, and for a moment Jin hung back behind a corner and listened.
[—not allow them to board yet,] one voice was saying. [The Commander, he does not want them aboard until all equipment has been loaded.]
[The isolation area, it is ready,] a second voice objected. [The humans, they would be out of our way if they were there.]
[More equipment, it must yet be brought to the ship,] the first said.
[The loading, we could handle it more efficiently alone.]
[The equipment to come, much of it is beyond the wall. Would you have the humans there see us?]
The second Troft gave a piercing, almost ultrasonic bray of laughter. [Why not? Their mythos, does it not allow for the existence of demons?]
The first alien didn't echo the laughter. [A risk, it is not worth taking,] he said sternly. [Return to your post. The humans, inform them that anything still beyond the wall in fifteen minutes will not be loaded.]
Jin licked her lips, setting her mind into full combat mode. Clearly, the Trofts weren't wildly enthusiastic about having their Qasaman clients aboard their ship, and while that was good for long-term plans, it did nothing for the upcoming near-term confrontation. The Troft outside the port drive monitor station had drawn on her without challenge or question; she had no intention of letting the ones back here do likewise. Setting her teeth, she stepped out from around the corner.
Just in time to see the two Trofts turn a corner of their own back toward the noise and commotion at the airlock.
She breathed a quiet sigh of relief and hurried after them... and was just two steps from the main corridor when the thin wail of an alarm abruptly split the air all around her.
The bridge? Or the welded blast door? She had no way of knowing which the Trofts had discovered... but it didn't much matter. Either way, her short grace period was over. Increasing her stride, she swung around the corner—
And skidded to a halt a bare three meters from a scene of chaos.
The rubberine tunnel she'd burned a flap in barely eight hours ago had become a bottleneck of activity, with a half dozen humans, an equal number of Trofts, and several equipment-laden load carriers all traffic-jammed together. The reason for at least part of the congestion was obvious: like a bucket brigade with a single node, the humans were bringing the equipment to the airlock and then passing it on to Trofts to haul into the ship proper.
And as she stopped every eye in the cramped space swung around to lock solidly onto her.
[You!—halt and identify yourself,] one of the nearer Trofts called toward her, his hand swinging toward his belted pistol. "You!" the Qasaman translation boomed from his translator pin an instant later. "Stop where—" And the rest was swallowed up in the thunderclap as her arcthrower hurled a lightning bolt into one of the boxes of equipment lying against the airlock wall.
Someone gave a choking scream; someone else cursed violently. Then all was silent, save for the wail of the alarm in the background.
The six Trofts were all armed, as were one or two of the Qasamans. But no one made any move toward a weapon. No one made any move at all, in fact... and as Jin gazed back into their frozen faces she realized why. They all finally understood what it was they were facing.
It would be easy to kill them all. A single swift crescent kick with her left leg, and her antiarmor laser would cut through them like a blazing knife. And it was surely the tactically intelligent thing to do. It would lower the number of opponents facing her, increase the odds of her and Akim and Daulo getting out alive.
You shot them down in cold blood.
She ground her teeth... but the memory of Daulo's quiet horror at her handiwork was too vivid to ignore.
And the Trofts on the bridge had fired first. These people hadn't even drawn their guns.
Damn them all. "You Qasamans will leave the ship," she grated. "Now."
No one tried to be a hero; no one tried to argue the point. Those farthest back on the ramp turned and fled, and the others followed immediately, abandoning their load carriers where they were.
Jin's eyes flicked across the Trofts, their arm membranes stretched wide with shock, fear, or anger. Or possibly all three. [Your hands, you will place them on your heads,] she ordered in catertalk.
One of the aliens looked around at the others, his arm membranes rippling for a second before going rigid again. [But you are a female,] he said, clearly bewildered. [A cobra-warrior, you cannot be that as well.]
[One of many things you don't know about cobra-warriors, consider this one of them,] Jin told him. [You and your companions, you will obey my order.]
Slowly, reluctantly, the Troft raised his hands away from his weapon and placed them on his head. After a long second, the others did likewise.
Jin stepped sideways to the edge of the airlock. [You will go into the ship now,] she instructed them. [The loading of equipment, it is now at an end.]
The first alien looked at his companions, gave the Troft equivalent of a nod. Carefully, they filed past Jin into the main corridor. [What about the humans?] the first Troft asked as he joined them.
[Your dealings with them are ended.] Carefully, Jin backed through the airlock toward the loading tower, trying to watch the Trofts and still keep an eye on the ramp behind her.
[A promise, our demesne made them.]
[The promise, it is broken.] At her side now was the control plate for the airlock, and her eyes flicked over to it. The large emergency button was, as she'd expected, easy to identify. Bracing herself, she set her feet, jabbed the button with her elbow, and simultaneously leaped back out of the lock onto the entryway platform.
The outer lock slid shut at high speed, just barely in front of her face. The boom of it echoed in the rubberine tunnel—
And a flash of laser fire sliced through the rubberine and metal behind her.
Instantly, she dropped to her belly, twisting over to face down the ramp. A handful of Trofts were visible below, loping cautiously toward the tunnel with lasers drawn. She targeted them, her hands automatically starting to curve into firing position—
She hissed a curse as a stab of pain shot through the injured fingers, belatedly reminding her that the triggers of her fingertip lasers were out of normal reach. Another laser blast sizzled the air above her head; swiveling on her hip and shoulder, she pivoted her feet around to point down the ramp and fired her antiarmor laser.
Her left leg seemed to jump of its own accord, the nanocomputer guiding the blasts with deadly accuracy, and the laser fire from below abruptly ceased.
Though presumably only for the moment. There would be other Trofts down there, as well as armed humans; but with luck, all such opposition would be concentrated on the ship's starboard side, between the Troft housing complex and the gateway to the human half of Mangus. Swinging her leg back toward the airlock, she repeated the welding procedure she'd used a few minutes earlier on the interior blast door. Then, shifting her aim, she lasered a chunk out of the rubberine tunnel. Rolling to her feet, she threw a last quick look down the ramp and leaped through the hole onto the ship's portside wing.
The heat rising from the drive nozzle hit her like something solid as she ran across and past it. Keeping low, she kept going, sprinting forward along the wing. Directly ahead loomed the maintenance building, a familiar-looking rubberine collar molding itself around the last few meters of the ship's neck. To her right, the upper deck of the engineering/cargo section hid her from most of Mangus. To her left—
To her left, a large section of the outer wall had vanished.
It was obvious, of course, once she thought about it. The overhead canopy that hid the Trofts' presence here so well also blocked all normal landing approaches. Building a sliding door into the wall was the most straightforward response.
And from her point of view, a highly useful one. It meant that if she and the others were able to get out of the ship, they wouldn't have any walls to climb.
She reached the rubberine collar without any shots or shouts being directed at her. Once there, however, she realized she had a new problem. There was no gap between collar and ship she could get through, and while her antiarmor laser would make short work of the rubberine it would do so spectacularly enough to alert any Trofts inside the building to her presence out here. But with her fingertip lasers out of commission...
Pursing her lips, she knelt down, bringing one knee up and resting the third finger of her right hand on top of it. Straightening the little finger, she mentally crossed her fingers and pressed down on the third-finger nail with her left thumb.
Somehow, she'd always thought that the triggering mechanism depended on having the finger of the appropriate hand curled. Apparently, that wasn't true. This way was awkward, but it worked; and within a few seconds she had a ragged flap burned through the rubberine. Taking one last look behind her, she ducked through into the building.
She'd seen a starship maintenance facility on Aventine once, and this one seemed built along similar lines. The ship's command module—a standard Troft flat-steeple design, as near as she could tell from her perch—stuck out into the center of a huge bay, with movable stairways and ramps leading to the entryways and equipment access areas. Scaffolds and boom cranes lined the bay's walls, all of them retracted away from the ship now in preparation for the imminent lift.
A dozen Trofts were also visible, standing on the ramps or milling about the bay floor. All had weapons drawn, and all were clearly agitated.
And none of them had yet noticed her.
Jin permitted herself a grim smile. They were rattled, all right; rattled and almost totally unsure of what they were doing. But they're all armed, she warned herself. They're all armed, and there are a hell-and-crackling lot of them.
The reminder sobered the wave of adrenaline-spurred cockiness. Crouching lower, she licked dry lips and considered her next move.
Below and to her left, leading to the rear/port side of the command module, she could see the lower end of one of the movable stairways. It seemed unlikely that it would still be against the ship unless there were an open entryway at its upper end. It was also unlikely that it would have been left unguarded.
But it was the best chance she had; and she had to take it quickly, before the Trofts outside figured out where she'd gone and alerted the rest. If she could get just another few meters along the neck and reach the rear edge of the command module before one of the aliens below happened to look up—
She'd made barely two meters of that distance when the bay suddenly echoed to the sound of excited catertalk.
Jin cursed under her breath, straightening and shifting from a crouch to a flat-out run. A laser split the air in front of her, sending a wash of heat and light over her. Automatically, she closed her eyes against the purple blob now floating in front of them and shifted to optical enhancers. She reached her target spot; skidding to a halt, she twisted forty-five degrees to the side and jumped.
And soared over the rear port corner of the command module to land squarely on the entryway stairs.
For a second she fought for balance, throwing her hands out to the sides and hooking her thumbs onto the railings in a desperate attempt to keep from falling backwards down the steps. For that second she was a sitting duck... but once again, the Trofts arrayed against her had been taken by surprise. The alien standing at the head of the stairs in front of the entryway simply stood there, frozen in shock; he was still standing like that when Jin's antiarmor laser all but cut him in half.
Another second was all she got before the weapons around the room opened up again; but it was all she needed. Regaining her balance, she took the remaining steps in a single leap, and an instant later was loping down what she hoped was the right corridor to get her to the bridge.
The corridor was deserted; and ten meters later, she reached the monitor intersection beneath the bridge to discover why. Nearly twenty Trofts filled the intersection, grouped around the circular stairway as they watched two more at the top working on the hatch with a laser torch. They turned en masse as she skidded to a halt, twenty lasers tracking toward her—
And with a boom that rattled her own skull, Jin fired her sonic disrupter.
A multiple flash of laser fire lit up the room as a wedge-shaped group of the Trofts collapsed into folded heaps, twitching hands firing almost at random as they went down. Again Jin fired, twisting her torso to a new firing angle; and again, and again, clenching her teeth tightly against the backwash from the sonic and the scorching near misses from lasers only marginally under their owners' control. By the time the first victims had ceased their spasmodic firing, the last group was collapsing to the deck; by the time the last group lay still Jin was on the stairs, pounding on the hatch with the heel of her hand in the three/two/four code she'd left with Akim.
She finished, and waited. And waited... and as some of the Trofts beneath her began stirring again there was the sound of released catches above her and the hatch suddenly swung open.
"Jin!" Daulo gasped, eyes wide as he stared down at her. "Are you—?"
"I'm fine," she grunted. "Get out of my way, will you?—they'll be able to fire again any second now."
He stepped back hastily, and she leaped up the last steps into the bridge. Akim was waiting to the side, and she'd barely cleared the rim before he slammed the hatch back down again. "You came back," he said, squatting down to seal the catches.
"Didn't you think I would?" Jin countered. Suddenly her knees were going all wobbly; staggering over to one of the chairs, she collapsed into it.
Akim stepped over to her, eyes flicking down her body. "We'd thought you might go for help."
"Help from where?" Jin countered. "Didn't we agree that we couldn't even reach any of your people for several hours?" Her foot touched something metallic; leaning back, she spotted a row of five laser pistols beneath the panel. "You making a collection?" she asked.
"We thought it would be good to have all the weapons together," Daulo told her. "For when... we weren't sure you were coming back, you know."
"Why did you return?" Akim demanded. "Let me be honest: I don't want to share my death with an enemy of Qasama."
Jin took a deep breath, exhaled it raggedly. "With any luck, you won't have to. Has the Troft commander tried to communicate with you?"
"He wants us to surrender," Daulo put in from behind her, clearly fighting against a tremor in his voice. "He says we can't possibly win and that they don't want to kill us if they don't have to."
"I don't blame them," Jin nodded. "Especially since he'd probably wreck his bridge in the process." She leaned forward, studying the control panels before her.
Akim followed her gaze. "What exactly are you planning, Jasmine Moreau?" he asked. "Are you going to fly this spacecraft out of Mangus?"
Jin snorted. "Not a chance. I've never flown anything bigger than an aircar in my life, and this isn't the time to start." She paused, looking over her shoulder as a faint crackling sound wafted into the bridge. The sound was coming from the hatch.... "They're back again," she said, stomach tightening as she turned back to the controls. Somewhere here there had to be—
There it was. Taking a deep breath, Jin hunched forward and tentatively touched the switch. "What are you doing?" Akim demanded suspiciously.
"You remember, Miron Akim, how surprised we were that Obolo Nardin would panic this early?" she asked. The volume control... there. Microphone?... clipped to the wall over there. "We wondered why both he and the Trofts would throw away their listening ear when there couldn't possibly be any enemies on their way here yet?" she added, working the mike free of its clip and gripping it awkwardly between palm and thumb.
"I remember," Akim growled. "Are you leading up to giving us the answer?"
"I hope so." She took a deep breath. If she was wrong... Raising the mike to her lips, she touched the operating switch. "This is Jasmine Moreau," she said in Anglic. "Repeating, this is Jasmine Moreau. Please respond. This is Jasmine Moreau; please respond. This is Jasmine—"
And abruptly the board speaker boomed in reply. "This is Captain Koja; commanding the Dewdrop. We read you, Cobra Moreau, and we're ready to come down and pick you up."
It took Jin three tries to relax her throat enough to speak again. "Understood, Dewdrop," she managed at last. "I—" she glanced up to see Akim gazing darkly at her. "Please tie in your Qasaman language translator."
There was a slight pause from the other end. "Why?"
"I have some Qasamans here with me," Jin explained, switching back to their language herself. "I think they ought to be in on the discussion."
"Who are you talking to?" Akim demanded.
"An Aventinian ship," Jin told him. "Here to rescue me. Captain, are you still in orbit?"
"Yes." The word was Qasaman, the voice the artificial one of a translator program. "Where are you?—wait a minute, the head of the rescue team wants to get in on the conversation."
"Jin?" a familiar voice said in accented Qasaman... a voice fairly dripping with relief. "Jin, it's Dad. Are you all right?"
Jin felt her mouth drop open. "Dad! Yes, yes, I'm fine. You—but—"
"What, you didn't think I'd drop everything to come get my daughter back? Oh, God, Jin—look, where are you?"
"In that covered compound west of Azras—Mangus, they call it. Wait a minute, though, you can't come down just yet."
"Why not?"
"You might run into a hunter/seeker missile. Courtesy of the Trofts whose ship I'm talking to you from."
There was a long pause. "We were wondering how you'd gotten on this frequency," the Dewdrop translator said at last. "What in blazes are Trofts doing there?"
"At the moment, trying to get us out of their bridge so that they can airlift some Qasaman allies to safety."
"Allies? You mean the Trofts and Qasamans have made an alliance?"
"No, no, it's not that bad. There's nothing official about this; it was a private deal with some Qasaman thugs making a power play."
"A power play which may yet succeed," Akim muttered.
Jin glanced up at him. "Yeah, right. The problem, Dad, is that we've got to find a safe passage out of here for the three of us and at the same time make sure Mangus's owners don't get away before the Qasaman rulers can deal with them."
"Now, wait a minute, Jin," Justin said cautiously. "We'll get you and your friends out, certainly, but the rest of it sounds like internal politics. Nothing we ought to get involved with."
Jin took a deep breath. "We're already involved, Dad, just by my presence here. Please just trust me on this one."
"Jin—"
"Cobra Moreau, this is Koja," the translator interrupted him, "Let's table this discussion until you're safe, all right? Now, you said you were on the bridge?"
"Yes, and we're sort of trapped—"
"Can you describe the ship? Is it a warship, or what?"
"From the way the crew fights, I doubt it. Let's see: the ship's got a large cargo/engineering section with sagging swept-forward wings over twin drive nacelles. The front section looked like a pretty standard flat-steeple command module, and there's a long neck connecting the two sections. No identification marks anywhere I could see."
"Okay. I'll see if we've got anything on this design on file."
"Jin?" Justin's voice came back on. "This is Dad. Now, you say you're trapped on the bridge?"
"Yeah, and they're trying to burn up to us through the emergency blast hatch. I can fight them if necessary, but I'd prefer it if we could find a way to convince the commander to just let us go."
"It's worth a try. Can you tie him in to us?"
Jin peered at the board again. "Hang on..."
[That will not be necessary,] a burst of catertalk cut in. [I have been listening.]
"I thought you might be," Jin said, only lying a little. "In Qasaman, please, Commander—as I told the Dewdrop, my companions need to hear all this, too."
There was a momentary pause. "Very well," the Troft's translator voice said. "I will listen, but you must realize that I cannot allow you to escape."
"Why not?" Justin asked.
"Our demesne-lord's agreement with the Qasaman Obolo Nardin will come to nothing if his plan is ruined."
"The plan's already ruined," Jin told him. "How are you going to get your allies into your ship for transport, now that I've sealed off the cargo section? And where are they going to stay during the ride?"
"Foolish human! How many other ways into our ship do you think there are?"
"Several," Jin agreed. "But you really don't want to let them see the areas you'd have to take them through. True?"
"The Qasamans can learn nothing from a casual glimpse of our equipment."
"Maybe. But if you're wrong, the Qasamans might advance a little too quickly... possibly quickly enough to break your grip on them before you have a strong enough puppet government in place. Is your demesne-lord willing to take that chance?"
"It is a negligible risk," the Troft insisted.
"Perhaps," the Dewdrop's translator put in. "Let's put it another way, then. Would your demesne-lord be willing to let an entire Crane-class starcarrier fall into Qasaman hands?"
For a long moment there was silence; and in that hiatus, a keen awareness of her body's condition seemed to flood into Jin's consciousness. Awareness of the throbbing ache in the stiff fingers of both hands—of the burning sensation in her left ankle from excessive use of her antiarmor laser—of an even more painful burning along her ribcage where one of the laser shots fired earlier must have come closer than she'd realized. Her eyes drifted around the bridge, and she realized for the first time just how much equipment was really here. Would she have the ability and stamina to systematically destroy all of it if she had to? Because that was the only realistic threat they had to bargain with.
And the Troft commander clearly knew it. "Our ship can be flown without the use of the bridge," he said at last.
"Oh, certainly," the Dewdrop agreed. "Most ships can. But not very easily. Besides which, the bridge isn't the only thing in danger here. There's a sensor bubble directly over her head, for one thing—it wouldn't take all that much for her to punch through to that. Oh, now there's an interesting idea," Koja interrupted his own thought. "If your ship follows standard design, there should be parallel connections between all your sensors for making synchronity checks. A good jolt of high voltage along that connector cable might just take out every navigation sensor you have on the ship."
"Ridiculous," the Troft snorted.
"Maybe. There's one sure way to find out."
Again the Troft was silent. "You may have the Cobra," he said at last. "If she will leave the ship now, she will be allowed safe passage away from here. The Qasamans with her may not leave, though."
"Jin?" Justin asked.
"No," she said firmly. "My companions leave with me, or I wreck the ship. But I'm ready to make you a counter offer."
"I am listening."
"Okay. You let the Dewdrop land—safely—and allow the three of us to leave here, and there'll be no further damage to your ship."
"And...?"
"No ands. We'll leave Qasama, you'll leave Qasama, and it'll all be over."
Akim snorted and turned away from her. Jin frowned over at his stiff shoulders, then turned back to the panel. "Face reality, Commander; your demesne-lord's scheme has failed, and all you can do is cut his losses."
"The scheme has not failed until the Qasaman authorities have been made aware of Mangus's true purpose," the Troft countered.
"Then your ship is dead," the Dewdrop said flatly. "Not just the bridge and sensors, Commander, but the entire ship. If Jin wrecks the bridge, it'll be hours before you can fly—you know it and we know it. Long before then we'll be there, even if we have to drop down outside your hunter/seekers' patrol range and come in on foot. And we have thirteen Cobras aboard."
A movement caught Jin's eye, and she looked up as Daulo stepped over to the spot at her side that Akim had just vacated. "Do you think he'll accept?" he asked in a whisper.
"He'd be a fool not to," Jin murmured back. "He has to have some idea of what a ship full of Cobras could do to him. Even just by myself, I could have killed half his crew if I'd wanted to."
"You should have done so," Akim growled from behind her.
"I'd like to end this mess with as little bloodshed as possible," she shot back over her shoulder. "It's enough that we chase the Trofts off Qasama; we don't have to kill them all just to underline the point. Unless the commander insists on that kind of lesson, of course."
"I do not so insist," the Troft commander said with something that sounded almost like a sigh. "Very well, Cobra: I agree to your terms. To your left is a keypad. Enter the following words."
Jin swiveled to the keypad as the Troft shifted into catertalk and gave a series of commands. "What's he telling you?" Daulo asked.
"Looks like the procedure for recalling the roving hunter/seeker missiles to the ship," she told him. A display above the keypad came alive. "Yes," she confirmed, studying it. "The missiles have been deactivated... they're on their way back to the ship."
"We're ready to break orbit, then, Jin," the Dewdrop said. "Shall we land near Mangus?"
"Better not—the Qasaman military may track your path in." She paused, thinking. Presumably the Qasamans weren't listening in... but Akim was, and she didn't want Qasaman helicopters getting to the Dewdrop before she did. On the other hand, if she shifted back to Anglic now, both Akim and Daulo might worry that she was giving the ship secret instructions.
And that bothered her. For reasons that weren't clear even to her, it had become very important to her to show that Qasama and the Cobra Worlds could trust each other at least this once. "Okay, here's how we'll do it," she said at last. "Picture Qasama as Aventine, with Mangus where Capitalia would be. Get down low where they can't track you and then take a circumspect route to Watermix. You get that?"
"Got it," the Dewdrop came back immediately. "You ready to head out to meet us?"
Jin looked at the hunter/seeker readout. If she was interpreting it correctly, the missiles were within fifteen minutes of reaching Mangus. "Yes, we're ready," she said into the mike.
"No, we're not," Akim said.
Beside her, Daulo turned and inhaled sharply. Slowly, carefully, Jin swiveled around in her seat, to find Akim standing against the opposite side of the bridge, a small device in his hand pointed at her. "What do you mean by this, Miron Akim?" she asked quietly.
"Exactly as I said," he replied, equally quietly. "We're not leaving yet. I'm claiming this ship for the Shahni of Qasama... and I intend to make certain it won't escape us."
For several heartbeats Jin and Akim just gazed at each other. "I wondered why you went along with me on all this," Jin asked at last. "Now I know. You want the stardrive in this ship, don't you?"
"The stardrive?" Akim snorted. "You think too small, Jasmine Moreau—or perhaps too big." He waved his free hand around him, keeping the other pointed at her. "There's literally nothing aboard this ship we won't be able to use. The stardrive, the computer systems, the powerplants—even the crew's personal effects will give us information about these new enemies we face." He nodded his head slightly toward the lasers behind her under the panel. "Daulo Sammon and I had time in your absence to learn how to use those hand weapons. You were right; they are indeed powerful. All by themselves they will be worth a ransom."
Jin's eyes flicked to his hand. "Weapons mean a lot to you, don't they? That's, what, a breakapart palm-mate dart pistol?"
Akim nodded. "Designed from the one Decker York used on our people thirty years ago. We learned a great deal from your last invasion; we'll learn even more from this one. Get up, now, and go over to the hatch."
"Why?" she asked, not moving from her seat.
"I want one of those lasers behind you. This ship is staying here, and your people were kind enough to tell me how to keep it from leaving."
I can stop him, she thought. My sonic—
Would be slow enough to leave Akim time for a reflexive shot. And if the poison they'd coated the darts with was anything like the ones the original model used... Okay, okay, don't panic girl, Jin told herself firmly. You're still in control here. With a flick of her eyes her nanocomputer's autotarget capability was locked onto the palm-mate in Akim's hand; and with a casual curving of her hands—
She inhaled sharply as a fresh wave of agony lanced through her injured fingers. Once again, she'd forgotten about her hands.
And it left her only the antiarmor laser and arcthrower to use against the palm-mate. The first of which would vaporize Akim's hand in the process... the second of which would kill him outright.
A hard knot began to form in Jin's stomach. I won't kill him, she told herself firmly. I won't. "Miron Akim, listen to me—"
"I said get up!"
"No!" Jin snapped back. "Not until you hear me out."
Akim took a deep breath, and Jin could see the knuckles on his gun hand tighten momentarily. "I don't intend to break our truce, Jasmine Moreau," he grated. "You've been of great help to us, and I won't kill you unless I have to. But I mean to have this ship."
Jin was suddenly aware of the mike still in her hand, and of the total silence from the speaker behind her. Both the Dewdrop and the Troft commander were waiting. Listening. "Miron Akim, listen to me," she said, fighting hard against the trembling in her voice as she reached behind her to set the mike down on the panel. "You don't want this ship. Qasama isn't ready for it yet."
He spat. "And you of Aventine are omniscient enough to know that, are you?"
"How are you going to control it?" Jin persisted. "You've seen how Obolo Nardin used the computers he was given—how are you going to keep someone else from doing something similar?"
"The Shahni will control the technology. They'll make sure it's used properly."
"Used by whom? Are the Shahni going to become a technocratic oligarchy, then?—doling out new technology to those they deem fit?" She shook her head. "Don't you see, Miron Akim, how something like that would change the whole texture of Qasaman society? I've seen how you do things here, the way your cities and villages each have their own unique political balance, independent from that of the next town over. Your people take great pride in this, and well they should; it's one of your society's greatest strengths. For that matter, search your records and legends—it was to escape from an overly centralized government that your ancestors left the Dominion of Man in the first place."
"Then perhaps it's time we grew up," Akim said stubbornly. "Would you have us hold onto petty quarrels and pride at the cost of civil war?"
"Civil war?" Jin snarled. "God above—you worry about civil war, and you want to add new weapons to the mixture?"
"The weapons will be controlled by the Shahni—"
"For how long? Months? Days? And what do you think will happen once a single village or city gets hold of one of them?"
Akim clenched his teeth. "I'm an agent of the Shahni," he grated out. "I'm charged to obey their orders, and to do that which benefits Qasama as a whole. It's not my place to make these larger policy decisions."
"Why not?" she countered. "For that matter, you've already made a policy decision. If standing orders are all that count, why haven't you killed me?"
"If keeping Qasama defenseless is all that counts to you," he countered, "why haven't you killed me?"
She sighed. "Because ultimately it doesn't matter. No matter what you do, Qasama won't get this ship. If the Trofts can't get it off the planet, they'll destroy it."
"Even damaged, it'll be worth—"
"Not damaged—destroyed," Jin snapped. "They'll turn the engines into a minor fusion bomb and blow the ship, themselves, and Mangus into dust and scatter it into the upper atmosphere. You heard me talking to the Troft commander—they're scared to even let Obolo Nardin's people get a glimpse at their readout displays. You think he'll let you take his crew alive and his ship intact?"
For a long moment the only sound in the room was the muffled hiss of the laser torch coming from the direction of the hatch. Jin kept her eyes on Akim, acutely aware of the targeting lock on the other's weapon... acutely aware, too, of Daulo's stiff presence a meter to her left. She wished she could see his face, try and get some feeling as to which side of this confrontation he was on. But she didn't dare look away.
"No," Akim said suddenly. His face was rigid, eyes almost unfocused, and Jin felt a sympathetic ache for him. But the other's voice was firm, with no hesitation left for her to work against. "No, my duty is clear. Even if it doesn't seem that I can win, I still have to try." He took a deep breath. "Stand up, Jasmine Moreau, and move over to the hatch."
Slowly, Jin stood up. "I beg you to reconsider, Miron Akim."
"Move over to the hatch," he repeated stiffly.
Licking her lips, her eyes still on Akim, Jin took a sidling step to her left toward the lock—
And gasped as her left knee collapsed beneath her.
Perhaps Akim had been expecting a trick; perhaps he merely reacted reflexively to her sudden movement. Even as Jin's hands snapped out toward Daulo's chest, she heard the faint snap of the palm-mate, and the hoarse whisper of the poisoned dart piercing the air bare centimeters from her right arm. She could almost sense her nanocomputer assessing the situation; could feel it preparing to take control of her servos and launch her into a defensive counterattack that would leave Akim burned to ashes—
And at the last instant before her outstretched hands reached Daulo's chest, she flipped her left hand over, curving the palm inward, and jammed the heel of her right hand against the left's fingertips. The fingernails slammed into Daulo's breastbone with the full force of her right hand behind it—
And with a flash of heat against her right wrist her left-hand fingertip laser fired.
Akim jumped violently to the side, swearing viciously as the blackened remains of his palm-mate went spinning to the deck. With a curse, he leaped toward Jin, hands curving into talons.
Jin waited, feet braced against the deck; and as his arms curved toward her shoulders she jabbed her arms out, the heels of her hands slamming hard into his upper chest. The impact stopped him dead in his tracks; sliding one hand around each of his shoulders, Jin twisted him around and shoved him hard into the chair she'd just been sitting in.
For a moment he just sat there, looking up at her in dazed astonishment as he caught his breath. "All right," she told him, taking deep breaths herself as the pain in her fingers slowly retreated again to a dull ache. "Let's get out of here before the Trofts get nervous and blow the ship regardless."
"Jin!" The Dewdrop's translator called faintly from the speaker. "What's happening? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," she called back. "All of us are. Commander, call your men off and we'll open up the bridge."
"Understood," the Troft translator said. "You will not be harmed."
Slowly, Akim got to his feet and faced Jin. "Someday," he said bitterly, eyes boring into hers, "we will repay you in full for all you have done to us."
She met his gaze without flinching. "Perhaps. At least now you'll have a chance of surviving to do so."
Silently, he moved toward the hatch. She followed, keeping her attention on him... and because of that they were halfway there before she suddenly realized Daulo wasn't following. "Come on, Daulo Sammon," she called over her shoulder. "Time to leave."
"Not quite yet," he said quietly.
Frowning, she threw him a quick glance... and then looked again.
Daulo was standing well back from her, pressed against the communications board. In his hand was one of the captured lasers. "Daulo Sammon?" she asked carefully.
"Thanks to you, your world is now safe from us," Daulo said tautly. His face was pale, but the gun was steady. "At least for now. But you, Jasmine Moreau, aren't nearly so safe... and the repayment Miron Akim spoke of can begin with you."
"Hold it!" Justin shouted. "You—whoever you are—if you harm her, you'll never get off that ship alive."
"You'll have to catch us first," Daulo called to the mike. "And by that time, we'll have figured out just what to do with her."
"Damn you! If you so much as—"
Stepping to one side, Daulo shifted his aim and fired a long burst into the communications board.
The Dewdrop's voice was suddenly cut off... and the clatter of Daulo's laser as he tossed it casually to the deck again was almost shattering in the taut silence.
"Daulo...?" Jin asked, feeling her eyebrows come together in bewilderment.
Daulo looked at her, took a deep breath. "Now we can leave," he said quietly. "And we'd better go quickly. Before, as you said, the Trofts get nervous."
Beside Jin, Akim took a step toward Daulo. "Would you mind explaining," he grated, "just what in God's name that was supposed to prove?"
Daulo gestured upward. "Her father is up there," he said simply.
For a long second the two men eyed each other... and then a smile tugged at Akim's lips and he snorted gently. "Clever. Very clever. Or it will be if it works."
"I think it will," Daulo nodded. "Like a good Qasaman family, they are very close." He looked at Jin. "Well, come on, Jasmine Moreau," he said briskly. "Let's get out of here."
The walk down the corridor was a nerve-wracking one. Jin had rather expected a large escort to tag along to make sure they actually left Mangus, but to her uneasy surprise they rated only a single Troft to lead them out of the ship, and he abandoned them just beyond the portside entryway where Jin had earlier shot her way back into the ship. "I don't like this," Akim muttered as they hurried down the steps into the now deserted maintenance bay. "Obolo Nardin's men may be waiting to gun us down out there."
"If Obolo Nardin's got any brains, he'll have his people behind their own wall by now," Jin said as they ran across the bay toward an exit door that would let them out of the maintenance building near the gap in the outer wall. "The Trofts seem to be in a flat-out hurry—that drive rumble is getting louder, and I wouldn't want to be on this side of Mangus when they fire up the engines for real."
The words were barely out of her mouth when, abruptly, the rumble swelled to a roar and a piercing ultrasonic whine rose to accompany it. "It's moving!" Daulo shouted over the noise, waving back at the ship.
Jin glanced over her shoulder. My God, he's right, she thought, stunned, as she watched the command module sliding smoothly back through the now retracted rubberine collar along the reddish haze of the ship's gravity lifts. "Run!" she shouted to the others. "Outside, to whatever cover you can find."
They needed no urging. Flinging open the building door, they sprinted out across a short patch of bare ground to the wall. Even here the air was becoming noticeably warmer; if they were anywhere near the nozzles when the Trofts kicked the drive to full power, Jin knew, they would stand a good chance of being charred on their feet.
They passed the edge of the wall at a dead run, and it took only a glance to see that there was nothing anywhere that could possibly serve as cover. "That way!" Akim shouted into the din, waving his arm to the right as he turned to run that direction. "Around the corner of the wall!"
It was the best they were going to get. Akim in the lead, they tore along the wall toward the south-east point of the Mangus diamond-shape a hundred meters away. Jin's left knee flashed stabs of pain with each step; gritting her teeth against the agony, she forced herself to keep going. Behind and to her side, she heard Daulo panting with the effort—sensed him stumble—
"Daulo!" She skidded to a halt and grabbed for his arm, gasping with pain as she reflexively tried to close her hand.
"No!" he panted, waving her forward. "Just go—never mind me—"
The rest of his protest was swallowed up in a sudden blast of sound from beyond the wall. Jin didn't hesitate; throwing one arm across Daulo's back and the other behind his knees, she lifted him bodily and ran.
She nearly made it. Akim was around the corner, and she and Daulo were within five paces, when the landscape in front of them abruptly flared with light and an incredible wave of heat washed over them from behind. In her arms Daulo cried out; blinking back tears, Jin fought to keep her balance against the hurricane windstorm behind them. She reached the corner—tried to turn—
And from seemingly out of nowhere Akim's arm darted out, grabbing Jin's just above the elbow and spinning both her and Daulo around the corner to sprawl to the ground.
For a few seconds Jin couldn't speak... but then, for that same time neither of the others would have been able to hear her, anyway. The roar from the Troft ship was deafening—far louder than she would have expected it to be—and seemed to go on forever. Finally—finally—it began to ease, and within a few seconds had faded to a whine in the distance.
Leaving behind it the crackling of fire.
"God in heaven—they've set Mangus on fire!" Akim snarled suddenly, leaping up and disappearing around the corner in the direction of the wall opening.
Jin scrambled to her feet and took a few steps back from the wall. Sure enough, the overhead canopy was flickering with reflected light from the flames beneath it. On the ground in front of her, Daulo said something under his breath. "What?" she asked, stepping closer.
"I said they were fools." Gingerly, Daulo propped himself up on an elbow, took a deep breath. "If they'd wanted to destroy their half of Mangus properly, they should have had a self-destruct set up ahead of time. Now they're always going to wonder what they left behind we might be able to use."
"Good," Jin said grimly. "Maybe that fear will keep them from coming back and trying this again. Odd that they'd panic like that, though; once they were rid of us, they really had all the time they needed to do their cleanup properly."
Daulo chuckled. "No, they didn't." He squinted toward the sky. "Take a look."
Frowning, Jin peered skyward... and felt her throat tighten.
Above them, a dark shape ringed with red haze was dropping swiftly toward the ground. "The Dewdrop? But... I told them not to land here."
"Of course you did. And I expect your father had a very sharp argument with the others about that after I threatened you and then destroyed your link with them."
Jin looked back down at him, suddenly understanding. "Is that why you did it? To get the Dewdrop down here faster?"
"Not faster, really. Just more directly."
"More—?" Jin clamped her mouth shut. "Oh. Sure. Wherever they track the Dewdrop, that's where they'll send the helicopters. Perfectly obvious."
His eyes were steady on her. "I had no choice, Jin. Even if you'd been willing to take us directly to Azras, we still might not have gotten the military here before Obolo Nardin covered his trail and cleared out."
"Agreed," Jin nodded. "Very clever, as Miron Akim said. I wish I'd thought of it myself." The Dewdrop was showing a recognizable shape now. Lying down on her back, Jin raised her left leg and sent three antiarmor laser bursts in the ship's direction. "That should let them know I'm all right," she explained.
Daulo slid over to sit next to her. "I'd rather... hoped we'd have a little more time together once this was over," he said, almost shyly. "Before you had to leave."
Jin reached over to touch his hand with her fingertips. "I did, too," she said, and was mildly surprised to find how much she really meant it. "But I don't think we can afford to stay. Miron Akim told me there were two of those SkyJo helicopters based near my shuttle; if they get the tracking data fast enough, they won't be more than a few minutes behind us."
Daulo nodded, and for a moment they watched the Dewdrop dropping through the sky toward them. Then, with a grunt that was half sigh and half groan, Daulo climbed to his feet. "Speaking of Miron Akim, I'd better go and track him down. Make sure he hasn't found some weapon and is lying in wait for your ship with it."
Jin got up too, conscience nagging uncomfortably. "Daulo... look, I... well, I want you to know that I really did plan to fulfill my half of our bargain."
He frowned at her. "What are you talking about? You don't think that my finding the way to capture Obolo Nardin and Mangus isn't going to raise my family's status?"
"But that was all your doing, not—"
"Could I have done it without you?"
"Well... no, not really. But—"
"Jin." He stepped close to her, put his hands on her shoulders. "The bargain is satisfied. Really."
Over the plain behind him, the Dewdrop was sweeping down toward Mangus. "Okay," Jin sighed. "Well, then... I guess there's nothing to say but goodbye. Thank you for everything, Daulo."
Leaning forward, Daulo kissed her gently. "Goodbye, Jin," he said, smiling at her. "I hope this will let your uncle keep his power among your people."
Jin had almost forgotten about that. "He will," she nodded. "There's no way even his enemies can twist what's happened into failure."
"Good." He smiled again, this time with a touch of mischievousness. "Then perhaps he can talk them into letting you visit Qasama again."
She smiled back. "If I can, I will—that's a promise. If I can't... you'll be getting back into space again someday. You can come visit me."
The background whine that had been growing steadily louder over the past few minutes suddenly shifted pitch. Looking over Daulo's shoulder, Jin saw the Dewdrop had landed. "I've got to go," she said, disengaging herself and stepping away from him. "Goodbye, and thank your father for me."
There were five men crouching in a loose arc around the Dewdrop's entryway before she was halfway there— Cobras, all of them, by their stances—but she didn't pay any real attention to them. Silhouetted against the hazy glow from the gravity lifts, another man was running toward her. Moving with the slightly arthritic gait she knew so well. "Dad!" she shouted to him. "It's all right—no one shoot!"
A moment later she was in his arms. A minute after that, they were aboard the Dewdrop, heading for space.
"...it is therefore the opinion of the undersigned members of the Directorate that the Mangus mission in general, and the actions of Cobra Jasmine Moreau in particular, be considered a success."
Corwin sat down, letting the end of the joint opinion—and its four signatures—linger on the syndics' displays for another moment before blanking it and pulling the magcard from his reader. At the center of the speakers' table, Governor-General Chandler stood up. "Thank you, Governor Moreau," he said, eyes flicking once to Corwin before turning away. "One might expect that, with virtually none of the facts or testimony from the Mangus mission in dispute, it would be a straightforward matter for this body to come to a conclusion as to its success or failure. However, as will soon become apparent, it's often possible to interpret things in more than one way. You've heard Governor Moreau's interpretation, and that of his co-signers; I yield the floor now to Governor Priesly and a different point of view."
Priesly stood up, his eyes fairly flashing with righteous fervor as he inserted a magcard in his reader... and Corwin braced himself.
It was even worse than he expected.
"...and so let me now summarize the main points:
"Cobra Moreau failed to keep her identity as an Aventinian spy hidden from the Qasamans, in clear violation of her orders.
"Cobra Moreau furthermore failed to keep her identity as a Cobra hidden from those same Qasamans, spoiling any future chance we might have of taking them by surprise with a similar ruse.
"Cobra Moreau voluntarily spent a great deal of time in close proximity to a member of the official Qasaman government. She spoke at length with him, cooperated with him, and—even more damaging—repeatedly demonstrated her Cobra weaponry in his presence.
"Cobra Moreau deliberately allowed the Troft meddlers to escape, thereby ruining any chance we might have of identifying them and making sure any threat of this alliance between them and Qasama is at an end.
"And finally, as a direct result of her actions, Cobra Moreau permitted the other mission members' bodies to fall into Qasaman hands, allowing the Qasamans to examine them and denying us the opportunity to give them decent and proper burials.
"It is therefore the opinion of the undersigned members of the Directorate that the Mangus mission in general, and the actions of Cobra Jasmine Moreau in particular, be considered a failure."
Jin was sitting by the window of her room, curled up into her old loveseat and staring outside at the waning light of sunset, when the tap came on the door. "Jin, it's Dad and Uncle Corwin," her father's voice said quietly. "May we come in?"
"Sure," she said, not turning around. "I've already heard, if that's what you want. It hit the net a couple of hours ago."
"I'm sorry," Corwin said, pulling up a chair to just inside her peripheral vision and sinking tiredly into it.
"May I?" her father asked, stepping to her side and waving at the loveseat. Jin nodded, shifting her legs off the seat to make room for him and wincing as her knee protested the action. The injury was probably going to lead to early arthritis in the joint, the doctors had told her; earlier even than the usual Cobra average. Just one more little sacrifice for the Mangus mission.
One more sacrifice for nothing.
Justin sat carefully down beside her. "How do you feel?" he asked.
"How should I feel?" she countered.
He sighed. "Probably about the same way we do."
She nodded. "Probably."
For a few moments the room was silent. "Look, Jin," Corwin said at last, "you really shouldn't be taking any of this personally. I was Priesly's target, not you. You just happened to be the most convenient conduit for the attack he had in mind."
"Oh, I was convenient, all right," she said bitterly. "Everything I did—everything I said—he just twisted all of it into knots like a snake pretzel. And everyone just rolled over and believed him."
Corwin and Justin exchanged looks. "Well, now, that may be open to debate," Corwin said. "I take it you stopped reading after the opinion reports and final vote came on?"
"I'd already seen how Priesly mangled what really happened," she said, blinking back tears of frustration. "I didn't need to see what the public would do with it."
"Oh, then, you missed a real treat," Justin said. Jin frowned over at him, to find a smile quirking at his lips. "It seems that about fifteen minutes after the vote came out an anonymous transcription hit the net: purportedly, that of discussions in the upper ranks of the Ject camp over the past couple of days. It shows several men, including Priesly himself, deciding how best to distort what happened on Qasama to their own political benefit."
Jin stared at him. "But who would... you two?"
"Who, us?" Corwin asked, radiating wide-eyed innocence. "As a matter of fact, no, we had nothing to do with it. Apparently it was some unidentified Ject of Justin's acquaintance who decided that perhaps Priesly was going a bit too far on this one."
Jin took a deep breath. For one brief moment it had felt better... "But it really doesn't help any. Does it?"
Corwin shrugged. "Depends on whether you're talking short-term or long-term results. Yes, I've resigned my governorship, so as far as that goes Priesly's won; and yes, your supposed failure will probably make it difficult, if not impossible, for other women to be accepted into the Cobras."
Jin snorted. "So what are all the big long-term gains? The fact that Qasama is temporarily safe from Troft meddling?"
"Don't sell that one short," Justin chided her gently. "Mangus was indeed as great a threat as we'd thought all along, just not quite as immediate a one. That part of your mission was a complete and resounding success—and everyone on the Council knows it, whether they admit it publicly or not."
"And we've made at least two other long-term gains, as well," Corwin told her. "First of all, Priesly may not yet realize it, but in kicking me out of the Directorate he's shot himself in the foot."
"How?" Jin asked. "Because it makes him look like a bully?"
"More or less. Never underestimate the power of a sympathy backlash, Jin, especially when it involves a name as historically revered as ours." Corwin smiled wryly. "In fact, I've been preparing a campaign for the past few days to try and guide the expected public reaction straight down Priesly's throat. Now, with all this other stuff coming out, I don't think I'll have to bother."
Jin closed her eyes. "So the Jects lose power, and all it costs is your career," she sighed. "Standard definition of a Pyrrhic victory."
"Oh, I don't know," Corwin shrugged. "Depends on whether I was tired of politics anyway, doesn't it?" Gently, he reached over to take one of her bandaged hands. "Times change, Jin, and we have to change with them. Our family's had more than its fair share of political power over the past few decades; perhaps it's time for us to move on."
"Move on to what?" she asked.
"Move on from politics to statesmanship," Corwin said. "Because we've now got the one thing neither Priesly nor anyone else in the Cobra Worlds can take away from us." He lifted a finger and leveled it at her. "We've got you."
Jin blinked. "Me?"
"Uh-huh. You, and the first ever genuinely positive contact with the people of Qasama."
"Oh, sure." Jin snorted. "Some contact. The twenty-year-old niece of an ousted political leader and the nineteen-year-old heir to a minor village mining industry."
Her father made an odd sort of sound, and Jin turned her head to look at him. "What's so funny?" she demanded.
"Oh, nothing," Justin said, making a clearly halfhearted effort to erase his amused smile. "It's just that... well, you never can tell where something like that will lead."
He took a deep breath; and suddenly the amusement in his smile vanished, to be replaced by a smile of pride and love. "No, you never know, Jasmine Moreau, my most excellent daughter. Tell me, have you ever heard the story—the full story, that is—of your grandfather's path from Cobra guardian of a minor frontier village to governor and statesman of Aventine?"
She had; but it was worth hearing again. Together, the three of them talked long into the night.
Copyright © 1988 by Timothy Zahn
Cover art by Vincent Di Fate
ISBN: 0-671-65383-0