Page 23 of Her Wolves

“And it didn’t do a lick of good,” Kris muttered.

“Whatever thing those arms were attached to must have been down here a long time, waiting for an opportunity to move, or waiting for a signal for them to strike—like the battle going on outside right now.How the hell did they get down here without anyone knowing?”

Kris guessed, “I’ve heard about machines that can be grown from artificial cells instead of put together by hand or mechanically.The cells would have the blueprints of the finished machine in them and be programmed how to assemble themselves.The artificial cells for the tentacle gadget could have been planted down there somehow, waiting to hatch out.”

“That kind of tech is just in the experimental stage with us,” I said.

Looking up from Nick again, Kris said, “I like to read up on things.”

I cracked the tiniest smile in our grim situation.Any other time I would have laughed, impressed at how quick and smart this kid was.Nick did the right thing, wanting to keep him close and keep an eye on him, because of Tara and for other reasons as well.

Getting down on one knee next to Kris and Nick, I said, “We don’t make the same kinds of regular sensor sweeps of the underground caverns as the buildings and streets up topside.That’s a gap in our security that the Soorns found a way to exploit.And there are certain minerals in the planet’s crust that can block sensors anyway.That would give us a major weakness, especially if the Soorns built their ships out of compounds withthose minerals in them.If their ships entered the atmosphere in the right way, they might have been taken for meteors.A meteor is nothing to be scared of.”

Kris didn’t answer my speculations.He just touched the arm of the unconscious Nick, looked at Nick’s vital signs on his sensors to make sure his condition was still stable, and repeated, “They got Tara.”

“Yeah, they sure did,” I said in a hushed tone.

Needing to do something, and keeping my two-gun raised, I left my partners and stepped over broken pieces again until I reached the edge of the hole that had been punched in the floor.I wanted to have my weapon ready for what I did next.Carefully, I stood near the edge of the hole and leaned slightly forward, keeping my balance, and took a hard look down.Old sayings from Earth about “looking into the abyss” went through my head.But nothing down there was looking back, and nothing down there seemed to be lying in wait to reach up like a snake striking from a box to grab me and pull me down.There were none of the lights from the thing that got Tara.There was nothing but blackness.

I took the torch light disk from my holster and dared to shine it down there.The beam of light hit pieces of stone, played over rocky walls, and crossed wisps of dust before the darkness swallowed it up.Nothing in the pit reacted.

Well, I thought, the thing couldn’t have taken Tara anywhere but down there.And since there’s nothing down there but caverns, it must have taken her somewhere else.

It was not knowing where she’d been taken that gnawed inside me like the fangs and jaws of a wolf cleaning the meat from a bone.Not knowing where she was—and not knowing what they might be doing with her.Were they going to use Tara as a bargaining chip, a tool to force the Colony’s surrender?As awful as that idea was, I hoped that was all it was.

The sound of doors sliding open caught my attention.I stepped away from where I was and started stepping over broken flooring again as two Guard medtechs, a male and a female in grey and white uniforms, shining lights and guiding a levitating stretcher, came into the corridor.Kris waved them over to where he was crouching beside Nick, told them what was on his sensor, and they quickly got to work.

I joined them and watched the medtechs make their own pass over Nick with their own sensors before preparing to lift him onto the stretcher.And I took one last look through the dim light and the dusty haze to where that hole was—and where Tara had gone.Wherever the Princess was, we’d find her, and not because it was our duty, but because she was Tara, and what mattered wasn’t her title or her station or what the Colony thought of her, but just Tara herself.She was beautiful and exciting, and she was important, just for being Tara.If the Soorns tried to stop us, to get between her and us, they’d be sorry.

If they had hurt her…they’d be dead.

CHAPTER 14

Nick

I had one damn howler of a headache.

When I woke up and tried to move, a feeling exploded in my head as if I’d grabbed a handful of live power cables.My skull was filled with a crackling, radiating pain.I winced and groaned loudly—and then my foggy vision started to clear, and I started to be aware of other sensations.There was a softness under my back, where the last thing I remembered was hitting something hard.There was a softness covering me from the chest down.I was lying propped up at an angle.I wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of regulation short-shorts.The space around me was brightly lit, where the last thing I remembered was a dim space.And there were figures moving around and voices going back and forth.

As I dragged my consciousness back together, I recognized where I was.This was an infirmary.The people moving around were wearing white and grey—medtechs.This was probably an infirmary, and from my last memories it was probably underground in the Regency bunker section.A short-haired female loomed into my view with a reassuring look.

“It’s all right, Commander Travis,” she said.“You’re in a Canis Guard infirmary.”That confirmed my guess.“You’ve sustained a concussion, but you’re otherwise in good shape.We’ve administered anti-traumatics and you’re going to need a few hours of rest.”

That made me wince as badly as the pain when my memories fully started to kick in.The corridor to the Regencybunker…the hole punched through the floor…those tentacle things…and Tara screaming!

I tossed my head and tried to get up.I called her name, about as scared as it was possible for me to get.“Tara…The Princess…Something’s happened to her.Where are my men?We’ve got to…”I raised up on my shoulders and tried to prop myself up on the palms of my hands, and the instant I managed it, my head protested.Now I had a white sheet of throbbing pain blocking my vision, and a feeling as if I were spinning in a whirlpool down into an abyss.I sank back against the pillow, and as my vision started to clear, a couple of other figures appeared just beyond the medtech woman.These two, I recognized.

Gulping, trying to steady myself against the whirlpool feeling that spun from my head to my limbs, I said, “Lieutenant Black, Sub-Lieutenant Tynan.Report!”My authority as team leader was the only thing about myself that felt steady just now, and I grabbed onto it.

Lon and Kris came closer, the medtech stepping aside for them.I didn’t like the grim looks they wore.“Nick,” said Lon, “we were ambushed, apparently by some alien tech coming up from the caverns.Something we took to be android or biosynthetic arms equipped with sensors attacked us—and took the Princess.We don’t know her whereabouts.”He paused, frowned, and gulped the way I did a second ago.“Tara’s gone.”He paused again and took a step to one side, and gestured across the space we were in.“And Leto is under siege.”

On a wall beyond beds with other fallen Guards and other medtechs tending to them was a collection of monitors showing feeds from cameras and satellites.On the monitors were multiple views from rooftop levels of buildings and orbital magnifications.My stomach knotted at what I was seeing.Soorn ships were swooping over the Capital of Lycia, firing atbuildings, firing at streets.The streets were thankfully clear of people except for human troops and Canis Guard members in wolf forms; the civilians had to have been quickly evacuated.There were armed speeder craft skimming along through the air, blasting back at the Soorn ships—and at the creatures that the troops were engaging in the streets.The Soorn mutators were at it again.

Stomping on the ground were dinosaur-like creatures that I guessed had to have been mutated from reptiles native to Lycia.They were hulking things with reinforced, armor-plated skin; they could take fire from our people’s energy weapons and keep going and doing more damage, smashing away at buildings and vehicles and troops before they were finally brought crashing down.For every one of them that fell, more took their place.Our guys out there were taking a ferocious beating on the ground and in the air, but they were holding the line.How long they could do it was anyone’s guess.

And yet, what most made my stomach sink with that awful whirlpool feeling inside me was what Lon had said when he started his report.Tara’s gone.Those damning words echoed in my head.Tara’s gone.

I shut my eyes for a second, as if to attempt the impossible task of chasing away the sight of what was on the monitors and the fear of what could have happened to Tara.But another voice entering nearby made me look.

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