The Wolf Worlds (3 page)

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Authors: Chris Bunch,Allan Cole

Tags: #Science Fiction

BOOK: The Wolf Worlds
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Alex broke in. The tubby three-gee-world Scotsman was lying on his accel couch. He'd insisted that if he were going to die, he was going to die in uniform. And the others agreed.

"It wae back ae Airt…ane, b'tore the Emp'ror, even. In those days, m'ancestors wae called Highlanders, aye."

"Twelve minutes, even, and closing," Ida announced flatly.

"Now, in th' elder days, tha' Brits wae enemies. E'en tha, we Scots ran th' Empire tha had, wi'out tha' known it."

In spite of the tension, Sten got interested.

"Howinhell, Alex, can anybody run an empire without the boss knowing about it?"

"Ten minutes to atmosphere," Doc said.

"Ah 'splain thae some other time, lad. So, one braw day, there's this reg'mint ae Brit guards, aw braw an' proud in their red uniforms an' muskits. An' th' walkin' along thro' this wee glen, wi' they band playin' an' drumits crashin' an singin' and carryin' on, an' all ae sudden, they hears this shout frae th'crags abouve 'em. 'Ah'm Red Rory a' th' Glen!'

"An' th' Brit general 'e looks up th' crag, an' here's this braw enormous Highlander, wi' his kilt blowin' an' his bearskin o'er one shoulder an' aye this braw great claymore in his hand. 'E has this great flowit beard on him.

"An' yon giant, 'e shouts just again, 'Ah'm Red Rory a' th'

Glen! Send oop y'best pickit man.'

"An' so the Brit gen'rl turns to his adj'tant an' says, ' Adj'tant!

Send up our best man. Ah wan' tha' mon's head!'"

"Hold on the story," Ida cut in coldly. "We're on launch."

Dead silence in the control room… except for the increased panting of the lashed-down tigers.

Consider three objects, the target/goal, the pursurer, and the pursued. Seconds… now milliseconds in the light-year chase… as the
Cienfuegos
tries to hide in-atmosphere. Three factors in the equation. And then an unexpected fourth as the decoy-missile launched.

"Captain! I have a double target!"

"Hold course. Repeat, hold course. ECM room, do you have a selection?"

"Negative, captain. We have a negative…Talamein help us…

all systems lost in ground-clutter."

The captain closed the com circuit. Forced down the sailor oaths that rose unasked in his regimented memory. Substituted a prayer. "May the spirit of Talamein—as seen in his only true prophet Ingild—be with us. All stations! Stand by for combat!"

The Jann cruiser suddenly looked more like a dolphin school as the Vydal close-range ship-to-ship missile stations fired.

Fired, cut power, and looked around for a target.

VYDAL-OPERATOR INPUT: TARGET NO TARGET…

CLUTTER ECHO HAVE TARGET TARGET TARGET DOUBLE

TARGET... DOUBLE LAUNCH FIRST TARGET NONACTIVE

FIRST TARGET POSSIBLE POWER.. TARGET. I HAVE A TARGET. HOMING ALL SYSTEMS HOMING ALL OTHER

UNITS SLAVE TO HOMING HOMING...

New, the Vydal-series missiles were not the brightest missiles the Empire ever built. After twenty years' hard service, several in the less-than-adequate maintenance the warriors of the Jann used, they were no longer even what they had once been.

Most of the Vydals obediently followed the tarted-up decoy launch as it blasted into deep space. But one more determined, more bright, or more iconoclastic than its brothers, speared flame from its drive tubes and homed on the
Cienfuegos
.

In the Jann cruiser, its operator cursed as he tried, without success, to divert the Vydal to its "proper" target. But the lone missile detonated barely 1000 meters from the
Cienfuegos
as the ship began the first white-hot skip into the atmosphere of the unknown world.

Ida had been trying to bring the
Cienfuegos—a
vehicle with the glide characteristics of an oval brick—successfully in-atmosphere for a landing, but the one kt detonation of the Vydal put paid to the plan. The
Cienfuegos
flipped, turned, spun.

No problem in deep space—down was only where the McLean generators defined it—but entering a world?

The explosion crushed the
Cienfuegos'
cargo holds and flipped the crablike ship a full 180 degrees. Top-to-bottom, of course, since disaster never comes as a solitary guest, just as the
Cienfuegos
finally hit solid atmosphere.

Doc was the only being who might have found the situation humorous as the craft spun wildly out of control, beyond the skew-path Ida had plotted, beyond even a conventional dive, beyond any kind of sanity.

But Doc was not chuckling. He was, after all, seconds from death.

As were Sten and the other members of Mantis.

The ship crackled out of the skies and plunged into the upper atmosphere. Sensors sniffed wildly for surface… any kind of molecular surface at all.

Figures danced and swirled across the ship's computer screen and Sten shouted strings of changing numbers at Ida. Her fingers flowed across the controls, tucking in the impedimenta of the mining ship, sliding out two stubby wings. She tensed, as she felt the beginnings of atmosphere. Brought the nose down gently… gently… The ship hit the first layer of air and spun wildly.

Ida slammed on the right thruster, a short violent flare, then off again. Hit the left. And slowly brought the ship back under control. Nose in again. Just right. Slicing deeper into the air a degree at a time. Then the ship settled out, behaving like a ship again.

Sten glanced around. Bet was pale in her seat, but steady.

Alex was flexing excess gees out of his muscles. And Doc had the fixed stare in his teddy-bear face that he got when he was plotting revenge on someone. Ida shot a grin over her shoulder.

"Now let's find a place to hide," Sten said.

She just nodded and turned back to the controls.

Suddenly the jet stream hit them at twice the speed of sound.

On the
Cienfuegos
girders bent and groaned. Cables snapped and whipped, sparking and hissing like electric snakes.

The massive air current tossed the
Cienfuegos
again, further out of control and driving it helplessly down toward the surface of the unknown planet.

Ida cursed and fought the control board, trying not to gray out. One viewscreen flashed a possible crashlanding site, then blanked out.

Ida jammed out everything the ship had that resembled brakes, from the stubby emergency landing foil to the landing struts to the atmosphere sampling scoops.

The ship juddered and jolted as the little winglets bit into the atmosphere, and Ida punched the nose thrusters, momentarily pancaking the
Cienfuegos
into something resembling control.

A moment later the
Cienfuegos
topped the high walls of the huge volcanic crater Ida had targeted on and then was booming low over a vast lake, sonic blast hurling up waves.

Everything not fastened down hurtled forward as Ida reversed the Yukawa-drive main thrusters and went to emergency power.

A prox-detector screen advised Ida that the current landing projection would impact the
Cienfuegos
against a low clifflet rimming the lake's edge—something that Ida was quite aware of from the single remaining viewscreen.

Ida did the only thing she could and forced the
Cienfuegos
into a 10-degree nose-down attitude.

The ship plowed into the lake, slashing out a huge, watery canyon.

And Sten was back on Vulcan, running through the endless warrens after Bet, Oron, and the other Delinqs. The Socio-patrolmen were closing in on him and he shouted after his gang to turn and figtit. Help him.

Something stung at him beyond dream-pain and Sten was clawing his way back up into bedlam. Every alarm on the ship was howling and blinking.

Doc was standing on Sten's chest, methodically larruping him across the face with his paws. Sten blinked, then wove up to a sitting position.

The other Mantis soldiers were scrambling around the room, in the careful frenzy that is normal Mantis-emergency.

Alex was lugging gear to the open port—wrong, Sten realized, it was a gaping tear in the ship's side—and hurling it out into bright sunlight. Bet had the tigers out of their capsules and was coaxing the moderately terrified beasts out of the ship. Ida was piling up anything electronic that was vaguely portable and self-powered.

Alex lumbered over to Sten and slung him over one shoulder.

With another hand he grabbed Sten's combat harness and rolled through the tear in the
Cienfuegos'
side.

Alex dumped Sten on the pile of packs and went back for another load. Sten staggered to his feet and looked at the
Cienfuegos
. The ship was broken almost in half longitudinally, and various essentials like the winglets and landing struts had disappeared into the lake mud. The
Cienfuegos
would never fly again.

Sten battled to clear the fog from his brain, trying to conjure up a list of the supplies they'd need. He stumbled toward the rent in the ship.

"Wait. We should—"

But Alex ran out with more gear then spun Sten around, turning him away. "W should be hurrin", lad. Tha wee bugger's aboot t'blow."

Within seconds, the team was assembled, packs shouldered, and stumbling up the low clifflet.

They had barely passed over its crest when, with a rumble that echoed around the vast crater walls, the
Cienfuegos
ceased to exist save as a handful of alloy shards.

CHAPTER THREE

THE EGG-SHAPED CRATER they had crashlanded in was huge, almost seventy-five kilometers long. The lake itself filled about half of the area, even though it was obviously drying rapidly, from the "big end" of the egg toward the "point," where Ida had glimpsed a break in the crater's walls.

The ship had cashed it in about ten kilometers from the gap, leaving the team with a nice hike to clear their still muddled brains.

By now they'd taken stock of their situation, which bore a close resemblance to dismal. They'd lost almost all their gear in the wreck, including emergency protective suits and breathing apparatus. They did have their standard ration/personal gear/water filtration packs that, rumor had it, no Mantis soldier would walk across the street without.

The arms situation was equally bleak. The only weapons they'd brought out were their small willyguns, a sufficiency of the AM explosive tube magazines for those guns, and their combat 2

knives.

No demo charges. No hand-launched missiles.

A slackit way f'r a mon, Alex mourned to himself. Ah dinnae ken Ah'd ever be Alex Selkirk.

"Does anyone have any plans?" Bet asked mildly as she pushed her way through a clump of reeds. "How the clot are we gonna get off this world?"

"Plans could be a bit easier if Ida would tell us where she committed that landing."

"Beats me," the heavyset woman growled. "If you recall, I didn't have much time for little things like navigation."

"Regardless," Bet put in. "It's all your fault."

"Why?"

"It always has to be somebody's fault," Bet explained.

"Imperial Regulations."

"An' who better'n the wee pilot?"

Alex should have kept his mouth shut. It had teen a very long day for Ida, and she decided the joshing was no longer funny.

She turned on Alex.

"I'd push your eyes out," she said, "except it'd only take one finger, you bibing tub of—"

And Sten stepped in before tempers could in fact heat up.

"Words. Just words. They don't cross klicks."

"Leave them be," Doc suggested. "At the moment, a little spilled blood would cheer me enormously."

Alex whistled suddenly. "Willna y'have a lookit this!"

They'd broken out of the reeds and were crossing an open section of terrain. Here the ground had once been covered by fine, volcanic ash, which had hardened over eons into solid rock.

Alex was pointing at a cluster of enormous footprints, bedded deeply into the rock surface. Sten followed the prints with his eyes: They came out of what must've been the lake's edge, moved about twenty meters along it. then the being who had made them stopped for a moment—the prints were deeper there. Then they turned, hesitated as if the being had looked at something, then went on, disappearing gradually.

Sten stood in one of the humanlike prints and raised an eyebrow. It was at least twice as large as his own foot.

"I hope we don't meet his cousin," he said fervently.

Ida turned her little computer on, measured the rock. She laughed and snapped it off again.

"You're safe," she said. "Those footprints are at least a million years old."

Sighs of relief all around.

"I wonder who they were?" Bet asked.

"The People of the Lake, obviously," Doc answered.

Alex gave him a suspicious look. "An" how w'ye be knowit thae, y' horrible beastie?"

Doc shrugged his furry shoulders. "What else would a being call itself if it lived on the shores of a lake this size?"

"Doc," Ida said, "if I were a gambling woman—which I am—I'd say you just outfoxed yourself. You couldn't possibly know something like that."

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