Free Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void by Sean Dalton - [Operation StarHawks 03] Page A

young Boxcan disappeared.
    With a faint sense of shock Beaulieu found herself facing a globe that pulsed white. When it spoke to her, its synthesized voice was flat and impersonal. Somehow that made it easier.
    â€œName. Species. Age. Gender.â€

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11

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    Kelly awakened with a start. He tried to sit up before he remembered he was strapped down. But the restraints were loose. He pulled free and snatched the strap off his throat with a vengeance. Like a cat he rolled off the gurney and landed silently upon his feet in a half crouch. He listened, trying to place the noise that had awakened him. But he heard only quiet.
    He went right, aware that he didn’t dare hesitate long while he had this chance of escape. He found himself in an overheated lab where equipment he couldn’t identify hummed busily. A vaguely reptilian creature lay dead upon the floor in the midst of broken glass.
    Kelly backed out of there at once. In the other direction he found an office of sorts, littered with papers, data files, and color charts of cell structures. He hurried through without examining anything.
    Not until he was outside in the cool gloom of a corridor the size of a street did he pause to wonder who had set him loose. Holborn probably. Kelly wasn’t going to waste time thinking about it. He had to find his bearings and locate his people. His instincts were screaming urgency. He had the sense of having slept too long, of having missed something important.
    About forty meters along the corridor, he found what he’d been looking for: a hatch to a service passage. It took some time to figure out how to gain access, but once it opened, Kelly was through in a flash. He let out his breath, feeling slightly safer in this narrow place. His presence triggered a sensor of some kind, for dim lights winked on at long intervals. Kelly’s hair prickled on the back of his neck. He wondered what else the sensors had registered and relayed. But just the same, he wasn’t a robot with headlights built in. He needed the illumination to operate.
    A toolbox fitted with probes, scanners, circuit interrupters, and the like proved a treasure trove. He tucked the tools into his pockets, keeping only the circuit interrupter in his hand in case he met something metallic and nasty along the way. Now he didn’t feel quite so helpless.
    About then he heard footsteps. Kelly froze, his breath locking up in his lungs. He pressed his back to the wall and strained to listen. At first all he got were echoes, then his hearing sorted through them and he determined that they were coming his way from the direction he was heading.
    He could reverse direction, but Kelly’s stubbornness made him hold his ground.
    His heart, however, was jumping erratically. He didn’t want to admit he was afraid. But he had to. It could be another damned warbot hunting for him, and he knew he didn’t have a prayer against one of those. Still, he didn’t run for it.
    The footsteps stopped, and that worried Kelly even more. He listened for what seemed like an eternity, aware that he was probably being picked up on a scanner but still unwilling to start making noise until he had to.
    He closed his eyes a moment, regulating his breathing and trying to pull himself under control. He realized he was gripping the circuit interrupter too hard and consciously loosened his fingers around it.
    Just as his nerves were about to unravel, the footsteps started up again. They were irregular, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow. Kelly frowned. Somehow they didn’t seem to belong to a machine.
    Eagerness leapt inside him, but he reined himself in. Something alive and fugitive didn’t mean it was friendly. He’d seen what the Visci looked like, but there could be other, equally hostile species aboard this city-ship. If it should be one, his circuit interrupter wasn’t going to be of much use.
    Kelly eased along silently until