Wolf Among the Stars (ARC)

283 Pages·2016·0.9 MB·English

by  White Steve

WOLF
AMONG THE
STARS-ARC
BY
STEVE WHITE

Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
BAEN BOOKS
BY
STEVEWHITE
***
***
Blood of the Heroes
The Prometheus Project
Demon's Gate
Forge of the Titans
Eagle Against the Stars
Prince of Sunset
The Disinherited
Legacy
Debt of Ages

The Starfire Series:
By David Weber & Steve White
Crusade
In Death Ground
The Stars At War
Insurrection
The Shiva Option
The Stars at War II

By Steve White & Shirley Meier
Exodus

By Steve White & Chuck Gannon
Extremis
WOLF AMONG THE STARS

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book
are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Steve White

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-4516-3754-0

Cover art by Kurt Miller

First printing, November 2011

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: t/k

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CHAPTER ONE
***

Nathan Arnstein’s life was not an especially long one, but it spanned a great
deal of eventful history, some of which he himself made.
He was born in 2011, in what still called itself the United States of America,
although it had only a few years to go before the Earth First Party would seize
power and rob that name of all it had once meant.
He was nine years old when the Lokaron ships appeared in Earth’s sky and
began dictating trade treaties. His father, a naval officer sidelined by lack of
Party connections (and under constant suspicion for being Jewish), was a
sympathizer of the Eaglemen, the secret organization of American junior
military officers dedicated to the restoration of the Constitution and the
expulsion of the extraterrestrials.
He was nineteen years old in the epochal year when the Earth First Party was
overthrown, Earth narrowly saved from devastation at the hands of the Lokaron
gevah of Gev-Rogov, and the Confederated Nations of Earth formed.
He was twenty-eight, and a junior officer in the United States component of the
new CNE Navy, when he distinguished himself in action against the Islamic
jihadist diehards in the last flareup of resistance to the new order.
He was thirty-seven, and one of the rising stars of the CNEN, when he was sent
to the planet Harath-Asor to study state-of-the-art galactic military technology at
the feet of humanity’s Lokaron allies of Gev-Harath. He learned his lessons well,
and later thought of applications of them that had never occurred to the self-
satisfied Lokaron military establishments.
He was fifty-five, and an admiral, when he settled an old score at the Battle of
Upsilon Lupus, annihilating the fleet of Gev-Rogov and forcing a Lokaron
power—for the first time in the history of the galaxy‘s dominant race—to sit
across a peace table from non-Lokaron. And nothing would ever be the same
again.
He was fifty-nine, and nearing retirement, when he was named to the prestigious
post of director of the CNEN Academy.
He was sixty-three when his chief of staff found him with his brains blown out.

“Is the director in, Midori?”
“Yes, Captain Roark. Just one moment, please.” The secretary turned aside to
make the adjustments necessary to admit even those who, like the chief of staff,
had automatic access to Admiral Arnstein’s inner sanctum. It gave Andrew
Roark a moment to glance through the transparency behind her desk. It was a
view that would have been breathtaking even if one hadn’t known its history.
The Academy was perched on the edge of the rim wall of a vast impact crater,
with North America’s Rocky Mountains circling it in the distance. The crater
was, beyond comparison, the youngest of its kind on Earth, and the elements had
not had time to smooth out its brutal contours. Only four and a half decades ago,
in fact, part of the Rockies had stood here: Cheyenne Mountain, in whose depths
the headquarters of the United States military had been buried, safe even from
nuclear bombs. But not safe from a deep-penetrator kinetic weapon like the
nickel-iron asteroid that the Lokaron of Gev-Rogov had accelerated, using a
titanic mass driver, into a high-velocity trajectory that had intersected Earth at
this point just before dawn on a never-to-be-forgotten autumn day in 2030,
decapitating Earth’s defenses and inflicting ecological wounds that had taken
years to heal. It had been meant to be a mere preliminary to the saturation
neutron-bombing that would have left the planet a lifeless tabula rasa to be
reseeded for Rogovon colonization. That had been stopped by the Lokaron of
Gev-Harath, and by two humans who had nearly died doing it.
Everyone knew all this. But Andrew Roark knew it better than most, for those
two humans, Ben Roark and Katy Doyle, had given birth to him four years later.
Afterward, the Confederated Nations of Earth had placed its space-navy
academy here, using Lokaron nanotechnology to sculpt the rim wall into terraces
and buildings in an architectural style incorporating all of mankind’s major
traditions, looking out over the crater’s floor of congealed magma. Those who
studied here could never for a moment forget their service’s reason for existence,
which could be distilled into two words: never again.
“You can go in, Captain,” said the secretary, interrupting his thoughts.
“Thanks.” He proceeded through the door to her left and into a short corridor. He
had long since ceased to notice the slight tingle as he stepped through the
invisible curtain of stationary guardian nanobots. The security wasn’t excessive,
for the Director was a far more important individual than the commandants of
the service academies of the last century had been. In the CNEN, his authority
extended to a wide range of advanced training functions in many locales,
including the hyper-prestigious Strategic College, through which the elite of the
Navy’s leadership must pass.
Andrew came to the final door, which slid open as it sensed his genetic
signature. The director’s private office was a spacious one, understatedly
elegant, the walls hung with honors. A shelf to the right bore models of ships he
had commanded, including CNS Revenge, his appropriately named flagship at
Upsilon Lupus. To the left was a holo-display tank that would have done credit
to a capital ship’s bridge. Behind the expansive desk, a wide transparency gave
an unequaled view of the crater, including the pylon that rose at its exact center,
inscribed with the names of those—worthy and otherwise—who had died in the
Cheyenne Mountain strike.
Andrew Roark had seen the office a thousand times. Its familiarity explained
why a detectable fraction of a second passed before that which was behind the
desk registered on his brain, despite the stench of death that immediately hit his
nostrils.
Admiral Arnstein still had a pistol clenched in his hand—a standard M-3 gauss
weapon, Andrew automatically noted. It used an electromagnetic pulse (not
energetic enough to have set off the alarm system) to accelerate a high-density
3mm bullet to a muzzle velocity of 2,000 meters per second with a crack as it
broke the sound barrier (not loud enough to have penetrated the soundproofing
of the multiple doors). It had a full-automatic capability, but it appeared only one
shot had been fired; Roark now saw the hole, with a radiating pattern of cracks,
where it had struck the right-hand wall. Unlike the needlelike metal slivers fired
by civilian gauss weapons, such a projectile at such a velocity resulted in
massive hydrostatic overpressure as it passed through a human head, causing the
brain to explode outward, blowing out the top of the skull. Admiral Arnstein was
slumped face down on the desk, and Roark was looking directly into such a
cavity. There was blood and fallen brain tissue everywhere around the body;
some of it had stuck to the ceiling.
Modern medicine, drawing on Lokaron technology, could perform what would
have been thought miracles of tissue and organ regeneration only half a century
before. But nothing could be done about a destroyed brain. The admiral could, of
course, be cloned. But the clone would not be the man under whom Andrew had
served at Upsilon Lupus; it would be another man with identical genetic
makeup, doomed to early aging and death as a result of having been produced
from postembryonic cells taken from an adult body. Such use of cloning was
interdicted by both law and custom.
All this flashed through Andrew’s mind in a second, before the onset of nausea
brought him out of shock. He sternly clamped his jaw shut and said “No!” to his
stomach. Then he raised his left arm and spoke into his wrist communicator in a
voice whose steadiness surprised him. “This is Captain Roark. Security to the
director’s office!” Then he stumbled forward, reminding himself not to touch
anything. The scene must be left scrupulously undisturbed for the investigators.
He walked gingerly around the desk, looking for a suicide note. There was none.
But a little plastic case of the kind used to hold datachips caught his eye. He
looked more closely at it: it was marked with a tiny black symbol . . . and, for the
second time since entering the office, he froze into immobility. There could be
no mistake: it was a silhouette of a dog . . . or, more likely, a wolf.
For a few seconds, he thought very hard.
He heard a commotion outside. He reached a decision. He scooped up the case,
put it in his pocket barely in time, then smoothed out his features and turned to
face the security detail.