Stars End - Starfishers Triology Book 3

Eight: 3049 AD

The Contemporary Scene

Hel did not belong. It was a Pluto-sized twerp of a straggler planet which, like an orphaned puppy, had taken up with the first warm body it had come across. When it did so, it set up for business too far from the unstable Cepheid it adopted. Even at perihelion in its lazy, eggy orbit it did not receive enough warmth to melt carbon dioxide.

Hel was a black eight ball of a world silver-chased by ice lying in the canyons of its wrinkled carcass. Its sun was but the brightest of the stars in its sky. No one would expect such a planet to exist, and no one would want to visit it if a suspicion of its existence arose.

Those were the reasons Confederation's Navy Bureau of Research and Development considered Hel the perfect site for a bizarre, dangerous, and ultra-secret research project.

Hel Station lay buried in a mountain like a clam in sand. Its appendages reached the surface at just two points.

The Station was not meant to be found.

"Ion?"

Marescu was a sight. His waistcoat was soiled, ragged, and wrinkled. His hose was bagged and falling. His wig was askew. His facial makeup was caked and streaked.

"Ion?" Neidermeyer said a second time, catching his friend's elbow. "You hear the news? Von Drachau is coming here."

Marescu yanked his arm away. "Who?" At the moment he did not give a damn about anything, Paul's news included. The agony was too much for mortal man to bear. He yanked a grimy silk handkerchief from a pocket, cleared the water from his eyes. Paul should not see his tears.

"Von Drachau. Jupp von Drachau. The guy who pulled off that raid in the Hell Stars a couple of years back. You remember. The commentators called him High Command's fair-haired boy. They talked like he'd be Chief of Staff Navy someday."

"Oh. Another one of your militarist heroes." Marescu could set in abeyance the worst blues for a good fight about the Services. "Fascist lackey."

Paul grinned, refused the bait. "Not me, Ion. I know you too well."

No fight? Marescu faded off into his internal reality. Damn her eyes! How could she have done it? And with that....hat blackamoor!

"Hey. Ion? Is something wrong?"

More than normal? Ion Marescu was Hel Station's resident crank and grouch, its leading Mr. Blues and Vinegar. Most people shunned him unless work forced contact. He had one real friend, astrophysicist Paul Neidermeyer, a lady love named Melanie Bounds, and managed a certain strained formality with his boss, Kathe the Eagle. Everybody else was fair game for his vituperation.

"Von Drachau? He's Line, isn't he? Why would they tell a Line officer about this place? They planning on locking him up?"

"Ion. Man, what's wrong? You look bad. Why don't we take you down and get you a shower and a clean jumper?"

One of the curiosities of Ion Marescu was that he appeared to change personalities with his clothing. When he wore standard Navy work clothing he was almost tolerable. When he donned his Archaicist costume he became arrogant, argumentative, viper-tongued, and abnormally misty, as if half the time half of him truly did exist in eighteenth-century England.

Marescu paused before a mirror inset in the passage wall, ignoring the people trying to pass. "I do look a little ragged, don't I?" he muttered. He adjusted his wig, straightened the ruffles at his throat, thought, I wish this were Georgian England. I could call the bastard out. Settle this crap with steel.

But you would not have done that with a Negro, would you? You'd have gotten some friends together and played dangle the darky from a tree limb. If you could have stood the shame of confessing to your friends.

Marescu was not one of Hel Station's more polished Archaicists. The others had brought their costumes and research materials with them. He had taken up the hobby only after the isolation had begun to grind him down. He had sewn his own costume, with Melanie's help.

He was more devoted than most Station Archaicists. He prided himself on that, as he prided himself on his contrariness, his crotchets, and the perfection of his work with the test programs. He liked to think that he was the best at whatever he did—including at making himself obnoxious. He seldom noticed the compensatory sloppiness he expressed in his personal habits and hobby.

He had not researched his period thoroughly. He winged most of it. His hobby-era values and beliefs were based on hearsay.

There were those who thought the dichotomy between a perfectionist work life and slovenly play life, taken far too seriously, was indicative of deep disturbance. Admiral Adler disagreed. She felt Marescu was all showoff.

Marescu started walking. He had forgotten Paul. Neidermeyer seized his arm again. "Ion, if I can't help, who can? We've been friends for years."

"It's not something anybody can help with, Paul. It's Melanie. I got off shift early. The quark tube was acting up. The strange positives and bottom negs were coming off almost a milli-degree out of track. They couldn't inject them into their orbital shells... They shut down. She had Mitchell with her."

Neidermeyer murmured an insincere, "I'm sorry." He thought, so what? and wondered if Marescu was not getting a little too far out of touch. Maybe the staff psychologists should hear about this.

A man who started confusing the mores of now with those of his hobby period was more than a little unstable.

Ion always had been neurotic. Now he seemed to have become marginally psychotic.

"How could she do it, Paul?"

"Calm down. You're shaking. Follow me, my son. What you need is a little firewater to settle the old nerves. Eh! None of that, now. Doctor's orders. Drink up, then tell me about it and we'll scope something out."

"Yeah. A drink. Okay." Marescu decided to get blotted. "Tell me about this von Dago."

"Von Drachau. Rhymes with Cracow, like in Poland."

"Poland? Where the hell is Poland?"

"Where they raise the Chinese pigs." Neidermeyer grinned.

Marescu stopped walking. His thin little face puckered into a baffled squint. Seconds passed before the intuition that made him one of Confederation's better test programers clicked. "The non sequitur game? We haven't played in ages, have we? Poland. Chinese pigs. Poland China hogs... Isn't that the strain they were talking about on that ag show the other day? They want to breed back to something extinct?"

"I don't know what they smell like."

"Okay, Paul. I'm all right now. Ease up. That was a weak one, anyway. Just give me the story on your mercenary hero."

Neidermeyer refused the challenge. "I don't know much. It's just something I overheard at Security. They were chasing their tails getting ready. Guess it took them by surprise. We're here. What're you drinking?"

They stepped off the escalator into soft luminescence just bright enough to prevent stumbling over furniture.

The lounge had been designed to give an impression of being open to Hel's surface. Its protective dome was undetectable. The lighting was too diffuse to glare off the glassteel. The dome itself pimpled from the flank of a mountain, overlooking dark peaks and cruel gorges. The Milky Way burned above, a billion-jeweled expanse of glory.

"Ever notice how it seems colder up here?" Marescu asked, for at least the hundredth time in their acquaintance. He stared out at the poorly illuminated skin of the dead world. The inconstant Cepheid sun hung behind a peak, limning it with a trace of gold. In its off moments that sun was little more noticeable than the brighter neighboring stars. "You pick it, Paul. I'm not particular today. But build it big."

Neidermeyer collected brandy and glasses from behind the bar. "Francis must have gone down for the Security festival," he said. A Marine with an unpronounceable Old Earther name, dubbed Francis Bacon by the research staff, usually tended bar. Security had very little to do most of the time, so filled time by trying to make the Station more endurable for everyone.

People came to Hel on a one-way ticket. Only the Director of Research and Chief of Security ever ventured off world. For security reasons there was no instel comm system available. Isolation was absolute.

"Brandy?" Marescu asked, startled. Paul was a whisky man.

"Old Earth's best, Ion. Almost makes being here worthwhile."

Marescu downed half a snifter at a gulp. "They ought to turn us loose now, Paul. We built their damned bombs. All we're doing now is piddling around with make-work."

"They won't, though. Security. Won't be any leaks as long as they keep us here."

"Paul, how could she?"

"You knew she was... "

"When I got involved? I know. I keep telling myself. But that doesn't make it hurt any less, Paul."

"What can I tell you?"

Marescu stared into his empty snifter.

"Ion... Maybe you ought to ease up on the Archaicist thing. Try to get your perspective back."

"The modern perspective sucks, Paul. You know that? There's no humanity in it. You probably laugh at me because of this outfit. It's a symbol, Paul. It's a symbol of times when people did have real feelings. When they cared."

"I've got feelings, Ion. I care about you. You're my friend."

"You don't. Not really. You're just here because having feelings bothers you."

Neidermeyer glared. There were times when being Ion's friend was work. Marescu refused to apologize. Paul took his brandy to the side of the dome. He stared at the indistinct hide of Hel. The critical question glared back from the serpent eyes of his own weak reflection.

Should Marescu be reported? Was he that far gone?

Nobody wanted to turn in a friend. The Psych people could lock him up forever. Their zoo of Hel-born mental mutations was a blue-chip growth industry.

The project was too delicate to risk its compromise by the unbalanced.

But the production team needed Ion. Nobody had his sure, delicate touch with the test systems. Best let it ride and hope he would come around. This thing with Melanie could be a positive if it jarred him back to reality.

Paul turned. He looked at a thin, short, weary little man who had a thousand years etched into his face and a million agonies flaring from his narrow little black eyes. Right decision? Those eyes were lamps of torment backfired by incipient madness.

Something rattled the foundations of the universe.

The snowy landscape glowed a deep, bloody red. The glow faded quickly.

Marescu turned an ashen color. He stumbled to the dome face, caressed it with shaking fingers. "Paul... That was damned close. They could have destabilized one of the test cores. We'd have been blown into the next universe."

Fear had drained Neidermeyer's face too. He mumbled, "But nothing happened."

"I'm complaining anyway. They ought to have better sense." Feeling the breath of the angel on his neck had snapped his streak of self-pity.

He stared into the darkness outside. A pale new light had begun etching the shadows more deeply. One brilliant point of light slid across the screen of fixed stars, growing more intense.

"They're coming in fast."

Hel's surface was screaming under a storm of violet-white light when the dome polarized. The glass continued to respond to the light beating against it, its inner surface crawling with an iridescence like that of oil on water.

"Doctor Neidermeyer? Mister Marescu? Excuse me a moment."

They turned. Marine Major Gottfried Feuchtmayer stood at the escalator's head. He was Deputy Chief of Security, and a man who appeared to have just stepped out of a recruiting commerical. He was the quintessential Marine.

"Bet he wakes up looking like that," Marescu muttered.

"What is it, Major?" Neidermeyer asked.

"We need your assistance in the arsenal. We need two devices for shipboard installation."

Marescu's stomach went fluttery. The butterflies donned Alpine boots and started dancing. "Major... "

"Briefing in Final Process in fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Thank you."

Neidermeyer nodded. The Major descended the escalator.

"So," Marescu snapped. "They'll never use it, eh? You're a fool, Paul."

"Maybe they won't. You don't know... Maybe it's a field test of some kind."

"Don't lie to yourself. No more than you already are. The damned bomb doesn't need testing. I already tested it. They're going to blow up a sun, Paul!" Ion's mouth worked faster and faster. His voice rose toward a squeak. "Not some star, Paul. A sun. Somebody's sun. The goddamned murdering fascists are going to wipe out a whole solar system."

"Calm down, Ion."

"Calm down? I can't. I won't! How many lives, Paul? How many lives are going to be blasted away by those firecrackers we've given them? They've made bloody fools of us, haven't they? They suckered us. Smug little purblind fools that we are, we made ourselves believe that it would never go that far. But we were lying to ourselves. We knew. They always use the weapon, no matter how horrible it is."

Paul did not respond. Marescu was reacting without all the facts. And saying things everyone else thought but did not say.

For the research staff, service at Hel Station had been a deal with the devil. Each scientist had traded physical freedom and talent for unlimited funding and support for a pet line of research. The Station was ultra-secret, but the knowledge it produced was reshaping modern science. The place seethed with new discoveries.

All Navy had asked for its money was a weapon capable of making a sun go nova.

Navy had its weapon now. The scientists had scrounged around and found a few Hawking Holes left over from the Big Bang, had pulled a few mega-trillion quarks out of a linear accelerator which circumscribed Hel itself, had sorted them, had stacked them in orbital shells around the mini-singularities, and had installed these "cores" in a delivery system. The carrier missile would perish in the fires of a star, but the core itself would sink to the star's heart before the quark shells collapsed, mixing positives and negatives in a tremendous energy yield which would ignite a swift and savage helium fusion process.

Navy had its weapon. And now, apparently, a target for it.

"What have you done, Paul?"

"I don't know, Ion. God help me if you're right."

The passageways were a-crawl with Marines, Marescu swore. "I didn't realize there were so many of the bastards. They been breeding on us? Where's everybody else?" The usual back and forth of technical and scientific staffs had ceased. Civilians were scarce.

At Final Process they were told to report to the arsenal instead.

They found three civilians waiting outside the scarlet door. The Director, though, was an R & D admiral in civilian disguise.

"This's a farce," Marescu growled at her. "Two hundred comic opera soldiers... "

"Can it, Ion," Paul whispered.

The Director did not bat an eye. "They're watching you, Ion. They don't like your mouth."

Marescu was startled. Ordinarily, even the Eagle did not bite back.

"What's going on, Kathe?" Neidermeyer asked.

Marescu grinned. Kathe Adler. Kathe the Eagle. It was one of those nasty little jokes that drift around behind an unpopular superior's back. Admiral Adler had a thin wedge of a face, an all-time beak of a nose, and a receding hairline. Never had a birthname fit its bearer so well.

"They're taking delivery on the product, Paul. I want you to work with their science officers. Ion, you'll prepare a test program for their shipboard computers."

"They're going to use it, aren't they?" Marescu demanded.

"I hope not. We all hope not, Ion."

"Shit. I believe that like I believe in the Tooth Fairy." He glanced at Paul. Neidermeyer was trying to believe. He was like all the science staff. Keeping himself fed on lies.

"Ship's down, Major," a Marine Lieutenant announced.

"Very well," Feuchtmayer replied.

"We'd better get lined out," the Director said. "Paul, pick whomever you want to help. Ion, you'll have to visit the ship to see what you'll be working with. I want your preliminary brief as soon as you can write it. Josip, get with their Weapons officers and draw up the preparatory specs for carrying mounts and launch systems. Have the people in the shops drop everything else."

Josip asked, "We have to build it all here?"

"From scratch. Orders."

"But... "

"Gentlemen, they're in a hurry. I suggest you get started."

"They brought the whole ship down?" Paul asked. Ships seldom made planetary landings.

"That's right. They don't want to waste time working from orbit. That would take an extra month."

"But... " That was dangerous business. The ship's crew would stay crazy-busy balancing her gravity fields with the planet's. If they made one mistake the vessel would be torn apart.

"It shouldn't take more than twelve days this way," Admiral Adler speculated. "Assuming we hit no snags. Let's go." She pushed through the red door.

The completed weapons had a sharkish, deadly look, looking nothing like bombs. The four devices were spaced around the arsenal floor. Each was a lean needle of black a hundred meters long and ten in diameter. They were longer than the shuttle craft intended to lift them to orbit. Antennae and the snouts of nasty defensive weapons sprouted from their dark skins like scrub brush from an old, burned slope.

They were fully automated little warships. The essentials of the nova bomb occupied space that would have been given over to crew in manned vessels. They were fast and shielded heavily enough to punch through a powerful defense.

The weapon remained largely theoretical. But the men who had created it were confident it would function.

Neidemeyer whispered to Marescu as they donned working suits, trying to convince his friend, and himself, that they were just gearing up for a field test. "I'm sure the money people just want to see if they're getting any return on their investment," he insisted. "You can't blame them for wanting to try their new toy."

"Yeah. Our hero von Drachau is going to take potshots at a couple of insignificant stars. Right?"

"Right."

"You're a fool, Paul."

A band of strangers entered the arsenal. They stared at the four dark needles, clearly awed and a little frightened.

"That's von Drachau on the right," Paul whispered. "I recognize him from the holo. Only he looks a lot older."

"Looks a little grey around the gills, I'd say."

Von Drachau did look depressed. He spoke with the Major and Kathe Adler. Kathe led his party around one of the missiles. Von Drachau became more impressed.

There was something about the big, terrible ones that excited a resonance in the soul. It was almost a siren call. Marescu felt it himself each time he touched one of the monsters. He was ashamed of himself when he did.

"Little boys play with firecrackers, and big boys play with bombs," he muttered.

"Ease up. Kathe meant it when she said they're watching you. Feuchtmayer isn't one of your big fans, Ion."

"I'll stay out of his way."

The days whipped past. Technicians swarmed over the pair of weapons von Drachau selected. Marescu tested systems and supervised the installation of special shipping aids. Josip brought the missiles' computation systems into communion with the battle computers aboard von Drachau's ship. Technicians designed and installed adapters and links that would fit the securing rings and launch vanes going onto the belly of the warship.

Neidermeyer prepared a manual for the science officers responsible for arming the sunkiller and monitoring its gluon pulse in passage, watching for that tiny anomaly that might forecast the expansion of a quark shell into disaster.

Marescu could not believe there was so much to do. His shifts were long and demanding. He felt a lot of sympathy for Paul, whose personal research project seemed threatened with death by inattention.

Neidermeyer watched his friend more closely than he did the gluon pulse, hunting some telltale psychological anomaly. Marescu seemed almost too much in control, and had thrown himself into his work with a near-fanaticism that bespoke a very fragile stability fighting its last stand. Yet there were positive signs. Ion had shed the filthy Archaicist outfit. He had begun devoting more time to his personal appearance...

Then it was over.

Kathe Adler joined them in the lounge. "Let the firewater flow," she proclaimed. "It's time to say the hell with it and turn loose of the brass ring for a while."

Marescu gave her an odd look.

The celebration became a premature New Year's bash.

The pressure was off. The antagonisms went on the shelf for the day. Guilts got tucked away. Scientists and technicians made shows of comradeship with the Marines. A handful of von Drachau's officers joined in, drinking lightly, listening to the jokes but seldom laughing.

"For them it's just begun," Ion murmured. He glanced around. No one had heard him.

Von Drachau was a focus of brooding gloom. He seemed to have sunk two-thirds into another universe. Ion watched him glare at Paul as if Neidermeyer were some small, venomous insect when Paul tried to strike up a conversation about the raid in the Hell Stars. Von Drachau disappeared only minutes later.

"Don't think you made an impression, my friend," Ion said.

Kathe agreed. "He's sensitive about it, Paul. He's a strange one. You should have heard the row he and Ion had."

Marescu met Paul's gaze. "It wasn't any big thing. I came on a little too strong, that's all."

"What was it?" Neidermeyer asked.

"About the morality of using the weapon," Kathe said. "Von Drachau is damned near a pacifist. Ion was pretty shook when he found out the man could adapt his convictions enough to let him use the weapon."

"Ion's problem is that he's an absolutist. He's got to have everything black or white. And he's getting worse. Is there any way we can get him into therapy without having him committed?"

"You think there's a reason to worry? His profiles keep coming up off-center, but they never show any danger."

"Sometimes. Lately... He's got a creepy feeling to him. Except for that argument with von Drachau, he's swung too far away from what he was. I'm nervous about the backswing. Like I can hear the timer clicking. He might break loose going the other way."

They had begun talking about Marescu as if he were not around for the very good reason that he was not, though neither of them had consciously marked his departure.

Kathe Adler had called von Drachau a crypto-pacifist, and Marescu had seen red. Literally. The dome and people went raggedly, liquid, and red. Then it was all clear. All perfectly clear. He had to go see Melanie and explain.

He was walking down a passageway. Time seemed to have passed. He had the distinct feeling that his head was on sideways. That mercenary von Drachau... The man had kicked the foundations out from under him. A flexible morality? How could there be such a thing? A thing was either right, or it wasn't. The nova bomb was the most evil thing yet conceived by the military mind. And he had helped midwife that evil into this universe. He had allowed himself to be seduced... He had whored himself...

There had to be a way to show them what they were doing.

He shook his head violently. Things were foggy. A band seemed to be tightening around his temples. There was something wrong. He could not force his thoughts into a straight line.

For an instant he considered finding a Psych officer.

Von Drachau seemed to laugh at him again.

"You fascist bastard!"

Christ! Some Torquemada had taken another turn on the strap. His skull was creaking with the pressure.

"Where am I?" he blurted. His feet had been moving without conscious direction. He tried to concentrate on his surroundings. "What am I doing here?"

He wanted to turn and go back. His feet kept going in the direction he was headed. His hand pushed on Melanie's door.

He was an alien, a passenger aboard a body under another's control. He was a slightly panicky observer of actions being carried out by another creature.

The little gasps and grunts lashed that devil, punishing it like a wizard's curse. He stared at the eight-limbed, twenty-toed beast. It heaved and lunged. Its four blind eyes rolled swiftly. Its three uncontrolled mouths made wet, hungry sounds.

The Ion of him silently screamed and turned inward, refusing to see any more. A darkness closed round it.

A clumsy puppeteer jerked him around, dragged him out the door and down the passageway with jerky, meandering, drunken steps. When next the Ion rider surfaced it found its steed in the arsenal, clad in its Georgian, bent over the computer board in the heavily shielded test control kiosk. The clock claimed that hours had vanished from his life. His hands and fingers were flying, a pair of pale white dancing spiders.

They were doing something dreadful. He did not know what, and they would not stop when he commanded them. He watched them like a baffled child watching slow death.

An image here, an image there, surged into his mind, playing back fragments of the missing hours. Ion Marescu crawled over a long black needle. Ion Marescu crouched beneath the needle, connecting the heavy cables that ran to the test station. Ion Marescu squeezed through the cramped interior of the black ship, removing safety chips...

"Ion?"

Paul's voice barely penetrated the thick stressglass of the booth's walls. He was screaming. Ion realized the yelling had been going on for a while. He glanced at Paul puzzledly, barely recognizing him. He did not stop working. This was the most important test he had ever run. For the first time in his life he was doing something of real worth. He had found himself a holy mission.

What was it? He shook his head, tried to clear the mists. They would not go.

His hands danced.

Kathe Adler joined Paul. They pounded the unbreakable glass with their fists. Then the woman fled. Paul grabbed a fire axe and swung away.

When Ion next glanced up, the vast arsenal floor was acrawl with Marines. Major Feuchtmayer had his pale face pressed against the glass directly in front of him. His lips writhed obscenely. He was screaming something. Ion had no time to listen. He had to hurry.

What the hell was going on out there? the observer part of him wondered.

He finished programing the test sequences.

Each weapon had to be run through a simulated plunge into Hel's own sun. Ion usually performed the test series on a system-by-system basis, with the drive never operational and the safety chips preventing the weapon from going active. "How do we know the drive will work?" Marescu muttered. "We just take their word for it?"

Paul and the Marines stopped trying to break the glass with hand tools. Ion saw the Major laying a sticky grey rope of something round the door frame.

"Plastic explosives? My God! What are those madmen trying to do?"

His right hand depressed the big black palm switch that opened the arsenal's huge exit doors. It was through those very doors that that hired assassin von Drachau had moved his two missiles to his ship.

People flung in all directions as the arsenal air burst into Hel's eternal night. Baffled, Marescu watched their broken doll figures tumble and bloat.

His left hand danced, initiating the test sequences. The arsenal drowned in intense light. The stressglass of the booth polarized, but could not block it all. The sabotaged holding blocks fell away from the number four weapon. It dragged itself forward, off its dolly. It flung off clouds of sparks and gouged its spoor deep into the concrete floor.

"Wait a minute," Ion said. "Wait a minute. There's something wrong. It's not supposed to do that. Paul? Where did you go, Paul?" Paud did not answer.

The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light, lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned its nose toward the target.

"What's happening?" Marescu asked plaintively. "Paul?

What went wrong?"

The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel's sun. It accelerated at 100 g.

And in the booth, where the atmospheric pressure had begun to fall, Ion Marescu realized the enormity of what he had done. With a shaking hand he took a suggestion form from a drawer and began composing a recommendation that, in future, all test programs be cross-programed in such a way that the activation of any one would automatically lock out the others.

"We have influence, Commander," Lieutenant Callaway reported.

"Take hyper," von Drachau replied. "And destroy that Hel astrogational cassette as soon as you have her in the hyper arc. For the record, gentlemen, we've never heard of this place. We don't know anything about it and we've never been here."

He stared into a viewscreen, slumped, wondering what he was, what he was doing, and whether or not he had been told the whole truth. The screen went kaleidoscopic at the instant of hyper-take, then blanked.

Seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds later the sun of the world he had just fled felt the first touch of a black needle. The little manmade gamete fertilized the great hydrogen ovum. In a few hours the nova chain would begin.

There would be no survivors. Security allowed no ships to remain on Hel. The Station personnel could do nothing but await their fate.

And nowhere else did there exist one scrap of information on the magnificent, deadly weapon created at Hel Station. That, too, had been a Security-decreed precaution.