Wolf Among the Stars-ARC (16 page)

Sonic stunners—a more humane alternative to the stun setting of laser weapons—used ultra-high frequency focused sound that affected the nervous system. Unfortunately, the difficulties of creating a unidirectional beam had defeated all attempts to make it a ranged weapon. On contact, though, it worked very well. Waemhofer went limp.

“I hate this,” said Rachel, not for the first time, as she helped Andrew ease him to the floor.

“He’ll awake in a few hours with no ill effects beyond a headache,” Andrew reassured her.

“That, and a great deal of understandable disillusionment,” said Persath. A complex of emotions was making him nervously irritable. “Let’s take the artifact and go!”

“Right.” Rachel lifted the device by its handle. “It really is lighter than it looks. Ready, Andrew?”

“In just a moment,” said Andrew in a preoccupied voice. He had stepped over to the coffin-shaped capsule and was bending over it with an instrument he had taken from his satchel.

“Well?” snapped Persath, his nerves seemingly at the breaking point. “Do you plan to take the body with us as well?”

“No,” said Andrew, and something in his voice stopped both his companions in their tracks. “We don‘t need to. I know everything about it I need to know.” He stood up and held out the instrument. It was the handheld medical sensor he had borrowed from Zhygon. His hand, like his voice, was steadier than he felt. “That is the body of a Shape-Shifter.”

“
What?
” blurted Rachel. “But that’s crazy! He would have transformed back into his natural shape when he died.”

“Not if Zhygon knows what he’s talking about. Remember, he theorized that sudden, instantaneous death, before the consciousness has had time to fragment, will leave the body locked into its current form. Only a prolonged death agony like Leong’s gives enough time for the mind’s control of the process to slip and the protoplasm to resume its natural form.”

Rachel looked at the burned body with a new level of revulsion.

“Well,” Persath broke the silence, “now we know why the Shape-Shifters want this device. It is, after all, their property.”

“But why is it so very important to them?” Rachel wondered aloud.

“Maybe that will become apparent when we’ve found out what it is and what it does,” said Andrew. “Let’s get out of here.”

Rachel handed the device to Persath, and she and Andrew each took Waemhofer under one arm. Together they lifted him partly upright and dragged him in front of the genetic scanner. The door slid open and, with some difficulty, they pulled him to the elevator and hoisted him up again, with the same result.

“Do we have to haul him any farther?” puffed Rachel.

“No,” said Andrew, entering the elevator and motioning the others to follow. “Leave him here. He didn’t have to get past any scanner that I could see when we came in through the main entrance. I’m counting on that.”

They rode the elevator upward—Andrew had been careful to observe Waemhofer’s manipulation of the controls—and ascended the stairs. They fled through one hallway after another, hoping that their recollection of the layout was accurate. There was no one about—Waemhofer, who had been bending the rules, had seen to that, as they had planned that he would—and they reached the main entrance without incident.

“All right, I think we’re home free,” said Andrew as he lifted the perfectly standard-looking latch.

It was, of course, precisely the wrong thing to say. An alarm screamed.

“Run for it!” yelled Andrew as he shoved the door open. They sprinted for the aircar, with Persath lagging behind under the burdens of age and Earth’s gravity. Andrew strapped himself in and activated the transponder. The gig’s location appeared as a blinking red light. As soon as Persath, emitting the thin whistling sounds of Lokaron gasps for breath, was inside, he flung the air-car aloft and into a north-northwestward course.

“Persath, call Reislon and tell him plans have changed. We’re coming directly back to the gig. Tell him to have it ready for takeoff. Tell him also to get on the horn to Borthru and have him get started toward the rendezvous point immediately” Only then did he get out his cell phone and make a call of his own.

“Mom, we’re not coming back to your house. We can’t afford to remain on Earth a minute longer than we have to. We’re leaving immediately on the gig. Your air-car will be there. You remember where it is?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Katy said impatiently. “Don’t worry about the damned aircar. What’s going on? Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No! I don’t want you to endanger yourself by getting involved in this in any way. As far as anybody, including the IID, is concerned, you don’t know I’ve been back on Earth.”

“What are you not telling me, Andy.”

Andrew thought of the spurious human corpse. “We’ve learned things that you don’t need to know” was all he said. It was enough.

“Where will you go,” she asked simply.

“Back to the rebel Rogovon fleet, I suppose. I can’t think of anywhere else to go just now.”

He needed no comm screen to see her somber expression in his mind’s eye. “Andy, I’ve never been religious, so I won’t tell you to go with God. But it’s my belief that a very great deal is going with
you.
Take care. I love you.”

“I love you, Mom.”

After a time, he became aware of a gentle pressure on his shoulder. It was Rachel’s hand.

They fled on through the night.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Reislon was ready for them.
No sooner had they piled out of the air-car and into the gig than he activated the drive and lifted off from the darkling mountain meadow, ascending at the sharpest angle of attack of which the craft was capable.

“I gather all did not go as planned,” he said dryly.

Andrew gave a succinct account, including the true nature of the Imperial Temple’s treasured “human” corpse. “Sonic-stun victims can be revived ahead of schedule,” he concluded. “Even now, Waemhofer is probably telling all. So we’ve got to get off Earth and into space as soon as possible.”

“You have,” Reislon pointed out. In the view-forward, the stars were appearing in even greater multitudes than were visible from the remote reaches of the Rockies, no longer twinkling but gleaming with the diamond-hard steadiness they showed in vacuum.

“
Over
space would be better still,” said Andrew. “Especially since the Shape-Shifters’ cloaking technology doesn’t seem to be as effective there, for some reason. Did Borthru—?”

“Yes, he acknowledged my call and brought the ship to general quarters.
Trovyr
is now accelerating.” Reislon indicated the nav plot.

The problem was that the frigate was trailing Earth in its orbit around the sun. So now it was accelerating into a hyperbolic solar orbit heading outward, to reach the region where they could make transition, and at the same time rendezvous with the gig, which after escaped from Earth’s gravity would begin to kill its velocity and, in effect, wait. It was a maneuver they had planned with inconspicuousness in mind. With reactionless drives it was possible, as it would not have been with rockets, however advanced.

Earth had fallen well behind by the time the maneuver was completed and they matched vectors. Reislon cradled the gig in
Trovyr
’s bay, and they all ran to join Borthru in the control room. As they ran, the acceleration warning sounded, and their weight jumped to what felt like one and a third Terran gravity. Persath staggered under what was, for him, slightly over 1.8 G. They helped him the rest of the way.

As they entered the control room, Andrew bade naval propriety be damned and shouted at Borthru. “You’re going to kill Persath! At his age—”

“It is only because of his presence that I haven‘t ordered a higher acceleration. We must get out to the transition limit—about the distance of Sol’s asteroid belt—without delay, and this time we have Sol’s gravity working against us, not for us. At the same time, we must work our way above this system’s plane of the ecliptic lest we be detected.”

“I think,” said Reislon, “that we already have been.”

They all followed his gaze to the sensor plot, where a subordinate was already turning to report to Borthru. He didn’t need to. The purple dot—the standard color that Lokaron fleets used to denote “hostile”—was obvious in the tactical plot.

It was immediately clear that the ship was not coming from Earth. It had been stationed ahead of the mother planet in its orbit, and now it was accelerating outward on an intercept course.

“How did they find us so readily?” Rachel asked. “I mean, isn’t this ship heavily stealthed?”

“There can be only one answer,” said Reislon. “They knew exactly where to look.” He studied the readouts. “The ship’s mass indicates that it is a cruiser, of the heavy strike cruiser category. Of course, it is impossible as yet to determine its precise class.”

“It hardly matters,” said Andrew. “A frigate—even one optimized as a combat ship, which this one isn’t—wouldn’t have a prayer in Hell against a strike cruiser and the fighters it can deploy.” In a corner of his mind, it occurred to him that he was coolly calculating the odds for a fight against a ship of his own service and his own race.

“Persath,” said Borthru tightly, “ please go to sick bay. They will be able to put you in a special acceleration bed.”

“It’s no use,” said Andrew. He knew enough of the common Lokaron script to make some sense of the readouts, and the course projections were self-explanatory. “That ship is crewed by humans—young, trained, physically fit humans. They can stand higher Gs than even your Rogovon. Given the respective courses we’re on, we can’t evade them or outrun them.”

“We can try,” snapped Borthru.

But the hopelessness of it soon became apparent. Even with the ability to accelerate continuously, without the reaction-mass limitation that had crippled the last century’s rockets, there were very finite limits to the extent that gravity and inertia, and the orbital courses around the Sun that they imposed, could be overcome. And whatever efforts Borthru made to wrench
Trovyr
into new courses, struggling steeply “uphill” against the gravity gradient, her pursuer could more than match them. The gap narrowed and narrowed until finally they received a signal.

“This is CNS
Broadsword
, calling the Rogovon frigate. You are in violation of Earth’s approach limits without authorization. Kill your acceleration and prepare to be boarded. Otherwise you will be destroyed.”

“How do they know this is a Rogovon ship?” Rachel whispered. Andrew had no answer.

“It would appear,” said Reislon, “that we have two choices: surrender, or commit suicide by attempting to fight.”

“Which is no choice at all,” said Borthru heavily. “But before surrendering, should we jettison
this
?” He indicated the enigmatic device that Persath had brought aboard.

“No!” Andrew shook his head emphatically even though he was sure the gesture would mean nothing to Borthru. “We can’t throw away our only lead to the Shape-Shifters. And it’s not as if we were surrendering to the Shape-Shifters, or to the Black Wolf Society, which must be considered effectively the same thing. This is the Confederated Nations Navy, for God’s sake! With them we at least have a hope of getting a hearing.”

“Agreed,” said Reislon. “However, indulge my cautious habits and conceal the artifact until we know where we stand with our captors. I’m sure, Borthru, you can think of any number of places on this ship.”

“We await your reply,” came the human voice from the comm station.

Borthru sought to temporize. “We have two humans aboard.”

“We are aware of that,” was the cold reply after the slight time lag of light-speed communications.

Andrew stepped up to the communicator with its still-blank screen. “This is Captain Andrew Roark, CNEN. I wish to speak to your commanding officer—and see him, if possible.”

After another delay as comm lasers crossed and recrossed space, the screen came to life. The man in it wore CNEN dark green with black and gold trim and the four- starburst insignia of a captain. Even in the screen, one could tell that he was a big man. His face was strong-featured and about as dark as African-Americans generally came.

“Jamel!” exclaimed Andrew, recognizing an old friend and classmate from the Academy, and a fellow veteran of Upsilon Lupus. “Jamel Taylor! I never expected to see
you
here.”

Taylor’s face showed no surprise, nor anything at all except grimness. “Well, I fully expected to see you. We know all about you, you see. But—” (a flash of pained bewilderment in the dark eyes) “—I never expected to find you a traitor!”

The Security personnel who swarmed aboard the unresisting
Trovyr
were no Black Wolf thugs. They were pros. A quick, efficient scan revealed Reislon’s implanted gauss needler, and a device that emitted a focused electromagnetic pulse disabled it.

But they didn’t find the Cydonia artifact. There was, Andrew realized, no way they could have known what to look for.

As soon as they reported the ship secured, Taylor came aboard. Andrew, Rachel, Persath, Reislon and Borthru awaited him in what would have been called the wardroom on a human warship, under the alert eyes and leveled M-3s of a Security detail. In the room’s viewscreen,
Broadsword
could be seen, a watchful killing machine, its intricate massiveness lost in the distance.

Taylor strode into the room, his face like a dark storm cloud. Following him, and dwarfed by him, was a gaunt woman in severe civilian dress, with equally severe features and short iron-gray hair.

“This,” said Taylor without preamble, “is Ms. Erica Kharazi. She is here as liaison and . . . advisor from the office of Legislative Assemblyman Valdes.”

“Valdes?” Andrew exclaimed.

“Yes.” Taylor gave him a look that held neither nostalgia nor friendship. “It’s thanks to him that we know about you. He came to the Admiralty in confidence and explained how he had sponsored your and Ms. Arnstein’s trip to Tizath-Asor. After you departed that planet without informing your contact, a Mr. Leong of our embassy, he knew you’d gone rogue.”