Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (3 page)

The watery-eyed bellhop, who watched them stroll through the hologram to the elevators, did not belong either. He limped when he walked, but he was too solid, too macho, to be staff. His uniform was a size too small. His stance was a centimeter too assertive.

“Something’s gone broomstick,” Mouse said. The elevator doors closed with startling severity, as though issuing a declaration of war.

Meticulous preliminary research characterized a Beckhart operation. They had seen holos of, and reports on, all regular hotel staff.

“I saw him. What do we do?”

“Cut out a floor short.”

Why not just get the hell out? Niven wondered.

“Well take the stairs. We’ll catch them from behind.”

“You’re taking a lot for granted.”

“Anything to save a kick in the teeth.”

Their floor was the fifth. The penthouse level. It contained four suites. Only theirs was occupied.

“The empty car will tip them,” Niven remarked after Mouse had punched Four.

“Yeah. You’re right.”

“So?”

“Tell you what. Let’s slide down and see if we can snatch the gimp. Shoot him with Nobullshit and see what he’s got to say.”

That was pure Mouse thinking, Niven reflected. Running was an alien concept.

They were both in Old Earther role. Holonet stereotype Old Earther role. But they had not received a full Psych-brief. Their speech patterns tended to meander between that appropriate to the role and that of Academy graduates. Their mission-prep had included only a limited Psych-brief. They remembered who they were. They had to think to maintain consistent images.

“We’re getting sloppy,” Niven observed. “Let’s tighten up.”

The elevator stopped on Three. They exchanged glances.

“Better stand back, Doc.”

Mouse’s eyes and face blanked. A subtle air of crouch, of tenseness enveloped him. He seemed to have gone to another world.

He had entered “assassin’s mind.” Which meant that he had become a biochemical killing robot.

Mouse was a physical combat specialist.

A dowdy, blubbery woman with two poodles and a make-believe fortune in cultured firestones waddled aboard. “Five, please.” And, before Niven caught the wrong note, “You’re new. Offworlders?”

Niven responded with an affirmative grunt. He had to think of some way to distract the woman while Mouse relaxed.

“How marvelous. Let me guess. One of the Inner Worlds?”

Niven grunted again. He stared at the door, hoping rudeness would be distraction enough. He took Mouse’s arm gently as the door opened on Four.

“Stay where you are!”

A tiny needlegun peeped from a fat hand. The woman sloughed the dowager character. Suddenly she was as hard-edged as they.

“Move together.” The doors closed. “Thank you.”

Niven looked beyond costume and props and saw the enemy.

She was the Sangaree Resident for The Broken Wings, Sexon S’Plez.

Christ, you’re slow
, he told himself.
The fat alone should’ve warned you
.

Plez was suspected of being a proctor of the Sexon, which was one of the First Families of the Sangaree. That would make her the equal of a Planetary Senator . . . 

The assignment of a heavy-duty Resident to a backwater world was what had stimulated Luna Command into sending in its shock troops.

How had she gotten onto them so fast? Niven wondered.

Two nervous heavies in ill-fitting hotel livery awaited the car on floor Five. They were a tall, pale, ginger-haired pair who had to be brothers.

“Which one’s Niven?” the older asked.

“Out.” The woman gestured with her weapon.

Wavering guns peered from all the brothers’ four hands.

Careful
, Niven thought. He raised his hands slowly. These men were amateurs. They might start panic-shooting.

“Chunky’s Niven. The gook must be Piao.”

The Starduster’s associates were as shadowy as he, but one of the few names known was John Li Piao, reputed number-two man and chief bone-breaker. The face of the man who wore that name, though, was as much an enigma as the Starduster’s.

“I don’t want you should get upset,” Niven said, trying to project terrified and outraged innocence, and having no trouble with the fear, “but I think you’ve got the wrong . . . ”

“Stuff it, animal!” the woman snarled.

The Old Earth cant is catching
, Niven thought.

The brothers’ eyes narrowed. Their lips tightened. The insult included them. Animal was the Sangaree’s ultimate racial slur.

Niven put on a bewildered face. “What’s going on, anyway? I’m just a social researcher. Studying the effects of dome constriction . . . ”

The brothers laughed tightly. One said, “Crap.”

Mouse had gotten caught in the limbo between normalcy and assassin’s mind. The state was one of semi-consciousness. It would take him time to push himself one way or the other. Niven knew which way Mouse would go. His stomach knotted.

“ . . . to study the effects of dome constriction on immigrant workers.” Mouse needed a distraction. “For Ubichi Corporation. This man is my secretary. We’re not carrying any cash.” That was the course, he thought. Protesting innocence of a connection with the trade would cause laughter. Protesting being robbed might make them hesitate the instant Mouse needed.

He did not feel that Mouse was doing the right thing. But Mouse did not know how to back down. He was a hitter. It would get him killed someday.

It might get them both killed, but he could not change Mouse’s ways.

The older gunman wavered. “The yacht was a Ubichi charter.”

“Cover . . . ” the woman began. Too late.

Mouse exploded.

Flying, with a scream that froze them an additional second.

A fist disarmed the woman. Her weapon dribbled into the elevator. One foot, then the other, pistoned into the older brother’s face. He triggered. Needles stitched the wall over Niven’s head.

The younger brother managed only a half turn. Mouse bounced into him. He chopped weapons away with his left hand. His right went for the man’s throat.

A gurgling scream ripped through a shattered windpipe.

Knowing what would happen did not help Niven. Mouse was
fast
.

The woman was running before Niven recovered her weapon. He crouched, trying to aim.

He was too sick to hold his target.

She had kneed him savagely. The agony numbed his mind.

He hit the button for One, left the brothers to Mouse. Maybe he could get her in the lobby . . . 

Reason returned before the doors opened.

There was nothing he could do. Not in front of fifty witnesses. Aching, helpless, he watched the fat woman collect her limping accomplice and depart.

He began shaking. It had been close. Too damned close.

Mouse was human again when Niven reached Five. He was shaking too. “Get her?”

“In the lobby? With fifty witnesses?”

“From the elevator. They couldn’t see you through the holo.”

“Oh.” That had escaped him. “What about those guys?”

“Got to do something with them.”

“Hell, turn them loose. Won’t make any difference . . . ” He took another look. His sickness returned, centered higher. “Did you have to? . . . ”

Defiantly. “Yeah.”

Mouse was driven by a murderous hatred of everything Sangaree. It splashed over on anyone who cooperated with them.

He refused to explain.

“Better get them out of the hall. Staff might come through.” He grabbed a leg, started dragging.

Mouse dabbed at bloodstains.

“The outfit won’t like this,” Niven said as he hauled the second corpse into the suite. “Number’s going to be on us now.”

“So? We’ve been on the bull’s eye before. Anyway, we bought some time. They’ll want to salvage the fat broad before they move. And they’ll bring in somebody new. They’re careful that way. We’ll hustle them meanwhile.”

“How? The number’s on. Who’ll talk? Anybody who knows anything is going to know that we’re dead.”

“You ain’t dead till they close the box.”

“Mouse, I don’t feel right about this one.”

“Doc, you worry too much. Let it stew. We keep our heads in and our backs to the wall, maybe a little something will blow our way. Just be on your toes. Like they said in the olden days, when you get handed a lemon, make lemonade.”

“I don’t think the hardcase course took,” Niven said. “You’re right, I mean. I shouldn’t be so worried.”

“Know what your problem is? You ain’t happy unless you’ve got something to worry about. You’re spookier than an old maid with seven cats.”

Three: 3048 AD
Operation Dragon, Blake City Starport

The terminal’s sounds crowded benRabi. The smells and swirling colors dazzled him. The nervousness started.

It always did at the mouth of the lion’s den. Or, this time, the dragon’s lair. The briefing tapes had claimed that starfish, seen in space, resembled dragons two hundred kilometers long.

He shuffled forward with the line, finally reached the table. One of the Seiner men asked a few questions. He replied numbly.

“Sign and thumbprint this please, Mr. benRabi. Give it to the lady with the rest of your paperwork.”

Shaking, he completed his contract. The Seiner girl at table’s end smiled as she shoved his papers into the maw of her reducing machine. She said, “Just through that door and take a seat, please. The shuttle will be ready shortly.”

He went, bemused. That pale Seiner girl, with her pale hair and harsh cheekbones, reminded him of Alyce, his Academy love. That was not good. More than a decade had passed, and still the pain could penetrate his armor.

Was that why he had trouble with women? Every affair since had, inevitably, fallen into emotional chaos. Each had become a duel with swords of intentional hurt.

But there had been no prior affairs to stand comparison. Maybe he was just consistent in picking unstable women.

He took a chair in the waiting room. Out came the tattered notebook, a traveling companion of many years. This time, he swore, he would finish
Jerusalem
.

The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: The footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird.

—
The Prose Edda

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he was sure that was the best possible opening quote. It had an indisputable universality.

Every life had its Loki capable of binding it with chains as tenuous but strong.

Those wormwood memories of Academy returned. They were indestructible memorabilia of an affair with a fellow midshipman who had been the daughter of the Vice Commandant and the granddaughter of the Chief of Staff Navy.

He had been an idiot. A pig-iron, chocolate-plated fool. How had he made it through? In the context of Alyce, he still thought his survival a miracle.

And the cost? What if he had not, as ordered, dropped the affair? What if he had persisted? She had demanded that he do so, defying what to him had been terrifying concentrations of authority.

To her those people had been family. Mother and grandfather. To him they had appeared as behemoths of power.

And the night beast with guilt-fangs longer than any of his other haunts: What of the child?

Come on
, he grumbled at himself.
What is this? Let’s ditch the memories and romantic nonsense
. He was a grown man. He should get back into
Jerusalem
; that would be a blow against the dread empire of his soul.

One of his favorites, from Pope’s
Dunciad
:

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word . . . 

“Ladies and gentlemen.”

He looked up. What now? Ah. A last-chance-to-get-out briefing.

It was conducted by an officer with a voice so infuriatingly scratchy that it had to be technically augmented. “We don’t want you on our ship. You’re not our kind of people,” the officer said for openers.

“Why’re you here? What are your motives?”

Good questions
, benRabi thought.

“Two reasons. You’re either bemused by the Seiner myth, which is a holonet fabrication, or you’re here spying. I’ll let you in on the secret now. This isn’t going to be any romantic adventure. And you’re not going to get at any information. All we’re going to give you is a lot of hard work inside a culture unlike any you’ve ever known. We’re not going to ease you into our world. We’re not going to coddle you. We don’t have the time.”

The man was deliberately trying to upset them. Moyshe wondered why.

“We’ve assembled you for one reason. It’s the only way we can meet next year’s harvest quotas.”

BenRabi had a sudden feeling. A premonition, he thought. The man had more than harvests on his mind. Some worry, or fear, was racketing around his brain. Something terrible and big had him half spooked.

Admiral Beckhart liked using benRabi because he had these intuitions.

Moyshe also sensed a ghost of disappointment in the speaker, along with a taint of distaste for landsmen. He spoke as if tasting the sour flavor of betrayal.

It was inarguable that these Seiners were desperate. They would never have sought outside technicians otherwise.

BenRabi quelled a surge of compassion.

The speaker’s home was a harvestship somewhere out in the Big Dark. To survive it needed a massive input of competent technicians. The man was sour because of all of Confederation’s billions, only two hundred people had come forward. And most of those could be considered suspect.

The Seiner fumbled in the pockets of his antiquated tweed jacket. BenRabi wondered if the man was an Archaicist. His preconceptions of the Seiners did not include the possibility that they were faddists too.

The man produced a curious little instrument. He thrust it between his teeth. He gripped it with his right thumb and forefinger, puffing while he held a small flame over its bowl. Only after he had begun expelling noxious clouds did benRabi realize what was happening.