But, this time, Johnson said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” The captain’s eyes widened; Johnson had taken him by surprise. But he recovered quickly, using a gracious gesture to urge the Peregrine ’s pilot to go ahead. And Johnson did: “What are they throwing into that space station to make it grow so fast?”
“Sorry, sir, but I really don’t know a thing about that,” the captain replied. “Not my area of responsibility.”
“Okay,” Johnson said with a smile and a shrug. He got to his feet. So did the young captain, who gave him a precise salute. He did an about-face and left the interrogation room. As soon as he got outside, he scratched his head. Unless everything he’d learned about human nature over a lot of tables with poker chips on them was wrong, that bright young captain had been lying through his shiny white teeth.
Johnson scratched his head again. He could think of only one reason why the captain would lie: whatever was going on aboard the space station was secret. It had to be a pretty juicy secret, too, because the captain didn’t want him to know it was there at all. Had the fellow just said, Sorry, sir-classified, Johnson would have shrugged and gone about his business. Now, though, his bump of curiosity itched. What were they hiding, up there a few hundred miles?
Something the Lizards wouldn’t like. He didn’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out. He couldn’t see the Race breaking out in a sweat about whatever it was, though, not when they had starships from two different fleets practically blanketing the Earth.
“Security,” Johnson muttered, making it into a dirty word. And at that, he had it good. He wouldn’t have traded places with the Nazi in the upper stage of that A-45, not for all the tea in China he wouldn’t. And Russia was no better place to live than Germany, not if half of what people said was true.
Let’s hear it for the last free country in the world, he thought as he headed toward the bar to buy himself a drink to celebrate being alive. Even England was slipping these days. Johnson sadly shook his head. Who would have thought, back in the days when the limeys battled Germany singlehanded, they would have ended up sliding toward the Reich an inch at a time?
He shrugged again. Who would have thought… a whole lot of things over the past twenty years? If the United States had to get secret to stay free, he didn’t see anything in the whole wide world wrong with that.
He was on his second whiskey before the irony there struck him. By the time he’d started his third one, he’d forgotten all about it.
Atvar was glad to return to Australia. It was late summer in this hemisphere now, and the weather was fine by any standards, those of Home included. Even in Cairo, though, the weather had been better than bearable. What pleased him more was how far the colony had come since his last visit.
“Then, all we had were the starships,” he said to Pshing. “Now look! A whole thriving city! Streets, vehicles, shops, a power plant, a pipeline to the desalination center-a proper city for the Race.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant replied. “Before very much longer, it will be like any city back on Home.”
“Indeed it will,” Atvar said with an emphatic cough. “This is going according to plan. When we proceed according to plan, we can move at least as fast as the Big Uglies. And here in the center of Australia, we shall have no Big Uglies interfering with our designs, except for the occasional savage like the one I saw the last time I was here. But this is and shall forevermore be our place on Tosev 3.”
“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “My only concern is that we are, in certain areas, still vulnerable to sabotage from the Tosevites. The desalination plant and pipeline spring to mind.”
“I am assured the security plans are good,” Atvar said. “They had better be good; we have had enough painful lessons from the Big Uglies on how to construct them and where our vulnerabilities lie.”
He did not want to think about security plans and sabotage, not now. He wanted to walk along the sidewalks of the growing city, to watch males and females peacefully going about their business and getting on with their lives. Before too many generations, if all went well, they would rule the whole planet, not just a little more than half. And the Empire could get on with the job of civilizing another world.
If all went well…
Very faintly, he could smell the pheromones that meant a female somewhere upwind was ripe for mating. He tried to ignore the odor. He couldn’t quite. For one thing, it made him a little more irritable than he would have been otherwise. Even here, in the heart of the Race’s haven on Tosev 3, the Tosevite herb had come. He sighed. The troubles this world brought seemed inescapable.
All over the town, alarms began hissing. Amplified voices shouted: “Missile attack! Incoming missile attack! Take cover against missile attack!”
“No!” Atvar screeched. All around him, the colonists stared foolishly. Every moment counted, but they did not seem to realize it. They had not been trained for this. Atvar did not know which way to start himself. The missiles could be coming from any direction. If they’d been launched from one of the accursed submersible ships the Big Uglies had developed, they would be here all too soon.
Antimissile sites ringed the city, as they ringed the whole area of settlement here in Australia. But they were not infallible. They had not been infallible against even the crude missiles the Big Uglies had had during the fighting. And Tosevite technology was better now than it had been then.
Atvar turned his eye turrets toward Pshing. “If we perish here, Kirel will take vengeance the likes of which this world has never seen.”
“Of course, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing sounded so calm, Atvar envied him. The fleetlord did not want to fall here. He wanted to bring the assimilation of this world into the Empire as far forward as he could. How much the universe cared about what he wanted was liable to be another question.
Alarms kept hissing. Atvar looked around for someplace to shelter against the nuclear missile he assumed would momentarily burst overhead. He saw nowhere to hide. Turning to Pshing, he said, “I am sorry you had to come here with me as part of your duties.” If he was about to die, he didn’t want to die with the apology unspoken.
Before Pshing could answer, antimissiles roared off their launch platforms. They would do what they could, but Atvar knew some of their targets were all too likely to elude them.
Explosions to the north, to the northwest, and overhead smote his hearing diaphragms. Debris fell out of the sky, crashing down around and in the city the Race was building. A great chunk dug a hole in the ground not far from Atvar. The leg and tailstump of a male or female stuck out from under it. That leg still twitched feebly, but no one could have lived after so much metal fell on him.
Still, despite the bursts overhead, no new temporary sun blazed into life above the city. “Exalted Fleetlord, we may live!” Pshing cried.
“We may indeed,” Atvar said. “The antimissiles are performing excellently.” They were performing better than he’d imagined they could, let alone hoped. Those continuing explosions above him had to be Tosevite missiles intercepted and blasted out of the sky. Had they been anything else, one of those missiles would have ensured that he never heard anything again.
He opened his mouth to laugh exultantly. As he inhaled, all the strange, alien scents of the Australian desert went past his scent receptors and into his lung. Among them was a spicy scent he did not remember from his previous visit. He had never smelled anything like it before. It was, he thought, the most delicious odor he’d ever known, with the possible exception of a female’s pheromones. It reminded him of those pheromones, as a matter of fact.