CHAPTER 13

Lon

At some point I realized I was lying sprawled on my back with jagged fragments under me.I raised a hand to my face and felt a human hand touching human flesh.I wasn't in my wolf form anymore.

When I realized what was going on the last time I was in my other shape, I bolted upright in the broken mess under and around me and shouted, "Tara!"

"She's gone," said a croaking voice from somewhere in the dimness in front of me.I recognized the voice as belonging to Kris.

I whirled from side to side where I was sitting, which made various places on my body complain.I remembered either being hit by energy beams in those places, or falling in the rubble on them.I checked in the debris and found my two-gun, which I had dropped when those tentacle things rose up out of the big hole that was ripped in the emergency corridor floor.I leaned to one side and grabbed up my weapon, then stood up on wobbly legs.It took a moment to steady myself, then I started maneuvering through the debris to where I could see Kris hunched over.

"What do you mean, she's gone?" I asked as I stepped over rocks that used to be floor."Those things that came up—they just grabbed her and left us lying here?What about…?"

Before I could say Nick's name, I saw him, lying unconscious at Kris's knees.Like Kris and me, he was back in human shape.Unlike us, he wasn't awake and wasn't moving.My blood felt chilled at how still he was.

Kris was waving the emergency medical sensor from the holster of his uniform over Nick.I couldn't make out the shifting flashes on its screen, but they couldn't mean anything good."What's happened to him?" I asked.

"A concussion and a minor skull fracture," Kris said grimly."His body's keeping him unconscious; his morphing is keeping him steady and knitting the wound."He looked up from Nick to me."But the morphing will only help with that fracture; he's gonna need some attention.I've put out an emergency call to Guard Medical.They shouldn't have any trouble getting in here—assuming they're not already up to their haunches in casualties and wounded."

Rubbing my chin, I said, "I figured that."One of the perks of being one of us, a metamorphic being, was that if you were injured, your body would shift you into your other shape and heal most any wound you took.The problem was with concussions and brain injuries.With the rest of the organs in your body, usually it was no problem.But the brain is more complicated than the other organs.Brain injury or concussion left you in as much trouble as if you were only human.

I looked behind me at the hole that something had torn in the floor from below, and the rubble and rocky mess strewn around it."And the Soorns got Tara.Damnit, I've never heard of them using any weapons tech like that.What came up from there didn't seem like the tentacles of a mutated cephalopod.Those things seemed robotic, or at least biosynthetic, like an android."Facing Kris again, I said, "Looks like the damn Soorns have learned some new tricks since the Guard last tangled with them."

Staring at Nick and shaking his head with a bitter look, Kris repeated my own words."And they've got Tara."

"Damnit," I said, "we were so close to getting her in the bunker."Then, sounding as bitter as Kris looked, I said, "I wonder if she would have been any safer in there than she was out here.This floor and these walls are almost as tough as the hull of a starship."

"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 with those 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.