by Timothy Zahn
“Maybe it gains him hostages,” Harli said tartly, moving toward the door. “How many Cobras have we got out there?”
“Just a minute, Harli,” Uy called, gesturing him back. “Let’s think this through. Kemp, are they picking specific people, or just gathering them at random?”
“I couldn’t tell,” Kemp said. “Some of the people were working. Others were just standing there chatting with each other or minding their own business.”
“I cannot imagine a warrior allowing random civilians past his barriers,” Omnathi said. “He must be doing some form of screening.”
“I’m sure he is,” Uy agreed. “We know that the first Dominion survey team pulled the city records. We’ve also seen that Tamu has either a prodigious memory or access to some computerized face-recognition system. If he wanted specific people, he could probably find them.”
“If they’re looking for hostages, they should be going after Council members or other community leaders,” Elssa said. “Is that who they’re approaching?”
“No, none of them are in the group,” Kemp said, frowning. “Wait a minute—I take that back. Pivovarci was one of them.”
“Pivovarci?” Harli snorted. “Terrific.”
“Who’s Pivovarci?” Jody asked.
“One of our chief malcontents,” Harli growled. “He didn’t like the way Stronghold got torn up while we were fighting the Trofts, he didn’t like the Isis deal with the Qasamans, and he really doesn’t like the food rationing we’ve had to impose.”
“So he’s not buying hostages,” Kemp said grimly. “He’s buying allies. Using food as his lure.”
“All the while whispering words of betrayal in their ears,” Omnathi said, nodding agreement. “A slower tactic than force of arms, but just as likely to yield results in the long run.”
“Too bad we can’t hear what those words consist of,” Harli said. “Kemp, was there anyone in the group we can pull aside later and ask what they talked about?”
“No one I’d trust to tell me the truth,” Kemp said sourly. “But they’re still collecting. Maybe Tamu will slip up and pick someone who’ll be a little more on our side.”
“Lord knows we don’t need any more enemies right now,” Elssa murmured.
Jody braced herself. “Then maybe we should see about bringing in a few more allies.”
“Meaning?” Uy asked.
“You said there were three more Djinn out in Aerie and a bunch of new combat suits,” Jody said, thinking quickly. She was going to need some fancy verbal footwork if she was going to sell this. “How many suits are there?”
“There are fifty,” Uy said, gazing hard at her. “All of them out in Aerie.”
“Are you suggesting we dress up a few citizens and pretend they’re full-fledged Djinn?” Kemp asked.
“Because if you are, it won’t work,” Harli added. “They have the population records, remember? One flick of his eyelid and Tamu will know they’re not Qasamans.”
“Unless all he got were Stronghold’s records,” Jody pointed out. “Do we know for sure that they got Aerie’s, too?”
“It’s a good bet they did,” Uy said.
“I still think it’s worth trying,” Jody said stubbornly. “All I need is an aircar.”
“You also need not to get picked up by Tamu,” Elssa warned. “I doubt he left here without putting a Marine on guard at our doors.”
“Actually, he left two,” Kemp confirmed. “But I can get her past them.”
“Besides, what Tamu doesn’t know is that I’m not worth nearly as much as he thinks I am,” Jody said. “As long as he doesn’t get my recorder, there’s nothing I can give them that they want.”
“Doesn’t mean they won’t lock you away until they figure that out,” Harli pointed out.
“I’m willing to risk it,” Jody said. “Besides, Aerie deserves to know what’s going on.”
For a moment the room was silent. Uy and Omnathi looked questioningly at each other, and Jody saw Omnathi give a small nod. “All right,” Uy said reluctantly. “Baxtern’s the Cobra in charge out there. Just tell him what’s going on, and have him coordinate with Ifrit Ghushtre on a cautious—a cautious—response.” He made as if to say something else, then seemed to change his mind. “Kemp, are you going to need a field radio for this?”
“No, we can do it pick-up,” Kemp said. “Come on, Jody—we need to get to the roof.”
“The roof?” Jody echoed, frowning, as she stood up and headed across the room.
“The roof,” he confirmed. “Trust me—you’re going to love this.”
“Good luck,” Uy called after them.
“And be careful,” Elssa added.
Two minutes and three flights of stairs later they emerged onto the roof. “We actually have your mother to thank for this one,” Kemp commented as he led the way across the tiles at a fast jog. “It was her last maneuver before the Trofts surrendered that inspired us to come up with it. Well, hers and the Qasamans’.”
He trotted to a halt right at the roof’s edge and peered down at the streets and people below. Jody stopped a more cautious meter away, a sudden sense of foreboding tingling up her spine. The way she remembered it, her mother’s last maneuver in that battle had nearly gotten her killed.
Abruptly, Kemp gave a short whistle and snapped his fingers. He paused, snapped his fingers again, and gave a sort of pancake-flipping motion with his hand. He nodded, gave whoever was down there a thumb’s up and gestured to Jody. “Okay, we’re ready,” he told her as she came up. He took hold of her wrist—
And to her stunned bewilderment pulled her toward him, leaned over, and scooped her up into his arms. “What—?”
“Happy landings,” he said.
And before she could more than gasp in surprise and terror he straightened his arms and hurled her high into the air off the edge of the roof. The city flashed dizzily around her as she spun around twice like a high diver who’d lost her way and orientation. On the second spin she thought she saw a figure flying up to meet her—
A second later her spin came to a sudden halt as a pair of strong arms closed around her shoulders and knees. She jolted slightly with the impact, and there was more disorientation as she belatedly realized she was still falling. The arm cradling her shoulders shifted, the hand reaching up to support the back of her head.
And then, with another jolt and a sudden but controlled deceleration, they were down.
Down, spinning around, and bouncing rhythmically across the ground. Blinking against the wind blowing across her face, Jody looked down.
She’d been wrong. They weren’t running along the ground, but along the top of a two-story building. Peering past the shoulder pressed against her cheek, she saw the Government Building receding behind her.
“Hope that wasn’t too frightening,” a soft voice murmured in her ear.
“No, I’m okay,” Jody said, bending the truth only a little as she looked up.
To find the last face on Caelian she’d expected smiling tightly down at her. “Tammling?” she breathed. “But I thought—” She broke off, dropping her eyes to the burn marks the Marine’s lasers had cut through his tunic. “You just got shot.”
“What, that?” He made a rude-sounding burble with his lips. “I got hit way worse during the war. We just wanted to see how close you could get before the Dommies’ auto-target stuff kicked in.”
“You mean the backstab thing Tamu mentioned?” Jody asked, turning her head to look the other direction. They were coming up fast on the edge of the roof. “Uh—”
“Right—backstab,” Tammling said. “Nice appropriate name for it, huh? Anyway—”
“Tammling—the edge—”
“Hang on,” Tammling said.
A second later Jody found herself once more arcing through the air as Tammling leaped over a narrow alleyway to the next building over.
A much smaller building than the one they’d just left, with another wide street beyond it.
“How much more of this is there?” Jody asked, hoping the bouncing covered up the quavering in her voice.
“Almost there,” Tammling soothed her. “Hopefully, Williams is in position.”
Jody felt her eyes bulge. “Hopefully?”
“Relax,” Tammling said with a chuckle. “Here goes nothing. Good luck.”
Jody clenched her teeth and folded her arms tightly across her chest. A second later, she was once again flying solo through the air with the city spinning beneath her.
The flight this time seemed shorter than the first one, though that might just have been because she was marginally more used to it. However it happened, a frozen moment later she landed with another disorienting thud in someone’s arms, followed by the same short drop and controlled deceleration as Cobra knee servos took the impact. “Jody Broom?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
Jody’s first impulse was to ask who else he was expecting to be flying over the streets this afternoon. But she resisted the urge. “Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”
“Jameson Williams,” he said as he bent over and set her feet back onto solid ground again. “We’ve never met, but I wanted to tell you how much I admire your family. It was mainly because of your mother and father that I decided to became a Cobra.”
“Oh,” Jody said. She’d been hit with similar comments in the past, and she had yet to figure out a good answer. “Thanks. I’m sure they appreciate it.” She glanced around at the people moving along the streets, all of them studiously ignoring the couple who’d just dropped out of the sky. “Where are we?”
“Oakleaf and Sun,” he said. “Where are you trying to go?”
“Aerie,” Jody said, frowning. “You telling me you don’t even know that?”
“All I got was the whistle to get ready for a skyhook and a handflap with your name,” Williams said, taking her arm and starting down the street. “Come on—we’re parking the aircars indoors these days.”
Jody kept an eye on the streets and the people as Williams hurried her along, watching especially for burgundy-black Dominion uniforms. But apparently the Marines hadn’t made it to this part of town yet.
They ended up two blocks later in a small warehouse with a large gash through its glazed-stone facing. “Used to be a food processing area,” Williams grunted as he forced open the door from its visibly distorted frame. “One of the Troft missiles blew it open to the air, and that was pretty much that.”
“Doesn’t look like there’s much food to be processed right now, anyway,” Jody said as they went inside. There were three aircars parked inside the building, none of them in terrific shape, but none of them looking like it would disintegrate out from under her, either. “How do we get it out?”
“Loading door in the back,” Williams said, heading toward the darkness at the rear of the building. “Pick one and get it started—keys should be on the seat.”
“Right.” Jody stepped to the closest vehicle, a bright red six-seater that seemed to have fewer dents and scrapes than the other two. She pulled open the door, spotted the keys on the seat—
“Hold!” a voice ordered tersely from behind her.
She spun around. Three Dominion Marines were standing just inside the building, two to the right of the doorway, the other to the left. “Who are you?” she demanded, trying to put some outrage into her voice. “What do you want?”
“Marine Sergeant Tapper,” the man on the left said. “And you, Jody Broom, are under arrest.”
Jody stifled a curse. “On what charge?”
“Attempting to flee possible felony charges will do for starters,” Tapper said, motioning the other two men forward. “You were ordered not to leave the Government Building, and yet here you are.”
“I was given no such order,” Jody insisted.
“I was told you had,” Tapper said. If he was disturbed by the discrepancy, it didn’t show in his voice. “That’ll be for you and Commander Tamu to work out. As for you, Cobra, whatever you’re planning back there, I strongly suggest you reconsider.”
Jody looked over her shoulder. She couldn’t see Williams anywhere, but she had no doubt he was lurking somewhere.
And after what had happened to Tammling…
“It’s all right,” she called, moving toward the Marines. “It’s all right. Don’t do anything—please. I’ll go with them. It’s all right.”
There was no response. Nothing but a brooding silence from the rest of the building. Tapper took Jody’s arm as she reached him, pulling her gently but firmly in front of him. He motioned his men to leave, then backed through the doorway after them.
Jody had half expected to find a Cobra ambush waiting out on the street. But there were only the ordinary citizens moving about their business. Unlike earlier, though, Jody could see many of them furtively eyeing the strangers as Tapper marched them briskly in the direction of the gate.
“How did you know I’d left the Government Building?” Jody asked as they walked. “Did you just happen to spot me, or what?”
“Trolling for information?” Tapper gave a derisive snort. “Go ahead—it doesn’t matter. I could give you the whole schematic stack for inversion-layer reflectives and it still wouldn’t help. How back-wash people with century-old technology think they can just sneak around without us knowing all about it is beyond the senses.”
“Must be something about frontier life,” Jody said, fighting back her reflexive anger. “Speaking of which, if you’re thinking about walking across the field to your ship, I strongly suggest you reconsider.”
“No fears,” he said, pointing at the sleek aircar just visible around the next corner. “The ordinaries can walk. Important snags like you get to ride.”
A minute later, they were in the aircar and soaring over the city, heading toward the Dominion ship.
Jody gazed down as they flew, noting the small but growing crowd behind Tamu and his Marines. The commander would probably be highly pleased when he learned that she’d been picked up and spirited away from the protection of Uy and his Cobras.
Hopefully, he would be pleased enough that it would never occur to him that this was exactly what she’d been going for in the first place.
Uy had wanted ears on Tamu’s pitch to Stronghold’s people. In just a few minutes, he would have them.
Of course, she would then have to find a way to slip into the main group and listen. After that would come the task of getting the information out of the ship and back to Uy and Omnathi. After that it would be handy if she could find a way to get out of the ship herself.
But she would figure it out. She was a Broom, and a Moreau. Somehow, she would figure it out.
CHAPTER TEN
Lorne’s first day at Bitter Creek wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Mayor Mary McDougal welcomed him politely enough, the people he met were civil, and the spine leopards hadn’t encroached as much on the edges of town as he’d feared they would during the couple of weeks the town had been without full-time Cobra protection.
Best of all, there was no mention of Tristan’s death during the invasion, or how Lorne hadn’t been there during their local war against the Trofts, or how Lorne would never measure up to a fine local boy like Tristan.
At least, none of that got said within Lorne’s hearing.
The biggest challenge, in fact, looked like it was going to be adjusting his biological clock to a sleep schedule consisting up of two- to three-hour, round-the-clock naps.
It was just after dawn on his first full day in town, and he was very much looking forward to one of those naps, as he parked the grav-lift cycle they’d given him and headed inside the grocery-goods store that doubled as the city building. Mayor McDougal was already at her desk behind the counter, working at her comboard. “Morning,” she said, a distracted smile on her round face as she nodded to him in greeting. “Any trouble?”
“Not really,” Lorne said, hungrily eyeing the other chair behind the counter next to McDougal. But he was still officially o
n duty, and tradition and professional pride dictated that he remain standing in the presence of his supervisor. “I chased away a couple of families snooping around a livestock shelter to the southwest, and I cleaned out a way station along one of the big creeks further north.”
“One of the ones that goes through the forest?” McDougal asked, frowning. “Which one?”
“I’m not sure,” Lorne said, wincing. He’d studied some of the area maps yesterday, but the local geography was still something of a jumble in his mind. “It went through a culvert under the perimeter road. But I guess they all do that, don’t they?”
“Were its banks mostly just mud and reeds, or were there a lot of stones and big rocks at the waterline?”
“There were a fair amount of stones,” Lorne said, thinking back. “At least at the spot where I found the way station.”
“Stony Creek.” McDougal smiled lopsidedly. “Yes, I know—we’re not very creative with our names around here.” Her smile faded. “Stony Creek. Damn.”
“Trouble?”
“There’s a crew supposed to be taking down a stand of blueleaf trees this morning along that creek about half a kilometer from the road into the forest,” McDougal said. “Tristan always said that if you saw one way station, there were two more you didn’t see.”
“That’s about right,” Lorne said heavily. And he’d been so looking forward to a couple of hours of sleep. “Do you want me to head back and see if I can find them?”
For a moment McDougal seemed tempted. Then, reluctantly, she shook her head. “No, you need to get some sleep,” she said. “Besides, Tristan also said it was easier to find the way stations at night when the beasts were on the move.” She scrolled down her comboard. “Let’s see if we can get clever. Okay. If they reschedule to that oak stand out north this morning, then shift to the blueleaves after you’ve had a nap…”
A faint noise in the distance caught Lorne’s attention: the sound of an approaching aircar. “You expecting company?” he asked.
“Not me,” McDougal said, frowning toward the window. “Doesn’t sound like one of ours, either. Maybe your new friends from Archway are back to see how you’re doing.”
