Free B009NFP2OW EBOK by Ian Douglas Page A

for free.
    “There are times,” Koenig told them, “when we do not ask you to sell us information because we do not know what to ask. If there is a threat to my species—whether it’s the Sh’daar or some other predatory race out there, I want to know about it.”
    “This we understand, Mr. President Koenig,” Dra’ethde told him. “And if we had something definite to trade to you on the matter, we would be certain you were aware of the fact, yes-no? But in this instance we are . . . bleep !”
    Koenig smiled. Agletsch translators sometimes encountered concepts they couldn’t handle in English, and the result was a brief, shrill, electronic tone. In twenty years, the Agletsch had gotten a lot better with English, but they still occasionally bleeped out.
    “We are as ignorant as are you,” Gru’mulkisch supplied.
    “I see.” Agletsch translations could also sometimes come across as blunt to the point of rudeness.
    “The destruction of your Endeavor ,” Dra’ethde continued, “may well have been caused by Sh’daar forces . . . possibly by elements of the Sh’daar Network in disagreement with current policies.”
    “The Sh’daar don’t speak with one voice?” Koenig said, feigning surprise. “How very . . . human! I never would have thought it of them!”
    “The Sh’daar Network is unimaginably vast,” Gru’mulkisch told him, missing the irony in Koenig’s voice, “extending, as it does, across a large part of this galaxy, and across an immense gulf of time. There can be, there often is . . . dissonance among disparate parts of the system.”
    “They have my sympathies,” Koenig said with dry amusement.
    Who speaks for Earth? That had been the cry of Carl Sagan, a late-twentieth-century cosmologist and philosopher. After four centuries, it was still an open question. It was interesting that the galaxy-spanning Sh’daar, unimaginably more advanced than Humankind, had the same problem.
    “What you call the Black Rosette, however,” Dra’ethde said, “remains a mystery to us. Over hundreds of millions of years, it has evolved into something quite beyond its builders’ original intent . . . beyond even their imaginings, yes-no?”
    “Evolved how?”
    The two Agletsch went into a momentary huddle, conversing with each other in a rapid-fire burst of eructations. Native Agletsch speech was produced by a kind of controlled belching impossible for humans to imitate. Their translation devices handled English fairly well . . . and also translated burps to Drukrhu , an artificial trade pidgin that had established the Agletsch as the galaxy’s premier data traders, diplomats, and interspecies liaisons.
    The two faced Koenig again. “Since there is no certainty,” Gru’mulkisch said, “since the information is largely supposition, we expect only first-level compensation.”
    Koenig opened a window in his mind and entered a thoughtclicked notation. Trade with the Agletsch was based on a well-established scale of prices for specific types of information. Some things—a complete description of a previously unknown alien star-faring civilization, for instance, including their location within the galaxy and a description of their world, were classified as Level Eight, and had a base price of some tens of tons of rhenium, or slightly less of artificial heavy elements. If Geneva could add new information to the exchange, the price in metals came down . . . but in fact there was surprisingly little that Humankind knew that the Agletsch did not. Earth depended on heavy metals as the medium of exchange with the interstellar trading network.
    And as head of the USNA, Koenig had to check large transfers of metal with the government in Geneva.
    This time, though, he could make the decision by himself. Level One information could be obtained for only a few hundred kilograms of rhenium or iridium, an amount easily within the reserve capabilities of North America.
    “Done,” he said. “Is half