Jin took a deep breath. This was it. Now if only he bought her performance....
Letting her face go slightly slack as if entering a hypnotic state, she dropped her voice an octave. "This is Kruin Sammon," she intoned. "I know what you are doing here in Mangus, Obolo Nardin, and I know what you are risking. With that knowledge I can destroy you... but I can also aid you. You need the resources I possess, as well as the strength of the western villages whose loyalty I command. I propose therefore an alliance between us, with the rewards shared equally. I await your reply."
Carefully, Jin brought her eyes back into focus. "Did you receive the entire message, Master Nardin?" she asked in a normal voice again.
Obolo Nardin's eyes were steady on her face. "Indeed I did," he grunted.
"I've already been paid to bring Kruin Sammon a reply, should you wish to send one," she continued, struggling to keep her face and voice impassive. Deep in the back of her mind, alarm bells were beginning to go off. Something here wasn't quite right... "However, in that event, I would need time to prepare myself-"
And without warning the scene ahead of her was abruptly rimmed by red.
A jolt of adrenaline surged through her as, reflexively, she held her breath.
Suddenly it all clicked: the long delay back at the changing room, the careful scrutiny Obolo Nardin was giving her, the breeze blowing in her face... a breeze undoubtedly laden with sleeping drug. They'd considered what to do with her, decided that the message cover was nonsense, and were taking the appropriate action.
At her sides, Jin's hands curled into fists, nails digging into the skin of her palms to ward off the drug's effect. She might be able to stun Obolo with her sonic and get out of here... but the hanging curtains could hide a hundred other men, and even now she couldn't afford to give herself away. On the other hand, she couldn't hold her breath forever, either, and she'd probably already inhaled enough of the stuff to put her under before she got too far, anyway. And Obolo was still staring at her. Still waiting...
Waiting for her to collapse? All right, she decided suddenly. "I-Master Nardin-" she began drunkenly, using the last of her reserve of air; and rolling her eyes up, she collapsed to the floor.
She'd made sure to let her head roll so as to face away from the direction of the sleep breeze, but the stars of her impact had barely cleared away before the air now playing at the back of her head was shut off anyway. Footsteps came slowly around one of the curtains... stopped at her side... "That was quick,"
Radig Nardin's voice said. "Even for a woman."
"She's a soft offworlder," Obolo replied contemptuously. "If this is the best our enemies can do, we have little to fear from them."
An iron spike seemed to drive itself up through Jin's stomach. God above-they know who I am! But how-?
"Perhaps." A hand pulled at Jin's shoulder, rolling her over on her back.
Keeping her eyes closed, she activated her optical enhancers, keying for zero magnification and the lowest light-amp setting. Radig peered at her face a moment, then straightened up again to face his father. "I'll have her body searched for tiny instruments before we confine her."
"As you choose, my son, but I doubt there's any need."
"Her clothing yielded nothing-"
"You're forgetting the crash of her spacecraft," the elder Nardin cut his son off. "She carries no devices because none survived with her."
"Perhaps. Have you decided yet what to do about Daulo Sammon?"
"Why, nothing, of course-his father has offered us a deal," Obolo said, heavily sarcastic. "Didn't you hear his message?"
Radig glanced down at Jin again. "You'll forgive me, my father, if I fail to see any humor in the situation. Or do you consider it impossible that the Sammon family has in fact made an alliance with this spy?"
"Hardly impossible," Obolo grunted. "Unlikely, though."
"Then let me get rid of him," Radig urged. "As long as he's here, he presents a danger to us."
"True. Unfortunately, removing him at this point may be even more dangerous.
Tell me, have you identified the man who came into Mangus with him?"
Radig's lip twitched. "Not yet. But he's probably just someone else from that bololin dropping of Milika."
" 'Probably' isn't good enough," Obolo said coldly. "The Shahni know the woman is on Qasama, and they know she stayed in the Sammon household while in Milika.
This man could well be a Shahni agent assigned to Daulo Sammon, either as protector or as jailer."
"But in either case, why accompany Daulo Sammon here?"
"She is here, is she not? Whatever she and our enemies know or suspect, it's not impossible she might have shared that knowledge with Kruin Sammon."
"But then allowing an agent of the Shahni-"
"Radig Nardin." Obolo's voice was like the crack of a whip. "Control your fears and think. As far as the Shahni are concerned, Mangus is an electronics firm-nothing more. If we behave openly, they'll have no reason to doubt that.
If, on the other hand, we make an inflated presentation of plucking Daulo Sammon from among the workers and throwing him outside our wall, will this agent's curiosity not be aroused?"
Radig took a deep breath. "It's still dangerous, my father."
"Of course it is. There's no profit without danger, my son. If your nerve threatens to foil you again, concentrate on that."
"Yes, my father." Radig glowered down at Jin. "And for what potential gain do we risk keeping this one alive?"
Obolo snorted. "You consider keeping a woman alive to be a risk?"
"She's not a normal woman, my father-she's an agent of the Cobra Worlds. That makes her dangerous."
Abruptly, Jin noticed that the red border was still around her vision... that it was, in fact, getting thicker... as the view itself seemed to be fading away...
No! she told herself furiously, trying to fight the sleep flowing over her mind.
Come on, Jin-hang on. But it was too hard to muster the necessary emotion. And it was so comfortable here on the floor...
Her last memory was that of rough hands digging under her armpits and legs, lifting her up and floating her away...
Chapter 36
"...The screen in front of each of you will display a brief summary of each of the steps I've just outlined," the instructor concluded his presentation, waving his hand over his podium toward the rows of equipment-laden tables in front of him. "If you have any questions tap the 'help' key; if that still doesn't do it, tap the 'signal' key and someone will come to your work station. Any questions?
All right, then. Get to it, and remember that the future of communication on
Qasama may depend on you."
Shifting his eyes to the screen attached to the work table, Daulo suppressed a grimace and picked up a circuit board and a handful of components. He hadn't really expected to be given a missile casing and told to load a warhead onto it... but assembling telephone circuitry was hardly what he'd hoped for, either.
"Not wasting any time getting us to work, are they?" he murmured.
He glanced to the side in time to see Akim's shrug. "They're paying all of us quite well," he pointed out.
Daulo gritted his teeth and plugged the first component into the circuit board.
He'd been trying to pique Akim's curiosity about Mangus itself ever since being ushered off the bus, and had yet to make any impression on the man. Akim was on the trail of a female offworlder, and he clearly had no intention in being distracted from that single-minded path. "At least it explains why they don't bother hunting down their previous workers," Daulo commented, trying another approach. "If everything they do here is this simple-minded it's just as easy to teach a new group from the beginning."
Akim glanced up and around, and for a moment Daulo hoped he might argue the point. But he merely nodded. "Inefficient, to some degree, but not overly so," he said, and returned his attention to his own circuit board. "Certainly helps spread a little extra wealth around
to Azras's poor."
"Right," Daulo muttered under his breath. "Obolo Nardin is just as noble as all creation."
"If I were you," Akim said coldly, "I'd try and forget my village prejudices and concentrate on the task at hand. Do you see anyone here who could be the woman in disguise?"
With a sigh, Daulo gave the room a careful scan, the image of Jin getting into
Radig Nardin's car rising up to haunt him. "I don't think so."
"Keep an eye out," Akim told him. "They may occasionally rotate workers between groups."
Daulo nodded and turned back to his work.
It was perhaps an hour later when he suddenly noticed Akim had stopped working and was gazing straight ahead into space. "Something?" he asked.
Akim turned sharply to look at him. "Something's wrong," he whispered hoarsely.
"There's-" he licked his lips, eyes darting all around him. "Don't you feel it?"
Daulo leaned close, fighting against the sudden dread rising in his throat.
Akim's barely controlled panic was contagious. "I don't understand. What is it you're feeling?"
Akim drew a shuddering breath. "Treachery," he said, hands visibly trembling.
"There's... treachery here. Don't you feel it?"
Daulo threw a quick look around the room. So far no one else seemed to have noticed them, but that wouldn't last long. "Come on," he said, getting to his feet and gripping Akim's arm. "Let's get out of here."
Akim shrugged off his hand. "I can manage myself," he snarled, standing up unsteadily.
"Whatever you want," Daulo gritted. The door they'd come in by was all the way at the back of the room; much closer was another exit near the front podium.
Taking Akim's arm again as the other staggered slightly, he headed that way.
The instructor intercepted them as they got to the door. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "The exit is back that-"
"My friend is sick," Daulo cut him off. "Is there a lavette out there somewhere?"
The other seemed to draw back, and Daulo took advantage of his hesitation to push past. Outside was a corridor he hadn't seen on their way into the building, with a heavy-looking door at the far end. Halfway toward it was the lavette he'd hoped for; guiding Akim through the door, he all but pushed the other down onto a cushion in the lounge section.
For a long moment neither man spoke. Akim took several slow, deep breaths, checked his fingers for signs of trembling, and after a bit rose and studied his face in the mirror. Only then did he finally look Daulo in the eye. "You didn't feel it, did you?" he demanded. "You didn't feel anything in there?"
Daulo spread his hands, palm upwards. "You'll have to be more specific," he said.
"I wish I could." Akim leaned back toward the mirror, gazed deeply into his own eyes. "I felt-well, curse it all, I felt treason. There's no other way to put it; I felt treason. Whether it makes any sense of not."
It didn't; but it almost didn't matter. Whatever the reason, Akim had finally been jolted out of his indifference toward Mangus, and it was up to Daulo now to fan that flame. "I don't understand," he admitted, "but I trust your instincts."
Akim threw him a baleful glance. "Instincts be cursed," he ground out. "There's something wrong in this place, and I'm going to find out what it is."
He started toward the door. "You going back in there?" Daulo asked carefully. "I mean, considering what just happened-"
"I'm fully under control now," the other said stiffly. "As far as you're concerned, I just had a bad reaction to something I ate for breakfast.
Understand?"
The instructor was watching from just outside the assembly-room door when they emerged from the lavette. He accepted Akim's suitably embarrassed explanation and escorted them back to the room and their tables. Returning to his work,
Daulo stretched out his senses to the limit, trying as hard as he could to pick up the feeling Akim had described.
Nothing.
What was perhaps worse, Akim could apparently no longer sense it, either.
Grim-faced, he sat at his table and worked on his circuit boards, without even a mild recurrence of his earlier reaction.
Which meant either that whatever it was had passed... or that it had never been there in the first place.
It was, Daulo decided, probably the oddest sunset he'd ever seen. Ahead, the sun was invisible below the level of Mangus's outer wall, while overhead it still sent multicolored light patterns across the shimmering canopy. "I wonder if that thing keeps the rain out," he commented, twisting his head to gaze upward out their window at it.
"Why else would it be there?" Akim growled from his bed.
To keep Jin's people from seeing in. But he couldn't tell Akim that. "You still bothered by what happened in the assembly room this afternoon?" he asked instead, keeping his eyes on the canopy.
"Wouldn't you be?" the other snapped. "I behaved like a fool in public, and then couldn't even discover why I'd done so."
Daulo pursed his lips. "Could it have been some chemical they use in the manufacturing process?" he suggested. "Something that might still have been evaporating from the circuit boards?"
"Then why didn't anyone else react? More to the point, why wasn't it still there when we came back into the room? And it wasn't still there."
Daulo chewed the inside of his cheek. "Well, then... maybe it was something meant for me, something you got caught in by accident."
Behind him, Akim snorted. "Back to your paranoia of Mangus wanting to keep villagers out, are we?"
"It fits the facts, doesn't it?" Daulo growled, turning to face the other. "A stream of gas, maybe, designed to make me feel frightened and leave on my own?"
"It wasn't fear I felt."
"Perhaps you're braver than I am. And then when you reacted instead of me, they may have panicked and shut it off."
Akim shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense. You're talking something far too sophisticated to be used in what amounts to a telephone assembly plant."
"And how do you know those were telephone circuit boards we were putting together?" Daulo countered.
Akim's forehead creased. "What else would they be?" he asked.
Daulo took a deep breath. "Weapons. Possibly missile components."
He'd expected at least a snort of disbelief and scorn. But Akim merely continued looking at him. "And what," the other said quietly, "would give you that impression?"
A cold shiver ran up Daulo's spine. He knows, was his first, horrible thought.
The Shahni are in this with Mangus-the cities really are preparing for war against the villages. But it was too late to back out. "Rumors," he said through stiff lips. "Bits of information, pieced together over the months."
"As well as suggestions from the Aventinian spy?" Akim asked bluntly.
"I don't know what you mean," Daulo said as calmly as possible.
For a half dozen heartbeats the two men stared at each other. "You slide dangerously close to treason, Daulo Sammon," Akim said at last. "You and the entire Sammon household."
"The Sammon family is loyal to Qasama," Daulo said, fighting a trembling in his voice. "To all of Qasama."
"And I, as a city man, am not?" Akim's eyes flared. "Well, let me tell you something, Daulo Sammon: you may think you love Qasama, but any loyalty you possess pales against mine. We of the Shahni's investigators have been trained and treated to be totally fair in our dealings with Qasama's people. Totally fair. We cannot be corrupted or led astray from what we see as our duty. And we do not show prejudice, to anyone on our world. If you remember only one thing about me, remember that."
Abruptly, he got to his feet, and Daulo took an involuntary step backward. But
Akim merely walked past the two beds and seated himself at the writing desk. "So you think we've been assembling parts for missiles, do you?" he said over his shoulder as he picked up the phone and turned it over. "There ought to be one quick way to settle that."
Daulo stepped over
and crouched down beside him as Akim pulled a compact tool kit from his pocket and selected a small screwdriver. There were, Daulo noted, about a dozen screws holding the bottom of the phone to the molded resin top.
"Why so many fastenings?" he asked as Akim got to work.
"Who knows?" Akim grunted, getting the first one loose. "Maybe they don't want anyone messing around with his phone unless it really needs fixing."
Akim was working on the last screw when Daulo first noticed the odor. "What's that?" he asked, sniffing cautiously. "Smells like something's burning."
Timothy Zahn - Cobra 03 - Cobra Bargain Page 28
