Shadowline-The Starfishers Trilogy I Read online

  The water stopped.

  Two Legionnaires stood in the doorway, holding a fire hose. Frieda Storm pushed past them, her face aquiver with anger. She looked every bit as daunting as her father, Cassius. "Benjamin. Get your clothes on. Woman. You too. Lucifer. On your feet. Now!" She kicked him. It was no delicate female toe tap.

  She did not ask what had happened. That was obvious.

  "What the hell is the matter with you?" she demanded of Benjamin. "There a suicidal streak in you? First that crap with Richard's cruiser, now this."

  "Mother, I . . . "

  "Homer did it. Yes. And who's responsible for Homer? Who let him do it? Heinrich, take Lucifer to Medical. There's something wrong with his hand." She moved toward Pollyanna. The girl was getting dressed so fast she kept getting snaps lined up wrong. Frieda grabbed her chin, turned her head one way, then the other. Pollyanna avoided her eyes. "What happened to your throat?"

  "I did it," Benjamin murmured.

  "What did you say?"

  "I did it, Mother. I had the dream . . . This time he caught me. I was fighting him."

  Frieda's face changed slightly. It was not a softening, just a momentary shadow of fear. "I'll have to talk to Madame Endor. Get a new reading. She was afraid this would happen."

  "Mother . . . "

  "Benjamin, don't you have any decency? Don't you have any common sense? This is your brother's wife. This is your brother's home. Shut up! I know she's a damned public utility. I know that anybody who asks gets. You should have brains enough not to ask. You should, for Christ's sake, have brains enough to realize that he'd want to see her tonight. He's leaving the Fortress tomorrow."

  "Leaving? I didn't know . . . "

  "My father wants him to do something. If you paid attention to anything but your own precious self . . . " She turned to Pollyanna, "Get this place cleaned up. I'll send someone to help. And be warned. I'm taking this up with my husband when he gets back. Benjamin." She took his hand. "Come on."

  Once in the citadel of her own apartment Frieda clutched him close, and whispered, exasperated, "Ben, darling boy, why do you do these things? I just can't keep getting you out of trouble. Your father is going to throw a bearing when he hears about this."

  "Mother . . . "

  "He'll hear about it. It'll be all over the Fortress tomorrow, for God's sake. Ben, stay away from her. She's like a cat in heat. She doesn't care."

  "Mother . . . "

  "Sit down. There. Good. I want you to think now, Ben. Really think. About you. About that woman. About Lucifer. About what all is happening here. The problems your father and grandfather have. And most of all, about Michael Dee. Michael Dee is here, Ben. Did you bother to wonder why? There's a reason. He doesn't do anything without a sneaky reason. And your father and grandfather made the mistake of leaving while he's here."

  "Mother . . . "

  "Don't move. Don't talk. Just think. I'll make you a drink."

  She did, and while he nursed it she made comm calls. First she spoke with Madame Endor, the occultist she had imported from New Earth. It was a long conversation. She ended it wearing a pale face.

  She placed the second call to the armory, waking the chief armorer. She ordered him to provide Benjamin with one of the lightweight weapon-proof "undersuits" Interstellar Technics had been trying to peddle to her husband for wear under ordinary garments.

  "I don't care if we haven't bought them, Captain. I'll pay for it myself if the Legion won't. And make the modifications. He'll be down for his fitting in the morning." She ended the call angrily.

  She went over and sat opposite her son, stared at him till he looked up and asked, "You called Madame Endor, didn't you?"

  She nodded.

  "About the dream? What did she say?" Frieda did not respond. "Was it bad?"

  "Ben, first thing tomorrow I want you to go to the armory. Captain Fergus will fit you with one of the ITI personal suits."

  "Mother . . . "

  "Do it, Benjamin."

  "Mother . . . "

  "I mean it, Benjamin."

  He sighed.

  The fear hit him. It was the first time it had come while he was awake. Involuntarily, he looked back to see how close the Faceless Man had come.

  Twenty-Two: 2844-2845 AD

  The Sangaree facility for bearing hatred like a torch against the night sustained Deeth throughout the grim months of his captivity. Jackson sometimes came close to crushing him, and assumed he had, but always, way back behind the meek exterior he adopted as protective coloration, Deeth nurtured his hatred. He thought, planned, and schooled his patience.

  A week after his attempted escape Jackson took him to the village. The visit shook him more than had the old man's knowledge of his racial identity.

  The village itself met his expectations. It consisted of a dozen filthy, primitive huts. The villagers were semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers. There were a hundred of them, ranging from numerous children to a handful of old folks.

  The chieftain was about thirty Prefactlas years of age. That was barely adult by civilized standards. Here he was an elder. Life in the forest was brief and brutal.

  About thirty Norbon workers and breeder fugitives had reached the village. Their condition astounded Deeth.

  The wild animals were using their cousins as slaves, and far more cruelly than had the Norbon. The villagers were still exchanging jests about their gullibility.

  Deeth followed Jackson as he went from house to house in search of patients. He saw Norbon animals being mistreated everywhere. There was a girl, no older than he, who had been confined in a storage pit for spurning the chieftain. There was a field hand nailed to a rude cross, moaning and coughing up blood. He had fought back. There was a corpse in the square, rotting away. Insects masked it. The man had been roasted alive.

  Deeth's stomach churned all day. How could these beasts use their own kind so cruelly? They had no reason.

  Was this why his elders held the human species in such contempt?

  Jackson had done him an accidental kindness by frustrating his escape. He could have stumbled into something worse.

  Jackson used steaming, fetid poultices to treat a growth on the chieftain's neck. Deeth squatted in the dust outside, beside the pit holding the girl. She hid in shadows and tangled, blood-caked, once-blonde hair. Her shoulders were scabby ruins. A cloud of insects surrounded her. She looked like one of the Nordic pleasure girls, a cheap, mass-market product.

  There was a steady demand for Nordics. The Norbon raised them real-time. The Family had a good strain.

  The Norbon claimed several excellent pleasure strains. Coffee Mulatto Number Three regularly placed in the shows.

  Deeth shrugged. That was another reality, a billion light-years away and a thousand years ago. It was another Deeth who had learned pride in Family achievement.

  "You," he grunted.

  She did not respond. He kept squatting there. The sun crept across the sky, sliding his shadow across her. He felt her growing curiosity.

  She glanced up, saw the rope around his throat. Fear and hope crossed her battered face.

  Deeth did not recognize her. Clearly, she knew him. He smiled reassuringly.

  He felt the caress of compassion, a gnarly, knobbly sort that had its roots more in classroom training than genuine emotion. He had been taught to cherish and maintain Family property. Abuse and waste were sins. Homeworld was a sometimes harsh, always poor planet. Its values and institutions were geared to conservation.

  He could order a thousand slaves killed without a touch of conscience if there was a compelling need. He could not waste one, or destroy it out of malice. He could not abide waste or malice in others.

  That was fitting in a Head.

  He was the senior Norbon on Prefactlas now. The welfare and conservation of Norbon properties were his responsibility.

  "Be patient, girl," he whispered. "Endure. We'll create our own good luck."

  He felt foolish. His promise
was meaningless. He was powerless to hurt or help. What would his father have done? Or Rhafu?

  The same. Endure. Take care of their own.

  An animal came howling into the village. He pointed behind him. The empty square filled. Animals hustled their valuables, especially the new slaves, into places of hiding. Bows and spears appeared.

  Jackson grabbed Deeth's rope and fled. The old man cursed softly and continuously.

  A pair of Marine personnel carriers clanked into the village from the far side. A support ship whickered over, hovered above the square. There were shouts and explosions. They faded as the old man kept putting distance behind them.

  Were they looking for him? Deeth wondered. Did they know about his escape? He hoped not. Sant spare him, they would hunt till they got him. Humans were singleminded that way.

  They reached the cave. Jackson beat him as though he were responsible for the raid.

  He endured.

  Months groaned by. Each staggered on like a wounded leviathan.

  Deeth spent three-quarters of a Prefactlas year as Jackson's slave. They made weekly trips to the village. The animals had stayed put since the raid. They were afraid to migrate. Stronger tribes might prey upon them.

  The slave girl Emily was the only Norbon animal not recovered by the Marines. Deeth visited with her whenever he had a chance. He kept repeating his promise of rescue.

  He added the obligation to his hatred. Together they sustained him.

  Twenty-Three: 3031 AD

  In 3031 the dead did not always stay down.

  Human brains were in demand in an exploding cryocyborgic data-processing industry. Personality-scrubbed and inplugged to computation and data-storage systems, a few kilos of human nervous tissue could replace tons of specialized control and volitional systems.

  No remedy for degradation in nervous tissue had yet been found. The cryocyborgic environment sometimes accelerated decay.

  Nerve life had become the practical span limit for men like Gneaus Storm, who had power, money, and access to the finest rejuvenation and resurrection technology.

  The number of brains available for cryocyborging never filled demand. The shortfall was filled in a variety of ways. Old Earth sold the brains of criminals in exchange for hard outworlds currency. A few were available through underworld channels. The bulk came of involuntary salvage.

  There were a dozen entrepreneurs who jackaled around the edges of disasters and armed conflicts, snapping up loose bodies to resell organs. Confederation's armed forces often left their lower grade enlisted men where they fell. The soldiers themselves were indifferent to the fate of their corpses. Most were desperate men willing to risk anything to earn a long retirement outside the slums of their birth.

  Gneaus Storm's agents dogged the service battlegrounds too, selecting men who had died well. Cryonically preserved, they were revived later and asked to join the Legion.

  Most accepted with a childlike gratitude. A rise from a slum to the imaginary glory and high life of the Iron Legion, after having escaped the Reaper by Storm's grace, seemed an elevation to paradise. The holonets called them the Legion of the Dead.

  Helga Dee used hundreds of scavenged brains in her business. Only the Dees themselves knew the capacity of her Helga's World "information warehouse." Publicly, Helga admitted only to capabilities in keeping with brain acquisitions that were a matter of public record.

  Storm was sure she controlled a capacity twice what she admitted.

  Helga's World was a dead planet. The human contagion had touched it only once, to create and occupy the vast installation called Festung Todesangst. The heart of Helga's far-reaching Corporation lay there, deep beneath the surface of that remote rock cold in the claws of entropy, orbiting a dying star. No one went in but family, the dead, and that occasional person the Dees wanted to disappear. No one came out but Dees.

  The defenses at Festung Todesangst were legend. They were as quirky and perverse as Helga herself.

  Men who went down to Helga's World were like last year's mayflies: gone forever. And Gneaus Storm meant to penetrate that ice-masked hell hole.

  He did not expect Helga to welcome him. She hated him with a hatred archetypal in its depth and fury. Michael's children all hated Storm. Each had compelled him to recognize his or her existence and respond. His crime was that he had come out on top every time.

  The Dee offspring were worse than their father.

  Fearchild had raised his fuss, costing Cassius a hand. Storm and Cassius now kept him confined in a place only they knew. He was a hostage guaranteeing restraint by the others. The Dees were, unfortunately, all irrational, passionate people, apt to forget in heated moments.

  Helga had tried to avenge Fearchild by capturing Storm's daughter Valerie and using her as part of Festung Todesangst.

  Storm's response had been to capture Helga and deliver her to her own fortress so badly mauled that she had been able to survive only by cyborging in to her own machines. Forever damned to a mechanical half-life, she calculated and brooded and awaited a day when she could requite his cruelties.

  Seth-Infinite, too, had given frequent offense. He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, appearing openly some place like Luna Command, then disappearing before the swiftest hunters closed in. Half the things he did were nose-thumbings at the Storms. Like his father, he was slippery, and he always had several schemes in the air. Like Michael, he did nothing for a simple, linear reason.

  It would be a fine, serendipitous thing, Storm reflected, if Cassius surprised Seth-Infinite on The Mountain.

  Twenty-Four: 2354-3031 AD

  Michael Dee's moments of happiness were tiny islands scattered in a vast sea. His life was a swift one. He had so much in the air that, when he found time to look around, he seemed to have surfaced in an alien universe. In the year of the Shadowline he had nothing but his schemes.

  He always had been a little outside. His earliest memory was of a fight with Gneaus over his being different.

  Gneaus eventually accepted him. He had less luck accepting himself.

  Down on the bottom line Michael Dee did not like Michael Dee very much. There was something wrong with him.

  That he was different he first inferred from his mother's attitude. She was too protective, too fearful.

  Boris Storm, the man he thought was his father, was seldom around. Boris was preoccupied with his work. He had few chances to be with his family. Michael developed no bond with the paterfamilias.

  Emily Storm hovered over her firstborn. She corrected and protected, corrected and protected, till Michael was convinced that there was an evil in him that scared her silly.

  What was this dark thing? He agonized over it by the hour and could find nothing.

  Other children sensed it. They withdrew. He studied people, seeking his reflection. He found ways to manipulate others, but the real secret eluded him.

  Only Gneaus accepted him. Poor bullheaded Gneaus, who would take a beating rather than admit that his brother was strange.

  Poor health complicated Michael's childhood. Boris spent fortunes on doctors. Bad genes, they would hazard, after finding nothing specifically wrong.

  He was weak, pale, and sickly into his teens. His brother fought his battles. Gneaus was so strong, so stubborn, and so feared that the other children ignored Michael rather than risk a fight.

  So Michael began spinning tall tales as an attention-getting device. He was amazed. His stories were believed! He had a talent. When he recognized the power he had to shape the truth, he used it.

  In time he came to weigh every word, every gesture, before revealing it. He calculated its effect on his audience carefully. He reached the point where he could not be direct. In time even the simplest end had to be accomplished by complex means.

  He never found his way out of that self-made trap.

  He was blessed, or cursed, with brilliance and an almost eidetic memory. He used those tools to keep his webs of deceit taut and strong. He became
a master liar, deceiver, and schemer. He lived at the eye of a hurricane of falsehood and discord.

  In those days Academy's minimum-age requirement was fourteen standard years. As Gneaus's eligibility year approached, Boris Storm maneuvered to obtain favorable consideration for his son and stepson.

  Boris was the scion of an old military family. His ancestors had been career people with the Palisarian Directorate, one of the founder-states of Confederation. He had departed service himself, but could conceive of no higher goal toward which to direct his offspring. He aimed them at commissions all their lives. Their early education took place in a private, militarily oriented special school he set up for the children of Prefactlas Corporation's officers.

  Michael and Gneaus first encountered Richard Hawksblood there. He was Richard Woracek at the time. He took the name Hawksblood when he became a mercenary.

  Richard was the son of a management consultant Boris brought in to improve his profit margin. The family had no service background. Richard was an outsider among children who saw civilians as a lower life form. Richard was, at the outset, smaller and more sickly than Michael. He was Dee's favorite victim.

  Richard accepted slings and arrows with calm dignity and a refusal to be aroused. His imperturbability infuriated his classmates. He fought back by being better than anyone at everything. Only Gneaus was able, on occasion, to rise to the rarefied airs where Woracek soared.

  His excellence only compounded his troubles with his peers. Gneaus, who was his closest acquaintance, often became exasperated because Richard would not fight back.

  "The scores will even themselves," Woracek promised.

  They did.

  Eligibility time arrived, and with it Academy's grueling competitive exams. The youths flashed like spearpoints toward the target at which their parents had aimed their young lives. They streaked toward their chances to become card-carrying members of the established elite.

  The battery lasted six exhausting days. Part was physical and psychological. A substantial fraction sampled general knowledge and tested problem-solving abilities. The candidates knew Richard would ace those forms. They were surprised to see Michael finish them almost as quickly.