The Crucible of Empire (2 page)

"You mean what's
left
of Aspen," Tully said. Most of the former millionaires' playground was now in ruins, abandoned by its former owners and then plundered by the desperate Resistance. "It'll take me a whole day to get down into the valley on horseback unless I can persuade Sawyer to waste some of her precious gas to send me in a truck." He shook his head. "And even then what's left of those roads will shake your teeth out if you drive too fast."

"Sooner would be better," Kralik said. "Make the best time you can. Your ride will be waiting."

Yaut poked his head into Aille's office and the younger Jao, current governor of Earth, looked up from the flimsies he was studying. Aille's golden-brown nap was still damp from a morning swim as his ears settled into
polite-inquiry
.

"Tully is on his way," Yaut said. His fraghta's ugly face was creased in thought. He had that classic bullnecked solidity that his birth-kochan, Jithra, prided itself upon breeding. His
vai camiti
, or facial striping pattern, was pure Jithra, strong and unabashed. "He is the last."

"But in some ways, the most important," Aille said. He shoved the flimsies aside and stretched to work the kinks out of his back. "Surprising, I know, but true."

"You always understood that one better than I did," Yaut said grudgingly. He sank onto a soft pile of traditional
dehabia
blankets along the wall. The room was suitably dim as Jao eyes preferred, mimicking the less brash stars of their homeworlds, both very far away.

"I just felt from the first moment I came across him that he had a quality I wished to understand, and that understanding it would lead me to comprehend something important about his entire species," Aille said. "I am not certain, even now, that it could be put into Jao words. It is so uniquely—human."

"He was certainly difficult to train," Yaut said, "but in the end exceeded my expectations." He stared moodily into the air, his angles signifying
contemplation
in the no-nonsense Jithra bodystyle. "You should order him to stay out of those mountains, though. Lately, he's been increasingly obsessed with negotiating with the Resistance, even though his efforts in that direction are obviously hopeless. Those of their number who can see reason, already have, like Rob Wiley. I doubt that the rest of them will ever accept the inevitable and willingly make themselves of use under your rule. They will just have to die out."

Aille considered, his ears pitched forward in
careful-thought
. "I think you misjudge the situation, which admittedly is full of variables. As for Tully, he possesses a great deal of fierce energy, too much to be down here, drilling his new unit all the time. Before he fell into our hands, he was always on the move, infiltrating the next military base or unit. He never stayed in one place very long."

"A human would say—'he can't sit still for two seconds,' " Yaut put in.

Aille's ears signaled a sketchy
amusement
. He was classically trained in postures, of course, like all highly ranked Jao, but he and Yaut were old companions who had no reason to impress one another with the elegance of their movements. "That energy is directed now, put to work in our favor. What he has been doing is critical, though we can no longer spare him. After this situation is resolved, though, I intend to use him to recruit members of the Resistance to staff several official positions in our new human taif so that the group edges toward full association with the Terra's Jao taif."

Yaut sniffed dismissively. "Tully is one thing, but what is left of the Resistance up there will never be that civilized. We cannot afford the time to intensively train them, one by one, through
wrem-fa
as we did him. Those still skulking up in the mountains are hard-core ferals who have not been held to account by any authority since the Jao took this world. In fact, I doubt even their own government, before the Conquest, could have made use of them."

"The secret is—they are in agreement with us already," Aille said, "only they do not yet realize it."

"By the time they do," Yaut said, his whiskers bristling with
doubt
, "this reckless world will be a glowing cinder."

Memories of the Ekhat attack surged back over Aille. Two orbital periods ago, a fiery plasma ball launched by the Ekhat had broken through combined Jao-Terran forces to incinerate the southern area of China, resulting in at least three million dead, perhaps more. The human authorities of that area had never been able to make a full accounting.

Aille rose and prowled the length of the room, restless with memory. Just the thought of that spectacular failure made it difficult to sit still. And there was something else, too, waiting out there to make itself known. Faraway, but significant. Lately, he could feel the flow of the nascent situation increasing bit by bit. Something, somewhere, that concerned them all was about to come together. "We can never let the Ekhat get that close again."

Yaut's green-black eyes gazed steadily at him. "Then you will have to make everyone on this world of the fullest use, including the rebels. They will have to be driven out of their mountain strongholds and then forced to understand where their best interests lie," the old fraghta said, "and right now I do not feel that flow ever completing itself."

"Let us hope you are wrong," Aille said.

Caitlin Kralik and her husband, Lieutenant General Ed Kralik, reported to the office of the governor of Earth, as requested. Even though she was a member of Aille's personal service, Caitlin had not seen the young Jao in several months. She'd been traveling the east coast with her father, who was still the President of North America, overseeing the repair of the last of the infrastructure devastated in the original Jao conquest of Earth. Virginia in particular had been shamefully neglected, but at last that was being put to rights.

Even after two years of Aille's supervision, people were still wary, still did not want to believe that things had changed. Most did not understand this new partnership with their former rulers. She often had trouble believing how much things had changed herself. The absence of her abusive former Jao guard, the unlamented Banle, did more to reassure her than anything else.

"Once more into the breach," Ed murmured, as they paused before the shimmering green door-field of Aille's office.

"You aren't expecting trouble, are you?" she said, one hand resting on his broad shoulder. "Matters have been going so well, I even gave Tamt leave for the next month and she's gone down to the Mexican coast to swim. I don't think the poor thing has had a day off since she was born, but I can recall her if you think I'm going to need a bodyguard again."

"I don't think that will be necessary," Ed said, taking her hand in his and squeezing it. "I'm not really expecting a blow-up, but you never know with the Jao. No matter how smoothly things have gone lately, they are aliens. Their priorities will never be ours and we won't always understand where they're coming from."

"The directions taken by the new taif are interesting," she said as the door-field winked off, allowing them entrance. She could make out Aille's familiar
vai camiti
within. "They've finally selected a designation. They're calling it 'Terra,' so now everyone can apply their new surname, if they like."

"Makes sense," he said, "but I still don't see you taking part in official taif activities."

"That's because my father has a cow every time he thinks about how we were all just inducted, willing or not," she said and stepped into the cool dimness of the spacious office beyond.

"Your sire has acquired a bovine?" Aille said, rising from his desk.

"Um, no," she said. She was struck anew, every time they met, how tall this Pluthrak scion was, even for a Jao, with powerful limbs and that impressive classic Pluthrak
vai camiti
in the form of a solid black band across his eyes. As always, he carried himself like a prince.

"If it would please him, we could have one sent over," Aille said, his angles settled into
polite-inquisitiveness
, "though I was not aware that such creatures were highly prized in urban households."

Caitlin fought to keep a grin off her face, letting her body assume instead the Jao posture signifying
appreciation-of-intended-favor
. "That is very thoughtful," she said, "but 'having a cow' is just another of our expressions. It means—" She thought fast, trying to be circumspect. "It means he does not approve."

Aille flicked an ear at her, indicating his understanding. Benjamin Wilson Stockwell, her father, had lost two sons to the Jao, one killed in the original conquest and the other murdered on no more than a vicious whim by the former governor of Earth, Oppuk krinnu ava Narvo.

"Father does want to know when elections for the human government of North America can be held," she said, noting that the wily fraghta, Yaut, was curled up in a pile of
dehabia
blankets and studying her. "He's eager to step down and restore the democratic process."

"Not yet," Aille said, "though it feels that the moment will be soon."

She nodded, then sank into a visitor's chair. The famous Jao timesense had spoken and there was no arguing with that. Jao claimed they always knew when something would happen, not a form of prescience exactly, but something else even more mystifying, an inexplicable sense of time that was right far more than it was wrong. They had no need to depend on anything as primitive as a clock. She wondered if the devilish Ekhat had bred that into them, too, back when the aliens uplifted their species into sapience, along with their physical strength and indomitable wills.

"So why have you called us here?" Ed positioned himself behind her chair and rested his hands possessively on her shoulders. "I know it must be important to take us away from our current projects."

"One of our ships has discovered something intriguing in a distant nebula, one which bears the designation NGC 7293 for human astronomers," Aille said. "Its crew, or at least, the survivors of the crew, have been sent here for questioning and Bond analysis of the situation."

"Survivors?" Caitlin glanced up at Ed.

"Yes," Yaut said, rising. The stolid fraghta was all
repressed-excitement
to her experienced eye. "I will notify Preceptor Ronz that you are here."

The door-field winked off as Yaut approached and then Gabe Tully entered, looking rumpled and out of sorts. His hands were shoved into his pockets, his cheeks wind-chapped, and his blond hair disarrayed. "This had better be good," he muttered. "I almost had Sawyer argued down!"

Yaut ducked out, then Rafe Aguilera followed in on Tully's heels, still limping from an old war wound, but head held high. He too had embraced the opportunities provided by the new taif and now was a superintendent in the construction of Earth's newest spaceship being built here at the Pascagoula facility.

Ed held out his hand. "Rafe! I had no idea you were coming."

The two men grasped hands. Aguilera shook his head. A few more threads of silver were apparent, but otherwise Caitlin thought he looked good. "Something big is cooking," the older man said. "I can't wait to find out."

The door-field crackled and Caitlin looked over in time to see Yaut return with Preceptor Ronz, along with the old Jao veteran, Wrot, a tall Jao female with classic Narvo
vai camiti
facial striping, and three unfamiliar Jao clad in maroon trousers and harness. Though most Jao had brown nap that could vary from gold to a reddish cast, these three were surprisingly dark with nap that might have been called bay, if they'd been horses. Their black
vai camiti
were almost invisible against such a deep brown background, which she thought might be perceived as a mark of homeliness by other Jao. A distinctive facial pattern was prized above all other physical attributes.

To anyone trained in the subtleties of Jao body language, their postures were blunt and unashamedly singular. The first individual radiated
disapproval
, the second,
unease
, and the third, glaring at all of them as though in challenge, had allowed her every line and angle to settle into unadulterated
rage
.

The situation was difficult to understand, Mallu krinnu ava Krant told himself, as the elderly Preceptor herded them into the room. As though it weren't traumatic enough to lose their ship, he and those of his crew who had survived had been dispatched all the way across the galaxy to this backward planet. True, Krant was a small kochan, isolated and little regarded by such luminaries as Narvo and Pluthrak, but even a backwater like Krant deserved consideration.

The rest of his crew had been sequestered in adequate housing, but he and his top two officers, Jalta, terniary-commander, and Kaln, senior-tech, had been summoned to this meeting. The room, though comfortably dim, was infested with
humans
, as the natives of this misbegotten world were called. He'd heard about them in scattered conversations during the voyage here on a Dano ship, troublemakers and savages by all accounts, not worth the firepower it had taken to subdue them.

They were, he thought, even uglier in person than the ship's vids had led him to believe, their skin mostly naked, their faces flat, ears tiny and immobile, with not a single whisker to be seen. Their bodies were chaotic, angles completely random.