He stopped, then motioned the trio over to the groundcar he’d obtained, stood by as Aille and his uncommunicative fraghta climbed in the back, then motioned Aille’s human, Tully, into the front, and took the driver’s seat himself.
Normally, as a general, he wouldn’t do so. But Kralik liked to drive, and since the situation was unusual anyway he saw no reason not to indulge himself. The Jao wouldn’t know the difference, or care if they did. Whatever their faults, they suffered from very few of the human foibles concerning prestige and protocol. Kralik had long since learned to let a Jao, no matter how prestigious or powerful, open his or her own doors. And the only time he saluted them was to maintain the example in front of human troops, for whom the gesture did matter.
The day was already sweltering and the car, of course, had no air conditioning. Jao ignored extremes of heat and cold, so such amenities as climate control were reserved for high ranking human collaborators. Kralik was just a jinau, a dime a dozen, a human might have said. Air conditioning was unavailable for the likes of him, general or not.
If the Stockwell woman had been along, matters most likely would have been different. Kralik smiled, half-ruefully. He’d been drawn to her initially by nothing more complicated than her leggy good looks. But, very quickly, he had found himself far more impressed by her poise and intelligence. One look in those blue-gray eyes and it was obvious she had seen and experienced things far beyond what one would expect for a woman of her years.
She was a piece of work, half Jao herself, some people said. Because of her father’s position in the government, she’d spent more time with aliens than humans as a child until she was old enough for a tutor. He’d watched her last night, trading bodyspeech beat for beat with Governor Oppuk and the Subcommandant as though she’d been born to it.
Her family had prospered under Jao rule, when so many had not. But she hadn’t painted a vai camiti across her face, as did many high-placed collaborators. Some even went so far as to have a vai camiti tattooed on them. Nor were all such simply toadies trying to curry favor. Some, motivated by various reasons, had gone over to the conquerors in both body and spirit.
Kralik had been tempted to do so himself, at one point, when he was younger. He’d fought the Jao during the conquest, as a young Army lieutenant fresh out of ROTC. Then, when he’d finally returned home to Los Angeles after the defeat at New Orleans, he’d discovered his family had been destroyed.
His mother had died from one of the diseases that ravaged so many large cities after the infrastructure collapsed. For that, he could blame the Jao. But it had been humans, bandits claiming to be “Resistance” who were “requisitioning needed supplies” who had smashed their way into his father’s hardware store and shot down his father and older brother—and his sister-in-law in the bargain—when they tried to stop them from rifling the till.
It had been chaos in many places, in the weeks after the surrender, and the police had often stood by unless paid to do otherwise. Paid in something other than money, since U.S. currency was no longer worth anything. Kralik had had nothing, beyond a field commission as captain and some decorations given by a government that no longer existed. The local police had shrugged their shoulders.
A brutal crime, and a stupid one—since the money the robbers had murdered three people for was worthless anyway. The sheer stupidity of it had outraged Kralik almost as much as the crime itself. In his anger, and—being honest—because he had no idea what else to do, he’d volunteered for the jinau once the Jao established it shortly thereafter. For a time, he’d been bitter enough to contemplate adopting a vai camiti himself. But, soon enough, his service had made him realize the Jao would never see humans as their equals. No matter what they did, humans would remain simply servants, industrial serfs, and sepoy troops. Clever with their hands and fierce enough to fill out the front lines of a good fight, but not acceptable in polite company.