Free torg 01 - Storm Knights by Bill Slavicsek, C. J. Tramontana Page B

said, "I saw the storm clouds gather over Earth. I saw the dark rain fall. There are seven raiders coming — seven invaders to attack Earth, seven different places to be attacked."
    "She has been experiencing this vision for several months now," the doctor explained. "I reported it to your superiors each time, and each time I was dismissed."
    "I am here now, doctor," said Ondarev. "Please do not interrupt us again. Katrina? May I call you Katrina?"
    Again the haunting voice spoke. "You may, captain. And might I add that you have a very nice name. I've always liked the name Nicolai."
    Ondarev could not remember using his first name since he entered this room. But he must have, he rea-
    soned, for her to know it. He dismissed the mystery and went back to his questions.
    "Where are these invasions going to occur, Katrina?"
    She tilted her head to one side, as though she were listening to a far-away voice. Then she began to spin the globe, letting her fingers run across its textured surface.
    "Here," she said, pointing to Borneo without looking where her finger struck.
    "Here," her finger tapped New York.
    "Here, here, here." Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union.
    "And here, and here." Her finger pointed to Eygpt and Japan.
    Captain Ondarev stood up and wiped perspiration from his brow. He took the globe from Katrina and held it so he could look at it. The outline of his beloved country stared back at him. She had touched the globe there with her fifth tap. That meant there was still time.
    "Captain, the storm has already begun," she added, "and the invaders are falling to our world along with its poisonous rain."
    "Prepare her, doctor," Ondarev ordered briskly, "she is to leave with me."
    "Why?" the doctor questioned nervously. "I do not understand? What is happening?"
    "We have lost all contact with Singapore and its Indonesian neighbors, and the United States has come under the attack of unknown forces. Don't you see? Her storm has begun, and I will need her help if our country is going to survive."
    As Ondarev moved to leave the room, Katrina's haunting voice stopped him.
    "The storm has a name, Captain Nicolai Ondarev."
    He forced himself to look at the young woman, even though his sweat was now running cold.
    "It calls itself Torg."
    28
    "Time To Go, Time To Go, Time To Go," streamed redly, blinking across the inside of her closed left eye. Irritatedly, she opened her eyes. The alarm display continued to flash and stream across her vision as she looked about the room. Faint, ghostlike images, leaking backward from the sensover chip in the first socket behind her right ear, through her brain, optic nerves, and to her retinas, overlay the hard reality of the sleeping portion in her living cubicle. She blinked her left eye once, turning off the alarm display and activating the snooze control. That would let her go back to sensover for ten more minutes before the alarm roused her again.
    The cubicle faded from her vision and the translucent images became solid as she closed her eyes and returned to experiencing a recording of the Kios City Philharmonic playing Hartel's Post-Invasion Symphony, with herself playing first piano.
    Atonal, bass vibrations trembled in the tips of her fingers where they pressed down upon the polished white plastic of the keys, and the attenuator pedal quivered under her foot as she floated back into the sensover scene. She was just getting to her solo when a voice came through the intercom panel near the door. The voice intruded on the music and spoke her name questioningly.
    "Dr. Hachi?" the voice of the security doorman forty-seven floors below asked.
    "Triple damn," she muttered to herself as she sat up in bed and pulled out the sensover chip of the symphony. She tossed it onto the counter that ran the length of the room, letting it mix with the jumble of electronic equipment, papers, books, program chips and data disks that littered the surface.
    "What?" she asked after she had slid off the bed