Cobra Bargain

Chapter 44

The monitor intersection was still deserted, but Jin knew it wouldn't be that way for long. Slipping through the collision door, she left the command module and headed aft down the neck, taking long loping strides that gave adequate speed while still allowing her time between steps to listen.

She was about halfway down the neck when she heard approaching footsteps, and she risked taking another two strides before ducking into one of the rooms lining the corridor. Standing just inside, her ear pressed against the door, she listened as four Trofts hurried past. Have they realized they've got intruders on their bridge? she wondered uneasily. But it wasn't a question she could afford to dwell on. Daulo and Akim wouldn't have been any safer anywhere else... and anyway, the Trofts would surely try to get their bridge back intact before resorting to anything violent.

She waited until the footsteps had faded completely before opening the door and slipping out. Luck continued to be with her, and she reached the end of the neck without encountering any more Trofts. She stepped from of the neck into the large cargo/engineering section with a sigh of relief-here, at least, she would have room to maneuver if it came to a fight. And with many of the Trofts presumably working back here...

She paused as a sudden idea struck her. Interfering with the loading back there was all well and good... but if she could cut down the opposition at the same time...

She retraced her steps to the base of the ship's neck. Sure enough, the edge of a blast door was visible right where the cargo/engineering section began. The manual control for it had to be nearby... there. Hauling on the lever, she watched as the heavy metal disk slid silently across the corridor, cutting her off from the front of the ship. If the door was connected to an automatic alarm...

But no sirens or horns went off. Must be tied into the decompression sensors instead, she decided, looking for a way to seal the door. There was of course no lock; but she still seemed to be unobserved, and a two-second burst from her antiarmor laser did an adequate job of spot-welding it. The welds wouldn't hold longer than a half-hour or so, even if they were trying not to completely destroy the door in the process. But if she was lucky, a half-hour would be all they'd need.

She continued on into the cargo/engineering section, switching from the main corridor to a smaller-and hopefully less traveled-parallel one. Staying alert, she headed back toward the aft entryway and the loading tower there.

With voices and drones and clangings coming from all around her, her audio enhancers were all but useless; but even so, she heard the Trofts well before she saw them. They were talking, and with all the noise around them they were talking loudly, and for a moment Jin hung back behind a corner and listened.

[-not allow them to board yet,] one voice was saying. [The Commander, he does not want them aboard until all equipment has been loaded.]

[The isolation area, it is ready,] a second voice objected. [The humans, they would be out of our way if they were there.]

[More equipment, it must yet be brought to the ship,] the first said.

[The loading, we could handle it more efficiently alone.]

[The equipment to come, much of it is beyond the wall. Would you have the humans there see us?]

The second Troft gave a piercing, almost ultrasonic bray of laughter. [Why not?

Their mythos, does it not allow for the existence of demons?]

The first alien didn't echo the laughter. [A risk, it is not worth taking,] he said sternly. [Return to your post. The humans, inform them that anything still beyond the wall in fifteen minutes will not be loaded.]

Jin licked her lips, setting her mind into full combat mode. Clearly, the Trofts weren't wildly enthusiastic about having their Qasaman clients aboard their ship, and while that was good for long-term plans, it did nothing for the upcoming near-term confrontation. The Troft outside the port drive monitor station had drawn on her without challenge or question; she had no intention of letting the ones back here do likewise. Setting her teeth, she stepped out from around the corner.

Just in time to see the two Trofts turn a corner of their own back toward the noise and commotion at the airlock.

She breathed a quiet sigh of relief and hurried after them... and was just two steps from the main corridor when the thin wail of an alarm abruptly split the air all around her.

The bridge? Or the welded blast door? She had no way of knowing which the Trofts had discovered... but it didn't much matter. Either way, her short grace period was over. Increasing her stride, she swung around the corner-

And skidded to a halt a bare three meters from a scene of chaos.

The rubberine tunnel she'd burned a flap in barely eight hours ago had become a bottleneck of activity, with a half dozen humans, an equal number of Trofts, and several equipment-laden load carriers all traffic-jammed together. The reason for at least part of the congestion was obvious: like a bucket brigade with a single node, the humans were bringing the equipment to the airlock and then passing it on to Trofts to haul into the ship proper.

And as she stopped every eye in the cramped space swung around to lock solidly onto her.

[You!-halt and identify yourself,] one of the nearer Trofts called toward her, his hand swinging toward his belted pistol. "You!" the Qasaman translation boomed from his translator pin an instant later. "Stop where-" And the rest was swallowed up in the thunderclap as her arcthrower hurled a lightning bolt into one of the boxes of equipment lying against the airlock wall.

Someone gave a choking scream; someone else cursed violently. Then all was silent, save for the wail of the alarm in the background.

The six Trofts were all armed, as were one or two of the Qasamans. But no one made any move toward a weapon. No one made any move at all, in fact... and as

Jin gazed back into their frozen faces she realized why. They all finally understood what it was they were facing.

It would be easy to kill them all. A single swift crescent kick with her left leg, and her antiarmor laser would cut through them like a blazing knife. And it was surely the tactically intelligent thing to do. It would lower the number of opponents facing her, increase the odds of her and Akim and Daulo getting out alive.

You shot them down in cold blood.

She ground her teeth... but the memory of Daulo's quiet horror at her handiwork was too vivid to ignore.

And the Trofts on the bridge had fired first. These people hadn't even drawn their guns.

Damn them all. "You Qasamans will leave the ship," she grated. "Now."

No one tried to be a hero; no one tried to argue the point. Those farthest back on the ramp turned and fled, and the others followed immediately, abandoning their load carriers where they were.

Jin's eyes flicked across the Trofts, their arm membranes stretched wide with shock, fear, or anger. Or possibly all three. [Your hands, you will place them on your heads,] she ordered in catertalk.

One of the aliens looked around at the others, his arm membranes rippling for a second before going rigid again. [But you are a female,] he said, clearly bewildered. [A cobra-warrior, you cannot be that as well.]

[One of many things you don't know about cobra-warriors, consider this one of them,] Jin told him. [You and your companions, you will obey my order.]

Slowly, reluctantly, the Troft raised his hands away from his weapon and placed them on his head. After a long second, the others did likewise.

Jin stepped sideways to the edge of the airlock. [You will go into the ship now,] she instructed them. [The loading of equipment, it is now at an end.]

The first alien looked at his companions, gave the Troft equivalent of a nod.

Carefully, they filed past Jin into the main corridor. [What about the humans?] the first Troft asked as he joined them.

[Your dealings with them are ended.] Carefully, Jin backed through the airlock toward the loading tower, trying to watch the Trofts and still keep an eye on the ramp behind her.

[A promise, our demesne made them.]

[The promise, it is broken.] At her side now was the control plate for the airlock, and her eyes flicked over to it. The large emergency button was, as she'd expected, easy to identify. Bracing herself, she set her feet, jabbed the button with her elbow, and simultaneously leaped back out of the lock onto the entryway platform.

The outer lock slid shut at high speed, just barely in front of her face. The boom of it echoed in the rubberine tunnel-

And a flash of laser fire sliced through the rubberine and metal behind her.

Instantly, she dropped to her belly, twisting over to face down the ramp. A handful of Trofts were visible below, loping cautiously toward the tunnel with lasers drawn. She targeted them, her hands automatically starting to curve into firing position-

She hissed a curse as a stab of pain shot through the injured fingers, belatedly reminding her that the triggers of her fingertip lasers were out of normal reach. Another laser blast sizzled the air above her head; swiveling on her hip and shoulder, she pivoted her feet around to point down the ramp and fired her antiarmor laser.

Her left leg seemed to jump of its own accord, the nanocomputer guiding the blasts with deadly accuracy, and the laser fire from below abruptly ceased.

Though presumably only for the moment. There would be other Trofts down there, as well as armed humans; but with luck, all such opposition would be concentrated on the ship's starboard side, between the Troft housing complex and the gateway to the human half of Mangus. Swinging her leg back toward the airlock, she repeated the welding procedure she'd used a few minutes earlier on the interior blast door. Then, shifting her aim, she lasered a chunk out of the rubberine tunnel. Rolling to her feet, she threw a last quick look down the ramp and leaped through the hole onto the ship's portside wing.

The heat rising from the drive nozzle hit her like something solid as she ran across and past it. Keeping low, she kept going, sprinting forward along the wing. Directly ahead loomed the maintenance building, a familiar-looking rubberine collar molding itself around the last few meters of the ship's neck.

To her right, the upper deck of the engineering/cargo section hid her from most of Mangus. To her left-

To her left, a large section of the outer wall had vanished.

It was obvious, of course, once she thought about it. The overhead canopy that hid the Trofts' presence here so well also blocked all normal landing approaches. Building a sliding door into the wall was the most straightforward response.

And from her point of view, a highly useful one. It meant that if she and the others were able to get out of the ship, they wouldn't have any walls to climb.

She reached the rubberine collar without any shots or shouts being directed at her. Once there, however, she realized she had a new problem. There was no gap between collar and ship she could get through, and while her antiarmor laser would make short work of the rubberine it would do so spectacularly enough to alert any Trofts inside the building to her presence out here. But with her fingertip lasers out of commission...

Pursing her lips, she knelt down, bringing one knee up and resting the third finger of her right hand on top of it. Straightening the little finger, she mentally crossed her fingers and pressed down on the third-finger nail with her left thumb.

Somehow, she'd always thought that the triggering mechanism depended on having the finger of the appropriate hand curled. Apparently, that wasn't true. This way was awkward, but it worked; and within a few seconds she had a ragged flap burned through the rubberine. Taking one last look behind her, she ducked through into the building.

She'd seen a starship maintenance facility on Aventine once, and this one seemed built along similar lines. The ship's command module-a standard Troft flat-steeple design, as near as she could tell from her perch-stuck out into the center of a huge bay, with movable stairways and ramps leading to the entryways and equipment access areas. Scaffolds and boom cranes lined the bay's walls, all of them retracted away from the ship now in preparation for the imminent lift.

A dozen Trofts were also visible, standing on the ramps or milling about the bay floor. All had weapons drawn, and all were clearly agitated.

And none of them had yet noticed her.

Jin permitted herself a grim smile. They were rattled, all right; rattled and almost totally unsure of what they were doing. But they're all armed, she warned herself. They're all armed, and there are a hell-and-crackling lot of them.

The reminder sobered the wave of adrenaline-spurred cockiness. Crouching lower, she licked dry lips and considered her next move.

Below and to her left, leading to the rear/port side of the command module, she could see the lower end of one of the movable stairways. It seemed unlikely that it would still be against the ship unless there were an open entryway at its upper end. It was also unlikely that it would have been left unguarded.

But it was the best chance she had; and she had to take it quickly, before the

Trofts outside figured out where she'd gone and alerted the rest. If she could get just another few meters along the neck and reach the rear edge of the command module before one of the aliens below happened to look up-

She'd made barely two meters of that distance when the bay suddenly echoed to the sound of excited catertalk.

Jin cursed under her breath, straightening and shifting from a crouch to a flat-out run. A laser split the air in front of her, sending a wash of heat and light over her. Automatically, she closed her eyes against the purple blob now floating in front of them and shifted to optical enhancers. She reached her target spot; skidding to a halt, she twisted forty-five degrees to the side and jumped.

And soared over the rear port corner of the command module to land squarely on the entryway stairs.

For a second she fought for balance, throwing her hands out to the sides and hooking her thumbs onto the railings in a desperate attempt to keep from falling backwards down the steps. For that second she was a sitting duck... but once again, the Trofts arrayed against her had been taken by surprise. The alien standing at the head of the stairs in front of the entryway simply stood there, frozen in shock; he was still standing like that when Jin's antiarmor laser all but cut him in half.

Another second was all she got before the weapons around the room opened up again; but it was all she needed. Regaining her balance, she took the remaining steps in a single leap, and an instant later was loping down what she hoped was the right corridor to get her to the bridge.

The corridor was deserted; and ten meters later, she reached the monitor intersection beneath the bridge to discover why. Nearly twenty Trofts filled the intersection, grouped around the circular stairway as they watched two more at the top working on the hatch with a laser torch. They turned en masse as she skidded to a halt, twenty lasers tracking toward her-

And with a boom that rattled her own skull, Jin fired her sonic disrupter.

A multiple flash of laser fire lit up the room as a wedge-shaped group of the

Trofts collapsed into folded heaps, twitching hands firing almost at random as they went down. Again Jin fired, twisting her torso to a new firing angle; and again, and again, clenching her teeth tightly against the backwash from the sonic and the scorching near misses from lasers only marginally under their owners' control. By the time the first victims had ceased their spasmodic firing, the last group was collapsing to the deck; by the time the last group lay still Jin was on the stairs, pounding on the hatch with the heel of her hand in the three/two/four code she'd left with Akim.

She finished, and waited. And waited... and as some of the Trofts beneath her began stirring again there was the sound of released catches above her and the hatch suddenly swung open.

"Jin!" Daulo gasped, eyes wide as he stared down at her. "Are you-?"

"I'm fine," she grunted. "Get out of my way, will you?-they'll be able to fire again any second now."

He stepped back hastily, and she leaped up the last steps into the bridge. Akim was waiting to the side, and she'd barely cleared the rim before he slammed the hatch back down again. "You came back," he said, squatting down to seal the catches.

"Didn't you think I would?" Jin countered. Suddenly her knees were going all wobbly; staggering over to one of the chairs, she collapsed into it.

Akim stepped over to her, eyes flicking down her body. "We'd thought you might go for help."

"Help from where?" Jin countered. "Didn't we agree that we couldn't even reach any of your people for several hours?" Her foot touched something metallic; leaning back, she spotted a row of five laser pistols beneath the panel. "You making a collection?" she asked.

"We thought it would be good to have all the weapons together," Daulo told her.

"For when... we weren't sure you were coming back, you know."

"Why did you return?" Akim demanded. "Let me be honest: I don't want to share my death with an enemy of Qasama."

Jin took a deep breath, exhaled it raggedly. "With any luck, you won't have to.

Has the Troft commander tried to communicate with you?"

"He wants us to surrender," Daulo put in from behind her, clearly fighting against a tremor in his voice. "He says we can't possibly win and that they don't want to kill us if they don't have to."

"I don't blame them," Jin nodded. "Especially since he'd probably wreck his bridge in the process." She leaned forward, studying the control panels before her.

Akim followed her gaze. "What exactly are you planning, Jasmine Moreau?" he asked. "Are you going to fly this spacecraft out of Mangus?"

Jin snorted. "Not a chance. I've never flown anything bigger than an aircar in my life, and this isn't the time to start." She paused, looking over her shoulder as a faint crackling sound wafted into the bridge. The sound was coming from the hatch.... "They're back again," she said, stomach tightening as she turned back to the controls. Somewhere here there had to be-

There it was. Taking a deep breath, Jin hunched forward and tentatively touched the switch. "What are you doing?" Akim demanded suspiciously.

"You remember, Miron Akim, how surprised we were that Obolo Nardin would panic this early?" she asked. The volume control... there. Microphone?... clipped to the wall over there. "We wondered why both he and the Trofts would throw away their listening ear when there couldn't possibly be any enemies on their way here yet?" she added, working the mike free of its clip and gripping it awkwardly between palm and thumb.

"I remember," Akim growled. "Are you leading up to giving us the answer?"

"I hope so." She took a deep breath. If she was wrong... Raising the mike to her lips, she touched the operating switch. "This is Jasmine Moreau," she said in

Anglic. "Repeating, this is Jasmine Moreau. Please respond. This is Jasmine

Moreau; please respond. This is Jasmine-"

And abruptly the board speaker boomed in reply. "This is Captain Koja; commanding the Dewdrop. We read you, Cobra Moreau, and we're ready to come down and pick you up."