Cobra Gamble

by Timothy Zahn

  [Further discussion, I will look forward to it.] Ukuthi gestured to Anya. [A slave, you must now behave as one. Anya Winghunter's behavior and manner, you must imitate them.]

  Merrick grimaced. He hadn't thought about that aspect of this masquerade. If the other Trofts tumbled to the fact that he wasn't, in fact, one of Ukuthi's slaves, there would be serious hell to pay.

  Still, if he wanted to monitor Ukuthi's behavior during the upcoming action and confirm he wasn't helping the Drim against the Qasamans, this was where he needed to be. [My best, I will do it,] he told the other.

  There were four soldiers waiting at the base of the Drim command ship when the Balin car arrived. Merrick thought he saw some surprise in their faces when Ukuthi strode toward them with a pair of human slaves in tow, but it might have been his imagination. Certainly neither of them said anything. Two of the soldiers ushered the visitors through the bow door into what seemed to be a guard room, then led the way up a switchback stairway to the ship's top deck. There, they were shown into a conference room where four Trofts wearing senior officers' insignia and identical sets of curlies were already seated on upholstered couches.

  The couches, Merrick noted, came equipped with small control boards and tables to hold the Trofts' drinks. A fifth couch, currently unoccupied, had a drink poured and waiting.

  The soldiers had been too polite or too discreet to mention Ukuthi's slave entourage. But one of the officers had no such compunctions. [The meaning, what is this?] he demanded, glaring at Merrick and Anya. [Commander Ukuthi, does he now bring slaves to military conferences?]

  [Commander Ukuthi, he is training them to military capabilities,] Ukuthi said calmly. [Constant service, I require them to learn it.]

  [Unseemly, it is,] the other Troft growled. [Commander Inxeba's slaves, he has not brought them.] He gestured to the other Drim officers. [My officers, their slaves they have also left elsewhere.]

  [Commander Inxeba's forgiveness, I ask it,] Ukuthi said. [My departure, do you wish it?]

  Inxeba sent Merrick another glare, but pointed to the empty couch. [Your presence, I request it,] he said tartly. [The slaves, they will stand silently]

  Ukuthi looked at Merrick as he settled onto his couch. [Silence, you will maintain it,] he ordered.

  Anya bowed. Merrick caught the beginning of the gesture in time to follow suit. [The order, we obey it,] she said. She looked sideways at Merrick and gave a small warning shake of her head.

  Merrick nodded back and remained silent. Apparently, all the members of a group of slaves were to bow, but it was sufficient for only one of them to acknowledge a general order.

  [The purpose of this meeting, what is it?] Ukuthi asked as he sampled his drink.

  [Activity in Purma, it has suddenly increased,] Inxeba said, pointing to one of a bank of sixty small monitors arrayed across two of the room's walls. That particular display showed an aerial view of a city intersection, with twenty Qasamans moving purposefully around the area. At the bottom of the image were the words Purma/Five in cattertalk script. [A SkyJo lair, it is,] Inxeba identified the view. [The Qasamans' attack helicopters, they are about to deploy them.]

  Merrick frowned. Ukuthi had predicted an attack, but in Azras, not Purma. Had he been wrong? Or was Purma just a diversion?

  Ukuthi was apparently wondering along the same lines. [The SkyJos, have you yet seen one?] he asked.

  [The SkyJos, I have not seen them,] Inxeba admitted. [A SkyJo lair, I am still convinced it is.]

  [The truth, perhaps you speak it,] Ukuthi said. [Azras, is there activity there?]

  [Activity, it is also occurring in Azras,] Inxeba said, a note of impatience in his voice. [But the activity, it is less urgent. Purma, the center of enemy government it is. Purma, from there will the enemy's next attack arise.]

  [Purma, the attack will perhaps arise from there,] Ukuthi said noncommittally. [The truth, you appear to have it. My presence, why have you requested it?]

  [Strategic command, the Drim'hco'plai have given you,] Inxeba said, and there was no mistaking the resentment in his tone. [Commander Goqana, he requests your approval for my action.]

  [Your action, what form does it take?] Ukuthi asked.

  The Drim commander launched into a convoluted explanation, much of it involving military terms that Merrick didn't know. As he listened with half an ear, he looked across the rest of the monitor bank until he found the set of eight images that were marked with the identifying word Azras. Like the Purma cityscape, all the Azras images were coming from hovering drones. All eight showed the same sort of street activity that the Purma drones were watching, though as Inxeba had said the Azras version didn't seem nearly as intense or surreptitious.

  He frowned as something odd caught his eye. The eight Azras monitors showed street activity; but it was the same street activity. Whoever was directing operations had apparently been intrigued enough by what was happening on that particular street to gather all the drones together to monitor it.

  Leaving the rest of the city completely unwatched.

  Merrick's guess had been right. Purma was a diversion.

  He stole a look at Inxeba. The Drim commander was still gazing intently at the wrong displays, his radiator membranes fluttering slowly with anticipation of the coup he was fully expecting to achieve today.

  [Slave.]

  Startled, Merrick looked at Ukuthi. The Balin commander was pointing at his empty glass.

  [Your wish, we obey it,] Anya said. Nudging Merrick, she nodded across the room to a sideboard where a large, half-full pitcher sat on a cooling plate.

  Merrick nodded back and crossed to the pitcher. It was heavier than it looked, but his arm servos were more than up to the task. Returning to Ukuthi's couch, he carefully refilled the glass. [The others, you will serve them,] Ukuthi said when he'd finished.

  [The order, I obey it,] Merrick said, wincing. Here he was, trying to hold still and remain invisible; and here Ukuthi was, thrusting him squarely into the center of attention.

  But for all he didn't know about proper slave protocol, he did know that he wasn't supposed to argue with his master. Steeling himself, he set off around the room, stopping at each of the occupied couches and topping off the other Trofts' drinks.

  To his mild surprise, none of them looked at him. Certainly none of them thanked him. It was entirely possible, in fact, that they didn't even notice him. Perhaps that was the point Ukuthi had intended to make.

  Still, Merrick didn't breathe easy again until he'd finished his task, returned the pitcher to the sideboard, and resumed his place at Anya's side.

  [My thought, I will give it to your proposal,] Ukuthi continued, gesturing to the Purma displays. [My attention, I will now give it to the situation.]

  His eyes flicked to Merrick. [Useful knowledge, I will hope to gain it.]

  Merrick swallowed hard, his eyes on the Azras displays. There was useful knowledge out there, all right. Ukuthi seemed to have already spotted it.

  The question was whether Inxeba would also pick up on it in time. Merrick would bet heavily that he wouldn't.

  The Qasamans of Azras were betting, too. Only they were betting their lives.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The first task, once the eight armored trucks had been captured and their crews neutralized, was to get the vehicles out of Azras.

  That part was more or less easy. Lorne had driven one of the trucks back on Aventine and had spent an hour the previous night coaching the Djinn who would be in charge of that part of the operation. The relative simplicity of the task, combined with the learning-enhancement drugs the Qasamans had been given during the session, pretty much guaranteed they'd do a decent job.

  And they did. Lorne watched with only mild trepidation as their driver maneuvered his truck through the city streets with a minimum of hesitation and only a single badly-taken corner. Along the way the other captured trucks swung out of other streets to join them, and by the time they came in sight of the main city ga
te the full eight-truck convoy was running together in a tight battle-phalanx array.

  The second task was to get past the Trofts guarding the gate. That one was slightly less easy. The individual soldiers weren't a problem—most of them goggled at the armored column bearing down on them, made frantic radio calls back to the warship for help or fired a useless shot or two before diving out of the way to the sides of the road. The four armored trucks, though their occupants were obviously as startled as the soldiers, stood their ground, their swivel guns turning toward the attackers and opening fire.

  They got off perhaps two shots each before the missiles the Djinn had set up in concealed launch tubes on top of the wall blasted down on them, destroying all four trucks and sending mushroom clouds of fire and debris curling high into the air.

  But with that, the real job began... because while the truck crews and the gate guards had been taken more or less by surprise, the warship a kilometer away was now on full alert. As the trucks set off toward it across the empty field, their swivel guns firing madly, the heavy lasers on the pylons beneath the warships stubby wings began returning fire.

  And suddenly the landscape around the trucks became a blazing hell of fire and smoke.

  Beside Lorne, Siraj was quietly cursing through clenched teeth, anger and fear mixing together in his voice. Not fear for himself, Lorne knew. Hanging underneath the truck on the hand- and footholds that had been quick-welded into place before they drove out of the city, and with the entire bulk of the truck between them and the warship's lasers, he and the rest of the strike team were as safe as it was possible to be.

  But the drivers and gunners inside the trucks didn't have nearly as much protection. They were heading straight into the deadly fire, fully aware of the danger, fully aware that most or all of them would probably die in the next ninety seconds, but fully committed to getting the strike team as close to the warship as they possibly could.

  A fresh wave of smoke billowed across the ground beneath the truck as a near-miss ignited a patch of low bushes. Lorne squeezed his eyes closed against the sting, relying on his implanted opticals to see what was happening. They'd made it across the first small ridge, he could tell, and he could hear the crack of the relays through the thick metal above him that meant their swivel gun was still sending laser fire back at the warship's weapons clusters. The assumption had been that the warship would target the swivel guns first, trying to knock them out before they could do serious damage to the ship's own lasers, missiles, and point-defense systems, and only then concentrate on disabling the trucks themselves.

  The truck lurched and seemed briefly to float in midair before crashing heavily to the ground again. Second ridge passed. Two more to go, then a shallow dip twenty meters wide that led right up to the warship's base and the two bow doors that were the strike team's hoped-for way in. Third ridge should be coming up...

  And then, with a final sputtering snap from the capacitors, the swivel gun above them went silent. "Siraj Akim?" Lorne called.

  "Our gun's been silenced," Siraj confirmed, his head tilted sideways as he listened to the small radio attached to his right shoulder. "Three of the others have also lost their guns. The others are still firing."

  Lorne grimaced. The assumption that the warship would take out the trucks' guns first was a reasonable one. But it was only an assumption. If the Troft commander decided he'd rather keep the stolen vehicles at arm's length than disarm them, the strike team could find themselves hanging under broken vehicles too far away from the warship to have any chance of breaching it.

  And then, to Lorne's dismay, a new sound joined the snapping of displaced air and the louder crackling of stressed metal and burning vegetation: the sizzle-roar of missiles. Had the Trofts decided it was time to escalate from lasers to missiles? "Siraj Akim?"

  "It's all right," Siraj said, his lips pulling back into an evil-looking smile. "Ghofl Khatir has ordered more missiles to be launched from the Azras wall."

  Lorne felt his own lips curl back. And now the Trofts were being forced to deal with the more immediate threat of a missile attack before they could return to the task of disabling or destroying the approaching trucks. Khatir had just bought them a few more precious seconds.

  His smile turned into a grimace... because the strike team's extra seconds were being bought with Qasaman lives. Back in Sollas, during the first invasion, he'd seen how the Trofts dealt with incoming fire: blanket the area with laser and missile fire, taking out the enemy positions as well as much of the architecture around them. If they kept to that pattern, many of the men manning the Azras missile launchers would be killed, along with probably dozens of civilians.

  The truck shot up and lofted itself down from another ridge. Lorne held on grimly, trying to figure out which of the five ridges that had been. To his embarrassed chagrin, he realized that in the confusion of the moment he'd lost count.

  But his nanocomputer clock circuit showed a minute twenty had passed since they'd blown out of Azras. It should only be another ten seconds to the ship.

  And then, with an ear-hammering blast and a jolt that nearly wrenched Lorne's hands from the bars, the truck ground to a halt.

  "Are we there?" the Djinni on Siraj's far side asked.

  "Either there or as close as we're going to get," Lorne told him. He lowered himself onto the ground, wincing at the heat from the burned grass against his back, and made his way to the front of the truck.

  The gamble had worked. The Troft warship was right in front of them, the nearest of the bow doors no more than five meters away.

  And now came the really hard part. "We're here," he confirmed, looking both directions. "We're five meters out—the rest are no farther than seven or eight. If we all hurry, we should be able to make it before they notice us and open fire from the wing clusters."

  "Assuming the invaders are foolish enough to open the doors," Siraj warned, crawling up beside him.

  Lorne nodded silently. Again, the assumption was sound: the Trofts would want to quickly deal with whoever might still be alive inside the trucks, but deal with them in a way that wouldn't require them to expend energy or missiles and also wouldn't end up with the utter destruction of their trucks. But again, it was only an assumption. "They will," he assured Siraj. "Anyone still alive in here will by definition be military, and the Trofts will want to question any survivors about Azras's SkyJo contingent."

  "Or if not question him, at least identify his face," Siraj said. "If they've been recording their drone observations, they may try to backtrack their prisoners and see which buildings they've been using."

  Lorne looked at Siraj in mild surprise. That one hadn't even occurred to him. "That would be clever, wouldn't it?"

  "One of my father's thoughts," Siraj explained with a tight smile. "He is the Marid of Djinn, after all. One should expect him to have an occasional good idea or flash of wisdom."

  "One should," Lorne agreed, looking back at the still sealed bow door. "Come on," he muttered. "Come on."

  "Give them a moment," Gama Yithtra advised as he crawled up beside Siraj. "They were taken by surprise. They may still be rushing madly to don their armor."

  Lorne nodded, looking down at the device clutched in Yithtra's hand. Its cross shape and flat sides, he'd been told, harkened back to an ancient hunting weapon called a chalip, which had long ago been relegated to the status of children's toy.

  But this version, consisting of four metal crossarms thirty centimeters across, was considerably more sophisticated. "Just stay alert," Lorne cautioned. "There won't be much time once they charge out."

  "Don't worry, Lorne Moreau," Yithtra said, wiggling the chalip for emphasis. "You may be an expert on hunting Troft invaders, but I'm the expert with this."

  And then, abruptly, the warship door swung open and a double line of armored Troft soldiers charged out, lasers held ready. The first four broke to their left, heading for the farthest of the stalled and battered trucks, while the next four split
into pairs and headed toward Lorne's vehicle.

  Lorne froze, pressing himself against the ground. But the soldiers' eyes were on the truck's partially blackened windshield and side windows, clearly expecting any further attack to come from one of those directions. Quickly, Lorne flicked a target lock onto the two on his side of the truck as they strode around the front and headed warily toward the rear. Behind them, more Trofts filed from the warship, breaking into more foursomes and heading for the other trucks. The flow stopped, and Lorne got a glimpse of two more Trofts inside the ship, keying the control that started the bow door swinging swing shut.

  Lurching his torso up off the ground, Yithtra hurled the chalip low over the ground toward the closing door, sailing it like a horizontal pinwheel firespitter through the smoky air. It reached the gap just as the door closed on it, getting caught between door and jamb and blocking the door open a few centimeters. There was a flash of bright yellow where the crossarms touched the door and the jamb—

  "Attack!" Ghushtre shouted.

  Grabbing the wide bar at the front of the truck, Lorne pulled hard, flinging himself out into the open like a missile from its launch tube. He flipped over onto his back, catching a glimpse of the Trofts who'd been heading toward the rear, now trying desperately to bring their weapons around to face this unexpected threat that had appeared behind them.

  They were still trying when Lorne's antiarmor laser flashed twice, sending both soldiers sprawling to the smoldering ground.

  Lorne kicked his legs over his head, flipping himself back to his feet as more flashes of laser fire lit up the area between the trucks. He glanced around, confirmed that the Cobras and Djinn of the strike force were all emerging from beneath their vehicles, then turned back to the warship.

  The two Trofts he'd seen inside hadn't been caught as thoroughly by surprise as their late comrades outside had been. Both aliens were at the jammed door, struggling with the chalip as they tried to pry it loose so that they could seal the door against this unexpected attack.

  But the exothermic fast-setting adhesive pellets spaced along the crossarms had fastened it in place as effectively as if it had been welded there. The Trofts were still trying to get it free when Siraj reached the door and took them out with two quick shots from his glove lasers.