by Timothy Zahn
Naturally, the sergeant’s back was to Lorne at the time, which meant he got nothing but a silhouetted view of the man’s head and torso against a quick-stutter of blue laser fire.
Sometimes, he thought sourly, he could practically hear the universe snickering at him.
He made one more effort to persuade the Marines to tackle another way station, but Khahar would have none of it. He announced in no uncertain terms that he and Chimm were heading back, and that Lorne was riding with them.
Which gave Lorne the small satisfaction of watching the sergeant’s face heat up when both Cobras politely but firmly told him that they would be riding together in their own car.
Given the still-early hour, the parking area at the Cobra command center should have been nearly deserted. It was therefore a disquieting surprise when de Portola rounded the corner and Lorne saw that there were already four cars in the lot. They hadn’t been sitting there for long—a check of the engines’ infrared signatures showed they’d barely begun to cool down. “Is that Eion Yates’ car?” he asked as de Portola angled them into a parking space.
“The fancy one on the end, yeah,” de Portola confirmed. “I don’t recognize the others, but I’ll bet a week’s pay it’s connected with this Colonel Reivaro character.”
“No bet,” Lorne said, opening his door and climbing out. “Let’s go see what’s going on.”
There was another Dominion Marine waiting just inside the main door. He looked the two Cobras up and down and then wordlessly pointed them along the darkened corridor toward the assembly room.
Inside the assembly room, as expected, they found Colonel Reivaro.
“Ah—Cobra Broom,” Reivaro called from the table at the front as Lorne and de Portola entered. “We wondered where you’d sneaked off to.”
“I didn’t sneak anywhere,” Lorne said mildly, looking around the room. Werle was there, looking somewhat bleary after only a couple of hours of sleep. Cobras Randall Sumara and Jarvic Whitherway were with him, looking only marginally better rested. None of the cars out in the lot were theirs: either they’d walked to the command center or else Reivaro had rented or commandeered some vehicles and sent Marines to roust them out of bed.
There were certainly enough of the latter for the job, he noted uneasily. Eight of them, to be precise, standing stiffly at various points around the room, all wearing the same shimmery burgundy-black outfits as Khahar and Chimm.
Standing even more stiffly beside Reivaro, looking like a storm cloud a minute away from opening up, was Eion Yates.
The DeVegas Cobras in general, and Commandant Ishikuma in particular, had had a somewhat rocky relationship with Yates over the years. As the province’s premier industrialist and third largest employer, Yates had a lot of money to throw at parks, roads, and general humanitarian causes. And for the most part he threw that money with generosity, grace, and occasionally even enthusiasm.
But he was also used to getting what he wanted when he wanted it, and Ishikuma’s eagerness to comply with his requests wasn’t always up to the man’s standards. Still, all in all, on most days Yates was less trouble than he was worth.
Judging from the look on his face, today wasn’t going to be one of those days.
“Apparently your definition of sneak is at variance with mine,” Reivaro said. “You never signed out, or even said good-bye.”
“Commodore Santores said you were finished with me, and I had work to do,” Lorne said. “And we don’t have to sign in or out everywhere we go.”
“Ah, yes—your so-called work,” Reivaro said, his tone managing to make the word into something mocking. “Slaughtering animals.”
“Killing predators,” Lorne corrected, knowing full well that Reivaro was trying to bait him. Santores and his people had had the Cobra Worlds’ complete records for a full week now, and Reivaro would have to be a complete idiot not to understand the threat spine leopards posed to people and livestock. “Comes under the heading of citizen protection.”
“Of course,” Reivaro said in that same condescending tone. “But don’t flatter yourself—we didn’t come all this way just to see why you ran out on us.” He gestured to Yates. “You know Mr. Yates, I presume?”
“Of course,” Lorne said, nodding to Yates in greeting. “He’s one of our most prominent citizens.”
“More importantly, he also owns a large-scale manufacturing facility,” Reivaro said. “We’re going to be borrowing it for a bit.”
“Colonel Reivaro uses borrow the same way a thief does,” Yates growled, the words clipped and precise. “He wants to take over the plant and completely retool and re-staff.” He gestured to Lorne. “I believe your great uncle Corwin still has the Governor-General’s ear. Would you kindly get on the comm and ask him to tell Santores and his crew of highway robbers to go stick their heads in a spiny burrow?”
“I’m sure Commandant Ishikuma will be able to clear this up,” Lorne said as soothingly as he could. “I presume he’s on his way?”
“Whether he is or isn’t is irrelevant,” Reivaro said off-handedly. “Commandant Ishikuma has been relieved of his command.”
Lorne looked at Werle and Sumara. Both men’s expressions had turned to carefully neutral stone. “I don’t understand.”
“Was I not clear enough?” Reivaro asked, shifting his eyes to de Portola. “Cobra de Portola, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” de Portola confirmed stiffly.
“I understand you and Cobra Werle were in Capitalia last night with Cobra Broom.”
“We were ordered to give him transport back to Archway after he’d finished his testimony,” de Portola said. “Why was Commandant Ishikuma relieved?”
“Forget Ishikuma,” Yates cut in impatiently. “So he gets some extra vacation while the Dome sorts it out—so what? What’s important is this military idiot’s got his thugs in my plant right now sending my people home.”
“For a little extra vacation,” Reivaro murmured.
Yates spun to face him, his face reddening dangerously. “Look, you sorry excuse for a—”
“It might help if we knew what you wanted with his factory,” Werle cut him off.
“As Mr. Yates, said, I’m going to retool and re-staff it,” Reivaro said. If Yates’s anger was bothering him in the slightest, he hid it well. “Tell me, Cobra Broom: how many starships do the Cobra Worlds possess?”
“Four,” Lorne said. Reivaro should know that one, too.
“Are they armed or armored?”
“Of course not,” Lorne said. “They’re freighters. They carry passengers and cargo.”
“Get to the point,” de Portola growled.
“The point is simple,” Reivaro said. “We’re going to use Mr. Yates’s facility to turn your freighters into warships.”
Again, Lorne looked at Werle and Sumara. Apparently, they hadn’t heard this part yet, either. “You must be joking.”
“I don’t joke about defending Dominion people and property,” Reivaro said icily. “Surely you haven’t already forgotten the recent Troft invasion? Your world is in danger, and we won’t always be here to protect you.”
“You weren’t exactly here to protect us before,” Yates countered. “What makes you think we need you now?”
“He’s right,” Lorne said. “I don’t know how things work at your end of the Troft Assemblage, but at this end military victories bring friends and allies out into the sunshine. We have plenty of both, thank you.”
“Only for the moment,” Reivaro warned. “Alliances based on mutual advantage are never stable. Those Trofts you’re counting on could turn into enemies in a single heartbeat.”
“Not a chance,” de Portola said firmly. “We’ve been trading with some of those demesnes for nearly a century. As Cobra Broom said, they’re not just our allies. They’re also our friends.”
“Friends?” Reivaro snorted. “Don’t make me laugh. We have no friends out here. You have no friends. No friends, no allies, no one who cares whether
you live or die. We’re all we have, Cobra de Portola. We’re all we’ll ever have. We stand together, or an uncaring universe will erase us from an uncaring history.”
For a moment no one spoke. Then, Yates lifted his hands and clapped them together three times. “Beautiful,” he said acidly. “Patriotic and poetic both. I’m impressed.”
“You seem to think this is some kind of joke,” Reivaro said, his eyes flashing. “As it happens, your so-called allies have already begun their campaign against you. Earlier this morning, one of their ship captains kidnapped a young human woman.” He looked at Lorne. “To be specific, Cobra Broom’s sister Jody.”
Lorne felt his mouth go dry. So that was what this was all about. Santores hadn’t been able to keep Jody here, so he was going to use her disappearance as his excuse for taking over Aventine and the rest of the Cobra Worlds.
And the only chance he had of stopping that was for him to come clean about the real reason why Jody had left the planet. “Actually—”
“What makes you think she was kidnapped?” Werle cut in. “Maybe she just wanted to get away for awhile.”
“Did she?” Reivaro asked.
Werle shrugged. “I hardly know the woman. How should I know what she wants or doesn’t want?”
“Yet you raise the question of her mental state without even being asked about it,” Reivaro said, giving Werle a hard look. “Interesting. But also irrelevant.” He looked back at Yates. “Because Jody Broom did not, in fact, simply leave of her own volition. She was attacked while in the company of two Dominion Marines, her escort was neutralized, and she was subsequently taken to Pindar and put aboard a ship of the Hoibe’ryi’sarai demesne.”
He turned to Lorne. “But don’t worry. The Dorian, under the command of Captain Moreau, is on its way there even as we speak, with orders to bring her back. Using whatever means necessary.”
With an effort, Lorne forced himself to hold the other’s gaze, his pulse thudding in his throat. This was insane. Completely and utterly insane. Was Santores actually going to risk war with the Hoibies just to find Qasama? No—that couldn’t be. Reivaro had to be bluffing.
But what if he wasn’t?
Lorne clenched his teeth. He had to stop it. He had to tell Reivaro the truth about what had happened.
Only if he did that, he would also have to finger Werle and de Portola as the men who’d attacked those two Marines.
Behind Reivaro, Lorne saw the two Cobras exchange looks. They saw Reivaro’s trap, all right.
But Lorne could see his same uncertainty reflected in their eyes. If Santores had really sent one of his ships to the Hoibies…
“In the meantime,” Reivaro continued, “we need to plan for war. You in DeVegas province—and you in particular, Mr. Yates—have been assigned to start building armor plating in your factory.”
“If I refuse?” Yates demanded.
“Then your factory will no longer be yours,” Reivaro said flatly. “Cobra Broom, you will escort Mr. Yates to his facility. You will have him unlock the computers so that our people can go in and reprogram the manufacturing lines.”
“The hell I will,” Yates said, just as flatly. “And the hell he will.”
“Cobra Broom?” Reivaro said, ignoring Yates’s outburst. “You’ve been given an order. You will carry it out. Now.”
Lorne took a deep breath—
Behind him, the assembly room door slammed violently open. “Broom?” Ishikuma’s voice echoed angrily off the walls and ceiling. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
CHAPTER SIX
Lorne spun around. Ishikuma was standing just inside the open doorway, his hair wild and tangled, his face unwashed, apparently freshly hauled out of bed. His expression was thunderous, his eyes flashing with more simmering danger even than Reivaro’s. “Commandant—” Lorne began.
“Shut up,” Ishikuma snarled. “Just shut the hell up.”
The order had been directed at Lorne, but it was one that apparently no one else in the room felt the need to challenge. Even Reivaro kept his peace as Ishikuma stalked his way to the front of the room, his footsteps unnaturally loud in the taut silence. He reached the front and for a long moment just stared into Lorne’s eyes. “You,” he said, his earlier fire turned now to subzero ice, “have a hell of a lot of nerve coming to my town.”
Lorne swallowed hard, trying to figure out why his universe was suddenly skewing in all different directions. What in the Worlds was going on? “I was told you wanted to see me,” he said carefully.
“Who the hell told you that?” Ishikuma demanded. He twisted his head toward Werle and de Portola. “Did you tell him that?”
“No, sir,” Werle said, his voice as cautious as Lorne’s. “We said you wanted him back here.”
“Here to DeVegas,” Ishikuma retorted. “Not here to Archway.” He turned his glare back onto Lorne. “We wanted that Isis machinery, Broom,” he said bitterly. “We needed it. But you never even once thought about that, did you? You never thought of us, did you? No. All you thought about—all you cared about—was your precious Qasama.”
I was thinking about trying to win the war! With an effort, Lorne forced the words back. For whatever bizarre reason, Ishikuma was clearly on hair trigger, and anything Lorne said might send his rage into actual violence.
And with Dominion Marines all around him, the first result of that violence would be Ishikuma’s own instant death.
“So they get new Cobras, and we don’t,” Ishikuma continued. “I guess that means we’re all going to have to work a little harder, doesn’t it? Cobra de Portola?”
Out of the corner of his eye Lorne saw de Portola straighten to full attention. “Commandant?”
“Bitter Creek’s been without a resident Cobra for over a month,” Ishikuma said, his eyes still on Lorne. “Cobra Broom’s just volunteered to take up that slack. You’ll check out an aircar and fly him out there.”
“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?”