Corwin's hands curled into tight fists as the second flash and crash came; he had been burned once by a faulty electrical outlet as a child, and the arcthrower with its high-amperage current flowing along an ionized laser path made his skin crawl in a way the far more powerful antiarmor laser never did.
But he forced himself to watch as Pyre and Justin worked methodically around the room, destroying every scrap of electronic equipment in sight. Pyre paused once before a large shielded display, and a low hum abruptly filled the room. "Sonic disruptor," Sun murmured, presumably for the Troft's benefit. A few seconds later Corwin thought he detected a muffled crack, and the hum disappeared as
Pyre moved on.
Their escape from the room, two arcthrower blasts later, was so straightforward as to be anticlimactic. Link and Winward, it now became clear, had spent most of their time clearing the exit route, and Pyre had to take out only two more remotes. Winward joined them as they passed his crossroads guard post, and by the time all four headed into the woods through Link's door Corwin's heartbeat was almost back to normal.
"And that," Sun said, "is that. All remotes, shut down; signal the team to return."
Corwin glanced beyond the central console as, in the darkened areas around the room, displays went uniformly black and the remote operators began to stretch and stand up. Beside him, Corwin felt his father's hand grip his shoulder. "I'd forgotten what it was like to see Cobras in genuine combat situations," Jonny said, his voice showing lingering traces of his tension.
"Amazing how much adrenaline the human body can put out," another familiar voice said. Corwin looked past his father in surprise. So engrossed had he been in the displays that he'd never even noticed Jonny's old teammate Cally Halloran was among the group Sun had assembled. Halloran nodded a greeting in Corwin's direction and then shifted his attention to the Troft standing silently beside him. "I understand the Baliu'ckha'spmi demesne feels the cost of this initial expedition is too high, Speaker One," he said. "Having now seen Cobras in action, do you agree?"
Speaker One stirred, its arm membranes stretching out like bat wings for a moment before resettling against its upper arms. "The Tlos'khin'fahi demesne has always been aware of koubrah-warrior fighting skill," it said.
Which wasn't exactly an answer, Corwin realized. His father wasn't fooled by the evasion, either. "But not sufficiently impressed, I gather, to absorb the extra costs the Baliu demesne isn't willing to pay?" the elder Moreau suggested.
"Perhaps your demesne-lord would like to see a tape of this exercise."
"It would be likely to interest him," the Troft agreed. "Presuming the price is reasonable."
"Quite reasonable," Jonny nodded. "Especially as you'll be able to recover some of the cost by selling a copy to the Baliu'ckha'spmi demesne. I think perhaps your two demesne-lords will be able to come to a new agreement afterwards on how much each is willing to spend to have our services."
"Yes," Speaker One said, and Corwin imagined he could hear a note of thoughtfulness in the flat translator voice. "Yes, I think that likely."
The prediction proved correct, and within two weeks the financial quibbles from the Troft side of the negotiation table suddenly ceased. It made little difference to the actual planning groups, which had already committed themselves to the twin goals of not scrimping on vital equipment while simultaneously keeping costs to a bare minimum. But emotionally, the tacit carte blanche was a big boost to all concerned; and politically Corwin found in the action a not-so-subtle enhancement of the Cobra Worlds' general reputation. A good thing, to a point... but he still had vivid memories of the days when the Trofts considered the Worlds a threat. The closing of their connection with the
Dominion of Man had ended the Troft's fears in that direction, but it was easy to see how a rumor of power could wind up being as disquieting to the aliens as the real thing. For the first time he began to understand that part of his father's twin-edged reluctance to demonstrate the Cobras' true war-making capabilities. But it was far too late to back out now.
Three weeks later-barely eleven since the Council's approval of the project-the
Cobra Worlds' two long-range spacecraft headed out from Aventine. On the
Dewdrop, bound for Qasama, were Justin and Joshua Moreau; aboard the Menssana, destinations as yet not officially named, rode Jonny and Chrys Moreau.
Corwin watched the ships leave, and was left to wonder how a planet with nearly four hundred thousand people could suddenly feel so lonely.
Chapter 7
The Dewdrop had been Aventine's only interstellar craft in the days when the planet was first colonized, and since its sole purpose then had been to reconnoiter nearby systems for possible future habitation it made little sense to the Dominion planners to tie up anything larger than a long-range scout ship.
With the normal complement of five crewers and four observers the Dewdrop had probably seemed adequately roomy; with a current load exactly twice that, it was pretty damned crowded.
Pyre didn't find it excruciatingly uncomfortable; but then, he'd grown up under conditions that were in their own way equally claustrophobic. The small village of Thanksgiving, ringed by spine leopard-infested forests, had by reasons of physical space been a very cozy place, and though Pyre had experienced both the greater anonymity of larger cities and the wide-open spaces of Aventine's frontier regions since then, he'd never lost his ability to create mental privacy where physical privacy didn't exist.
To varying degrees, most of the other ten passengers also seemed to adapt reasonably well. Justin and Joshua, of course, had shared a room for most of their lives, and even in a cramped stateroom got along together better than most other sets of brothers Pyre had known. The other two Cobras, Link and Winward, had survived both the academy's barracks arrangement and the intense training of the past few weeks, and Winward commented at least once that shipboard life was almost a vacation by comparison. The contact team members-who, besides Joshua, consisted of Yuri Cerenkov, Marck Rynstadt, and former Dominion Marine Decker
York-had been screened for anything vaguely resembling a neurosis, and Pyre doubted much of anything would bother them, at least noticeably. And the two chief scientists, Drs. Bilman Christopher and Hersh Nnamdi, were so busy testing equipment, programs, and contingency branch schemes that it was unlikely they even noticed the lack of breathing space.
Which left Governor Telek.
To Pyre it was still a mystery why she was aboard this mission. Arguments about high Council representation notwithstanding, it seemed to him incredible that
Governor-General Stiggur should allow a woman on what was looking more and more like a military mission. Pyre's attitudes were as healthy as anyone else's, and he had no qualms whatsoever about female doctors or engineers; but warfare was different, and Stiggur with his roots back in the Dominion should feel that even more strongly than Pyre did. Which led immediately to the conclusion that the decision had been purely political... which led even faster to the question of why he, Pyre, was aboard.
And that was the really troublesome one. Pyre hadn't had as much access to closed-door information lately as he'd had when he'd been living near the
Moreaus, but even so it was pretty obvious that Stiggur wouldn't have let Telek come unless he expected her report and recommendations on Qasama to fall more or less in line with his own expectations. Pyre was a good friend of Jonny Moreau, who had both as governor and governor emeritus locked horns regularly with
Telek... and yet it was Pyre's team she'd asked to observe in the field back on