Cobra Alliance-Cobra War Book 1 (37 page)

Zoshak had his backpack off by the time Merrick arrived beside him. "Ready?" Merrick called over the noise of the gunfire.

Zoshak nodded. Lifting his left leg, Merrick aimed at the wing's inner edge and fired his antiarmor laser.

The sizzle of vaporizing metal was lost amid the cacophony still going on around them. But the shimmery flash as the laser cut into the wing was all Merrick needed to know that his guess had been correct. There was some sort of radar-absorption material coating the metal, a coating that was burning off with gratifying speed in the laser's focused heat.

The metal beneath it was another story. It was thick and strong, and as Merrick tracked his laser slowly along the edge of the wing he saw he was barely managing to carve a shallow groove. If the Qasamans' fancy acid didn't work, this whole exercise was going to be for nothing.

He was nearly finished when a flash of something caught the edge of his eye. He looked up—

To see a flicker of brilliant blue light coming from somewhere on the other side of the hull crest.

He felt his chest seize up. It was the Trofts over there. It had to be. They'd gotten up there somehow, and were coming for him and his team.

And the two Djinn up there who were supposed to be watching for that kind of flanking maneuver were just
standing
there?

"Move it!" he snapped to Zoshak. Without waiting for acknowledgment, he leaped up from the wing onto the crest. In the pulsating light from the laser he could see a handful of figures gathered on the other weapons wing. Cocking his ring fingers into laser firing position, wondering if he could get all of them before they took him down, he threw himself into a shallow dive onto the wing.

He was midway through his jump when it suddenly registered that the figure he could now see standing at the inner edge of the wing wasn't actually
holding
the laser that had caught his attention. The beam was, instead, blasting downward from the figure's left foot . . .

Even with his mind frozen with stunned disbelief, his nanocomputer was up to the task of landing him safely on the wing. But the figure had spotted him. It reacted instantly, throwing itself flat onto the metal surface and spinning around on its back to bring

its laser to bear—

"Mom!" Merrick barked. "Don't shoot!"

"Merrick?" his mother's voice came from the Djinn-suited figure as she jerked her laser away from him. "What are you doing here?"

"That's
my
question," Merrick gritted out. "You're supposed to be on an operating table somewhere."

"I meant, what are you doing on this side of the ship?" Jin demanded as she scrambled back to her feet. Even in the dim light, Merrick could see that her face was pinched with pain from the quick-dodge maneuver his sudden appearance had forced her into.

"Get back over there," Siraj Akim snapped, coming up beside Merrick. "This operation depends on everyone following the plan as ordered."

"He's right," Jin seconded. "Get over there and let me finish up here."

"Right," Merrick said through clenched teeth as he stepped past her and hopped up onto the hull again. Like he could be expected to follow a plan that he didn't know half of. If he made it through this alive, he promised himself darkly, Miron Akim was going to have some
very
serious explaining to do.

Zoshak was crouching beside the groove Merrick had carved in the wing when he made it back to his side of the ship. "What's going on?" the Djinni asked.

"We've got company," Merrick growled. "Miron Akim sent my mother along with Siraj Akim's squad to take out the other wing. How's it going here?"

Zoshak gestured. "See for yourself."

Merrick peered down at the wing. Actually, there wasn't a lot to be seen through the wispy white smoke pouring up from the crack he'd cut through the metal's coating. Briefly, he ran through his optical enhancers' various settings, but none of them did much good against the smoke. "Any idea how we'll know when we're deep enough to cut through the control cables?" he asked.

"When the weapons fall silent," Zoshak said, carefully dribbling some more acid from his flask into the smoking groove. "We'll get word—"

"Incoming aft!" one of the Djinn up on the hull snapped a warning. An instant later he gurgled and collapsed as a barrage of laser bolts riddled him from somewhere to their rear.

"Watch it!" Merrick shouted, dropping flat onto the wing and pulling Zoshak down with him. At the other end of the ship a dozen armored Trofts had appeared and were moving toward them along the hull, their lasers spitting fire at the intruders.

Frantically, Merrick looked around. But there was literally no cover anywhere to be had. Nowhere to hide, and only one place to run. "Get out of here!" he snapped at Zoshak as he swiveled around to bring his antiarmor laser to bear. "Leave the acid and take the others down the bridge. I'll cover you."

"Yes, cover me," Zoshak snapped back as he set down the acid flask and headed at a quick crawl toward the end of the wing and the bridge waiting there.

Clenching his teeth, Merrick targeted the first three of the approaching Trofts with his antiarmor laser. If the aliens had been traveling single file, he might have been able to take all of them. But they were bunched together, using each other's armored bodies as partial shields.

He could hear Zoshak doing something with the bridge now, and only then did it occur to him that for the rest of the Djinn to escape someone was going to have to hold the end of the bridge for them. A laser shot grazed across his upper arm, and his nanocomputer took over, rolling him away from the shot as his own laser continued firing. From the far side of the crest he could see other flashes of blue light as his mother joined in the battle, and he sent up a quick prayer for her safety. The Djinn were firing, too, the flashes from their glove lasers fainter in comparison with either the Troft or Cobra weapons, and Merrick wondered if their efforts were doing anything more than distracting the aliens. There was a sudden movement at Merrick's side.

And he jerked reflexively as something long and dark and big went whipping across his line of sight, spinning in a flat arc toward the rear of the ship. He had just enough time to recognize it as their rope bridge before it slammed into the cluster of Trofts, sending their shots wildly in all directions as it wrapped them in a tangle of rope and wood.

"Attack!" Zoshak shouted. He leaped past Merrick onto the hull, his glove lasers blazing at the Trofts, the two remaining Djinn of his team right behind him.

Merrick leaped to his feet, hesitating as he tried to decide whether to join the mad rush or stay here and try to pick off more of the attackers. But the Trofts were pushing their way free of the bridge and starting to fire again, and there was no more time for thinking or planning. Gauging the distance, he bent his knees and jumped.

He had just left the wing when a brilliant laser flash lanced across the space he'd vacated, blasting a cloud of metal splinters from the wing's trailing edge. Merrick bit out a curse as he glanced down at the smoking metal, wondering where that shot had come from. A second later he hit the hull crest, landing two meters in front of Zoshak and the other Djinn and barely four meters away from the approaching Trofts. A half-dozen alien lasers tracked toward him—

Their shots went wild as Merrick fired a full-power burst from his sonic. He fired again, staggering them back, then thrust his right hand forward and activated his arcthrower.

The lightning bolt caught the lead Troft squarely in the torso, throwing him backward into the two directly behind him. Merrick shifted aim and fired the arcthrower again, this time catching one of the Trofts' lasers and shattering it into a burst of shrapnel.

He was lining up on one of the other Trofts when a laser shot caught him in his stomach.

For that first frozen second there was no pain, only the horrifying realization that his luck had finally run out. His knees buckled as the shock swept through him, and he felt himself falling as if in slow motion. He heard a voice shout his name as he landed hard on his knees, and from somewhere behind him he saw a sudden barrage of brilliant blue laser shots flashing across the remaining Trofts, throwing clouds of vaporized metal from their armor and twisting and throwing them into little piles of death.

And then, suddenly, the pain was there, rushing through him like a flash flood in a mountain arroyo. He gasped, gripping his stomach with both hands, feeling himself swaying as his eyes dimmed and he started to fall over.

He was headed face-first toward the hull when a hand came from behind him and grabbed him beneath his left arm in a steadying grip. A second hand took his other arm, and suddenly he was being lifted upright again, swaying a little as the two people made a mad dash along the hull. Dimly through the pain he saw an open hatchway with another Troft helmet just emerging, and then a gray-suited figure leaped over him from behind and a blue laser bolt sent the Troft tumbling out of sight. The figure stopped beside the hatchway, sending a flurry of bolts down into the opening as Merrick's handlers hustled him past. Through his wavering vision he could see the sentry ship's aft wings looming ahead . . .

With a jolt, he snapped back to consciousness and found himself sitting in the middle of one of the aft wings. Crouching in front of him was Siraj Akim, sorting quickly through a set of small hypos. Behind him, Zoshak was crouching beside the hull end of the wing, more white smoke drifting around him as he poured acid into the metal. "What—?" Merrick croaked.

"Just sit still," his mother's taut voice came from behind him, and only then did he realize that her grip on his upper arms was what was holding him upright. "Siraj Akim is trying to stabilize you."

Merrick turned his head to look toward the forward wings, wincing as he spotted the motionless bodies lying there. "Where are the others?"

"Most gave their lives for Qasama," Siraj said grimly as he carefully stuck the needle into Merrick's side. "I've already ordered the survivors away."

"The Trofts started firing at us with the weapons clusters under these aft wings," Jin explained. "Must have done some quick recalibrating—usually you can't fire on your own ship that way."

"They seem to have managed it just fine," Merrick said, knowing that she was talking mostly to distract him. Or to distract herself.

He focused on Siraj's grim expression as the Djinni selected another hypo. Yet more Djinn deaths on the young man's conscience. He wondered how Siraj was feeling, but his mind didn't seem to be working very well. But at least the pain was fading. "Did we take the ship?" he asked. "I mean the ground troops. Did they get inside?"

"I don't think so," Jin said. "And it's about to be too late. You feel that?"

With an effort, Merrick concentrated what little mind he seemed to have left. "The vibration?" he asked.

"Right," Jin said. "The Trofts are about to—there we go."

Merrick blinked as the cityscape around them suddenly shifted. The sentry ship they were huddled on was lifting off the pavement on its gravity lifts, rising above the level of the surrounding buildings and starting to turn toward the spaceport.

"So once again we've failed," Zoshak said bitterly. "More lives lost for nothing."

"At least we chased them away," Merrick said, a fresh ache flooding through him at Zoshak's words. He tried to think of what they might have done differently, how they might have pulled out the victory that Zoshak and Siraj deserved and the Qasamans so desperately needed. But his mind was drifting. "Sends them a message, anyway."

Zoshak hissed between his teeth. "You'll forgive me if I don't find that message worth the cost."

"You are forgiven, Djinni Zoshak," Siraj said.

Merrick frowned, trying to focus his increasingly bleary eyes on the other. Siraj was actually
smiling.
A grim, vicious smile, but a smile nonetheless. "You all right?" Merrick asked.

"I'm quite well, thank you," Siraj said. "You speak of a message, Merrick Moreau. And you, Djinni Zoshak, speak of cost." Dramatically, he pointed toward the street below. "Behold."

Merrick turned his head. In the center of the market place that their particular sentry ship had been overlooking, a large section of pavement had opened up to reveal a dark, deep pit. Too big a hole for individual soldiers, his sluggish mind realized, but also with no visible ramp for ground vehicles.

Which left only . . . "Mom?" he croaked.

And caught his breath as a helicopter shot out of the opening. A slender helicopter, lean and deadly-looking as an Arkon's dragonfly, black and gray in the reflected light, clusters of weapons visible beneath its own set of stubby support wings as it climbed rapidly into the sky. Hard on its tail was a second gunship, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.

Behind him, Merrick heard his mother gasp. "
SkyJos?
" she said.

"Indeed," Siraj confirmed, and there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice. "Trapped uselessly in their underground hangar until
we
drove their unsuspecting guardian away."

The words were barely out of his mouth when the SkyJos opened fire.

The earlier diversionary attack on the sentry ship had been loud. But it was nothing compared to this. Merrick gazed out across at the city, wishing he could close his ears against the hammering as the SkyJos fired lasers and heavy missiles and multiple hailstorms of armor-piercing rounds at their invaders.

The Troft sentry ships didn't have a chance. Caught on the ground, their weaponry designed for repulsing ground-based attacks, they began to disintegrate beneath the pounding. A few of the more distant ones made it off the ground, but by the time they did other hidden nests around the city, now likewise freed from their enemy guardians, were sending their own fleets of SkyJos to join in the attack.

Away to the north, Merrick could see the first signs of movement from the airfield as some of the larger Troft ships tried to beat the approaching Qasamans into the air. One of the heavy ships succeeded in its attempts, rising above the buildings and picking up speed as it turned toward the nearest group of incoming SkyJos.