Cobra Guardian

  "Thanks," Lorne said, frowning as he took the coat. "How do I get it back to you?"

  "You don't, genius," she growled. "You kick it under a parked car and get the blazes out of there."

  "Ah," Lorne said, eyeing her closely. "You sure you want to do this? If the Trofts catch you helping me, they're going to kick you right back into the spine leopard zone again."

  "Let them," the woman said firmly. "No, I mean that. You Cobras are our best chance of getting them off our planet. Whatever we can do to help you, that's what we need to do. And whatever you need to do, you do that, too. Okay?"

  "Okay," Lorne said, slipping on the coat. The bulk of his belt bag made the garment too tight around his waist to seal, and he had to settle for sealing it only from neck to stomach.

  He looked back at the woman, feeling a fresh sense of determination. Whether or not those two men across the way were planning to betray him, there were still people in Capitalia worth fighting for. "Thanks," he said.

  "Thank me by staying alive," she countered. "And by getting us out of this."

  The crowd in the downstairs hallway had grown considerably in the time that Lorne and the woman had been away, the word of the mass escape apparently having spread to the entire building. The murmur of conversation stopped as Lorne appeared, the people melting away to either side as he headed toward the far end.

  Treakness and Poole were waiting by the door when he arrived. "There are a couple of men inside the door over there," Treakness said, eyeing Lorne's new coat. "Looks like they're set to open it for us."

  "Good," Lorne said. "Here's how it'll work. I'll lead us to about the middle of the street, then stop there and watch our flanks while you take everyone the rest of the way."

  "What if a spine leopard attacks before we reach the middle?" Poole asked.

  "Then he'll stop a little earlier," Treakness said acidly. "Sounds good." He turned to the crowd. "We're heading out," he called. "Here are the rules. You will not spread out--no more than three people abreast. You will walk--walk--as quickly as you can without stepping on the person in front of you. You will stay close together, and no matter what happens you will not run. Running leads to chaos and panic, and we will not put up with either."

  "And keep as quiet as you can," Lorne added. "I need to be able to hear trouble coming."

  "Right," Treakness said. "Everyone understand?"

  There was a general murmur of agreement. Treakness turned back to Lorne and gave him a sharp nod. "Go."

  Taking a deep breath, Lorne pulled the door open and once again headed into the sunlight.

  He'd hoped to make it halfway across the street before stopping. He had in fact covered no more than half that distance when the spine leopard attacked.

  It came from above, from the branches of one of the neatly trimmed trees lining both sides of the street. Unfortunately for it, Lorne had caught the quiet rustling of leaves as it prepared for its attack, and was already pivoting up onto his right foot as the animal leaped into sight. There was no time for a proper target lock, but he had his leg up in time to slash an antiarmor laser blast across the spiny's flank as it arrowed toward the line of people behind him.

  The creature was already dead when it slammed limply into a man and woman a few meters behind Lorne, tumbling all of them onto the pavement.

  "It's all right," Lorne barked over the bubbling of reflexive screams as the two would-be victims scrambled madly to get back up on their feet and away from the predator. "Don't worry--it's dead. Everyone keep calm and keep moving."

  To his mild surprise, they obeyed. There were a few muffled sobs of released tension, but for the most part the long line of people continued quickly and silently on their way. A hint of movement on the other side of the column caught Lorne's eye, and he made a quick rolling leap over the crowd. But it turned out to be merely a large squintal loping across the street on its way from one tree to another. Lorne stayed on that side, alert for more trouble, until Nissa and the Koshevski brothers appeared, bringing up the end of the line. Lorne fell into step behind them, and a few seconds later they were all safely inside their target building.

  The two men were still holding the door open. "Thanks for your help," Lorne said, nodding to them. As he did so, he activated his opticals' infrared, creating a patterned red haze across their faces. "Nice to know there are still people you can rely on."

  "No problem," the younger man said. His infrared pattern changed subtly, indicating an increase in heat output that might have been merely the result of the extra blood flow to his facial muscles as he spoke.

  But there was no such innocent explanation possible for the rush of heat into the older man's face. His heartbeat had suddenly increased, the irrefutable mark of either exertion or emotion. And given that he was just standing there, it clearly wasn't exertion.

  The woman had been right, Lorne realized with a sinking feeling. The two men were indeed planning to betray him.

  Unless, maybe, he preempted that treachery by offering them the most important part of the Trofts' bribe himself. "We're heading over to the safe zone," he continued, nodding toward the people crowded into the hallway. "You two want to tag along?"

  "Yes," the older man said without hesitation. "Thank you."

  The younger man gave him a startled look, and his lip twitched. "Yeah," he said, with considerably less enthusiasm. "Sure."

  "Good," Lorne said. "You've got five minutes to get anything you want to take with you."

  The hallway here was narrower and more tightly packed than the last one had been, but again the crowd managed to move aside enough to let Lorne pass. "That went well," he commented to Treakness as he arrived at the governor's side.

  "If you liked that, you're going to love this," the governor said sourly, gesturing through the door toward the gathering area beyond it. "There are at least two spine leopards back there."

  "Probably even more than that," Lorne agreed, keeping his voice calm as he peered out the door's window. There were several trees back there, a couple of stands of bushes, a reed-and-flower patch big enough for a couple of spinies to hide behind, plus several benches and a children's play apparatus. "I'm guessing a family's moved in there. I'll need a few minutes to clear them out."

  "You need any help?" Poole asked.

  "Like what?" Treakness growled. "You offering to be bait?"

  Poole grimaced. "No."

  "Just wait here," Lorne told them. "Keep everyone calm and ready to go."

  Dealing with spine leopard families came with both plusses and minuses. The big minuses were that there could be up to ten of the predators in a comparatively small area, and that they would move against their prey with the kind of close coordination that a similarly sized group of individual spinies never achieved. The chief plus was that the pattern those coordinated attacks normally took was straightforward and well known.

  In this case there were eight of them, stalking him from the trees, bushes, and benches. They attacked in the standard twos and threes, and as Lorne gradually but steadily wore down their numbers, the stalking time between attacks increased, requiring him to make a turn or two through the gathering area in order to persuade them to move out of their concealment.

  The whole thing took nearly ten minutes. In the end, Lorne got them all.

  He was standing in the middle of the gathering area, breathing heavily as he scanned the treetops with his infrareds just to be sure, when the glow of grav lifts drifted into sight from behind the line of buildings to the east.

  He dropped into a crouch beside a bench, keying in his telescopics. The incoming aircraft was a civilian-style transport, the same type as the ones the Trofts were using to bring in their spine leopards. But this particular transport wasn't showing any of the brisk determination he'd seen in others that morning as they went about their tasks. On the contrary, it was just wandering lazily across the sky, as if it had nothing in particular to do.

  Or as if it was looking for the source of
noises that might have caught the attention of the Trofts two streets away. Like, perhaps, the screams of dying spine leopards.

  Grimacing, keeping an eye on the hovering transport, Lorne hurried back to the apartment building.

  "Interesting technique," Treakness commented as Lorne rejoined him inside. "Very different from the robot spine leopard and Troft battles they run trainees through at the Sun and MacDonald Centers."

  "You should try seeing the full range of those tests sometime," Lorne said. "We need to get going. There's a transport wandering around that's clearly looking for something."

  Treakness's lip twitched. "Did they spot you?"

  "I don't think so," Lorne said. "If they had, there should be more than just one of them up there. I'm thinking someone in the safe zone either heard the dying spine leopards or caught a reflection of one of my laser shots."

  "Understood," Treakness said. "I notice there's a good-sized gap between the buildings over there. Did you see whether it went all the way through to the street?"

  "I never looked in that direction, but one way or another we'll get through," Lorne assured him. "It'll be risky, running straight out into the street that way. But it'll be faster than going through the building, and speed is what we need right now."

  "Agreed," Treakness said. "Same marching plan as the last street?"

  "With one difference," Lorne said. "As soon as you're all through, maybe a little before that, I'm going to head off and try to draw the Trofts' attention away from you."

  "How?" Poole asked.

  "Just as safely as I can," Lorne said. "Regardless, we're going to be split up. I suggest that once we're inside the safe zone we plan to meet up six blocks to the west, on the northeast corner."

  "Six blocks?" Treakness demanded, his eyes widening.

  "We need the rendezvous to be far enough away from the chaos I'm hoping to create," Lorne explained. "We'll touch that corner on the hour and the half hour until we link up again."

  "But who's going to protect us while you're off making noise or whatever?" Treakness protested.

  "You'll just have to make sure you stay out of trouble," Lorne said impatiently.

  Treakness clamped his mouth shut. "Fine," he ground out. "Anything else?"

  "Just pass the word on to Nissa for me," Lorne hesitated. "And if any of us hasn't made it to the rendezvous in two hours, the others need to go on without him or her."

  "Understood," Treakness said grimly. "Well, if we're going to go, let's go."

  "Right," Lorne said. "Good luck."

  Pulling open the door, he headed across the gathering area at a dead run, quickly crossing it and ducking into the narrow passageway between the two buildings on the far side. At the other end of the walkway, he saw now, their exit was blocked by a short wrought-iron fence. He target-locked the tops and bottoms of four of the vertical bars as he ran, and at five paces away he fired eight quick bursts from his fingertip lasers. Three of the bars snapped and fell to the ground, the fourth managing to hang on until the impact of Lorne's shoulder broke it free.

  On the far side of the fence a pair of two-meter-tall blueleaf bushes decorated the buildings' corners. Between them, Lorne could see the street, and beyond that the stonework façade of the Hendrezon's storefront. Bracing himself, he raced between the bushes and out into the street.

  And squarely into the path of two spine leopards.

  There was no time for subtlety. Lorne leaped aside out of the predators' paths, target-locking both as he hit the pavement and rolled over on his shoulder. As the animals landed and started to spin back toward him he fired a pair of laser shots that dropped them both.

  He rolled back to his feet, doing a quick three-sixty as he did so. There were three more of the predators to the east, but they were over a block away, out of position to attack the refugees now streaming across the street. To the west, two more spine leopards appeared as they charged around the corner of the Hendrezon's building where they'd probably been hungrily eyeing the human prey passing so tantalizingly close on the far side of the Trofts' fence. A quick double target lock, two more antiarmor blasts, and both predators were dead.

  "Broom!" Treakness shouted from the front of the line of refugees, now running openly as they crossed the street behind him. "The door!"

  Lorne had forgotten that the door on this side would probably be locked against the spine leopard threat. Turning toward the door, he swung his leg around and blasted the lock. "Get them in and through," he shouted back to Treakness. He gave the street one final visual sweep, then raised his eyes to the sky above him.

  The transport that had been wandering around up there wasn't wandering anymore. It was arrowing straight toward him, weaving between the buildings as it dropped toward the street like a hawk zeroing in on a large rodent.

  Lorne had no way of knowing whether or not the Trofts had added extra armor plate to the spacecraft, though at this distance it was doubtful whether a Cobra antiarmor laser would be powerful enough to penetrate even an unarmored hull. But the transport was a civilian design, and Lorne had seen plenty of such vehicles over the years. Keying in his telescopics, he located and target-locked the transport's nose sensor array and poured a full second of laser fire into it. Without waiting to see the crew's reaction, he turned and made for the Hendrezon's storefront, sprinting past the line of running refugees. Five meters from the building, he bent his knees in midstride, and shoved off the pavement as hard as his servos could manage.

  He hadn't done a wall jump like that since his first week in basic training. But the maneuver was part of his collection of programmed reflexes, and as he flew facefirst into the patterned stone, his computer took over, extending his arms to first absorb the impact and then curving his fingers into talons and locking them solidly into handholds on the uneven stone. Before he was even completely settled he pulled convulsively down with his arms, shoving himself farther up along the wall, his hooked fingers again scrabbling for and then finding grips. Three more repetitions, and he made it to the roof.

  He headed across at a dead run, dodging the various vents and protrusions, counting on his reflexes to handle any problems with the uneven surface as he focused his main attention outward. The transport that he'd fired on was still in sight but was no longer trying to close the distance between them. Off to the north, two more sets of grav lifts had appeared, both sets heading his way at high speed.

  And off to the west and northeast, the two warships that were within firing range of him loomed ominously over the buildings around them. Lorne felt his skin tingling as he ran, wondering if their heavy lasers and missile launchers were even now being swiveled to target him.

  If they were, their commanders had apparently not yet been given permission to fire. Lorne reached the northern end of the roof and skidded to a halt, dropping down onto one knee and peering cautiously over the edge.

  He'd speculated earlier that the safe zone between the Trofts' fences would be crowded with people trying to stock up on food and other necessities. But he'd had no idea that it would be this crowded. The street scene below looked like a parade route, except that the street itself was as packed as the walkways on either side. Parked in the center of each of the three intersections Lorne could see one of the armored vehicles he'd seen driving briskly down the street just before he and the others had taken to the underground drainage conduits. Each of the trucks had four or five Trofts perched on top, monitoring the activity of the crowds swirling along below them. Other Trofts stood sentry along various sections of the fence, the laser rifles held prominently across their chests guaranteeing that the mob would keep a respectful distance.

  And every eye behind every one of those helmet visors was turned upward toward Lorne.

  "Well, you wanted them all looking at you," he muttered under his breath. Throwing targeting locks on each of the five Trofts on the vehicle in the intersection to the west, he pushed back from the edge of the roof and headed in that direction at a quick zi
gzag run. A few laser bolts sizzled past him from the street, but he was far enough in from the edge that they did nothing but blow some chips from the stonework.

  The big ships still waited silently. Either they were hoping the ground troops could capture this particular Cobra alive, or else they were simply waiting for an easier shot.

  If it was the latter, Lorne reflected grimly, they were about to get their chance. The edge of the building and the wide street beyond were coming up fast. Eyeing the chasm, using his opticals' target-lock system to measure the distance, he made a final adjustment to his stride, and as he reached the end of the Hendrezon's building he jumped.

  And an instant later he was soaring across the street in a flat arc, the absolutely best and easiest target any Troft gunner could ever hope for.

  He had gambled that the Trofts wouldn't be ready for this stunt, and it was quickly clear that he'd been right. He was already past the midpoint of his jump before any of the Trofts below even recovered enough to start firing at him, and none of those shots came very close to their intended target. Either the invaders were unaware of the full range of Cobra abilities, or else they had badly underestimated the depths of Cobra audacity and recklessness.

  For five of the Trofts, it was probably the last lesson they ever learned. Lorne was nearly to the other roof, the laser fire from below still running wide of its target, when he tucked his left leg behind him and sent five quick antiarmor bursts slashing across the Trofts he'd targeted half a minute ago from the rooftop's northern edge. There was a faint scream from somewhere, rage or pain or death.

  Then he was safely across, his knees bending as his servos absorbed the impact of his landing. He dropped into a partial crouch, then straightened both knees and body as he shoved off into a resumption of his zigzag run.

  He'd gone five steps when the whole sky lit up in front of him.