Wolf Among the Stars-ARC (13 page)

“What?” Andrew blinked. “You mean you’re not Rogovon Navy?”

“That’s what I was about to explain, Andrew,” said Reislon patiently. “I am associated with what you would term a revolutionary organization, whose rogue fleet is secretly based here in the outskirts of the Kogurche system, outside the jurisdiction of Gev-Rogov.”

“Yes,” Borthru exclaimed, and the translator registered bitterness. “We’re sick of Gev-Rogov being a pariah among the other
gevahon.
It isn’t just that they find us physically unappealing. It’s our centralized, authoritarian government that’s the real freak.”

Andrew found himself nodding. “Yes. The governments of the other
gevahon
are so limited that they’re barely governments at all by human standards. The ideologues who were running Earth when the Tizathon arrived never recovered from the shock!”

“You understand, then, why we want Gev-Rogov to become a normal
gevah,
instead of continuing to stagnate under a system that, as our defeat in the war showed, is as corrupt and incompetent as it is repressive.” Borthru seemed to rein himself in. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to burden you with a political speech.”

Andrew turned to Reislon. “So this is where you went when you dropped from sight after the war.”

“Yes, but I had been working with the revolutionary elements in Gev-Rogov even before the war.”

“Are you aware that Svyatog’Korth thinks you were working for Gev-Rogov Intelligence at that time?”

“So does Gev-Rogov Intelligence, since I was pretending to do precisely that. It was thus that I was able to maintain very indirect lines of contact with the revolutionaries.”

Andrew struggled to keep it all straight. “And
we
think you were working for the CNE during the same pre-war period, although as far as I know Svyatog isn’t aware of it. Was
that
also a pretense?”

“Not at all. I passed some quite useful information on to your service and aided it in planting a certain amount of disinformation. You must understand, I never felt I was in any way betraying my employer, Hov-Korth, in any of this. My goal, a reformed Gev-Rogov integrated into mainstream Lokaron civilization, would be to the benefit of everyone, including Hov-Korth and, incidentally, Earth. Also, I was working to prevent the war.” Reislon gave Borthru a sidelong glance. “This did not endear me to certain factions among the revolutionary underground.”

“Yes.” Borthru’s bitterness was back in full force. “We were fools—children! We actually
wanted
a war, thinking that defeat would discredit and destabilize the regime, creating a power vacuum for us to fill. Reislon warned us that we were dreamers, and that the only result would be tightened repression. And he was right. Oh, there was some disorder at first, and a great deal of outrage over the regime’s mishandling of the war. The government offered some concessions as a sop. But then, as soon as quiet had returned and the regime felt secure enough, they clamped down, rescinding all the reforms, and now things are worse than before.”

Andrew considered this in light of what CNEN Intelligence knew, and it fit. After the war, despite all attempts at censorship, it had been clear that Gev-Rogov had been wracked by political upheavals, brutally suppressed.

“There were mutinies in the fleet,” Borthru continued. “Some succeeded. Those whose ships had integral transition capability—including the one I led—escaped into overspace. We met at prearranged rendezvous points—we had had that much forethought at least—and decided that we needed to establish a base outside Gev-Rogov. The Kogurche system at first seemed an odd choice, but the more we thought about it, it was rather like . . . like . . .”

“Hiding in plain sight,” Rachel suggested.

The translator evidently had a little trouble with that, as it often did with paradoxes, for Borthru paused perceptibly. “Yes. It had certain other advantages. It was as close to Gev-Rogov as we could safely get. It was easy to remain undetected in these unfrequented gravitational hinterlands between the two component suns. And once the treaty came into operation and allowed Lokaron—including Rogovon—access to Kogurche, we were able to pass unnoticed on the system’s inhabited planets.”

“I arranged my own disappearance at this point.” Reislon picked up the thread. “I realized I would not be able to sustain the rather complex game I had been playing for much longer. And you were right, in a sense, Andrew. For all my high regard for Svyatog’Korth, honesty forced me to confront the fact that my first priority was and always had been the liberation of Gev-Rogov from the regime that had . . . mistreated me in my youth. Finally, I was disgusted by the failure of my efforts to prevent the war—a war I was more and more convinced was being promoted behind the scenes by the Black Wolf Society.”

“Which doubtless was also behind this attack on you,” Borthru said grimly.

“So it was. But . . . there is more.” Reislon turned and led the way to a storage area with temperature controls that allowed it to be used as an improvised meat locker. While waiting for Borthru, they had loaded the two corpses into it, with Andrew’s flesh crawling at the touch of “Leong,” although he had retained enough presence of mind to notice that the body had seemed very light even for the short, slight human they had thought they’d known. Now Reislon opened it and slid out the tray on which the bodies lay. Borthru made a rustling sound that Andrew recognized as the Lokaron equivalent of a sharp indrawing of human breath.

“It gets worse,” said Rachel. “On Tizath-Asor we knew this being as a human, working for the CNE embassy. He still appeared to be one when he showed up here and declared himself a member of the Black Wolf Society. And then, as he was dying, he somehow changed into . . .
this.
”

“What’s more,” Andrew put in, “He followed us here from Gev-Tizath in a ship using a form of cloaking technology more advanced than any we know—except that of certain ships briefly glimpsed by a Harathon vessel in the Sol system in 2055. Yes, Reislon, I know about that.”

“I believe,” said Persath carefully, “that this calls for further study.”

“Agreed,” said Borthru firmly. “Fortunately, we have the facilities for it.”

The three vessels proceeded in formation to the headquarters of the rogue Rogovon fleet. It appeared in the viewscreen as a sprawling junk sculpture, a madman’s caricature of a space station, obviously added on to over the years with components surreptitiously brought to this system and bits and pieces of damaged or uselessly obsolete ships, each segment with its own artificial-gravity generators. Escher would have gone crazy trying to figure it out.

They disembarked in what must have passed for a central reception area, although it looked more like a deserted factory. After the one Tizath-Asor G they had been used to, a near-Terran gravity pull seemed almost burdensome. Persath didn’t trouble to conceal the fact that he thought so.

Borthru and Reislon had been in almost constant communication with the station, and a fair-sized group awaited them. Andrew, who prided himself on his
savoir faire
among Lokaron, now realized it extended only to the “good guy” genotypes; he could not yet overcome his discomfort in the presence of so many Rogovon. But one member of the group stood out by reason of several departures from the stereotype. For one thing, he was short even for a Rogovon—only about six and a half feet—and less inclined than most Rogovon to what passed among the Lokaron for stockiness. Secondly, he was dressed, even in these surroundings, in the universal Lokaron semiformal attire of double-breasted tunic and sleeveless robe, suggesting an old-fashioned, shabby-genteel fustiness. Possibly accounting for the last, his old age was obvious even to a non-expert like Andrew. Borthru introduced him as Zhygon’Trogak, the revolutionaries’ chief medical officer, head of research, and general polymath. He listened with avid interest to the story behind the two corpses.

“Exobiology is one of my interests,” he told them, “including the study of humans. And we have fairly up-to-date biological sensors and other tools here.” He took the bodies away, and Andrew and Rachel were assigned quarters where they waited with all the patience they could muster.

It was an awkward wait. The quarters were most charitably described as “functional,” less charitably as “industrial-hideous,” and they were not designed for human occupancy, least of all for privacy of humans of different genders. The two of them established a set of unspoken protocols for handling the problem, but the time still dragged.

Finally Zhygon reported his findings to a group consisting of the two humans, Reislon, Persath, Borthru, and a couple of members of the executive committee that governed the ragtag refugee community. “The human-appearing corpse is, in fact, indisputably human. The other is, obviously, something else. What that something is, I cannot say. The species is entirely unfamiliar.’

“But,” Rachel protested, “He
looked
human! We never suspected him of being anything else. He passed for human well enough to get a job with the CNE diplomatic service. For God’s sake, he passed for human with a bunch of human chauvinists like the Black Wolf Society! How can that be possible? Shape-shifting like that is supposed to be a fantasy.”

“That was what took me so long. Fortunately, I was able to draw on a human analogue, which may make it easier for you to understand.

“Put very simply, this species—let us call them the Shape-Shifters for convenience—has a gland somewhat similar to the human pineal gland, producing a hormone similar to a more extreme form of pinearin. The result is something beyond the most extreme case of hyperpinealism. It affects the surface tension of the protoplasm’s cells in such a way as to make the entire body plastic and malleable. And unlike hyperpinealism among humans, which is an allergic reaction, this is produced and controlled as a conscious act of will. Evidently the hormone also reroutes the sympathetic nervous system to the cerebral cortex, or its equivalent.”

Andrew wasn’t sure what to marvel at more: Zhygon’s knowledge of human biochemistry, or the ability of the translator software to cope with all this.

“This ability must have limitations,” Persath argued.

“Undoubtedly. First of all, while it may be able to arrange and shape its organs to resemble the imitated speces, their function would remain closer to their own species.”

So their heartbeat might be slower or faster than a normal human heartbeat?” Rachel asked.

“Precisely,” Persath continued. “More importantly, it must be able to affect the skeletal structure in a very limited way, so it can only assume the shape of a quadruped or a two-armed biped. Furthermore, there must be very definite limits on the degree to which density, and therefore size, can be varied. This is a small species, as sentients go. I am surprised it was able to assume the form of a human.”

“Leong was a small man,” Rachel said.

“No doubt. And if you had weighed him, he would have proven to be even lighter than he looked.”

“Something else,” said Andrew. “Leong was obviously of mixed ethnic background, sort of racially nondescript—an average human being. Maybe the Shape-Shifters find that easier than trying to convincingly reproduce a well-marked set of ethnic features.” He wasn’t sure how much this meant to the Rogovon, in whose eyes all humans probably looked alike. But in Reislon he thought to detect the body language of agreement.

“And,” Rachel added, “on today’s Earth there are more and more racially mixed people.” A thought seemed to occur to her. “But how is it that they can speak English like they were born to it?”

“Oh, that must be relatively simple,” Zhygon explained. “The technique of imprinting a new language on the speech centers by direct neural induction is well known. We Lokaron hardly ever use it because, as you may know, we find most such procedures to be vaguely distasteful, and because the ubiquity of translation devices renders it unnecessary.”

“Still,” Rachel speculated, “each infiltrator must be a unique work of art, as it were. Another Shape-Shifter, even if it could assume exactly the same human form, would bring its own personality to the . . . performance.”

“Indubitably,” Zhygon agreed. “I don’t believe we have to worry about multiple copies of the same person.”

“Question,” interjected Reislon. “Captain Roark killed Leong with a gauss pistol. I should think that a Shape-Shifter in the state you have described would be able to ignore bullets.”

“Except maybe
silver
bullets,” Rachel muttered
sotto voce
.

“An astute observation, Reislon” said Zhygon. “And you are undoubtedly correct in the case of a
single
bullet, or perhaps even more than one. But the condition of the corpse made it clear that Captain Roark fired an entire autoburst, inflicting so much trauma to so many organs that it overloaded the capacity of the protoplasm to simply reconfigure itself.”

“I thought he seemed to take an awfully long time to die, under the circumstances,” said Andrew.

“So,” mused Reislon, “we will find these beings very hard to kill, despite their seeming physical fragility. I doubt if any number of flechettes from my implanted weapon would have sufficed, given the extremely small diameter of the perforation they inflict.”

“But why did he change back when he died?” Rachel wanted to know.

“I have a theory on that,” said Zhygon, who seemed to have a lot of theories. “As I mentioned, the process is a conscious one—although after the initial transformation it must become more or less automatic and effortless, since they are obviously able to remain in their assumed forms for extended periods of time, and function normally while doing so. As death approaches and consciousness fades, the mind becomes incapable of sustaining it. If you had inflicted
instantaneous
death—which, as Reislon has deduced, would take some doing—I suspect the body would have been left frozen in its human form.”

“But,” argued Persath, “it could still be identified as nonhuman by genetic testing.”

“Or even by a reasonably thorough scan with a handheld medical sensor such as the one I performed,” Zhygon agreed. “Only . . . it would never have occurred to anyone to perform such a scan.”