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

Her heart crashed in her chest.
    The crew of the freighter, she thought. The rebels had put them in here, not having anyplace else. Their skins were grey, the tongues protruding and black. Some kind of poison, she thought.
    “Welcome to Cuervo Gold,” she said, and laughed. Nerves.
    She hit the button to cycle the airlock, found it refused to work. Incurious dead eyes gazed at her as she cranked the outer door shut manually, then planted thermocharges on the inner door locks. She drifted up to the top of the airlock again, the Wolf’s horns scratching the outer door. The dead men rose with her, bumping gently against the Wolf’s arms and legs.
    Reese curled her legs under her, protecting the Wolf’s more vulnerable head and back. Adrenaline was beating a long tattoo in her pulse.
    A vulture smile crossed her face. Her nerves sang a mad little song. Here’s where I take it up the ass , she thought, and pulsed through her wetware the radio code to set off the detonators.
    The lock filled with scorching bright light, smoke, molten blobs of bright metal. Air entered the lock with a prolonged scream. Suddenly her olfactory sensors were overwhelmed with the smell of scorched metal, burning flesh. Her gorge rose. She pulsed a command to cut out the smell, then moved down to the inner lock door, seized it, rolled it up with the enhanced strength of the Wolf.
    An explosion went off right in her face. Projectiles thudded into corpse flesh, cracked against the faceplate. She and the dead men went flying back, slamming against the outer hatch. Her pulse roared in her ears. She gave the Wolf a command to move down, and move down fast.
    Her nerves were shrieking as she smashed into a wall of the airlock, corrected, flew down again, out the lock this time, cracked into another wall. Her teeth rattled. A homemade claymore, she thought, explosive packed in a tube with shrapnel, bits of jagged alloy, wire, junk. Command-detonated, most likely, so that meant someone was here watching the airlock door. Targeting displays flashed bright red on the interior of her faceplate. She turned and fired. Slammed into a wall again. Fired a second time.
    The targets died. Fixed to each of the Wolf’s upper forearms was a semiautomatic ten-gauge shotgun firing shells packed with poison flechettes. Reese had more deadly equipment available— a small grenade launcher on the left lower forearm, and a submachine gun on the right, gas projectors on her chest— but the op plan was to kill the targets without taking a chance on disturbing any of the valuable equipment or experiments.
    Dollops of blood streamed into the near-weightlessness, turning into crimson spheres. A man and a woman, the latter holding some kind of homemade beam weapon she hadn’t got the chance to fire, were slowly flying backward toward the sprayed grey plastic walls, their hearts and lungs punctured by a dozen flechettes each. Their faces were frozen in slow-gathering horror at the sight of the Wolf. Reese tried to move, then hit the wall again. She realized the shrapnel had jammed one of her maneuvering jets full on. Her wetware wove routines to compensate, then she leaped past the dying pair and through an open doorway.
    No one was in the next series of partitioned rooms, the crew quarters. These people were incredibly naive, she thought, hiding out next to an airlock they knew was going to be blown and not even getting into vac suits. They should have put the claymore on the interior hatch door, not inside the station itself.
    Maybe they couldn’t face going into where they’d put the crew they’d killed. These weren’t professionals, they were a bunch of eggheads who hadn’t known what they were getting into when they signed their declaration of independence from a policorp that could not even afford to acknowledge their existence.
    They weren’t soldiers, but they were still volunteers. They’d already killed people, quite coldly it seemed, in the name of whatever