Cobra Bargain

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, but 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.

She reached the door unseen and repeated Radig's code on the keypad. Too late, she wondered if the system might also be sensitive to fingertip pattern... but

Obolo hadn't bothered with extra refinement, and with a quiet click the door unlocked.

She opened it just enough to slip through, closing it again behind her and moving immediately to the cover of the nearest hanging curtain. The room seemed hazy, and she nearly choked on her first breath. Chemical smoke, she realized, remembering the unnatural glow in Obolo's eyes earlier. Presumably one of those wonderful mind-stimulating drugs. Keying in her audio enhancers, she slid off her shoes and moved out cautiously in Radig's wake.

Two guards were near the door, hidden from view behind a pair of curtains.

Pinpointing them by the sounds of their breathing, Jin moved silently past on her bare feet. Radig's footsteps were easy to follow, and she was within a single curtain of Obolo Nardin's cushion throne when they came to a halt.

Squatting down behind the curtain, Jin held her breath.

"My son," Obolo's voice said, his tone oddly grating in Jin's ears-the vocal equivalent, perhaps, of the drug user's shining eyes.

"My father," Radig greeted the elder Nardin in turn. "I've brought you the manifest of the latest shipment. Unloading has already begun; transfer of the special components to the assembly building will begin as soon as it's dark and all the temporary workers are properly confined in their houses."

The familiar shisss-click of a magdisk into a reader... Obolo grunted. "Good.

Have they begun work on the second computer system yet?"

"They're still setting it up," Radig told him. "They estimate it'll be ready in about two days."

"Two and a quarter," Obolo said with casual certainty. "They consistently underestimate the actual time they'll need."

"Perhaps this time-" Radig stopped as a ping came from the work table.

"Obolo Nardin," Obolo said. Something inaudible even to Jin's enhanced hearing... "Command," he bit out angrily. "Specified recorder; last playback."

More inaudible speech... but even without visual cues, Jin could sense a sudden tension on the other side of the curtain.

As Radig clearly also did. "What is it?" he asked tautly when the voices had stopped.

Obolo took an audible breath. "The Shahni agent who came in with Daulo Sammon has found the key to the Mongoose Project."

"The Shahni-? You know for certain that's what he is?"

"If I hadn't already, his last conversation with Daulo Sammon confirmed it."

Obolo's voice was settling down, drifting almost toward boredom. "His reaction this morning to the subliminals was actually all the proof I needed."

Radig seemed to be having trouble catching up. "You say he knows? How?"

"He was pushed into the discovery by Daulo Sammon, as it happens. There was some fantasy about missile production here, and it goaded the agent into disassembling the phone. Perhaps you were right; perhaps we should have removed the villager right at the beginning."

"But the phone's self-destruct-"

"Worked properly, of course. But you don't suppose for a minute that that really helped, do you? Destroyed evidence is as intriguing to such people as undestroyed evidence."

Radig cursed. "We'd better get some guards to their complex right away."

"Why?"

"Why?" Radig echoed in disbelief. "Because if he gets that information to his superiors-"

"He can't." Obolo was almost glacially calm. "Mangus is sealed for the night, and I've had all outside phone contact except that from this building shut off since he betrayed his identity this morning. Quiet, now, my son, and let me think."

For a moment the painful thudding of her own heart was all Jin could hear. It had happened, her worst fear about this whole penetration: Daulo was in deadly danger. Her legs trembled with the urge to leap out of concealment, cut both

Obolo and Radig in half with her antiarmor laser, and get herself and Daulo out of here...

"Yes," Obolo said abruptly. "Yes. You will assemble a small force, my son-four men-and take them to the assembly building. The agent's next step will be to try and find some of our special components in undamaged form to take out of Mangus with him."

"How will he know-"

"He'd have seen the final assembly room door this morning when he and the villager left their own area in reaction to the subliminals. He'll remember it and go there first."

"I understand. Do you wish them killed there, caught in an act of burglary?"

Jin's hands twitched involuntarily into combat position: little finger pointed straight out, thumb resting on ring-finger nails... "Of course not," Obolo snorted scornfully. "That would merely bring others from the Shahni to investigate why one of their preconditioned agents would stoop to simple thievery. No, my son, bring them back here, alive and unharmed."

"We will eventually kill them, though, won't we?" Radig asked, almost pleading.

"A Shahni agent's training won't allow-"

"Of course we won't kill them," Obolo said evenly. "We will do nothing. It'll be the offworlder spy who'll handle that task for us."