Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (12 page)

Marya shared her roof with whole tribes of roaches. Dirt streaked the plastic walls. The curtains were frayed and soiled.

It was exactly the sort of place where a busy, impoverished woman would come to rest. She was crafty, this one. She had converted her ethnic liabilities into assets.

But would a poor woman serve real coffee? When coffee had to come all the way from Old or New Earth?

He did not call her on it. He might give something away by revealing that he recognized the real thing when he tasted it. Most Old Earthers would not, because every ounce went into export.

They were fencing now, subtly, with rapiers consisting of little tests.

One of the rules of his profession was never to yield anything concrete.

She was not giving him anything either. Certainly not enough to understand her.

Who could comprehend the Sangaree mind? The Admiral had been trying for decades. He barely got by.

Like Mouse, though, Beckhart did not want to understand. Not really. He wanted to destroy. Comprehension was just a weapon in his arsenal.

They sat in silence for several minutes. He watched Marya over his cup. She considered him. He wondered what strange thoughts might be running through her alien brain.

“I’d better check on Michael, Gun.”

He followed her as far as the bedroom door.

The room was tiny. It contained two dilapidated beds. One for Marya, one for her children.

Marya settled on the edge of the one containing a pale five-year-old. The boy watched Niven warily.

“Michael, this is my friend Dr. Niven. He’s going to stay with us for a while.”

“Hi, Mike.”

“Not Mike.” The child’s voice was weak but angry. “Michael. After my great-grandfather.”

Marya winced.

Michael radiated pride.

Niven controlled his surprise. “Right. Michael it is.”

He had been wrong. Almost fatally wrong. These Sangaree would know the Shadowline well.

There had been but one Sangaree with the human name Michael. Michael Dee. The man who had engineered the war. The man who had been both the pride and despair of his race.

The man who had paid the ultimate price for failing.

“Brandy says you like pirate stories. I knew a pirate once. Only he wasn’t a pirate when I met him. That’s what he is now. I grew up and went to school, and he grew up and became a pirate.”

“I don’t think he’s ready for that right now, Gun.” Marya seemed honestly worried. “I’m going to have to call a doctor, I think.”

Niven was surprised at himself. He was concerned too. “You want me to call a cabcar?” What was he doing? The kid was Sangaree. His purpose in life was to help guide that species to a final solution. Little ones became big ones.

“Oh, no. There’s one from the hospital who lives right upstairs. I don’t know her very well, but . . . ”

“Go get her, woman. I’ll manage here.”

She stared. Something within her softened momentarily.’The hidden woman, the one behind the one behind the one she was trying to portray, showed through. She kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Gun.” When he pulled her closer, “Later. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He had not been after a kiss. He had attached a tiny chameleon transmitter to the back of her collar.

She closed the apartment door behind her. Niven inserted a receiver into his ear while pretending to scratch.

Smiling wryly, he patted himself where she had touched him. Had she done the same to him?

There was no reason why she should have to go out for a doctor. She would have sufficient medical background herself—if there was any truth to her cover.

He smiled again. Marya was no tactician, either.

“Are you my mom’s new lover?”

He was surprised. Little girls did not ask questions like that.

“No. Not yet.”

“She needs one. Do you think she’s pretty?”

“I think she’s gorgeous.” He was uncomfortable. He did not know how to socialize with children. The only child he knew was Jupp’s boy, Horst-Johann.

“Maybe she should get married again. Are you married?”

Marya had reached a public comm. She was briefing someone. Following her part of a conversation and trying to guess the other half while carrying on another with Brandy proved impossible. He did hear Marya ask for a deep trace on his cover. That meant he had won a round. She had doubts. Or wanted to have them, which came to the same thing.

“No. I never met the right lady.” This was one bold child. Did she know she was not human? Probably. From the little he had heard, Sangaree had no childhood in the human sense. Their children were shielded from nothing. They were treated as, and expected to behave as, miniature adults.

“Don’t know if I’d like you, though.”

Honest, too
, he thought. He went to check on Michael. The boy still watched him with wide, wary eyes.

He was bad sick. Marya would not risk a human doctor otherwise. There were few greater risks the underground Sangaree could take. Physicians could sometimes spot the subtle differences between species.

Marya returned with the doctor before Niven’s conversation with Brandy became impossible.

The doctor, he decided, was “tame.” She worked with a confidence and quickness that betrayed her.

Niven whispered to Marya, “Brandy’s been matchmaking.”

She laughed. “Husband-shopping for me again? She never gives up.”

“I don’t think I passed the exam.”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t get caught in that trap again.”

“Why’d you bring them out here?” On Old Earth parents usually put their children into public care as soon as they were born. Niven had had an unusual childhood in that he had spent much of it with his mother. He still kept in touch with her, but had lost track of his father years ago.

The shedding of children was a common practice on the tamed outworlds, too. Fewer than a quarter of Confederation’s children were raised by their biological parents.

Marya was shocked. Her Sangaree sense of Family had been outraged. But she could not tell him that. “I forgot. You do things differently where you come from. Yeah, it would be convenient sometimes. But they’re my kids.”

“Don’t try to explain. Just call it one of the differences between the Inner Worlds and the frontier. I’m getting used to them.”

The doctor returned from the bedroom. “I gave him a broad-spectrum antibiotic, Marya. And an antiviral. It’s nothing serious. See that he gets plenty of bed rest and lots of fluids, and keep an eye on his temperature. It’ll go up. Give him some aspirin if it gets too high. Do you need a thermometer?”

Marya nodded. She portrayed embarrassment beautifully.

You did that well, lady
, Niven thought.
Too poor to afford a thermometer. But you serve genuine coffee
. He smiled. She was doing a chemo-psychiatric internship, but had to summon an outside doctor . . . Was she driven by some secret death wish?

“Nice to have met you, Doctor Niven,” the doctor told him.

“You too.” He watched her go to the door. There was no pride in the way she walked.

“You want to get some sleep now, Gun?” Marya asked.

“Going to have to.” But would his nerves permit it here in the heart of enemy territory?

They would. After he had skinned down to his underwear, had flopped into Marya’s bed, and had told Michael, “Good night, Captain,” the lights went out.

He wakened once, hazily, when Marya slipped into bed beside him. He mumbled foggily, then knew nothing for hours.

He wakened slowly. Gradually, he realized that The Broken Wings’ truncated day had sped by. It was night again. He did not remember where he was till he rolled against the woman.

That simple movement initiated three tempestuous days.

Marya was insatiable. The only word he found to fit her was “hungry.” He had never encountered a woman who had such a need for a man.

Niven astounded himself. Their lovemaking became so savage, so narrowly scoped, that it was more like combat. As if, “Let he who first cries ‘Hold! Enough!’ be damned forever.”

They seemed to do nothing but sleep and copulate, making attack after attack in some sort of sexual war. The outside world seemed to have lost all meaning.

Yet there was method. There was rationality. In struggling to please Marya, who was struggling to distract him, Niven kept himself motivated by remembering who she was. He kept trying to convince himself that he was doing this to sabotage the enemy chain of command.

He knew Marya was not motivated entirely by lust either.

Oh, but they did have one hell of a good time on the rumpled sheets of that battlefield.

In the interims Niven sometimes wondered what had become of Mouse. Mouse, he reflected, sure had the free hand he always wanted.

Brandy, recognizing the way of things, had taken her brother out the first night. They were staying upstairs with the doctor. Michael, looking a little better, sometimes wandered in, moped around without saying much, then wandered out again. Brandy stayed away all the time.

“What are we doing?” Niven once muttered to himself. They were enemies to the death. That was the prime rule, the blood rule, by which he and she were supposed to live and die. Yet they were denying it, or sublimating it in the form of love . . . 

He began to dread mission’s end. Debriefing . . . He would have to answer questions. He would have to explain.

Niven was snoring. He had one arm beneath Marya’s neck.

The building shuddered like a dog shaking off water. A window cracked. Tableware clattered onto the kitchen floor. The whole neighborhood reverberated to the explosion.

Niven jerked upright. “D-14,” he grunted.

“What?”

“What was that?”

“An explosion.”

They dressed, almost racing. Reflections of dancing firelight colored the cracked window. Marya looked out. “Oh, Holy Sant!”

“What?”

“The warehouse . . . ”

“Eh?”

“I’ll be right back . . . What’s that?”

A yell had come from somewhere downstairs. Cries and screams followed it.

Niven knew that first yell. That was Mouse in assassin’s mind.

Earlier, he had seen the shape of the needlegun lumping her underwear in a dresser drawer. He beat her to it.

The door crashed inward. A ragged, battered, bloody Mouse hurtled through. He was so keyed for action that he looked three meters tall.

“Easy,” Niven said, gesturing with the needlegun. “Everything’s under control, Mouse.”

Mouse was not hurt. The blood was not his own. “Got everything,” he croaked through a dry throat. “Message away. Got to bend the bitch and get out.”

That was their business, but . . . Niven could not permit the woman’s murder. That she was Sangaree seemed irrelevant. “No. There’s no need. Not this time.”

Mouse was coming down. Thought was replacing action. He glanced at Niven’s weapon, at the woman. “All right. You’re the boss, Doc. But I’ve got to get something out of this. Where’re the damned kids?”

“Upstairs. But I won’t let you kill children, either.”

“Wouldn’t think of it, Doc. Wouldn’t even drown a puppy. You know old John. So tie her up, will you? Can’t have her coming after us.” He backed out the door.

Siren howls tortured the streets. The grumble of a gathering crowd slipped tentacles into the room. “Sorry it had to end this way, Marya. But business is business.”

“I almost believed . . . ” She stared at him. For an instant she looked small and defenseless. He reminded himself that she was Sangaree, that she would become instant death if he were careless. “I suppose you’re soothing your conscience. I wouldn’t if the tables were turned. You’ve hurt us too much already.”

Not a smart thing to say to somebody pointing a gun at you
, Niven thought. He shrugged. “Maybe. It’s not conscience, though. A different weakness. You’d probably have to be human to understand.” He left it to her to figure out what he meant.

Mouse returned with the children and doctor. In the process he had acquired a weapon. “Tie these three, too, Doc.”

The doctor was more frightened than Brandy or Michael. Humans on the fringes of the Business generally imagined operations by and against the organization to be more deadly than they were.

Brandy asked, “What’re you doing, Gun?” Straight out, emotionlessly. As if she were used to being under the gun.

“Business, dear.”

“Oh.” She sped her mother a disgusted look.

“He’s the Starduster,” Marya told her.

“And you fell for his story?”

Niven tore sheets into strips, tied the doctor, then the girl, then Michael. “Told you I knew a pirate, Captain.”

“Good,” Mouse said. “Let me have the gun, Doc.”

“Eh? Why?”

“Because I need it.”

Puzzled, Niven handed the weapon over. Mouse tossed it into the hallway.

Niven shook his head, said, “We’d better get moving. They won’t stay disorganized forever.”

“One thing first.” Mouse shoved his weapon under his arm. He took a hypo from the doctor’s bag and filled it from an ampule he carried in his pocket. “This one’s for your great-grandfather, kids. And all his brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Niven demanded.

“Just business, Doc. Turnabout’s fair play, right? We should expand our own markets.” He raised Michael’s sleeve.

Marya understood instantly. “No! Piao! Not my children. Kill me if you want, but don’t . . . ”

Mouse answered her with a tight smile. “Just business, lady. Gag her, Doc. Hurry. We got to get the stuff out before Navy pops to we’ve cut out the instel here.”

Niven suddenly understood what Mouse was doing. “Hey! You can’t . . . ” He wanted to stop it, to protest, to refuse, got confused by the reference to Navy. “Stardust?”

Mouse nodded, smiling wickedly. His hand strayed toward his weapon.

“Oh.” How could the man be so cruel? That was murder in the worst possible way.

Marya needed gagging desperately. Her screams could attract attention . . . 

Dazed, Niven silenced her. Her flesh seemed icy beneath his fingertips. He felt the rage and hatred boiling inside her. She started shaking.