Cobra Slave-eARC (12 page)

“Just a moment,” Reivaro said, finally breaking free of the paralysis that had settled over the room. “You have no authority to give orders to these men.”

Ishikuma looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Who the hell are you?”

“Colonel Milorad Reivaro,” Reivaro said stiffly. “You’ve been relieved of command, Commandant. The Dominion of Man is in charge here.”

“You need to take another look at the statutes, Colonel,” Ishikuma said. “I’m not relieved until Commandant Dreysler says I’m relieved. He hasn’t. So I’m not. I gave you an order, Cobra de Portola.”

“Yes, sir.” De Portola unglued himself from the floor and headed for Lorne. “Cobra Broom?”

“Marines, seal that door,” Reivaro snapped. “No one leaves here without my permission.”

The two Marines closest to the door took three long steps each, stopping in front of the door and turning back in perfect unison to face the rest of the group.

Once again, the room filled with a rigid silence. “Colonel Reivaro,” Ishikuma said, almost too quietly for Lorne to hear without his enhancements, “you have thirty seconds to order your men away from the door and permit Cobra de Portola to carry out his orders.”

“And if I don’t?” Reivaro asked just as quietly.

“There will be bloodshed,” Ishikuma said, his voice dropping into liquid nitrogen range. “And because you have no legal reason to impede the movements of my men—and you don’t have one, or you’d already have stated it—the blame and the blood will be squarely on your hands. I doubt very much that Commodore Santores will have any option but to throw you to the wolves. Possibly literally.”

For a long moment the two men stared unblinkingly at each other. Keeping his head motionless, Lorne put targeting locks on the four Marines within his field of vision.

The thought that the standoff might escalate to actual combat both horrified and sickened him. But if it did, he was damned if he would stand here and not do whatever he could to protect his fellow Cobras. The seconds counted down…

And as his clock circuit reached Ishikuma’s thirty-second ultimatum Reivaro finally stirred. “Stand down,” he growled. “They can go about their business.”

“Thank you,” Ishikuma said, his voice about as far from actual gratitude as Lorne had ever heard. “Cobra de Portola?”

“Yes, sir.” De Portola stepped to Lorne’s side and gestured toward the door. Throwing a last look at Ishikuma’s profile, Lorne followed de Portola between the two glowering Marines and out of the room.

As the door closed behind them, de Portola picked up speed. Lorne matched his pace to keep up, cancelling the target locks he’d set up. A few seconds later they passed the Marine door warden—who was also glowering—and emerged once again into the chilly morning breeze.

Lorne took a deep breath, marveling at how clean the air smelled after what had nearly gone down in there. “What the hell was that?” he murmured.

“That was Ishikuma saving your hide,” de Portola said grimly, angling toward the car they’d arrived in. “Come on, we’ll take the car. It’ll be faster than walking.”

“Saving my hide?” Lorne frowned, playing back his memory of the showdown. No—that couldn’t have been an act. Could it?

“Believe it, buddy,” de Portola said, wrenching open the car door and sliding behind the wheel. “You really think Ishikuma’s too stupid to realize that giving Isis to the Qasamans was the move that won the whole damn war? Come on—get in before Reivaro’s blood pressure drops back to normal and he figures out his next move.”

“But this is crazy,” Lorne protested, getting in beside him. “I can see why they want Jody, what with—you know. But I’ve already told them I don’t know where Qasama is.”

“Maybe they don’t believe you,” de Portola said, backing out of the parking space and gunning the car out onto the deserted street. “Maybe they just think you’ll be good leverage when they finally track her down. But they do want you. Why else would Reivaro have tried so hard to force you into confessing you’d been involved in last night’s incident?”

“Or trying to get me to refuse his order to make Yates give up his factory,” Lorne said as the pieces finally fell into place. “He wants to get me on some Dominion charge so that he and Santores can pry me away from Chintawa.”

“Bingo,” de Portola said. “And as a side note, I’ll point out that by laying into you in front of all those witnesses Ishikuma made it clear that none of us are going to lift a finger to help you out in any way.” He hunched his shoulders. “Hopefully, this will all blow over and that won’t be necessary. But if it doesn’t…”

For a minute they drove in silence. Lorne gazed out the window, again feeling the disorientation of watching his universe shift around him. He’d just been through the hell of one war. Was Commodore Santores really this determined to push them to the edge of another?

He stole a sideways look at the scar on de Portola’s cheek. The Cobras in Capitalia might have obeyed Chintawa’s order to sit out the Troft invasion. But it was clear that the Cobras out here in the expansion regions hadn’t.

And if Santores ordered those Cobras into a war against the Hoibies…

“How did you knock out those Marines?” he asked suddenly.

De Portola shot him a suspicious look. “Why? You thinking about trying it?”

“I’m thinking it would be a nice thing to have in my skill set,” Lorne said. “You and Werle seemed to do just fine.”

“Only because we were lucky,” de Portola said. “We caught them by surprise. And we caught them in their dress uniforms instead of these night-fighter things they all seem to be wearing now. Or weren’t you paying attention during our joint spine leopard hunt this morning?”

“Yeah, I saw the lasers in the epaulets and the electrical grid pattern in the torso sections,” Lorne confirmed. “Any idea what that grid thing was all about?”

“I’m guessing it had something to do with rigidity,” de Portola said. “You notice the pattern was only over the core body sections and didn’t extend over the major limbs or joints. I’m guessing it was a sort of instant armor, with the positioning a compromise between protection and mobility.”

“Not that they seem to do a lot of moving when they fight,” Lorne pointed out. De Portola’s analysis made sense—the Qasaman combat suits had similar stiffeners running through the material, also triggered by small currents.

Except that the Qasaman suits had used that rigidity in conjunction with strength-enhancing servos, allowing their Djinn warriors to mimic Cobra combat abilities. If de Portola was right, the Dominion Marines were mainly interested in the protection aspects of the system.

“Yeah, well, it’s not like they have to do much moving,” de Portola said sourly. “Did you happen to catch the fire pattern from their epaulets?”

“They were punching out figure-eights,” Lorne said, nodding. “Scatter-gun approach—they weren’t sure where the spine leopard kill points were, so they fired everywhere and hoped for the best.”

“Basically,” de Portola said. “Except for one small detail. They weren’t doing that targeting manually. I mean, I’m sure they were firing manually, but the figure-eights were pre-programmed.”

Lorne raised his eyebrows. “Really? I thought parrot guns just fired wherever the gunner was looking.”

“Maybe that’s how they worked a hundred years ago,” de Portola said. “But they’ve gotten more sophisticated since then. Another thing: I got a good look at their tactics on that second encounter, and neither of them so much as looked over their shoulders during the attack. Either they’re more arrogant or stupid than they have any right to be, or else they’ve got some kind of sensor array watching their backs.”

“Tied into the parrot guns, no doubt,” Lorne agreed. “I wonder how they keep from shooting each other if one of them happens to come into range.”

De Portola shrugged. “Must have some kind of Identify Friend/Foe setup. They’d be stupid to run that kind of weaponry without one.”

“True,” Lorne said. “On the other hand, the Trofts on Qasama had IFF systems, too, and we found a way to turn them to our advantage. I’ll bet we can do it here, too.”

“Maybe,” de Portola said. “One more thing. As near as I could tell, their right forefingers twitched each time they fired, so that must be the firing mechanism. And you were right, the targeting is optical—they looked at each spine leopard before they fired. But it seemed to be a single, real-time system, without the multiple sequential targeting locks we have.”

“Maybe those extras come with a helmet or visor or something,” Lorne said, looking curiously at the other. “You got all this while you were wrestling with a spine leopard?”

“What wrestling?” de Portola asked with a shrug. “The thing was already dead. I just wanted an excuse to flail around in one place while I watched them work.”

Lorne shook his head. “You always were a little nuts.”

“Yeah, I got a lot of that from people during the war,” he said ruefully. “So. You have anything to add to our little library?”

“Only that all that fancy figure-eight programming is probably tucked away inside the inner edges of the epaulets,” Lorne told him. “Those were the only places that weren’t warm after all the firing.”

“Really,” de Portola said thoughtfully. “Nice—I missed that one. I wonder what happens if you fry those spots.”

“I doubt it totally disables the lasers,” Lorne said. “That would be a pretty stupid design. I’d guess it probably kills any programming presets, though. So how did you take them out back in town?”

“Like I said, we were lucky,” de Portola said. “Badj blew out a tire as they passed, and when they opened their doors we dropped in from above and behind and zapped them with a combination of sonics and our stunners.” He gestured. “But don’t count on getting away with that one now. Any material as shiny as those combat suits has to have some serious conductivity going. I wouldn’t even trust a full-power arcthrower to get through, let alone a stun blast. And if they’re smart, they’ll already have a defense ready against sonics.”

“Though you could go for a head shot with your stunner,” Lorne pointed out.

“Bad idea,” de Portola warned. “Current designed to overload voluntary-muscle nerves might have nasty side effects when blasted straight to the brain. It might even kill him.”

“Which is the last thing we want right now,” Lorne agreed, wincing. Still, if it ever came down to one of them or one of his fellow Cobras…

Firmly, he pushed the thought away. His job—all the Cobras’ jobs—was to make sure it didn’t come to that. “What happened to Tristan?” he asked.

De Portola’s lips compressed briefly. “He was killed in a raid on one of the Troft ships,” he said. He threw Lorne a tight smile. “Did you know they had to bring a second warship to Archway? We made that much of a nuisance of ourselves that they actually needed reinforcements.”

“Good for you,” Lorne said, inclining his head. “I wish I’d been here to help.”

“Yeah.” De Portola’s smile faded. “You know…I’d like to think it all meant something. All the work. Especially all the lives.”

“It did,” Lorne assured him. “Believe me. The victory at Qasama might have been what brought the Tlossies and other demesnes into the war, but it was you and the Caelians and everyone else who convinced the invaders not to argue the point when the Tlossie ships showed up. Not to mention that every ship and Troft you pinned down here was one the Qasamans didn’t have to deal with. No, you guys did your part. And everyone knows it.”

“Yeah,” de Portola said. “Maybe.”

A minute later they pulled onto the field. Ten minutes after that, they were in an aircar headed for the tiny farming and logging community of Bitter Creek.

Where Lorne would try to step into the shoes of a favorite son. A man who’d been killed in a war that Lorne had fought, not alongside the rest of them, but on a foreign world forty-five light years away.

He sighed. It was looking to be a long, long day.

#

For the first six hours after Jin’s confrontation with Commodore Santores, she’d been unable to rest, her heart and brain working feverishly and uselessly, wondering if Lorne was indeed going to fall into Santores’s trap.

Occasionally she was able to sit on the edge of her bed for a few minutes at a time. But she was too tense to stay there for long. Mostly she paced back and forth across the tiny holding cell, her enhanced hearing on nervous edge as she waited for the sound of arrogant Dominion footsteps in the corridor outside.

Paul, for his part, had listened to her hurriedly whispered summary of the meeting, and then had stayed out of her way, letting her work it through the only way she could. For a couple of hours, to her guilty annoyance, he actually managed to get some sleep.

But for those first hours the corridor outside had held only the occasional non-arrogant footsteps and murmurings of the two Cobra guards on duty. Once, a meal was delivered by a silent jailer. No one came to gloat, or threaten, or even remind them that the Dominion still cared they were in here.

Eventually, Jin had managed to persuade herself that that was in itself good news. Had Lorne been caught in the Dominion’s scheme, surely something would have happened by now. Santores wasn’t the type to pass up the opportunity to personally bring the news that Lorne was in his hands.

And so, for the past two hours the tension had been slowly draining away, allowing her to lie down, even doze a little.

It was eight hours and seventeen minutes after the Marines had returned her to her cell when they finally had a real visitor. But this time it wasn’t Dominion Marines or even a gloating Santores.

“Cobras,” Governor-General Chintawa greeted them gravely as he stepped into the cell. He gestured, and some unseen person outside closed the door behind him. “How are you holding up?”

“We’re fine,” Paul said, “considering we’re being held without charges.” He raised his eyebrows. “Or is that by deliberate design?”

“Of course it’s by design,” Chintawa confirmed sourly. “The minute I file specific charges, Gendreves and Santores will have something tangible they can deal with. As long as you’re nothing but vague persons-of-interest, there’s nothing either of them can get a grip on.”