Aftershocks (31 page)

Ttomalss laughed. “You are ingenious. I cannot deny that. In fact, I applaud it. Few in the Race would have thought to use outcast status as a justification for receiving sensitive data. Even so, I am afraid I must tell you no. The secrecy classification for this data is too red for me to have any other choice.”

“By the Emperor!” Kassquit exclaimed, irked that her ploy had failed. “By the way you make things sound, we might be at war with another Tosevite not-empire by this time tomorrow.”

“Truth,” Ttomalss said. “We might be.” And then, as Jonathan Yeager had before him, he ended his conversation with Kassquit as fast as he could.

“By the Emperor!” she said again, and again looked down at the floor of her cubicle to show reverence for a male she’d never seen and never would see. “Is it as bad as that?” It almost surely was; Ttomalss, as she knew from a lifetime of experience, was not the sort to panic over nothing.

What could Straha know? The question tormented her, like an itch under the scales. She laughed when the simile crossed her mind, laughed and ran a hand along her smooth, scaleless skin. No, the language of the Race and its images did not always fit her well. That she could laugh instead of mourning said she was in a better mood than usual.

But laughing brought her no closer to the truth, whatever that was, wherever it lay. What could Straha know? What could Sam Yeager have known? How was she supposed to figure that out when she’d never set foot on the surface of Tosev 3? Whatever it was, though, it had to be something that had to do with the Race. Maybe her not setting foot on Tosev 3 didn’t matter after all.

I should not be guessing,
she thought.
I should
know.
The data are all in front of me.
Some of the Race’s games, played either in groups or against a computer, involved solving elaborate puzzles where all the relevant pieces and many that were not were displayed together. This was like one of those games, except she wasn’t sure she could see all the pieces.

As in those games, she could pause and review the evidence. She didn’t have access to the conversations she and Sam Yeager had had when he visited the starship; Ttomalss and other psychological researchers endlessly studied those recordings for what they revealed about how Big Uglies thought. But she could go over all the electronic conversations she’d had with the wild Tosevite—those where he admitted his species and also those in which he appeared as Regeya and Maargyees—fictitious members of the Race under whose names he’d managed to sneak onto the electronic network.

Kassquit discovered she enjoyed reviewing those messages. Sam Yeager had an odd and interesting slant on the world. Part of that, of course, was because he wasn’t really a male of the Race. His perspectives were alien. But part, she’d gathered from meeting Jonathan Yeager and the Deutsch pilot Johannes Drucker, was Sam Yeager himself. He had an odd and interesting slant on the world even compared to other Big Uglies.

He also had wide-ranging interests, wide-ranging curiosity. That, Kassquit knew, was more common among Tosevites than among the Race. But, even for a Tosevite, Sam Yeager had a sense of what was interesting that swooped and darted and landed in unpredictable places.

Among them . . . Kassquit paused and reread a few of the things Sam Yeager had said in the guise of Regeya. She let out a soft, speculative hiss, very much as if she were in truth the female of the Race she wished herself to be. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know, not without asking some questions to which she wouldn’t get answers: Ttomalss had already told her that those answers, whatever they were, were too secret for her to be allowed to learn them.

No, she didn’t, couldn’t, know. But she had what she thought was a pretty good idea. She almost wished she didn’t. The Deutsche had come much too close to destroying this starship, and had destroyed too much that was the Race’s. Now, she feared, the Americans might get their chance.

Glen Johnson was sleeping when alarms inside the
Lewis and Clark
started screaming. He jerked and thrashed and tried to get out of his sleep sack without undoing the straps that secured him in it. That didn’t work. He had to wait till his brain fully engaged before his hands could reach for and open the fastening.

“Screw you, Brigadier General Healey,” he muttered as the sirens howled insistently. He understood the need for periodic drills. He just resented having this one wake him up. Anything he resented, he blamed on the spaceship’s short-tempered commandant. That seemed fair. Whenever Healey found something he didn’t like, he blamed Johnson.

The number-three pilot had just pushed off toward the doorway to his cubicle when he realized what sort of drill it was. The ones the
Lewis and Clark
ran most often were pressure-loss drills, because that was the sort of misfortune likeliest to strike. Not this time. This set of sirens was summoning the spaceship’s crew to battle stations.

“Jesus!” Johnson muttered as he swung hand over hand to the control room. He couldn’t remember the last time the ship had run a battle-stations drill. He couldn’t remember any battle-stations drills. That made him wonder if it was a drill.

If it’s not, we go down swinging,
he thought. That wasn’t a good thought to have, not when they wouldn’t even take out any Lizards while they fought. The Race’s machines would do the dirty work.

He almost bumped into Mickey Flynn at the entrance to the control room. They did an Alphonse and Gaston act—after you; no, after
you—
before Flynn preceded him into the
Lewis and Clark’s
nerve center. Walter Stone was already there; it was his shift.

“Well?” Flynn asked. “Are we radioactive dust?”

“Gas,” Stone answered. “Radioactive gas.”

“I am wounded,” Flynn declared. Wounded or not, he strapped himself into his chair.

Johnson got into the seat behind those of the two men senior to him. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “This
is
a drill, isn’t it?”
Please, God, tell me it’s a drill.

“We’re not under attack,” Stone said. “All the Lizard spy ships we’ve identified are sitting there quietly. If there are any we haven’t identified, they’re sitting there quietly, too.”

Even before Johnson had finished his sigh of relief, Flynn said, “The assumption here, of course, is that they may not necessarily keep on sitting there quietly. I’ve heard assumptions I liked better.”

“Now that you mention it, so have I,” Johnson said. “They haven’t shown hostility since we first spotted them. Why are we worried all of a sudden?”

From behind him, a rough voice said, “You always were a nosy son of a bitch, weren’t you, Johnson?”

“Yes, sir, General Healey,” Johnson answered. As far as he was concerned, Brigadier General Charles Healey won the SOB prize hands down. He turned around and smiled into the commandant’s hard, blunt-featured face. “It’s made me what I am today, sir.”

Healey didn’t like taking sarcasm; he preferred dishing it out. After muttering under his breath, he said, “You’re plainly supernumerary here. Perhaps your station ought to be out in the scooter, engaging targets from the flank.”

“If you say so, sir.” Johnson shrugged. It wasn’t even a bad idea. He didn’t think it would help much—he didn’t think anything would help much against a determined Lizard attack—but it wouldn’t hurt, either. Of course, if things went wrong, as they were bound to do, he’d have the loneliest death in the solar system. “Tell me where to go, and I’ll go there.”

He knew Healey would rise to the line like a trout rising to a fly. But before Healey could say anything, Walter Stone asked, “Sir, what the devil
is
going on?”

Stone could get away with questions like that; the commandant approved of him. Brigadier General Healey scowled and sighed and answered, “Things are heating up between Cairo and Little Rock. I don’t know why, exactly”—the scowl got deeper; he didn’t like not knowing—“but they are. We need to be ready for whatever happens.”

“I’ve heard news I liked better,” Mickey Flynn observed.

“Me, too,” Stone agreed. “What touched this off, sir? President Warren’s not crazy, the way the Nazis were. He couldn’t be threatening the Lizards.”

“He’s not,” Healey said. “They’re angry at us, and I don’t know just why. I told you that.” He shook his head, annoyed at having to repeat himself.

“If they want to bad enough, they can wipe us right out of the asteroid belt, and that’s with the ship full of johnny-come-latelies,” Johnson said. Healey gave him another venomous look, presumably for seeing the truth and presuming to tell it.

“If they want to bad enough, they can wipe us off the face of the Earth,” Flynn said.

“We’d hurt ’em if they tried it.” Healey’s voice was savage. “We’d hurt ’em a lot worse than the Germans did. We’re stronger to begin with, and the Nazis already gave their defenses one good pounding.”

Johnson nodded at that. Every word the commandant said was true. And yet . . . He didn’t have to put
and yet
into words. Walter Stone did it for him:

“Mickey’s right, sir. I’m not saying you’re wrong. We’d hurt ’em. We’d hurt ’em plenty. But if they wanted to, they could smash us back to the Stone Age.”

“They’d really have to want to,” Johnson said. “That’s the point of all the bombs and rockets and submarines. They’d know they were in a fight.”

“Another few years,” Healey muttered. “Maybe just another couple of years. Another couple of years and the goddamn Lizards would have been talking out of the other side of their snouts. You boys all know it. That’s why we’re here.”

“One of the reasons, anyhow,” Flynn said.

“The A-number-one reason, and you know it as well as I do,” Healey ground out. He scowled at Mickey Flynn, challenging him to disagree. The
Lewis and Clark’s
number-two pilot maintained a discreet silence.

“There are a few other things going on,” Johnson said. “The mining, the colonies on every rock where we can run up a dome—we haven’t just come out here to fight a war. We’re here to stay, if we can do a little more spreading out before the Lizards try and drop the hammer on us.”

“All sorts of good things here,” Stone agreed. “The Race doesn’t have any real notion of how many goodies there are, either. From what they say, the solar systems in their Empire are tidier places than ours.”

“Smaller suns,” Mickey Flynn said. “Fewer leftover chunks of rock after their planets formed.” An eyebrow quirked. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“If they give us the time we need, it won’t be missing them,” Johnson said. Brigadier General Healey gave him a nasty look. “Don’t violate security,” he snapped.

And that did it. Johnson lost his temper. “Christ on a crutch, sir, give it a rest,” he said. “I’m not on the radio to the Race, and we all know what’s going on.”

“You’re insubordinate,” Healey said.

“Maybe I am—and maybe it’s about time, too,” Johnson retorted. “Somebody’s needed to tell you to go piss up a rope ever since before we left Earth orbit. If I’m the one stuck belling the cat, okay, I am, that’s all.”

“You have been nothing but trouble since you came aboard this spacecraft,” Healey said. “I should have put you out the air lock then.”

“Oh, he has his uses, sir,” Flynn said. “After all, whose money would we take in card games if he weren’t here?”

That was slander; Johnson more than held his own. But it distracted the commandant—and Johnson, too. Stone continued the work of changing the subject: “If the Lizards are angry enough at us now, what we might be able to do in a few years doesn’t matter. Remember the
Hermann Göring.”
The
Reich’s
imitation of the
Lewis and Clark
had been blown to atoms during the last round of fighting. Stone went on, “So why the devil
are
the Lizards ticked at us?”

Brigadier General Healey shook his head. “I do not have that information. I already told you I don’t have it. I wish to God I did.” Every inch of him screamed that he thought he was entitled to the information, and that he blamed people back on Earth for withholding it from him. “The Lizards are playing it close to their scales, too, dammit. You’d think they’d be screaming from the housetops if they caught us doing something we weren’t supposed to, but they aren’t.”

Thoughtfully, Stone said, “Sounds like they will fight if they’re pushed, but they don’t want to do it unless they decide they have to.”

“But they’re pushing us,” Healey said. “That’s what makes this such a confusing mess.”

“Have they given us any demands?” Flynn asked.

“Nothing I’ve heard.” The commandant sounded all the more frustrated. “And I should hear, God damn it to hell. How am I supposed to do my job if I don’t know what the devil is going on?”

“What it sounds like is, if anybody admitted what the fuss was about, everything would go up in smoke right then and there,” Johnson said.

Brigadier General Healey nodded as if he and Johnson hadn’t had words a few minutes before. The riddle facing him was a bigger source of irritation than even his number-three pilot. “You’re right—and that doesn’t make any sense, either.”

“Nothing makes sense if you don’t know the answers,” Mickey Flynn observed. “The people who do know the answers must have, or think they have, good reason to make sure nobody else finds out. We call them senseless. They call us ignorant. Odds are, we and they are both right.”

“They’d better not be senseless, or all of us—and an awful lot of people and Lizards back on Earth—are in a ton of trouble,” Johnson said.

“This is true,” Flynn agreed. “On the other hand, I could refer you to the late Doctor Ernst Kaltenbrunner—if he weren’t late, of course. He was senseless, and now he is and will remain permanently senseless.”

Johnson grimaced and protested, “Yeah, but the Nazis have been off the deep end ever since Hitler started slaughtering Jews. We aren’t like that. We’ve always played straight.” He hesitated. “We played straight with everything I know about except the
Lewis and Clark,
as a matter of fact.”

“It’s not us,” Healey said. “I have been assured of that. Had it been us, the Race has had plenty of chances to take us off the board.”