Cobra Traitor Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Cobra Traitor

  By Timothy Zahn

  CONCLUSION TO THE COBRA REBELLION TRILOGY

  Cobras: technologically enhanced warriors bred to fight an alien menace no ordinary human can withstand.

  Once the Cobras fought the implacable alien invaders, the Trofts, to an uneasy stalemate. But in recent years they have faced an enemy more insidious, the oppressive regime known as the Dominion of Man. Now, the Cobra Worlds find themselves under the boot heels of the Dominion, forced into what amounts to slavery, living under martial law. But two clans of Cobras—the Moreaus and the Brooms—will not stand idly by and let the Dominion run roughshod over their home worlds.

  Now a threat from without looms. The alien Troft are again planning an attack. Before, they came to conquer. This time they’ve come to annihilate. If the Cobras are to survive, they may have to do the unthinkable: align themselves with the hated Dominion.

  Cobras are not known for taking the easy path—and this may be the hardest path of all. But If the Cobras can manage to avoid complete destruction or abject slavery, a new day may finally dawn on the Cobra worlds. The day of Freedom.

  Book nine in the Cobra series and the conclusion of the Cobra Rebellion trilogy, from #1 New York Times best-selling author Timothy Zahn.

  BAEN BOOKS by TIMOTHY ZAHN

  Blackcollar: The Judas Solution

  Blackcollar

  (contains The Blackcollar and Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission)

  The Cobra Trilogy

  (contains Cobra, Cobra Strike, and Cobra Bargain)

  THE COBRA WAR TRILOGY

  Cobra Alliance

  Cobra Guardian

  Cobra Gamble

  THE COBRA REBELLION

  Cobra Slave

  Cobra Outlaw

  Cobra Traitor

  MANTICORE ASCENDANT

  A Call to Duty (with David Weber)

  A Call to Arms (with David Weber & Thomas Pope)

  A Call to Vengeance (with David Weber & Thomas Pope)*

  *forthcoming

  Cobra Traitor

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Timothy Zahn

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8280-6

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-623-3

  Cover art by Dave Seeley

  First printing, January 2018

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zahn, Timothy, author.

  Title: Cobra traitor / Timothy Zahn.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2018] | Series: Cobra Rebellion ; Book

  Three

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017042951 | ISBN 9781481482806 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction /

  Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera. | FICTION / Science

  Fiction / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3576.A33 C5696 2018 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042951

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic version

  by Baen Books

  CHAPTER ONE

  Martial law. Martial law. Martial law.

  The words echoed through Lorne Moreau Broom’s mind, running a counterpoint rhythm with the soft hiss of tires on the pavement beneath their car. Martial law. Martial law. Martial law.

  “How you doing back there?” Badger Werle asked from the front passenger seat.

  Lorne tightened his fingers around the armrest. How was he doing?

  His father Paul, all but kidnapped by Colonel Milorad Reivaro of the Dominion of Man Marines and taken to one of the Dominion War Cruisers orbiting their silent threat over his world. His mother Jin, vanished somewhere in the Dominion-controlled province of DeVegas, her whereabouts and fate unknown. His sister Jody, somewhere on the hell world of Caelian with only the Cobra friends she’d made there standing between her and violent death. His brother Merrick, taken by the Trofts in the waning days of their invasion of Qasama, vanished without leaving a hint of his whereabouts. Lorne himself on the run, a wanted fugitive.

  And his entire world placed under martial law by the same Colonel Reivaro who had started this whole mess.

  How did Badj think he was doing?

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  Seated behind the wheel, Dillon de Portola made a decidedly rude noise. “Liar,” he said flatly. “I can see you, you know. You look like you’re ready to start eating through the side of the car.”

  Lorne focused on the center mirror, keying on his optical enhancements to boost the faint starlight. Sure enough, de Portola had shifted the mirror’s angle to focus on Lorne instead of the traffic behind them. “Whatever happened to keeping your eyes on the road?” he growled.

  “It’s not what’s behind us that concerns me,” de Portola said. “It’s what’s ahead. And that I can see just fine.”

  “I suppose,” Lorne said. Twitching his opticals up another notch, he focused his attention out the side window.

  He frowned. Fighting fatigue and immersed in his own dark thoughts, he’d paid only token attention to the landscape around him for the past hour or so, relying on whatever plan Werle and de Portola had cooked up to get them safely into Capitalia. Now, as he studied the trees and hills rolling past, he realized to his chagrin that he had no idea where the hell they were. “So where exactly are we going?”

  “What, you don’t recognize the area?” Werle asked innocently.

  Lorne checked his nanocomputer’s compass. De Portola had told him they would be taking the road that ran south of Capitalia, and they were now heading northeast. Assuming they’d already passed the Old Town sector on the eastern edge, and were somewhere on the southern edge of the city proper while he’d been brooding, that should mean they were heading through the Alice Lane district of Capitalia’s satellite towns.

  But none of the surrounding terrain looked like what he remembered of the district. “Not a clue,” he admitted. “We are still going to Capitalia, aren’t we?”

  “Of course,” Werle said. “You remember a guy named Emile Chun-Wei?”

  Lorne frowned. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you
should,” de Portola said. “He tried to stop you from sneaking Governor Treakness out of Capitalia the first day of the Troft invasion.”

  Lorne winced as the memory came back. Emile was a Capitalia Cobra who had ordered Lorne to follow Governor-General Chintawa’s stand-down order and turn Treakness over to the invaders. The discussion had been short and unpleasant, and it had ended with Lorne dropping the other man with a stunner blast. “Right. That Emile.”

  “That Emile, indeed,” Werle said. “Anyway, we got in touch with him before we broke you out of Reivaro’s clutches, and he’s going to meet us at the Indus Entertainment Center.” He raised his eyebrows. “Along with another old friend of yours. Aaron Koshevski.”

  Lorne nodded heavily. He could see now where this was going. “The drainage system.”

  “It got you out from under the Trofts’ noses,” de Portola reminded him. “I doubt the Dominion will be looking for us down there any more than they did.”

  “Probably not,” Lorne said. “You sure you can trust them?”

  “I think so,” Werle said. “Koshevski proved himself before, and he still seems grateful for what you did for his family. As for Emile, after you got Treakness off Aventine he decided to ignore Chintawa’s order and spent the rest of the invasion organizing a civilian resistance group in Capitalia.”

  “The whole time, huh?”

  “Okay, so the Trofts weren’t here all that long,” Werle conceded. “But he didn’t know how long a stretch he was letting himself in for at the time.”

  “And he caught a fair amount of heat for doing it,” de Portola said. “Dreysler pulled his seniority and would probably have kicked him out completely if he’d been able to figure out a way to do that.”

  Lorne sighed. “Fine,” said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  It was a good idea, of course. Certainly better than trying to bluff or blast their way through whatever checkpoints Reivaro’s Marines had set up around the central and governmental sections of the city.

  Still, those drainage conduits were an absolute pain to get through.

  * * *

  De Portola brought the car to a halt beside one of the entertainment center’s service entrances. The door had a large padlock on the hasp, but it turned out to be just there for show. As Lorne and the other two Cobras walked toward it, the door swung open, and a pair of familiar men stood framed in the opening.

  “Hello, Broom,” Koshevski said, giving a short, abbreviated nod. “Good to see you.”

  “And you, Koshevski,” Lorne said, nodding in return. He shifted his eyes to Emile Chun-Wei and nodded again. “Emile.”

  “Broom,” Emile said, his voice rather flat. “Good to see you alive.”

  A neutral, maybe even slightly backhanded greeting. Pretty much what Lorne had expected. “You, too,” he said. “Let’s all stay that way.”

  Emile grunted. “No argument here. You ready?”

  “Ready,” de Portola said. “You got us a route?”

  “I’ve got you a great route,” Koshevski said, beckoning to an access cover a meter behind him. “If one of you gentlemen would oblige, we can get this show on the road.”

  The trip through the underground conduits seemed faster this time around. One factor was probably psychological: the second time through something usually seemed easier than the first. The other factor was that this time Lorne wasn’t dragging three squabbling civilians along with him.

  Still, by the time Koshevski announced that they’d reached their destination he was more than ready to get out into the open air again.

  Their exit was unexpectedly delayed, though—unexpected to Lorne, anyway—by the fact that the access cover seemed to have been welded to the opening. The shaft-mounted ladder looked old and was dangerously corroded, so instead de Portola hopped up onto the palms of Werle’s upstretched arms. Balancing there like they were part of an acrobatic show, he used his fingertip lasers to carefully slice through the welds, beveling the cut so that the cover wouldn’t fall on them. He finished and eased the cover a few centimeters upward, listened for a few seconds, then moved it sideways off onto the ground.

  And Lorne found himself looking up, not at the starry Aventinian sky, but at a slab of metal fifty centimeters above the opening.

  The underside of a vehicle, presumably, since most of these access shafts were on the streets. But even granted that Lorne didn’t spend much time looking at the undersides of vehicles, this one looked odd. The usual maze of pipes, struts, and attachment points was missing, replaced by what looked to be a smooth, unbroken sheet of metal. A protective seal, maybe, or possibly armor plating.

  And then he got it.

  He looked at Emile. You’re joking, he mouthed silently.

  The other Cobra shrugged. They’re sure as hell not going to look for you here, he mouthed back.

  De Portola had pulled himself high enough to put his eyes just above ground level and was doing a slow three-sixty. He finished his sweep and pulled himself the rest of the way out of the hole, disappearing into the gap between the pavement and the Dominion vehicle. Werle jumped upward, caught the edge of the opening, and followed.

  Lorne looked at Emile. Emile responded by politely gesturing Lorne toward the shaft.

  So Emile was apparently going to stay down here. Fleetingly, Lorne wondered just how much of the other Cobra’s purported activity during the Troft invasion had been real, and how much had been after-the-fact embellishment.

  He stepped beneath the hole, bent his knees, and jumped.

  The presence of the armored vehicle above them had led to the conclusion that Koshevski had brought them inside a commandeered parking structure. That turned out to be correct. From Lorne’s new vantage point he could see the wheels of other vehicles, lined up in neat rows to either side of him, with more lined up across the interior driveway. Werle and de Portola had already moved out from under their vehicle, and Lorne could see their feet as they slipped silently around the garage, checking it out more thoroughly.

  And then, through the soft, diffuse rumble of background noises, he heard a new set of footsteps approaching.

  He notched up his auditory enhancers. The footsteps were brisk and rhythmic, with no indication that the owner was trying to be stealthy. Werle and de Portola had stopped, and from the angles of their ankles Lorne could tell they were crouched down out of sight between the cars. The footsteps were getting closer, and Lorne turned his head back and forth, trying to pinpoint their location through the echoes bouncing off the walls and other cars.

  He had tentatively concluded the newcomer was coming from his left when a movement caught his eye: Werle’s hand dropping into view under the row of cars and beckoning. Hoping fervently that the Cobra knew what he was doing, Lorne pulled his way out of the shaft, slid out from under the vehicle, and rose into a crouch. Curling his hands into fingertip-laser position, he eased his head up for a look.

  To find that their visitor was none other than Governor-General Chintawa.

  And he looked terrible.

  The man had never looked all that good, in Lorne’s private and completely nonpartisan opinion. For years there’d been rumors that his health was on the decline, but he’d never let whatever was going on behind the scenes keep him from his appointed duties.

  But in the fifteen days since Lorne had last seen him, Chintawa had gone seriously downhill. His face was pale, the skin of his cheeks and throat sagging. There were large bags under his eyes, the eyes themselves seemed dull and lifeless, and Lorne would swear that his hair had gone a little grayer.

  But there was the same hard set to his jaw that he’d always had in times of political warfare, a grimness that warned there was still fire inside the crumbling body. As Lorne rose from concealment, he wondered briefly whether that fire was for him or against him.

  Chintawa stopped short as Lorne came in view. “You,” he bit out, “are an absolute and utter pain in the butt.”

  Lorne sighed. So much for Chintaw
a’s fire being for him.

  “That’s not fair, sir,” Werle said, rising out of his own hiding place behind Chintawa. “Broom didn’t start any of this.”

  “That’s debatable,” Chintawa said, his gaze hard on Lorne. “Regardless of who started what, he’s certainly not doing anything to lower the tension level.”

  “Neither are they,” de Portola said, also standing up.

  Chintawa’s lip twisted. “No, they’re not,” he said. “Fine. I’m here. What do you want?”

  Lorne shot a frown at Werle. What did he want? He wasn’t the one who’d set up this meeting.

  But Werle just made a little gesture toward Chintawa. Apparently, they were all laboring under the same misconception.

  “Come on, come on,” Chintawa growled. “We’re burning daylight, and the next shift of Dominion goons could be coming at any time to get their cars. Your uncle said you wanted to talk. So talk.”

  Lorne felt the tightness in his stomach ease a little. So it was Great-Uncle Corwin who’d set this up?

  That was good. In fact, it was more than just good. After a lifetime in politics, former Aventinian Governor Corwin Moreau knew as much about the Dome’s inner workings as anyone on Aventine. More than that, his years of service had gained him an assortment of contacts and—hopefully—a few unredeemed favors to go along with them.

  And the fact that he was having quiet chats with Chintawa also implied he’d made it back safely from Smith’s Forge after his clandestine meeting with Kicker Pierce.