Cobra Slave-eARC (19 page)

“No, I’m okay,” Jody said, bending the truth only a little as she looked up.

To find the last face on Caelian she’d expected smiling tightly down at her. “Tammling?” she breathed. “But I thought—” She broke off, dropping her eyes to the burn marks the Marine’s lasers had cut through his tunic. “You just got shot.”

“What, that?” He made a rude-sounding burble with his lips. “I got hit way worse during the war. We just wanted to see how close you could get before the Dommies’ auto-target stuff kicked in.”

“You mean the backstab thing Tamu mentioned?” Jody asked, turning her head to look the other direction. They were coming up fast on the edge of the roof. “Uh—”

“Right—backstab,” Tammling said. “Nice appropriate name for it, huh? Anyway—”

“Tammling—the edge—”

“Hang on,” Tammling said.

A second later Jody found herself once more arcing through the air as Tammling leaped over a narrow alleyway to the next building over.

A much smaller building than the one they’d just left, with another wide street beyond it. “How much more of this is there?” Jody asked, hoping the bouncing covered up the quavering in her voice.

“Almost there,” Tammling soothed her. “Hopefully, Williams is in position.”

Jody felt her eyes bulge. “Hopefully?”

“Relax,” Tammling said with a chuckle. “Here goes nothing. Good luck.”

Jody clenched her teeth and folded her arms tightly across her chest. A second later, she was once again flying solo through the air with the city spinning beneath her.

The flight this time seemed shorter than the first one, though that might just have been because she was marginally more used to it. However it happened, a frozen moment later she landed with another disorienting thud in someone’s arms, followed by the same short drop and controlled deceleration as Cobra knee servos took the impact. “Jody Broom?” an unfamiliar voice asked.

Jody’s first impulse was to ask who else he was expecting to be flying over the streets this afternoon. But she resisted the urge. “Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Jameson Williams,” he said as he bent over and set her feet back onto solid ground again. “We’ve never met, but I wanted to tell you how much I admire your family. It was mainly because of your mother and father that I decided to became a Cobra.”

“Oh,” Jody said. She’d been hit with similar comments in the past, and she had yet to figure out a good answer. “Thanks. I’m sure they appreciate it.” She glanced around at the people moving along the streets, all of them studiously ignoring the couple who’d just dropped out of the sky. “Where are we?”

“Oakleaf and Sun,” he said. “Where are you trying to go?”

“Aerie,” Jody said, frowning. “You telling me you don’t even know that?”

“All I got was the whistle to get ready for a skyhook and a handflap with your name,” Williams said, taking her arm and starting down the street. “Come on—we’re parking the aircars indoors these days.”

Jody kept an eye on the streets and the people as Williams hurried her along, watching especially for burgundy-black Dominion uniforms. But apparently the Marines hadn’t made it to this part of town yet.

They ended up two blocks later in a small warehouse with a large gash through its glazed-stone facing. “Used to be a food processing area,” Williams grunted as he forced open the door from its visibly distorted frame. “One of the Troft missiles blew it open to the air, and that was pretty much that.”

“Doesn’t look like there’s much food to be processed right now, anyway,” Jody said as they went inside. There were three aircars parked inside the building, none of them in terrific shape, but none of them looking like it would disintegrate out from under her, either. “How do we get it out?”

“Loading door in the back,” Williams said, heading toward the darkness at the rear of the building. “Pick one and get it started—keys should be on the seat.”

“Right.” Jody stepped to the closest vehicle, a bright red six-seater that seemed to have fewer dents and scrapes than the other two. She pulled open the door, spotted the keys on the seat—

“Hold!” a voice ordered tersely from behind her.

She spun around. Three Dominion Marines were standing just inside the building, two to the right of the doorway, the other to the left. “Who are you?” she demanded, trying to put some outrage into her voice. “What do you want?”

“Marine Sergeant Tapper,” the man on the left said. “And you, Jody Broom, are under arrest.”

Jody stifled a curse. “On what charge?”

“Attempting to flee possible felony charges will do for starters,” Tapper said, motioning the other two men forward. “You were ordered not to leave the Government Building, and yet here you are.”

“I was given no such order,” Jody insisted.

“I was told you had,” Tapper said. If he was disturbed by the discrepancy, it didn’t show in his voice. “That’ll be for you and Commander Tamu to work out. As for you, Cobra, whatever you’re planning back there, I strongly suggest you reconsider.”

Jody looked over her shoulder. She couldn’t see Williams anywhere, but she had no doubt he was lurking somewhere.

And after what had happened to Tammling…

“It’s all right,” she called, moving toward the Marines. “It’s all right. Don’t do anything—please. I’ll go with them. It’s all right.”

There was no response. Nothing but a brooding silence from the rest of the building. Tapper took Jody’s arm as she reached him, pulling her gently but firmly in front of him. He motioned his men to leave, then backed through the doorway after them.

Jody had half expected to find a Cobra ambush waiting out on the street. But there were only the ordinary citizens moving about their business. Unlike earlier, though, Jody could see many of them furtively eyeing the strangers as Tapper marched them briskly in the direction of the gate.

“How did you know I’d left the Government Building?” Jody asked as they walked. “Did you just happen to spot me, or what?”

“Trolling for information?” Tapper gave a derisive snort. “Go ahead—it doesn’t matter. I could give you the whole schematic stack for inversion-layer reflectives and it still wouldn’t help. How back-wash people with century-old technology think they can just sneak around without us knowing all about it is beyond the senses.”

“Must be something about frontier life,” Jody said, fighting back her reflexive anger. “Speaking of which, if you’re thinking about walking across the field to your ship, I strongly suggest you reconsider.”

“No fears,” he said, pointing at the sleek aircar just visible around the next corner. “The ordinaries can walk. Important snags like you get to ride.”

A minute later, they were in the aircar and soaring over the city, heading toward the Dominion ship.

Jody gazed down as they flew, noting the small but growing crowd behind Tamu and his Marines. The commander would probably be highly pleased when he learned that she’d been picked up and spirited away from the protection of Uy and his Cobras.

Hopefully, he would be pleased enough that it would never occur to him that this was exactly what she’d been going for in the first place.

Uy had wanted ears on Tamu’s pitch to Stronghold’s people. In just a few minutes, he would have them.

Of course, she would then have to find a way to slip into the main group and listen. After that would come the task of getting the information out of the ship and back to Uy and Omnathi. After that it would be handy if she could find a way to get out of the ship herself.

But she would figure it out. She was a Broom, and a Moreau. Somehow, she would figure it out.

CHAPTER TEN

Lorne’s first day at Bitter Creek wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Mayor Mary McDougal welcomed him politely enough, the people he met were civil, and the spine leopards hadn’t encroached as much on the edges of town as he’d feared they would during the couple of weeks the town had been without full-time Cobra protection.

Best of all, there was no mention of Tristan’s death during the invasion, or how Lorne hadn’t been there during their local war against the Trofts, or how Lorne would never measure up to a fine local boy like Tristan.

At least, none of that got said within Lorne’s hearing.

The biggest challenge, in fact, looked like it was going to be adjusting his biological clock to a sleep schedule consisting up of two- to three-hour, round-the-clock naps.

It was just after dawn on his first full day in town, and he was very much looking forward to one of those naps, as he parked the grav-lift cycle they’d given him and headed inside the grocery-goods store that doubled as the city building. Mayor McDougal was already at her desk behind the counter, working at her comboard. “Morning,” she said, a distracted smile on her round face as she nodded to him in greeting. “Any trouble?”

“Not really,” Lorne said, hungrily eyeing the other chair behind the counter next to McDougal. But he was still officially on duty, and tradition and professional pride dictated that he remain standing in the presence of his supervisor. “I chased away a couple of families snooping around a livestock shelter to the southwest, and I cleaned out a way station along one of the big creeks further north.”

“One of the ones that goes through the forest?” McDougal asked, frowning. “Which one?”

“I’m not sure,” Lorne said, wincing. He’d studied some of the area maps yesterday, but the local geography was still something of a jumble in his mind. “It went through a culvert under the perimeter road. But I guess they all do that, don’t they?”

“Were its banks mostly just mud and reeds, or were there a lot of stones and big rocks at the waterline?”

“There were a fair amount of stones,” Lorne said, thinking back. “At least at the spot where I found the way station.”

“Stony Creek.” McDougal smiled lopsidedly. “Yes, I know—we’re not very creative with our names around here.” Her smile faded. “Stony Creek. Damn.”

“Trouble?”

“There’s a crew supposed to be taking down a stand of blueleaf trees this morning along that creek about half a kilometer from the road into the forest,” McDougal said. “Tristan always said that if you saw one way station, there were two more you didn’t see.”

“That’s about right,” Lorne said heavily. And he’d been so looking forward to a couple of hours of sleep. “Do you want me to head back and see if I can find them?”

For a moment McDougal seemed tempted. Then, reluctantly, she shook her head. “No, you need to get some sleep,” she said. “Besides, Tristan also said it was easier to find the way stations at night when the beasts were on the move.” She scrolled down her comboard. “Let’s see if we can get clever. Okay. If they reschedule to that oak stand out north this morning, then shift to the blueleaves after you’ve had a nap…”

A faint noise in the distance caught Lorne’s attention: the sound of an approaching aircar. “You expecting company?” he asked.

“Not me,” McDougal said, frowning toward the window. “Doesn’t sound like one of ours, either. Maybe your new friends from Archway are back to see how you’re doing.”

Lorne scowled. Now that she mentioned it, the grav lifts did sound like the ones on the aircar Khahar and Chimm had swooped in on yesterday morning. “Could be,” Lorne told her, heading for the door. “Better stay inside. I’ll go see what they want.”

It was indeed a Dominion aircar that settled to the ground outside the store a minute later. The two men who got out were equally familiar. “Good morning, Sergeant,” Lorne said as politely as he could as Khahar and Chimm strode toward him. “Bored with life in Archway already?”

“That’s funny,” Khahar said with a grunt as he stopped a couple of meters away. “Get in the car.”

Lorne frowned. They walked all they way over here from the car just to tell him they were all getting right back in and leaving? “Why?” he asked.

“Because there’s trouble, and we need you back there,” Khahar said. “We’ll explain on the way.” He stepped forward and to his left, clearly heading to get behind Lorne.

“Whoa,” Lorne protested, taking a quick step to his own left to keep both Marines in sight. “I can’t just run off, not even to Archway. I’ve been assigned here, and I’m on duty.”

“And Colonel Reivaro is reassigning you,” Chimm said.

“Reivaro’s not in my chain of command,” Lorne countered. “I can’t leave without a good reason.”

“How about a general riot?” Khahar growled. “That a good enough reason?”

Lorne felt his eyes widen. “A riot? What the hell have you been doing down there?”

“Hey, it’s your people who’ve gone off the deep end, not ours,” Chimm shot back.

“Like I said, we’ll explain on the way,” Khahar said, taking another step forward. “Come on, come on—the colonel needs every man he can get, and that includes you Cobras.”

Another quiet alarm went off in the back of Lorne’s mind. Reivaro was still in Archway? That didn’t make any sense at all.

Unless, of course, this whole alleged riot was nothing more than Reivaro taking another run at getting Lorne into a dark room and trying to squeeze Qasama’s location out of him. “I understand,” he said, taking another step back and pulling out his comm. “But like I said, I’m on duty. Any changes have to be cleared with the commandant first.”

“Are you tired, Broom, or just naturally stupid?” Khahar demanded impatiently. “Commandant Ishikuma has been relieved. You know that. Colonel Reivaro’s in command now.”

“I wasn’t talking about Commandant Ishikuma,” Lorne said, punching in a number. “I was talking about Commandant Dreysler, supreme Cobra commander on Aventine. He has final say on everything we do.”

Khahar and Chimm looked at each other. “Fine,” Khahar growled. “Make it fast.”

The comm clicked and a woman answered. “This is Cobra Lorne Broom,” Lorne identified himself. “It’s urgent that I speak with Commandant Dreysler right away.”

#

The night’s drive had been long and tedious, the monotony punctuated mainly by soreness in Jin’s hips, soreness in her lower back, and an occasional fatigue cramp in one of her legs. There had been several times through the long hours when she’d nearly given up and asked Paul to stop at a motel where they could get a few hours of real sleep.