Starwolves Omnibus by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

Author:Thorarinn Gunnarsson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The first hint Lenna had that they were anywhere near the base was when the small patrol ship came over the top of the hill to their left, moving quickly to intercept them. She recognized the ship immediately as a hover tank, a fairly standard type used by the Union in rugged terrain, part attack craft with powerful weapons and part transport. It could fly like a real aircraft for covering rough ground, although it usually hovered just over the surface on a form of field drive to save power. It could even float, although such a function was of little use in this place.

The tank settled to the ice a short distance away and the main hatch opened, dropping down to form a boarding ramp. Lenna waited patiently while a pair of soldiers in environmental suits like her own stepped out.

“What are you doing out here?” the apparent leader of the pair asked. At least he asked in the calm, almost bored voice of someone who expected a perfectly reasonable answer. After all, Lenna was dressed as one of their own and walking about this disgruntled countryside with a sentry. She relaxed.

“Performing cold-weather exercises on this experimental model,” she explained, indicating Bill. He bent one foreleg and nodded. “We were flying along when something came up behind us in a hurry and blasted us good.”

“Must have been that rebel freighter that made that laughable pass at the base three days ago,” the second of the two offered.

“I imagine so, considering the fact that you’ve been walking due west along its approach,” the first one agreed. “Why don’t we give you a ride in, as much as that might seem like better late than never.”

“How far are we from the base?” Lenna asked as she directed Bill into the rear portion of the tank.

“Oh, it’s just over that next hill, not more than a kilometer away.”

There was certainly something to be said about being delivered to the front door, although she was just as glad that they had not found her before this. As it was, it seemed likely that she would be allowed to simply disappear inside the base as soon as they arrived. Otherwise, after finding her in the middle of the frozen nowhere, there would have been too much time to wonder about her, perhaps even to test her identity to greater depth than her forged idents could endure.

The base was sprawled across the icefield that filled the wide, circular depression of a valley that appeared to be the better part of fifty kilometers across, although only the tops of a few mostly-buried buildings broke through the surface of the snow in widely-scattered clumps. Very little information existed about this base, and no photographs. Lenna was not surprised to find that the largest part of the complex was actually deep underground, in the zone of constant temperatures and therefore sheltered from the deadly cold of the winter storms.

The tank cut a straight path across the ice to the nearest of many long, featureless buildings.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.