by Timothy Zahn
"Yes, I heard the Interrorum guys talking about that. They said a Cobra would blow up if he'd been hypno-conditioned."
"No, they took those self-destruct triggers out right after the war. But I wasn't hypno-conditioned; by the Trofts or anyone else."
"That Committee man, Wrey, seems to think so."
Jonny smiled bitterly. "Wrey's a short-sighted idiot who's nursing a bruised pride. I had to practically force him to bring me from Aventine in the first place, and then I saved his spangles for him when the Trofts captured the Menssana. This is his way of putting me in my place."
"But would you necessarily know if your mind had been tampered with?"
"I would, yes. That kind of thing requires that the subject be put into an unconscious or semiconscious state, and I've got internal sensors that would warn me of any chemical, optical, or sonic attempts to do that."
The guard nodded slowly. "Does Wrey know that?"
"I wasn't given the chance to tell him."
"I see. Well . . . I'd better get back to my duties. I'll be back later for the comboard."
"Thanks again," Jonny said; but the other had gone. Now what, he wondered uneasily, was that all about? Information? Reassurance? Or was someone pulling his strings, trying to see how much I'd say? Maybe Wrey had decided to hang around a few more hours hoping to be spared the trouble of shipping Jonny to Asgard. If so, Jonny knew, it would be a long wait. Balancing the comboard on his knees, he started his search.
Weissmann, Dane, Nunki; the names of a dozen temporary families and twice that many temporary teammates; the names and faces of Cobras living and dead—all of them tumbled out together with an ease that belied the twenty-six-year gap. For nearly half an hour he bounced back and forth through the directory as fast as his stiffening fingers would allow; for an hour after that he went more slowly as the flood of names became a trickle and finally ceased entirely.
And none of them were listed.
He stared at the comboard, mind unwilling to accept the evidence of his eyes. Adirondack was still classified as a frontier world, yes, with new areas constantly being developed—but even in twenty-six years how could everyone he'd known here have moved somewhere else?
He was still trying to make sense of it all when a movement outside his cell made him look up. The click of multiple bolts being withdrawn gave him just enough time to slide the comboard under his pillow before the cell door opened to reveal a young woman. "Governor Moreau?" she asked.
"Yes," Jonny nodded. "I hope you're someone in authority here."
Something crossed her face, too quickly to identify. "Not hardly. Thank you," she said, turning to the guard hovering at her shoulder—a different one, Jonny noted, than the one he'd talked with earlier. "I'll call when I'm done."
"All right, Doctor." The door swung shut behind her.
"Well, Governor, your medicine's been cleared," she said briskly, reaching into a pouch on her belt and producing the two vials that had been taken from him earlier. "I imagine you'd like to get some into your system before the examination."
Jonny frowned. "Examination?"
"Just routine. Take your pills, please."
He complied, and she sat down beside him on the cot. "I'll be taking some local/gradient readings," she said, producing a small cylinder from her pouch. "Just hold still and don't talk."
She flipped the instrument on and an oddly pervasive humming filled the room. "You've changed a lot," she said, just barely over the noise. "I wasn't sure it was you until I heard you speak."
"What?"
"Talk without moving your lips, please." She moved the instrument slowly across his chest, eyes on the readout.
Jonny felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. Again, the possibility that this was a test sprang to mind . . . but if so the stakes had been jumped immensely. Even passive cooperation with this woman might be worth a conspiracy charge. "Who are you?" he mumbled, lips as motionless as he could keep them.
Her eyes met his for the first time and a strangely mischievous smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "Don't you remember your star geometry pupil?"
Geometry? "Danice? Danice Tolan?"
Her smile widened a bit. "I knew I hadn't changed that much." Abruptly, she became serious again. "Now: what are you doing in a Dominion military prison?"
"Officially, I'm here because I've been talking about peace with the Trofts and am therefore considered a security risk. In actuality, I'm here for stepping on a little man's pride."
"Peace." Danice said the word as if tasting it. "Anything come of those talks that could be considered progress?"
"It wasn't exactly a formal negotiation: but yes, I think I can keep the war from happening. If I can get the Central Committee to go along, that is."
"Which you obviously can't do from here." Her eyes were hard, measuring. "How long are you in for?"
"Wrey said three to five days or more. But he's already gone on to Asgard and there's no telling what the Committee'll do when he tells them we were stopped and boarded by the Trofts."
"You think they might declare war right then and there?"
"You tell me—you must know more about Dominion politics these days than I do."
Danice chewed gently at her lip, and for a long minute the only sound in the cell was the hum of her probe. Twice she paused to reset the instrument, and Jonny noticed a worried frown gradually spreading across her face. "All right," she mumbled abruptly. "We'll do it now. I'm registering a possible aneurysm in the hepatic artery—that should buy us a trip to the hospital for a closer look. Just try and play off of any cues." Without waiting for a reply she flicked off the instrument and called for the guard captain.
The captain wasn't wildly enthusiastic about her proposed hospital trip, but it was clear from his tone and worried glances that he considered the Cobra an important prisoner. Barely fifteen minutes later Jonny and Danice were heading under heavy guard through the gathering dusk toward the city's newest and best-equipped hospital.
Jonny's last experience with full mainstream medical care had been just before leaving for Aventine, and he was thoroughly impressed by the added sophistication and power the equipment had achieved in the intervening time. Multiple-layer, real-time holographic displays of his body were available at anything from a quarter- to twenty-thousand-power magnification, with structural and chemical highlighting available. Danice handled the controls with the skill of obvious practice, locating and displaying the alleged aneurysm so clearly that even Jonny could spot it in the holo.
"We'll have to operate," Danice said, turning to the senior guard who'd accompanied them. "I suggest you check with your superiors for instructions—see if there's a particular surgeon they'd prefer to use or whatever. In the meantime I'm going to sedate him and give him a shot of vasodepressor to relieve pressure on that aneurysm."
The guard nodded and fumbled out his phone. A floating table, looking uncomfortably like a coffin with a long ground-effect skirt, was brought up. Jonny was hoisted onto it and strapped down, and from a cabinet in its side Danice withdrew a hypospray and two vials. Injecting their contents into Jonny's arm, she replaced the hypospray and brought out a full-face oxygen mask. "What's that for?" one of the guards asked as she slipped the milky plastic over Jonny's head.
"He needs a slightly enhanced air supply to compensate for his suppressed circulation," she said. "What room, orderly?"
"Three-oh-seven," the man who'd brought in the floating table told her. "If you'll all get out of the way . . . thank you."
Danice at his side, Jonny was pushed out into the hospital's corridor maze, arriving eventually at room 307, the numbers barely legible through the mask. "Wait here until he's settled," Danice told the guards curtly. "There's not enough room to accommodate spectators in there."
Jonny was maneuvered alongside a bed in a crackerbox-sized alcove. Stepping to the far side of his table—the side between him and the guards at the door—Danice and the orderly reached down
—
And he was flipped over into total darkness.
The action was so unexpected that it took Jonny several heartbeats to realize exactly what had happened. The flat top of the floating table had apparently rotated a half turn on its long axis, concealing him in a hollowed-out part of the table's upper section. Above him he could hear the faint sounds of something heavy being lifted from the table . . . felt the table moving away from the bed . . . indistinct voices holding a short conversation . . . then moving again, through several turns and a long elevator ride. . . .
When he was finally rotated into the open again, he and Danice were alone in an underground parking garage. "Hurry," she whispered, her hands shaking as she unfastened his restraints. "We've got to get you off-planet before they realize that's not you in that bed."
"Who is there?" Jonny asked as they jogged to a nondescript gray car.
"Fritz—one of the hospital's medical practice robots." She got behind the wheel, took a deep breath. "We had a few minutes to touch up his features a bit, but the minute someone pulls off that mask, it's all over."
"You want me to drive?" Jonny asked, eyeing the tension lines in her face.
A quick shake of the head. "I need to get used to this sometime. It might as well be now."
She drove them through the garage, up a ramp, and out into the bustle of early-evening traffic. Jonny let her drive in silence for a few minutes before asking the obvious question. "Where are we going?"
"There's a freighter leaving for Palm in about two hours," she said, not looking at him. "We've bumped some ungodly number of high-stress plastic whosies to put aboard a yacht and pilot for you—you can tell him exactly where and when to part company with the freighter."
Jonny nodded, feeling slightly dazed by the speed at which this was all happening. "Do I get to ask who I have to thank for all this?"
"Do you really want to know?" she countered.
Jonny thought that one over. It wasn't a trivial question. "Yes," he said at last.
She sighed. "Well. First of all, you can lay your worst fears to rest—we're not in any way a criminal group. In fact, in one sense we're actually an official arm of the Dominion Joint Command." She snorted. "Though that may change after this. We're what's known as the Underground Defense Network, an organization that's supposed to do in this war what you and my parents' underground did in the last one. Except that we won't have any Cobras."
"You sound like one of my guards," Jonny murmured. "He the one who told you about me?"
Danice glanced at him in obvious surprise. "You're as quick as I always remembered you being. Yes, he's one of the handful of quiet liaisons between the military and the UDN, though I don't think his immediate superiors know. He's the one who put word of your arrest on our communications net."
"And convinced all of you I was worth defying the authorities over?"
She smiled bitterly. "Nothing of the kind. Everyone helping us thinks this is just another training exercise. Rescuing Prisoner From Under Enemy's Nose 101; final exam."
"Except you." The question was obvious; he didn't bother to voice it.
"I was just a kid in the last war, Jonny," she said quietly, "but I remember enough about it to haunt two or three lifetimes. I don't want to go through it again . . . but if the Dominion goes to war I'll have to."
"Maybe not—" Jonny began cautiously.
"What do you mean, 'maybe not'?" she flared. "You think they're going to all this trouble for the fun of it? They know Adirondack's going to be a major Troft target, and they've as good as admitted they won't be able to defend us. The plain, simple truth is that they're writing our world off and preparing us to sink or swim on our own. And for nothing."
She broke off and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Jonny. I'm sure Aventine means a lot to you. But I just can't see sacrificing Adirondack and maybe Silvern and Iberiand too in what amounts to a war of retribution."
"No need to apologize," he assured her, "No world should have to fight for its life twice in one generation."
Danice shook her head wearily. "You don't know the half of it. The social upheaval alone . . . There were a lot of books written about us after the war, you know, books that listed a lot of the underground people by name. Well, the Joint Command decided those people's lives might be in danger when the Trofts came in again, so five years ago they took everybody mentioned in any of the books and gave them new identities somewhere else on the planet. I was just barely able to find my own parents, and they still don't know where half of their oldest friends are."
Ahead, Jonny could see the starfield's control tower silhouetted against the last traces of red in the southwestern sky. "This pilot you've picked out also thinks this is a training exercise?"
"Theoretically. But Don is pretty smart—he may have figured out something else is up. Anyway, you'll have several days to discuss it." She favored him with a thoughtful look. "You really don't like this business of trusting other people with your life, do you? I suppose the habits of being a Cobra die hard."
"Not as hard as you'd think," Jonny shook his head. "You're remembering me with the eyes of a ten-year-old. Even then, I wasn't really any less dependent on other people than you are now."
Which was not, of course, an answer to her question. He didn't like depending on others, especially with so much at stake.
But it was something he could get used to.
* * *
"Committé Vanis D'arl's office," the bored face in the phone screen announced.
"Jame Moreau," Jonny told her, watching her closely. If she gave even the slightest indication she recognized him . . .
"Who's calling, please?" she asked.
"Teague Stillman—I used to be mayor of his home town. Tell him it's important."
Jonny held his breath; but, "Just a minute, please," was all she said before her face was replaced by a stylized dome. The local "hold" symbol, Jonny supposed, automatically starting his nanocomputer clock circuit. He'd give Jame two minutes to answer before assuming the woman had called the cops instead and getting the hell out of the area—
"Hello, Jonny."
Jonny wrenched his gaze back from its survey of possible escape routes. If Jame was surprised to see him, it didn't show. "Hi, Jame," he said cautiously. "Uh . . ."
"The line's secure," his brother said. "You all right?"
"I'm fine, but I need your help. I have to—"
"Yeah, I know all about it. Damn it all, Jonny—look, where are you?"
Jonny felt icy fingers closing around his gut. "Why?"
"Why do you think?" Jame waved a hand in irritation. "Never mind—do it your own way. My neck's stuck far enough out as it is."
Jonny gritted his teeth. "I'm at a public phone on V'awter Street, just north of Carle Park."
Jame sighed. "All right. I'll be there in half an hour or less to get you. And stay put this time—understand?"
"Okay. And—thanks."
Some of the steel seemed to go out of Jame's backbone, and a small, guarded smile even touched his face. "Yeah. See you soon."
He was there in twenty minutes flat, and even with Jonny's lack of familiarity with current styles, it was obvious the younger Moreau's car was a top-of-the-line model. "Nice," Jonny nodded as he got in beside Jame and sank into the rich cushioning. "A step or two up from Dader's old limper."
"It won't stay that way long if anyone spots us," Jame replied tartly as he pulled into the traffic flow. "We're just lucky the alert on you was limited to the military and not made public. What did you think you were up to, anyway, breaking confinement like that?"
"What did you expect—that I'd just sit there in Wrey's private limbo while the pompous idiot got a war going?"
"Granted Wrey's a self-centered grudge-holder, credit him with at least the intelligence to guard his own skin," Jame growled. "He wouldn't have left you there more than two days at the most—and he'd arranged for a Star Force scoutship to bring you here after you'd been cleare
d. With the extra speed scouts can make, you'd have been here four days ago—barely a day, if that, behind Wrey."
Jonny's hands curled into fists. Could he really have misread Wrey that badly? "Damn," he murmured.
Jame sighed. "So instead of being brought before the Committee to have your say, you're right up there on the military's must-find list. I don't think even Wrey really believed his innuendo about you making a private deal with the Trofts, but the ease with which your friends got you loose has a lot of people very nervous. How'd you organize all that, anyway?"
"I didn't." Jonny sighed. "Okay. I admit I crusked up good. But it doesn't change the fact that the Committee needs to hear what I've brought."
Jame shook his head. "Not a chance. You wouldn't get past the first door of the dome."
Abruptly, Jonny realized that they were heading further out of the city instead of inward. "Where are we going?"
"To Committé D'arl's country estate."
Jonny's mouth went dry. "Why?"
Jame frowned at him. "You're the one who just said you wanted to talk to someone. Committé D'arl's agreed to hear you out."
"At his private estate." Where Jonny could quietly and conveniently disappear, if necessary, with no one the wiser.
Jame sighed. "Look, Jonny, I know you don't like the Committé, but this is the only way you're going to get a hearing. And I'll tell you flat out that you couldn't find a more receptive audience anywhere in Dome." He glanced at his older brother. "Come on—settle back and relax. I know it probably looks like the whole universe is against you right now, but if you can't trust your old pillow-fight partner, who can you trust?"
Almost unwillingly, Jonny felt a smile touch his lips. "You may be right," he admitted.
"Of course I'm right. Now: we've got just under an hour for you to bring me up-to-date on the Aventine branch of the Moreau family. So start talking."
* * *
D'arl's country estate was at least as large as the entire city of Capitalia; a rich man's version, Jonny thought once, of the Tyler Mansion and grounds of Adirondack. With a rich man's version of security, too. The car was stopped six times by pairs of variously armed guards, and at each roadblock Jonny's enhanced vision picked out hidden remotes and backups lurking near trees or oddly-shaped statues. But the Moreaus were clearly expected, and the guards passed them through without question.
