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

science they were doing here. She clenched her teeth and thought about how some people, no matter how smart they were, remained just too stupid to live.
    There was a new bulkhead door welded to the exterior of the crew quarters. Reese blew it open the same way as the airlock, then jetted through. Shrieks sounded on her audio thread, the strange organ sounds Powers made through their upper set of nostrils. Even as her mind squalled at the unearthly sight of a fast-moving, centauroid pair of aliens, she fired. They died before they could fire their homemade weapons. Her mind flashed on the video, the actor-Steward eradicating aliens with his shotgun. An idiotic memory.
    She went through a door marked with biohazard warnings. The door gave a soft hiss as she opened it.
    The next room was brightly lit, humming with a powerful air conditioning unit, filled with computer consoles plugged into walls of bare metal, not plastic. Cable stretched to and from something that looked like a hundred-liter aquarium filled with what appeared to be living flesh. Strange, she thought. It looked as if the meat were divided by partitions, like honeycomb in a cultured hive. Silver-grey wires, apparently variable-lattice thread, were woven through the meat. Elsewhere an engine hummed as it pumped crimson fluid. Monitors drew jagged lines across screens, holographic digits floated in air.
    Weird, she thought again. Alien biochemistry.
    There were three other rooms identical to the last. No one was in the first two.
    In the third was a single man, gaunt, silver-haired. He was floating by the room’s aquarium, a frown on his face. He was in a vac suit with the helmet in his hand, giving the impression he simply didn’t want to bother to put it on.
    He looked at Reese as she came in. There was no fear in his eyes, only sadness.
    He spoke as he pushed off from the aquarium, floating to the empty alloy ceiling, where Reese’s shot wouldn’t hit his experiment by mistake.
    “It’s over,” he said. “Not that it matters.”
    Reese thought of Steward in the hospital bed, dying for something else equally stupid, equally futile, and filled the man’s face with poison darts.
    Past the next seal two Powers tried to burn her with acid. The stuff smoked pointlessly on her ceramic armor while she killed them. One of the remaining humans tried to surrender, and the other tried to hide in a toilet. Neither tactic worked. She searched the place thoroughly, found no one else, and disarmed the traps at each of the airlocks.
    There was a pain deep in her skull. The air in the suit had begun to taste bad, full of sour sweat, burnt adrenaline. Sadness drifted through her at the waste, the stupidity of it all. Twelve more dead, and all for nothing.
    Reese left the bodies where they lay— nobody was paying her to clean the place up— and used the other personnel lock to return to Voidrunner . Once she was in sight of the ship she pointed one of her microwave antennae at the ship and gave the code signaling success: “Transmit the following to base. Mandate. Liquid. Consolidation. ” A combination of words unlikely to be uttered by accident.
    She cycled through the ship’s central airlock. Pain hammered in her brain, her spine. Time to get out of this obscene contraption. The door opened.
    Targeting displays flashed scarlet on the interior of her faceplate. Reese’s nerves screamed as the Wolf’s right arm, with her arm in it, rose: The ten-gauge exploded twice and the impact spun Vickers back against the opposite wall. He impacted and bounced lightly, already dead. “ No !” Reese cried, and the Wolf moved forward, brushing the body aside. Reese’s arms, trapped in the suit’s webbing, rose to a combat stance. She tried to tug them free. Targeting displays were still flashing. Reese tried to take command of the suit through the interface stud. It wouldn’t respond.
    “Take cover!” Reese shouted. “The Wolf’s gone rogue!” She didn’t know whether