Wolf Among the Stars-ARC (2 page)

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.

CHAPTER THREE

The following day,
they took a suborbital transport from Washington to Denver, where Katy’s air-car was waiting. Then they headed west, to Andrew Roark’s boyhood home. It was a clear winter day, and the sunlight gleamed blindingly on snow-capped peaks that rose over pine-clothed lower slopes.

Some people who’d known Ben Roark had found it surprising that he had chosen the Colorado Rockies as a retirement locale. Somewhere in the West Indies would have seemed more in character: the Caymans, where he had spent some time before the unforgettable events of 2030, or perhaps Jamaica, whose rum he had always appreciated—appreciated to excess, as some might have said. But Andrew thought he understood what had been going through his parents’ minds when they’d chosen this place, in the spectacularly mountainous heart of their country that had then been in the process of reclaiming the soul it had seemingly lost.

Now he was surer of that than ever, as the air-car passed over the throat-hurtingly beautiful valley that held the Maroon Bells—Snowmass Wilderness Area and the town of Aspen. They continued on over the sun-gleaming upland lakes and beyond, where the trees that gave the town its name—now, alas, denuded of the soft golden autumn foliage they had worn a month ago—covered the lower slopes beneath a brutally rugged crag. At the foot of that mountain, and seeming to belong there, was the rambling stone-and-timber house he hadn’t seen in far too long.

After they landed and settled in, he got a fire going in the massive stone fireplace at one end of the cathedral-ceilinged great room, flanked by windows that gave a panoramic view of the ranges to the west, while Katy mixed drinks. Then they accessed the datachip. The fire, unheeded, burned low while they studied the readout.

“Can you make anything at all of this gibberish?” Katy finally asked. “I know you’re not a crypto specialist, but—”

“No, I’m not. But I’ve had some basic familiarization. And, as a souvenir of that course, I’ve got some elementary codebreaking software that my own computer can run.”

“Any luck with it?”

“Very little. It helps to have some idea of what you’re looking for. So I’ve tried a few of the codebreaking software, and broken a few words.”

“Surely you can build on that.”

“Not when it isn’t a straight alphabet-based code. I’m sure this could be broken—there’s no such thing as an unbreakable code, although various people throughout history have thought they had one. But all I’ve been able to do is establish that certain words do occur in this stuff. One is Admiral Arnstein’s name.”

“No surprise,” Katy put in.

“Another is ‘Black Wolf Society.’ I don’t suppose that should be a surprise either.”

“I suppose not. But I’m still having trouble adjusting to the idea that it really exists. Well, no, I guess there’s never really been any doubt as to its existence. But like everybody else, I’ve always assumed that it’s just a crime syndicate, and that the wilder stories about it are just media sensationalism. Sort of like the Sicilian Mafia in the last century. But now I have to wonder.”

“In addition to those, I ran through anything I could think of that had any connection with Admiral Arnstein. I got occurrences of quite a few of them, but most were pretty innocuous and useless: words like ‘Academy’ and ‘Earth’ and so forth. But a couple of my longer shots paid off.” Andrew paused significantly. “One was ‘Kogurche.’”

Katy looked up sharply. “Well, after all, that was the system in Lupus where our confrontation with Gev-Rogov began in 2057, leading to the war a decade later. So I suppose it’s not too surprising.”

“No, it isn’t. But I’ve saved the best for last.” Andrew gave another unconsciously dramatic pause. “‘Admiral Valdes.’”