Cobra Guardian

  In view of all that, it was probably remarkable that the group made it a full hundred meters before they had their first accident.

  It happened to be Freylan, though in retrospect Jody realized it could have been any of them. Carrying the rear poles of the gigger's cage, he got his foot caught in a tangle of vines and sprawled facefirst on the ground. That by itself wouldn't have been so bad, but his left hand unfortunately hit the low hill of one of Caelian's antlike insect forms. This species was fortunately not poisonous or even biting, but enough of them got up his sleeve before he could disengage that he had to strip off his entire outfit in order to get clear of them.

  Jody dutifully faced away from the situation, which was why she missed the additional drama of her father lasering a pair of orctangs that tried to take advantage of the party's preoccupation and creep up on them.

  They got Freylan put back together and continued on, only to run into a patch of blue lettros fifty meters later lurking beneath a stand of solotropes. Paul was able to burn away just enough of the patch's end for them to get around it, but barely ten meters further on they hit a line of blue treacle that went all the way down the ridge on both sides. That meant there was no going around it, which meant Paul had to not only cut their way through the plants themselves but then use his arcthrower to systematically flash-burn a path through the adhesive that the lasered plants leaked all over the ground. That single patch took over half an hour to pass.

  Midway through the operation they were attacked by two whisperlings that Paul had to kill. At the far edge of the patch, just as they were starting to pick up some speed again, he had to fend off two hooded clovens. Through all of it, Snouts never stopped growling once.

  The next incident was Jody's, involving a nest of micewhiskers that she managed to kick as she was trying to avoid a patch of hookgrass, and left her with a bruise on her forehead and some madly itching scratches on her cheek. Her father and Geoff took the brunt of the next one, when a branch Paul was cutting fell the wrong way and sent some tendrils of poison shink whipping across both their faces. The resulting inflamed scratches not only itched, but hurt as well.

  Still, the animal attacks were the most serious threat. Fortunately, Paul was mostly able to hear or see them coming in plenty of time to thwart them.

  The sun was nearing the western horizon, and Jody estimated they'd covered about six of the seven or eight kilometers back to Stronghold, when one of the attacks finally got through.

  * * *

  With one final sizzle of charged vegetation, the last bit of poison shink blocking their path blackened and curled away. "Okay," Paul said, peering forward at the immediate terrain ahead, then lifting his head to survey the multiple arches of tree branches stretching out above them.

  Jody looked up, too, eyeing the brilliant greenery distrustfully. Many of the trees they'd passed beneath during that long afternoon had featured lower branches that were dead and leafless and had thus provided little cover for anything larger than a nest of split-tails.

  Not so this bunch. This bunch had apparently choked out all competing large vegetation, with the result that their branches had more or less free access to the region's daily quota of sunlight. That, along with the spiral arrangement of the branches, meant that it was worthwhile for nearly all of those branches to sprout leaves to catch that sunlight.

  Which meant pretty much anything could be hiding up there.

  Jody didn't like the look of the path. Not a bit. But they had little choice. A brief reconnoiter had showed a huge patch of green treacle to their left, and an equally large expanse of impassible marshland to their right. The only other option was to backtrack and find another route, and with the forest having grown steadily denser as they traveled there was a good chance they would find themselves in a similar situation somewhere else down the line anyway.

  The others had clearly, and probably just as reluctantly, come to the same conclusion. "Are we going, or aren't we?" Geoff, at the cage's rear, growled as the seconds ticked past without anyone moving. "Come on, I don't want to be out in the open when the sun goes down and the predator night shift starts."

  "Good point," Freylan agreed reluctantly. He took a deep breath. "Okay--"

  "Hold it," Paul said suddenly. "Listen."

  Jody frowned, straining her ears. What had he heard?

  "Uh-oh," Freylan said quietly, twisting half around to look over his shoulder at the cage.

  And Jody felt her breath catch in her throat as she suddenly got it.

  For the first time in hours, Snouts had gone silent.

  "You three wait here," Paul said, starting to ease forward past Freylan. "I'll check it out."

  "Hold it," Geoff said. "All things being equal, if something decides to jump us I'd rather be up there with you than back here alone."

  "I agree," Freylan seconded.

  Paul's lip twitched, but he reluctantly nodded. "If it'll make you feel better," he said. "But stay a couple of paces back, and don't crowd me."

  They set off, Paul in the lead, followed closely by Freylan, the swaying cage, and Geoff. Jody walked at Geoff's left, keeping her eyes moving and making especially sure to keep an eye behind them. During the past half hour an odd haze had begin to take over her mind, no doubt brought on by a day's worth of fear, fatigue, and adrenaline overload.

  And they still had a good kilometer or two to go. At this point, she wasn't at all sure she was going to make it.

  "Jody, you have those stun sticks handy?" Geoff murmured in her ear.

  "Handy enough," Jody said, frowning at him. "Why?"

  "Why do you think?" Geoff muttered. "Let me have one."

  "Dad said you weren't supposed to," Jody reminded him.

  "I don't care what he said," Geoff bit out. "Hand it over. Now."

  Jody threw a quick glance forward. Her father, his attention on the area ahead and above them, didn't seem to have heard the exchange.

  And suddenly she realized that she would rather like to have a weapon handy, too. Sliding open the fastener on one of the two packs hanging across her chest, she pulled out the two stun sticks and handed one to Geoff. "Be careful with it," she muttered.

  "Don't worry," he said. Shifting it across to his right hand, he clicked off the safety catch and rested his thumb on the activation switch. Swallowing hard, wondering what her father would say if he caught them with the weapons, Jody did the same.

  They'd gone ten more paces when the entire grove exploded in ululating howls and a dozen snarling, wolflike animals leaped from the branches above them.

  Reflexively, Jody dropped into a crouch, turning half around as two of the animals hit the ground three meters away and charged toward her. Vaguely, she heard herself screaming at them in turn as she frantically tried to activate her stun stick.

  But somehow, her madly searching thumb couldn't seem to find the switch. The nearest of the predators had opened its jaws wide, giving her a horrifying glimpse of sharp teeth and a bright red mouth.

  Abruptly a brilliant flash of blue light slashed across the animal's flank. The creature twitched violently in midstride, then nose-dived onto the matted ribbon vines. Its partner dodged to the side, opened its own jaws, then also fell as a second antiarmor laser shot took it out.

  And then, Jody's scrabbling thumb found the stun stick's activation button, and the sizzle of half a megavolt of electricity joined the cacophony of howling filling the grove. Something moved at the corner of her eye, and she swung around, trying to bring up the stun stick to intercept it.

  She didn't make it. The creature slammed into her, its jaws stretching toward her throat, its body shoving her arm and the stun stick violently to the side. The impact turned her whole body into instant jelly, and her suddenly hazy brain realized she was being slammed to the ground. Her head hit the ground hard . . .

  The darkness evaporated, and she found herself lying on her back in the grass. Freylan was kneeling over her, his arm stretched out rigidly, whipping the
crackling stun stick in his hand back and forth in a hundred-eighty-degree arc, yelling defiantly at the pack of animals still filling the grove with their howls. Jody tried to roll away or get up and help, but her body inexplicably refused to move.

  And then, someone shot past above Freylan's head, and Jody rolled her eyes to the side and saw that it was her father. He landed in front of the snarling animals, sending servo-powered kicks at the nearest ones while his fingertip lasers flashed death at those out of kicking range. Two of the animals leaped at him from behind, but before they could make contact he threw himself into a low leap over the ones in front of him. He hit the grass and rolled, and as the two animals leaped again, his antiarmor laser flashed twice, sending their charred bodies to thud against the ground. The rest of the pack turned to the attack, only to find themselves in the middle of a three-prong laser barrage.

  A few seconds later, the last of them was dead.

  The sizzling of Freylan's stun stick, audible now that the howling had stopped, also went silent, and she looked up to see Freylan lower the weapon to his side, his whole body shaking with reaction. He took a careful breath, gave one final look around the grove, then looked down at Jody. "You all right?" he asked.

  "I do' know," Jody said. The words came out embarrassingly slurred, her mouth as numb as the rest of her. "Wha' ha'n'ed?"

  "We were attacked by a pack of--I don't know what; call them tree wolves," Freylan said. "Your dad did a spinning sonic blast to try to slow them down, but I guess when one of them slammed into you, it bumped you and the stun stick over into Geoff."

  Jody grimaced. Or tried to, anyway--she had no idea whether her facial muscles were even responding. "An' the curren' go' all th'ee o' us," she muttered.

  "Yeah," Freylan said. He looked somewhere to his left, his face hardening. "With Geoff taking the brunt of it."

  Jody felt a sudden flash of horror roll through her useless body as she remembered her father's warning that the stun sticks could deliver a lethal jolt. "Is he a' right?" she breathed.

  "I don't know," Freylan said grimly. "He's still breathing, though."

  "No thanks to you," Jody's father's voice came from the direction Freylan was looking, an uncharacteristic anger in his voice that made Jody wince. "Or to him. What in the Worlds did you two think you were doing?"

  "I'm sorry," Jody said. Her mouth was starting to come back now, and with an effort she managed to turn her head.

  Geoff was lying on his back on the ground, his eyes closed, his face pale. Paul was kneeling over him, busy pulling the cap off a hypo, the survival kit's medical pack laid open on the ground beside him. "Yeah," Paul rumbled. "Sorry."

  "We were afraid," Jody said, knowing even as she said them how lame the words sounded. That was an excuse, not a reason, and her parents had never much liked excuses. "We thought that if . . . no. We weren't really thinking at all, were we?"

  "No, you weren't," Paul ground out as he slipped the needle into Geoff's arm and pressed the plunger. "There's a reason why you need training to use a weapon. Any weapon." He held his fingers against Geoff's neck for a few seconds, then looked up at Jody. "But I think he'll be okay," he added, the anger starting to fade from his voice. His eyes flicked to Freylan. "How about you, Freylan?"

  "I'm all right," Freylan said. He looked back down at Jody, as if suddenly realizing how close he was still kneeling to her, and got stiffly to his feet.

  Only then did Jody see the blood-stained slashes in the side of his silliweave tunic.

  "Freylan!" she gasped, struggling to get her body working again.

  "Don't worry, it's okay," Freylan hastened to assure her. "They hurt, but they don't feel very deep."

  "What happened?" Jody demanded, running her eyes over the rest of his outfit. There didn't seem to be any damage anywhere else.

  "Nothing serious," Freylan said. "When the first tree wolves attacked, your father had to get out of their way so that he could set up his counterattack." He shrugged. "One of them got through before he could do that."

  And then, suddenly, Jody understood.

  She turned to her father again, her eyes tracing out the tension lines in his face and throat, the repressed anger still simmering there. Only it wasn't her and Geoff he was primarily angry at.

  It was himself.

  Jody closed her eyes, a wave of frustration and sympathy flowing through her. From the very beginning of the Dominion's Cobra project a hundred years ago, the men who volunteered to become their elite soldiers were carefully screened, not just for mental and emotional stability, but also for the kind of outward-centered personalities that would permit the downplaying of their personal desires and the elevation of the lives and safety of the civilians they would be fighting for. That screening had gotten tighter and more sophisticated over the years, but the goal was still the same: to create warriors who were able and willing to give their lives if necessary for their people and their worlds.

  Only the military planners who'd created the Cobras' equipment hadn't seen it quite that way. The combat reflexes programmed into their nanocomputers weren't designed so that Cobras could throw themselves into self-sacrificing lunges into enemy fire in defense of the small and helpless. They were designed to get the Cobra himself out of harm's way, therefore permitting him to survive long enough to launch his own counterattacks against the enemy.

  Even if it meant abandoning one of the small and helpless to take the brunt of the attack alone.

  Freylan clearly understood that. But not everyone did. Jody had heard heartbreaking stories from her brothers and their friends about incidents in the Aventinian frontier, incidents where Cobras had lived and civilians had died. Every one of those stories had been told with a catch in the Cobra's voice, and usually a stiff drink in the Cobra's hand.

  It wasn't a problem that was going to go away, either. The Dominion had given the Cobra Worlds the equipment necessary to reproduce the Cobra equipment, but not the ability to reprogram the nanocomputers.

  There was a groan from Jody's side. "Geoff?" she called, trying again to get up. She halfway succeeded this time, rolling part of the way up onto her side. "You okay?"

  "Thin' so," he said, his voice as slurred as Jody's had been a minute ago. "Kind o' nu'. Thin' it's gettin' better--startin' t' hurt now."

  "Oh, good," Jody said.

  "Just lie there for a few more minutes," Paul said, collecting the medical pack and standing up. "Your turn, Freylan. Let me help you with that tunic."

  "It wa' 'y faul', Co'a Broo'," Geoff called as Paul stepped over to Freylan and the two of them started easing off Freylan's bloodied tunic. "I m-mean m-my fault. Not Jody's."

  "I appreciate knowing that," Paul said. "I hope you appreciate now that stun sticks aren't toys." He flashed a look at Jody. "Both of you."

  "Trust me," Jody said fervently, trying to sit up. Once again, she was halfway successful. "What's the plan?"

  "There's no point in trying to get any farther tonight," Paul told her, peering at Freylan's gashes and selecting an anti-infection salve from the kit. "After I get Freylan fixed up, I'll see what I can put together in the way of a shelter."

  Jody looked around at all the predator corpses scattered around them, corpses the scavenger insects and carrion animals were already flocking to. "You think it'll be safe here?"

  "As safe as anywhere else," Paul said. "If this pack of tree wolves permanently held this territory, we can hope it'll take any other predators at least until tomorrow to realize they're gone and move in."

  "Unless they share the area with a nocturnal batch," Freylan warned, wincing as Paul applied the salve.

  "In which case, again, we're in no more danger here than a hundred meters down the road," Paul said. "Let me get some sealant and bandages on this, and then the three of you can rest while I build us a shelter."

  * * *

  Jody expected the shelter to be something simple, perhaps a hedge of uprooted thorn bushes with a few well-placed treacles gluing it a
ll together.

  She was wrong.

  By the time she was able to fully sit up, her father had burned off a three-by-four-meter area about ten meters upwind of the scattering of dead tree wolves. By the time she was able to stand up and hobble around, he'd begun lasering down some of the smaller trees, cutting them into sections, and lugging them to the cleared area. By the time her fine-muscle control had recovered to the point where she was able to start assembling the survival pack's silliweave tent, he'd put together a waist-high barrier enclosing the campsite on three sides.

  And by the time Geoff had also recovered from his encounter with the stun stick, the sun was going down and the tent was nestled snugly inside a chest-high barrier that would give pause to even the most determined predator.

  Clearly, her father had had a lot more frustration to work out than she'd realized.

  "The last step will be to string the extra support wire across the entrance once you're settled down in there," Paul said as Jody and the others finished collecting the rest of the equipment and supplies. "I can tie in the stun sticks and rig a pressure switch so that anything that hits the wires hard enough will get a good jolt. That and the barricade should keep anything serious from getting through from the sides."

  "And the top cover and support poles should be springy enough to bounce off anything that leaps in from the top," Freylan said. "At least, that's what the manual said is supposed to happen."

  "We'll probably get a chance to see how that works," Paul said grimly. "Make sure you've done any business you need to do out here, then get inside."

  "What about Snouts?" Freylan asked, nodding toward the gigger snarling quietly in its cage. "We just going to leave him out here?"

  "You want him in there with us?" Geoff countered.

  "He was a good early-warning system for the tree wolves," Freylan said doggedly. "He might do the same for the nighttime predators, too."

  "Only if they run the same territorial game the daytime ones do," Geoff said.