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.
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.
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.
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.