Cobra Strike

He hadn't been paying all that much attention to the route the one time

Cerenkov's team had been in this place, but fortunately the layout seemed straightforward. Pyre followed the main corridor to the first junction and branched right. At the next cross corridor he turned left, aiming toward the center of the building-and there, barely ten meters away, were the two liveried guards he remembered seeing at the mayor's door.

They looked at him in frowning surprise, hands dropping to their guns. Pyre shot both of them out from under their mojos, then killed the birds as they tried to disengage their talons from their epaulet perches and become airborne. Mentally bracing himself, he shoved the doors open and stepped inside, hands held at the ready.

It was almost a repeat of the scene he'd seen through Joshua's sensors the last time, with two important exceptions. The fumes that both he and the contact team had missed out on before were an almost literal sledgehammer to the nose, bringing him to an abrupt halt and nearly gagging him. And this time the mayor's cushiony throne was vacant.

It took Pyre a handful of heartbeats to get his breath and voice back. For the people seated at the low tables around the throne, those few seconds turned out to be their salvation. Whether the fumes enhanced their mental processes or whether they were simply naturally observant he didn't know, but by the time he was able to function again all of them had apparently deduced who he was and were making mad dashes from the room. Within seconds the scene was deserted.

"Damn," Pyre murmured under his breath. The smoke, he discovered, tasted odd, too. Clicking up his audio enhancers, he held his breath... and from somewhere out of sight among the free-hanging curtains he heard the faint sound of shallow breathing.

So they hadn't all made it out of boltholes. Was the straggler armed?

Probably... though none of the others had tried to use their guns, and that carried some interesting implications. But even if the skulker was afraid to shoot. Pyre had no desire to hunt him down in this maze, with only the diffuse sounds of breathing to guide him. But there might be another way. If the mojos were really as touchy about weapons as they'd seemed when the contact team first stepped outside the Dewdrop's lock...

Left hand ready for trouble, he reached down with his right and drew his stolen pistol.

The sound of steel on leather was loud in the silent room-and the single flap of bird wings that followed gave direction enough. Ahead and to the left... he sprinted around the curtains there and came face to face with a crouching, terror-eyed man.

For a second they gazed at each other in silence. Pyre's main attention was on the Qasaman's mojo, but the bird seemed to realize that an attack would be suicide, and it stayed put on its shoulder perch. Shifting his full attention to the man, Pyre said the only Qasaman word he knew: "Kimmeron."

The other, apparently misunderstanding, shook his head wildly. "Sibbio," he choked, slapping his chest with an open palm, eyes dropping to the gun still in

Pyre's hand. "Sibbio."

Pyre grimaced and tried again. "Kimmeron. Kimmeron?" He waved his free hand vaguely around the room.

The Qasaman got it then. Even through the haze of fumes Pyre saw his face visibly pale. Doesn't know where the mayor is? Or does know and the place is top-secret? The latter, he suspected; Sibbio's clothes seemed too ornate for a mere servitor. Taking a long step forward, the Cobra glared as hard as he could at the man. "Kimmeron," he bit out harshly.

The other gazed into Pyre's eyes and silently got to his feet.

The bolthole was right where, in retrospect. Pyre should have expected to find it: directly in front of the cushiony throne. Sibbio showed him the hidden lever that released the trap door; looking down the hole, Pyre saw the meter-square shaft change a few meters down into a curving ramp that presumably dumped the passengers into the safety of a heavily guarded room somewhere down the line.

Unfortunately, the trap's position implied it was also useful for getting undesirables out of the mayor's sight, which meant the guards below would be trained to handle potential nuisances. But there was nothing Pyre could do about that on his time budget... and now that the trap was open, there was no point in further hesitation. Giving Sibbio's mojo one last glance, the Cobra stepped into the pit.

It was a smooth enough ride, the curved section of tu

To find a ring of guns surrounding him.

Five of them, he counted as he lay motionless. The guard nearest his fallen weapon scooped it up, jamming it into his own empty holster. "You will make no move," said a man standing at Pyre's feet in the middle of the semicircle, in harshly accented Anglic.

Pyre locked eyes with him, then sent his gaze leisurely around the ring of guards. "I want to talk to Mayor Kimmeron," he said to the spokesman.

"You will not move until you are judged to be weaponless," the Qasaman told him.

"Is Kimmeron here?"

The other ignored his question. He spoke instead to his men, two of whom handed their weapons to the others. They knelt down on either side of Pyre... and the

Cobra kicked his heels hard into the pad.

The pad was spongy, but the kick had servo strength behind it and an instant later Pyre was flipping rigidly around the pivot point of his head. One of the guns barked, too late-and then it was too late for any further response as Pyre triggered the laser salvo he'd set up while looking around the guard ring. For an instant the room blazed with laser fire... and by the time Pyre's body had completed its flip the five Qasamans were kneeling or lying on the floor in various stages of shock, their flash-heated guns scattered among the dead mojos.

Pyre got to his feet, eyes seeking the spokesman. "I could as easily have killed all of you," he said calmly. "I'm not here to kill Mayor Kimmeron-"

Without warning, the other four Qasamans leaped to their feet and rushed him.

He let them come; and as the first one got within range, he snapped out his arm to catch the other in the chest with his palm. There was a wumph of expelled air, the sharper crack of snapped ribs, and the Qasaman flew two meters backwards to crash to the floor. The other three skidded to a halt, and Pyre saw an abrupt swelling of fear and respect in their faces. It was one thing, he reflected, to be disarmed by effectively magical bursts of light; it was quite another to see brute physical force in action. Or to feel it, for that matter.

The temporary numbness in his palm was wearing off and the skin there was aching like fury. The Qasaman would feel a lot worse when he woke up. If he ever did.

Pyre's eyes caught the spokesman's again. "I'm not here to kill Mayor Kimmeron, but merely to talk with him," he said as calmly as his tingling hand permitted.

"Take me to him. Now."

The other licked his lips, glancing over to where one of his men was ministering to his injured colleague. Then, looking back at Pyre, he nodded. "Follow me this way." He said something else to his men, then turned and headed for a door in the far end of the room. Pyre followed, the two remaining Qasamans falling into step behind him.

They passed through the door, and Pyre felt a split second of d‚j… vu. The same cushiony throne and low tables as in the office upstairs were here as well. But this room was smaller, and the hanging curtains had been replaced by banks of visual displays.