Free Wolf Among the Stars-ARC by Steve White

even Andrew had ever really grown used to.
    The rest of the voyage was uneventful. Star Wanderer , built by and for humans, was no more alien-seeming than its cuisine. They couldn’t even watch the stars while in overspace, and all external viewscreens were deactivated after transition to guard the passengers’ emotional equilibrium from the sight of the indescribable nothingness that lay outside the hull. There were various recreational and entertainment facilities available, and as time went by Andrew felt that a thaw was beginning to creep into his association with Rachel.
    “Listen,” she said in one unguarded moment, “I’m sorry if I seemed to snap at you that first night after departure, at dinner.”
    “You mean when I asked if your father had ever mentioned the Black Wolf Society?”
    “Right. I’m sure you’re just pursuing every possible lead. But . . . well, I had a friend once, shortly after I’d first moved to San Francisco. He got hooked on drugs—relatively harmless ones at first, or so he thought. But then one led to another, right up to brainbloom.”
    Andrew didn’t trust himself to speak. He knew of the utterly illegal designer drug. It produced an explosive enhancement of creativity—for a while. But then . . .
    “Dead?” he finally queried.
    “That would be better. He might as well be anencephalic. But his brain still produces EEG readings, so they can’t legally pull the plug on him. He’s just a mass of flesh, hooked up to a machine.” She shook herself and spoke a little too briskly. “The police are certain that the Black Wolf Society is behind distribution of the stuff, but they haven’t been able to prove anything. Confidentially, one of them told me they’re swimming against a very strong tide of influence at high places.”
    And when I mentioned your father’s name in the same sentence with them . . . “You’re right,” Andrew said quickly. “I was just speculating at random.” He steered the conversation into safer channels. The subject never came up again.

    Andrew discovered that his travels hadn’t really prepared him for Tizath-Asor, when they emerged from overspace at one of its transition gates. He had been to Harath-Asor, home of Earth’s closest Lokaron associates and origin of Tizath-Asor’s original settlers. There, he had been struck—as had so many others, including his parents, the first humans to see it—by the strange contrast between the overwhelming presence of transcendent technology and the ancientness of the world itself, with its worn-down landscapes, its enigmatic cyclopean ruins of an extinct pre-Lokaron race, its long days . . . and, in its deep-blue sky, the great orange sun whose tidal pull had produced those long days by slowing its rotation over the eons.
    There was none of that here. Tizath-Asor was younger than Earth, and its sun was a G2V like Sol. It still held oceans that covered three-quarters of its surface, even though its surface gravity was only slightly higher than the 0.72 Terran g its Harathon colonists had evolved under. Those colonists had required so little genetic engineering that the two subspecies could still interbreed normally, as was not the case with either of them and the Lokarathon of the species’ homeworld, who represented the original Lokaron genotype—or with the Rogovon, or any of the other gengineered Lokaron subspecies.
    They proceeded inward from the transition gate through the crowded spacelanes, passing awesome space habitats, titanic powersats, streaming convoys of ore carriers, and all the rest of what had to be expected in the capital system of a major Lokaron gevah. But as a secondary colony of Gev-Harath, this was a relatively young gevah , and as they approached the planet (reassuringly Earthlike despite its smaller size), its night side wasn’t the almost unbroken dazzlement of city lights Andrew had seen on Harath-Asor. There was, however, the same thread—impossibly thin for its