CHAPTER ONE
Martial law. Martial law. Martial law.
The words echoed through Lorne Moreau Broom’s mind, running a counterpoint rhythm with the soft hiss of tires on the pavement beneath their car. Martial law. Martial law. Martial law.
“How you doing back there?” Badger Werle asked from the front passenger seat.
Lorne tightened his fingers around the armrest. How was he doing?
His father Paul, all but kidnapped by Colonel Milorad Reivaro of the Dominion of Man Marines and taken to one of the Dominion War Cruisers orbiting their silent threat over his world. His mother Jin, vanished somewhere in the Dominion-controlled province of DeVegas, her whereabouts and fate unknown. His sister Jody, somewhere on the hell world of Caelian with only the Cobra friends she’d made there standing between her and violent death. His brother Merrick, taken by the Trofts in the waning days of their invasion of Qasama, vanished without leaving a hint of his whereabouts. Lorne himself on the run, a wanted fugitive.
And his entire world placed under martial law by the same Colonel Reivaro who had started this whole mess.
How did Badj think he was doing?
“I’m okay,” he said.
Seated behind the wheel, Dillon de Portola made a decidedly rude noise. “Liar,” he said flatly. “I can see you, you know. You look like you’re ready to start eating through the side of the car.”
Lorne focused on the center mirror, keying on his optical enhancements to boost the faint starlight. Sure enough, de Portola had shifted the mirror’s angle to focus on Lorne instead of the traffic behind them. “Whatever happened to keeping your eyes on the road?” he growled.
“It’s not what’s behind us that concerns me,” de Portola said. “It’s what’s ahead. And that I can see just fine.”
“I suppose,” Lorne said. Twitching his opticals up another notch, he focused his attention out the side window.
He frowned. Fighting fatigue and immersed in his own dark thoughts, he’d paid only token attention to the landscape around him for the past hour or so, relying on whatever plan Werle and de Portola had cooked up to get them safely into Capitalia. Now, as he studied the trees and hills rolling past, he realized to his chagrin that he had no idea where the hell they were. “So where exactly are we going?”
“What, you don’t recognize the area?” Werle asked innocently.
Lorne checked his nanocomputer’s compass. De Portola had told him they would be taking the road that ran south of Capitalia, and they were now heading northeast. Assuming they’d already passed the Old Town sector on the eastern edge, and were somewhere on the southern edge of the city proper while he’d been brooding, that should mean they were heading through the Alice Lane district of Capitalia’s satellite towns.
But none of the surrounding terrain looked like what he remembered of the district. “Not a clue,” he admitted. “We are still going to Capitalia, aren’t we?”
“Of course,” Werle said. “You remember a guy named Emile Chun-Wei?”
Lorne frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, you should,” de Portola said. “He tried to stop you from sneaking Governor Treakness out of Capitalia the first day of the Troft invasion.”
Lorne winced as the memory came back. Emile was a Capitalia Cobra who had ordered Lorne to follow Governor-General Chintawa’s stand-down order and turn Treakness over to the invaders. The discussion had been short and unpleasant, and it had ended with Lorne dropping the other man with a stunner blast. “Right. That Emile.”
“That Emile, indeed,” Werle said. “Anyway, we got in touch with him before we broke you out of Reivaro’s clutches, and he’s going to meet us at the Indus Entertainment Center.” He raised his eyebrows. “Along with another old friend of yours. Aaron Koshevski.”
Lorne nodded heavily. He could see now where this was going. “The drainage system.”
“It got you out from under the Trofts’ noses,” de Portola reminded him. “I doubt the Dominion will be looking for us down there any more than they did.”
“Probably not,” Lorne said. “You sure you can trust them?”
“I think so,” Werle said. “Koshevski proved himself before, and he still seems grateful for what you did for his family. As for Emile, after you got Treakness off Aventine he decided to ignore Chintawa’s order and spent the rest of the invasion organizing a civilian resistance group in Capitalia.”
“The whole time, huh?”
“Okay, so the Trofts weren’t here all that long,” Werle conceded. “But he didn’t know how long a stretch he was letting himself in for at the time.”
“And he caught a fair amount of heat for doing it,” de Portola said. “Dreysler pulled his seniority and would probably have kicked him out completely if he’d been able to figure out a way to do that.”
Lorne sighed. “Fine,” said. “Let’s give it a try.”
It was a good idea, of course. Certainly better than trying to bluff or blast their way through whatever checkpoints Reivaro’s Marines had set up around the central and governmental sections of the city.
Still, those drainage conduits were an absolute pain to get through.
* * *
De Portola brought the car to a halt beside one of the entertainment center’s service entrances. The door had a large padlock on the hasp, but it turned out to be just there for show. As Lorne and the other two Cobras walked toward it, the door swung open, and a pair of familiar men stood framed in the opening.
“Hello, Broom,” Koshevski said, giving a short, abbreviated nod. “Good to see you.”
“And you, Koshevski,” Lorne said, nodding in return. He shifted his eyes to Emile Chun-Wei and nodded again. “Emile.”
“Broom,” Emile said, his voice rather flat. “Good to see you alive.”
A neutral, maybe even slightly backhanded greeting. Pretty much what Lorne had expected. “You, too,” he said. “Let’s all stay that way.”
Emile grunted. “No argument here. You ready?”
“Ready,” de Portola said. “You got us a route?”
“I’ve got you a great route,” Koshevski said, beckoning to an access cover a meter behind him. “If one of you gentlemen would oblige, we can get this show on the road.”
The trip through the underground conduits seemed faster this time around. One factor was probably psychological: the second time through something usually seemed easier than the first. The other factor was that this time Lorne wasn’t dragging three squabbling civilians along with him.
Still, by the time Koshevski announced that they’d reached their destination he was more than ready to get out into the open air again.
Their exit was unexpectedly delayed, though—unexpected to Lorne, anyway—by the fact that the access cover seemed to have been welded to the opening. The shaft-mounted ladder looked old and was dangerously corroded, so instead de Portola hopped up onto the palms of Werle’s upstretched arms. Balancing there like they were part of an acrobatic show, he used his fingertip lasers to carefully slice through the welds, beveling the cut so that the cover wouldn’t fall on them. He finished and eased the cover a few centimeters upward, listened for a few seconds, then moved it sideways off onto the ground.
And Lorne found himself looking up, not at the starry Aventinian sky, but at a slab of metal fifty centimeters above the opening.
The underside of a vehicle, presumably, since most of these access shafts were on the streets. But even granted that Lorne didn’t spend much time looking at the undersides of vehicles, this one looked odd. The usual maze of pipes, struts, and attachment points was missing, replaced by what looked to be a smooth, unbroken sheet of metal. A protective seal, maybe, or possibly armor plating.
And then he got it.
He looked at Emile. You’re joking, he mouthed silently.
The other Cobra shrugged. They’re sure as hell not going to look for you here, he mouthed back.
De Portola had pulled himself high enough to put his eyes just above ground level and was doing a slow three-sixty. He finished his sweep and pulled himself the rest of the way out of the hole, disappearing into the gap between the pavement and the Dominion vehicle. Werle jumped upward, caught the edge of the opening, and followed.
Lorne looked at Emile. Emile responded by politely gesturing Lorne toward the shaft.
So Emile was apparently going to stay down here. Fleetingly, Lorne wondered just how much of the other Cobra’s purported activity during the Troft invasion had been real, and how much had been after-the-fact embellishment.
He stepped beneath the hole, bent his knees, and jumped.
The presence of the armored vehicle above them had led to the conclusion that Koshevski had brought them inside a commandeered parking structure. That turned out to be correct. From Lorne’s new vantage point he could see the wheels of other vehicles, lined up in neat rows to either side of him, with more lined up across the interior driveway. Werle and de Portola had already moved out from under their vehicle, and Lorne could see their feet as they slipped silently around the garage, checking it out more thoroughly.
And then, through the soft, diffuse rumble of background noises, he heard a new set of footsteps approaching.
He notched up his auditory enhancers. The footsteps were brisk and rhythmic, with no indication that the owner was trying to be stealthy. Werle and de Portola had stopped, and from the angles of their ankles Lorne could tell they were crouched down out of sight between the cars. The footsteps were getting closer, and Lorne turned his head back and forth, trying to pinpoint their location through the echoes bouncing off the walls and other cars.
He had tentatively concluded the newcomer was coming from his left when a movement caught his eye: Werle’s hand dropping into view under the row of cars and beckoning. Hoping fervently that the Cobra knew what he was doing, Lorne pulled his way out of the shaft, slid out from under the vehicle, and rose into a crouch. Curling his hands into fingertip-laser position, he eased his head up for a look.
To find that their visitor was none other than Governor-General Chintawa.
And he looked terrible.
The man had never looked all that good, in Lorne’s private and completely nonpartisan opinion. For years there’d been rumors that his health was on the decline, but he’d never let whatever was going on behind the scenes keep him from his appointed duties.
But in the fifteen days since Lorne had last seen him, Chintawa had gone seriously downhill. His face was pale, the skin of his cheeks and throat sagging. There were large bags under his eyes, the eyes themselves seemed dull and lifeless, and Lorne would swear that his hair had gone a little grayer.
But there was the same hard set to his jaw that he’d always had in times of political warfare, a grimness that warned there was still fire inside the crumbling body. As Lorne rose from concealment, he wondered briefly whether that fire was for him or against him.
Chintawa stopped short as Lorne came in view. “You,” he bit out, “are an absolute and utter pain in the butt.”
Lorne sighed. So much for Chintawa’s fire being for him.
“That’s not fair, sir,” Werle said, rising out of his own hiding place behind Chintawa. “Broom didn’t start any of this.”
“That’s debatable,” Chintawa said, his gaze hard on Lorne. “Regardless of who started what, he’s certainly not doing anything to lower the tension level.”
“Neither are they,” de Portola said, also standing up.
Chintawa’s lip twisted. “No, they’re not,” he said. “Fine. I’m here. What do you want?”
Lorne shot a frown at Werle. What did he want? He wasn’t the one who’d set up this meeting.
But Werle just made a little gesture toward Chintawa. Apparently, they were all laboring under the same misconception.
“Come on, come on,” Chintawa growled. “We’re burning daylight, and the next shift of Dominion goons could be coming at any time to get their cars. Your uncle said you wanted to talk. So talk.”
Lorne felt the tightness in his stomach ease a little. So it was Great-Uncle Corwin who’d set this up?
That was good. In fact, it was more than just good. After a lifetime in politics, former Aventinian Governor Corwin Moreau knew as much about the Dome’s inner workings as anyone on Aventine. More than that, his years of service had gained him an assortment of contacts and—hopefully—a few unredeemed favors to go along with them.
And the fact that he was having quiet chats with Chintawa also implied he’d made it back safely from Smith’s Forge after his clandestine meeting with Kicker Pierce.
So Uncle Corwin had sent him here to talk? Good. Because he had one or two things he very much wanted to say.
“Talk is good,” he said to Chintawa. “Talk is also cheap. Are you ready to do more than just talk and listen? Because if you’re not, I have better things to do with my time.”
“I’m sure you do,” Chintawa said. “But before we get all high and mighty, let’s remember some recent history. I’m the one who’s been sitting here under the Dominion’s guns trying to keep a lid on this whole thing. I’m the one who talked Commodore Santores into easing Colonel Reivaro down from a Code One martial law order on DeVegas to a Code Three, which at least allows civilians some liberty in their day-to-day activities. And I’m the one who tried his damnedest to keep your father out of their hands.”
“Let’s drop the campaign mode, shall we?” de Portola suggested. “No one’s voting today.”
“Not to mention that all three of those particular laurel leaves have wilted,” Werle added.
“And whose fault is that?” Chintawa demanded, jabbing a finger toward Lorne. “If he hadn’t insisted on tearing through Archway like a deranged hornet—”
“After Reivaro murdered three Cobras?” Werle shot back. “What did you want him to do? Invite the man to Sunday tea?”
“I wanted him to stand out of the way and let the politicians deal with policy,” Chintawa said bitterly. “If he had, maybe we could have confined the trouble to DeVegas instead of forcing Captain Lij Tulu to put the whole planet under martial law.”
“Which kind?” Lorne asked.
Chintawa blinked at him. “What?”
“Which kind of martial law?” Lorne asked. “Code One or Code Three?”
For a pair of heartbeats Chintawa just stared at him. “It’s a Code Three for everyone,” he said at last. “Civilians are largely unaffected, except for the nine o’clock curfew.” He breathed out a tired-sounding sigh. “You’re not going to ease off, are you? You’re going to move this insane war of yours to Capitalia.”
“The Cobras didn’t start this, Governor-General,” Lorne reminded him. “But we didn’t bow down when the Trofts invaded our world, and we’re not going to do it now, either.”
“At least some of us didn’t,” de Portola said. “The question is whether Capitalia will be with us this time, or whether they’ll—how did you put it? Stand out of the way and leave policy to the politicians?”
Chintawa looked back and forth between them, his gaze finally settling back on Lorne. “I kept the city safe, you know,” he said. “We had just thirty deaths during the whole occupation, and all of those were people who ignored the Troft order to stay indoors and were killed by spine leopards. DeVegas province, with barely a third of our population, lost nearly three hundred.”
“We also had twenty-two confirmed Troft kills,” Werle said. “How about you? Any of the Capitalia invaders trip and stub their precious little toes? Face it, Governor-General—you’d still be getting your morning orders from the Trofts if it hadn’t been for us.”
“And the Qasamans,” Lorne murmured.
Werle shot him a glance. “And the Qasamans,” he echoed, a little grudgingly. “The point is that you and Capitalia came out of the last invasion looking pretty pathetic. You’ve got a chance to redeem yourselves. Are you going to take it?”
Chintawa sighed again. “You have no idea the position I’m in,” he said heavily. “Not just with Lij Tulu and Reivaro, but with my own government. There’s still a significant faction that opposes even having Cobras inside Capitalia, let alone letting them do anything against the Dominion forces. If open warfare erupts on the street, they will move to isolate and paralyze me.”
“So don’t give any orders,” Lorne said. “No orders to resist the Dominion; no orders to stand down. Let each Cobra decide for himself what he wants to do. They can hardly blame you for that.”
“They can blame me for anything they choose,” Chintawa said bitterly. “But the point is already moot. Lij Tulu has ordered all of Capitalia’s Cobras to be fitted with those loyalty collars. Once they’re in place, they’ll have no choice but to stand down.”
“Yes, we know about the collars,” Lorne said. “They did the same thing to the DeVegas Cobras.”
“So you see the problem—”
“All of them,” Lorne interrupted. “Including Badj and Dill here.”
“Because—” Chintawa broke off, his eyes narrowing. He looked at de Portola, then at Werle…
And when he turned back to Lorne there was a sudden hint of fire in his eyes. “You got them off,” he murmured.
“Yes, we did,” Lorne said. “And we can do the same for the Capitalia Cobras.”
“Assuming they’re not just looking for an excuse to sit on their hands,” Werle said pointedly.
“They aren’t,” Chintawa said firmly. “Some of them aren’t, anyway.” He took a deep breath. “All right. You’re going to need freedom of movement. That means keeping the martial law level at Code Three as long as possible so that there’s a populace out there for you to mix with.”
“We also need to get into the city’s personnel records,” Lorne said. “I had a disguise in Archway, but because my new face wasn’t in any of the databases they were able to nail me. We need to wipe out everyone’s records so that they don’t know who’s who.”
“Won’t work,” Chintawa said, shaking his head. “From what my people said, Santores has already had all the records uploaded to his ships. Erasing the records here won’t do anything.”
“So we need to get into their computers?” de Portola asked.
Chintawa snorted. “Yes, and there’s not a chance in the Worlds we can do that. Certainly not from down here.”
“Maybe all we need to do is block their transmissions,” Werle suggested. “Reivaro’s Marines can’t have their whole computer system downloaded into their brains or eyeballs or whatever. They have to be calling up facial recognition programs on a real-time basis.”
“And they can’t be getting it all from the ships,” de Portola pointed out. “Their orbits would put them in Aventine’s shadow too much of the time. Do we know if they deployed any monitor satellites? They could be relaying signals through those.”
“Santores hasn’t said anything about satellites,” Chintawa said. “I can check. You’d still have the same problem of getting to them.”
“Not necessarily,” de Portola said. “We can’t run the Dewdrop against a Dominion war cruiser, but we might be able to sneak it up to a relay satellite or two.”
“Especially since Reivaro’s all hot to wrap his damn armor plate on the thing,” Werle said, sounding cautiously intrigued. “Somebody will need to take it out for a test drive. See if the balance and thrust and whatnot all still works.”
“Like they’d let any of us near the ship,” Lorne pointed out. “Which brings us back to the original question.”
“Let me work on it,” Chintawa said. “In the meantime, you’d better get going. And don’t tell me how you got in—I don’t want to know.” And to Lorne’s mild surprise, he actually forced a small smile. “Good luck, Broom. Try not to get yourself killed. Or anyone else.”
He turned and strode back the way he’d come. De Portola signaled Lorne to wait; and only when the governor-general had disappeared from sight around a curve did the other two Cobras head toward the hidden access hole, beckoning Lorne to join them.
Two minutes later, they were all back in the drainage conduit and the cover was once again welded in place.
“Well?” Emile asked.
“He’s going to help,” Lorne said.
“Even better, it sounds like you’re all going to get to choose whether to fight or sit on the sidelines,” Werle added.
“Good enough,” Emile said. “Better than I’d hoped, really. Ready to go?”
“Sure,” Lorne said. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace where you can lay low for a few days,” Emile said. “Collect intel, see what kind of support you can get among the rest of the Cobras.” He gave a little snort. “See what Chintawa comes up with in the freedom-of-movement department.”
“We’re not really going to depend on him, are we?” de Portola asked.
“No, no, you’re perfectly free to come up with something brilliant yourselves,” Emile said. “But that’s you, not us. I’m back on duty in two hours, and it’s a little early to be throwing away my cover. I’ll keep my ears open and try to get whatever I hear back to you.”
“What if they give you one of their dog collars?” Werle asked.
“Then I’ll have to try a little harder, won’t I?” Emile gestured to Koshevski. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
“Well, that’s it,” Corwin Moreau said, his tone that of a tired but proud father. “What do you think?”
Jasmine “Jin” Moreau Broom fingered the two curved strips of ceramic her uncle had handed her. Each strip was about five centimeters wide and three millimeters thick, with the edges curved slightly outward from the main arc in a sort of flattened saddlepoint shape. Placed end to end, the two pieces formed a circle about fifteen centimeters across. “And they work?” she asked, looking up at him. The odd echoes from the basement walls and low ceiling somehow made the whole thing feel even more cloak-and-dagger than it already did. “They really work?”
“They really work,” Corwin assured her. “Don’t let the thinness of the material fool you—remember that the whole point of this hobby was to come up with a more bio-friendly ceramic bone laminate for future Cobras. This stuff is very tough.”
“And there’s probably not a lot of explosive in the Dominion’s loyalty collars anyway,” she agreed, feeling her stomach tighten. The Qasamans had used explosive collars on the members of the first Cobra Worlds expedition to that world, including Jin’s own father and her other uncle. She remembered thinking after the expedition returned what an utterly barbaric tactic that was.
She also remembered wondering when she first went to that world whether she and her teammates would face the same kind of intimidation if they were caught.
And now, the supposedly civilized Dominion of Man was using the same deadly and humiliating method to suppress resistance from the Aventinian Cobras.
But like the Qasamans before them, the Dominion had no idea who they were dealing with.
Cobras didn’t take this sort of thing lying down. Neither did anyone else in the Cobra Worlds.
“From what I hear, there’s hardly any at all,” Corwin confirmed. “Just enough to ensure that the wearer is killed without making a mess of the surrounding landscape.”
“Lovely,” Jin said, shivering. “Probably don’t want a Cobra grabbing the nearest Marine and decapitating two for the price of one.”
“Possibly,” Corwin said. “Or else Dominion Marines don’t like cleaning blood stains any more than anyone else. Either way works for me. I just hope they don’t tumble to our little trick and start packing in more bang.”
“If they do, you can just make the shields thicker,” Jin said, handing back the two sections.
“Though only up to the point where they’re so thick they choke the wearer to death before the collar even has its chance,” Corwin said. He picked up a mug from the table, started to take a drink, then set it down again. “I’m sorry—did you want some tea?” he asked, looking around as if trying to remember where the rest of the mugs were kept. “I can make you some tea if you’d like.”
Jin felt the ever-present knot in her stomach tighten another couple of turns. She’d sneaked into Capitalia three days ago, but between dodging Dominion Marines and evading the city’s own patrollers it had only been today that she’d found a way to get onto her uncle’s estate without being caught.
Only to learn that the day before she’d hit town Corwin’s wife Thena had packed her bags and moved out.
Even worse, she’d filed with the Dome for a restraining order against her husband.
In a world that seemed to have become a never-ending series of gut punches, that had been the worst one of all. It was also the most utterly unexpected. To all appearances, her aunt and uncle had had the perfect relationship, with all the interlaced threads of love, respect, humor, and commitment that should have made it rock-solid.
Now, it seemed that the outward appearance had been nothing more than a façade laminated onto a rotten core.
What made it worse, from Jin’s perspective, was that the occasional fumbling and misty-eyed moments she’d observed in her uncle since she’d arrived made it clear that the separation was entirely Thena’s idea.
“Nothing, thanks,” she said, waving away the offer. “How hard is it to make these things?”
“Not too hard,” he said, his mind visibly dragging itself back to the task at hand. “Let me get you some—no; you didn’t want tea. All right. We’ll start by mixing up a batch of the material and getting it into the molds. It needs an hour or so to set, and then we can fire up the kiln.”
“You need to bake them?” Jin asked, frowning. Cobra ceramic laminae was injected directly onto the bone, where it did its final setting without any added heat. If Corwin had been working toward a replacement for the current material, this didn’t seem like a promising direction to take.
“There are a couple of catalysts you can use instead,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any of them left, so we’ll have to go with the kiln instead.”
“Ah,” Jin said. So at least he hadn’t been blind to the obvious requirements of what he was trying to make. That would have been heart-breaking, especially after all the years he’d put into the hobby.
Distantly, she wondered if Corwin’s work had been what had driven the wedge between him and his wife. Perhaps it had become an obsession that Thena simply couldn’t take anymore.
“I’m going to need more base and admix,” Corwin continued, nodding toward the table by the wall. A portable kiln sat there, a heavy-looking cube about sixty centimeters on a side with a locking door in front. “Could you go upstairs and get them for me? They’re the coffee and flour bags in the back of the pantry.”
“The—? Oh. Right.”
He smiled faintly, the first smile she’d seen from him since he first welcomed her into his house an hour ago. “Exactly,” he said. “The Dominion could raid me at any time, and if they’re determined enough they’ll find the stuff. But there’s no point in making it easy for them.”
“Coffee and flour—right,” Jin said, heading across the basement toward the stairs.
“And stay clear of the windows,” Corwin called after her. “At last count there were a hundred forty Cobras in Capital province, and Lij Tulu has promised to scrape up enough loyalty collars for all of them. We need both of us working if we’re going to stay ahead of them.”
“Got it.”
It was important work, of course, Jin knew as she headed up the stairs. But equally important was that this would give Corwin something less anguishing to focus on than his personal problems.
And maybe it would help Jin set aside hers, as well.
Her family had been torn apart, her husband and children taken or vanished, their locations and fates unknown. There was nothing she could do about any of it except see it through and hope and pray for their safety.
But maybe she could do something about Corwin and Thena. Not now, of course, but maybe later. Once this was all over, she would sit down with them—together if possible, separately if necessary—and find out what exactly had precipitated this tragedy. With love and perseverance, maybe she could help heal their rift.
And if the Dominion’s clampdown on Aventine had caused or precipitated the split, she thought darkly, God help them. All of them, from Commodore Santores and Colonel Reivaro on down.
Because there would be a day of reckoning for their actions. A dark, and probably very bloody day. And it was coming soon.
Jin would make sure of that.