Cobra Slave-eARC (2 page)

The Dominion uniforms were the first thing Lorne Broom had noticed on his initial visit to Governor-General Chintawa’s private conference room. That wasn’t all that surprising, really, given the blaze of royal blue shimmer, gold braid and rank epaulets, and neat rows of intricately detailed medal triangles across the officers’ upper chests. They were outfits that were clearly designed to be impressive, intimidating, and more than a little arrogant.

Or maybe it was just the uniforms’ wearers who were intimidating and arrogant, and not the uniforms themselves. After yesterday’s long hours of testimony, Lorne still wasn’t certain which it was.

Hopefully, by the end of today he would either know for sure or would never have to concern himself with it again.

“Welcome back, Cobra Broom,” Commodore Rubo Santores greeted him as two of the uniformed Cobras ushered Lorne to the witness chair in front of the long table and the five Dominion officers seated behind it. “We appreciate your willingness to give us another day of your time.”

“Thank you, Commodore,” Lorne said politely. Like he’d actually had a choice in the matter.

“I trust you had a good night’s rest?” one of the others asked blandly.

Lorne focused on him. Most of the Dominion officers had just sat there during his previous day of testimony, listening closely but otherwise keeping silent. Even Santores seemed to prefer asking short, simple questions and then letting Lorne ramble on at his own pace.

Not so Colonel Milorad Reivaro. He was the whistling image of the stereotypical courtroom bully lawyer, questioning every little nittery error, misstatement, or perceived contradiction. His attitude had quickly turned the room’s atmosphere from that of a simple debriefing into something more akin to an enemy interrogation.

And if there weren’t any errors Reivaro could find to jump on, the man seemed to enjoy being simply and straightforwardly annoying.

Like he was being right now. “As a matter of fact, last night was very unrestful,” Lorne told him, working hard to keep his tone civil. His father, mother, and Great Uncle Corwin had all warned him—repeatedly—not to let Reivaro’s barbs get under his skin. “For some reason Ms. Gendreves thought midnight would be the perfect time to serve a search order and have my temporary quarters turned upside down.”

“Really,” Reivaro said. He didn’t sound perturbed or surprised by the news. “What precisely was the Governor-General’s office looking for?”

Lorne resisted the urge to look over at Governor-General Chintawa, sitting quiet and alone behind the clerk’s desk at the side of the room. “I really can’t say,” he told Reivaro. “You’d have to ask Ms. Gendreves.”

“She didn’t bother to specify?”

“I didn’t bother to listen.”

“I’m sure anything of interest will be sent to us along proper channels,” Santores said. His voice was casual enough, but Lorne had seen this happen a couple of times yesterday. Reivaro had apparently been granted a long leash, but play period was over and it was time to get back to work.

Sure enough, Reivaro leaned back in his seat. “Of course, sir,” he said. “I’m sure Cobra Broom is anxious to get back to his hunting duties out in Donyang province.”

“DeVegas province,” Lorne corrected mildly. On an impulse, he keyed in the infrared part of his optical enhancers. “I’m stationed in DeVegas, not Donyang.”

On the infrared view, Reivaro’s face changed color slightly as his skin flushed with extra blood. Lorne’s generation of Cobra enhancements had the fine-tuning necessary to watch for the subtle signs of anger or embarrassment, and he had the satisfaction of seeing both emotions flick across the colonel’s face.

It was childish, he knew, to correct the man’s error in front of his fellow officers and the Cobra Worlds’ governor-general. But he had to admit it felt good.

And at least he didn’t follow up the spike with a bland smile. Reivaro, he felt sure, would have done that.

“Correction noted,” Santores said.

Lorne shifted his attention to the commodore. The other’s voice was suddenly very formal. He wasn’t smiling, either, blandly or otherwise.

“I thought the record should be kept straight,” Lorne said, matching the other’s tone.

“So it should,” Santores said. “Perhaps we can move on to actual testimony now?”

“Of course,” Lorne said, feeling his face flush with belated annoyance at himself. He would probably hear about this later from his parents and Uncle Corwin. “I believe we were in the middle of the battle of Azras.”

“Let’s go back a bit to your trip from Caelian to Qasama,” Santores said, twitching his left eyelid once. From what Lorne had been able to glean from bits of conversation, that was how Dominion people accessed their communications and data search systems. “You said you traveled aboard a ship of the Tlos’khin’fahi demesne?”

“That’s correct,” Lorne said, frowning. Yesterday’s testimony had progressed far beyond that particular point. Why in the Worlds was Santores going all the way back to Caelian now? “The Tlossie second heir, Ingidi-inhiliziyo, took us aboard his ship at Caelian—”

“You and the Isis equipment,” Reivaro put in.

“Yes,” Lorne said, suppressing a sigh. Inevitably, it seemed, the conversation somehow always came back to Isis. The Integrated Structural Implantation System that Dr. Glas Croi and the Troft demesne-heir Ingidi-inhiliziyo had created—the automated surgical machinery that the Aventine press had unimaginatively labeled the Cobra Factory—had become a virtual obsession with Reivaro.

And it didn’t take a genius to see that dragging up Isis every chance he got didn’t bode well for the treason charges looming over the whole Broom family. Nissa Gendreves was pushing hard to turn her formal charges into a formal trial, and though Chintawa had so far been able to sidetrack her with procedural tricks, those delaying tactics had to be close to bottoming out. Santores had made it clear that if the Cobra Worlds weren’t prepared to deal with the charges quickly and efficiently, the commodore himself was.

On the other hand…

Lorne stole a quick look at the man to Santores’s left. Sitting straight and tall, his face composed and unreadable, was Captain Barrington Moreau, commander of the Dorian and decorated member of the Dominion Fleet.

And, perhaps more significantly, Lorne’s mother Jin’s second cousin.

Why was he here? That was the question the family had been pondering ever since their first polite but somewhat strained meeting with Barrington a few days ago. Their conversation had been hurried, sandwiched between the parade of official testimonies, and they hadn’t gotten very far past the pleasantries and what Lorne’s father Paul called reception-room chatter. To Lorne, the formal tone of the meeting had made it feel almost like an afterthought, as if Barrington had been idly reading up on family history during the long voyage and suddenly discovered he was related to some of the original Cobra Worlds’ colonists.

Which was absurd, of course. According to Santores, the three warships had taken eight months to circle around the Troft and Minthisti-controlled sections of space on their voyage here. The Dominion Military Command would hardly have plucked Barrington and his ship from whatever duty they’d been on and sent them along just on some random whim.

Unless it hadn’t been the military’s idea at all.

Lorne’s great-grandfather Jonny Moreau had died relatively young, suffering from anemia, arthritis, and all the rest of the physical ailments that still plagued the men who volunteered their lives to become Cobras. It was a foreshortened future Lorne himself was facing, and one he tried very hard not to think about. But Jonny’s brother Jame had been a few years younger than he was, and hadn’t carried the handicap of Cobra gear inside his body. Moreover, at the time the Dominion and Cobra Worlds lost contact, Jame had been on the fast track to becoming a member of the Dominion’s Central Committee.

Could Jame Moreau still be alive? He would be somewhere around a hundred and twenty by now, a decade or two beyond the best lifespan anyone on the Cobra Worlds had yet been able to manage. But Lorne had no idea what the current state of Dominion medicine was; and whatever that state was, Dominion Committés would certainly have the benefits of the very best of it.

And if Jame was alive, could he still be in power? Or at least have the ear of the people in power?

Could it have been Jame Moreau himself who’d pulled strings so that his grandson Barrington could come and see what had become of this branch of his family?

“While you were aboard the Tlos’khin’fahi ship,” Santores continued, “did you ever have occasion to enter the command or navigational areas?”

Lorne snapped his attention back from his musings. The command area? What kind of question was that? “I was on the bridge a couple of times, yes,” he said.

“Were you close enough to get a look at any of the navigational readouts?”

“I don’t know,” Lorne said.

“It’s a simple question,” Reivaro put in impatiently. “Did you get close enough to the navigational displays to read them, or didn’t you?”

“And I said I don’t know,” Lorne repeated. “Even if I was, I certainly wasn’t paying any attention to them.”

“Because you were focusing on how to get Isis down and into Qasaman hands?”

“Because we were focusing on how to win the damn war,” Lorne shot back.

“Which you did,” Santores said, inclining his head slightly. “And our sincerest congratulations on that.”

He twitched his eyelid again. “As you said a moment ago, yesterday’s session ended with your attack on the Troft warship outside Azras. Let’s go ahead and pick it up from there.”

#

Captain Joshti Lij Tulu of the Algonquin muttered a curse. “Unbelievable,” he said, twitching his eyelid to close off the data stream. “One world, against a combined invasion force of at least three Troft demesnes?”

“And without any modern weapons,” Barrington added.

“No, I literally mean unbelievable,” Lij Tulu growled. “Broom is lying. There has to be more to this.”

“Like what?” Barrington asked.

“Like maybe the Qasamans had a lot more help than Broom says they did,” Lij Tulu said. “These three demesnes—the Tlos’khin’fahi, Hoibe’ryi’sarai and—what’s the other one?—the Chrii’pra’pfwoi. Maybe they’re the ones who intervened and kicked the invaders off the planet.”

“Why would he lie?” Barrington asked.

“Please,” Lij Tulu said scornfully. “Can’t you hear it in his voice? He’s madly in love with these Qasamans—the whole damn Broom family is. He’d say anything—he’d believe anything—that made them look superhuman.”

“If they’re so superhuman, why did they need the Isis equipment?” Barrington countered.

At the head of the table, Santores stirred. “It doesn’t matter how they threw the invaders off Qasama,” he said quietly. “Whether they did it themselves or had strong enough ties with the Tlos’khin’fahi and others to get them to do it for them, the point remains that they did drive the invaders away. And not just from Qasama, either, but apparently from the Cobra Worlds, as well.”

“With a lot of help from Caelian, if Nissa Gendreves’s testimony is to be believed,” Barrington reminded him.

“Yes,” Santores murmured. “I’m thinking that we’ve found exactly what we’re looking for.” His lips compressed. “Except that we haven’t really found it, have we?”

For a moment the room was silent. “We could, though,” Lij Tulu said.

Barrington twitched up the data stream and ran it down the transcript of Lorne Broom’s testimony, feeling a swirl of conflict churning through his stomach. It was necessary, he knew.

But necessary or not, the boy was kin, his second cousin once removed. What Lij Tulu was suggesting… “What if we tried the parents again?” he suggested. “They were all in the Troft control room together, and they may be able to see the big picture better than their son.”

“Are you serious?” Lij Tulu scoffed. “Paul Broom owes the Qasamans his leg. Jasmine Broom owes them her life. I’d rank those beside hero worship any day of the month.” He looked back at Santores. “Commodore, we’ve asked for cooperation. We haven’t gotten it. In my opinion, it’s time to bring in the MindsEye.”

“Your intent being to use it on the Brooms?” Barrington shook his head. “My patron would strongly oppose any such suggestion.”

“Your patron’s not here,” Lij Tulu countered tartly. “And we have a job to do.” He raised his eyebrows. “Commodore?”

“I agree the MindsEye is our best hope at this point,” Santores said. “But there’s a problem. I’d hoped Colonel Reivaro’s public focus on the Isis project would pressure Chintawa to back down to the point where we could take custody of the Brooms. Unfortunately, it’s also motivated Nissa Gendreves to push that much harder to have the family tried by the Cobra Worlds government. It looks to me like that Chintawa is starting to lean that direction, and once any such trial begins the family will be off-limits to us.”

“Why do we care what Chintawa and Gendreves want or don’t want?” Lij Tulu growled. “We’re the Dominion of Man. If we want the Brooms, why can’t we just take them?”

“Because we also want to maintain good relations with the local leadership,” Santores said firmly. “Until we know everything about this place, including how the various Troft demesnes fit into the picture, we need their cooperation.”

“But the Brooms are charged with treason,” Lij Tulu said. “The locals have to grant authority to us, don’t they?”

“In theory, yes,” Santores said. “But there are two problems. I’ve looked through the statutes, including the original Cobra Worlds charter. It appears there’s no provision for an accredited Dominion force to assume power.”

Lij Tulu stared. “That’s insane,” he said. “That provision’s always in planetary charters.”

“It is now; it apparently wasn’t back then,” Santores said. “Don’t forget, the whole purpose behind the Cobra Worlds was to have a place where Dome could get rid of the Cobra war veterans before their presence became a danger to the Dominion as a whole. I can see some short-sighted Committé rationalizing that no one was ever going to come out here again and therefore not bothering to add it to their charter.”