Starfishers - Starfishers Triology Book 2

Thirteen: 3048 AD

Operation Dragon, Danion

BenRabi muttered: " ‘Aljo! Aljo! Hens ilyas! Ilyas im gialo bar!... ' " Over a joint with stripped threads.

"What the hell?" Mouse asked.

"A nonsense poem. By Potty Welkin. From Shadows in a Dominion Blue. Goes:

" ‘Nuné! Nuné! Scutarrac... ' "

"Never heard of it. Think we ought to cut new threads?"

"Let's put in a new fitting. It was a political protest thing. Not one of his biggies. It was a satire on Confederation. The poem was his idea of what a political speech sounded like."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"It's just the way I feel this morning. Like a poem without sense or rhyme that everybody's trying to figure out. Including me. There. That's got it. What do we do next?"

Beyond Mouse, Amy consulted her clipboard. She had been staring at him with questioning eyes. "A cracked nipple in a lox line about a kilometer from here."

"Uhn." BenRabi tossed his tool kit into the electric truck, sat down with his legs dangling off the bed. Mouse joined him. Amy took off with a lurch that bounced spare fittings all over the truckbed. She had been angry and uncommunicative all week.

Moyshe had been as wary himself, as unsure. He thought she was upset because he had not tried to seduce her.

Mouse had let it be for three days. Now, whispering, he asked, "What happened between you two?"

"Nothing."

"Come on, Moyshe. I know you better than that."

"Nothing. Really. That's the trouble." He shrugged, tried to change the subject. "I still can't believe we're inside a ship. I keep feeling we're back in the tunnels at Luna Command."

"What did you mean by that poem?"

"What I said. People keep trying to figure me out. So they can use me."

The ship was a lot like Luna Command, with long passageways connecting the several areas that had to be big to function.

"I don't understand," Mouse said.

"Who does? No, wait. Look. Here's Skullface, trying to get me to cross over... "

"So? He tried me too. He's trying everybody. Looks like part of their plan. I just told him I couldn't meet his price. I don't know anything that would be any good to him anyway. So what's the big deal? It's all part of the floor show. We've been through it before."

But there's something different this time, benRabi thought. I've never been tempted before. "Why was she hustling me?" He jerked his head toward Amy.

Mouse laughed wearily, lowered his head, shook it sadly. "Moyshe, Moyshe, Moyshe. Does it have to be a plot? Did the Sangaree woman burn you that bad? Maybe she likes you. They're not all vampires."

"But they'll all get you hurt," benRabi mumbled.

"What? Oh. You ever stop to think maybe she feels the same way?"

BenRabi paused. Mouse could be right. Mouse knew how to read women, and it paralleled his own impression. He wished he could assume a more casual, no-commitment attitude in his personal relationships. Mouse managed, and left the girls happy.

"Speaking of women. And her." The Sangaree woman gave them a bright gunmetal smile and mocking wave as they glided past her work party, "What to do?" She had been less obnoxious since Mouse's recreation-day demonstration, but had not abandoned her plot.

"Just wait. We're making her nervous. You think old Skullface knows about her? We might make a few points by stopping her when she moves."

"It's a notion," Mouse said, becoming thoughtful. As they rolled to a stop, he suggested, "Why don't you come by for a game tonight?"

His partner was still very much devoted to the mission, Moyshe realized.

Amy plugged the truck into a charger circuit. "That woman. Who is she?"

"Which woman?" Mouse countered, tone idle.

BenRabi scanned the area. It looked like the site of a recent elephant riot. The passage had been open to space. Liquids had frozen and burst their pipes.

"Well be here a week, Amy. How come we didn't bring any replacement pipe?"

"They're sending a Damage Control team up after lunch. They'll bring what we need. We just worry about the lox line now. It's got to be open by noon. You didn't answer my question, Mouse."

"What's that?"

"Who's that woman?"

BenRabi shrugged, said, "Maria Gonzalez, I think."

"I know her name. I want to know what's between you three."

BenRabi shrugged again. "I guess she hates spies. A lot of people have scratched us off their Christmas lists." Avoiding her eyes, he handed Mouse a wrench.

"Who does she work for?"

The question took him by surprise, but he was in good form. "Paul Kraus in atmosphere systems. He could tell you whatever you want to know."

Mouse chuckled.

A muscle in Amy's cheek started twitching. "You know what I mean. Answer me."

"Take it easy, Amy," Mouse said. "Your badge is showing."

‘What?"

"A little professional advice, that's all. Don't press. It puts people off. They clam up. Or play games with you, leading you around with lies. A good agent never pushes unless he has to. You don't have to. Nobody's going anywhere for a year. So why not just lie back and let the pieces fall, then put them together." He had selected the tone of an old pro advising a novice. "Take our situation. Give me a twenty-centimeter copper nipple, Moyshe. You know we're Navy men. We know you work for Kindervoort. Okay... "

"I what?"

"Don't be coy. Torch, Moyshe. And find the solder. You give yourself away a dozen times a day, Amy. The greenest apprentice wouldn't have fallen for that left-handed wrench thing."

BenRabi chuckled. Amy had torn through all three tool kits trying to find the mythical wrench. Then she had gone down to Damage Control and tried to requisition one. Somebody down there had gone along with the gag. They had passed her on to Tooling...

Amy had been given a crash course in plumbing, but she had not learned enough to fool the initiate.

Fury reddened her face. It faded into a soft smile. "I told him I couldn't pull it off."

"He probably didn't expect you to. He knows we're the best. Doesn't matter anyway. We're out of it now. Just a couple spikes here working. Okay, we know where we stand. Where's the flux, Moyshe? So why don't you do like we do? Don't push. Pay attention. Wait. It'll come in bits and pieces. No hard feelings that way. And that closes Old Doc Igarashi's Spy School and Lonely Hearts Club for today. Be ready for a surprise quiz tomorrow. Ow! That's hot."

"Watch the torch, dummy," Moyshe said. "This T pipe is an odd size. We'll have to choke it down to two centimeters somehow."

"Here," Amy said. She made a checkmark on one of the sheets on her clipboard, handed Moyshe a reduction joint with a number tag attached. "Special made. See. I'm learning." She laughed. "No more questions. Mouse. Moyshe. I feel better now. Not so sneaky."

"Good for you," Mouse said.

Danion suddenly groaned and shivered. BenRabi whirled, looking for a spacesuit locker. Mouse crouched defensively, making a sound suspiciously like a whimper. "What the hell?" he demanded. "We breaking up?"

Amy laughed. "It's nothing. They're shifting mindsails and catchnets."

"Mindsails?" BenRabi asked. "What's that?"

Her smile vanished. She had, evidently, said too much. "I can't explain. You'd have to ask somebody from Operations Sector."

"And that's off limits."

"Yes."

"Got you."

The shuddering continued for a half hour. They lunched while waiting for the Damage Control people. Amy began to lose her reserve toward benRabi. Soon they were chattering like teenagers who had just made up.

Mouse did a little poking and prodding from the sidelines, as skillfully as any psychologist, maneuvering Amy into inviting Moyshe out next recreation day.

BenRabi went to Mouse's cabin after supper. They played chess and, lip reading, discussed what Moyshe was putting down, using the venerable invisible ink trick, between the lines of his drafts of Jerusalem. They also attacked the problem of the Sangaree woman, and found it as stubborn as ever.

Recreation day came, with all its mad morning chess tournaments and its afternoon sports furor, its Archaicist exhibitionism, and its collectors' excitement. BenRabi concluded some business with Grumpy George, got deadlocked over some stamps, and managed a handsome cash settlement on some New Earth mutant butterflies he had brought along for trading.

That evening he and Amy attended another ball. This one was Louis XIV. He went in his everyday clothing. Amy, though, scrounged a costume and was striking. From the ball they went to her cabin so she could change. They had been invited to another party, by the same cousin.

"How did you people get involved in the Archaicist thing?" Moyshe asked while she was changing.

"We're the originals," she replied from her bathroom, her voice light with near-laughter. She had been mirthfully happy all day. Moyshe, too, had been feeling intensely alive and aware. "It starts in creche. In school. When we act out history. We haven't really been around long enough to have any past of our own, so we borrow yours."

"That's not true. We all have the same history."

"I guess you're right. Old Earth is everybody's history if you get right down to it. Anyway, it's a creche game. A teaching method. And it carries over for some people. It's fun to dress up and pretend. But we don't live it. Not the way some people do. Know what I mean?"

"You remember Chouteau? That Ship's Commander who brought us here? He had as bad a case as I've ever seen."

"An exception. Look at it this way. How many people go to these things? Not very many. And they're most of the Archaicists aboard. See? It's a game. But your people are so serious about it. It's spooky."

"I'll buy that." Curious, he thought. In these two weeks he had seen nothing culturally unique to the Seiners. They lived borrowed lives in a hash that did not add to a whole. His expectations, based on landside legends, rumors, and his Luna Command studies, had been severely disappointed.

But Amy had a point. He had encountered only a narrow selection of her people. An unusual minority. The majority, remaining aloof, might represent something different.

She came from the bathroom. "Zip me up, okay?" Then, responding to a question, "We're not complete borrowers. It's partly because you're just seeing a few people, like you say. And partly because this is the fleet. You wouldn't judge Confederation by what you saw on one of your Navy ships, would you? The Yards and creches are different. Except when we're working, we try to make life a game. To beat the boredom and fear. Can't be that much different for Navy men. Anyway, you're not seeing the real us, ever. You're just seeing us reacting to you."

What were these Yards? They kept slipping into Seiner conversation. Did the Starfishers have a world of their own, hidden somewhere out of the way? It was not impossible. The records revealing the whereabouts of scores of early settlements had been destroyed in the Lunar Wars... He was about to ask when he recalled Mouse's advice about pressing.

There was much, much more to the Seiner civilization than anyone in Confederation suspected. The bits he and Mouse had collected already would be worth fortunes to the right people. If he kept learning at this rate...

They were going to give him another medal when he got back. He could see it coming. He would rather have that damned year off.

The party was a carbon of the previous one. Same people. Same music. Same conversation and arguments. Only he and Amy were different. They watched their drinking and tried to understand what was happening to them.

The partiers were younger than he or Amy, and uncomfortable with the gap, though Amy's cousin did her best to make them part of things. Moyshe never felt unwelcome, only out of place. He supposed he had been as much an anomaly before, but had been too preoccupied to notice.

Had Amy manipulated the invitation? If so, why? Another Kindervoort ploy? Both Jarl and Mouse seemed eager to push them together.

Why did he question everything? Even the questioning? Why did he feel that he was losing his grasp on his place in the universe?

They cuddled. They drank. The shadows closed in. They probed one another's pasts. He learned that she had once had an abortion after having been tricked into pregnancy by a man who had wanted to marry her, but whom she had loathed. He resisted the temptation to ask why she had been in bed with him in the first place.

He also learned that she was afraid of sexual intercourse because of some failing in herself. What? She shied away from explaining. He did not press.

Time marched. The sun of the party zenithed and hurried on. He and Amy stayed till everyone else had gone.

They feared leaving more than overstaying their welcome. That room locked them into a cell with well-known walls. Their interaction was defined by rules of courtesy toward their hostess. The limits would expand a pale of hurt.

Yet courtesy demanded that they leave before Amy's cousin found their presence painful.

The subtle differences between weeks coalesced and came to a head when they reached benRabi's cabin. Amy was frightened, unsure. So was he. This time, they knew, something would happen. The Big It, as they had called it when he was first becoming sexually aware.

Like kids, they were eager and afraid. The pleasant sharing they wanted carried with it a big risk of pain.

Thus did the sins of the past leave their marks. Both were so frightened of repeating old mistakes that they had almost abandoned trying anything new.

Moyshe watched the processes of his mind with mild amazement. The detached part of himself could not comprehend what was happening. He had survived affairs. Even with the Sangaree woman. Why this retrogression to the adolescent pain and confusion of the Alyce era?

There was a long, pale, tense moment when the night balanced on the edge of a double-edged blade. Amy stared at him as he slowly dismounted from the scooter. Then, with a grimace, she jammed the charging plug into a socket.

Moyshe yielded to a surge of relief. She had saved him the need to make a decision. She would bear the blame if anything went wrong.

They remained nervous and frightened. The tension had its effect in temporary impotence and difficult penetration. They whispered a lot, reassuring one another. BenRabi could not help remembering the first time, with Alyce. Both of them had been virgins.

Now, as then, they managed the main point only after trying too hard. Experience made it easier from there.

The truly cruel blow did not fall till the ultimate moment.

At the peak instant Moyshe felt a flood of hot wetness against his groin, something he had thought the exclusive domain of pornography.

Amy started crying. She had lost bladder control.

Ego-mad with that stunning proof of his manhood, benRabi laughed and collapsed upon her, holding her tightly.

She thought he was laughing at her.

Her nails ripped his skin. Angry words filled the air. She tried to knee him. He rolled away, baffled and babbling.

Hair streaming, wet with their sweat, trailing a damp, wrinkled sheet, Amy fled into the corridor. By the time benRabi got into his jumpsuit and started after her, she was a hundred meters down the corridor, scooter forgotten, trying to wrap herself in the sheet as she fled.

"Amy! Come back. I'm sorry."

Too late. She would not listen. He started after her, but gave it up when people began coming out to see what was going on.

He went back and pondered what he had done.

He had given her a gut-kick in a festering wound. This must have happened before and have caused her a lot of grief. This was why she had been so frightened. But she had come to him anyway, hoping for understanding.

And he had laughed.

"Fool," he said, flinging a pillow against a wall. Then, "She should have warned me... " He realized that she had, in her timorous way.

He had to do something before her anger ossified into hatred.

He tried. He really tried. He returned her clothing with a long, apologetic note. He called, but she would not answer. He visited Kindervoort and asked his help, but that seemed to do no good.

Their paths no longer crossed. She did not return to work. He could not corner her and make her listen.

The sword had fallen.

His new supervisor, another of Kindervoort's people, was a small, hard character named Lyle Bruce. Bruce was uncommunicative and prejudiced. He was intolerant and grossly unfair. Repairs had to be done his way even though he was less skilled than Amy.

Mouse and benRabi took it all and smiled back. So Bruce tried harder. "His turn in the barrel will come," Mouse promised. "This is just some test Kindervoort is putting on."

BenRabi agreed. "He won't last. I'll sweet him to death."

BenRabi was right. Next week Bruce was replaced by a man from Damage Control. Martin King was not exactly friendly, but neither was he antagonistic. He was a prejudiced man controlling his prejudices, for the good of Danion. He did nothing to hamper their work.

At shift's end one day he told Moyshe, "I'm supposed to take you to Kindervoort's office."

"Oh? Why?"

"He didn't say."

"What about supper?"

"Something will be arranged."

"All right. Let's go."

Kindervoort's office was a place comfy-cozy in nineteenth-century English decor. Lots of dark wood, scores of books. A fireplace would have set it off perfectly.

"Have a seat, Moyshe," Kindervoort suggested. "How's it going out there?"

BenRabi shrugged.

"Dumb question, huh?" He left his chair, came around his desk and sat on its corner. "This isn't really business. Relax." He paused. "No, that's not all the way true. Everything gets to be business, sooner or later. I want to talk about Amy. You willing?"

"Why not?" After all, this was the man he had come running to when things had fallen apart.

"It's personal. I thought you might be touchy."

"I am."

"And honest. I'll be honest too. I want to help because you're my friends. Not close, but friends. And I've got a professional interest, of course. There's going to be more of this kind of trouble. That's bad for Danion. I want to find ways to smooth things over."

Nicely rehearsed speech, Moyshe thought. "You want to use me and Amy as guinea pigs?"

"In a way. But it's not just an experiment. You're what counts in the end."

Moyshe fought his reaction to Kindervoort's appearance. He pushed back the anger and resentment this interference stimulated...

Swirling visions of stars and darkness. The image of the gun flaming on a black velvet background. He had never had it so strongly, nor in such detail. Fear replaced anger. What was happening? What did this deadly vision mean to his unconscious mind?

"Moyshe? Are you all right?" Kindervoort bent over him, studying his eyes. His voice was remote.

BenRabi rumbled for an answer. His tongue betrayed him. Ghosts had begun dancing inside his head. He could not focus his attention.

A burning crowbar drove through his right eyesocket.

"Migraine!" he gasped.

It was so sudden. None of the little spots or the geometric figures that were the usual warnings. Just the ghosts, the guns, and that curiously familiar stellar backdrop.

BenRabi groaned. The devil himself had him by the skull, trying to crush it down to pea size.

Kindervoort bounced back around his desk, took something from a drawer, dashed through a door into an adjoining bathroom, returned with pills and water. BenRabi watched with little interest. The pain had become the dominant force in his universe. There was just him and it... And now voices.

He heard them, faint and far away, unintelligible but real, like snatches of conversation caught drifting down a hallway from a distant room. He tried to listen, but the agony made a flaming barrier against concentration.

"Moyshe? Here're some pills. Moyshe? Can't you hear me?"

A hand grabbed benRabi's chin, pulled back. Fingers forced his mouth open. Dry, bitter tablets burned his tongue. Water splashed him. A hand covered his mouth and nose till he had no choice but to swallow. The hand departed. He gasped for air.

He had not screamed. Not yet. Because he could not. The pain was killing him, and he could do nothing but cling to its shooting star. Down it went, down into darkness...

Seconds later he recovered, the pain vanishing as quickly as it had come. With it went the ghosts and voices. But he remained disoriented.

Kindervoort was seated behind his desk again, talking urgently into an intercom. "... exact time you went on minddrive." He glanced at his watch. "Were the comnets open? Thanks." He switched off. His expression was grave.

Moyshe had to have more water. He felt as dry as a Blake City summer. He tried to rise. "Water... "

"Stay there!" Kindervoort snapped. "Don't move. I'll get it." Glass in hand, he rushed into the bathroom.

BenRabi fell back into his chair, shivering both from shock and coolness. He had sweated out a good liter. The painkiller, which hit the system as fast as a nerve poison, worked perfectly but did nothing to ease nervous exhaustion. He would not be able to move for a while.

Several glasses of water and a blanket helped. When he felt human enough to talk again, Kindervoort went on as if nothing had happened. "Moyshe, I think it's important that we work out something between you and Amy. Both on the personal and social level."

"Uhm."

"Will you talk to her?"

"I've been trying for a week and a half."

"All right. Easy. Easy." He thumbed his intercom. "Bill? Send Miss Coleridge in now."

Amy burst through the door. "What happened? I heard?... "

Softly, so Moyshe could not hear, Kindervoort explained. Amy's concern became mixed with dismay. She moved to benRabi. "Are you all right?"

"I'll live. Unfortunately."

"Moyshe. Moyshe. What're we going to do?"

"I'm going to say I'm sorry," he murmured.

The apologies and explanations came easy with the edge off their emotions, though Amy remained sensitive. Her problem, as Moyshe had suspected, had caused her a lot of grief.

Kindervoort thoughtfully absented himself. In an hour or so they concluded a cautious truce.