Starfishers - Starfishers Triology Book 2

Seven: 3048 AD

Operation Dragon, Engagement

He could not write. He had too much free time. He always worked better when the minutes were quick and crowded.

Something was wrong with his head. Skeletons were coming out of their closets in there. Especially the Alyce affair. The unbreakable walls of Tyre were crumbling.

It had been years since he had thought about Alyce. Why now? That hasty Psych programing before the mission? Or were the edges of his sanity just fraying?

He had two bad days. There were moments when he did not know where he was or why, or, sometimes, just who he was.

He sometimes felt his life was managed by guardian devils. The Fates pursued him like indefatigable hounds, with malice their only joy.

The ship dropped hyper without warning. "Are we finally there?" he asked the air. He stepped into the corridor. Most of the landsmen were there.

Jarl Kindervoort's voice filled the ship. ‘Passengers, remain in your quarters. Strap in for acceleration. We're about to engage a Confederation squadron that has been following us."

"Engage?" Moyshe said. "What the hell? Mouse? What's going on? Jupp's not supposed to move for two weeks yet."

Mouse shook his head warningly. People were listening. The Sangaree woman appeared to be in a black rage.

"Wheels within wheels," benRabi whispered. "Beckhart's doing it to us."

"Let's hope we didn't suddenly get expendable," Mouse'said. "What's going on?"

"Oh, damn! I figured you knew. Beckhart? Maybe Jupp thought he saw a chance? Maybe that frontier thing broke?"

"What? That's bullshit. The Ulantonids know better. It's the Old Man. Got to be."

"Better strap in. Say any prayers you know." BenRabi had seen several battles while in the line. They had ruined his taste for space warfare. Defeats were too total and final.

The vessel shuddered while he was strapping in. He recognized a heavy missile salvo departing. The ship clearly mounted weaponry not customary for her class.

Would the nasty surprises never end?

For a few seconds his mind fell apart completely, into absolute chaos. A tiny part of him seemed to be outside, watching the disorder.

All-clear bells and his door buzzer sounding bracketed the reassembly process.

A crewman stepped into his cabin. "Mr. benRabi? Will you come with us, please?"

He was as polite as the spider inviting the fly.

There was going to be trouble.

A half-dozen people wearing guns backed him. BenRabi joined them in the passageway.

Another group had collected a stoic Mouse.

How had they blown it?

Kindervoort was directing the pickup himself. He looked like a man with a compulsion to explain. And to ask. Moyshe hoped he would not get primitive.

Mouse seemed to fear that. But hatchetmen lived by the Old Testament: eye for an eye, live by the sword...

"Got you, boys." Kindervoort grinned toothily. He had an overbite.

BenRabi had an irrational aversion to the man. It had nothing to do with the situation. More like loathing at first sight.

Kindervoort had a colorless, fleshless face. His skin lay stretched drumhead tight over prominent cheekbones and a lantern jaw. Shadowed hollows lay between. He achieved a deathshead look when the light was wrong.

BenRabi automatically disliked anyone with that gaunt, graveyard look.

"Ah, here you are," said the Ship's Commander as they shuffled into his darkly decorated office.

The furniture was of mahogany-toned imitation woods crafted in antique styles. The walls and ceiling had been artificially timbered to suggest the captain's cabin of a sailing ship. There were reproductions of antique ship's lanterns, a compass, a sextant, a chart of Henry the Navigator, framed prints featuring caravels, clippers, and the frigate Constellation. "Any trouble, Jarl?"

"No sir. The Bureau doesn't employ fanatics. May I present Commanders Masato Igarashi Storm and Thomas Aquinas McClennon, of Confederation Navy? They're senior field agents of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence. Commanders, Ship's Commander Eduard Chouteau."

BenRabi pursed his lips. He had been afraid Mouse's real name might be Storm. Mouse had been conspicuously absent from Academy during their final year of school. That had been the year of the Storm-Hawksblood war in the Shadowline.

Moyshe had visited Blackworld after that war's end. There had been a Masato Igarashi Storm there at the time, but their paths had not crossed. That Masato had taken command of his father's mercenaries after Sangaree treachery had killed his father, brothers, and most of the family officers.

Kindervoort certainly had him pat, though the name McClennon seemed like a stranger's, like that of someone he had known a long time ago, in an age of innocence.

He felt less like Thomas Aquinas McClennon than he did Moyshe benRabi, Gundaker Niven, Eric Earl Hollenkamp, Walter Clark, or... How many men had he been?

"Take seats, gentlemen," Chouteau said. "And relax."

BenRabi dropped into a chair, glanced at his partner, Mouse, who also seemed stunned. The simple knowing of a secret name bore so many implications... The spookiest was that someone might have penetrated the Bureau deep enough to have gained access to its primary data system. That meant a mole of a generation's standing.

"Worrying about your Navy friends?" Kindervoort asked. "Don't. They're all right. They cut and ran. And I mean fast. Guess they figured there wasn't any point to a slugfest when they couldn't gain anything even if they won." He chuckled. So did Chouteau.

Had to be a deep mole. Nothing else would explain their perpetual success at evading Confederation.

Kindervoort planted himself in front of benRabi. He leaned close, frowning. Moyshe avoided his deathshead face by staring at Chouteau.

The Ship's Commander leaned back in his fat, comfortable chair and half closed his eyes.

Kindervoort said, "But we're not worried about von Drachau or Admiral Beckhart, are we?" He chuckled, again, moved to Mouse. "Why we wanted to see you was these tracers you've got built in. Walking instels they inflict on us. Ingenious."

They did have a mole.

Moyshe had thought he was the only human instel. Beckhart had pissed and moaned like the expense of it was coming out of his own pocket. Redundancy had not seemed plausible after that.

He hadn't really wondered why Mouse was along. Beckhart had issued an assignment. Nobody questioned the Old Man. Not in any way that might look like contradicting his will.

Mouse looked like death warmed over. Swell. It would do him good to get short-sheeted sometimes too.

How come Mouse had not been hurting?

Knowing Beckhart, the Pyschs had programed the headaches. Maybe to divert attention from Mouse. Had Mouse known?

They had some talking to do.

Beckhart clockwork, jerking along, often was oiled by the confusion of its parts. Only the master knew all the secrets of his machinery.

Would there be more?

Silly question.

Beckhart's nature semed to demand twists on twists and gaudy smoke screens that concealed truths as slippery as greased snakes. His plots, however, while labyrinthine, had their own tightness and logic. They were mapped by the finest computers in Luna Command. He ran simulation models against even the most ridiculous contingencies.

Had Beckhart calculated a mole into this scheme?

BenRabi suddenly intuited that he and Mouse were not partners after all. This time they were voyagers sailing parallel but distinct courses. They had been programed to hide from one another as much as from their targets. And they had been intended for exposure from the beginning.

Beckhart knew about the mole.

He wanted them taken captive. He wanted them to spend a year in Seiner service.

Moyshe got mad. That was a year stolen from his life!

"The thing's all biological, eh?" Kindervoort asked.

"What?"

"This instel. Remarkable gimmick. Our detectors didn't quiver when you came aboard. 'Course, that didn't matter in the long run."

He was smug, damn him. So was Chouteau, chubby-happy there in his plastic-antique, made for the Archaicist trade captain's chair.

"How the hell did you get my name?" benRabi demanded. They were in the mood for talking. They might give him something the computers could use to pinpoint the mole.

Kindervoort ignored his question.

"We began monitoring the hyper bands when we broke orbit at Carson's. We wanted to see if we could catch anything from von Drachau's squadron. Imagine our surprise when we found out somebody was sending from the ship."

"You were plain lucky, Jarl," Chouteau said.

"It wasn't luck that we knew they were coming, just that they started broadcasting in a ship small enough for us to pinpoint them."

How had they gotten the word?

Moyshe remembered a raggedy-assed Freehauler boat that had not lifted on schedule. Had the Freehaulers been the mole's couriers? Black Mirage. Remember that ship, Somebody would have to have a talk with her people someday.

Was there a relationship between Seiners and Freehaulers? Both certainly refused to stop giving grief to Confederation's policy makers.

Chouteau called out, "Doctor DuMaurier, come in here. Let's get on with this."

Kindervoort darted behind Moyshe and seized his shoulders. BenRabi did not resist. There was nothing he could do.

A doctor pushed into the room. He poked, pinched, and sprayed Moyshe's neck with an aerosol anesthetic. He removed an unsettlingly ancient lase-scalpel from his medical bag. Then, quoting every doctor who had ever lived since the days when Incas trepanned one another with sharp stones, he said, "This will only take a minute. You won't feel a thing."

"That's what they told me when they put it in," benRabi grumbled. He could not go down without registering some kind of protest.

"We'll just pull the ambergris nodes," Kindervoort said. "Ed, what do you think? Is it proper to sell them back to Navy come next auction?"

Chouteau nodded amiably. "I think so. I like it."

Moyshe wished they would stop. It made him want to scream, "You're being unprofessional!"

They were not professionals. The harvestships apparently had no real intelligence-oriented security people.

There was justice in Kindervoort's suggestion. BenRabi and Mouse, and all the other agents aboard, irrespective of their allegiances, were after the same thing. Access to one of the herds of great nightbeasts that produced the critical element in the node being removed from benRabi's neck.

The Seiners called it ambergris. The name had evolved from that of a "morbid secretion" of Old Earth whales once used by perfumers. The word could mean anything anyone wanted now. The leviathans of the deep no longer had a claim. They had been extinct for centuries.

Star's amber, space gold, and sky diamond were other popular names. By any name ambergris was the standard of wealth of the age.

In the vernacular its name was short and pithy. It was the solid waste of a starfish. Crap.

This crap fertilized a civilization. Confederation could not have existed without it. Without it there would have been no fast star-to-star communication. Speed and reliability of communications ultimately define the growth limit of any empire.

BenRabi did not comprehend the physics of instel. He knew what the man in the street knew. A tachyon spark could be generated in the arc between an ambergris cathode and a Bilao crystal anode. The spark could be made to carry an FTL message. Neither ambergris nor Bilao crystal could be synthesized.

The crystal occurred naturally deep in the mantles of several roughly earth-sized worlds orbiting super-cool stars. Sierra was the only such world within Confederation. Mining the crystal, at depths exceeding thirty kilometers, was overwhelmingly expensive.

Bilao crystal was cheaper than ambergris. The Seiners had a monopoly. They were free market capitalists of the first water. Every node went to the highest bidder.

The demand for ambergris perpetually exceeded supply. Despite gargantuan capital demands, optimists often assembled the hard and software of an installation merely in hopes that an ambergris node would become available.

The combined Seiner harvestfleets, in their best year ever, had gleaned fewer than forty thousand nodes. Most of those had gone to replace nodes already burning out.

The Seiners sold their product at auction, on worlds declared temporarily neutral and threatened by all the firepower the fleets could muster. The bidders always went along with Seiner rules. The Starfishers might refuse to do business with someone who pushed.

Ambergris alone explained the flood-tide of operatives heading toward Carson's after Danion had begun advertising for groundside technicians. The agents had swept in like vultures, hoping to feed on the corpse of a betrayed Payne's Fleet.

That's what we are, benRabi thought. Me and Mouse, we're vultures... No. Not really. We're more like raptors. Falcons flung from Beckhart's wrist. Our prey is information. We're to bring down any morsel that might betray a starfish herd.

Moyshe tried to believe that Confederation should control the harvesting and distribution of ambergris. He tried hard.

Sometimes he had to tell himself some tall ones to get by. Otherwise he asked himself too many questions. He started worrying irrelevancies like Right and Wrong.

His soul, slithering past morality shyly, merely mumbled I want. There was a pain in it that he could not understand. It nagged him worse than did his ulcer.

BenRabi dreaded madness. He was afraid of a lot of things lately. He could not figure it out.

"There. One down." The doctor dropped Movshc's node into a gleaming stainless steel tray. Plunk! Exclamation point to the end of a phase of the mission. He began suturing Moyshe's wound.

"How bad will that hurt when the anesthetic wears off?"

"Not much. Your neck should be a bit stiff, and tender to the touch. See me if it gives you any trouble." The doctor turned to Mouse. Mouse squirmed a little before he submitted. His conscience, benRabi supposed. He had to make a showing.

Doctors were another of Mouse's crochets. He had no use for them, as he often told anyone who would listen.

BenRabi suspected that was why Beckhart never had Mouse altered during his mission preps.

"We don't like spies," the Ship's Commander blurted. The way he said it made it sound both spontaneous and irrelevant, a non sequitur despite what was happening.

We, Moyshe thought. These people always say we.

The worm within him bit. He shifted uncomfortably. Somehow, Chouteau had taunted his need. Weird.

He tried to recapture it, to discover what it was that he wanted, but, like a wet fish, it wriggled through his fingers.

Nearly a minute later, Chouteau pursued his remark. "But Danion needs your expertise to survive. And we love her enough to give you another chance." He became less distant.

"Listen up. We're going to keep you alive. But you're going to work till you drop: Till you forget why it was that you were sent here. And when we're done with you, we're going to ship you home just as ignorant as you were when you signed on.

"Men, don't give us any more trouble. Be satisfied being ignorant. We need you bad, but won't let you push. Danion's big. A couple men more or less wouldn't make much difference. Doctor, aren't you finished yet?"

"Just have to sew him up, sir. One minute."

"Commander McClennon, Commander Storm, go back to your cabins. Try not to aggravate me for a while."

BenRabi rose, touched the small bandage behind his ear. The numbness had begun to fade. He could feel a mild burning. It made him think of bigger cuts on his body and soul.

The doctor finished with Mouse. "There you go, Commander. Try not to strain it too much. I suggest you let your lady friends do the work for a few days." He spoke with a gentle sarcasm that may have masked envy.

"Word's getting around about you, Mouse," benRabi said.

Mouse did not respond. He was in no mood for banter.

They beat an unescorted retreat, seeking their cabins like wounded animals seeking the security of their dens. In the passage outside benRabi's cabin, Mouse asked, "What do we do now, Moyshe?"

BenRabi shrugged. "I don't know. I was hoping you'd think of something. Go for the ride, I guess. They've stalemated us."

"Just for now." Mouse stood a little taller. "We've got a year. They can't keep their guard up forever, can they?"

"They probably can." But a little false encouragement felt good. "Still, you never know. Something might turn up."

"Look at that."

The Sangaree lady was watching them from her doorway. She smiled, waved.

"Gloating," benRabi said.

"Think she knows what happened? Think she helped do us in?"

BenRabi shrugged, looked at the woman. Their gazes seemed to ring like meeting swords. Her smile broadened. "Yes. I'm sure she did."