Starfishers - Starfishers Triology Book 2

Fifteen: 3048 AD

Operation Dragon, Danion

Danion became as comfortable as an old, well-worn shoe.

"Fact is, it's getting downright dull," Mouse complained toward the end of the third month.

"What?" benRabi demanded. "All those ball games, and you up to your ears in women, and you're bored?"

"You got it, partner. Like the man in the joke said, women are fine, but what do you do the other twenty-three hours of the day?"

Amy made a remark that Moyshe did not catch.

"If that's how you feel," Mouse replied, laughing, "you can carry your own damned books."

They were moving her into Moyshe's cabin. BenRabi was not overwhelmed by the idea. Nor was he sure how it had come about. It had just sort of fenced him in, pushed by Amy and Mouse till the move actually began and he still had not said "No!"

He preferred living alone. Sharing struck him as synonymous with imposition. Amy's mere presence foreordained increased demands... At least he would have someone around when the headaches came.

Mouse and Amy kept bickering. Mouse was teasing, but Amy sounded serious. She did not like Mouse much.

BenRabi's migraines came several times a week now. He was scared. The voices and visions... He thought it might be a tumor, but the Seiner doctors would not take him seriously. They gave him pain pills and told him not to worry.

He had been on continuous medication the last ten days. He was pale, dehydrated, weak, and shaky.

Amy seemed to be the only one who cared, and she would not say why.

His old downdeep fear that he was going mad seemed ever more creditable.

This is a hell of a time to take a live-in lover, he thought, dumping an armload of clothing. The relationship was paraplegic.

The inexplicable recurring memory of Alyce did not help. It frightened and disoriented him.

There was no reason for that old, dead affair to obsess him.

It was just another symptom of whatever was happening to him. But it was damned scary.

On The Broken Wings he had, almost, been the tough, hard character he had been portraying. Now, less than a year later, he was a spineless, whimpering... Disgusted, he tried to kick a chair across the cabin. It did not move. All shipboard furniture was bolted down.

He resumed work in grim silence.

"Moyshe, I need your help," Mouse said a month after the move, voice sounding a plaintive note.

"What? How? I'll do whatever I can." He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Amy remained in the women's head. He was surprised. This tone did not fit his partner at all.

"Figure out a way to keep me from killing her."

BenRabi followed Mouse's gaze. It was fixed on the Sangaree woman like the cross hairs of an assassin's rifle scope.

"She's working on me, Moyshe. She's got me working on myself. I've been having trouble sleeping. I just lay there thinking up ways... Thinking about her being right down the passage. It's because of the mess on Blackworld. I can't get it out of my head. And I thought I had it under control."

"You too? What the hell did Beckhart do to us?"

Amazing, Mouse's finally owning up to a connection with the Shadowline War. He must be under real stress.

"Self-discipline, Mouse. That's the only answer I've got. And maybe the notion that you ought to save yourself for a bigger target. She's not worth getting burned over."

"She's the queen in the game. And the stakes are as big as they can get, Moyshe. Watch her. I've never seen anybody so sure they had a winning hand. She's got a royal flush in spades look."

"You're mixing metaphors."

"Metaphors be damned, Moyshe. I need help."

Jesus, benRabi thought. Here I am halfway to the psycho ward and my partner is crying for me to keep him out. Are we going to have one nut stand guard over the cracks in the other's noggin? "Let's take it to Kindervoort, then."

"Oh, no. This stays in the family. Jarl doesn't get anything free. How's your head doing?"

"The docs keep saying there's nothing wrong. It don't sound right. I mean, how come I hurt so goddamned much? But maybe it's true. For a while I thought it was a tumor and they were just jollying me so I wouldn't panic. But the scans didn't show anything when I finally got them to let me see them. Now I think something external is causing it."

"Allergy?"

"No. I can't explain yet. It's just barely a suspicion so far."

That suspicion did not leaf out, blossom, and bear fruit for months.

Time lumbered forward. Mouse worked himself into the shipwide chess finals. BenRabi had a falling out with the collector crowd, among whom he had been a brief, bright star. They were older, more prejudiced people, and unable to tolerate his alienness indefinitely. He trudged onward in his laborious relationship with Amy.

He tried to make it work. He sincerely believed he was giving it an honest go, and for a while the curious Alyce memories and attendant mental oddities withdrew, but he never saw any long-term hope.

He even abandoned his writing in order to give her more time. "I just don't feel like writing," he lied. "It isn't me anymore."

She protested, but with such restraint that he began to resent her presence during moments when he could have written.

Turn around twice and there went another month into the file cabinets of time. And here was Mouse with another. "Moyshe, I think I need help."

"Stay out of her way."

"Not the Sangaree woman this time, Moyshe. Another one."

"What else?"

"Carrie just gave me the word. That Sally I was going with... She's peegee."

"Come on. You're shitting me. People don't get pregnant unless... Oh, my."

"Oh, my, yes. Unless they want to."

Moyshe fought a grin.

"You laugh and I'll kick your head in."

"Me? Laugh? I'm sorry. It's just that... What do you want me to do?"

"Shee-it, Moyshe. I don't know. Talk to me. I've never been up this tree before."

"What is it? She figure you'd do the honorable thing?" Why are you doing this to me, Mouse? I had a handle on the Alyce thing.

"That's the name of the game. That's the way they do things here. And the way they lay their little traps. Straight from Century One."

"No law says you've got to give her what she wants, though. Kiss her good-bye." That was how he had failed Alyce, so long ago. He had not found the strength to say no until it was too late.

"I don't like to hurt anybody's feelings."

"That's the chance she took, isn't it?" How come it was so easy to say, but so hard to do? "I don't see how anybody could believe in a marriage that started out that way anyway. Go on. Tell her to kiss off."

"Easier said than done, Moyshe."

"I know. Advice is that way. Here's some more, while we're at it. Take your own precautions so it doesn't happen again."

"That much I figured out for myself." Mouse went away. He returned within the hour, shaking his head. "She couldn't believe that landsmen don't give a damn if a kid's parents are married or not. But I think I finally got through to her."

For a while Mouse's social calendar was less crowded. But only for a while. The ladies seemed incapable of remaining away.

"Tell me something, Amy," benRabi said one afternoon. "Why are we here?"

She started giving him the standard story.

"That's not true. Danion didn't really need us. Certainly not a thousand of us. Even with only two hundred we'll finish up six months early. Your own Damage Control people wouldn't have taken much longer. So what's really going on?"

She would not tell him. She even refused to speculate. He suspected, from her expression, that she might not know, that she was beginning to ask herself the questions that were bothering him.

His came of a long line of thinking sparked by snippets of information and flashes of intuition that had begun accumulating on Carson's.

"Correct me if you can fault this hypothesis," he told Mouse when Amy was out of hearing. "We're guinea pigs in a coexistence experiment. They've got something big and dangerous going and they thought they could hire outside help to get through it. I'd guess they expect heavy fighting. Our job descriptions all deal with damage control. But the experiment was a failure. No takers."

"I wouldn't know, Moyshe. You've got your head working. Who were they going to fight? Not us."

"Sharks?"

"Maybe. But it doesn't add up. Still, I'm not much good at puzzles. How's your head doing?"

"Real good. Why?"

"I thought so. You're more like the old Moyshe lately." They completed the last scheduled repair three weeks later. From then on there was little to do.

One day a long-faced Amy announced, "They just told me. Starting Monday you'll be assigned to Damage Control. To the emergency ready room at D.C. South. I'll take you over and introduce you."

"Breaking up the team, eh?" Mouse asked. "Where are you going?"

"Back to Security." She did not sound pleased.

BenRabi felt a guilty elation. Though he loved Amy, he did not like having her around all the time. He felt smothered.

The damage control assignment was a crushing bore. "A fireman in a steel city would have more to do," Mouse complained. A few days later, he cornered benRabi in order to update him on his own snooping.

"Our fleet commander looks like a maverick. He won't bow down to Gruber of Gruber's Fleet as the head honcho Starfisher. He wants to do things his own way. The other fleets treat this one like an idiot cousin."

"That why the Old Man targeted Payne's Fleet?"

"No. He just jumped on a chance to get somebody onto a harvestship. You were right about the experiment, by the way. It was something Gruber put Payne up to. I get the impression that now he's using the failure as an excuse to go haring off on some adventure of his own as soon as we're done harvesting."

"Speaking of which. Amy says it's the best they've ever had. They're going to hold their auction after we leave."

"Kindervoort still on you about crossing over?"

"He mentions it sometimes. Came to the cabin last week." Did Mouse suspect that he found the offer tempting?

Sports season became crazier than ever as playoff time approached. For Moyshe it was all bewildering color and madness. Mouse, of course, was right in the thick of it. Football was his latest passion. He could quote records and statistics by the hour. BenRabi studied the game just so he could carry on a conversation.

Their lives, increasingly, became frosting, sugar-bits having nothing to do with their assignments. They had come here to find starfish. Despite a thousand doubts and distractions, benRabi kept his wavering cross hair sighted near his programed target. He even resumed wrestling with Jerusalem so he could keep his invisible notes.

Sharing quarters with an agent for the other side constantly hampered him. He was not so naïve as to believe that Amy had been struck deaf and blind by love.

He had come aboard thinking starfish were a wonderful concept, a miraculous hook on which to hang modern myths and legends. They had been one with the lost planet Osiris and the fabulous weapons of Stars' End. Now he knew that the hydrogen streams teemed with "life." The fairy magic was gone, but still the fantastic fish were something to play with during his long hours of waiting for an emergency that never arose.

The starfish, the leviathans of the airless deep, were more fields of force and the balances between them than they were creatures of matter. The longbeards of the breed could be three hundred kilometers long and a million years old. They might occupy thousands of cubic kilometers, yet have fewer atoms in them than a human adult. In them atoms and molecules functioned primarily as points upon which forces anchored. Here, there, a pinpoint hawking hole left over from the big bang formed the core of an invisible organ.

The fabric of space and time were the creature's bone and sinew. He could manipulate them within himself. In essence, he built himself a secondary universe within the primary, and, within that homemade pocket reality existed as tangibly as did men in their own reality. The part of a starfish that could be detected was but a fraction of the whole beast. He also existed in hyperspace, null space, and on levels mankind had not yet reached.

Those beasts of the big night were living fusion furnaces. They fed on hydrogen, and enjoyed an occasional spice of other elements in the fusion chain. At first Moyshe had wondered why they did not gather where matter was more dense, as in the neighborhood of a protostar.

Amy told him that the field stresses around stellar masses could rip the creatures apart.

A starfish's stomach contained a fire as violent as that at the heart of a sun. Not only did fusion take place there, but matter annihilation as well when the beast browsed on anti-hydrogen with that part of him coexisting in a counter-universe.

BenRabi did not speculate on the physics. He was a field man. A supernova seemed kindergarten stuff by comparison. He simply noted his thoughts in invisible ink and hoped the Bureau's tame physicists could make something of them.

"Mouse, I've run into a philosophical problem," he said one morning. "About the fish."

"You've lost me already, Moyshe."

"I've gotten onto something that's turning my thinking inside out."

"Which is?"

"That this isn't your usual man/cattle relationship. It's a partnership—if the Fishers aren't the cows. The fish are intelligent. Probably more intelligent than we are." He looked around. No one was listening. "They have what they call a mindtech section in Ops Sector. Somehow, they communicate with the starfish. Mind to mind."

"Where'd you get that?"

"Around. Keeping my ears open. Adding things up."

"So the ugly old psi theory raises its head again. Out here. You know what the Old Man's scientists will say about that?"

"They'll have to loosen up those stiff necks. But what I think is interesting is the research possibilities."

"Research?"

"Historical research. The fish have been in contact with other races. And some of them are over a million years old. That's a lot of remembering, I'm thinking."

Like oceans, the hydrogen streams supported a complete ecology, including the predatory "shark," the starfish's natural enemy. There were a dozen species. Even the biggest and most dangerous was much smaller than an adult starfish. However, like man and wolves, several of the species hunted in cooperative packs. They could even pursue their prey through hyperspace.

Packs shadowed all the great herds. They struck when a fish straggled. Sometimes, when driven by hunger, they tried to cut individual fish from the herd. And occasionally, when their numbers reached a certain critical mass, a whole pack went berserk and threw itself at the herd.

The starfish were not helpless. They could burp up balls of gut fire and sling them around like granddaddy nuclear bombs. But sharks were fast and the burping was slow. A starfish under attack seldom had a chance for more than one defensive attempt. He had to count on the help of his herdmates, who might be under attack themselves. Thus inadequate, the starfish sometimes needed allies to survive.

When the earliest Seiners had located their first starfish herd the shark packs had been expanding rapidly. That first herd had been threatened with extinction.

Its fish had touched the minds of those early Seiners, had found in them a hope, and so had contacted them and had made a bargain. They would produce ambergris in quantity in exchange for human protection.

"There're times when I think they're trying to touch me," benRabi told Mouse, after rehearsing what history he had learned.

"What makes you think that?" Mouse seemed excited by the idea.

"Probably just my imagination." He was reluctant to tell Mouse that he sometimes dreamed of vast, swimming spatial panoramas, oddly alive with things never seen by human eyes. Dragons flew there, and played, with a ponderousness unmatched even in Old Earth's vanished whales. Each time he dreamed the dream, he wakened with a screaming migraine.

"So those first Fishers armed themselves," he said, resuming his history lesson. "The fish taught them to detect the sharks. The herd slowly recovered."

But the sharks, in their slow fashion, reasoned. They learned to associate casualties with the hard things shepherding their prey. In the middle thirties they had begun getting harvestships as well as herds, forcing the Seiners to defend themselves before they protected their allies.

This past year they had begun attacking the ships first, and cooperating between packs of different species.

Their numbers were still expanding. Soon, the Seiners feared, they would be numerous enough to attack and destroy whole harvestfleets.

No ships had yet been lost, but the attack on Danion had demonstrated the reality of the peril.

The Starfishers believed themselves at war, and feared it was a war they could not win. They were too few and too weakly armed.

"Packs are migrating here from deeper in the galaxy," Moyshe concluded. "I suppose because of a depleted food supply there."

"That's it?" Mouse asked.

"What'd you expect? It's hard to get anything out of Amy. She may be sleeping with me but she doesn't forget that I'm the other old enemy, the landsman. About the only other thing is that they're desperate for more and better weapons. They might have something cooking there. Any time I mention weapons, Amy changes the subject fast."

In fact, she usually left the cabin. That scared him. Something big was going on and she did not want to risk giving him a hint.

Her behavior confirmed the feeling he had had from the beginning. This was no ordinary harvest.

Danion had been under drive for weeks. Moyshe's suspicions had become stronger. Harvestships seldom went hyper. The fish did not like it.

Were the beasts following the fleet?

Nobody was talking. Even the friendliest Seiners had little to say anymore.

The year was winding down. He had learned a lot, but still nothing concrete, nothing of genuine advantage to the Bureau and Confederation. Was the mission going to end up a wild goose chase?

Playing spy-vs-spy in the bedroom with Amy had become agonizing. Yet he had to pursue his tradecraft. He had to try to learn, and he did not dare relax.

He could not forget the Sangaree woman. She was still there, and still very much involved in her own mission.

Whatever her game was, it was in its final moves. She had resumed pushing Mouse, hard, confident of her strength.

The drives had been dead a week. Danion had reached her destination. Whole new sections of the ship had been closed to landsmen. The Seiners who came and went there were more closed mouthed than ever. Some, whom Moyshe considered friends, would barely acknowledge his greetings. Whatever they were doing, they wanted no hint to get back landside.

Work schedules went to shift-and-a-half. There were no exceptions. BenRabi and Mouse just spent that much more time being bored.

"Whatever it is, it's dangerous," Mouse said. "They're all scared green."

"The shark packs are collecting. Like ten times thicker than they've ever seen."

"I watched one of the Service Ship crews come in this morning. They rotated with an alternate crew."

"Fighting?"

"Just exhausted, I think. I didn't see any stretchers. But Kindervoort's thugs ran me off before I could find out anything."

Despite Kindervoort they gleaned their bits of information. "They're in a race against time," benRabi told Mouse. "I heard one guy say they wouldn't get a chance to gamble if the sharks hit aggressive mass before they finish their experiments."

"What did he mean? Are they working on some new weapon?"

BenRabi shrugged. "I didn't ask. But I sure wouldn't mind knowing what they're risking my life for."

One evening, after a workday spent within taunting distance of the Sangaree woman, benRabi and Mouse tried to relax over a chessboard.

"You're shook up again," Mouse observed while staring at his pieces. "What's up? Trouble with Amy?"

"That's part of it. I've only seen her twice all week. She just comes in long enough to shower and change."

"So? She's not sitting on the only one in the universe. The little redhead, Penny something, from New Earth... "

"She's young enough to be my kid, Mouse. Only a couple of years older than Greta."

Mouse flung his hands up in mock exasperation. "What's that got to do with it? She's willing, isn't she?"

"Maybe. But I think I'm more a father image... "

"So indulge in a little incest."

"It doesn't matter anyway. Sex isn't the problem."

"What? It's always a problem. One way or another." Mouse chuckled. He chuckled again as he ambushed Moyshe's queen. Moyshe could not keep his mind on his game. The want had returned, mildly, along with that damned thing with the gun. "What is the problem, then?"

"The way people are treating us? I guess. They're so scared they won't have anything to do with us."

"Check. Check there too. Part of it's the Sangaree woman, Moyshe. She's telling stories on us again. Trying to isolate us. I wonder why? One move to mate."

They batted possibilities around. Moyshe so loathed the one that occurred to him that he refused to mention it right away.

His game grew increasingly poor. He became irritable. The I want grew stronger, louder, mocking him, telling him that he was on the threshold of its fulfillment and was too blind to see it.

"I can't hold off much longer," Mouse said, taking a pawn with a savage grab. "Next time she gouges me, or the next, I'll bend her, and damned be the consequences."

"Please don't. We're almost home. We've only got five weeks to go."

Mouse slaughtered a knight. "You think we should let her set us up?"

BenRabi glanced at Mouse's emotionless face, back to the disaster already developing on the chessboard. "I yield." The more he reflected, the more he was sure he knew what Marya was planning. He stood abruptly, scattering chessmen. "We may have to."

"Have to what?"

"Bend her. For our own good. I know what she's doing. We ignored the obvious. Suppose she has the same kind of tracer we did? They've got the technology. And suppose she has control and didn't turn it on till after the Seiners stopped worrying about things like that?"

"Got you. Let's not bend her. Let's just chop the tracer out." Mouse returned his chessmen to their box with loving care, then recovered a wicked homemade plastic knife from beneath his mattress. "Let's go."

BenRabi thought of a dozen reasons for putting it off, but could not articulate a one. It was time Marya was put out of the game. She was too dangerous.

They were halfway to her cabin when he stopped, struck by a sudden thought. "Mouse, what if she's expecting us?"

"Doesn't seem likely."

"You can't overlook anything in this business."

"That's true. Let me think a minute."

For months they had known that the Seiners sometimes listened in on them. When they did not want to be overheard they carefully lipread one another, never verbalizing anything that might excite an eavesdropper.

"I think I made a mistake bringing this up in your cabin."

"Yeah. Maybe. But it's too late to cry. If she bugged us, she bugged us."

"What're you going to do?"

"I'm thinking. I don't got a whole lot of use for Pyrrhic victories, you know."

They continued talking quietly, ten meters from Marya's door.

Three Seiners on a flying scooter squealed round a corner and skidded to a stop at Marya's door. They wore Security patches. One moved toward Mouse and benRabi, hand on his weapon, then stood easy. They tried to look like curious bystanders. The other Security men eyed the door.

"Looks like we get it done for us, Mouse."

"They're not thinking!" Mouse growled. BenRabi's heart pounded out a flamenco. These guys were too sure of themselves.

They overrode the door closure. A pair of explosions greeted them. One man fell in the doorway. The other flung himself inside.

The one facing Mouse and benRabi whirled, charged into the cabin too. His face had gone grey.

They heard grunts and a cry of pain. "Homemade gunpowder weapons!" benRabi gasped. "Nice welcome she had for us."

Mouse looked up and down the passageway. "Come on. Before we draw a crowd."

BenRabi did not know what Mouse planned, but he followed. Mouse went in the door low, scooping the weapon from the hand of the dying Seiner. BenRabi scrambled after him, seizing another fallen handgun.

The Sangaree woman had her back to the door. She was struggling with the last Security man. Her left hand darted past his guard, smashing his windpipe. He gagged. She followed up with a bone-breaking blow over his heart.

BenRabi's grunt of sympathy warned her of enemies to her rear.

"Slowly," Mouse said as she started for the Seiner's weapon. "I'd hate to shoot."

For once she had no instantaneous retort. Mouse's tone made it clear there was nothing he would hate less than killing her. Emotional pain twisted her face when she turned. Once again, from her viewpoint, they had out-maneuvered her—and this time might be fatal.

Her agony turned into a strained smile after a moment. "You're too late." The smile broadened. It became anticipatory. "They're on their way by now."

"Moyshe, get that man in here and close the door. How bad is he?"

"He's gone."

"Better be nice," Marya said as benRabi forced the door shut. She had the sense to keep her voice neutral. To survive, to enjoy her victory, she had to overcome the obstacle she had made of Mouse. "They'll be here soon. You won't want them mad at you."

"This one's gone too," benRabi said. "The other one might make it. Marya, don't think the Seiners will hand over a harvestfleet because a few raidships turn up."

She smiled that gunmetal smile.

He remembered ruined merchantmen left in the wake of Sangaree raiders. They would come with enough gunpower. There would be no survivors.

An alarm began hooting. It was a forlorn call to arms.

"General quarters, Mouse. She's for real." The borrowed weapon seemed to swell painfully in his hand. A part of him was telling him it was time he finished what he had started on The Broken Wings.