Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void (4 page)

“Name. Species. Age. Gender.â€

 

Kelly awakened with a start. He tried to sit up before he remembered he was strapped down. But the restraints were loose. He pulled free and snatched the strap off his throat with a vengeance. Like a cat he rolled off the gurney and landed silently upon his feet in a half crouch. He listened, trying to place the noise that had awakened him. But he heard only quiet.

He went right, aware that he didn’t dare hesitate long while he had this chance of escape. He found himself in an overheated lab where equipment he couldn’t identify hummed busily. A vaguely reptilian creature lay dead upon the floor in the midst of broken glass.

Kelly backed out of there at once. In the other direction he found an office of sorts, littered with papers, data files, and color charts of cell structures. He hurried through without examining anything.

Not until he was outside in the cool gloom of a corridor the size of a street did he pause to wonder who had set him loose. Holborn probably. Kelly wasn’t going to waste time thinking about it. He had to find his bearings and locate his people. His instincts were screaming urgency. He had the sense of having slept too long, of having missed something important.

About forty meters along the corridor, he found what he’d been looking for: a hatch to a service passage. It took some time to figure out how to gain access, but once it opened, Kelly was through in a flash. He let out his breath, feeling slightly safer in this narrow place. His presence triggered a sensor of some kind, for dim lights winked on at long intervals. Kelly’s hair prickled on the back of his neck. He wondered what else the sensors had registered and relayed. But just the same, he wasn’t a robot with headlights built in. He needed the illumination to operate.

A toolbox fitted with probes, scanners, circuit interrupters, and the like proved a treasure trove. He tucked the tools into his pockets, keeping only the circuit interrupter in his hand in case he met something metallic and nasty along the way. Now he didn’t feel quite so helpless.

About then he heard footsteps. Kelly froze, his breath locking up in his lungs. He pressed his back to the wall and strained to listen. At first all he got were echoes, then his hearing sorted through them and he determined that they were coming his way from the direction he was heading.

He could reverse direction, but Kelly’s stubbornness made him hold his ground.

His heart, however, was jumping erratically. He didn’t want to admit he was afraid. But he had to. It could be another damned warbot hunting for him, and he knew he didn’t have a prayer against one of those. Still, he didn’t run for it.

The footsteps stopped, and that worried Kelly even more. He listened for what seemed like an eternity, aware that he was probably being picked up on a scanner but still unwilling to start making noise until he had to.

He closed his eyes a moment, regulating his breathing and trying to pull himself under control. He realized he was gripping the circuit interrupter too hard and consciously loosened his fingers around it.

Just as his nerves were about to unravel, the footsteps started up again. They were irregular, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow. Kelly frowned. Somehow they didn’t seem to belong to a machine.

Eagerness leapt inside him, but he reined himself in. Something alive and fugitive didn’t mean it was friendly. He’d seen what the Visci looked like, but there could be other, equally hostile species aboard this city-ship. If it should be one, his circuit interrupter wasn’t going to be of much use.

Kelly eased along silently until his shoulder pressed against a small bulkhead rib. That would hide him until X was almost on him. Maybe. He hugged the wall, trying to flatten himself as much as possible.

The footsteps halted again and stayed quiet for so long that Kelly’s nerves were screaming by the time X finally started coming. Kelly tensed himself. Just as X came even with him, Kelly sprang, grasping the wrist of X’s knife hand and stepping in close to land a couple of hard chops to the throat and ribs while X was still reacting.

He heard a grunt and grasped a thatch of wiry hair. Kelly brought up his knee as he pulled X’s head down. There was a satisfying thud and X sagged. The knife clattered upon the floor. Kelly hobbled back, his knee aching, and looked for the knife. He couldn’t find it in the gloom.

His quarry lay facedown on the floor, but Kelly had already determined he was human. Cautiously he knelt, wishing the light were better, and reached through the gloom for X’s shoulder. X, however, snaked out an arm and grabbed Kelly by the throat, heaving him over in a fierce roll to his back. Suddenly, not quite sure how it had happened, Kelly found himself on the bottom and X on top. X was throttling him. Kelly thrashed and did his best to pry X’s fingers off his throat. His ears roared; the gloom began to swim around him. Kelly brought up the circuit interrupter to X’s carotid and zapped him with it.

It was a low voltage current and couldn’t do much harm, but it startled X. His grip loosened, and Kelly kicked him in the stomach, thrusting him back. Kelly scrambled up, heaving for breath. His throat felt like mashed gristle.

“Now, you blob-lover, try some of this—â€

 

The blast shook the corridor and a wave of heat and debris came belching toward Kelly. He dived to his stomach. Coughing, he buried his face until it rolled past him. Then he got to his feet and hurried forward through the settling dust. What in the five galaxies had Caesar done?

He found himself crunching over small bits of robot almost before he realized it. The corridor walls were buckled. A severed power cable snaked about, crackling dangerously. Flames flickered on what remained of the ceiling.

The actual area of destruction wasn’t that large, but it was thorough. The explosive gel Caesar was so fond of hadn’t done this. Maybe one of the warbots had exploded. Kelly frowned, kicking a metal foot out of his way. No chance of salvaging these bots for weapons.

And there was no chance that this would pass unnoticed.

A short distance ahead the access hatch slammed open. Kelly dropped to a crouch, aiming his launcher.

Just in time, however, he recognized Phila’s dark curly head and held his fire. With her came the shrill whoop of an alert siren.

“Commander!â€