“That’s the plan,” Reese said. The smell of the Wolf, oil and plastic webbing and cold laminate armor, rose in her nostrils. She repressed a shiver.
Vickers was still admiring the Wolf. “One wicked son of a bitch,” he said. When talking to machines, he lost his stammer.
REESE AND THE Wolf moved as one in the void. Amber-colored target-acquisition data glowed on the interior of the black faceplate. Below them the asteroid glittered as flecks of mica and nickel reflected the relentless sun.
No way they’re not gonna know you’re coming, Berger had told her. Not with your ship’s torch coming at them. We stabilized the rock’s spin, so you can try landing on the blind side, but they’re smart enough to have put detectors out there, so we can’t count on surprise. What we’re going to have to do is armor you so heavily that no matter what they try to do to you, they can’t get through.
Great, she thought. Now the rock’s little techs, human and alien, were probably standing by the airlocks with whatever weapons they’d been able to assemble in the last weeks, just waiting for something to try booming in. All she could do was hope they weren’t ready for the Wolf.
The hissing of her circulating air was very loud in the small space of the helmet. Reese could feel sweat gathering under the Wolf’s padded harness. The rock’s short horizon scrolled below her feet. Attitudinal jets made brief adjustments, keeping Reese close to the surface. The Wolf’s suit monitors were projected, through her interface stud, in a complex multi-dimensional weave, bright columns glowing in the optical centers of her brain. She watched the little green indicators, paying little attention as long as they stayed green.
The target rolled over the near horizon in an instant—a silver-bright pattern of solar collectors, transmission aerials, dishes pointed at different parts of the sky…In the middle squatted the gleaming bulk of the freighter that had been sent to retrieve the base personnel, its docking tube still connected to the big cargo airlock.
Reese had a number of choices for gaining entry: there were two personnel airlocks, or she could go through one of the freighter locks and then through the docking tube. There were nine personnel on station, five humans and four Powers.
They can brew explosives with the stuff they’ve got on station, Berger had told her. But they can’t put anything too big around the airlock, or they’d decompress the whole habitat—and they don’t have enough stored air to repressurize. They can’t set off anything too big inside, or they’d wreck their work. It’s too small a place for them to plan anything major. We figure they’ll depend on small explosives, and maybe gas.
The base rolled closer. Reese felt her limbs moving easily in the webbing, the hum of awareness in her nerves and blood. A concrete certainty of her capabilities. All the things she had been unable to live without.
Coolant flow had increased, the suit baking in the sun. The webbing around her body was chafing her. She thought of explosive, of gas, the way the poison clouds had drifted through the tunnels on Archangel, contaminating everything, forcing her to live inside her suit for days, not even able to take a shit without risking burns on her ass…at least this was going to be quick, however it went.
Reese decided to go in through one of the small personnel airlocks—the brains inside the rock might have decided the cargo ship was expendable and packed its joints with homemade explosive. She maneuvered the Wolf in a slow somersault and dropped feet-first onto the Velcro strip by Airlock Two. Berger wanted her to get in without decompressing the place if she could—there was stuff inside he didn’t want messed up. Reese bent and punched the emergency entrance button, and to her surprise she began to feel a faint humming through her feet and the hatch began to roll up…she’d planned to open the hatch manually.
How naïve were these people? she wondered. Or was there some surprise in the airlock, waiting for her?
You’re gonna c-carry that stuff? Vickers had asked in surprise, as he noticed the pistol snugged under the armpit and the long knife strapped to her leg.
I don’t want to depend entirely on the Wolf, she’d said. If it gets immobilized somehow, I want to be able to surprise whoever did it.
There’d been an amused grin on Vickers’ face. They immobilize the Wolf, they sure as hell can immobilize you.
Adjust the webbing anyway, she’d said. Because battle machinery always went wrong sooner or later, because if the mission directive didn’t give her backup, she’d just have to be her own. Because she just didn’t like the Wolf, its streamlined design, its purposeful intent. Because even to someone accustomed to violence, the thing was obscene.
Reese knelt by the airlock, pulled a videocamera from her belt, and held it over the airlock, scanning down…and fought back a wave of bile surging into her throat, because the lock was full of dead men.
Mental indicators shifted as, with a push of her mind, she ordered her attitudinal jets to separate the Wolf from the Velcro parking strip, then drop into the lock. The dead swam in slow motion as she dropped among them. Her heart crashed in her chest.
The crew of the freighter, she thought. The rebels had put them in here, not having anyplace else. Their skins were grey, the tongues protruding and black. Some kind of poison, she thought.
“Welcome to Cuervo Gold,” she said, and laughed. Nerves.
She hit the button to cycle the airlock, found it refused to work. Incurious dead eyes gazed at her as she cranked the outer door shut manually, then planted thermocharges on the inner door locks. She drifted up to the top of the airlock again, the Wolf’s horns scratching the outer door. The dead men rose with her, bumping gently against the Wolf’s arms and legs.
Reese curled her legs under her, protecting the Wolf’s more vulnerable head and back. Adrenaline was beating a long tattoo in her pulse.
A vulture smile crossed her face. Her nerves sang a mad little song. Here’s where I take it up the ass, she thought, and pulsed through her wetware the radio code to set off the detonators.
The lock filled with scorching bright light, smoke, molten blobs of bright metal. Air entered the lock with a prolonged scream. Suddenly her olfactory sensors were overwhelmed with the smell of scorched metal, burning flesh. Her gorge rose. She pulsed a command to cut out the smell, then moved down to the inner lock door, seized it, rolled it up with the enhanced strength of the Wolf…
An explosion went off right in her face. Projectiles thudded into corpse flesh, cracked against the faceplate. She and the dead men went flying back, slamming against the outer hatch. Her pulse roared in her ears. She gave the Wolf a command to move down, and move down fast.
Her nerves were shrieking as she smashed into a wall of the airlock, corrected, flew down again, out the lock this time, cracked into another wall. Her teeth rattled. A homemade claymore, she thought, explosive packed in a tube with shrapnel, bits of jagged alloy, wire, junk. Command-detonated, most likely, so that meant someone was here watching the airlock door. Targeting displays flashed bright red on the interior of her faceplate. She turned and fired. Slammed into a wall again. Fired a second time.
The targets died. Fixed to each of the Wolf’s upper forearms was a semiautomatic ten-gauge shotgun firing shells packed with poison flechettes. Reese had more deadly equipment available—a small grenade launcher on the left lower forearm, and a submachine gun on the right, gas projectors on her chest—but the op plan was to kill the targets without taking a chance on disturbing any of the valuable equipment or experiments.
Dollops of blood streamed into the near-weightlessness, turning into crimson spheres. A man and a woman, one holding some kind of homemade beam weapon she’d never got the chance to fire, were slowly flying backward toward the sprayed grey plastic walls, their hearts and lungs punctured by a dozen flechettes each. Their faces were frozen in slow-gathering horror at the sight of the Wolf. Reese tried to move, then hit the wall again. She realized the shrapnel had jammed one of her maneuvering jets full on. Her wetware wove routines to compensate, then she leaped
past the dying pair and through an open doorway.
No one was in the next series of partitioned rooms, the crew quarters. These people were incredibly naïve, she thought, hiding out next to an airlock they knew was going to be blown and not even getting into vac suits. They should have put the claymore on the interior hatch door, not inside the station itself. Maybe they couldn’t face going into where they’d put the crew they’d killed. These weren’t professionals, they were a bunch of eggheads who hadn’t known what they were getting into when they signed their declaration of independence from a policorp that could not even afford to acknowledge their existence.
They weren’t soldiers, but they were still volunteers. They’d already killed people, quite coldly it seemed, in the name of whatever science they were doing here. She clenched her teeth and thought about how some people, no matter how smart they were, remained just too stupid to live.
There was a new bulkhead door welded to the exterior of the crew quarters. Reese blew it open the same way as the airlock, then jetted through. Shrieks sounded on her audio thread, the strange organ sounds Powers made through their upper set of nostrils. Even as her mind squalled at the unearthly sight of a fast-moving, centauroid pair of aliens, she fired. They died before they could fire their homemade weapons. Her memory flashed on the video, the actor-Steward eradicating aliens with his shotgun. An idiotic memory.
She went through a door marked with biohazard warnings. The door gave a soft hiss as she opened it.
The next room was brightly lit, humming with a powerful air conditioning unit, filled with computer consoles plugged into walls of bare metal, not plastic. Cable stretched to and from something that looked like a hundred-liter aquarium filled with what appeared to be living flesh. Weird, she thought. It looked as if the meat was divided by partitions, like honeycomb in a cultured hive. Silver-grey wires, apparently variable-lattice thread, were woven through the meat. Elsewhere an engine hummed as it pumped crimson fluid. Monitors drew jagged lines across screens, holographic digits floated in air.
Weird, she thought again. Alien biochemistry.
There were three other rooms identical to the last. No one was in the first two.
In the third was a single man, gaunt, silver-haired. He was floating by the room’s aquarium, a frown on his face. He was in a vac suit with the helmet in his hand, giving the impression he simply didn’t want to bother to put it on.
He looked at Reese as she came in. There was no fear in his eyes, only sadness.
He spoke as he pushed off from the aquarium, floating to the empty alloy ceiling, where Reese’s shot wouldn’t hit his experiment by mistake.
“It’s over,” he said. “Not that it matters.”
Reese thought of Steward in the hospital bed, dying for something else equally stupid, equally futile, and filled the man’s face with poison darts.
Past the next seal two Powers tried to burn her with acid. The stuff smoked pointlessly on her ceramic armor while she killed them. One of the remaining humans tried to surrender, and the other tried to hide in a toilet. Neither tactic worked. She searched the place thoroughly, found no one else, and disarmed the traps at each of the airlocks.
There was a pain deep in her skull. The air in the suit had begun to taste bad, full of sour sweat, burnt adrenaline. Sadness drifted through her at the waste, the stupidity of it all. Twelve more dead, and all for nothing.
Reese left the bodies where they lay—nobody was paying her to clean the place up—and used the other personnel lock to return to Voidrunner. Once she was in sight of the ship she pointed one of her microwave antennae at the ship and gave the code signaling success: “Transmit the following to base. Mandate. Liquid. Consolidation.” A combination of words unlikely to be uttered by accident.
She cycled through the ship’s central airlock. Pain hammered in her brain, her spine. Time to get out of this obscene contraption. The door opened.
Targeting displays flashed scarlet on the interior of her faceplate. Reese’s nerves screamed as the Wolf’s right arm, with her arm in it, rose. The ten-gauge exploded twice and the impact spun Vickers back against the opposite wall. He impacted and bounced lightly, already dead. “No!” Reese cried, and the Wolf moved forward, brushing the body aside. Reese’s arms, trapped in the suit’s webbing, rose to a combat stance. She tried to tug them free. Targeting displays were still flashing. Reese tried to take command of the suit through the interface stud. It wouldn’t respond.
“Take cover!” Reese shouted. “The Wolf’s gone rogue!” She didn’t know whether the suit was still on transmit or whether anyone was listening. The Wolf had visible light and IR detectors, motion scanners, scent detectors, sensors that could detect the minute compression wave of a body moving through air. There was no way the Wolf would miss anyone in the ship, given enough time.
Reese’s heart thundered in her chest. “Get into vac suits!” she ordered. “Abandon ship! Get onto the station. Try and hold out there.”
Chung’s voice snapped over the outside speakers. “Where the hell are you?” At least someone was listening.
“I’m moving upship toward the control room. Oh, fuck.” The heads-up display indicated the Wolf had detected motion from the docking cockpit, which meant the armored bulkhead door was open.
The Wolf caught Falkland as he was trying to fly out of the cockpit and get to an airlock. The flechettes failed to penetrate the exoskeleton, so the Wolf flew after him, caught him bodily. Reese felt her left hand curling around the back of Falkland’s head, the right hand draw back to strike. She fought against it. Falkland was screaming, trying to struggle out of the Wolf’s grip. “I’m not doing this!” Reese cried, wanting him to know that, and closed her eyes.
Her right arm punched out once, twice, three times. The Wolf began to move again. When Reese opened her eyes there was blood and bone spattering the faceplate.
“I’m still heading upship,” Reese said. “I don’t think the Wolf knows where you are.”
Chung didn’t answer. No point, Reese thought, in his sending a radio signal that might give away his position. The Wolf reached the forward control room, then began a systematic search of the ship, moving aft. Reese reported the suit’s movements, hoping to hell he’d get away. The ship was small, and a search wouldn’t take long.
Custom thread, Vickers had told her. Woven into the target-acquisition unit. Berger had done it, she knew, not only wanting to wipe out the station personnel but anyone who knew of Cuervo’s existence. She was riding in an extermination cyberdrone now, trapped inside its obscene, purposeful body. Mandate. Liquid. Consolidation. The code had sent the Wolf on its rampage. The liquidation is mandated. Consolidate knowledge about Cuervo.
Displays flickered on the screen. The thing had scented Chung. Reese could do nothing but tell him it was coming.
Chung was by the aft airlock, halfway into the rad suit he’d need to flee through the airless engine space. His face was fixed in an expression of rage. “Steward!” Reese screamed. The ten-gauge barked twice, and then the Wolf froze. The displays were gone. The Wolf, still with considerable momentum, continued to drift toward the aft bulkhead. It struck and rebounded, moving slowly toward Chung.
Reese tried to move in the suit, but its joints were locked. Her crashing pulse was the loudest sound in the helmet. She licked sweat from her upper lip, felt it running down her brows. Chung’s body slowly collapsed in the insignificant gravity of the asteroid. Drops of blood fell like slow-motion rubies. The gravity wasn’t enough to break the surface tension, and the droplets rested on the deck like ball bearings, rolling in the circulating air…
Reese’s heart stopped as she realized that the sound of the Wolf’s air-circulation system had ceased. She had only the air in the suit, then nothing.
Her mind flailed in panic. Shouting, her cries loud in her ears, she tried to move against the locked joints of the Wolf. The Wolf only drifted slowly to the deck, its limbs immobile.
Like Archangel, sh
e thought. Nothing to look forward to but dying in a suit, in a tunnel, in the smell of your own fear. Just like her officers had always wanted. She tasted bile and fought it down.
I’m using air, she thought, and clamped down, gulping twice, trying to control her jackhammer heart, her panicked breath.
Chung’s furious eyes glared into hers at a distance of about three feet. She could see a reflection of the Wolf in his metal teeth. Reese began to move her arms and legs, testing the tension of the web.
There was a pistol under her left arm. If she could get to it with her right hand, she might be able to shoot her way out of the suit somehow.
Fat chance.
But still it was something to do, anyway. She began to move her right arm against the webbing, pulling it back. Blood rubies danced before her eyes. She managed to get her hand out of the glove, but there was a restraining strap against the back of her elbow that prevented further movement. She pushed forward, keeping her hand out of the glove, then drew back. Worked at it slowly, synchronizing the movement with her breath, exhaling to make herself smaller. Steward, she thought, would have been quoting Zen aphorisms to himself. Hers were more direct. You can get smaller if you want to, she thought, you’ve done it before.
She got free of the elbow strap, drew her arm back, felt her elbow encounter the wall of the suit. She was beginning to pant. The air can’t be gone this quickly, she thought, and tried to control panic as she pulled back on her arm, as pain scraped along her nerves. Sweat was coating her body. She tried to think herself smaller. She could feel warm blood running down her arm. The Wolf was saturated with the scent of fear.
Reese screamed as her arm came free, part agony, part exultation. She reached across her chest, felt the butt of the pistol. It was cold in her hand, almost weightless.
The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Page 46