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Cobra warriors had been handed their power all at once, instead of having to
acquire and use it in small increments, which essentially sidestepped the
usual adjustment mechanisms. "I understand," he told H'orme. "Do you want me
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to file that report in the main system?"
"No, I'll do it later. I want to study the numbers more closely first."
"Yes, sir." The unspoken implication being that some of those figures might
wind up in H'orme's personal database rather than in the more accessible main
Dome system. One of the bases of power, D'arl had long ago learned, was in not
letting potential opponents know everything you did. "Shall I
have someone bring up dinner for you?"
"Please. And add in an extra pot of cahve; I expect I'll be working late this
evening."
"Yes, sir." D'arl got to his feet. "I'll probably also be in my office until
later if you need me."
H'orme grunted acknowledgment, already engrossed in the comboard again.
Walking silently on the thick carpet, D'arl crossed to the inlaid grafwood
door. The Cobra warriors were certainly no danger while occupied in a war; but
H'orme wasn't one to jump at sudden noises, and if he was becoming concerned,
it was time D'arl did likewise. First step would be a call around the planet
to the Cobra training center in Freyr Complex to see about shaking loose some
more numbers.
And after that... it would probably be best to have the dining service send up
two dinners instead of just one. It looked like this could be a long evening
for him, too.
Warrior:
2406
The apartment living room was small and cluttered, with the kind of sad
dinginess that comes more from lack of time and materials rather than from
lack of interest in housekeeping. Seated at the scarred table in the room's
center, Jonny let his eyes drift across the far wall, finding an echo of his
own weariness in the faded blue paint there. A map of his own soul, he'd
frequently thought of it, with its small cracks and chips echoing the effects
of nearly three years of warfare on Jonny's psyche.
But it's still standing, he told himself firmly, as he always did at this
point in his contemplation.
The explosions and sonic booms can strain the surface, but beneath it the wall
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Cobra remains solid. And if a stupid wall can do it, so can I.
"Like this?" a tentative voice asked from beside him.
Jonny looked down at the rumpled piece of paper and the lines and numbers the
child had written there. "Well, the first three are right," he nodded. "But
the last one should be "
"I'll get it," Danice interrupted, attacking the geometry problem with renewed
vigor. "Don't tell me."
Jonny smiled, gazing fondly at the girl's tangled red hair and determined
frown as she redid her work. Danice was ten years old, the same age that
Jonny's sister was now, and though Jonny hadn't heard from his family since
arriving on Adirondack, he sometimes imagined that Gwen had grown to be a
dark-haired version of the girl now sitting beside him. Certainly Gwen's spunk
and common-
sense stubbornness were here in abundance. Certainly too Danice's ability to
treat Jonny as a good friend despite her parents' quiet reservations over the
Cobra's temporary presence in their household showed the independent streak
Jonny had often seen in his sister.
But Danice was growing up in a war zone, and no strength of character could
get her through that entirely unscathed. So far she'd been lucky: though
crowded into a small apartment with too many people, the simmering guerrilla
war outside had otherwise touched her life only indirectly.
Given sufficient time, though, that was bound to change, especially if the
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Cobras overstayed their welcome in this part of Cranach and brought the Trofts
down on the neighborhood. On the negative side, it gave Jonny one more thing
to worry about; on the positive side, it was an extra incentive to do his job
right and end the war as quickly as possible.
Through the open window came the dull thump of a distant thunderclap. "What
was that?" Danice asked, her pencil pausing on the paper.
"Sonic boom," Jonny said promptly. He'd cut in his auditory enhancers halfway
through the sound and caught the distinctive whine of Troft thrusters beneath
the shock wave. "Probably a couple of kilometers away."
"Oh." The pencil resumed its movement.
Standing up, Jonny stepped to the window and looked out. The apartment was six
stories up, but even so there wasn't much of a view. Cranach was a tall city,
forced by the soft ground around it to go up instead of out as most of
Adirondack's cities had done. Directly across the street was a solid wall of
six-story buildings; beyond them only the tops of Cranach's central-city
skyrisers were visible. Clicking for image magnification, he scanned what was
visible of the sky for the trails of falling space-chutes. The pulse-code
message last night from off-planet had sparked a desperate flurry of activity
as the underground tried to prepare for their new Cobras Cobras who, with
lousy planning, would be landing virtually in the lap of the Troft buildup
going on in and around Cranach.
Jonny's jaw tightened at the thought, but there'd been nothing anyone had been
able to do about it.
Receiving a coded signal that in essence blanketed half a continent was one
thing; signaling back again, even if the courier ship could afford to stick
around that long, was a whole lot dicier. Jonny
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Cobra knew a round dozen ways of outsmarting radio, laser, and pulse-code
direction finders and each one had worked a maximum of four times before the
Trofts came up with a way to locate the transmitter anyway. The underground
had one method in reserve for emergencies; the Cobra landing had been deemed
not to qualify as such.
"See anything?" Danice asked from the table.
Jonny shook his head. "Blue sky, skyrisers and a little girl who's not doing
her homework," he added, turning back to give her a mock glare.
Danice grinned, the very childlike expression not touching the more adult
seriousness in her eyes.
Jonny had often wondered how much she knew of her parents' activities out in
Adirondack's shifting and impromptu battlefields. Did she know, for example,
that they were at this moment on a hastily thrown together diversionary raid?
He didn't know. But if she didn't need a distraction from what was happening
out there, certainly he did. Seating himself beside her again, he gave his
mind over as fully as he could to the arcane mysteries of fifth-grade
mathematics.
It was nearly three hours later before the click of a key in a lock came from
the outer door. Jonny, his hands automatically curled into fingertip laser
firing position, watched with muted anxiety as the six people filed silently
into the apartment, his eyes flicking from faces to bodies as he searched for
signs of injuries. The survey, as usual, yielded results both better than his
fears and worse than his hopes. On the plus side, all those who'd left the
apartment at dawn two Cobras, four civilians had returned under their own
power. On the minus side
He was across the room before Danice's mother was two steps inside the door,
taking her unbandaged left arm from her husband's tired-looking grip. "What
got you?" he asked quietly, steering her over to the couch.
"Hornet," Marja Tolan said, her voice heavy with pain-killers. Two of the
civilians brushed Jonny aside and got to work with the apartment's bulky
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medical kit.
"Locked in on the click of her popcorn gun's firing mechanism, we think,"
Marja's husband Kern added tiredly from the table and Jonny's former chair. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]