Timothy Zahn - Cobra Bargain

To her right, the upper deck of the engineering/cargo section hid her from most of Mangus. To her left-

To her left, a large section of the outer wall had vanished.

It was obvious, of course, once she thought about it. The overhead canopy that hid the Trofts' presence here so well also blocked all normal landing approaches. Building a sliding door into the wall was the most straightforward response.

And from her point of view, a highly useful one. It meant that if she and the others were able to get out of the ship, they wouldn't have any walls to climb.

She reached the rubberine collar without any shots or shouts being directed at her. Once there, however, she realized she had a new problem. There was no gap between collar and ship she could get through, and while her antiarmor laser would make short work of the rubberine it would do so spectacularly enough to alert any Trofts inside the building to her presence out here. But with her fingertip lasers out of commission...

Pursing her lips, she knelt down, bringing one knee up and resting the third finger of her right hand on top of it. Straightening the little finger, she mentally crossed her fingers and pressed down on the third-finger nail with her left thumb.

Somehow, she'd always thought that the triggering mechanism depended on having the finger of the appropriate hand curled. Apparently, that wasn't true. This way was awkward, but it worked; and within a few seconds she had a ragged flap burned through the rubberine. Taking one last look behind her, she ducked through into the building.

She'd seen a starship maintenance facility on Aventine once, and this one seemed built along similar lines. The ship's command module-a standard Troft flat-steeple design, as near as she could tell from her perch-stuck out into the center of a huge bay, with movable stairways and ramps leading to the entryways and equipment access areas. Scaffolds and boom cranes lined the bay's walls, all of them retracted away from the ship now in preparation for the imminent lift.

A dozen Trofts were also visible, standing on the ramps or milling about the bay floor. All had weapons drawn, and all were clearly agitated.

And none of them had yet noticed her.

Jin permitted herself a grim smile. They were rattled, all right; rattled and almost totally unsure of what they were doing. But they're all armed, she warned herself. They're all armed, and there are a hell-and-crackling lot of them.

The reminder sobered the wave of adrenaline-spurred cockiness. Crouching lower, she licked dry lips and considered her next move.

Below and to her left, leading to the rear/port side of the command module, she could see the lower end of one of the movable stairways. It seemed unlikely that it would still be against the ship unless there were an open entryway at its upper end. It was also unlikely that it would have been left unguarded.

But it was the best chance she had; and she had to take it quickly, before the

Trofts outside figured out where she'd gone and alerted the rest. If she could get just another few meters along the neck and reach the rear edge of the command module before one of the aliens below happened to look up-

She'd made barely two meters of that distance when the bay suddenly echoed to the sound of excited catertalk.

Jin cursed under her breath, straightening and shifting from a crouch to a flat-out run. A laser split the air in front of her, sending a wash of heat and light over her. Automatically, she closed her eyes against the purple blob now floating in front of them and shifted to optical enhancers. She reached her target spot; skidding to a halt, she twisted forty-five degrees to the side and jumped.

And soared over the rear port corner of the command module to land squarely on the entryway stairs.

For a second she fought for balance, throwing her hands out to the sides and hooking her thumbs onto the railings in a desperate attempt to keep from falling backwards down the steps. For that second she was a sitting duck... but once again, the Trofts arrayed against her had been taken by surprise. The alien standing at the head of the stairs in front of the entryway simply stood there, frozen in shock; he was still standing like that when Jin's antiarmor laser all but cut him in half.

Another second was all she got before the weapons around the room opened up again; but it was all she needed. Regaining her balance, she took the remaining steps in a single leap, and an instant later was loping down what she hoped was the right corridor to get her to the bridge.

The corridor was deserted; and ten meters later, she reached the monitor intersection beneath the bridge to discover why. Nearly twenty Trofts filled the intersection, grouped around the circular stairway as they watched two more at the top working on the hatch with a laser torch. They turned en masse as she skidded to a halt, twenty lasers tracking toward her-

And with a boom that rattled her own skull, Jin fired her sonic disrupter.

A multiple flash of laser fire lit up the room as a wedge-shaped group of the

Trofts collapsed into folded heaps, twitching hands firing almost at random as they went down. Again Jin fired, twisting her torso to a new firing angle; and again, and again, clenching her teeth tightly against the backwash from the sonic and the scorching near misses from lasers only marginally under their owners' control. By the time the first victims had ceased their spasmodic firing, the last group was collapsing to the deck; by the time the last group lay still Jin was on the stairs, pounding on the hatch with the heel of her hand in the three/two/four code she'd left with Akim.

She finished, and waited. And waited... and as some of the Trofts beneath her began stirring again there was the sound of released catches above her and the hatch suddenly swung open.

"Jin!" Daulo gasped, eyes wide as he stared down at her. "Are you-?"

"I'm fine," she grunted. "Get out of my way, will you?-they'll be able to fire again any second now."

He stepped back hastily, and she leaped up the last steps into the bridge. Akim was waiting to the side, and she'd barely cleared the rim before he slammed the hatch back down again. "You came back," he said, squatting down to seal the catches.

"Didn't you think I would?" Jin countered. Suddenly her knees were going all wobbly; staggering over to one of the chairs, she collapsed into it.

Akim stepped over to her, eyes flicking down her body. "We'd thought you might go for help."

"Help from where?" Jin countered. "Didn't we agree that we couldn't even reach any of your people for several hours?" Her foot touched something metallic; leaning back, she spotted a row of five laser pistols beneath the panel. "You making a collection?" she asked.

"We thought it would be good to have all the weapons together," Daulo told her.

"For when... we weren't sure you were coming back, you know."

"Why did you return?" Akim demanded. "Let me be honest: I don't want to share my death with an enemy of Qasama."

Jin took a deep breath, exhaled it raggedly. "With any luck, you won't have to.

Has the Troft commander tried to communicate with you?"

"He wants us to surrender," Daulo put in from behind her, clearly fighting against a tremor in his voice. "He says we can't possibly win and that they don't want to kill us if they don't have to."

"I don't blame them," Jin nodded. "Especially since he'd probably wreck his bridge in the process." She leaned forward, studying the control panels before her.

Akim followed her gaze. "What exactly are you planning, Jasmine Moreau?" he asked. "Are you going to fly this spacecraft out of Mangus?"

Jin snorted. "Not a chance. I've never flown anything bigger than an aircar in my life, and this isn't the time to start." She paused, looking over her shoulder as a faint crackling sound wafted into the bridge. The sound was coming from the hatch.... "They're back again," she said, stomach tightening as she turned back to the controls. Somewhere here there had to be-