Cobra Bargain

Chapter 12

It started easily enough, as forest travel went. Within a few meters of the crash site she ran into a patch of mutually interlocking fern-like plants that lasted most of the first kilometer, giving her the feeling of wading through knee-deep water; and she'd barely left the ferns behind when she found herself having to use fingertip lasers to cut through a maze of tree-clinging vines that reminded her of Aventinian gluevines with five-centimeter thorns. But physical obstacles were the least of her worries, and even as she used lasers and servo strength to good advantage against the forest's best efforts, she tried to keep as much of her attention as possible on the subtle sounds filtering in through her audio enhancers.

The first attack came, in retrospect, right where she should have expected it: at the spot where the forest undergrowth abruptly vanished into a wide path of trampled earth bearing northwest. The path of a bololin herd... and where there were bololins, there were bound to be krisjaws, too.

She didn't identify the attacker as a krisjaw at first, of course. It wasn't until after the brief battle was over, and she was able to turn over the laser-blackened corpse and get a clear look at the wavy, flame-shaped canines that she could positively identify the beast. Vicious, cunning, and dangerous was how krisjaws has been described to her; and even with only this one interaction to go on she could well understand why the first generation of humans to reach Qasama had done their damnedest to try and wipe the things out.

Wrapping a field bandage from her kit around the gash the predator's claws had torn in her left forearm, she continued on her way. Krisjaws were as nasty as

Layn had warned, but now that she knew what to listen for she should be able to avoid being sneaked up on. If the forest didn't get any worse, she decided, she should be able to get through all right.

The forest, unfortunately, got worse.

The line of trampled undergrowth marking the bololins' route turned out to be nearly three kilometers wide, and within that cleared area an astonishing number of ground animals and their ecological hangers-on had set up shop. Insects buzzed around her in large numbers, attracted perhaps by the blood from her injuries. Most of them were merely annoying, but at least one large type was equipped with stingers and showed little compunction about using them. It was as she was swatting at a group of those that she found out that krisjaws weren't

Qasama's only predator species.

This kind-vaguely monkey-like except for their six clawed limbs-hunted in packs, and it cost her another clawing before she found the best way to deal with them.

Her omnidirectional sonic, designed originally to foul up nearby electronic gear, turned out to be equally effective in disrupting the monkeys' intergroup communication, and the arcthrower with its thundering flash of current scattered them yipping back into the cover of the surrounding trees.

Unfortunately, the sonic had an unexpected side effect, that of attracting a species of gliding lizard that, like the monkeys, launched their attacks in groups from the trees above her. Smaller and less dangerous than the larger predators, they were also too stupid to be frightened by the arcthrower's flash.

She wound up having to kill all of them, collecting several small needle-toothed bites in the process.

It seemed like forever before she finally reached the road cutting across her path.

Captain Rivero Koja gazed down at the high-resolution photo on his viewing screen, a cold hand clenched around his heart. The line of destruction through the Qasaman forest could mean only one thing. "Hell," he said softly.

For a long moment the Southern Cross's bridge was silent, save for the quiet clicking of keys from the scanner chiefs station. "What happened?" Koja asked at last.

First Officer LuCass shrugged helplessly. "Impossible to tell, sir," he said.

"Some malfunction, perhaps, that knocked them too far off their glide path-"

"Or else maybe someone shot them down?" Koja snapped, his simmering frustration and helplessness boiling out as anger.

"The Trofts claimed that wouldn't happen," LuCass reminded him.

"Yeah. Right." Koja took a deep breath, fought the rage back down to a cold anger. If only the Southern Cross had been overhead when the shuttle went down, instead of in their own orbit half a world away. If only they'd been there; had seen the crash as it happened, instead of finding out about it an hour afterward...

And if they had, it wouldn't have made any difference. None at all. Even if the

Southern Cross had the capability of landing down there-which it didn't-they would still have been too late to save anyone. A crash like that would have killed everyone on board on impact. Koja closed his eyes briefly. At least, he thought, it would have been quick. It wasn't much consolation.

"I'll be damned," the scanner chief muttered abruptly into his thoughts.

"Captain, you'd better take a look at this."

Koja turned back to his display. A closer view of the crash site had replaced the first photo on his display. "Lovely," he growled.

"Maybe it is," the chief said, picking up his lightpen. A circle appeared briefly in the photo's lower right-hand corner. "Take a look and tell me if I'm seeing what I think I am."

It was an animal-that much was obvious even to Koja's relatively untrained eye.

A quadruped, with the build of a hunting feline, lying prone on the leafy ground cover in the clearing the shuttle's passage had torn through the tree canopy. "A spine leopard?" he hazarded.

"That's what I thought, too," the other nodded. "Notice anything unusual about its head?"

Frowning, Koja leaned closer. The head...

Was gone. "Must have gotten caught in the crash," he said, feeling suddenly queasy. If something outside the shuttle had been torn up that badly...

"Maybe, maybe not," the chief muttered, an odd note in his voice. "Let me see if

I can get us in a little closer-"

A new, tighter photo replaced the one on the display, the normal atmospheric blurring fading away as the computer worked to clean up the image. The spine leopard's head...

"Oh, my God," LuCass whispered from his side. "Captain-that's not crash damage."

Koja nodded, the cold hand on his heart tightening its grip. Not crash damage; laser damage. Cobra laser damage.

Someone had survived the crash.

"Complete scan," Koja ordered the scanner chief through dry lips. "We've got to find him."

"I've already done a check of the area we can penetrate-"

"Then do it again," Koja snapped.

"Yes, sir." The chief got busy.

LuCass took a step closer to Koja's chair. "What are we going to do if we do locate him?" he asked softly. "There isn't any place down there we could possibly set this monster down."

"Even if there was, I doubt the Qasamans would sit back and let us do it." Koja clenched his teeth until they ached. He'd asked the Directorate-begged the

Directorate-to rent a second shuttle from the Trofts as an emergency backup. But no; the damned governor-general had deemed it an expensive and unnecessary luxury and vetoed the request. "Any chance we could get some food and medical supplies down to him? It would at least give him a fighting chance."

LuCass was already typing on Koja's computer keyboard. "Let's see what we've got on board... well, we could foam some ablator onto a mini cargo pod. A parachute... yes, we could rig a chute. Pressure sensor to tell it when to pop...? Hmm. Nothing... wait a second, we could put it on a simple timer and have it pop at a prefigured time. Looks feasible, Captain."

"At which point the question arises of where to send it so that he can actually find it." Koja looked over at the scanner chief. "Anything?"

The other shook his head. "No, sir. The canopy's just too thick for short-wave or infrared penetration. His only shot at civilization is to the east, though-we could try dropping the supplies where the road ahead of him intersects an eastward path." He hesitated. "Of course, there's no guarantee he's lucid," he added. "He could be going in any direction, in that case, or even walking around in circles. Or his brain could be functioning fine but his body too badly injured to get all the way to the road."

"In either case he's dead," Koja said tightly. "He may be dead even if he does get to a village-the Qasaman leaders are hardly going to keep the shuttle crash an official secret." He looked at LuCass. "Get a crew busy on that pod," he ordered. "Include a tight-beam split-freq radio with the other supplies. We'll have a spot picked out to aim for by the time you're ready."

"Yes, sir." LuCass turned back to his own board, keyed the intercom, and began issuing orders.

Exhaling in a silent sigh, Koja looked back at the dead spine leopard still on his display. And it's all just so much wasted effort, he thought blackly.

Because as long as the Cobra was alone in enemy territory the time clock would be ticking down toward zero. Eventually, the Qasamans would identify him; or else a wandering krisjaw or spine leopard would find him; or else something completely unknown would get him.

Qasama was a deathtrap... and the only people who had any chance at all of pulling him out of it were back on Aventine. Eight days and forty-five light-years away.

Eight days. Koja cringed, trying desperately to find a closer alternative. The

New Worlds, perhaps-Esquiline and the other fledgling colonies-or even the nearby Troft demesne of Baliu'ckha'spmi. But Esquiline would have no spacecraft capable of making groundfall, either; and with neither an official credit authorization nor a supply of trade goods on board, trying to deal through an unfamiliar Troft bureaucracy for the rent of another shuttle could take literally months.

Eight days, A minimum of fourteen days for the round trip, even if the faster

Dewdrop was available. Add the time needed to choose and equip a search and rescue team, and it could easily be twenty days before they could even begin to look for him.

And with or without a supply pod, twenty days alone on Qasama was a death sentence. Pure and simple.

But that didn't mean they had to give up without a fight... and if the fight in this case consisted of hoping for a miracle, then so be it. The fact that one of the Cobras had survived the crash was a miracle in and of itself; perhaps the angel in charge of this area would be feeling generous.

Eventually, they would find out. In the meantime...

Reaching to his keyboard, Koja began plotting out the route and fueling stops for a least-time course back to Aventine. It had been his experience that miracles, when they happened, tended to favor those who had laid the proper groundwork for them.