CHAPTER TWO
Ben Roark’s military service had consisted of a hitch in the Navy in his youth. But in his case they made an exception.
He had died at eighty-eight, not a great age in this day of Lokaron-derived biotechnology. But he had been in his forties before he’d had access to any of that—and it had barely been enough to save his life after what his body had endured, flying a Lokaron space fighter in a forlorn hope that had actually succeeded.
The morticians had wanted to fix up the areas of smooth, shiny burn tissue, the better for viewing by a funeral party that included the president of the United States and the president-general of the Confederated Nations of Earth, among others. But Katy Doyle-Roark had refused to permit it.
Now she sat, not shedding the tears she had already shed in full, barely noticing the raw winter breeze that blew in off the Potomac as she stared at the coffin and listened to the skirl of the bagpipes.
Out of the corner of her eye, she became aware of a blue six-digited hand (two opposable thumbs on opposite sides of four fingers, all very long and extremely dexterous) moving back and forth, gradually coming into time with the pipes. She turned and looked up at the profile of the tall, thin biped who sat beside her. His face—one always thought of a Lokaron transmitter as a “he”—wore an expression that was perfectly recognizable under all the alienness as one of dawning realization.
“They’re playing a tune!” he exclaimed. Katy’s translator earpiece conveyed his tone of excited discovery perfectly.
“You’re not the first to have that reaction to bagpipes,” she admitted. “These are the good ones though: the Irish ones, distinguished from the Scottish one by having one less drone.”
Svyatog’Korth looked blank. Again, far from the first, Katy thought ruefully. She had no difficulty reading his expressions, after decades of practice.
Most humans would have looked at his hairless head and seen simply a Lokar, with large, convoluted ears, slit-pupiled yellow eyes, skull ridge running down to where it formed a bony protection for the nasal orifice, and nearly lipless mouth that, when opened, revealed serrated ridges that performed the same function as human teeth for a race of omnivores with more strongly carnivorous tendencies than Homo sapiens. They also would have taken his light-blue skin for granted, for it was characteristic of Gev-Harath, the Lokaron gevah that was humanity’s closest trading partner, and its offshoot Gev-Tizath which had first discovered Earth fifty-four years earlier.
Katy, however, knew better than most that each gevah (most often translated simply as “nation”) was in fact a subspecies, descended from Lokaron colonists genetically engineered to suit a world. Only Gev-Lokarath, the gevah occupying the original homeworld of the species, represented the original Lokaron genotype, narrower of features and build, and bluish-white of satiny skin. Certain other subspecies diverged from this far more than that of Gev-Harath. Gev-Rogov, for instance. Designed for a planet whose gravity was almost equal to Earth’s, the Rogovon were characterized by a body build that was squat and stocky on Lokaron standards—not very unlike tall humans, in fact—and a green skin tone. It was a Lokaron genotype with which humans were familiar.
Oh, yes, thought Katy, very familiar. And the object of a hate that may endure as long as there is a human alive in the universe.
Then the honor guard fired the salute with old-fashioned nitrocellulose-burning rifles, causing Svyatog to jump slightly, and the president and president-general presented her with the folded flags of the USA and the CNE. And it was over. She got to her feet unaided, despite her eighty-three years—more easily, in fact, than Svyatog. The Lokar was an old Earth hand, but also inescapably a product of a 0.72 g planet . . . besides which he, too, wasn’t getting any younger. She paused for a last look at the gravesite into which her husband’s remains had just been lowered, and at the waiting, vacant plot beside it.
Not just yet! she thought tartly.
“Thank you for coming, Svyatog,” she said to her alien companion as they walked away, oblivious to the curious glances they drew. “It would have meant a great deal to him.”
“Of course I came.” With the automatism of long experience, Katy mentally edited out the high-pitched sounds produced by Svyatog’s vocal apparatus and heard only the—dare one say it?—inhumanly perfect English produced by the translation software. “It was a stroke of good fortune that I happened to be here on Earth, on hovah business.”
“Yes, of course. I forgot to congratulate you. And,” she teased, “we humans should be flattered to rate the personal attention of the new executive director of Hov-Korth.”
Svyatog gave a hand gesture that, in his culture, denoted insincerely self-deprecatory denial. “Executive director” was a pale translation, and Katy had often thought that human history offered a far better one: tai-pan.
Early twenty-first-century humans had found it hard to adjust to the fact that the Lokaron were not a monolithic politico-economic unity. That was how super-advanced space aliens had always been visualized: sometimes as an evil empire and sometimes as a goody-two-shoes democratic federation, depending on what hobbyhorse the individual science-fiction author was riding, but always as a single polity. And that was how the Lokaron had initially represented themselves, lest the humans should get any ideas about “comparison shopping.” When the truth had come to light, the aliens’ division into sovereign gevahon had been hard enough to get used to. Still harder was the fact that a gevah was not the kind of centralized bureaucratic state that several generations of humans had been taught to regard as the most “advanced” form of social organization. It was more like the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, with the real power in the hands of the hovahon, or merchant houses. (Gev-Rogov was an exception, but the other Lokaron had always regarded the Rogovon as rather backward.) And Hov-Korth was the most influential hovah of Gev-Harath, the richest and most powerful gevah of the galaxy’s dominant race.
When Svyatog’Korth, holder of no governmental office, had been introduced to the two human presidents earlier in the day, he had been just too properly deferential for words. But no one had been under any illusions as to which of the three beings counted for most in the larger scheme of things.
“Yes, I’m glad you could come,” Katy repeated as they entered the parking lot. An edge of bitterness came into her voice. “Not everyone could.”
Svyatog looked down at her from his seven-foot-plus height. He knew humans better than almost any other Lokar, and this human in particular. “Andrew,” he stated rather than asked.
Katy nodded and did not meet his eyes. “He said there was something going on out at the Academy that made it impossible for him to get away, even for this. And he couldn’t explain what it was.” She sighed. “I suppose I ought to understand how sometimes. . . .” Her voice trailed off as an air-car swooped down with a faint hum of gravitics and settled onto the asphalt. It clamshelled open, and the driver emerged: a strongly built early-middle-aged man with short sandy hair, dressed in the CNE Navy’s winter greatcoat of dark green edged with black and gold, bearing a captain’s insignia of four small starbursts. His gray eyes looked around anxiously.
“Andy!” Katy called out in joy.
“Mom!” They embraced, and he looked around at the stragglers of the dispersing crowd. “It’s over, isn’t it? Oh, God, Mom, I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll visit the grave together later. You remember Svyatog’Korth, don’t you?”
“Of course. Thank you for coming, sir.” Andrew Roark had known the Lokar as an occasional visitor during his youth and had always regarded him with awe as a tangible link with the heroic past, in which Svyatog had saved Andrew’s parents from certain death—twice, in the case of his mother. Arguably, he had done the same thing for this world of Earth.
“As I told your mother, I was fortunate to be on Earth at the right time. And it is good to see you after so many years, Captain Roark. I have followed your career with great interest, ever since your distinguished service at Upsilon Lupus.” Svyatog’s alien eyes flickered from one human to the other, and then back again, and understanding flickered in their amber depths. He hitched his fur-collared cloak around his neck against the cold. (The Lokaron found the attitude of modern humans toward fur-wearing disingenuous if not hypocritical, coming from a race with such a bloodthirsty history.) “But now urgent affairs call me away, and I’m sure the two of you have much to talk about—hopefully, Katy, not including any complaints about Captain Roark’s failure to marry and present you with grandchildren, of which I’m sure he has grown even more weary than I have.”
Katy spluttered with mock indignation, and Andrew gave a laugh that was clearly pro forma. Svyatog’s eyes gave the two of them another appraising glance, and then he was gone, walking with the careful steps of age and high gravity toward a large, ornate Lokaron air-car.
The towering alien was barely out of earshot when Andrew turned to his mother. “I didn’t tell you why I was detained at the Academy—”
“It’s all right, dear. I know you weren’t allowed to talk about it.”
“And I’m still not. But I’m going to anyway.” He drew a deep breath. “Admiral Arnstein is dead.”
“What?” Katy stared at him round-eyed for a second, then her head slumped and she glanced back toward the grave site she had just departed. “Jesus! It seems like all the good ones are going!” Then she drew a deep breath and took control of herself. “But why hasn’t it been in the news? How did he die?”
“Suicide.” Andrew met his mother’s incredulous stare and nodded grimly. “That’s why they’re covering it up.”
“Suicide! I can‘t believe it! Are you sure?”
“Trust me, it’s true. You see, I was the one who found him. That’s why they’ve held me for the investigation. I was lucky to get away as soon as I did. And I’m still under orders to keep it under wraps.”
“I can imagine.” Her greenish-hazel eyes sharpened as the shock of what she’d heard wore off. “But if you’re not supposed to talk about it, why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I’ve got to talk to someone. You’re the only one I know I can trust—and it doesn’t hurt that you’ve still got debts you can call in from people in the American and CNE governments.”
Her eyes sharpened still further. “There’s more to this than you’ve told me.”
“Yes, quite a lot.” Andrew glanced around nervously, making sure there was no one in earshot. And there was no reason for any ranged audio pickups to be focused on this place. “As I said, I was the first one on the scene. And . . . I took something from it.”
“You what?”
“I know, I know,” he said miserably. “And I would never have considered doing it, except . . .” He looked around again, then reached into a pocket of his greatcoat. “I found this on his desk, beside his body.” He opened his hand, revealing the little datachip case marked with the odd silhouette. He let her stare at it for a second or two before clasping his hand and putting it back in his pocket.
She met his eyes. “The Black Wolf Society! So they are for real!”
“And, it would seem, connected in some way with Admiral Arnstein. Connected, perhaps, in some way that caused him to find it necessary to do away with himself.”
She stared. Clearly, she hadn’t allowed herself to think this far ahead. Roark sympathized. He’d had more time than she for doing some very hard thinking.
But she recovered quickly, which he knew shouldn’t surprise him. He sometimes had to remind himself that in her youth his mother had been involved in intelligence work. One such operation had left her, by the human medical definition of the time, dead. It had been the beginning of her association with Svyatog, who had been responsible for both her death and her rebirth.
“Now I understand why you didn’t leave this where it was, and why you don‘t turn it over to the Internal Investigations Division now,” she said levelly. “If Arnstein was involved, then there’s no telling how high it’s gone, or how deep. Naturally you’ve run the chip on your own computer.”
“Of course. And, of course, it’s in code—and not one I recognize. Not that it would help much if I did recognize it. It takes a full-time expert to read this stuff. Naturally, the Navy has some very sophisticated codebreaking computers—”
“But you can’t exactly use them for this, can you?” She shook her head. “Andy, I think this is something too big for us.”
“I know. And I have no right to involve you. But as I said before: I have no way of knowing who I can trust. The only place I could think to turn was to you and Dad. And now . . .” He glanced toward the endless rows of headstones, which had just gained a new fellow, and his misery deepened.
Katy followed his glance, and she found she had a few unshed tears left after all.
“Well,” she said, a little too briskly, “let’s at least get out of this wind. I’ve got a hotel room here in Arlington. You’re on leave, I suppose?”
“Yes—indefinite leave. They let me go after all the questioning. But I’m supposed to keep the IID appraised of my movements.”
“And coming here was a perfectly natural thing to do. All right. Going home with me to Colorado tomorrow will also be perfectly natural. It’s pretty isolated there. We’ll be able to consider our options.”
“All right. But before we go. . .”
“Of course, dear.”
They turned and walked toward the freshly dug grave.