It was obvious, of course, once she thought about it. The overhead canopy that hid the Trofts' presence here so well also blocked all normal landing approaches. Building a sliding door into the wall was the most straightforward response.
And from her point of view, a highly useful one. It meant that if she and the others were able to get out of the ship, they wouldn't have any walls to climb.
She reached the rubberine collar without any shots or shouts being directed at her. Once there, however, she realized she had a new problem. There was no gap between collar and ship she could get through, and while her antiarmor laser would make short work of the rubberine it would do so spectacularly enough to alert any Trofts inside the building to her presence out here. But with her fingertip lasers out of commission...
Pursing her lips, she knelt down, bringing one knee up and resting the third finger of her right hand on top of it. Straightening the little finger, she mentally crossed her fingers and pressed down on the third-finger nail with her left thumb.
Somehow, she'd always thought that the triggering mechanism depended on having the finger of the appropriate hand curled. Apparently, that wasn't true. This way was awkward, but it worked; and within a few seconds she had a ragged flap burned through the rubberine. Taking one last look behind her, she ducked through into the building.
She'd seen a starship maintenance facility on Aventine once, and this one seemed built along similar lines. The ship's command module-a standard Troft flat-steeple design, as near as she could tell from her perch-stuck out into the center of a huge bay, with movable stairways and ramps leading to the entryways and equipment access areas. Scaffolds and boom cranes lined the bay's walls, all of them retracted away from the ship now in preparation for the imminent lift.
A dozen Trofts were also visible, standing on the ramps or milling about the bay floor. All had weapons drawn, and all were clearly agitated.
And none of them had yet noticed her.
Jin permitted herself a grim smile. They were rattled, all right; rattled and almost totally unsure of what they were doing. But they're all armed, she warned herself. They're all armed, and there are a hell-and-crackling lot of them.
The reminder sobered the wave of adrenaline-spurred cockiness. Crouching lower, she licked dry lips and considered her next move.
Below and to her left, leading to the rear/port side of the command module, she could see the lower end of one of the movable stairways. It seemed unlikely that it would still be against the ship unless there were an open entryway at its upper end. It was also unlikely that it would have been left unguarded.
But it was the best chance she had; and she had to take it quickly, before the
Trofts outside figured out where she'd gone and alerted the rest. If she could get just another few meters along the neck and reach the rear edge of the command module before one of the aliens below happened to look up-
She'd made barely two meters of that distance when the bay suddenly echoed to the sound of excited catertalk.
Jin cursed under her breath, straightening and shifting from a crouch to a flat-out run. A laser split the air in front of her, sending a wash of heat and light over her. Automatically, she closed her eyes against the purple blob now floating in front of them and shifted to optical enhancers. She reached her target spot; skidding to a halt, she twisted forty-five degrees to the side and jumped.
And soared over the rear port corner of the command module to land squarely on the entryway stairs.
For a second she fought for balance, throwing her hands out to the sides and hooking her thumbs onto the railings in a desperate attempt to keep from falling backwards down the steps. For that second she was a sitting duck... but once again, the Trofts arrayed against her had been taken by surprise. The alien standing at the head of the stairs in front of the entryway simply stood there, frozen in shock; he was still standing like that when Jin's antiarmor laser all but cut him in half.
Another second was all she got before the weapons around the room opened up again; but it was all she needed. Regaining her balance, she took the remaining steps in a single leap, and an instant later was loping down what she hoped was the right corridor to get her to the bridge.
The corridor was deserted; and ten meters later, she reached the monitor intersection beneath the bridge to discover why. Nearly twenty Trofts filled the intersection, grouped around the circular stairway as they watched two more at the top working on the hatch with a laser torch. They turned en masse as she skidded to a halt, twenty lasers tracking toward her-
And with a boom that rattled her own skull, Jin fired her sonic disrupter.
A multiple flash of laser fire lit up the room as a wedge-shaped group of the
Trofts collapsed into folded heaps, twitching hands firing almost at random as they went down. Again Jin fired, twisting her torso to a new firing angle; and again, and again, clenching her teeth tightly against the backwash from the sonic and the scorching near misses from lasers only marginally under their owners' control. By the time the first victims had ceased their spasmodic firing, the last group was collapsing to the deck; by the time the last group lay still Jin was on the stairs, pounding on the hatch with the heel of her hand in the three/two/four code she'd left with Akim.
She finished, and waited. And waited... and as some of the Trofts beneath her began stirring again there was the sound of released catches above her and the hatch suddenly swung open.
"Jin!" Daulo gasped, eyes wide as he stared down at her. "Are you-?"
"I'm fine," she grunted. "Get out of my way, will you?-they'll be able to fire again any second now."
He stepped back hastily, and she leaped up the last steps into the bridge. Akim was waiting to the side, and she'd barely cleared the rim before he slammed the hatch back down again. "You came back," he said, squatting down to seal the catches.
"Didn't you think I would?" Jin countered. Suddenly her knees were going all wobbly; staggering over to one of the chairs, she collapsed into it.
Akim stepped over to her, eyes flicking down her body. "We'd thought you might go for help."
"Help from where?" Jin countered. "Didn't we agree that we couldn't even reach any of your people for several hours?" Her foot touched something metallic; leaning back, she spotted a row of five laser pistols beneath the panel. "You making a collection?" she asked.
"We thought it would be good to have all the weapons together," Daulo told her.
"For when... we weren't sure you were coming back, you know."
"Why did you return?" Akim demanded. "Let me be honest: I don't want to share my death with an enemy of Qasama."
Jin took a deep breath, exhaled it raggedly. "With any luck, you won't have to.
Has the Troft commander tried to communicate with you?"
"He wants us to surrender," Daulo put in from behind her, clearly fighting against a tremor in his voice. "He says we can't possibly win and that they don't want to kill us if they don't have to."
"I don't blame them," Jin nodded. "Especially since he'd probably wreck his bridge in the process." She leaned forward, studying the control panels before her.
Akim followed her gaze. "What exactly are you planning, Jasmine Moreau?" he asked. "Are you going to fly this spacecraft out of Mangus?"
Jin snorted. "Not a chance. I've never flown anything bigger than an aircar in my life, and this isn't the time to start." She paused, looking over her shoulder as a faint crackling sound wafted into the bridge. The sound was coming from the hatch.... "They're back again," she said, stomach tightening as she turned back to the controls. Somewhere here there had to be-
There it was. Taking a deep breath, Jin hunched forward and tentatively touched the switch. "What are you doing?" Akim demanded suspiciously.
"You remember, Miron Akim, how surprised we were that Obolo Nardin would panic this early?" she asked. The volume control... there. Microphone?... clipped to the wall over there. "We wondered why both he and the Tro
fts would throw away their listening ear when there couldn't possibly be any enemies on their way here yet?" she added, working the mike free of its clip and gripping it awkwardly between palm and thumb.
"I remember," Akim growled. "Are you leading up to giving us the answer?"
"I hope so." She took a deep breath. If she was wrong... Raising the mike to her lips, she touched the operating switch. "This is Jasmine Moreau," she said in
Anglic. "Repeating, this is Jasmine Moreau. Please respond. This is Jasmine
Moreau; please respond. This is Jasmine-"
And abruptly the board speaker boomed in reply. "This is Captain Koja; commanding the Dewdrop. We read you, Cobra Moreau, and we're ready to come down and pick you up."
Chapter 45
It took Jin three tries to relax her throat enough to speak again. "Understood,
Dewdrop," she managed at last. "I-" she glanced up to see Akim gazing darkly at her. "Please tie in your Qasaman language translator."
There was a slight pause from the other end. "Why?"
"I have some Qasamans here with me," Jin explained, switching back to their language herself. "I think they ought to be in on the discussion."
"Who are you talking to?" Akim demanded.
"An Aventinian ship," Jin told him. "Here to rescue me. Captain, are you still in orbit?"
"Yes." The word was Qasaman, the voice the artificial one of a translator program. "Where are you?-wait a minute, the head of the rescue team wants to get in on the conversation."
"Jin?" a familiar voice said in accented Qasaman... a voice fairly dripping with relief. "Jin, it's Dad. Are you all right?"
Jin felt her mouth drop open. "Dad! Yes, yes, I'm fine. You-but-"
"What, you didn't think I'd drop everything to come get my daughter back? Oh,
God, Jin-look, where are you?"
"In that covered compound west of Azras-Mangus, they call it. Wait a minute, though, you can't come down just yet."
"Why not?"
"You might run into a hunter/seeker missile. Courtesy of the Trofts whose ship
I'm talking to you from."
There was a long pause. "We were wondering how you'd gotten on this frequency," the Dewdrop translator said at last. "What in blazes are Trofts doing there?"
"At the moment, trying to get us out of their bridge so that they can airlift some Qasaman allies to safety."
"Allies? You mean the Trofts and Qasamans have made an alliance?"
"No, no, it's not that bad. There's nothing official about this; it was a private deal with some Qasaman thugs making a power play."
"A power play which may yet succeed," Akim muttered.
Jin glanced up at him. "Yeah, right. The problem, Dad, is that we've got to find a safe passage out of here for the three of us and at the same time make sure
Mangus's owners don't get away before the Qasaman rulers can deal with them."
"Now, wait a minute, Jin," Justin said cautiously. "We'll get you and your friends out, certainly, but the rest of it sounds like internal politics.
Nothing we ought to get involved with."
Jin took a deep breath. "We're already involved, Dad, just by my presence here.
Please just trust me on this one."
"Jin-"
"Cobra Moreau, this is Koja," the translator interrupted him, "Let's table this discussion until you're safe, all right? Now, you said you were on the bridge?"
"Yes, and we're sort of trapped-"
"Can you describe the ship? Is it a warship, or what?"
"From the way the crew fights, I doubt it. Let's see: the ship's got a large cargo/engineering section with sagging swept-forward wings over twin drive nacelles. The front section looked like a pretty standard flat-steeple command module, and there's a long neck connecting the two sections. No identification marks anywhere I could see."
"Okay. I'll see if we've got anything on this design on file."
"Jin?" Justin's voice came back on. "This is Dad. Now, you say you're trapped on the bridge?"
"Yeah, and they're trying to burn up to us through the emergency blast hatch. I can fight them if necessary, but I'd prefer it if we could find a way to convince the commander to just let us go."
"It's worth a try. Can you tie him in to us?"
Jin peered at the board again. "Hang on..."
[That will not be necessary,] a burst of catertalk cut in. [I have been listening.]
"I thought you might be," Jin said, only lying a little. "In Qasaman, please,
Commander-as I told the Dewdrop, my companions need to hear all this, too."
There was a momentary pause. "Very well," the Troft's translator voice said. "I will listen, but you must realize that I cannot allow you to escape."
"Why not?" Justin asked.
"Our demesne-lord's agreement with the Qasaman Obolo Nardin will come to nothing if his plan is ruined."
"The plan's already ruined," Jin told him. "How are you going to get your allies into your ship for transport, now that I've sealed off the cargo section? And where are they going to stay during the ride?"
"Foolish human! How many other ways into our ship do you think there are?"
"Several," Jin agreed. "But you really don't want to let them see the areas you'd have to take them through. True?"
"The Qasamans can learn nothing from a casual glimpse of our equipment."
"Maybe. But if you're wrong, the Qasamans might advance a little too quickly... possibly quickly enough to break your grip on them before you have a strong enough puppet government in place. Is your demesne-lord willing to take that chance?"
"It is a negligible risk," the Troft insisted.
"Perhaps," the Dewdrop's translator put in. "Let's put it another way, then.
Would your demesne-lord be willing to let an entire Crane-class starcarrier fall into Qasaman hands?"
For a long moment there was silence; and in that hiatus, a keen awareness of her body's condition seemed to flood into Jin's consciousness. Awareness of the throbbing ache in the stiff fingers of both hands-of the burning sensation in her left ankle from excessive use of her antiarmor laser-of an even more painful burning along her ribcage where one of the laser shots fired earlier must have come closer than she'd realized. Her eyes drifted around the bridge, and she realized for the first time just how much equipment was really here. Would she have the ability and stamina to systematically destroy all of it if she had to?
Because that was the only realistic threat they had to bargain with.
And the Troft commander clearly knew it. "Our ship can be flown without the use of the bridge," he said at last.
"Oh, certainly," the Dewdrop agreed. "Most ships can. But not very easily.
Besides which, the bridge isn't the only thing in danger here. There's a sensor bubble directly over her head, for one thing-it wouldn't take all that much for her to punch through to that. Oh, now there's an interesting idea," Koja interrupted his own thought. "If your ship follows standard design, there should be parallel connections between all your sensors for making synchronity checks.
A good jolt of high voltage along that connector cable might just take out every navigation sensor you have on the ship."
"Ridiculous," the Troft snorted.
"Maybe. There's one sure way to find out."
Again the Troft was silent. "You may have the Cobra," he said at last. "If she will leave the ship now, she will be allowed safe passage away from here. The
Qasamans with her may not leave, though."
"Jin?" Justin asked.
"No," she said firmly. "My companions leave with me, or I wreck the ship. But
I'm ready to make you a counter offer."
"I am listening."
"Okay. You let the Dewdrop land-safely-and allow the three of us to leave here, and there'll be no further damage to your ship."
"And...?"
"No ands. We'll leave Qasama, you'll leave Qasama, and it'll all be over."
A
kim snorted and turned away from her. Jin frowned over at his stiff shoulders, then turned back to the panel. "Face reality, Commander; your demesne-lord's scheme has failed, and all you can do is cut his losses."
"The scheme has not failed until the Qasaman authorities have been made aware of
Mangus's true purpose," the Troft countered.
"Then your ship is dead," the Dewdrop said flatly. "Not just the bridge and sensors, Commander, but the entire ship. If Jin wrecks the bridge, it'll be hours before you can fly-you know it and we know it. Long before then we'll be there, even if we have to drop down outside your hunter/seekers' patrol range and come in on foot. And we have thirteen Cobras aboard."
Timothy Zahn - Cobra 03 - Cobra Bargain Page 36
