Cobra Strike

by Timothy Zahn

  Joshua waved a hand in the general direction of the intercom display. "There's no room up there for anyone bigger than a hamster-oh, all right." Snorting feigned exasperation, he stepped aside. Justin took his place at the viewport... and Joshua waited for the other's first awe-filled whistle before turning toward the intercom.

  The display showed the room euphemistically called the lounge-and "crowded" was far too mild a term for it. Packed in among the various displays and equipment monitors were Yuri Cerenkov, the scientists Christopher and Nnamdi, and Governor

  Telek. Back near the viewport, almost out of the intercom camera's range, Pyre and Decker York stood together, occasionally sharing inaudible comments. Joshua turned the volume up a bit, just in time to catch Nnamdi's thoughtful snort.

  "I'm sorry, but I simply don't see what in blazes the Trofts are so worried about," he said, apparently to the room at large. "How can a village-level society be a threat to anyone outside its own atmosphere?"

  "Let's show a little patience, shall we?" Telek said, not looking up from her own bank of displays. "We haven't even finished a complete orbit yet. All the high-tech cities may be on the other side."

  "It's not just the matter of technology, Governor," Nnamdi countered. "The population density is too low to be consistent with an advanced society."

  "That's anthropomorphic thinking," Telek shook her head. "If their birth rate's low enough and they like lots of room around them they could still be high-tech.

  Bil, what're you getting?"

  Christopher sat in silence another moment before answering. "Nothing conclusive one way or the other yet. I can see roads between some of the villages, but the tree cover's too thick to tell how extensive the network is. No satellite communications systems, though, and no broadcasts I can detect."

  Joshua touched the intercom's talk switch. "Excuse me, but is there any way to see how much of the ground around the villages is being cultivated? That might be a clue."

  Telek looked over at the intercom camera. "So far that's not conclusive, either," she said. "There are some good-sized candidates for crop fields, but the terrain and vegetation color scheme make real measurement iffy."

  "Besides which," Christopher put in, "whether a given village is growing crops for local use or for export is something else we can't tell from up here."

  "So let's go on down," Justin muttered from his place at the viewport.

  Joshua looked back at his brother. Justin's face was thoughtful as he gazed at the planet below... but nowhere in expression or stance could Joshua detect the same hard knot that had taken up residence in his own stomach. "Let's be a little less anxious to throw the landing party outside, shall we?" he said tartly.

  Justin blinked at him. "Sorry-did I sound callous?"

  "You sounded overconfident, and that's worse. Your tendency toward optimism could be downright dangerous down there."

  "Tiptoing around up here like we've got some guilty secret to hide will be better?"

  Joshua grimaced. Alike as two electrons, they'd often been called... but when the crunch came it was really very easy to tell them apart. Deep down, Justin had a strangely potent variety of fatalistic optimism that refused to let him believe the universe would really hurt him. A totally unrealistic philosophy, to

  Joshua's way of thinking-and all the more incomprehensible because Justin wasn't simply incapable of recognizing potential danger. He was as good at looking ahead and weighing odds as anyone else in the family; he just acted as if those odds didn't apply to him. It was this attitude, more than anything else, that had fueled Joshua's private reservations about Justin's Cobra ambitions... and had nearly persuaded him to back them out of this mission entirely.

  "Aha!" Cerenkov's satisfied exclamation came from the intercom speaker into

  Joshua's musings. "There we go. You wanted a city, Hersh?-well, there it is."

  "I'll be damned," Nnamdi murmured, fingertips skating across his display controls. "That's a city, all right. Let's see... electric power for sure... still no radio broadcasts detectable... looks like the tallest buildings are in the ten- to twenty-story range. Bil, can you find anything that looks like a power plant?"

  "Hang on," Christopher said. "Got some odd neutrino emissions here-trying to get a spectrum analysis...."

  "Another city showing now-south and a little west of the first," Cerenkov reported.

  Joshua let a breath hiss slowly between his teeth, caught between the desire to rush down to the lounge and see the cities for himself and the fear of missing something important en route. "I think I can see them," Justin said behind him.

  "Come take a look."

  Joshua joined him at the viewport, glad to have found a compromise. The cities were just barely visible. "Your telescopic vision show anything interesting?" he asked his brother.

  "At this range? Don't be silly. Wait a second, though-I've got an idea."

  Stepping back to the intercom, Justin busied himself with the keyboard. A moment later the crowded lounge was replaced by a slightly fuzzy still picture. "Got the ultra-high-resolution-camera feed," he told Joshua with satisfaction.

  Joshua craned his neck to look. The city seemed normal enough: buildings, streets, park-like areas... "Odd angle for a street pattern, isn't it?" he remarked. "I'd think it simpler to run their streets north-south and east-west instead of whatever angle that is."

  He hadn't realized the voice link with the lounge was still open until Telek's voice came in reply. "The angle, in case you're interested, is twenty-four degrees, rotated counterclockwise from true north. And the southeast-northwest streets are considerably broader than the perpendicular set. Speculations as to why? Anyone?"

  "Second city's the same way," Cerenkov grunted. "The streets are only skewed twenty-three point eight degrees, but the same wide/narrow pattern's there."

  "Doesn't look like they're ringed, either, the way the villages are." Justin spoke up, leafing through the ultra-camera's other shots.

  There was a short pause from the other end. "What do you mean, "ringed"?" Nnamdi asked.

  "There's a dark ring around each of the villages," Justin told him, backtracking a few photos. "I assumed it was shadow from the surrounding trees, but now I'm not so sure."

  "Interesting," Telek grunted. "What's the number on that photo?"

  "While you're doing that," Christopher put in, "we've got the neutrino spectrum identified now. Looks like they're using a tandem fission/fusion reactor system for their power supply."

  Someone in the lounge gave a low whistle. "That's pretty advanced, isn't it?" another voice-Marck Rynstadt's, Joshua tentatively identified it-came in on the intercom hook-up.

  "Yes and no," Christopher said. "They obviously haven't got anything as reliable as our fission plant design or they wouldn't be fiddling with a tandem system.

  On the other hand, fission alone ought to be hundreds of years beyond a village society's capabilities."

  "Dual cultures, then?" Joshua hazarded. "Cities and villages on separate development tracks?"

  "More likely the cities are run by invading aliens," Nnamdi said bluntly, "while the villages are home to the original natives. I concede the technology issue-and it therefore becomes rather clear what the Trofts are worried about."

  "That Qasama is the leading edge of someone else moving toward Troft territory,"

  Telek said grimly. "Moreau-whichever of you asked-we've got an ID on those ring shadows now. They're walls, about a meter thick and two to three meters high."

  The twins exchanged glances. "Primitive defenses," Justin said.

  "Looks that way," Cerenkov said. "Governor, I think we'd do well to cut this part of the run to one or at most two more orbits. They're almost certainly aware by now that we're up here, and the longer we wait before landing, the less forthright and honest we look. Remember that we aren't going to be able to pretend we didn't know Qasama was here."

  "At least not if we intend to use the Troft translator," Telek agree
d-reluctantly, Joshua thought. Stealing a glance back at the intercom screen, he studied her face... but if she were feeling any fear at ordering them down into the snake pit, it wasn't visible. Two of them, he thought morosely, turning back to his brother and the viewport.-Or else it's me who's the odd one.

  Maybe I'm just overcautious... or even an out-and-out coward.

  Oddly enough, the possibility carried no sense of shame along with it. Justin and Telek, after all, wouldn't be leaving the relative safety of the Dewdrop the minute they landed; Joshua and the rest of the contact team would. An extra helping of native caution would likely be more an asset than a liability out there.

  They came down on the next orbit over what Nnamdi had dubbed the "city belt," aiming for a set of runways at the north end of the northernmost of the five cities in the chain. There had been some excitement when the runways had first been noticed, Nnamdi pouncing on them as evidence that Qasama was indeed the forward base of a star-going people. Christopher, though, had suggested their width and length were more suitable for aircraft than robot glide-shuttles, and for a while a tension-sharpened argument had raged in the lounge. It was Decker

  York who eventually pointed out that the runway directions seemed oriented more along prevailing wind directions than along the most likely orbital launch/land vectors. Further study had failed to come up with anything else that could possibly be a starfield, and Telek had elected to use the airport as the next best site.

  For Pyre, it was the most unnerving part of the mission thus far. Strapped into an emergency crash chair near the main exit hatchway, far from any viewports or intercom displays, he felt more helpless than a Cobra had any business feeling.

  If the Qasamans had any interest in shooting the Dewdrop down, the approach glide would be the ideal time to do so. More so than the aliens might think, in fact; they presumably had no way of knowing that the Dewdrop was a gravity-lift,

  VTOL craft and that her crew had little experience with the emergency runway landing procedure Telek had insisted they use.

  But no one opened fire, and with only the mildest of lurches the ship touched down. Heaving an unabashed sigh of relief, Pyre nevertheless kept one eye firmly on the hatch's inner door as he unstrapped and got once more to his feet. The plan was to wait a few minutes and then send Cerenkov outside to wait for whatever reception committee the Qasamans might send. Through all of that Pyre and one of his Cobras would be the Dewdrop's, only real defense.

  His auditory enhancers, still set on high power from the landing, picked up

  Nnamdi's gasp from down the hall in the lounge. "My God, Governor. Look!

  It's-oh, my God!"

  "Almo!" Cerenkov's voice boomed from the other direction an instant later. "Get up here!"

  Pyre was already moving, his hands automatically curving into fingertip laser firing position as he sprinted for the bridge, where Cerenkov had been for the landing.

  The small gray-tone room was alive with color when he arrived, as virtually every screen displayed views of the city and surrounding forest outside the ship. Pyre hadn't realized before then just how colorful the city itself actually was, its buildings painted with the same wide range of shades as the forest, as if in deliberate mimicry. But for the moment the "Qasamans" decorative sense was the last thing on his mind.

  "What's up?" he snapped.

  Cerenkov, standing behind F'ahl's command chair, pointed a none too steady finger at a telescopic view of the nearest buildings a couple of hundred meters away. "The Qasamans," he said simply.

  Pyre stared at the screen. Six figures were indeed heading in the Dewdrop's direction, each with the bulge of a sidearm at one side and something that seemed to be a small bird perched on the opposite shoulder. Six figures-

  As human as anyone aboard the Dewdrop.

  Chapter 8

  For a long minute Pyre just stood there, brain struggling mightily to reconcile what his eyes showed him with the sheer impossibility of it all. Humans here?-over a hundred and fifty light-years from the nearest world of the

  Dominion of Man? And past the Troft Assemblage, to boot?

  Back in the lounge, someone cleared his throat, a raspy sound in the bridge intercom speaker. "So you say we've all been thinking too anthropomorphically,

  Governor?" Nnamdi said with exaggerated casualness.

  For once, it seemed, Telek was at a loss for words. A moment later Nnamdi continued, "At least now we know for sure the Baliu demesne didn't have much to do with the Troft-Dominion War. They could hardly have failed to mention that the Qasamans were the same species as we were."

  "This is impossible," York growled. "Humans can't be here. They just can't."

  "All right, they can't," Christopher spoke up. "Shall we go out and tell them that?"

  "Maybe they're an illusion of some kind," Joshua suggested from the twins' room.

  "Controlled psychic hallucination or something."

  "I don't believe in that sort of thing, either," York snapped.

  "Besides," F'ahl added, touching some controls, "if they're an illusion they're a mighty substantial one. Short-radar's picking them up with no trouble and confirms shape."

  "Maybe they're the slaves of the real Qasamans," Cerenkov suggested.

  "Descendents of people kidnapped from Earth centuries ago. Regardless, Governor, we've got to go out there and meet them."

  Telek hissed between her teeth, finally seeming to find her voice. "Captain, what's the analyzer showing?"

  "Nothing inimical so far," F'ahl reported, running a finger down one of the few displays not showing an outside view. "Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and other trace gasses in acceptable amounts. Uh... no evidence of unusual radioactive or heavy-metal contamination. Bacteria analysis has barely gotten started, but so far no problems-computer shows similar DNA and protein structures in the ones it's analyzed, but doesn't show any health hazards from them."

  "Hmmm. Well, I'll want to check that data over myself later, but if the Aventine pattern holds here microbes probably won't be a big problem. All right, Yuri, I guess you can go out. But you'd better wear a filter bubble, to be on the safe side. The number two should be adequate unless Qasaman viruses come a lot smaller than ours."

  "Right." Cerenkov hesitated. "Governor, as long as we've got a reception committee on its way, I'd like to take my whole team out with me."

  The six Qasamans were almost to the ship now. Pyre watched the magnified view, his eyes shifting from the details of the faces to the silver-blue birds perched on each person's left shoulder to the pistols belted on each hip. "Governor, I'd recommend we let Yuri go alone first," he said.

  "No, he's right-we ought to show good faith," Telek said with a sigh.

  Cerenkov didn't wait any longer. "Marck, Decker, Joshua-meet me at the dock with full gear." He got three acknowledgments and hurried out of the bridge.

  "Almo?" Telek called as Pyre turned to follow. "I want you back here for this."

  Pyre grimaced, but there wasn't time to argue the order now. "Michael,

  Dorjay-back up positions by the hatch," he called into the intercom. The two

  Cobras acknowledged and Pyre once again headed aft.

  He passed the furious activity near the hatch without actually colliding with anyone; and by the time he skidded to a stop beside Telek, the lounge displays showed Cerenkov just emerging from the airlock.

  If the Qasamans had been a shock to the Dewdrop's passengers, the reverse was equally true. The welcoming committee jerked raggedly to a stop, and Pyre saw astonishment and disbelief sweep across their faces. He tensed; but the guns stayed firmly in their holsters. One of the birds squawked and flapped its wings, settling down only when its owner reached up to gently stroke its throat.

  Pyre was aware of Telek leaning closer to him. "Do you buy Hersh's theory about the Baliuies?" she murmured.

  "That ignorance was bliss?" he muttered back. "Not for a minute. The Baliuies knew we were the same species, all right-and
if we were supposed to free human slaves from the Qasamans they sure as hell would have told us."

  Telek grunted. Nnamdi and Christopher, Pyre noted, seemed to have missed the by-play. Shifting his own attention fully to the displays, the Cobra waited for the Qasamans to speak, wishing he knew what sort of game the Baliuies were playing.

  The Qasaman delegation had shown a remarkably quick recovery to the contact team's appearance, a fact Cerenkov took to be a good sign. Whether the humans were slaves or masters, it was clear they weren't in the ignorant savage category. Which meant... what? Cerenkov wasn't sure, but he knew it was a good sign anyway.