Fortunately, the two carriers were still well to the south of him as the Trofts apparently worked on bracketing his last known position. Possibly they assumed he had gone to ground at their approach, and Lorne winced at the thought of the house-to-house search that was probably next on their agenda. Briefly, he wondered why they weren't bringing in reinforcements, a question that was answered a moment later as he got a glimpse of the sentry ship through the houses and saw the vehicle ramp starting down again. Grimacing, concentrating on looking inconspicuous, he kept going.
He was six blocks north of the ship, with no sign of alien forces gathering around him, before he finally began to breathe easy again. He gave it one more block, and then turned eastward back toward the central city. According to Koshevski, the accessible part of the drainage conduit system angled northeast. Lorne had to find an access point into that section and get back to the others before they concluded he'd been taken and Treakness decided to do something stupid.
And once he'd done all that, he still had to figure out how to get them across the rest of the spine leopard territory to the spaceport.
He was passing one of the darkened houses when he spotted exactly what he needed.
* * *
He was still two blocks away from the group huddled in the underground chamber when he began to hear their worried whispered conversation. He was a block away when he was able to see them with his light-amplifiers.
They didn't see or hear him until he was ten meters away and turned his flashlight on his own face.
To their credit, the loudest reaction he heard was a gasped curse. "What the hell are you doing coming in from there?" Treakness demanded as Lorne reached the end of the conduit and joined the others in the narrow chamber. "I thought you were going to come back that way." He jabbed a finger upwards.
"Change of plans," Lorne said. "We need to head north. And keep your voices down--the Trofts are on the move out there."
"Looking for you, I assume?"
"More or less," Lorne said. "The good news is that the observation drones aren't keyed to look for individuals on foot. Not all that surprising, I guess, since any kind of motion sensors would keep getting triggered by the roving spinies."
"Aren't their infrareds good enough to distinguish between spine leopards and humans?" Nissa asked, frowning.
"You can't get fine-tuned infrared profiles from a grav-lift craft that small," Poole said. "The grav lifts cause too much interference with the readings. You can distinguish a human or large animal from, say, a car engine, but not two animals of about the same size."
"Been spending our weekends with the Dome's tech manuals, have we?" Treakness asked acidly.
Poole ducked his head. "Sorry, sir."
"But he's right, isn't he?" Nissa asked.
"Yes, he's right," Treakness growled. "Fine, so they can't pick us up from the air. But that won't stop them from picking us up on the ground. You have an answer for that one, Broom?"
"Actually, from what I saw the Trofts should only be a minor problem," Lorne said, studying the other's face with his infrareds. Poole's unsolicited comment had sparked way more heat in Treakness than Lorne had expected, even from him. He hoped the governor wasn't starting to come apart. "They seem to be relying on the spine leopards to do most of the patrolling in this part of the city, which means they have only token forces of their own on the streets."
"If that hasn't changed now that they know you're out there," Treakness pointed out.
"True," Lorne conceded. "But I'm expecting them to concentrate on the neighborhood where I killed a couple of spinies, which we won't be going anywhere near. The spinies are going to be the big problem, and I'm pretty sure the Trofts know it. If I use my lasers, the drones will spot it in an instant and send the troops straight to wherever we are. If I don't use my weapons, the spinies will eventually nail us."
"I trust you have a solution to that problem?" Treakness asked
"I think so, yes," Lorne said. He bent over at the waist and headed back into the conduit. "Come and take a look."
Traveling this part of the drainage system was every bit as unpleasant and backbreaking as all the earlier parts had been. But for Lorne, at least, it was worth all the trouble just to see Treakness's expression when the governor raised his head through the access point opening and got his first look at what Lorne had brought for them. "What in the name of hell is that?" he demanded.
"It's a garden shed," Lorne said, gesturing toward the squat, three-meter-square structure he'd borrowed from one of the homes down the block. "I know you don't see any of them in the city, but I'm sure you use things like this at your country estate--"
"I know what it is," Treakness growled. "What are you expecting us to do with it?"
"Walk to the spaceport, of course," Lorne said, beckoning. "If you'd step out of there, please, and let the others come up?"
"What, inside that?" Treakness demanded, making no attempt to move out of the others' way. "Don't be ridiculous--it's nothing but stamped sheet metal. It won't even stop a target slug, let alone a Troft laser."
"Technically, it's sheet metal over a ceramic grid foundation," Lorne corrected, giving the sky overhead a quick look. So far the drones still seemed to be concentrating on the area to the southwest where he'd given the Trofts the slip. "And as I told you before, if we pick our route properly the Trofts should never even notice us."
"So then why the--? Oh," Treakness interrupted himself, finally climbing the rest of the way out of the shaft. "It's supposed to keep the spine leopards away from us."
"Exactly," Lorne said as Nissa popped into view behind the governor. "And we're wasting time."
"Ah--a portable bunker," Poole said approvingly as he climbed out of the shaft behind Nissa. "And all the metal will even help diffuse our heat signatures for any roving Troft patrols. Very nice."
"Only if the spine leopards aren't able to bite through it," Treakness warned, tapping his fingertips against the metal. "This isn't very thick, you know."
"It doesn't have to be," Lorne assured him. "The first time a spiny starts nosing around I set the shed down onto its ceramic supports--you can see they stretch a few centimeters below the metal--and run a little current from my arcthrower into the appropriate spot. The spiny gets enough of a shock to discourage further investigation, but the Trofts don't see any of the big flashes their drones are looking for."
"Maybe," Treakness said doubtfully. "Too bad we can't give it a field test first."
"We can," Lorne said, "and I have. Twice, in fact, on the way over here. Everyone inside, please. We still have a long way to go."
* * *
After everything that had gone before, the walk to the spaceport ended up being refreshingly anticlimactic. The shed weighed over eighty kilos, a daunting challenge for human muscles but a casual load for Cobra servos and laminated bones. Lorne held the structure up by its center, keeping it high enough for general ground clearance but low enough that a roving spine leopard wouldn't be able to poke its snout underneath for a quick bite. Nissa walked directly in front of him, peering through one of the under-eave ventilation slits where she could murmur warnings about curbs, bushes, houses, and other obstructions. Treakness and Poole walked at Lorne's right and left, watching for trouble through other slots and making sure they kept clear of the Troft sentry ships dotting the area.
Several times along the way Lorne had to set the shed down and deliver a mild shock to a persistent spine leopard. Twice during the trip they ended up sitting in one spot for several minutes while he drove off an entire family group that refused to take no for an answer.
But that was the worst of it. The sporadic Troft patrols themselves caused no trouble at all, since the rumble of their carriers' engines always announced their imminent appearance. That gave Lorne plenty of time to get the shed to an innocent-looking landing place beside someone's house or driveway, where it looked perfectly at home to anyone who didn't know the area.
Once, as the sound of the carrier began to fade away, Lorne noticed the twitch of a curtain in the house beside their mobile bunker, and his mind flashed back to the hostile crowd he'd had to face in the Twentieth Street safe zone. But either the homeowner didn't grasp the significance of the shed that had magically appeared beside his house in the middle of the night, or else he wasn't yet ready to betray his people to the occupiers.
Still, for the next two kilometers Lorne paid extra attention to the stray noises around them.
Two hours before dawn, they arrived at the Creeksedge Spaceport.
* * *
Lorne had expected it to be bad. It was worse.
"God," Nissa murmured as the four of them crouched beside one of the squat guidance beacons a kilometer from the spaceport's edge.
"And then some," Poole said soberly.
Lorne nodded in silent agreement as he gazed across the open ground. At the edges of the field, marking the four points of the compass, the invaders had placed four warships, bigger ones than the sentry ships they'd sent to guard Capitalia's intersections. Clustered around them like chicks around a mother hen were a dozen or more of the smaller transports that they'd used to bring in all the Qasaman spine leopards. In and amidst it all were dozens of Troft soldiers, some walking guard patrols, others driving carts laden with supplies into the spaceport's terminal and storage buildings or running hoses from the big fueling stations out to some of the transports.
"An interesting challenge," Treakness said calmly. "I trust you have a plan, Broom?"
Lorne grimaced, keying up his opticals a little as he gave the area a second, more careful look. Aside from the close-in foot patrols, there were also several of the armored carriers that had been set up in guard positions outside the cluster of ships, their roof-mounted swivel guns pointed outward. Still farther out, other carriers were tracing an outer sentry circle that, judging from the fresh ruts he could see in the ground, were coming no more than halfway to the beacon where their group was huddled.
But while the roving patrols weren't coming anywhere near their current position, Lorne noticed suddenly, they were coming right to the edge of the line of posts marking the banks of Tyler's Creek. "Which one is the Tlossie freighter?" he asked Treakness. "Do we know?"
"It should be that one right there," the governor said, pointing. "The one with the blue running lights."
Lorne grimaced. The transport was the ship currently nearest them, probably by the Tlossies' deliberate design. And that would have been very handy if the refugees could head directly there. Unfortunately, it was a quarter of the field away from the creek's closest approach, with two of the invaders' own ships between them.
But they would just have to deal with that. "Okay, here's the plan," he said. "We go back, head south, and get into Tyler's Creek. We'll head along it--"
"Wait a minute," Treakness interrupted him. "Did you say we get into the creek?"
"Afraid so," Lorne said. "The cut's pretty deep along there, but I doubt there's enough room on the edge above the water level for us to stay out of the big ships' sensor range. And unfortunately, the creek's the only way we're going to get in close enough without being spotted."
"But that water is cold," Treakness protested. "We'll die of hypothermia before we even get that far."
"It's not that cold," Lorne growled.
"Actually, lowering our body temperatures a bit will make us harder to identify," Poole murmured helpfully.
Treakness turned to him--
"I'm open to other suggestions," Lorne put in before the governor could get out whatever retort he was planning. "I just don't think there are any."
For a minute Treakness glared in silence across the distance, the light from the roving troop carriers glinting off his eyes. "We'll still need a way to attract the Tlossies' attention," he said at last. "They may possibly be willing to come out a ways and pick us up, but they're definitely not going to park by the creek and wait."
"I've got a couple of ideas," Lorne assured him. "With luck, we won't have to impose too far on their diplomatic immunity."
"Glad to hear it," Treakness said grimly. "Because I'm not at all sure how far that immunity extends." He exhaled a hissing sigh. "No point in putting it off, I suppose. I think the Chino Park picnic area will probably be the best place to get into the creek."
"Sounds good," Lorne said. "Let's get to it."
Chapter Twelve
Fleecebacks, as Jody had already noted, were easy enough to catch. For Cobras, apparently, they were even easier, because the team that had been sent out to find one returned only minutes after Harli finally decided on the site for the test's staging area.
"I hope Freylan won't have a problem sending Snouts on a suicide mission," Paul commented to Jody as they sat on the ground a bit apart from the others.
"I'm sure he won't," Jody assured him. "It's not like they've had a long and rewarding relationship together. Remember, Freylan's the guy who used to name his lab equipment."
"Right." Paul paused. "This is a good plan, Jody," he continued. "I just wanted you to know that."
"Thanks," Jody said dryly. "But you'd better save the accolades until we see if it works."
"Success or failure doesn't change the quality of the plan," Paul said. "It only defines whether a good plan is also a successful good plan."
"Right. Important distinction."
"Actually, it is," Paul said, lowering his voice. "Harli's plan, for example, didn't work as well as we'd all hoped it would. But it was still a good plan, which is what made it worth trying."
Jody looked over at the other Cobras. Harli's back was to them, and she could see no sign that he'd heard her father's comment. But she knew he probably had. "What's your definition of not working?" she asked quietly. "Because Buckley got killed?"
"That's part of it," her father said. "But mostly it didn't work because we didn't really learn anything."
"What do you mean?" Jody asked, frowning. "They shot back. We must have gotten something out of that."
"We saw the power levels they used against us, but we don't know if that was their full power or not," Paul said. "We saw their targeting capabilities, but they waited long enough to begin firing back that we don't know if the lasers were sensor-locked or manually aimed." He grimaced. "And as we've already discussed, we don't know whether Buckley's death was because our attack got too close to something important, or whether it was simply the Trofts sending a message."
"Yes, I see," Jody murmured, peering through the trees. A bit of Stronghold's wall was visible, a sliver of dull metallic sheen in the starlight. "Maybe we didn't learn anything, but if Matigo is right about the Cobras in the town launching an attack earlier, someone in there must have some better data on the Trofts' weapons."
"Which, even if true, is irrelevant," Harli spoke up, his back still to them. "We can't talk to them, they can't talk to us, and if the Trofts are smart they'll keep it that way." He half turned. "They're coming."
Jody tensed. "The Trofts?"
"Kemp and the others," Paul told her. He cocked his head. "And it sounds like Freylan and Geoff are with them."
He was right. Half a minute later, with soft footsteps through the leaves on the part of the Cobras and much louder ones on the part of Geoff and Freylan, the group arrived.
"Good morning, gentlemen," Paul said, nodding greetings at Jody's teammates. "I'm a bit surprised to see you here."
"We're a little surprised to be here," Geoff agreed, looking around. "A bit surprised at the company, too. You guys really made it all the way from Aerie? That's amazing."
"We're good at what we do," Harli said, stepping forward and peering into the cage swinging from the two Aventinians' shoulders. "Apparently, so are you. Most caged giggers I've seen tear themselves apart trying to break out. This one looks completely intact."
"Actually, the cage is Jody's--Ms. Broom's--design," Geoff told him.
"I see." Harli looked at Jody. "Did you also have a
plan for rigging the stun stick to its mouth tusks?"
"Wait a minute," Freylan said before Jody could answer. "Stun stick? Kemp didn't say anything about a stun stick."
"We have to use Snouts against the Trofts," Jody said, wincing. She'd assured her father that Freylan wasn't attached to the animal, but seeing the intensity in his face she suddenly wasn't so sure about that. "I'm sorry."
"Never mind the gigger," Freylan said. "I'm talking about you. You and stun sticks don't exactly work well together."
"Don't worry. Jody's just going to describe the positioning," Paul told him. "We'll let one of the Caelians do the actual attachment."
"Oh," Freylan said, and to Jody's surprise the intensity and concern faded from his face. Apparently, he really hadn't been worried about Snouts. "I--yeah. Okay."
Paul looked at Jody, and even in the faint light she could swear she saw an amused smile tugging at his mouth. "I believe Cobra Uy asked you a question, Jody?" he said.
It took Jody a second to backtrack her memory that far. "I was thinking we could fasten it between the tusks, pointing forward, then rig it so that it would go off on impact. It would then fire when the tusks hit the fleeceback, which would presumably be right beside the ship. If everything goes right, that should kick up a show the Trofts won't be able to ignore."
"Things going right doesn't seem to be the pattern tonight," Harli growled. "But it sounds reasonable. You won't need a trigger, though--stun sticks have an on-contact activation setting."
"Really?" Jody said, feeling heat rise in her cheeks. "I guess I skipped that page in the manual."
"Not that we had much time for reading," Freylan put in.
"One reason we don't like visitors playing with Caelian gadgets," Harli said. "Any volunteers for belling the cat?"