The man’s eyes widened even more. “Your voice,” he said disbelievingly. “You are kin of Merrick Hopekeeper?”

  Jody caught her breath. These people knew Merrick? “I—”

  She stopped as Kemp touched a subtle warning on her arm. “Who are you?” she asked instead. “What do you know of Merrick Hopekeeper?”

  “I am Ludolf Treetapper,” he man said. “Merrick Hopekeeper is an ally of my daughter, Anya Winghunter.”

  “An ally in this war?”

  “He has served,” Ludolf said. “Do you come to serve, as well?”

  “We’ve come to find him,” Jody said. There was a flicker of something suspicious in Ludolf’s face—“so that we can hear his report on the situation,” she added quickly.

  “He is not here,” Ludolf said. “But we expect him soon. Until then, you will help us battle the masters?”

  “The masters? You mean the Trofts?”

  “I mean they who enslaved us,” Ludolf bit out. “They will all die—”

  He broke off, dropping into a startled crouch as a stutter of laser fire blasted from Smitty’s gunbay, blasting a building to Jody’s left into a pile of rubble. “Smitty?” Kemp murmured.

  “Trofts trying to flank you,” Smitty’s voice came through Jody’s comm. “Whatever business you’ve got with these guys, get it over with fast.”

  “He says they worked with Merrick,” Jody said.

  “You believe them?”

  Jody looked back at the men, keying in her infrareds. Hopefully, she was getting better at this whole lie-detecting business.

  She frowned. Ludolf’s facial heat signature was a little elevated, not unreasonable in the middle of a battle. But his two companions were practically blazing.

  Were they ill? If so, they had to have the kind of fever that was normally extremely debilitating in adults. Yet they were not just alert and walking around, but fighting.

  She focused on the rocks they were holding, a cold sensation on the back of her neck. Put Cobra strength behind them, Kemp had said. These men weren’t Cobras, but maybe they had the equivalent of Cobra strength.

  The Qasamans used a wide range of enhancement drugs for everything from quick healing and learning to deep thinking and planning. Apparently, these people had something similar.

  “I don’t know,” Jody told Smitty, easing back on her infrareds. “But Merrick will be here soon. Until then, we need to keep the Trofts back so that he’s got a place to land.” She gestured to Ludolf. “What’s your plan here? What are you trying to accomplish?”

  “No plan,” Ludolf said. “We kill the masters. As many as we can, to drive them from our world.”

  “Got it,” Jody murmured, another shiver running through her. Wholesale slaughter. Terrific plan. Useless and completely counterproductive.

  But Ludolf’s rebellion was his problem. Merrick was hers, and she needed to clear the area for him. “All right, we’ll do what we can to help. How long does that drug last?”

  “Drug?”

  “The drug that makes a rock a useful weapon against armored Trofts,” Jody said. “I need to know it won’t peter out halfway through a rush.”

  “It will last,” Ludolf said. His eyes had narrowed, a sudden woodenness to his face. Maybe the combat drug was supposed to be a secret? “But we need weapons,” he added, looking pointedly at her holstered laser. “Do you have more?”

  “Behind you!” Smitty snapped.

  Jody spun around, dropping into a crouch as she yanked her laser from its holster. A pair of Trofts had emerged from one side of a broken wall, their lasers swinging around as they spotted the cluster of humans. Jody snapped her own weapon up into position, shifting to the two-handed grip she’d practiced so long aboard the Squire. She flicked a target-lock onto each of the two Trofts and fired.

  As it had aboard ship, the fainter echo of her fingertip laser was painfully visible to her. But she was looking for it, and she doubted anyone else was. Regardless, both Trofts twitched and dropped with gratifying ease, their weapons clattering to the ground.

  “On your three!” Smitty called.

  Jody jerked her head around to see three more Trofts coming around the other side of the broken wall. Again, she target locked them.

  But Kemp was already on it, spinning on his right foot, his left leg sweeping the aliens. Three flashes from his antiarmor laser, and the Trofts were down.

  “Good shooting, Broom,” Plaine said.

  “Thanks,” Jody said, turning back to Ludolf.

  He was staring at Kemp, his eyes gone wide again. “What was—what was that?” he managed.

  “Leg laser,” Kemp said before Jody could answer. “Strapped under my clothes.”

  “But—”

  Ludolf broke off as a multiple flicker of reflected light came from the wreckage around them. “Plaine?” Jody called.

  “Yeah, they’re on the move,” Plaine confirmed grimly. “I had to brush them back. Bringing up the heavier stuff now.”

  “Aircraft?” Kemp asked.

  “Not yet,” Plaine said. “Don’t know what they’re waiting for. I’m talking about barrel guns.”

  “You’ve seen them?” Jody asked, a knot forming in her stomach. Plaine had given them several lectures aboard the Squire about Troft field weaponry, and barrel guns were one of the nastiest. Each was basically a fat cylinder, two meters in diameter, full of caseless armor-piercing ammo belts wrapped around an axial gun. With a cyclic rate of thirty rounds per second they could do serious damage to slow or stationary targets.

  “Two of them, yeah,” Plaine confirmed. “I lost them behind that smashed hangar-looking thing that’s in front of you and to your right, but I’m thinking they’ll stage them from that line of storage sheds on your two. They can send the barrels rolling on the ground behind the sheds, targeting the Squire the whole way.”

  “Firing through one gap and rolling under cover to the next,” Kemp said grimly. “Best plan is to get there before they send them off?”

  “Best plan, sure,” Plaine said. “Not necessary the safest.”

  “Close enough,” Kemp said. “I’ll take it.”

  “We’ll take it,” Jody corrected firmly. “Ludolf, we’re going to check out those sheds. You can go back to doing whatever you were doing when we landed.”

  “Do you seek to send us away?” Ludolf demanded, his eyes narrowing. “Do you plan—?”

  “There!” Kemp cut him off, pointing to the sheds. “Come on—I saw a barrel.”

  He set off toward the sheds at a zigzag run. Jody followed, her heart pounding. Her first battle as a Cobra. She hoped desperately she wouldn’t let Kemp down.

  They reached the nearest of the sheds. Kemp glanced behind him, probably making sure Jody was still there, did a quick three-sixty, then slipped around the shed. Resting her thumbs gently on her ring finger nails, ready to fire her lasers at an instant’s notice, Jody followed.

  Straight into a hornet’s nest.

  There were a couple of dozen Trofts in the space behind the sheds, some of them prepping a pair of barrel guns, others standing a loose perimeter guard.

  And as Kemp and Jody came into sight, every one of the aliens turned toward them.

  Jody jolted to a halt, her first impulse to back up into the partial protection of the nearest shed and try to fight from there. But Kemp didn’t even hesitate. He fired a full-power blast from his sonic, then threw himself forward into a twisting dive that landed him on his back with enough sideways momentum to start him spinning.

  A second later, the area lit up as he opened fire with his antiarmor laser.

  The three nearest Trofts jerked and toppled over. The laser flicked on and off and on again as Kemp’s target locks and nanocomputer calculated, aimed, and fired. As his spin slowed to a halt, he half rolled onto his side, tucked his knees to his chest, and continued firing at the next group of Trofts.

  But there were too many for him to take down before they recovered from their surprise and started firing back. Too many for him; too many, Jody knew, even for the two of them.

  But they had to try. She had to try. Her brother’s life was on the line, and she hadn’t come all this way to leave him hanging now. The barrel guns could wreck the Squire and completely demolish Merrick’s aircar, and it was up to her and Kemp to neutralize the weapons before either of those happened.

  Setting her teeth firmly together, throwing target locks onto the nearest three Trofts outside Kemp’s fire zone, she charged into battle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Suddenly, sooner somehow than Merrick had expected, they were there.

  The spaceport was a mess. Not the kind of mess where there was fighting and destruction everywhere, but the kind where the fighting had mostly come and gone, leaving pockets of wrecked buildings and small, smoldering fires scattered randomly across the landscape.

  The battle hadn’t completely stopped, though. Here and there he could see the sporadic fire of lasers or the muted flash of firearms as Ludolf’s rebels continued their struggle against their enslavers. With the war drug Ludolf had stolen boosting the strength and stamina of his forces, the fight would probably drag on for quite a while.

  Though a few combat aircars like the one they were currently riding in could bring things to a much faster end. Distantly, Merrick wondered why the Trofts hadn’t deployed fighters, or even aerial spotters. Were they hoping to capture Ludolf and his people alive for questioning? That might explain the lack of fighters, but not the lack of spotters.

  But Ludolf’s private war wasn’t his concern. Ahead, at the edge of the spaceport and right in the middle of some of the heaviest fighting, was the Dominion ship he’d seen going down. “There,” he said, pointing it out to Kjoic as he keyed in his telescopics. The ship had crashed with its bow pointing toward them, which limited how much Merrick could see. Still, while it had definitely hit the ground hard, there seemed to be less damage than he’d expected from the way it had been arrowing down from the sky. Hopefully, it was still spaceworthy. “Looks like there’s enough room to the left of it for us to put down.”

  “Safety, that place does not have it,” Kjoic said, his radiator membranes fluttering. “To the left of the ship, behind the line of storage huts—the two large cylinders?”

  Merrick shifted his gaze that direction. The cylinders were big, all right: two meters tall and four long. They were behind one of the sheds, pointing directly at it. “What are they?”

  “Antiarmor rollers, they are them,” Kjoic said. “The warriors are preparing to roll them past the huts to fire at the Dominion ship.”

  Merrick winced. Rolling the cylinders just a few meters to the side would clear the shed and leave them pointing directly at the ship. “How do they work?”

  “Belts of explosive shells, they have them,” Kjoic said. “The shells, an axial gun fires them.”

  “Protection?”

  “Heavy armor, the front has it. Less armor, the sides and rear have it.”

  “Loading?”

  “From the rear.”

  So that would be the weakest point. “How good are the shells? How badly could they damage the Dominion ship?”

  “Very,” Kjoic said. “We must land on the other side to be safe.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when the area around the rollers erupted with laser fire. Laser fire coming from the heel of a barely seen figure on the ground.

  Jody had brought along a Cobra?

  “The danger, it is that the Dominion ship may fire on us—”

  “Never mind that,” Merrick cut him off, searching for inspiration. A second Cobra had now joined the battle, but that seemed to be all. With over a dozen Trofts still on their feet, even a pair of Cobras would be hard-pressed. Merrick needed to find a way to whittle down the odds, and he needed to find it fast.

  There it was. Maybe. “That half-broken wall over there,” he said as he unstrapped from his seat. “Four meters high, directly behind that first cylinder. You see it?”

  “Yes,” Kjoic said, his membranes fluttering a little more. “The far side of the wall, do you wish to land there?”

  “No, you’re going to land on the far side of the Dominion ship like you said.” Merrick stepped to the side hatch and got a grip on the release. “But first you’re going to come in low—ten meters up should do—directly over the wall, flat on to it, holding your current speed. Can you do that?”

  “An attack, do you intend to make one?”

  “Just do what I said,” Merrick said. “I’ll catch up after you’ve landed.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it,” Merrick snapped.

  The wall was coming up fast. Merrick watched, hoping there was enough structural strength left in the masonry for what he needed, and wishing fleetingly there was a program in his nanocomputer that could handle the speed and distance calculations for him. Theoretically, this should be just like a wall bounce, the kind he’d done a hundred times.

  Except that a wall bounce usually required two walls. Here, Merrick had only one.

  Almost time…and as his mental countdown ran to zero, he flung open the hatch and leaped out. He flicked a targeting lock on the shed wall, and let his muscles go limp.

  He’d hoped that his nanocomputer would classify this as a wall bounce and respond accordingly. To his relief, it did. Even as he arced downward the servo system took full control of his body, twisting and flailing his arms and legs in precisely the right way to line him up feet-first with the broken wall. An instant later he slammed into it, his knees bending as his leg servos absorbed the impact.

  The wall creaked in protest, but held. As Merrick’s body started to rotate into a fall, his knee servos reversed direction, shoving him off the wall and starting him on a quick spin that would normally bounce him to the next wall over, repeating the maneuver until he was safely on the ground.

  Only in this case, there was no second wall.

  What there was, instead, was a two-meter-high Troft roller.

  Merrick had no idea how much a roller weighed. His main goal, aside from getting to the ground quickly so he could help the other Cobras, was to skew the roller just enough out of line with the Dominion ship that some of the Trofts would have to stop their side of the fight long enough to get it back into position.

  But either he’d overestimated the roller’s mass or underestimated his own momentum. To his surprise, the weapon yawed a solid thirty degrees off line as he slammed feet-first into the rear part of the cylinder wall. His servos straightened again, shoving the big cylinder another few degrees over, leaving its axial gun pointed well off target.

  And leaving its rear loading area pointed directly toward a cluster of Trofts.

  Mentally crossing his fingers, Merrick triggered his antiarmor laser.

  Kjoic had said the cylinder’s rear wall was less well armored than the front. But it was armored enough. Merrick kept his laser trained on that same spot as his servos pushed him back off the weapon; continued firing as he arced through the air; even kept at it as he landed hard on the jagged debris scattered on the ground at the base of the wall. But the cylinder remained intact. His only hope now was to get around behind the roller and try his luck with the back endcap. He slid to a halt and started to scramble to his feet—

  Without warning a laser lashed out from his right, blasting into the roller’s rear endcap.

  Reflexively, he ducked, his nanocomputer throwing him to the side. An instant later he ducked again as a pair of Trofts appeared in the reflected glow of the beam and fired their own lasers at him. He sent them a blast from his sonic, hoping to jar their aim, and flicked a pair of target locks on their helmets. Snapping out his right hand, he pointed at the nearest Troft and activated his arcthrower, sending a lightning bolt into the alien’s helmet.

  Just as the roller endcap disintegrated in a massive blast of fire and shredded metal.

  Even with the explosion pointed away from Merrick there was enough shockwave bounce-back to throw off his balance. He twisted around, trying to stay on his feet, and was losing that battle when a pair of strong hands grabbed his upper arms from behind.

  Instinctively, he tried to twist away. But the grip was too strong and held him solidly. One of Ludolf’s drugged men? He twisted his forearm up, cocking his hand over his shoulder for an arcthrower shot at his assailant—

  “Merrick!” Jody’s voice gasped in his ear.

  An instant later she’d let go of his arms and thrown herself on him in a full-body bear hug. “I knew we’d find you,” she said, her voice barely understandable with her face buried in his shoulder. “I knew we would. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine—” He broke off as a laser blast came from the rear of the second roller.

  “That’ll be Kemp,” Jody said, finally pulling away. “Come on—we need to get to the ship.”

  “In a minute,” Merrick said. He got to his feet, wincing at the multiple points of pain that seemed to cover his entire back. “I need to get to Anya and Kjoic. Unless whoever’s aboard the ship shot them down,” he added as that horrible thought belatedly struck him.

  “It’s okay,” Jody assured him, grabbing his right arm and helping him up. “We saw you jump and called Plaine to leave that one alone. He said they’ve landed on the Squire’s portside, and he’s keeping an eye on them.”

  “Good,” Merrick said, looking down at her hand. It was unmistakably his sister’s hand. Only it was strong. It was too strong.

  And he’d seen two Cobras firing lasers at the Trofts down here. Kemp and…?

  He looked up again, to find her gazing back into his eyes. “Yes,” she said simply. “But don’t talk about it. Not everyone aboard knows, and I’m kind of our secret weapon.”

  “Got it.” Merrick’s hand twitched as a figure appeared through the residual smoke from the roller he and Jody had destroyed, relaxed again as he saw the figure was human. “Kemp?” he called.

  “Yeah,” the man said as he came up to them. “Merrick?”