by Timothy Zahn
Merrick felt his throat tighten. "How bad?"
Zoshak seemed to brace himself. "Thirty percent casualties, killed and wounded, among the Djinn who were deployed." He hesitated. "Among the regular soldiers, sixty percent."
Merrick stared at the Djinni in disbelief. Even in his great-grandfather's war against the Trofts the casualties hadn't been that bad. "But some of the wounded are going to recover, aren't they?"
"If their lives on the other side can be considered recovery," Zoshak said, an edge of bitterness in his voice. "Many will be crippled, or at the very least severely limited in what they can do. But that's not the point. The point is that what should have been a staggering blow against the invaders failed."
"I'm sorry" was all Merrick could think of to say.
"As are we all," Zoshak said with a sigh. "Ironic, isn't it, that the only clear successes all day were those that you and your mother were involved in." His gaze flicked to Merrick's left leg. "Those long lasers give you a strong advantage over even the Djinn."
"They're definitely handy," Merrick agreed. "But your glove-mounted lasers are no slouches, either. They're certainly stronger than our fingertip versions."
Zoshak hissed. "For all the good that did us."
"It did a lot of good," Merrick insisted. "For starters, I can't shoot through the Trofts' faceplates, with that instant black-block system of theirs. You can."
"The faceplates, perhaps," Zoshak conceded. "But our glove lasers aren't nearly powerful enough to penetrate their main armor." He snorted again. "I'm told the designers of our combat suits considered putting such a laser along the left calf, but ultimately rejected it as being too difficult to aim."
"It is a little tricky," Merrick agreed. "But you already have implants on your eye lenses for targeting, right? Couldn't they have tied an antiarmor laser into that system?"
"I don't know," Zoshak said. "Perhaps it wouldn't work because our system requires both eyes to be on target. The positioning of a calf-mounted laser would normally require us to fire it with only one eye on the target."
So either the Qasamans' computers couldn't handle the kind of targeting system Cobras routinely used, or else their power suits' servos weren't up to the necessary fine tuning. "So we got nothing out of the attack except a couple of the Shahni and their families?"
"The invaders took casualties," Zoshak said. "But we didn't permanently recover any buildings, nor did we inflict any serious damage on their weaponry or ships before we were pushed back. Particularly the ships."
"Yes, I saw what those sentry ships could do," Merrick said, grimacing at the memory of Djinn Baaree's fiery death.
"Yet the shipboard and vehicle weaponry was only a small part of our defeat," Zoshak said. "Many of our casualties were caused by small, self-homing missiles that seemed to seek out the sound of the soldiers' gunfire."
"I remember stories about things like that from my great-grandfather's war," Merrick said ruefully. "Not much you can do about them except try not to let the Trofts get close enough to use them."
"What do you mean, close enough?" Zoshak asked, frowning. "Some of the missiles were launched from over two blocks away."
"Two blocks?" Merrick asked, frowning. "They were able to lock on to gunfire noise from that far away? Accurately?"
"Accurately enough to kill and wound our soldiers," Zoshak said grimly.
Merrick scratched at his cheek stubble, trying to remember everything he'd ever learned about what little the Cobra Worlds' trading partners had let slip about Troft weaponry. Gunshots did have a fairly unique sound pattern, he knew. But for a missile to make that identification, then have enough sensor scope and memory to figure out the proper vector and guide the weapon there was starting to sound awfully complex. Especially for something small enough for antipersonnel use.
Unless the gunfire had come as a barrage, which would give the missile current-time data and allow it to take its electronic time locking in on the sounds. "Were the soldiers using machine guns or single-shot weapons?" he asked Zoshak. "And do we know how big the missiles were?"
"I don't," Zoshak said, standing up. "But if you feel up to a short walk, we could go speak to one of the field officers."
"I thought I wasn't supposed to leave the ward."
"You won't," Zoshak assured him. "Several of the wounded officers are in this facility. Perhaps one of them will be awake and willing to speak to you."
"It's worth a try," Merrick said, eyeing the tubes still poking into his arm. "Though come to think of it, I'm not sure how portable I am at the moment."
"Very portable," Zoshak assured him as he walked around the end of the bed. "Give me a moment, and I'll extend the medical stand's wheels."
A minute later they were walking down the corridor between the twin lines of beds. Merrick found himself feeling a little light-headed, and made sure to keep a firm grip on the rolling stand to help maintain his balance. At the end of the corridor they turned in to a much longer corridor that had likewise been equipped with beds and patients. As in Merrick's ward, most of the beds were occupied, and Merrick found his stomach churning as he noted how many head and chest wounds seemed to be in evidence.
He was passing yet another bed when the occupant's half-bandaged face suddenly leaped out at him. "Hold it," he said, grabbing Zoshak's arm and peering at the sleeping man. "Is that—?"
"Merrick Moreau?" a strained but familiar voice spoke up from the next bed over.
Merrick tore his eyes away from Daulo Sammon's closed eyes. Sure enough, Daulo's son Fadil was peering up at him from the next bed. He didn't look much better than his father, but at least his face seemed mostly undamaged. "What in the Worlds are you doing here?" he demanded as he stepped to the young man's side.
"What does it look like we're doing?" Fadil countered. "We're two of the casualties of the great Plan Saikah."
"Yes, but—" Merrick shot a look at Zoshak, who was standing a couple of paces away with a stony expression on his face. "I meant, why were you wounded in the first place," he said, turning back to Fadil. "Miron Akim told us the Shahni were keeping you and your father as hostages for our good behavior."
"And so they were, until I asked permission to join in the battle." Fadil smiled weakly. "They graciously allowed us to do so."
Merrick winced. "I'm sorry."
"You need not apologize, Merrick Moreau," Fadil said. "It was my decision, and that of my father, that put us here." He looked over at Zoshak. "And I would make the same decision again," he added, an edge of pride or challenge slipping into his voice.
"You may yet have that opportunity," Zoshak said. "You and every other villager on Qasama."
"We stand ready," Fadil assured him.
For another moment the city dweller and villager continued to stare at each other. Then, Zoshak stirred. "Merrick Moreau wishes information about the invaders' anti-personnel missiles," he said.
"They were fast, and they were deadly," Fadil growled. "What more do you need to know?"
"I want to figure out how they were aimed," Merrick said, trying to keep his voice calm. "Djinni Zoshak suggested they might have homed in on the sounds of your gunfire. Were you actually shooting when the missiles arrived?"
"We opened fire on the sergeant's command," Fadil said with the air of someone who's told the same story way too many times already. "The first missile struck him—I don't know how soon afterwards. Not long. The rest of the missiles came in a group. One of them hit my rifle, and then my father pulled me down on the floor as all the rest began exploding. Everyone was killed except us. Does that tell you anything?"
"Maybe," Merrick said. "You say the sergeant was hit first. Was he firing like everyone else?"
"I already said he was."
"And how far away were the Trofts you were shooting at?"
"We were in the hospital from which you and I escaped earlier," Fadil said. "Top floor. Our targets were the Trofts on the Palace grounds. Do a calculation, or ask someone to loa
n you a measuring tape."
Merrick scratched his cheek thoughtfully. At least a block's worth of distance, then. "And the main group of missiles arrived together?"
"I already said that, too," Fadil said impatiently.
"And you all had projectile rifles?" Merrick persisted. There was something here, something he could sense but couldn't quite get a handle on. "No lasers?"
"No," Fadil said.
"But teams using lasers against the invaders suffered the same fate," Zoshak put in.
"Really?" Merrick asked, frowning. "But lasers don't sound anything like projectile guns. How did the missiles home in on them?"
Zoshak shrugged. "Possibly through their heat signatures."
"Maybe," Merrick said, thinking back to the rescue of Mali Haafiz and the others of her family. "But in that case, why didn't the Trofts use them against Djinni Narayan and me? We were using our lasers like crazy out there."
"There may have been no one nearby who carried the launchers," Zoshak pointed out. "The Palace explosion and the multiple attacks drove most of the ground troops to cover." He grimaced. "At least briefly."
"I suppose," Merrick said, getting a firmer grip on his med stand as his head started to swim a little. "I still don't think that's the whole answer."
"Are you all right?" Zoshak asked.
"Just feeling a little dizzy," Merrick assured him. "Two days of no food, probably."
"Or two days on healing medication without time to purge the drugs from your system," Zoshak said, stepping forward and taking his arm. "Time you were returned to your bed."
"Wouldn't argue the point even if I could," Merrick agreed. "Thank you for your time, Fadil Sammon. And thank you, too, for your willingness to risk your lives."
Fadil snorted gently. "As if risking our lives for Qasama means anything to you."
"It does," Merrick told him. "Whether you believe it or not."
He turned away, paused a moment to wait for the spots in front of his eyes to fade out, then headed back the way they'd come. "I'm okay," he assured Zoshak as the other continued to hold his upper arm. "You don't have to hang around if you don't want to."
"It's not a problem," Zoshak assured him. "I'm happy to assist you."
"And I'm happy to have your company," Merrick said. "But you surely must have better things to do than visit the troops in the recovery ward."
Zoshak was silent for another two steps. "You misunderstand, Merrick Moreau," he said. "I'm not your visitor. I'm your guard."
Merrick swallowed. "Oh," he said.
They made the rest of the trip in silence.
Jin looked up from the report, her throat tight. "Thirty percent," she murmured.
"Yes," Miron Akim confirmed, his back unnaturally stiff as he sat in a chair beside Jin's hospital bed. He looked tired, Jin thought, his facial skin sagging, his eyelids clearly being held open by sheer force of will.
Jin herself had spent the past two days resting up after being healed from the glass cuts she'd received when she blew out the tower office window. Distantly, she wondered how Akim had spent those two days. "I don't know what to say, Miron Akim," she went on, laying the report on the bed beside her. "Is that the end, then? Do you have any fighting force left at all?"
"Of course we do," he assured her. "Less than a quarter of our soldiers and Djinn were committed to this first battle, and many of the wounded will recover enough to fight again." He grimaced. "The true horror of this loss was that we brought to it both the coordination of a preplanned attack and the element of surprise. That combination should have been sufficient to at least stagger the invaders, if not defeat them outright. To have instead paid so high a cost for so little again is a disaster."
His eyes bored suddenly into hers. "A disaster which we have no intention of revealing to the general populace."
"Understood," Jin said with a shiver. It was a given that secrecy and censorship were a necessary part of any wartime effort . . . but whether even a government as strict and powerful as the Shahni could keep something like this quiet remained to be seen. "Which leads directly to the question of why you're telling me about it."
"Because I come with two questions I must ask," Akim said. "The first . . . we have never trained for this sort of war, Jasmine Moreau. What we have trained for has clearly been ineffective. Your people, on the other hand, have fought against the Trofts. More importantly, you have fought against the Trofts. My first question, then, is whether you can offer advice and insight that will enable us to mount a more successful resistance."
Jin let out her breath in a huff. "That's a tall order, Miron Akim," she warned. "And understand that I'm not as well trained in combat as I wish I was. I'll have to think on the matter, but a couple of thoughts do come immediately to mind. First off, Cobras weren't designed for use as regular frontline troops. Our mission has always been one of harassment and sabotage, using small groups and infiltration tactics. I think that's also the direction your Djinn need to go."
"And the tactics themselves?" Akim asked. "You're familiar with them?"
"I had the standard Cobra course in military theory," Jin said. "But it was brief and largely theoretical. You and your military planners are undoubtedly far more knowledgeable than I am."
"Still, you have the advantage of having worked with such groups," Akim said. "But I understand that you need time to contemplate. Take what time you need, but no more than necessary."
"I'll be as quick as I can," Jin promised. "And the second question?"
Akim cocked his head slightly. "This may sound strange, but is there a value to razorarms that we're unaware of?"
Jin blinked. A value to razorarms? "What sort of value?"
"That is precisely the question." Abruptly, Akim stood up. "Come. I'll show you."
He waited until Jin had pulled on a robe and slippers, then led the way out of the private room into the subcity's maze of seemingly identical hallways. Jin walked carefully, favoring her bad left knee, trying to read the mood of the soldiers and civilians moving briskly back and forth down the hallway on their various errands. If any of them was worried about the failures of Plan Saikah, they weren't showing it.
Or perhaps they simply didn't know just how bad a failure it had been.
A few minutes later they reached a door flanked by a pair of armed soldiers. Akim gave them a hand signal as he and Jin approached, then stepped between them and pushed the door open. Pausing on the threshold, he gestured Jin inside.
Jin had expected an ordinary conference room. Instead, she found herself in a duplicate of the airfield tower control room. An exact duplicate, in fact, or at least exact within the limits of her memory.
"Over here," Akim said, brushing past her and heading across the room, circling the Qasamans who were gathered in twos and threes around the monitor stations.
Jin followed, glancing at the various monitors as she passed. Each display seemed to be active, with either a single image or else a short loop of words or images or track lines. It was, she realized with an eerie feeling, a complete reconstruction of the handful of seconds she and Akim had been standing in the hidden corridor.
Earlier, she'd wondered what Akim had been doing for the past two days. Now she knew.
"Here," Akim said as he stopped by a monitor no one else seemed to be interested in at the moment. "Sit down, and tell me what you see."
Jin slid into the chair in front of the monitor, wincing a bit as her bad knee gave a last twinge, and skimmed the display. It appeared to be a status report on—"Spine leopard captures," she murmured, frowning.
"In the forested areas to the north and west of Sollas," Akim said, tapping a list of latitude/longitude pairs. "Reports from the villages in those regions confirm the presence of large invader transports moving back and forth."
"Yes, but spine leopards?" Jin objected, frowning at the display. If she was reading the numbers correctly, the Trofts had already captured twenty of the predators by the time Akim took his menta
l snapshot of their activities, only a few hours into the aliens' occupation. If they were still at it, she could only guess how many they might have picked up since then. "What do they want with them all?"
"That was my question to you," Akim reminded her. "You've stated that your worlds have trade dealings with the Trofts. You've also been studying the creatures far longer than we have. So again I ask: are razorarm pelts in demand? Or is there something in their nature or biochemistry that would make them valuable to the invaders?"
"Nothing I've ever heard of," Jin said, staring at the display with a mixture of horror and revulsion. Could this whole invasion—all the death and destruction the Trofts had rained down on Qasama—be nothing more than a bizarre resource grab?
No—that made no sense. Qasama was as big as any other inhabitable world, with the Qasamans themselves occupying only a relatively small fraction of its land area. In the sixty years since the Cobra Worlds had brought the first spine leopards here, the animals had surely spread out far enough into uninhabited regions that anyone wanting to harvest them could simply travel out into the wilderness and do so.
But if the Trofts didn't want the predators as trophies, what did they want them for?
Unfortunately, there was only one reason Jin could think of, and it wasn't a pleasant one. "I think the people of Sollas are about to get some unexpected company," she told Akim grimly. "Best guess is that the Trofts are planning to release them into the cities and villages in the hope of keeping your soldiers and Djinn busy shooting something besides them."
"Yes, that was our thought as well," Akim said. "But it's been nearly three days since the invasion began. If the invaders intend to flood our streets with predators, why haven't they done so? What are they waiting for?"
"You're right, that doesn't make any sense," Jin said, grabbing for the edge of the desk. Suddenly, without warning, the dizziness she'd felt on the airfield tower escape ladder was hitting her again. "Maybe they're . . . waiting until they have . . . enough to—"