by Timothy Zahn
Daulo spread his hands, palm upwards. "You'll have to be more specific," he said.
"I wish I could." Akim leaned back toward the mirror, gazed deeply into his own eyes. "I felt—well, curse it all, I felt treason. There's no other way to put it; I felt treason. Whether it makes any sense or not."
It didn't; but it almost didn't matter. Whatever the reason, Akim had finally been jolted out of his indifference toward Mangus, and it was up to Daulo now to fan that flame. "I don't understand," he admitted, "but I trust your instincts."
Akim threw him a baleful glance. "Instincts be cursed," he ground out. "There's something wrong in this place, and I'm going to find out what it is."
He started toward the door. "You going back in there?" Daulo asked carefully. "I mean, considering what just happened—"
"I'm fully under control now," the other said stiffly. "As far as you're concerned, I just had a bad reaction to something I ate for breakfast. Understand?"
The instructor was watching from just outside the assembly-room door when they emerged from the lavette. He accepted Akim's suitably embarrassed explanation and escorted them back to the room and their tables. Returning to his work, Daulo stretched out his senses to the limit, trying as hard as he could to pick up the feeling Akim had described.
Nothing.
What was perhaps worse, Akim could apparently no longer sense it, either. Grim-faced, he sat at his table and worked on his circuit boards, without even a mild recurrence of his earlier reaction.
Which meant either that whatever it was had passed . . . or that it had never been there in the first place.
* * *
It was, Daulo decided, probably the oddest sunset he'd ever seen. Ahead, the sun was invisible below the level of Mangus's outer wall, while overhead it still sent multicolored light patterns across the shimmering canopy. "I wonder if that thing keeps the rain out," he commented, twisting his head to gaze upward out their window at it.
"Why else would it be there?" Akim growled from his bed.
To keep Jin's people from seeing in. But he couldn't tell Akim that. "You still bothered by what happened in the assembly room this afternoon?" he asked instead, keeping his eyes on the canopy.
"Wouldn't you be?" the other snapped. "I behaved like a fool in public, and then couldn't even discover why I'd done so."
Daulo pursed his lips. "Could it have been some chemical they use in the manufacturing process?" he suggested. "Something that might still have been evaporating from the circuit boards?"
"Then why didn't anyone else react? More to the point, why wasn't it still there when we came back into the room? And it wasn't still there."
Daulo chewed the inside of his cheek. "Well, then . . . maybe it was something meant for me, something you got caught in by accident."
Behind him, Akim snorted. "Back to your paranoia of Mangus wanting to keep villagers out, are we?"
"It fits the facts, doesn't it?" Daulo growled, turning to face the other. "A stream of gas, maybe, designed to make me feel frightened and leave on my own?"
"It wasn't fear I felt."
"Perhaps you're braver than I am. And then when you reacted instead of me, they may have panicked and shut it off."
Akim shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense. You're talking something far too sophisticated to be used in what amounts to a telephone assembly plant."
"And how do you know those were telephone circuit boards we were putting together?" Daulo countered.
Akim's forehead creased. "What else would they be?" he asked.
Daulo took a deep breath. "Weapons. Possibly missile components."
He'd expected at least a snort of disbelief and scorn. But Akim merely continued looking at him. "And what," the other said quietly, "would give you that impression?"
A cold shiver ran up Daulo's spine. He knows, was his first, horrible thought. The Shahni are in this with Mangus—the cities redly are preparing for war against the villages. But it was too late to back out. "Rumors," he said through stiff lips. "Bits of information, pieced together over the months."
"As well as suggestions from the Aventinian spy?" Akim asked bluntly.
"I don't know what you mean," Daulo said as calmly as possible.
For a half dozen heartbeats the two men stared at each other. "You slide dangerously close to treason, Daulo Sammon," Akim said at last. "You and the entire Sammon household."
"The Sammon family is loyal to Qasama," Daulo said, fighting a trembling in his voice. "To all of Qasama."
"And I, as a city man, am not?" Akim's eyes flared. "Well, let me tell you something, Daulo Sammon: you may think you love Qasama, but any loyalty you possess pales against mine. We of the Shahni's investigators have been trained and treated to be totally fair in our dealings with Qasama's people. Totally fair. We cannot be corrupted or led astray from what we see as our duty. And we do not show prejudice, to anyone on our world. If you remember only one thing about me, remember that."
Abruptly, he got to his feet, and Daulo took an involuntary step backward. But Akim merely walked past the two beds and seated himself at the writing desk. "So you think we've been assembling parts for missiles, do you?" he said over his shoulder as he picked up the phone and turned it over. "There ought to be one quick way to settle that."
Daulo stepped over and crouched down beside him as Akim pulled a compact tool kit from his pocket and selected a small screwdriver. There were, Daulo noted, about a dozen screws holding the bottom of the phone to the molded resin top. "Why so many fastenings?" he asked as Akim got to work.
"Who knows?" Akim grunted, getting the first one loose. "Maybe they don't want anyone messing around with his phone unless it really needs fixing."
Akim was working on the last screw when Daulo first noticed the odor. "What's that?" he asked, sniffing cautiously. "Smells like something's burning."
"Hmm. It does, doesn't it." Frowning, Akim lifted the phone to his nose. "—uh-oh."
"Did we ruin it?"
"Sure smells that way. Well . . . the damage is probably already done." He got the screw free and carefully pulled the bottom plate out.
Just inside the plate was a circuit board—the same board, Daulo saw immediately, that they'd been working on all day. All the same components, plus a tangle of connecting wires, plus—
"What are those things?" he asked, pointing to a row of slightly blackened components. "We didn't put those on our boards."
"No, we didn't," Akim agreed thoughtfully. He raised the board to his nose again. "Whatever they are, they're where the smell is coming from."
A knot began to form in the pit of Daulo's stomach. "You mean . . . we tried to take the phone apart, and they burned themselves out?"
Akim held the board closer, peering at it from different angles. "Take a look," he said, lifting a bundle of wires and pointing beneath it. "Right there. See it?"
Daulo tried to remember what that component was. "A capacitor?" he hazarded.
"Right. And there—" he pointed beneath it "—is what releases its stored current into that section of the circuit."
The knot in Daulo's stomach tightened an extra turn. "That's . . . right over one of the screw holes."
"Uh-huh," Akim nodded. "And now that we've got it open, it's clear that screw doesn't help hold the phone together at all." He looked up at Daulo. "It's a self-destruct mechanism," he said quietly.
Daulo had to work moisture into his mouth before he could speak. "Any way to find out what those burned-out components are supposed to do?"
"Not now. Not this set, anyway." Akim gazed at the board another moment, and then put it back into the phone and picked up one of the screws. "I'll have to find out where they finish this part of the assembly and get in there." He paused, a strange look flashing across his face. "You know . . . phones manufactured in Mangus have been the most advanced on Qasama for the last two or three years. They're very popular among top city officials."
"And the Shahni?" Daulo asked.
"And the Shahni," Akim nodded. "I've got one on my desk . . ." He took a deep breath. "I don't know what we've got here, Daulo Sammon, but whatever it is, I need to check it out, and quickly."
"Are you going to call for reinforcements?"
Akim gave him a sardonic look. "Over these phones?" he asked pointedly.
Daulo grimaced. "Oh. Right. Well . . . look, it probably wouldn't take more than an anonymous tip to the right person to get me thrown out. If you want to give me a message, I'll make sure to deliver it to Moffren Omnathi in person."
"Even if Radig Nardin decides to make sure you never try to enter Mangus again?" Akim asked.
Daulo licked his lips, remembering the toughs who'd attacked him and Jin. "And what do you suppose they'll do to us if they find out we know about their phones?" he countered.
Akim set the phone back on the table and stood up. "I'm a representative of the Shahni," he said flatly. "They wouldn't dare harm me."
There was no response Daulo could make to that. "Were you planning to try and find that extra assembly room tonight?" he asked instead.
Akim hesitated, looking out the window. "It's getting late . . . but I don't remember them saying anything about us being confined to quarters in the evenings." He turned back to Daulo. "I suppose you want to go, too?"
"If I may. Unless you don't trust me."
Akim looked at him steadily. "To be perfectly honest, no, I don't. I don't think you're the innocent bystander you try to appear, and until I figure out just what the game is you're playing I'm not going to like having you at my back." He snorted gently under his breath. "Unfortunately, if you're working against me I risk just as much by leaving you here where I can't watch you."
Daulo grimaced. "Is there anything I can say or do to convince you I don't oppose you?"
"Not really."
"Then I guess you'll have to make up your mind on your own. Bear in mind that I can't come with you and stay here at the same time."
Akim's lip twitched. "True." He inhaled deeply. "All right, then. Come on, let's go."
Chapter 37
It was something of a surprise to Jin to awake and find herself still alive.
She took a moment first to listen with her eyes closed. Silence, except for the hum of distant machinery or forced air venting. No sounds of breathing except her own.
Which meant that, along with leaving her alive, they'd left her alone.
Opening her eyes, she found herself in a small room, perhaps three meters by four, bare except for the thin mattress on which she was lying and a somewhat thicker sitting cushion in one corner. Set into the ceiling was an air vent, too small for anything larger than a cat to get through; on one wall was a metal door.
Carefully, she got to her feet. There was no dizziness, no pain except for a mild ache from the bruise where she'd allowed her head to hit the floor. And no way to know how long the stuff had me under, either, she reminded herself grimly, wishing she'd thought to start her clock circuit before going under. Stepping to the door, she pressed her ear against it and activated her audio enhancers.
The faint sound of cloth on skin came from outside, followed by a cough.
At least they thought enough of me to lock me up, she thought, feeling a little mollified. Even recognizing on an intellectual level that her supposed feminine weakness was greatly to her advantage, it still somehow rankled to be so casually treated by her opponents.
Whoever these opponents were.
She frowned as the memory of that last overheard conversation came back to her. Obolo Nardin had known about the shuttle crash—had known she was an offworlder and that she'd been staying with the Sammon family in Milika. Had the Shahni made that information public? Or was Mangus in fact a government operation? Neither option was especially attractive.
And yet . . . unless the drug they'd been blowing in her face had thoroughly scrambled her memory . . . hadn't they also been openly worried about the risk of having an agent of the Shahni in their midst?
Which implied they were hiding something from the Shahni. But how then did they know things only the Shahni were supposed to know?
Could Mangus be some kind of chip in an internal power struggle among the Shahni themselves? One side's jealously guarded effort, perhaps, to come up with a way to fight back against the Cobra Worlds?
Cobra Worlds. Cobras. Mangus. Mongoose . . .
God above.
For a long moment Jin just stood there, rooted by horror to the spot. God above. It'd been staring her right in the face the whole time, and she'd managed to completely miss it. Mongoose . . .
Angrily, she shook her head, the movement sending a stab of pain through her bruise. It still wasn't too late to redeem her error . . . assuming that she could get out of this room. Gritting her teeth, she crouched down and examined the door's lock.
It was instantly obvious that the room hadn't originally been designed to hold prisoners. The door had been locked by the simple expediency of removing the inner knob mechanism and welding a metal plate over the resulting opening.
Moving back from the door, she gave the room a quick but careful scan. There were no hidden cameras that she could find, though there could still be subsurface microphones buried out of sight in the walls. Those could be dealt with, though. A more pressing problem would be to find something she could use to bend back the metal covering the lock. Pulling off one shoe, she experimented with the heel. Not ideal, but it would do. Taking a deep breath, she wedged the heel beneath the edge of the plate with one hand and activated her other hand's fingertip laser.
It was easier than she'd expected it to be; clearly, the man assigned the job of securing the door hadn't wanted to make a career of the task and had used a soft metal that he could spot-weld in place in a couple of minutes. It took Jin even less time than that to free three of its edges and soften the rest enough to pry it back from the hole. Waiting for it to cool was the hardest part, but the door itself was a fair heat sink, and within a few minutes she was able to get close enough to see into the opening.
Inside the door was the minor maze of wiring and equipment: an electronic lock. She knew a dozen quick ways of dealing with such a device, ranging from frying it with her arcthrower to slagging it with her antiarmor laser. Unfortunately, most of them tended to be extremely noisy, and the last thing she could afford right now was for the guard outside to hit whatever panic button he was equipped with.
Fortunately, there were more subtle approaches available to her. The solenoids and deadlock bolt of the actual mechanism were easy enough to locate; easing a finger into the hole, she found the bar that blocked the deadbolt in place when the lock was engaged. Pushing it out of the way with one finger, she teased the deadbolt back with two others . . .
There was no click, just a slight inward movement of the door as it was suddenly freed to swing on its hinges again. Straightening up, Jin slipped her shoe back on and licked her lips. This was it. Activating her omnidirectional sonic to interfere with any microphones that might be operating, she got her fingernails on the door edge and pulled it open.
The two guards standing with their backs to her probably weren't even aware the door behind them had opened before she dropped them where they stood with a blast from her sonic. Gripping the door jamb, her own head ringing from the sonic's backwash, Jin leaned out into the hallway and looked around. No one was in sight; and from the level of light coming in a window down the hall, it was already early evening out there. She'd slept the whole day away . . . Gritting her teeth, she bent to the task of disposing of the unconscious guards.
The next door down the hall turned out to be a small washroom, its size indicating it had been designed for use by one person at a time. Carrying the guards inside, she propped them up in such a way that they would help wedge the door once she closed it. Her trainers had warned them repeatedly that the duration of sonic-induced unconsciousness varied so wildly between people and situations that it couldn't be relied on, bu
t with nothing around to secure them with, she would just have to hope that they wouldn't wake up too soon.
Her next stop was the window down the hall. The sun was indeed well down past Mangus's western wall, though its light was still sending a rainbow of color across the canopy overhead. More importantly, the view outside told her that she was still in the building she'd first been brought to that morning.
Which gave her a very good idea of where she ought to start her investigation . . .
* * *
There were still a handful of people roaming around the building, but in the relative stillness their footsteps carried clearly to her enhanced hearing, and she found it an easy task to elude them. It took her several minutes and a few false turns, but eventually she made it to the hallway leading to the ornate door of Obolo Nardin's office-cum-throne room.
There hadn't been any guards outside the door when she'd been first brought before Obolo, and there weren't any now, either. Which implied either very good electronic security on the entrance itself, or else human guards waiting out of sight behind some of the hanging curtains inside. She was just starting around the corner to check out the door when another set of footsteps caught her ear and she ducked back.
It was Radig Nardin.
Jin gnawed at her lip. The messenger who'd taken her to Obolo earlier had announced their arrival on an intercom set beside the door and they'd been admitted by someone inside. But given Qasama's culture, it seemed unlikely that the son of Mangus's director would have to go through such a routine. On a sudden hunch, she clicked her optical enhancers to telescopic and focused on the door.
Radig stepped up to the panel, tapped six buttons on a keypad she hadn't noticed before, and opened the door.
Jin was gliding down the hallway toward the closing door before it occurred to her on a conscious level that sneaking into Obolo's office right on Radig's heels might be an unnecessarily stupid risk to take. But she kept going. Obolo presumably had a perfectly adequate communications system available in his office, and if he and Radig needed to speak in person, perhaps it would be worth listening in on.
