Wolf Among the Stars-ARC by Steve White Read Free Book Online Page A

this one must, in keeping with its overall appearance, have cloaking technology normally unavailable to civilians, to have slipped by the police.
    He looked around. People were either running in panic or stunned into immobility. Then a cry wrenched his attention back to the young woman, whom he had momentarily forgotten. The air-car had landed as close to her as it could without actually hitting her, and the ground-pressure effect of its drive had knocked her to the ground. Before it even settled onto its landing jacks, its doors clamshelled open. Two men dressed in ninjalike head-to-toe black leaped out and grasped her.
    She screamed, struggling like a wildcat.
    That scream brought Andrew to his feet. He launched himself at the two attackers, whose backs were to him as they held on to the woman, one to each arm.
    A whole series of desk jobs had intervened since his training in unarmed combat. But he had tried to keep up with refresher courses, and these days forty-one was not as creaky an age as it had once been. He managed a quite creditable flying side-kick that connected with the small of one attacker’s back, sending him staggering into the other.
    Andrew landed on his feet with a balance that would have left him feeling smug at any other time. At this moment, his only thought was to grab the young woman by the wrist and pull her away from her two off-balance erstwhile captors.
    “This way!” he yelled, with no particular plan except to get her to his ground car. She caught on at once, gripped his wrist as tightly as he was gripping hers, and sprinted in that direction with him . . . and suddenly went limp and became dead weight.
    He spun around in time to see her slump to the pavement. Behind her, a third black-clad figure had leaned out of the air-car and was pointing the weapon that Andrew knew had brought her down: a standard M65-A-3 laser rifle, highly illegal for civilians to possess. At least Andrew knew it had brought her down alive, for there had been none of the pinkish-gray explosion of instantly superheated bodily fluids that marked the full-power use of a weapon-grade laser on a human target. So it was set on its stun function, powering down the laser to a mere guide-beam that ionized the air for the passage of an electrical charge.
    Then the gunman swung the weapon toward him, and with his right hand made an adjustment that Andrew recognized as switching the setting.
    Before he could make a futile attempt to evade a weapon that struck at the speed of light, he heard a somehow familiar voice from inside the air-car. “Take him, too.” The gunman made a reverse adjustment . . . and Andrew lost consciousness in a brief agony of electric shock.
    ***
    Almost twenty years ago, as part of the climax of the Academy’s survival training, Andrew had been hit with a laser stunner. Now the miserable sensations of awakening from it—the splitting headache, the tremulous feebleness of the muscles, the residual nerve pains—all came roaring back as he struggled up to an unwelcome consciousness.
    After a while he felt able to take an interest in his surroundings.
    He was in a dimly lit, starkly featureless enclosed space with insufficient headroom for a tall man to stand up straight under the metal-raftered ceiling. It was completely nondescript, but a sensation of movement and a faint hum of grav repulsion enabled him to identify it as the cargo hold of an air carrier—a large cousin of air-cars, widely used for economy and quietness whenever the tearing speed of suborbital transports was not needed.
    The only interesting thing in view in the semidarkness was the woman, still dressed as he had last seen her, and unbound as he now noticed he himself was. She sat on the deck, hugging her knees and regarding him with what seemed to be clear eyes.
    “How long have you been awake?” he asked.
    “Only a few minutes,” she replied, which irrationally made him feel better, even though he knew it was only natural that