Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (16 page)

A man could do a lot of thinking if he was alone with himself in a spacesuit, Helmut reflected.

“But he could . . . ” Frieda began.

“Get hurt?” Helmut snapped, bludgeoning her line. “Crap. He’ll be safer outside. He’s not suicidal, is he?” He glanced at Michael Dee, smiling a thin, bitter smile.

Benjamin reddened.

“Accidents happen!” Frieda had become neurotic about her son’s safety.

“Relax, Mother,” Homer said with heavy sarcasm. “You’d still have me to dote on.”

Frieda winced. She forced a smile while coloring guiltily.

Homer’s dead eyes glared at the floor. He knew. Even from his mother affection had to be forced.

“Accidents, yes,” Helmut mused, smiling at Dee again. “I’ve been giving accidents a certain amount of thought. They’re like mutations. Once in a while one can be beneficial. Wulf and I were discussing the possibilities a bit ago.”

Dee’s smile vanished. He had gotten the message. And he had noted the marks strain had left on Helmut. It was time he became more circumspect. Helmut had declared, albeit obliquely, that he no longer considered the interests of Gneaus Julius Storm and those of the Legion to be congruent. The hint that he and his brother were ready to eliminate Dee indicated a revolution in thought that could spread throughout the organization. When the old lap dogs stood on their hind legs and growled . . . 

Helmut sat there and smiled as if reading Michael’s every thought.

Frieda went on nagging. Helmut finally exploded. “You question my orders, madam? Complain to the colonel when he returns. Meantime, hold your tongue.”

It was as harsh an admonition as ever he had given a woman. She shut up. Storm always supported those upon whom he bestowed the proconsular power.

Having delivered his messages, Helmut went to waken Thurston Storm. Thurston was his relief. Initially, Thurston’s sole task had been to birddog Michael. With tension mounting, the Darkswords had been forced to saddle him with part of their burden. They worked staggered sixteen-hour shifts, one sleeping while the other two held chaos at bay.

“Friendly today, isn’t he?” Michael observed as Helmut stalked away. “He’d turn on the gloom at a wedding. Put the groom to work before the party started.”

Ah, his words were subtle. Benjamin was blind to their snare. “A party. That’s an idea, Michael. We need to liven this place up. I’ll put me on a going-outside party.”

Michael smiled and nodded.

The party, through Benjamin’s efforts, shed some of its early artificiality and turned fun. With the help of a few drinks the younger people forgot the pressures that had been building so swiftly and mysteriously. The occasional tentative spurt of laughter erupted from their midst.

Benjamin’s mother hovered in the background, as grim as an old raven. She had opposed the party from its inception, purely on feeling. She had been unable to sway Benjamin. Madame Endor had failed. He was in revolt against mothering. He would not let them save him.

He could be as stubborn as his father.

Where were her husband and father? Frieda wondered. The Fortress was going to hell and they were off God knew where chasing women or something.

Dee watched the partiers with a disdainful, mocking smile.

Thurston Storm observed from a doorway. He was a huge, sullen, muscular redhead who looked too simple for even the most obvious subtleties. His appearance was an illusion. He was a dangerous man.

He resented having been left off the guest list. They thought him too boisterous. It did not occur to him that he could simply abandon his duties and invite himself in. He just stood there with his arms folded across his chest. His right hand clutched a needlegun made tiny by the size of his fist. It tracked Michael Dee as if computer-aimed.

Thurston puzzled everyone. He seemed almost a hollow man, entirely an appearance. He had the disquieting vacuity of a Pollyanna Eight. The appearances he presented sometimes conflicted. Occasionally he was a reflection of his father. Most of the time he appeared to be what people took him for, a big, dull, happy fellow who drank as if there were no future, ate for a company, brawled, bragged, and bullied his way through life. A mass of strength without a brain to guide it.

Wulf had absented himself from the party, pleading his work load. Pollyanna was sulking in her apartment. Helmut was asleep. Everyone else was there.

Benjamin looked splendid in a uniform of his own design. It was too ruffled and gaudy for the Legion. His father would not have approved. He was not pleased with it himself. His protective armor softened its effect.

That armor was the finest available. Energy weapons would feed its shields. Anything moving at high velocity would pillow out in its fields. Those fields would seize and wrench aside the metal of an assassin’s blade. In a truly hostile environment he could button up and survive on his own air, water, and nutrient soup. He could not be touched. His mother bragged about his invulnerability when she was not being afraid he would find a way to get himself killed despite his protection.

Benjamin invented a game. He had his friends take turns shooting, hacking, and stabbing him. They ruined his uniform without harming him. He laughed a lot.

The point was to aggravate his mother.

Homer, alone in his blindness, shunned for his ugliness, sat and brooded. Another party, strong with the laughter of the beautiful women who gravitated to the Legion. Were they mocking him again? Women always laughed at him. Even that madwoman Pollyanna. Her real purpose for tempting him, surely, had been to mock him. And Frieda, that bitch who claimed to be his mother . . . She would like nothing better than to have him put away somewhere where she would not be embarrassed by him. She tried hard to pretend, but she could not hide from his flashes of psi.

No one cared. No one understood. Except Ben, his father, and sometimes that young, strange one, Mouse. And his father he could never forgive for having given him life. Surely, with all his power and money, he could have done something. Sight. Corrective surgery for his physical defects . . . 

He knew his father had tried. The human mind in despair seldom responds to the soft persuasion of reason.

In fits, Homer hated Gneaus Julius Storm.

“Homer. You’re unhappy,” said a voice nearby. He was startled. It contained more compassion than he had ever before heard. He was primed to take advantage of someone’s pity.

Odd that he had not sensed the speaker’s approach. His eyes were dead, but his other senses were strong. This man was a ghost.

“Who is it?” He did not recognize the voice.

“Michael.”

Of course. The sneaking and voice-changing should have cued him. “What do you want?”

“Only to cheer you up. The Fortress is becoming so terribly grim.”

Homer nodded. He did not believe a word, of course. Dee was the Prince of Liars, and always oblique. He might indeed do some cheering up, but only as a means to an end.

Homer’s suspicion was solidly grounded. His handicap betrayed him. Without vision he could not detect the evil Michael planned. Only on Dee’s face was the wickedness obvious, and that for but an instant.

Dee had discovered Benjamin’s Achilles’ heel. He had gotten the information from the man’s staunchest defender, his mother, simply by listening to her brag and worry.

“Would you like to get into the game, Homer? Benjamin is dueling. Maybe he’d give you a go.”

“Duel a blind man? You’re a fool, Dee.”

“Oh, I’ll help you. Here. Benjamin. Homer wants a try.” Dee glanced over his shoulder. A droplet of sweat dribbled down one temple. Thurston’s weapon still tracked him with deadly precision.

“Hell, why not?” Benjamin replied. “Come on, Homer. You’ll probably do better than these clowns.”

As was customary, the healthy stepped aside, condescending to allow the cripple his moment.

Glibly, smoothly, Dee talked Homer to his feet, placed a dueling knife in his hand, positioned him facing his twin. The gallery watched with amused smiles. Homer sensed their amusement. His temper soared.

“Count of three,” Michael said, easing back, trying to place someone between himself and Thurston. “One . . . ”

Benjamin, playing to his audience, presented his chest to Homer’s blade. He could not be hurt. No known hand weapon could penetrate the protection of his armor.

“Two . . . ”

Guided by Benjamin’s breathing, Homer lunged. He wanted to knock Ben onto his showoff ass.

For a long moment after the drugged tip of the wooden blade slipped through armor proof against any metal there was absolute silence. The tableau became a freezeframe from an old-time movie. Then Benjamin and Homer screamed with one voice. Their psi forces locked. Their rage and pain reached out to envelop the Fortress. Benjamin folded slowly. Homer fainted, toppled onto Benjamin. His mind could not withstand the psi backwash from his twin. Women shrieked. Men shouted.

And as quietly as he had come to the blind brother, while even Thurston’s attention was diverted, Michael Dee slipped away.

Pandemonium invaded the hall.

When Wulf arrived he found Thurston raging among a group of young officers trying to avenge Benjamin on Homer. The big man laid them out left and right while screaming for somebody to for God’s sake get the twins down to Medical.

A man slipped around Thurston and, with the guilty wooden blade, as Homer recovered consciousness, exacted vengeance. Thurston whirled and cracked the man’s skull.

Homer welcomed death with a smile. That dark lady was the only woman who could love him.

Wulf ignored the drama. With Medical a minute away nobody needed die the death-without-resurrection. He was looking for people notable for their absence.

Helmut roared in clad in nothing but underwear. He had a gun in each hand. “What happened?”

“Find Dee!” Wulf ordered. “Kill him. Cut him up and shove the pieces out different locks. The Colonel can’t stop it this time.”

Helmut looked at the bodies. He needed no more clues.

They separated, seeking a trail. They were hounds who would not be satisfied till the blood of their quarry stained their muzzles.

Wulf was too angry. He missed the most outstanding absence. Frieda. She should have been in the middle of things, screaming and weeping over her poor baby, preventing anything sensible from getting done.

Within minutes the entire Fortress was mobilized for the sole purpose of locating Michael Dee. But somehow, despite the planetoid’s limitations, he managed to evade capture.

The brothers Darksword conquered their emotions, repaired to Combat, directed the search from there.

They arrived as the man on instel communications ripped off a printout. It was a frantic message from Storm. Wulf read it first, bowed his head in despair. “Twenty minutes, that’s all it would have taken.”

“Signal too late. Twenty minutes too late. Sign my name,” Helmut said.

“I want Dee,” Wulf grumbled.

“Set the hounds on him.”

“Yes.”

In minutes they had Storm’s Sirian warhounds seeking a trail. They found it on Residential Level. It led to the ingress locks. Their questions baffled the duty section. They had seen no one but the Colonel’s wife in hours. She and two corpsmen had loaded a pair of medical-support cradles aboard an old singleship . . . 

“Oh, hell!” Wulf swore. “You think . . . ?”

Helmut nodded. He grabbed a comm.

It took two calls to confirm the worst. Dee, following Homer’s killing thrust, had seized Frieda and dragged her to her apartment. He had stripped and bound and gagged her, and had assumed her clothing and identity. From there he had gone to Medical and, playing on Frieda’s neurotic concern from Benjamin, had convinced the duty corpsmen to transfer the dead to a hospital with planetary resources backing it. Dee had played his part to such perfection that the unsuspecting corpsmen had helped move and load the cryo coffins.

Even those who had known the Darkswords for decades were awed by the rage they displayed.

“He isn’t away yet,” Helmut remarked after regaining his composure. “He didn’t know where the Colonel went when he pulled this. Let’s see what they say in Combat. We might have a shot at him yet.”

They commenced the counter game backed by Combat’s resources.

“He’s headed straight out,” Wulf said, indicating the Dee blip in the main global display. “Putting on a lot of inherent velocity while he’s getting up influence to go hyper.” He picked up a pointer and indicated each of a half-dozen blips chasing Dee. “They scrambled fast.”

The senior watchstander said, “I sent everybody who was on maneuvers when I heard what the situation was, sir.” He happened to be the man who had disappointed Storm and Cassius in the Abhoussi and Dee incident.

“Very good,” Helmut replied. “That’s thinking on your feet.”

“I scrambled everything in dock, too, sir. I assumed . . . ”

“You assumed correctly,” Wulf said. “Anything that will space. They’re starting to come on display, Helmut.”

A wild spray of diverging tracks began to spread behind the Dee blip. Wulf glanced to one side. “Tactical computer have control?”

“Yes, sir. You can input whatever the situation seems to call for.”

“Basal strategy?”

“Build a plane of no return behind Dee, sir. Put the fastest ships on the rim and move them forward to make a pocket.”

“Very good. Helmut, looks like we’ve got him. It might take a while, though.”

“We’re going to have to get a command ship out. We won’t be able to direct it from here for long.”

The senior watchstander said, “I held the
Robert Knottys
, sir. I’ve given them a direct feed. They’re running a parallel program. You can board and shift control.”

“Good. That’s a good start,” Wulf said.

“I believe we have him,” Helmut said, peering into the display tank. “Unless he’s headed somewhere damned close. That’s a damned slow boat he’s running.”

“What’s the nearest planetfall that direction?” Wulf asked. If Dee made planetfall before the jaws of pursuit closed he would become impossible to find. He would vanish amid the population and marshal his own resources in the time it took to track him down. His resources were not inconsiderable.