Cobra Guardian: Cobra War: Book Two (25 page)

"Fine, so it takes two weeks," Harli said. "I don't think the Trofts are going anywhere."

Jody braced herself. This was going to be awkward. "Or, even simpler, you could just send me in," she said. "I already know it."

It was, she reflected, probably just as well that she couldn't see her father's expression. "You
what
?" he asked, sounding as stunned as Jody had ever heard him. "How?"

"How do you think?" she said. "Back when Merrick was learning the system he needed someone to practice with." She lifted her hands, palms upward. "He was lousy at it. I was good at it. What can I say?"

"What can you
say
?" Paul echoed, his famous patience teetering on the edge. "What were you
thinking
? What was
he
thinking?"

"Yes, I know," Jody said, her own far-less-than-famous patience even closer to the crumbling point. "If it helps, we both feel terrible about it. The point is that I've got the skill, and we need it, and the thought of a D-class felony charge doesn't seem all that important out here with saberclaws and Trofts trying to kill us."

For a long minute no one spoke. Then, Paul stirred. "You have your flashlight?"

"Right here," Jody said, pulling it out.

"Lowest setting," her father ordered. "Tell me you honor and respect me, that I'm thirty point two times as experienced as you are, and that you'll never break a twenty-second-degree, hullmetal-clad rule again."

Swallowing, Jody keyed the flashlight for touch operation and set to work.

The Dida code was every bit as complex as Paul had told Harli, and Jody had nearly forgotten how long it took to send anything with any detail to it. Three minutes later, she finally finished. "That it?" her father asked.

"Yes," Jody said, refraining from pointing out that he already knew that. The close-off was, after all, an important part of any coded message.

"How'd she do?" Freylan asked. "Did she get it right?"

"Letter-perfect, actually," Paul told him. "She even got the numbers right, which is the trickiest part of the code." He looked at Harli. "I think we're in business. How do you want to work this?"

"Well, there's no point in trying to sneak in," Harli said. Jody couldn't see his expression, but his voice suddenly sounded a lot more respectful than it ever had before, at least when he was talking to her. "With the clear zone, and the way the two ships are positioned, there aren't any blind spots where she could even get to the wall without being spotted."

"Let alone over it," Paul agreed.

"Right," Harli said. "So it seems to me that the best approach is for her to have been outside the city when the Trofts landed--which the city records will show she genuinely was--and only now is coming back."

"She was out taking samples," Geoff suggested. "I mean, that's what we were doing anyway."

"You mean
we
were out taking samples," Freylan said firmly.

"Yeah, I said that," Geoff said, sounding puzzled.

"I mean we, as in all three of us are going back in together," Freylan said.

"Out of the question," Harli said firmly before Geoff could answer. "You two are staying here with us."

"And letting Jody go in alone?" Freylan shook his head. "No." He leveled a finger at Geoff. "
You
, of all people, ought to be telling them that. You're the one who--"

"May I have a moment alone with my colleague?" Jody jumped in, grabbing Freylan's arm. "Thank you. Come on, Freylan."

"But--"

"Come
on
," Jody said, pulling him outside the circle. "The rest of you, a little privacy, please?"

"Make it fast," Harli growled.

Jody nodded and kept going, pulling Freylan as far away from the others and the safety of their weapons as she dared. "Look, Freylan, I appreciate your concern," she murmured. "But they're right. You're safer out here with them than you are in there with me."

"All the more reason for someone to go in with you," Freylan said stubbornly. "If Geoff isn't going to volunteer, it's up to me."

"I appreciate the offer," Jody said. "But you're making it for the wrong reason."

"What reason is that?"

"You're being all brave and noble because you think I'm not here because of my degrees in animal physiology and management," she said. "You think Geoff invited me to join the team for some other reason entirely."

Freylan sighed. "So you know," he said heavily. "I'm sorry. I should have stood up to him right from the beginning. But"--he waved a hand helplessly--"he can talk me into anything. He can talk
anyone
into anything. That's how we got our funding in the first place."

"Which is why he's so valuable to the team," Jody said. "But you still don't get it. His reason for inviting me isn't what you think."

"Of course it is," Freylan said, and Jody could hear the embarrassment in his voice. "I was
there
, Jody. I saw how he looked at your picture on the registry. His eyes just--you know--kind of . . . you know."

In the darkness, Jody didn't even bother to suppress her sudden smile. Freylan was so
earnest
sometimes. Like a big, earnest, awkward dog. "He wasn't looking at my picture, Freylan," she said gently. "He was looking at my family affiliations, which are on that same registry page.
That's
what he was drooling over, not my face or my body or anything else."

She could sense Freylan's frown in the darkness. "I don't get it."

Jody sighed. Big, earnest, awkward, and innocent. "He saw that my father and brothers were all Cobras," she said. "He figured that if he got me to Caelian, one of them would probably volunteer to come along, thereby saving the team the expense of hiring someone to guard us while we were out in the wilderness collecting our samples."

Freylan seemed to digest that. "You mean he didn't--?"

"Of course not," Jody said, putting a little additional steel into her voice. "And if I'd even suspected he wanted me along for any sort of recreational purposes, I'd have turned him down flat."

"But--" Freylan shook his head. "And all this time I thought . . . he's crazy, you know."

"He's driven by thoughts of fame and fortune," Jody said dryly. "When a person like Geoff gets that taste in his mouth, everything else pretty much goes by the boards."

"I see." Freylan straightened up. "Thank you for clearing that up. I guess I've misjudged him." He hesitated. "And you, too. I'm sorry."

"No apology needed," Jody assured him. "Meanwhile, we
are
keeping everyone else waiting."

"Right." Freylan gestured. "After you."

They returned to the group. "Everything settled?" Paul asked, his tone suggesting that he'd probably heard more than Jody would have liked.

"Yes," Freylan said firmly. "We're both going."

Jody felt her jaw drop. "Freylan, I just got done explaining--"

"I'm not going because I feel obligated on behalf of the team to protect you," Freylan said. "If the Trofts bother to look at the records, they'll see that
four
of us left in that aircar. We might be able to explain splitting into groups of two, but we're never going to convince them that three of us stayed together and sent one back alone."

"He has a point," Harli said reluctantly. "The first rule of Caelian travel is to never do it alone."

"So I go with you," Freylan concluded. "Meanwhile, your father will be here with the rest of the Cobras, where he can assist wherever they need him. If they need to trap more animals for an attack on the ships, they'll have Geoff here, too."

Jody glared through the darkness at him. But his logic was unassailable, and he knew it. So did everyone else.

And even if all he could do was give her moral support, she had to admit such support would be more than welcome. "I give up," she said with a sigh. "So do we head out tonight or wait until morning?"

"Both," Harli said. "You leave from here right now, but you don't head back to Stronghold until morning. You can't plausibly leave from where you landed and pretend you didn't know the Trofts had invaded. Your site was way too close for that."

"True," Paul agreed. "Not only did we see them come in, but we also heard the explosions when they demolished the comm towers."

"And you'd be hard pressed to explain why you came strolling back to a city you knew had been occupied by an enemy force," Harli said. "So we're going to spend the rest of the night getting you and the aircar as far out into Wonderland as we can, so that you can innocently blunder into an occupied city all shocked and stunned by the situation."

"What if they spot us lifting the aircar out of the forest?" Freylan asked.

"They won't, because we're not going to," Harli told him. "We're going to turn the thing up on its side, strap five or six of our spookers to it, and haul it out through the woods."

Jody blinked. "Oh."

"Unless there are objections," Harli continued, in a tone that said there had better not be, "let's get to it. The six of you on transport duty, get to your spookers. The rest of you, gather around. We've got some thinking to do."

* * *

Jody had never ridden any kind of grav cycle before, not even the sporty little ones she'd seen scooting around Capitalia's streets. The Caelian spookers, which were at least twice those scooters' size and rigged with clusters of spines and rim guards to keep away opportunistic predators, were intimidating to the point of borderline panic.

But given that the other option was to walk the Caelian gauntlet, Jody didn't argue.

At least Kemp seemed to be a competent enough driver. She rode behind him on his spooker, holding tightly to the grip bar in front of her, torn between the urge to look over his shoulder and see what dangers might be lying ahead of them, and the equally powerful urge to just press her forehead against his back, keep her eyes shut, and not know.

From the glimpses she got of Freylan, hunched over behind Tracker, he wasn't doing much better than she was.

Jody hadn't expected six Cobras to have any trouble turning an aircar up on its side, and they didn't. Fifteen minutes after reaching the camp, they were off again.

It was nearly dawn by the time they reached the spot Kemp had chosen. "That's the Jakjo River," he said, pointing down the slope as the other Cobras unfastened the aircar and turned it upright again. "The place has a crazy ecology, probably because there's something in the water that supports a rollin' big number of pantra shrubs and kokkok vines. Perfect place for visiting animal researchers."

"Sounds good," Jody agreed, feeling her pulse thudding in her throat. Up to this point most of her attention had been focused on the dangers of Caelian itself. Now, suddenly, the full magnitude of the job she'd volunteered for was looming in front of her. "Are you and the others heading back to Stronghold?"

"Right," Kemp said. "Just as soon--" He broke off, swiveling around and snapping his leg up to send a laser shot into a saberclaw that had just been starting its leap. "As soon as you're in the air," he finished. "Oh, and once you're inside, make sure you put everything back in place. The Trofts'll find it pretty strange if they check out the aircar and find all the loose gear piled up along one side."

"We'll do that," Jody promised.

Kemp peered closely at her. "You ready for this?"

"No idea," Jody said honestly. "But whether I am or not, I'm doing it." She reached down and squeezed his hand. "Thanks for everything."

"No problem," Kemp said, squeezing rather shyly back. "Watch yourselves, okay?"

"You, too," Jody said. "Tell Cobra Harli that when I have something to report I'll try to find a place where I can signal due west."

"We'll watch for you," Kemp promised. "Good luck."

* * *

The trip through the forest by spooker had been a long, tedious, dangerous affair. The flight over the forest by aircar was considerably faster, and a whole lot safer. Within a few minutes, it seemed, Jody was able to see the sheen of Stronghold's wall in the sunlight now peeking over the forest to the east. "You ready?" she asked Freylan.

"Yes," he said, his voice shaking slightly. "You want me to do the talking?"

"No, that's okay," Jody said. It was probably a toss-up as to which of them was more nervous, but he
sounded
more nervous, and that could make all the difference. "I'll handle it."

The laser burn marks her father had told them about weren't visible right away, certainly not until after the Troft ships themselves came into view. But as Jody headed down toward their rental house she finally spotted them: small, crisply-defined black grooves in various places on the ground and several of the houses, all of them angling back toward one or the other of the warships' wing-mounted weapons.

She was searching the wall for signs of the scoring Paul had also mentioned when a two-meter-long, dartlike device suddenly appeared by her side mirror. "Whoa!" she gasped, jerking in reaction. She started to twitch the aircar away from the thing--

"Careful--there's one over here, too," Freylan warned.

Jody leaned forward and looked past him. The Trofts had the aircar flanked, all right. "Any idea what they want?"

As if in answer, the machine on Freylan's side edged over and nudged the aircar to the left. Jody tweaked her own controls that direction in response, then repeated the adjustment twice more as the dart continued its nudging. By the time it finally pulled back to its original escort position she was pointed at a spot just inside the wall and right by the northernmost Troft ship.

And as she headed for the ground Jody saw a group of armed Trofts emerge from one of the buildings beside her new landing site. They formed a semicircle around the open area, their heads and lasers pointed toward her. Keeping one eye on the lasers, Jody put the aircar down squarely in the middle of their semicircle.

"What's going on?" she called toward them as she and Freylan opened their doors and climbed out. Now that they were closer, she could see that, along with being armed, the Trofts were also wearing helmets and armored leotards. "What's wrong," she called again. "Did some screech tigers get in?"