Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

Thirty-Seven: 3028 AD

Moira was seventeen when she received the summons. It terrified her. She had heard stories... Not even Blake would force her. Would he?

She had no protector. She had had to do her own fighting since Frog's death. She was tough even for an Edgeward girl. But Blake? Fight a demigod?

Frog had, in his stubborn way.

She looked around the tiny room that had been the dwarf's home, that he had made home for a girl-child abandoned and unwanted by so many better able to provide. She turned an ear to listen for a ghost voice. "Frog, what should I do?"

"Go on, girl. And crank the bastard's nose up his butt if he tries anything."

She really had no choice. Blake was the great bull gorilla boss of Edgeward. They would come and get her if she did not go on her own.

As she prepared, making herself as unattractive as she could, she surveyed the room again. A cool tickle of irrational fear said it might be her last look around.

She had turned it into a museum. Almost a shrine, of and to the crazy dwarf called Frog, whose real name she had never known. There had been no way to show she cared while she lived. She had sensed that he would have been embarrassed by affection. Now, in her most romantic years, with her memories growing ever more vague and rose-lensed, she was, progressively, elevating him to godhead.

Moira did not fit. Edgeward was a black community. She was a curiosity and "old Frog's stray brat." The latter, with the ghost of the mad dwarf always peering over her shoulder, put people off more than did the former.

Old Frog had become a city legend. Edgewarders boasted about him to outsiders. The Man Who Ended the Shadowline. They had brought in his tractor and made a memorial of it. But he still made them nervous.

Dead and canonized was where madmen belonged. His mind had been diseased. They feared Moira might be a carrier.

They did not know what to say or do around her, so they did nothing. She was an outcast without justification, lonely, given far too much time to brood. The pressures of her fellow citizens' trepidations and expectations were creating the thing they feared.

Frog pictures on the walls. Frog things around the room. The ragged remnants of his hotsuit. A model of his crawler. Brightside charts which bore Frog's stamp, his openings of terra incognita. A diary in which Moira jotted what she felt were her most important thoughts, many of which orbited around her namesake, Edgeward's first woman tractor hog, The Girl Who Saw the Sun, a character saint of the same weird canon as Frog. Frog had claimed a relationship. Moira never had learned what it was. It was a mystery she was afraid to delve into. She had started in on the city records several times, and always stopped before she traced the link. She had a niggling little fear that she might find out her patron had had feet of clay.

She dithered. "At your earliest convenience," from Blake meant yesterday, and was that much more intimidating.

"Might as well get it over." She sighed, mussed her hair, and went.

Main offices for Blake Mining and Metals were in a huge old building at Edgeward's center, beneath the strongest part of the meteor screen shielding the dome. Years ago it had been City Hall and had housed city administrators' offices exclusively. Blake controlled that now. Edgeward was a company town. He might as well be in City Hall.

Moira arrived as the afternoon's programed rain began falling. A light breeze drove mist into her face. Scents on the air brought back vague images of herself running across a grassy, wild-flowered plain under a friendly yellow sun, playing with the other children on the breeding farm. It had been a gentle, realtime operation run by a paternalistic station master. The youngsters had not known they were property to be trained and sold. She would not have cared had she known. She had been happy.

She paused on the steps of City Hall and stared upward, trying to glimpse the star-speckled black enemy besieging the city. She saw nothing but sunlights and the piping from which the rain was falling. Edgeward worked hard to deny the night.

The rain fell harder. She hurried through an iris door that would become an airlock should the dome fall.

She entered a small, comfortable reception room. Its sole occupant was a thin, elderly gentleman who reminded her of a grown Frog. He had the leathery look of a lifelong tractor hog forced to retire from outservice. He made her nervous. Retired hogs sometimes became antsy and unpleasant.

This man had not. He glanced up and noticed her biting her lip in front of his desk. His whole face broke into smiles. He made it look as if he had been waiting years just for her.

"Miss Eight? Moira Eight? So glad you could come." He thrust a dark, wrinkled hand at her. She took it in a bit of a daze. It felt warm and soft. She relaxed a little. She judged people by the way they felt. Soft and warm meant nice and no harm planned. Cold, damp, hard, meant unpleasant intentions. She knew body temperatures were nearly the same in everyone, yet she depended on the difference in hands—and later, lips—and trusted that part of her unconscious which interpreted them.

It proved right most of the time.

"What... What's it about?" she asked.

"Don't know. I'm just the old man's legs. So you're Frog's little girl. All growed up. You should get out more. Pretty thing like you shouldn't hide herself." As he talked and she blushed, he guided her toward an elevator. "Mr. Blake is in the penthouse. We'll go straight up. He said to bring you right to him."

Moira bit her lip and tried for a brave face.

"Now then, no need to be scared. He's no ogre. We haven't let him devour a maiden in, oh, three or four years."

That's the way Frog used to baby me, she thought. There was something about Brightside that made tractor men more sensitive. Everybody thought Frog was a crusty old grouch—maybe even Frog thought he was—but that was just people who didn't know him.

Nobody bothered to get to know tractor hogs well. Their life expectancies were too short. It did not pay to get close to an enemy of the Demon Sun. Men like this one and Frog, who got old running the Thunder Mountains and Shadowline, were rare. Human beings simply could not indefinitely endure the rigid discipline and narrow attention/alertness it took to survive beyond the Edge of the World. Frog had broken down in the end, but he had been lucky. They had brought him out—to be murdered. Maybe this man had had his failure and been lucky too.

She began to grow angry. They had not done a thing about Frog's murder. Oh, they had exiled those people, but the murderer hadn't been caught. She planned to do it herself. She would be of age in less than a year. With Frog's bequest, and the credit from the sale of the salvageable parts of his rig after Blake had deducted recovery costs, she would buy passage offworld and find August Plainfield.

The obsession had been growing from the moment she had looked through that hospital door and realized what Plainfield had done. The practicalities did not intimidate her. She was still young enough to believe in magic and justice.

Her plan was her one rebellion against the dwarf's philosophy. Sour and grumbly as he had been, he would not have wanted her to hold a grudge so deeply it would shape her life.

"Here we are. Top of the tower. Be sure to ask if you can see the observation platform. Not many people get the chance. The view is worth it."

Moira's escort led her into an antechamber almost exactly reflecting her preconception of Blake's headquarters. It smelled of wealth. Such spendthrift use of space!

A domed city like Edgeward used every cubic centimeter to some critical purpose. Even open areas were part of a grand design intended to provide relief from the cramped limits of living quarters.

Here space existed without function beyond announcing the wealth and power of its occupant.

"He'll be in his private office, I believe," Moira's companion told her. "Follow me."

"There's so much room... "

"A big man with big responsibilities needs room to wrestle them."

"Thank you. Uh... I don't know your name."

"It's not important. Why?"

"Because you've been kind, I guess. And it is important. I like to know who's been nice so I can think nice things about them." She could not think of a better way to put it.

"Albin Korando, then."

"That's odd."

"For Blackworld, I suppose. My people didn't come here till after the war."

"No, I mean Frog used to talk about you. I was trying to remember your name just yesterday."

"I'll bet he told some stories," Korando said, and laughed softly. He wore a faraway look. Then he saddened. "Some stories, yes. We're here. And Miss?"

"Yes?"

"Don't be frightened. He's just a man. And a pretty good man at that. Very few of the street stories are true."

"All right." But as they paused before the door that would open on a man almost omnipotent, she became terrified of the sheer power she faced.

Korando pushed through. "Miss Eight is here, sir."

Timorously, Moira followed.

The man who swiveled a chair to greet her was not the fang-toothed cyclops she expected. Nor was he old. She guessed thirty-five. Maybe even younger. He had a slight frame which, nevertheless, had about it a suggestion of the restrained power of the professional fighter. His smile was broad and dazzling, revealing perfect teeth. For an instant she noticed nothing else.

"Forgive me for not rising," he said, offering a hand. With the other he gestured at legs that ended in stumps where he should have had knees. "An accident at the shade station in the Shadowline a few years ago. I haven't had time to grow new ones."

"Oh! I'm sorry."

"For what? I earned it. I should know better than to go crawling around under a rogue slave. I've got people who get paid for doing that sort of thing. Albin, bring the lady something. Something mixed, Moira? No, better not. Wouldn't do to have it get around that I'm getting young women drunk. Will coffee do?"

Korando departed when she nodded.

"Well, have a seat. Have a seat. And why this look of perplexity?"

"Uh... " Moira reddened. She had been staring. "I thought you were old."

Blake laughed. His laugh was a pleasant, almost feminine tinkle. She wished she had taken his briefly offered hand to see if it was warm. That hand gestured toward oil portraits hanging on a distant wall. "There they are. The real old ones. My father. His father. And the old pirate who started it all. Obadiah Blake." Three dark, hard faces fixed her with that look which is traditional in ancestral portraiture, a sort of angry calculation or cunning rapacity, as if each had been considering selling the artist into slavery. "They're old enough to suit anybody. I call them the Ancient Marinators. They took everything so serious. They soaked in their own juices." He smiled as if at an old joke. "Greedy grabbers, they were. Had to have it all."

"I guess when you've got it all you can point fingers and say shamey-shamey." Moira was astounded at her own temerity.

Blake laughed. "You're Frog's brat, all right. Hardly knew him myself, but Dad had a few things to say about him."

"None of them kind, I hope." She smiled at Korando as he arrived with a silver carafe and china teacup on a silver tray. Silver and gold were by-products of Blake's mining operations. Both were common around Edgeward. Korando wore one large gold loop earring.

"Not a one. Not a one. And none of them fit for your pretty ears, either. No, Albin, stay. I think my guest would feel more comfortable with a chaperon, though God alone knows how I'd run her down if the fancy hit me."

"As you wish, sir."

Moira smiled gratefully, including both men.

"Well, then," said Blake, "pretty as you are, and much as I'd like to chat and look and wishful think, it's business that made me ask you here, so to business we must. How do you feel about the man who killed Frog?"

She did not have to answer. Her feelings burned on her face.

"That strongly? Albin, rummage through that stuff on the table there and hand Miss Eight the solidos we were talking about last night." Blake's office was a vast clutter. He seemed to be a man without time to keep order.

"Plainfield," she said, handling two cubes about ten centimeters to a side. There were little differences in appearances, but she felt no doubt.

"Those came in yesterday, from Twilight Town. I've got a man up there who watches out for things. Made these of a fellow who's been hanging around their brass. Thought he recognized him from back when. He was one of the ones we exiled when Frog was killed. He was lucky. Got picked up by one of their crawlers. But he wants to come home. Has family here. He's trying to earn his way back in."

"What about Plainfield?" Her voice was hard, her throat tight. Her stomach felt as though she were about to throw up.

"He's using the name Diebold Amelung now, but that's not his real one either."

"What're you going to do?"

"For now, nothing." He raised a hand to silence her protest. "For now. In time, what needs doing. I could have him killed, but then I wouldn't find out what he's up to. I wouldn't find out why he killed Frog. I wouldn't find out if he's connected with some strange phenomena we've observed Brightside. Albin, is that projector ready? Good. Moira, the man's real name is Michael Dee. We've known that for some time."

"And you haven't done anything?" She began to get mad.

"My dear young lady, Blake has done everything possible, consistent with its own interests. Which isn't much, I'll grant. This man, whatever name he uses, is no Old Earth shooter, no crackdome cutthroat. He could buy and sell Edgeward City. He's a very old, rich, and powerful man. He's got a lot of connections."

"So?"

"For you it's simple. You could burn him. You've got nothing to lose. I've got an industrial empire and a hundred thousand people to consider."

"He can't be that important."

"No? He owns a planet. He almost controls the private instel trade. He has interests in all the shipping lines that carry our exports. His brother is Gneaus Julius Storm, the mercenary, who has a personal army of twenty thousand men and the ships to move it. He's associated with Richard Hawksblood, another mercenary. And he has friends in Luna Command who would put Blackworld under embargo simply on his say-so."

"I see. If he's such a big man, how come he's in Twilight?"

"Exactly. Now we're in tune, little lady. Let's watch some clips. Albin."

Korando lowered the lighting and started the holo projector.

"This is the shade cloud we send up from the outstation to cover the run from the Whitlandsund to the Shadowline," Blake said. The holo cube portrayed a tower of darkness, which, she realized after a moment, was dark only due to a lessening of an almost unbearable glare. "We've filtered it down to the limits of resolution."

The hologram changed. Another pillar of dust appeared, viewed from a slightly sunward angle, making a portion look like a tower of fiery motes. "A charter running fourteen hours north of the Shadowline caught this two years ago. We couldn't make anything of it then. Too far to investigate, and in Twilight territory. Somebody thought it might be dust blowing out of a volcano."

The third clip was a still of crawler tracks under artificial lighting. "This one's only about a month old. It was taken a little over two thousand kilometers out the Shadowline by another charter. He thought he'd stumbled across some side trip of Frog's. They didn't look right. Too wide. We checked against Frog's log. He didn't make them.

"Something was wrong. Obviously. It bothered me. Curiosities always do. I had Albin check the records. I had him talk to drivers. And he found out what I thought he'd find out. The only Edgeward man who ever went that far was Frog. So I had Albin make the rounds again. He found several charters who had gotten readings on, or sightings of, dust pillars in the north, especially way out west, where they could be seen from the Shadowline itself. Albin."

The holo changed to a small-scale chart of the northern hemisphere west of the Edge of the World. "Nobody thought they were worth reporting. Just another Brightside curiosity. Once we got interested, we plotted them. They all seem to have appeared along the black line there."

Moira understood. "A shade route to the Shadowline from Twilight territory. That would be expensive."

"She's quick, Albin. And the crawler track confirms it. It was made by a Meacham long-range charter. Twilight is in the Shadowline, at considerable expense in money and man-hours. More than they'd have available for a speculative venture. Putting a line of shadow generators across two thousand kilometers of Brightside is an awesome feat. The cost in equipment and lives must have been phenomenal. I checked with the engineers. They said it could be done, but somebody would have to be crazy to try it. So why did somebody?"

Korando changed clips twice while Blake was talking. The first showed an artist's concept of a peculiar tractor, the second an action sequence of the real thing, slightly different in its lines. The camera angle left no doubt that it had been shot in the Shadowline. Fine lines of intense light ran along the lip of towering cliffs in the background. "This was shot earlier in the week, not far from where we found the mysterious crawler track," Blake explained.

"This doesn't make sense," Moira told him. "There's no profit in it."

"Are you sure? There's got to be. Huge profits. Those Meachams are worse pirates than old Obadiah ever was. I was hoping you could shed some light."

"Me? All I know about the Shadowline is what Frog told me."

"Exactly. The only man who ever went all the way to the end."

"You mean he found something?"

"That's what I want to know. Did he?"

"He never said anything. But I only got to see him for a minute before he shooed me out. And then... Then... "

"Yes." Blake swept a hand around to include most of the room. "I've gone over every record we've got, trying to find something. Even those dreadful hours of broadcasts that went out before he made it back. I haven't found a thing. In fact, I've found too much nothing. It's like making a fly-by of a black hole. You know there's something there, but all you can tell is that it isn't. If you see what I mean. A lot of records were tampered with. You can't tell what Plainfield wanted to cover up. And more records seem to have been ‘rectified' since. Like that black hole, there's so much nothing that you can tell it's something big and dangerous. And my only recourse is to some very fallible human memories of something that happened a long time ago."

"What about your spy?"

"I'd have to bring him home to question him properly. I'm trying, but I don't think I'll make it. The past few years the Meachams have gotten more paranoid than usual. Like maybe they've got something to hide. Getting the solidos of Dee was damned near impossible."

"You could put someone in, sir," Korando suggested. "Someone with a legitimate reason to come and go. Do the interview there."

"Easier than bringing someone out, I agree. But I'm afraid of how much trouble I might have getting my someone back out, legitimate business or not. My man there gives the impression that outsiders are watched pretty damned close."

"Then stage an ambush in the Shadowline," Moira said. "Use guns instead of cameras. Grab some of their people."

"I don't want them to know we know. That would bring on the war before we're ready."

"War?" Moira and Korando asked. The girl's voice squeaked.

"Of course. If there's something out there worth the trouble they've invested in stealing it, then it's worth our fighting for it to get it back."

Korando said, "Boss, you've got one hell of a subjective way of looking at things. On the map... "

"The Shadowline starts in Edgeward territory. As far as I'm concerned, the whole damned thing is ours. Doesn't matter that it wanders up above Twilight's south parallel."

So there's a little pirate in this Blake, too, Moira thought. She smiled. It took claim-jumper types to make money on Blackworld. "What's my part in this?" she asked. "You knew I couldn't help with what Frog found. So why drag me in?"

"You're right. You're right. Smart girl. I've got something in mind, something complicated. Do you think you could kill Dee?"

"Plainfield? Yes. I've thought about it. I could. I don't know how reliable I'd be afterward."

"Could you not kill him?"

"I don't understand."

"Could you be around him, exposed to him, and not do something to get even?"

"I don't know. Maybe. If there was a good reason. What are you driving at?"

"You think you could be friendly? Or more?"

Her breakfast slammed against her esophagus. She took a moment to force it down. Then it struck her that she could exact a much more satisfying revenge if she could get the man to love her before she killed him. The sheer cruelty of it felt good.

That was when she first realized how truly deep her hatred for Plainfield ran. It was an obsession. She would do anything.

She frightened herself. And did not like Moira very much. That was not the sort of person she wanted to be.

"What do you want me to do? I'll do it."

"Eh?"

"I'll do whatever you want me to do, as long as getting Plainfield is part of the deal."

Blake peered at her. "Don't let them turn you over to their women," he muttered. He seemed disappointed. "All right. Here's my thinking. It's still rough. We'll smooth it out as we go. First, we send you to Twilight Town. We're going to ticket you through to Old Earth. You can't get a through ship from any other port. We'll arrange a meet with our man there if we can. Then you'll take the first Earthbound ship out. You'll leave it at Weiderander's Station, cash in the rest of your ticket, and buy another for The Big Rock Candy Mountain under a different name. We're going to enroll you in the Modelmog. They've started taking rich kids in order to balance their books."

The Modelmog was the century's foremost study center for young artists, actors, and writers. As Blake suggested, the school had fallen on hard times. Rich no-talents were being admitted to carry the costs of subsidizing the talented but poor who made up the bulk of the student body. Substantial endowments were the price of the university's highly respected diplomas.

"What's this got to do with Plainfield?" Moira demanded. Her voice was plaintive. "It's awful complicated."

"Patience, child. Patience. I'm getting to it. At the Modelmog we want you to vamp a poet named Lucifer Storm. He's a talented young man, they say, and quite handsome. You shouldn't find him repulsive. Attach yourself. He'll be your passport into the Fortress of Iron. That's the headquarters of the mercenary Gneaus Storm. Dee is in and out of there all the time. You should have no trouble making contact. Become his consort."

"I see. Live with him and spy on him."

"Exactly."

"For how long?"

"There's more than Frog's paybacks to worry about, girl. There's Edgeward. I'm a big fish around here, but out there I'm just a minnow. I can't make enemies out of sharks."

Moira was intelligent. She recognized his problem, thought she found it emotionally unpalatable. "All right. Butyou're making it too complicated. I'll mess it up for sure."

Blake chuckled. "I've been studying Moira Eight, too, dear. She's no dummy. Her acquaintances say she's a very good actress, both on stage and in her personal life. Dramatist White thinks he's made a real find."

Moira shrugged. Secretly, she was pleased. Mr. White never said anything of the sort to her.

"My Dad, and my grandfather, they treated old Frog pretty bad. If I'd been in charge, I'd have done it different. Frog was important. He reminded us that we aren't gods. He reminded us that what was good for the Corporation wasn't always good for Edgeward's people. He didn't realize it, and my Dad only saw the edges of it, but your old man kept Edgeward from turning into something like Twilight. You'll see what I mean if we send you. Blake and Edgeward still have a human side—despite my Board of Directors. I digress. I'm sorry. It's my hobbyhorse."

"May you never dismount, sir," Korando said.

"Albin is my conscience. He came from Twilight."

"I know. He was an exile. Frog brought him in. He's sort of my brother. That was a long time ago."

"A long time ago," Korando agreed. "Had a habit of collecting strays, didn't he?"

Grimly, Blake said, "I wish he were here today. I've got to present this to the Board pretty soon. He's the kind who could have bullied them into line. They were afraid of him. Still are, in a way. As if he might come back to haunt them."

"He has, hasn't he?" Moira asked. "When do we start? What do we have to do?"