Cobra Outlaw - eARC by Timothy Zahn Page B

needed some answers, and he and Anya needed someplace to go. The crash site seemed like a reasonable place to start.
    Merrick usually had a pretty good sense of direction. But navigating the Muninn forest proved trickier than he’d expected, with the terrain and occasional impassable clumps of trees and bushes forcing him to veer off course or sometimes turning him around completely. Fortunately, Anya had a better feel for the forest than he did and was always able to get them back on track.
    Still, between the travel and the ever-present need for vigilance, progress was slow. The distance to the crash site was less than fifteen kilometers, but it wasn’t until early afternoon that they finally arrived.
    At first glance, the ship looked to be in surprisingly good shape. It was about a hundred meters long, a fairly typical size for a Troft medium freighter. The style, too, was familiar: Merrick had seen other such ships hunting for razorarms back on Qasama. He and Anya had happened to arrive near the bow, and aside from some serious dents and cracks where the ship had plowed through the trees it looked mostly undamaged.
    But that first look was deceptive. As they worked their way across the scorched ground alongside the wreck Merrick saw that the aft hull plates were blackened with heat stress, and there were considerably more cracks in the sides than even at the bow.
    Anya spotted that, too. “Why is the back part more damaged than the front?” she murmured.
    “I don’t know,” Merrick said. “Let’s take a look.”
    The scorched ground and burned grass turned out to be much easier to traverse than the main part of the forest had been, though the ashes sometimes hid shards of broken tree or jutting roots that could trip up an unwary traveler. As they worked their way aft, Merrick began to pick up the stench of burned plastic, hydraulic and coolant fluids, and a dozen other odors that he couldn’t identify. Whatever had happened back there, it had clearly left a serious mess behind.
    It wasn’t until they reached the rear of the ship that they found out just how big a mess it was.
    “By the heavens and the land beneath,” Anya murmured, her voice nearly unrecognizable.
    “Yeah,” Merrick agreed grimly, staring at the gaping, ragged-edged hole in the ship’s starboard stern. Beyond the hole, the compartment’s blackened walls were bent and cracked.
    “What kind of weapon could have done such damage?” Anya asked, peering into the opening.
    “Oh, there are plenty that could do that,” Merrick said grimly. “I saw some of them on Qasama. But I don’t think it was an attack. See how the edges of the hole angle outward? That implies the explosion came from inside, not outside.”
    “Then it was an accident?”
    “Probably,” Merrick said. “Let’s see if we can get inside—I think I see some gaps we can squeeze through.”
    It had probably been an accident, Merrick reminded himself as he led the way carefully through the wrecked engine room. That was certainly the most likely explanation.
    But he couldn’t help remembering that those two Trofts on the mountainside had seemed awfully interested in seeing what Merrick and Anya knew about the wreck.
    An internal explosion could have been an accident. It could also have been sabotage.
    The engine room’s doors were warped and jammed shut. But as he’d already noted, there were several cracks in the wall where seams had burst under the shock and pressure. They were narrow, but a couple of them proved to be passible. Merrick and Anya eased their way through, being careful not to slice clothing or flesh on the jagged edges, and headed inside.
    Merrick had expected to find similar damage further in. To his mild surprise, the rest of the ship, even the sections just beyond the engine room bulkhead, seemed largely undamaged. The damage that was there looked more like a result of the crash than from the explosion. Apparently, the engine room had done a good job