Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (20 page)

“It did take some doing. They tried to double check every captive to make sure none of us got away by hiding with the slaves. I mostly outran them. I had a hard few years, then I got settled in here. Except for the occasional agent from off planet, you’re the first of our people I’ve seen in nine years.”

“We’re the only survivors?” Prefactlas was irrevocably lost, then.

He had known that for a long time. The planet had been lost the moment a Dharvon had approached a human. He had been ducking the final admission. The denial was one brick in the wall he had raised to hide himself from the charge his father had set upon him. “How have you been keeping yourself, Rhafu? And do we have anything to build on?” His duty could be shirked no more.

Rhafu smiled. “I haven’t been remiss. Once a field man, always a field man. Don’t let my job fool you. I’ve become a very rich man. Being the only one of our people here has certain advantages. I’ve become the underworld here. I control it all. Without bragging, I can say the only man on Prefactlas with more power is Boris Storm. Nobody knows who I am, but everybody has heard of me.”

“The Serpent?”

“In the scaly flesh.”

“I’ll be damned.” Deeth laughed uncontrollably. “Why didn’t we run into each other sooner? Years have gone to waste, Rhafu.” The laughter evaporated. Rhafu had an empire of his own now. He might consider old obligations a liability.

“Were that true,” Rhafu replied to Deeth’s indirect question, “I wouldn’t be here today. I would’ve gotten off Prefactlas as soon as I had the machinery running smooth. I’d have gone somewhere safe and collected my cut and shown my strength just often enough to keep the would-be independents in line. No. I stayed because I still haven’t fulfilled my contract with the Norbon.”

Deeth grinned. Rhafu was as sentimental as a Sangaree could be. “What should we do now, Rhafu?”

The old man grinned right back. “That’s easy. We just reclaim the Family and its Homeworld power base.”

“Really? That’s going to take money and muscle, my friend. Do you have it?”

“No. Not enough. We’ll have to liquidate here and use the cash to pick up a ship and some good men. We’ll have to work Osiris till we’re strong enough. We’ll have to stay away from Homeworld but keep the Family informed so you don’t get frozen out of your patrimony. Osiris will be our leverage. It’ll bring them into line. Let’s see. Maybe two years? Then at least another two to consolidate and fatten the Family on Osiris? Another five to settle with the Dharvon, defend ourselves in court and accommodate ourselves with any new enemies the feud stirs up, and to thoroughly develop the Osirian operation? Another year or two just for margin? Say plan on at least ten before we’re solid, strong, and in any position to get down to the real work your father left us, the destruction of the animals who killed him and your mother.”

“That’s a lot of years, Rhafu.”

“You had something else to do with them? Perhaps you went through all that business in that cave just so you could retire?”

The years rolled away into the dusty corners of time. Deeth and Rhafu made dream after dream come real. They recaptured the Homeworld Norbon. They went to Osiris. They built a Norbon Family as strong and feared as any among the Sangaree. By cunning and guile they devoured several small Houses whom the Dharvon, aware of their Family’s complicity in the Prefactlas disaster, tried to frame with forged evidence. When the Norbon rapacity had been sated and they were ready to settle with the Dharvon for all time, Deeth had a friend bring in damning documents lifted directly from Prefactlas Corporation files.

Emily stayed one day after her appearance before the assembled Heads of the First Families. She had become a stunning woman. Deeth felt the yearnings of their earlier life together. As did she. But . . . 

Her years with Boris Storm had chipped the rough edges off her. She was no longer Emily the fugitive pleasure girl. She had become a lady, and one even a Sangaree must respect. She was a completely different person. She merely shared a few memories with Norbon w’Deeth’s little Emily.

And Deeth was no longer an orphan boy surviving in a shack in a slum on an enemy world.

They spent a quiet afternoon walking the perfectly landscaped gardens of the Norbon Family holding, remembering when and trying to get to know the people they had become.

It was a ritual of ending, a final emotional endorsement of the separation that had taken place while they were still those other people. In their respective ways they agreed that there were no debts between them now, no enmities, and no tomorrows.

Deeth shed a tear for her when she left him. And never saw her again.

But the children that she brought with her, the sons, would cross his path again and again.

Book Two—HANGMEN

Who springs the trap when the hangman dies?

Thirty-Five: 3052 AD

Some of the most unpleasant moments in life come when we have to face the fact that our parents are human and mortal. For me the revelations came in quick succession. They really rocked me, though I think I concealed my shock at the time.

I grew up believing my father a demigod. In an offhand way I knew he was mortal, but it simply never occurred to me that he could be killed. I suppose I should thank my uncle for removing those scales from my eyes.

I have only my father to thank, or blame, for making me realize that even the wise and noble Gneaus Julius Storm could be petty, arrogant, blind, unnecessarily cruel, and maybe even a little stupid. This latter revelation touched me far more deeply than did the other. After all, we all begin life under sentence of death. But nowhere is it written that our time on death row is to be spent compounding the idiocies and miseries of our fellow condemned.

Though I did not love him less afterward, I lost my awe of my father after witnessing his brush with my uncle. For a time just his presence made me suffer.

The loss of an illusion is a painful thing.

—Masato Igarashi Storm

Thirty-Six: 3031 AD

Gneaus Storm gradually drifted up into a universe of gnawing pain.

Where was he? What had happened?

His dying hand had reached the switch in time. Or the automatics had asserted themselves. Somehow, he had been enveloped by the escape balloon before vacuum could take a fatal bite.

He knew that he had not died. There was very little pain in a resurrection. When you died the docs gave you a complete overhaul before they brought you around again. You came out with the vivacity, spirit, and lack of internal pain characteristic of youth. If you did not die, and you came back by more mundane medical processes, you had to play it by Nature’s old rules. You took the pain along with the repairs.

More than once Storm wished they had let him go. Or that Cassius had had the decency to return him to the Fortress for proper medical care.

Storm once returned to consciousness to find a worry-faced, exhausted Mouse hovering over his medicare cradle. “Mouse,” he croaked, “what are you doing here?”

“Cassius told me to stay,” the boy replied. “It’s part of my training.” He forced a smile.

“He begged me.” Cassius’s voice, through the additional filter of the intercom speaker, sounded doubly mechanical and remote.

“Son, you’ve got to go back to Academy,” Storm insisted, forgetting that he had lost this argument once before.

“It’s arranged,” Cassius said.

Perhaps it was, Storm reflected. He was not remembering clearly. The past month was all a jumble. Maybe Cassius had used his clout with the War College.

He tried to laugh. His reward was a shot of excruciating pain. Vacuum had done a job on his lungs.

“He needed somebody to watch you and Michael,” Mouse told him, unaware that his father did not quite realize what was going on. “That’s not a one-man job even with Michael sedated.”

Storm remembered some of it. He smiled. Michael really impressed Cassius. Dee was only a man. He had been bested as often as not. His greatest talent was that of weaver of his own legend.

“He survived too, eh?” He remembered most of it now.

“He came through in better shape than you did,” Cassius said. “He took some elementary precautions.”

“It was his boat that was off tune,” Mouse added. “He jiggered it on purpose. A trick he learned from Hawksblood. Hawksblood sets all his drives so they’re off tune with everything but each other.”

“His first intelligence coup,” Cassius droned. “Though anybody with computer time and a little inspiration could have figured it out. Give him credit for the inspiration.”

Mouse reddened slightly.

“We’re headed for the asteroid?” Storm asked.

Mouse nodded. Cassius replied, “Yes. There’re still questions we might put to Michael and Fearchild.” Then, “We won’t be able to reach Michael by the usual methods. He’s been conditioned to resist drugs and polygraphs. Primitive methods may prove more efficacious.”

“Uhm.” Storm doubted that they would, though Michael, for all his bravado and daring, was a coward at heart.

How had Dee obtained an immunization course against the subtler forms of truth research? The process was complicated, expensive, and highly secret. Confederation restricted it to its most favored and highly ranked operatives and leaders in the most sensitive positions. Mouse, if he could stay alive for forty years and achieve flag grade, was the only man he knew who had a hope of attaining that signal honor. “Curious, that,” he murmured.

“How curious you can’t imagine.”

Inflections in Cassius’s speech were necessarily hard to grasp. This time Storm caught it. “You found something?”

“I think we learned most of it. It will be interesting watching the Dees while we discuss it.”

“You can’t tell me now?”

“We’re fifty-one hours from the asteroid. Take time to recuperate. You’re still disoriented. The discussion will be a strain.”

“No doubt.”

For two days Storm slept or endured his son’s vague, intriguing hints about what he and Cassius had discovered on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. He tried to make the best of it by retreating to his clarinet and Bible. One of his sergeants had risked his life to salvage them from the phase-disrupted wreck of his singleship.

His eye was too weak for the book, his fingers insufficiently coordinated for the instrument. Mouse read some for him. Time did not drag. He slept a lot.

Mouse wakened him once, so he could watch while Cassius blurred their influential backtrail in the field around a star. Walters meant to make a complete orbit, take hyper briefly while masked by the star’s own field, then drift for a day at a velocity slightly below that of light. The asteroid lay in the cometary belt of the chosen star.

The maneuver was intended to shed any unnoticed tail. Perforce, any such shadow would be operating at the limits of detection and would quickly lose contact.

Storm had Mouse move him to the control room for the stellar orbit.

“Cassius, roll her so the sun’ll be topside during orbit,” he said.

“You’ve got it.” The star wobbled slightly as Cassius adjusted the ship’s attitude. It swelled to the size of a sun. Cassius dove in, sliding around so close that the horizon curves vanished and they seemed to be drifting below an endless ceiling of fire. It was an Armageddon sky from which flames reached down with stately grace, as if to capture them and drag them into all that fury. Even smaller sunspots appeared as vast, dark continents surrounded by vaster oceans of flame. Cassius put all his filters up and let Storm stare, brooding, into that furnace that was the ultimate source of all other energies.

Storm said, “How like life itself a star is. It pulses. It struggles to maintain itself in a boundless ocean of cold despair. Every atom vibrates its little nucleus out, fighting the vampire night sucking its life. And the star fights knowing the struggle is hopeless, knowing that all it can do is die defiantly, going nova as its last grand gesture.”

Mouse leaned forward, listening intently. His father seemed to be trying to create some order out of his own nebulous philosophy.

“Entropy and Chaos, death and evil, they can’t be beaten by star or man, but in defeat there’s always the victory of defiance. This sun is telling me, Gneaus, the mortal flesh can be destroyed, but the spirit, the courage within, is eternal. It need not yield. And that’s all the victory you’ll ever get.”

Mouse watched with watery eyes as his father fell asleep, exhausted by the effort it had taken to put his feelings into words. The youth stared up at the fire, trying to see what Gneaus Storm had seen. He could not find it. He rose and took the old man back to his medicare cradle.

Being moved brought Storm back to a twilight awareness.

All his adult life Storm had been anticipating a fierce and final conflict from which he could win no mundane victory. With almost religious faith he believed that the manipulators would someday push him into a corner from which there would be no escape but death. He had always believed that Richard would be the instrument of his destruction, and that he and Richard, by destroying one another, would spell the doom of their kind.

The fires of the Ulantonid War had ignited a blaze of panhumanism of which Confederation was still taking full advantage. It was bulling its way into broad reaches of relatively ungovernmented space in apparent response to a set of laws similar to those defining the growth of organisms and species. Mercenary armies were among those institutions facing increasingly limited futures.

No government willingly tolerates private competition, and especially not competition which can challenge its decrees. The most benign government ever imagined has as its root assumption its right to apply force to the individual. From inception every government continuously strives to broaden the parameters of that right.

Storm believed he and Richard, if lured into a truly bloody Armageddon, would fight the last merc war tolerated by Confederation. The Services now had the strength and organization to disarm the freecorps. All they needed was an excuse.