Beginnings-eARC Read online

  “I know,” Heissman said, his voice going a little darker. “Unfortunately, that's going to make you unpopular in certain quarters, too. Genuine, unashamed patriots are an embarrassment to the cynical and manipulative.”

  Some of the lines in his face smoothed out. “Which leads me to my final question. This whole ‘travesty of this, travesty of that' sarcastic catchphrase that seems to follow you around. What's all that about, anyway?”

  Travis sighed. “It started back in high school,” he said reluctantly. “One of the teachers fancied himself a scholar and a wit, and liked to give his students nicknames. I was Travis Uriah Long, or Travis U. Long, which he thought sounded like Travis Oolong, which was a type of Old Earth tea. Hence, Travis Tea.”

  “Travesty,” Heissman said with a nod, a small smile playing across his face. “And with your penchant for enforcing even minor regulations, the sarcastic direction was probably inevitable.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Travis braced himself. “I'd appreciate it, Sir, if you didn't . . .pass it around too much.”

  “Not a problem,” Heissman said. “Well. I've just been informed that Casey's going to be another month in dock, so everyone's leave's been extended. But you may be called up for more testimony at any time, so don't stray too far from Landing City.”

  And then, to Travis's surprise, he rose to his feet. “Well done, Travis,” the commodore said as they exchanged salutes. “I look forward to returning to Casey with you. And as soon as possible.”

  His eyes went a little distant. “Because I have a feeling Manticore's about to lose the nice, peaceful backwater status we've enjoyed for so long. I don't know how or why. I don't think anyone does. But I can guarantee this much: as of two weeks ago the RMN is no longer a joke and a political football. Someone out there has us in their sights . . .and we are going to figure out who.”

  His expression tightened. “You said you were willing to die for the Star Kingdom. You may very well get that chance.”

  The End

  BEAUTY AND

  THE BEAST

  David Weber

  “Lieutenant Harrington?”

  Alfred Harrington turned. After the better part of two T-years, it no longer felt strange not to be addressed as “Gunny,” but it didn't feel completely natural to be addressed as “Lieutenant,” either. No doubt that would change. Everything changed, after all.

  “Yes?” he said, raising one eyebrow as he looked at the man who'd addressed him.

  He was a shrimpy little fellow. No more than a hundred and fifty-six centimeters—fifty-eight, at the outside—compared to Alfred's own two meters. Like a lot of Beowulf's population, he had the almond-shaped eyes of Old Earth's Asia, dark hair, and a complexion which reminded Alfred of Sphinxian sandal oak. And, on second impression, shrimpy or not there was something about him that suggested he might be just about as tough as sandal oak. It wasn't really anything a man could put his finger on. Just something about the way he stood, or about the well-defined musculature, perhaps. Or about the eyes. Yes, it was the eyes, Alfred realized. He'd seen eyes like that before. They might have been differently shaped, or a different color, but he'd seen them.

  “I'm Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou,” the little fellow said.

  “Gesundheit,” Alfred said, before he could stop himself, then shook his head. “Sorry. I don't suppose a Navy officer ought to admit it, but I'm not at my best after a flight, I'm afraid. Besides,” he smiled crookedly, “I doubt I'm the first one to make that particular bad joke.”

  “Here on Beowulf?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou cocked his head, looking up at Alfred's towering centimeters with the speculative eye of a logger considering a crown oak. “Actually, you probably are.” He looked up at Alfred for another moment, then smiled. It was a slow smile, but just as crooked as Alfred's, and Alfred felt something inside warming as amusement gleamed in those eyes. “Off Beowulf, now, I think I may have heard it a time or two.”

  “Well,” Alfred extended his right hand, reminding himself to mind his Sphinxian muscles and not absentmindedly crush the other's metacarpals, “I'll try to behave myself in the future, Mister Benton-Ramirez y Chou.”

  “Don't try too hard,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied dryly, gripping the proffered hand with surprising strength. “I wouldn't want you sprain any synapses.”

  Alfred's smile grew broader and he shook his head.

  “I'll try to go easy on my poor, overworked mental processes,” he assured the Beowulfer. “Of course, the air's thin enough here that I'm probably suffering from oxygen deprivation.”

  “Or altitude sickness,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou offered affably, looking up at him.

  “Possibly,” Alfred agreed with a chuckle. “Possibly.”

  The smaller man grinned and released his hand, and Alfred felt that inner warmth grow stronger. It had been a while—much too long a while—since he'd felt something like that, and he stepped on it quickly, reflexively.

  “Should I assume you were specifically looking for me and didn't just happen to read my nameplate and decide to strike up a conversation?” he asked.

  “Guilty,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied. “I was asked to meet you and see you squared away on campus.”

  “Oh?” Both of Alfred's eyebrows rose. “Nobody told me I rated an escort!”

  “Well, consider it a military courtesy. It's not really ‘Mister Benton-Ramirez y Chou;' it's ‘Captain Benton-Ramirez y Chou.' Biological Survey Corps.”

  Alfred felt his shoulders square themselves automatically, despite the fact that the other man was in civilian dress, as he realized what he'd seen the first time he looked at the Beowulfer. The BSC, despite its civilian-sounding name, was one of the best special operations forces in the Solarian League. It was also quite small. There were rumors that not all of its operations accorded perfectly with official Solarian League policy, but it didn't seem to care very much about that. And it didn't hand out captain's insignia in cereal boxes, either.

  “Pleased to meet you, Sir,” he said more formally, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou shook his head.

  “I'm a very new captain, you're due to make lieutenant (senior grade) in about five months, and that's the Osterman Cross ribbon on your chest, Lieutenant.” There was very little humor in his voice now. “I don't think we need any ‘sirs.'”

  Alfred's lips tightened. A spike of anger flickered through him, made even brighter and sharper by the sincerity of the Beowulfer's tone. But that anger was irrational, and he knew it, so he made himself nod, instead.

  “My family's got better connections than most with the medical establishment here on Beowulf,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou continued. If he'd noticed anything about Alfred's expression, it didn't show. “Of course, here on Beowulf, just about everybody's got at least some connection with BioSciences, but—I know you'll find this hard to believe, Lieutenant Harrington, but I swear it's true—there are actually people, real live Beowulfers, who don't have any association with medicine at all. We try to keep them locked in cellars deep enough none of you outworlders will discover their shameful secret, though.”

  “I see.” Alfred felt the lips which had tightened twitch in amusement. Then something clicked in his brain. Benton-Ramirez y Chou, was it? And “better connections” with the medical establishment? Well, he supposed that was one way to describe one of the two or three families which had been at the pinnacle of Beowulf bioscience for a mere nine hundred T-years or so. Just what in hell had sent a member of that family into the military? Or, for that matter, gotten him assigned to play nursemaid for an ex-enlisted Manticoran medical student?

  “Your planet's shameful secret is safe with me, Captain,” he said out loud.

  “Thank you,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said with an air of great earnestness. “However, that connection and the fact that I've strayed from the normal family business into a rather different field of endeavor led certain people to conclude that I'd make a suitable escort to get you cleared through Customs and delivered to campus w
ithout your getting lost along the way.”

  “I see,” Alfred said again, although he was oddly certain that Benton-Ramirez y Chou's explanation, while accurate, had not been complete. He didn't know why he was so positive of that, but he was accustomed to relying on his hunches, his ability to “read” people. After all, it had kept him alive on more than one occasion.

  A fresh billow of darkness tried to blow through him, but he stepped on it firmly. It was easier than it had been. Possibly with enough practice he wouldn't even realize when he did it, and would that be a good thing or a bad one?

  “Well, since I would truly hate to get lost in the urban jungles of downtown Grendel,” he said, “I accept your offer of a local guide with gratitude, Captain. Let me grab my bags.”

  * * *

  Much later that same day, Alfred sat on the small balcony attached to his apartment, looking out across the campus of Ignaz Semmelweis University of Beowulf at the massive pastel towers of the city of Grendel. The mellow, slanting rays of a setting sun gilded them in bronze and gold and shadow. Despite his joke about getting lost in urban jungles, Grendel really was an impressive sight for a boy who'd grown up in the Sphinxian bush. Landing, back on Manticore, was just as impressive in its own way, but Grendel was at least twice Landing's size, and far older. They were still areas in the heart of Grendel where historical buildings from the planet's colony days reared no more than forty or fifty stories from the ground, carefully maintained as historical relics. They deserved it after the better part of two thousand T-years, and they also reminded anyone who visited them that Beowulf was the oldest extra-solar star system to have been settled.

  It was far warmer here than it would have been back on Sphinx, although not so warm as Manticore itself. He would have preferred something a little cooler, but he couldn't really complain. He'd grown up on a planet whose gravity was twenty-three percent greater than Beowulf's, so he felt light enough on his feet. And the air smelled good, seasoned with the greenery and flowering shrubs of ISU's beautifully landscaped grounds. He didn't like the birds, though. The Terrestrial imports weren't bad, and the local analogues were pleasing enough to the eye, but some of them had a peculiar, warbling whistle that reminded him of the stone ravens on Clematis. He didn't need that.

  He sipped beer from the stein in his hand. Back home, he preferred his beer at room temperature, but room temperature on Sphinx was substantially lower than room temperature here on Beowulf. He'd gotten into the habit of drinking it chilled at OCS on Manticore, and this was clearly no place to start breaking such useful habits. And at least the beer was good. Not as good as Sphinxian beer, of course, but he'd already checked; Old Tilman was available as an import as soon as he got around to reprogramming the apartment kitchen. On the other hand, the wine list looked interesting, too. He was picky about his wines. His buddies in the Corps had ribbed him about that often enough, but he'd given as good as he got, and there were at least at least two dozen vintages on the list that he'd never even heard of. He looked forward to sampling them all; in the meantime, beer would do just fine.

  He swallowed appreciatively while his mind ran back over the long day's activities.

  Ignaz Semmelweis University's Beowulf campus was probably the most prestigious medical school in the explored galaxy. Competition for admission was always fierce, and Alfred suspected that at least some of his fellow students were going to resent his presence.

  Beowulf was home to one of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's secondary termini. The Solarian League in general wasn't especially fond of Manticore and its steadily expanding merchant marine, but the relationship between Beowulf and the Star Kingdom had been very close for centuries. There was a lot of intermarriage between Beowulf and Manticore, for that matter, and relations between the Beowulf System Defense Force and the Star Kingdom's military were cordial and based on mutual respect. The Star Empire had worked closely with the Biological Survey Corps on many occasions, as well, although that particular relationship was a bit more . . . fraught, given the nature of some of the BSC's operations. All of which helped to explain why the Royal Manticoran Navy was allocated a certain quota of students for ISU each year. Not everyone approved of that arrangement, and as surely as the sun would rise in the morning, someone was going to decide Alfred was here only because of that quota. Certainly an overgrown lummox from Sphinx who hadn't even bothered to complete his undergraduate degree before running off to join the Marines hadn't been able to make it on his merits as a student!

  Actually, though, he could have. It might have been tight, given the University's scholastic standards, but he'd carried a perfect 4.0 GPA through the undergraduate studies and two years of premed the Navy had paid for, and he knew he'd aced the aptitude tests and ISU's written admission requirements. He hadn't done as well on the oral admissions interview, though. He'd known at the time that he wasn't earning top marks from two of the Beowulfers. That “hunch” ability of his had told him they weren't entirely satisfied with his explanation of why he wanted to specialize in neurosurgery. It wasn't that they'd disbelieved him, or that anything he'd said had been . . . objectionable. It was just that they hadn't thought he was being completely open with them.

  Because he hadn't been.

  His grip on the stein tightened, and he felt his brown eyes going bleak and hard as he looked out across the beautiful campus at the sun-washed towers of Grendel. He saw something else entirely in that moment. He saw Clematis. He saw the fires rolling through the city of Hope. He heard the explosions and the screams. He saw again what neural disruptors could do, and suddenly the beer tasted foul in his mouth and his stomach muscles tightened with remembered nausea. And with that terrible, burning rage. That sense of exalted purpose. The poisonous, soul-killing joy.

  He closed his eyes and set the stein gently on the table at his elbow. He felt the remembered emotions guttering out through his nerves, felt his pulse settling back towards normal, and drew a deep, deep breath. He held it in his lungs, forcing himself towards stillness once more. And then, when the demons had retreated, he opened his eyes once again.

  That was a bad one, he thought. Probably because I'm tired. But that's okay. It's getting better. And I can't really complain too much. At least I got out alive, didn't I?

  His mouth quirked humorlessly and he inhaled again. He was probably bullshitting himself by blaming it on fatigue, but he really was tired. And maybe the universe really would look better again in the morning.

  He pushed himself up out of the chair, gave Grendel one more look, then headed for bed.

  * * *

  “So, Lieutenant Harrington, I take it you're settled in?”

  “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

  “Good.”

  Captain Howard Young, the Manticoran military attaché, was some sort of distant connection to the North Hollows, according to Alfred's briefing before he'd left for Grendel. He didn't look especially happy to see a towering Sphinxian ex-Marine on his com display, but at least he wasn't holding his nose the way some of the more aristocratically advantaged members of the Navy's officer corps seemed wont to do.

  “Good,” Young repeated. His right hand toyed with an antique paperweight on his desk, and he seemed to be feeling for the exact words he wanted. That struck Alfred as being just a little odd, since Young had screened him for the official purpose of welcoming him to Beowulf. Of course, he couldn't think of any reason for a captain of the list to worry about “welcoming” a mere lieutenant who'd been assigned to Beowulf to attend school, either, so he simply waited patiently. Patience was something he'd learned early, hunting on Sphinx, although he'd required a different variety of it since leaving Sphinx.

  “Ah, something was called to my attention yesterday, Lieutenant,” Young said finally. “A security matter.” His eyes narrowed suddenly, looking out at the display in to Alfred's.

  “Yes, Sir.” Alfred's voice was flatter than it had been, and his jaw muscles tightened. The intelligence pukes back home ha
d cautioned him repeatedly about the need to keep his mouth shut. In fact, they'd reminded him so often he'd felt an almost overwhelming urge to pinch a few heads like zits. He understood, he wasn't an idiot, and he'd given his word, so why the hell couldn't they just shut up and leave him alone?

  His hands clenched into fists outside the field of view of the com's pickup, and he felt his jaw muscles tense.

  You're overreacting . . . again, he told himself harshly. Young's probably just dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s. Or maybe he's protecting his own posterior—couldn't have the out-of-control jar head shooting his mouth off on his watch, now could he?

  “I was thoroughly advised about that matter before leaving the Star Kingdom, Sir,” he said levelly.

  “Oh, good.” Young seemed to relax, then he shook his head. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I didn't mean to harp on it. Unfortunately, my Admiralty counterpart didn't get all the little boxes checked in his dispatch to me. He told me I wasn't supposed to bring it up, but he hadn't specifically indicated that he'd told you about that. Under the circumstances, I thought I'd better check and save us both some grief if he hadn't gotten around to that.”

  “I understand, Sir.” Alfred felt himself relaxing in turn and drew a deep breath. “It's not something I'd be likely to talk about a lot, anyway, though.”

  Young started to speak, then stopped, shook his head, and visibly changed what he'd been about to say.

  “Well, I hope you understand that the embassy will be happy to see to anything we can do for you while you're on Beowulf. I don't think we have any other officers over there on campus at the moment, do we?”

  “Not to the best of my knowledge, Sir. No.”

  “I didn't think so.” Young smiled much more naturally. “I've been left adrift among civilians a time or two myself, Lieutenant. If you get the feeling that you need to talk to another uniform while you're here—just to retain your sanity, you understand—drop by. We've even got a couple of Marines on the staff, and we play a pretty mean game of poker.”