Cobra

by Timothy Zahn

  "Perhaps. But perhaps not." H'orme flipped to the report directory, found an item. "Three hundred of them sent out in the first landing wave; six hundred more in training. Hmmm. I suppose it could just be a reflection of the poor statistics available. Any indication the Army's adjusting its prelim testing screen?"

  "Too soon to tell," D'arl shook his head.

  For a moment the other was silent. D'arl let his attention drift to the triangular windows at H'orme's back and the panoramic view of Dome it provided.

  Some Committ‚s had the windows permanently blanked in favor of more picturesque holos, and he'd often thought H'orme's choice indicated a firmer commitment to seeking out truth and reality. "If you'd like, sir," he spoke up, "I could place a cancellation order for the whole project on the Considerations List. At the very least it would alert the rest of the Committee that there were potential problems with it."

  "Hm." H'orme gazed at his comboard again. "Three hundred already in action. No.

  No, the reasons the Committee gave its approval in the first place are still valid: we're in a war for Dominion territory and we've got to use every weapon that could possibly help us. Besides, cutting things off now would essentially doom the Cobra warriors already fighting to a losing war of attrition. Still..."

  He tapped his fingers on his desk. "I want you to start gleaning all military intelligence coming from Silvern and Adirondack for data on how they're interacting both with each other and the local civilian populations. If any problems start developing, I want to know about it right away."

  "Yes, sir," D'arl nodded. "It might help if I knew exactly what you were looking for."

  H'orme waved a hand vaguely. "Oh, call it a... a Titan complex, I suppose. The belief that one is so powerful that one is above normal laws and standards. The

  Cobra warriors have been given a great deal of physical power and that can be a dangerous thing."

  D'arl had to smile at that. Imagine, a Committ‚ of the Dominion worried about too much power in a single individual! Still, he saw the other's point. The

  Cobra warriors had been handed their power all at once, instead of having to acquire and use it in small increments, which essentially sidestepped the usual adjustment mechanisms. "I understand," he told H'orme. "Do you want me to file that report in the main system?"

  "No, I'll do it later. I want to study the numbers more closely first."

  "Yes, sir." The unspoken implication being that some of those figures might wind up in H'orme's personal database rather than in the more accessible main Dome system. One of the bases of power, D'arl had long ago learned, was in not letting potential opponents know everything you did. "Shall I have someone bring up dinner for you?"

  "Please. And add in an extra pot of cahve; I expect I'll be working late this evening."

  "Yes, sir." D'arl got to his feet. "I'll probably also be in my office until later if you need me."

  H'orme grunted acknowledgment, already engrossed in the comboard again. Walking silently on the thick carpet, D'arl crossed to the inlaid grafwood door. The

  Cobra warriors were certainly no danger while occupied in a war; but H'orme wasn't one to jump at sudden noises, and if he was becoming concerned, it was time D'arl did likewise. First step would be a call around the planet to the

  Cobra training center in Freyr Complex to see about shaking loose some more numbers.

  And after that... it would probably be best to have the dining service send up two dinners instead of just one. It looked like this could be a long evening for him, too.

  Warrior: 2406

  The apartment living room was small and cluttered, with the kind of sad dinginess that comes more from lack of time and materials rather than from lack of interest in housekeeping. Seated at the scarred table in the room's center,

  Jonny let his eyes drift across the far wall, finding an echo of his own weariness in the faded blue paint there. A map of his own soul, he'd frequently thought of it, with its small cracks and chips echoing the effects of nearly three years of warfare on Jonny's psyche. But it's still standing, he told himself firmly, as he always did at this point in his contemplation. The explosions and sonic booms can strain the surface, but beneath it the wall remains solid. And if a stupid wall can do it, so can I.

  "Like this?" a tentative voice asked from beside him.

  Jonny looked down at the rumpled piece of paper and the lines and numbers the child had written there. "Well, the first three are right," he nodded. "But the last one should be-"

  "I'll get it," Danice interrupted, attacking the geometry problem with renewed vigor. "Don't tell me."

  Jonny smiled, gazing fondly at the girl's tangled red hair and determined frown as she redid her work. Danice was ten years old, the same age that Jonny's sister was now, and though Jonny hadn't heard from his family since arriving on

  Adirondack, he sometimes imagined that Gwen had grown to be a dark-haired version of the girl now sitting beside him. Certainly Gwen's spunk and common-sense stubbornness were here in abundance. Certainly too Danice's ability to treat Jonny as a good friend-despite her parents' quiet reservations over the

  Cobra's temporary presence in their household-showed the independent streak

  Jonny had often seen in his sister.

  But Danice was growing up in a war zone, and no strength of character could get her through that entirely unscathed. So far she'd been lucky: though crowded into a small apartment with too many people, the simmering guerrilla war outside had otherwise touched her life only indirectly.

  Given sufficient time, though, that was bound to change, especially if the

  Cobras overstayed their welcome in this part of Cranach and brought the Trofts down on the neighborhood. On the negative side, it gave Jonny one more thing to worry about; on the positive side, it was an extra incentive to do his job right and end the war as quickly as possible.

  Through the open window came the dull thump of a distant thunderclap. "What was that?" Danice asked, her pencil pausing on the paper.

  "Sonic boom," Jonny said promptly. He'd cut in his auditory enhancers halfway through the sound and caught the distinctive whine of Troft thrusters beneath the shock wave. "Probably a couple of kilometers away."

  "Oh." The pencil resumed its movement.

  Standing up, Jonny stepped to the window and looked out. The apartment was six stories up, but even so there wasn't much of a view. Cranach was a tall city, forced by the soft ground around it to go up instead of out as most of

  Adirondack's cities had done. Directly across the street was a solid wall of six-story buildings; beyond them only the tops of Cranach's central-city skyrisers were visible. Clicking for image magnification, he scanned what was visible of the sky for the trails of falling space-chutes. The pulse-code message last night from off-planet had sparked a desperate flurry of activity as the underground tried to prepare for their new Cobras-Cobras who, with lousy planning, would be landing virtually in the lap of the Troft buildup going on in and around Cranach. Jonny's jaw tightened at the thought, but there'd been nothing anyone had been able to do about it. Receiving a coded signal that in essence blanketed half a continent was one thing; signaling back again, even if the courier ship could afford to stick around that long, was a whole lot dicier.

  Jonny knew a round dozen ways of outsmarting radio, laser, and pulse-code direction finders-and each one had worked a maximum of four times before the

  Trofts came up with a way to locate the transmitter anyway. The underground had one method in reserve for emergencies; the Cobra landing had been deemed not to qualify as such.

  "See anything?" Danice asked from the table.

  Jonny shook his head. "Blue sky, skyrisers-and a little girl who's not doing her homework," he added, turning back to give her a mock glare.

  Danice grinned, the very childlike expression not touching the more adult seriousness in her eyes. Jonny had often wondered how much she knew of her parents' activities out in Adirondack's shifti
ng and impromptu battlefields. Did she know, for example, that they were at this moment on a hastily thrown together diversionary raid?

  He didn't know. But if she didn't need a distraction from what was happening out there, he certainly did. Seating himself beside her again, he gave his mind over as fully as he could to the arcane mysteries of fifth-grade mathematics.

  It was nearly three hours later before the click of a key in a lock came from the outer door. Jonny, his hands automatically curled into fingertip laser firing position, watched with muted anxiety as the six people filed silently into the apartment, his eyes flicking from faces to bodies as he searched for signs of injuries. The survey, as usual, yielded results both better than his fears and worse than his hopes. On the plus side, all those who'd left the apartment at dawn-two Cobras, four civilians-had returned under their own power.

  On the minus side-

  He was across the room before Danice's mother was two steps inside the door, taking her unbandaged left arm from her husband's tired-looking grip. "What got you?" he asked quietly, steering her over to the couch.

  "Hornet," Marja Tolan said, her voice heavy with pain-killers. Two of the civilians brushed Jonny aside and got to work with the apartment's bulky medical kit.

  "Locked in on the click of her popcorn gun's firing mechanism, we think,"

  Marja's husband Kern added tiredly from the table and Jonny's former chair.

  Fatigued or not, Jonny noted, he'd made it a point immediately to go over and reassure his daughter.

  Jonny nodded grimly. Popcorn guns had hitherto been remarkably safe weapons to use, as such things went. Their tiny inertially guided missiles emitted no radar, sonar, or infrared-reflection that could be picked up by any of the

  Trofts' myriad detectors and response weapons. The missiles were furthermore blasted inert out of the gun barrels by a solid kick of compressed air, their inboard rockets not firing until they were ten to fifteen meters from the gunner. A lot of the missiles themselves had been destroyed in flight by Troft hornets and laser-locks, but until now the aliens hadn't had a way to backtrack to the gunner himself. Unless Marja had simply suffered a lucky hit...?

  Jonny looked at Cally Halloran, raised his eyebrows in a question so common now that he didn't even need to vocalize it. And Halloran understood. "We won't know for sure until popcorn gunners start dropping en masse," the Cobra said wearily.

  "But it was really too clear a shot to be pure chance. I think we can safely assume popcorn guns are out for the duration."

  "For all the good the damn things have done so far," Imel Deutsch growled.

  Stalking to a window, he stood there facing out, his hands clasped in a rigid parade rest behind his back.

  The room was suddenly quiet. Stomach churning, Jonny looked back at Halloran.

  "What happened?"

  "Cobra casualty," Halloran sighed. "One of MacDonald's team, we think, though visibility was pretty poor. The people who were supposed to be guarding one of the approaches to their position apparently lost it and about a dozen Trofts got inside. We got a warning off but were too far away to help."

  Jonny nodded, feeling an echo of the bitterness Deutsch was almost visibly radiating... of the bitterness he himself had nearly choked on twice since their arrival on Adirondack. Parr Noffke and Druma Singh-both of their team's own casualties had come about through the same kind of civilian incompetence. It had taken Jonny a long time to get over each of the deaths; Halloran, with marginally less tolerance for frontier people, had taken somewhat longer.

  Deutsch, born and raised on Adirondack, hadn't gotten over it at all.

  "Any idea of casualties generally?" Jonny asked Halloran.

  "Low, I think, except for the Cobra," the other said. Jonny winced at the unspoken implication-more common lately than he liked-that Cobra lives were intrinsically more valuable than those of their underground allies. "Of course, we weren't really trying to take that stockpile, so no one had to take any unusual chances. Did the fresh troops make it down okay?"

  "No idea," Jonny shook his head. "Nothing's come in on the pulse receiver from off-world confirming it."

  "It'd be just like those phrijpushers to put a last-minute hold in the drop without telling us."

  Jonny shrugged, turned back to the people working on Marja's arm. "How's it look?"

  "Typical hornet injury," one of them said. "Lots of superficial damage, but it'll all heal okay. She's out of action for a while, though."

  And for that time, at least, Danice would have one parent out of the immediate fray.

  If that mattered. Jonny had already seen far too many uninvolved civilians lying dead in the middle of cross fires.

  The next few minutes were quiet ones. The two civilians finished with Marja's arm and left, taking the group's small supply of combat equipment with them for concealment. Kern and Danice accompanied Marja to one of the apartment's three bedrooms, ostensibly to put her to bed but mainly-Jonny suspected-to give the three Cobras some privacy to discuss the operation and plan future strategy before the rest of the apartment's occupants returned home from work.

  In the first few months, Jonny reflected, they might have done just that. But after three years most of the words had already been said, most of the plans already discussed, and gestures of hand and eyebrow now sufficed where conversations had once been necessary.

  For now, the gestures merely indicated fatigue. "Tomorrow," Jonny reminded them of the next high-level tactical meeting as they headed for the door and their own crowded apartments.

  Halloran nodded. Deutsch merely twitched a corner of his lip.

  And another wonderful day on Adirondack was drawing to a close. If the wall can stand it, Jonny repeated to himself, so can I.

  The three people seated at the table looked very much like everyone else in

  Cranach these days: tired, vaguely dirty, and more than a little scared. It was hard sometimes to remember that they were among the best underground leaders

  Adirondack had to offer.

  It was even harder, in the face of Cobra and civilian casualties, to admit that they really were reasonably good at their jobs.

  "The first news is that, despite some crossed signals, the latest Cobra drop was successful," Borg Weissmann told the silent Central Sector underground team leaders seated around the room. Short and stocky, with lingering traces of concrete dust in hair and fingernails, Weissmann looked indeed like the civilian building contractor he actually was. But he'd retired from the Army twenty years previously as a Chief Tactics Programmer, and he'd been proving for nearly a year now that he'd learned more than computers in that post.

  "How many did we get?" someone sitting against the side wall asked.

  "Cranach's share is thirty: six new teams," Weissmann said. "Most of those will go to North Sector to replace those that got lost in the airstrip attack a month ago."

  Jonny glanced at Deutsch, saw the other grimace at the memory. Their team hadn't been involved in that one at all, but details like that didn't appear to affect

  Deutsch's reaction. If anyone from Adirondack was involved, he seemed to react as if he personally had let his fellow Cobras down. Jonny wondered if he himself would feel similarly if the war was being fought on Horizon; decided he probably would.

  "We'll also be getting one of the teams here," Weissmann continued. "Ama's already made arrangements for their living quarters, identity backgrounds, and all. But given the heightened Troft activity these past few weeks, I think it might be a good idea to create a little breathing space while they're settling in."

  "In other words, a raid." The tone of Halloran's voice made it clear it wasn't a question.

  Weissmann hesitated, then nodded. "I know you don't like to run operations so closely together, but I think it's something we ought to do."

  " 'We'?" Deutsch spoke up from his usual corner seat. "You mean 'you,' don't you?"

  Weissmann licked his lips, a brief flicker of tongue that advertised his dis
comfort. Deutsch had once been a sort of social buffer zone between the

  Cobras and Adirondack forces, his dual citizenship-as it were-enabling him to short-circuit misunderstandings and cultural differences. Now, in his current state of disillusionment, he was hell for anyone to deal with. "I-uh-assumed you'd want a squad or two along to assist you," Weissmann suggested. "We're certainly willing to carry our part of-"

  "Not carrying your part is what got another Cobra killed yesterday," Deutsch said quietly. "Maybe we'd better do this one ourselves."

  Ama Nunki shifted in her seat. "You, of all people, should know better than to expect too much from us, Imel. This is Adirondack, not Earth or Centauri-we haven't got any history of warfare here to draw on."

  "What do you call the past three years-?" Deutsch began hotly.