Timothy Zahn - Cobra 03 - Cobra Bargain

by Cobra Bargain(lit)

  Her wrecked aircraft. The aircraft whose existence she'd taken great pains to conceal... and which therefore was very probably worth seeing.

  Besides which-he was honest enough to admit-his pride wouldn't let him lose track of her now. Taking a deep breath, he cradled the barrel of his gun with his left hand and stepped in under the tree canopy.

  Daulo had been out in the raw Qasaman forest before, of course, but never under conditions like this; and it only gradually dawned on him just how different this was. Always before he'd been part of a squad of village hunters, shielded from danger by their guns and experience. Now, however, he was alone. Worse, he was trying to follow another person without being spotted in turn, a chore that took far more concentration than he liked.

  And no one knew he was here. Or would even miss him for several hours.

  If he was killed, would they ever even find his body?

  He fought the growing fear for nearly fifteen minutes... and then, all at once, something seemed to snap within him. The sounds of animals and insects buzzing and scurrying all around him mingled with the rapid thud of his heartbeat in his ears, and suddenly it didn't seem quite so important anymore that he, personally, find out what Jasmine Alventin was up to. This is crazy, he told himself, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of a trembling hand. She wants something from her aircraft?-fine. She can have it. Whatever it was, it was no longer worth risking his life over-especially when he could have a squad of armed men waiting for her by the time she came back to retrieve her bag.

  Checking one last time to make sure she wasn't looking back, he turned around-

  The purring growl came from off to his left, and his heart skipped a beat as he nearly tripped over his feet spinning around to face it. A razorarm stood there, crouched ready to spring.

  It was one thing to face a razorarm caught in a village wall's upper mesh; it was something else entirely to encounter one on its own home ground. Daulo didn't even realize he'd pulled the trigger until the gun abruptly jerked in his hand and a stutter of thunderclaps shattered the quiet of the forest. Dimly, through the gun's roar, he heard the razorarm's purr become a scream-saw the clawed front paws coming at him like twin missiles-

  And with a flash like a lightning bolt from God, the razorarm blazed with light and flame.

  It slammed into him, flooding his nostrils with the nauseating stench of seared meat and fur. He staggered back, gagging, trying to shove the dead weight off his shoulders and chest-

  "Daulo-duck!"

  The warning did no good. Daulo's horror-numbed muscles had no chance to react before a flash of silver-blue exploded in his face-

  And to the stench was added pain.

  Pain like nothing he'd ever felt before-a dozen nails jabbing and twisting and ripping through his flesh. He was aware in a distant way that he was screaming; aware that his efforts to tear his tormentor away merely made the pain worse.

  One eye was closed against something slapping at it; with the other he saw

  Jasmine running toward him, the look of an avenging angel on her face. Her hands reached out-no, he tried to scream, don't try to tear it off-

  And then her hands seemed to flicker with light... and the claws digging into his face were suddenly stilled.

  "Daulo!" Jasmine said tautly, her hands gently yet firmly pulling the tormentor off him. "Oh, my God-are you all right?"

  "I'm-yes, I think so," he managed, struggling to regain his dignity in front of this woman. "It-what happened?"

  "You tried to shoot a razorarm," she said grimly, holding his hands firmly away from the throbbing in his cheek as she examined the wounds with eyes and fingertips. "It wasn't a complete success."

  "It-?" Turning away from her probing fingers, he looked down at the carcass lying limply beside him.

  Its head was gone. Burned away.

  "God be praised," he sighed. "That lightning bolt was..." He paused, an eerie feeling crawling up his back. The second attacker... his eyes found where

  Jasmine had tossed it. The razorarm's mojo, of course. Also burned.

  Slowly, he looked back at Jasmine Alventin. Jasmine Alventin, the uncultured woman who'd appeared from nowhere... and who'd made it through raw forest alone... and whose hands had spat fire deadly enough to kill.

  And it all finally fell together.

  "God above," he groaned.

  And to his everlasting shame, he fainted.

  Chapter 21

  Daulo wasn't unconscious for more than about ten minutes. It was still plenty of time for Jin to dress his injuries as best she could, move the spine leopard and mojo carcasses away before they could attract scavengers, and call herself every synonym for idiot that she could think of.

  The worst part was the knowledge that her detractors had been right. Totally.

  She simply didn't have what it took to be a Cobra; not the emotional toughness, not even the ability to keep her focus on her mission. Certainly not the basic intelligence.

  She looked down at Daulo for a moment, gritting her teeth hard enough to hurt.

  That was it, then-the mission was scrubbed. An hour after he got home half the planet would be out here looking for her. Nothing left to do now but to strike out into deep forest and wait in the vain hope that she might somehow connect up with the next team the Cobra Worlds sent. Whenever in the distant future that might be.

  Not that it mattered. At this point it would be better for everyone concerned if she died here, anyway.

  Daulo groaned, and his hands twitched against his chest. Another minute and he'd be fully conscious, and for a moment Jin debated whether or not it would be safe for her to leave him here alone. The road wasn't more than fifteen minutes away, and his injuries wouldn't slow him down all that much. And he did have a gun.

  Sighing, Jin stayed where she was, giving the area a quick visual sweep. There wasn't much point, after all, in shooting spine leopards and mojos off a man and then turning him loose for the forest to take another crack at. When she looked down again, his eyes were open. Staring up at her.

  For several heartbeats neither spoke. Then Daulo took a shuddering breath.

  "You're a demon warrior," he croaked. There was no question in his voice.

  Nor anything that required a verbal answer. Jin merely nodded once and waited.

  Daulo's hand went to his cheek, gingerly touched the handkerchief Jin had tied there with a strip of cloth. "How... badly am I hurt?" He was clearly fighting to sound and act natural.

  "It's not too bad," Jin assured him. "Deep gouges in places, but I don't think there's any major muscle or nerve damage. Probably hurts like blazes, though."

  A ghost of a smile touched his lips for a second. "That's for sure," he admitted. "I don't suppose you'd happen to have any painkillers with you."

  She shook her head. "There are some near here, though. If you feel up to a little travel we could go get them."

  "Where are they?-at your wrecked spacecraft?"

  Jin hissed between her teeth. So they had found the shuttle, after all. "You're a good actor," she said bitterly. "I would have sworn that none of you knew about the crash. No, the painkiller's in my pack, hidden near the road. Unless your people have grabbed that by now, of course."

  She took his arm, preparing to lift him upright, but he stopped her. "Why?" he asked.

  "Why what?" she growled. "Why am I here?"

  "Why did you save my life?"

  "That's a stupid question. Come on-I've got to retrieve those packs before the rest of your army starts beating the bushes for me. You at least owe me a little head start."

  Again she started to lift him; again he stopped her. "You don't need a head start," he said, his voice trembling slightly. "No one else knows about you. I followed you in alone."

  She stared at him. Truth? Or some kind of test?

  Or a ploy to keep her in one place while they encircled her?

  It doesn't really matter, she realized wearily. As long as Daulo was alive,
the clock was already ticking down. "Well..." she said at last. "We still need to go and get you that painkiller. Come on."

  She'd expected to have to support him most of the way back, and was mildly surprised that he made it the whole way under his own power. Either the physical shock to his system wasn't as bad as she'd feared or else the boneheaded male arrogance she'd already seen too much of on Qasama did have its useful side.

  They made it back to the road in just over fifteen minutes... and there was indeed no army waiting for them.

  "So," Daulo said with elaborate casualness after she'd treated his cuts with a disinfectant/analgesic spray and replaced the handkerchief with a proper heal-quick bandage. "I suppose the next question is where we go from here."

  "I don't see much of a question," Jin growled. "I'd guess you're going back to

  Milika to sound the alarm, and I'm going to start running."

  He stared silently at her... and, oddly enough, behind the tight mask she could see there was a genuine battle of emotions underway. "I see you don't know very much about Qasama, Demon Warrior," he said after a moment.

  It was a second before she realized he expected a response. "No, not really," she told him. "Not much more than I learned from you over the past couple of days. That's one of the reasons we came, to find out more."

  He licked his lips. "We put a high premium on honor here, Demon Warrior. Honor and the repayment of debts."

  And she'd just saved his life... Slowly, it dawned on Jin that it might not yet be over. "I see your dilemma," she nodded. "Would it help to tell you I'm not here to make war on Qasama?"

  "It might-if I could believe you." He took a deep breath. "Is your spacecraft really wrecked?"

  Jin shivered at the memory. "Totally."

  "Why were you going back there, then?"

  And there was no longer any way out of it. She was going to have to admit, in public, just what an emotional idiot she was being. "I had to leave the wreck in a hurry," she said, the words tearing at her gut. "I thought it would be found right away, and that there would be a manhunt started-" She broke off, blinking angrily at a tear that had appeared in one eye. "Anyway, I left... but it seemed to me that if you'd found it the authorities would certainly have checked all nearby villages for strangers. Wouldn't they?"

  Daulo nodded silently.

  "Well, don't you see?" she snapped suddenly. "You haven't found it... and I ran off and left my friends there. I can't just... I have to-"

  "I understand," Daulo said softly, getting to his feet. "Come. We'll go together to bury them."

  It took them only a few minutes to get the car off the road and into concealment behind a pair of trees. Then, together, they headed back into the forest.

  "How far will we need to go, Demon Warrior?" Daulo asked, peering up at the leafy canopy overhead and trying not to feel like he'd just made a bad mistake.

  "Five or six kilometers, I think," the woman told him. "We should be able to get through it a lot faster than I did the first time. Thanks to your people's medical skill."

  "It's the kind of skill that comes from living on a hostile world," he ground out. "Of course, it's been considerably more hostile lately-say, in the past twenty or thirty years?"

  She didn't answer. "Did you hear me, Demon Warrior?" he demanded. "I said-"

  "Stop calling me that," she snapped. "You know my name-use it."

  "Do I?" he countered. "Know your name, I mean?"

  She sighed. "No, not really. My name is Jasmine Moreau, of the world Aventine.

  You can also call me Jin."

  "Djinn?" he said, startled. All the childhood scare-stories of djinns came flooding back in a rush... "Given to you when you became a demon warrior, I assume?"

  She glanced a frown over at him. "No. Why?-oh, I see. Huh. You know, I never noticed that before. No, it has nothing to do with the djinns of folklore-it's just pronounced the same. It's a name my father gave me when I was very young."

  "Um. Well, then, Jin Moreau, I'd still like an answer to my question-"

  "Freeze!"

  For a single, awful second he thought he'd pushed her too far and that she'd decided to kill him after all. She dropped onto her side, left leg hooking up beneath her skirt-

  There was a brilliant thunderbolt flash, and a smoking krisjaw slammed into the dead leaves.

  "You okay?" she asked, rolling to her feet and peering around them.

  Daulo found his tongue. "Yes. That's... quite a weapon," he managed, blinking at the purple afterimage.

  "It comes in handy sometimes. Let's get moving-and if I yell, you hit the ground fast, understand? If there are as many animals out here today as there were my first time through it could be a busy trip."

  "There shouldn't be," he shook his head. "You came in right after a major bololin herd went through, and that always stirs up lots of animal activity."

  It pleased him to see that that knowledge was completely new to her. "Well, that's relief. In that case it should only take us a couple of hours to get to the shuttle."

  "Good," he nodded. "And maybe to pass the time you could explain to me just why your world declared war on ours."

  Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he saw her grimace. "We didn't declare war on you," she said quietly. "We were told by others that Qasama was a potential threat. We came to see if that was true."

  "What threat?" he scoffed. "A world without even primitive spaceflight capability? How could we possibly be a threat to a world light-years away?-especially one protected by demon warriors?"

  She was silent for a moment. "You won't remember it, Daulo, but for much of

  Qasama's history all of you lived together in a state of extreme noncompetition."

  "I know that," he growled. "We aren't ignorant savages who don't keep records, you know."

  She actually blushed. "I know. Sorry. Anyway, it seemed odd to us that a human society could be so-well, so cooperative. We tried to find a reason-"

  "And while you were looking you became jealous?" Daulo bit out. "Is that it? You envied us the society we'd created, and so you sent these razorarm killing machines in to kill and destroy-"

  "Did you know that mojos can control the actions of their owners?"

  He stopped in mid-sentence. "What?"

  She sighed. "They effect the way their owners think. Cause them to make decisions that benefit the mojo first and the owner only second."

  Daulo opened his mouth, closed it again. "That's absurd," he said at last.

  "They're bodyguards, that's all."

  "Really? Does your father have a mojo? I never saw him with one."

  "No-"

  "How about the head of the Yithtra family? Or any of the major leaders of Milika or Azras."

  "Cities like Azras have hardly any mojos at all," he said mechanically, brain spinning. No; it had to be a lie. A lie spun by Aventine's rulers to justify what they'd done to Qasama.

  And yet... he had to admit that he had always sensed a difference in the few mojo owners he knew well. A sort of... placidity, perhaps. "It doesn't make sense, though," he said at last.

  "Sure it does," she said. "Out in the wild mojos pair up with krisjaws for hunting purposes-hunting and, for the mojos, access to embryo hosts."

  "Yes, I know about the native reproduction cycle," Daulo said hastily, obscurely embarrassed at discussing such things with a woman. "That's why cities were designed to let bololin herds charge on through, so that the mojos there could get to the tarbines riding the bololins."

  "Right," she nodded. "You could have walled the cities like you did the villages, you know, and kept the bololins out completely. It would have saved a lot of grief all around... except that it was in the mojo's best interest to keep the bololins nearby, so that's how you built them. And because they didn't want to risk their own feathers with any more bodyguarding than they could get away with, they made sure you cooperated with each other in every facet of life."

  "And so we had no warfare, an
d no village-city rivalry," Daulo growled. He understood, now... and the cold-bloodedness of Aventine's scheme turned his stomach. "So you decided to interfere... and with krisjaws all but gone from the

  Great Arc, you had to give the mojos somewhere else to go. So you gave them razorarms."

  "Daulo-"

  "Have you seen enough of what Qasama has become since then?" he cut her off harshly. "Okay, fine-so perhaps we used to bend our own lives a little to accommodate other creatures. Was that too high a price to pay for peace?"