by Timothy Zahn
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.
From the way Akim had described the elevator escape route earlier, Jin had expected to find herself in some kind of emergency drop shaft. To her surprise, the hidden door led instead into a narrow corridor that stretched away to her left, its far end hidden by a gentle inward curve. She took a couple of steps into the passageway, pausing there until Akim had joined her and closed the secret door, plunging them into total darkness.
Or rather, nearly total darkness. Activating her optical enhancers, Jin discovered there was a faint light coming from around the curve ahead. "Where are we?" she whispered.
"On the outer rim of the central monitoring room," Akim whispered. "Follow the corridor, but make no noise."
Jin looked past Akim's shoulder at the hidden door behind him, wondering what they would do if and when the Trofts found the way in. With Akim between her and any intruders, she would be severely limited in her ability to fight off any such attack.
"Don't concern yourself with pursuit," Akim said. He did something , and a section of the wall rotated silently to seal off the passageway behind him. "Should the invaders find the door, the passage will now lead them in the opposite direction. Now go."
They were nearly to the curved section when the whole building gave a gentle shake around her. Jin looked back at Akim, her stomach suddenly tightening. "The Palace?" she whispered.
His expression in her amplified eyesight was tight and grim. "Yes," he confirmed. "Hurry—the attack here will begin very soon."
Jin nodded and continued on. The adrenaline rush of the earlier activity had worn off, and she could feel a dozen points of stinging pain and the warmth of trickling blood where shards from the exploded window had dug a new set of wounds into her face and arms and chest. Ignoring the injuries, she reached the curve and walked around it.
And came to a sudden halt. She'd expected to find some kind of secret exit that would get them out of this place. Instead, clearly visible behind a layer of tinted plastic on the corridor's inner wall, was the central monitoring room Akim had mentioned.
A monitoring room currently filled to the rafters with Trofts.
Jin twitched back from the dark plastic, feeling horribly exposed. "Go further in," Akim whispered, pressing a hand impatiently into her shoulder. "Don't be concerned—we aren't visible."
Jin wasn't nearly so sure about that. Still, from the Trofts' frantic hand and head movements, not to mention their vibrating radiator membranes, it did appear that they had other matters occupying their attention at the moment. Keeping her movements slow and smooth, she sidled farther down the corridor, studying the room and its occupants as she went.
Not all of the Trofts appeared to be line soldiers. Not even most of them, she realized as she focused on the unarmored leotards most of the aliens were wearing. The only actual combat troops were a pair of armed Trofts standing guard by each of the room's two doors, plus another four standing at the sides of a large curved glass window that opened out onto the airfield and the rows of Troft ships parked across the open space. "What now?" she whispered as Akim moved into view of the room.
"We wait," he said. "And we watch."
Jin frowned. Watch? For what?
And then, through the window, she caught the flicker of gunfire.
The Qasamans were attacking the airfield.
She took a deep breath, methodically target-locking the eight armed Trofts in the control room and preparing herself mentally for combat. "I'm ready," she murmured. "Just tell me when."
There was no answer. "Miron Akim?" she prompted, turning to look at him.
And felt a shiver run up her back. Akim wasn't looking at her. He was instead gazing into the room, his eyes bright and unblinking, his lips making small movements as if he was talking silently to himself.
Earlier, Jin had wondered if he'd had come on this mission with some other purpose in mind than the ostensible one of freeing the two Shahni trapped in the Palace. Now, she finally understood what that purpose was.
Akim wasn't here to fight. He was here to observe. To see how exactly the Trofts would react to Plan Saikah.
Jin looked away from him back into the monitor room, fighting back a reflexive flicker of anger at having been lied to this way. She should have known there would be layers of other motivations lurking behind the obscuring veil of the Qasamans' distrust of her and Merrick.
Still, if Akim's goal had been observation, he'd certainly found a good place to do it. As the gunfire picked up outside, the monitor room burst into quiet but frenetic activity. The unarmored Trofts hunched over their consoles, their radiator membranes fluttering like crazy, their beaks snapping in rapid-fire cattertalk. The soldiers were equally tense, the ones at the window gazing tautly out at the battle that had been joined, the ones at the doors taking up full defensive positions, their lasers leveled against possible intrusion.
And unless Akim had lied to her about the extent of the Qasaman attack, there could be Djinn coming through those doors at any minute. "Do you want me to take them out?" she murmured. "Miron Akim? Shall I eliminate the soldiers?"
She counted ten seconds before Akim finally stirred. "We're finished here," he murmured. "The wall behind you. Give it a gentle push."
Jin turned around, studying the smooth wall. "Where?" she asked, looking in vain for the subtle clues as to where the wall ended and the hidden door began.
"There," Akim said, tapping his fingertips on an otherwise unremarkable section of the wall, his eyes still on the activity in the monitor room. "Push there."
Bracing her feet against the floor, Jin placed her palms against the wall and pushed. Nothing happened. She reset her feet and hunched her shoulders in preparation for another try, wondering if the whole wall was supposed to move, and wondering too why such an escape route was even here when obviously only someone with Cobra or Djinni strength could operate it.
"Enough," Akim said. He took a step backward, squatted down, and pulled up a thick section of floor, revealing a narrow shaft leading downward into darkness. Attached to one side of the shaft were a set of metal rungs. "Follow," he told Jin as he took hold of the top rung and lowered himself into the shaft. "Pull the door closed behind you—it will seal automatically."
A moment later they were heading downward, the faint sounds of voices and running feet drifting in through the shaft's walls. Jin tried her audio enhancers, but there was too much distortion and echo for her to tell whether the voices were Troft or human. Occasionally she also heard what sounded like volleys of laser fire.
They had gone perhaps three floors when a sudden surge of dizziness swept over her.
Reflexively, she looped her right arm through the nearest rung, crooking her elbow around the cold metal as she gripped her forearm with her left hand to make sure she didn't fall. The blackness of the shaft seemed to spin around her, twisting her brain into a hard knot and threatening to empty her stomach right where she stood.
"Jin Moreau?" Akim called softly from beneath her. "Are you all right?"
"I don't know," Jin said, clenching her teeth against the waves of vertigo.
"Do you need me to carry you?"
Jin took a careful breath. The dizziness was fading, as inexplicably as it had begun. "I'm all right," she said. "Just let me catch my breath a minute. Keep going—I'll catch up."
"We go together," Akim said firmly. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Jin said. "It felt like I'd been hit with a sonic weapon—dizziness and nausea and all that. You felt nothing?"
"No," Akim said. "And we certainly wouldn't have installed any such traps in these exits. Those most likely to use them would be poorly equipped to find and disable such barriers."
Jin nodded. That was pretty much the same conclusion she'd a
lready come to.
Of more immediate importance, the simple act of nodding hadn't threatened to take off the top of her head. "I think I'm all right now," she said, cautiously readjusting her grip on the rung. "Go ahead—I'm right behind you."
They continued downward. Jin took each rung carefully, making sure she had a solid grip with one hand before releasing the other. The voices and running feet and gunfire still echoed through the shaft, and she wondered vaguely if the Qasamans were winning.
And tried not to wonder what was happening to her.
Chapter Fourteen
Merrick's first indication of how seriously the Trofts were taking their new prisoners was the sheer thickness of the rear double doors on the truck they marched him up to. The doors were dauntingly thick, heavy with the sort of armor that would have worn well on a frontline urban assault tank.
It was only as he stepped into the vehicle and got a look at the interior that he understood why it had such security overkill. Instead of the plain benches and equipment racks or attachment rings he would have expected to find in a troop carrier, the vehicle was instead equipped with padded walls, monitor and communications screens, and a half dozen luxuriously upholstered and padded couches.
This wasn't a simple troop carrier. It was a senior officers' transport.
"Sit," one of the Trofts piling in behind him ordered, punctuating the order with a poke from his laser.
"Watch it," Merrick growled, striding past the rear couches and sitting down on the rightmost of the two front ones. And suppressing a grim smile.
Because the Trofts had made a mistake. A big one. A normal troop carrier would probably have had a personnel section that was sealed away from the driver's cab. A prisoner transport certainly would have.
But not this vehicle. This vehicle was for VIPs, who would want to see what was going on as they drove along, studying terrain and troop positions through the thick glass windshield.
Which meant there wasn't even a partial barrier between where Merrick was sitting and the driver sitting on the left side of the cab.
He'd barely gotten himself settled when the rear doors thudded shut. The driver apparently already had his orders, and immediately shifted into drive and pulled away from the curb. A moment later, they were lumbering down the street.
"Where are we going?" Merrick asked, turning back toward the Trofts behind him.
None of them bothered to answer. None of them had made any move to settle onto the fancy couches, either, Merrick noted, instead propping themselves against the walls or bracing themselves into the rear corners. Despite the vehicle's slight roll and occasional bounce, though, all five lasers were holding remarkably steadily on Merrick.
"Well?" Merrick tried again, shifting his gaze to each of the Trofts in turn as he put a targeting lock onto each faceplate. His fingertip lasers hadn't done much good earlier against those faceplates, but his more powerful antiarmor laser shouldn't have that problem. "Come on—how about a little consideration?" he continued. "I just saved all your skins from the self-destruct, you know."
"That remains to be seen," one of the Trofts finally said. "If you lied, it will go badly for you."
The words were barely out of his mouth when a thunderous blast slammed into the truck from behind, lifting its rear end momentarily off the street and sending the whole vehicle into a violent swerve.
And as the Trofts grabbed at the walls for balance, Merrick opened fire.
It would have been better if he could have tackled the soldiers first, while the element of surprise was still with him. But the first targeting lock he'd set up, back inside the Palace, had been on his shackles, and that was where his first shot had to go. He triggered his left fingertip laser, hoping the Trofts bouncing around the transport would be too preoccupied to notice what was happening.
His hand twitched and curled as the nanocomputer shifted it into position, and with a flash of heat across his wrist the cuff broke in half and Merrick was free. Rolling over onto his side on the couch, he lifted his left leg and triggered his antiarmor laser.
But the Trofts had indeed noticed that first blast. Even as Merrick's laser began to blaze its precision shots across the open space, all five aliens opened fire.
Merrick's nanocomputer took over, swinging his shoulder violently backward, twisting his torso to send him rolling off the couch onto the floor. But in the cramped space even programmed reflexes could only do so much. As Merrick fired his final shot, a brilliant flash stabbed across his vision and a burning stab of pain lanced across his right cheek.
Clenching his teeth against the agony, he pushed himself shakily back up onto the couch. His cheek felt like it was on fire, and his right eye could see nothing but a giant purple blob. Switching to his optical enhancers, he peered forward into the cab.
The driver was still fighting the wheel as the aftershocks from the Palace explosion continued to shake both the vehicle and the ground beneath it. Whether the Troft was aware of what had just happened behind him Merrick couldn't tell, but he had no intention of giving the alien time to react to it. Shoving himself off the couch, he staggered across the weaving vehicle into the cab, grabbed the driver's arm and pulled him out of his seat, then threw him across the cab to smash headfirst into the window on the opposite side.
To Merrick's surprise, the soldier didn't simply bounce back off of the obviously strengthened glass, but instead went straight through as the impact popped the window neatly out of its frame and onto the street. The Troft himself ended up half in and half out of the cab, hanging limply through the window with his legs dangling inside. Dropping into the seat behind the wheel, Merrick pressed his foot on the accelerator to get back up to speed and gave the controls a quick once-over. Everything seemed simple and straightforward enough.
He peered into his side-view mirrors. The other transport was still following closely, apparently with no idea that anything was wrong. For a moment Merrick wondered why the driver was ignoring the Troft hanging out though the window, then realized that part of the transport's exterior wouldn't be visible from the other driver's position.
But the soldier would be extremely visible to any other Trofts they might happen to pass. Whatever Merrick was going to do, he had to do it before they ran across a patrol or vehicle and the alarm was raised. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the accelerator to the floor.
With a muted roar from the engine, the transport leaped ahead. The sudden change in speed seemed to take the other driver by surprise, but a second later he also began to speed up. Merrick continued to accelerate, watching as the transport behind him slowly closed the gap.
And as it settled into place a few meters behind him, Merrick braced himself against the wheel and jammed on the brakes.
Once again, the other driver was caught completely by surprise. This time, though, the results were immediate and cataclysmic. Even as Merrick fought the sudden yawing from his own transport, the other vehicle plowed full-tilt into the rear of Merrick's.
There was a horrendous grinding of metal and both transports jumped forward, the impact jamming Merrick's back and head into the thin seat cushion and the unyielding metal behind it. He wrestled the vehicle to a halt, jammed the gearing into park, and wrenched open the door beside him. Jumping out, he headed back.
The Trofts had built their transports well, he found as he reached the other vehicle. Despite the force of the collision, neither was badly damaged, with the hood of the rear vehicle merely showing some external crumpling and the doors of Merrick's bent inward slightly at the point of impact. Jumping up onto the top of the rear vehicle's hood, Merrick peered in through the windshield.
The collision might not have affected the vehicle itself much, but the same couldn't be said of its passengers. The driver was draped over the steering wheel, his torso twitching with some kind of reaction Merrick couldn't identify. Behind him, both the prisoners and their guards were sprawled on the rear compartment floor, some of them motionless, the rest m
aking the slow movements of dazed people fighting their way back toward full consciousness.
Jumping back down onto the street, Merrick tried the door handle. It was locked, of course, but he already knew the way in. Aiming his little fingers at the lower edge of the window, he fired his lasers, methodically vaporizing a line through the metal lip protecting the thick glass.
And then, without even a hint of warning, his peripheral vision caught a flicker of movement from the transport's rear.
Once again, his nanocomputer took over, shoving him back from the door and toward the ground as it swung his hands up to aim at the unexpected threat.
But it wasn't the Trofts from inside the transport, as he'd assumed. Sprinting silently toward him were two Qasamans in gray Djinn outfits with matching gloves and soft helmets. "Moreau?" one of them called.
"Yes," Merrick confirmed, scrambling to his feet again. "There are prisoners in the back—"
"We know," the Qasaman cut him off as they stopped beside him. "Carsh Zoshak sent us. I am Narayan—how can we assist?"
"We need to unseal this window," Merrick said, turning his fingertip lasers on the frame again. "It pops right out—their idea of an emergency exit, I suppose."
"Understood," Narayan said, stepping up beside Merrick and adding his more powerful glove-mounted lasers to the operation. "Baaree: see to the rear."
The second Qasaman nodded and headed back along the transport's side. "Wait—come back!" Merrick called after him. "Waste of time—you can't get in that way."
"He knows that," Narayan said calmly. "His purpose is to provide a diversion."
Merrick swallowed, a flush of embarrassment warming his face. "Oh."
Sure enough, a moment later the transport began to vibrate as Baaree began pounding with loud uselessness against the rear doors. Merrick kept his eyes on his work, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his cheek and chest.
Ten seconds later, he and Narayan had finished. "Now we need to pop it out," Merrick said, wincing as he eyed the narrow gap beneath the window. It was barely wide enough for his fingertips, with burning hot metal all around it. But without anything handy that he could as a pry bar, his fingers would have to do.