Cobra Gamble

by Timothy Zahn

  Or to move them.

  Slowly, he turned around. Anya was standing quietly by the bed, apparently waiting for orders. "So what now?" Merrick asked, for lack of anything better to say.

  "You should take a few drops of the medicine," she said, again holding up the vial. "It will aid in—"

  "In the healing process," Merrick cut her off. "Yes, I remember. I meant after that."

  "I have been sent to stay here," Anya repeated. "I have been given to you, to serve you however you choose."

  The obvious method by which a young woman could serve a young man flashed into Merrick's mind. Ruthlessly, he forced it back, feeling an unpleasant rush of heat in his cheeks. Getting involved in the middle of a war with someone—anyone—would be bad enough. But the absolute worst thing he could do would be to let himself get entangled with someone who was under Troft control. The minute he let that happen, they would have a lever they could use against him however they chose.

  "Not much call for servants in a prison cell," he told her, trying to keep his voice light. "I could use a snack, though. Any chance they'll let you out to go get me something?"

  "I will ask." Lowering her bag to the floor, she walked toward him. He stepped to the side out of her way and watched as she rapped lightly on the door. She called out, again using the strange cattertalk dialect she'd used earlier. This time, though, Merrick was able to pick out the words master and food. Maybe a little practice was all he needed to learn how to understand it.

  There was no response to her question. She knocked twice more, repeating the message each time, and then turned to Merrick. "They do not seem willing to grant your request," she said.

  "I'm not surprised," Merrick said. Bracing himself, he stepped up to her and held out his hand. "Your bedroll, please."

  Silently, she slid it off her shoulder and handed it to him. "You can have the bed," he told her, moving to the narrow space at the foot of the bed and fumbling with the bedroll's fasteners. Like Anya herself, the clasps weren't quite like anything he'd ever seen before. "I'll sleep over here."

  "Please," she said, crossing to him and taking the bedroll back. With three casually deft flicks of her fingers she undid the fasteners and spread the bedroll on the floor. A small hand pump was fastened to one side, and he watched in fascination as she gave it a few quick squeezes, inflating the roll into something that looked at least marginally comfortable.

  And then, before he could do or say anything, she lowered herself onto the roll, stretching out across it. "Is there anything more you wish before I sleep?" she asked, looking up at him.

  "No, no," Merrick said, pointing to the bed. "You sleep there. I sleep here."

  Anya didn't move. "Is there anything more you wish from me?"

  "Anya—"

  "That is a master's bed," she said quietly. "This is a slave's bed. I won't sleep there."

  Merrick took a deep breath. He could argue with her, he knew. Better yet, he could simply order her to the more comfortable bed. He was the master, after all. He could do that.

  But even if she obeyed, she would undoubtedly feel guilty about it the rest of the night. That would probably keep her awake, which would pretty well negate the whole point of giving her the more comfortable bed in the first place.

  Worse, making any kind of self-sacrifice for her, even one this small, might be exactly what his captors were banking on. Even so mild an emotional interaction would start him on the road he'd already decided he couldn't take.

  "Fine," he said shortly. Turning his back on her, he crossed over to the bed. "Maybe by morning they'll let you get me some food."

  "I will ask when I awaken," she promised. "Will you take the medicine now?"

  "Maybe tomorrow," he said. "I've had about enough Troft generosity for one day."

  "As you wish." If she was annoyed at his refusal or his sarcastic tone, she gave no indication of it. "Sleep well, and call if you need anything."

  Suppressing a sigh, Merrick lay down on the bed, wishing he could turn off the overhead light. Wishing even more that he could shut out the sound of her breathing.

  It was, he suspected, going to be a very long night.

  CHAPTER NINE

  According to the tentative schedule Jody had seen the night before, the downed Troft warship had been due to be raised that morning. But as she and Geoff headed across Stronghold, she could see that the damaged ship was still lying across the broken wall.

  "Uh-oh," Geoff muttered. "That doesn't look good."

  "They're probably just behind schedule," Jody said. "I can't imagine that using Troft slave labor is the most efficient way to run a business."

  "I was talking about that," Geoff said, pointing toward the wall ten meters away from the bow of the downed ship. "Isn't that Nissa Gendreves talking to Harli?"

  Jody made a face. Two weeks ago, back on Aventine, Nissa Gendreves had been a lowly secondary assistant to Governor-General Chintawa, a career bureaucrat moving her slow but steady way up the Cobra Worlds' political ladder.

  But all that had changed with the Troft invasion. Jody's brother Lorne had been tasked with the job of getting Senior Governor Tomo Treakness and his two companions clear of the Trofts, out of Capitalia, and off Aventine. At the height of their mad scramble to take refuge aboard the Tloss demesne heir ship where their more-or-less ally Warrior was waiting for them, a badly injured Treakness had given Nissa full authority of negotiation and treaty for the beleaguered Cobra Worlds.

  Unfortunately, the woman was nowhere near ready to handle that kind of power. She'd quickly shown herself to be just another pre-machined and pre-formed cog from Capitalia's political machinery, unable to grasp the desperate new reality the Cobra Worlds faced and incapable of thinking or functioning outside the lines.

  So Jody's father had been forced to do that offline thinking for her. His reward for that initiative had been Nissa's furious promise that he would one day stand trial for treason, along with his entire family and probably most of the Caelian government.

  Nissa had kept mostly to herself for the past thirteen days, ever since Jody's parents and brother had headed for Qasama with Dr. Croi and the Isis equipment. She'd stayed holed up in the apartment Uy had assigned her—plotting or sulking, Jody didn't know which—coming out only for food and the occasional glowering walking tour of the war-torn city. Whatever it was that had lured her out into the fresh air today and over to the wrecked Troft ship, Jody was pretty sure she wasn't going to like it.

  "Maybe we should take a little walk around the block," Geoff suggested. "Let the air clear out a little."

  Jody squared her shoulders. If Nissa was hoping that Jody and the others would avoid her out of fear or anything else, the girl was sadly mistaken.

  Besides, if there was one thing Jody's parents had taught her it was to hold loosely to any preconceptions, particularly preconceptions backed up by limited numbers of data points. Maybe instead of brooding, Nissa had spent some of her self-imposed exile thinking. "People can change," she reminded Geoff. "Maybe Nissa's thought it through and is ready to see things our way."

  "Right," Geoff growled. "That exactly what I'd expect from a mindless government lock-stepper."

  "She deserves the benefit of the doubt," Jody said firmly. "Anyway, what have you got to worry about? You've charmed the socks off dozens of reluctant investors. You can certainly stand around and smile nicely enough to keep yourself off Nissa's hit list."

  "It's not her hit list I'm worried about," Geoff said sourly. "I'm more worried about Harli. If whatever they're arguing about escalates past words, I don't want to be in the line of fire when he offers to send her into orbit."

  "Now you're just being silly," Jody chided. Though now that they were closer and Harli's expression was easier to read, she saw that Geoff's fears might not be all that exaggerated. "Anyway, Harli's way more accurate than that. Just stay behind me and you'll be fine."

  Geoff grunted. "Yeah."

  The argument had clearly been
going back and forth, but it was Nissa who was the one speaking when Jody and Geoff came into earshot, "—can't wait any longer," she said, her tone the exact mixture of bombastic and whiny that always drove Jody crazy. "What if that courier ship didn't have to go all the way to Qasama to get help? What if they have reserves sitting somewhere out in space where they can jump anywhere quickly? In that case, they could be here any time."

  "Why would they waste the resources to plant a force out in the middle of nowhere?" Harli asked, his expression stiff but his voice still well back from the breaking point. Maybe his parents had taught him about offering the benefit of the doubt, too. "It makes no sense."

  "It's called a flying squad," Nissa said. "That's a unit that can move quickly to—"

  "Yes, I know what it is," Harli interrupted. "My question is why the Trofts would bother setting up a flying squad that might need to come to Caelian."

  "Because—" Nissa broke off, glowering at Jody and Geoff as they came up. "Aren't you two supposed to be working on something?"

  "We are," Jody said coolly. "What seems to be the trouble?"

  "It's a policy issue," Nissa said. "Not really any of your business."

  "Ms. Gendreves is trying to convince me to move all the Troft prisoners out of Stronghold," Harli said. "What she apparently fails to grasp is that I already agree with her. The problem is where to put them where they won't be a threat to us and won't just end up as gigger snacks."

  "I've given you three alternatives," Nissa said stiffly.

  "Right—Essbend, Aerie, or the downed ship," Harli countered. "And if any of those was actually viable, I'd be happy to consider it."

  "They're all viable," Nissa insisted. "You can put restraints on the prisoners or else drug them while you fly them to one of the two villages—that lets you transport at least four per aircar. Pull in all twenty aircars you have on Caelian, and you can do it in two and a half trips."

  "And then we just clear out whatever town you want to put them in?" Harli countered. "Move all the rightful residents out and let the Trofts do whatever they want with people's homes and property? Not a chance."

  "Then put them in there," Nissa said, jabbing a finger toward the downed warship. "I've already told you how you can eliminate any possibility that they'll find something to use against us."

  "Really?" Jody asked, intrigued in spite of herself. There'd been endless discussions and arguments across Stronghold over the past few days on how they could assure that any prisoners locked inside the warships couldn't access hidden weapons or equipment. "How?"

  "Basically, by blowing it up," Harli growled. "No, seriously. She wants us to take one of the remaining missiles off the wing, set up the warhead on the command deck, and let it blow. Then we move the prisoners into an essentially empty shell."

  "And again I ask, what's wrong with that?" Nissa challenged. "That much hullmetal should be strong enough to contain the blast."

  "The key word being should," Harli said. "We don't know that even a completely intact hull will contain that kind of blast. We also don't know if this particular hull is, in fact, intact. There could be all kinds of damage to the plates, seams, or supports that we don't have the equipment to detect."

  "Which is why you first move the ship away from Stronghold," Nissa said.

  "Which we may not be able to do," Harli snapped, his voice starting to teeter on the edge.

  "Wait a minute," Jody said, frowning. "You can't move the ship? I thought you had all the grav lifts in place and calibrated last night."

  "The problem isn't the grav lifts," Harli said. "It's the question of what we do once the downed ship isn't filling in most of the gap where the wall used to be."

  "I thought the plan was to raise it up off its side and then just move it back into the gap," Geoff said.

  "It was," Harli said heavily. "Problem is, we've taken another look at how we've attached the grav lifts, and we're not sure anymore that we'll be able to move the ship once it's upright. There's apparently a whole raft of angle and lift-vector calculations no one bothered to do."

  Jody winced. The broken wall already had an open three-meter gap at either end of the downed ship, which had to be guarded around the clock against gigger and screech tiger incursions. If those smaller gaps suddenly became a single, huge, seventy-meter opening, there would be no way to keep the predators out.

  "What about the other ship?" Geoff asked, gesturing to the warship looming over the downed one. "Could that one be moved into the gap once the damaged one's out of the way?"

  "That's currently our Plan B," Harli said. "Whether we can move it or not will depend on whether there'll be room to lower it into place once the other one is standing upright again. We're doing some calculations on that one, too."

  "Can't we just try it?" Jody suggested. "If it doesn't work, you can always lower the wrecked ship back into place, can't you?"

  "In theory, yes," Harli said. "But again, it boils down to the angles we've set the grav lifts at. They can lift it all right, but they may or may not be able to lower it again, at least not in a controlled fashion."

  "How about this?" Nissa said, her forehead wrinkled in thought. "We take the grav lifts off the standing ship and put them in the correct lower-hull positions on the wrecked one. We use the first set to raise it up off the ground, then use the second set to move it back into the gap in the wall."

  "That's not bad," Jody said, her opinion of Nissa going up a notch. Maybe she had spent some of her self-imposed isolation thinking. "That might be the answer."

  "It might," Harli agreed, a bit grudgingly. "Problem is, I don't think we've got the time and resources to pull it off. Especially since that would leave the upright ship sitting there with no way to move it."

  "Can't we put the grav lifts back after we've lifted and moved the first ship?" Jody asked.

  "Again, not in the time we've got," Harli said. "The reinforcements could be here in as little as eight days." He grimaced. "And our available labor force isn't exactly enthusiastic about working fast."

  "So let's try thinking outside the lines," Geoff suggested, a sudden, cautious excitement in his voice. "What exactly do we need the wall for, anyway?"

  Harli snorted. "I don't have time for this," he growled, starting to turn around.

  "No, no, I mean it," Geoff said, grabbing his arm. "Walk with me here. We need the wall mainly to keep out the organics and all the rest of the unpleasant ecology that comes rushing in after them. Right?"

  Jody snapped her fingers as she finally figured out where he was going. "The Qasamans' combat suits," she said. "We already know that current flowing through the stiffeners and servos repels the organics, or at least prevents them from attaching. If we can build a curtain across the gap that can do that, it should keep out everything but the larger predators."

  "Not much comfort to the citizens who end up being eaten," Nissa muttered.

  "Actually, if the smaller animals stay away, most of the predators should, too," Harli said thoughtfully. "The few who get curious enough to come in should be easy enough to deal with. Problem is, unless those suits are a hell of a lot stretchier than they look, they're not going to begin to fill the gap."

  "Right, but we don't need the combat suits per se," Geoff said. "We just need the electric fields they generate. If we can duplicate those in or around some other material, we should be able to pull it off. It's at least worth a try."

  Harli turned toward the crushed wall, and for a moment gazed at it in silence. Then, abruptly, he turned back and nodded. "What do you need?" he asked.

  "Freylan's running the final readings on the electric field right now," Geoff said. "Once he's done—"

  "Freylan's doing the readings?" Harli said, frowning. "I thought he was still in the hospital."

  "He was," Jody said. "He checked himself out early this morning."

  "Said there was no way he was going to just sit around and listen to his ribs mend when there was work to be done," Geoff told him.
"Anyway, once he's got the final specs, it should be easy to program a generator to duplicate the field."

  "So you'll need a generator," Harli said, nodding. "What else?"

  "Access to everything Stronghold's got in the way of electronics supplies," Geoff said. "Depending on what we end up needing, we might have to disassemble some of your entertainment or computer systems."

  "We'll also need samples of cloth to try out," Jody said. "Drapes, extra clothing—anything we can attach the electronics to that won't block the electric fields."

  "And once we figure out which material works best, we'll need probably every bit of it you've got," Geoff said. "In Stronghold, and possibly everywhere else on the planet."

  "Plus you'll need a lot of hands to put it all together," Harli concluded.

  Jody winced. Between the work on the warship, the general cleanup, and keeping everyone fed and safe. Stronghold's resources and personnel were already stretched dangerously thin. "Unfortunately, yes," she admitted. "I'm sorry."

  "Don't worry about it," Harli assured her. "There are plenty of people out there sitting around loafing. A little real work will do them good. I'll have the orders cut by the time you know what you need." Abruptly, he held up his hand. "Quiet a minute." He turned around toward the downed warship.

  Jody frowned, trying to figure out what he was looking at. A movement above the crowd of Trofts caught her eye: one of the other Cobras—Popescu, she tentatively identified him—was standing beside the ship's upper stern weapons wing, gesturing toward Harli, his mouth moving. Jody strained her ears, but without Cobra audio enhancements she couldn't tell what he was saying.

  But Harli could. And it was clear he didn't like what he was hearing. "You two get back to work," he told Jody and Geoff. His eyes flicked to Nissa. "If you really want to make yourself useful, you can go with them."

  Nissa's eyes narrowed—

  "We could certainly use your help," Geoff seconded quickly. "Freylan's basically glued to his chair right now, with his ribs and all. He could use someone to get equipment and lift things for him."