Cobra Guardian: Cobra War: Book Two (12 page)

She didn't make it. The creature slammed into her, its jaws stretching toward her throat, its body shoving her arm and the stun stick violently to the side. The impact turned her whole body into instant jelly, and her suddenly hazy brain realized she was being slammed to the ground. Her head hit the ground hard . . .

The darkness evaporated, and she found herself lying on her back in the grass. Freylan was kneeling over her, his arm stretched out rigidly, whipping the crackling stun stick in his hand back and forth in a hundred-eighty-degree arc, yelling defiantly at the pack of animals still filling the grove with their howls. Jody tried to roll away or get up and help, but her body inexplicably refused to move.

And then, someone shot past above Freylan's head, and Jody rolled her eyes to the side and saw that it was her father. He landed in front of the snarling animals, sending servo-powered kicks at the nearest ones while his fingertip lasers flashed death at those out of kicking range. Two of the animals leaped at him from behind, but before they could make contact he threw himself into a low leap over the ones in front of him. He hit the grass and rolled, and as the two animals leaped again, his antiarmor laser flashed twice, sending their charred bodies to thud against the ground. The rest of the pack turned to the attack, only to find themselves in the middle of a three-prong laser barrage.

A few seconds later, the last of them was dead.

The sizzling of Freylan's stun stick, audible now that the howling had stopped, also went silent, and she looked up to see Freylan lower the weapon to his side, his whole body shaking with reaction. He took a careful breath, gave one final look around the grove, then looked down at Jody. "You all right?" he asked.

"I do' know," Jody said. The words came out embarrassingly slurred, her mouth as numb as the rest of her. "Wha' ha'n'ed?"

"We were attacked by a pack of--I don't know what; call them tree wolves," Freylan said. "Your dad did a spinning sonic blast to try to slow them down, but I guess when one of them slammed into you, it bumped you and the stun stick over into Geoff."

Jody grimaced. Or tried to, anyway--she had no idea whether her facial muscles were even responding. "An' the curren' go' all th'ee o' us," she muttered.

"Yeah," Freylan said. He looked somewhere to his left, his face hardening. "With Geoff taking the brunt of it."

Jody felt a sudden flash of horror roll through her useless body as she remembered her father's warning that the stun sticks could deliver a lethal jolt. "Is he a' right?" she breathed.

"I don't know," Freylan said grimly. "He's still breathing, though."

"No thanks to you," Jody's father's voice came from the direction Freylan was looking, an uncharacteristic anger in his voice that made Jody wince. "
Or
to him. What in the
Worlds
did you two think you were doing?"

"I'm sorry," Jody said. Her mouth was starting to come back now, and with an effort she managed to turn her head.

Geoff was lying on his back on the ground, his eyes closed, his face pale. Paul was kneeling over him, busy pulling the cap off a hypo, the survival kit's medical pack laid open on the ground beside him. "Yeah," Paul rumbled. "Sorry."

"We were afraid," Jody said, knowing even as she said them how lame the words sounded. That was an excuse, not a reason, and her parents had never much liked excuses. "We thought that if . . . no. We weren't really thinking at all, were we?"

"No, you weren't," Paul ground out as he slipped the needle into Geoff's arm and pressed the plunger. "There's a reason why you need training to use a weapon.
Any
weapon." He held his fingers against Geoff's neck for a few seconds, then looked up at Jody. "But I think he'll be okay," he added, the anger starting to fade from his voice. His eyes flicked to Freylan. "How about you, Freylan?"

"I'm all right," Freylan said. He looked back down at Jody, as if suddenly realizing how close he was still kneeling to her, and got stiffly to his feet.

Only then did Jody see the blood-stained slashes in the side of his silliweave tunic.

"Freylan!" she gasped, struggling to get her body working again.

"Don't worry, it's okay," Freylan hastened to assure her. "They hurt, but they don't feel very deep."

"What happened?" Jody demanded, running her eyes over the rest of his outfit. There didn't seem to be any damage anywhere else.

"Nothing serious," Freylan said. "When the first tree wolves attacked, your father had to get out of their way so that he could set up his counterattack." He shrugged. "One of them got through before he could do that."

And then, suddenly, Jody understood.

She turned to her father again, her eyes tracing out the tension lines in his face and throat, the repressed anger still simmering there. Only it wasn't her and Geoff he was primarily angry at.

It was himself.

Jody closed her eyes, a wave of frustration and sympathy flowing through her. From the very beginning of the Dominion's Cobra project a hundred years ago, the men who volunteered to become their elite soldiers were carefully screened, not just for mental and emotional stability, but also for the kind of outward-centered personalities that would permit the downplaying of their personal desires and the elevation of the lives and safety of the civilians they would be fighting for. That screening had gotten tighter and more sophisticated over the years, but the goal was still the same: to create warriors who were able and willing to give their lives if necessary for their people and their worlds.

Only the military planners who'd created the Cobras' equipment hadn't seen it quite that way. The combat reflexes programmed into their nanocomputers weren't designed so that Cobras could throw themselves into self-sacrificing lunges into enemy fire in defense of the small and helpless. They were designed to get the Cobra himself out of harm's way, therefore permitting him to survive long enough to launch his own counterattacks against the enemy.

Even if it meant abandoning one of the small and helpless to take the brunt of the attack alone.

Freylan clearly understood that. But not everyone did. Jody had heard heartbreaking stories from her brothers and their friends about incidents in the Aventinian frontier, incidents where Cobras had lived and civilians had died. Every one of those stories had been told with a catch in the Cobra's voice, and usually a stiff drink in the Cobra's hand.

It wasn't a problem that was going to go away, either. The Dominion had given the Cobra Worlds the equipment necessary to reproduce the Cobra equipment, but not the ability to reprogram the nanocomputers.

There was a groan from Jody's side. "Geoff?" she called, trying again to get up. She halfway succeeded this time, rolling part of the way up onto her side. "You okay?"

"Thin' so," he said, his voice as slurred as Jody's had been a minute ago. "Kind o' nu'. Thin' it's gettin' better--startin' t' hurt now."

"Oh, good," Jody said.

"Just lie there for a few more minutes," Paul said, collecting the medical pack and standing up. "Your turn, Freylan. Let me help you with that tunic."

"It wa' 'y faul', Co'a Broo'," Geoff called as Paul stepped over to Freylan and the two of them started easing off Freylan's bloodied tunic. "I m-mean m-my fault. Not Jody's."

"I appreciate knowing that," Paul said. "I hope
you
appreciate now that stun sticks aren't toys." He flashed a look at Jody. "Both of you."

"Trust me," Jody said fervently, trying to sit up. Once again, she was halfway successful. "What's the plan?"

"There's no point in trying to get any farther tonight," Paul told her, peering at Freylan's gashes and selecting an anti-infection salve from the kit. "After I get Freylan fixed up, I'll see what I can put together in the way of a shelter."

Jody looked around at all the predator corpses scattered around them, corpses the scavenger insects and carrion animals were already flocking to. "You think it'll be safe here?"

"As safe as anywhere else," Paul said. "If this pack of tree wolves permanently held this territory, we can hope it'll take any other predators at least until tomorrow to realize they're gone and move in."

"Unless they share the area with a nocturnal batch," Freylan warned, wincing as Paul applied the salve.

"In which case, again, we're in no more danger here than a hundred meters down the road," Paul said. "Let me get some sealant and bandages on this, and then the three of you can rest while I build us a shelter."

* * *

Jody expected the shelter to be something simple, perhaps a hedge of uprooted thorn bushes with a few well-placed treacles gluing it all together.

She was wrong.

By the time she was able to fully sit up, her father had burned off a three-by-four-meter area about ten meters upwind of the scattering of dead tree wolves. By the time she was able to stand up and hobble around, he'd begun lasering down some of the smaller trees, cutting them into sections, and lugging them to the cleared area. By the time her fine-muscle control had recovered to the point where she was able to start assembling the survival pack's silliweave tent, he'd put together a waist-high barrier enclosing the campsite on three sides.

And by the time Geoff had also recovered from his encounter with the stun stick, the sun was going down and the tent was nestled snugly inside a chest-high barrier that would give pause to even the most determined predator.

Clearly, her father had had a lot more frustration to work out than she'd realized.

"The last step will be to string the extra support wire across the entrance once you're settled down in there," Paul said as Jody and the others finished collecting the rest of the equipment and supplies. "I can tie in the stun sticks and rig a pressure switch so that anything that hits the wires hard enough will get a good jolt. That and the barricade should keep anything serious from getting through from the sides."

"And the top cover and support poles should be springy enough to bounce off anything that leaps in from the top," Freylan said. "At least, that's what the manual said is supposed to happen."

"We'll probably get a chance to see how that works," Paul said grimly. "Make sure you've done any business you need to do out here, then get inside."

"What about Snouts?" Freylan asked, nodding toward the gigger snarling quietly in its cage. "We just going to leave him out here?"

"You want him in there with us?" Geoff countered.

"He was a good early-warning system for the tree wolves," Freylan said doggedly. "He might do the same for the nighttime predators, too."

"Only if they run the same territorial game the daytime ones do," Geoff said.

"It's still worth a try," Paul decided. "You two put him next to the tent, and I'll string the wire so that he'll be inside the perimeter. Just make sure to position him where his tusks can't poke through the tent and hit something."

Jody watched as the two young men maneuvered the cage into position, then stood aside and let them slip through the tent flap. "You want any help with that?" she asked as her father started unspooling the wire.

"No, I'm all right," Paul assured her. "Go on in and get settled. Make sure you leave me enough room just inside the flap where I can get out if there's trouble."

"I will." Jody took a step toward him and lowered her voice. "It wasn't your fault, you know, that the wolf got through to Freylan."

"Yes, I know," Paul said, a hint of his earlier frustration briefly touching his voice. "You know it, too. Does that knowledge make you feel any better?"

Jody grimaced. "Not really."

"It doesn't for us, either." He sighed. "I don't know, Jody. Maybe people like Treakness are right. Maybe it's time for the Cobras to fade gracefully into the sunset."

Jody peered at him in the gathering gloom, a knot forming in her stomach. This didn't sound like her calm, cool-headed father. "Not sure the middle of a Troft invasion is the right time to hand in your resignation," she warned.

"Fine, so we don't fade away, but instead go out in a blaze of glory," he said. "Same end result."

"That's nonsense," Jody insisted. "The Cobras are the best--"

"The Cobras are a hundred-year-old tactical concept, Jody," he interrupted quietly. "Surely there must be better and more practical weapons available by now. Combat suits, exoskeletons, remote drones--something."

"Okay, so you're old," Jody said. "Not all military doctrines go out of style, you know. There's this little something called
concentration of firepower
that I believe has been around since, oh, the invention of reliable firearms. It might go back to the longbow, too. Not sure about that."

Paul shook his head. "Hardly the same thing."

"There's also the old, time-tested doctrine of never trusting conclusions, strategic or otherwise, that you reach when you're tired," Jody continued. "So finish with your wire and stun sticks and get some sleep. If you really want to walk to the scrap center, tomorrow will be soon enough."

Paul snorted. "You sound like your mother," he said. "Except the scrap center part."

"Probably because if you head there she logically has to go with you," Jody said, her mind flicking briefly to her mother and brother on Qasama, wondering what the problem was that her mother's old friend Daulo Sammon had called them there to solve. Something incredibly thorny, no doubt.

But at least they weren't in the middle of a Troft invasion. "But the principle still holds," she added. "Namely, listen to the women in your family."

"A principle that I believe predates even concentration of firepower," Paul said, some of his usual dry humor finally peeking through.

"Absolutely," Jody said, starting to breathe a little easier. "And while you mull that over, toss me the end of that wire. The sooner we get this thing strung, the sooner we can both get some sleep."

Chapter Seven

Traveling through the drainage conduit wasn't nearly as bad as Lorne had expected it to be. Once he got past that first touch of claustrophobia in the narrow confines, he was able to configure his back and knee servos to take most of the strain off his muscles and joints as he walked.