Shadowline Read online

  “What do you mean, get tight? It already is. I had sticktights all day yesterday. Some of them stayed so close we could have worn the same shoes.”

  “That’s what they get for using local talent. But I think that’s part of their camouflage. We’d figure a place this important would have a battalion of high-powered types baby-sitting it. If somebody hadn’t gotten onto S’Plez, they might have rolled along forever.”

  “I’ve got a feeling too, Mouse. And it ain’t a good one. What happens if we get caught in a crunch between them and the Starduster?”

  Mouse whipped a finger to his lips. “Let’s not get back to tertiary cover yet,” he breathed. Then he grinned. “Going to suicide? Look, if you have trouble, make the fallbacks. If I can’t make them myself, I’ll drop you a note somewhere. Otherwise, I’ll catch you here tonight. It should be our last here, anyway.”

  Niven hit the lobby convinced that Mouse knew a lot more than he was telling. But that would be typical. Mouse was Beckhart’s fair-haired boy. His perfectly expendable fair-haired boy.

  He glanced back at the holorama. It was portraying one of the furious electrical storms in Ginunga Gap on Camelot. A herd of wind-whales quartered toward him through the rain and lightning.

  For Beckhart the Bureau’s work was a game. A vastly recomplicated form of the chess to which Mouse was addicted. The universe was his board. He would sacrifice his most precious pawn for a minuscule advantage.

  He had been taking on the entire Sangaree race for a generation. And, with the implacability of a glacier, he was winning.

  The prices of little victories left Niven appalled.

  It took some sweet talk on his part to get to the Med Center’s commercial records. He never was quite sure what made the old nurse give in. Somewhere along the line he said the right things. Pretty soon her death mask fell apart and reassembled itself in imitation of a smiling face. Then she fell all over herself explaining the data-retrieval system.

  The information was there. A bonanza, and only thinly disguised. More than Mouse could have prayed for. This was the data center from which the whole operation was controlled. And it was not guarded by so much as a data lock.

  The Sangaree were notoriously sloppy administrators. They had entered the interstellar community as predators, and had never really adapted to the demands of modern commerce. Action-oriented, they tended to ignore boring details, especially on worlds they believed safely in their pocket.

  Like making sure no one without an absolute need had access to their records.

  There had been a time when the need for protection would not have occurred to them at all, just as certain hues might not occur as existing to a color-blind man who had spent his entire life among others with the same affliction. But they were learning. Beckhart was teaching them via the Pavlovian method. The weakness was his favorite angle of attack.

  The Sangaree did keep one secret. They wrote it down nowhere, and defended it to the death. The need to protect it was the one thing that could bring all the Families together. Even Families in vendetta would set aside their enmity long enough to keep Homeworld’s location from becoming known.

  On Borroway Sangaree children had murdered their younger brothers and sisters and had then committed suicide rather than face human interrogation, and that just because they had been afraid they might know something the human animals would find useful.

  The hospital records were perfect. Niven unearthed few names, but did gather business intelligence pinpointing critical distribution points on more than two dozen worlds. Crimped there, the pipelines would require years of healing.

  He found it incredible that a people could be so ingenious in marketing and so inept in administration. But the Sangaree were pure power people. They provided the muscle, money, guns, and merchandise. They let human underlings take most of the risks. And lumps.

  From the Sangaree viewpoint their human associates did not much matter. The tips of the kraken’s tentacles were nothing but ignorant, expendable animals. They could be replaced by others just as ignorant, greedy, and expendable.

  Only one or two people on a market world could point toward Angel City. Only from the back of the beast itself could the entirety of the monster be seen. And the beast was solidly in Sangaree pay.

  Marya caught him before he finished. “What in the world?” she demanded when she found him immersed in the data, far from his usual orbit.

  Five: 3048 AD

  Operation Dragon, Lifting Off

  “Sorry I startled you.” A she-wolf’s grin made it plain that the Sangaree woman felt no remorse whatsoever. “I’m Maria Elana Gonzalez. Atmosphere Systems. Distributions Methods. Sometimes I do a little Hydroponics Ecology. I don’t have a Master’s for either, though. Too busy with other things.” She smiled her gun-metal smile.

  Yes, benRabi thought, the lady has other interests. Stardust and murder.

  “Moyshe benRabi,” he replied, in case she had forgotten.

  “An unusual name.” She smiled that smile. “Jewish?”

  “So I’m told. I’ve never been in a synagogue in my life.”

  “You wouldn’t be a writer?” She knew damned well that he was. Or that he pretended to be. He had whispered to her about it . . . “The name sounds so literary, somehow.”

  “I try, yes.” Was she going to expose the Pale Imperator?

  No. She did not push it. Nor did she thrust with anything from her arsenal of needles.

  “What made you decide to sign up?” she asked.

  “Unemployment.”

  “A space plumber? You’re kidding. You must be on the blacklist.”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Somebody’s. What about you?”

  “The money.”

  The vibrations of hatred had begun mellowing out. She was controlling herself superbly.

  BenRabi let it flow. He hurt too much to fence, or to probe about her mission. The armed truce persisted till the lighter reached the Starfisher.

  Moyshe did not forget that she was Sangaree, that she would drink his blood happily. He simply tabled the facts for the time being.

  Hundreds of her people had died because of him. Her children were dying. She would do something. The Sangaree tradition of honor, of Family responsibility, would compel her . . .

  But she would not act right away. She had come here on a mission. She would complete that first. He could relax for a while.

  As introspective and morality-stricken as he sometimes became, he could not feel guilty about The Broken Wings. Nor about its aftermath. Humanity and Sangaree were at war, and the Sangaree had fired the opening shot. That it was a subterranean war, fought at an almost personal level, did not matter. Nor did the fact that only humanity perceived a war, that the Sangaree were just in business. Battles were battles. Casualties were casualties, no matter how or why they went down.

  Most of his associates and contemporaries hated the Sangaree, but to him they were just people. People he had to hurt sometimes, because of what they did and represented.

  He snorted. The most bigoted man alive could say the same thing and mean it.

  The whole stardust trade turned his stomach.

  “The trouble with me is, I don’t love or hate anything,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Thinking with my mouth in gear.”

  His mood left nothing counting. Nothing could move him. The pain tablets had kicked him into nirvana. Or into a depthless black pit where the light of emotion simply could not shine. He was not sure which.

  He did not care. He did not give a damn about anything. Instead, he immersed himself in the mystery he called Mouse.

  BenRabi believed he knew Mouse better than did anyone but the Admiral. A lot of one another had leaked across during their teamed operations. These little flare-ups in the secret war were slowly melting them, molding them . . .

  And still Mouse remained a mobile enigma.

  Mouse scared hell out of benRabi.

  Mo
use was the only man he knew who had killed someone with his bare hands.

  Killing had not become a social dodo. But the personal touch had been removed. Murder had become mechanized, its soul and involvement eliminated. It had been that way for so long that most civilians could not endure the emotions they suffered if they entered a killing rage.

  Their brains shorted. They went zombie. And nothing happened.

  Anybody could push a button and hurl a missile to obliterate a ship of a thousand souls. A lot of timid little anybodies had.

  The same anybody could sleep without dreaming the following night. The involvement was with the button, not the bang.

  Ample opportunities arose in nice remote space battles with Sangaree, McGraw pirates, or in the marque-and-reprisal antics of minor governments, for that kind of killing. But to do a man face to face, with hands or knife or gun . . . It was too personal.

  Confederation men did not like to get too close to anyone. Not even to end a life. A man knew he was in too deep if the urge arose.

  The People of Now wanted no faces on their haunts.

  BenRabi was free-associating, and unable to escape the flight of his thoughts. Mouse. Interpersonal relationships. The two joined forces to kick him into a pit of fear.

  He had known Mouse as early as their Academy days. They had shared their moments then, both in training and the play typified by sunjammer racing in the wild starwinds of an old supernova. They had crewed their sunjammer victoriously, and had shared celebrations during leave. But they had refused, persistently, to become anything more than acquaintances.

  Friends were strange creatures. They became responsibilities. They became walking symbols of emotional debits and personal obligations.

  He was getting too close to Mouse. Growing too fond of the strange little man. And he suspected that Mouse was having the same trouble.

  Friendship would be bad for their professional detachment. It could get them into trouble.

  The Bureau had promised that they would not be teamed again after the operation on The Broken Wings. The Bureau had lied. As it always did. Or this really was a critical, hurry-up, top-man job.

  He wondered. The Admiral apparently would do or say, or promise anything to get the work done.

  Always there was a rush but he had no good reason to complain. Hurry was inherent in the modern social structure. Change came about so swiftly that policy, operational, and emotional obsolescence developed overnight. Decision and action had to be sudden to be effective.

  The system shuddered constantly under the thundering impact of precipitous error.

  BenRabi was now involved in one of the Bureau’s few old, stable programs. Catching a starfish herd had been a prime mission before his birth. He suspected it would continue to be one long after his death.

  He might die of boredom here. He now saw little hope that he and Mouse would be recalled early. The presence of Sangaree altered all the rules.

  He had abandoned all hope of enjoying the mission.

  Somehow, sometimes, because of the Sangaree woman or otherwise, he or Mouse would get hurt.

  A clang rang through the shuttle. The vessel shuddered. BenRabi ceased flaying himself with the tiny, dull knives of the mind.

  The lighter nosed into its mother ship like a piglet to a sow’s belly. Moyshe followed the crowd moving to board the starship. He worked his way close to the pale Seiner girl. Could he pick up where he had left off?

  He wondered why she intrigued him so. Just because she had been kind?

  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.

  “Lights!” 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 s
pace 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.