Wolf Among the Stars-ARC by Steve White Page A

circumstances of her father’s death, and the knowledge might shatter her.
    Yes . . . very close to my chest indeed.
    Rachel leaned forward, trembling with a complex mixture of emotions. “Murdered? Are you sure? But who—?”
    “As I say, I don’t know exactly who. But I’m fairly sure I know the motive for this heinous act.” Valdes’s eyes—large, and so dark a brown as to be almost literally black—took on a hypnotic intensity. “Your father, Ms. Arnstein, was about to declare openly in favor of my candidacy for the president-generalcy of the Confederated Nations of Earth. That was why he had to be silenced by my enemies!”
    “He hadn’t said anything to me about this declaration,” said Rachel dubiously.
    “And,” Andrew trusted himself to add, “it would hardly have been appropriate, as he was still on active duty.”
    “Well, of course he intended to wait until after his retirement—which, as you know, was imminent—to go public with it. But I solemnly assure you that he had come to see, as I have, that we stand at a unique turning point in human history—no, the history of all life in the galaxy! At such a moment, human destiny can’t be entrusted to business-as-usual hack politicians! Your late father, Captain Roark, had also come to see this. Unfortunately, he died before he could say so publicly.”
    Another lie , Andrew filed away.
    But Valdes was in full tilt. “The Lokaron were the first to master high technology, including the secret of interstellar travel. That head start enabled them to spread their multitudes across the stars. But now their greed has been their downfall, because they’ve sold their technology to us and thus lost that advantage. The war with Gev-Rogov made this clear for all who have eyes to see. Given technological parity, or near parity, we handed them their asses! Humanity is the natural ruling race of the galaxy. Lokaron population numbers mean nothing, any more than did the population numbers of the Persian and Roman and Chinese empires when younger, more vigorous peoples burst in on them and shattered their decadent, fossilized structures, opening up unimagined new possibilities.
    “But we were robbed of the full fruits of our victory. The established Lokaron powers that brokered the peace settlement saw to that. All at once, their traditional rivalries with Gev-Rogov were forgotten, when they realized that the unthinkable had happened and Lokaron had been humbled by non-Lokaron for the first time in history. That couldn’t be permitted. The lesson is clear: the Lokaron will always close ranks around their own when the chips are down. It’s an illusion to think we can join in the traditional Lokaron political and economic games as an equal player. They’ll never allow that. We can rely on no one but ourselves.
    “Unfortunately, our current leadership can’t see beyond the short-term profits from dealing with the doomed Lokaron mercantile system. That’s the limit of their vision. If we are to seize this unrepeatable moment, we must be unified under a strong leader who won’t let commercial money-grubbing or constitutional nit-picking stand in the way of the imperatives of racial destiny!”
    And who, I wonder, might that be? thought Andrew.
    The strange thing, he reflected, was that even though he had heard all this before—Valdes’ speeches were hard to miss on the news—and had always considered it claptrap, he now found himself, on a certain level, being caught up against his will in the oratorical flow. Not that he took it seriously . . . but he could see how others might. Was it some subliminal quality of Valdes’s voice? Or was it that Valdes was speaking to something deep in the recesses of the human soul, some dark need that today’s prosperous libertarian democracy did not satisfy?
    “Uh, sir,” he ventured, “isn’t this a lot like what the old Earth First Party—which my parents fought to overthrow—used to say? I mean, they were