Wolf Among the Stars-ARC (12 page)

Persath, indignant beyond fear, stepped up almost to the muzzle of the gauss pistol. He loomed over the diminutive Leong even more than he would over most humans. “What is the meaning of this outrage? I am informed that you are an employee of the CNE diplomatic service. The government of Gev-Tizath will hear of this hostile act! I shall protest strongly, yes,
strongly
to the—”

“Shut up!” snapped Leong. His fixed expression slipped, and what could be momentarily glimpsed behind it was ugly indeed. “As our prisoners, you’re in no position to bluster.”

“Yeah,” the other man snarled. “Prisoners of
humans
! Get used to it!”

Leong irritably waved him to silence. “We primarily want you two for questioning,” he said, indicating Persath and Reislon, “concerning the whereabouts of a certain . . . artifact.” He turned to Andrew and Rachel. “You will have to come, too, as we can hardly let you go. Also, you may be able to provide useful information.”

“You’ve already used us plenty,” said Rachel expressionlessly, “letting us lead you to Resilon. But why is the CNE doing this?”

“Oh, we don’t work for the damned gutless CNE,” the laser-armed goon began.

“Quiet, you cretin!” rasped Leong.

“That’s right, isn’t it, Leong?” said Andrew. “Naval Intelligence might play it this way, but I doubt it. This is more the style of you people in the Black Wolf Society.” Leong’s expression told him his guess had hit home. He decided to risk another stab in the dark. “The only question in my mind is this: Are you also working for Admiral Valdes?”

For a moment, Andrew thought Leong was going to have a stroke. Then he smoothed out his features and apparently decided that dissembling was more trouble than it was worth under the circumstances. “As he’s repeatedly stated, he isn’t associated with us in any way. We do find much to agree with in his platform. We share his disgust with the CNE’s groveling acceptance of the peace settlement that was forced on us by the Lokaron powers, robbing Earth of the full fruits of its victory. We’re working toward the complete expulsion of the Rogovon interlopers from the Lupus frontier.”

Using the profits from drugs and extortion and human trafficking,
Andrew mentally finished for him. He considered saying it out loud in an attempt to provoke Leong into losing control, but decided it probably wouldn’t have that effect. Leong’s words might be those of a fanatic spouting doctrine—and the goon certainly took it that way, judging from his stupidly rapt expression—but to Andrew it had a strangely hollow quality, as though he was consciously trying to
seem
like a fanatic spouting doctrine. He confirmed the impression by dropping the oration as abruptly as he might have switched off a recording and turning businesslike.

“Now my ship will come alongside and we will commence transferring the four of you to it, after which your two ships will be destroyed, leaving no evidence. Afterwards—
what?
” Suddenly, Leong’s attention was riveted on what he was hearing through his earpiece, and he swung around to look at the viewscreen, on which his ship still showed at full magnification.

Andrew at once saw what was happening. The laser blisters were swiveling in their mounts, turning away from Persath’s ship toward some other target. Of course the laser beams were invisible in vacuum, but a sudden flash like that of heat lightening from off to the side suggested that they were being worked, and had hit something . . . an incoming missile, perhaps.

“Power up the drive and get out of here!” snapped Leong into his communicator.

“We’ll break this ship loose and try to escape.” Then he turned back around, gauss pistol pointed at his prisoners. “Stun them!” he ordered the goon.

That worthy moved to comply, raising his laser weapon.

Up to this point, Reislon was the only one present who had not said a word. In fact, he had somehow made himself so perfectly ignorable that Andrew hadn’t even thought of him as being silent—hadn’t thought of him, period. Which made it all the more startling when he exploded out of his inconspicuousness, thrust out a hand, pointed at something behind the goon, and shouted, “
Look!”

The goon turned his head to look (he would have been more than human if he had not), causing the laser weapon to swing out of line.

Reislon brought his outstretched arm down slightly, and raised the hand as a human would when making the
stop
gesture.

The six-digited Lokaron hand was different from the human version in many ways, just as the Lokaron skeletal structure in general differed. But raising it in the way Reislon had done exposed something analogous to the human “heel of the hand.” Now he pointed it at the goon’s direction and swept it horizontally across.

Andrew heard the sharp, vicious rapid-fire snapping sound as the tiny steel slivers of a gauss needler—a hundred of them in a single burst—broke the sound barrier. The long, thin needles were harmless against any sort of rigid barrier, but in living tissue they were lethally unstable. A stream of them sleeted across the goon’s head, with no knock-back effect and the characteristic near-bloodlessness of instant death. He simply slumped to the deck.

Leong was already turning to bring his Gauss pistol to bear on Reislon. It gave Andrew a chance to reach behind him and pull out his M-3.

Leong saw him out of the corner of his eye and whirled back toward him . . . while Andrew was still in the act of clicking off his safety.

In what seemed like slow motion, Andrew watched Leong’s muzzle come into line and knew himself for a dead man.

All at once they were bathed in a blinding glare as the viewscreen became a momentary sun.

A missile got past the lasers and the deflection shields
, Andrew had time to think.

With a cry compounded of rage and despair, Leong turned to stare at the funeral pyre of his ship.

It gave Andrew the split second he needed.

He intended to use an autoburst to shoot Leong’s gauss pistol out of his hand and take him alive (though doubtless minus the hand). But the wave front of expanding gas from the explosion reached them, rocking their ship and throwing off his aim. The first 3mm bullet shattered Leong’s wrist, sending his pistol flying. But the rest of the burst slanted downward across Leong’s abdomen, stitching a row of tiny holes. With a rasping moan, he sank to his knees and toppled over forward.

It had all happened too quickly for Rachel or Persath to even react. Now the former turned aside and looked like she was going to be sick, but mastered herself, while the latter still seemed marbled in shock.

Andrew turned to Reislon, who was critically examining the hole in the heel of his hand where the tiny flechettes had torn away a covering of artificial skin. Their eyes met. “It sometimes has its uses,” said Reislon urbanely.

Surgically implanted weapons, operated by direct neural induction, were highly illegal on Earth. Among the Lokaron, a general distaste for implants in general made legal prohibition almost superfluous. But, Andrew reminded himself, Reislon was an atypical Lokar in many ways. He dismissed the matter from his mind and gestured at the viewscreen, where the white-hot debris was rapidly dissipating.

“Your associates?” he queried.

Reislon, an old hand with humans, nodded his head. “I would hardly have come here alone, without what you call backup.”

Further explanation could wait, Andrew decided. He knelt beside Leong, who was still moaning softly, and turned him over. He seemed about to speak, but his mouth only produced a bloody foam. There was obviously no saving him, although he was taking his time about dying, considering his assortment of perforated vital organs.

“Leong,” Andrew began—but then he staggered back with a nonverbal cry of horror, because before his eyes Leong began to
change
.

Leong’s skin rippled and flowed in delicate patterns as it changed color and texture and became a purplish-white integument, too pale to be called lavender, repellently translucent. At the same time, his facial structure and entire body began to writhe and reshape. There was a creaking sound as the bone structure altered and foreshortened, the nanofabric of the suit contracting to keep pace with the change. Andrew also heard a grinding sound, but then realized it was his own teeth, in a rictus of shock.

A moan of agony finally escaped the small lipless orifice that was no longer a human mouth, rising to a kind of choked shriek that could never be produced by a human throat. The spray of froth was no longer the same shade of pink. The body went into a sudden violent convulsion and then lay still. It was dead, and the obscene transformation was over.

Behind him, Andrew heard a gagging followed by a splash. This time, Rachel was being sick. There was no other sound.

They all stared down at that which they had known as Amletto Leong. It was a biped less than five feet tall, slightly built even in proportion to itis height, with arms almost as long as its legs. Those arms terminated in disproportionately large hands whose four spidery fingers were all mutually opposable. The face was dominated by huge golden-black eyes. There was no nose as such, only a small but complex orifice flush with the face, which tapered from a wide forehead to a tiny mouth and almost nonexistent chin. The head had an unpleasantly thin covering of white hairs or perhaps cilia. The pool of blood that was beginning to spread from under it was a kind of dark copper color.

Rachel wiped her mouth and pointed unsteadily at the thing. “What
is
that?” she whispered.

Andrew turned to the two Lokaron, whose race had explored a significant fraction of the galaxy. “Do you know . . . ?”

“No.” Reislon’s usual urbanity was in abeyance, but the translator conveyed calmness. “I have never heard of this species. Nor have I ever heard of
any
species which could alter its form in this manner.”

“It’s a myth among us,” said Rachel. “Were-animals, usually wolves.”

“We lack even such a myth. Incidentally, as you will have noted, the transformation did not overtake the other one.” Actually they hadn’t noted it, in their stupefaction. But in fact the goon’s body was still as human as it had ever been.

“This requires study,” said Reislon in a masterpiece of understatement. “Fortunately, we will soon have the facilities available.” He indicted the viewscreen, where a ship was gliding into view. Andrew automatically classified it as what the CNE Navy called a frigate: a light combatant, the lightest capable of mounting its own transition engines (the lessons of the events of 2030 had not been ignored, and the Lokaron navies had begun mounting such engines on lighter vessels than cruisers), although heavier than the corvettes that were the heaviest capable of landing on and taking off from a planetary surface. It was not intended for fleet actions, but it was more than adequate for the kind of battle it had just fought. A vague familiarity made him feel he ought to be able to identify its class, but he wasn’t exactly thinking straight at the moment.

“If you wil,” Reislon said to Persath, indicating the post-side passenger lock.

“Oh . . . yes. Of course.” Persath gave what seemed to be a delayed-action shudder and came out of shock. He busied himself clearing the lock by disengaging the intership car and letting it drift off into infinity. In the meantime, Reislon went to the comm console and hailed the approaching ship. A face appeared on the comm screen.

Rachel gasped. Andrew didn’t even do that. He had had too many shocks to his sensibilities already.

It was a Lokaron face, as expected. But it was a green-skinned face, and it was broader than the faces of humanity’s Harathon and Tizathon associates, and it was . . .
Rogovon!
Andrew forced down the emotions that a face like that aroused in every human.

He turned and gave Reislon a long look. “Well, I see you finally decided which side to come down on.”

CHAPTER TEN

“This,” said Reislon,
formally introducing the Rogovon transmitter they had seen in the comm screen, “is Borthru’Goron.”

The newly arrived ship—which Andrew now recognized as a Rogovon
Potematu
-class frigate, an obsolescent prewar design—had maneuvered alongside and sealed its access tube to the port-side lock. Borthru had entered: a stereotypical Rogovon in ways besides his green skin, for he was less than seven feet tall and almost as broadly built as a human, in keeping with the almost one-Terran-g planet for which their subspecies had been gengineered. It was not a body type that the other Lokaron admired.

“And these,” Reislon continued, “are Rachel Arnstein—”

“Arnstein?” Borthru cut in. His voice held the oddly metallic-sounding quality that was one of the things setting the Rogovon apart from other Lokaron. “Would that be . . . ?”

“Yes.” Rachel’s voice rang with quiet defiance. “My father was Admiral Nathan Arnstein—a name I imagine is familiar to all Rogovon.”

Andrew wondered if it was only his imagination that the hulking Lokar flinched just a bit.

“And I,” he said before Reislon could continue, “am Captain Andrew Roark of the CNE Navy. I was formerly Admiral Arnstein‘s chief of staff, after previously serving under him in a number of capacities.”

“Including, perhaps, the Battle of Upsilon Lupus?” Borthru asked mildly.

“I was executive officer of a battlecruiser there.”

“Ah.” Borthru’s eyes seemed to darken to a deep gold, but his voice remained mild. “I have heard that there were inexplicable delays in acceptance of some of our ships’ surrender signals there—fatal delays, in certain cases.”

Andrew met those eyes unflinchingly. “I’ve heard that, too. I’ve also heard that Gev-Rogov had struck my world with a kinetic-kill weapon, intended as a preliminary to wiping it clean of all life, including my species.”

They glared at each other for a silent heartbeat. It was Borthru’s eyes that slid away.

“I cannot deny historical fact. Especially when the act in question was so very much in character for the regime we are trying to overthrow. It should come as no surprise to you, as your own history should teach you what totalitarian regimes are capable of.”