Cobra Traitor, page 9
part #3 of Cobra Rebellion Series
“The Megalith chews just fine, thank you,” Lij Tulu said. “But let’s not drift from the point.”
“I’m not,” Corwin said. “The point, or the topic anyway, is biting off more than you can chew. You want me to help defuse things? Fine—we can talk about that. The bigger question is whether you’ve bitten off too much, and if so what you’re willing to do in the cause of peace and domestic tranquility.”
“The Dominion is at war, Governor,” Lij Tulu said coldly. “So are you, or will be soon. My orders are to bring you to a war footing as quickly as I can, and I intend to do precisely that.”
Corwin shook his head. “Then we have nothing further to discuss.”
“Oh, on the contrary—we have a great deal to discuss.” Lij Tulu shifted his eyes to Reivaro. “Take him to my shuttle. Then find everything he was using for those—” he jabbed a finger at the handful of neckband sections Corwin had left on the table “—equipment, raw materials, everything. Collect it, catalogue it, and take it to the Dome.”
He turned and strode toward the stairs. His two Marine guards fell into step in front of him, while Reivaro, Corwin, and Corwin’s guard fell into step behind him. The other two Marines waited until the rest of the parade had left, then began a methodical search of the items on the shelves and cabinets. From above her, Jin heard the indistinct sound of Lij Tulu giving more orders, followed by the thudding herd of footsteps she’d expected earlier as the Marines up there started searching the rest of the house.
She checked her nanocomputer’s clock circuit. Just after three in the afternoon. The Marines hadn’t bothered to turn off the kiln, possibly because they didn’t realize it was still running. Sooner or later, though, they were bound to notice, and since Lij Tulu had ordered them to bring everything associated with Corwin’s neckband factory they would probably consider the kiln to be on that list.
For the moment, the thing was too hot to be easily moved. Once they shut it off, though, it wouldn’t take long for it to cool to the point where it would no longer shield her from whatever infrared sensors they had in those helmets. She had until then to figure out what to do.
Whatever she came up with had better be good. She hadn’t witnessed the brief battle between the Marines and Cobras in Archway, but she’d been through all the reports Corwin had been able to pull together, and it was obvious that the lasers built into the Marines’ epaulets had both power and pinpoint accuracy. The only weakness she could see was that the lasers couldn’t fire straight up or down, which still left the question of how an attacker could get into one of those positions in the first place without getting killed.
For the next half hour she watched the Marines search through cabinets, bins, and stacks of odds and ends. Along the way they collected tools, bags of ceramic powder, molds and, of course, the neckband sections Corwin had already made. All of it was duly noted, catalogued via some internal system, and then added to a growing pile near the base of the stairs. The sounds of footsteps from overhead gradually decreased as the Marines up there finished going through the rest of the house, and Jin kept expecting a few of them to come downstairs and assist the two already working the main center of contraband.
But no one appeared, and gradually it dawned on Jin that while this raid was important it was surely not the only situation the Dominion forces in Capitalia had on their plate. As the Marines finished their assigned task upstairs they were apparently leaving the house and heading elsewhere.
She’d assumed Lij Tulu’s warning to Corwin that the situation was about to boil over onto the streets was simply overdramatic hype. Maybe it wasn’t.
The Marines were nearing the end of their search when one of them discovered that the kiln was still on and shut it off.
And with that, the clock was ticking.
Jin watched as they tackled the final two cabinets, listening to the silence from overhead. If the situation elsewhere in Capitalia was as dire as she hoped, maybe these last two would decide to take their collection of loot and head back to the Dome. The kiln would be too hot to move for at least another hour, and Reivaro didn’t strike her as the type to let two of his men sit idle when there was other work to be done. They could always come back later and get the kiln if they really wanted it.
Unless, of course, the two Marines didn’t bother to tell the colonel they were finished.
It didn’t exactly fit the image of the stolid, professional Dominion warrior that Reivaro and the rest of the Dominion force had tried so hard to project. But Jin had seen enough organizations to know that there were slackers in every group. She could certainly see how these Marines might prefer hanging around an empty house, obeying their orders to the letter, instead of going outside to face whatever mischief Lorne and the other Cobras might be hatching.
The Marines finished with the cabinets and gave the room a final visual sweep. Jin pressed one ear to the door, mentally crossing her fingers as she keyed her audios to full power…
“Guess that’s it,” one of the Marines said. “Want me to go get the cart?”
“In a minute,” the other answered. “What about that?”
Jin shifted her attention back to the eyehole just in time to see the Marine’s hand come up and point to the kiln. She turned her ear back to the panel. “—forever to cool down,” the first Marine groused.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” the second said, a malicious edge in his voice. “Hang on—there was a bucket in one of these cabinets over here.”
Frowning, Jin looked back through the eyehole. One of the Marines was heading toward the set of cabinets beside the deep utility sink while the second one watched. “What are you going to do?” the second one’s voice came faintly.
“You want it cooled down?” the first called back. “Fine. I’ll cool it down.”
“You pour water in it, you’ll wreck it,” the second warned. “Probably split it wide open.”
“So? The colonel just said to collect it. He didn’t say what condition it had to be in.”
Jin mouthed a curse. So much for her hope that they might be slackers.
So much, too, for the security of her hiding place. Left to cool down on its own, the kiln could have masked her presence for another half hour or more. With cold water dumped into it, that cover would vanish within a couple of minutes.
Desperation, her late father had often said, was the true mother of invention. By the time the Marine had located and filled the bucket Jin had a plan. Not a great one, but it was the best she could come up with.
The second Marine had taken a couple of cautious steps back, taking up a position about five meters away from the kiln and the table it was sitting on. Carefully, Jin put a target lock on the inside edges of each of his epaulets, where the sensors and targeting computer were located. Then, easing one hand up to rest lightly against the wall just above her head, she got a grip on the door’s release with the other. The Marine with the water reached the table, raised the bucket over the top of the kiln, and poured a hefty slosh onto the hot metal.
And as a violently hissing cloud of steam billowed into the air, Jin popped the release and shoved open the door, dropping onto her butt with her legs stretched straight along the basement floor. Giving the wall behind her a shove, leaning back to give the push extra strength, she lurched out of the hole and slid on her back under the table and squarely beneath the legs of the closer Marine.
With the roiling white cloud obscuring the back wall and the hidden door, it was doubtful either Marine even saw was happening until Jin slid out from under the table and into their view. But if they were surprised, they were also quick on the uptake. Jin had barely come to a halt beneath the closer Marine when the more distant one snapped out some kind of warning, the exact word muffled by his helmet and the hiss of the steam.
But Jin was also ready. She triggered the antiarmor laser in her left leg, and her nanocomputer instantly took over her body’s servo network, swiveling the leg to blast a pair of rapid-fire shots into the Marine’s epaulets. The same movement of Jin’s leg also shoved the right leg of the Marine standing over her, nearly knocking him off balance as the water bucket went flying off to the side. Even as he tried to get away from her, she lifted her right leg, cocked her knee to her chest, and shoved upward against his crotch, sending him flying straight up. His head slammed into the ceiling, shattering the acoustic tile and thudding hard into the joists and subflooring. He dropped back, flopping onto the floor like a dead fish, and lay still.
The other Marine was charging forward, fumbling at the strap of his holster, when Jin leveled her right hand and sent a full-power arcthrower blast at his helmet.
He staggered, his head and shoulders sheathed in a brilliant coronal discharge. Jin fired again, and this time he twitched violently and then collapsed to the floor, sections of his helmet still sparking. Jin scrambled to her feet, fingertip lasers at the ready. But he didn’t move.
Neither did the other one. His head and neck seemed straight enough, but there was no way to tell through the helmet and armor what kind of damage he might have taken. He could be severely concussed, or paralyzed.
Or dead.
For a moment she stared at the figure, her stomach tensed in a painful knot. This was not what she’d signed up for when she’d become a Cobra.
But there was no time for regret or reflection now. The two Marines had surely been linked to the overall Dominion communication network, and reinforcements were probably burning their way toward her. She had to get out, and fast.
The first task was to retrieve the bag of neckband segments Corwin had entrusted to her. Then, splashing her way across the wet floor, she grabbed the bucket the Marine had used to douse the kiln and hurried over to the stairway and the pile of contraband the intruders had collected. She eyed the pouches of powered ceramic longingly, but there was no time to gather all of that together.
But she could at least retrieve the rest of the neckband segments. She scooped them into the bucket, stuffed her bag on top of them, then hurried across the room to the furnace. The emergency escape route Corwin had mentioned was well hidden, but knowing what the catch looked like enabled her find it within a few seconds.
This door was thicker than the one on her hidey hole, with more mass of insulation attached to its back. Probably to make it harder for infrareds to pick the door out of the rest of the basement wall, she decided. Beyond the door was a narrow, rough-walled tunnel no more than a meter and a quarter high leading outward from the house. Wondering again when her uncle had put in all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, she worked her way into the tunnel and sealed the door behind her.
Whenever he’d done it, he’d taken the time to do it right. The door fit perfectly into its frame, not letting through even a glimmer for her opticals’ light-amps to work with. She switched to infrared, found it almost as useless as the light-amps in the uniform temperature of the dirt around her.
Still, with the heat radiation coming from her own body, the infrareds did give her about a half-meter bubble of faint visibility. It wasn’t much, but it should at least keep her from whacking her head on any protrusions that might be sticking out of the low ceiling along the way. Holding the bucket close to her chest, her knees forced to a ninety-degree angle, she headed down the tunnel in an awkward squatting walk.
The floor was as rough as the walls, with plenty of lumps and the occasional root or large rock or other hazard. But it was mostly flat, and with the IR glow of her body she was able to see most of the obstacles before she could trip over them. In the silence her breathing seemed extra loud and harsh, and her back tingled with the eerie expectation of the moment when the Dominion’s backup force found the hidden door and started shooting. She had to keep reassuring herself that it would surely be another few minutes before they could arrive, land their aircars, get inside, and start a search. As long as she kept going, she ought to be reasonably clear before the shooting started.
Her back didn’t care about logic. It continued to tingle.
She’d gone thirty meters when a hint of light appeared.
But not from behind her. From ahead of her.
She stopped short, her breathing sounding even louder as the sound of her footsteps ceased. The light was still faint, but it was slowly getting stronger. Someone was coming toward her.
She frowned. No, not toward her, but perpendicular to her. As the light intensity increased, she could make out a wall blocking the end of her tunnel about thirty meters ahead. A curved wall, made of a dirty-white ceramic or concrete. The light seemed to be coming from somewhere to the side of that wall.
And then, it clicked. The curved wall she was seeing was the far side of one of Aventine’s storm drain tunnels. The light was someone moving toward her along the tunnel.
She clenched her teeth, painfully aware that she was in about the worst possible location for a fight. Her sonics were all but useless in an enclosed area like this—too much of the blast would bounce straight back at her—and the distance to the drainage conduit ruled out use of her arcthrower. Corwin’s tunnel was straight enough for her to use her lasers, but line-of-sight weapons worked equally well in both directions, and in a tunnel that wasn’t even tall enough for her to stand upright she would have roughly zero chance of dodging whatever the person or persons at the other end of the target gallery chose to throw back at her.
Still, if she couldn’t maneuver, she could at least make herself as small a target as possible. Setting the bucket on the ground behind her, she eased herself down onto her back, her left leg and antiarmor laser pointed forward toward the approaching light.
Which was getting closer. And moving quickly: she could now see the slight variations in intensity caused by the movement of the owner’s arms as he or she strode along, and she could see that the stride was just short of a full-fledged jog. He was in a hurry, and in Jin’s experience people on urgent business often didn’t pay as much attention to their surroundings as they should. Fish in a barrel, the old saying whispered through her mind.
She just wished she knew which of them was the fish.
The light was getting closer, and her audios could now pick up the sound of footsteps. There were at least three people, possibly more.
She took a deep breath and lifted her leg slightly. If they passed her by, great. If instead they turned into her tunnel, she would have to wait until all of them were in sight before opening fire. There was a flicker of a shadow, and a hunched-over human figure carrying a flashlight was suddenly framed in the opening.
And without pausing he stepped up into Jin’s tunnel and headed straight toward her.
She clenched her teeth. Behind him, two more figures came into view and joined him in her tunnel. For the moment, the light was aimed mostly at the floor, which should leave Jin still in shadow. But that wouldn’t last. Holding her hand up to block out most of the glow, she keyed in her light-amps and tried to see the person behind the glare. If that was a Marine helmet back there, she would have no choice but to take the first shot.
And then, the light swung upward, as if the person was checking to see if the ceiling was this low the whole way. For a second a muted backwash of light reflected off his face—
Jin caught her breath. “Lorne?” she called softly.
All three figures froze. The light swung down again—“Mom?” Lorne’s voice came.
Jin exhaled in a huff. “Yes,” she said. She scrambled to her feet, remembering just in time not to try to straighten all the way up, and grabbed the bucket. “I thought you were the Dominion,” she said, hurrying toward them.
“Not yet, but they’re not far behind,” Lorne said, coming forward and meeting her halfway. “We got a tip they were going to raid Uncle Corwin.”
“Too late,” Jin said as they came to a stop facing each other. Her son’s face was thin and tired-looking, she noted, but otherwise he seemed in good health. “They’ve already got him.”
Lorne’s gaze flicked over her shoulder. “Are they still there? Maybe we can break him out.”
Jin shook her head. “Sorry, no. They’re long gone.”
“Damn.” Lorne pointed at her bucket. “Are those his neckbands?”
“Yes, everything he had,” Jin said, holding it up. “But we need to get out of here. I made kind of a racket getting out.”
“On a couple of Marines, I hope,” Lorne said. He threw another look past her, then abruptly spun around and headed back the way he’d come. “Too late,” he called softly to the others, who had remained by the drainage conduit.
“You know these others well, I hope?” Jin asked quietly.
“Very well,” Lorne assured her. “Badj Werle and Dill de Portola from DeVegas province. You remember them, right?”
“Yes, of course,” Jin said, some of her anxiety fading. Not only had the other two Cobras been solid friends to Lorne, but they’d also done serious damage to the Troft occupation forces during that conflict.
She swallowed. And speaking of the Trofts…“Listen, there may be some more bad news. According to Lij Tulu, Barrington Moreau and his ship—”
“When were you talking to Lij Tulu?” Lorne asked, frowning over his shoulder.
“He was with the raiding party,” Jin told him. “He and Reivaro both. Lij Tulu was trying to persuade Uncle Corwin to help keep the peace here.”
Lorne snorted. “Like that’s going to happen.”
“That’s what Uncle Corwin said, too,” Jin said. “Lij Tulu also told him they’ve found Qasama.”
She sensed his shoulders stiffen. “Did they get the location from Dad?”
“I don’t think so,” Jin said. “He said Barrington Moreau found them. Though I suppose he could be lying.”
“Probably not,” Lorne said sourly. “That would explain the courier ship we spotted coming in early yesterday. And why it took off again later in the day. Chintawa thinks it was going to Caelian—he said Lij Tulu told him Santores has gone there.”
