Cobra Gamble by Timothy Zahn

Author:Timothy Zahn [Zahn, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, cookie429, Adventure, Space Opera
ISBN: 9781451637694
Google: eBn1tgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1451638604
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2012-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The first night with Anya in his cell was rough on Merrick. Every time she rolled over, it seemed, or made any kind of unexpected noise or strange movement he snapped awake, his brain and reflexes on hair trigger, his body in full fight-or-flight mode. By the time the guard delivered the breakfast tray through the slot at the bottom of the door, he felt almost as tired as when he'd gone to bed.

Fortunately, the day itself turned out to be uneventful. The Troft doctor came by once with another injection, but aside from that Merrick didn't see any of the aliens. Every half hour or so Anya asked if there was anything she could do for him, subsiding without comment or complaint when he told her there wasn't. He tried taking a nap after lunch, just to see if she or the Trofts would try to pull something when he was wasn't watching. Nothing had happened by the time he did accidentally fall asleep, nor did anything seem changed when he woke up.

At bedtime Anya again offered him a dose from her medicine vial. Again, he turned her down.

And life settled into an odd but not unpleasant routine.

Merrick had told himself firmly that he wasn't going to get emotionally involved with Anya, no matter what she did to encourage such a relationship. To his mild surprise, she did absolutely nothing in that direction. She never spoke to him unless she was asking if he had any orders, or was answering one of his infrequent questions. She was always first at the door when meals arrived, retrieving the tray and bringing it to Merrick, then retreating to her bed to sit silently and patiently until he turned over her half of the food to her. When it was time to sleep, she asked one final time what she could do for him, offered him some of her medicine, then retreated again to her bed. She never joined Merrick in his daily workout regimen, but he often noticed her doing quiet isometric exercises of her own. Once, when he woke up in the middle of the night, he spotted her doing some stretching and limbering and something that looked like a combination of tai chi chuan and ballet.

Once, out of a sudden sheer desperation for human companionship, he invited her to eat with him. As she had with his offer of the room's bed that first night, she reminded him that he was the master and she was the slave, and that she would eat only what he didn't want, and only after he'd decided what that portion was. The strangest part of the conversation was the sense Merrick had afterward that Anya had made the same decision he had about not becoming emotionally entangled with her unasked-for roommate. All of which, to Merrick's mind, made her a most unlikely Troft spy. So who was she? And why had they put her in his cell?

By the fourth day of their captivity together, he'd still come up with only one answer.

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