by Timothy Zahn
Left hand ready for trouble, he reached down with his right and drew his stolen pistol.
The sound of steel on leather was loud in the silent room—and the single flap of bird wings that followed gave direction enough. Ahead and to the left . . . he sprinted around the curtains there and came face to face with a crouching, terror-eyed man.
For a second they gazed at each other in silence. Pyre's main attention was on the Qasaman's mojo, but the bird seemed to realize that an attack would be suicide, and it stayed put on its shoulder perch. Shifting his full attention to the man, Pyre said the only Qasaman word he knew: "Kimmeron."
The other, apparently misunderstanding, shook his head wildly. "Sibbio," he choked, slapping his chest with an open palm, eyes dropping to the gun still in Pyre's hand. "Sibbio."
Pyre grimaced and tried again. "Kimmeron. Kimmeron?" He waved his free hand vaguely around the room.
The Qasaman got it then. Even through the haze of fumes Pyre saw his face visibly pale. Doesn't know where the mayor is? Or does know and the place is top-secret? The latter, he suspected; Sibbio's clothes seemed too ornate for a mere servitor. Taking a long step forward, the Cobra glared as hard as he could at the man. "Kimmeron," he bit out harshly.
The other gazed into Pyre's eyes and silently got to his feet.
The bolthole was right where, in retrospect, Pyre should have expected to find it: directly in front of the cushiony throne. Sibbio showed him the hidden lever that released the trap door; looking down the hole, Pyre saw the meter-square shaft change a few meters down into a curving ramp that presumably dumped the passengers into the safety of a heavily guarded room somewhere down the line.
Unfortunately, the trap's position implied it was also useful for getting undesirables out of the mayor's sight, which meant the guards below would be trained to handle potential nuisances. But there was nothing Pyre could do about that on his time budget . . . and now that the trap was open, there was no point in further hesitation. Giving Sibbio's mojo one last glance, the Cobra stepped into the pit.
It was a smooth enough ride, the curved section of tunnel beginning early enough and gradually enough to ease him onto his back for the final thirty-degree slope. It was also a much shorter trip than he'd planned on, and he had barely registered the dim square outline rushing toward him when he shot through the light-blocking curtain and landed flat on his back on a giant foam pad, the gun slipping from his grip as he hit. His eyes adjusted—
To find a ring of guns surrounding him.
Five of them, he counted as he lay motionless. The guard nearest his fallen weapon scooped it up, jamming it into his own empty holster. "You will make no move," said a man standing at Pyre's feet in the middle of the semicircle, in harshly accented Anglic.
Pyre locked eyes with him, then sent his gaze leisurely around the ring of guards. "I want to talk to Mayor Kimmeron," he said to the spokesman.
"You will not move until you are judged to be weaponless," the Qasaman told him.
"Is Kimmeron here?"
The other ignored his question. He spoke instead to his men, two of whom handed their weapons to the others. They knelt down on either side of Pyre . . . and the Cobra kicked his heels hard into the pad.
The pad was spongy, but the kick had servo strength behind it and an instant later Pyre was flipping rigidly around the pivot point of his head. One of the guns barked, too late—and then it was too late for any further response as Pyre triggered the laser salvo he'd set up while looking around the guard ring. For an instant the room blazed with laser fire . . . and by the time Pyre's body had completed its flip the five Qasamans were kneeling or lying on the floor in various stages of shock, their flash-heated guns scattered among the dead mojos.
Pyre got to his feet, eyes seeking the spokesman. "I could as easily have killed all of you," he said calmly. "I'm not here to kill Mayor Kimmeron—"
Without warning, the other four Qasamans leaped to their feet and rushed him.
He let them come; and as the first one got within range, he snapped out his arm to catch the other in the chest with his palm. There was a wumph of expelled air, the sharper crack of snapped ribs, and the Qasaman flew two meters backwards to crash to the floor.
The other three skidded to a halt, and Pyre saw an abrupt swelling of fear and respect in their faces. It was one thing, he reflected, to be disarmed by effectively magical bursts of light; it was quite another to see brute physical force in action. Or to feel it, for that matter. The temporary numbness in his palm was wearing off and the skin there was aching like fury. The Qasaman would feel a lot worse when he woke up. If he ever did.
Pyre's eyes caught the spokesman's again. "I'm not here to kill Mayor Kimmeron, but merely to talk with him," he said as calmly as his tingling hand permitted. "Take me to him. Now."
The other licked his lips, glancing over to where one of his men was ministering to his injured colleague. Then, looking back at Pyre, he nodded. "Follow me this way." He said something else to his men, then turned and headed for a door in the far end of the room. Pyre followed, the two remaining Qasamans falling into step behind him.
They passed through the door, and Pyre felt a split second of déjà vu. The same cushiony throne and low tables as in the office upstairs were here as well. But this room was smaller, and the hanging curtains had been replaced by banks of visual displays.
And glaring darkly at one of the displays was Mayor Kimmeron.
He looked up as Pyre and his escort approached, and the Cobra waited for the inevitable reaction. Kimmeron's gaze swept Pyre's matted hair and growth of beard; his borrowed jacket over camouflage survival suit; the dead mojo now hanging over his shoulder by a single thread. But his expression didn't change, and when he looked up again at Pyre's face the Cobra was struck by the brightness of the other's eyes. "You are from the ship," Kimmeron said calmly. "You left it before our cordon was set up. How?"
"Magic," Pyre said shortly. He glanced around the room. Another fifteen or so Qasamans were present, nearly all of them staring in his direction. All had the usual sidearm and mojo, but no one looked like he was interested in making any move for his weapon. "Your underground command post?" he asked Kimmeron.
"One of them," the other nodded. "There are many more. You will gain little by destroying it."
"I'm not really interested in destroying anything," Pyre told him. "I'm here mainly to arrange our companions' release."
Kimmeron's lip curled. "You are remarkably slow to learn," he spat. "Didn't the death of your other messenger teach you a lesson?"
Pyre felt his mouth go dry. "What other messenger? You mean the contact team?"
For a moment the other frowned. Then his face cleared in understanding. "Ah. The jamming of your radio signals was effective against you, at least. I see. So you do not know the man Winward left your ship without permission and was shot."
Winward? Had Telek started her breakout attempt already? "Why did you shoot him?" he snapped. "You just said he was a messenger—"
"For the unprovoked deaths of eight men in Purma and six here you are all responsible. You have spied and you have murdered, and your punishment will be that of death."
Pyre stared at him, mental wheels unable to catch. Winward . . . shot down like a spine leopard, probably without so much as a warning. Then, why aren't they shooting at me? Simple fear?—he wouldn't be taken by surprise, after all. Or was it something more practical? With Winward gone and whatever the hell had happened in Purma—whatever that was—all over, did they want a live Cobra to study?
His gaze drifted to the particular bank of displays Kimmeron had been studying. Rooms, corridors, outside views . . . three showed the Dewdrop. Must be from the airfield tower, he realized. Live picture? If so, there was still a chance for some of them to escape; the ship seemed undamaged.
"We would prefer to keep you alive at present," Kimmeron broke into his thoughts. "You, and the ones named Cerenkov and Rynstadt, have no possibility of escaping
. I tell you this so that you will not try and thereby force us to kill you prematurely."
"Our ship might escape," Pyre pointed out. "And it will tell our people of our imprisonment."
"Your ship, too, cannot escape." Kimmeron was quietly certain. "The weapons set against it will destroy it before it reaches the end of the field."
But the Dewdrop can lift straight up. Would that make enough of a difference? There was no way to know . . . but given the national paranoia, Pyre tended to doubt it. "I'd still like to talk to you about release of our companions," he told the mayor, just for something to say.
Kimmeron arched his eyebrows. "You speak foolishness," he bit out. "We have you and the body of Winward, from which your so-named 'magic' powers can surely be learned."
"Our magic cannot be learned from a corpse," Pyre lied.
"You are still alive," the other said pointedly. "From Cerenkov and Rynstadt we will obtain information about your culture and technology which will prepare us for any attack your world launches against us in the future. And from your ship—intact or in pieces—we will learn even more, perhaps enough to finally regain star travel. All that is within our hands; what could you offer of greater value for allowing your departure?"
There was no answer Pyre could give to that . . . and it occurred to him that a method which allowed its users to learn Anglic in a week might indeed let them reconstruct the Dewdrop and its systems from whatever wreckage remained after its destruction.
Which meant that his gallant rescue attempt was now, and always had been, doomed to failure. Cerenkov and Rynstadt were beyond help, and Pyre's own last minutes would be spent right here in the mayor's underground nerve center. If he could somehow find the communications panel—and then find a way to shut off or broadcast through the jamming—and then figure out how to signal the Dewdrop to get the hell away—and all before sheer weight of numbers overwhelmed him—
And as the impossibilities of each step lined up before him like mountains the universe presented him a gift. A small gift, hardly more than a sign . . . but he saw it, and Kimmeron did not, and he had the satisfaction of giving the mayor a genuine smile. "What do I have to offer, Mr. Mayor?" he said calmly. "A great deal, actually . . . because all that was in your hands a moment ago is even now slipping through your fingers."
Kimmeron frowned . . . and as he started to speak Pyre heard a sharp intake of breath from the guard spokesman beside him. Kimmeron twisted to look behind him . . . and when he turned back his face was pale. "How—?"
"How?" Pyre shifted his eyes over Kimmeron's shoulder, to the displays that showed the airfield tower and environs.
—Or that had done so a few minutes earlier. Now, the entire bank showed a uniform gray.
How? "Very simple, Mr. Mayor," Pyre said . . . and suppressed the shiver of that boyhood memory. Like MacDonald before him on that awful day of vengeance against Challinor. . . . "Winward, it appears, has returned from the dead."
Chapter 21
It was so unexpected—so totally unexpected—that Winward never even had a chance to react. One minute he was walking around the tower with his Qasaman escort, surreptitiously searching the building and immediate area for weapons and additional guards and trying to work out exactly what he would say when they reached whoever he was being taken to. Just walking peacefully . . . and then the leader muttered something and turned around . . . and before Winward could do more than focus on the other the night lit up with a thunderous flash and a sledgehammer slammed into the center of his chest, blowing him backwards into nothingness as the crack of the lethal shot echoed in his ears. . . .
The blackness in his brain faded slowly, and for what seemed like hours he drifted slowly toward the reality he could faintly sense above him. The pain came first—dull, throbbing pain in his chest; sharp, stinging pain in his eyes and face—and with that breakthrough the rest of his senses began to function again. Sounds filtered in: footsteps, doors opening and closing, occasional incomprehensible voices. He discovered he was on his back, bouncing rhythmically as if being carried, and every so often he felt a trickle of something run down his ribs under his tunic.
And slowly, he realized what had happened.
He'd been shot. Deliberately and maliciously shot. And was probably dying.
The only general rule he could recall from his first-aid training was that injury victims should not be unnecessarily moved. And so he remained still, eyes closed against the pain there, as he waited for loss of blood to dim his consciousness back into darkness.
But it wasn't happening. On the contrary, with each passing heartbeat he felt his mind sharpening, with strength and sensation rapidly returning to his limbs. Far from dying, he was actually coming back to life.
What the hell?
And it was only then, as his body and brain finally meshed enough to localize his wound, that he realized what had happened.
The Qasaman had shot him in the center of his chest. Directly over the breastbone. The breastbone which, coated with ceramic laminae, was functionally unbreakable.
The aftermath was less clear, but its main points weren't hard to figure out. The bullet's impact had knocked the air out of him, possibly even temporarily stopped his heart, and for the past few seconds or minutes he'd been fighting to get oxygen back into his system. His face and eyes must have taken the impact of burning propellant to sting as they did, and for a painful heartbeat he recognized that he might have been permanently blinded.
But somehow even that didn't seem important at the moment. He was alive, he was reasonably functional—
And the Qasamans thought he was dead.
They would pay for that mistake. Pay in blood.
Starting right now. Winward's eyes might be unusable, but the optical enhancers set into the skin around them were harder to damage and fed into the optic nerves further back inside the skull's protection. They weren't really designed to replace normal vision, but a minute's experimentation showed that a zero-magnification setting combined with the lowest light-amp level provided an adequate picture.
Between the four head-and-upper-torsos bobbing at the edges of the view, he could see a ceiling passing overhead. Carefully, keeping the motion slow, he eased his head a few degrees to the side. A couple of doors went by, the party turned a corner, and abruptly they were through open double doors and into a white-walled room with bright steel fixtures extending to the ceiling in various places. The four stretcher-bearers set him down on a hard table, and he let his head loll so to leave it turned to his right, toward the exit. The men left, closing the doors behind them, and he was alone.
Though probably not for long. The room he was in was very obviously a sick bay or surgery, and in the Qasamans' place Winward would want a preliminary dissection started on a dead Cobra as quickly as possible. The doctors were probably prepping in another room, and could arrive at any time.
Forcing himself to again move slowly, Winward eased his head up and down until he located the glassy eye of a fisheye monitor camera. It was in a back upper corner, out of direct line of any of his lasers or his sonic disrupter. He could lift his hands and fire, of course, but if someone was watching the monitor closely the alarm would be raised before he even got through the double doors into the hall. Using his omnidirectional sonic to shake up the picture before shooting wouldn't help appreciably, either. What he really needed was a diversion.
Behind him there was the sound of a door opening, and a second later four white-gowned people came around the maze of support equipment and into view.
And a diversion abruptly became vital. The soldiers and stretcher-carriers outside might miss his slow breathing or the fact that the skin of his chest was still bleeding, but the approaching doctors hadn't a chance in hell of doing so. He had to keep them away before they found out he was still alive.
The leader was within a meter of him now. Activating his omnidirectional, Winward ran it to its lowest frequency setting and held his breath.
&n
bsp; Their reaction was all he could have hoped for. The leader jerked to a stop as the inaudible waves hit him, the second in line stumbling into him as she staggered slightly. For a minute they all stood together in a little knot just beyond the most uncomfortable zone, conversing in voices that sounded both concerned and irritated. Winward waited, gritting his teeth himself against the gut-rattling sound as he waited for their next move.
It came quickly, and was one more indication of how much the high command wanted the Cobra dissected immediately. Waving the others back, the leader picked up a sharp-looking instrument from a nearby tray and stepped to the table. He reached down to pull back Winward's tunic—
And jumped back with a strangled gasp as the Cobra's sonic disrupter flash-heated the skin of his hand. Followed by one of the others, he dashed around the table to the back door, shouting as he ran.
The door opened and closed, and for a moment the last two Qasamans huddled together, whispering in fear or awe or both to each other. Winward tried to guess what they'd try next, but the grinding of his sonic combined with the throbbing pain in his chest and face was fogging his mind too much for him to hold a coherent train of thought.
Again, he didn't have long to wait. One of the two disappeared toward the back of the room, returning a minute later with a coil of insulated electrical cable. Snaring a knife from the instrument tray, he began stripping the insulation from one end . . . and as the other Qasaman plugged the wire's other end into what appeared to be a ground socket beneath a wall outlet, Winward realized with growing excitement that the break he'd hoped for was here.
Clearly, the Qasamans had jumped to the conclusion that their colleague had suffered an electrical burn from Winward's body and were preparing to try and drain the excess charge away.
