by Timothy Zahn
Jin took a deep breath. “You will not do this,” she said quietly, enunciating each word like it was a hand-crafted threat. “Not to my family.”
“We’re the Dominion of Man,” Santores said, his tone matching hers precisely. “We do whatever we want. Now sit down. Or my men will make you.”
“You have no authority to give such an order,” Jin said, trying to force back her fury. He was goading her, she knew, using the same tactic he’d already said he was going to use on Lorne. Trying to force her into making a move that would let him snatch her out from under Chintawa’s protection and put her under Dominion law.
But knowing the facts didn’t matter. Her whole body was shaking with the overwhelming desire to wipe that superior look off the man’s face.
No, she told herself firmly. Not now. Not yet. “And your men don’t dare attack without provocation or legal authority,” she managed. “But they’re welcome to walk me back to my cell.”
“Perhaps they’ll walk you to the gates of hell,” Santores said.
A whisper of air brushed the back of Jin’s neck as one of the Marines behind her took a step forward. A quick ceiling flip, she knew, would land her behind Santores and put him between her and his men’s weapons…
With a final, supreme effort, she forced herself to stand perfectly still. “Are you threatening me, Commodore?” she asked instead.
For a moment no one moved or spoke. Then, with a small, ironic smile, Santores gestured to the Marines. Jin turned her head far enough to see them each take a step backward. “You’re a cool one, Cobra Broom,” Santores said, a hint of grudging admiration in his voice. “I would have bet heavily that just hinting at danger to your children would drive you into an attack.”
“You should be damn glad it didn’t,” Jin told him darkly. “I’m already charged with treason. The murder of a Dominion commodore could hardly have made things worse.”
Santores shook his head. “You’d never even have reached me.”
“You think not?” Jin looked at the Marines again.
“I know not,” Santores said scornfully. “These are Dominion Marines, with the best personal weaponry ever created. Your hundred-year-old Cobra technology wouldn’t have had a chance.”
“Really?” Jin countered. “When did the human body become immune to lasers, sonics, and high-voltage current?”
“Since we created uniforms that deflect or disperse lasers, ear implants that block sonics, and conductive micromesh that drains away current,” Santores said calmly. “And with shoulder-mounted lasers that fire wherever the soldier is looking, even your target-lock system is obsolete.”
“I see,” Jin said in a subdued voice. So the Dominion had scrapped the whole Cobra concept in favor of a version of the Qasaman combat suits. Interesting. “Can I go back to my cell now?”
Santores exhaled a slightly frustrated-sounding sigh. “For the moment. Marines, return her to confinement.”
A minute later Jin was again walking down the corridor through the darkened dome and the darkened city.
So Santores liked to play cliff-edge games, did he? There’d been plenty of politicians like that during Uncle Corwin’s days in the Dome, she remembered. In the end, every one of them had either been taken down by someone who played the game better, or else had outsmarted themselves right off the cliff.
Santores would go the way of all the others. That much she was sure of. She just hoped he didn’t take down her family or her world before that happened.
In the meantime, she’d survived his first move. She could only hope Lorne would do the same.
#
The Hoibie merchant ship captain hadn’t been happy with Jody’s request to hitch a ride. He’d been even less happy when he learned she was hoping for that ride to take her to Caelian, nearly two days and exactly a hundred eighty degrees off his plan of heading straight for home.
None of that exactly surprised Lorne. What did surprise him was the fact that it took less than ten minutes for Jody to persuade him to accept her request anyway.
On Aventine, the Broom name might be linked to treason, he mused as he and the other two Cobras continued their trip toward DeVegas province and the provincial capital of Archway. But for the Hoibies, the Broom name was linked to victory.
What that victory consisted of for them, he had no way of knowing. Maybe it had manifested in a major restructuring of the local demesnes’ precedence order. Maybe it had created a situation where resources or cash traded hands. Maybe it had simply been a welcome humiliation of a rival demesne and its allies.
But whatever the Hoibies had gained, it had apparently bought enough good-will to get Jody safely off Aventine. For now, and for Lorne, that was all that mattered.
Getting Jody away from Santores’s people had been Lorne’s primary goal. Now, with that accomplished, he was ready to tackle his next task: drawing the Dominion’s attention toward himself and hopefully deflecting it away from inquiries about his sister’s whereabouts until the Hoibies were ready to lift. Keeping himself out of Santores’s target-lock as long as possible would be an added bonus.
Fortunately, there was a way for him to accomplish both.
Ten minutes after Werle set the aircar down at the Archway field, Lorne had signed himself into the Cobra duty roster for the day. Five minutes after that, as Werle headed for his apartment and some long-overdue sleep, Lorne and de Portola headed the opposite direction: through one of the gates in the city’s perimeter fence on nighttime patrol.
If the Dominion people had any brains, their first try at a computer check would spot the roster and mark him as being back in DeVegas. But with night patrols by definition following semi-random paths through the province’s fields and grazing lands, anyone Santores sent out to bring him back to Capitalia would have the devil’s own job finding him. They would first have to track everyone who was out and about, then figure out which of them were Cobra teams and which were ordinary citizens getting a jump on the day’s chores, and then get close enough for a positive identification. By the time they did all that, Jody should be well on her way to Caelian.
They’d been on patrol for three hours, with dawn less than an hour away, and were circling through the western part of Dushan Matavuli’s grazing land when a sleek aircar of unfamiliar design suddenly appeared directly above them, the red glow from its grav lifts blazing as the vehicle dropped like a stone. It braked at the last possible second and settled with only a small bounce across the dirt road twenty meters ahead of them.
“Nice,” de Portola commented as he let their car roll to a stop. “Makes you want to hop right out and applaud, doesn’t it?”
“I always like to wait until the orchestra stops playing and the performers take a bow,” Lorne said, eyeing the two big men who had now emerged from the aircar and were striding toward them. Unlike the fancy dress uniforms the Dominion men had worn at the Capitalia hearings, these outfits were unadorned, burgundy-black suits that shimmered strangely in the car’s headlights. A quick check with his opticals’ infrareds indicated the men’s stony expressions were hiding some serious annoyance.
More interesting was that the infrareds also showed a noticeable heat signature in the thick rank epaulets on both men’s shoulders. “Dill, take a look at those epaulets,” he said.
“Yeah, I see it,” de Portola said thoughtfully. “Any ideas?”
“Back in my great-grandfather’s day, Dominion Marines had weapons called parrot guns on their shoulders,” Lorne told him. “Automatic target tracking, with a choice between pulse lasers or short-range antipersonnel missiles. The pictures I’ve seen showed the things as being pretty bulky, which I gather was part of the point.”
“Like snipe dots,” de Portola said, nodding. “You’re obviously being targeted, so you behave yourself.”
“Right,” Lorne said. “Looks like the Dominion’s dropped blatant in favor of subtle this time around.”
“Could be,” De Portola agreed. “I wonder h
ow you target-lock the things.”
“Maybe we’ll find out,” Lorne said, unfastening his restraints as the two Marines split formation, one heading down each side of the car. “Okay; nice and innocent.”
The Marines reached the two car doors simultaneously. There was a screech of a lockpop, and the man on Lorne’s side pulled the door open. “Lorne Broom?” he demanded.
“Morning, soldier,” Lorne greeted him genially. He nodded at the door. “It was unlocked.”
“Are you Lorne Broom?” the other repeated.
“Yes,” Lorne said. “And you?”
The Marine glanced over the top of the car at his companion, then looked down at Lorne again. “It’s Marine, not soldier,” he corrected stiffly. “Marine Sergeant Singal Khahar.”
“This is Cobra Dillon de Portola,” Lorne said, nodding at his companion. “You here to try your hand at killing some spine leopards?”
The Marine on de Portola’s side of the car snorted. “Hardly. We came to drag your—”
“Squelch it, Chimm,” Khahar cut him off. “Sure, why not? Where do you keep them?”
“Everywhere you want, and most places you don’t,” Lorne said, gesturing Khahar back. The sergeant’s eyes narrowed, but he obediently stepped back to make room for Lorne to get out of the car. “Down along Sutter’s Creek is usually a good place to start,” Lorne continued, pointing toward the wooded slope fifty meters away.
“We’re always clearing nests and way stations out of the groves bordering the creek,” de Portola added as he also got out of the car. “You two should probably hang back a little—they can come at you from unexpected directions. We’ll show you how it’s done.”
“You just worry about yourselves,” Khahar said. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll take point,” de Portola offered, and headed toward the cluster of trees and high grass. Keying in his infrareds and light-amps, Lorne followed.
They’d reached the tall grass on the edges of the grove, ten meters from the bank, when he caught the first hint of something warm in the middle branches of one of the trees. It was too diffuse to get a positive identification, but the positioning suggested that it was an adult, probably a male.
De Portola had spotted it, too. He snapped his fingers softly and pointed to the tree. Lorne snapped twice in acknowledgement, and as de Portola angled to the right of the tree Lorne shifted toward the left. A straightforward flanking maneuver would draw out the spine leopard and force it to choose between the two targets.
Lorne was still focused on the tree when, to his stunned disbelief, the two Marines strode between him and de Portola and headed at a brisk walk straight for the tree. “Wait!” Lorne whispered. “Don’t go that—”
Too late. With a crackle of displaced branches, the spine leopard leaped out of concealment. It hit the ground running, headed straight toward the Marines.
Lorne swore under his breath. The timing of that bonehead move had left him off-balance, his weight on his left leg, unable to bring the antiarmor laser running along that calf to bear on the attacker.
Fortunately, de Portola had been on his right leg when the spine leopard made its move. Even as the predator put on a burst of speed, he twisted to his right and swung up his left leg. The blue beam flashed from his heel to cut across the spine leopard’s head and flank. Its legs collapsed beneath it, and it plowed into the ground with a mournful screech.
As its final howl faded into the night, a dozen spine leopards boiled up into view from beneath the bank and charged.
Lorne dived to his right, flicking target locks on the three nearest predators as he sailed through the air. He landed hard on his side, his vision jolting with the impact as he triggered his antiarmor laser. His body swiveled around as his nanocomputer took control of his servos, pivoting him around his shoulder and swinging his left leg up to fire a triple blast into the spine leopards he’d targeted. He blinked to clear his vision, only to spot the rippling wakes in the tall grass that meant two more of them were headed toward him.
There was no time for even his nanocomputer to get his leg into position for these two. Rolling over onto his back, he pointed his right-hand little finger at the first of the predators and triggered his arcthrower. The high-voltage current snapped through the grass, riding the ionized path that his fingertip laser had burned through the air a microsecond earlier, and the spine leopard jerked and collapsed. There was a multiple flash of blue laser fire from somewhere to his left, and the second predator skidded to a halt in the brush.
And with that, the world was suddenly quiet.
Lorne frowned, running a quick mental count. That couldn’t possibly be it—he and de Portola couldn’t have accounted for more than half the predators he’d seen charging them. And with a group this big there was usually a second wave, as well.
“You chirpies always make such a big a deal about these things?” Khahar asked into the silence.
Frowning, Lorne sat up. The two Marines were just standing there, more or less where they’d been when the attack began, their faces wreathed in self-satisfied smirks.
Scattered on the ground around them were eight dead spine leopards.
“They’re getting themselves all dirty, too,” Chimm added. “Not very professional, are they?”
“Hey, we can’t all be Dominion Marines,” Khahar chided his partner. “Give them some slack.”
“Sure thing,” Chimm said. “But they promised to show us some action.” He raised his eyebrows blandly at Lorne. “That wasn’t it, was it?”
For a couple of heartbeats Lorne was seriously tempted to flatten both men with a blast from his sonic. But common sense kicked in, reminding him that it wouldn’t gain him anything except a brief moment of childish satisfaction.
On the other hand, if he kept his temper he might be able to learn something. Getting slowly to his feet, he adjusted his opticals’ infrared settings and gave the two Marines a good, hard look.
Mostly of what he saw was the standard human infrared pattern, topped off with the condescending cheerfulness he’d already noted. But there were two interesting anomalies. The first was the thick rank epaulets, which had an strong layer of heat everywhere except along the inside edges close to the Marines’ necks. Parrot guns, almost certainly. The second anomaly was a close-knit grid of slightly higher warmth throughout their uniforms, especially along the front of their torsos and down their thighs to their knees.
“Nicely done,” de Portola said with a grunt as he hopped back up and brushed at his back and butt where he’d been rolling around on the ground. “I never even saw you draw.”
Lorne looked down at the Marines’ belted sidearms. Neither of the guns had so much as a hint of infrared to them.
The sidearms hadn’t been fired. They’d probably not even been drawn. Pure camouflage, put there to distract a potential enemy form their real weaponry.
“You weren’t supposed to see us,” Chimm said loftily. “Like the sergeant said, not everyone can be Dominion Marines.”
“I’m sure we backwater amateurs have a lot to learn,” de Portola said with far less sarcasm than Lorne would have felt justified in using. “Spine leopards aren’t easy to kill, either. Those things must pack a real punch.”
“And have some nice targeting capabilities on top of it,” Lorne agreed, notching up his opticals’ magnification a little and studying the nearest of the dead spine leopards. Instead of the massive laser burn he’d expected to see there was a figure-eight pattern of perhaps twenty smaller burns across the predator’s head, neck, and chest. Three or four of the shots had hit kill points, but the others had done little but burn more or less uselessly through hide and muscle.
“Regardless, I think we can safely scratch off that way station for the moment,” de Portola said, throwing a lingering look at one of the other spine leopards before turning back to the Marines. “Next likely spot should be about half a kilometer up the road. You coming?”
“No, and neither
are you,” Khahar said briskly. “We need to get back to Archway. Colonel Reivaro wants to see you.”
“We’re not done with our shift,” Lorne pointed out, impressed in spite of himself. So Reivaro had come all the way out here in person? Clearly, Lorne’s plan of drawing attention away from Jody had worked. Possibly too well. “We can’t put the citizens here at risk.”
“Point accepted,” Khahar said calmly. “Fine. Your buddy de Portola can stay here on patrol. The rest of us can head back in our flitter.”
Lorne felt his throat tighten. The last thing he wanted to do was get into an aircar alone with these jokers, especially with Reivaro waiting at the other end of the flight. Out of the corner of his eye he saw de Portola lift a finger. “I suppose I could do that,” Lorne said, rubbing his forehead. Under cover of the movement he flicked a look at de Portola.
One more, the other mouthed silently. One more.
“Or we could compromise,” Lorne continued, dropping his hand back to his side. “Let’s check the grove de Portola mentioned, and then all four of us can head back together.”
Khahar’s eyes narrowed. “The colonel doesn’t like being kept waiting.”
“And we really shouldn’t press their luck,” de Portola offered helpfully. “Just because they survived one attack doesn’t mean they could get through another one. You go ahead, Lorne—I can handle the rest myself.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Khahar ground out. “Just show us where they are.”
#
The second encounter was pretty much a repeat of the first. Lorne tried hard to stay on his feet this time, hoping to see first-hand how the Marines’ combat gear worked. But the attack had barely started when his nanocomputer once again threw him out of the way of a charging predator, and he spent the rest of the fight leaping and dodging and rolling on the ground.
De Portola didn’t have it any better. In fact, he had it worse—at one point Lorne spotted him flat on his back, holding off a spine leopard that had somehow gotten past his lasers and was going for his throat. He was still flailing around, and Lorne was trying to get a clear shot at the animal, when Khahar killed it.
