Starfishers - Starfishers Triology Book 2

Sixteen: 3049 AD

Operation Dragon, Combat

Time telescoped, then coiled around itself like some mad snake trying to crush itself. It detached Marya's battlefield cabin from the macro-universe, establishing an independent timeline. Ten seconds became an eternal instant.

BenRabi was afraid.

Something clicked inside Mouse. He slipped into assassin's mind. BenRabi vacillated between answering the alarm and staying to restrain the organic killing machine.

Danion shivered. Moyshe recognized the feel of service ships launching.

"I'm going on station, Mouse. Keep her here till Jarl's people come. And keep her alive."

Mouse nodded mechanically. He was easily guided while in assassin's mind—if Psych had keyed him to accept your direction. He would be upset later. He wanted to show the woman the death of a thousand cuts, or something equally grisly.

He was on his way back to the real universe already. "Take the guns, Moyshe. Hide them."

"What about?... "

"This." He tapped the plastic knife thrust through a tool loop on his jumpsuit.

"All right." BenRabi collected the weapons. He hid them in Mouse's cabin, then headed for Damage Control South.

"What's up?" he asked one of his teammates when he arrived.

"Sangaree raidships. They say there's at least fifty of them. That's scary."

"In more ways than one."

"What do you mean?"

"That their show is being put on by a consortium. No one Family has that kind of muscle. The last time they put that many ships together was for the Helga's World thing during the Shadowline War."

The Seiner regarded benRabi with a puzzled fearful frown. Moyshe was talking foreign history.

Moyshe found his fellow landsmen in a low-grade panic. They had no faith in Seiner arms. And they were sure the Starfishers would fight. He did not understand till he heard the Seiners themselves second-guessing Payne.

Fleet Commander Payne had refused to negotiate or back down. He had told the Sangaree that he would fight to the last harvestship.

"What're we fighting about?" Moyshe asked plaintively.

His Seiner companions refused to enlighten him.

He felt that touch of panic himself. He never had wanted to die with his boots on. Not since he had given up boyhood daydreams. He had no interest in dying at all. Not for several thousand years.

Time moved with the haste of pouring treacle. He knew the Sangaree ships were maneuvering in the darkness outside. Outgunned service ships were moving to meet them. The death dance had begun.

Moyshe stood facing the dark gate with all the unanswerable questions still banging around in his mind. The nature of his want remained the biggest, closely followed by the meaning of the gun thing.

He started worrying about Amy. Where was she? Would she be safe? "Stupid question," he muttered. Of course she was not safe. Nobody was safe today.

Then he saw her standing at the tool crib. What was she doing here? She spotted him, started his way.

"Where's Mouse?" she asked.

He explained quickly.

"Good," she said when he finished. She tried to remain cool, but a tear formed in the corner of one eye. She brushed at it irritably. She had caught some of the groundside uninvolvement disease from him, he thought. Why else would a Seiner hide her emotions? Three men had died. It was a sad affair.

She said, "I'll call Jarl. He may not have sent anyone else down."

Moyshe resumed his seat, stared at the deck tensely, counting rivets and welds. When would the Sangaree missiles arrive?

The attack, when it came, was not Sangaree. The dull-witted sharks, confused and distressed by the sudden appearance of so many more ships, reached emotional critical mass. They attacked in all directions.

Scraps of news filtered in from Operations Sector. Some were good, some bad. The Sangaree were having a hard time. But the sharks attacking the harvestfleet were concentrating on Danion.

In the sea of nothing the service ships were killing, and sometimes being killed by, sharks. The Sangaree vainly fought an enemy invisible to their equipment while, foolishly, continuing to try for a position of vantage against the harvestfleet. There was a wan hope in that, Moyshe thought. The sharks might take care of them. But, then, who would take care of the sharks?

Danion shivered continuously. All her weaponry was in action, firing on Sangaree and sharks alike. BenRabi grimaced as he wondered just what the monster ship mounted.

He waited with his team in the heart of the great mobile, he smelling their fear and they his. Amy quivered like a frightened rabbit in the crook of his arm. Alarms screamed each time the sharks penetrated the defenses, but DC South received no emergency calls.

Courage brewed beneath the fear. There was no tension between landsman and Seiner now. They were united in defiance of an unprejudiced death.

Danion rocked. Sirens raked their wicked nails over a million blackboards. Officers shouted into the confusion. A damage-control team piled aboard an electric truck and hurtled off to aid technicians in the stricken sector. Behind them the mood gradually turned grim as the fear, unable to sustain itself indefinitely, faded into a lower key, an abiding dread. Each technician sat quietly alone with his or her thoughts.

The damage reports began arriving. Nearly ten percent of Danion's population were either dead or cut off from the main life-support systems. More trucks left. Survivors had to be brought out before the emergency systems failed.

And there Moyshe sat, doing nothing, awaiting his dying turn.

Somewhere in the big nothing the Sangaree raidmaster decided he had had enough. His fleet took hyper, bequeathing the Starfishers his share of ghostly foes.

"Suits," said the blank-faced Fisher directing DC ops when the news arrived. He foresaw the end.

They drew spacesuits from the emergency lockers. BenRabi donned his while thinking that this was the first time he had worn one seriously. Always before it had been for training or fun.

He wondered why Mouse had not yet shown. Was he in the sector cut off? He asked Amy.

"No. There's no damage there yet. Jarl probably hasn't had a chance to do anything. Our people should all be manning weapons."

Danion screamed, whirled beneath them. Moyshe fell. His suit servoes hummed and forced him to his feet. The gravity misbehaved. He floated into the air, then came down hard. The lights weakened, died, returned as emergency power entered the lines.

A shark had hit Danion's main power and drives.

Somebody was yelling at him. Amy. "What?" He was too upset to listen closely, heard only that his team was going out. He jumped at the truck as it started rolling. Seiner hands dragged him aboard.

Twenty minutes later, in an odd part of the ship devoted to fusion plant, his team captain set him to securing broken piping systems. Whole passageways had been ripped apart. Gaps opened on the night. Sometimes he saw it, starless, as he worked, but thought nothing of it. He was too busy.

Hours later, when the pipes no longer bled and he had time for sloth, he noticed a vacuum-ruined corpse tangled in a mass of wiring, dark against an outer glow. That gave him pause. Space. It was what he was not supposed to see, so of course he had to look. He walked to the hole, saw nothing. He pushed the corpse aside, leaned out. Still nothing. No stars, no constellations, no Milky Way. Nothing but a tangle of harvestship limned by a sourceless glow.

He stood there, frozen in disbelief, for he knew not how long. No stars. Where were they that there were no stars?

The harvestship rotated slowly. Something gradually appeared beyond tubing, spars, and folded silver sails—the source of the glow. He recognized it, but did not want to believe it. It was the galaxy, edge on, seen from beyond its rim. His premonitions returned to haunt him. What, outside the galaxy, was near enough to be reached by ship?

Far away, another harvestship coruscated under shark attack. Danion had shuddered to several while he worked, but none had been bad. There was an explosion aboard the other vessel. Gases spewed from her broken hull. But his eyes fled her, hurrying on to the coin-sized brightness rising in the direction of rotation.

It was a planet. Self-illuminating, no sun. There was only one such place...

Stars' End.

Certain destruction for all who went near.

What were the Seiners doing? Were they mad? Suicidal?

Something broke, something blossomed across the face of the galaxy, a hundred times brighter, a fire like that of an exploding star. A harvestship was burning in a flame only a multidimensional shark could have ignited. They were growing more cunning, were spraying antimatter gases that totally devoured. In a corner of his mind a little voice asked, as a Fisher would, if that vessel's death had served the fleet. Were sharks dying there too?

His gaze returned to Stars' End. All his myths were hemming him in. He did not doubt that the Sangaree would return. It was not their style to back down when the stakes were high, and there was more on the line now than a source of ambergris.

He knew why the Seiners had come here. As did all who sought Stars' End, they wanted the fortress world's fabulous weapons. For centuries opportunists had tried to master the planet. Whoever possessed its timeless might became dictator to The Arm. No modern defense could withstand the power of Stars' End weaponry. Nor could sharks. The weapons were the salvation for which Payne had dared hope.

What a faint hope! BenRabi knew there was no way to penetrate the planet's defenses. Battle fleets had failed.

A hand touched his shoulder. A helmet met his. A voice came by conduction. "We're pulling out. Danion's been hit inboard of us. We don't want to get trapped here." In those words Moyshe imagined great sadness, but little of the fear he felt himself.

They managed to reach D.C. South again only by trekking several kilometers afoot through regions of ship that looked like they had been mauled by naval weaponry. Moyshe found it hard to believe that the wrecking had been done by a creature he could not see.

A room had been prepared for them to relax in, with snacks and drinks, and secure enough so they dared shed their suits.

Mouse was there, wounded and bleeding.

"Mouse! What the hell!... "

"I should've bent her straight off, Moyshe. She got to me. Tricked me. Now she's into it somewhere."

It was a big and confused ship. She could disappear easily. "How?" Moyshe examined Mouse's left arm. It was angled. Mouse had gotten a tourniquet on somehow.

"Thing like a hatchet." Mouse's face was drawn and bloodless, but he did not protest benRabi's rough hands.

"She must've caught you napping. That don't sound like you."

"Yeah. We were playing chess... "

"Chess? For Christ's sake... "

"She's pretty good. For a woman. Nailed me when I was moving in for a mate."

BenRabi shook his head. "Are you for real?"

He could picture it. An overconfident Mouse suggesting a game to kill time, getting too deep into alternate moves to react quickly. Stupid, but in character. "How many times have I told you it was going to get you into trouble someday?"

"God damn, Moyshe, don't mother me. Not now. Do something about the arm, eh? Nobody around here is interested. I could lose it. And these clowns don't do regeneration surgery."

"Amy? Where's Amy Coleridge?" benRabi asked. He found her. "You seen Mouse? He needs a doctor bad."

"I saw him come in. There's one on the way. The woman?"

"Yeah." What was Marya doing now?

This was the price of not having let Mouse have his way on The Broken Wings. On his hands was the blood of a friend; in his mind a nagging gunmetal smile. Whatever feeling he might have had for her, or she for him, they were of enemy tribes. That was the overriding rule. In the end, neither could give quarter.

"I'll take care of it, Mouse," he whispered to his friend. "You keep Amy busy." He rose. "Keep an eye on him, will you, love? I'll be back in a couple minutes."

She asked no questions, probably assuming he was off to the toilet.

From the tool crib he drew an old Takadi Model VI laser cutting torch. It was a light-duty one-handed tool meant for sheet metal trimming. The crib attendant asked no questions.

He slipped out of D.C. and into an empty office nearby. It took just minutes to make the modifications he had been taught in a Bureau school. He created an unwieldy lasegun. Then he stole a scooter and took off.

He had tried to think like the woman while modifying the torch. He presumed that she would not know the attacks were shark and not her own people's. She would do something to neutralize the ship without damaging it. Her specialty dealt with atmosphere...

She would head for Central Blowers. She could take out Operations if she could cut its oxygen supply.

He hurtled through passageways, impatiently trying to remember the way to the blower rooms. Fate seemed determined to stall him. Damage compelled long detours. He had to wait on emergency traffic. People kept stopping him to tell him to get a suit on. The scooter, low on power, slowed to a crawl. He had to walk a kilometer before he found another unattended.

But he eventually reached his destination and instantly knew that he had guessed right. Dead men guarded the closed blower room door from within. Their weapons, if they had been armed, were gone. Moyshe glanced at the thing in his hand. Would it work?

The blower room was vast. It served only Danion's core, but still was a wild jungle of massed machinery and ducting. A lot of air needed moving and scrubbing...

She was in there somewhere, trying to kill them.

Half an hour departed with antelope fleetness. He wandered among the brobdingnagian machines and found nothing. Danion kept shivering but the battle had become so old that it no longer caught his attention. An overpowering fatalism had set in now, a feeling that he was completely powerless in the greater situation.

But, damn! it was a long skirmish.

Weariness preoccupied him. He had been through twenty hard, emotionally draining hours.

He finally located the huge ring of consoles from which Danion's core oxygen levels and humidities were controlled.

He crawled, he climbed, he attained himself a perch on a high catwalk from which most of the controls were visible. He saw only empty seats where a dozen technicians should have been stationed. Corpses lolled lifelessly in two more. A body lay like a broken doll on the aluminum grate decking.

She had been here. What was she doing now?

The question answered itself. She appeared as if spontaneously generated, moving among the boards, selecting cutoffs.

BenRabi aimed his makeshift weapons.

"Marya... Maria... " Her names ripped themselves from him against his will. She had been closer to him, in some hidden part of him, than he had realized.

Her head jerked up, turning, startled. Her eyes were narrow and searching. That mocking smile exploded across her face. "Moyshe. What are you doing here?" She hunted him with jerkily moving eyes, her hand hovering near a holstered, captured weapon. She was afraid. And she wanted to shoot.

"You're trying to kill us," he croaked.

What a stupid thing to say. Of course she was. Why was he waiting? Pull the trigger, pull the trigger, he screamed at himself.

He had done it a million times in imagination. All those images of the gun... Go! Go!

He couldn't. It was real this time. It was not some insane, inexplicable daydream oozing from the nether pits of his mind. Had the gun thing ever had anything to do with real weapons?

She stepped over a dead Seiner. "Moyshe, how can you say that? Not you. You'd be repatriated."

Repatriated to Hell, maybe. Her lie was a kilometer tall. After The Broken Wings and von Drachau's raid? She was going to have his guts on her breakfast toast if he did not do something.

She crossed his aim repeatedly, but he just could not end it. It had seemed so easy when he had been angry. It was easy for Mouse... wasn't it? Sweat beaded on his forehead as he tried to force his trigger.

His aim fell.

The movement gave him away. Her smile gave way to clashing-sabers laughter. Her weapon leapt into her hand. Her hand rose.

He reacted. Her shot reddened metal where he had crouched. But he was moving, across an open space. His finger was frozen no more, though he fired wild, scoring a section of console. He dove into the shelter of a huge machine. Disinterested, it went on grumbling to itself. Like a lot of people, it would do nothing till it was hurt, and then it would just sit there and scream.

Her shouts mocked him. He did not catch her words, but they did not matter. She was taunting him, trying to get him to give himself away again. Beams licked here and there, probing his cover, making metal run like tongues of candlewax.

He was scared. He had swum too deep this time. He had taken the dive he had feared since his assignment to Beckhart.

In an instant of insane gallows humor he told himself that death would certainly end his psychological woes.

But both he and the woman were too confident of his inability, his uncertainty, his lack of commitment. Something within him cracked. Something hatched from an egg of darkness lying in his deeps. He suddenly knew that there was something he could believe in, something worth fighting for. It had been trying to break through from the beginning.

He grinned, then laughed at the ludicrous irony of life. His Grail. He had found it here on the marches of Hell, as he was about to die. This ship, these Seiner people...

In marveling stupidity, he stepped into the open. The woman was so startled she hesitated. He did not. He shot first. His hand was steady, his aim flawless. Just as they had taught him.

The madness of the moment faded. He felt as empty as he had on the day he had entered the Blake City spaceport. Had he found anything after all? Or had his gun-need just thrown up a light-show of justification?

He was standing over her when Kindervoort's people arrived. He did not know how long he had been there. The battle had died away while he waited. And he had reversed all the switches she had thrown, though he did not remember doing so. Operations was getting its desperately needed oxygen.

He was crying when they found him. He had wondered about that for a long time. Mouse sometimes shed tears afterward, as if the new corpse were that of a favorite brother. He supposed Mouse spent his stored emotion then, while it was safe, while no one could grab a handle on his soul.

Someone pried the torch from his bent rod fingers.

"Moyshe?" Amy asked. "Are you all right?"

He seized her, held her. She was a warm fire in a cold, dark, and lonely cavern. She let him cling for a second, then pulled away, retaining a grip on his arm. She seemed a little distant, a little frightened. And who wouldn't be, after what he had done? "Come on. You've got to talk to Jarl."

He nodded. Yes. Kindervoort would want to know all about it. Old Doctor Deathshead would poke and prod and try to pry open the lid of his soul. Even on a battle day Kindervoort would want to keep an eye on the blood of his ship. That was all people were to Danion. The harvestship was the real living thing here. The folks inside were just specialized cells.

He let Amy lead him away, but looked back at Marya as he went. They were taking pictures and nattering into recorders. Medics were piling bodies onto stretchers. Techs were weeping over the damaged console and impatiently trying to cajole readouts on atmospheric quality... But he had eyes only for Marya.

Marya. She was dead now. He could ease up and let her be more than just "the Sangaree woman."

He did not know why or how, but he must have loved her in some odd, psychotic way. Or maybe he was in love with the death she had symbolized. But, now that she was lying there, sprawled inelegantly, brokenly, he felt a little freer. And a little sadder.

Kindervoort's office was hectic. People came and went hastily, crowding its outer reaches. The chaos was probably typical of every office aboard, Moyshe thought. There would be plenty of work for everyone.

Kindervoort pushed through the crowd. "Moyshe. Amy. Come on in the office." He broke trail. Settling behind his desk, he said, "Thank God for this lull. I was in-suit for eleven hours. The damned things drive me crazy. Give me claustrophobia. You all right now, Moyshe? You look a little pale."

BenRabi sat with his elbows on his knees, staring into infinity. He shrugged.

"For a long time you had me worried, Moyshe," Kindervoort said. "You seemed so solitary, so introspective, so ineffectual. Not exactly up to advance billing. I don't know what I expected Beckhart's top man to be, but you weren't it. Not till today. Then you acted when you had to. Intuitively, quickly, correctly, efficiently. The way I was told to expect. And in character. All on your own. Except maybe you told Mouse?"

Kindervoort had steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. He seemed to be thinking out loud. "Now tell me what happened. An unedited version."

Moyshe started talking. It helped. He began at the beginning and told the whole story, presuming Jarl had enough details to catch any major deletions. He tried to be objective.

Kindervoort nodded, occasionally doodled, once made a call for corroboration. He asked Moyshe to go over several things twice. It was a brief and gentle holiday compared to a Bureau debriefing. He had Amy call to make sure Mouse was getting medical attention.

BenRabi left out nothing but the hiding of the weapons.

When he concluded, Kindervoort asked, "Did today change anything for you? You ready to cross over now?"

Moyshe considered it. Hard. He wanted to be part of what he had found here. But he could not. Not on Kindervoort's terms. "No, Jarl. I can't."

Amy was disappointed. He expected her to be. The signs were unmistakable. She had plans. Bells and white satin, a regular Archaicist extravaganza.

"Why'd you go after Gonzalez, then? We would've gotten her eventually. Maybe too late to have saved Ops, though," he conceded.

BenRabi could not bring himself to answer truthfully. Landsmen did not avenge friends. They had no friends to avenge. And he did not want them to know that a prime rule of the Bureau was that you let no blow against one of its people slide. "That's why. It meant my neck too." Briefly, he sketched what had happened on The Broken Wings.

"I wish you'd done it for us... If you change your mind... I really want you on my team, Moyshe."

"Not on your terms."

Kindervoort looked perplexed. He started to say something, but was interrupted by a comm buzzer. He pressed a button, said, "Kindervoort, Security." He stared at Moyshe, frowning.

"LeClare, Contact," a tiny voice said. "You got a landsman named... let's see... benRabi, Moyshe benRabi, down there?"

"Right. He's here with me now."

"Good. Been trying to track him down all over. He the one with the headaches?"

"The same."

"Has he been Warner tested, do you know?"

"No. He's landside."

"But he's a marginal?"

"I'd guess a strong full. Looks to me like repeated and intense spontaneous contact reaction."

Moyshe began to feel like a sample on a microscope slide.

"Good. I'm sending a man to pick him up. Priority Alpha. The Old Man's okay. The paperwork will come down later. Off."

"Off," Kindervoort said, puzzled. He leaned back, studied Moyshe speculatively, finally said, "Well. Things change. Desperate times, I guess. I just hope they know what they're doing. Moyshe, when you're finished in Contact I want you to get plenty of rest. Amy, see that he does. Then report back here."

Moyshe looked from one to the other. Both seemed shaken, disturbed.

What the hell was going on? That comm exchange made no sense at all, but it had gotten these two as antsy as a cat in heat. What was a Warner test? Why were his migraines so important? He studied Amy. His thoughts drifted back to the attack he had suffered after being switched on. She had become as nervous then.

He had tried a dozen times to discover why she thought his migraines important. She would not tell him.

They were important to him, heaven knew. They had become one of the central features of his life. He had had scores since coming aboard. So many that he had become conditioned to recognize the slightest warning symptom. He gulped his medication instantly.

For a while, though, he had not been bothered much. Till Danion had come here. He had been eating the pills like candy the past few days, at regular intervals, not waiting for symptoms to begin. What did it mean?

"Well," Jarl said, "I've got a ton of work. Have to sort things out, count the bodies, inform the next of kin. Amy, turn him over to Contact, then get some sleep. This break probably won't last."

She took benRabi's hand, guided him to the door. Why was she so quiet? Because of Marya?

As he was about to close the door behind him, Kindervoort called, "Moyshe? Thanks."