Wolf Among the Stars-ARC (25 page)

Morales leaned on a console, limp with the release of accumulated tension.

“Well done, Alana,” said Andrew, releasing his breath. The Kappainu might have intended to simply flood the ship’s interior with lethal gas, or otherwise summarily dispose of the inconvenient human Black Wolf crew, but now Morales’ presence would preclude that.

“Aye—a bravura performance indeed,” said Gallivan with a grin. “Are you sure you’re not part Irish?”

Morales smiled, before remembering who was speaking. “
Absolutely
sure,” she said with a glare that didn’t quite come off.

They followed the navigational instructions they had been given, decelerating to almost nothing and going into free fall at the designated instant, while Andrew resumed worrying. The success of their initial deception had only brought them face-to-face with a whole new set of problems. One was the awkward absence of
City of Osaka
’s original Black Wolf crew, all of whom except Gallivan had been left in the Kogurche system. The prize crew could be explained as Morales’s fellow survivors. But they would have to act before Da Silva had time to notice the absence of
any
familiar faces.

Andrew was still thinking about it when they entered the Kappainu space station’s region of invisibility. He was prepared for the unnatural sensations of passage, and for the sudden appearance of the Brobdingnagian structure dead ahead. His companions weren’t.

“Holy Mary, mother of God!” gasped Gallivan. Morales murmured something in Spanish.

Andrew shook Gallivan out of his stunned immobility. “Start frantically signaling! It’s what they’ll expect you to do, although they probably won’t bother to acknowledge.”

His prediction proved accurate as the communicator remained silent. They felt the characteristic jar as the tractor beam took hold and began to haul them in.

Andrew considered ordering a futile effort to break free and escape, simply to keep Gallivan in character, but decided against it—the weapons the station was training on them would have been obvious to anyone. So he watched with renewed tension as the station grew closer. The last time he had been here, the Kappainu had deposited the gig he had ridden on a hangar deck. But there might not be room for the near frigate-sized
City of Osaka
, in which case they would park the ship alongside the station . . . and all bets would be off.

But the maw of the docking bay gradually surrounded them and they slid through the atmosphere screen into the hangar. Andrew ordered himself not to go weak with relief and studied the vast interior space. It seemed even larger than it had before, when it had held a number of the Kappainu warships. Now it was nearly empty. He had no idea what the warships’ absence portended; it might or might not be good news from the standpoint of Borthru’s force, but it left ample room for
City of Osaka
, and for that at least he was profoundly grateful.

The gravitic hands holding their ship lowered it to the deck with scarcely a bump. At once, two files of Kappainu guards hurried out to cover the egress ports with their carbine-sized handheld laser weapons. There was still no attempt at communication.

“I think they assume you’ve taken charge, Alana,” said Andrew.

“Don’t keep them waiting,” Gallivan added grimly. “Lead forth your prisoners.”

They all went down to the main personnel port. Morales emerged first, followed by Gallivan and the all but two prize crew. Andrew and Reislon remained concealed inside the port, each to one side. Andrew peered surreptitiously out, not certain what to expect in the next few seconds but sure that the Kappainu would not simply open fire on the humans as long as they were behind Morales.

His heart sank as he saw Zoltan da Silva emerge from the rank of guards and advance to the ramp.

Morales stopped halfway down the ramp. Da Silva halted at its foot and addressed her in a string of syllables that Andrew recognized as the Kappainu language as mispronounced by a human-configured throat.

Morales stood, unable to speak.

Da Silva frowned and spoke again, more peremptorily than before. As he did, he seemed to glance at the file of humans behind Morales—perhaps noticing that Gallivan’s was the only familiar face among them—and his frown deepened.

Morales’ paralysis broke. “Ah . . . I regret that I suffer from a rare condition which makes it impossible for me to pronounce any but a human language while in this—”

Without warning, Da Silva screamed an order to the guards. Simultaneously, he drew a laser pistol from his belt and fired at Morales.

She was drawing her M-3 and twisting desperately to her right side as he fired. She screamed as the coherent energy glanced searingly against her upper left arm.

“NO!” roared Gallivan He flung himself forward, pushed her down, and grabbed the M-3 she had half drawn. Fortunately, she had already set the weapon for autoburst fire. It blasted Da Silva’s head apart.

All this took less than a second. The Kappainu guards were still bringing their carbine-sized laser weapons into line, and the prize crew were still going prone on the ramp.

“FIRE!” Andrew roared into his wrist communicator to the two crewmen who had not accompanied Morales but were manning
City of Osaka
’s two point-defense lasers. They already had their orders from him, based on his recollection of the hangar deck’s layout.

X-ray laser weapons could be produced without the need to detonate a fusion bomb by using free-electron laser to ionize carbon material, the resultant plasma undergoing a population inversion and giving off coherent x-rays. They were ideal for space combat, where nothing less was energetic enough across the distances involved. They were never intended for use in atmosphere, which absorbs X-rays and therefore reduces their range to almost nothing. But “almost nothing” was precisely the range involved within the hangar bay.

These lasers were small weapons of their kind, comparable to the antiaircraft guns mounted by the previous century’s wet-navy ships. But within an enclosed space—even one of this size—the crackling roar as tunnels of vacuum were drilled through air was deafening. The air grew thunderous with ozone, and the heat of energy exchange made it almost unbreatheable. One of the gunners sent a rapid-fire series of X-ray pulses down the line of guards, who simply exploded into pinkish-gray mist at the touch of energies beyond any ever intended for antipersonnel use.

The other laser fired at the glassed-in control mezzanine that overhung the hangar bay. It exploded outward in a sheet of flame and a shower of debris. Andrew hoped those controls had included the only ones by which the atmosphere screen could be turned off, leaving the hangar bay in vacuum as a tornado of air sucked them all out into space. It was not an unreasonable hope; deactivating such screens was, for obvious reasons, made almost impossible to do by accident and difficult enough to do on purpose.

Andrew, drenched with sweat, ran down the ramp to where Morales lay. Gallivan, using a knife Andrew hadn’t even known he was carrying, was cutting open her left sleeve to expose the ugly laser burn. Reislon came immediately behind.

“I thought this might be useful,” the Lokar remarked as he applied pain-deadening antiradiation salve from a tube in a first-aid kit, then slapped on a seal that restored the light-duty vac suit’s integrity.

“Kozlowski!” Andrew shouted to a first-class petty officer. “Get the weapons distributed to everyone. You, and the rest of Section One, will come with me and Reislon. Lieutenant Davis, you stay here with the rest and guard the ship—and set up our little surprise. Now get Lieutenant Morales inside to sick bay.”

“Like hell.” Morales struggled to her feet, swaying in the ovenlike heat. Gallivan helped her upright. She resisted . . . but, Andrew thought, not too hard. “I’m coming, Captain.”

“As am I,” said Gallivan.

“God damn it, this is no time for goddamned insubordination! I could have both of you shot!”

Even in this hellish time and place, Gallivan’s grin was infectious and his brogue was back in full force. “Sure now, Captain, darlin’, you’ll not be reducing your already none-too-numerous following by two?”

“I can handle an M-3, Captain,” said Morales quietly. “And I won’t slow you up.”

“I’ve got no time to argue,” sighed Andrew. Kozlowski was passing out bandoliers of grenades and a choice of weapons. Reislon picked a Rogovon flamer, which fired a devastating but short-ranged discharge of superheated plasma—ideal for combat inside a space habitat if one wasn’t overly concerned with damage to property or bystanders. Andrew took an M-15A gauss submachine gun, firing hypervelocity 3mm bullets like the M-3’s, only more of them. “Do you know how to use one of these?” he demanded of Gallivan.

“I’m not unacquainted with it.”

“All right. Let’s go!”

He led the way at a run toward the hatchway he remembered, and hoped he could remember the rest of the route he had taken before.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

They advanced rapidly
through the passageways Andrew recalled, occasionally pausing to clear side-passages and compartments of resistance with grenades tossed through doorways followed by bursts of automatic fire. Reislon withheld use of his flamer; its fuel supply was limited, besides which the resistance they encountered was too light to require such a terror weapon.

Andrew was certain that in a human military installation—or, he was almost equally certain, a Lokaron one—they would have had to fight their way through determined if improvised defenses while counterattackers worked their way around, through the maze of passageways, to flank the intruders. But the Kappainu, heirs to the genes of a million years’ worth of ancestors who had survived by concealment, subterfuge, and indirection, were ill-prepared to cope with a direct, brutal assault by enemies who knew their secrets. Andrew was counting on it, for it was the only thing that gave his plan even a hope of success. So far the theory seemed to be panning out; as often as not, any Kappainu they spotted were simply running away.

“Now remember,” Andrew cautioned the others as they trotted along in the half-crouching gait everyone except Morales had to adopt in these Kappainu-scaled passageways, “our primary objective is to take Valdes alive but our secondary objective is to rescue Ms. Arnstein. He’ll be the clinching proof we need.”

“But what if he’s shifted back to his natural form?” asked Morales. She had been as good as her promise to uncomplainingly keep up with them, although the pain-lines were visible on her face. “We won’t even be able to tell him apart from the other Kappainu.”

“Then we’re pretty much fucked,” said Andrew forthrightly. “But I’ve consistently gotten the impression that a volitional shape-shift, in either direction, takes a bit of time and effort for them, which is why the ones masquerading as humans prefer to keep on doing so even when they’re here and don’t need to. It’s one of the things I’m counting on.”
One of the many,
he didn’t add.

Then they reached the steps Andrew remembered and ascended to the more spacious and ornamented precincts above. They were almost suspiciously empty. Then they were through the hangings and into the chamber where Valdes had interviewed his prisoners. It too was empty.

“Secure this compartment,” Andrew ordered, and men moved to cover the two doors Andrew remembered in the opposite wall. He was just telling himself that something didn’t seem right when a roar of explosions came through the doorway they had just entered. Kozlowski acknowledged something on his wrist communicator. “Rear guard’s under attack, Skipper. They’re coming in here—they’ve lost two men, and they can’t hold.”

At that moment the opposite doors opened and Kappainu rushed in—only to be ripped apart by M-15A fire from the two point men. Morales ordered men forward to secure the doors. They used the standard tactics—grenades, then poorly aimed blasts of automatic fire—after which no more Kappainu came through.

Grenades don’t seem to be a favorite Kappainu weapon
, thought Andrew.
They’re probably not used to combat in this kind of environment. Thank God for that.

In fact, this doesn’t seem to be a particularly well-executed counterattack in general. But
, he amended as he saw the remains of his rear guard scurry through the entrance, turning around to fire through the doorway at their pursuers,
it seems to be good enough to have trapped us in here.

These split-second reflections had barely flashed through his mind before he barked an order at Morales. “Lieutenant, we’ve got to push on ahead. It’s our only chance.”

“Aye aye, sir. Uh . . . which door?”

And there was the rub. Andrew thought fleetingly of “
The Lady and the Tiger
,” then shouted, “The right-hand one!” for no particular reason. “Reislon, see if you can slow down the ones behind us.”

The Lokar stepped back to the ingress door and fired a gout of superheated plasma flame. From down the passageway came the eerie sound of what Andrew assumed was Kappainu screaming as the hangings and any nearby flammable plastic ignited. The two men of the rear guard fired follow-up bursts for good measure, then they all sprinted to the door Andrew had indicated. Grenades and another roaring flame-discharge from Reislon’s terror weapon cleared away any Kappainu who might have been waiting on the other side.

“Go!” Andrew yelled. Kozlowski motioned the point men through the door. He, Andrew, Morales, Gallivan, and the others followed them as quickly as they could squeeze through the door into the hellish heat of the blackened, devastated chamber beyond.

Dehydration will be the death of us yet,
thought some imp in the shielded depths of Andrew’s mind.

Then there was no time for inner gallows humor, for they were through and into a chamber beyond—and into an inferno of fire from Kappainu behind an improvised barricade of piled furniture. One of the point men died before the barricade was cleared using some of their diminishing stock of grenades—they dared not use Reislon’s flamer in a small enclosed space holding any of their own people.

After that it became a timeless hell as they fought their way through one compartment after another. The Kappainu might be physically feeble, but they were nightmarishly hard to kill. It even grew hand-to-hand—Andrew once glimpsed Gallivan plunging his knife into a Kappainu and then gutting the being before his protoplasm could simply reconfigure the wound out of existence. Another time he saw Morales thrust the muzzle of her M-3 into a Kappainu’s mouth before firing a burst that shattered the flimsy-looking alien head. But in the midst of horror he forced his mind—one segment of it, anyway—to focus on memorizing the layout of the passageways they were traversing.