Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (2 page)

Mouse was a mad collector too: postage stamps from the days when they had been used, coins, bottles, mugs, wrought-iron, almost anything old. But the ends they were after varied.

BenRabi collected for escape, for relaxation, as a means of learning. Mouse had gone mad Archaicist during his recent stay in Luna Command. His collecting had become a means of slipping into the gestalt of departed life styles. He had fallen in love with the twentieth century, the last with a real spectrum of class, ethnic, and cultural differentiations.

BenRabi did not comprehend Archaicists at all. His opinion of them was, to use Mouse’s words, lower than a snake’s butt.

The old distinctions had changed. Race, sex, wealth, style, and manner of speech no longer set a person apart. Prejudices pivoted round origins and profession, with Old Earthers the niggers of the age, and Service personnel the aristocracy.

BenRabi, under his other names, had known Mouse a long time. But he just did not know the man. Professional acquaintance and even a budding friendship had done nothing to break down Mouse’s defenses. BenRabi was Old Earther. Mouse was Outworlds and third generation Service. That was a barrier across which little could trickle.

BenRabi studied other faces, saw bewilderment, determination, malaise. A lot of these people were not sure why they were here. But he was looking for the nonchalant ones, the ones who did know. They would be the competition and beekies.

The Bureau was far from unique in its interest in Starfish. Half these people, probably, were spies . . . “Uhn!”

“Excuse me, please?”

He turned. A small blue nun had paused beside him, startled by his grunt. “Pardon, Sister. Just thinking out loud.”

The Ulantonid woman wobbled off wearing a perplexed frown, perhaps wondering what sort of mind thought in dull monosyllables. BenRabi frowned himself. What had become of the human need for faith? The Christians he encountered were almost always conquered aliens.

His curiosity faded. He returned to that disturbing face.

Yes, it was Marya, though she had changed as much as he. Her hair, skin, and eyes had all been darkened. She had put on twenty pounds. There were other changes, too. They were subtler, but did not prevent his recognizing her. She had not disguised her ways of moving, speaking, listening.

She never was much of an actress, he reflected.

She did have a talent essential to their profession. She survived despite the odds.

She noticed him looking. Her eyebrows rose a millimeter, then puckered in consternation. Then she smiled a wicked iron smile. She had recognized him, too.

How big a demotion had she earned for failing on The Broken Wings? How much had it cost, beyond the cruel, slow deaths of her children? . . . 

Frost mites danced between his shoulder blades. She would be doing score-evening calculations already.

She nodded ever so slightly, politely.

It was a vast universe. There was no way he should have run into her again, ever. He was too stunned for rational thought.

Nothing could have shaken him more than her presence.

He did not fear her. Not in a cold sweat way. She would see Mouse. She would know she had to let be, or die, or make damned sure she got them both with the same hit.

Several other faces teased his memory. Trace recognitions trickled back from his studies of Bureau files. None of them were outright enemies. They were competitors, beekies from the Corporations. Or possibly McGraws.

He tried to view the crowd as an organism, to judge its composition and temper. It was smaller than he had expected. Not more than two hundred. The Seiners had advertised for a thousand, offering bonuses and pay scales that approached the outrageous.

They would be disappointed.

He supposed there weren’t many techs romantic enough, or hungry enough, to plunge into an alien society for a year. That might mean returning to a home changed beyond recognition. After the lighters lifted there would be no turning back. No one would be able to quit because he did not like his job.

Moyshe shuffled into the check-in line four places behind his partner. Mouse was shaking.

Moyshe never ceased to be amazed. Glacial. Glassteel. Conscienceless. Stonedeath. He had thought Mouse many cold, hard things. Yet there were unpredictable moments when the man let slip the humanity behind the facade of adamant. BenRabi watched as if witnessing a miracle.

This might be the only time during the operation that Mouse would let the hardness fall. And that only because he was poised on the brink of a shuttle fly.

Liftoffs terrified him.

“Dr. Niven.” A whisper. Warmth caressed benRabi’s arm. He looked down into eyes as hard and dark as Sangaree gunmetal coins.

“Pardon, ma’am?” He put on his disarming smile. “Name’s benRabi. Moyshe benRabi.”

“How quaint.” She smiled a gunmetal smile. “Candy, even.”

She must be more widely read than he had suspected.

Moyshe benRabi was the protagonist of Czyzewski’s sole and almost unknown trial of the novel, a cartoon caricature painted in broad strokes of Gargantua and Don Quixote. The critics had said too much so, stopping only on the edge of accusations of plagiarism.

Strange that a Sangaree should be familiar with
His Banners Bright and Golden
 . . . 

Sangaree. He had to remind himself. He had shared her bed. There had been feeling in it during those hungry days on The Broken Wings.

She might willingly share beds again, but . . . 

In the end she would drink his blood. Sangaree nursed their hatreds forever. For generations, if rumor was true.

“And the Rat, too, eh?” Meaning Mouse. She would have a special hell set aside for him. But the feeling was mutual. BenRabi knew Mouse would plain love a date with her in a medieval torture chamber. “All you Confies and beekies and McGraws pretending you need Seiner money . . . Orbit in an hour, Gun. See you upstairs.”

More gunmetal smiles as she took her gunmetal-hard body toward the Ladies.

She would see him upstairs.

No doubt. He wondered if he could conjure up a Mark XIV Combat Suit real quick. Or spider’s eyes so he could watch his back. This mission was going to be Roman candle all the way.

And he had hoped for a vacation operation. For nothing to do but loaf and work on
Jerusalem
.

Two: 3047 AD
The Olden Days, Angel City

A whisper swifted on lightning feet through Angel City’s underworld. It said the Starduster was on The Broken Wings.

A private yacht had slipped into Angel Port after making a surreptitious worldfall. It was registered to a Dr. Gundaker Niven. The cognoscenti in the outfit remembered that name in connection with a blow-up on Borroway that had set the Sangaree back a billion stellars.

Port workers with connections started the excitement. The bounty on Gundaker Niven was immense. The Sangaree would not sit still for a billion-stellar burn from God Himself.

The dock workers passed the word that the
Lady of Merit
boasted just two passengers. One was Caucasian, the other a small Oriental.

That got their attention downtown. Niven had something to do with the Starduster. He might even be the Starduster under an alias. And the Starduster’s number-one man was an Oriental, one John Li Piao.

These men, though, looked like Old Earth shooters, not the masters of a shadow empire rivaling that managed by the Sangaree.

Nevertheless, heads nodded in the board rooms of crime. Orders went out to the soldiers.

The Starduster was a unique creature. He was a man in limbo. A crime czar who had built a kingdom independent of the established syndicates. He preyed on his own kind rather than pay a single credit for Sangaree-produced stardust.

His was the most feared name on the Sangaree hate list.

Sentences of death had been pronounced on a dozen worlds. Open, often redundant contracts approaching a hundred million stellars existed.

Time and success had made of him an almost mythic devil.

He had been claimed killed a half dozen times. But he kept coming back, like a thing undead, like a dying wizard’s curse. Hardly would the jubilation end before his invisible hand would again strike swiftly and viciously, ripping the guts from another syndicate pipeline of profit.

Was there more than one Starduster?

The Sangaree Heads, to whom most organized crime could be traced, sometimes suspected that he was not a man at all, but a role. Perhaps Piao was the real Starduster. The handful of men who had been pinned with the Starduster name were as diverse a group as could be selected from a good-sized crowd. Short, tall, thin, fat, white, black.

The Sangaree family dictators knew only one thing for certain. The Starduster was human. Sangaree might be contentious, piratical, greedy, and short on conscience, but only a human who hated would slash at them as bloodily as the Starduster did.

Even his motives were obscure. The narcotic he stole did not always find its way back into trade channels. Greed had no obvious hold on him.

The yachtsmen rented a groundcar and vanished into Angel City’s warehouse district. Gundaker Niven was a chunky man of medium height. He had hard, dark eyes of the sort that intimidated civilians. He had thick, heavy hands. He jabbed with forefingers for emphasis whenever he spoke. A wide scar poured from his right ear down over his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.

“Take it out with a kilo of D-14,” he growled, punching a finger at a dilapidated warehouse. His words came out slurred. The right side of his mouth did not move. “Burn them and run.”

His driver was a small man with Fu Manchu mustaches. He had the same cold eyes. “But this ain’t no shatter run. All that would do is show us how good they die.”

“Working for Beckhart is getting a meter too tall for me, Mouse. This underworld stuff isn’t my specialty. It’s too rough. Too complicated. Suppose the real Starduster has people here?”

The smaller man laughed. “He does. You can count on it.”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Hey! Working for the Old Man is an honor. When he asks for you, it means you’ve made it. Didn’t you get sick of that military attaché dodge?”

“No. I was drafted into this.”

“Come on! Engineering coups in the outbacks. How dull can you get? There’s no rise to give it spice. When things go broomstick you go hide in the embassy.”

“You think it’s all champagne and ballroom conspiracy? I got my spleen burned out on Shakedowns. Inside the embassy.”

“Still ain’t the same. Yeah. The Starduster has people here. But by the time the word floats up and the shit comes down we’ll be long gone.”

“That’s what you told me on Gorki. And New Earth was supposed to be a piece of cake.”

This was their third mission teamed. Admiral Beckhart’s specialized, secretive division of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence had found that they complemented one another well.

“So you should be used to it.”

“Maybe. Gundaker Niven. What the hell kind of name is that?”

“You take what they give you. This ain’t the diplomatic service. You’re in the big time now.”

“You keep telling me. But they don’t job you. You stay Mouse every go. They never crank you through the Medical mill. They don’t have the Psychs scramble your brain.”

“They don’t need to. I’m not the front man. I’m just around to drag your ass out of the fire when it gets hot.”

“I don’t like the feel of this one, Mouse. Something’s wrong. There’s going to be trouble.”

“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

“Holy shit! I’m looking for toilet paper and he throws the Bible at me. It’s sour, Mouse.”

“Because we got no backup? Hang tight, Doc. We don’t need it. The Sangaree outfit here wouldn’t make a pimple on the ass of a Family like the Norbon. They’ve only got five or six people on the whole damned planet. They get the work done with local talent.”

“Stickers can burn you just as dead as any Homeworld shooter. Beyond-the-resurrection. What’s out here, anyway?”

“Got to go with you there, Doc. Not a million people on this rat hole. Three lousy domes, and enough swamp to supply the rest of Confederation.”

“It even stinks in here.”

“It’s in your head. Going to circle the block.”

They idled on, learning the warehouse district’s tight, twisty out-of-the-ways first hand. Street maps and eidetic holo-memories had been given them, but only exploration made a place real. Every city had its feel, its color, its smell, its style. Psych’s familiarization tapes could not capture the intangibles of reality.

Knowledge and preparation were the corner- and keystones of their trade.

“I need a bath,” Niven complained. “I can smell swamp muck on me.”

“Let’s head back to the Marcos. My stomach’s okay now. I’m hungry. And a game or two would get me back in the groove. Tomorrow’s soon enough to take the case.”

The Marcos was The Broken Wings’ best hotel, and one of the best in The Arm. And that despite the limits imposed by the space and conservation regulations of a dome city.

Dome cities are planet-bound space vessels. Which translates as uncomfortable.

The lobby of the Marcos had been decorator-engineered to provide an illusion of openness. The wall facing the entrance was masked by a curving hologramic panorama from another world.

Mouse froze.

“What’s the matter?”

The smaller man stared straight ahead. He did not reply.

“The Thunder Mountains seen from Edgeward City on Blackworld,” Niven murmured, recognizing the scene.

It was a stark view, of black mountains limned by the raging star winds of a pre-nova sun. Blackworld was one of the least hospitable and most dramatically beautiful of the outworlds.

“Just surprised me, Doc.” Mouse glanced around the lobby. “It was the Cathedral Forest on Tregorgarth when we checked in.”

People stared. The two gave the impression of being invaders instead of guests. Their appearance labeled them hardcases barely able to get by on their wits. Men of that breed belonged in the warehouse district, not at the watering hole of the genteel.