Timothy Zahn - Cobra Bargain

The sudden stream of light as the car reached ground level made Daulo blink.

Shifting the equipment around in his hands, he surreptitiously wiped away the sudden tears as the operators outside opened the gates and stepped back, making the sign of respect as they did so. Daulo stepped out, nodding at the mine chief as the latter also made the sign of respect. "I trust, Master Sammon," the chief said, "that your inspection found nothing wanting?"

"Your service to my father seems adequate," Daulo told him, keeping his face and voice neutral. He had, in fact, found things down there to be excellent, but he had no intention of saying so on the spur of the moment. Aside from the danger of swelling the mine chief's ego with unnecessary public praise, Daulo's father had always warned him against rendering hasty judgments. "I shall report to my father what I have seen."

The other bowed. Passing him, Daulo walked out from under the elevator canopy and headed past the storage and preparation buildings toward the access road where Walare was waiting with his car.

"Master Sammon," Walare said, making the sign of respect as Daulo came up to him. Daulo climbed in, and a moment later Walare was guiding the car off the mine grounds and onto Milika's public streets.

"What news is there?" Daulo asked as they turned toward the center of town and the Sammon family house.

"Public news or private?" Walare asked.

"Private, of course," Daulo said. "Though you can skip past the backlife gossip."

In the car's mirror, Walare's eyes were briefly surrounded by smile lines. "Ah, how times have changed," he said with mock sadness. "I remember a time-no more than three years ago-when the backlife news was the first thing you would ask for-"

"The news, Walare; the news?" Daulo interrupted with equally mock exasperation.

He'd known Walare ever since the two were boys; and while the public relationship between driver and Sammon family heir were rigidly defined, in the privacy of Daulo's car things could be considerably freer. "You can reminisce about the lost golden age later."

Walare chuckled. "Actually, it's been a very quiet day. The Yithtra family trucks are mobilizing-someone there must have found a rich section of forest.

Perhaps because of that, the mayor's trying again to talk your father into supporting his efforts to have the top of the wall rebuilt."

"Waste of money and effort," Daulo snorted, glancing behind him. Part of the village wall was visible past the village's buildings, the forest-like paintings on the lower part in sharp contrast with the stark metal mesh extension atop it.

"The razorarms can't get over what we've got now."

Walare shrugged. "Mayors exist largely to make noise. What else is there for him to make noise about these days?"

Daulo grinned tightly. "Besides our trouble with the Yithtra family, you mean?"

"What can he say about that that he hasn't already said?"

"Not much," Daulo admitted. There were times he wished the competition between his family and the Yithtra family didn't exist; but it was a fact of life, and disliking it didn't change that. "Anything else?"

"Your brother Perto brought in that shipment of spare motor parts from Azras,"

Walare said, his voice abruptly taking on a grim tone. "Along with a passenger: an injured woman they found on the road."

Daulo sat up a bit straighter. "A woman? Who?"

"No one at the house recognized her."

"Identification?"

"None." Walare hesitated. "Perhaps it was lost in... the trouble she had."

Daulo frowned. "What sort of trouble?"

Walare took a deep breath. "According to the driver who helped bring her in, she'd been clawed at least once by a krisjaw... as well as clawed by a baelcra and bitten by one or more monota."

Daulo felt his stomach tighten. "God above," he muttered. "And she was still alive?"

"She was when they brought her to the house," Walare said. "Though who knows how long she'll stay that way?"

"God alone," Daulo sighed.

They reached the house a few minutes later, Walare guiding the car expertly through the filigreed doors and over to the wide garage nestled behind a pair of fruit trees in one corner of the large central courtyard. Stomach tightening against what he knew would be a horrible sight, Daulo headed for the women's section of the house.

Only to discover that his worst fears had been for nothing.

"Is that the worst of it?" he asked, frowning across the room at the woman on the bed. Surrounded by three other women and a doctor, with a blanket pulled up to her neck, it was nevertheless clear that the injured woman wasn't the horribly mauled victim he'd expected to find. There was a bad set of scratches on her cheek, visible beneath the healing salve that had been applied, and a rather worse set on her arm that was still being treated. But aside from that...

From her seat across the bed Daulo's mother glanced up at him. "Please stay back," Ivria Sammon said softly. "The dust on your clothing-"

"I understand," Daulo nodded. His eyes searched the visible wounds again, then settled for the first time on her face. About his age, he judged, with the soft-looking skin of someone who had spent little time out in the sun and wind.

His eyes drifted down her left arm, past the wounds, to her hand.

No ring of marriage.

He frowned, looking at her face again. No mistake-she was at least as old as he was. And still unmarried-?

"She must have come from a far way," Ivria said quietly, almost as if to herself. "See her face, the way her features are formed."

Daulo glanced at his mother, then back at the mysterious woman again. Yes; now that he was looking for it he could see it, too. There was a strangeness in the face, a trace of the exotic that he'd never seen before. "Perhaps she's from one of the cities to the north," he suggested. "Or even from somewhere in the

Eastern Arm."

"Perhaps," the doctor grunted. "She certainly hasn't built up much resistance to monote bites."

"Is that what the problem is?" Daulo asked.

The doctor nodded. "On the arms and hands-here, and here," he added, pointing them out. "It looks like she had to fend them off with her bare hands."

"After her ammunition ran out?" Daulo suggested. She surely hadn't fended off that krisjaw with her bare hands, after all.

"Perhaps," the doctor said. "Though if she had a gun it was gone by the time she was found. As was the holster."

Daulo gnawed at his inner cheek, glancing around the room. A pile of clothing had been tossed into the corner; keeping well back from the bed, he stepped over to it. The injured woman's clothes, of course-the bloodstains alone would have attested to that, even without the odd feel of the cloth that branded it as from someplace far away. And the doctor was right: there was no holster with the ensemble. Nor any markings on the belt where one might once have hung.

"Maybe she had some companions," he suggested, dropping the clothing back on the floor. That would certainly make more sense than a single woman wandering alone out in the forest. "Was any effort made to see if there were others in the area where she was found?"

It was Ivria who answered. "Not at the time, but I believe Perto has now gone back to continue the search."

Stepping to the room's intercom, Daulo keyed the private family circuit. "This is Daulo Sammon," he identified himself to the servant who answered. "Has Perto returned from the forest?"

"One moment, Master Sammon," the voice answered. "...He is not answering."

Daulo nodded. Out of the house, away from all the Sammon family holdings in

Milika, Perto would be out of touch with the buried fiber-optic communications network which was the only safe way to send messages in Milika. "Leave a message for him to contact me as soon as possible," he instructed the other.