Stars End - Starfishers Triology Book 3

by Glen Cook

  The men had shared missions under fire. Sometimes they did not like one another much. Their backgrounds were day and night. Centuries of prejudice had erected walls between them. Yet an indestructible bond had been forged and hammered on the anvils of shared peril. They had guarded one another's backs and saved one another's lives too often to let go.

  Mouse waited without moving, with the patience of a samurai.

  He was a dedicated Archaicist. He had just encountered his own ancient heritage and, in imagination, was trying the samurai role for size. The code and conduct suited the warrior within him.

  But it did nothing for the libertine. And Mouse was a classic of that genre, at least with the opposite sex.

  Masato Igarashi Storm did nothing by half measures.

  The doctor coughed softly.

  "Will he be all right?" Amy demanded. "He'll come out okay? I know what you told me, but... "

  Mouse's facial muscles moved slightly. His wan expression spoke volumes about his disgust at her display.

  The doctor was more patient. "Just an enforced rest, Miss. That's all it is. There's nothing wrong that rest can't cure. I hear he did a hell of a job feeding realtime to Weapons Control. He just pushed himself too far."

  A look flickered across Mouse's stony face.

  "What're you thinking?" Amy demanded.

  "Just that he's not usually a pusher."

  Amy was ready for a fight.

  The doctor aborted it by giving benRabi an injection. He began to come around.

  Mouse seemed indifferent to Amy's response. But not oblivious. He was an astute observer. He just did not care what she thought.

  "Doc," he said, "is there any special reason for sticking with this kind of medical setup?"

  The woman held benRabi's wrist, taking his pulse. "What do you mean?"

  "It's primitive. Almost Archaicist obsolete. They had sonic sedation systems before I was born. Easier on the patient and staff both."

  The doctor reddened. Mouse had been out of the hospital only a few weeks himself. He had spent a month recuperating from a severe wound received from a Sangaree agent who had tried to seize control of Danion. He was not pleased with the quality of medical care, and made no secret of it. But Mouse hated all doctors and hospitals. He could find fault with the finest.

  BenRabi had tracked the Sangaree woman down, and had shot her...

  Mouse had the nerve to stand toe-to-toe with the Devil and tell him to put it where the sun doesn't shine.

  "We have to make do with what we can afford, Mr. Storm."

  "So I've been told." Mouse did not pursue it, though he thought Seiners pleading poverty was on a par with Midas begging alms on a street corner.

  BenRabi opened his eyes.

  "How you doing, Moyshe?" Storm asked, trampling Amy's more dramatic opener. His presence there, betraying his concern, embarrassed him.

  The fabric of centuries takes the stamp; they mark the children indelibly. Their legacy remains as invisible and irresistible as the secret coded in DNA. The young Mouse had learned that Old Earthers were pariahs.

  Mouse's family had been in Service for three generations. They were part of Confederation's military aristocracy. BenRabi's forebears had been unemployed Social Insurees for centuries.

  Neither man considered himself prejudiced. But false truths sown in the fallows of childhood, planted deep, continued to sprout unrealistic real-world responses.

  BenRabi had begun bridling his prejudice early. He had to survive. There had been only two Old Earthers in his Academy battalion.

  He needed a minute to get his bearings. "What am I doing here?" he demanded.

  "You needed rest," Amy told him. "Lots of it. You overdid it this time."

  "Come on. I can take care of myself. I know when... "

  "Crap!" the doctor snapped. "Every mindtech thinks that. And then they turn up here, burned out. I change their diapers and spoon feed them. What is it with you people, benRabi? You all got egos two sizes too big for a small god."

  Moyshe was fuzzy. He tried to say something flip. His tongue felt like it was wrapped in an old sock.

  He saw tears in the doctor's eyes. "Did you lose someone at Stars' End?"

  "My sister. She came out of creche just before you landsmen came aboard. She was only seventeen, benRabi."

  "I'm sorry."

  "No, you're not. You're a mindtech. Anyway, sorry doesn't help. Not when I have to take care of her every day. She was just like you, benRabi. She knew she could handle it. She wouldn't listen either. None of them would. Not even the controllers, who should've known better. They put her back in with only four hours' rest."

  BenRabi kept his mouth shut. What could he say? He had been introduced to Contact during the battle at Stars' End. The main Contact room had been a shambles. Dozens of mindtechs had given everything to save Danion.

  He never would have seen Contact, or even have discovered its existence, had those linker casualties not been cruel. In those days he had been a distrusted landsman, a convicted enemy spy who was screened from all Seiner secrets. They had drafted him into Contact only because he might give Danion a millimeter's better chance of surviving.

  He had made his decision to cross over after Stars' End, virtually in the hatch of the ship designated to return the landsmen contractees to Confederation.

  He had waited too long. Half of his personal possessions had departed with the ship. He had not recovered them. The service ship crew had gotten into a row with Customs. The bureaucrats had retaliated, seizing everything not bolted to the ship's frames.

  BenRabi took Amy's thin, cool hand. "How've you been, darling? You look tired. How long has it been?" She felt so cold... She was a spooky woman. Why had he fallen in love with her?

  He always fell for the strange ones, the neurotic and just plain rotten ones. Alyce, in Academy... What a loser she had turned out to be. And the Sangaree woman, Marya, who had been a vampire in the midst of his last two missions.

  "I'm all right now that I know you'll be okay. Moyshe, please be more careful."

  She seemed unusually remote. BenRabi glanced at her, at Mouse, and back again. More problems with Mouse? Her dislike for his friend had taken a quantum leap recently.

  Mouse did not talk much. The inevitable chess board had accompanied him, but he did not offer to play. Amy's presence restrained him. Chess was one of his great passions, rivaling his passion for seducing a parade of beautiful women.

  "Hey, Mouse. Ever wonder what Max is doing these days?" Referring to someone they had known before coming out here was the only way he could think of to pull his friend into the conversation.

  "Probably getting richer and wondering why we don't come into her shop anymore. I don't think Beckhart will bother giving her our new address."

  "Yeah." BenRabi laughed. "He should have heard the news by now, don't you think? Or pretty soon. He'll foam at the mouth." For Amy's benefit, he explained, "Max was a friend of ours in Luna Command. She ran a stamp store."

  "Best hobby shop in the moon," Mouse said.

  Amy did not respond. She simply could not comprehend what these two got out of accumulating small bits of paper that were ages old and required jeweler's grade care.

  And stamps were not the only thing. Between them they seemed to collect everything. Coins. Stamps. All kinds of ancient miscellania. Mouse had little wrought-iron trivets and other old-time dohickeys all over his quarters. The one collection she could appreciate was Moyshe's butterflies. He had a frame of exotics on his wall. They were incredibly beautiful.

  The Seiner ships were ecologically sterile. Only their zoos contained nonhuman life, and that the large, well-known mammals.

  Amy had no hobbies of her own. She read for relaxation. She had acquired the habit from her mother.

  Mouse even managed passably with a clarinet, an antique woodwind seldom seen anymore. He claimed to have learned from his father.

  "What about Greta?" Mouse asked. "You think the Departm
ent will take care of her?"

  Amy jumped at the name. "You never did tell me about Greta, Moyshe."

  "That was in another life."

  They were lovers, but they did not know one another well. BenRabi did not like stirring up the snake pit of people's pasts. There was too much chance of finding something nasty. It was there in every life.

  But he answered Amy's question. "I told you before. She's a kid I met the last time I was on Old Earth. The last time I visited by mother. She wanted out. Her friends wouldn't let her go. I arranged it for her. And ended up sponsoring her."

  "Sort of like being a foster parent," Mouse explained.

  "Guess she'd be eighteen now. I haven't thought about her in ages. You shouldn't have mentioned her, Mouse. Now you've got me worried."

  "Hey, don't. Max will look out for her."

  "Maybe. But that's not right, putting it on somebody else. Is there any way I could send her a letter now and then, Amy? Just to let her know I'm all right and thinking about her? I'd let you or Jarl write it if you wanted. You could even run it through the crypto computer to make sure it's innocent."

  "This's just a kid?" Amy demanded.

  "Yeah. She reminded me a lot of me when I came off Old Earth. Awful lost. I thought I could help out by sponsoring her. And then I kind of ran out when the Bureau sent us out here. I told her we'd be back in a couple of months. It's been almost fourteen."

  "I'll ask Jarl. He lets a little mail go out. Some of us have relatives outside. But it's slow."

  "That doesn't matter. Amy, you're a jewel. I love you."

  "Well, if you're going to get mushy," Mouse said, standing. "I've got to run. A citizenship class. It's from hunger, Moyshe. Me and Emily Hopkins and this fascist bastard of a teacher... Maybe I'll hurt the arm again. Get back in here so I can miss a few too. Behave. Do what the doctor lady says. Or I'll wring your neck." He made his exit before Moyshe could embarrass him with many thanks-for-comings.

  "You're awful quiet today, honey," benRabi said after a while. Perhaps if the doctor had not been there...

  "I'm just tired. We're still doing double shifts and barely keeping our heads above water. We're going to be in the Yards a long time. Assuming Danion doesn't fall apart before we get there. Assuming the sharks don't knock us apart."

  "You've mentioned these Yards about fifty times and wouldn't tell me about them. Do you trust me enough now?"

  "They're what the name sounds like. Where we build and fix our ships. Moyshe, you're not going anywhere for a while. Tell me about you."

  "What?"

  "I met you the very first day. Way back on Carson's, when you signed your contract. We lived together for months before I even found out you've got a daughter. I don't know anything about you."

  "Greta isn't my daughter, honey. I just helped a kid who needed somebody... "

  "It's almost the same thing, isn't it?"

  "Legally, I guess. On paper. They'd have trouble making it stand up in court."

  "Tell me. Everything."

  There was little else to do but talk. He talked.

  The doctor, lurking in the background watching suspiciously, had made it clear that he would be stuck here for a while.

  "All right. Let me know when it gets boring."

  He had been born in North America on Old Earth, to Clarence Hardaway and Myra McClennon. He had hardly known his father. His mother, for reasons he still did not understand, had elected to raise him at home instead of burying him in the State Creche. Only a few Social Insurees raised their children.

  His early years had been typical for home-raised S.I. children. Little supervision, little love, little education. He had been running with a kid gang before he was eight.

  He had been nine when he had seen his first offworlders. Spikes, they had called them. These had been Navy men in crisp dress blacks diligently pursuing the arcane business of offworlders.

  Those uniforms had captured his imagination. They had become an obsession. He had started keying information out of his mother's home data retrieval terminal. He had not had the education to decipher most of it. He had started teaching himself, building from the ground up toward the things he so desperately wanted to know.

  At ten he had quit the gang so he would have more time to study. Halfway through his eleventh year the revelation had come. He had to get into space. He had approached a Navy recruiter clandestinely. The man had arranged for him to sneak through the Academy exams.

  He never would have made it had there been no special standards and quotas for Old Earthers. He would have gotten skunked had he been in direct competition with carefully prepared Outworlders, many of whom had grown up in the military life. Half the officers in Service were the children of officers. Service was a complete sub-culture, and one that was becoming increasingly less connected with and controlled by the over-culture. He had had motivation.

  At twelve he had run away from home, fleeing to Luna Command and Academy. In six years he had climbed from dead last to the 95th percentile in class standing. At graduation he had taken his Line option and been assigned to the Fleet. He had served aboard the destroyers Aquataine and Hesse, and the attack cruiser Tamerlane, before requesting Intelligence training.

  Following a year of schooling the Bureau had assigned him as Naval Attaché to the Embassy on Feldspar. He had had a half dozen similar assignments on as many worlds before his work attracted the attention of Admiral Beckhart, whose department handled dangerous operations, and tricks on the grey side of legal.

  He had taken part in several tight missions, and had reencountered his former classmate, Mouse. They had shared several assignments, the last being to join the Starfishers to ferret out information that could be used to force the Seiners to enter the Confederation fold.

  Some of it Amy had heard before. Some she had not. She was not satisfied. Her first comment was, "You didn't say anything about women."

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

  "Everything, as far as I'm concerned. I want to know who your lovers were and how come you broke up. What they were like... "

  "You'll shit in your hand and carry it to China first, Lady."

  He was still a little dopey. He did not realize that he had said it aloud till he began to wonder why she had shut up so suddenly.

  After one stunned gasp Amy blew out of the room like a tornado looking for a town to wreck.

  The lady doctor came out of the background, took his blood pressure. "She's pushy, isn't she?"

  "I don't know what's got into her. She wasn't like that before."

  "You've had an interesting life."

  "Not really. I don't think I'd do it the same if I had it to do again."

  "Well, you could, couldn't you?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Rejuvenation. I thought it was available to everybody landside."

  "Oh. Yes. More or less. Some of the brass have been around since Noah landed the Ark. But Fate has a way of catching up with people who try to slide around it."

  "Wish we had it out here."

  "You don't look that old."

  "I was thinking about my father. He's getting on now."

  "I see. How soon can I leave?"

  "Any time, really. But I wish you'd wait a couple hours. You'll be weak and dizzy."

  "Mouse was right about sonic sedation."

  "I know. But I don't write the medical budget. Good luck, Mr. benRabi. Try not to see me again."

  "I hate hospitals, Doctor."

  He did. His only stays had been at Bureau insistence, to modify him mentally or physically.

  He did a few minor exercises before catching a public tram home.

  Amy was waiting. "Oh, Moyshe. That was stupid of me. You were right. Those things aren't any of my business."

  She had been crying. Her eyes were red.

  "It's all right. I understand." But he did not. His cultural background had not prepared him for personal nosiness. In Confederation peop
le lived now. They did not consider the past.

  "It's just that I feel... Well, everything's so chancey the way it is between us."

  Here she comes, he thought. Hints about getting married.

  Marriage was important to the Seiners. In Confederation it was more an amusing relic, an entertainment or daydream for the young and the romantic. He could not reconcile his attitudes with Seiner seriousness. Not yet.

  The Starfishers had won his loyalty, but they could not make him a different man. They could not make him reflect themselves merely by adopting him.

  Was Mouse having the same trouble? he wondered. Probably not. Mouse was a chameleon. He could adapt anywhere, vanish into any crowd.

  "I have to go to work," Amy told him. Weariness seemed to be dragging her down.

  "You'd better get some rest yourself, honey."

  After she left he took out his stamp collection and turned the well-thumbed album pages. Mouse had opened a Pandora's box by mentioning Max and Greta. After a while he pushed the album aside and tried to compose a letter to the girl.

  He could not think of much to say.

  Five: 3049 AD

  The Contemporary Scene

  Admirals and generals did not have to endure the usual waiting and decontamination procedures getting into Luna Command. The security checks were abbreviated. No staff-grade officer had gone sour since Admiral McGraw had turned freebooter following the peace with Ulant. Admiral Beckhart entered his office just three hours after his personal shuttle berthed a little south of the Sea of Tranquility.

  He had not spared the horses, in the vernacular of another age. The mother had dropped hyper midway between Luna and L-5. The first message he had received had been code-tagged, "Personal presence required immediately. Critical."

  Either the bottom had dropped off of the universe or McClennon and Storm had come home with their saddlebags dripping delicious little secrets.

  The Crew, as he called his hand-picked brain-trust, were in the office when he arrived.

  He raised a hand. "As you were. What have we got?"

  Jones asked, "You don't want to shower and change?"