Wolf Among the Stars-ARC

by Steve White

  WOLF

  AMONG THE

  STARS-ARC

  BY

  STEVE WHITE

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  BAEN BOOKS

  BY

  STEVEWHITE

  ***

  Blood of the Heroes

  The Prometheus Project

  Demon's Gate

  Forge of the Titans

  Eagle Against the Stars

  Prince of Sunset

  The Disinherited

  Legacy

  Debt of Ages

  The Starfire Series:

  By David Weber & Steve White

  Crusade

  In Death Ground

  The Stars At War

  Insurrection

  The Shiva Option

  The Stars at War II

  By Steve White & Shirley Meier

  Exodus

  By Steve White & Chuck Gannon

  Extremis

  WOLF AMONG THE STARS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book

  are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Steve White

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4516-3754-0

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First printing, November 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: t/k

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nathan Arnstein’s life was not an especially long one, but it spanned a great deal of eventful history, some of which he himself made.

  He was born in 2011, in what still called itself the United States of America, although it had only a few years to go before the Earth First Party would seize power and rob that name of all it had once meant.

  He was nine years old when the Lokaron ships appeared in Earth’s sky and began dictating trade treaties. His father, a naval officer sidelined by lack of Party connections (and under constant suspicion for being Jewish), was a sympathizer of the Eaglemen, the secret organization of American junior military officers dedicated to the restoration of the Constitution and the expulsion of the extraterrestrials.

  He was nineteen years old in the epochal year when the Earth First Party was

  overthrown, Earth narrowly saved from devastation at the hands of the Lokaron gevah of Gev-Rogov, and the Confederated Nations of Earth formed.

  He was twenty-eight, and a junior officer in the United States component of the new CNE Navy, when he distinguished himself in action against the Islamic jihadist diehards in the last flareup of resistance to the new order.

  He was thirty-seven, and one of the rising stars of the CNEN, when he was sent to the planet Harath-Asor to study state-of-the-art galactic military technology at the feet of humanity’s Lokaron allies of Gev-Harath. He learned his lessons well, and later thought of applications of them that had never occurred to the self-satisfied Lokaron military establishments.

  He was fifty-five, and an admiral, when he settled an old score at the Battle of Upsilon Lupus, annihilating the fleet of Gev-Rogov and forcing a Lokaron power—for the first time in the history of the galaxy‘s dominant race—to sit across a peace table from non-Lokaron. And nothing would ever be the same again.

  He was fifty-nine, and nearing retirement, when he was named to the prestigious post of director of the CNEN Academy.

  He was sixty-three when his chief of staff found him with his brains blown out.

  “Is the director in, Midori?”

  “Yes, Captain Roark. Just one moment, please.” The secretary turned aside to make the adjustments necessary to admit even those who, like the chief of staff, had automatic access to Admiral Arnstein’s inner sanctum. It gave Andrew Roark a moment to glance through the transparency behind her desk. It was a view that would have been breathtaking even if one hadn’t known its history.

  The Academy was perched on the edge of the rim wall of a vast impact crater, with North America’s Rocky Mountains circling it in the distance. The crater was, beyond comparison, the youngest of its kind on Earth, and the elements had not had time to smooth out its brutal contours. Only four and a half decades ago, in fact, part of the Rockies had stood here: Cheyenne Mountain, in whose depths the headquarters of the United States military had been buried, safe even from nuclear bombs. But not safe from a deep-penetrator kinetic weapon like the nickel-iron asteroid that the Lokaron of Gev-Rogov had accelerated, using a titanic mass driver, into a high-velocity trajectory that had intersected Earth at this point just before dawn on a never-to-be-forgotten autumn day in 2030, decapitating Earth’s defenses and inflicting ecological wounds that had taken years to heal. It had been meant to be a mere preliminary to the saturation neutron-bombing that would have left the planet a lifeless tabula rasa to be reseeded for Rogovon colonization. That had been stopped by the Lokaron of Gev-Harath, and by two humans who had nearly died doing it.

  Everyone knew all this. But Andrew Roark knew it better than most, for those two humans, Ben Roark and Katy Doyle, had given birth to him four years later.

  Afterward, the Confederated Nations of Earth had placed its space-navy academy here, using Lokaron nanotechnology to sculpt the rim wall into terraces and buildings in an architectural style incorporating all of mankind’s major traditions, looking out over the crater’s floor of congealed magma. Those who studied here could never for a moment forget their service’s reason for existence, which could be distilled into two words: never again.

  “You can go in, Captain,” said the secretary, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Thanks.” He proceeded through the door to her left and into a short corridor. He had long since ceased to notice the slight tingle as he stepped through the invisible curtain of stationary guardian nanobots. The security wasn’t excessive, for the Director was a far more important individual than the commandants of the service academies of the last century had been. In the CNEN, his authority extended to a wide range of advanced training functions in many locales, including the hyper-prestigious Strategic College, through which the elite of the Navy’s leadership must pass.

  Andrew came to the final door, which slid open as it sensed his genetic signature. The director’s private office was a spacious one, understatedly elegant, the walls hung with honors. A shelf to the right bore models of ships he had commanded, including CNS Revenge, his appropriately named flagship at Upsilon Lupus. To the left was a holo-display tank that would have done credit to a capital ship’s bridge. Behind the expansive desk, a wide transparency gave an unequaled view of the crater, including the pylon that rose at its exact center, inscribed with the names of those—worthy and otherwise—who had died in the Cheyenne Mountain strike.

  Andrew Roark had seen the office a thousand times. Its familiarity explained why a detectable fraction of a second passed before that which was behind the desk registered on his brain, despite the stench of death that immediately hit his nostrils.

  Admiral Arnstein still had a pistol clenched in his hand—a standard M-3 gauss weapon, Andrew automatically noted. It used an electromagnetic pulse (not energetic enough to have set off the alarm system) to accelerate a high-density 3mm bullet to a muzzle velocity of 2,000 meters per second with a crack as it broke the sound barrier (not loud enough to have penetrated the soundproofing of the multiple doors). It had a full-automat
ic capability, but it appeared only one shot had been fired; Roark now saw the hole, with a radiating pattern of cracks, where it had struck the right-hand wall. Unlike the needlelike metal slivers fired by civilian gauss weapons, such a projectile at such a velocity resulted in massive hydrostatic overpressure as it passed through a human head, causing the brain to explode outward, blowing out the top of the skull. Admiral Arnstein was slumped face down on the desk, and Roark was looking directly into such a cavity. There was blood and fallen brain tissue everywhere around the body; some of it had stuck to the ceiling.

  Modern medicine, drawing on Lokaron technology, could perform what would have been thought miracles of tissue and organ regeneration only half a century before. But nothing could be done about a destroyed brain. The admiral could, of course, be cloned. But the clone would not be the man under whom Andrew had served at Upsilon Lupus; it would be another man with identical genetic makeup, doomed to early aging and death as a result of having been produced from postembryonic cells taken from an adult body. Such use of cloning was interdicted by both law and custom.

  All this flashed through Andrew’s mind in a second, before the onset of nausea brought him out of shock. He sternly clamped his jaw shut and said “No!” to his stomach. Then he raised his left arm and spoke into his wrist communicator in a voice whose steadiness surprised him. “This is Captain Roark. Security to the director’s office!” Then he stumbled forward, reminding himself not to touch anything. The scene must be left scrupulously undisturbed for the investigators.

  He walked gingerly around the desk, looking for a suicide note. There was none. But a little plastic case of the kind used to hold datachips caught his eye. He looked more closely at it: it was marked with a tiny black symbol . . . and, for the second time since entering the office, he froze into immobility. There could be no mistake: it was a silhouette of a dog . . . or, more likely, a wolf.

  For a few seconds, he thought very hard.

  He heard a commotion outside. He reached a decision. He scooped up the case, put it in his pocket barely in time, then smoothed out his features and turned to face the security detail.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As far back as the turn of the century, with even the youngest of the World War II veterans nearing their eighties, Arlington National Cemetery had been growing overcrowded. Later, new ground had become available after the ruling Earth First Party’s ceremonial razing of the adjacent Pentagon. But that ground, too’ had filled up, and by now it was a standing joke that one had to be a general or an admiral to get in.

  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.