by Timothy Zahn
And suddenly a small knife flashed in his other hand, driving straight at Merrick's heart.
Chapter Thirteen
It was so unexpected that for that crucial fraction of a second Merrick's eyes and brain refused to grasp the fact that he was under attack by a man he was risking his own life to save. But his nanocomputer had no such emotional limitations. Even as the knife tip drove through Merrick's clothing and into his skin his servos were twisting his torso away from the blade while at the same time shoving him backward.
But even Cobra reflexes could move a man only so fast from a dead stop. As Merrick twisted and fell onto his back he could feel the throbbing pain in his chest and the warm spreading wetness of his own blood. "What are you doing?" he gasped, pushing himself desperately backward along the floor on his torn palms.
"You think I do not know who and what you are, enemy of Qasama?" Haafiz bit out, jabbing his knife toward Merrick, an edge of bright red now coating the gleaming metal. "Better for my family to die together in honor than to allow them to fall into your hands and those of your allies."
"I'm not working with the Trofts," Merrick protested, clutching at his wound. The sudden pressure sent a dazzling stab of new pain through the torn skin. "I came here to help you."
"And here is where you will die," Haafiz said. Shifting the grip on his knife, he started toward Merrick. Merrick braced himself, flicking a target lock on to the knife.
And then, through the open doorway behind him, he heard a dull thunderclap and the crackle of scattered debris hitting tiled floor. "You hear that?" he demanded as the Shahni came to a sudden halt. "That's the Trofts getting through the barricade I set up to slow them down."
"That you set up?" Haafiz scoffed.
"There is no time for foolishness," Zoshak snapped. His face was rigid, his eyes staring in horror and disbelief at the spreading stain on Merrick's tunic. "Shahni Haafiz, you must come to me now, or die."
The Shahni hesitated another moment. Then, contemptuously tossing the knife to the side, he turned and climbed up onto the desk. Zoshak slid farther down the cylinder and Haafiz put his legs in. As he slid downward, the other Shahni climbed in on top of him, this one not even bothering to glance in Merrick's direction. Another moment, and he, too, was out of sight.
Leaving Merrick, bleeding and alone, to face the Trofts.
"Damn," Merrick muttered, pressing his hand to his chest as he carefully got to his feet, the throbbing agony in his chest momentarily eclipsed by an equally throbbing rage. What the hell did Haafiz think he was doing? And who the hell did he think he was doing it to? Staggering on suddenly wobbly knees, Merrick made his way across to the cylinder. He would like nothing better than to jump up onto the desk, aim his antiarmor laser down the cylinder, and give His Exalted Excellency Shahni Haafiz one last second of wisdom-enhancing pain before he died.
He couldn't do that, of course. Not even if he could guarantee that such a blast wouldn't kill two innocents in the process.
But he would remember Shahni Haafiz. He would remember him well.
The metal lid he'd burned off earlier was still lying on the desk. Setting it back on top of the cylinder, Merrick fired three quick shots with his fingertip lasers, spot-welding it into place. Then, pressing one hand against his chest wound, wondering how deep the Shahni's blade had gotten and how fast he was losing blood, he headed back toward the safe room.
He was nearly there when five Trofts suddenly appeared, their lasers pointed at him. "Human, stop!" the translator pin boomed.
"We have to get out of here," Merrick gasped, putting a weaving stagger into his walk as he continued toward them, trying to look like a man on his last legs. "They wouldn't listen—they wouldn't
stop it. He stabbed me—"
"Human, stop!" the Troft repeated, more emphatically this time.
"He tried to kill me," Merrick said, finally coming to a shambling halt. "He stabbed me, and then they left."
"Who left?" the Troft demanded.
"The Shahni who were hiding here," Merrick said. There was a sudden commotion behind the Trofts and another group of aliens appeared, pulling and dragging the five Qasamans who Merrick had left in the safe room. "They were hiding with them in that secret room," Merrick added, pointing at the newcomers. "They're going to blow up the building and kill us."
One of the Trofts stepped to the side, covering his translator and muttering urgent-sounding cattertalk into his radio. "Didn't you hear me?" Merrick pleaded, putting some desperation in his voice. "They're going to blow up the building. You have to get us out of here."
"How do they plan to do that?" the lead Troft asked. "With artillery?"
"The bombs are already built into the walls," Merrick said, wondering dimly whether the aliens were serious or just humoring him.
But the tone of the soldier still talking with upper command was anything but light-hearted. Even more telling, all the aliens were exhibiting the telltale fluttering of radiator membranes that was the mark of serious emotion. They believed him, all right.
And only then did it occur to him that Shahni Haafiz's sneak attack might have something to do with that. A human in the Shahni's palace would almost certainly be lying to Qasama's invaders. A human who those same Shahni had tried to kill might not be.
"Which walls?" the Troft demanded.
That was, Merrick realized with a sinking sensation, a damn good question. He'd hoped to sell this story to the Trofts, but had never really expected to get even this far with it. Apparently his bloody tunic, plus the ticking countdown timer the young Qasaman man had set up, had convinced someone to take the whole thing seriously.
Only now he was expected to point out some actual explosives as confirmation. Without any such proof, the Trofts would probably put his story down to an elaborate hoax and go about their business.
At least until the building turned to fiery dust eight and a half minutes from now. "I don't—" Merrick began.
"Traitor!" the Qasaman man shouted suddenly. "Don't tell them!"
Merrick jerked, the movement sending a fresh wave of pain through his chest, the words themselves digging deep into his soul. Couldn't these people understand that he was trying to help them? Were they all so full of unthinking rage at what his parents and grandparents had done that they couldn't see anything beyond that?
And then he took another look into the young man's eyes. Eyes that were holding steady on Merrick even as the rest of his face twisted with rage and contempt. Eyes that waited until Merrick was looking straight at them, and then flicked to his right.
And with that, some of the frustrated weariness lifted from Merrick's shoulders. The young man was onto Merrick's plan . . . and despite Qasama's corporate institutional rage at the Cobra Worlds, he was willing to cooperate. "You want to die?" Merrick demanded, throwing every bit of acting ability he'd ever had into selling it.
"I will die with honor," the young man snarled, again twitching his eyes to his right. "Let them die, too, like the dung worms that they are."
"You die however you want to," Merrick bit out. "I'd rather live." He pointed at the wall the Qasaman had indicated. "You want to see some of the explosives? You can start with that wall right there."
The lead Troft snapped an order, and one of the soldiers grouped around the Qasamans stepped across the hallway, sprung a long knife, and stabbing into the wall between a pair of standing sculptures. He twisted the knife hard over and pulled, and a half-meter chunk of some plaster-like substance came free.
And behind it, nestled into the space between the a pair of thick wooden supports, was a square meter's worth of a plastic-wrapped gray clay.
The lead Troft didn't waste even a second gawking. [The prisoners, take them below,] he snapped, loud enough for Merrick to hear even without using his enhancements. [Their bindings, fasten them along the way. The commanders, warn them immediately.]
"And that's just one of them," Merrick said as the Trofts grabbed the Qasamans' arms or jabbed lasers into th
eir ribs, getting the group moving down the hallway toward the elevators. A second later Merrick bit back a gasp of pain as his own arm was grabbed and he was hustled off after the others.
And as they hurried along, one of the Trofts wove in and out of the Qasamans, fastening their arms behind them with chain-link wrist shackles. Merrick watched the operation closely, studying the restraints and trying to figure out where best they could be broken. Unlike the solid-bar shackles the Qasamans had used on him earlier, chains were harder for his nanocomputer to pinpoint when it didn't have any optics available for positioning data. The place where the chain was fastened to the right wrist cuff, he decided, would be his best bet.
The Troft finished with the Qasamans and headed toward Merrick with one final set of shackles in hand. Merrick glanced a target lock onto the spot he'd chosen, and silently let the alien pin his arms behind him.
The elevators were both waiting when the group arrived. The five Qasamans and their escort were guided into one, while Merrick and his own five-Troft guard took the other.
Merrick took a careful breath as the elevator started down, his nose tingling with the subtle scents of Troft and metal and armored leotard, his mind's eye flashing with unpleasant images from his last time in an elevator with Qasama's invaders. But this wouldn't be a replay of that other deadly ride. This time, he was going to cooperate fully with the Trofts. Right up to the moment when he stopped.
"Three minutes," the sergeant called softly from the hallway. "All gunners, stand ready."
Lying flat on his belly on one of the Lodestare Hospital's beds, Daulo took a moment to reflect on the irony of the whole situation. Earlier, Jin Moreau and Siraj Akim had gone to tremendous lengths to get him and Fadil out of this very place. And yet, now here they were again, joining a dozen other Qasaman soldiers preparing to throw this invasion down the enemy's throat.
On the face of it, moving troops into a building that the Trofts had already sequestered could be considered the height of foolishness. But on the other hand, bypassing the guards the Trofts had set up at the hospital's entrances had been simplicity itself, thanks to the subcity passages. And Daulo had to admit that after Jin and Siraj Akim had put the Lodestone into the center of Troft attention it was probably the last place the invaders would expect the Qasamans to come back to.
It was also unarguable that this particular line of eighth-floor rooms gave a perfect view of the rear of the Palace and the enemy soldiers guarding that section of the perimeter.
"Uh-oh," Fadil murmured from the bed beside Daulo's. "Look there, Father, at the group heading toward the street."
Daulo shifted his gaze to the street running along the front of the Palace. There were two different groups there, one consisting of five Qasamans and a half-dozen Troft guards, the other composed of a single human and five more of the aliens. "What about them?" he asked.
"Look closely at the singleton," Fadil said. "I believe we know him."
Frowning, Daulo swung his rifle around, centering the scope on the man Fadil had indicated.
It was Merrick Moreau.
"You suppose this is part of his plan?" Fadil suggested, his tone making it clear that he thought exactly the opposite.
"Enough chatter," the sergeant crouched beside the window growled. "If you villagers can't keep your minds and eyes where they're supposed to be, I'll find something else for you to do."
"Our apologies," Daulo said, his face warming with embarrassment and annoyance. Villagers. Not fellow soldiers, or fellow snipers, or even fellow Qasamans. Just villagers.
He stole a final look at the street as Merrick Moreau and his guards filed through the massive rear doors of the first of the two armored trucks the aliens had pulled to the curb, while the group of Qasamans were ushered into the one behind it.
He could only hope that being taken prisoner was, in fact, part of Merrick Moreau's plan.
"It's time," Miron Akim murmured from behind Jin.
With a start, Jin jolted out of a light doze and checked her nanocomputer's clock. Fifty-eight minutes of Akim's estimated hour to Plan Saikah had passed. "Right," she confirmed. "Let me get turned around."
Looking casually over at one of the room's two hidden cameras, she put a targeting lock on it. Then, gripping her chair's armrests, she started rocking her body back and forth, steadily walking her chair around toward the window.
"You still wish to destroy the window first?" Akim murmured.
"It's our best chance of hiding who I am," Jin reminded him. "At least for a little longer."
"And every minute that truth is concealed is valuable," Akim agreed with a sigh. "Very well. Proceed."
Jin continued to walk the chair around until she was facing the window. As she settled herself into place, she glanced behind her across the room and put a targeting lock on the second hidden camera. Then, turning back to the window, she lifted her arms off the armrests as high as the shackles permitted and began curving her hands into a series of sign-language configurations.
Not genuine ones, of course. Or at least, nothing that would make any sense to anyone watching her. She'd learned some of the gestures when she was a girl, mostly so that she and her sister Fay could talk together at family gatherings without the adults eavesdropping on their conversation. Once Fay had married and moved off Aventine, though, Jin's abilities had waned to the point where she could now barely even remember the finger-spelling letters.
But the Trofts had no way of knowing that. For all they knew, the random set of gestures she was making might be an esoteric Qasaman battle code. If they were good little soldiers, they would be recording her every move and trying to figure out what she was trying to say.
And with their attention now hopefully pointed in the wrong direction, she activated her sonic disruptor.
She started the weapon at low power, giving its sensors time to search for the window's resonance. In principle, this was no different than the trick she'd pulled back at the Sun Center when she'd shattered the glass surrounding the observation catwalk. In practice, though, the size of this window made the whole thing considerably less certain. Not only would the resonances be harder to hit, but it would take a lot more power to actually shatter the glass.
And if she couldn't make that happen, her hoped-for diversion wasn't going to happen.
Deep within her, she felt a subtle change in vibration as the sonic locked onto the window's resonance. Still making her nonsense hand signals, she fed more power to the weapon. Ten seconds, she decided. If she couldn't break the glass in ten seconds she wasn't going to break it at all. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Akim join in the fun with hand signals of his own.
Her mental countdown had reached nine seconds when, without even a warning crack, the window blew up in their faces.
The explosion was so unexpected and so violent that Jin nearly missed out on the opportunity she'd been trying to create. But then her brain unfroze, and as the flying glass swirled past her and Akim she twisted her hands into cross-fire positions and fired her fingertip lasers.
Her nanocomputer responded with its usual deadly efficiency, gouging a pair of black-edged holes in the walls where the hidden cameras had been, hopefully fast enough that the Trofts would assume they'd been taken out by shards from the exploded window. Shifting aim, Jin cross-fired at her own wrist shackles, blasting apart the metal and freeing her hands. Another pair of shots freed her legs, and then she was out of her chair, turning toward the door. If the Trofts had left guards out there, they would be charging in any second now.
But the door remained closed. Keeping one eye on the panel, Jin cut Akim free of his chair, and together they headed across the room.
They were nearly to the door when it finally slammed open and a pair of Trofts charged through.
A blast from her antiarmor laser could have taken them out instantly. But Jin had something a bit more subtle in mind. Putting a targeting lock on the lead Troft, she bent her knees and shoved herself off the
floor straight toward him.
The combination of targeting lock and leap kicked Jin's nanocomputer into the programmed ceiling flip that Merrick had performed earlier for Akim and the other Djinn. Only this time, it wasn't a sturdy ceiling that took the impact of her feet, but the Troft, who gave an agonized cough of expelled air as he went flying back into his companion. Jin herself bounced back from the impact, again turning halfway around as her nanocomputer tried to finish the ceiling flip, and landed on her side on the floor. She scrambled up into a crouch as Akim grabbed one of the Trofts' lasers and did a quick one-two slam to their helmeted heads. "Come," he snapped to Jin. Flipping the laser around into firing position, he stepped over the unconscious aliens and out into the hallway.
And threw himself to the floor as a pair of laser shots blazed through the air from down the hallway to the left.
Biting out a curse, Jin again bent her knees and leaped forward. Her arcing path shot her just through the doorway, her momentum breaking as she grabbed the door jamb with her left hand and brought herself to a sudden halt. She caught a glimpse of four Trofts at the far corner, two of them in kneeling positions in front of the other two as another pair of shots cut through the space where she would have been if she'd let her leap carry her all the way into the hallway.
The Trofts were busily correcting their aim as Jin fell flat onto her back on the hallway floor beside Akim and slashed her anti-armor laser across them, collapsing them into crumpled heaps.
"Quickly," Akim murmured from her side as he scrambled to his feet.
"Shall I clear us a path?" Jin asked, eyeing the corner beyond the dead Trofts. There were bound to be more of the aliens gathering somewhere on the far side.
"No need." Akim crossed to the wall across from the office they'd just broken out of and rested his hand against a decorative wall-mounted plaque.
And two meters to the right, a section of the inner wall popped open. "Quickly," he said again, nodding Jin toward the opening.
Jin threw a final look at the dead Trofts. So much for not revealing who she really was. But maybe the Troft commanders would assume someone had simply used one of their own lasers on the victims. Stepping behind Akim, she slipped into the narrow entryway.