by Timothy Zahn
Only neither alien dropped over dead. Instead, the transparent faceplates blackened at the points of impact, blocking off the main brunt of the blasts.
But enough had gotten through to send a shock of pain through both aliens. Merrick grabbed again at the first Troft's laser, and this time he was able to wrench it from the alien's grip. Spinning it around, he jammed it upward beneath the lower edge of the alien's faceplate and fired.
There was a brilliant flash, and the soldier dropped to the floor. Merrick spun the weapon around, elbowing the remaining Troft's laser aside, and fired a second shot under that one's faceplate, sending him crumpling to the floor beside the first.
Merrick stared down at the bodies, his heart thudding in his ears, his breath coming in short gasps. My God, the thought flashed across his numbed mind. Was that me?
Of course it had been him. It had been his body, his combat reflexes, his Cobra weaponry.
He closed his eyes, fighting the sudden urge to vomit. Never before had he used his power against another person. Never before had he even been tempted by anger or frustration to do so.
He'd killed two people. Not spine leopards, mindless predators who would cut a murderous swath through someone's ranchland if they weren't eliminated. He'd killed two living, sentient beings.
He clamped his teeth tightly as a second wave of nausea swept through him. Up until now he'd thought only about the fear-edged respect Miron Akim had shown for him and his mother, a respect in stark contrast to the disdain that radiated from so many of Aventine's people. Thoughts of combat had been little more than a hazy backdrop to that warm glow of vindication, a vague and sanitized mural consisting of images of fire and triumph and glory. This blood and stillness and stench of burned flesh wasn't what he'd expected. Wasn't at all what he'd signed up for.
He took a shuddering breath. Only it was, he knew. He'd signed up willingly, even eagerly, and it was too late to back out. Not when there were people out there who were counting on him.
People like Miron Akim . . . and Merrick's mother.
Merrick winced. Jasmine Moreau, daughter of Justin Moreau, granddaughter of the legendary Jonny Moreau. She wouldn't panic in this situation. Hadn't panicked, in fact, when she'd found herself facing similar danger all those years ago.
You boast overmuch of your strength, demon warrior, Miron Akim's son Siraj had scoffed. Maybe he'd been right.
It was time to find out.
Merrick gave his head a sharp shake, and as the haze in front of his eyes vanished he realized that the elevator was still heading downward. Apparently, the fight and his brief surge of horrified introspection and self-pity had lasted only a few seconds.
He checked the elevator indicator, noting that they were passing the second subbasement, and tried to think. With Jin and Merrick stuck here at the airfield, it was clear that Akim assumed the two Shahni trapped in the Palace would have to be abandoned.
Probably he was right. But maybe he was wrong.
Reaching down, Merrick picked up one of the Trofts' lasers. So far, the invaders had no idea that there were Cobras on Qasama. The longer that ignorance could be maintained, the better. Steeling himself, he pointed the laser at the black spot he'd made in the first alien's faceplate and squeezed the trigger.
The Troft weapon was considerably more powerful than Merrick's fingertip lasers, and the blast had no trouble getting through even the darkened faceplate and through the mass of skin and bone behind it. A reminder, Merrick thought grimly, that he'd better make damn sure he didn't end up at the receiving end of any future blasts. Shifting aim, he repeated the camouflage on the second Troft, then lifted the weapon toward the side of the car. He had no idea how to trigger the secret trapdoor Akim had told him about, or whether the net would deploy properly if he simply blasted the floor open. He certainly wasn't ready yet to just throw himself blindly down a Qasaman elevator shaft. Aiming at a spot about chest height, he shifted the laser to continuous mode and squeezed the trigger.
The beam lanced out, sizzling like cooking breakfast meat as it sliced through the relatively thin metal of the car wall. Merrick carved out a human-sized opening, then dropped the weapon back onto the floor and peered through the hole he'd created.
A meter away, the wall of the shaft was sliding past, its surface covered with cables and protrusions. Bracing himself, Merrick picked out a suitable spot and jumped, grabbing on to a convenient set of handholds. He locked his fingers around the cold metal and looked down in search of similar purchase for his feet.
Just as the elevator car settled to a stop a meter below him.
Merrick blinked, embarrassment and chagrin sweeping across him as he saw the elevator shaft floor no more than half a meter below the car. The Trofts had been taking him to the tower's lowest level, and he'd now arrived.
But the chagrin at his unnecessary derring-do vanished as a far more urgent thought belatedly gripped him. When the car doors opened, and the reception committee saw the two dead bodies in there...
There was a faint creak as the doors started to open. Merrick looked frantically around, but there was nowhere he could see where he could hide. From the corridor beyond the elevators came a sudden explosion of startled cattertalk—
And even knowing how stupid and predictable it was, but unable to think of anything better, Merrick stepped onto the car's roof and dropped silently onto his stomach.
Just in time. Against the shaft wall he saw a multiple flicker of shadows, and with the scraping of leathery armor against metal a pair of Trofts climbed out of the car through Merrick's newly blasted hole. Merrick pressed himself as flat onto the roof as he could, wondering tensely if the Trofts would be able to jump high enough to catch a glimpse of him up here.
Fortunately, they didn't seem interested in trying. From the sounds of their footsteps, they were instead working their way around the car, easing cautiously around the rear toward the larger open area on the far side. Possibly hoping to get a better view of the car roof from over there?
Abruptly, Merrick tensed. No, of course the searchers weren't going to bother with the top of the car. Not when the Trofts one floor up could simply open their own elevator doors and look directly down on him.
He looked up. Those doors were still closed, but they wouldn't stay that way for long. No exit for him that direction. Meanwhile, the two roving Trofts were still poking around the shaft on the far side of the car.
Which left Merrick only one option. Getting a grip on the edge of the car, he rolled his legs over the side, making sure not to come anywhere near the hole and any more Trofts prowling around in there. He took half a second to let his swing dampen out, then dropped as quietly as he could onto the shaft floor. Dropping flat onto his stomach, he slid underneath the car.
The gap between car and floor was smaller than it had looked when he'd been hanging on to the wall a few moments ago, and he found the space an ominously snug fit. But at least he was finally out of sight.
But again, probably not for long. He could see the roving Trofts' feet as they continued to move around, the sizes and angles of their shadows now indicating that they were shining lights up along the inside of the shaft. Unless one of them had already looked beneath the car, they would surely eventually get around to doing so. And if there was one guaranteed fact in the universe right now, it was that Merrick wasn't going to be doing any serious fighting from under here.
But if he was lucky, he might not have to.
The trapdoor will drop you into a net, Akim had said, which will then drop you through the false floor of the shaft to a landing below. The floor beneath him certainly didn't feel false, Merrick observed as he wriggled his way over to the car's rear corner. It felt as solid as any other floor he'd ever been on.
But Merrick had studied all the records from Grandpa Justin's mission half a century ago, and he knew that the airfield tower elevators went a lot deeper than just a couple of subbasements. This had to be the false floor Akim had talked about
, which meant there had to be a way through it somewhere.
But if the rabbit hole was directly under the trapdoor, Merrick couldn't find it. He ran his hands over the grimy concrete, keying in his light-amplification and infrared enhancements to help in his search. But he couldn't find a single trace of anything that seemed out of the ordinary.
The muffled footsteps across the shaft changed tempo. Merrick looked in that direction, to see that the two Trofts were retracing their path around the rear of the car, heading back toward the hole.
And if they decided to check under the car one more time before they gave up their search . . .
Cursing silently, Merrick frantically renewed his search. But there was still nothing. He rolled up onto his side facing the Troft feet, raising his hands into firing position. A futile gesture, he knew—the minute he fired, everyone in the shaft, the car, and the corridor would know instantly where he was. If they decided they still wanted him alive, they could recapture him with ease. If they didn't, all they had to do was open fire through the floor of the elevator car.
The Trofts were at the rear of the car and starting around the last corner when Merrick heard a soft snick.
And without a whisper of warning, the floor beneath his elbow suddenly gave way.
He grabbed for support as his upper body started to fall into the large, irregularly shaped hole that had magically opened up in the thick concrete. He looked for the missing section of flooring, saw it swinging gently from hinges at the far end. Getting a grip on the edge of the hole, he pulled himself forward and down into the opening.
For a moment he hung there, studying the underside of the floor in the dim backwash of light from the elevator shaft. The false floor was constructed on long metal I-beams, one of which ran right along one edge of the trapdoor. Shifting his grip to it, he held on one-handed as he reached over and pulled the trapdoor back up into place. It closed with another soft snick.
And then all was silence.
For a long minute Merrick just hung there, listening to the indistinct sounds of activity overhead. It was hard to tell through the thick floor, but he couldn't hear any of the extra urgency that might mean his escape had been spotted. Within half a minute, all of the sounds had faded away. The hunt, apparently, had moved elsewhere.
Merrick took a deep breath, painfully aware of how close he'd just come to his own death. Something else that hadn't entered into his calculations when he'd volunteered to join this war. He took a few more deep breaths, sternly ordering his heart to calm down, then keyed his light-amps to full strength.
It was a waste of effort. The shaft extension stretching down around him was completely and utterly dark, without a single bit of light coming in from anywhere that even his optical enhancers could detect. He shifted to infrared, hoping his own body might be radiating enough in that wavelength that he could at least see something. But aside from giving him a view of the two or three square meters of false floor directly above him, that didn't work either.
Switching back to his light-amps, he let go with one hand and aimed his little finger into a random section of the darkness. He touched his thumb to his forefinger nail—the laser's lowest setting—sent up a silent prayer that he wasn't aiming at anything important, and fired.
The shaft below him stretched deep enough that even the laser flash wasn't bright enough to show where it ultimately ended. But it was more than adequate to show the semicircular platform five meters below the spot where he was hanging. Bracing himself, he let go.
He hit the platform with a solid, metallic thud, bending his knees as he landed to absorb some of the impact. The shaft was still pitch black, but his glimpse of the platform had also shown a door in the shaft wall across from where he now stood. Moving carefully forward, one hand extended in front of him, he made it to the wall.
He pressed his ear against the metal and held his breath, his auditory enhancers keyed to full power. The wall was alive with the hums, thumps, and rumblings of distant machinery, but there were no sounds of human activity that he could detect.
Still, Akim had said there would be Djinn down here somewhere. Turning his enhancers back down again, he tried the knob and found it unlocked. Pushing the door open, he stepped through into a space filled with the soft mustiness of dust and age and long neglect. Unlike the shaft, this place had a little light, a faint glow coming from somewhere to Merrick's left. Closing the door behind him, he started to activate his light-amps.
And suddenly, a blazing white light exploded in his face.
He jerked back, squeezing his eyes tightly against the blaze as he reflexively threw one arm up to protect his face. "Well, well, well," a voice growled from somewhere behind the light. "What have we here?"
The Troft stepped into the elevator behind Merrick . . . and to Jin's stunned horror, the doors closed behind him, leaving her, Akim, and the other five Trofts still outside.
Wait! Ruthlessly, she stifled the word before it could make it past her lips. She was a woman in a patriarchal society, and it would look suspicious if she spoke up instead of Akim.
Only Akim wasn't speaking up. He was just standing there, not even looking at Jin, apparently without a single shred of concern that their little group of infiltrators had just been split up. One of the Trofts gestured toward the right-hand elevator, and Akim merely nodded and stepped inside, leaving Merrick to whatever fate the Trofts had planned for him.
But whatever those plans were, they were about to be canceled. Glancing casually around, Jin set a targeting lock on each of the five Trofts' foreheads. Her fingertip lasers were useless against their faceplates, but a drop onto her back and a sweep of her antiarmor laser would leave her free to pry open the elevator doors and either drop onto the top of Merrick's car if they'd taken him down or else to jump up to the underside if they'd taken him up. Either way, another blast from her antiarmor laser would get her inside—
"Niora Kutal."
Jin jerked out of her frantic train of thought. Akim was standing in the elevator, gazing at her with the mix of authority and aloofness she'd seen on so many Qasamans as they dealt with female subordinates. "Yes, Miron Akim?" she managed.
"Attend," he said, making a small gesture toward his side.
But what about my son? "Of course," she said instead. Lowering her eyes like a good Qasaman woman, her jaw tight as she fought to control her pounding rage and fear, she stepped into the elevator. Akim was right. Whatever the Trofts had planned for Merrick, blowing their cover now wouldn't do him any good.
And he wasn't seven years old anymore, either, she reminded herself firmly. He was a competent, capable adult.
And a Cobra.
She stepped to Akim's side. The five Trofts piled in behind her, lasers leveled and ready, their sheer numbers and bulk forcing the two humans all the way to the rear of the car. The doors slid shut,
one of the Trofts punched a button, and they headed up.
"To whom do you take us?" Akim asked into the silence.
No one bothered to answer. In the close confines, Jin heard a faint voice coming from somewhere, and keyed up her auditory enhancements. [—of his presence,] the cattertalk whispered. [A full search of the elevator shaft, it is being made.]
Jin felt her muscles tense. Were they talking about Merrick? Had he escaped?
[The other humans, under close guard hold them,] the voice continued.
None of the five Trofts stiffened, gasped, or showed any other visible reaction to the report. But it seemed to Jin that the ring of lasers moved perhaps a centimeter or two closer to her and Akim.
She took a careful breath, feeling her heartbeat slow a little. But only a little. Merrick had apparently escaped, and escaped alive. But had he taken that action on purpose, as Akim had ordered, so that he could go warn the Djinn of the change in plan? Or had he panicked, as his grandfather Justin had when facing an eerily similar situation?
There was no way for her to know. She could only hope that either way, he
would make it safely to the subcity.
She raised her eyes to one of the Troft faces gazing at her above his leveled laser. The double sets of eyes gazed back through the faceplate, the main eyes a dark blue, the three tiny compound eyes grouped around each of the main ones largely colorless in the elevator's artificial light. She lowered her gaze, taking in the vaguely chicken-like beak, the double throat bladders, and the flexible radiator membranes on his arms. The Troft's outfit was similar to the usual leotard-like garment the traders on Aventine wore, except that his was festooned with various equipment pockets and hooks and was clearly armored.
Why were they here? The Qasamans had had contact with the local Troft demesnes—that much had been obvious fifty years ago, when the Trofts had provided the Worlds with a Qasaman translation program prior to their first mission here. Had the Qasamans annoyed someone enough to invite this kind of response? Had some Troft demesne decided it was running out of room, and Qasama offered the most convenient and attractive expansion?
The elevator came to a stop at the topmost floor, and the doors opened to reveal another group of five Trofts with weapons at the ready. Apparently, the aliens weren't taking any chances that their other two human visitors might make a break for it. The Trofts in the elevator filed out, the two groups of aliens forming themselves into a sort of double receiving line out in the corridor. It was, Jin thought as she and Akim passed between the lines, very much like the honor guard she'd sometimes seen at official Aventinian receptions.
Except for the drawn weapons, of course. And the way the lines re-formed into a guard behind them.
"To whom do you take us?" Akim asked again.
Again, the Trofts ignored him. The two humans were escorted through a couple of turns and arrived at last at an open door. At a gesture from one of the aliens, they went inside.
The room was clearly an executive office, complete with a large expanse of carpeted floor and a panoramic window that opened out onto the city of Sollas stretching out to the south. But unlike most offices, the only furniture here was a pair of metal armchairs sitting back to back across the room by the window.
