shutting down the base. They had not even submitted her to a strip-search, and that was a common enough practice even in polite company.
She had been rather looking forward to it.
As far as it went, she was not particularly worried. Her idents were real enough, and the computer records on her were quite extensive. She was high enough in rank that she was ordinarily answerable only to written orders. They even knew her in Technical Support, where she had put in regular appearances and a very real eight hours of trouble-shooting each day. What she did with her free time was entirely her own affair, not to the extent that she had used it, but no one at this base would know about that. When nothing came up on her ident check, she would be released with vague warnings to be more careful. Under the circumstances, a strip search would have been the high point of this little adventure.
She would have been feeling very good about the whole affair, except that she was very worried about what the Starwolves might be thinking, and what they could well be doing in her absence. She was very much afraid that Bill would go ahead and open the overhead doors on bay twelve, not waiting for orders. She doubted that Bill possessed the intelligence or complexity of thought to contact the Methryn on his own initiative, but she did believe that they would contact him and determine his latest orders. If she was lucky, she would be released before any of those dire things could happen.
“We’re to take you to the tram,” said the senior of the two guards, identified to Lenna only by the name Barg on his ident tag, as he entered the room where Lenna sat politely handcuffed to a chair. It was, at least, the most comfortable of the four chairs in the room. The other guard, Salgey, had sat brooding in one of the other chairs.
“Why is that?” Lenna asked just a little nervously, wondering if something was going wrong. Years of experience had taught her that the person she was supposed to be would have been expected to be just a little nervous by this time, wondering if she was about to be run over by the ponderous, uncaring wheels of military bureaucracy for a mistake that she did not consider to be her fault.
“Standard procedure,” Barg explained as he released the handcuffs from around the arm of the chair. “A security tram is being sent around to take us to Main Security, if the officer on duty thinks that it’s necessary. It’s most likely that he will just ask you a few of the usual, stupid questions and send you back to work.”
Lenna stood up, and her hands were again cuffed. At least this time her hands were cuffed in front, less awkward and much more comfortable. She was taken through the corridors to the tram station, not the smaller passenger trams, but the wide, double-tracked tunnels of the immense freight trams. One small, single-unit tram, like a flattened silver oval resting on its massive magnetic tracks, was pulled up to the loading platform. The front and rear of the top of the tram’s armored hull were dominated by its massive turrets; at need, the machines could be rolled out onto the surface tracks to repel a major attack. Lenna was directed through its main door.
Inside, the tram was fitted with benches along its outer walls and in small islands in the center, leaving a considerable amount of open space between. This was a transport for security forces, with room for supplies and for guards to get into their gear. Lenna was directed to the enclosed control cabin in the front of the tram. From there, the operator could set the tram’s destination with the central computer control, or guide the vehicle directly through remote-control switches at the track junctions.
“Here we go,” Barg said, directing her to the seat before the communications panel. “You can speak to the old bastard here.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lenna warned him, with a noticeable respect for the wrath of superiors.
“Oh, not to worry,” he insisted. “The com is on standby from our end.”
He pressed a single button, and the small monitor in the center of the unit came to life. A middle-aged man with a rather gaunt face and large nose afforded her the briefest of glances before looking back down at something he had been reading. “So. Kalen Makensee, lately of Balarn. Nineteen years of impeccable service in technical support. Graduated with honors with a degree in engineering from the Service Academy.”
“Ah, only seventeen years, sir,” Lenna offered the correction as she recognized the simple trap, hoping that she remembered the facts of this alternate persona properly.
“Yes, my mistake.” He glanced at her only briefly, turning back to the hard copy that he now held within view of the monitor. “It says here that you have been at this base for only four months. Long enough to know better, I would assume.”
“Sir, the bay was not properly sealed for security,” she said, which was all perfectly true. “There were no standard lights or signs, and the doors were all wide open.”
“That is right, sir,” Barg offered.
The officer turned off the sound at his end for a moment while he spoke to someone she could not see. He glanced back at Lenna, this time a somewhat hard stare. “Just what were you doing in that bay anyway? Admitting that you are assigned to random trouble-shooting, what led you to start tampering with high-power outlets?”
“I’ve known those outlets to short, more than once,” she explained. “A little dirt or moisture in the connections, and you have quite an arc on your hands. Starts fires about half the time, since a lot of fools on the deck will stack goods too close to the things. And I wanted to double-check all of the connects in the base, seeing as how we’re supposed to be putting everything in hold for a long time.”
“I see,” the officer agreed vaguely, then turned off the sound a second time while he listened to some brief report. He turned back to her in a somewhat more congenial frame of mind. “Yes. Well, the mistake does seem to be our own, and everything does seem to check out just fine. I’ll go ahead and clear you to finish your work in that bay.”
Lenna was hardly aware of muttering her thanks; her mind was already on her next problem. Actually, her problems existed very much in the significant plural. She had Starwolves waiting for her to create a diversion in a hurry, and she hardly knew how she could arrange that while she was very much in the eye and mind of Base Security. She was considering whether she should go ahead and arrange that same power outlet to short when she put it back together. Maintaining her cover would no longer be important, once Starwolves entered the base. Then this whole installation would explode into confusion, and Valthyrra’s cannons would finish the task soon after.
“Told you there was nothing to worry about,” Barg said as he bent to remove her handcuffs. She braced herself for the inevitable, knowing what was to follow when the guard looked awkward and uncomfortable. “You know, I really hate to have done this to someone your age.”
“Oh, I… “ It suddenly registered with Lenna just what he was saying, and her mouth fell open. She had never felt more insulted in her life, all the more so for knowing that those words had been impolite but hardly untrue. And she had been sitting there, waiting for this polite young man to put the moves on her old bones.
A sentry unit thundered through the main door of the tram at that moment, turning to bring all of its weapons to bear on the control cabin. Lenna glanced over her shoulder, harboring certain nasty suspicions about just whose sentry that was.
“Freeze, bastards!” Bill roared.
That left absolutely no doubt at all. Lenna had years of experience with the quirky logic of the semi- intelligent, at least where that term applied to automatons, and she threw herself to the floor.
As she had predicted, the two guards did not freeze. They were too confused and startled out of their wits to freeze, and Bill was not prepared to accept anything less. He opened fire with his forward arsenal, a deadly barrage of weapons powerful enough to bring down a Union fighter. Fortunately he had not seen the need to use full power, but his bolts still made quick work of the control panel. The two guards ducked their heads and, by some miracle, escaped out the small forward door.
Bill had, of course, been listening through Lenna’s comlink, which had not been removed from the pocket of her uniform’s tunic. In all of the many possibilities that she had considered, Lenna had never dreamed that Bill would elect to run to her rescue like some four-legged knight in ceramic alloy armor, just in time to turn an unexpected victory into resounding defeat. Bill talked a line about machine efficiency, but he always seemed to do everything the hard way.
When the two guards ran out the forward door, Bill, for reasons that were equally mysterious, elected to run after them. Lenna continued her own crawl into the safety under the main control panel, which was already beginning to spark and burn, as the sentry crashed through the forward cabin and out the door. Lenna paused a moment to listen. She heard a few more scattered shots from Bill’s main battery, but she assumed that he must have missed his target when the ponderous thumps of his heavy legs continued.
