by E. M. Foner
“I wouldn’t repeat this to the older Stryx, but it’s mainly a question of appearances,” Jeeves told her. “You know the old riddle about who polices the police?”
“Nobody?” Lynx ventured.
“Exactly,” Jeeves replied, allowing the self-satisfaction to show in his synthesized voice. “It’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it.”
“We also took some surveillance photographs of suspicious activities on the surface of Seventy,” Thomas said. “Lynx was very daring.”
“Photographs?” Clive asked. “I think I’ve seen some prints in a gallery, the old chemical process, right? When can we look at them?”
“It’ll be a while,” Lynx explained defensively. “I have to use up the roll before I send it for developing.”
Fourteen
The ragged line of approximately two dozen humans, male and female, stood more or less at attention in the newly designated parade grounds at Mac’s Bones. While the camping and repair business was still going tolerably well, it had never made full use of the space left in the hold after consolidating the old Raider/Trader mock-ups into cabins and losing the parking business for Paul’s old gaming squadron. When Clive brought up the subject of establishing a training camp for the new intelligence service, Joe had jumped at the opportunity. Then Clive drafted him to help with the training.
“You are the first class of EarthCent Intelligence agents attending our new training facility, so we’ll be feeling our way forward together,” Clive began his speech. He stood before the recruits at parade rest with his hands held behind his back. “You’ve all passed the same vetting and expressed your desire to serve humanity, and I want to make clear that in intelligence work, your main weapon will be your brain. That said, we’ll be starting with a course in self-defense, taught by myself and instructor Joe McAllister. The goal is not to encourage you to insert yourself into situations where you’ll need to fight for your life, but rather to give you the confidence so you won’t get backed into a corner.”
“Could I interrupt?” asked a bookish-looking middle-aged man from the line, half raising his hand.
“I haven’t gotten to the part about discipline yet, so go ahead,” Clive replied with a wry smile.
“I was recruited as an analyst, and I was told I wouldn’t need to leave Union Station,” the man said. “It’s not that I’m against learning a little self-defense, but I have a wife and four children, so I’m really not interested in a job that would take me away from the station.”
“The majority of you here today are on track to become analysts or cultural attachés,” Clive responded. “We have no intention of asking the analysts to go on missions, or of asking the field agents to stay up all night reading, for that matter. But you will eventually be paired as teams, an analyst for every field agent, and taking physical training together is an important exercise for team building.”
“How about partners?” Lynx asked, without raising her hand. “Will partners in the field share a single analyst?”
“So everybody, this is Lynx,” Clive said, beckoning her to step out from the line. “Lynx, this is everybody. Lynx was one of the first two agents recruited by EarthCent before I became the director, and she volunteered to audit the training course, even though she has already successfully completed a mission in the field. Lynx is a trader by profession, and she was assigned an artificial person as a partner by the previous management. In short, the answer to her question is that field agent teams will be partnered with a single analyst. Thank you, Lynx.”
Lynx nodded and stepped back into the line, where the man next to her immediately whispered out of the side of his mouth, “You were on a real mission? Where did you go?”
“Shh!” Lynx replied, keeping her eyes fixed on Clive. She had never gone to camp as a child and she was trying to make the most out of the experience.
“I’m not going to give you a pep talk or tell you about the importance of your work for humanity,” Clive continued. “My own service background was in the mercenaries, where money and remaining alive were the only measures of success. Most of your work in intelligence will be more akin to journalism than anything of a military nature, though unlike journalists, you’ll be reporting to a private audience. Which leads me to our most important rule. The information gathered by field agents and assessed by analysts will be kept private. No sharing with your friends or family, this is an absolute condition of employment. You’re welcome to tell everybody that you work for EarthCent Intelligence, it may help us with recruiting, but you will treat the intelligence we generate like proprietary business secrets. Any questions so far?”
“What’s that thing sneaking up behind you?” asked a young woman, one of several recruits Blythe had brought in from InstaSitter’s human alumni.
Clive spun around striking a defensive pose, but then relaxed just as quickly when he saw it was Beowulf. “This is Beowulf, and he’ll be keeping an eye on the training. He’s part Huravian, a war dog with more combat experience than most career mercenaries, though he’s been retired for some years now.”
Beowulf yawned at Clive to show he wasn’t insulted by this last comment, displaying a mouth full of formidable, if well-worn, teeth. Then he strutted forward stiffly, like an old general reviewing the troops, the arthritis in his hips giving him a military gait that impressed the recruits as he walked down their line. When he reached Lynx, the hair on his back bristled and he gave a deep-throated growl. The man next to EarthCent’s first human agent began to tremble and back away. With one lunge, Beowulf put the man on his back and pinned him to the deck.
“Hold him, boy!” Joe shouted. He charged forward towards the dog and the downed recruit, with Clive just a step behind. “What have you got?”
Beowulf growled again, his massive head just inches away from his captive’s face. The man’s features were twitching violently, almost as if he had two different faces, and when Lynx got over her initial shock, she realized she’d seen such a performance before.
“He’s a Vergallian face dancer!” she exclaimed, pointing down at the man as the recruits backed away to a safe distance. “I once saw a face dancer in a bar get drunk and lose his concentration and he got all twitchy like that.”
“Vergallian!” Joe growled, almost as deeply as Beowulf as he stood over the fallen alien. “Got any last words?”
“Get him off me, get him off me. I’ll talk, I’ll talk,” the Vergallian cried in fear. “They didn’t say anything about a monster dog.”
“Talk first and then I’ll get him off you,” Joe replied, as the Vergallian tried to avoid a descending dollop of dog drool without success. “Where’s the man you’re impersonating.”
“They have him in stasis,” the Vergallian practically sobbed out the reply. “If anything happens to me, you’ll never get him back.”
“You know that kidnapping is a capital crime in EarthCent jurisdiction?” Clive interjected, not having a clue whether or not it was true. “The Stryx don’t interfere with local law enforcement.”
“He wasn’t kidnapped,” the alien babbled. “He chose to follow a woman into the Vergallian section where he made inappropriate advances.”
“No human chooses to follow a Vergallian woman anywhere,” Joe retorted. “You’re not giving me any reasons to keep the dog from making you his dinner.”
“I have a swap card, I have a swap card,” the Vergallian shouted in panic. “Let me get it out. I swear, you’ll get your man back unharmed.”
“A swap card?” Joe asked, squatting down on his haunches to stare into the alien’s eyes. “What’s that?”
“Just get the dog off of me, I’ll explain everything,” the Vergallian moaned, beginning to froth at the mouth.
Joe exchanged glances with Clive and then reluctantly ordered the dog, “Down, boy!” Beowulf interpreted the instruction as a reason to drop his entire bulk onto the Vergallian’s chest, forcing the air from his lungs in an explosive gasp. “Come on, you know that I kn
ow that you know that’s not what I meant,” Joe reasoned with the dog. “You did a good job, now get off of him and you can have an extra beer before bedtime.”
Beowulf rolled off of the Vergallian and onto his side, taking his time in the process, then slowly rose to his feet, throwing in a down-dog stretch just to show he couldn’t be hurried. The alien, who had begun to turn white, remained on his back, but recovered his poise quickly.
“That was torture!” he exclaimed. “The Treaty of Gersh prohibits torture of captive intelligence agents who identify themselves and offer a swap card.”
“The Treaty of Gersh. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that one,” Clive remarked to Joe. “You?”
“I sort of remember a general back on Hwoult Five referring to it when he was telling me about the history of the planet,” Joe replied. “It’s nothing we’ve ever signed.”
“Everybody signs the Treaty of Gersh!” the Vergallian agent declared in alarm. “You have to! How can you run an intelligence service and not sign the Treaty of Gersh! I demand to see a whachamacallit, an attorney. Do you think I’d be stupid enough to accept this mission without the treaty protections?”
“Apparently you are,” Clive pointed out. “And you had plenty of time to figure out for yourself that we couldn’t have signed back when you were studying on Earth to pass as human.”
The Vergallian agent blanched as if Beowulf had just collapsed on his chest again. “How did you know? Wait, I have a right to remain silent!”
“Your only right is to be eaten by a dog,” Joe informed him in a steely voice. “You seem to be confusing Earth with EarthCent, we have different sets of rules. If you don’t want to talk, you can scream.”
“No, I’ll talk, I’ll talk,” the Vergallian repeated frantically. “Under the Treaty of Gersh, undercover agents impersonating an alien all carry a swap card to expedite an exchange if they get caught. Nobody would do this work otherwise.”
“Explain how the swap card works,” Clive ordered. More than anything else to this stage of the questioning, this impressed Lynx, who would have asked how the card worked, rather than ordering the spy to tell them. It showed that Clive really had experience with interrogations.
“It’s a Thark thing,” the Vergallian panted, still eyeing Beowulf in fear. “You bring the captured agent, that’s me, to any Thark embassy, and present the swap card. They’ll hold me until my side brings in your guy, then they let us both go. It’s not a big deal, they do it all the time.”
“What’s in it for the Tharks?” Lynx asked, forgetting that she wasn’t part of the interrogation scheme. The alien turned his head on the floor to face her, and he looked relieved to be talking to somebody other than the two ex-mercenaries.
“The Tharks sell the swap cards,” the Vergallian explained. “It’s sort of an insurance policy for undercover agents. They also sell ransom cards in war zones, but only the upper classes can afford them.”
Joe tapped Beowulf on the side of his nose to get the dog’s attention and pantomimed licking something. Beowulf grimaced, gave Joe a mournful look, and then dragged his rough tongue over the alien’s face from the ear to the nose.
“Torture!” the Vergallian whimpered, turning away from Lynx. “What do you want from me? If I’m not in good condition, the Tharks won’t make the trade.”
“Tell us your orders,” Joe growled. “Don’t leave anything out.”
Beowulf, who had turned his head away and licked himself a few times to get the taste of the Vergallian out of his mouth, turned back again, and allowed his tongue to loll over his lower teeth in an impressive display of pink muscle. The alien agent capitulated.
“I’ve been training for this assignment for two years,” the face dancer groaned. “I spent most of that time living on your miserable planet, learning to speak this language that sounds like children’s gibberish. I’m really an actor by training. I played human parts in some documentaries about your barbaric history. We originally planned to set up a private espionage agency, with me as the human owner, and my controller was going to feed me some juicy intelligence I could use to convince EarthCent to trust us. But just when we were getting ready to launch, you went and started your own stupid intelligence agency.”
“Then you kidnapped Tom Curran and assumed his identity,” Clive told him, having made good use of the alleged torture time to consult his tab and figure out who was missing.
“He was the right height and build,” the Vergallian explained. “I can do faces, as long as the general shape is close. It was all very last-minute. I only got assigned the mission yesterday after we grabbed your man in our section. I was going to be your star agent.”
“A mole,” Lynx provided the technical term, having finished reading the twentieth century spy novels she was originally provided as training materials.
“I think he’s telling the truth,” Clive said to Joe, setting the older man up to play bad cop to his good cop.
“Maybe,” Joe replied, absently scratching Beowulf behind the ears. “What do you say, boy?”
Beowulf went nose-to-nose with the supine Vergallian for the second time, staring down at the alien through unblinking eyes. The face dancer’s features locked in a rictus of fear. The dog almost looked disappointed when he lifted up his massive head and gave Joe the nod. The would-be mole had passed the canine polygraph test.
“You two, get him on his feet,” Clive ordered Lynx and the man who had asked the question about training for analysts. “Do you have any binders, Joe?”
“Got something better,” Joe replied, assigning Beowulf another mission. “Duct tape, boy!” The dog gave Joe his best “You owe me big,” look, before trotting off to retrieve a roll of one of Earth’s most popular manufactured goods from the jumble of tools and supplies under the back of the ice harvester.
The Vergallian was too shaken to remain on his feet and sat back down on the floor, watching fearfully for the return of the giant dog. Convinced he wasn’t going to make a sudden break for freedom, Lynx sidled up to Clive and whispered, “How about his implants? He’s seen us all, and the facility, too.”
Clive nodded and concentrated for a moment, his eyes straight ahead, but Lynx could see his lips moving slightly, typical for humans who hadn’t learned to subvoc at an early enough age. After his lips stopped moving, he was still for a longer period, listening. When the subvoced conversation was completed, he addressed the trainees.
“Everybody take ten and relax,” Clive said. “We’re confirming the mole’s story with the Tharks. If it checks out, Joe and Lynx will escort him to the Thark embassy for the exchange. I’m sure Beowulf would enjoy the exercise as well.”
“Hear that, boy?” Joe asked the dog when Beowulf arrived back with a roll of silver duct tape in his mouth. “We’re going for a W - A - L - K.” As he peeled off a two-foot-long strip of tape, the Vergallian hopefully extended his arms before him, wrists crossed. Beowulf gave a growl, and the alien immediately turned around, offering his wrists crossed behind his back instead. Joe wrapped the tape around and then added a second strip. In the meantime, Clive took Lynx aside for a private talk.
“Good thinking about the implant, we’re going to have to look into technology for dealing with implant memories of spies in the future,” Clive said. “Blythe isn’t worried about it in this case. For the Vergallian to show up here this morning means they knew we were setting up camp, and even though we had the Drazens sweep the place for bugs, they probably watched the corridor and got everybody’s faces recorded already.”
“That makes sense,” Lynx admitted. “How come you picked me to go with Joe and the dog to the Thark embassy?”
“We’re grooming you,” Clive told her bluntly. “Even the most horizontal organization needs to have somebody in charge. Blythe and I intend to do a lot of traveling and we can’t always come running to deal with every issue. At the moment, you and Thomas are numbers three and four on our depth chart.”
“I’ve never b
een groomed for anything before,” Lynx said with a happy grin. “It may take me a while to get used to it. And sorry about interrupting your interrogation. You guys are really good at it.”
“Lots of aliens end up using human mercenaries as auxiliary police departments on their outposts. Both Joe and I have a few years of experience with it.”
“Is that because mercenaries are outsiders, so there’s less politics?” Lynx conjectured.
“It’s because mercenaries are cheap temporary help without benefits,” Clive replied with a laugh. “Now, keep a hand on the Vergallian’s elbow while you’re walking him, and he’ll assume that you know what you’re doing. And don’t worry. Between Joe and the dog, there won’t be any surprises.”
“Ready to go, boy?” Joe asked the dog as Lynx came up and took a hold of the alien’s elbow.
Beowulf stretched and nodded, thinking, the sooner we leave, the sooner we’ll get back. Back from the W - A - L - K. After which you owe me a B - E - E - R.
Joe held up his right hand with his index and forefinger pressed together, scout’s honor. He wasn’t a telepath, but it wasn’t hard to guess what the dog was thinking, and Beowulf always smiled with his eyes when he spelled “beer.”
Fifteen
“You’re doing a great job, Aisha,” Kelly reassured her intern in her best professional tone. The ambassador was making her scheduled monthly visit to the office while taking Samuel out for a stroll, and praising the girl at the embassy was a different thing than encouraging her at home. “I’ve asked Donna to put in for EarthCent approval to let you keep the temporary acting junior consul job permanently.”
“Thank you,” Aisha responded, even as she struggled to interpret the new modifier to her compound title. “But can somebody be permanently temporary?”
“Yes, actually, though that’s not what I meant,” Kelly answered. “I requested that your internship be upgraded to an acting junior consul slot, but not permanently, since that would imply you couldn’t be promoted again. And congratulations, that’s a year faster than I made it.”