Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (28 page)

Wulf had the man carry a hand comm and patched him into the comm net. There was a lot of back and forth about how to open the escape hatch from outside. Wulf had a lot to say about hurrying it up because the shadow generators would not last forever.

“What I wanted to know,” Storm told Blake, “was why you couldn’t have used this method to rescue that man Frog.”

“Because his tractor was built on the other side of the hill where Noah was building the Ark. His only escape hatch was under his cabin. The high-hatch modification came about because of the trouble we had getting to him. Meacham picked up the idea the same time we did.”

“I see.”

“I don’t see anything but dead men, Colonel,” Wulf’s investigator reported once he had effected entry. “I’m starting forward to the control cabin.”

There was a minute of silence. Storm waited tensely, something raising the hair at the back of his neck.

“Can’t figure what happened here, Colonel. They’re all bluish and puffy-faced. Their screens are still up and the oxy levels look good . . . ”

“Wulf!” Storm thundered, ignoring the code rules. “Get the hell out of there! I mean now!” The bad feeling had bloomed into an intuition. “It’s some kind of trap!”

His order came too late. It had been too late for an hour.

There was an instant of thunder on the net, then a silence punctuated only by static.

“Andiron, Andiron, this is Honeycomb,” a tight voice said, breaking the silence. “We have a visual and lase-radar on a nuclear cloud at approximately Point Nine Twenty, fifteen kilometers out. Over.”

And, “Andiron, Andiron, this is Charing Cross. I’m getting heavy richters epicentered at approximately point Nine Seventeen, fifteen kilometers out, accompanied by heavy gamma radiation. Over.”

Similar and related reports came in from a dozen observers. Storm responded to none. The communications technician acknowledge in a dull voice.

Wulf. Dead. Along with hundreds of his men. Because of a humanitarian impulse. It had been a trap. Dee work for sure, predicated on a knowledge of mercenaries and miners.

Storm told Thurston, “That was Fearchild’s doing.”

Thurston nodded sadly. “It’s his style. What are we going to do, Father?”

Storm paused a moment before answering. “You take over here.” His stomach felt as though the great-grand-daddy of all ulcers were trying to gnaw its way out. “I’ve got to tell Helmut. Try to get through to Cassius. He has to know.”

He was surprised at himself. He should have been in an insane rage. Instead, he was emotionally numb, still trying to convince himself that it really had happened. Part of him kept thinking Wulf would call in and say it was all a bad joke.

He scanned his people once before going to Helmut. Their faces were all reflections of his own, he suspected. Each portrayed shock and an inability to believe.

Nuclears had not been used on-planet, against people, even during the most critical days of the Ulantonid War. They had joined the list of banned-by-gentleman’s-agreement weapons ages ago. One would expect chemical and biological weapons to see use first. Their effects were less long-lasting . . . 

He had been right. The Shadowline war was the swan song of the freecorps. Confederation would move in and disarm them for sure, now. The public outcry would leave the government no choice.

He overlooked one small fact while thinking that. The media were completely indifferent to the Shadowline war. No one was covering it. Hardly anyone off Blackworld knew anything about it. He, the people in the war room, and perhaps a handful of men in Twilight, were the only folks Darkside who knew that proscribed weaponry had been employed.

Forty-Five: 2860-3023 AD

Only months after they had overcome the last Dharvon, Deeth growled, “I’m bored, Rhafu. I think I’ve figured out why my father was always so damned cranky. There’s no real challenge in trying to boost a profit margin a tenth of a percent.”

Rhafu looked at Deeth, perhaps thinking the young Head was fooling himself. “Your peers would argue the point.”

“That’s their lifestyle. The Haug and Gaab haven’t ever done anything else. I might be happy if I’d had a normal childhood. But I didn’t. The normal life makes me feel caged.”

“We have a mission your father bequeathed us.”

“We can’t do anything about it. We’re stuck with the tedious stuff here. By the time we clear it up, the animals will be warring with Ulant, and we’ll have to wait them out. That could last twenty years. The Ulantonid are stubborn.”

“I don’t recall your father saying revenge had to be instantaneous. Even so, I have to admit to a certain restlessness myself.”

“Any ideas?”

“Some.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“I think we should divide ourselves into a greater and lesser House. One to go on being traditional Norbon, the other to exploit Osiris and pursue our vendetta with the animals. Creating a dual structure would isolate risks. If we fail, we wouldn’t take the Family down with us.”

Deeth eyed Rhafu uncertainly. They had built a very responsive, monolithic structure in order to destroy the Dharvon. He did not want to relinquish any of the power he had acquired.

“Your cousin Taake hasn’t much imagination, but he’s a competent administrator. Put him in charge of the Homeworld arm of the Family. Collect up our more venturesome people and move to Osiris. You’ll find plenty of excitement there. And all the work you want, too. We can build puppet empires. We can develop broader markets. Raise sithlac domes. Construct breeding stations. Hell, we could even get into ordinary commerce and industry. It’s a whole planet, and we don’t have to share it with anyone.”

A primitive, medieval world
, Deeth thought.
We can play God, if we want. What more could I ask?
“I’ll consider it. Any other suggestions?”

“We could exploit this war. We’ve collected a lot of new dependents since we came home. We have to employ them somehow.”

“Build a raidfleet? Rhafu . . . When I was little, when I first went to Prefactlas, that was all I ever thought about. Growing up to be a raidmaster.”

“Don’t think it’s all adventure and romance, Deeth. Even piracy is plain hard work if you’re going to be any good at it. Ships have to be bought or built. Arms have to be acquired. All that takes financing. You have to assemble reliable intelligence sources. You have to find men who’ll work together without letting too much pride get in their way. Men without Family loyalties who would become loyal to you and one another. That’s not easy with our people.”

“Yes, yes. I see. More of the same old administrative hoohaw. But at least with an interesting end in sight.” Deeth began to recover some of that awe and excitement he had felt when, as a child, he had studied the adventures of the great raiders.

If the Sangaree race had one outstanding weakness, it was a cultural bias against tight, devoted administration, a cultural aversion to administrative detail. They pictured themselves as a people of action and behaved accordingly. The sprawling, suffocating, ever-growing bureaucracies characteristic of human enterprises were unknown to them. They strayed to the extreme in the opposite direction, sometimes so far that the lack was as crippling to them as was the excess to humankind. Critical records might amount to nothing more than a few handwritten notes on scraps of paper soon lost . . . What did not exist in the minds of the Heads and their immediate assistants could be extremely ephemeral, and setbacks frequently came about simply through failure of communication or absence of administrative precision or reliable records.

A Family’s most prized retainers were those few Sangaree capable of being clerkish and detail-conscious. The Families scrambled for them aggressively and traded them carefully.

Deeth’s raiding and Osirian operations prospered. In time the Norbon were accepted, grudgingly, as one of the Sangaree First Families. Deeth and Rhafu earned a reputation as a team with a golden touch. Their projects usually sprang from Rhafu’s fertile mind. Deeth’s carefully recruited employees and agents put them into effect. The old man did his best to remain obscure and play his own role.

In a sense Rhafu was the power behind the throne, the real genius of the Family. Deeth simply manipulated hands.

Deeth did not want to be the brains. He dared not be. Despite all the lessons of Prefactlas, he remained impulsive. Rhafu usually softened the impact of his impetuosity, but there were times when the Family welfare suffered because of some ill-considered scheme Deeth launched without consulting the old man.

Though one of the First Families now, the nouveau riche Norbon were never fully accepted as such. They were a little too crude, too rough, too much involved in the more barbarous ways of garnering wealth. And Deeth employed outsiders.

He did not use them in the traditional way, as cat’s-paws among their own peoples. He found good men and brought them into the Family operations on Osiris and, occasionally, Homeworld. Accountants. Economists. Data-processors. And soldiers, hard men who became the fist of the Family, led by trusted Sangaree retainers.

The more traditional Families were appalled. And not a little jealous of the wealth-accumulating and fighting efficiencies of the Norbon.

Deeth received few social invitations, but even fewer slights that might be viewed as invitations to bad feelings. He did not miss the social life. He remained unregenerate in his distaste for parties and the people who frequented them.

During the war he saw occasions when he thought he could fulfill his father’s charge on the cheap. He moved without consulting Rhafu, hoping, like a child eager to surprise a parent with an accomplishment. His enemies were cunning and slippery. They seemed to smell danger from light-years away. They evaded him every time, and so effectively that they remained unaware of the nature of the threat.

During the war, from a distance, he re-encountered his son, and could not shake the Sangaree sense of Family. He applied a few helpful nudges where the Norbon had the power, and helped create a rich man. And an instrument by which, Deeth hoped, Norbon influence might be intruded into the heart of human power structures.

Much later, long after he had revealed himself, Deeth began spiriting Michael off to Homeworld and Osiris for a belated Sangaree education.

There were grave deficiencies in Michael’s character. Deeth was disappointed. He never let on. Michael was his only child.

Deeth did not marry. That he did not, and remained untempted by the prizes steered onto his path, caused quiet comment. There were ungrounded speculations about the nature of his relationship with Rhafu, and questions about Michael.

Only Rhafu suspected the truth, and even with his oldest friend Deeth refused to discuss the question.

Norbon w’Deeth was carrying a torch for an animal woman called Emily Storm.

For a bred pleasure slave.

That one dread secret could topple his empire. A physical relationship could be tolerated, could be winked at, but an emotional involvement could not. Not ever. Such weakness could not be accepted in a Head.

He dared not share his feelings for fear that it would, like a Frankenstein monster, get loose and destroy him. His own House would repudiate him.

He had won the loyalties of his relatives. They would go into hell for him if he ordered it, but for the sake of a perverted love they would not follow him to a new Wholar.

Yet he walked the edge. He dared bring Michael into Sangaree society. He formed an alliance with the Gaab by wedding his son to one of their daughters. He dodged all questions about Michael’s mother by saying that she had perished on Prefactlas.

Rhafu, sensing the mild, unformed suspicion of the Heads, spread a tale of a companionship with a Sexon girl. He used the whole true story of Deeth’s youth, merely changing Emily’s name.

Time marched. Decades dwindled into the past. Deeth suffered severe and extended depressions whenever he withdrew from his work and realized that he had, again, become an administrator. Fulfillment of his great obligation to his father seemed to be ever more remote. There just was no time to plot against the Storms.

A sudden and unexpected opportunity arose on a world the humans called Amon-Ra.

Michael sent word that his brother, who had just assumed command of the Iron Legion, had agreed to help the underground human government oust the Sangaree Families controlling the world.

The Amon-Ra Families were all small and weak. They would stand no chance against the Legion.

Deeth decided to help them. Over Rhafu’s protests, without adequate preparation, he threw in his raidships. Aboard them he sent the quasi-military forces he had developed on Osiris.

He lost everything. Every man, every ship, every weapon. It was a hard way to learn the truth about his officers. Landless, Houseless, Familyless Sangaree simply were not disciplined enough to make war in human terms.

Rhafu treated him to an extended lecture on those cultural biases which made it impossible to fight the Storms heads up . . . 

“All right!” Deeth finally snarled. “I can see that for myself. And I’m going to correct it. We’ll build a real fleet and real army. And if our own people won’t do, we’ll use animals. All animals.” They had used humans and Ulantonid from the beginning, but never in command positions.

Amon-Ra slipped away. The years and decades rolled on. Deeth buckled down, subjected himself to an intense self-discipline, did not let up till the Norbon had recovered from the Amon-Ra disaster.

When he did pause to look around he found himself blessed with an excuse for ulcers. Michael and his children . . . They carried on as if they were alone and immune to anything. Time and again, one or another endangered his plans for the future of the Storms or threatened to scuttle one of his profitable intrusions into the human business sphere. The children were the despair of their mother, who was a stolid First-Family woman completely uninterested in bizarre adventures. She came to him, as the Norbon, again and again, pleading for his intercession.