Cobra Guardian: Cobra War: Book Two (23 page)

The tension had almost faded, and Lorne was starting to congratulate himself on his cleverness and his luck, when two spine leopards appeared out of nowhere and jumped him.

He managed to discourage them without using his lasers, dodging their attacks and throwing servo-powered punches and kicks in return until they both gave up and left in search of easier prey. He wasn't so lucky with the next attack, though, and was forced to use his fingertip lasers and even a short arcthrower burst to finally put the spine leopards down. Again, while it seemed impossible that the Trofts hadn't spotted the brief battle, there wasn't any obvious response.

He'd made it halfway through another block of darkened houses when it belatedly occurred to him that the lack of
obvious
response didn't necessarily mean the lack of response.

Ahead was a sculpted bush. He dropped down beside it, freezing in place and keying his opticals and audios to full power. In the near distance he could hear the sounds of a pair of Troft transports, much softer than he'd usually heard them, as if they had been put on some kind of stealth mode. It was hard to tell, but they seemed to be coming up on both sides of him, working their way toward the area where he'd last fired his arcthrower.

He tilted his head back and studied the sky above him. One of the observation drones was hovering nearly overhead, while two more were moving into the area from opposite directions.

"Damn," he muttered under his breath. His plan had been to make his way to the industrial park Koshevski had mentioned and try to cobble together something that he could use to protect Treakness and the others from spine leopard attacks during the long walk the rest of the way to the spaceport.

But it was clear the Trofts knew or at least suspected a Cobra was working the neighborhood. The drones up there might not be programmed to watch for movement, but they clearly knew laser and arcthrower blasts when they saw them. And if there was one thing certain, Lorne would never make it to the industrial park without having to use at least one of those weapons again. Whatever he was going to put together, he was going to have to do it right here in this neighborhood, with whatever resources he could find.

Or rather, not in
this
neighborhood, but whichever neighborhood he could find to escape to. Mentally marking the locations of the two approaching carriers, he slipped away from the concealing bush and turned back toward the Troft sentry ship.

The dead spine leopard he'd used as camouflage was right where he'd dropped it during that first predator attack. Slinging it on his back again, he headed north, moving as casually as he could. The dead spine leopard's residual heat profile should help protect him from whatever infrared sensors the Trofts in the carriers were using, but rapid, panicky movement was even more eye-catching than heat profiles, and the last thing he could afford right now was to catch any of the Trofts' eyes.

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?"