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roar changed pitch as the driver suddenly increased speed, and as the car disappeared past the other side of the alcove Lorne saw the passenger lower the binoculars.
    And then they were gone. Lorne listened as their engine noise faded away, an eerie feeling creeping up his back.
    Those weren’t just a couple of Nissa Gendreves’ warrant enforcers. They were Dominion Marines.
    Had Nissa somehow persuaded Commodore Santores to take the treason investigation away from Chintawa? That could be good, or it could be very, very bad.
    But there was no time to weigh the possibilities now. He’d had his look, and now he had to figure out what to do next.
    Should he go into hiding somewhere? Or should he head back to the Dome on foot and play innocent if someone called him on the stunt he’d just pulled?
    And someone would call him on it. The Marine with the binoculars had almost certainly spotted Lorne’s sudden disappearance. Their assumption might be that he’d merely ducked down in the seat, either to get something or just to mess with them. But that engine surge right at the end implied they were going to check it out anyway. Somewhere along the line they would pull his parents over, at which point they would discover that Lorne had indeed vanished.
    If the Marines were following Paul and Jin, whether on orders from Nissa or Santores, that would probably be the end of it. They would most likely be annoyed by Lorne’s trick, as well as the fact that their surreptitious pursuit had been exposed. But there certainly weren’t any official charges they could bring.
    But if they were following Lorne, someone was going to be very unhappy indeed.
    He caught his breath, a sudden belated thought flooding in on him.
    There had been two cars following them. Only one had continued the chase around the corner.
    Where the hell was car number two?
    Cursing his inattention, he keyed in his audio enhancements. The distant sounds of his parents’ and the Marines’ cars jumped in volume, along with the city’s other background noises. But there were no other engine sounds nearby. Had the car turned off somewhere else?
    And then, he heard footsteps. Two sets, moving stealthily along the walkway.
    Coming closer.
    His right hand curled into stunner mode. Whoever was out there was about to take an unexpected nap. The footsteps were nearly to his doorway now…
    “Lorne?”
    Lorne felt the tension drain out of him, a combination of relief and annoyance taking its place as he straightened up. No Dominion Marines or legal annoyances this time—just Badger Werle, one of his teammates out in DeVegas province. He should have guessed that only another Cobra could have anticipated Lorne’s slingfrog maneuver. “Here, Badj,” he called back, and walked around the doorway wall.
    It had only been a few weeks since Lorne had last seen Werle. But with all that had happened it felt more like a lifetime. It was therefore something of an odd shock to see that the man looked pretty much exactly the way Lorne remembered him.
    That wasn’t the case with the second man. To Lorne’s shocked surprise, Dillon de Portola now had a long, ragged laser burn scar across his right cheek and up along the side of his head. “Hey, Dill,” he said. Even to himself his voice sounded strained and forced.
    But if de Portola noticed the sudden stress, he ignored it. “Hey, Lorne,” he replied calmly. He tapped the backs of his fingers against Werle’s shoulder. “I told you he’d pulled a slingfrog.”
    “Yes, you did,” Werle agreed, rolling his eyes. It was a game the two of them had been playing for years: de Portola pointing out a bit of his own brilliance, and Werle pretending that it irritated him. “What’s going on?”
    “I could ask you the same thing,” Lorne said. “How come you two were following us?”
    “Mainly because they were,” Werle said, nodding down the street. “Dill and I came to your great uncle’s place looking for you and spotted