Cobra Strike

So I went up this afternoon and got a copy."

"Just like that?"

"More or less. A combination of bluff, bluster, and legal footwork." He smiled faintly. "Plus a healthy new respect for us on their part."

"God knows we earned that much," she said quietly. York and Winward alone had earned them at least that much.... She shook off the sudden resurgence of guilt for her failures on the trip. "So why give it to me?"

"Oh, the whole Council will get copies in the morning," he shrugged. "As I said,

I was in the neighborhood."

"Yeah. Well... thanks."

"No charge." Jo

"Not after what we've seen of Qasama. A surgical strike against their technological base, perhaps, if feasible; aerial bombings, probably, if it'll actually do any good. But no land war. Not even for Caelian."

She nodded slightly. "I understand. And I'm as willing to look for middle ground as you are."

"Let's hope we can find it. Good night."

He left, and Telek found herself staring at the Troft magdisk in her hand.

Suddenly she was very, very tired....

Ejecting the Menssana's report, she inserted the Trofts' into her comboard, keying to run it through the Academy's central translator. Then, sighing wearily, she splashed more cahve into her mug and began to read.

Chapter 24

The Council meeting was postponed two days, to give the members a chance to read both the Qasama Mission debriefing and the Troft data package Jo

And it wasn't hard to figure out why.

"If the damn planet wasn't a lost human colony no one would be nearly this emotional about the whole thing," Dylan Fairleigh growled afterward as the governors gathered for their own meeting.

"Neither of the Caelian syndics was complaining," Vartanson pointed out quietly.

"We know what the trade-off is here."

"Us or them?" Jo

Trofts are so worried about Qasama."

"Don't we?" Roi shot back. "A thriving, highly cooperative, highly paranoid human culture? That's not something to be afraid of?"

"A culture without starflight, without even system space travel?" Hemner quavered.

"We don't know they don't have spaceflight capability," Fairleigh reminded him tartly. His eyes flicked to Jo

Jo

"I only meant-"

"If you'd like, you can head the next trip to Qasama," she cut him off. "We'll see then how well you do."

Stiggur chose that moment to make his own belated entrance, his presence stifling the budding argument. "Good afternoon; sorry I'm late," he said with an air of harried distraction as he sat down at his place and pushed a pile of magdisks into the center of the table. "Preliminary biological data analysis-just came in. Summary in the front. Take a quick look and we'll discuss it."

It was, as Jo

"Aside from the weird reproductive setup, I presume," Roi said. "The whole arrangement looks pretty fragile to me. Kill off enough of their embryo-hosts-these whatyoucallem, these tarbines-and you could wipe out the species overnight."

"Most ecosystems look that unstable at first glance," Telek put in dryly. "In practice, you'd find you'd need to kill a hell of a lot of tarbines to make any real dent. I take it, though, that you feel the mojos to be the major threat to any Cobra forces we put down there?"

"No question," Roi said. "Look at the record. No one except Winward suffered any appreciable damage from the Qasamans' guns, and that single case was a surprise attack. But the mojos got him and York and came close with Pyre and Moreau."

"They really are the first line of defense," Fairleigh agreed. "And the Qasamans know it. Hell, they design their cities to keep the things happy."

"Makes sense, of course," Stiggur said with a shrug. "Why risk human deaths in a battle when you've got animals to take the brunt of the attack?"

"That's not how the arrangement began," said Telek. "It was originally for defense against predators and evolved into a personal bodyguard system."

"And now shows itself easily adapted to warfare," Stiggur said. "The history doesn't concern us as much as the current situation does." He turned to Jo

"Is there any way you know of to make the Cobra equipment better able to deal with the mojos? Some change in the targeting mechanism, for instance?"

Jo

"Then how about reprogramming the nanocomputer to identify mojos as hostile?"

Fairleigh suggested. "That way at least the next generation of Cobras could handle them."

Vartanson snorted. "If that could be done, don't you think we'd already have something like that for the Caelian Cobras? Shape recognition just takes up too much computer memory."

"It's actually more basic than that," Jo

There was a moment's silence. "Sorry," Jo

Stiggur waved the apology aside. "The point was reasonable and well taken. I don't think anyone wants to have specialized cadres of Cobras. So. Is there some other way to reduce the mojos' effectiveness?"

"Excuse me for changing the subject," Hemner spoke up hesitantly, "but there are still some points about Qasama generally that bother me. History, Brom, you implied wasn't important, but I'd like to know a little about the colony's background. Specifically, how and when it came to be."

"I didn't mean history wasn't important." Stiggur poked at his comboard. "Only that-oh, never mind. Let's see. The historians' report indicates the original

Qasamans left the Dominion circa 2160, probably as colonists bound from Reginine for Rajput. The direction vector is about right, and the various historical references and language-not to mention the name Qasama itself-all point to one of Reginine's basic subcultures."

"The name Qasama?" Vartanson frowned.

"You've got this report yourselves," Stiggur said, a bit tartly.

" 'Qasama' is an Old Arabic word meaning 'to divide.' It's come into Anglic through a couple of different languages and changes to become 'kismet,' meaning

'fate' or 'destiny.' "

"Divided by destiny," Roi murmured. "Some linguist aboard the original ship had a strange sense of humor."