Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (21 page)

Cassius’s ship reached the chunk of celestial debris that Storm had long ago developed as a prison for Fearchild Dee. It was a living hell, Fearchild’s reward for his perfidy on the world where Cassius had lost his hand.

That had not been a matter of the hazards of war.

Fearchild had been a dilettante merc captain commanding forces his father had hoped to turn into a Family army. The Legion had humiliated him in his field debut. He had tried using Dee tactics to recoup.

Merc wars were ritualized and ceremonial. Their ends were celebrated with a formalized signing of Articles of Surrender and the yielding up of banners by the defeated captain. Fearchild had smuggled in a bomb, hoping to obliterate the Legion staff prior to a surprise resumption of hostilities.

Appalled, his officers had turned on him and warned their opposites. Cassius had been the only Legionnaire injured. He had refused to have the hand replaced.

It reminded him that there were dishonorable men in the universe. He could consider its absence and remember just how much he hated the Dees.

It took Cassius and Mouse two hours to transfer Storm and Michael and their medicare cradles to the asteroid’s single habitable room. They wakened the injured men only after completing the task.

Michael awoke with a whimper. The instant he discovered Storm’s presence, he wailed, “Gneaus, that man is going to kill me.”

Cassius chuckled. His prosthetic larynx made it a weird sound. “I will, yes. If I can.”

“You promised, Gneaus. You gave me your word.”

“You’re right, Michael. But Cassius never promised you anything. Neither did Masato, and I’ve got the feeling he’s mad about what you did to his brothers.”

Mouse’s attempt to look fierce fell flat. Dee did not notice. He was too involved with himself and Fearchild, whom he had just noticed.

“My God! My God!” he moaned. “What are you doing?”

“Thought he’d be up to his neck in houris, eh?” Cassius asked.

Michael stared, aghast. He was not inhuman. He loved his children. His parental concern overcame his trepidation. “Fear. Fear. What’re they doing to you?”

“Plug him in, Cassius,” Storm ordered. “It should make him more amenable.”

Mouse and Cassius lifted a passive Michael onto an automated operating table.

Fearchild’s situation did not seem cruel at first glance. He was chained to a wall. He wore a helmet that enveloped his head. A thick bundle of wires attached the helmet to a nearby machine.   

That machine restricted Fearchild to limits that kept him barely among the living. Like Valerie in Festung Todesangst, he was permitted no lapses in self-awareness. Nor was he free to slide off into insanity. The machine enforced rationality with a battery of psychiatric drugs. At random intervals it stimulated his pain center with an equally random selection of unpleasant sensations.

They were all cruel men.

Mouse worked in a daze, not quite able to believe this place was real, not quite able to accept that his father had created it.

Cassius adjusted Fearchild’s machine so the younger Dee could take an interest in what was being done to his father.

Mouse and Cassius strapped Michael to the table, rotated it till it stood upright. Storm watched impassively. Cassius positioned and adjusted surgical machinery which included a system similar to that which kept Fearchild sane. He added an anaesthesia system programmed to heighten rather than dampen pain.

“Do we have to do this?” Mouse whispered.

Cassius nodded. He was enjoying himself.

All cruel men.

“I keep my word, Michael,” Storm said. His voice was soft, weak, and tired. “No matter what, I’ll never kill you. I tried to make a point on The Mountain. You refused to understand it. I’m going to make it again here, a little more strongly. Maybe you’ll get the message this time.”

He paused for a minute, gathering strength. “Michael, I’m going to make you beg me to kill you. And I’m going to keep my promise and make sure you stay alive. You ready, Cassius?”

Cassius nodded.

“Give him a taste.”

The machine whined. A tiny scalpel flayed a few square millimeters of skin off Dee’s nose. A second waldo bathed the exposed flesh with iodine. A third applied a small dressing. The anaesthesia program intensified the fire of the antiseptic. Dee shrieked.

“Enough. You see, Michael? That rig is a little toy I put in when we slapped this place together. I had a feeling you’d make me use it someday. What it will do is skin you a few square millimeters at a time, here and there. You’ll get plenty of time to heal so the skinning won’t ever end. Think about that. Pain for the rest of your life.”

Dee whimpered. His eyes seemed glazed.

Mouse turned his back. He kept jerking from the stomach upward as he fought to keep his breakfast down. Cassius laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Easy,” he whispered.

Storm snarled, “Michael, Michael, you’ve just got to play your games. You can’t claim you weren’t warned. You can’t say you didn’t know the risks.” He waved a weak hand at Cassius. “Do an eyelid now.”

Dee flushed a pale shade of death. “My face . . . ”

Cruel men. Cassius laughed. The sound was so malignant it seemed no artificial voice box could have produced it.

“There’ll be scars,” Storm promised. His voice was soft, musing. “Yes. That will hurt more than the skinning, won’t it? Cassius, make sure there are plenty of scars in the program. Do something artistic.”

Dee cried, “Damn it, Gneaus . . . ”

“This isn’t a pleasure spa, Michael. This is hell. Your own private hell. You brought it on yourself. Then you expect the rest of us to feel sorry for you. It doesn’t work that way. We aren’t kids now. You can’t fool us the way you used to. We’re on to all of your tricks.”

“Gneaus, not my face.”

“You want to tell us why Blackworld means so much to you?”

“It’s my way out . . . ” Dee shut up. He refused to speak again.

“Cassius, before we leave I want you to position them so they have to look at each other. Put a sound baffle between them so they can’t talk. Now, before we tackle my questions again, tell me what you found on The Mountain.”

Cassius sketched the story. Storm occasionally interrupted with a question or to make a point. When Cassius mentioned the elderly assassin, he asked, “Sangaree?”

Cassius nodded.

Storm turned to an attractive and frightened Michael Dee. “So that rumor is true. You
have
been dealing with them. That won’t make you any friends, Michael.” He shook an admonitory finger. “Go on, Cassius. This is getting interestinger and interestinger.”

A minute later Storm muttered, “I’ve got a feeling I’ll be eligible for Social Insurance after I pay your instel bill.”

“Possibly. The man’s name was Rhafu.”

Storm sent a puzzled glance Michael’s way. Dee seemed both disappointed and relieved. “It doesn’t make sense, Cassius.”

“It does. Keep listening.” He explained what he had learned from his friend in Luna Command.

“Why would this mystery Sangaree wait till now to get even?”

“I take it he’s really a low-key sort. Tries to get everything lined up perfect before he makes his move. He’s probably been chipping away at us for a long time.”

Storm looked at Dee. “That could explain a lot of things. But not too clearly.”

“I’ve been doing some thinking. It was a long trip out, watch and watch. Not much chance to talk. Mainly, I tried to figure out why a man would want to destroy his brother so bad he would cut a deal with Sangaree. I didn’t come up with anything. Each time I thought I had it, I came back to the same thing. The only things you’ve ever done were in reply to something a Dee did first. Our friend here is a son-of-a-bitch, but in the past he usually took his lumps when he deserved them. And until just lately he was always pretty impersonal about his crap.

“So I went back and thought it through from the beginning. There had to be a clue somewhere.

“I think it started because he wanted to get even with Richard Hawksblood. Including you was a sop for this Deeth creature. In others words, it’s not really personal. It’s an arrangement. Deeth helps him get Richard. He helps Deeth get you and the Legion.”

Storm stared at his brother. Michael looked terribly uncomfortable. “Why the hell would he take up with this Deeth?”

“That’s where I had to strain the old logic box. We have to go back to your father and mother to put it together. You know the family stories. He met her on Prefactlas. She was pregnant when they got married. Boris never found out who Michael’s father was. Emily wouldn’t say. Like that.

“Check my reasoning. Emily was born a Sangaree pleasure girl. Her genetic tagging was distinctly Norbon. We know she spent several years traveling and living with a boy who may have fathered Michael. He vanished completely once your mother moved in with Boris.

“There was a more notorious disappearance at the same time. The grand master of the Prefactlas underworld, a man we called the Serpent. My friend Beckhart tells me the Serpent and this Rhafu are the same guy. Starting to get a picture?”

“I’ve got one.” Storm laid a finger alongside his nose. “And I don’t like it. He’s not just dealing with them, he is one of them. The son of this Deeth. Implausible on its face, but you found a few crossbreeds on Prefactlas, didn’t you?”

“Too many. And from Michael’s expression, I’d say we’ve hit it square.”

“Ah, yes. So we have.”

“Gneaus, I . . . ” Dee shut up. It was too late for truth or lies.

The silence stretched out. Mouse began to move around nervously, glancing from man to man.

Storm murmured, “The thing takes shape. We know some whos and whys, and even a few hows. Enough to have upset them by recapturing Benjamin and Homer. But that doesn’t really change anything. Probably too late to wriggle out.”

“We can kill us a few Dees,” Cassius suggested. “I grilled Beckhart on this Deeth. There’s no way we can get to him. He’s moved off Homeworld. His whole outfit is on his First Expansion planet. He’s the only bastard in the universe who knows where it is. So how the hell do you bribe some fool Sangaree to go cut his throat? If we want him, we have to make him come to us.”

“Michael stays alive. I gave him my word. He may not be as guilty as he looks, anyway.”

“Stop making excuses for him, Gneaus.”

Storm overlooked Cassius’s remark. “He and Fearchild will be safe here. Remember Trojan Hearse? I’ll order a go on it, and start hunting Seth-Infinite. If we nail him down too, this Deeth will have to come out if he wants to keep us running. He won’t have any cat’s-paws left.”

“Helga,” Mouse suggested.

“She doesn’t get around so good anymore,” Storm replied. “Warm your instel, Mouse. I’ve got to talk to Richard.”

“We don’t have one. We had our wave guides sheered off by friend Michael there,” Cassius said. “And we’ve lost relay contact with your Seiner friend. It’ll have to wait till we get back to the Fortress.”

“Why are we fooling around here, then? Take me home.”

Mouse turned his father’s medicare cradle and pushed it into the passage to the ship dock. Michael started screaming behind him.

Cassius had energized the torture machinery.

Cruel men. All cruel men.

A small yacht drifted in normspace. Its pilot patiently watched her hyper scan. She had lost her quarry, but hoped to find it again.

Cassius went hyper. His vessel left a momentarily detectable ripple.

The yacht turned like a questing needle. In a moment it began to accelerate.

Thirty-Seven: 3028 AD

Moira was seventeen when she received the summons. It terrified her. She had heard stories . . . Not even Blake would force her. Would he?

She had no protector. She had had to do her own fighting since Frog’s death. She was tough even for an Edgeward girl. But Blake? Fight a demigod?

Frog had, in his stubborn way.

She looked around the tiny room that had been the dwarf’s home, that he had made home for a girl-child abandoned and unwanted by so many better able to provide. She turned an ear to listen for a ghost voice. “Frog, what should I do?”

“Go on, girl. And crank the bastard’s nose up his butt if he tries anything.”

She really had no choice. Blake was the great bull gorilla boss of Edgeward. They would come and get her if she did not go on her own.

As she prepared, making herself as unattractive as she could, she surveyed the room again. A cool tickle of irrational fear said it might be her last look around.

She had turned it into a museum. Almost a shrine, of and to the crazy dwarf called Frog, whose real name she had never known. There had been no way to show she cared while she lived. She had sensed that he would have been embarrassed by affection. Now, in her most romantic years, with her memories growing ever more vague and rose-lensed, she was, progressively, elevating him to godhead.

Moira did not fit. Edgeward was a black community. She was a curiosity and “old Frog’s stray brat.” The latter, with the ghost of the mad dwarf always peering over her shoulder, put people off more than did the former.

Old Frog had become a city legend. Edgewarders boasted about him to outsiders. The Man Who Ended the Shadowline. They had brought in his tractor and made a memorial of it. But he still made them nervous.

Dead and canonized was where madmen belonged. His mind had been diseased. They feared Moira might be a carrier.

They did not know what to say or do around her, so they did nothing. She was an outcast without justification, lonely, given far too much time to brood. The pressures of her fellow citizens’ trepidations and expectations were creating the thing they feared.

Frog pictures on the walls. Frog things around the room. The ragged remnants of his hotsuit. A model of his crawler. Brightside charts which bore Frog’s stamp, his openings of terra incognita. A diary in which Moira jotted what she felt were her most important thoughts, many of which orbited around her namesake, Edgeward’s first woman tractor hog, The Girl Who Saw the Sun, a character saint of the same weird canon as Frog. Frog had claimed a relationship. Moira never had learned what it was. It was a mystery she was afraid to delve into. She had started in on the city records several times, and always stopped before she traced the link. She had a niggling little fear that she might find out her patron had had feet of clay.