Starfishers - Starfishers Triology Book 2

Five: 3048 AD

Operation Dragon, Lifting Off

"Sorry I startled you." A she-wolf's grin made it plain that the Sangaree woman felt no remorse whatsoever. "I'm Maria Elana Gonzalez. Atmosphere Systems. Distributions Methods. Sometimes I do a little Hydroponics Ecology. I don't have a Master's for either, though. Too busy with other things." She smiled her gun-metal smile.

Yes, benRabi thought, the lady has other interests. Stardust and murder.

"Moyshe benRabi," he replied, in case she had forgotten.

"An unusual name." She smiled that smile. "Jewish?"

"So I'm told. I've never been in a synagogue in my life."

"You wouldn't be a writer?" She knew damned well that he was. Or that he pretended to be. He had whispered to her about it... "The name sounds so literary, somehow."

"I try, yes." Was she going to expose the Pale Imperator?

No. She did not push it. Nor did she thrust with anything from her arsenal of needles.

"What made you decide to sign up?" she asked.

"Unemployment."

"A space plumber? You're kidding. You must be on the blacklist."

"Yeah. Sort of. Somebody's. What about you?"

"The money."

The vibrations of hatred had begun mellowing out. She was controlling herself superbly.

BenRabi let it flow. He hurt too much to fence, or to probe about her mission. The armed truce persisted till the lighter reached the Starfisher.

Moyshe did not forget that she was Sangaree, that she would drink his blood happily. He simply tabled the facts for the time being.

Hundreds of her people had died because of him. Her children were dying. She would do something. The Sangaree tradition of honor, of Family responsibility, would compel her...

But she would not act right away. She had come here on a mission. She would complete that first. He could relax for a while.

As introspective and morality-stricken as he sometimes became, he could not feel guilty about The Broken Wings. Nor about its aftermath. Humanity and Sangaree were at war, and the Sangaree had fired the opening shot. That it was a subterranean war, fought at an almost personal level, did not matter. Nor did the fact that only humanity perceived a war, that the Sangaree were just in business. Battles were battles. Casualties were casualties, no matter how or why they went down.

Most of his associates and contemporaries hated the Sangaree, but to him they were just people. People he had to hurt sometimes, because of what they did and represented.

He snorted. The most bigoted man alive could say the same thing and mean it.

The whole stardust trade turned his stomach.

"The trouble with me is, I don't love or hate anything," he murmured.

"What?"

"Sorry. Thinking with my mouth in gear."

His mood left nothing counting. Nothing could move him. The pain tablets had kicked him into nirvana. Or into a depthless black pit where the light of emotion simply could not shine. He was not sure which.

He did not care. He did not give a damn about anything. Instead, he immersed himself in the mystery he called Mouse.

BenRabi believed he knew Mouse better than did anyone but the Admiral. A lot of one another had leaked across during their teamed operations. These little flare-ups in the secret war were slowly melting them, molding them...

And still Mouse remained a mobile enigma.

Mouse scared hell out of benRabi.

Mouse was the only man he knew who had killed someone with his bare hands.

Killing had not become a social dodo. But the personal touch had been removed. Murder had become mechanized, its soul and involvement eliminated. It had been that way for so long that most civilians could not endure the emotions they suffered if they entered a killing rage.

Their brains shorted. They went zombie. And nothing happened.

Anybody could push a button and hurl a missile to obliterate a ship of a thousand souls. A lot of timid little anybodies had.

The same anybody could sleep without dreaming the following night. The involvement was with the button, not the bang.

Ample opportunities arose in nice remote space battles with Sangaree, McGraw pirates, or in the marque-and-reprisal antics of minor governments, for that kind of killing. But to do a man face to face, with hands or knife or gun... It was too personal.

Confederation men did not like to get too close to anyone. Not even to end a life. A man knew he was in too deep if the urge arose.

The People of Now wanted no faces on their haunts.

BenRabi was free-associating, and unable to escape the flight of his thoughts. Mouse. Interpersonal relationships. The two joined forces to kick him into a pit of fear.

He had known Mouse as early as their Academy days. They had shared their moments then, both in training and the play typified by sunjammer racing in the wild starwinds of an old supernova. They had crewed their sunjammer victoriously, and had shared celebrations during leave. But they had refused, persistently, to become anything more than acquaintances.

Friends were strange creatures. They became responsibilities. They became walking symbols of emotional debits and personal obligations.

He was getting too close to Mouse. Growing too fond of the strange little man. And he suspected that Mouse was having the same trouble.

Friendship would be bad for their professional detachment. It could get them into trouble.

The Bureau had promised that they would not be teamed again after the operation on The Broken Wings. The Bureau had lied. As it always did. Or this really was a critical, hurry-up, top-man job.

He wondered. The Admiral apparently would do or say, or promise anything to get the work done.

Always there was a rush but he had no good reason to complain. Hurry was inherent in the modern social structure. Change came about so swiftly that policy, operational, and emotional obsolescence developed overnight. Decision and action had to be sudden to be effective.

The system shuddered constantly under the thundering impact of precipitous error.

BenRabi was now involved in one of the Bureau's few old, stable programs. Catching a starfish herd had been a prime mission before his birth. He suspected it would continue to be one long after his death.

He might die of boredom here. He now saw little hope that he and Mouse would be recalled early. The presence of Sangaree altered all the rules.

He had abandoned all hope of enjoying the mission.

Somehow, sometimes, because of the Sangaree woman or otherwise, he or Mouse would get hurt.

A clang rang through the shuttle. The vessel shuddered. BenRabi ceased flaying himself with the tiny, dull knives of the mind.

The lighter nosed into its mother ship like a piglet to a sow's belly. Moyshe followed the crowd moving to board the starship. He worked his way close to the pale Seiner girl. Could he pick up where he had left off?

He wondered why she intrigued him so. Just because she had been kind?

Guides led the way to a common room where several high-powered command types awaited them. Another lecture, Moyshe thought. Some more shocks set off by a lot of boredom.

He was half right.

Even before they were comfortable, one of the heavy-duty lads said, "I'm Eduard Chouteau, your Ship's Commander. Welcome aboard Number Three Service Ship from Danion, a harvestship of Payne's Fleet." That was enough ceremony, evidently. He continued, "We've contacted you as emergency replacements for technicians Danion lost in a shark attack two months ago. Frankly, Fishers haven't ever liked or trusted outsiders. That's because outsiders have given us reason. But for Danion's sake we'll do right by you till we get our own people from the schools. All we ask is that you do right by us."

BenRabi felt that little feather tickle again. Half-truths were fluttering around like untamed butterflies. The man had something on his mind. There was a smoke screen rolling tall and wide, and behind it something he and Mouse just might find interesting. He made a mental note.

The Seiner schools were unique. Most ground-siders knew a little about them. They made romantic, remote settings for holonet dramas.

Those shows, naturally, had borne little relation to reality.

The Seiner creches were hidden in dead planetoids somewhere in deep space. The old and the young of the Fisher fleets dwelt there, teaching and learning. Only healthy Seiners of working age spaced with the fleets and hazarded themselves against disasters of the sort that had overtaken Danion.

Unlike Confederation parents, Starfishers yielded their children to professional surrogates out of love. They did not see their young as dead weight that might hamper them as they shot the rapids of life.

BenRabi had never seen enough of his father to have developed an emotional attitude toward him. And what could he think about his mother? She could not help being what she was. His mother was the child of her society, shaped by a high-pressure environment. The years and prejudice had devoured their tenuous umbilical link... They were of alien tribes now. The barrier between them could no longer be breached, even with the best will on both sides.

Visiting her had been a waste of leave time, but then there was the kid.

How was Greta doing? Christ! He might not know for one hell of a long time.

Why had his mother's behavior so horrified him? He should have known better than to have gone. He had come out of that world. All Old Earth was a screaming rat warren packed with people seeking new thrills and perversions as escapes from the grim realities of narrow little lives.

"Lights!" the Ship's Commander snapped. BenRabi returned from introspection. A hologram took form in the center of the darkening common room. It developed like some fantasy magician's uncertain conjuration, flickering for several seconds, then jerking into sudden, awe-inspiring solidity.

"The stars you see here we retaped off a standard Second Level astrogation training module. Our holo people dubbed the ships from models used in an engineering status display at Ship's Engineering Control aboard Danion. This is Danion, your home for the next year."

The name Danion rolled off his tongue, freighted with everything the ship meant to him: home, country, refuge, responsibility.

A ship formed against the imaginary stars. It was a weird thing, making Moyshe think of octopi entwined. No. He decided it looked like a city's utilities systems after the buildings and earth and pavement had been removed, with the leavings flung mad among the stars. There were vast tangles of tubing. Here and there lay a ball, a cone, a cube, or an occasional sheet of silverness stretched taut as if to catch the starwinds. Vast nets floated between kilometers-long pipelike arms. The whole mad construct was raggedly bearded with thousands of antennae of every conceivable type. The totality was spectacularly huge, and dreadful in its strangeness.

In theory a deep-space vessel need not be confined in a geometric hull. Most small, specialized vessels were not. A ship did not have to have any specific shape, though the complex relationships between drive, inertial-negation, mass increase effect reduction, temporal adjustment, and artificial gravity induction systems did demand a direction-of-travel dimension slightly more than twice that of dimensions perpendicular to line-of-flight in vessels intended to operate near or above the velocity of light. But this was the first truly large asymmetric ship benRabi had ever seen.

It was a flying iron jungle. The streamlined ship had been preferred by mankind since space travel had been but a dream. Even now designers felt more comfortable enclosing everything inside a skin capable of generating an all-around defensive screen.

Even the wildest imaginings of novelty-hunting holo studios had never produced a vessel as knotted and strewn as this mass of tangled kitten's yarn.

BenRabi's astonishment was not unique. Silence died a swift death in that room.

"How the hell does that bastard keep from breaking up?" someone demanded.

"What I want to know is, how do you build something like that without a crew from every holonet in the universe turning up?"

Someone more technically smitten asked, "Ship's Commander—what sort of system do you use to synchronize drives? You'd have to have hundreds on a ship that big. Even with superconductor or pulse laser control systems your synch systems would be limited to the velocity of light. The lag between the more remote units... "

BenRabi lost the thread. Another surprise had jumped on him wearing hobnailed boots on all four feet.

He was aboard a ship he and Mouse had studied from the surface of Carson's. She was a typical interstellar vessel of an obsolete class now common only among the Rim Run Freehaulers.

A similar vessel had appeared in the hologram. It was approaching the harvestship.

The surprise was in their relative sizes.

The starship became a needle falling into an expanding, cosmic ocean of scrap. The service ship retained its holo dimensions. Danion swelled till she attained epic proportions.

Moyshe could not begin to guess her true dimensions. His most conservative estimate staggered him. She had to be at least thirty kilometers in cross-section, twenty thick, and sixty long. That was impossible. There were countries on Old Earth smaller than that.

And stretching far beyond the dense central snarl of the ship were those spars spreading silvery sails and nets.

Did she sunjam on stellar winds?

She couldn't. The Starfish stayed away from stars. Any stars, be they orbited by settled worlds or not. They stayed way out in the Big Dark where they could not be found.

The whole thing had to be a brag show. Pure propaganda. It just had to be.

He could not accept that ship as real.

His normal, understandable operation-opening jitters cranked themselves up a couple of notches. Till that ship had declared itself he had thought he could handle anything new and strange. Change was the order of the universe. Novelty was no cause for distress.

But this mission held too much promise of the new and unknown. He had been plunged tabula rasa into a completely alien universe.

Nothing created by Man had any right being so damned big.

Light returned. It drowned the dying hologram. BenRabi looked around. His jaw was not the only one hanging like an overripe pear about to drop.

Despite prior warning, everyone had believed themselves aboard a harvestship. Cultural bias left them incapable of believing the Fishers could have anything better.

Moyshe began to realize just how poorly he had been prepared for this mission. He had done his homework. He had devoured everything the Bureau had known about Starfishers. He had considered speculation as well as confirmed fact. He knew all there was to know.

Too little had been known.

"That's all you'll need to know about Danion's outside," the Ship's Commander told them. "Of her guts you'll see plenty, and you'll have to learn them well. We expect to get our money's worth."

They had the right to ask it, Moyshe figured. They were paying double the usual spacer's rates, and those were anything but poor.

The man talked on awhile, repeating the security officer's injunctions. Then he turned the landsmen over to ratings, who showed them to their quarters. BenRabi's nervousness subsided. He had been through this part before, each time he had boarded a Navy warship.

He got a cabin to himself. The Seiner assigned to him helped settle him in. From the man's wary replies, Moyshe presumed he could expect to be aboard for several days. Payne's Fleet was harvesting far from Carson's.

Once the man had left and benRabi had converted his barren cubicle into a Spartan cell, he lay down to nap. After looking for bugs and spy-eyes, of course. But sleep would not come. Not with all the great lumpy surprises his mind still had to digest.

Someone knocked. Mouse, he guessed. The man never used a buzzer. He made a crochet a means of identification.

Yes. It was Mouse. "Hi," he said. "I'm Masato Iwasaki. Oh. You're in Liquids too? Good." He stuck out a hand. They shook.

"BenRabi. Moyshe. Nice to meet you." Silly game, he thought. But it had to be played if they wanted people to believe that they had just met.

"You wouldn't happen to play chess?" Mouse asked. "I'm looking for somebody who does."

He was addicted to the game. It would get him into trouble someday, benRabi thought. An agent could not afford consistent crochets. But who was he to criticize?

"I've been up and down the passage, but I haven't found anybody."

No doubt he had. Mouse was thorough.

"I play, but badly. And it's been awhile." It had been about four hours. They had almost been late to the spaceport because of a game. Mouse had been nervous about liftoff. BenRabi had been holding his own.

Mouse prowled, searching for bugs. BenRabi closed the door. "I don't think there are any. Not yet. I didn't find anything."

Mouse shrugged. "What do you think?"

"Broomstick all the way. Strictly from hunger. We're riding the mythical nova bomb."

"The woman? Yeah. Pure trouble. Spotted a couple McGraws, too. You think she's teamed?" He dropped onto the extra bunk.

"I don't think so. Not by choice. She's a loner."

"It doesn't look good," Mouse mused. "We don't have enough info. I feel like a blind man in a funhouse. We'd better fly gentle till we learn the traffic code." He stared at the overhead. "And how to con the natives."

BenRabi settled onto his own bunk. They remained silent for minutes, trying to find handles on the future. They would need every advantage they could seize.

"Three weeks," Mouse said. "I can handle it. Then a whole year off. I won't know what to do."

"Don't make your reservations yet. Marya... The Sangaree woman. She's one bad omen. Mouse... I don't think it's going to work out."

"I can handle it. You don't think I want to spend a whole damned year here, do you?"

"Remember what that character said down at Blake City? It could be the rest of our lives. Short lives."

"Bah. He was blowing smoke."

"Ready to bet your life on it?"

BenRabi's head gave him a kick. He was not sure he could take much more pain. And this compelling need...

"What's the matter?"

"Headache. Must be the change in air pressure."

How the hell was he supposed to work with his body in pain and his mind half around the bend? There was something to be said for those old-time sword swingers who did not have to worry about anything but how sharp their blades were.

"We'd better hedge our bets, Moyshe. Better start planning for the long haul, just in case."

"Thought you could handle it."

Mouse shrugged. "Got to be ready for everything. I've been poking around. These Seiners are as bad as us for special interests. They've got coin clubs and stamp clubs and Archaicist period groups... The whole thing. They're crazy to get into the past. What I was thinking was, why don't we start a chess club for landsmen? We'd have a cover for getting together."

"And you'd have an excuse to play."

"That too. A lot of Seiners play too, see. Maybe we could fish a few in so we could pump them socially." He winked, smiled.

The Seiners he was interested in hooking were probably female.

BenRabi could not fathom Mouse. Mouse seemed happy most of the time. That was disconcerting. The man carried a load of obsessions heavier than his own. And somebody whose profession was hatchet work should, in benRabi's preconceptions, have had a happiness quotient approaching zero.

BenRabi never had been able to understand people. Everybody else seemed to live by a different set of rules.

Mouse shrugged. "Fingers crossed? Hope Beckhart will pull it off? Wouldn't bet against him."

BenRabi never knew where he stood in the Admiral's grand, tortuous schemes.

"Hey, I've been here long enough," Mouse said. "No point attracting attention straight off. I saw you get pills from that girl. What was wrong? Head?"

"Yeah. Might even be my migraine. My head feels like somebody's been using it for a soccer ball."

Mouse went to the door. "A game tonight, then?"

"Sure, as long as you don't mind playing an amateur." BenRabi saw him off, feeling foolish. There had been no one around to hear his parting speech.

The public address system announced dinner for passengers. Mouse turned back. "Feel up to it?"

BenRabi nodded. Though it had ached miserably seconds ago, the tracer was not bothering him at all now.

Somebody was trying to impress them. The meal was superb. It was the kind Navy put on when important civilians came aboard. Everything was hydroponics and recycle, yet supremely palatable. Each mouthful reminded benRabi of the horrors of a Navy mess six months out, after the fresh and frozen stores were gone. From some angles the mission had begun to show promise.

He looked for the Seiner girl, Amy, but did not see her.

Lazy days followed. There was little to do in transit. He stayed in his cabin most of the time, loafing, toying with Jerusalem, and trying not to remember too much. Mouse, and a few others he had met, occasionally came to visit, play chess, or just bullshit about common interests.

The landsmen began to settle in, to get acquainted. The unattached singles started pairing off. Mouse, never inclined to celibacy, found himself a girl the second day. Already she wanted to move in with him.

Individual quarters had been assigned everyone but the married couples. There was room. The ship had been prepared to haul a thousand people.

Mouse immediately established himself as a character and leader among the landsmen. His notion of a chess club, while no fad, caught on.

One of the joiners was the Seiner who had striven to rattle them at Blake City.

His name was Jarl Kindervoort. He did not hide the fact that he ranked high in Danion's police department.

BenRabi marveled again at the size of the harvestship. A vessel so huge that it had a regular police agency, complete with detectives and plainclothes operatives... Just incredible.

They called themselves Internal Security. BenRabi saw nothing in what he learned of their structure to remind him of a security unit in the intelligence sense. The function was doubtless there, cobbled on in response to the arrival of outsiders, but the agency look was that of a metropolitan police force.

Mouse's club inspired a general movement. Half a dozen others coalesced. Each was Archaicist-oriented.

In an age when nothing seemed as permanent as the morning dew, people who needed permanence had to turn to the past.

BenRabi looked on the whole Archaicist movement with studied contempt. He saw it as the refuge of the weak, of moral cowards unwilling to face the Now without the strategic hamlets of yesterday to run to when the pressure heightened.

Archaicism could be damned funny. BenRabi remembered a holocast of pot-bellied old men stamping through modern New York outfitted as Assyrian soldiery off for a sham battle with the legions of the Pharaoh of New Jersey.

Or it could be grim. Sometimes they started believing... He still shuddered whenever he recalled the raid on the temple of the Aztec Revivalists in Mexico City.

One morning he asked Mouse to read the working draft of his story. He had managed to push it all the way to an unsatisfactory ending.

Mouse frowned a lot. He finally said, "I guess it's all right. I don't know anything about non-objective art."

"I guess that means it isn't working. I'd better get on it and do it right. Even if you can't figure out what the hell it's about, it should affect you."

"Oh, it does, Moyshe."

His tone conveyed more message than did his words. It said that he thought benRabi was wasting his time.

Moyshe wanted to cry. The story meant so damned much to him.