Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sweat gathering under the Wolf’s padded harness. The rock’s short horizon scrolled below her feet. Attitudinal jets made brief adjustments, kept Reese close to the surface. The Wolf’s suit monitors were projected, through her interface stud, in a complex multidimensional 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 naive 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.