Cobra Bargain

Chapter 36

"...The screen in front of each of you will display a brief summary of each of the steps I've just outlined," the instructor concluded his presentation, waving his hand over his podium toward the rows of equipment-laden tables in front of him. "If you have any questions tap the 'help' key; if that still doesn't do it, tap the 'signal' key and someone will come to your work station. Any questions?

All right, then. Get to it, and remember that the future of communication on

Qasama may depend on you."

Shifting his eyes to the screen attached to the work table, Daulo suppressed a grimace and picked up a circuit board and a handful of components. He hadn't really expected to be given a missile casing and told to load a warhead onto it... but assembling telephone circuitry was hardly what he'd hoped for, either.

"Not wasting any time getting us to work, are they?" he murmured.

He glanced to the side in time to see Akim's shrug. "They're paying all of us quite well," he pointed out.

Daulo gritted his teeth and plugged the first component into the circuit board.

He'd been trying to pique Akim's curiosity about Mangus itself ever since being ushered off the bus, and had yet to make any impression on the man. Akim was on the trail of a female offworlder, and he clearly had no intention in being distracted from that single-minded path. "At least it explains why they don't bother hunting down their previous workers," Daulo commented, trying another approach. "If everything they do here is this simple-minded it's just as easy to teach a new group from the beginning."

Akim glanced up and around, and for a moment Daulo hoped he might argue the point. But he merely nodded. "Inefficient, to some degree, but not overly so," he said, and returned his attention to his own circuit board. "Certainly helps spread a little extra wealth around to Azras's poor."

"Right," Daulo muttered under his breath. "Obolo Nardin is just as noble as all creation."

"If I were you," Akim said coldly, "I'd try and forget my village prejudices and concentrate on the task at hand. Do you see anyone here who could be the woman in disguise?"

With a sigh, Daulo gave the room a careful scan, the image of Jin getting into

Radig Nardin's car rising up to haunt him. "I don't think so."

"Keep an eye out," Akim told him. "They may occasionally rotate workers between groups."

Daulo nodded and turned back to his work.

It was perhaps an hour later when he suddenly noticed Akim had stopped working and was gazing straight ahead into space. "Something?" he asked.

Akim turned sharply to look at him. "Something's wrong," he whispered hoarsely.

"There's-" he licked his lips, eyes darting all around him. "Don't you feel it?"

Daulo leaned close, fighting against the sudden dread rising in his throat.

Akim's barely controlled panic was contagious. "I don't understand. What is it you're feeling?"

Akim drew a shuddering breath. "Treachery," he said, hands visibly trembling.

"There's... treachery here. Don't you feel it?"

Daulo threw a quick look around the room. So far no one else seemed to have noticed them, but that wouldn't last long. "Come on," he said, getting to his feet and gripping Akim's arm. "Let's get out of here."

Akim shrugged off his hand. "I can manage myself," he snarled, standing up unsteadily.

"Whatever you want," Daulo gritted. The door they'd come in by was all the way at the back of the room; much closer was another exit near the front podium.

Taking Akim's arm again as the other staggered slightly, he headed that way.

The instructor intercepted them as they got to the door. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "The exit is back that-"

"My friend is sick," Daulo cut him off. "Is there a lavette out there somewhere?"

The other seemed to draw back, and Daulo took advantage of his hesitation to push past. Outside was a corridor he hadn't seen on their way into the building, with a heavy-looking door at the far end. Halfway toward it was the lavette he'd hoped for; guiding Akim through the door, he all but pushed the other down onto a cushion in the lounge section.

For a long moment neither man spoke. Akim took several slow, deep breaths, checked his fingers for signs of trembling, and after a bit rose and studied his face in the mirror. Only then did he finally look Daulo in the eye. "You didn't feel it, did you?" he demanded. "You didn't feel anything in there?"

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 of 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 really 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."