Starfishers Volume 3: Stars End (12 page)

People flung in all directions as the arsenal air burst into Hel’s eternal night. Baffled, Marescu watched their broken doll figures tumble and bloat.

His left hand danced, initiating the test sequences. The arsenal drowned in intense light. The stressglass of the booth polarized, but could not block it all. The sabotaged holding blocks fell away from the number four weapon. It dragged itself forward, off its dolly. It flung off clouds of sparks and gouged its spoor deep into the concrete floor.

“Wait a minute,” Ion said. “Wait a minute. There’s something wrong. It’s not supposed to do that. Paul? Where did you go, Paul?” Paud did not answer.

The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light, lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned its nose toward the target.

“What’s happening?” Marescu asked plaintively. “Paul?

What went wrong?”

The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel’s sun. It accelerated at 100
g.

And in the booth, where the atmospheric pressure had begun to fall, Ion Marescu realized the enormity of what he had done. With a shaking hand he took a suggestion form from a drawer and began composing a recommendation that, in future, all test programs be cross-programed in such a way that the activation of any one would automatically lock out the others.

“We have influence, Commander,” Lieutenant Callaway reported.

“Take hyper,” von Drachau replied. “And destroy that Hel astrogational cassette as soon as you have her in the hyper arc. For the record, gentlemen, we’ve never heard of this place. We don’t know anything about it and we’ve never been here.”

He stared into a viewscreen, slumped, wondering what he was, what he was doing, and whether or not he had been told the whole truth. The screen went kaleidoscopic at the instant of hyper-take, then blanked.

Seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds later the sun of the world he had just fled felt the first touch of a black needle. The little manmade gamete fertilized the great hydrogen ovum. In a few hours the nova chain would begin.

There would be no survivors. Security allowed no ships to remain on Hel. The Station personnel could do nothing but await their fate.

And nowhere else did there exist one scrap of information on the magnificent, deadly weapon created at Hel Station. That, too, had been a Security-decreed precaution.

Nine: 3049 AD
The Main Sequence

Mouse drove down to the same departure station that had witnessed the Sangaree failsafer’s suicide. A half dozen bewildered former landsmen were there already. He and benRabi were last to arrive. All but one of the others were women.

“They haven’t shown yet, Ellen?” Mouse asked.

“No. Did you hear anything? You know what it’s about?”

“Not really.”

BenRabi tuned them out. He walked through those last few minutes before Kindervoort’s men had come to disarm Mouse and he had walked into the failsafer’s line of fire. He went to the spot where he had been standing, turned slowly.

“Jarl was here. Mouse was there. Bunch of people were there . . . They brought Marya’s intensive care unit down that way, before Jarl showed, and took her right into the service ship.”

He walked through it three times. He could not recall anything new. He had been distracted at the time. He had believed that Mouse was shanghaiing him, and had not wanted to leave. Then Jarl had distracted him . . . 

“Hey, Mouse. Walk through this with me. Maybe you can think of something.”

A scooter rolled into the bay. A pair of unfamiliar Starfishers dismounted. “You the citizenship class?” the woman asked.

“Hello there,” Mouse said, like a man who had just crossed a ridgeline and spied all seven cities of Cibola.

The woman stepped back, her eyes widening.

“Must be Storm,” the man said. “My wife, Mister Storm.”

“Well . . . You win some, lose some. You don’t know till you try.”

“I suppose not. All right. Let’s check the roll, then get started. Looks like we’re good. We’ve got the right number of heads. All right. What we’re going to do is leave the ship through the personnel lock and line over to one of the work bays on one of the mooring stays. There’s zero gravity in the work area so you don’t have to worry about falling. Follow me.”

He went to a hatchway, opened it, stepped through. The future Seiner citizens followed.

Mouse tried hanging back, to get nearer to the woman.

BenRabi gouged his ribs. “Come on. Let her alone.”

“Moyshe, she’s driving me crazy.”

“She’s prime. Yes. And married, and we don’t need any more enemies.”

“Hey. It isn’t sex. I mean, she’s fine. Like you say, prime stuff. What I’m saying, though, is this is our shot at somebody from outside.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“She’s not from
Danion.
”

“How the hell do you know that?” BenRabi ducked through the third of the lock doors. “You’ve maybe been around the world here, but I don’t think you’ve gotten to them all. Not yet. We haven’t run into a hundredth of
Danion’s
people.”

“But the ones we have all came from the same mold. Oh, Christ!”

BenRabi slithered out of the ship. He stood on her skin, offering Mouse a hand. In both directions, as far as he could see, were tubes, cubes, spars, bars . . . Hectare on hectare of abused metal. Overhead, the laser-polished stone of the asteroid arched in an almost indiscernible bow.
Danion’s
outermost extremities cleared it by a scant hundred meters.

Those hundred meters had Mouse petrified.

Mouse was scared to death of falling. The phobia usually manifested itself during a liftoff or landing, when up and down had a more definite meaning.

“You all right?”

Storm was shaking. Sweat beaded his face. He shoved a hand out the hatch, twice, like a drowning man clawing for a lifeline.

The others were hand-over-handing it along a cable spanning the gap between ship and asteroid.

“Come on, Mouse. It won’t be that bad.” How the hell had he gotten through all the e.v.a. exercises and small boat drills they had had to endure in Academy?

Mouse’s phobia perpetually astonished benRabi. Nothing else fazed the man. Whining bullets and crackling lasers simply created the background noises of his work . . . 

His work!

“Assassin’s mind, Mouse. Go into assassin’s mind.” The state approximated a meditational trance, except that while he was in it Mouse was one of the most deadly men who ever lived.

Was he too much out of practice?

Mouse’s shaking slowly subsided. His eyes became glassy.

“All right,” benRabi said. “Come on. Slow. Take the handholds and work your way over to the line. That’s good. Good. Now across to the balcony.”

Moyshe spoke softly, without inflection. In this state Mouse had to be handled gently. Anything could set him off. Anyone not programed in as Friendly could get broken up pretty bad.

The woman instructor overtook benRabi on the line. “What’s wrong with your friend?”

“He’s an acrophobe.”

“A Navy man?”

“I know. Be real careful for a few minutes. Keep the group away. He’s not very stable right now.”

He got Mouse onto the balcony, with his back to the vast mass of the ship, and talked him down. In five minutes Storm was asking, “You ever meet anyone on
Danion
who wasn’t blond with blue eyes?”

“Some. Not many.”

“Anybody with black blood?”

“No.”

“I rest my case.” Mouse surveyed the harvestship. “Damn, she took a beating.”

“Huh?”

“Different perspective, Moyshe. It’s not up and down from here.”

BenRabi scanned the battered ship. “Mouse, I think we’ve been set up.”

“What?”

“I thought it was a little weird, coming out the way we did. I was going to ask the lady why they didn’t have something better.” He pointed with his chin.

A half kilometer away a telescoping tubeway connected the ship with the rock face. BenRabi soon indicated a half dozen more connections. Each was large enough to use to drive heavy equipment onto and off the harvest-ship.

“Think they’re just working on you and me? Or the whole group?”

“Fly easy,” benRabi suggested.

“It’s my ass in a sling, Moyshe. I’ll be your basic model of decorum.”

“Are these two part of a plan?”

“Take it for granted. The question is, was it supposed to be obvious? Or are they just clumsy?”

“To quote a certain Admiral, who used to tell us what to do, ‘Just lay back in the weeds and let them show their hand.’ He was good at mixing metaphors.”

“How’s the writing going, Moyshe?”

They turned to follow the Seiner couple, who were shooing the others into a tunnel.

“I haven’t written a page in months. I don’t know why.”

“Time?”

“That’s part of it. But I always found time before.”

Atop all his other hobbies, benRabi dabbled at writing short fiction. Traveling to Carson’s from Luna Command, an eon ago, he had looked forward to the Starfisher mission as a vacation operation during which he could get a lot of work done. He had expected to stay a maximum of six weeks. The Admiral had promised . . . A year had passed, and he had completed one dreary story, the manuscript of which he had not seen in months.

Once they departed the central hollow of the asteroid they entered local artificial gravity. There was little visible difference between ship and shore.

“Oh, boy!” Mouse said. “More brand new same old thing. This is going to get boring in a few years, Moyshe.”

“Sorry you decided to stay?”

Mouse eyed him momentarily. “No.” His expression became a little strange, but benRabi paid it no attention.

“Look, Mouse. Kids. I haven’t seen any kids since we left Luna Command.”

“Hooray.”

“Come on, man. Look at that. Must be some kind of class tour.”

Twenty little girls around eight years old were giggling along behind an old man. The old man was explaining something in a crackling voice. Several of the girls were aping him behind his back. Some of the others were making faces at the mockers.

“Call me back in ten years,” Mouse said. “I got no use for them till they get ripe.”

“You have got to be the sourest . . . ”

“It some kind of crime not to like kids? Speaking of which, I never saw you get along with any but Jupp’s boy and that Greta. And she was sixteen going on twenty-six.”

Jupp von Drachau had been their classmate in Academy. He was now High Command’s special errand boy. He had helped with their operation on The Broken Wings. Later, it had been his assignment to provide the firepower when it had come time to seize Payne’s Fleet. They had thought. His premature approach and detection had left them stranded for the full year they had contracted to work for the Seiners.

“Horst-Johann. I didn’t see him last time we were in Luna Command. That’s two years ago now. Damn, time flies. Bet he’s grown half a meter.”

Their male guide said, “People, we’ll lunch in one of the worker’s commons before we show you a typical creche. Don’t be shy. Visit. People here are as curious about you as you are about them. We’d appreciate it if you’d stay close, though. If one of you gets lost, we’ll both have trouble explaining.”

“Great,” Mouse said. “Still more brand new same old thing. Doesn’t anybody ever eat anywhere but in these goddamned cafeterias? I’d sell my soul for a go at a decent kitchen on my own.”

“You cook?”

“I’m a man of myriad talents, Moyshe. Think that’s what I’ll do when we hit The Broken Wings. Figure out how to make myself a home-cooked meal. And devour it in private. Not out in the middle of a goddamned football field with five thousand other people.”

“You’ve got one classic case of the crankies this morning, my friend.”

“I didn’t get any last night. Besides, I’m not patient with crap, and this whole field trip is main course horseshit without the hollandaise.”

The commons was as predictable as Mouse feared. So was the food. The conversation did not sparkle either, till Mouse took the offensive. “Grace, what’s the point of this exercise?”

“I don’t understand your question, Mister Storm.”

Moyshe grinned behind his hand. The woman was sensitive to that overpowering Mouse charm. She had become as decorous as a schoolteacher by way of compensation.

“This bullshit exercise. You dragged us away from work we don’t have time to get done right anyway. You run us out on a goddamned wire, then walk us all to hell and gone when we could have done the whole thing on a bus. You tell us we’re going to see how Seiners live when they’re not in the fleet, but you just show us the same old stuff. And since you’ve only kidnapped us for today, you’re not really serious about showing us anything. I mean, an idiot would realize that it would take weeks just to skim the surface of a civilization like yours.”

The woman’s dusky face darkened with embarrassment.

“I mean, here we sit, eight former landsmen, all with that much figured out, and all of us on our best behavior figuring it’s some kind of test or someone wants us off
Danion
for a while . . . Whichever, it’s dumb. You’re wasting our time and yours.”

“Mister Storm . . . ”

“Don’t mind him,” Moyshe interjected. “It’s old age creeping up on him. He’s not as tolerant of games-playing as he used to be.”

Mouse grinned and winked. BenRabi grinned back.

Their guides surveyed the other landsmen. They said nothing, but aggravated agreement marked each of their faces.

“There’s no point in going ahead, then,” the male guide said. “Your response is data enough. Finish your meals. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared.

“What
is
the point?” benRabi asked.

Grace shrugged. “I just work here.”

“Psychologist?”

She was startled. “How did you know?”

“I can smell them. You really married to him?”

“No.” She laughed weakly. “He’s my brother.”

“Ooh.” Mouse said it softly. Only Moyshe heard.