Cobra Gamble (25 page)

He looked up at the cracked ceiling. On the other hand, he had no idea how much damage this part of the subcity had taken. It was conceivable that an explosion of any size would bring the whole arena down on top of them.

His programmed Cobra reflexes might still get him safely through a catastrophe like that. But they wouldn't help Anya.

He'd promised himself that he wouldn't get in any way emotionally attached to this mysterious woman. But whether he liked it or not, she was a fellow human being, and he couldn't risk her life so casually. Certainly not on a plan that had such a limited chance of ultimate success anyway.

"Fine," he muttered. "Whatever." He raised his voice. [The Games, begin them.]

There was a short pause. Then, across the arena, one of the storage room doors opened, and a razorarm strode into the room. It caught sight of the two humans and broke into a loping run toward them.

Merrick frowned. Was Ukuthi kidding? Razorarms had decentralized nervous systems that made them tricky to kill, but Aventine's Cobras had long since learned the necessary tricks. Targeting three of the easiest kill points, he waited for the predator to get closer.

And as it closed to within ten meters and threw itself into an attack sprint, he swiveled his left leg up and fired his antiarmor laser. There were three brilliant bursts of light, and the spine leopard slammed into the floor and skidded to a halt at Merrick's feet.

Merrick gave it a few seconds, just to make sure, then looked up at the speaker. "Is that it?" he called. "Can we go home now?"

"There will be more," Anya murmured into the silence, her voice odd. "They will not stop with just one."

Merrick looked at her, frowning. The oddness of her voice, he saw now, was matched by the oddness in her face. In place of the wooden, distant expression he'd become accustomed to was a mixture of surprise, disbelief, and a touch of fear.

Only then did it occur to Merrick that she'd probably never seen what a Cobra could do.

"Don't worry about it," he said as soothingly as he could. There was something disconcerting about being looked at in that way. "Whatever they throw at me, I can handle it."

[The next predator, it will not be the same,] Commander Ukuthi's voice came over the speaker. [Concussion charges, they will be attached to its hide. Detonation of the charges, your lasers will cause. Understanding, do you have it?]

Merrick looked at Anya again. This one seemed new to her, too. [Understanding, I have it,] he called. [Danger to us, do the charges possess it?]

[Danger, they certainly possess it,] Ukuthi assured him. [The charges, they are shaped to spread their force outward. The predator, it will not be harmed.]

[Understanding, I have it,] Merrick repeated sourly. In other words, if the concussion charges were close enough when they detonated, they would stun or otherwise disable Merrick and Anya but not the razorarm, leaving the predator free to maul them at its leisure.

But that shouldn't be a problem. He knew at least four different ways to kill a razorarm, and if this was Ukuthi's way of learning the full range of Merrick's Cobra weaponry he was going to be disappointed. All four ways involved his lasers, which the Trofts had already seen.

To Merrick's left another of the storage room doors swung open and a second razorarm bounded out. This one, he saw, was noticeably more agitated than the first had been.

Small wonder. Attached to its head, looking like some sort of strange lily pads floating on a misshapen pond, were three cuplike devices about ten centimeters across.

And they were positioned precisely over the three spots where Merrick had shot the first razorarm.

This time Merrick didn't bother to let the predator find and identify its potential prey and launch itself into a charge. With three more rapid-fire laser shots, he dropped it where it stood.

"Amazing," Anya murmured from his side.

"It's all in the wrist," Merrick told her, glancing around the room. The rest of the arena's doors were still closed. "Stay here," he ordered. Warily, he crossed to the dead razorarm and squatted down beside it.

The devices fastened to the animal's hide weren't anything he was familiar with. But the trigger mechanism did indeed look like a temperature fuse, which meant Ukuthi hadn't been lying about the risk if Merrick's aim went awry.

What was interesting was that a temperature fuse would also be triggered by Merrick's arcthrower or possibly even the lower-intensity current of his stunner. Yet Ukuthi had only warned him against laser misfires. Did that mean Ukuthi didn't know about those weapons? Or had that been a test to see if Merrick was smart enough to extrapolate to such conclusions on his own?

He was pondering that question, and trying to figure out what he might be able to do to the concussion charges without setting them off, when a third door swung open across the room. This time, the razorarm sported six of the concussion-charge lily pads, the collection covering both sets of Merrick's earlier kill points.

Merrick sighed as he got back to his feet. Now it was just getting ridiculous.

He killed the razorarm, and the one after that, and the one after that. Each time, the next predator emerged with more and more of the concussion charges in place, until the last one came out looking like some high-fashion satire.

But there was nothing amusing about the fact that all the predator's best target zones were now off-limits. Merrick wound up lasering its legs to bring it to a halt, then moving right up beside it and carefully lasering three shots into its head beneath the charges. Once again he confirmed that the predator was dead, then returned to Anya's side to wait for whatever Ukuthi and the Games had planned for him next. Another door opened, much earlier than Merrick had expected, and he turned to face it.

And felt his mouth drop open. It wasn't a razorarm this time, but a creature like nothing he'd ever seen before.

Its basic shape was that of a tapered cylinder, five meters long and half a meter in diameter at its largest, heavily scaled, with no legs and a barely discernible head with tiny eyes and a wide slit of a mouth. It rippled its way out of the storage room onto the arena floor in a fluid, snake-like motion, its movement accompanied by the muted crackle of hard scales against concrete floor. Its front segment swayed back and forth a few times, as if the creature was surveying its new territory. Then, with almost arrogant leisure, it turned to face Merrick and Anya.

"What the
hell
is that?" Merrick muttered, taking Anya's arm and backing them slowly away from the creature.

"It is called a jormungand," she said, her voice trembling. Merrick spared her a quick glance, his stomach tightening at the sight of her wide eyes and suddenly pale face. Whatever this thing was, she was very unhappy to see it. "How did he find—?"

"Save it," Merrick cut her off. The armored snake was on the move, rippling toward them with deceptive speed.

There was no time for finesse. Swiveling on his right leg, Merrick brought up his left and fired his antiarmor laser into the creature's head. The shot sent a burst of thick green smoke from the impact point, momentarily hiding the jormungand from sight.

The smoke cleared away to reveal the creature still slithering toward them as if nothing had happened.

"You have to kill it!" Anya said frantically. "Please."

"I'm trying, I'm trying," Merrick snarled, wrinkling his nose as the fetid odor from the smoke reached him. He fired again, still targeting the head, then again, and again. The results were the same: clouds of smoke, some charring of the scales where the shots hit, but no serious damage and no obvious effect on the jormungand's ability to function. The scales were ablative, Merrick realized with a sinking feeling, the first microsecond of the laser's heat vaporizing a thin layer, with the resulting smoke then diffusing the rest of the shot and probably also carrying away most of the energy. If the scales were thick enough, he could probably pump fifty shots into the damn thing and still not kill it.

He didn't have time for fifty shots. And he definitely didn't have time to experiment. Angered or stung by Merrick's useless attacks, the jormungand had picked up speed and was now coming at them at the pace of a brisk jog. "Go," Merrick told Anya, giving her a push back behind him. "Go. Run!"

"Run where?" she asked, taking a few steps and then stopping.

Merrick glanced around. Aside from the dead razorarms the arena was bare, with no cover anywhere. The catwalks would be safe enough from something that couldn't jump, but they were all too high to reach.

Except for the broken one hanging precariously from one end.

It would be dangerous, Merrick knew—the supports might be in bad enough shape that any extra weight would bring the whole thing crashing down. But it was all they had. "Over by the catwalk's lower end," he ordered, jabbing a finger toward it. "Go there and wait for me."

"Be careful," Anya said, and took off running.

Merrick turned back to the jormungand slithering toward him and tried to think. Distance shots weren't working. Maybe something a little closer would be more effective.

The problem was that closer also meant more dangerous. He hadn't seen what kind of teeth the thing had, but he had no doubt they were as formidable as the rest of it. But he had to risk it. Bending his knees, he stretched out his right hand toward the creature and braced himself.

And as the jormungand got to within two meters he fired his arcthrower, sending a bolt of high-voltage current into the creature's head. As the thunderclap echoed across the arena he shoved off the floor, leaping up and over the armored snake.

He nearly died right there. The entire lower half of the jormungand's body whipped upward like a thick, scaled whip as he jumped, barely missing him as he soared past overhead. He hit the floor and spun around.

To find that the arcthrower hadn't done any better than the laser.

Or maybe it had, just a little. The jormungand seemed fractionally more sluggish as it turned around toward him again. Fifty shots with the arcthrower, maybe, would do as well as fifty with the antiarmor laser.

Across the room, Anya had reached the hanging catwalk and turned back to watch the drama. Merrick gave the jormungand a wide berth and sprinted over to join her.

"Are we going up there?" she asked, pointing at the catwalk as he braked to a halt.

"You
are," Merrick said, crouching down in front of her and holding his hand, palm-upward, beside her foot. "Step on my hand. Come on—do it."

Hesitantly, she did as ordered. Merrick straightened, hearing the faint whine as his servos took the woman's weight, and lifted her up to the catwalk. "Grab the rail and pull yourself up," he instructed. "If it feels safe, try climbing another meter or so—we don't want the snake thinking you're close enough to be worth making a snatch for."

"What about you?" Anya asked as she eased herself onto the catwalk. The structure swayed ominously, but the anchors at the upper end seemed to be holding.

"I'll be back soon," Merrick said, giving the catwalk one last look and then turning back around.

And leaping instantly to the side as his nanocomputer took over, he jormungand's snapping jaws nearly catching his leg as he flew way out of its reach. It had teeth, all right, lots of big, sharp ones, Merrick hit the floor, rolled, and came back up onto his feet.

His first fear was that the jormungand might decide to try for the low-hanging catwalk and the stationary prey clinging to it. But apparently it was smart enough to recognize that Merrick posed the more immediate threat. It had already turned again and was slithering toward him, its beady eyes barely visible beneath the scaled brow ridges. Briefly, Merrick considered trying to blind it, decided his better option right now would be to get the hell out of there, and took off running.

He reached the far wall and again turned around. The jormungand was still charging toward him, but his sprint had opened up a wide enough gap to give him some breathing space. Time to breathe, and time to think.

The snake could be killed. Everything could. He just had to find the right way to do it.

Glancing up at the ceiling, wondering if Ukuthi was enjoying the show, he keyed his infrareds.

The facial-mapping system his generation of Cobras had been fitted with had been designed mainly to study human faces, with the goal of detecting stress, fatigue, and possible bald-faced lies. But it should work equally well on large armored snakes. Warm spots, Merrick knew, would indicate places where the scaling was thinner, or where the jormungand's blood vessels were closer to the surface, which might give him a clue as to where his weapons would be most effective.

Only there weren't any such warm spots, not anywhere on the creature's head, back, or sides. There was heat there, certainly, but it seemed to be radiating pretty uniformly across the whole of the jormungand's hide.

But there had to be
someplace
that was less protected. At the very least, the snake had to have an opening for dumping its wastes. Probably somewhere in the tail area, either underneath the animal or otherwise blocked from Merrick's current vantage point. He waited for it to slither closer, then leaped over it, making sure this time that he went high enough to avoid its lunge.

And as he reached the top of his arc and started back to the floor, he finally spotted it. The whole tip of the jormungand's tail was blazing with infrared. Thinner, possibly newer scales, and the place where he was going to have to nail it.

He hit the floor and spun around, readying his laser. But it was too late. The jormungand had already twisted around and was heading for him again. Clearly, the first challenge was going to be getting the damn thing to hold still.

He glanced around the room, looking for inspiration. Could he get Anya to somehow hold the jormungand's attention long enough for him to get behind it? But the snake had already shown it was more interested in Merrick than it was in her.

Could he lure it close to one of the dead razorarms and then laser some of the concussion charges? But fine-tuning the snake's positioning that way would require Merrick to be dangerously close himself, and there was a fair chance the concussion would affect him more than it did the jormungand.