The Stone Dogs (57 page)

Hans came over. "Thank you again, Merarch," he said, and gave her the full bow, hands over eyes. There was a ripple as the room followed suit.

"No problem, Hans," she said, holding up a hand. "I know the difference between goin' through the motions and really tryin'."

Which had helped her considerably, and this was an important career stop. "If there's ever any trouble, feel free to ask fo' help."

"Pretty weddin'," Jolene said, with a sigh.

Yolande yawned and stretched, wiggling her shoulders against the pleasant jasmine-scented smoothness of the sheets and looking up through the ceiling of her bedroom at the silver-bright circle of mirror in the sky. It kept the night moodily half-lit, but not enough to dim the stars away from its circle.

Like a moon,
she thought. One perfect and un-stained, the first fresh idea of a moon dropped pure and untouched from the mind of a god.
We did that.
That had been the first; the second was down south, put up just last year, wanning the frozen water and carbon dioxide of the south pole. It had already made a difference to the atmosphere, although you needed instruments to detect it. They were the biggest constructs yet made by humans, although gossamer-thin.

"Yo' saw mo' of it," she said. "Everythin' go nice?"

"Beautiful singing," Jolene said from the foot of the bed.

"They've got a really nice choir. Good fiddler, too, had fun dancin' befo' yo' arrived."

"Sorry to drag yo' away fo' nothin'," Yolande replied. Nikki had charmed Decurion Kang into taking him out with the ghouloons on a carefully edited training patrol for the rest of the day, and his mother into allowing it. Kang had confessed that he was irresistibly reminded of a younger brother, back on Earth…

"Oh, that was the fun part," Jolene said, and laughed. "I don't know these here folks well enough to fit in at a feast. Incidentally, think that nice Mastah Kang had an eye on me."

Yolande turned a critical eye on the serf. "Yo' lost weight on the trip out," she said. "It suits."

Jolene touched her stomach. "Does, doesn't it. Only good thing about not bein' able to eat." She had never been able to handle zero-G.

"Shall I lend yo' to him, then?"
That
was not something a junior officer would feel free to ask of a Merarch, frontier informality or no.

"Mmmm. Maybe in a while, Mistis." She sighed again, looking up through the bubble ceiling herself.

"Pretty."

"Jolene." She looked around. "Why did yo' never marry, yo'self?"

"Oh… wanted to travel around, Mistis. See space, especial, even if it makes me sick." Not easy; plenty of serfs were assigned to space, but that was with the military or the Combines. Jolene had ample intelligence, but had been far too expensive for such buyers. "That's difficult. Iff'n I got tied down too hard, yo'd have moved me out of personal service. I've got my Marybeth, anyhows." A year younger than Nikki; Yolande suspected Teller was the father, but it wasn't particularly important. "Mastah Nikki's out like a light. Not surprisin', after tearin' about like he does… That boy, he must have fusion power somewheres! Settled Marybeth in down by my quarters, too." A frown. "Yo' know, I was thinkin'… Folk there at the church, they say Marya goes regular. Didn't know her to be that religious, back to home, Mistis."

"People change," Yolande said, yawning again.

She was tired, but it was the pleasant fatigue of keeping up with two high-energy adolescents, not the nagging brain-tiredness of days spent fighting administrative problems.

With a wry smile, she thought of enemy accounts she had read that depicted the Domination as a smooth well-oiled machine moving in perfect coordination. If they only knew.
Thank the
Yankees for inventing the computer, otherwise the
clerks would
have locked us in
rigor mortis,
like a fossilized dinosaur
. She put work out of her mind; barring emergencies, that could wait until Monday. It was a relief to have only household matters to concern her.

"It's been, what, better than a year since yo' saw Marya. She's gotten a little moodier here,'s' much as I've had time to notice.

Good to have an outside interest." The Draka linked the fingers of both hands around a knee. "What I was thinkin' of, was those two pretties enjoyin' they weddin' night."

Jolene tossed back hair silvered by the mirrorlight; her brass-colored eyes were startling against the shadowed ebony of her skin. "Well, that we two can do somethin' about, eh, Mistis?"

SPIN HABITAT SEVEN

CENTRAL BELT

BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF MARS AND JUPITER

DECEMBER 28, 1991

"Aw, dad!"

Frederick Lefarge looked over at his wife. She was mixing them martinis, at the cabinet on the other side of the living room. Dinner was a pleasant memory and a lingering smell of guinea-chile and avocado salad—
God, what did I do to deserve a
good cook, on top of looks and brains?
—and he wanted that drink, and his feet up, and more quiet than two teenaged daughters promised. On the other hand…

He glanced sternly at Janet and Iris. "Homework done?" he said.
Gods, they're getting to be young
women,
he thought.

Haltertops,
yet. And those fashionable hip-huggers… the damned things looked as if they had been
sprayed
on.

"Yeah," Janet said. Well, her marks had been excellent, particularly the math. It looked as if there was going to be at least one spacer in the family, if this kept up. Iris nodded. Her current fancy was composing. Well, at least she was still working at that, not like the other fads.

"It's a nice group," Cindy said. She finished shaking the cocktail pitcher, broke it open deftly and filled the chilled martini glasses. "From school, and a bunch over from Habitat Three. You know, the Martins and the Merkowitz kids?"

Lefarge pushed his chair back. "All right," he said, glancing at the viewer; it was set on landscape, with a time-readout down near the lower righthand corner. "But be back by 0100, latest, or I'll shut the airlock on you for a week, understand?"

"Thanks, dad!" Janet gave him a quick hug.

"We'll be back on time, daddy." Iris kissed his cheek.
"And
they're playing one of my dance tunes
." she whispered into his ear, giggling.

He sighed as he watched them fling themselves down the hall with an effortless feet-off-the-ground twist; they adjusted to the varying gravity of the habitat's shell-decks the way he and Marya had to the streets of New York.

"Next thing you know, I'll be beating off boyfriends with a club," he grumbled, accepting the drink. "Ah, nice and dry."

Cindy put hers on the table and went behind the chair. Her fingers probed at his neck. "Rock. Don't worry, they're sensible girls, and we've got a nice family town here." He closed his eyes and rolled his head slightly as she kneaded the taut musics. "At least we don't have to worry about jüviegroups and trashing or having them go into orbit over Ironbelly Bootstomper bands,"

she continued.

Lefarge shuddered. "No, thank God. Sometimes I think the spirit that made America great hasn't died—just emigrated."

Cindy laughed and leaned over him; he felt a sudden sharp pain at the base of his cropped hair. "Hey, cut that out!"

She held an almost-invisible something close to his eye on the tip of one finger: a gray hair.

"You don't have enough of these to be an old fogey yet, honey,"

she said, and kissed him upside-down. Her face sobered.

"Something's really bothering you, isn't it?"

He reached up to run his hand through her hair, streaked with silver against the mahogany color, shining and resilient.

"You're too old to be so indecently beautiful," he murmured.

Then: "I have to take a trip back dirtside," he said.

"Oh. That chair big enough for two?"

She picked up her drink and settled in against him, curving into the arm he laid about her shoulders. The silk of her blouse and skirt rustled, and he smelled a pleasant clean odor of shampoo and perfume and Cindy. "Uncle Nate?"

"He's sharp as ever, but not getting any younger," Lefarge said grudgingly. "You know how it is, anyone in his position so long makes enemies." The executive positions two or three steps down from the top in an agency like the OSS were coveted prizes. Not high enough to be political appointments, but they set policy.

"Those who want his job, if nothing else; the problem is they're all disasters waiting to happen."

He paused to take another sip of the martini. "I have to blather to a couple of select committees. On top of that, Nate's afraid the new people in charge over in Archona are foxy enough to let up the pressure. That von Shrakenberg's a cunning devil; he knows how quickly some of us will go to sleep if they're not prodded." A frown. "I don't like it, when the Snakes get quiet.

They're planning something. Maybe not now, maybe in a decade; something big."

Cindy shivered against him, and he held her closer. "No more raids, at least," she said. "Oh God, honey, I was so frightened."

And went straight from your office to your emergency
station and had the rest of them singsonging
a
nd playing
bridge,
he thought with a rush of warmth.
Jesus H. Christ, I'm a
lucky man.
Grimly:
And we took out a major warship, too. They
may be pulling back their fingers because we singed them,

"There's something else, isn't there?" she went on.

"Witch." He sighed. "In the latest courier package from Uncle Nate." The Project was on the AI-3 distribution list; this was as secure an OSS station as anywhere in the Alliance, if only because so little went out. "They're in contact with Marya again."

"Bad?" Cindy said softly.

"No worse than before. That Ingolfsson creature's spawn…"

He turned his head aside for a moment, then continued.

"Anyway, Marya's been taken to their main Martian settlement.

Working in household accounts, but even better, she's made some social contacts with the HQ office workers… just rumor, gossip, but priceless stuff. Contact's a priest; Christ, it's dangerous, though!" More softly: "And I miss her, sweet, I really do."

"Mmmmh. So do I. She was always like a big sister to me…"

The diskplayer came on, with a quiet Baroque piece that Cindy must have selected beforehand. The lights dimmed, turning the homey familiarity of the living room into romantic gloom, and a new scene played on the viewer. He recognized that beach, with the full moon over the Pacific and the swaying palms. Surf hissed gently…

"Why, Mrs. Lefarge," he said, looking down at her face. She grinned. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that a respectable matron was trying to seduce her husband again."

She wiggled into his lap. "Why, Mr. Lefarge," she whispered, twining her arms around his neck. "Why do you think I was so eager to get the girls out of the house?" She nibbled at his ear.

"And if
you
are too young to be a fogey,
I'm
too young to be a matron. So there."

The Protracted Conflict has a brutal simplicity; the Final War will start the moment either side feels it can attack without risking unacceptable losses. The Draka definition of "acceptable cost" is much higher than the Alliance's. These two facts have driven most human endeavor since 1945, aeronautics included.

Average speeds of 200 mph in 1930 increased to about 400 mph by the beginning of the Eurasian War. By 1942 prop-engine fighters had reached their maximum of around 480 mph, but the first swept-wing turbojets were already in service, and by 1946 maximum speeds of 620 mph were common. German rocket-boosted experimental aircraft had reached nearly twice the speed of sound, providing invaluable aerodynamic information to both the Domination and the Alliance. They had also launched research into high-altitude rockets, and rocket-boosted ramjet unmanned vehicles.

After the Eurasian War ended in a blaze of nuclear fire, the contending powers were left with weapons of unprecedented lethality, and inadequate delivery systems. For strategic purposes, what was needed was a means of striking deep into the continental heartlands of the enemy with little or no chance of interception; and the primitive fission and fusion bombs of the 1945-1955 era were massive and clumsy to boot. Jet bombers were useful for tactical purposes, but were too limited in range and easy to intercept to be really satisfactory for delivering the new "sunbombs." Rockets had abundant speed, but inadequate payload. The solution both sides developed was the ramjet which was light theoretically simple, and had excellent performance in the Mach 2 to Mach 7 envelopes. Desperate need drove both sides to solve the incredibly complex materials and engineering problems; by the early 1950s, unmanned ramjet missiles following high-suborbital trajectories at speeds of up to 4,000

mph were in production on both sides.

These use-once missies pressed the materials technology of the day to its limits; the Alliance had a lead in precision-formed refractory alloys, and used it to produce the first reusable, manned ramjet craft. The Draka "leapfrogged" with fiber-matrix composites and high-strength ceramics; the Alliance in turn used its superior computers to successfully model supersonic airflows and achieve scramjets (supersonic-combustion ramjets) in the late 1950s. Combined with liquid hydrogen fuel/ coolant and pure-rocket boost this gave the Alliance the ultimate "high ground" of orbital capacity. As might be expected, espionage and frantic catch-up prevented either side from gaining the last crucial edge needed for assured survival. Once out of Earth's gravity well, it was clear that the answer to the high-atmospheric missile was orbital weapons and sensors; these in turn suggested massive counter-measures. Space-based manufacturing and energy were obviously necessary, even after laser-launch and mass drivers became available in the 1960s; this made Luna an indispensable source of raw materials. Once orbital and lunar stations were in place, expeditions to deep space became relatively easy, and neither side could allow the other to monopolize either the material treasures or the knowledge to be found there, nuclear-pulse engines opened translunar space, and beyond the orbit of the moon the Protracted Struggle could and did flicker into active clashes.