Second Contact (54 page)

“I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager said as Straha came to the door. “The two emissaries from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army will be coming in an hour or so. I hope you do not mind.”

“Would it matter if I did?” Straha asked before remembering his manners: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”

Not directly answering the exile’s bitter question, Yeager said, “I hoped you might be able to tell them useful things about how the Race conducts itself, things they could take back to their homeland with them. They will be returning soon.”

“It is possible,” Straha said. “I do not claim it is likely, but it is possible. And what shall we discuss before these other Big Uglies arrive?”

“Come into the study,” Yeager said obliquely. “Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you alcohol? Can I get you ginger?”

“Alcohol, please—rum.” Straha used an English word. “Ginger later, perhaps. I have been trying to cut back on my tasting lately.” He hadn’t succeeded, but he had been trying.

“Rum. It shall be done.” Yeager attended to it. He had some himself, with cubes of ice in it. Straha did not care for drinks so cold. After they had both sipped, the Tosevite asked, “And have you heard anything new about who might have attacked the ships of the colonization fleet?”

“I have not,” Straha answered, “and, I admit, this perplexes me. You Big Uglies are not usually so astute in such matters. The incentive here, of course, is larger than it would be in other cases.”

“Yes, I would say so,” Yeager agreed. “Whoever did it, the Race will punish—and whoever did it deserves to be punished, too. I wonder if your contacts with males—maybe even with females now, for all I know—in the occupied parts of Tosev 3 had brought you any new information.”

“As far as who the culprit may be, no,” Straha said. “I have learned that one of the ships destroyed carried most of the specialists in imperial administration. Whether the guilty party knew this in advance or not, I cannot say. My sources cannot say, either. I would be inclined to doubt it, but am without strong evidence for my doubt.”

“I think you are right. The attack came too soon for Tosevites to have known such details about the colonization fleet—I believe,” Major Yeager said. “But it is an interesting datum, and not one I had met before. I thank you, Shiplord.”

“You are welcome.” Straha drank more rum. Another minor treachery to his kind. After so many larger acts of treason, one more was hardly noticeable.

Yeager did not scorn him as a traitor, not where it showed. He did not think Yeager scorned him at any deeper level. The Big Ugly was too interested in the Race in general to do anything of that sort: one more part of his character that made him so unusual.

Before too long, the Chinese Tosevites came. Yeager introduced them as Liu Han and Liu Mei. They spoke the language of the Race fairly well, with an accent different from the American’s. Straha noted that Yeager’s son, who had paid little attention to his own arrival despite fascination with the Race, joined the group and made polite conversation for a time after the new Big Uglies arrived.

From their voices, both of them were female. Did Jonathan Yeager find one of them sexually attractive? If so, which? After a while, Straha remembered that Liu Mei was Liu Han’s daughter. Since Jonathan was younger than Sam Yeager, that made him more likely to be interested in Liu Mei—or so Straha thought. The subtleties of Tosevite behavior patterns were lost on him, and he knew it.

Presently, Sam Yeager spoke in English: “Enough chitchat—time to talk turkey.” Straha didn’t follow the idiom, but Jonathan evidently did, for he left. Liu Mei stayed. Maybe that meant she didn’t find him attractive. Maybe it meant she put duty above desire, which Straha found admirable. Or maybe it just meant the exiled shiplord didn’t fully grasp the situation.

Liu Han said, “Shiplord, how do we best use ginger against the Race?”

“Give it to females, obviously,” Straha answered. “The more females in season, the more addled males become.”

“I understand this,” the Chinese female said—was that impatience in her voice? “How to give ginger to females over and over to keep males addled all the time?”

“Ah,” Straha said. Liu Han did see the obvious, then; the ex-shiplord hadn’t been sure. He went on, “Introducing it into food or drink would do the job, I think. They might not even know they were tasting. . . . No, they would, because they would come into their season.”

“Truth,” Liu Han said. “This endangers those who prepare food for the Race; they would naturally be suspect.”

“Ah,” Straha said again. “Yes, that is so.” He hadn’t thought the Big Uglies would care; they hadn’t seemed to worry much about spending lives during the fighting.

“If we could get enough females and males excited at the same time, it might be worth the risk,” Liu Mei said: maybe the Tosevites, or some of them, retained their ruthlessness after all.

Jonathan Yeager came back into the study. Did the younger female’s voice draw him, as pheromones would have drawn a male of the Race? “That could get a lot of people hurt,” he observed. He might be interested in Liu Mei, but was not addled by her; Straha heard reproof in his voice.

“It is war,” Liu Mei said simply. “Here, the fighting is over. You Americans have won your freedom. In China, the struggle against the imperialism of the Race goes on. The People’s Liberation Army shall free my not-empire, too.”

“And make it as free as the SSSR?” Straha inquired with sarcasm he thoroughly enjoyed. “That is the model the People’s Liberation Army uses, is it not?”

Sam Yeager whistled softly. Straha had learned Big Uglies sometimes did that when they thought someone had made a good point. But Liu Han said, “We would be freer under our own kind at their worst than the Race at their best, for we did not choose to have the Race come here and try to set itself over us.”

Straha leaned forward. “Now there is a topic on which we could have considerable debate,” he said, anticipating that debate. “If you believe that—”

Several loud pops resounded outside, followed by a fierce, ripping roar. Straha was slower to recognize the noise than he should have been; as shiplord, he’d had no experience with close combat. Before he could react, Sam Yeager spoke in English: “That’s gunfire. Everybody down!”

Straha dove for the floor. Yeager did not follow his own order. He grabbed a pistol from a desk drawer in the study and hurried out toward the front of the house. “Be careful, Sam,” his wife called from the next room.

More gunfire sounded from the direction of the street. A window—or maybe more than one—shattered. Yeager’s pistol resounded, the noise shockingly loud indoors. Liu Han came as close to taking the shots calmly as anyone could—closer than Straha was doing, for that matter. Liu Mei never seemed to get excited about anything. And Jonathan Yeager, though he had no weapon, hurried to his father’s aid.

“It’s over,” Sam Yeager called from the front room. “I think it’s over, anyhow. Barbara, call the cops, not that half the neighborhood hasn’t already. Jesus, I can’t afford new window glass, but we sure as hell need it.”

Barbara Yeager came in and picked up the telephone. Straha went out into the front room to see what had happened. His driver was coming toward the house, an automatic weapon in his hand. “Is the shiplord all right?” he shouted.

“I am well,” Straha answered.

“He’s fine,” Yeager said at the same time. “What the devil happened out there?”

“I was sitting in the car, reading my book,” the driver answered. “The guy who drives for the Chinese women was in the car behind me, doing whatever he was doing. A car came by. A couple of guys leaned out the window and started blazing away. Lousy technique. I think I may have nailed one of them. Thanks for the backup, Yeager.”

“Any time,” Sam Yeager said. “You okay?”

“Right as rain,” Straha’s driver answered. “The Chinese guy, though, he took one right in the ear, poor bastard. Never knew what hit him, anyway.”

Through the howls that Tosevite constabulary vehicles used to warn others out of their way, Yeager said, “Whom were they after? The shiplord? The Chinese women? Could have been either one.”

Someone trying to kill me?
Straha thought. He hadn’t imagined Atvar could sink so low. Assassination was a Tosevite ploy, not one the Race used.
No,
he thought.
Not one the Race had used.
Maybe Atvar was able to learn some unpleasant things from the Tosevites after all.

“Either one’s possible,” his driver said. “And how about you, Major? Got any people who aren’t fond of you?”

“I didn’t think so,” Yeager said slowly. “It’d be a real kick in the teeth finding out I was wrong. The shiplord and the Red Chinese are a lot more important targets than I’ll ever be, though.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Straha’s driver agreed, adding, “No offense.”

While Sam Yeager yipped Tosevite laughter, Straha stared out at the dead Big Ugly in the motorcar behind his own.
That could have been me,
he thought, with a chill worse than any Tosevite winter.
By the Emperor whom I betrayed, that could have been me.

Back at the Biltmore Hotel after endless questioning by American policemen and others from the FBI (which Liu Han thought of as the American NKVD), her daughter asked, “Were those bullets meant for us or for the scaly devil?”

“I am not sure. How can I be sure?” Liu Han answered. “But I think they were meant for the little devil. Can you guess why?” She sent Liu Mei an appraising glance.

Her daughter considered that with her usual seriousness. “If the NKVD had sent assassins after us, they would not have made such a poor attack.”

“Exactly so,” Liu Han answered, pleased. “The Russians do not attempt assassinations. They assassinate.”

“But”—Liu Mei sounded abashed at disagreeing, as a good daughter should, but disagreed nonetheless—“what about the Kuomintang or the Japanese? They might have sent killers after us, too, and theirs would not be so good as the ones Beria could hire.”

“I had not thought of them for a while,” Liu Han admitted in a small voice. “Next to the Russians, everything else seemed such a small worry, I forgot about it. But that was a mistake, and you are right to remind me of it.” She grimaced. “No one will remind Frankie Wong of it, not now.”

“No,” Liu Mei said. “He helped us.”

“Yes, he did,” Liu Han said. “He did not do it out of the goodness of his heart—I am certain of that. But he did help us, even if he was helping himself and maybe others at the same time. But his wife is a widow tonight, and his children are orphans. And now they have reason to hate us, too. A bad business, oh, a very bad business.”

“The Americans were brave when the shooting started,” Liu Mei said. “They knew just what to do.”

“Major Yeager is a soldier,” Liu Han replied, a little tartly. “His job is to know what to do when shooting starts.” She glanced over at her daughter out of the corner of her eye. “Or were you thinking of his son?”

Liu Mei did not look flustered. Liu Mei’s face had trouble holding any expression. But she sounded troubled as she answered, “The father had a gun. The son had none, but went forward anyhow.”

“He went to aid his father,” Liu Han said. “That is what a son should do. It is what a daughter should do for a mother, too.”

“Yes, Mother,” Liu Mei said dutifully. Less dutifully, she went on, “Will we be able to go outside this hotel again, now that assassins are loose?”

“I do not know the answer to that,” Liu Han said. “In part, it will be up to the Americans. I do not know if they will want to take the chance.”

“Why should they worry?” Liu Mei’s voice was expressive, even if her face was not. She sounded bitter now. “China cannot harm the United States. The People’s Liberation Army cannot conquer America—the People’s Liberation Army cannot even conquer China. We are not the little scaly devils, or even the Russian or German foreign devils. The Americans will not be very worried about letting us go into danger.”

She was probably right. That did not make her words any more pleasant for Liu Han to hear. “Mao would think well of you,” Liu Han said at last. “You see things in terms of power.”

“How else?” Liu Mei sounded surprised. Liu Han was surprised to hear that in her daughter’s voice, but realized she shouldn’t have been. She herself had been involved in the revolutionary struggle since before she’d managed to liberate Liu Mei from the scaly devils. That meant Liu Mei had been involved in the revolutionary struggle for as long as she could remember. No wonder she thought in those terms.

“I hope the assassins were after the little scaly devil,” Liu Han said, tacitly yielding the earlier point to her daughter. “I also hope the Americans can catch them and get answers out of them. That should not be too hard; this country does not have so many people among whom they could disappear.”

“No, but they were in a motorcar—the American who serves the little devil said so,” Liu Mei countered. “With a motorcar, they could go a long way from Major Yeager’s house, to a place where no one was looking for them.”

“You are right again.” Now Liu Han eyed her daughter with respectful curiosity. Liu Mei was getting the hang of the way the USA worked faster than her mother did. Maybe that was just because she was younger. Maybe it was because she was smarter, too. Liu Han didn’t like to admit the possibility even to herself, but she was too much a realist to be blind to it.

And Liu Mei, no matter how clever she was, still had certain blind spots of her own. In musing tones, she repeated, “The Americans were very brave when the shooting started.”

Liu Han didn’t know whether to laugh or to go over to her and shake her. “When you say ‘the Americans,’ you are talking about the younger one, the one called Jonathan, aren’t you?”

Liu Mei flushed. Her skin was slightly fairer than it would have been were she of pure Chinese blood, which let Liu Han more easily see the flush rise and spread. Her daughter lifted her head, which also made her stick out her chin. “What if I am?” she asked defiantly. She was bigger and heavier-boned than Liu Han; if they quarreled, she might do some shaking of her own.