"I already said that, too," Fadil said impatiently.
"And you all had projectile rifles?" Merrick persisted. There was something here, something he could sense but couldn't quite get a handle on. "No lasers?"
"No," Fadil said.
"But teams using lasers against the invaders suffered the same fate," Zoshak put in.
"Really?" Merrick asked, frowning. "But lasers don't sound anything like projectile guns. How did the missiles home in on them?"
Zoshak shrugged. "Possibly through their heat signatures."
"Maybe," Merrick said, thinking back to the rescue of Mali Haafiz and the others of her family. "But in that case, why didn't the Trofts use them against Djinni Narayan and me? We were using our lasers like crazy out there."
"There may have been no one nearby who carried the launchers," Zoshak pointed out. "The Palace explosion and the multiple attacks drove most of the ground troops to cover." He grimaced. "At least briefly."
"I suppose," Merrick said, getting a firmer grip on his med stand as his head started to swim a little. "I still don't think that's the whole answer."
"Are you all right?" Zoshak asked.
"Just feeling a little dizzy," Merrick assured him. "Two days of no food, probably."
"Or two days on healing medication without time to purge the drugs from your system," Zoshak said, stepping forward and taking his arm. "Time you were returned to your bed."
"Wouldn't argue the point even if I could," Merrick agreed. "Thank you for your time, Fadil Sammon. And thank you, too, for your willingness to risk your lives."
Fadil snorted gently. "As if risking our lives for Qasama means anything to you."
"It does," Merrick told him. "Whether you believe it or not."
He turned away, paused a moment to wait for the spots in front of his eyes to fade out, then headed back the way they'd come. "I'm okay," he assured Zoshak as the other continued to hold his upper arm. "You don't have to hang around if you don't want to."
"It's not a problem," Zoshak assured him. "I'm happy to assist you."
"And I'm happy to have your company," Merrick said. "But you surely must have better things to do than visit the troops in the recovery ward."
Zoshak was silent for another two steps. "You misunderstand, Merrick Moreau," he said. "I'm not your visitor. I'm your guard."
Merrick swallowed. "Oh," he said.
They made the rest of the trip in silence.
Jin looked up from the report, her throat tight. "Thirty percent," she murmured.
"Yes," Miron Akim confirmed, his back unnaturally stiff as he sat in a chair beside Jin's hospital bed. He looked tired, Jin thought, his facial skin sagging, his eyelids clearly being held open by sheer force of will.
Jin herself had spent the past two days resting up after being healed from the glass cuts she'd received when she blew out the tower office window. Distantly, she wondered how Akim had spent those two days. "I don't know what to say, Miron Akim," she went on, laying the report on the bed beside her. "Is that the end, then? Do you have any fighting force left at all?"
"Of course we do," he assured her. "Less than a quarter of our soldiers and Djinn were committed to this first battle, and many of the wounded will recover enough to fight again." He grimaced. "The true horror of this loss was that we brought to it both the coordination of a preplanned attack and the element of surprise. That combination should have been sufficient to at least stagger the invaders, if not defeat them outright. To have instead paid so high a cost for so little again is a disaster."
His eyes bored suddenly into hers. "A disaster which we have no intention of revealing to the general populace."
"Understood," Jin said with a shiver. It was a given that secrecy and censorship were a necessary part of any wartime effort . . . but whether even a government as strict and powerful as the Shahni could keep something like this quiet remained to be seen. "Which leads directly to the question of why you're telling
me
about it."
"Because I come with two questions I must ask," Akim said. "The first . . . we have never trained for this sort of war, Jasmine Moreau. What we
have
trained for has clearly been ineffective. Your people, on the other hand, have fought against the Trofts. More importantly,
you
have fought against the Trofts. My first question, then, is whether you can offer advice and insight that will enable us to mount a more successful resistance."
Jin let out her breath in a huff. "That's a tall order, Miron Akim," she warned. "And understand that I'm not as well trained in combat as I wish I was. I'll have to think on the matter, but a couple of thoughts do come immediately to mind. First off, Cobras weren't designed for use as regular frontline troops. Our mission has always been one of harassment and sabotage, using small groups and infiltration tactics. I think that's also the direction your Djinn need to go."
"And the tactics themselves?" Akim asked. "You're familiar with them?"
"I had the standard Cobra course in military theory," Jin said. "But it was brief and largely theoretical. You and your military planners are undoubtedly far more knowledgeable than I am."
"Still, you have the advantage of having worked with such groups," Akim said. "But I understand that you need time to contemplate. Take what time you need, but no more than necessary."
"I'll be as quick as I can," Jin promised. "And the second question?"
Akim cocked his head slightly. "This may sound strange, but is there a value to razorarms that we're unaware of?"
Jin blinked. A value to
razorarms?
"What sort of value?"
"That is precisely the question." Abruptly, Akim stood up. "Come. I'll show you."
He waited until Jin had pulled on a robe and slippers, then led the way out of the private room into the subcity's maze of seemingly identical hallways. Jin walked carefully, favoring her bad left knee, trying to read the mood of the soldiers and civilians moving briskly back and forth down the hallway on their various errands. If any of them was worried about the failures of Plan Saikah, they weren't showing it.
Or perhaps they simply didn't know just how bad a failure it had been.
A few minutes later they reached a door flanked by a pair of armed soldiers. Akim gave them a hand signal as he and Jin approached, then stepped between them and pushed the door open. Pausing on the threshold, he gestured Jin inside.
Jin had expected an ordinary conference room. Instead, she found herself in a duplicate of the airfield tower control room. An exact duplicate, in fact, or at least exact within the limits of her memory.
"Over here," Akim said, brushing past her and heading across the room, circling the Qasamans who were gathered in twos and threes around the monitor stations.
Jin followed, glancing at the various monitors as she passed. Each display seemed to be active, with either a single image or else a short loop of words or images or track lines. It was, she realized with an eerie feeling, a complete reconstruction of the handful of seconds she and Akim had been standing in the hidden corridor.
Earlier, she'd wondered what Akim had been doing for the past two days. Now she knew.
"Here," Akim said as he stopped by a monitor no one else seemed to be interested in at the moment. "Sit down, and tell me what you see."
Jin slid into the chair in front of the monitor, wincing a bit as her bad knee gave a last twinge, and skimmed the display. It appeared to be a status report on—"Spine leopard captures," she murmured, frowning.
"In the forested areas to the north and west of Sollas," Akim said, tapping a list of latitude/longitude pairs. "Reports from the villages in those regions confirm the presence of large invader transports moving back and forth."
"Yes, but
spine leopards
?" Jin objected, frowning at the display. If she was reading the numbers correctly, the Trofts had already captured twenty of the predators by the time Akim took his mental snapshot of their activities, only a few hours into the aliens' occupation. If they were still at it, she could only guess how many they might have picked up since then. "What do they want with them all?"
"That was my question to you," Akim reminded her. "You've stated that your worlds have trade dealings with the Trofts. You've also been studying the creatures far longer than we have. So again I ask: are razorarm pelts in demand? Or is there something in their nature or biochemistry that would make them valuable to the invaders?"
"Nothing I've ever heard of," Jin said, staring at the display with a mixture of horror and revulsion. Could this whole invasion—all the death and destruction the Trofts had rained down on Qasama—be nothing more than a bizarre resource grab?
No—that made no sense. Qasama was as big as any other inhabitable world, with the Qasamans themselves occupying only a relatively small fraction of its land area. In the sixty years since the Cobra Worlds had brought the first spine leopards here, the animals had surely spread out far enough into uninhabited regions that anyone wanting to harvest them could simply travel out into the wilderness and do so.
But if the Trofts didn't want the predators as trophies, what
did
they want them for?
Unfortunately, there was only one reason Jin could think of, and it wasn't a pleasant one. "I think the people of Sollas are about to get some unexpected company," she told Akim grimly. "Best guess is that the Trofts are planning to release them into the cities and villages in the hope of keeping your soldiers and Djinn busy shooting something besides them."
"Yes, that was our thought as well," Akim said. "But it's been nearly three days since the invasion began. If the invaders intend to flood our streets with predators, why haven't they done so? What are they waiting for?"
"You're right, that doesn't make any sense," Jin said, grabbing for the edge of the desk. Suddenly, without warning, the dizziness she'd felt on the airfield tower escape ladder was hitting her again. "Maybe they're . . . waiting until they have . . . enough to—"
"Are you all right?" Akim asked sharply. "Jasmine Moreau?"
The last thing Jin remembered before the darkness took her was Akim's hand closing around her arm.
The dishes from the evening meal had been cleared away, the ward lights had been dimmed for the night, and Merrick was starting to drift off to sleep when he heard the sound of measured footsteps coming his direction.
He rolled over, grunting like a sleeping person might, and activated his optical enhancers. Six Djinn in full combat suits were marching quietly down the corridor toward him.
Merrick turned his head slightly to give his enhancers an angle behind him. The chair Carsh Zoshak had been occupying for most of the day was vacant. Time for the changing of the guard?
He looked back at the approaching Djinn, this time concentrating on their faces. The enhancers had limited detail sensitivity, but as near as Merrick could tell every man in the group was wearing the same grim and wary expression. And all eyes were definitely focused on him.
He continued to play asleep as the Djinn arrived at his bed. One of them stepped to Merrick's side, waited until the other five had fanned out into a semicircle at the foot of the bed, then carefully touched Merrick's shoulder. "Merrick Moreau?" he murmured. "Djinni Moreau?"
Merrick inhaled sharply, the way his brother Lorne always did when woken out of a deep sleep, and opened his eyes. "What is it?" he asked, blinking in feigned surprise at the group gathered around him. "Is something wrong?"
"You are summoned," the Djinni beside him said. "Your clothing is in a drawer beneath the bed. Dress quickly."
"Where are we going?" Merrick asked as he pulled the blanket aside and sat up, bracing himself for a fresh bout of the dizziness he'd experienced earlier in the day. But this time there was nothing. Maybe the healing drugs were finally out of his system. "Has something happened?"
"Dress quickly" was the only reply.
Two minutes later, they were all heading back between the rows of sleeping patients in the direction the Djinn had come from. His escort, Merrick noted uneasily, had fallen into step around him in a two-in-front, four-in-back formation, the same setup Cobra units typically used with civilian VIPs in spine-leopard-infested areas. It allowed the Cobras to focus maximum firepower to the front and sides, while protecting the group's rear with their own bodies.
Only there weren't any spine leopards in the subcity. And Merrick was hardly a helpless civilian.
Maybe that was the point.
The corridors were quiet and mostly deserted, with only the pairs of guards at each corridor intersection as evidence that the citizenry hadn't simply picked up and left. Occasionally someone else would come by, either walking with the briskness of someone on an errand or else plodding along with the weariness of someone long overdue for sleep.
The trip ended at a door guarded by two pairs of armed guards and another pair of Djinn. One of the guards opened the door as Merrick and his escort approached, revealing a darkened room beyond. Merrick keyed in his infrared enhancers as he walked inside and spotted three figures seated behind a long, curved table about ten meters away at the far end of the room. His rear guard filed in behind him, the door was closed, and a set of low-level lights came on.
The figures Merrick had seen turned out to be three old men, dressed in what were obviously some kind of ceremonial robes. The two on the ends were men Merrick had never seen before, but the one in the middle was someone he recognized all too well.
"Step forward, Merrick Moreau," Shahni Haafiz ordered, his voice stiff and unfriendly.
Merrick glanced at the Djinn standing on either side of him. Their full attention was on Merrick, their expressions unreadable.
Turning back to the Shahni, Merrick walked forward until he was a meter from the table. "If you wanted to apologize to me, Shahni Haafiz," he said, "a nice note would have been sufficient."
"Hardly, enemy of Qasama," Haafiz growled. "You were summoned here for judgment."