Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1 Read online

  Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

  Glen Cook

  Glen Cook

  Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

  Book One—ROPE

  Who twists the rope that dangles from the gibbet?

  One: 3052 AD

  Who am I? What am I?

  I am the bastard child of the Shadowline. That jagged rift of sun-broiled stone was my third parent.

  You cannot begin to understand me, or the Shadowline, without knowing my father. And to know Gneaus Julius Storm you have to know our family, in all its convolute interpersonal relationships and history. To know our family...

  There is no end to this. The ripples spread. And the story, which has the Shadowline and myself at one end, is an immensely long river. It received the waters of scores of apparently insignificant tributary events.

  Focusing the lens at its narrowest, my father and Cassius (Colonel Walters) were the men who shaped me most. This is their story. It is also the story of the men whose stamp upon them ultimately shaped their stamp upon me.

  —Masato Igarashi Storm

  Two: 3031 AD

  Deep in the Fortress of Iron, in the iron gloom of his study, Gneaus Storm slouched in a fat, deep chair. His chin rested on his chest. His good eye was closed. Long grey hair cascaded down over his tired face.

  The flames in the nearest fireplace leapt and swirled in an endless morisco. Light and shadow played out sinister dramas over priceless carpeting hand-loomed in Old Earth's ancient Orient. The shades of might-have-been played tag among the darkwood beams supporting the stone ceiling.

  Storm's study was a stronghold within the greater Fortress. It was the citadel of his soul, the bastion of his heart. Its walls were lined with shelves of rare editions. A flotilla of tables bore both his collectibles and papers belonging to his staff. The occasional silent clerk came and went, updating a report before one of the chairs.

  Two Shetland-sized mutant Alsatians prowled the room, sniffing shadows. One rumbled softly deep in its throat. The hunt for an enemy never ended.

  Nor was it ever successful. Storm's enemies did not hazard his planetoid home.

  A black creature of falcon size flapped into the study. It landed clumsily in front of Storm. Papers scattered, frightening it. An aura of shadow surrounded it momentarily, masking its toy pterodactyl body.

  It was a ravenshrike, a nocturnal flying lizard from the swamps of The Broken Wings. Its dark umbra was a psionically generated form of protective coloration.

  The ravenshrike cocked one red night eye at its mate, nesting in a rock fissure behind Storm. It stared at its master with the other.

  Storm did not respond.

  The ravenshrike waited.

  Gneaus Julius Storm pictured himself as a man on the downhill side of life, coasting toward its end. He was nearly two hundred years old. The ultimate in medical and rejuvenation technology kept him physically forty-five, but doctors and machines could do nothing to refresh his spirit.

  One finger marked his place in an old holy book. It had fallen shut when he had drifted off. "A time to be born and a time to die... "

  A youth wearing Navy blacks slipped into the room. He was short and slight, and stood as stiff as a spear. Though he had visited the study countless times, his oriental inscrutability gave way to an expression of awe.

  So many luxuries and treasures, Mouse thought. Are they anything more than Death, hidden behind a mask of hammered gold?

  And of his father he thought, He looks so tired. Why can't they leave him alone?

  They could not. Not while Richard Hawksblood lived. They did not dare. So someday, as all mercenaries seemed to do, Gneaus Storm would find his last battlefield and his death-without-resurrection.

  Storm's tired face rose. It remained square-jawed and strong. Grey hair stirred in a vagrant current from an air vent.

  Mouse left quietly, yielding to a moment of deep sadness. His feelings for his father bordered on reverence. He ached because his father was boxed in and hurting.

  He went looking for Colonel Walters.

  Storm's good eye opened. Grey as his hair, it surveyed the heart of his stateless kingdom. He did not see a golden death mask. He saw a mirror that reflected the secret Storm.

  His study contained more than books. One wall boasted a weapons collection, Sumerian bronze standing beside the latest stressglass multi-purpose infantry small arms. Lighted cabinets contained rare china, cut crystal, and silver services. Others contained ancient Wedgwood. Still more held a fortune in old coins within their velvet-lined drawers.

  He was intrigued by the ebb and flow of history. He took comfort in surrounding himself with the wrack it left in passing.

  He could not himself escape into yesterday. Time slipped through the fingers like old water.

  A gust from the cranky air system riffled papers. The banners overhead stirred with the passage of ghosts. Some were old. One had followed the Black Prince to Navarette. Another had fallen at the high-water mark of the charge up Little Round Top. But most represented milemarks in Storm's own career.

  Six were identical titan-cloth squares hanging all in a line. Upon them a golden hawk struck left to right down a fall of scarlet raindrops, all on a field of sable. They were dull, unimaginative things compared to the Plantagenet, yet they celebrated the mountaintop days of Storm's Iron Legion.

  He had wrested them from his own Henry of Trastamara, Richard Hawksblood, and each victory had given him as little satisfaction as Edward had extracted from Pedro the Cruel.

  Richard Hawksblood was the acknowledged master of the mercenary art.

  Hawksblood had five Legion banners in a collection of his own. Three times they had fought to a draw.

  Storm and Hawksblood were the best of the mercenary captain-kings, the princes of private war the media called "The Robber Barons of the Thirty-First Century." For a decade they had been fighting one another exclusively.

  Only Storm and his talented staff could beat Hawksblood. Only Hawksblood had the genius to withstand the Iron Legion.

  Hawksblood had caused Storm's bleak mood. His Intelligence people said Richard was considering a commission on Blackworld.

  "Let them roast," he muttered. "I'm tired."

  But he would fight again. If not this time, then the next. Richard would accept a commission. His potential victim would know that his only chance of salvation was the Iron Legion. He would be a hard man who had clawed his way to the top among a hard breed. He would be accustomed to using mercenaries and assassins. He would look for ways to twist Storm's arm. And he would find them, and apply them relentlessly.

  Storm had been through it all before.

  He smelled it coming again.

  A personal matter had taken him to Corporation Zone, on Old Earth, last month. He had made the party rounds, refreshing his contacts. A couple of middle-management types had approached him, plying him with tenuous hypotheses.

  Blackworlders clearly lacked polish. Those apprentice Machiavellis had been obvious and unimpressive, except in their hardness. But their master? Their employer was Blake Mining and Metals Corporation of Edgeward City on Blackworld, they told him blandly.

  Gneaus Julius Storm was a powerful man. His private army was better trained, motivated, and equipped than Confederation's remarkable Marines. But his Iron Legion was not just a band of freebooters. It was a diversified holding company with minority interests in scores of major corporations. It did not just fight and live high for a while on its take. Its investments were the long-term security of its people.

  The Fortress of Iron stretched tentacles in a thousand directions, though in the world of
business and finance it was not a major power. Its interests could be manipulated by anyone with the money and desire.

  That was one lever the giants used to get their way.

  In the past they had manipulated his personal conflicts with Richard Hawkblood, playing to his vanity and hatred. But he had outgrown his susceptibility to emotional extortion.

  "It'll be something unique this time," he whispered.

  Vainly, he strove to think of a way to outmaneuver someone he did not yet know, someone whose intentions were not yet clear.

  He ignored the flying lizard. It waited patiently, accustomed to his brooding way.

  Storm took an ancient clarinet from a case lying beside his chair. He examined the reed, wet it. He began playing a piece not five men alive could have recognized.

  He had come across the sheet music in a junk shop during his Old Earth visit. The title, "Stranger on the Shore," had caught his imagination. It fit so well. He felt like a stranger on the shore of time, born a millennium and a half out of his natural era. He belonged more properly to the age of Knollys and Hawkwood.

  The lonely, haunting melody set his spirit free. Even with his family, with friends, or in crowds, Gneaus Storm felt set apart, outside. He was comfortable only when sequestered here in his study, surrounded by the things with which he had constructed a stronghold of the soul.

  Yet he could not be without people. He had to have them there, in the Fortress, potentially available, or he felt even more alone.

  His clarinet never left his side. It was a fetish, an amulet with miraculous powers. He treasured it more than the closest member of his staff. Paired with the other talisman he always bore, an ancient handgun, it held the long night of the soul at bay.

  Gloomy. Young-old. Devoted to the ancient, the rare, the forgotten. Cursed with a power he no longer wanted. That was a first approximation of Gneaus Julius Storm.

  The power was like some mythological cloak that could not be shed. The more he tried to slough it, the tighter it clung and the heavier it grew. There were just two ways to shed it forever.

  Each required a death. One was his own. The other was Richard Hawksblood's.

  Once, Hawksblood's death had been his life's goal. A century of futility had passed. It no longer seemed to matter as much.

  Storm's heaven, if ever he attained it, would be a quiet, scholarly place that had an opening for a knowledgeable amateur antiquarian.

  The ravenshrike spread its wings momentarily.

  Three: 3052 AD

  Can we understand a man without knowing his enemies? Can we know yin without knowing yang? My father would say no. He would say if you want to see new vistas of Truth, go question the man who wants to kill you.

  A man lives. When he is young he has more friends than he can count. He ages. The circle narrows. It turns inward, becoming more closed. We spend our middle and later years doing the same things with the same few friends. Seldom do we admit new faces to the clique.

  But we never stop making enemies.

  They are like dragon's teeth flung wildly about us as we trudge along the paths of our lives. They spring up everywhere, unwanted, unexpected, sometimes unseen and unknown. Sometimes we make or inherit them simply by being who or what we are.

  My father was an old, old man. He was his father's son.

  His enemies were legion. He never knew how many and who they were.

  —Masato Igarashi Storm

  Four: 2844 AD

  The building was high and huge and greenhouse-hot. The humidity and stench were punishing. The polarized glassteel roof had been set to allow the maximum passage of sunlight. The air conditioning was off. The buckets of night earth had not been removed from the breeding stalls.

  Norbon w'Deeth leaned on a slick brass rail, scanning the enclosed acres below the observation platform.

  Movable partitions divided the floor into hundreds of tiny cubicles rowed back to back and facing narrow passageways. Each cubicle contained an attractive female. There were so many of them that their breathing and little movements kept the air alive with a restless susurrus.

  Deeth was frightened but curious. He had not expected the breeding pens to be so huge.

  His father's hand touched his shoulder lightly, withdrew to flutter in his interrogation of his breeding master. The elder Norbon carried half a conversation with his hands.

  "How can they refuse? Rhafu, they're just animals."

  Deeth's thoughts echoed his father's. The Norbon Head could not be wrong. Rhafu had to be mistaken. Breeding and feeding were the only things that interested animals.

  "You don't understand, sir." Old Rhafu's tone betrayed stress. Even Deeth sensed his frustration at his inability to impress the Norbon with the gravity of the situation. "It's not entirely that they're refusing, either. They're just not interested. It's the boars, sir. If it were just the sows the boars would take them whether or not they were willing."

  Deeth looked up at Rhafu. He was fond of the old man. Rhafu was the kind of man he wished his father were. He was the old adventurer every boy hoped to become.

  The responsibilities of a Family Head left little time for close relationships. Deeth's father was a remote, often harried man. He seldom gave his son the attention he craved.

  Rhafu was a rogue full of stories about an exciting past. He proudly wore scars won on the human worlds. And he had time to share his stories with a boy.

  Deeth was determined to emulate Rhafu. He would have his own adventures before his father passed the family into his hands. His raidships would plunder Terra, Toke, and Ulant. He would return with his own treasury of stories, wealth, and honorable scars.

  It was just a daydream. At seven he already knew that heirs-apparent never risked themselves in the field. Adventures were for younger sons seeking an independent fortune, for daughters unable to make beneficial alliances, and for possessionless men like Rhafu. His own inescapable fate was to become a merchant prince like his father, far removed from the more brutal means of accumulating wealth. The only dangers he would face would be those of inter-Family intrigues over markets, resources, and power.

  "Did you try drugs?" his father asked. Deeth yanked himself back to the here and now. He was supposed to be learning. His father would smack him a good one if his daydreaming became obvious.

  "Of course. Brood sows are always drugged. It makes them receptive and keeps their intellection to a minimum."

  Rhafu was exasperated. His employer had not visited Prefactlas Station for years. Moreover, the man confessed that he knew nothing about the practical aspects of slave breeding. Fate had brought him here in the midst of a crisis, and he persisted in asking questions which cast doubt on the competence of the professionals on the scene.

  "We experimented with aphrodisiacs. We didn't have much luck. We got more response when we butchered a few boars for not performing, but when we watched them closer we saw they were withdrawing before ejaculation. Sir, you're looking in the wrong place for answers. Go poke around outside the station boundary. The animals wouldn't refuse if they weren't under some external influence."

  "Wild ones?" The Norbon shrugged, dismissing the idea. "What about artificial insemination? We don't dare get behind. We've got contracts to meet."

  This was why the Norbon was in an unreasonable mood. The crisis threatened the growth of the Norbon profit curve.

  Deeth turned back to the pens. Funny. The animals looked so much like Sangaree. But they were filthy. They stank.

  Rhafu said some of the wild ones were different, that they cared for themselves as well as did people. And the ones the Family kept at home, at the manor, were clean and efficient and indistinguishable from real people.

  He spotted a sow that looked like his cousin Marjo. What would happen if a Sangaree woman got mixed in with the animals? Could anyone pick her out? Aliens like the Toke and Ulantonid were easy, but these humans could pass as people.

  "Yes. Of course. But we're not set up to handle it on the ne
cessary scale. We've never had to do it. I've had instruments and equipment on order since the trouble started."

  "You haven't got anything you can make do with?" Deeth's father sounded peevish. He became irritable when the business ran rocky. "There's a fortune in the Osirian orders, and barely time to push them through the fast-growth labs. Rhafu, I can't default on a full-spectrum order. I won't. I refuse."

  Deeth smiled at a dull-eyed sow who was watching him half-curiously. He made a small, barely understood obscene gesture he had picked up at school.

  "Ouch!"

  Having disciplined his son, the Norbon turned to Rhafu as though nothing had happened. Deeth rubbed the sting away. His father abhorred the thought of coupling with livestock. To him that was the ultimate perversion, though the practice was common. The Sexon Family maintained a harem of specially bred exotics.

  "Thirty units for the first shipment," Rhafu said thoughtfully. "I think I can manage that. I might damage a few head forcing it, though."

  "Do what you have to."

  "I hate to injure prime stock, sir. But there'll be no production otherwise. We've had to be alert to prevent self-induced abortion."

  "That bad? It's really that bad?" Pained surprise flashed across the usually expressionless features of the Norbon. "That does it. You have my complete sanction. Do what's necessary. These contracts are worth the risk. They're going to generate follow-ups. The Osirian market is wide open. Fresh. Untouched. The native princes are total despots. Completely sybaritic and self-indulgent. It's one of the human First Expansion worlds gone feral. They've devolved socially and technologically to a feudal level."

  Rhafu nodded. Like most Sangaree with field experience, he had a solid background in human social and cultural history.

  The elder Norbon stared into the pens that were the cornerstone of the Family wealth. "Rhafu, Osiris is the Norbon Wholar. Help me exploit it the way a Great House should."

  Wholar. That's the legendary one, Deeth thought. The bonanza. The bottomless pot of gold. The world so big and wild and rich that it took five Families to exploit it, the world that had made the consortium Families first among the Sangaree.