Cobra Slave-eARC (37 page)

Jody gestured, and the Cobra activated his sonic again. “Where are your combat suits?” she murmured.

Ghushtre nodded down the corridor. “Back there,” he said. “Come.”

He led the way to the storage bin where Nisti had launched his ambush against the two Marines. Tied together in a bundle in one corner were the three scaled gray suits. “We planned to clear the guards from the hatchway and then retrieve them,” Ghushtre explained as he removed the two gas canisters from one of the suits. He did something to them, then handed them to Jody. “They’re keyed for impact trigger,” he said. “You need merely throw them against the wall or floor.”

“Got it,” Jody said, gingerly taking the canisters and putting one in each of her tunic’s side pockets. “I’ll go try to find a place where I can watch the CoNCH. If someone opens the engine room door, will you be able to get a canister in there if you’re all the way up by the forward hatch? The ceiling’s too low to get much of an arc on the throw.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Ghushtre assured her, eyeing the engine room door as he removed the other suits’ canisters. “I can set them for timed detonation so that bounces won’t matter. There’s another stairway leading up from just in front of the engineering door that will give you a view of the CoNCH entrance.”

Jody craned her neck. There was another stairway down there, all right. She hadn’t noticed it before. “Perfect. Remember, don’t gas Shahni Omnathi and the others until they’re all the way inside the ship. If they’re anywhere still outside, they’ll probably be in range of the gunbays.”

“Understood,” Ghushtre said. “Good luck.”

The massive door sealing off the control room was just where Ghushtre had said it would be. Jody settled into position on the aft stairway, crouching a few steps down with her eyes on a level with the deck. As long as no one tried to use the stairs she should be mostly undetectable. And if someone did start down from the upper deck the sound of footsteps should give her enough warning to get back down and out of the way.

Pulling the gas canister from her right-hand pocket, setting it onto the top stair in front of her, she rubbed her suddenly sweaty palms on her silliweave trousers and settled in to wait.

And tried to force calm into her mind. Because suddenly, the fate of two worlds were resting on her shoulders.

It hadn’t been like that during the Troft invasion. She’d played her part in Caelian’s victory, certainly. But the planning and execution had been handled by other people. Experienced people, or at least trained people. She’d been one of hundreds who’d helped, followed orders, and occasionally come up with a useful idea or two.

This time it was different. She was the one who’d first recognized the corner Tamu had backed himself into. She was the one who’d figured out how to exploit that. She was the one crouching here now with a gas canister.

She was the one whose actions over the next few minutes would mean success or failure.

She drew a long, careful breath, pushing back the doubts. She was a Broom, and a Moreau, and her family had a long tradition of standing at the pivot points of history. Her parents, grandparents, and brothers had all played such roles. It was time for her to step up and do the same.

And then, as she wiped her hands one last time, there was a soft but deep click from in front of her, and the door began to swing ponderously open. As it did, one of the other room doors nearby slid open and two men slipped into the corridor and hurried toward the CoNCH door.

Jody smiled grimly as she picked up the gas canister. She’d guessed right, all the way down the line. Perfect. Rising half to her feet, she lifted the canister over her head.

And as she cocked her arm to throw, a hand closed around hers. “I don’t think so,” a voice murmured in her ear.

Jody jerked violently, her heart suddenly pounding. She wrenched at the grip, trying to pull her hand free, trying to spin around. Trying to do something.

But it was no use. The man behind her had an iron grip, and her efforts didn’t even budge him.

“Come on,” he said with a grunt, hauling her to her feet and pushing her the rest of the way up the stairs. The two men who’d been running for the open door looked back over their shoulders at the little drama, their expressions part startled, part relieved. Jody’s feet reached the deck, and as her captor forced her toward the door his other hand caught her left wrist and pulled it back behind her, twisting it up at the elbow in a hammer-lock hold. “Keep moving,” he added, picking up his pace.

She peered back over her shoulder. It was one of the Marines, wearing the same type of fatigues as the other crewmen she’d seen aboard the Squire. But over the fatigues he’d thrown on his dress tunic.

Which only made sense. The fatigues didn’t have parrot gun epaulets. The dress tunic did.

“Nice try, though,” he continued as he hurried her along. “Your Qasaman friends are good, too—together, you almost had us. Not your fault none of you knew about the hidden sentry post behind the stairs.”

“So it was a trap,” Jody said, a bitter taste in her mouth. “You were there the whole time.”

“Hardly,” the Marine admitted. “I couldn’t come out of hiding and get into the sentry post until we were sure all three Qasamans were at the hatchway. But it’s going to work out just fine, thanks to you and your cleverness.” He bent her arm up a little harder toward her shoulder blades, forcing her to speed up. “Oh, and I wouldn’t count on the gas to knock out the other Marines, either,” he added. “The full combat suit includes gas filters.”

Jody said nothing, her stomach churning on the edge of being sick. So it was over. The Marines would capture or kill Ghushtre and the others, bring Omnathi and Rashida aboard, and as soon as the pilots got the engines going Omnathi would be on his way to Aventine.

And unlike Omnathi, Rashida did know how to find Qasama. In fact, if she’d brought Jody’s recorder along, they would have the location without even having to interrogate anyone.

And it was Jody’s fault. All of it. “You’ve got what you want,” she managed as the Marine pushed her toward the open door. Maybe she could at least salvage Ghushtre’s life out of this. “Let Ghushtre and the others go.”

“And you?” Her captor snorted as he shifted his grip on her right hand and took away the gas canister. “Sorry. Commander Tamu’s taking you back to Aventine.”

Jody took a careful breath. The two pilots were already inside the control room, taking their places at one of the consoles. From behind and beneath her, she could hear the rumble as the engines powered up. Whatever was going to happen at the hatchway was going to happen, and there was nothing in the universe she could do about it.

But it suddenly occurred to her that there was a chance for her to do something here. One last chance.

She waited until they was nearly to the room. Then, bracing herself, she leaned forward at the waist, taking some of the pressure off her arm, and kicked back as hard as she could with her left foot.

The kick went a little wide, her heel slamming into his upper left thigh instead of her intended target. But it was close enough. The man didn’t bellow with pain—Dominion Marines were apparently too tough for that—but she had to bite down on a bellow of her own as his fingers dug into her left wrist. She clamped her teeth together and brought her foot back for another try—

With a shove that sent a dazzling stab of agony up her entire left arm, he shoved her hard through the open doorway.

She stumbled forward, trying to get her feet under her. But her upper body was moving too fast, and she toppled forward toward the deck. As she fell, she twisted her torso a few degrees to the side in midair—

“Get in there, you fremping little horker,” the Marine snarled.

—and as she slammed to the deck on top of her other gas canister it went off, wrenching her back as the pressure of its eruption twisted her hip back around and filled the control room and corridor around her with a sweet-smelling mist.

Her last memory before the darkness took her was of the Marine’s body slamming down onto her legs.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Two hours of instruction, Merrick suspected, was considerably less than the typical winghunter got before setting off into the sky.

Unfortunately, two hours was all he was going to get.

It would have been better if they could have done ast least some of the training outside. To spread the wing out all the way, which Anya couldn’t do in the confines of the hut, to strap himself into the harness that hung beneath the wing and actually see how the control bar moved—that would have been far more useful than the half-open wing and tentative examination of the bar and the struts and bracing wire. Even more helpful would have been some actual in-flight training.

But both were out of the question. The two Trofts were tucked into their aircar just across the clearing, and anything that looked like instruction between two supposedly skilled winghunters would only increase their suspicions.

What the effect on those suspicions would be when Merrick fell out of the sky like a rock tomorrow morning was something he really didn’t want to contemplate.

But even more disturbing than the sense of his own impending doom was the fact that Anya didn’t seem at all worried about it. She was glacially calm, as unruffled as if she was instructing him in a new cooking procedure instead of something that could cost him his life.

She wasn’t just putting up a good front, either. An infrared analysis of her face showed that her calm was genuine.

It took him the entire two hours to figure out a way to ask her about her attitude without making it sound like he was accusing her of not caring whether he lived or died. But when he did ask the question all she would say was that she had ultimate faith in him. Whatever that meant.

The hut had only a single bed. Anya insisted Merrick take it, just as she had back in their Qasaman prison cell. For her own part, she wrapped herself in a blanket and stretched out on a pair of woven-leaf mats on the floor.

Merrick didn’t sleep much that night. When he did drift off, his dreams were filled with horrific images of him plummeting toward the forest below while Anya calmly watched. In some of the dreams, she laughed as he fell past her.

They woke early, and ate breakfast while it was still dark. The meal consisted of a piece of leftover dinner meat that Anya had tucked away beneath the embers the night before. Merrick had expected to find the slab burned to a crisp, but Anya had buried it just deeply enough for the heat above it to keep it warm without overcooking. The Trofts emerged from their car midway through the meal, and for a tense couple of minutes Merrick thought they were going to commandeer the slaves’ food for themselves. But they merely watched the humans eat while munching some kind of field rations of their own.

It seemed uncommonly generous of them, especially since they’d calmly helped themselves to the first cut of the meat the evening before. With the already dark mood Merrick was in, the whole thing felt uncomfortably like he was being granted a condemned man’s last meal.

The group set off as soon as it was light enough to see, Anya and Merrick continuing their trudge up the mountain while the Trofts floated behind in their aircar. The terrain was getting stepper, Merrick noted uneasily, and each time they reached a spot that afforded a view downward he felt a fresh surge of acrophobia-tinged trepidation.

But by midmorning, to his mild surprise, the fear had vanished. Either the emotional part of his brain was tired of dealing with it and had shut down, or the logical part had reluctantly realized that a five-hundred-meter fall wouldn’t kill him any deader than a fifty-meter one.

It wasn’t exactly a comforting thought. But the challenge was looming closer and closer, and he was ready to take anything that would help clear his mind.

It was midafternoon when Anya decided they’d climbed high enough.

[The wings, we shall assemble them there,] she told the Trofts, pointing past a row of short trees to a flat rock outcropping that jutted out from the edge of the cliff. [The rock, it will provide a natural jump-off point.]

[The nets, you have brought them?] the first Troft asked. [The jattorns, I long to feast on them.]

[The nets, we have brought them,] Anya confirmed. [Assistance, we may need it in a moment.]

Both Trofts’ radiator membranes fluttered. [Assistance, you will provide it yourselves,] the second Troft said tartly. [The masters, we are they. The slaves, you are they.]

[Your pardon, I crave it,] Anya said, bowing to him.

[The hunt, you will begin it,] the second Troft bit out.

[The order, I obey it.]

She turned and strode between the trees onto the rock outcropping, pulling off her pack as she walked. Merrick followed, setting his folded wing beside hers. “If you don’t mind, I’ll let you go first,” he murmured as he gingerly lowered himself to his knees on the rock.

“There’s no need for you to assemble your wing,” Anya said softly as she knelt down across her pack from him. “You will not be hunting today.”

A chill ran up Merrick’s back that had nothing to do with the cold mountain air. “What are you talking about?” he asked carefully. For a moment his mind flicked to the Trofts, but his back was to them and without turning around he couldn’t tell whether or not they were watching. “Of course I’ll be hunting today. I can do this.”

She shook her head, a quick, nervous movement. “They’ll know,” she said, her voice starting to shake. “As soon as you take to wing and sky they’ll know you aren’t one of us. They’ll take you, question you, and kill you. And once you are dead, our chance for freedom will be gone.” Her right hand, he noted suddenly, was hovering at the edge of her jacket. “And so, you must not fly.”

“Let me guess,” Merrick said, consciously relaxing his muscles. He saw now where she was going with this. He could only hope that his programmed reflexes could handle it. “You propose to wreck my wing and then take off as if you’re trying to get away from the Trofts. The Trofts chase you, you crash, and they assume you were the spy they were looking for. Problem is, It won’t work.”