AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The officer in question, a bulldog-faced fellow whose name tag read LeMAY, didn’t keep him in suspense for long. He stabbed out a stubby forefinger and tapped Johnson in the chest, forcing him back a pace. “You have been asking questions,” he growled in a voice raspy from too many years of too many cigarettes.
“Sir! Yes, sir!” Johnson replied, as if back in Parris Island boot camp. Gus Wilhelm had warned he might get into trouble. Gus hadn’t dreamt how much trouble he might get into, or how fast. Neither had Johnson.
“You have been asking questions about things that are none of your business,” Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay said. “People whose business they are told you they were none of yours, but you kept on asking questions.” That forefinger probed again. Johnson gave back another pace. One more and he’d be backed up against the bed. LeMay strode after him. “That’s not smart, Lieutenant Colonel. Do you understand me?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” Johnson had to work to keep from shouting it out, as he would have to a drill instructor. Rather desperately, he said, “Permission to ask a question, sir?”
“No.” The lieutenant general turned even redder than he had been. “You’ve already asked too goddamn many questions, Johnson. That’s what I came here for: to tell you to button your lip and keep it buttoned. And you will do it, or you will regret it. Have you got that?”
For a moment, Johnson thought LeMay was going to haul off and belt him. If the lieutenant general tried that, he resolved, the lieutenant general would get a hell of a surprise. But LeMay mastered himself and waited for an answer. Johnson gave him the one he wanted: “Sir! Yes, sir!”
Still breathing hard, LeMay rumbled, “You’d damn well better.” He turned and stomped out of the BOQ.
“Jesus.” Glen Johnson’s legs didn’t want to hold him up. Facing his furious superior was harder than going into battle had ever been. It was as if one of his own wingmen had started shooting at him along with the Lizards. “What the hell have I stumbled over?” he muttered as he sank down onto the bed.
Whatever it was, Gus Wilhelm had been dead right: it was a lot more secret than his security clearance could handle. The United States trusted him to fly a spacecraft armed with explosive-metal missiles. What didn’t his own government trust him to know? If he tried to find out, he was history. Curtis LeMay had made that more than perfectly clear. Crazy, he thought. Absolutely goddamn crazy.
“Where to, Shiplord?” Straha’s Tosevite driver asked him as he got into the motorcar.
“Major Yeager’s, as you no doubt know already,” the ex-shiplord replied. “I have had the appointment for several days.” The driver said nothing, but started the motorcar’s engine. He put the machine in gear and rolled away from Straha’s house in the Valley.
Yeager lived in Gardena, a toponym presumably derived from the English word garden. The place did not look like a garden to Straha, though Yeager had told him fruit trees grew there before houses went up. It looked like most other sections of Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs. As for the toponym Los Angeles… Straha did not believe in angels, even in Spanish, and never would. When he imagined winged Big Uglies, he imagined them flying through the air and voiding on the heads of the Race down below. Tosevites would find that sort of thing very funny. That he might find it funny himself only meant he’d been associating with Tosevites too long.
“Wait for me,” he told the driver as the motorcar pulled to a stop in front of Major Yeager’s home. He knew it was an unnecessary order as soon as he gave it, but, though he commanded no one any more, he still liked to see things clawed down tight.
“It shall be done,” the driver said, and took out a paperbound book. The cover showed an intelligent being unlike any with which Straha was familiar. Seeing Straha’s eye turrets turn toward it, the driver remarked, “Science fiction.” In the language of the Race, it would have been a contradiction in terms. But Straha remembered that Yeager was also addicted to the stuff, and claimed it had helped give him his unmatched insight into the way the Race thought. Straha reckoned that one more proof of how strange the Big Uglies were.
“I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager said as Straha came to the door. “The two emissaries from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army will be coming in an hour or so. I hope you do not mind.”
“Would it matter if I did?” Straha asked before remembering his manners: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”
Not directly answering the exile’s bitter question, Yeager said, “I hoped you might be able to tell them useful things about how the Race conducts itself, things they could take back to their homeland with them. They will be returning soon.”
“It is possible,” Straha said. “I do not claim it is likely, but it is possible. And what shall we discuss before these other Big Uglies arrive?”
“Come into the study,” Yeager said obliquely. “Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you alcohol? Can I get you ginger?”
“Alcohol, please-rum.” Straha used an English word. “Ginger later, perhaps. I have been trying to cut back on my tasting lately.” He hadn’t succeeded, but he had been trying.
“Rum. It shall be done.” Yeager attended to it. He had some himself, with cubes of ice in it. Straha did not care for drinks so cold. After they had both sipped, the Tosevite asked, “And have you heard anything new about who might have attacked the ships of the colonization fleet?”
“I have not,” Straha answered, “and, I admit, this perplexes me. You Big Uglies are not usually so astute in such matters. The incentive here, of course, is larger than it would be in other cases.”
“Yes, I would say so,” Yeager agreed. “Whoever did it, the Race will punish-and whoever did it deserves to be punished, too. I wonder if your contacts with males-maybe even with females now, for all I know-in the occupied parts of Tosev 3 had brought you any new information.”
“As far as who the culprit may be, no,” Straha said. “I have learned that one of the ships destroyed carried most of the specialists in imperial administration. Whether the guilty party knew this in advance or not, I cannot say. My sources cannot say, either. I would be inclined to doubt it, but am without strong evidence for my doubt.”
“I think you are right. The attack came too soon for Tosevites to have known such details about the colonization fleet-I believe,” Major Yeager said. “But it is an interesting datum, and not one I had met before. I thank you, Shiplord.”
“You are welcome.” Straha drank more rum. Another minor treachery to his kind. After so many larger acts of treason, one more was hardly noticeable.
Yeager did not scorn him as a traitor, not where it showed. He did not think Yeager scorned him at any deeper level. The Big Ugly was too interested in the Race in general to do anything of that sort: one more part of his character that made him so unusual.
Before too long, the Chinese Tosevites came. Yeager introduced them as Liu Han and Liu Mei. They spoke the language of the Race fairly well, with an accent different from the American’s. Straha noted that Yeager’s son, who had paid little attention to his own arrival despite fascination with the Race, joined the group and made polite conversation for a time after the new Big Uglies arrived.
From their voices, both of them were female. Did Jonathan Yeager find one of them sexually attractive? If so, which? After a while, Straha remembered that Liu Mei
was Liu Han’s daughter. Since Jonathan was younger than Sam Yeager, that made him more likely to be interested in Liu Mei-or so Straha thought. The subtleties of Tosevite behavior patterns were lost on him, and he knew it.
Presently, Sam Yeager spoke in English: “Enough chitchat-time to talk turkey.” Straha didn’t follow the idiom, but Jonathan evidently did, for he left. Liu Mei stayed. Maybe that meant she didn’t find him attractive. Maybe it meant she put duty above desire, which Straha found admirable. Or maybe it just meant the exiled shiplord didn’t fully grasp the situation.
Liu Han said, “Shiplord, how do we best use ginger against the Race?”
“Give it to females, obviously,” Straha answered. “The more females in season, the more addled males become.”
“I understand this,” the Chinese female said-was that impatience in her voice? “How to give ginger to females over and over to keep males addled all the time?”
“Ah,” Straha said. Liu Han did see the obvious, then; the ex-shiplord hadn’t been sure. He went on, “Introducing it into food or drink would do the job, I think. They might not even know they were tasting… No, they would, because they would come into their season.”
“Truth,” Liu Han said. “This endangers those who prepare food for the Race; they would naturally be suspect.”
“Ah,” Straha said again. “Yes, that is so.” He hadn’t thought the Big Uglies would care; they hadn’t seemed to worry much about spending lives during the fighting.
“If we could get enough females and males excited at the same time, it might be worth the risk,” Liu Mei said: maybe the Tosevites, or some of them, retained their ruthlessness after all.
Jonathan Yeager came back into the study. Did the younger female’s voice draw him, as pheromones would have drawn a male of the Race? “That could get a lot of people hurt,” he observed. He might be interested in Liu Mei, but was not addled by her; Straha heard reproof in his voice.
“It is war,” Liu Mei said simply. “Here, the fighting is over. You Americans have won your freedom. In China, the struggle against the imperialism of the Race goes on. The People’s Liberation Army shall free my not-empire, too.”
