Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (25 page)

“Moyshe, get that man in here and close the door. How bad is he?”

“He’s gone.”

“Better be nice,” Marya said as benRabi forced the door shut. She had the sense to keep her voice neutral. To survive, to enjoy her victory, she had to overcome the obstacle she had made of Mouse. “They’ll be here soon. You won’t want them mad at you.”

“This one’s gone too,” benRabi said. “The other one might make it. Marya, don’t think the Seiners will hand over a harvestfleet because a few raidships turn up.”

She smiled that gunmetal smile.

He remembered ruined merchantmen left in the wake of Sangaree raiders. They would come with enough gunpower. There would be no survivors.

An alarm began hooting. It was a forlorn call to arms.

“General quarters, Mouse. She’s for real.” The borrowed weapon seemed to swell painfully in his hand. A part of him was telling him it was time he finished what he had started on The Broken Wings.

Sixteen: 3049 AD
Operation Dragon, Combat

Time telescoped, then coiled around itself like some mad snake trying to crush itself. It detached Marya’s battlefield cabin from the macro-universe, establishing an independent timeline. Ten seconds became an eternal instant.

BenRabi was afraid.

Something clicked inside Mouse. He slipped into assassin’s mind. BenRabi vacillated between answering the alarm and staying to restrain the organic killing machine.

Danion
shivered. Moyshe recognized the feel of service ships launching.

“I’m going on station, Mouse. Keep her here till Jarl’s people come. And keep her alive.”

Mouse nodded mechanically. He was easily guided while in assassin’s mind—if Psych had keyed him to accept your direction. He would be upset later. He wanted to show the woman the death of a thousand cuts, or something equally grisly.

He was on his way back to the real universe already. “Take the guns, Moyshe. Hide them.”

“What about? . . . ”

“This.” He tapped the plastic knife thrust through a tool loop on his jumpsuit.

“All right.” BenRabi collected the weapons. He hid them in Mouse’s cabin, then headed for Damage Control South.

“What’s up?” he asked one of his teammates when he arrived.

“Sangaree raidships. They say there’s at least fifty of them. That’s scary.”

“In more ways than one.”

“What do you mean?”

“That their show is being put on by a consortium. No one Family has that kind of muscle. The last time they put that many ships together was for the Helga’s World thing during the Shadowline War.”

The Seiner regarded benRabi with a puzzled fearful frown. Moyshe was talking foreign history.

Moyshe found his fellow landsmen in a low-grade panic. They had no faith in Seiner arms. And they were sure the Starfishers would fight. He did not understand till he heard the Seiners themselves second-guessing Payne.

Fleet Commander Payne had refused to negotiate or back down. He had told the Sangaree that he would fight to the last harvestship.

“What’re we fighting about?” Moyshe asked plaintively.

His Seiner companions refused to enlighten him.

He felt that touch of panic himself. He never had wanted to die with his boots on. Not since he had given up boyhood daydreams. He had no interest in dying at all. Not for several thousand years.

Time moved with the haste of pouring treacle. He knew the Sangaree ships were maneuvering in the darkness outside. Outgunned service ships were moving to meet them. The death dance had begun.

Moyshe stood facing the dark gate with all the unanswerable questions still banging around in his mind. The nature of his want remained the biggest, closely followed by the meaning of the gun thing.

He started worrying about Amy. Where was she? Would she be safe? “Stupid question,” he muttered. Of course she was not safe. Nobody was safe today.

Then he saw her standing at the tool crib. What was she doing here? She spotted him, started his way.

“Where’s Mouse?” she asked.

He explained quickly.

“Good,” she said when he finished. She tried to remain cool, but a tear formed in the corner of one eye. She brushed at it irritably. She had caught some of the groundside uninvolvement disease from him, he thought. Why else would a Seiner hide her emotions? Three men had died. It was a sad affair.

She said, “I’ll call Jarl. He may not have sent anyone else down.”

Moyshe resumed his seat, stared at the deck tensely, counting rivets and welds. When would the Sangaree missiles arrive?

The attack, when it came, was not Sangaree. The dull-witted sharks, confused and distressed by the sudden appearance of so many more ships, reached emotional critical mass. They attacked in all directions.

Scraps of news filtered in from Operations Sector. Some were good, some bad. The Sangaree were having a hard time. But the sharks attacking the harvestfleet were concentrating on
Danion
.

In the sea of nothing the service ships were killing, and sometimes being killed by, sharks. The Sangaree vainly fought an enemy invisible to their equipment while, foolishly, continuing to try for a position of vantage against the harvestfleet. There was a wan hope in that, Moyshe thought. The sharks might take care of them. But, then, who would take care of the sharks?

Danion
shivered continuously. All her weaponry was in action, firing on Sangaree and sharks alike. BenRabi grimaced as he wondered just what the monster ship mounted.

He waited with his team in the heart of the great mobile, he smelling their fear and they his. Amy quivered like a frightened rabbit in the crook of his arm. Alarms screamed each time the sharks penetrated the defenses, but DC South received no emergency calls.

Courage brewed beneath the fear. There was no tension between landsman and Seiner now. They were united in defiance of an unprejudiced death.

Danion
rocked. Sirens raked their wicked nails over a million blackboards. Officers shouted into the confusion. A damage-control team piled aboard an electric truck and hurtled off to aid technicians in the stricken sector. Behind them the mood gradually turned grim as the fear, unable to sustain itself indefinitely, faded into a lower key, an abiding dread. Each technician sat quietly alone with his or her thoughts.

The damage reports began arriving. Nearly ten percent of
Danion
’s population were either dead or cut off from the main life-support systems. More trucks left. Survivors had to be brought out before the emergency systems failed.

And there Moyshe sat, doing nothing, awaiting his dying turn.

Somewhere in the big nothing the Sangaree raidmaster decided he had had enough. His fleet took hyper, bequeathing the Starfishers his share of ghostly foes.

“Suits,” said the blank-faced Fisher directing DC ops when the news arrived. He foresaw the end.

They drew spacesuits from the emergency lockers. BenRabi donned his while thinking that this was the first time he had worn one seriously. Always before it had been for training or fun.

He wondered why Mouse had not yet shown. Was he in the sector cut off? He asked Amy.

“No. There’s no damage there yet. Jarl probably hasn’t had a chance to do anything. Our people should all be manning weapons.”

Danion
screamed, whirled beneath them. Moyshe fell. His suit servoes hummed and forced him to his feet. The gravity misbehaved. He floated into the air, then came down hard. The lights weakened, died, returned as emergency power entered the lines.

A shark had hit
Danion
’s main power and drives.

Somebody was yelling at him. Amy. “What?” He was too upset to listen closely, heard only that his team was going out. He jumped at the truck as it started rolling. Seiner hands dragged him aboard.

Twenty minutes later, in an odd part of the ship devoted to fusion plant, his team captain set him to securing broken piping systems. Whole passageways had been ripped apart. Gaps opened on the night. Sometimes he saw it, starless, as he worked, but thought nothing of it. He was too busy.

Hours later, when the pipes no longer bled and he had time for sloth, he noticed a vacuum-ruined corpse tangled in a mass of wiring, dark against an outer glow. That gave him pause. Space. It was what he was not supposed to see, so of course he had to look. He walked to the hole, saw nothing. He pushed the corpse aside, leaned out. Still nothing. No stars, no constellations, no Milky Way. Nothing but a tangle of harvestship limned by a sourceless glow.

He stood there, frozen in disbelief, for he knew not how long. No stars. Where were they that there were no stars?

The harvestship rotated slowly. Something gradually appeared beyond tubing, spars, and folded silver sails—the source of the glow. He recognized it, but did not want to believe it. It was the galaxy, edge on, seen from beyond its rim. His premonitions returned to haunt him. What, outside the galaxy, was near enough to be reached by ship?

Far away, another harvestship coruscated under shark attack.
Danion
had shuddered to several while he worked, but none had been bad. There was an explosion aboard the other vessel. Gases spewed from her broken hull. But his eyes fled her, hurrying on to the coin-sized brightness rising in the direction of rotation.

It was a planet. Self-illuminating, no sun. There was only one such place . . . 

Stars’ End.

Certain destruction for all who went near.

What were the Seiners doing? Were they mad? Suicidal?

Something broke, something blossomed across the face of the galaxy, a hundred times brighter, a fire like that of an exploding star. A harvestship was burning in a flame only a multidimensional shark could have ignited. They were growing more cunning, were spraying antimatter gases that totally devoured. In a corner of his mind a little voice asked, as a Fisher would, if that vessel’s death had served the fleet. Were sharks dying there too?

His gaze returned to Stars’ End. All his myths were hemming him in. He did not doubt that the Sangaree would return. It was not their style to back down when the stakes were high, and there was more on the line now than a source of ambergris.

He knew why the Seiners had come here. As did all who sought Stars’ End, they wanted the fortress world’s fabulous weapons. For centuries opportunists had tried to master the planet. Whoever possessed its timeless might became dictator to The Arm. No modern defense could withstand the power of Stars’ End weaponry. Nor could sharks. The weapons were the salvation for which Payne had dared hope.

What a faint hope! BenRabi knew there was no way to penetrate the planet’s defenses. Battle fleets had failed.

A hand touched his shoulder. A helmet met his. A voice came by conduction. “We’re pulling out.
Danion
’s been hit inboard of us. We don’t want to get trapped here.” In those words Moyshe imagined great sadness, but little of the fear he felt himself.

They managed to reach D.C. South again only by trekking several kilometers afoot through regions of ship that looked like they had been mauled by naval weaponry. Moyshe found it hard to believe that the wrecking had been done by a creature he could not see.

A room had been prepared for them to relax in, with snacks and drinks, and secure enough so they dared shed their suits.

Mouse was there, wounded and bleeding.

“Mouse! What the hell! . . . ”

“I should’ve bent her straight off, Moyshe. She got to me. Tricked me. Now she’s into it somewhere.”

It was a big and confused ship. She could disappear easily. “How?” Moyshe examined Mouse’s left arm. It was angled. Mouse had gotten a tourniquet on somehow.

“Thing like a hatchet.” Mouse’s face was drawn and bloodless, but he did not protest benRabi’s rough hands.

“She must’ve caught you napping. That don’t sound like you.”

“Yeah. We were playing chess . . . ”

“Chess? For Christ’s sake . . . ”

“She’s pretty good. For a woman. Nailed me when I was moving in for a mate.”

BenRabi shook his head. “Are you for real?”

He could picture it. An overconfident Mouse suggesting a game to kill time, getting too deep into alternate moves to react quickly. Stupid, but in character. “How many times have I told you it was going to get you into trouble someday?”

“God damn, Moyshe, don’t mother me. Not now. Do something about the arm, eh? Nobody around here is interested. I could lose it. And these clowns don’t do regeneration surgery.”

“Amy? Where’s Amy Coleridge?” benRabi asked. He found her. “You seen Mouse? He needs a doctor bad.”

“I saw him come in. There’s one on the way. The woman?”

“Yeah.” What was Marya doing now?

This was the price of not having let Mouse have his way on The Broken Wings. On his hands was the blood of a friend; in his mind a nagging gunmetal smile. Whatever feeling he might have had for her, or she for him, they were of enemy tribes. That was the overriding rule. In the end, neither could give quarter.

“I’ll take care of it, Mouse,” he whispered to his friend. “You keep Amy busy.” He rose. “Keep an eye on him, will you, love? I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”

She asked no questions, probably assuming he was off to the toilet.

From the tool crib he drew an old Takadi Model VI laser cutting torch. It was a light-duty one-handed tool meant for sheet metal trimming. The crib attendant asked no questions.

He slipped out of D.C. and into an empty office nearby. It took just minutes to make the modifications he had been taught in a Bureau school. He created an unwieldy lasegun. Then he stole a scooter and took off.

He had tried to think like the woman while modifying the torch. He presumed that she would not know the attacks were shark and not her own people’s. She would do something to neutralize the ship without damaging it. Her specialty dealt with atmosphere . . . 

She would head for Central Blowers. She could take out Operations if she could cut its oxygen supply.

He hurtled through passageways, impatiently trying to remember the way to the blower rooms. Fate seemed determined to stall him. Damage compelled long detours. He had to wait on emergency traffic. People kept stopping him to tell him to get a suit on. The scooter, low on power, slowed to a crawl. He had to walk a kilometer before he found another unattended.