Homeward Bound (56 page)

“Which means trouble,” the fleetlord muttered. Like the 37th Emperor Risson, he vastly preferred peace. Unlike his sovereign, he’d seen war and its aftermath at first hand, not just as signals sent across the light-years. More war now would be dreadful—but more war later might be worse.

One of his eye turrets swung toward the ceiling. Somewhere up there, out past all the stories above him, the Tosevite starship spun through space. When the conquest fleet first came to Tosev 3, the Big Uglies hadn’t been able to fly out of their stratosphere. Two generations before that, they’d had no powered flight at all. And now they were here.

Their nuclear weapons were here, too. If it was possible to keep the wild Big Uglies on that ship from finding out the Race had gone to war against the United States, that might save Home some nasty punishment. Or, on the other hand, it might not. Something might go wrong, in which case the starship would strike the Race’s home planet. The Big Uglies might launch other starships, too. For that matter, they might already have launched them. There was one of Atvar’s nightmares.

Signals flew faster than ships between the stars. That had been true ever since the Race first sent a probe to the Rabotevs’ system, and remained true today. Atvar hoped he would have heard if more Tosevite ships were on the way. He hoped, but he wasn’t sure. The Race could keep the American starship here from knowing an attack order had gone out. Back in the Tosevite system, the Big Uglies might be able to keep the Race from learning they’d launched ships. Because they’d been cheating one another for as long as they’d been more or less civilized, they were more practiced at all forms of trickery than the Race was.

And what was going on in
their
physics laboratories? How long before abstract experiments turned into routine engineering? Could the Big Uglies turn these experiments into engineering at all? Could anyone?

We’ll find out,
Atvar thought. He laughed. Before leaving for Tosev 3, he’d been used to knowing how things worked, what everything’s place was—and everyone’s, too. It wasn’t like that any more. It never would be again, not till the last Big Uglies had been firmly incorporated into the Empire—and maybe not even then.

Atvar made the negative gesture. One other possibility could also bring back order. It might return when the last Big Uglies died. It might—if the Tosevites didn’t take the Race (to say nothing of the Rabotevs and Hallessi) down with them.

They would do their best. The fleetlord was sure of that. How good their best might be . . . As Atvar did so often in his dealings with the Big Uglies, he trembled between hope and fear. More often than not, the Race’s hopes about Tosev 3 had proved unjustified. The Race’s fears . . .

He wished that hadn’t occurred to him.

Karen Yeager wondered why Major Coffey had called all the Americans on the surface of Home to his room. He’d never done that before. He was the expert here on matters military. If he had something to say, he usually said it to Karen’s father-in-law. What was so important that everyone needed to hear it?

At least Kassquit wasn’t here. Karen had half wondered if she would be. In that case, Frank Coffey wouldn’t have been talking about military affairs, but about his own. Could he have been foolish enough to ask Kassquit to marry him? People far from home did strange things, and no one had ever been farther from home than the people who’d flown on the
Admiral Peary.
Even so—

“People, we have a problem.” Coffey’s words cut across Karen’s thoughts. The major paused to check the antibugging gadgets, then nodded to himself. He went on, “The Lizards have come up with something sneaky.” He went on to explain how the Race could order war to start back on Earth without leaving the humans on and orbiting Home any the wiser.

Though the room was warm—what rooms on Home weren’t warm, except the ones that were downright hot?—ice walked up Karen’s back. “They can’t do that!” she exclaimed. She felt foolish the moment the words were out of her mouth. The Lizards damn well
could
do that, which was exactly the problem.

“What do we do about it?” Linda de la Rosa asked.

Sure enough, that was the real question. “Whatever we do is risky,” Sam Yeager said. “If we sit tight, the Lizards may get away with their scheme. If we don’t, we let them know we’re tapping their phone lines. They may not like that at all.”

“What can they do? Throw us off the planet?” Karen asked. “Even if they do, how are we worse off?”

“We have to make sure they don’t order their colonists to sucker-punch the United States without our knowing it,” Frank Coffey said.

“It would be nice if they didn’t order the colonists to sucker-punch the United States even if we do know about it,” Tom de la Rosa said. Karen had a devil of a time disagreeing with that.

Melanie Blanchard said, “I don’t see how we can stop them from sending the order secretly. All they have to do is transmit from a ship that’s gone outside this solar system. They’d have the angle on any detectors we could put out.”

That held the unpleasant ring of truth. Jonathan said, “All things considered, we’re probably lucky they didn’t think of this sooner. They haven’t had to worry about these kinds of problems for a long, long time. They’re a little slow on the uptake.”

“So what do we do?” Sam Yeager asked. “We let them know we know what they’ve got in mind?”

“That would show them our electronics are better than theirs,” Coffey said. “It might make them think twice about taking us on. Who knows how far we’ve come since the
Admiral Peary
left, and how far we will have come by the time their signal gets to Earth?”

“We might make them more eager to jump us, though, to make sure they don’t fall further behind,” Tom said. “From what you told us, the Emperor and Atvar were talking about that.”

“And what are these experiments they were talking about?” Karen asked. “It sounds like they’re trying to catch up with some sort of discovery that got made on Earth a while ago. Do we know anything about that?”

Nobody answered, not right away. At last, Major Coffey said, “People back on Earth may not have transmitted anything about it to us, just to make sure the Lizards didn’t intercept . . . whatever it is.”

That made a fair amount of sense. It also argued that the discovery, whatever it was, was important. Jonathan said, “The Lizards must have spotted it on their own, then. Has the
Admiral Peary
picked up anything that would give us a clue?”

“There’s a lot of electronic traffic coming from Earth to Home—an awful lot,” Coffey said. “We’re the Race’s number-one interest right now. There’s more than our starship can keep up with. This bit might have slipped through without even being noticed—or it might have been encrypted. We haven’t broken all the Lizards’ algorithms, not by a long shot.”

“What kind of search can we run?” Sam Yeager held up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t need to know right now. But whatever they can do on the ship, they ought to start doing it. The more we know, the better off we’ll be.”

“Maybe we can shame the Lizards into behaving,” Linda said. Then she laughed. “I know—don’t hold my breath.”

“I’ll try. It’s one more weapon. What’s that line? Conscience is the still, small voice that tells you someone may be watching,” Sam said. “The other thing the ship has to do is send a warning back to the States that there might be a surprise attack. After Pearl Harbor and the strike against the colonization fleet, Earth has seen too much of that kind of thing.”

Major Coffey stirred, but didn’t say anything. More than a few people in the military still felt the strike against the colonization fleet had been legitimate because the United States carried it out. Frank Coffey had never shown any signs of being one of those officers—never till now. He probably still deserved the benefit of the doubt.

“Are we agreed, then?” Sam Yeager asked. “I will protest to Atvar and the Emperor and anyone else who’ll listen. I’ll let them know we’re sending back a warning, so they won’t catch us napping.”

“They’ll deny everything,” Jonathan predicted.

“We would,” Tom de la Rosa said. “They may not even bother— they haven’t had as much practice at being hypocrites as we have. Any which way, though, the more complicated we make their lives, the better.”

“Amen,” Karen said. Several other people nodded.

“All right, then. We’ll try it like that.” Sam Yeager shook his head. “I wish I were talking about getting my car to start, not rolling the dice for everybody on the planet—for everybody on four planets.”

“You’re the one the Lizards wanted when the Doctor didn’t wake up,” Karen said. “If they won’t listen to you, they won’t listen to anybody.”

Her father-in-law nodded, not altogether cheerfully. “That’s what I’m afraid of—that they won’t listen to anybody. Well, we’ll find out.” On that note, the meeting broke up.

“Happy day,” Jonathan said as the Americans filed out of Frank Coffey’s room.

“Uh-huh.” Karen felt numb, drained. “I wonder just how much trouble there’s going to be.” She looked around, as if expecting the hotel corridors to go up in a radioactive cloud any minute now. That had always been possible, though they’d all done their best not to think about it. Now it felt appallingly probable.

“If anybody can get us out of it, Dad’s the one,” Jonathan said. “You were right about that.” He plainly meant it. At a moment like this, he didn’t waste time on jealousy of his father, the way he often did. Even when jealous, though, he didn’t try to tear down his father’s abilities; he only wished his own measured up to them.

“We’ll see.” Karen did her best to look on the bright side of things, if there was one. “It sounds like a lot’s been going on back on Earth that we don’t know much about. I do wonder what those experiments the Lizards were talking about mean.”

Jonathan waved her to silence. She bit down on the inside of her lower lip, hard enough to hurt. She’d let her mouth run away with her. The Race was bound to be bugging the corridors. The Americans didn’t even try trolling for eavesdropping devices there; the job was too big.

“They’ll know we know soon enough,” she said.

“Oh, yeah.” Jonathan didn’t argue with that. “And we’ll never get a nickel’s worth of useful intelligence by tapping the phones again.” He shrugged. “What can you do? Sometimes that stuff is useless if you don’t cash it in.”

Lunch in the refectory was . . . interesting. Kassquit knew the Americans had gathered, and wanted to know why. Nobody wanted to tell her. Her face never showed anything much. Even so, Karen had no trouble telling she was getting angry. “Why will you not let me know what you talked about?” she demanded of all of them—and of Frank Coffey in particular.

Like so many lovers through the eons, she assumed her beloved would tell her everything because they were lovers. Karen had wondered about that herself. But Coffey said what he had to say: “I am sorry, but this was private business for us. When we decide to talk about it with the Race, we will.”

“But I am not a member of the Race. You of all males ought to know that,” Kassquit said pointedly.

“You are a citizen of the Empire,” Coffey said. “That is what I meant. We Americans often think of the Empire as belonging only to the Race. I realize that is wrong, but it is our first approximation.”

“I am also a member of the Empire’s team of negotiators,” Kassquit pointed out. “If anyone on Home is entitled to know, I am.”

Sam Yeager made the negative gesture. “This is a matter for the fleetlord, and perhaps for the Emperor himself.”

Karen wondered if that said too much. It was enough to make Kassquit’s eyes widen in surprise: one expression she did have. “What could be so important? Our talks are not going perfectly, but they have not suffered any great crisis.”

That only proved she was out of the loop for some of the things going on around her. Karen eyed her with an almost malicious satisfaction.
You’re not as smart as you think you are. We know things you don’t.
She stopped herself just before she tacked on a couple of mental
Nyah-nyah
s.

“You will hear soon enough,” Sam said.

“Why will you not tell me now?” Kassquit asked.

“Because high officials in the Empire need to know first, as I said before,” Sam Yeager answered, more patiently than Karen would have. “They will tell you what you need to know. If they do not tell you enough, ask me. I will speak freely then. Until I have followed protocol, though . . .” He made the negative gesture.

Karen thought Kassquit would get angry at that, but she didn’t. She
was
reasonable, sometimes even when being reasonable was unreasonable. Not letting her emotions run wild probably helped her in dealing with the Race. Lizards operated differently from people; Kassquit would have been banging her head against a stone wall if she’d tried getting them to respond on her terms. But her chilly rationality was one of the things that made her seem not quite human.

Now she said, “Very well, Ambassador. I understand the point, even if I do not like it. I shall be most interested to learn what your concerns are.”

“I thank you for your patience,” Karen’s father-in-law said, letting her down easy.

In English, Tom de la Rosa said, “She’s not going to wait for Atvar and Ttomalss. She’s going to try to wheedle it out of you, Frank.” He grinned to show Coffey he didn’t mean that seriously.

“She can try,” Coffey said, also in English. “I know what I can tell her, and I know what I can’t.”

Karen eyed Kassquit. Even if she didn’t wear clothes, she probably wasn’t cut out to be a spy. Karen sighed. Life was different from the movies. Here was a naked woman on the other side, and she
didn’t
seem to be using her charms for purposes of espionage. What was the world—what were the worlds—coming to?

Kassquit stared at Ttomalss in something approaching horror. “The Big Uglies dared spy on the conversations of the Emperor himself?” She cast down her eyes at mentioning her sovereign.

Ttomalss also looked down at the floor for a moment as he made the affirmative gesture. “I am afraid that is a truth, yes. What is even more disturbing is that they were
able
to eavesdrop on the Emperor’s conversation with Fleetlord Atvar. We have had no luck listening to their private conversations.”