Cobra Gamble (10 page)

All the while, the Troft warship stayed right on top of him, or just behind him, the hum of its gravs audible over the crash of his feet through the dead leaves, the gravs themselves occasionally glowing briefly through the canopy of leafy branches above him. It never opened fire, and none of Merrick's tricks ever lost it for more than a few seconds. The Trofts simply stayed up there, pacing his mad run, waiting for their quarry to finally exhaust his strength.

On that count, at least, they were going to be in for a surprise. New Cobra recruits invariably tried to do this kind of long-range running on their own power, which inevitably led to muscle fatigue and exhaustion. Experienced Cobras like Merrick knew how to let their leg servos do all the work. He could probably run halfway to Sollas without serious problem.

The other possibility, that the ship wasn't trying to run him to ground but was instead subtly herding him toward in a particular spot, never even occurred to him. Not until it was too late.

Not until he hit the trap.

It was a simple trap, really: a wall of thick, sturdy netting, laid flat against the ground beneath the leaves and spring-loaded to snap up in front of him at his approach. Almost before his eyes even registered the obstacle, certainly before his programmed reflexes could stop his forward momentum, he hit the wall, yanking the netting out of its frame and wrapping it securely around him.

All three of his lasers flashed, but the bits of netting vaporized were small and insignificant. He tried pressing outward with his arms, but the mesh was highly elastic and merely stretched without tearing. His legs could also stretch out the mesh, and for a few seconds he managed to keep going. But the netting was self-adhering, and his scissoring legs merely tangled it against itself, and a few steps later he found himself sprawled face-first onto the ground.

He was firing his lasers again, trying to maneuver his hands enough to cut an actual tear in the material, when the world faded away into blackness.

* * *

The sky to the east was still dark with pre-dawn gloom as Jin walked tiredly through the gate into Milika.

The first news was good. Paul was standing near a few silent villagers, clearly alive and no worse off than he'd been when he slipped away from their encampment a few hours ago.

But Merrick wasn't with him. And the expression of guilt and of and pain on his face was all she needed to know that the worst had indeed happened.

But something deep inside her still needed to make sure. "He's gone," she said as she came up to him.

Paul nodded heavily. "I'm sorry, Jin," he said. "I tried to stop him."

Jin took a deep breath. He had indeed tried. She knew him well enough to know that he'd done his very best to protect their son.

And yet, if he'd succeeded, she would have gained her son and lost her husband. Or she might have lost them both.

She'd been furious when Zoshak told her about Paul's unilateral decision on what to do about Merrick's situation. But the anger had long since evaporated. All that was left now was weariness and sorrow.

And, to her own private shame, a small nugget of guilty gratitude that he'd taken the decision on his own shoulders instead of giving half of it to her.

A woman should never be forced to choose between the lives of her son and her husband.

"It's all right," she said, reaching up to rest her hand on his cheek. "Merrick's smart and clever, and he has his great-grandfather's genes. He'll get through this."

"I know," Paul said.

He didn't, of course, Jin knew. But then, neither did she.

Many of the families on Qasama and Caelian had lost loved ones to the Troft invasion. It was probably inevitable, she knew, that sooner or later her family would be one of them.

All she could do now was try her damnedest to make sure that Merrick's sacrifice—that
all
of their sacrifices—weren't wasted.

"Did you talk to Fadil Sammon?" she asked, giving Paul's cheek one final caress and then lowering her hand back to her side.

"Yes, and it's all set," he said. "The foreman has three crews below ground right now, clearing out the mining equipment and checking the ventilation, safety, and power systems. By the time we get Isis here, it should be ready for us to move right in."

"Good." Jin took a deep breath, pushing the pain as far back as she could. It wasn't far, but it would hopefully be enough to allow her to function. "Let's see what progress the Djinn have made in organizing a vehicle caravan." She glanced around, spotted Siraj and Zoshak talking to the gate guards while a circle of villagers stood quietly around them. Ghofl Khatir, the third Djinni, was nowhere to be seen. "Do you know what happened to Djinn Khatir?" she asked.

"He's talking to Fadil Sammon," Paul said. "Some high-level conference, I gather, from the way both of them looked when I left."

Jin nodded. She'd wondered why Fadil hadn't been down here to meet her and the others as they arrived. "Is Fadil doing all right?" she asked.

"Actually, no," Paul said, a fresh edge of grimness to his voice. "But we can talk about that later. Right now, we have to get Isis here and get Dr. Croi started putting the pieces together."

"While we meanwhile dig up some recruits," Jin said. "I just hope we can find enough of them."

"I don't think that's going to be a problem," Paul assured her. "From what little I've seen of Milika, I think Siraj Akim and the others should have plenty of volunteers to choose from."

"Assuming he can find whatever qualities the Shahni consider necessary for good Qasaman warriors." Jin looked toward the east, where the sun would soon be coming up, and where the Troft invaders had long since settled in across the Qasaman landscape. "He'd just better find them fast," she added. "Even starting right now, it's ten days minimum before we can get any new Cobras into the field. That's ten more days the invaders will have to work on consolidating their positions and wrecking Qasama's infrastructure."

"We'll make it," Paul said firmly. "Whatever we have to do, we'll make it." 

CHAPTER SIX

The sound of hammering and power tools from the northern edge of the Caelian capital of Stronghold had begun right at sunup, jarring Jody Broom out of an already troubled sleep. By the time she finished her morning routine, including the tedious but vital job of scraping the spores and other floating organics off her silliweave clothing, the hammer-and-tongs were going full force.

The door to the rented house's other bedroom was closed, which meant at least one of her two business partners, Geoff Boulton and Freylan Sanderby, was still trying to sleep through the racket. Probably Geoff, she made a private bet with herself. For all of his outgoing energy and easy social enthusiasm, he'd never been much of a morning person. Freylan, the shy introspective one of their research team, was much more likely to have risen at dawn, quietly eager to get back to work on the two combat suits the Qasaman Djinn had given them.

Besides which, Freylan was a light sleeper. There was no way he was still zonked out in there.

Jody had expected to find him outside on the house's small veranda, surrounded by the equipment Geoff had begged or borrowed, working on the puzzle of how exactly the electronics in the Djinni outfits were able to resist the floating organics that attached themselves to all non-living surfaces. But he was nowhere to be seen.

Unfortunately, with the planetary communications system still down, there was no way for her to call him, or even to call someone else to ask about him. At this hour, she decided, her best bet would be to check in with the men at the wrecked wall and see if any of them had seen him. Readjusting the stiff silicon-based fabric across her shoulders, she headed toward the noise.

Caelian's original settlers had quickly learned that the trouble with the floating organics wasn't the tiny spores per se. It was, rather, the tiny insects that eagerly descended on any and all bits of such entrenched vegetation, eating both the spores and bits of whatever carbon-based clothing or building material the spores happened to be attached to at the time. Tiny insects attracted larger insects, which attracted small birds and reptiles, all the way up the food chain to the larger predators that could take on human beings with impunity.

There was nothing anyone had ever been able to do about the spores except try to keep them from finding something edible to attach to. The big predators, though, were another story. They could be shot and killed by projectile weapons and laser fire, which explained Caelian's relatively large contingent of Cobras and its heavily armed non-Cobra populace. Alternatively, the predators could be kept out of the settlements entirely, which explained the tall stainless-steel wall that had been erected around Stronghold.

Only the wall wasn't very stainless anymore. In fact, for about seventy meters of its length along the northern part of the city, it wasn't even a wall. The Troft warship that had fallen sideways squarely on top of it had seen to that.

Since it was the Troft invasion that had brought that warship into proximity to the wall in the first place, it was only fair that it should be the Troft prisoners who'd been tasked with the job of cleaning up the mess.

They were doing a good job of it, Jody saw as she arrived at the downed warship. Or if not a good job, at least a busy and noisy one. The aliens were moving in and out of the wreckage, all two hundred of them, hammering at the ship's lower hull, lugging sections of grav-lift panels, or using pry bars and cutting torches on the weapons pods on the stubby wings. Standing watchful vigilance over the operation were twenty Cobras, some standing above the crowd on the intact sections of wall, others forming a barrier between the prisoners and the rest of the city.

"You're up early."

Jody turned. Harli Uy, Cobra commander and son of Caelian's governor, was walking briskly up behind her. "So are you," she said, eyeing the fatigue lines and blotches in his face. "Only
I
got a decent night's sleep."

He grunted as he came to a halt beside her. "So did I," he said. "As decent a night's sleep as any of us gets these days, anyway."

"That bad, huh?"

"We're doing okay," Harli assured her. "We're just spread a little thin, that's all."

"We knew that was going to happen," Jody reminded him. Now that he was closer, she could see the extra tension that was simmering beneath the tiredness. "How's your father?"

Harli gave a microscopic hunch of his shoulders. "Recovering."

"And?" Jody prompted.

"And what?"

"And what does he think about our agreement with the Qasamans?"

"He's dealing with it." Harli waved at the working Trofts. "So you here for the circus, or the Biblical epic?" Jody frowned. "The
what?"

"The Biblical epic," Harli said. "Someone was saying yesterday the whole thing reminded him of Israelite slaves building pyramids back on Earth in some big screen epic."

"Yes, I guess I can see that," Jody agreed, looking closely at Harli's face. "He doesn't like the agreement, does he?"

Harli huffed out a sigh. "No, he's not very happy with it," he conceded. "Or with me." His lip twitched. "And to be honest, I'm starting to agree with him."

"He's worried about the Qasamans having Isis?"

"He's more annoyed that we
don't
have it." Harli gestured at two of the Cobras standing on the wall. "I mean, look at them. They're just standing there, doing absolutely nothing except ride herd on a bunch of prisoners. Meanwhile, Stronghold is running low on food, and the other towns are having to stay inside their own walls because they haven't got enough Cobras to escort anyone heading outside."

And without the ability to send out hunting parties, Jody knew, those other towns would also soon be running short of food. "Maybe we should lock them up in the ships," she suggested. "Or maybe just that one," she added, pointing to the second Troft warship, the one still standing upright beside the sideways one. "At least that would eliminate a lot of the guard duty."

"Then who would do all the work to get the other ship out of there and start repairing the wall?" Harli countered. "Besides, there's no way to know what's still aboard that ship. They could have a hundred of those big hand lasers hidden behind the walls for all we know. Worse, they might find a way to wire around the power and control cables we cut and reactivate what's left of their wing-based weapons."

Weapons that had devastated sections of Stronghold and killed or injured three hundred Cobras, including Jody's own father. Not to mention nearly getting her mother killed outright. "You're right," she acknowledged. "Sorry—I didn't think it through."

"Don't worry about it," Harli said. "We've been working through all the options longer than you have, that's all. The idea actually surfaced almost a week ago, right after your parents and the rest of the crowd headed off for Qasama." He hesitated. "We also considered the idea of just dumping them out in the forest somewhere and letting Wonderland deal with them."

Jody felt a shiver run through her.
Wonderland
—Caelian slang for everything on the planet not under direct human control. Out in the forest, without weapons or defenses, the aliens would be dead within days. Probably within hours. "You might as well just shoot them."

"Which would be completely unethical," Harli agreed grimly. "I know. But ethics don't feed the bulldog, as my grandfather used to say. Doesn't get us any more Cobras, either."

"If sending Isis to Qasama wins us the war, it'll be worth it," Jody reminded him.

"If."
Harli said. "And if it doesn't kill all of us first."

For a minute they stood together in silence, watching the Trofts work. Most of the aliens she could see had their upper-arm membranes fully extended, the equivalent of heavy sweating for humans. Their overseers were working them hard, all right. Occasionally, Jody caught a flicker of light as one of the Cobras on guard duty fired his antiarmor laser, probably at some predator nosing around the work zone. "What did you mean, the circus?" she asked.