Cobra Gamble

by Timothy Zahn

  [The instruction, I obey it.]

  Rashida touched a switch, and a row of lights went out. "I'm sorry," she said, turning to Harli again. "He insisted."

  "That's all right," Harli said, pulling out his field radio. "No—wait a second," he said, stepping back to Rashida's side and running his eyes over the board. "I remember there being some kind of external loudspeaker system that keys in here somewhere. Find it for me, will you?—it'll be a lot faster than using the radios."

  Rashida peered at the board, pointed to a set of controls. "There."

  "Turn it on," Harli ordered. "How long before they get within eyeshot?"

  "Not long," she said, keying the controls and handing him a slender mike. "Five or ten minutes."

  "Terrific." Pursing his lips, Harli lifted the mike. "This is Harli," he announced. "We're about to get some company. All Cobras, find yourselves some spots where you'll be out of sight but still able to control the prisoners. Renny, Bill—make it clear to Captain Eubujak that if his people step out of line we will shoot to kill."

  He covered the mike and gestured at Rashida. "Where did you tell them to land?"

  "On the rectangle to the south of the village," she said. "I told them we were doing repairs on a downed ship, and that there was no room for them to land anywhere nearby."

  "Good." Harli raised the mike again. "They should be putting down in the landing area," he continued. "Smitty, grab a team from town and get into attack position down there. If and when we get them to open the hatch, you take them out. There's no time for questions—they'll be here in five minutes. Play it by ear and do the best you can. And keep in mind that once they're down we do not want them leaving again."

  He keyed off the mike and tossed it back to Rashida, his eyes again darting around the room. "Is there any way to see what's happening down there?" he asked.

  "There's the drone control room," Jody offered. "Deck Four. That's where—"

  "Yes, I know," Harli interrupted. "Except that all the wing cameras on that side of the ship are gone. Plus half the controls got slagged when your brother and Carsh Zoshak ran amok through the place."

  "Right," Jody said, wincing with embarrassment. She should have remembered that.

  "I was hoping there were some extra cameras somewhere tied in up here," he continued. "But I don't see anything." He snapped his fingers. "But the drone hatchways should still be open. Get down there and see if everyone's doing what I told them to."

  "What do I do if they aren't?" Jody asked, backing toward the door.

  "Pretend you're their mother and yell at them," Harli growled. "Just get them out of sight."

  Jody grimaced. "Right."

  The Stronghold techs had finished their checks of Deck Four a couple of days earlier, and the entire area was quiet, dark, and deserted. Fortunately, there was enough light coming in through the open drone hatches for Jody to pick her way across the battle debris and through the damaged barrier to the portside drone hatch. The rectangular opening was a little above her head; getting a grip on the lower edge, she pulled herself up and looked out.

  Wherever the Cobras had found to disappear to, they'd done a terrific job of it. The Trofts were still laboring away, but she couldn't see a single white silliweave tunic anywhere among or around them.

  No white tunics, but there was still one gray one. Freylan had obeyed the general order to hide, but he'd done it by crouching behind a clump of pankling bushes between Jody and the Troft work groups.

  Which left him nicely hidden from the latter, but completely visible from overhead.

  Jody ground her teeth. But then, Harli hadn't actually said where the company was coming from. She raised her eyes from Freylan and gave the sky a quick look, wondering if she still had time to shoo Freylan to a better hiding place.

  But no. She could see the incoming ship now, a small silvery dot glinting in the sunlight as it approached across the western sky. It was still too far away for Jody to make out any details, but it surely had telescopic cameras already trained on Stronghold and the damaged warships.

  Which meant that any movement on Freylan's part would be instantly visible. Awkward and risky thought it might be, at this point Freylan would probably do better to just stay put and hope the drab color of his combat suit would keep him from being noticed. Suppressing a curse, Jody looked back down at the ground.

  And blinked in surprise. The Troft prisoners had obviously spotted the incoming ship as well. But instead of continuing their work, they'd dropped their tools and were waving.

  Not just normal waving, either. They were putting their whole arms into it, swinging them over their heads like parade float-masters trying to be seen from the back row.

  Jody chewed at her lip, indecision tearing at her. Should she stop them? Or, rather, should she order them to stop, which might or might not be the same thing?

  Or was it perfectly natural for Drim'hco'plai soldiers on the ground to salute a group of fellow soldiers flying over their heads? Worse, was it required that they do so? Without knowing more about the demesne's cultural rules, there was no way to know. If it was a form of military etiquette, ordering them to stop would be a dead giveaway to the courier that something was wrong.

  But if it wasn't something they were supposed to do, wouldn't that be equally likely to arouse suspicion? Feeling sweat popping out on her forehead, Jody stared down at the gesticulating Trofts, trying to figure out what she could do.

  And then, abruptly, she caught her breath. The waving arms...

  She took a deep breath and stuck her head as far out of the hatch as she could. "Cobras!" she shouted. "Stop them! They're signaling the ship. They're signaling the ship!"

  For a long, horrible moment nothing happened. The Trofts continued their waving and the Cobras remained out of sight. Could they not have heard her? Or had they simply decided that Harli's orders superseded hers? A movement from beneath her caught her eye, and she looked down to see Freylan rise from his inadequate concealment, take a couple of quick steps forward with his right arm cocked over his shoulder, and then throw something as hard as he could toward the prisoners. The object arced across the group and disappeared somewhere into the mass of upstretched arms.

  Jody frowned. What in the Worlds had he thrown? A rock?

  And then, abruptly, the Trofts at the point of impact collapsed to the ground, their falling bodies jostling against those nearest to them. Before their off-balance neighbors could recover, they too staggered and disappeared beneath the sea of waving hands. For a few seconds the effect rippled outward, dropping the aliens as if a silent grenade had been tossed into their midst. Below Jody, Freylan was again in motion, throwing a second object into a different part of the group. Again, the Trofts at the impact point began to stagger and fall.

  An instant later, all hell broke loose.

  Ten of the Trofts on the edge of the group closest to Freylan abruptly turned and charged away from the latest rippling mass collapse, forming themselves into a close-packed sweeping wedge as they ran. They were maybe ten meters from the rest of the prisoners when the Troft in the lead gave a hand signal, and the whole wedge shifted direction.

  Heading directly toward Freylan.

  Jody gasped. "Freylan!" she shouted out the drone hatch. "Get inside! Quick!"

  But it was too late. Freylan was midway through his third throw, his body twisted and off balance, his feet out of position for any sort of movement, let alone a mad dash anywhere. Jody saw him twitch violently as he spotted the wedge of Trofts charging toward him, and he tried desperately to get himself back into balance. There was some sort of guttural shout from down there, but she couldn't tell whether it came from Freylan or from the Trofts. Freylan's knees gave a sudden, hopeless twitch, which the powered Djinni suit transformed into a two-meter leap.

  Only it was his final mistake... because instead of taking him sideways or back toward the warship or anywhere else useful, the reflexive leap had instead sent him soaring straight upw
ard. He would hit the ground again, Jody estimated, just in time to land right in front of the charging Trofts.

  At which point they would have the choice of simply knocking him over and continuing on toward the forest, or of pausing long enough to beat him to death.

  Clenching her hands around the edge of the drone hatchway, Jody watched helplessly as Freylan hit the top of his arc and started back down.

  And jerked in surprise as a multiple burst of laser fire flashed across the landscape beneath him.

  She'd completely forgotten about Kemp, standing his quiet guard down at the warship's entrance. Apparently, so had the Trofts. The bolts slashed across the line of charging aliens, dropping them into sprawling, smoking heaps on the ground. The fire cut off as Freylan hit the ground, once again blocking Kemp's line of fire.

  He was starting to straighten up when the last two surviving Trofts slammed full-tilt into him, hurling him three meters backward to slam onto the ground.

  Jody gasped with sympathetic pain. But even before the aliens had recovered their balance two final laser blasts dropped them to the ground with the others.

  Jody took a deep, painful breath... and only then did it occur to her to look back up into the sky.

  The Troft ship was considerably closer, close enough now that she could see it was definitely the size of a freighter or courier. But it was no longer coming toward Stronghold. It had instead veered ninety degrees toward the south and was hauling its gravs for all they were worth. They'd gotten the look they'd come for, all right.

  And Caelian was suddenly in very big trouble.

  * * *

  "They were forming letters," Jody told the small group that had gathered around Governor Romulo Uy's hospital bed. "Tracing them out, actually, like a child might trace out an up-down-across to make a capital A." She demonstrated. "Each Troft had one letter, repeating it over and over, the whole mass of them tracing out the complete message."

  "Only the letters were being traced out horizontally instead of vertically," Harli added. "Visible and obvious from above, but not from ground level." He looked at Jody. "Semi-obvious from above, anyway," he amended. "That was a good call."

  Governor Uy gave a sound that was half groan and half grunt. "Don't know as I necessarily agree," he said. "That little battle has now put us in serious jeopardy. The enemy knows beyond a doubt that their invasion failed."

  "They would have known that anyway," Harli pointed out. "If Jody and Freylan hadn't garbled the message, it would have given them that and probably a lot more."

  "Or they might not even have noticed it was a message," Uy countered. "Or even if they had, they might have thought it was a joke."

  "That seems unlikely," Harli said, his tone respectful but giving no ground. "Captain Eubujak certainly thought it would get through."

  "Could you tell what it was, Jody?" Kemp asked.

  "I didn't get very much," Jody admitted. "The first word was definitely danger, and I think the next four were defeated Cobra numbers diminished. Two of the ones in the middle, near where Freylan threw the first of his gas canisters, looked like drone hatch. But that's all I got."

  "He was probably warning them how we got into their ship during the battle," Kemp suggested. "Good thing that little tidbit got erased. We might need to use that back door on the next ship."

  Uy grunted again. "It would have been nice if the Qasamans had told us they'd left sleep-gas canisters with their combat suits." His eyes locked on Jody. "Or was that supposed to be a surprise?"

  "The canisters are part of the suits," Jody said. "It probably never even occurred to them to mention them."

  "And your excuse?"

  "No excuse, Governor," Jody said, fighting against a surge of annoyance at the injured man. Despite what he obviously thought, none of any of this was her fault. "That wasn't the thrust of our work on the suits, so it also never occurred to us to mention them."

  "And we did know about them," Harli put in firmly. "I'm mildly surprised that Freylan remembered the things and was able to use them. But I'm glad he did."

  For a moment he and his father locked eyes, and Jody had the uncomfortable sense of the silent argument going on between them.

  Uy blinked first. "I suppose," he acknowledged, shifting his eyes to one of the other Cobras standing around the hospital room. "Gaber, I assume you've had a talk with Captain Eubujak about this little stunt?"

  "For all the good it did," Gaber said ruefully. "All he'll say is that escape is the right and privilege of every prisoner of war, and more or less dared us to punish him for it."

  "You ask him what the message was?" Kemp asked.

  "I did, and he wouldn't tell me." A hint of a smile touched Gaber's lips. "I did get the impression that he's rather astonished we figured out there was a message, let alone figured it out fast enough to do something about it. He did admit that the frontal assault on Freylan was mainly to force us to show the courier that we still had Cobras at our disposal."

  "They would have guessed that anyway," Harli said. "This way, at least it cost Eubujak another ten of his troops."

  "For whatever that's worth," Uy said. "So to summarize: they know we defeated their initial attack, that we wrecked one of their ships in the process, that we took nearly half of the Troft forces prisoner and killed the rest, and that we still have Cobras. That about cover it?"

  "I think so," Harli said. "The next question is what we do now."

  "Starting with how long we're going to have to come up with a plan," Gaber said. "It's, what, about five days to Qasama from here?"

  "Qasama?" Harli growled. "They can get all the ships they want from Aventine."

  "Oh, hell," Gaber muttered. "I hadn't thought about that. They could have a new force here in two days."

  "I don't think so," Jody said. "Lorne and Rashida both said that the demesne markings on the warships at Aventine were different from the ones here."

  "So?" Gaber asked. "They're allies, aren't they?"

  "They may be allies, but they're still Trofts," Jody said. "The ones I've worked with have been extremely competitive, to the point where they'll waste ridiculous amounts of time and money rather than let even a business partner know about a weakness that they can exploit. A Drim courier ship isn't about to tell even an ally that the invasion team muffed it. They're going to go to the nearest Drim force, and according to Rashida that force is on Qasama."

  "Unless the Drim have ships on Palatine or Esquiline," Gaber pointed out grimly.

  "It doesn't matter," Harli cut in. "If they get help from any of the Cobra Worlds we're dead, period—there's no way we can be ready for them in two or three days. So let's assume Jody is right, and they have to go to Qasama. In that case, what's our timing look like?"

  Jody curled her hands into fists. She was hardly an expert on Trofts, especially not on Troft military matters. But with Jennifer McCollom gone to Qasama, and given the rest of the Caelians' self-absorbed isolation, she was probably the best they had. "Let's assume the courier takes five days to get to Qasama," she said slowly, thinking it through. "That's about top speed for our freighters, so it's probably a fair guess. Warships, with all their extra mass and cross-section, will almost certainly be slower—six or seven at least. It may also take a day or two for the Drim commander on the scene to digest the report and decide what he wants to do."

  "Or maybe not," Uy said. "Let's go with your eleven-day estimate. In fact, let's err on the safe side and say ten."

  "Terrific," Kemp murmured. "Ten days to prepare for another invasion."

  "We'll find a way to do it," Uy said. "Because we really don't have a choice." He looked over at his clock. "I want everyone back here in two hours, along with the city council and anybody from Essbend or Aerie who are still here. At that time, you're each to have at least two ideas to bring to the table. Understood?"

  An affirmative murmur swept the room. "Good." Uy looked at Jody. "That goes for you, too, Ms. Broom. You and your two friends. Two ideas eac
h, and they'd better be good."

  "Yes, sir," Jody murmured.

  "So get to it," Uy said, looking around the room. "I want answers, gentlemen, and I want them today."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The under-road culvert was exactly where Miron Akim had said it would be, five kilometers up the road to Windloom. It was also as roomy as he'd said, and as easily rigged to be defensible against nocturnal predators.

  He hadn't, however, said anything about its comfort, or lack of same. It wasn't long after they'd settled in for the night that Daulo realized why that part had been left out of the discussion.

  Even Akim was apparently not all that impressed with the accommodations. During one of Daulo's frequent awakenings, this particular one a little after midnight, he saw Akim slip through the makeshift barrier at one end of the culvert and head out into the night, in the opposite direction from the clump of trees that Omnathi had earlier designated as the group's latrine. For a few minutes Daulo kept his eyes pried open, wondering whether Akim was searching for better padding for his sleeping blanket or whether he was giving up entirely on the culvert and had decided to take his chances with the predators.

  But idle curiosity was no match for fatigue. Even with his aching muscles and back, the rigors of the day's events soon forced Daulo's eyelids closed again. The next time he awoke, the culvert and its occupants were once again silent and still.

  He was still exhausted when the diffuse sunlight of morning awakened him for the final time. The rest of the group was already up, he saw as he carefully levered himself into a seating position, wincing at each movement and muscle twinge. Akim was passing out ration bars and water bottles, the six Djinn were busily repacking the equipment for travel, and Shahni Haafiz was scowling as he bit pieces off his breakfast.

  Daulo had made it to his feet and was working himself into his wheelchair when Akim came over. "Good morning, Daulo Sammon," he said as he offered Daulo a ration bar and water bottle. "Did you sleep well?"

  "Not especially, Marid Akim," Daulo confessed. "I'm afraid Sollas's hospital beds have spoiled me. Culverts just don't seem all that comfortable anymore."