Merrick clenched his teeth. Letting them kill him just to maintain his cover would be the ultimate in futility. But revealing his true identity would be equally disastrous. If the Drims realized there was a Cobra loose on Muninn, they would turn the whole planet upside down looking for him, and probably kill untold numbers of innocent slaves in the process.
But maybe there was a small patch of middle ground. If he could reveal that he was a spy, but not that he was a Cobra…
Another laser shot cut through his wing, and this time no amount of maneuvering could keep it flying level. Merrick was going down—not too steeply yet, but he was definitely going down.
His final fate was sealed. But the Trofts apparently weren’t interested in the gradual approach. Peering back over his shoulder, Merrick saw the aircar move lower, and to his stunned disbelief the Troft on that side began gathering in double handfuls of the net tied to his ankles. [The truth, you will give it,] he shouted. He pantomimed yanking back on the net. [Or the net, I will hang you from the sky from it.]
And with that, Merrick no longer had a choice. Glancing back at the aircar, flicking targeting locks on both Trofts’ foreheads, he shifted his grip on the control bar, curling his right hand over the top and pressing his little finger awkwardly along the bar, aiming it toward the bar’s outer end.
The Troft was still gathering in the net, but so far hadn’t attached it to anything inside the aircar. Wrapping his other fingers around the bar, Merrick settled his thumb against the right ring-finger nail, the trigger for the fingertip laser’s highest setting. Taking a deep breath, he twisted the bar violently around to his right, swinging the end toward the aircar, and fired.
The two flashes weren’t as bright as the ones that had sliced all those tears in Merrick’s wing. But they were more than powerful enough to kill the two aliens where they sat.
At least Merrick hoped they had. His nanocomputer had barely fired off the second shot when the world erupted in a dizzying spiral as his wing went completely berserk.
He twisted back forward and grabbed the bar again, this time in a proper grip. But his ninety-plus-degree turn to line up the control bar with the Trofts had completely wrecked both his stability and his forward momentum. An instant later the spin abruptly became a three-dimensional spiral roll as the now driverless aircar shot past, catching the wing’s tip as it arced toward the forest below.
For an eternity of seconds Merrick tried everything he could think of, every maneuver and trick Anya had taught him. Finally, finally, he managed to dampen out the spin and roll.
But it was only a temporary victory. The Trofts’ laser shots had damaged the wing far beyond Merrick’s ability to compensate. He was falling, and there wasn’t a single thing he or his weapons or his fancy Cobra programmed reflexes could do to stop it.
He was still trying to regain some altitude, wondering what it would feel like to die, when he was abruptly jammed into his harness as the wing was jerked upward. Somehow, the nosedive had been halted, or at least slowed.
He looked over his shoulder, expecting to see the aft end of a Troft aircar behind the edge of his tattered wing. To his surprise, what he saw was a trailing jattorn net.
He craned his neck to look straight up. A pair of hands were sticking through the flapping tears in the fabric, holding tightly to the support struts.
A flood of relief flowed through him. There was no way Anya could keep them in the air for long, and any chance of a hunt was completely out of the question. But if she could hold on long enough she should at least be able to bring them to a more or less smooth landing. Certainly a landing that would leave them both alive. “Thank you,” he shouted toward her. “Your timing is perf—”
“They’re coming,” she cut him off, her voice rigid. “There—to the left. They’re coming.”
Merrick turned to look. To the south, just above the range of mountains, a fast-moving speck had appeared. Snarling under his breath, he keyed in his telescopics.
It was an aircar, all right, the same design as the one he’d just sent on a power dive into the forest. Unlike that one, though, this model came equipped with a pair of hood-mounted weapons. Lasers, or something equally nasty.
His plan to convince them that he was a spy had worked, all right. And the backup crowd had come loaded for bear.
What in the Worlds were the Drims up to on Muninn that the possibility of a lone spy could prompt this kind of violent response?
“Merrick Hopekeeper, what do we do?”
“Take it easy,” Merrick said as soothingly as he could as he searched for inspiration. Below them, the forest seemed to stretch forever in all directions, with Gangari and a handful of other villages forming the only sizeable open areas. The main road they’d come in on was visible, as were a network of narrower side roads, some of them running alongside narrow but fast-looking rivers or streams. More mountains were visible in the distance to the north, possibly part of the same chain as the one they’d just jumped from.
“Merrick!”
“I said relax,” Merrick snapped. “You’ll be all right—they’re coming for me, not you.”
He frowned. They were coming for him, he realized suddenly. He was the proven spy, while as far as they knew Anya might be nothing more than a naïve local whom the intruder had conned into helping him.
Which meant that if they could split up, the pursing Trofts’ logical choice would be to chase him and leave her alone.
The trick was how to do that without getting himself captured. Or killed.
But at the same time to let the Trofts think he’d been killed…
“I need a ravine,” he shouted up to Anya. “Or a massive cave, or maybe a sinkhole system. Some place close at hand where a body would be hard to find.”
“There’s the Jendl River ravine,” Anya said. “It’s there, to the right, about three kilometers away. What are you planning?”
Merrick looked that direction. He’d spotted the river earlier, but hadn’t noticed the ravine. But it was there, all right, its contours obscured by the trees. It looked to be about a hundred meters across and maybe four hundred meters long.
A muted flash caught his eye: a piece of forest a kilometer downriver from the ravine had suddenly sprouted a set of smoky yellow flames. The aircar he’d sent crashing into the woods had apparently caught fire.
“Merrick?”
“Here’s the plan,” Merrick said, throwing a quick look at the incoming aircar. It was closing fast, but by the time he made his move it should still be far enough away for the trick to work. Even better, it was maintaining its altitude, staying high above the gliders, probably in hopes of avoiding whatever weapon Merrick had used on the first vehicle. “In about ten seconds I want you to drop us to treetop level and head toward the ravine,” he continued. “And when I say treetop level, I mean I want us—me, anyway—actually skimming between the tops of the trees. Can you do that?”
“Yes, I think so,” she said doubtfully. “The steering will be difficult. I may not be able to keep you from hitting the treetops. Are we then going into the ravine?”
“As long as I don’t hit anything hard enough to bring you down that shouldn’t be a problem,” he assured her. “And no, the only thing going into the ravine will be my wing. Someplace between here and there, I’ll drop off. You’ll then continue to the ravine, drop my wing into it, then get as far away as you can before you have to come down. With any luck, they’ll start the search for me there. Can you do that?”
“I think so,” she said again. “But these trees are twenty meters tall. Can you survive a fall from that height?”
“Let me worry about that,” Merrick said. Drawing his knees to his chest, he pulled the tether rings off his ankles and started hauling in the net. He hadn’t tested the material’s tensile strength, but given that the first pair of Trofts had planned to hang him and his wing from it, the stuff ought to be strong enough for what he had in mind. “You worry about finding a safe pla
ce for you to land.”
“There are many such places,” she assured him. “Do you see that stone dome ten kilometers ahead?”
Merrick keyed in his telescopics as he wadded the net against his chest. Just visible over the trees was a rounded chunk of gray-white rock. “Yes.”
“I shall meet you there sometime after sundown,” she said. “Are you ready?”
Merrick found the two ends of the net and wrapped one securely around each wrist. “Ready,” he said. “Take us down.”
An instant later, his stomach seemed to leap into his throat as Anya sent them into a sharp dive downward. The trees rushed up at him, and for an awful second he thought she’d miscalculated and was about to send them crashing at full speed into the forest—
And then, just when it seemed too late, he was again yanked in his harness as she leveled off.
He’d asked her to stay at treetop height. She’d taken him at his word, the tops of the highest trees now whipping past at awesomely dangerous speeds. How she was steering with both hands holding his crippled wing he couldn’t begin to guess, but somehow she was managing to avoid the taller trees and only occasionally brushing his shins against one of the shorter ones.
But no matter how skillful she was, her luck couldn’t last forever. Time for Merrick to find a way off this bus.
There it was, fifty meters ahead: a treetop reaching to within two meters of his stomach, with no other taller trees immediately behind it for at least ten meters. “Hold us straight on this path,” he called to Anya. “Here I go.”
“Good luck,” she called back.
“You too.” Glancing up at the straps fastening his harness to the wing support struts, he put target locks on each of them. Almost as an afterthought he freed the control bar from its own straps and tucked it away inside his jacket. He’d gone to a lot of effort to make it look like he had a laser hidden in the bar, and it would be a shame to leave the thing with his wing where a search team might find and examine it. He looked back at his target tree, trying to judge his timing…
With about a quarter second to go, he fired his fingertip lasers, simultaneously twisting his shoulders to the side. The lasers sliced cleanly through the straps, and with a lurch he fell free, the last-second shoulder twist giving him just enough rotational momentum to turn him halfway around. Free-falling down and forward, his back now to the wind, he winced as his target treetop slapped across the backs of his thighs and flew past beneath him.
And throwing his arms out, he sent the loop of net fabric flying behind him and dropped it neatly over the top of the tree.
It was like catching a car with a lasso. His body snapped straight out behind him, his wrists and shoulders threatening to pop out of their sockets as the tree did its level best to change his forward momentum from incredibly high to incredibly zero as quickly as possible. In that first agonizing second of multi-gee deceleration the only thing that saved him from disaster was the combination of his bone and ligament strengtheners, the springiness of the treetop, and the slight elasticity of the net material itself.
The net was never designed for such strain, and within the first second and a half it snapped in two. But by then its job was done. Merrick had slowed himself from bat-out-of-hell to rapid jog, and he’d lived through it.
And with that, all he had to do was get safely down the twenty meters still separating him from the ground.
But that one, at least, was in his repertoire of preprogrammed reflexes. Looking over his shoulder, he put a targeting lock on the tree trunk now whooshing up toward him and bent his knees slightly. His feet hit the trunk, and as his knees bent to absorb the remaining momentum he put another target lock on a tree he’d just passed. His body started falling forward, his knees straightened, and he flew across the gap, turning a one-eighty to again hit the second tree feet-first. Again his knees bent and then straightened, and again the nanocomputer launched him across and down.
It was a technique that had been designed for city maneuvering, to be used with an alley or narrow street to get from rooftop to street level in a hurry. Apparently, it worked just as well with trees.
The nanocomputer choreographed his final bounce, and as he landed at last on the grass and mat of dead leaves it occurred to him that he’d never been so glad to be on solid ground in his life.
But there was no time to pause for relief or self-congratulation. The Trofts would presumably start their search at the ravine where Anya was about to dump his wing, but if they had any brains they would include an infrared sweep of the entire area. Orienting himself, he headed off into the forest, running as fast as the terrain and his Cobra servos would permit.
He’d had some concerns that the aircar he’d sent crashing to the ground might burn hot enough to ignite a full-blown forest fire. To his relief, that didn’t look like it would be a problem. The aircar—what was left of it—was still burning when he reached the scene, but while the vegetation immediately around each of the scattered pieces was blackened, the trees and bushes and ferns even as close as twenty meters away seemed untouched.
The exception being the handful of trees that had been in the direct path of the vehicle’s final flight. Two of them had been smashed in the process of shredding the aircar into rubble, while another two now showed the same type of scorch marks Merrick had seen at the other more distant wreckage site.
Near the main fire was what appeared to be the twisted remains of one entire side of the aircar, lying at the end of a deep groove it had gouged in the ground. Wrapping the pieces of the torn jattorn net around his hands to protect them, Merrick went over to the smoldering metal and pulled it back a couple of meters, positioning it over the deepest part of the groove. Then, rewrapping the net into a loose protective turban around his head and face, he crawled along the groove and lay down underneath the metal.
It was hot down there, but not unbearably so. As Anya had demonstrated that morning with the leftover meat, most of the heat from the burning metal was flowing upward away from him.
More importantly, all that rising heat should be more than enough to mask his presence from whatever infrared detectors the pursuing Trofts might be using.
So he would lie here for awhile, resting from his ordeal and waiting for the opening that would come between the Trofts’ quick survey of the site and the more detailed follow-up team who would come to collect the pieces for closer study. It would be during those minutes or hours that he would be able to slip away and disappear into the forest.
Only then would he find out whether Anya had also survived this first battle for her world’s freedom.
But what had happened had happened, and for now there was nothing he could do one way or the other. Closing his eyes, keying his audio enhancers to full power, he settled down to wait.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was clear from the moment Colonel Reivaro stormed into Commandant Ishikuma’s former office that the man was in a foul mood. He slammed the door behind him, rattling the frosted-glass window to within a millimeter of shattering, and stomped across to the desk. He flicked on the small reading light and dropped into the chair like he was trying his best to accidentally break it. The chair survived anyway. Glancing across the monitors lined up along the desk’s edge, he cursed feelingly and reached for the keyboard.
“I know how your comm system works,” Lorne said quietly from his hiding place beside the door. “Twitch either eye, and I’ll kill you.”
For a handful of seconds Reivaro didn’t move, his face and body frozen, his eyes still on the keyboard. Then, a small smile curved one corner of his mouth. “I’m impressed,” he said calmly. “I truly am. May I ask how you got in here?”
“Of course not,” Lorne said, coming out into the muted light and showing the colonel the small device in his hand. “This is a dead-man switch. I presume you highly advanced Dominion people still know what those are?”
“It’s hardly a technology likely to go out of style,” Reivaro said. “Wha
t’s it keyed to?”
“The block of explosive I put under your chair,” Lorne told him.
A muscle in Reivaro’s cheek twitched. “I see,” he said. “Are we making this personal, then?”
“That depends,” Lorne said. “Right now, I’m just here to get my parents. Where are they?”
The muscle twitched again. “Unfortunately both are currently beyond my reach.”
“I didn’t ask if you could bring them to me,” Lorne said coldly. “I asked where they were.”
“Cobra Paul Broom is in Capitalia, being prepped for interrogation,” Reivaro said. “Trust me when I tell you he’s completely out of your reach.”
“I’m sure you think so,” Lorne said. “But then, I’m also sure you thought you were out of my reach.”
Another half-smile. “Point. As to Cobra Jasmine Broom, her whereabouts are currently unknown.”
“Of course they are.”
“Believe what you will, but for once I’m being completely and totally honest,” Reivaro said. “She disappeared right after she sabotaged the Yates Fabrications power system.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “She did sabotage the factory, correct?”
“No idea,” Lorne said. “I’ve been in Bitter Creek all day.”
“Of course—I’d forgotten. May I ask what’s become of Sergeant Khahar and Marine Second Chimm?”
“Both were still alive and reasonably well when I left them,” Lorne assured him. “Cobras don’t kill unless absolutely necessary. Unlike others I could name.”
“We all have our orders and our missions, Cobra Broom,” Reivaro said. “And you must never forget the reality that’s driven everything that’s happened here.”
“The reality that the Dominion of Man likes power?”
“The reality that the Dominion of Man is at war.”
“And no doubt fighting for her very survival?”