Free B009NFP2OW EBOK by Ian Douglas

brought his palm down on the contact plate and relaxed.
    He had to deliver a mental code group, to get clearance. The information he was downloading came from the Agletsch, by way of Naval Intelligence, and was not for public access.
    After a moment, the data began scrolling past his mind’s eye.
    Executive Office, USNA
    Columbus, District of Columbia
    United States of North America
    2034 hours, EST
    “What the hell do your . . . masters think they’re doing?” Koenig demanded.
    He was in a virtual conference, standing in a . . . place , a world with towering mountains of ice on the horizon, and a night sky ablaze with the shifting green and red hues of a spectacular aurora. Stars gleamed, myriad pinpoints peeking through the auroral haze, and the intricate clots and twists and curlings of the Milky Way stretched across the zenith.
    It was a real place, Koenig knew, a Confederation colony established in 2294 by settlers from North America and Russia. Themis was the human name for the cluster of cities on the great southern continent of Zeta Doradus V, some thirty-eight light years from Sol. The place was surprisingly Earthlike in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of planetary bodies, most of which were quite different, quite alien from Earth. A living, vibrant world of vast oceans, violet forests, and brilliant sunlight, Zeta Doradus was best known as the place of First Contact—Humankind’s first meeting with an extrasolar species.
    Two of them—Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde—stood before Koenig now, looking up at him with almost comical twists to their stalked eyes—four apiece, rising from the spidery, flattened, sixteen-legged bodies covered in a velvety-brown leather patterned with gold and blue reticulations. Humans called them “bugs” or “spiders,” but in fact they were not much like either, with unsegmented bodies, an unpleasant mode of eating through their bellies, and sixteen limbs—short at the back and quite long at the front. Both were female; their male companions, like the mates of female Angler fish on Earth, were small parasites attached to their bodies. Properly, the beings were known as Agletsch .
    “The masters have told us nothing, President Koenig,” Gru’mulkisch said, speaking through the small translation device affixed to what might approximate its chest. “It is not in their nature to do so, yes-no?”
    “Are you certain that the attackers at Omega Centauri were Sh’daar?” Dra’ethde added. “Others might use the ancient transport systems. Others occupy the Great Deeps of the stars.”
    Koenig glared at the two small aliens. He’d known these two particular individuals for a long time, ever since he’d commanded CBG-18. When the fleet had departed for Operation Crown Arrow, striking deep into Sh’daar space in order to buy time for a desperate Earth, he’d taken them along as native guides.
    It was still difficult sometimes to follow how they thought. Their social conventions were strange—their need for privacy when they ate, for example. These two seemed to have been around forever, and had aged, outwardly at least, not at all. He didn’t know how their life span compared with that of humans. Were they still young? Old? Did age even make a difference for entities so alien, so different physically and emotionally from Humankind?
    Generally, the Agletsch seemed friendly, unassuming, and at times eager to help . . . though they were not always forthcoming with important information. The Agletsch were interstellar traders. What they traded was information, exchanging data about star systems and life forms and interstellar civilizations for information about Earth and humanity, occasionally leavened with the stores of heavy elements that appeared to be a common medium of trade throughout the known galaxy, in particular platinum, iridium, rhenium, as well as some of the longer-half-lived artificials—neptunium-237, and californium-251.
    And they gave nothing away