Cobra Bargain

Chapter 41

The hard part wasn't taking the high road for the second time that night, jumping from ground to housing complex roof to the top of the wall. The hard part wasn't even inching along the wall on her stomach, leaning precariously down to cut the power cables linking the spotlights and splice them together into a makeshift rope.

The hard part was wondering the whole time whether Akim would still be waiting down below when she finally finished the chore.

But he was. Evidently, she decided as she carefully pulled him up, Shahni agents were not as fanatic as she'd feared they might be. A true fanatic would probably have preferred death to dealing with a perceived enemy of Qasama.

She got him up and spreadeagled in a safe if not entirely comfortable position atop the wall, and for a long minute he gazed in silence at the Troft ship below. "May God curse Obolo Nardin and his household," he spat at last. "So you were telling the truth after all."

"Keep your voice down, please. You know anything about Troft ships besides what they look like?"

He shook his head. "No."

"Me, neither. Which could be a problem... because that's where we're going to hide out for the next day or two."

He didn't fall off the wall, or even gasp in stunned astonishment. He just turned a rock-carved face to her. "We're what?"

She sighed. "I don't much like it either, but at the moment we're slightly low on options." She waved back toward the administrative center. "As soon as they find out we're gone, they'll turn their half of Mangus upside down looking for us. And since they're already scouring the countryside between here and civilization for my theoretical accomplice, going outside the wall isn't going to be any safer. What's left?"

"If we're discovered here, it will be Trofts we'll have to fight," Akim said pointedly. "Will you be as effective a warrior against them as you would be against Obolo Nardin's men?"

Jin snorted, the image of her father battling the target robots in the MacDonald

Center's Danger Room flashing through her mind. "We were designed to fight the

Trofts, Miron Akim," she told him grimly.

"I see." Akim exhaled a thoughtful hiss. "I suppose it really is our best chance, then. All right, I'm ready."

"Yes, well, I'm not. First I've got to go back and get Daulo Sammon, remember?"

"I thought perhaps you'd changed your mind." Visibly, Akim braced himself. "All right, then. Tell me what you want me to do."

He didn't think much of the idea-that much was evident from the play of emotions across his face as she explained it. But he didn't waste any time arguing the point. Unlike Daulo, Akim didn't seem particularly disturbed by the thought of taking orders from a woman. Perhaps he'd had experience with female agents of the Shahni; perhaps it was simply that he knew better than to let pride get in the way of survival.

A moment later she was moving silently through the darkness toward the administrative center as, behind her, Akim pulled the cable back up. At least this time, Jin knew, she wouldn't have to worry about him leaving before she returned.

She hit the wall a little harder this time, rekindling the ache in her left knee. For a moment she hung by her fingertips, gritting her teeth tightly as she waited for the pain to subside.

"You all right?" Akim asked softly from half a meter in front of her.

"Yeah." Pulling herself up, she rolled onto her stomach facing Akim and took the end of the cable/rope from him. "Knee got hurt in the crash and hasn't totally recovered yet. How about you?"

"Fine. Any trouble?"

"Not really," Jin replied, trying not to pant. Even before that last leap over from the housing complex, the jog from Daulo's interrogation cell with the boy in fire-carry across her shoulder had worn her out far more than it should have.

A bad sign; it implied she was getting too tired to give her servos as much of the load as they were capable of. "You were right about him being on the lowest level," she said as she began pulling Daulo up. "Obolo Nardin thoughtfully left a pair of guards outside his door to mark the spot for me."

"Did you kill them?"

Jin's cheek twitched. "I had to. One of them recognized me before I could get close enough."

Akim grunted. "They're all parties to treason. Don't forget that."

Jin swallowed. "Right. Anyway, I found Daulo Sammon strapped to a chair with a set of tubes in his arms and smoke curling around him from a censer under his chin."

"Was he alone?"

"No, but I was able to stun the interrogator without killing him. Okay, here he comes. I'll take his weight; you protect his head."

Between them, they got Daulo up on the wall, draping his limp body over it like a hunting trophy across an aircar rack. "Any idea what they might have used on him?" she asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as Akim peered closely at Daulo's slack face. The boy was so quiet...

Akim shook his head slowly. "There are too many possibilities." He took Daulo's wrist. "His heartbeat's slow, but it's steady enough. He should be able to simply sleep the drugs off."

"I hope you're right." Notching her light-amps to higher power, Jin gave the

Troft side of the compound a quick scan. "Did you see any activity over there while I was gone?"

"No. Nor on the other side, either."

Jin nodded. "Hard to believe our escape still hasn't been noticed, but I suppose we should be grateful for small favors."

Akim snorted gently. "Perhaps Obolo Nardin expected his son to disobey the order about leaving you untouched."

"You're a cheery one," Jin growled, shivering. "Well, there's no point in postponing this. Watch his head again, will you, while I flip him over the side?"

A minute later Daulo was down, half lying and half slouching at the base of the wall. "Your turn," Jin told Akim. "Don't step on him."

"I won't. How will you get down?"

She felt her stomach tighten. "I'll have to jump," she said, trying not to think about what had happened the last time she'd tried that stunt. "Don't worry, I can manage it."

Akim's eyes were steady on her. "That last jump from the housing roof-you didn't make it by very much."

"I'm just getting a little tired. Look, we're wasting time."

He gazed at her another moment, then pursed his lips and nodded. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he wrapped it around the cable and held on there with both hands. Rolling off the wall top, he slid down to the ground in a military-style controlled fall. Waving once to her, he knelt and began to untie

Daulo from the cable.

This is it. Dropping her end of the cable to fall beside Akim, Jin lowered herself over the edge to hang by her fingertips. Knees slightly bent, she set her teeth and let go. The ground jumped up to meet her-

And she clamped down hard on her tongue as a hot spike jabbed up through her left knee.

"Jasmine Moreau!" Akim hissed, dropping to the ground beside her.

"I'm all right," she managed, blinking back tears of pain as she lay on her back clutching her knee. "Just give me a minute."

It was closer to three minutes, in fact, before she was finally able to get to her feet again. "Okay," she breathed. If she consciously turned over to her servos the job of keeping her upright... "I'm fine now."

"I'll carry Daulo Sammon," Akim said in a voice that allowed for no argument.

"Okay by me," Jin said, wincing as she eased back down to a sitting position.

"I'll let you carry the cable, too, if you don't mind. But first we have to figure out how we're going to get into that ship."

Akim looked over at it. "Security systems?"

"Undoubtedly." Jin adjusted her enhancers to a combination telescopic/light-amp and made a slow sweep of the unloading tower nestled up to the ship's stern.

"Looks like the twin horns of a sonic motion-detector over the doorway there," she told Akim. "As well as a-let me see-yes; there's also an infrared laser sweep covering the loading ramp and a fifteen-meter wedge of ground in front of it."

"What about that one?" Akim asked, pointing at the maintenance building. "The one the craft's nose is buried in."

"Probably something similar." Jin glanced back along the wall behind them. "More motion detectors and monitor cameras over the gateway to the other half of

Mangus. A reasonably layered intruder defense."

"Can you defeat it?"

"If you mean can I destroy it, sure. But not without setting off a dozen alarms in the process."

"Well, then, what can you do?"

Jin gnawed at her lip. "It looks like our only chance will be to approach the ship from the side. If I can get on top of it, there'll probably be a way to get through the coupling between the unloading tower and the ship proper."

Akim considered that. "That almost sounds too easy. Except for a demon warrior, of course."

"No, their security wasn't planned with demon warriors in mind," Jin said dryly.

"On the other hand, they haven't been totally stupid, either. You can't see it, but for about thirty meters out from the side of the ship there's a crisscross infrared laser pattern running a few centimeters off the ground."

"Can you see it well enough?"

"Seeing it isn't what I'm worried about. The problem is that the pattern of crisscrosses changes every few seconds."

Surprisingly, Akim chuckled. "What's so funny?" Jin growled.

"Your Trofts," he said, the chuckle becoming a snort of derision. "It's nice to know they're neither omniscient nor even very clever. That laser system is a

Qasaman one."

"What?" Jin frowned.

"Yes indeed. Perhaps Obolo Nardin deliberately gave it to them to keep a little extra control over the bargain."

"Meaning there's a weakness in the system?" Jin asked, heart starting to beat a little faster.

"There is indeed." He pointed toward the ship. "The pattern changes randomly, as you noted; but there are between three and six one-meter-square places in every system of this sort where the lasers never touch."

"Really?" Jin looked back at the ship. "Doesn't that sort of negate the whole purpose?"

"There's a reason behind it," Akim said, a bit tartly. "It gives those using the system places to mount monitor cameras or remote weapons. The gaps are normally set far enough back from the edge to be useless to the average invader... but of course, you're hardly an average invader."

"Point." Bracing herself, Jin eased to her feet. A flicker of pain lanced through her knee as she did so; she tried hard to ignore it. "Okay. Wait here until you see me wave to you from the top of the tower ramp over there. Don't move until then, understand?-I don't want you wandering into range of the detectors by mistake before I figure out how to shut them down."

"Understood." Akim hesitated. "Good luck, Jasmine Moreau."

Akim had been right: the gaps were indeed there, though she had to spend a few tense minutes out in the open watching the lasers go through their paces before she had all four of the spots identified. The pattern led like meandering steppingstones back toward the ship itself, with distances between them that under normal conditions would have been child's play for her. But with her knee the way it was, it wasn't going to be nearly that easy.

But then, it wasn't as if she had any real choice in the matter. Clenching her teeth, she jumped.

Akim had said the gaps would be a meter square each; to Jin they'd looked a lot smaller. But they were big enough. Pausing just long enough at each point to regain her balance and set up the next leap, she bounded like a drunken kangaroo through the detection field. The second-to-last jump took her to within three meters of the ship's hull; the last took her to the top of the stubby swept-forward wing.

For a long minute she crouched there, watching and listening and waiting for her knee to stop throbbing. Then, standing up again, she made her way aft along the wing, passing over the blackened rim of the starboard drive nozzle to the forward edge of the unloading tower.

The tower, like the ship, was of Troft manufacture, and the two had clearly been designed to mate closely together. But "closely" was a relative term, and as she approached it Jin could see that the metal of the tower proper gave way to a flexible rubberine tunnel half a meter from the entryway cover. Rubberine was inexpensive, flexible, and weatherproof, but it had never been designed to withstand laser fire. A minute later, Jin had sliced a person-sized flap in the soft material; a minute after that, she was inside the tower.

Inside the tower... and standing on the threshold of a Troft ship.

The emotional shock of it hit her all at once, and her mouth was dry as she stepped through the vestibule-like airlock into the ship. Inside a Troft ship, she thought, a shiver running up her back as she paused in the center of the long alien corridor. A Troft ship... with Trofts aboard?

Her stomach tightened, and she held her breath, keying her auditory enhancers to full power. But the ship might have been a giant tomb for all the activity she could detect. All of them ashore? she wondered. It seemed foolish... but on the other hand, if Troft shipboard life was anything like what she'd experienced on the way to Qasama, the crew was unlikely to spend their nights here by choice.

And if there were only two or three duty officers aboard, they'd probably be all the way forward in the command module.

It was a good theory, anyway, and for now it would have to do. Returning to the airlock, she went back out into the loading tower.

She'd half feared the controls to the approach-detection system would have been routed to the command module, but it turned out the Trofts had elected convenience over extra security. All those long hours of catertalk classes were paying off now; scanning the labeled switches, she figured out the procedure and shut off the system.

Akim was on his feet against the wall, Daulo already hoisted onto his back, when she stepped out into the cool night air and waved. He headed toward her at a brisk jog, and a minute later had reached the ramp. "Is it clear?" he hissed as he started up.

"Far as I can tell," she whispered back. "Come on-I don't want the security system to be off any longer than it has to be."

A handful of heartbeats and he was beside her. "Where to now?" he puffed, pulling back from her attempt to take Daulo's weight from him.

"Forward, I think, at least a little ways," she told him. "We need to find an empty storeroom or something where we won't be getting any company."

"All right," he nodded. His eyes bored into hers. "And when we're settled and have time to talk, you can tell me exactly why you came to Qasama."