The Stone Dogs (48 page)

"Patch to their com," she said. A sound of voices in some Asian-sounding language; well, everybody who could have gotten a ship command would speak English. "Y'all in there," she said.

"Surrender. Last chance."

Silence. She shrugged, looked up at the warrior who was preparing their entranceway, made a hand signal. That one finished drawing the applicator around the shallow dome of the spacecraft's nose. It had left a thick trail of something that looked very much like mint toothpaste.

"Secure." They backed off, tagged lines to protuberances on the surface. The
Pathfinder
was built smooth-hulled because that eased fabrication, but there were fittings a-plenty. "On the three."

"One. Two. Three."

A flash of soundless light, and the hull flexed slightly to push her up to the limit of the line. Then the cap of steel was floating away, dark against the mirror-bright surface of the sail; it would strike it, before the film could sweep away on the breeze from the Sun. The warrior nearest the giant circular hole freed a grenade from her belt and tossed it in, a flat straight line like nothing that could be done planetside. There was another pulse of light.

"Storm!" Yolande shouted, and the Draka slid forward, throwing themselves into the hole.

Thung.
Yolande twirled in midleap to land feet first on the deck. A figure in a foil-covered skinsuit was thrashing, ripped by the shards from the grenade; his blood sprayed out, and she could see the scream behind his transparent bubble-helmet. Her eyes skipped, jittering. Another Alliance suit, rising from behind a spindly crashcouch, something gripped in both hands. The red dot pivoted toward him, but before she could fire the man's torso exploded in a corona of red and pinkish white. The bullets from a reaction gun were tungsten monofilament in a glass sabot; they punched through hard targets, but underwent explosive deformation in soft.

"Shit," she swore, seeing the rank-tabs on the man's shoulders. "That was the captain." Yolande batted a lump of floating
something
away from her faceplate with a grimace; zero-G combat was
messy.
Two others were zipping the wounded man into an airbag and doing what crude first aid they could.

"Labushange, Melder, stay here. Pull the compcore and see if y' can patch through to log memory. Anderson, take the door."

That was a hatch in the middle of the floor. "Pressure-lock it."

The warrior knelt and focused on the door, calling up a schematic to show the vulnerable spots in his faceplate. Two others peeled the covering off the base ring of a plastic tent and slapped it adhesive-down on the deck around the hatch. The lochos stepped inside, zipping it over their heads.

"Got it," Anderson grunted. "Ready?"

"Go," she snapped.

He locked his boots to the deck and pointed the gauntlet gun.

It flashed twice, and translucent confetti drifted back to join the particles already rising out of the hole above their head, mixed with a haze of blood. The deck sparked with impact and glittered with a new plating of molten glass, and there was the blue flicker of discharge. Yolande kicked the lockbar of the door; it slammed down with blurring speed, and air roared in to bulge the tent over their heads.

"Bulalal"
she shrieked, and dove through the opening into light.

"Shhhh," Cindy said again.

There had been sounds, clanging, shouts, screams, a sharp
ptank-tank
rapping she could not identify, even pistol shots.
I
wish I'd taken the gun,
she thought desperately. She had had the usual personal-defense training in school, though her national Service had been in the research branch; even the worn old high school submachine-gun would have been something…

Probably just enough to get us all killed,
she thought bleakly.

Even worse was the knowledge that that might be the best thing.

The locking bar of the door moved a half-inch back and forth.

She started, then unstrapped the children and pushed them back into the farthest corner of the cabin, bracing herself in front of them with her arms across the angle of the wall. There was silence for a second, then a bright needle of flame spat from beside the door. It swung open; she had a brief glimpse of the boot that kicked it, before a thin black stick poked in. A figure bounced through two seconds afterward and stopped itself with one expert footblow against the far wall. The fluted muzzle of a weapon fastened to the right arm pointed at her; she crowded her daughters farther behind her body.

Another head came through the doorway, then a body likewise strapped around with pieces of equipment. They were both in skinsuits and some sort of flexible armor that was a dull matte black, but a line of silver brightness showed along a scratch on one's chest. She swallowed through a mouth the consistency of dry rice-paper and tried to keep her face from twisting. Then they unlatched their helmets and pushed them back against their backpacks.

The first Draka she had ever seen in the flesh. For a moment she was surprised that they looked so much like the pictures.

These two were both men, young, hair cropped close at the sides and slightly longer on top. One had a stud earring, the other a rayed sunburst painted about an eye— hard faces, scarcely affected by the usual zero-G puffiness, all slabs and angles, almost gaunt. The first one spoke, in a purring drawl hurtfully reminiscent of her mother's… No, more archaic-sounding, with a guttural undertone.

"All cleah." That into the thread-and-dot microphone that curved up from the neck-ring of his suit. "Yes, suh, these're the last. We'll get 'em secured an' up to the lounge."

"Yo'," he said. "Out of the skinsuit. The picknins, too."

The words flowed over her mind without meaning.
Can't be,
can't be
, was sounding somewhere inside her.
Bad movie.

"Shit," the man said in a tired voice; it sounded more like

"shaay't." He reached across to do something to the weapon, and a red dot sprang out on the wall beside her head. It settled on her forehead for a moment, then shifted to the outer surface.

Bang!
ptank
. A hole the breadth of her thumb flashed into existence in the steel, and there was a shower of something flakey and glittering from behind his elbow. A brief whistling of air, before the self-sealing layer in the hull blocked it off. The red dot settled between her eyes again.

"To't' count 'a three, wench. One. Two—"

Trembling slightly, her hands went to the seals of her suit, then hesitated.
My god, I'm only wearing
briefs under this.
The Draka made a gesture of savage impatience, and she stripped out of the clinging elastomer. "Help the picknin," he snapped.

"Come on, punkins," she said. The girls were staring enormous-eyed at the two Draka; Iris's lips were caught between her teeth as she fought rhythmically against her sobs. "We have to do what the man says."

"Mom!" Janet said, scandalized. "Those—those are
strangers!"

The red dot settled on her daughter's face. Shoulderblades crawling, Cindy put herself between the gun and Janet, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her. "Come on, you silly girl,"

she forced herself to say, harshly. "Quickly."

The Draka in the doorway held up what looked like a medical injector. "Docilize?" he said to the other.

"Na, quicker if we let her handle the sprats," he said. "Don'

have time to fuck around." He looked at her, up and down, and grinned. "Pity. Maybe latah." Reached out, quite casually, and grabbed her crotch.

Cindy closed her eyes and gritted teeth. Then something windmilled by her and struck the Draka with a
thump.
It was Janet.

"You bad man! Leggo my mom! Leggo!" The five-year-old was clinging to the man's harness with one hand and trying earnestly to punch him with the other, while her feet flailed at his stomach. "You let go, or I'll kill you!" Iris started to scream, shrill high-pitched sounds like an animal in a trap.

The Draka snarled, rearing his head back and raising the arm with the gun to club at Janet. Cindy felt a great calm descend as she readied herself; reach down and immobilize the left hand, strike up with the palm under his nose…

A hand snaked in with the injector and pressed it against Janet's side. It hissed, and the girl slumped; not unconscious, just drifting with her eyes half-closed. The Draka with the drug-gun laughed and reached around her to plant the muzzle against Iris's neck.

"Dociline," he said to her as the screaming stopped. "Trank.

Haa'mless." To his companion: "Let's get on with it."

She huddled back with her children as they ransacked the cabin, giving the comfort of skin against skin that was all she had to offer. The two warriors went systematically through the tiny closet and the bulkhead containers. Cindy noticed what they took: books, letters, dataplaques, her new Persimmon 5 portable perscomp that Fred had got from the PX, all stuffed into a transparent holder. One of them came across her jewelry, but that went into a pouch at his belt.

"Right," the one with the face-painting said when they had finished. "Yo'. Hold out y' arms. Togethah." A loop went around her elbows, painfully tight; she could use her hands, but awkwardly. "Now, listen good. Yo' take the picknins, and we're goin' up to the top level. An' wench—any trouble an' we kill yo'

spawn. Understand?" She gave a tight nod. "Go."

Cindy gathered her daughters with slow care; they had curled into fetal positions floating near her, and it would be easy to bruise them if she moved too quickly. She kicked her feet into the ripstick slippers on the floor and began to step out into the corridor. The man who had groped her earlier reached out one hand and stripped the briefs off her with a wrench as she went by.

"Later," he said.

"Is that the last of them?" Yolande asked, as the woman steered the two children into the lounge.

"Yes, ma'am," the Centurion said."Cept fo' the one who gave us trouble."

"Number Two," she said. "Target secured. Reel her in an' run a tube over to the airlock on this level."

"Makin' it so, Cohortarch. Twenty seconds to commencement.

"

"Silence !" she called to the crowd of prisoners through the exterior speaker on her helmet. "Everybody brace themselfs."

There were about eighty of them, milling about at the far end of the grubby lounge. Most had been wearing skinsuits, and so were nearly stripped; she looked at them with disgust.
This is the
enemy?
Flabby, soft-gutted rubbish,
she thought. A few had been docilized. Those thumped painfully against the wall when the ship lurched again, and so did a few of the fully-conscious ones. Sheep. There was an almost imperceptible feeling of sideways acceleration for a few minutes, and then the cables went slack; the
Subotai
would be backing off with her attitude jets, to reestablish zero relative motion.

"Line them up," she continued.

Her troopers moved in, prodding with their gauntlet guns. A moment of trouble from two young men, stocky-muscular; they looked like they played—what was that absurd Yankee sport?

Football? A flurry of dull thudding sounds and they were against the wall with the others, one clutching his groin, the other a flattened nose that leaked blood in drifting red globules. Three more figures floated up through the central hatch. A wounded Draka with a long cut through the belly-section of her armor, hands to a pad over the wound, helped by a comrade. Then a prisoner trussed hand and foot. Hand and elbows, rather; one forearm ended in a frayed stump covered in glistening spray seal.

Typical gauntlet-gun wound.

"What happened with
him
?" the Centurion asked.

"Had a fukkin'
sword
," the wounded Draka said, between clenched teeth. Soft impact-armor gave excellent protection against projectiles, but very little against something sharp and low-velocity. "Under his pallet covers. I blew his hand off on the backswing."

"Careless," the Centurion said. There were clanging noises and voices from the background, as the tube was secured and the airlock opened on the temporary seal between the two vessels.

"McReady, get her back to sickbay. Bring up the rest of the bodies."

Yolande reached up to remove her helmet, wrinkling her nose at the proof that some of the prisoners had lost control of their bowels. She looked at the one-handed man. Black-Asian, she guessed, about fifty. Wiry and strong, stone-faced under her gaze. Shock, part of that calm, but that was one with a hard soul.

It would not do to underestimate them all; few of the Alliance peoples were natural warriors, but they could learn, and the Americans in particular had a damnable trader's cunning that made them capable of all manner of surprises.
I wish they
hadn't brought the picknins
. She pushed the children's sobbing below the surface of her mind. Now—

Cindy forced herself to take her eyes off the raw stump of Professor Takashi's hand. She tried to imagine what that would feel like, failed, raised her eyes to his face. He was smiling; that was almost as shocking as the wound.

The Draka commander was removing her helmet. A woman, she saw without surprise. The face was huge-eyed, triangular, delicately feminine, haloed in short platinum-colored hair. Then the eyes met hers, and she shivered slightly.

"This one?" the Draka said, to the man holding Takashi.

"Cybernetic Systems Analysis," the guard said.

"Lucky fo' us yo' didn't get killed," the woman said genially.

The dark man shook his head, smiling more broadly. "Not so—
ah!
," he shook once, slumped. The guard cursed, felt for his pulse.

"Dead," he spat. "Must've taken something."

The commander turned back toward the prisoners. "Listen,"

she said, and all fidgeting died away. The voice was deliberately pitched rather low, so that they would have to strain to hear it; it was soft,naturally light, Cindy thought.

"Yo' will, startin' at the right, go one by one to that table." She pointed to one where a group of Draka were going through the identity documents of the passengers. "Yo' will - state yo' name and profession, and answer
all
other questions. Then go back to that end of the line. Understood, serfs?"