by Timothy Zahn
Without warning, the field of snow on the displays abruptly cleared, and they were back in the Qasaman bus.
Telek leaned forward, hands tightening painfully . . . but the carnage she'd half expected wasn't there. The scene was almost exactly as it had been when the signal had been cut off a scant few minutes ago . . . except that Moff was sitting facing the Aventinians with his gun drawn.
Telek groped for the mike. "Joshua, let me see the rest of the team," she called.
The scene remained unchanged. "He can't hear you," Christopher murmured. "We can clean up the signal at this end, but there's no computer equipment out there to do the same."
"Great," Telek gritted. "Which means we can't contact Almo, either. Damn it all." She stared at the display another moment, then turned to the two men standing quietly just inside the lounge door. "Well, gentlemen, it looks very much like your paid vacation is over. Suggestions?"
Michael Winward gestured toward one of the displays showing the nearby forest. "The Qasamans presumably don't know Almo's out there, which is theoretically an advantage for our side. But if we can't tell him what's going on the advantage is pretty useless. Somehow, we've got to get his attention so that he'll set up the comm laser."
"In other words, you think you should try and sneak out to him." Telek hesitated, shook her head. "No. Too risky. Even if we could come up with a diversion for you you'd probably be spotted before you could get to cover. Let's see if we can wait until the usual check-in time."
The other Cobra, Dorjay Link, glanced at Winward and shook his head minutely. "The Qasamans may be moving people and weapons into the forest to cover the Dewdrop from that side," he told Telek. "Almo could come down from his nest right into the middle of them."
"He'd hear or see them, though, wouldn't he?" Nnamdi spoke up.
"Cobras are human, too," Winward said tartly. "And if he doesn't even wake up until they're in position they won't be making much noise."
Telek stared at the forest display. I'm out of my depth, she admitted to herself. We've gone to a military situation without a scrap of warning—
No. They had had their warning; and that was what really hurt. The purpose of Moff's mysterious disappearance a few hours ago was now clear: he'd been setting up this operation, coordinating things via the still unknown, triple-damned long-range communication system of theirs. In which case—"The soldiers and guns are probably already in place out there," she said out loud. "The only way to wake Almo up and simultaneously let him know there's trouble . . ." She stopped and looked back at the two Cobras.
Winward nodded—understanding or agreement, she didn't know which. "A quick sortie. Gunfire and all that. Let me get into my camouflage suit—be back in a minute. Dorjay, start looking for my best approach, will you?"
"Sure," Link said as Winward vanished out the lounge door. "Any chance, Governor, that we can wait until full dark?"
"No," Christopher spoke up before Telek could say anything. "Governor, we've got a new problem—the contact team's not being brought back to Sollas."
"Damn." Telek stepped to his side, looked at the display that was now showing an aerial photo of the area between Sollas and Huriseem. "How do you know?"
"Joshua's been looking around a little—I saw the sun out of the side window. Looks to me like they're taking this road—" he traced it with a finger—"down to the next city southwest of here."
Telek checked the scale. "Damn. Closest approach doesn't get them under twenty kilometers from the Dewdrop. Where's the next connecting road?—oh, there it is. Three kilometers past that point. Any idea where on the road they are?"
Christopher spread his hands helplessly. "The range finder doesn't seem to work when the computer's mucking with the signal like this. About all I can do is estimate their speed and extrapolate from Huriseem. Looks like they're about here, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes from that crossroads."
Telek looked over at Justin, immobile on his coach. If she'd just let him replace his brother as they'd planned . . . but, no, she'd wanted to have her damned window to the world. "We've got to intercept that car," she said to the room in general. "Either free the team outright or try to replace Joshua. Somehow."
"With Moff on the alert I somehow doubt the latter option's open," Link said from in front of the display he'd appropriated from Nnamdi.
"I know." Telek gritted her teeth, then turned toward the intercom. "Captain, I want a pulse-laser message to the Troft backup ships right away. Tell them to get in here as fast as they can."
"Yes, Governor."
And it'll do no good at all. She knew it, and everyone aboard knew it. The Troft ships were too far away even to make orbit before dawn. The Dewdrop was on her own.
Which meant that Winward would have to make his suicide sortie in a few minutes . . . and Almo still had an even chance of getting caught before he knew what was happening . . . and it was all futility anyway, because there was no way a Cobra or even two could ambush that bus without killing or injuring everyone aboard in the ensuing firefight.
The inescapable conclusion was that it would be better to lift off now, hoping the Dewdrop would have the necessary speed to escape the Qasamans' shells or rockets.
To cut their losses. And if that was to be the decision, it had to be made before Winward went outside to sacrifice his life. Which meant within the next ninety seconds.
A no-win situation . . . and even as she wondered what she was going to do, there was a slight movement in the forest far to the south of them, and an invisible laser beam lanced out, catching the Dewdrop squarely in the nose.
Chapter 16
For a long moment Pyre lay quietly in his hammock bag, wondering what had awakened him. The level of sunlight filtering through the trees indicated sundown was approaching. He'd slept the whole day away, he realized, guilt twinging at him. Probably woke up simply because his body had had all the rest it needed; he must have been a lot more tired than he'd thought.
He was just starting to pull his arms out of the bag when he heard the muffled cough.
He froze, notching his auditory enhancers to full power. The normal rustlings of the forest roared in his ears . . . the normal rustlings, and the fainter sound of quiet human voices. Ten or more of them, at the least.
Hunting party? was his first, hopeful thought. But he heard no footsteps accompanying the voices, just the occasional sounds of someone easing from one position to another. Even stalking hunters moved around more . . . which implied that his unexpected guests were less akin to hunters than to fishermen.
And there were only two fish out here worth such a concerted effort, at least as far as he knew: the Dewdrop and himself.
Damn.
Slowly, moving with infinite care and silence, he began disentangling himself from the hammock bag and the defense cage. If they were looking for him the activity could well be a mistake; but whether it brought them down on him or not, he had no intention of getting caught wrapped up like yesterday's leftovers. The cage creaked like a tacnuke explosion as he opened it, but no one seemed to notice, and a minute later he was standing above the hammock bag with his back pressed against the tree trunk.
And the prey was now ready to become the hunter. The voices had come from the strip of forest between him and the Dewdrop; moving to the far side of the trunk he started down, pausing at each branch to look and listen.
He reached the ground without seeing any of the hidden Qasamans, but further noises had given him a better idea of their arrangement and he wasn't surprised to have avoided drawing fire. They seemed to be paralleling the edge of the forest nearest the Dewdrop, their attention and weaponry almost certainly focused on the ship. And to have been set up now, an entire week after the landing, implied something had gone wrong. Whether the contact team had gumfricked up or the exaggerated Qasaman paranoia had finally asserted itself hardly mattered at this point. What mattered—
What mattered was that Joshua Moreau was out there in the middle of it. An
d if he'd been killed while Pyre overslept—
The Cobra bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. Stop it! he snarled. Settle down and think instead of panicking. The fact that the Qasamans had not yet openly attacked the Dewdrop implied they were still in the planning stages here . . . and if so, then chances were Joshua and the others were still okay. Moving against the contact team would tip off the Dewdrop, and the Qasamans were surely smart enough to avoid doing that.
And with the ship and Cerenkov both unaware that anything was wrong, it was all up to Pyre now.
He didn't have a lot of options. His emergency earphone was a one-way device, with no provision for talking to the ship. His comm laser was well hidden and probably undiscovered, but if the Qasaman cordon line wasn't sitting on top of it they weren't far off. Take out the whole bunch of them? Risky, possibly suicidal, and almost certain to run the timer to zero right there and then.
But if the members of the cordon weren't in actual visual contact with each other, it might be possible to quietly take out the one or two closest to his laser without alerting all the others. Grab the laser, back off to somewhere safe—the top of a tree, if necessary—and call the ship. Together they might be able to figure out a way to snatch the contact team from under Moff's nose.
Mindful of the crunchy forest mat underfoot, Pyre set off cautiously toward the laser's hiding place, trying to watch all directions at once. He was, he estimated, only five meters from his goal when a sudden roar erupted from beside him.
He was halfway through his sideways leap before his brain caught up with his reflexes and identified the sound: his emergency earphone was screaming with static. He twisted it out and thumbed it off in a single motion, and as the echo of it bounced for another second around his head he realized with a sinking feeling that he was too late. Static at that intensity could mean only that the Qasamans were attempting to jam all radio communications in the area. They were making their move—
"Gif!" a voice hissed.
Pyre froze, his eyes shifting between the two Qasamans crouched facing him from half-concealed positions. The pistols pointed his way seemed larger than those he'd seen others wearing; the mojos with their wings poised for flight were certainly more alert. One of the men muttered something to his companion and stepped toward Pyre, gun steady on the Cobra's chest.
There was no time to consider the full implications of his actions, no consideration beyond getting out of this without bringing the rest of the troops down on him. Clearly, his captors still hoped to keep their presence secret from the Dewdrop; just as clearly, they'd lose that preference once he made his own move. His first attack would have to be fast and clean.
Pyre had never killed a human being before. His closest brush with such a thing had been on that awful day long ago when Jonny Moreau and a man apparently returned from the dead shot down Challinor's fledgling Cobra warlords in two or three seconds of the most terrifying display of laser fire he'd ever seen, then or since. For a teenaged boy on a struggling colony world such a slaughter had been the stuff of nightmares—particularly as the knowledge of his own early support of Challinor carried with it a small but leaden piece of the responsibility for the deaths. The last thing he wanted to do was to add more deaths to that weight between his shoulders.
But he had no choice. None at all. His sonic weapons could stun men at this range, but not for long enough . . . and the necessary frequencies were unlikely to be effective on the two mojos. All of them had to be silenced before any of them—human or mojo—could screech out a warning.
The leading man was barely two meters away now, properly staying out of his partner's line of fire. Four instants of eye contact to give his nanocomputer its targets; the gentle pressure of tongue against the roof of his mouth to key automatic fire control . . . and as the Qasaman opened his mouth to speak Pyre fired.
His little fingers spat laser bursts, arms and wrists shifting in response to the computer-directed servos within them. Like all his Cobra reflexes, this one was incredibly fast, and it was all over almost before he had a chance to wince.
That wasn't so hard, he thought, dropping to a crouch as he waited to see if the quiet crash of falling bodies would draw attention. Not too hard at all. And his eyes strayed to the corpse which had landed almost beside him and the head where the laser burn would be, though the undergrowth was hiding it, and the mojo who had died so quickly its talons still gripped its epaulet perch, and he began to tremble violently and tried hard not to throw up.
He waited for nearly half a minute, until the worst of the muscle spasms had subsided and the taste of bile had left his mouth, before resuming his cautious move forward. With no buzzing earphone to startle him this time, he made it the rest of the way to his laser without attracting attention. Once, as he was pulling the device from concealment, he saw another Qasaman; but the other was looking another way and Pyre was able to complete his task without being spotted.
Moving deeper into the forest, he headed south, hoping the Qasamans hadn't lined the whole damned forest with soldiers. If they had, he might have to climb a tree to contact the ship, after all.
But their exaggerated caution hadn't carried them to quite that length. A hundred meters from his laser's hiding place the silent cordon line ended; Pyre went another fifty and then pushed his way cautiously to the edge. A convenient bush allowed him to get a clear shot at the Dewdrop's nose without exposing himself to direct view of the airfield control tower. Flat on his stomach, he set up the laser as quickly as he could and aimed it toward where he thought the bow sensor cluster was located. Crossing his fingers, he flipped it on. "Pyre here," he murmured into the mike. "Come in; anyone."
There was no response. He waited a few seconds, then shifted his aim fractionally and tried again. Still nothing. My God—have they somehow taken everyone out already? He searched the hull for signs of damage. Gas, perhaps, or sonics that could have penetrated without harming the ship itself? The taste of fear starting to well up into his throat, he again adjusted his aim—
"—in, Almo; are you there? Almo?"
Pyre's body sagged with relief. "I'm here, Governor. Phew. I thought something had happened to all of you."
"Yeah, well, it's about to," Telek said grimly. "Somehow they've tumbled to the fact that we're a spy mission, and it's probably a tossup as to whether they try and board us or take the safer way out and just blow us up."
"Any word from the contact team?" Pyre asked, forcing his voice to remain steady.
"Moff still has them on the bus, and so far they seem okay. They're being taken somewhere besides Sollas, though, probably the next city down. We were hoping you'd have a chance of intercepting them before they got too far away, assuming we could contact you in time."
"And?"
Telek hesitated. "Well . . . we estimate the bus will be passing the main road heading south from Sollas in ten or fifteen minutes. But that's twenty-plus kilometers from us—"
"How many Qasamans aboard?" he cut her off harshly.
"The usual six-man escort," she told him. "Plus their mojos. But even if you could get there in time I don't know how you'd get them out safely."
"I'll find a way. Just don't lift until I get back here with them . . . or until it's clear I'm not going to make it back at all."
He broke the connection without waiting to hear her reply and began crawling backwards from his concealing bush toward the protection of the forest, leaving the comm laser deployed for possible future use. Twenty kilometers in ten minutes. Hopeless even if he'd had clean ground to run on instead of a forest . . . but maybe the Qasamans would outsmart themselves on this one. Six guards in an ordinary bus was a fairly loose setup, even with the mojos and against four unarmed prisoners. In their place Pyre would transfer the Aventinians to a safer vehicle at the first opportunity . . . and to his way of thinking the crossroads to the south would be the ideal spot for such a switch.
And if his guess proved correct the whole party would be there
for a few extra minutes. Long enough, perhaps, for Pyre to get there too.
At which point he'd have to face not only the busload of Qasamans but also whatever troops they'd assembled for the transfer. But there was nothing he could do about that. It was time for Almo Pyre, Cobra, to become what his implanted equipment had always intended him to be. Not a hunter, spy, nor even a killer of Aventinian spine leopards.
But a warrior.
Setting off at the fastest run the forest permitted, he headed south. It was all up to him now.
* * *
It was all up to him now.
York took a quiet breath, using his Marine biofeedback techniques to relax his muscles and nerves and to prepare him for action. To the right and slightly ahead he could see the buildings of Sollas silhouetted against the darkening sky, and if he remembered the aerial maps correctly they were now about as close to the city as this road got. It was time to make his attempt . . . and to find out just how deadly these mojos were.
His pen and ring were already resting casually in his left hand. Easing his calculator-watch off his left wrist, he fit the pen through its band, making sure the contacts were wedged solidly together. The ring slid onto the pen's clip to its own slot, and the palm-mate was ready. The arming sequence was three keystrokes on the calculator.
Wrapping the watchband into position around his right palm, he raised his hand over the back of the seat in front of him. Moff had given up his guard duty to one of the others a few kilometers back, but the Qasaman's attention was on Rynstadt and Joshua at the moment. I get one free shot, York reminded himself distantly; and bringing the pen to bear on the guard, he squeezed the trigger.
The Qasaman jerked as the tiny dart buried itself deep in his cheek, his gun swinging wildly in reflexive search for a target. Reflexive but useless; already his eyes were beginning to glaze as the potent mix of neurotoxins took effect. York shifted his aim to the mojo on the dying man's shoulder and a second dart found its target . . . but as he brought the palm-mate to bear on Moff's mojo all hell broke loose.
