Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (7 page)

Guides led the way to a common room where several high-powered command types awaited them.
Another lecture
, Moyshe thought.
Some more shocks set off by a lot of boredom
.

He was half right.

Even before they were comfortable, one of the heavy-duty lads said, “I’m Eduard Chouteau, your Ship’s Commander. Welcome aboard Number Three Service Ship from
Danion
, a harvestship of Payne’s Fleet.” That was enough ceremony, evidently. He continued, “We’ve contacted you as emergency replacements for technicians
Danion
lost in a shark attack two months ago. Frankly, Fishers haven’t ever liked or trusted outsiders. That’s because outsiders have given us reason. But for
Danion
’s sake we’ll do right by you till we get our own people from the. schools. All we ask is that you do right by us.”

BenRabi felt that little feather tickle again. Half-truths were fluttering around like untamed butterflies. The man had something on his mind. There was a smoke screen rolling tall and wide, and behind it something he and Mouse just might find interesting. He made a mental note.

The Seiner schools were unique. Most ground-siders knew a little about them. They made romantic, remote settings for holonet dramas.

Those shows, naturally, had borne little relation to reality.

The Seiner creches were hidden in dead planetoids somewhere in deep space. The old and the young of the Fisher fleets dwelt there, teaching and learning. Only healthy Seiners of working age spaced with the fleets and hazarded themselves against disasters of the sort that had overtaken
Danion
.

Unlike Confederation parents, Starfishers yielded their children to professional surrogates out of love. They did not see their young as dead weight that might hamper them as they shot the rapids of life.

BenRabi had never seen enough of his father to have developed an emotional attitude toward him. And what could he think about his mother? She could not help being what she was. His mother was the child of her society, shaped by a high-pressure environment. The years and prejudice had devoured their tenuous umbilical link . . . They were of alien tribes now. The barrier between them could no longer be breached, even with the best will on both sides.

Visiting her had been a waste of leave time, but then there was the kid.

How was Greta doing? Christ! He might not know for one hell of a long time.

Why had his mother’s behavior so horrified him? He should have known better than to have gone. He had come out of that world. All Old Earth was a screaming rat warren packed with people seeking new thrills and perversions as escapes from the grim realities of narrow little lives.

“Lightsl” the Ship’s Commander snapped. BenRabi returned from introspection. A hologram took form in the center of the darkening common room. It developed like some fantasy magician’s uncertain conjuration, flickering for several seconds, then jerking into sudden, awe-inspiring solidity.

“The stars you see here we retaped off a standard Second Level astrogation training module. Our holo people dubbed the ships from models used in an engineering status display at Ship’s Engineering Control aboard
Danion
. This is
Danion
, your home for the next year.”

The name
Danion
rolled off his tongue, freighted with everything the ship meant to him: home, country, refuge, responsibility.

A ship formed against the imaginary stars. It was a weird thing, making Moyshe think of octopi entwined. No. He decided it looked like a city’s utilities systems after the buildings and earth and pavement had been removed, with the leavings flung mad among the stars. There were vast tangles of tubing. Here and there lay a ball, a cone, a cube, or an occasional sheet of silverness stretched taut as if to catch the starwinds. Vast nets floated between kilometers-long pipelike arms. The whole mad construct was raggedly bearded with thousands of antennae of every conceivable type. The totality was spectacularly huge, and dreadful in its strangeness.

In theory a deep-space vessel need not be confined in a geometric hull. Most small, specialized vessels were not. A ship did not have to have any specific shape, though the complex relationships between drive, inertial-negation, mass increase effect reduction, temporal adjustment, and artificial gravity induction systems did demand a direction-of-travel dimension slightly more than twice that of dimensions perpendicular to line-of-flight in vessels intended to operate near or above the velocity of light. But this was the first truly large asymmetric ship benRabi had ever seen.

It was a flying iron jungle. The streamlined ship had been preferred by mankind since space travel had been but a dream. Even now designers felt more comfortable enclosing everything inside a skin capable of generating an all-around defensive screen.

Even the wildest imaginings of novelty-hunting holo studios had never produced a vessel as knotted and strewn as this mass of tangled kitten’s yarn.

BenRabi’s astonishment was not unique. Silence died a swift death in that room.

“How the hell does that bastard keep from breaking up?” someone demanded.

“What I want to know is, how do you build something like that without a crew from every holonet in the universe turning up?”

Someone more technically smitten asked, “Ship’s Commander—what sort of system do you use to synchronize drives? You’d have to have hundreds on a ship that big. Even with superconductor or pulse laser control systems your synch systems would be limited to the velocity of light. The lag between the more remote units . . . ”

BenRabi lost the thread. Another surprise had jumped on him wearing hobnailed boots on all four feet.

He was aboard a ship he and Mouse had studied from the surface of Carson’s. She was a typical interstellar vessel of an obsolete class now common only among the Rim Run Freehaulers.

A similar vessel had appeared in the hologram. It was approaching the harvestship.

The surprise was in their relative sizes.

The starship became a needle falling into an expanding, cosmic ocean of scrap. The service ship retained its holo dimensions.
Danion
swelled till she attained epic proportions.

Moyshe could not begin to guess her true dimensions. His most conservative estimate staggered him. She had to be at least thirty kilometers in cross-section, twenty thick, and sixty long. That was impossible. There were countries on Old Earth smaller than that.

And stretching far beyond the dense central snarl of the ship were those spars spreading silvery sails and nets.

Did she sunjam on stellar winds?

She couldn’t. The Starfish stayed away from stars. Any stars, be they orbited by settled worlds or not. They stayed way out in the Big Dark where they could not be found.

The whole thing had to be a brag show. Pure propaganda. It just had to be.

He could not accept that ship as real.

His normal, understandable operation-opening jitters cranked themselves up a couple of notches. Till that ship had declared itself he had thought he could handle anything new and strange. Change was the order of the universe. Novelty was no cause for distress.

But this mission held too much promise of the new and unknown. He had been plunged
tabula rasa
into a completely alien universe.

Nothing created by Man had any right being so damned big.

Light returned. It drowned the dying hologram. BenRabi looked around. His jaw was not the only one hanging like an overripe pear about to drop.

Despite prior warning, everyone had believed themselves aboard a harvestship. Cultural bias left them incapable of believing the Fishers could have anything better.

Moyshe began to realize just how poorly he had been prepared for this mission. He had done his homework. He had devoured everything the Bureau had known about Starfishers. He had considered speculation as well as confirmed fact. He knew all there was to know.

Too little had been known.

“That’s all you’ll need to know about
Danion
’s outside,” the Ship’s Commander told them. “Of her guts you’ll see plenty, and you’ll have to learn them well. We expect to get our money’s worth.”

They had the right to ask it, Moyshe figured. They were paying double the usual spacer’s rates, and those were anything but poor.

The man talked on awhile, repeating the security officer’s injunctions. Then he turned the landsmen over to ratings, who showed them to their quarters. BenRabi’s nervousness subsided. He had been through this part before, each time he had boarded a Navy warship.

He got a cabin to himself. The Seiner assigned to him helped settle him in. From the man’s wary replies, Moyshe presumed he could expect to be aboard for several days. Payne’s Fleet was harvesting far from Carson’s.

Once the man had left and benRabi had converted his barren cubicle into a Spartan cell, he lay down to nap. After looking for bugs and spy-eyes, of course. But sleep would not come. Not with all the great lumpy surprises his mind still had to digest.

Someone knocked. Mouse, he guessed. The man never used a buzzer. He made a crochet a means of identification.

Yes. It was Mouse. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Masato Iwasaki. Oh. You’re in Liquids too? Good.” He stuck out a hand. They shook.

“BenRabi. Moyshe. Nice to meet you.” Silly game, he thought. But it had to be played if they wanted people to believe that they had just met.

“You wouldn’t happen to play chess?” Mouse asked. “I’m looking for somebody who does.”

He was addicted to the game. It would get him into trouble someday, benRabi thought. An agent could not afford consistent crochets. But who was he to criticize?

“I’ve been up and down the passage, but I haven’t found anybody.”

No doubt he had. Mouse was thorough.

“I play, but badly. And it’s been awhile.” It had been about four hours. They had almost been late to the spaceport because of a game. Mouse had been nervous about liftoff. BenRabi had been holding his own.

Mouse prowled, searching for bugs. BenRabi closed the door. “I don’t think there are any. Not yet. I didn’t find anything.”

Mouse shrugged. “What do you think?”

“Broomstick all the way. Strictly from hunger. We’re riding the mythical nova bomb.”

“The woman? Yeah. Pure trouble. Spotted a couple McGraws, too. You think she’s teamed?” He dropped onto the extra bunk.

“I don’t think so. Not by choice. She’s a loner.”

“It doesn’t look good,” Mouse mused. “We don’t have enough info. I feel like a blind man in a funhouse. We’d better fly gentle till we learn the traffic code.” He stared at the overhead. “And how to con the natives.”

BenRabi settled onto his own bunk. They remained silent for minutes, trying to find handles on the future. They would need every advantage they could seize.

“Three weeks,” Mouse said. “I can handle it. Then a whole year off. I won’t know what to do.”

“Don’t make your reservations yet. Marya . . . The Sangaree woman. She’s one bad omen. Mouse . . . I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

“I can handle it. You don’t think I want to spend a whole damned year here, do you?”

“Remember what that character said down at Blake City? It could be the rest of our lives. Short lives.”

“Bah. He was blowing smoke.”

“Ready to bet your life on it?”

BenRabi’s head gave him a kick. He was not sure he could take much more pain. And this compelling
need
 . . . 

“What’s the matter?”

“Headache. Must be the change in air pressure.”

How the hell was he supposed to work with his body in pain and his mind half around the bend? There was something to be said for those old-time sword swingers who did not have to worry about anything but how sharp their blades were.

“We’d better hedge our bets, Moyshe. Better start planning for the long haul, just in case.”

“Thought you could handle it.”

Mouse shrugged. “Got to be ready for everything. I’ve been poking around. These Seiners are as bad as us for special interests. They’ve got coin clubs and stamp clubs and Archaicist period groups . . . The whole thing. They’re crazy to get into the past. What I was thinking was, why don’t we start a chess club for landsmen? We’d have a cover for getting together.”

“And you’d have an excuse to play.”

“That too. A lot of Seiners play too, see. Maybe we could fish a few in so we could pump them socially.” He winked, smiled.

The Seiners he was interested in hooking were probably female.

BenRabi could not fathom Mouse. Mouse seemed happy most of the time. That was disconcerting. The man carried a load of obsessions heavier than his own. And somebody whose profession was hatchet work should, in benRabi’s preconceptions, have had a happiness quotient approaching zero.

BenRabi never had been able to understand people. Everybody else seemed to live by a different set of rules.

Mouse shrugged. “Fingers crossed? Hope Beckhart will pull it off? Wouldn’t bet against him.”

BenRabi never knew where he stood in the Admiral’s grand, tortuous schemes.

“Hey, I’ve been here long enough,” Mouse said. “No point attracting attention straight off. I saw you get pills from that girl. What was wrong? Head?”

“Yeah. Might even be my migraine. My head feels like somebody’s been using it for a soccer ball.”

Mouse went to the door. “A game tonight, then?”

“Sure, as long as you don’t mind playing an amateur.” BenRabi saw him off, feeling foolish. There had been no one around to hear his parting speech.

The public address system announced dinner for passengers. Mouse turned back. “Feel up to it?”

BenRabi nodded. Though it had ached miserably seconds ago, the tracer was not bothering him at all now.

Somebody was trying to impress them. The meal was superb. It was the kind Navy put on when important civilians came aboard. Everything was hydroponics and recycle, yet supremely palatable. Each mouthful reminded benRabi of the horrors of a Navy mess six months out, after the fresh and frozen stores were gone. From some angles the mission had begun to show promise.