Cobra Alliance-Cobra War Book 1 (25 page)

"I will die with honor," the young man snarled, again twitching his eyes to his right. "Let them die, too, like the dung worms that they are."

"You die however you want to," Merrick bit out. "I'd rather live." He pointed at the wall the Qasaman had indicated. "You want to see some of the explosives? You can start with that wall right there."

The lead Troft snapped an order, and one of the soldiers grouped around the Qasamans stepped across the hallway, sprung a long knife, and stabbing into the wall between a pair of standing sculptures. He twisted the knife hard over and pulled, and a half-meter chunk of some plaster-like substance came free.

And behind it, nestled into the space between the a pair of thick wooden supports, was a square meter's worth of a plastic-wrapped gray clay.

The lead Troft didn't waste even a second gawking. [The prisoners, take them below,] he snapped, loud enough for Merrick to hear even without using his enhancements. [Their bindings, fasten them along the way. The commanders, warn them immediately.]

"And that's just one of them," Merrick said as the Trofts grabbed the Qasamans' arms or jabbed lasers into their ribs, getting the group moving down the hallway toward the elevators. A second later Merrick bit back a gasp of pain as his own arm was grabbed and he was hustled off after the others.

And as they hurried along, one of the Trofts wove in and out of the Qasamans, fastening their arms behind them with chain-link wrist shackles. Merrick watched the operation closely, studying the restraints and trying to figure out where best they could be broken. Unlike the solid-bar shackles the Qasamans had used on him earlier, chains were harder for his nanocomputer to pinpoint when it didn't have any optics available for positioning data. The place where the chain was fastened to the right wrist cuff, he decided, would be his best bet.

The Troft finished with the Qasamans and headed toward Merrick with one final set of shackles in hand. Merrick glanced a target lock onto the spot he'd chosen, and silently let the alien pin his arms behind him.

The elevators were both waiting when the group arrived. The five Qasamans and their escort were guided into one, while Merrick and his own five-Troft guard took the other.

Merrick took a careful breath as the elevator started down, his nose tingling with the subtle scents of Troft and metal and armored leotard, his mind's eye flashing with unpleasant images from his last time in an elevator with Qasama's invaders. But this wouldn't be a replay of that other deadly ride. This time, he was going to cooperate fully with the Trofts. Right up to the moment when he stopped.

"Three minutes," the sergeant called softly from the hallway. "All gunners, stand ready."

Lying flat on his belly on one of the Lodestare Hospital's beds, Daulo took a moment to reflect on the irony of the whole situation. Earlier, Jin Moreau and Siraj Akim had gone to tremendous lengths to get him and Fadil out of this very place. And yet, now here they were again, joining a dozen other Qasaman soldiers preparing to throw this invasion down the enemy's throat.

On the face of it, moving troops into a building that the Trofts had already sequestered could be considered the height of foolishness. But on the other hand, bypassing the guards the Trofts had set up at the hospital's entrances had been simplicity itself, thanks to the subcity passages. And Daulo had to admit that after Jin and Siraj Akim had put the Lodestone into the center of Troft attention it was probably the last place the invaders would expect the Qasamans to come back to.

It was also unarguable that this particular line of eighth-floor rooms gave a perfect view of the rear of the Palace and the enemy soldiers guarding that section of the perimeter.

"Uh-oh," Fadil murmured from the bed beside Daulo's. "Look there, Father, at the group heading toward the street."

Daulo shifted his gaze to the street running along the front of the Palace. There were two different groups there, one consisting of five Qasamans and a half-dozen Troft guards, the other composed of a single human and five more of the aliens. "What about them?" he asked.

"Look closely at the singleton," Fadil said. "I believe we know him."

Frowning, Daulo swung his rifle around, centering the scope on the man Fadil had indicated.

It was Merrick Moreau.

"You suppose this is part of his plan?" Fadil suggested, his tone making it clear that he thought exactly the opposite.

"Enough chatter," the sergeant crouched beside the window growled. "If you villagers can't keep your minds and eyes where they're supposed to be, I'll find something else for you to do."

"Our apologies," Daulo said, his face warming with embarrassment and annoyance.
Villagers.
Not fellow soldiers, or fellow snipers, or even fellow Qasamans. Just
villagers.

He stole a final look at the street as Merrick Moreau and his guards filed through the massive rear doors of the first of the two armored trucks the aliens had pulled to the curb, while the group of Qasamans were ushered into the one behind it.

He could only hope that being taken prisoner
was,
in fact, part of Merrick Moreau's plan.

"It's time," Miron Akim murmured from behind Jin.

With a start, Jin jolted out of a light doze and checked her nanocomputer's clock. Fifty-eight minutes of Akim's estimated hour to Plan Saikah had passed. "Right," she confirmed. "Let me get turned around."

Looking casually over at one of the room's two hidden cameras, she put a targeting lock on it. Then, gripping her chair's armrests, she started rocking her body back and forth, steadily walking her chair around toward the window.

"You still wish to destroy the window first?" Akim murmured.

"It's our best chance of hiding who I am," Jin reminded him. "At least for a little longer."

"And every minute that truth is concealed is valuable," Akim agreed with a sigh. "Very well. Proceed."

Jin continued to walk the chair around until she was facing the window. As she settled herself into place, she glanced behind her across the room and put a targeting lock on the second hidden camera. Then, turning back to the window, she lifted her arms off the armrests as high as the shackles permitted and began curving her hands into a series of sign-language configurations.

Not genuine ones, of course. Or at least, nothing that would make any sense to anyone watching her. She'd learned some of the gestures when she was a girl, mostly so that she and her sister Fay could talk together at family gatherings without the adults eavesdropping on their conversation. Once Fay had married and moved off Aventine, though, Jin's abilities had waned to the point where she could now barely even remember the finger-spelling letters.

But the Trofts had no way of knowing that. For all they knew, the random set of gestures she was making might be an esoteric Qasaman battle code. If they were good little soldiers, they would be recording her every move and trying to figure out what she was trying to say.

And with their attention now hopefully pointed in the wrong direction, she activated her sonic disruptor.

She started the weapon at low power, giving its sensors time to search for the window's resonance. In principle, this was no different than the trick she'd pulled back at the Sun Center when she'd shattered the glass surrounding the observation catwalk. In practice, though, the size of this window made the whole thing considerably less certain. Not only would the resonances be harder to hit, but it would take a lot more power to actually shatter the glass.

And if she couldn't make that happen, her hoped-for diversion wasn't going to happen.

Deep within her, she felt a subtle change in vibration as the sonic locked onto the window's resonance. Still making her nonsense hand signals, she fed more power to the weapon. Ten seconds, she decided. If she couldn't break the glass in ten seconds she wasn't going to break it at all. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Akim join in the fun with hand signals of his own.

Her mental countdown had reached nine seconds when, without even a warning crack, the window blew up in their faces.

The explosion was so unexpected and so violent that Jin nearly missed out on the opportunity she'd been trying to create. But then her brain unfroze, and as the flying glass swirled past her and Akim she twisted her hands into cross-fire positions and fired her fingertip lasers.

Her nanocomputer responded with its usual deadly efficiency, gouging a pair of black-edged holes in the walls where the hidden cameras had been, hopefully fast enough that the Trofts would assume they'd been taken out by shards from the exploded window. Shifting aim, Jin cross-fired at her own wrist shackles, blasting apart the metal and freeing her hands. Another pair of shots freed her legs, and then she was out of her chair, turning toward the door. If the Trofts had left guards out there, they would be charging in any second now.

But the door remained closed. Keeping one eye on the panel, Jin cut Akim free of his chair, and together they headed across the room.

They were nearly to the door when it finally slammed open and a pair of Trofts charged through.

A blast from her antiarmor laser could have taken them out instantly. But Jin had something a bit more subtle in mind. Putting a targeting lock on the lead Troft, she bent her knees and shoved herself off the floor straight toward him.

The combination of targeting lock and leap kicked Jin's nanocomputer into the programmed ceiling flip that Merrick had performed earlier for Akim and the other Djinn. Only this time, it wasn't a sturdy ceiling that took the impact of her feet, but the Troft, who gave an agonized cough of expelled air as he went flying back into his companion. Jin herself bounced back from the impact, again turning halfway around as her nanocomputer tried to finish the ceiling flip, and landed on her side on the floor. She scrambled up into a crouch as Akim grabbed one of the Trofts' lasers and did a quick one-two slam to their helmeted heads. "Come," he snapped to Jin. Flipping the laser around into firing position, he stepped over the unconscious aliens and out into the hallway.

And threw himself to the floor as a pair of laser shots blazed through the air from down the hallway to the left.

Biting out a curse, Jin again bent her knees and leaped forward. Her arcing path shot her just through the doorway, her momentum breaking as she grabbed the door jamb with her left hand and brought herself to a sudden halt. She caught a glimpse of four Trofts at the far corner, two of them in kneeling positions in front of the other two as another pair of shots cut through the space where she would have been if she'd let her leap carry her all the way into the hallway.

The Trofts were busily correcting their aim as Jin fell flat onto her back on the hallway floor beside Akim and slashed her anti-armor laser across them, collapsing them into crumpled heaps.

"Quickly," Akim murmured from her side as he scrambled to his feet.

"Shall I clear us a path?" Jin asked, eyeing the corner beyond the dead Trofts. There were bound to be more of the aliens gathering somewhere on the far side.

"No need." Akim crossed to the wall across from the office they'd just broken out of and rested his hand against a decorative wall-mounted plaque.

And two meters to the right, a section of the inner wall popped open. "Quickly," he said again, nodding Jin toward the opening.

Jin threw a final look at the dead Trofts. So much for not revealing who she really was. But maybe the Troft commanders would assume someone had simply used one of their own lasers on the victims. Stepping behind Akim, she slipped into the narrow entryway.

From the way Akim had described the elevator escape route earlier, Jin had expected to find herself in some kind of emergency drop shaft. To her surprise, the hidden door led instead into a narrow corridor that stretched away to her left, its far end hidden by a gentle inward curve. She took a couple of steps into the passageway, pausing there until Akim had joined her and closed the secret door, plunging them into total darkness.

Or rather, nearly total darkness. Activating her optical enhancers, Jin discovered there was a faint light coming from around the curve ahead. "Where are we?" she whispered.

"On the outer rim of the central monitoring room," Akim whispered. "Follow the corridor, but make no noise."

Jin looked past Akim's shoulder at the hidden door behind him, wondering what they would do if and when the Trofts found the way in. With Akim between her and any intruders, she would be severely limited in her ability to fight off any such attack.

"Don't concern yourself with pursuit," Akim said. He did something , and a section of the wall rotated silently to seal off the passageway behind him. "Should the invaders find the door, the passage will now lead them in the opposite direction. Now go."

They were nearly to the curved section when the whole building gave a gentle shake around her. Jin looked back at Akim, her stomach suddenly tightening. "The Palace?" she whispered.

His expression in her amplified eyesight was tight and grim. "Yes," he confirmed. "Hurry—the attack here will begin very soon."

Jin nodded and continued on. The adrenaline rush of the earlier activity had worn off, and she could feel a dozen points of stinging pain and the warmth of trickling blood where shards from the exploded window had dug a new set of wounds into her face and arms and chest. Ignoring the injuries, she reached the curve and walked around it.

And came to a sudden halt. She'd expected to find some kind of secret exit that would get them out of this place. Instead, clearly visible behind a layer of tinted plastic on the corridor's inner wall, was the central monitoring room Akim had mentioned.

A monitoring room currently filled to the rafters with Trofts.

Jin twitched back from the dark plastic, feeling horribly exposed. "Go further in," Akim whispered, pressing a hand impatiently into her shoulder. "Don't be concerned—we aren't visible."

Jin wasn't nearly so sure about that. Still, from the Trofts' frantic hand and head movements, not to mention their vibrating radiator membranes, it did appear that they had other matters occupying their attention at the moment. Keeping her movements slow and smooth, she sidled farther down the corridor, studying the room and its occupants as she went.