by Timothy Zahn
Jin grimaced. "The latter, I'm afraid. In fact, my uncle lost his political position because of me. Is it that obvious?"
Akim shrugged. "You came here with only your son," he reminded her. "An honored and respected warrior would have answered the summons with a full contingent of warriors."
Jin stared at him. "Then you did send the message."
Akim shook his head. "Not I," he said. "Perhaps it came from one of the Shahni, though who that could be I can't even begin to guess. More likely the note was from Daulo Sammon, who is now simply lying about it. My point was that I was treated much the same way you were. On the surface I was honored for my role in eliminating Obolo Nardin's threat. But beneath that layer of gratitude lay a quiet anger and suspicion for my having cooperated with you. That distrust lasted long after most of the Shahni had forgotten even my name, let alone what specific crimes I was accused of committing."
He smiled tightly. "So I'm not a stranger to charges of treason, Jasmine Moreau. And if preventing my people from beating themselves mindlessly against an enemy they can't defeat is treason, then I'm willing to wear that badge."
"I admire your courage, Miron Akim," Jin said. "You rather remind me of my uncle that way."
"I'll take that as a high compliment," Akim said gravely. "Then you'll do this?"
"Yes," Jin said, a tingle running up through her. With that word, and that promise, the deal was made. There would be no going back. "You know the real irony here? Two weeks ago, back on Aventine, I was wishing something dramatic and dangerous would happen to our worlds. Something that would remind them that the Cobras are still a vital part of our society." She shook her head. "As the saying goes, one should be careful what one wishes for."
"We have that saying here, too." Akim took a deep breath and exhaled it in a tired-sounding sigh. "I'll escort you back to your room now. Get as much rest as you can."
Jin felt her stomach tighten. "It's set for tomorrow, then?"
"Barring any last-minute problems, yes," Akim confirmed. "The Djinn can be made ready in time, and delay only favors the invaders."
"I suppose so," Jin said. "Will I be seeing you again before then?"
Akim shook his head. "I'll be occupied all day with other matters."
And even if he wasn't, he probably wouldn't want to be seen with her anyway. "Understood," Jin said. "Good luck to you, Miron Akim."
"And to you, Jasmine Moreau," he said. He hesitated, then touched his fingers to his forehead and lips in the sign of respect. "Travel with God."
Ten minutes later, the nurse bade Jin good night and closed the door to her room. Listening to her heart pounding in her ears, she closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep. And wondered if she would ever see Miron Akim again.
Chapter Twenty
The rooftop beneath Merrick was cold and hard, the warmth of the day's sunlight long gone. Above him, the Qasaman stars glittered in a cloudless sky, their patterns subtly different from the ones he'd grown up with on Aventine. Beside him, Zoshak and the other three Djinn of their squad huddled together in the radar and infrared shadow of the building's heat-plant chimney.
And directly in front of him, past the edge of the building's roof, was the Troft sentry ship, the same one Zoshak's team had attacked the previous day. Theoretically, or so Akim had said, now that the Trofts were alerted to possible attacks on their ships, one that had already repulsed an attack would be thought unlikely to be the target of a second one.
Theoretically.
"Two minutes," Zoshak murmured.
Merrick checked his nanocomputer's clock circuit. One minute and fifty-eight seconds, according to his count. "Check," he murmured.
"You ready?" Zoshak added, hunching his shoulders to resettle the heavy backpack he was wearing.
Merrick grimaced. Crouching in the middle of a Qasaman rooftop, dressed in a Qasaman Djinn combat suit—which the techs assured him would alter his infrared signature to something nonhuman, should the Trofts happen to pick up on him—surrounded by Qasaman warriors, preparing to take on an alien warship. Was
anyone, he wondered, ever ready for something like that? "As ready as I'll ever be," he murmured back.
"This time we'll succeed," Zoshak said firmly. "I have no doubts. We'll show them that Qasamans—" He gave Merrick a lopsided smile. "That humans aren't to be trifled with."
"Let's hope they get the message," Merrick said, studying the shimmery mass of alien metal in the distance and doing one final ranging check. The wing supporting the weapons cluster was three meters above the level of the rooftop, plus another three from the edge.
An impossible jump for a normal human. Also well beyond the range of a Djinni in a combat suit, though Merrick doubted the Trofts knew enough about Djinn to have positioned their sentry ship that deliberately.
No problem at all for a Cobra.
Assuming, that is, that Merrick's borrowed combat suit didn't get in the way. The techs had also assured him that the built-in computer had been disconnected and that there would be no residual resistance or sluggishness from the suit's servos. But Merrick had had only limited opportunity to experiment with his new outfit between the day's practice sessions, and he couldn't quite shake the feeling that it might suddenly turn against him at the worst possible moment.
He peered across the rooftop again, where Siraj Akim and his squad were supposed to be waiting on the rooftop on the far side of the avenue, ready to provide cover fire for Merrick's team. Siraj had insisted on being included in this second attack on the sentry ship, and his father and the other team leaders had signed off on it, but that was yet another bad feeling Merrick couldn't shake. It had been barely a day since Siraj had led his original squad in the first disastrous attack on this same target, and Merrick wasn't at all sure Siraj was up to trying it again this soon.
Oddly enough, he had no such doubts about Zoshak. The Djinni crouched beside him seemed to have come out of that experience stronger, more determined, and somehow more optimistic than he'd gone into it. Siraj Akim, though, seemed to have come out darker and grimmer.
Merrick had seen that sort of response a few times before, in Cobras whose mistakes during a spine leopard hunt had gotten someone killed. Sometimes it took months or even years for them to fully snap out of it.
Which led to the even more interesting question of why Siraj was not only aboard, but had also been put in charge of Ghofl Khatir's team.
That one bothered Merrick a lot. True, Khatir had been decidedly unenthusiastic about having to work with the offworld Cobra, and it was possible that Miron Akim had decided he wasn't right for the job after all.
But for him to then replace Khatir with his own son was even more ominous. Was this Akim's version of the old get-back-behind the-wheel philosophy, that the best therapy for Siraj's dark mood would be to lead the charge on the return engagement?
Certainly Siraj seemed determined to do it right this time. Even after Merrick's team had been declared fully prepared, Siraj had insisted his own squad stay in the arena for more drills. The question was whether the Djinn was being driven by thoroughness, or obsession.
"One minute," Zoshak murmured.
Merrick took a deep breath and tried to put his concerns about Siraj out of his mind. It hadn't been his place to question Miron Akim's authority in these matters before, and it wasn't his place to be second-guessing him now. Long ago, Merrick's mother had trusted her life to Akim, and it had worked out all right. He would just have to hope that thirty years hadn't dulled the older man's judgment. Getting a fresh grip on the heavy rope bridge coiled up beneath his left arm, he watched his clock circuit count down to zero.
Exactly half a second later, the neighborhood exploded with the thunder of automatic gunfire.
It was an awesome display of firepower, particularly given that no one had any illusions that it would do any good against the sentry ship's thick armor. The entire point of the attack was to draw the Trofts' attention away from the small groups of men huddl
ed here on the rooftops. The crucial question was whether or not the aliens would really let themselves be fooled this way.
And then, beneath the wing, Merrick saw the lasers and missile launchers of the weapons cluster swivel around and began spitting their deadly fire toward the impertinent humans who insisted on fighting against their new overlords.
"Five seconds," Zoshak announced tensely.
Merrick squeezed his hand into a fist. Over the years the Qasamans had slowly built up a profile of the basic Troft mind, and had concluded that it would take five seconds from the opening salvo of their counterattack until they were mentally and emotionally committed to that course of action.
But even five seconds was an eternity when you were at the business end of an enemy barrage. There were Qasamans behind each of those chattering machine guns, and the delay that would help protect Merrick's team would cost some of them their lives.
"Go!"
Merrick shoved himself out of his crouch, leaning forward into an all-out sprint toward the edge of the roof. The under-wing lasers were still firing at the other attackers, the Trofts apparently still unaware of this new threat closing in on their flank. Merrick kept going, waiting tensely for the moment when someone aboard the ship would suddenly notice him and bring one of those lasers to bear...
And then, sooner somehow than he'd expected, the edge of the roof loomed directly ahead. Gauging his distance, giving his stride one final tweaking, he ran to the very edge, and jumped. There was a tense half second as he soared toward the sentry ship, a half second of ballistic flight where no programmed reflexes could do him a damn bit of good if the Trofts locked up on him—
And then he was there, landing neatly on the center of the wing's two-by-three-meter expanse. He braked quickly to a halt, then spun around and hurled the coiled rope bridge back toward the rooftop. Zoshak was in position; catching the coil, he snapped out the bridge's anchoring spikes and jabbed them hard into the rooftop. Getting a firm grip on his own end, Merrick dropped onto his back, bracing one foot against a small ridge at the wingtip and the other against the wing's trailing static discharge wick. He stretched the bridge tight and locked his arm servos in place.
And with a multiple thud that jarred him with each footstep, the rest of the Djinn ran single-file up the bridge and onto the wing.
Zoshak was the last one up. As he stepped past Merrick onto the wing, Merrick tossed his end of the bridge to one of the other Djinn, waiting beside him for that purpose, then bounded back to his feet and followed Zoshak toward the line where the wing joined the hull. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw the remaining two Djinn climb up onto the crest of the hull and crouch down into guard positions.
Zoshak had his backpack off by the time Merrick arrived beside him. "Ready?" Merrick called over the noise of the gunfire.
Zoshak nodded. Lifting his left leg, Merrick aimed at the wing's inner edge and fired his antiarmor laser.
The sizzle of vaporizing metal was lost amid the cacophony still going on around them. But the shimmery flash as the laser cut into the wing was all Merrick needed to know that his guess had been correct. There was some sort of radar-absorption material coating the metal, a coating that was burning off with gratifying speed in the laser's focused heat.
The metal beneath it was another story. It was thick and strong, and as Merrick tracked his laser slowly along the edge of the wing he saw he was barely managing to carve a shallow groove. If the Qasamans' fancy acid didn't work, this whole exercise was going to be for nothing.
He was nearly finished when a flash of something caught the edge of his eye. He looked up—
To see a flicker of brilliant blue light coming from somewhere on the other side of the hull crest.
He felt his chest seize up. It was the Trofts over there. It had to be. They'd gotten up there somehow, and were coming for him and his team.
And the two Djinn up there who were supposed to be watching for that kind of flanking maneuver were just standing there?
"Move it!" he snapped to Zoshak. Without waiting for acknowledgment, he leaped up from the wing onto the crest. In the pulsating light from the laser he could see a handful of figures gathered on the other weapons wing. Cocking his ring fingers into laser firing position, wondering if he could get all of them before they took him down, he threw himself into a shallow dive onto the wing.
He was midway through his jump when it suddenly registered that the figure he could now see standing at the inner edge of the wing wasn't actually holding the laser that had caught his attention. The beam was, instead, blasting downward from the figure's left foot . . .
Even with his mind frozen with stunned disbelief, his nanocomputer was up to the task of landing him safely on the wing. But the figure had spotted him. It reacted instantly, throwing itself flat onto the metal surface and spinning around on its back to bring
its laser to bear—
"Mom!" Merrick barked. "Don't shoot!"
"Merrick?" his mother's voice came from the Djinn-suited figure as she jerked her laser away from him. "What are you doing here?"
"That's my question," Merrick gritted out. "You're supposed to be on an operating table somewhere."
"I meant, what are you doing on this side of the ship?" Jin demanded as she scrambled back to her feet. Even in the dim light, Merrick could see that her face was pinched with pain from the quick-dodge maneuver his sudden appearance had forced her into.
"Get back over there," Siraj Akim snapped, coming up beside Merrick. "This operation depends on everyone following the plan as ordered."
"He's right," Jin seconded. "Get over there and let me finish up here."
"Right," Merrick said through clenched teeth as he stepped past her and hopped up onto the hull again. Like he could be expected to follow a plan that he didn't know half of. If he made it through this alive, he promised himself darkly, Miron Akim was going to have some very serious explaining to do.
Zoshak was crouching beside the groove Merrick had carved in the wing when he made it back to his side of the ship. "What's going on?" the Djinni asked.
"We've got company," Merrick growled. "Miron Akim sent my mother along with Siraj Akim's squad to take out the other wing. How's it going here?"
Zoshak gestured. "See for yourself."
Merrick peered down at the wing. Actually, there wasn't a lot to be seen through the wispy white smoke pouring up from the crack he'd cut through the metal's coating. Briefly, he ran through his optical enhancers' various settings, but none of them did much good against the smoke. "Any idea how we'll know when we're deep enough to cut through the control cables?" he asked.
"When the weapons fall silent," Zoshak said, carefully dribbling some more acid from his flask into the smoking groove. "We'll get word—"
"Incoming aft!" one of the Djinn up on the hull snapped a warning. An instant later he gurgled and collapsed as a barrage of laser bolts riddled him from somewhere to their rear.
"Watch it!" Merrick shouted, dropping flat onto the wing and pulling Zoshak down with him. At the other end of the ship a dozen armored Trofts had appeared and were moving toward them along the hull, their lasers spitting fire at the intruders.
Frantically, Merrick looked around. But there was literally no cover anywhere to be had. Nowhere to hide, and only one place to run. "Get out of here!" he snapped at Zoshak as he swiveled around to bring his antiarmor laser to bear. "Leave the acid and take the others down the bridge. I'll cover you."
"Yes, cover me," Zoshak snapped back as he set down the acid flask and headed at a quick crawl toward the end of the wing and the bridge waiting there.
Clenching his teeth, Merrick targeted the first three of the approaching Trofts with his antiarmor laser. If the aliens had been traveling single file, he might have been able to take all of them. But they were bunched together, using each other's armored bodies as partial shields.
He could hear Zoshak doing something with the bridge now, and only then did it occur
to him that for the rest of the Djinn to escape someone was going to have to hold the end of the bridge for them. A laser shot grazed across his upper arm, and his nanocomputer took over, rolling him away from the shot as his own laser continued firing. From the far side of the crest he could see other flashes of blue light as his mother joined in the battle, and he sent up a quick prayer for her safety. The Djinn were firing, too, the flashes from their glove lasers fainter in comparison with either the Troft or Cobra weapons, and Merrick wondered if their efforts were doing anything more than distracting the aliens. There was a sudden movement at Merrick's side.
And he jerked reflexively as something long and dark and big went whipping across his line of sight, spinning in a flat arc toward the rear of the ship. He had just enough time to recognize it as their rope bridge before it slammed into the cluster of Trofts, sending their shots wildly in all directions as it wrapped them in a tangle of rope and wood.
"Attack!" Zoshak shouted. He leaped past Merrick onto the hull, his glove lasers blazing at the Trofts, the two remaining Djinn of his team right behind him.
Merrick leaped to his feet, hesitating as he tried to decide whether to join the mad rush or stay here and try to pick off more of the attackers. But the Trofts were pushing their way free of the bridge and starting to fire again, and there was no more time for thinking or planning. Gauging the distance, he bent his knees and jumped.
He had just left the wing when a brilliant laser flash lanced across the space he'd vacated, blasting a cloud of metal splinters from the wing's trailing edge. Merrick bit out a curse as he glanced down at the smoking metal, wondering where that shot had come from. A second later he hit the hull crest, landing two meters in front of Zoshak and the other Djinn and barely four meters away from the approaching Trofts. A half-dozen alien lasers tracked toward him—
Their shots went wild as Merrick fired a full-power burst from his sonic. He fired again, staggering them back, then thrust his right hand forward and activated his arcthrower.
The lightning bolt caught the lead Troft squarely in the torso, throwing him backward into the two directly behind him. Merrick shifted aim and fired the arcthrower again, this time catching one of the Trofts' lasers and shattering it into a burst of shrapnel.
