“I thought you said the Draka were smart?”
“Ayuh. Very smart, and very, very tough. But they don’t understand us; some of them do, intellectually, but not down here.” He touched his stomach. “Our reactions don’t make sense to them, emotionally, any more than theirs do to us, and they’re . . . a little less flexible. They know it, they repeat it to themselves, but it’s . . . hard . . . for them to really believe anyone could fudge a power contest, could want to fudge one. For them, life is lived by the knife. That’s reality for them. They believe in enemies; they don’t have our compulsive need to be liked. For a Draka, if you’ve got an enemy you destroy or subjugate them; it’s their lifework. Subconsciously, they assume that everybody else is the same, only weaker and less cunning.”
Fred grinned wolfishly. “The way we assume that deep-down everyone is just plain folks, and you can always make a deal and square the differences, and the guy in the black hat either repents or gets shot five minutes before the hero’s wedding? That’s the point of these Socratic dialogues you’ve been putting us through?”
“More like Socratic monologues, I’m afraid,” Stoddard said. “Also the temptation is, when we realize somebody isn’t like that, to hate them. Which interferes with the task at hand.”
“Elucidate, as you Ivy League types would say.”
“The task of wiping every last Draka off the face of the Earth,” Stoddard said calmly, and touched a control on the surface of his desk. A printer began to hum, and pages spat out into a tray with a rapid shft-shft sound.
The younger man snorted. “Glad to hear you say it, Uncle Nate; the sweet reason was beginning to wear a little.”
The general paused with his finger on the control. “Ayuh, not so sweet, Fred.” A pause. “I grew up in a world where the Draka were a blot, not a menace. I’ve had to watch the Domination grow like a cancer, metastasizing. Watch my children”—he paused again, face like something carved out of maple—“nieces and nephews and their children grow up in the shadow of it.”
His eyes met the younger man’s. Frederick Lefarge had seen danger. Leading an incursion team ashore in Korea, to snatch a fallen reconnaissance drone from the coastal hills. Once on the surface of an asteroid, when a friend turned around and saw his hands reaching for the air controls of the skinsuit. Never quite so strongly as now, in the gentle horsey face of the New Englander. There had been Stoddards who signed the Mayflower Compact, stood at Bunker Hill, helped break the charge of the Confederate armor at Shiloh. Certain things you shouldn’t forget about Uncle Nate, he reminded himself. The memories were real, visiting the New Hampshire farmhouse, snowball fights and tree forts and sitting in the kitchen with Uncle Nat and Aunt Debra . . . and this was real, too. Every man had his god; Stoddard’s was Duty, and he would sacrifice both the Lefarges to it with an unhesitating sorrow, as he had his own son, as he would himself.
Stoddard blinked, and the moment passed. “It doesn’t pay to get emotional about it, is all. You’ll be happy to know the Ekstein problem is what I want you working on. He has to go.”
“I thought you were sorry for him, General.”
“I am. What’s that got to do with the barn chores? I’ve selected a partner for you, too; Captain Lefarge will be your backup on this one.”
“Captain Lefarge?” Marya sat bolt upright at that.
“You deserved it,” Stoddard said. He pulled a small box out of a drawer. “This job has a few compensations, anyway.
“And here’s the Ekstein file,” he continued. “All but the eyes-only portion. Marya, you covered this before you left for India.”
“Yes, sir, partially.” Marya said. “Need to know,” she added to her brother. “He’s really quite formidably good. And I attended a few lectures of his at the Institute.”
Frederick looked a question at the general.
“MIT, their Reserve Training Program.” Fred nodded; he had known that much. “We wanted her to qualify as an electronics specialist, microwafer design and comp instruction both.” Fred blinked surprise; it was not at all common to be an expert in designing computers and in the instructional sets that ran them as well.
“We put the captain through MIT under an assumed name, and fudged the physical records on her military service; enough to keep the Security Directorate from tagging her with a routine border scan.”
“You have been a close-mouthed little sister,” Fred said.
“Need—”
“I know, I know. Why do you think I never asked where you were, when you dropped out of sight for three months at a time?” The general’s last words sank home. “We’re going in?” he asked sharply.
“Certainly.” Stoddard rose and walked to the window again. “You’ll both be in for intensive briefing, starting Monday. Take the next few days off, rest. This may get messy, but we certainly can’t afford to let them keep Ekstein much longer.” The general looked aside at the black-bordered portrait of his son whose P-91 had taken a seeker missile over the Pacific. Just a skirmish, border tension . . . and a valuable indication that the Alliance electronic countermeasures were not as good as they had hoped. “Not much longer at all.”
* * *
VON SHRAKENBERG TOWNHOUSE
ARCHONA, ASSEGAI BOULEVARD
ARCHONA PROVINCE
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
NOVEMBER 21, 1972
“Gayner’s next,” the assistant said.
Senator Eric von Shrakenberg tipped his chair back from the desk. “Spare me,” he muttered, rising and pacing with a smooth graceful stride.
It was a warm summer’s afternoon, and the windows of the office were open on the sloping gardens that overlooked the city below. The von Shrakenberg townhouse was old; the core of it had been built around 1807, in the time of his great-great-grandfather, when Archona had been new. He tried to imagine it as it had been then, a vast rocky bowl on the northern edge of the great plateau; olive-green scrub, dense thickets of silverleaf trees around the springs and the Honeyhive River. A chaos of muddy streets and buildings going up by fits and starts, mansions and hovels and forced labor compounds, bars and brothels and fitting-out shops for the miners and planters, the hunters and slavers and prospectors pushing north into the great bulk of Africa.
“Why exactly do you detest Gayner, suh?” the assistant asked. She was just back from the yearly Reserve maneuvers of her legion in the Kalahari, bronzed and fit with rusty sun streaks through her black hair. “Apart from her bein’ a political enemy.”
“Why?” Eric stroked a finger over his mustache in an unconscious gesture of thought. “Because she’s totally ruthless, insanely ambitious—personally, as much as for the Race—and has no more scruples than a crocodile.”
“Yes, but what does she want? And . . . we’re idealists?”
“No, Shirley. We’re utterly unscrupulous for the greater good,” Eric said, smiling without turning. At fifty, he was a generation older than his assistant, dressed in a gentleman’s day suit: jacket and trousers of loose cream silk brocade trimmed in gold, ruffled shirt and indigo sash, boots and a conservative ruby stud in the right ear. The clothing brought out the lean shape of his body: broad shoulders tapering to slim hips. The long narrow skull bore faded blond hair worn in an officer’s crop, short at the sides and back, slightly longer on top. His eyes were gray, set over high cheekbones in a face that was handsome in a bony beak-nosed fashion.
“What does Gayner want? I suspect she doesn’t know herself; at a minimum, all this.”