Cobra Traitor by Timothy Zahn

Author:Timothy Zahn [Zahn, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military, Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, General
ISBN: 9781481482806
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2018-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The first thing Jin noticed as she drifted back to consciousness was that her arms wouldn’t move.

Her first thought was that she’d fallen asleep on them somehow and the nerves simply weren’t responding to her brain’s commands. Her second thought was that somehow her servos had failed.

That was the horrifying thought that snapped her out of the fog. With a quick shake of her head, she opened her eyes.

To find herself sitting in a padded contour chair, her legs held down by a pair of massive metal bars, her arms held crossed against her chest by another set of bars. Across the room from her—and it wasn’t a very big room—was a ship-style hatch flanked by two glowering Dominion Marines.

“She’s awake,” a voice announced from her left.

“Yes, Doctor, thank you—I did notice,” a dark voice replied from the same direction.

Jin turned her head toward the voices. There was a young man sitting at a display that looked like a medical monitor panel, his face carefully neutral. Beside him, standing stiffly and staring back at Jin—

“Captain Lij Tulu,” she greeted him, keeping her voice cool and professional even as she felt her heart seize up inside her. Her last thought as the gas attack took her was a desperate hope that Lorne or one of the other Cobras would see what had happened and whisk her away to safety.

Clearly, that hadn’t happened.

One of the lines on the display the two men were sitting beside gave a little twitch in response to Jin’s suddenly enhanced heartbeat.

Lij Tulu noticed. “Calm yourself, Cobra Broom,” he said, standing up and walking around her one-chair prison to a spot between the two Marines, presumably so he could stare at her more efficiently. “If I’d wished you dead, you’d be dead.”

“And of course, we can’t have that,” Jin said. “You’ll want to run me through your mind-sifting machine before you drop me out an airlock.”

“I did think about that, yes,” Lij Tulu said with a casual shrug. “There must be a whole collection of tidbits inside that armored skull of yours that would prove interesting, embarrassing, or both.”

“Along with a few choice opinions about you and the whole Dominion of Man.”

“I’m sure,” Lij Tulu said. “Fortunately for you, at this point it’s probably not worth the effort. It would take at least a few hours to locate and retrieve information on your resistance friends, and by that time they would surely have relocated and changed their faces.” His lips compressed briefly. “And we seem to be rapidly moving beyond the point where political pressure or even blackmail is of any use.”

“That’s what happens when you start using scare tactics that inflame the populace,” Jin pointed out. “Is that how you got that woman to help you? Blackmail?”

“Woman?” Lij Tulu asked, frowning.

“The one who gassed me.”

Lij Tulu’s frown cleared. “Oh—her. No, no—there was no blackmail involved. She’s one of us.”

“Really?” Jin asked, thinking back. As far as she could remember, there hadn’t been a single women among the various Dominion troops that she’d seen.

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