Wolf Among the Stars-ARC Read online

  “Attention on deck!” rapped a master-at-arms at the hatchway. Everyone rose as Taylor entered. Andrew had carefully briefed the three Lokaron on such points of human naval etiquette.

  “As you were,” Taylor rumbled, taking his place at the head of the table. “We all know by now the facts of the . . . extraordinary situation in which we find ourselves. Now we must decide what to do next. Most especially, what to do in connection with that.” He indicated the Cydonia artifact, which sat in the center of the table, enveloped in its flesh-crawling aura of mystery. “Fortunately, we have some leeway, as we’re still in free fall and I haven’t communicated any reports as yet.”

  “There is a new factor to take into account,” said Reislon. “We must assume that Legislative Assemblyman Valdes is in league with the Shape-Shifters.”

  Even after what had happened aboard Trovyr, it was shocking to hear it put into words. Huai shook her head. She wore a Chinese flag shoulder patch—the CNEN had a policy of encouraging personnel exchanges among its national components—but her English was almost unaccented. “I simply can’t believe that of Admiral Valdes,” she said, using Valdes’s military title as most Navy people still did. “Maybe they’ve made a dupe of him, infiltrated his political organization—”

  “Perhaps you’re right, Commander,” said Reislon. “But even if you are, it makes no practical difference. Either way, we cannot afford to trust him. Which means in turn that we don’t know who we can afford to trust in the CNE Navy or government. Remember, he has very high connections.”

  Huai’s expression of resentful incredulity was unchanged, but she had no rejoinder to make.

  “So,” said Persath, “it appears that we’re back where we started. All we have to work with is this device. We need to ascertain its capabilities and purpose. I propose that we take it to Tizath-Asor. At the risk of seeming immodesty, I can say without fear of contradiction that my research establishment there is amply equipped and staffed for such an investigation.”

  “It is also undoubtedly under close observation by the Shape-Shifters,” Reislon reminded him. “As you’ll recall, they had infiltrated the CNE embassy there. And now that they know of your role in all this, their cloaked ships must be patrolling the orbital approaches.”

  Persath made a sound that must have been an inarticulate splutter, for the translator was silent. The possibility of his privacy being violated had obviously never occurred to him.

  “No,” Reislon continued, “I fear we must revert to the course of action we were pursuing before we . . . encountered Captain Taylor and his command. We must return to Kogurche, and the Rogovon rebel base there.”

  Huai glanced sideways at Borthru. The rogue Rogovon starship captain had, by prior agreement with his companions, kept silent and as inconspicuous as possible, for his was a face that humans had, for over four decades, identified as the face of the enemy.

  “Are you sure?” asked Huai. Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Taylor. “I don’t like it, Captain.”

  “I don’t, either,” said Taylor with equal forthrightness. “And I’m open to alternatives. I can’t think of any myself.”

  “Remember,” Rachel urged, “that’s one place where we don’t have to worry about Shape-Shifter infiltration, since everybody there is Lokaron.”

  Of a sort, said Huai’s expression as she glanced again at Borthru.

  For the first time, Borthru spoke up. “I would remind you of something everyone seems to have forgotten: the highly advanced cloaking technology the Shape-Shifters possess. For all any of us know, this ship may be under observation even as we speak.” He gave a closed-mouthed Lokaron smile at the CNEN officers’ visible reaction. “Admittedly, Persath was able to detect the vessel following him from Tizath-Asor to Kogurche in overspace, which may indicate that the technology is less effective in that domain . . . or it may simply mean that they felt no need to conceal themselves from his yacht, as they undoubtedly would from your cruiser.” His expression hardened. “The point of all this is that by letting you come to our base, we would be running a risk of compromising its location. I have been given a wide range of discretion, and I am willing to run the risk in the interest of solidarity against a common threat.” He laid a heavy emphasis, which might have held an element of irony, on the last five words as he gazed levelly at Huai.

  “You must understand our reluctance in dealing with the Rogovon,” Taylor rumbled.

  “I understand why you hate and fear Gev-Rogov,” said Borthru bluntly. “Do not deny it. You have a right to. What you must understand is that some of us are trying to change Gev-Rogov into something neither you nor anyone else will have to hate and fear.”

  “I’ve dealt with Borthru’s people,” said Andrew, using the word people without the slightest hesitancy. “I’ve found them trustworthy. And Jamel . . . I too was at Upsilon Lupus.”

  “So you were.” Taylor wore a look of brooding concentration for a few heartbeats. “All right. Is there any further discussion? If not, we will make transition as soon as we reach the gravitational limit and then shape an overspace course for Kogurche.”

  “Just two points,” said Andrew. “First, I have an idea that may help alleviate Borthru’s entirely legitimate concerns, and perhaps also provide us with additional sources of information. I got the germ of the idea when we were in Persath‘s ship being followed.” He proceeded, in very rough outline, to lay out his plan.

  “Hmmm,” Taylor ruminated. “It has definite possibilities. And we all know that CNEN officers have a wide range of latitude in dealing with smugglers—which, officially, is all we know we’re looking at here. I can think of a few refinements, but . . . yes . . .”

  “I concur,” said Borthru.

  With all CNEN personnel certified as human, the cruiser, accompanied by Trovyr, plunged on toward the outer Solar system.

  When they neared the inner fringes of the asteroid belt, human and Lokaron pilots relinquished control to their ships’ synchronized computers and both ships performed a simultaneous transition into overspace. Reislon lay in an improvised Lokaron-compatible acceleration couch in Broadsword’s control room and watched along with Andrew and Rachel as a polychromatic tunnel seemed to recede astern and the indescribable surge of transition seemed to pull them through a hole in reality. Persath was in sick bay, out of caution.

  Almost immediately, a blip appeared on the sensor screen.

  “Well,” Andrew heard himself say, “I guess this settles the question. They can cloak themselves in normal space, but something about the characteristics of overspace prevents it.”

  The blip promptly settled into a course following theirs. It could, of course, do so in perfect safety despite the cruiser’s firepower. Ships in overspace could detect each other’s energy output by special sensors, at least at short ranges. (The range limitation had defeated all attempts to create a faster-than-light interstellar communications network using buoys in overspace signaling to each other by a kind of Morse code.) But they could not interact physically, or even communicate normally, due to the still poorly understood physics of energy transfer in overspace. All combat must take place in normal space.

  “So it does. And I see no need for delay in setting your plan in motion.” Taylor turned to his intraship communicator and spoke a brief order to the chief engineer. Broadsword’s power plant put out a momentary energy pulse, meaningless and barely noticeable to anyone who wasn’t looking for it and didn’t know its significance. Borthru did. Aboard Broadsword and Trovyr, a brief simultaneous countdown began.

  At a prearranged instant, the cruiser engaged its transition engine, while Trovyr continued on in overspace toward Kogurche.

  Transition from overspace involved the usual surging sensation, but the visual manifestation was different in this starless realm. The tunnel through which they were seemingly pulled was not a light show here, but a series of waves of various shades of black. Of course that made no sense, but everyone who had ever exp
erienced it had described it that way.

  Andrew tried to imagine what was flashing through the head of the skipper of the ship following them, who found himself forced into making a snap decision. The frigate’s uninterrupted course must be disturbing. But his attention was naturally focused on the great strike cruiser, and he would lose it beyond all hope of recovery if he did not follow it back into normal space, where he could cloak himself from its sensors. Andrew’s plan depended on his decision.

  Abruptly, transition was over and they were back among the innumerable stars of normal space. Even their brief time in overspace had taken them far beyond the Oort Cloud, and Sol was merely a zero-magnitude star astern, lost in the stellar multitudes.

  “Now we’ll see if they—” Taylor began.

  Before he could finish, lights at the sensor station flashed with confirmation of the gravitational flux that meant a ship had made transition—a ship that could not be detected.

  That emergence into normal space was close to them—practically in their laps, in terms of the usual distances with which spacefarers were accustomed to deal. The very brief interval between their own commencement of transition and the enemy commander’s decision had brought his ship flashing closer to them in overspace before he initiated transition. The result was a dramatic narrowing of the range in normal space once they were both there. That, too, had been an element of Andrew’s plan.

  They were still too far away to use shipboard laser weapons, which despite certain artificial-gravity-based tricks that extended their range were still basically chained to the diameter of their focusing optics—and engineering practicalities imposed definite limits on those. But Taylor rapped out a pair of orders. The first caused the cruiser to begin decelerating, so as to bring the still-accelerating ship behind them into even closer proximity. The second resulted in a salvo from the cruiser’s missile launchers, whose crews had been at general quarters since before transition. The missiles—essentially miniature unmanned spacecraft with overpowered reactionless drives that burned themselves out as they produced accelerations whose g-forces would have reduced any life forms to protoplasmic mush—streaked aft.

  Their target, now that it was in normal space, was cloaked beyond any possibility of ordinary targeting. But the location of its transition emergence, combined with its last observed velocity, gave the computers something to get their figurative teeth into, allowing a reasonable prediction of where it ought to be.

  It was on that point in space that the missile storm converged.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was only the impossibility of precise targeting solutions that enabled the cloaked ship to survive even momentarily. The cruiser’s missiles detonated simultaneously, their warheads energizing nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers that poured an inferno of concentrated energy into the volume of space their invisible target was projected to occupy. Most undoubtedly missed. But it immediately became apparent that the ones that hadn’t had sufficed to disable the cloaking system. The stranger lay revealed: a commercial ship almost the size of a naval frigate, with some obvious modifications, doubtless related to the fact that someone with a great deal of money had retrofitted it with an integral-transition engine.

  It was also obvious to their sensors that the stranger’s deflection shield had overloaded and failed. The ship lay naked as well as visible. Sensibly, her skipper was making no attempt to run or evade. Taylor wasted no more missiles. Instead, he brought his command into range of shipboard lasers and launched a squadron of fighters for added emphasis. The little two-seat craft, whose crews were chosen for (among other things) acceleration tolerance, were intended to get in close to enemy ships, where deflection shields’ space-distorting properties were less of a problem, and deliver precision strikes with small missiles whose limited range requirements enabled them to carry disproportionately large warheads. Andrew could never look at such a fighter without remembering the Lokaron one his parents had ridden on an insane suicide run in 2030, as a result of which Earth had lived.

  They began to receive frantic calls. Taylor quite properly ignored them until, in his own good time, he hailed the stranger.

  “This is CNS Broadsword. Yow will match vectors with us and, on our signal, go into free fall and prepare to be boarded. Failure to obey this order will result in your destruction, as will any attempt at flight. Now, identify yourself.”

  The face that appeared on the comm screen was that of a lean dark-haired man in need of a shave. In the background, damage-control work was in progress as a man with a chemical extinguisher put out a series of electrical fires where controls had shorted out.

  “This is private vessel City of Osaka, Zoltan da Silva commanding. And we surrender, damn you! You’ve got us. Why don’t you just finish us?”

  “We have no intention of finishing you as long as you behave,” Taylor purred deeply. “In fact, after putting a prize crew aboard your ship, we intend to bring you, personally, aboard Broadsword. We have a few questions to ask.”

  Taylor awaited the prisoner in the office portion of his day cabin, seated behind a desk. Andrew sat unobtrusively beside the desk to his left, with Rachel behind him.

  In person, Zoltan da Silva was no less surly-looking than he had appeared on the screen. Two Security guards ushered him in and stood him directly in front of the desk, then stationed themselves watchfully beside the hatch.

  “Now, then,” Taylor began, “why was the Black Wolf Society interested in following my ship?”

  “The Black Wolf Society?” The prisoner gave a truculent sneer. “That’s just a myth invented to justify harassing small private merchants who aren’t linked up with the big cartels that are hand in glove with the government! It’s all part of a conspiracy to squeeze out—”

  “Stow it,” Taylor cut him off dispassionately. “All right. What was a private merchant doing following us? And what was he doing with a ship equipped with an integral-transition engine . . . and a stealth system beyond state of the art?”

  “We weren’t following you! We just happened to be going the same way. And we had an emergency that caused us to have to drop out of overspace, and then you attacked us, and—”

  At that moment, a buzzer sounded. Taylor pressed a button to signal “Enter.” Reislon came through the hatch, carrying the Cydonia artifact. He set it down on the desk and moved to stand behind Taylor.

  For an instant, da Silva’s eyes widened and a shiver ran through him. But only for an instant. Then his persona reasserted itself as though with a clang.

  “Why are you so interested in this thing?” asked Taylor mildly.

  “Who’s interested in it? I’ve just never seen one, that’s all. Besides, I was surprised to see a Lokar aboard your ship—especially one who almost looks Rogovon.”

  “Were you? And you still haven’t answered the question about your ship’s . . . special equipment.”

  Da Silva turned to bluster. “Am I under arrest? If so, I refuse to answer your goddamned questions until I’ve seen a lawyer. I’ve got rights!”

  “No you don’t,” said Andrew, speaking for the first time and standing up, arms folded. “Humans have rights.”

  The bluster rose a few decibels. “Who the hell are you? And what do you mean by—”

  “We know what you are,” said Andrew in a tightly controlled voice.

  With unnatural abruptness, the tack changed to one of wheedling. “Hey, Captain, look . . . All right, I admit I’m mixed up with the Black Wolf. My business is a little irregular, you see. I suppose you’d probably call me a smuggler. I prefer free trader. That’s why I need what you call special equipment. The Black Wolf Society was able to supply it—they’ve got some stuff that isn’t generally available, you see. But I never—”

  “It’s no good,” said Andrew, unfolding his arms and revealing a small instrument in his left hand that had been concealed behind his right elbow. “You may not be familiar with this model—it’s Rogovon—but you know a med sensor when you s
ee it. I’ve had it under the ledge of the desk, performing a scan on you while you’ve been talking. It confirmed what I was already pretty sure of. I’ve seen enough Shape-Shifters in human form by now to have a sense of the signs.”

  “Who is this nut, Captain?” Da Silva’s bluster was back, but in a forceless sort of way. “What’s this crazy nonsense he’s talking?”

  Andrew sighed and drew his M-3. “You want to do this the hard way? I can put a single bullet through your chest, and we can watch you not die from it. Or, even more definitively, I can go to full auto and destroy too many of your vital organs for your reconfiguring ability to handle, and we’ll watch you die slowly, during which process you’ll become unable to sustain the human semblance. I’ve seen that happen twice to you Shape-Shifters.”

  For an eternal moment, their eyes locked. Then, too abruptly for the change to be noticed, Da Silva sloughed off his assumed personality like a cloak.

  “Actually,” he said in a conversational tone, “our name for ourselves is Kappainu, as nearly as a human voice box can produce the sound.”

  There are things so outrageous that, even when one is absolutely certain of them, it is still a shock to hear them openly acknowledged. It is even worse when the acknowledgment is almost casual. Several heartbeats passed before Andrew was able to speak and break the stunned silence.