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, one holding some kind of homemade beam weapon she’d never 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 naïve, 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 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 memory 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. Weird, she thought. It looked as if the meat was 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 the suit was still on transmit or whether anyone was listening. The Wolf had visible light and IR detectors, motion scanners, scent detectors, sensors that could detect the minute compression wave of a body moving through air. There was no way the Wolf would miss anyone in the ship, given enough time.
Reese’s heart thundered in her chest. “Get into vac suits!” she ordered. “Abandon ship! Get onto the station. Try and hold out there.”
Chung’s voice snapped over the outside speakers. “Where the hell are you?” At least someone was listening.
“I’m moving upship toward the control room. Oh, fuck.” The heads-up display indicated the Wolf had detected motion from the docking cockpit, which meant the armored bulkhead door was open.
The Wolf caught Falkland as he was trying to fly out of the cockpit and get to an airlock. The flechettes failed to penetrate the exoskeleton, so the Wolf flew after him, caught him bodily. Reese felt her left hand curling around the back of Falkland’s head, the right hand draw back to strike. She fought against it. Falkland was screaming, trying to struggle out of the Wolf’s grip. “I’m not doing this!” Reese cried, wanting him to know that, and closed her eyes.