The Cobra Trilogy

by Timothy Zahn

  "I will," Corwin sighed. "Goodnight, sir . . . and thank you."

  The governor-general threw him a grim smile and vanished from the screen.

  For a long moment Corwin just sat there, staring blankly at the empty screen. So Priesly hadn't been content with merely embarrassing Corwin's family; instead, he was out for real blood. Well, if it's a fight he wants, he thought bitterly, it's a fight he's going to get. And Corwin had been in politics considerably longer than Priesly had. Somehow, he'd find a way to turn all this back on the Ject.

  Somehow.

  Taking a deep breath, he pushed the thought back as far as he could and got to his feet. He was going to a party, after all, and ought to at least try to project an image of happiness. Whether he felt that way or not.

  * * *

  The red streaks of sunset were fading into the early-evening darkness of the springtime Capitalia sky as Jin drove up to the curb and stepped out onto the walk. For a moment she just stood there in the dusk, gazing at the house and wondering why the home of her childhood should look so different to her now. Surely it wasn't just that she'd been away for four weeks—she'd been away that long many times before. No, the house hadn't changed; it was she who was different. The home of her childhood . . . but she was no longer a child. She was an adult.

  An adult; and a Cobra.

  Almost automatically, she keyed through a series of settings on her optical enhancers as she walked up toward the house, spotting things about the building and grounds that she'd never known before. The infrared setting showed what seemed to be a minor heat leak in the corner by her bedroom—no wonder that room had always felt colder than the rest of the house in the winter. Telescopic enhancement showed that the allegedly permanent siding was beginning to crack near the guttering; and a telescopic/light-amplified study of a hole in the tall sideyard borlash tree won her a glimpse of bright animal eyes hiding there. Memories of the past, thoughts of the future—all of it mingled together with the reality of the present. The reality that, against all odds, she'd achieved her life's ambition.

  She was a Cobra.

  The sound of a decelerating car behind her registered on her consciousness and she turned, expecting to see one of her uncles driving up.

  It was Mander Sun.

  "Hey! Jin!" he called, leaning his head out the window. "Hold up a minute."

  She retraced her steps and crossed the street as he pulled to a halt against the opposite curb. "What is it?" she asked, belatedly noticing the hard set of his mouth. "Is anything wrong?"

  "I don't know." His eyes probed her face. "Maybe it's just rumors . . . look, I heard something this afternoon from a friend of my dad's who does datawork for the Directorate. Do you know why you were approved for the Academy?"

  The obvious reasons—the official reasons—came to Jin's mind, faded unsaid. "I know what I was told. What did you hear?"

  "That it was a quiet deal," he growled. "That your uncle—the governor—put himself on the line for you. If this mission succeeds he gets to keep his position. Otherwise . . . he has to resign."

  Jin felt her mouth go dry. The memory of that horrible night so many weeks ago flashed back to mind: the night her father had shot Monse . . . the night she'd gone and pleaded with Uncle Corwin to get her—somehow—into the Cobras. "No," she whispered. "No. He wouldn't do that. Politics is his life."

  Sun shrugged helplessly. "I don't know if it's true or not, Jin. I just thought . . . well, that maybe you didn't know. And that maybe you should."

  "Why?—so that I can be more nervous about the mission than I already am?" she snarled, the numbness suddenly flashing into anger.

  "No," Sun said quietly. "So that you could hear it from a friend. And so I could tell you that the rest of the team is behind you."

  She opened her mouth, closed it again as the anger vanished. "So that . . . what?"

  He held her gaze. "I talked to Rafe and Peter before coming over here," he said. "We all agreed that you were a good teammate who didn't deserve this kind of extra pack on her shoulders." He snorted gently. "We also agreed that anyone who would pull a scummy move like that on Governor Moreau was a full-blooded phrijpicker, and that a guy like that might arrange to leak the the word to you just before we left—little extra squeeze value, you know. And like I said . . . I thought you'd do better to hear it from friends."

  She looked back toward the house so that he wouldn't see the moisture in her eyes. It was true, of course—in retrospect it had to have been something like that. Oh, Uncle Corwin . . . "Yes," she said. "I . . . yes. Thank you."

  A tentative hand touched hers where it rested on the car. "We'll do it, Jin," Sun said. "All of us together—we'll do such a bang-up job on Qasama that they'll be lucky if they don't have to give us a full-city parade and canonize Governor Moreau in the bargain."

  Jin blinked the tears back and tried a smile. "You're right," she said, squeezing his hand briefly. "We'll make them sorry they tried to pick on a Moreau."

  "And even sorrier that they tried to use a Sun to do it," Sun added with grim pride in his voice. "Anyway. I've got to get moving—my family's waiting for me. You going to be okay?"

  "Sure," she nodded. "Mandy . . . thanks."

  "No charge. Partner." Reluctantly, she thought, he pulled his hand away from hers. "Well. Look, you take care of yourself—try not to get into any trouble—and I'll see you at the starfield in a week."

  "Right. Bye."

  "Bye."

  She watched until his car turned a corner and vanished from sight. Then, taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and started back toward the house. Not all the nuances of this mess were clear to her, but one of them was clear enough. The family didn't intend for her to know about Uncle Corwin's bargain; and so, as far as they were concerned, she wouldn't. She'd never had any formal acting experience, but she'd grown up with two older sisters and had long since learned how to bend the truth with a straight face.

  Or even with a smiling face. She was going to a party, after all, and ought to at least try to project an image of excitement. Whether she felt that way or not.

  Chapter 9

  The new Cobras had a week of liberty before they were due to leave. For Jin, at least, the week went by very quickly.

  * * *

  " . . . and whatever you do, listen to Layn, okay?" Justin told his daughter as they walked arm in arm up the long ramp leading to the Southern Cross's entryway. "I know he's a pain in the butt as an instructor, but he's a smart tactician and a crackling fighter. Stick with him and you'll be all right."

  "Okay, Dad," Jin nodded. "Hey, don't worry—we'll be fine."

  Justin looked down at his daughter's face as, for a brief second, an intense feeling of déjà vu washed over him. "Qasama is the last place in the world to be overconfident about, Jin," he said quietly. "Everything about the planet is dangerous, from the krisjaws and spine leopards to the mojos to the Qasaman people. They're all dangerous, and they all hate you. Especially you."

  Jin squeezed him a little tighter. "Don't worry, Dad, I know what I'm getting into."

  "No, you don't. No one ever does. You have to—well, never mind." He took a deep breath, fighting back the urge to lecture her. "Just be careful, and come back safely. Okay?"

  "Good advice," she said solemnly. "You be careful, too, huh? At least I'll be with a group of Cobras and other competent people. You'll be stuck here with Priesly and his mob."

  And under Priesly's trumped-up house arrest . . . Justin's jaw tightened momentarily with a freshly renewed awareness of the two guards standing a few paces behind them. "Yeah, well, it's not all that bad," he told his daughter, forcing a smile. "As long as Corwin's in there fighting for me Priesly hasn't got a chance of making this thing stick."

  Something passed, too quickly to identify, across Jin's face. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah. Well . . . walk me up the ramp?"

  He did. At the entryway they exchanged one last hug . . . and as Jin's arms tightened, Cobra-stro
ng, around him, Justin's vision blurred with moisture. A quarter century of hope and frustration was finally over. His child had succeeded him as a Cobra.

  A triple tone sounded from the entryway. "I'd better get inside," Jin said into his chest. "I'll see you in a few weeks, Dad. Take care of yourself, okay?"

  "Sure." Reluctantly, he released her and took half a step back. She smiled at him, blinking back tears of her own, then turned to wave one last time down the ramp to where her sisters and cousins were waiting for the Southern Cross's takeoff.

  Then she was gone, and Justin found himself walking away from the ship. She'll be all right, he thought over and over to himself. She'll be all right. Really she will. She's my daughter—she has to come through it all right.

  And for the first time he truly knew how his own parents must have felt on that day, so long ago, when he and Joshua had themselves lifted off for Qasama. The realization brought a half-bitter smile to his lips.

  Whether there was justice in the universe he didn't know. But there did appear to be a certain symmetry.

  Chapter 10

  It was a two-week trip to Qasama; two weeks that went by very quickly. It was, for one thing, the first time the new Cobras had had a chance to interact with each other on anything approaching a social level. With each other, and also with the two men who would actually be leading the mission.

  They were, to her mind, a study in contrasts. Both were top experts at Aventine's Qasama Monitor Center, but at that point all similarity ended. Pash Barynson was middle-aged and thin and short, a few centimeters shorter even than Jin, with sparse black hair and an excruciatingly academic manner that was so stiff that it bordered on caricature. His associate, Como Raines, was almost exactly the opposite, in both manner and appearance. Tall and chubby, aged somewhere in his mid-thirties, he had red-blond hair, a perpetual smile, and an outgoing manner that enabled him to become friends with everyone on board almost before the Southern Cross had cleared Aventine's atmosphere.

  It was an unlikely pairing, and it took Jin nearly a week to realize that the mission's planners hadn't simply pulled their names out of the grab-bag. Raines, with his easy friendliness, would presumably be the main contact man with the Qasamans, while Barynson's job would be to stay in the background and analyze the data as Raines and the others pulled it in.

  From the briefings, too, it was quickly clear that Barynson was the man in charge.

  "We'll be making our approach along here—from the uninhabited west—making our landing about here," Barynson said, leaning over the photomap and jabbing a finger at a section of forest. "Timing the touchdown for about an hour before dawn, local time. The nearest of the villages bordering the Fertile Crescent area are about fifteen kilometers to the east and southeast—" he touched each in turn "—with what looks to be lumbering operations to the northeast here on the river at about the same distance. You'll note that the site is—theoretically, at least—a fair compromise between distance and seclusion. Whether it'll turn out that way in practice, of course, we won't know until we get there."

  "Any idea what kind of undergrowth we'll have to go through?" Todor asked.

  "Unfortunately, no," Barynson admitted. "Most of the data we've got on Qasaman forests comes from far to the east of this site, and infrared studies indicate that the canopy here, at any rate, is different in composition from that area."

  "Of course," Raines put in, "if travel turns out to be impractical, we can always take the shuttle up to treetop height and move it closer to the villages."

  "Only if things are pretty damn difficult," Layn muttered. "We have only the Trofts' word for it that the Qasaman observation systems won't be able to track our approach. The more we move the shuttle around, the higher the risk we'll be spotted."

  "Agreed," Barynson nodded. "Though the more immediate danger will probably be the Qasaman fauna. I hope you Cobras will be up to the challenge."

  "We're ready," Layn told him. "My men—people—know what they're doing."

  Baryson's eyes flicked to Jin, turned quickly away. "Yes, I'm sure they do," he said, almost as if he believed it. "Well, anyway . . . we'll all be equipped with the best simulations of Qasaman clothing that the Center's analysis of telephotos could provide. The landing is timed so that we can get through the forest in daylight and reach one of these villages by nightfall. That'll give us the chance to make a close check of our clothing and get a first approximation of the culture before we have to tackle Azras and the main Fertile Crescent civilization. So; questions?"

  Jin glanced across the table, caught Sun's eye. The other shrugged fractionally, echoing Jin's own thoughts: there wasn't a lot of point in asking questions to which there were as yet no answers.

  "Very well, then." Barynson threw a look around the table. "We have three days left before planetfall, and for those three days I want all of you to do your best to become Qasamans. You'll wear our ersatz Qasaman clothing, eat our nearest approximations to the food the Qasamans were eating thirty years ago, and—most important of all—speak only Qasaman among yourselves. That rule is absolute—you aren't to speak Anglic to anyone, not even to one of the Southern Cross's crew. If any of them talks to you, you aren't to understand them. Is that clear?"

  "Isn't that carrying things just a little far?" Hariman asked with a frown.

  "The Qasmans had ample opportunity to study Anglic the last time we were here," Jin put in quietly. "Some of them were even able to force-learn it well enough to speak it. If they suspect us, they might throw one of those people at us."

  "Right," Barynson nodded, looking impressed despite himself. "The old trick of getting a spy to speak in his native language. I'd just as soon none of us falls for it."

  "We understand," Sun said in Qasaman. "We demon warriors, at least, won't fall for it."

  "I hope not." Barynson looked him straight in the eye. "Because if you ever do, you'll probably wind up earning your pay the hard way."

  * * *

  Qasama was a dark mass against the stars, a fuzzy new-moon sliver of light at one edge showing the dawn line, as the shuttle fell free of the Southern Cross and began its leisurely drift toward the world below. Gazing down through the tiny porthole to her left, Jin licked dry lips and tried to quiet her thudding heart. Almost there, she told herself. Almost there. Her first mission as a Cobra—a goal she'd dreamed about and fantasized about for probably half her life. And now, with it almost close enough to taste, she could feel nothing but quiet terror.

  So much, she thought half bitterly, for the heroic Cobra warrior.

  "You ever fly before this trip?" Sun, sitting on the aisle seat next to her, asked quietly.

  "Aircraft, sure, but never any spacecraft," Jin told him, thankfully turning her attention away from the porthole. "Hardly ever into enemy territory, either."

  He chuckled, a sound that almost masked the nervousness she could see around his eyes. "We'll do fine," he assured her. "Parades and canonization, remember?"

  A smile broke of its own accord through her tension. "Sure." Reaching across the armrest, she took his hand. It was almost as cold as her own.

  "Hitting atmosphere," she heard the pilot say from the red-lit cockpit at the front of the passenger compartment. "Injection angle . . . right on the mark."

  Jin gritted her teeth. She understood all the reasons behind coming in as far as they could on an unpowered glide approach—the light from a ship's gravity lifts was extremely visible, especially against a night sky—but the eerie silence from the engines wasn't helping her nervousness a bit. Looking back out the porthole, she tried not to imagine the planet rushing up to hit them—

  "Uh-oh," the pilot muttered.

  "What?" Barynson snapped from the seat beside him.

  "A radar scan just went over us."

  Jin's mouth went a little drier, and Sun's grip on her hand tightened. "But they can't pick us up, can they?" Barynson asked. "The Trofts told us—"

  "No, no, we're okay," the pilot assured him. "
I was just surprised they're scanning this far from the Fertile Crescent, that's all."

  "They're paranoid," Layn muttered from the seat across the narrow aisle from Sun. "So what else is new?"

  But they aren't supposed to be that way any more, Jin thought morosely. They were supposed to lose that when we got the mojos off their shoulders. That had been the whole point of seeding the planet with Aventinian spine leopards thirty years ago, after all. If it hadn't worked—

  She shook her head to clear it. If it hadn't worked, they would find out soon enough. There wasn't any point in worrying about it until then.

  "Parades and canonization," Sun murmured, misreading her thoughts. It helped, anyway, and she threw him a grateful smile.

  The minutes dragged on. An oddly distant scream of air against the shuttle's hull increased and then faded, and slowly all but the brightest of the stars overhead began to be swallowed up by the thickening atmosphere around them. Straining upward against her restraints, Jin could make out the gross details of the ground beneath them now, and in the distance the horizon had lost all of its curve. Five minutes, she estimated—ten at the most—and they would be down. Setting her nanocomputer's clock circuit, she leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, took a deep breath—

  And through the closed lids she still saw the right-hand side of the passenger compartment abruptly blaze up like a fireball, and a smashing wall of thunder slammed her against her seat and into total blackness.

  Chapter 11

  The pain came first. Not localized pain, not even particularly bad at first; more like a vague and unpleasant realization that somewhere in the darkness something was hurting. Hurting a lot . . .

  A large part of her didn't care. The blackness was quiet and uncomplicated, and it would have been pleasant to stay hidden there forever. But the pain was a continual nagging at the roots of the nothingness, and even as she was forced to accept and notice its existence she found herself being forced slowly up out of the blackness. Grudgingly, resentfully, she passed through the black, to a dark gray, to a lighter gray—