Wolf Among the Stars-ARC

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-automatic 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.