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Cobra Traitor Page 2
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So Uncle Corwin had sent him here to talk? Good. Because he had one or two things he very much wanted to say.
“Talk is good,” he said to Chintawa. “Talk is also cheap. Are you ready to do more than just talk and listen? Because if you’re not, I have better things to do with my time.”
“I’m sure you do,” Chintawa said. “But before we get all high and mighty, let’s remember some recent history. I’m the one who’s been sitting here under the Dominion’s guns trying to keep a lid on this whole thing. I’m the one who talked Commodore Santores into easing Colonel Reivaro down from a Code One martial law order on DeVegas to a Code Three, which at least allows civilians some liberty in their day-to-day activities. And I’m the one who tried his damnedest to keep your father out of their hands.”
“Let’s drop the campaign mode, shall we?” de Portola suggested. “No one’s voting today.”
“Not to mention that all three of those particular laurel leaves have wilted,” Werle added.
“And whose fault is that?” Chintawa demanded, jabbing a finger toward Lorne. “If he hadn’t insisted on tearing through Archway like a deranged hornet—”
“After Reivaro murdered three Cobras?” Werle shot back. “What did you want him to do? Invite the man to Sunday tea?”
“I wanted him to stand out of the way and let the politicians deal with policy,” Chintawa said bitterly. “If he had, maybe we could have confined the trouble to DeVegas instead of forcing Captain Lij Tulu to put the whole planet under martial law.”
“Which kind?” Lorne asked.
Chintawa blinked at him. “What?”
“Which kind of martial law?” Lorne asked. “Code One or Code Three?”
For a pair of heartbeats Chintawa just stared at him. “It’s a Code Three for everyone,” he said at last. “Civilians are largely unaffected, except for the nine o’clock curfew.” He breathed out a tired-sounding sigh. “You’re not going to ease off, are you? You’re going to move this insane war of yours to Capitalia.”
“The Cobras didn’t start this, Governor-General,” Lorne reminded him. “But we didn’t bow down when the Trofts invaded our world, and we’re not going to do it now, either.”
“At least some of us didn’t,” de Portola said. “The question is whether Capitalia will be with us this time, or whether they’ll—how did you put it? Stand out of the way and leave policy to the politicians?”
Chintawa looked back and forth between them, his gaze finally settling back on Lorne. “I kept the city safe, you know,” he said. “We had just thirty deaths during the whole occupation, and all of those were people who ignored the Troft order to stay indoors and were killed by spine leopards. DeVegas province, with barely a third of our population, lost nearly three hundred.”
“We also had twenty-two confirmed Troft kills,” Werle said. “How about you? Any of the Capitalia invaders trip and stub their precious little toes? Face it, Governor-General—you’d still be getting your morning orders from the Trofts if it hadn’t been for us.”
“And the Qasamans,” Lorne murmured.
Werle shot him a glance. “And the Qasamans,” he echoed, a little grudgingly. “The point is that you and Capitalia came out of the last invasion looking pretty pathetic. You’ve got a chance to redeem yourselves. Are you going to take it?”
Chintawa sighed again. “You have no idea the position I’m in,” he said heavily. “Not just with Lij Tulu and Reivaro, but with my own government. There’s still a significant faction that opposes even having Cobras inside Capitalia, let alone letting them do anything against the Dominion forces. If open warfare erupts on the street, they will move to isolate and paralyze me.”
“So don’t give any orders,” Lorne said. “No orders to resist the Dominion; no orders to stand down. Let each Cobra decide for himself what he wants to do. They can hardly blame you for that.”
“They can blame me for anything they choose,” Chintawa said bitterly. “But the point is already moot. Lij Tulu has ordered all of Capitalia’s Cobras to be fitted with those loyalty collars. Once they’re in place, they’ll have no choice but to stand down.”
“Yes, we know about the collars,” Lorne said. “They did the same thing to the DeVegas Cobras.”
“So you see the problem—”
“All of them,” Lorne interrupted. “Including Badj and Dill here.”
“Because—” Chintawa broke off, his eyes narrowing. He looked at de Portola, then at Werle…
And when he turned back to Lorne there was a sudden hint of fire in his eyes. “You got them off,” he murmured.
“Yes, we did,” Lorne said. “And we can do the same for the Capitalia Cobras.”
“Assuming they’re not just looking for an excuse to sit on their hands,” Werle said pointedly.
“They aren’t,” Chintawa said firmly. “Some of them aren’t, anyway.” He took a deep breath. “All right. You’re going to need freedom of movement. That means keeping the martial law level at Code Three as long as possible so that there’s a populace out there for you to mix with.”
“We also need to get into the city’s personnel records,” Lorne said. “I had a disguise in Archway, but because my new face wasn’t in any of the databases they were able to nail me. We need to wipe out everyone’s records so that they don’t know who’s who.”
“Won’t work,” Chintawa said, shaking his head. “From what my people said, Santores has already had all the records uploaded to his ships. Erasing the records here won’t do anything.”
“So we need to get into their computers?” de Portola asked.
Chintawa snorted. “Yes, and there’s not a chance in the Worlds we can do that. Certainly not from down here.”
“Maybe all we need to do is block their transmissions,” Werle suggested. “Reivaro’s Marines can’t have their whole computer system downloaded into their brains or eyeballs or whatever. They have to be calling up facial recognition programs on a real-time basis.”
“And they can’t be getting it all from the ships,” de Portola pointed out. “Their orbits would put them in Aventine’s shadow too much of the time. Do we know if they deployed any monitor satellites? They could be relaying signals through those.”
“Santores hasn’t said anything about satellites,” Chintawa said. “I can check. You’d still have the same problem of getting to them.”
“Not necessarily,” de Portola said. “We can’t run the Dewdrop against a Dominion war cruiser, but we might be able to sneak it up to a relay satellite or two.”
“Especially since Reivaro’s all hot to wrap his damn armor plate on the thing,” Werle said, sounding cautiously intrigued. “Somebody will need to take it out for a test drive. See if the balance and thrust and whatnot all still works.”
“Like they’d let any of us near the ship,” Lorne pointed out. “Which brings us back to the original question.”
“Let me work on it,” Chintawa said. “In the meantime, you’d better get going. And don’t tell me how you got in—I don’t want to know.” And to Lorne’s mild surprise, he actually forced a small smile. “Good luck, Broom. Try not to get yourself killed. Or anyone else.”
He turned and strode back the way he’d come. De Portola signaled Lorne to wait; and only when the governor-general had disappeared from sight around a curve did the other two Cobras head toward the hidden access hole, beckoning Lorne to join them.
Two minutes later, they were all back in the drainage conduit and the cover was once again welded in place.
“Well?” Emile asked.
“He’s going to help,” Lorne said.
“Even better, it sounds like you’re all going to get to choose whether to fight or sit on the sidelines,” Werle added.
“Good enough,” Emile said. “Better than I’d hoped, really. Ready to go?”
“Sure,” Lorne said. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace where you can lay low for a few days,” Emile said. “Collect i
ntel, see what kind of support you can get among the rest of the Cobras.” He gave a little snort. “See what Chintawa comes up with in the freedom-of-movement department.”
“We’re not really going to depend on him, are we?” de Portola asked.
“No, no, you’re perfectly free to come up with something brilliant yourselves,” Emile said. “But that’s you, not us. I’m back on duty in two hours, and it’s a little early to be throwing away my cover. I’ll keep my ears open and try to get whatever I hear back to you.”
“What if they give you one of their dog collars?” Werle asked.
“Then I’ll have to try a little harder, won’t I?” Emile gestured to Koshevski. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
“Well, that’s it,” Corwin Moreau said, his tone that of a tired but proud father. “What do you think?”
Jasmine “Jin” Moreau Broom fingered the two curved strips of ceramic her uncle had handed her. Each strip was about five centimeters wide and three millimeters thick, with the edges curved slightly outward from the main arc in a sort of flattened saddlepoint shape. Placed end to end, the two pieces formed a circle about fifteen centimeters across. “And they work?” she asked, looking up at him. The odd echoes from the basement walls and low ceiling somehow made the whole thing feel even more cloak-and-dagger than it already did. “They really work?”
“They really work,” Corwin assured her. “Don’t let the thinness of the material fool you—remember that the whole point of this hobby was to come up with a more bio-friendly ceramic bone laminate for future Cobras. This stuff is very tough.”
“And there’s probably not a lot of explosive in the Dominion’s loyalty collars anyway,” she agreed, feeling her stomach tighten. The Qasamans had used explosive collars on the members of the first Cobra Worlds expedition to that world, including Jin’s own father and her other uncle. She remembered thinking after the expedition returned what an utterly barbaric tactic that was.
She also remembered wondering when she first went to that world whether she and her teammates would face the same kind of intimidation if they were caught.
And now, the supposedly civilized Dominion of Man was using the same deadly and humiliating method to suppress resistance from the Aventinian Cobras.
But like the Qasamans before them, the Dominion had no idea who they were dealing with.
Cobras didn’t take this sort of thing lying down. Neither did anyone else in the Cobra Worlds.
“From what I hear, there’s hardly any at all,” Corwin confirmed. “Just enough to ensure that the wearer is killed without making a mess of the surrounding landscape.”
“Lovely,” Jin said, shivering. “Probably don’t want a Cobra grabbing the nearest Marine and decapitating two for the price of one.”
“Possibly,” Corwin said. “Or else Dominion Marines don’t like cleaning blood stains any more than anyone else. Either way works for me. I just hope they don’t tumble to our little trick and start packing in more bang.”
“If they do, you can just make the shields thicker,” Jin said, handing back the two sections.
“Though only up to the point where they’re so thick they choke the wearer to death before the collar even has its chance,” Corwin said. He picked up a mug from the table, started to take a drink, then set it down again. “I’m sorry—did you want some tea?” he asked, looking around as if trying to remember where the rest of the mugs were kept. “I can make you some tea if you’d like.”
Jin felt the ever-present knot in her stomach tighten another couple of turns. She’d sneaked into Capitalia three days ago, but between dodging Dominion Marines and evading the city’s own patrollers it had only been today that she’d found a way to get onto her uncle’s estate without being caught.
Only to learn that the day before she’d hit town Corwin’s wife Thena had packed her bags and moved out.
Even worse, she’d filed with the Dome for a restraining order against her husband.
In a world that seemed to have become a never-ending series of gut punches, that had been the worst one of all. It was also the most utterly unexpected. To all appearances, her aunt and uncle had had the perfect relationship, with all the interlaced threads of love, respect, humor, and commitment that should have made it rock-solid.
Now, it seemed that the outward appearance had been nothing more than a façade laminated onto a rotten core.
What made it worse, from Jin’s perspective, was that the occasional fumbling and misty-eyed moments she’d observed in her uncle since she’d arrived made it clear that the separation was entirely Thena’s idea.
“Nothing, thanks,” she said, waving away the offer. “How hard is it to make these things?”
“Not too hard,” he said, his mind visibly dragging itself back to the task at hand. “Let me get you some—no; you didn’t want tea. All right. We’ll start by mixing up a batch of the material and getting it into the molds. It needs an hour or so to set, and then we can fire up the kiln.”
“You need to bake them?” Jin asked, frowning. Cobra ceramic laminae was injected directly onto the bone, where it did its final setting without any added heat. If Corwin had been working toward a replacement for the current material, this didn’t seem like a promising direction to take.
“There are a couple of catalysts you can use instead,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any of them left, so we’ll have to go with the kiln instead.”
“Ah,” Jin said. So at least he hadn’t been blind to the obvious requirements of what he was trying to make. That would have been heart-breaking, especially after all the years he’d put into the hobby.
Distantly, she wondered if Corwin’s work had been what had driven the wedge between him and his wife. Perhaps it had become an obsession that Thena simply couldn’t take anymore.
“I’m going to need more base and admix,” Corwin continued, nodding toward the table by the wall. A portable kiln sat there, a heavy-looking cube about sixty centimeters on a side with a locking door in front. “Could you go upstairs and get them for me? They’re the coffee and flour bags in the back of the pantry.”
“The—? Oh. Right.”
He smiled faintly, the first smile she’d seen from him since he first welcomed her into his house an hour ago. “Exactly,” he said. “The Dominion could raid me at any time, and if they’re determined enough they’ll find the stuff. But there’s no point in making it easy for them.”
“Coffee and flour—right,” Jin said, heading across the basement toward the stairs.
“And stay clear of the windows,” Corwin called after her. “At last count there were a hundred forty Cobras in Capital province, and Lij Tulu has promised to scrape up enough loyalty collars for all of them. We need both of us working if we’re going to stay ahead of them.”
“Got it.”
It was important work, of course, Jin knew as she headed up the stairs. But equally important was that this would give Corwin something less anguishing to focus on than his personal problems.
And maybe it would help Jin set aside hers, as well.
Her family had been torn apart, her husband and children taken or vanished, their locations and fates unknown. There was nothing she could do about any of it except see it through and hope and pray for their safety.
But maybe she could do something about Corwin and Thena. Not now, of course, but maybe later. Once this was all over, she would sit down with them—together if possible, separately if necessary—and find out what exactly had precipitated this tragedy. With love and perseverance, maybe she could help heal their rift.
And if the Dominion’s clampdown on Aventine had caused or precipitated the split, she thought darkly, God help them. All of them, from Commodore Santores and Colonel Reivaro on down.
Because there would be a day of reckoning for their actions. A dark, and probably very bloody day. And it was coming soon.
Jin would make sure of that.
&nb
sp; CHAPTER TWO
Merrick Moreau Broom had spent a lot of time in the Muninn forest over the past couple of weeks. More time than he liked. Way more time than was probably healthy for him.
And he was getting damn sick of it.
It had been bad enough when he was traveling with Anya Winghunter. She spoke the language without Merrick’s potentially damning accent, and though she’d been away from her home world for the twelve years she’d been a Troft slave, at least she knew the people and the basics of the social norms they were trying to fit into. The fact that they’d never really had a chance to blend into the population wasn’t her fault.
Only now Anya was gone, vanished somewhere unknown. Possibly with the parents she hadn’t seen for half her life. Possibly without them.
Either way, she’d left Merrick to face the dangers of the forest alone. Or rather, with a new traveling companion.
Who happened to be a Troft. And not just any Troft, but an agent of the Kriel’laa’misar demesne, sent to Muninn to learn the details of the mind-control war drug the local Drim’hco’plai Trofts were creating to use in the Trofts’ war against the Dominion.
The fact that the Drims had already promised to sell the weapon to the Kriels was an additional twist that made Merrick’s head spin. The reason the Kriels had sent Kjoic here in the first place was to try to steal the drug, thereby avoiding any need to pay the Drims for it.
And Kjoic was deadly serious about his mission. He’d already killed an entire transport ship’s worth of Drim crewers, plus another handful of Drim soldiers, in pursuit of that end. He was also clearly ready to kill again if and when it became necessary.
It was hardly the way allies were supposed to behave toward each other, in Merrick’s view. But then, Trofts didn’t see things the way humans did. From what Merrick had read in the history books, Troft demesne-lords were never so much allies than they were temporary partners of convenience. If and when one of them saw an advantage in abandoning his partners, he would take it.
And since Kjoic’s current partner of convenience was Merrick himself…