LITMIR.BIZ

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started to say something, but she turned suddenly and broke into a run toward her medics.

      Stern strode quickly toward the comtech’s hut. “Report, Mister,” he said.

      “Still no luck, sir,” the boy replied. “Even with my boosters I can’t even weed out the interference between here and HQ. There’s no way to get a message home until it lets up.”

      Stern’s eyebrows jerked. He turned his gaze to the camp, carelessly observing the medics. Sensations tugged at his memory, but they were too vague to grasp. The sight of the bodies, mutilated by massive doses of radiation, didn’t affect him at all. Not even those of the children. Why should it? he thought. They were only clones. Duplicates of a dozen alien races whose originals didn’t have the guts for a colonization attempt in the New Territory.

      “Sickening, isn’t it?” Dr. Strick Hahnson asked, ambling up at his elbow. “The last hope of a war-torn galaxy, gone down into the dust of treachery. How long did it take those ten planetary federations to agree to this? Five, ten years? It only took the damned Rojoks one solar hour to atomize it.”

      “Stow the poetry,” Stern told him. “This is a rescue hop, not a—”

      “Sir!” the comtech interrupted. “I’ve got a bogie! She’s two AU and closing like a trambeam!”

      “Configuration?” Stern asked quickly. “Is she a Rojok, Mister?”

      “I can’t classify her, sir.” The comtech searched his readout screen. “She’s making speeds I don’t believe, and she scans too light to be a standard warship.”

      Stern sighed angrily. “Well, can’t you make identification from her commbeam?”

      “She isn’t carrying one, sir. Her signals are too quick for my analybanks. I’m sorry, Captain, but this one’s beyond my experience. I’ve never read anything like her.”

      “Keep trying.” Stern raised his eyes upward. The skies were brighter than ever with spreading blue glowing radiation. Megabeam radiation, settling on the scarred surface of the planet.

      “Hurry it up!” he called to the medics. “Leave the Jebobs and Altairians for now—we’ll send a relief ship back for them. Concentrate on the casualties that are ready to lift!”

      He turned away from the shocked looks of the medics and back to the comtech. “What about it, Jennings?”

      The young comtech shook his head. “She’s positioning to assume orbit, sir.”

      “Beam Higgins on the Bellatrix. Tell him to throw up his screens and prime his main batteries. As soon as he can make a visual ID, I want it. And if she’s a Rojok—” he thought for a minute “—if she’s a Rojok, tell him to get the hell out of here and get the data to Lawson at HQ. Got that?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Stern strode out through the makeshift medical prefabs, where specialists in sweat-soaked uniforms were fighting time and the lack of supplies to save life.

      “Stern!”

      He whirled at the urgency in Madeline Ruszel’s normally calm voice, putting a hand to his temple. The pain was back. The tall young officer slowed down from a run just in time to avoid colliding with him.

      “We’ve got it…the sci-archaeo group,” she panted. “The medtechs are bringing them in now. Stern, you’d better come with me.”

      “Strick,” he called to Hahnson, “get your people together. Jennings,” he told the comtech, “I want an ID on that bogie the second you get it. Okay, Maddie, let’s go!”

      “It’s the Centaurian boy,” she said when they were out of earshot. “He’s wearing the blue and gold colors of Alamantimichar.”

      Stern felt his neck hairs bristle. “The Royal Clan? My God!”

      “That’s not all. His sister was with him, according to the ship passenger roster, and she’s missing. And so are the Jaakob Spheres. Two of the sci-archaeo scientists were subjected to mind taps. They’re little more than vegetables. Two others are missing. The Centaurian boy’s much worse.”

      His hand went to his dark, wavy hair. “There’ll be hell to pay now. Those Spheres contained the DNA of every member race in the Tri-Galaxy Council. If the Rojoks have them…”

      “The possibilities are endless.” She stopped at one of the ambulifts. “Look at this.”

      Stern leaned a hand against the transparent cylinder and looked in through the blue antiseptic mist. The Centaurian boy inside looked as though someone had taken an old-fashioned straight razor to him, from head to toe. He’d been tortured.

      Stern watched him curiously. He was a member of an alien race called the Cehn-Tahr from the central star system near the Algomerian Sector. First contact prompted Terravegan officials to link them with the young Alpha Centauri system near old Earth and call them Centaurians. The name stuck. That, Stern recalled, was the joke of the millennium. These aliens were an ancient race, which legend linked to Cashto, the cat god of Eridanus. Their emperor, Tnurat Alamantimichar, had formed a commando unit called the Holconcom and gone out to conquer neighboring star systems. To date, he had one hundred fifty of them under regional governors with democratic parliaments.

      The alien boy seemed completely human except for the pale golden skin that peeked out from the sleeves and neck of his one-piece suit. His ears, his body, were like any human’s. He had no tail or fur. But then his head turned, and Stern had to fight the urge to back away. The huge elongated eyelids opened over great black orbs that sent chills the length of his body. They weren’t human eyes. They were the eyes of some human cat, slit-pupiled, unblinking and tortured with pain.

      “Don’t let it bother you,” Madeline said gently. “They have that effect on all of us when we see them for the first time. It’s the eyes.”

      “Cat-eyes,” he murmured, but the chills still came. He wondered at his own reaction. The sight shouldn’t have frightened him. He’d seen textdiscs of the race often enough.

      “Not precisely,” she said. “Cat-eyes don’t change color. Centaurians’ do. Each color stands for a separate emotion. There’s blue for concern, green for amusement, gray for curiosity, brown for anger—that’s a generalization, of course. It’s more complicated when several emotions are at play.”

      “His are black,” he remarked.

      “That means pain and/or death. I’ll explain someday. Stern, he needs medication. It’s a breach of protocol that carries an automatic court-martial if I give it. I don’t have a choice.”

      “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll sit on the hot seat with you.”

      She smiled up at him. “Thanks.”

      She reached inside the ambulift and laid the bionic wrist scanner against the boy’s thin chest, activating the compact unit’s drug bank with her free hand. Pressing lightly, the laserdot was triggered to hammer the drug deep inside the frail chest. She withdrew her arm.

      The boy’s eyes dilated. “Creshcam,” he whispered softly. Then, all at once, the great cat-eyes closed gently and his chest went flat.

      She slammed the wrist scanner back through the hatch of the ambulift and laid it against the boy’s throat. An eternity of seconds went by before she straightened wearily and, glancing at Stern, shook her head.

      “Captain!” the comtech sang out. “The intruder’s visual! She’s a Centaurian warship, and I’m getting signals from a scout about to leave her!”

      “Tell Higgins to keep his distance,” Stern called back. “We can’t take on the Rojoks and the Centaurians at the same time. And get the ship police out here!”

      “Yes, sir!”

      “Now just how the hell did that Centaurian ship know what happened here,” Stern murmured thoughtfully,

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