Cobra Gamble

by Timothy Zahn

  "Trust me," Kemp said with a sly smile. "Come on—I've got the power going."

  Rashida had been right, Jody noted soberly as she followed Kemp through the narrow corridors toward the bow. The beating the freighter had taken, first from the invaders' brief attack and then from the crash landing, had seriously messed up the interior. Walls and bulkheads were buckled, floors were canted, and there was broken equipment everywhere. The vines and other plants already starting to fill the open areas merely added a bizarre aspect to the ship instead of hiding any of the damage.

  "So now what?" Kemp asked when they were finally standing in the command room.

  "Rashida and I need to do some reconstruction of the course," Jody said, a shiver running through her as she stared at the lumpy gray hull sealant running in a jagged line across the wall. Her mother had nearly died right here...

  "What can we do to help?"

  "Nothing, really," Jody said. "It's pretty much a job for us cattertalk-readers."

  "There's a lounge just aft of the hatch, if you'd like to rest," Rashida offered.

  "And if you get bored with that, you can poke around and see if there's anything aboard worth taking back to Stronghold," Jody added.

  "Yeah, keeping busy sounds good," Kemp said. "Smitty, you stay here and keep an eye on them. I'll go start opening cabinets."

  Jody looked at Rashida's suddenly tense face. If Smitty figured out what they were doing, they were going to be in big trouble with Harli. "It would be safer if you stuck together," she told Kemp. "Remember, you still don't know how that hooded cloven got in. The command room looks pretty secure—we'll be fine here on our own."

  "Besides, we have these," Rashida added, holding up her arms to show the glove lasers on their combat suits.

  For a moment Kemp eyed her thoughtfully. Then he shifted his gaze to the walls and floor, his eyes moving methodically across every centimeter of the command room's surfaces. "Okay," he said at last, pulling out a field radio and handing it to her. "We'll seal up behind us—call me immediately if you see anything that even looks like it might be trouble. And don't open the door until we get back, for any reason. Got it?"

  "Got it," Jody said, clipping the radio to her belt. "Happy hunting."

  Kemp gave the room a final sweep, then strode out. Smitty gave a last look at Rashida and then followed, sealing the door behind him.

  Jody took a deep breath and pulled her recorder from her inside pocket. "Okay," she said, gesturing Rashida toward the helm. "Let's see what we've got."

  After the way Rashida had talked, Jody had fully expected the script on the helm controls to be faded or scratched or otherwise difficult to read.

  She hadn't expected for it to be completely incomprehensible.

  Steady, girl, she told herself firmly as she studied the flowing characters. These are Trofts. They speak cattertalk, and they write cattertalk. This has to be understandable.

  But the characters refused to resolve themselves into anything she was familiar with.

  "You can't read it either?" Rashida asked anxiously as the silence lengthened. "What do we do?"

  "We start by not panicking," Jody told her. "The Troft Assemblage is made up of hundreds of small demesnes, with probably dozens of different dialects and tonal shadings among them. This has got to be one of those differences. We just have to figure out how it... wait a minute."

  "You have something?"

  Jody smiled lopsidedly. Of course. "Got it," she said. "It's normal script, except with a bunch of extra twiggings and some really strange angles. Sort of like—let's see; what did they call it?—like Earth Gothic script. Something like that."

  "Yes," Rashida said slowly, peering closely at the script. "Yes, I think I see it now. But don't these differences make communication difficult?"

  "Apparently not to the Trofts," Jody said. "I've heard that groups who normally speak even extremely different dialects usually don't have any trouble understanding each other's cattertalk. I guess reading each other's script works the same way."

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a relieved whoof. Now, with that realization, the whole board made sense again. Deciphering it would be slow and tricky, but at least it would be possible. "So okay," she continued briskly. "How do you want to work this?"

  "I thought we could go down the same list of situations and responses that the interrogator used back on Qasama," Rashida said, sitting down in the main helm seat and flexing her fingers. "You can record both, and hopefully we can then adapt all the movements to the warship's controls after we return to Stronghold."

  "Sounds reasonable," Jody said. "You think you can remember all the questions?"

  Rashida frowned up at her. "Of course."

  "Right," Jody murmured. Settling herself at Rashida's side, she aimed the recorder's lens over the board. "Whenever you're ready."

  [The main drive engines, they are to be activated,] Rashida said, slipping into cattertalk as her hands traced out a sequence of eight different controls. [The grav lifts, they are to be activated...]

  They'd been at it for four hours straight when Kemp and Smitty finally returned to the command room. "How's it going?" Smitty asked as the two Cobras again made sure to seal the door behind them.

  "We're making progress," Jody confirmed. "You?"

  "The same," Smitty said, pulling over one of the chairs and sitting down. "There's a lot more stuff back there than we realized."

  "A little too much, in fact," Kemp said, passing Smitty and coming up beside the two women. "Rashida, how long did it take you to fly from Qasama to Aventine in this thing?"

  "About five days," Rashida said. "That was the freighter's highest speed."

  "Why, were you thinking they should have gotten there faster?" Jody asked.

  "No, just the opposite," Kemp said, frowning down at the control board. "It looks like there was space for twelve spine leopards in the main hold. That sound about right?"

  "Yes, I believe so," Rashida said. "I know Miron Akim removed ten, and there was room for one or two more."

  "So ten to twelve of the beasts," Kemp said. "But the amount of food they had stored up for them—some kind of frozen carcasses, I think—looks like enough for a good three-week trip."

  "'Course, we don't know how much Qasaman spinies usually eat," Smitty warned. "Could be they chow down more than their Aventinian cousins."

  "No, they should be pretty much the same," Jody said, frowning. "I think Governor Telek made sure they did food compatibility tests before they released the first of them onto the planet." Rashida stirred, but didn't speak. "They were probably just planning a slower trip, that's all."

  "Yeah, we thought of that," Kemp said. "Problem is, it brings up an even thornier question. Your mother and brother both told us that the Trofts had already invaded Aventine when your mother and the Qasamans arrived. That means that if the original Troft crew had still been in charge, they'd have been barely in time to offload their load of spinies before the first invasion wave finished consolidating their gains. If they'd been running at fuel-saver speeds, there's no way they would have arrived until the party was pretty much over."

  "Maybe they were supposed to be part of the second wave," Jody suggested. "They were to bring in the next batch of spinies to replace the ones the Aventine Cobras would have killed."

  "And they wanted to bring them all the way from Qasama?" Kemp asked. "Think about it—once the Trofts have Aventine, they can zip out to the expansion regions whenever they want and pick up as many spinies as they want."

  "And they can get the things without having Qasamans shooting at them the whole time," Smitty added.

  Jody frowned. They had a point. An extremely good point. "Okay," she said slowly. "So maybe the carcasses were also for the crew to eat?"

  Kemp snorted. "You see a butcher shop or carving station on your way in?" he asked. "Come on—a simple freighter crew's not going to load a bunch of whole carcasses aboard a ship when pre-packaged meals are a he
ll of a lot easier to deal with."

  "No, I suppose not." Jody looked at Rashida. "Feel free to jump in with any ideas," she invited.

  "I have one thought," Rashida said slowly. "But I'm not sure it makes sense."

  "Well, the one we came up with doesn't make sense, either," Smitty said. "How bad can yours be?"

  "Go ahead, Rashida," Jody said encouragingly.

  Rashida hunched her shoulders. "Perhaps the presence of extra supplies means the invaders never intended to bring these particular razorarms to your worlds. Perhaps the plan was to take them somewhere else."

  "Congratulations," Kemp said sourly. "Looks like we're all going crazy together, because that's the same conclusion we came to. Problem is, we can't figure out where or why anyone would want to do that."

  "I don't suppose the pilot your people interrogated might still be alive," Smitty said. "If he is, we might be able to ask him when this is all over."

  "I don't know what happened to him," Rashida said, frowning into the distance. "That would have been Senior Advisor Omnathi's decision. But there may be another way."

  She swiveled back to the board. "There should be a history of previous travel in the ship's log," she continued, keying the navigational section. "If we can find out where the ship has been, we may find a clue to where it was going."

  "Good idea," Smitty said approvingly, getting up and stepping to her side. "Do we have some kind of—? Oh, you've got a recorder, Jody. Great. Does it have a Troft jack?"

  "It has a standard one," Jody said, looking around. "But I didn't bring a cable for it."

  "I'll look in here," Kemp offered, heading toward a cabinet fastened to the side wall. "Smitty, see if you can find any drawers under the control boards."

  "There's another spare-parts cabinet in the anteroom," Rashida said.

  "I'll check it," Jody said, turning toward the door.

  "I'll check it," Kemp said firmly, changing direction. "You can look in this one."

  They'd collected a total of five data cables by the time Rashida found the freighter's course history. Three of the cables were of an odd and non-standard configuration, which Jody suspected went along with the script variant used by the ship's owners. Fortunately, the control board had several different jacks, one of which was the kind Jody was used to and that her recorder could take. Even more fortunately, the other two cables were of that same type.

  Three minutes later, she had a full recording of everywhere the wrecked freighter had been in the past eight Troft standard months.

  "For all the good it'll do us," Kemp said with a grunt as Jody disconnected the cable. "If it's been flying someplace off our charts, we won't know where any of those planets is anyway."

  "There are more extensive maps back on Aventine," Jody said, double-checking the download. It would be embarrassing to get back to Stronghold and only then discover that her recorder hadn't encoded the data properly. But everything seemed to be there. "And the Tlossies should be able to pull up data on everything any group of Trofts have ever put their status curlies on. When Warrior's people get here we can have him take a look."

  "Let's hope they're not running at fuel-saver speeds," Kemp said. "So what now?"

  "We still have some work to do in here," Jody said, looking at Rashida and getting a small nod of confirmation in return. "You said something earlier about lunch?"

  "That we did," Kemp agreed. "Come on, Smitty, let's go outside and get a fire going. Might as well give our guests the full Wonderland experience."

  "Sure," Smitty said. "Rashida, how do you like your hooded cloven steaks?"

  For a moment Rashida looked uncertainly at him, as if trying to figure out if he was making fun of her. She must have seen something in his face, though, because Jody saw her tense muscles relax. "Not too deeply cooked," she told him. "The very center part should remain the color of the original meat."

  "We'll call that a rare," Smitty said, looking at Jody "Jody?"

  "Medium rare," Jody told him. "And char the outside, if you don't think it'll make the meat too tough."

  "It won't," Smitty promised. "You two get back to work. One of us will come get you when it's ready."

  * * *

  By the time Smitty came to get them, Rashida and Jody were nearly finished with the read-through on the piloting instructions Rashida and Khatir had received back on Qasama. Long before that point was reached Jody found herself utterly astonished by the sheer amount of information the Qasaman treatments had enabled Rashida to retain.

  And not just information, either, but also the detailed muscle memory that had allowed her to pilot an alien ship across the stars to Aventine and then to Caelian.

  Khatir and Siraj had assured Governor Uy that the Qasamans would be able to learn how to be Cobras in days rather than weeks. At the time, Jody had assumed that was fifty percent boasting and fifty percent finger-crossed hope. Now, she wasn't so sure it wasn't a hundred percent truth.

  The lunch the two Cobras had prepared was excellent, far better than Jody had expected untreated and unseasoned meat cooked on an open fire could ever be. Kemp hadn't been kidding about including a ribbon-vine salad, either, which was also delicious. The fact that they had to eat everything with their field knives only added a dash of adventure to the whole experience.

  The rest of the piloting read-through took less than an hour. By the time Jody announced they were ready to leave, Kemp and Smitty had finished searching the ship and had assembled a small collection of electronics and other small items they thought might be useable and that could be carried on the spookers.

  By the time the sun had reached the tops of the tallest western trees, they were back in Stronghold.

  Jody's plan had been to head immediately to her house and see how Freylan and Geoff were doing with the spore-repellant cloth. But Rashida insisted on first going to the Troft warship to look over the helm board again and run a quick comparison with the records Jody had made of the freighter's controls. Reluctantly, Jody agreed.

  It was just as well that she had.

  "The good news is that we should be able to translate everything you did in the freighter to here," she told Rashida after a quick but careful study of the boards. "The bad news is that you're not going to be able to do it alone."

  "What?" Rashida asked, looking stunned. "But you said the pilot should be able to fly the ship alone."

  "Under normal circumstances, he probably could," Jody said grimly. "But that didn't count on Captain Eubujak having five last minutes in here before the Cobras broke in."

  Rashida's eyes widened some more. "Sabotage?"

  "Yes, of a very clever sort," Jody said. "See here, how the power section and sensor monitor sections of the helm board are dark? Looks like he had just enough time to cut the cables that echoed those control systems from those particular boards over to here."

  Rashida looked at the areas Jody had pointed out. "I don't understand," she said. "If he wished to completely disable the ship, why didn't he just destroy the entire board? I was told he and those with him were armed with lasers when they surrendered."

  "Because he didn't want to completely disable the ship," Jody said. "A wrecked board would have meant no one would ever get the thing off the ground, at least not without a lot of work. What he did was make sure it took three people who knew what they were doing to fly the thing."

  "His thought being that there wouldn't be that many humans on Caelian with such knowledge?"

  "Exactly," Jody said. "Besides which, I don't think he'd given up hope of pulling a last-minute run for it. I'm guessing they had the grav lifts coming up to power when the Cobras came charging through that door."

  Rashida let out a long, thoughtful breath. "All right," she said, still staring at the board. "You say three people can fly it. What about two?"

  "Like who?" Jody countered. "Eubujak was right, you know. No one else on Caelian has even a clue how to run systems like this."

  Rashida turned her gaze on Jody.
"Except you."

  "Including me," Jody retorted. "I've never flown anything more complicated than an aircar in my life. I've never even watched anyone fly something this big."

  "But you understand the language," Rashida reminded her, gesturing at the cattertalk script. "You watched while I ran through the procedures for flying the freighter, and you've already promised to help me adapt the procedures here. How much more complicated can it be for you to learn while you also teach me?"

  "Rashida—" Jody held out her hands, palms upward. "I can't do this. I'm sorry. It's not that I won't do it. It's that I can't."

  "You're wrong," Rashida said quietly. "I've seen your family in action, Jody Moreau Broom. I've seen what your parents and brothers can do. You're part of a remarkable family, more remarkable even than the rest of your people. Whatever you choose to do, you can do it. I know you can."

  Jody shook her head. "My family is Cobras, Rashida," she said. "The parents and brothers you so admire—they're all Cobras. That's the reason they're special, not some historical or mystical family name." She sighed. "But that being said, if we don't get this thing off the ground, it's going to sit here until the invaders' reinforcements arrive, at which point it probably gets turned back around against us."

  "Yes, it does," Rashida said. "Which leaves us only two choices: fly it, or destroy it."

  "And we can't destroy it this close to Stronghold without risking the city," Jody concluded reluctantly. "Which means that either way we have to learn how to fly the damn thing." She sighed again. "Sometimes I hate logic. Okay, fine. I'm in."

  "Thank you," Rashida said. "You said the power and sensor functions have been detached?"

  "Yes," Jody said. "And since power is probably more important than sensors, I'll have to handle that board."

  "But won't we need the sensors, too?"

  "Given that Eubujak made a point of disconnecting them, I'd say we probably will," Jody conceded. "We'll just have to hope we can find a way to preset them."

  "Or," a voice said calmly from the doorway behind them, "you get a third person to run them."

  Jody spun around, nearly wrenching her back in the process, a taste of bile welling suddenly into her throat. Kemp and Smitty stood just inside the doorway, their faces expressionless.