Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

Forty-Eight: 3032 AD

Mouse sat in his father's chair, behind his father's desk. His eyes were closed. He felt much as his father looked the day he had returned from Academy. How long ago? Just a few months... It seemed like half a lifetime.

So much had happened. So much had changed. The Fortress had slipped quietly over some unseen boundary into a foreign universe, a hateful, actively hostile universe.

He had changed with his home. He had seen things. He had helped do things. None of them left him proud. He had turned a sharp corner on the yellow-brick road and had caught a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of a side of his family he had not known existed when he had gone off to Academy.

"I was a child then," he murmured. "This is just growing-up pain. Just reaction to a head-on with reality."

With reality. With a special reality unique to the family and Legion, with their bizarre array of problems and enemies.

He opened his father's comm drawer, punched for Combat. "Anything new?" he asked.

"Ah, negative, sir. Situations appear static."

"Keep me informed."

"Will do, sir."

"You're very good," Mouse whispered after breaking the connection. "If I were you I would've lost patience with me last week." He rose and began prowling the study.

He could not shake a subtle conviction that something dreadful was about to happen. He was restless all day. He had been unable to sleep well the past several nights.

"If there was just something to do around here."

He began strolling from cabinet to cabinet, looking into each, re-examining his father's collections. He did the rounds at least once a day. The circuit had a curiously calming effect.

He wondered if his father used them for the same talismanic purpose.

The coins, the dolls, the china, the books—they were all evidence of a past, of a connection with and a part in a vast, ongoing process. You could reach out and touch them and feel that you were touching part of something larger than yourself. You pulled in endless, invisible strands of humanity and spun yourself a chrysalis... It was all very subjective and emotional.

Still restless, he quit the study and went up to Cassius's office. He met no one along the way.

The tiny, empty world of the Iron Legion made him think of still, abandoned cities, deserted for no reason history bothered to remember. Take twenty thousand people out of the Fortress and it became a self-contained desolation almost timidly murmuring to itself.

These days he heard sounds he had never noticed before, all the background noises of supportive machines that had been drowned in the chatter and clatter of human presence. The sounds left him with an eerie, spooky feeling. Sometimes, as he strolled the empty hallways of the office levels, he would freeze suddenly, for a fraction of a second completely convinced that he was alone, trapped in an empty structure seven light-years from the nearest human being.

In those instants he staggered with the impact of a very vacant, very hollow feeling, inevitably followed by an instant of panic. Alienation was not the same as being alone. The alienated man moved in a bubble, but could see other human beings outside. The soul of him knew they were there, accessible if he could find the enchanted key. The separation was emotional, not physical. The truly alone man was barred from human intercourse by insuperable physical barriers...

Mouse would never forget the look on Fearchild's face when he had entered the torture chamber in that asteroid—such pathetic joy at the appearance of another being, an almost eager anticipation of torment that would reaffirm his membership in a fundamentally gregarious species.

Mouse decided that he had had an insight into the human animal. The bad marriages that went on, the cruel relationships that persevered beyond all logic—most people preferred pain to being alone. Even pain was an affirmation of belonging.

"The beast isn't really a solipsist," he muttered. Cassius's toy purchases from The Mountain were still in their shipping packs. He considered unwrapping them, setting them up, abandoned the idea. They were Cassius's private pleasure. He had no right to interfere.

He spent an hour playing with an ancient electric train, just running it around and around its track, making switches, stopping at stations, restacking the boxcars, wondering how the original owner had differed from people of his own age.

Beliefs and values made him think of his Academy classmates. Drawn from Confederation's farthest reaches, they had brought with them an incredible range of ideas and attitudes, some of which he had found wholly alien.

Tommy McClennon, with whom he had crewed and miraculously won in the Crab Nebula Sunjam Regatta two years ago... Tommy was Old Earther and more alien than most of the racial aliens attending Academy. Those aliens were of the same caste, the warrior, as the Storms. Tommy's ancestors had been nonproductive wards of the state for centuries. Tommy's different ideas went right to the bone.

A beep-beep-beep sounded from a silver button on the breast of his tunic. An elf's voice repeated a number three times. Mouse opened Cassius's desk and punched it on Walters's comm. "Masato Storm."

"Sir, word from Ceislak. He's just had a Sangaree raidfleet drop hyper... "

"I'll be right down." He ran to the nearest elevator, feeling foolish as he did. What could he do, really? Nothing but listen while this Helga's World disaster developed.

"I was right about something bad coming on," he told himself.

Frieda Storm stepped from another elevator as he left his. "You got the word?" she asked.

"The Sangaree? Yes."

"What the hell happened to that nitwit admiral who said he was going to help?"

Two big boards had been set up in Combat. One tried to follow operations on Blackworld, the other Ceislak's Helga's World action. They were not fully computerized, nor were they up-to-date. A mob of old folks and youngsters did their best with sketchy information.

"What's happened?" Mouse demanded.

"Donninger's trying to hold them off, but he's going to have to run. There's way too many of them."

Mouse glared at a newly activated display globe. At its heart lay a cue-ball-looking orb which represented Helga's World. Combat was receiving a data relay from Legion ships orbiting the planet. Mouse watched the blips a while.

"What's our real-time lag?"

"Five minutes and some seconds. Pretty good, considering. Your father's Fisher friends must be right in on top of it. Close enough to risk getting shot at."

Mouse considered the trend. "Tell Donninger to get the hell out. Ten more minutes and he won't be able to." A Legion ship winked out of existence while he spoke.

"They brought in some heavy stuff," someone said. "Bigger than anything on the ID lists."

Mouse tried to watch several screens at once as specs came through and the computers tried to build images of the enemy warships. "They are big," he told Frieda. "Something new in the way of raidships."

"I hear the Norbon are something new in the way of Sangaree."

"You think it's them?"

"Who else?"

"This's what Father and Cassius wanted, then. To draw that Deeth out of hiding."

Frieda sniffed. "He wasn't terribly cooperative about timing his appearance."

"Uhm." Mouse found himself a chair. He did not move, except to use the toilet, till the engagement reached its bloody conclusion.

"Astounding," he murmured, rising at last. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. I'm going to get some sleep."

He awoke to the insistent scream of the general alarm.

For a moment he could not understand what it was. He had heard it only twice before, long ago, during drills.

A booming voice echoed through the hallways: "Action stations. All personnel to action stations. We are about to be attacked. All personnel to action stations. We are about to be attacked."

"Holy Christ!" He grabbed clothing and ran.

He burst into Combat. "What the hell is going on?"

The senior watchstander indicated a display globe. His face was pallid. He gasped, "We got about two minutes' warning from the Fishers. They snuck past them somehow."

Red blips surrounded the Fortress in the tank. Tiny wires of fire lanced across the globe. Little stars sparkled. Diminutive sub-blips swarmed and danced like clouds of gnats on a still spring day.

"Eighty-two of them, sir," someone said. "There were eighty-five to start. Mostly light stuff. Sangaree."

"But... " He did not understand. It made no sense at all.

"They range from singleships to light battle, sir. Computer's still trying to project their assault plan."

Somewhere else, a computer voice murmured, "Kill. Bogey Forty-Six. Five thousand tons."

Frieda arrived. She had been asleep too. She was groggy and disheveled.

Mouse kept trying to make sense of the ship movements in the display globe. He could detect no pattern but an inexorable inward pressure.

"Just a raid?" he asked. "Or are they serious?"

The senior watchstander gave him a funny look. "Damned serious. Suicidally serious. They said so." He punched up something on his comm screen. A face appeared. The man said he was going to do to the Fortress what had been done to Prefactlas.

Mouse asked Frieda, "You think that's him?"

"Probably. Nobody's ever seen him, as far as I know."

"I've seen him before," Mouse said, suddenly remembering a moment on The Mountain. "He was there when that old man tried to kill us. In the crowd."

"Sir," the senior watchstander said, "the computer says they're running a randomed assault pattern. Some sort of command battle computer is controlling their ships. It looks like the ships' commanders have free manueuver any direction but backward. They've got to come after us whether they want to or not."

"Then it's a kamikaze attack."

"Sir?"

"A suicide thing."

"Definitely. Until whoever controls the battle computer turns them loose."

Mouse glanced at the display. An additional two enemy ships had been neutralized. "Are they going to break through?"

The watchstander sighed. "I think so. Unless we get a little more efficiency out of the automatic defenses."

"How long before they touch down?"

"Too early to predict."

"Tell the Fishers to contact Ceislak. Tell them to pass the word to Navy. Then have them get ahold of my father."

He could take only two hours of watching the claws of doom creep closer. The enemy kept coming and coming, despite one of the most sophisticated and deadly automatic defense systems ever devised. A third of their number had been destroyed, and still they came on with a dreadful, almost machinelike determination. Plainly, a madman was in charge out there.

He walked the silent halls of the office level, in some way making tentative good-byes to the Legion and everything he had known. He visited his father's study again, thinking it would be a crime against history to destroy the collections gathered there. So many beautiful things...

He returned to Combat. "What's it look like?"

"Still bad, sir."

"We going to hold till Hittite gets here?"

"Yes, sir. You think they'll commit her by herself?"

"I couldn't say. There's nothing out there that can stand up to her."

"Empire Class could take on any ten, sir. But there're fifty-some still."

"When you get signals from her, you give her everything we know. Especially about their combat lock. They'll have to break it to engage her, won't they? Maybe some of the individual ships' commanders will make a run for it."

"Will do, sir."

An elderly officer, retired from Legion service, said, "Some figures, sir."

Mouse scanned them. They predicted that the Sangaree would overwhelm the outer defenses and land at least fifteen vessels on the planetoid's surface. "Not good. This makes Hittite our only hope."

"Yes, sir."

"Sir," said the senior watchstander. "We've just picked up another group of them moving in."

"What?"

"Easy, sir. They aren't fighting ships. Here. Five of them. Four big ones that scan out as transports of some kind, and one medium one that might be the command ship."

"Transports. Of course. So they can send troops inside."

Frieda eased up on the senior watchstander's far side. She studied the data momentarily, then stalked out of Combat. It was the first she had moved in hours.

"Pass the word to the Armory to stand by to issue small arms," Mouse said. "And tell them to run a check on all internal defense systems. You computation people. I want some kind of parameters on best and worst times we can expect them to reach the surface." More to himself than anyone, he added, "Father thought the Fortress could stand up to anything. I guess he never considered being attacked by a madman."

"Uhm. Sir, there never has been a perfect defense against someone who doesn't care what happens to himself."

Next evening Mouse mustered the entire population of the Fortress in the gymnasium. He explained the situation. He asked for suggestions and received none. There was little that could be suggested. They could but try to hang on till Navy arrived. He bid them do what they could, and before he finished decided he had screwed up by bringing them together. It only rubbed everyone's nose in the fact that there were hundreds of children who would share the Fortress's fate.

Mouse's comm roused him from a troubled sleep. "Storm here."

"Contact with Hittite, sir. She's coming in."

"I'll be right down."

When he reached Combat, the senior watchstander told him, "We've fed them our data, sir. We've established a continuous instel link. She's got a couple of Provincials with her, for what they're worth. They're going to go for the command ship and transports first."

"How soon?"

The man checked the time. "They drop hyper in two hours and eight minutes, sir. They'll be coming in with a big inherent and only a couple degrees out of the slot to target."

"How much warning will our Sangaree friends have?" Mouse nodded at the red blips on the display.

"Depends on how good their detection gear is. Anywhere from five minutes to an hour."

It came up closer to an hour. "Damn!" Mouse spat. "Look. They're pulling back."

Within a half-hour it was obvious the raidships were being moved to protect the command ship and transports, and that they were still under that relentless outside control.

"I guess we'll see just how mean one of those big-assed Empire babies is," Mouse said.

"I suppose we will, sir."

Hittite dropped hyper and went into action in an awesome blaze of weaponry. She and her escort settled into a quiet, deadly routine of systematic destruction. The Sangaree seemed unable to touch her. But invincibility proved an illusion.

"Hello, Iron Legion. Hittite here. Boys, I don't want to tell you this, but I have to. We've taken some drive damage. We'll have to pull out or lose our screens. Sorry."

"Sorry?" Mouse snarled. "Sorry don't help nothing."

"At least we softened them up a little for you." Hittite's Communications Officer had not heard Mouse. "We make it eleven solid scratches and a whole lot of bloody noses. Good luck, guys. Hittite out."

"Run the numbers," Mouse snapped.

"They're still going to get through, sir. Unless those bloody noses are worse than they look."

"Bloody hell! I didn't want to hear that."

Frieda made her first appearance of the new day. "What's going on?"

Mouse explained.

"Damn it all, anyway!" She flew out of Combat.

Mouse was returning to his quarters when he saw the body lying on the stretcher in the corridor. A girl of about fifteen. He did not recognize her. She had to be a daughter of one of the enlisted men.

"What the hell?" He knelt, felt her pulse. She was alive. Just unconscious. Or sleeping.

A sound startled him. He glanced up, saw two old men go into a cross corridor carrying a youngster on a stretcher. The one to the rear gave him a furtive look.

He started to run after them, became distracted when he passed an open dormitory door. The lights were on. A half-dozen retirees were lifting children onto stretchers.

"What the hell is going on here?" he demanded.

They stared at him. Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled or frowned. Two hunkered down, lifted a stretcher, came toward him.

He grabbed an arm. "I asked a question, soldier."

"Mouse."

He turned. Frieda stood framed in the doorway, not a meter away. She held a weapon and it was aimed at him.

"What the hell are you up to, Mother?"

She half smiled. "We're loading you youngsters aboard the Ehrhardt. We're sending you to your father. The Fishers will give you covering fire."

His thoughts zigged and zagged. That was a good idea. It should have occurred to him. Gets the children out. It would be risky, but Ehrhardt was one of the fastest ships ever built... But Frieda seemed to be including him in this Noah's Ark venture. He would not have any of that.

"I've got a job here."

She smiled weakly. "I relieve you of command, Mouse. Bring a stretcher, men."

"Don't try to pull anything on me... "

"Take your father a kiss for me, Mouse." Her finger tightened on the trigger.

Mouse tried to jump aside. He was not quick enough. The stun bolt scrambled his thoughts. He was falling, falling, falling... He never reached the floor.