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-
There it was. Taking a deep breath, Jin hunched forward and tentatively touched the switch. "What are you doing?" Akim demanded suspiciously.
"You remember, Miron Akim, how surprised we were that Obolo Nardin would panic this early?" she asked. The volume control... there. Microphone?... clipped to the wall over there. "We wondered why both he and the Trofts would throw away their listening ear when there couldn't possibly be any enemies on their way here yet?" she added, working the mike free of its clip and gripping it awkwardly between palm and thumb.
"I remember," Akim growled. "Are you leading up to giving us the answer?"
"I hope so." She took a deep breath. If she was wrong... Raising the mike to her lips, she touched the operating switch. "This is Jasmine Moreau," she said in
Anglic. "Repeating, this is Jasmine Moreau. Please respond. This is Jasmine
Moreau; please respond. This is Jasmine-"
And abruptly the board speaker boomed in reply. "This is Captain Koja; commanding the Dewdrop. We read you, Cobra Moreau, and we're ready to come down and pick you up."
Chapter 45
It took Jin three tries to relax her throat enough to speak again. "Understood,
Dewdrop," she managed at last. "I-" she glanced up to see Akim gazing darkly at her. "Please tie in your Qasaman language translator."
There was a slight pause from the other end. "Why?"
"I have some Qasamans here with me," Jin explained, switching back to their language herself. "I think they ought to be in on the discussion."
"Who are you talking to?" Akim demanded.
"An Aventinian ship," Jin told him. "Here to rescue me. Captain, are you still in orbit?"
"Yes." The word was Qasaman, the voice the artificial one of a translator program. "Where are you?-wait a minute, the head of the rescue team wants to get in on the conversation."
"Jin?" a familiar voice said in accented Qasaman... a voice fairly dripping with relief. "Jin, it's Dad. Are you all right?"
Jin felt her mouth drop open. "Dad! Yes, yes, I'm fine. You-but-"
"What, you didn't think I'd drop everything to come get my daughter back? Oh,
God, Jin-look, where are you?"
"In that covered compound west of Azras-Mangus, they call it. Wait a minute, though, you can't come down just yet."
"Why not?"
"You might run into a hunter/seeker missile. Courtesy of the Trofts whose ship
I'm talking to you from."
There was a long pause. "We were wondering how you'd gotten on this frequency," the Dewdrop translator said at last. "What in blazes are Trofts doing there?"
"At the moment, trying to get us out of their bridge so that they can airlift some Qasaman allies to safety."
"Allies? You mean the Trofts and Qasamans have made an alliance?"
"No, no, it's not that bad. There's nothing official about this; it was a private deal with some Qasaman thugs making a power play."
"A power play which may yet succeed," Akim muttered.
Jin glanced up at him. "Yeah, right. The problem, Dad, is that we've got to find a safe passage out of here for the three of us and at the same time make sure
Mangus's owners don't get away before the Qasaman rulers can deal with them."
"Now, wait a minute, Jin," Justin said cautiously. "We'll get you and your friends out, certainly, but the rest of it sounds like internal politics.
Nothing we ought to get involved with."
Jin took a deep breath. "We're already involved, Dad, just by my presence here.
Please just trust me on this one."
"Jin-"
"Cobra Moreau, this is Koja," the translator interrupted him, "Let's table this discussion until you're safe, all right? Now, you said you were on the bridge?"
"Yes, and we're sort of trapped-"
"Can you describe the ship? Is it a warship, or what?"