He could not write. He had too much free time. He always worked
better when the minutes were quick and crowded.
Something was wrong with his head. Skeletons were coming out of
their closets in there. Especially the Alyce affair. The
unbreakable walls of Tyre were crumbling.
It had been years since he had thought about Alyce. Why now?
That hasty Psych programing before the mission? Or were the edges
of his sanity just fraying?
He had two bad days. There were moments when he did not know
where he was or why, or, sometimes, just who he was.
He sometimes felt his life was managed by guardian devils. The
Fates pursued him like indefatigable hounds, with malice their only
joy.
The ship dropped hyper without warning. “Are we finally
there?” he asked the air. He stepped into the corridor. Most
of the landsmen were there.
Jarl Kindervoort’s voice filled the ship.
‘Passengers, remain in your quarters. Strap in for
acceleration. We’re about to engage a Confederation squadron
that has been following us.”
“Engage?” Moyshe said. “What the hell? Mouse?
What’s going on? Jupp’s not supposed to move for two
weeks yet.”
Mouse shook his head warningly. People were listening. The
Sangaree woman appeared to be in a black rage.
“Wheels within wheels,” benRabi whispered.
“Beckhart’s doing it to us.”
“Let’s hope we didn’t suddenly get
expendable,” Mouse’said. “What’s going
on?”
“Oh, damn! I figured you knew. Beckhart? Maybe Jupp
thought he saw a chance? Maybe that frontier thing
broke?”
“What? That’s bullshit. The Ulantonids know better.
It’s the Old Man. Got to be.”
“Better strap in. Say any prayers you know.” BenRabi
had seen several battles while in the line. They had ruined his
taste for space warfare. Defeats were too total and final.
The vessel shuddered while he was strapping in. He recognized a
heavy missile salvo departing. The ship clearly mounted weaponry
not customary for her class.
Would the nasty surprises never end?
For a few seconds his mind fell apart completely, into absolute
chaos. A tiny part of him seemed to be outside, watching the
disorder.
All-clear bells and his door buzzer sounding bracketed the
reassembly process.
A crewman stepped into his cabin. “Mr. benRabi? Will you
come with us, please?”
He was as polite as the spider inviting the fly.
There was going to be trouble.
A half-dozen people wearing guns backed him. BenRabi joined them
in the passageway.
Another group had collected a stoic Mouse.
How had they blown it?
Kindervoort was directing the pickup himself. He looked like a
man with a compulsion to explain. And to ask. Moyshe hoped he would
not get primitive.
Mouse seemed to fear that. But hatchetmen lived by the Old
Testament: eye for an eye, live by the
sword . . .
“Got you, boys.” Kindervoort grinned toothily. He
had an overbite.
BenRabi had an irrational aversion to the man. It had nothing to
do with the situation. More like loathing at first sight.
Kindervoort had a colorless, fleshless face. His skin lay
stretched drumhead tight over prominent cheekbones and a lantern
jaw. Shadowed hollows lay between. He achieved a deathshead look
when the light was wrong.
BenRabi automatically disliked anyone with that gaunt, graveyard
look.
“Ah, here you are,” said the Ship’s Commander
as they shuffled into his darkly decorated office.
The furniture was of mahogany-toned imitation woods crafted in
antique styles. The walls and ceiling had been artificially
timbered to suggest the captain’s cabin of a sailing ship.
There were reproductions of antique ship’s lanterns, a
compass, a sextant, a chart of Henry the Navigator, framed prints
featuring caravels, clippers, and the frigate Constellation.
“Any trouble, Jarl?”
“No sir. The Bureau doesn’t employ fanatics. May I
present Commanders Masato Igarashi Storm and Thomas Aquinas
McClennon, of Confederation Navy? They’re senior field agents
of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence. Commanders, Ship’s
Commander Eduard Chouteau.”
BenRabi pursed his lips. He had been afraid Mouse’s real
name might be Storm. Mouse had been conspicuously absent from
Academy during their final year of school. That had been the year
of the Storm-Hawksblood war in the Shadowline.
Moyshe had visited Blackworld after that war’s end. There
had been a Masato Igarashi Storm there at the time, but their paths
had not crossed. That Masato had taken command of his
father’s mercenaries after Sangaree treachery had killed his
father, brothers, and most of the family officers.
Kindervoort certainly had him pat, though the name McClennon
seemed like a stranger’s, like that of someone he had known a
long time ago, in an age of innocence.
He felt less like Thomas Aquinas McClennon than he did Moyshe
benRabi, Gundaker Niven, Eric Earl Hollenkamp, Walter Clark,
or . . . How many men had he been?
“Take seats, gentlemen,” Chouteau said. “And
relax.”
BenRabi dropped into a chair, glanced at his partner, Mouse, who
also seemed stunned. The simple knowing of a secret name bore so
many implications . . . The spookiest was that
someone might have penetrated the Bureau deep enough to have gained
access to its primary data system. That meant a mole of a
generation’s standing.
“Worrying about your Navy friends?” Kindervoort
asked. “Don’t. They’re all right. They cut and
ran. And I mean fast. Guess they figured there wasn’t any
point to a slugfest when they couldn’t gain anything even if
they won.” He chuckled. So did Chouteau.
Had to be a deep mole. Nothing else would explain their
perpetual success at evading Confederation.
Kindervoort planted himself in front of benRabi. He leaned
close, frowning. Moyshe avoided his deathshead face by staring at
Chouteau.
The Ship’s Commander leaned back in his fat, comfortable
chair and half closed his eyes.
Kindervoort said, “But we’re not worried about von
Drachau or Admiral Beckhart, are we?” He chuckled, again,
moved to Mouse. “Why we wanted to see you was these tracers
you’ve got built in. Walking instels they inflict on us.
Ingenious.”
They did have a mole.
Moyshe had thought he was the only human instel. Beckhart had
pissed and moaned like the expense of it was coming out of his own
pocket. Redundancy had not seemed plausible after that.
He hadn’t really wondered why Mouse was along. Beckhart
had issued an assignment. Nobody questioned the Old Man. Not in any
way that might look like contradicting his will.
Mouse looked like death warmed over. Swell. It would do him good
to get short-sheeted sometimes too.
How come Mouse had not been hurting?
Knowing Beckhart, the Pyschs had programed the headaches. Maybe
to divert attention from Mouse. Had Mouse known?
They had some talking to do.
Beckhart clockwork, jerking along, often was oiled by the
confusion of its parts. Only the master knew all the secrets of his
machinery.
Would there be more?
Silly question.
Beckhart’s nature semed to demand twists on twists and
gaudy smoke screens that concealed truths as slippery as greased
snakes. His plots, however, while labyrinthine, had their own
tightness and logic. They were mapped by the finest computers in
Luna Command. He ran simulation models against even the most
ridiculous contingencies.
Had Beckhart calculated a mole into this scheme?
BenRabi suddenly intuited that he and Mouse were not partners
after all. This time they were voyagers sailing parallel but
distinct courses. They had been programed to hide from one another
as much as from their targets. And they had been intended for
exposure from the beginning.
Beckhart knew about the mole.
He wanted them taken captive. He wanted them to spend a year in
Seiner service.
Moyshe got mad. That was a year stolen from his life!
“The thing’s all biological, eh?” Kindervoort
asked.
“What?”
“This instel. Remarkable gimmick. Our detectors
didn’t quiver when you came aboard. ’Course, that
didn’t matter in the long run.”
He was smug, damn him. So was Chouteau, chubby-happy there in
his plastic-antique, made for the Archaicist trade captain’s
chair.
“How the hell did you get my name?” benRabi
demanded. They were in the mood for talking. They might give him
something the computers could use to pinpoint the mole.
Kindervoort ignored his question.
“We began monitoring the hyper bands when we broke orbit
at Carson’s. We wanted to see if we could catch anything from
von Drachau’s squadron. Imagine our surprise when we found
out somebody was sending from the ship.”
“You were plain lucky, Jarl,” Chouteau said.
“It wasn’t luck that we knew they were coming, just
that they started broadcasting in a ship small enough for us to
pinpoint them.”
How had they gotten the word?
Moyshe remembered a raggedy-assed Freehauler boat that had not
lifted on schedule. Had the Freehaulers been the mole’s
couriers? Black Mirage. Remember that ship, Somebody would have to
have a talk with her people someday.
Was there a relationship between Seiners and Freehaulers? Both
certainly refused to stop giving grief to Confederation’s
policy makers.
Chouteau called out, “Doctor DuMaurier, come in here.
Let’s get on with this.”
Kindervoort darted behind Moyshe and seized his shoulders.
BenRabi did not resist. There was nothing he could do.
A doctor pushed into the room. He poked, pinched, and sprayed
Moyshe’s neck with an aerosol anesthetic. He removed an
unsettlingly ancient lase-scalpel from his medical bag. Then,
quoting every doctor who had ever lived since the days when Incas
trepanned one another with sharp stones, he said, “This will
only take a minute. You won’t feel a thing.”
“That’s what they told me when they put it
in,” benRabi grumbled. He could not go down without
registering some kind of protest.
“We’ll just pull the ambergris nodes,”
Kindervoort said. “Ed, what do you think? Is it proper to
sell them back to Navy come next auction?”
Chouteau nodded amiably. “I think so. I like
it.”
Moyshe wished they would stop. It made him want to scream,
“You’re being unprofessional!”
They were not professionals. The harvestships apparently had no
real intelligence-oriented security people.
There was justice in Kindervoort’s suggestion. BenRabi and
Mouse, and all the other agents aboard, irrespective of their
allegiances, were after the same thing. Access to one of the herds
of great nightbeasts that produced the critical element in the node
being removed from benRabi’s neck.
The Seiners called it ambergris. The name had evolved from that
of a “morbid secretion” of Old Earth whales once used
by perfumers. The word could mean anything anyone wanted now. The
leviathans of the deep no longer had a claim. They had been extinct
for centuries.
Star’s amber, space gold, and sky diamond were other
popular names. By any name ambergris was the standard of wealth of
the age.
In the vernacular its name was short and pithy. It was the solid
waste of a starfish. Crap.
This crap fertilized a civilization. Confederation could not
have existed without it. Without it there would have been no fast
star-to-star communication. Speed and reliability of communications
ultimately define the growth limit of any empire.
BenRabi did not comprehend the physics of instel. He knew what
the man in the street knew. A tachyon spark could be generated in
the arc between an ambergris cathode and a Bilao crystal anode. The
spark could be made to carry an FTL message. Neither ambergris nor
Bilao crystal could be synthesized.
The crystal occurred naturally deep in the mantles of several
roughly earth-sized worlds orbiting super-cool stars. Sierra was
the only such world within Confederation. Mining the crystal, at
depths exceeding thirty kilometers, was overwhelmingly
expensive.
Bilao crystal was cheaper than ambergris. The Seiners had a
monopoly. They were free market capitalists of the first water.
Every node went to the highest bidder.
The demand for ambergris perpetually exceeded supply. Despite
gargantuan capital demands, optimists often assembled the hard and
software of an installation merely in hopes that an ambergris node
would become available.
The combined Seiner harvestfleets, in their best year ever, had
gleaned fewer than forty thousand nodes. Most of those had gone to
replace nodes already burning out.
The Seiners sold their product at auction, on worlds declared
temporarily neutral and threatened by all the firepower the fleets
could muster. The bidders always went along with Seiner rules. The
Starfishers might refuse to do business with someone who
pushed.
Ambergris alone explained the flood-tide of operatives heading
toward Carson’s after Danion had begun advertising for
groundside technicians. The agents had swept in like vultures,
hoping to feed on the corpse of a betrayed Payne’s Fleet. That’s what we are, benRabi thought. Me and Mouse,
we’re vultures . . . No. Not really.
We’re more like raptors. Falcons flung from Beckhart’s
wrist. Our prey is information. We’re to bring down any
morsel that might betray a starfish herd.
Moyshe tried to believe that Confederation should control the
harvesting and distribution of ambergris. He tried hard.
Sometimes he had to tell himself some tall ones to get by.
Otherwise he asked himself too many questions. He started worrying
irrelevancies like Right and Wrong.
His soul, slithering past morality shyly, merely mumbled I want.
There was a pain in it that he could not understand. It nagged him
worse than did his ulcer.
BenRabi dreaded madness. He was afraid of a lot of things
lately. He could not figure it out.
“There. One down.” The doctor dropped
Movshc’s node into a gleaming stainless steel tray. Plunk!
Exclamation point to the end of a phase of the mission. He began
suturing Moyshe’s wound.
“How bad will that hurt when the anesthetic wears
off?”
“Not much. Your neck should be a bit stiff, and tender to
the touch. See me if it gives you any trouble.” The doctor
turned to Mouse. Mouse squirmed a little before he submitted. His
conscience, benRabi supposed. He had to make a showing.
Doctors were another of Mouse’s crochets. He had no use
for them, as he often told anyone who would listen.
BenRabi suspected that was why Beckhart never had Mouse altered
during his mission preps.
“We don’t like spies,” the Ship’s
Commander blurted. The way he said it made it sound both
spontaneous and irrelevant, a non sequitur despite what was
happening. We, Moyshe thought. These people always say we.
The worm within him bit. He shifted uncomfortably. Somehow,
Chouteau had taunted his need. Weird.
He tried to recapture it, to discover what it was that he
wanted, but, like a wet fish, it wriggled through his fingers.
Nearly a minute later, Chouteau pursued his remark. “But
Danion needs your expertise to survive. And we love her
enough to give you another chance.” He became less
distant.
“Listen up. We’re going to keep you alive. But
you’re going to work till you drop: Till you forget why it
was that you were sent here. And when we’re done with you,
we’re going to ship you home just as ignorant as you were
when you signed on.
“Men, don’t give us any more trouble. Be satisfied
being ignorant. We need you bad, but won’t let you push.
Danion’s big. A couple men more or less wouldn’t make
much difference. Doctor, aren’t you finished yet?”
“Just have to sew him up, sir. One minute.”
“Commander McClennon, Commander Storm, go back to your
cabins. Try not to aggravate me for a while.”
BenRabi rose, touched the small bandage behind his ear. The
numbness had begun to fade. He could feel a mild burning. It made
him think of bigger cuts on his body and soul.
The doctor finished with Mouse. “There you go, Commander.
Try not to strain it too much. I suggest you let your lady friends
do the work for a few days.” He spoke with a gentle sarcasm
that may have masked envy.
“Word’s getting around about you, Mouse,”
benRabi said.
Mouse did not respond. He was in no mood for banter.
They beat an unescorted retreat, seeking their cabins like
wounded animals seeking the security of their dens. In the passage
outside benRabi’s cabin, Mouse asked, “What do we do
now, Moyshe?”
BenRabi shrugged. “I don’t know. I was hoping
you’d think of something. Go for the ride, I guess.
They’ve stalemated us.”
“Just for now.” Mouse stood a little taller.
“We’ve got a year. They can’t keep their guard up
forever, can they?”
“They probably can.” But a little false
encouragement felt good. “Still, you never know. Something
might turn up.”
“Look at that.”
The Sangaree lady was watching them from her doorway. She
smiled, waved.
“Gloating,” benRabi said.
“Think she knows what happened? Think she helped do us
in?”
BenRabi shrugged, looked at the woman. Their gazes seemed to
ring like meeting swords. Her smile broadened. “Yes.
I’m sure she did.”
He could not write. He had too much free time. He always worked
better when the minutes were quick and crowded.
Something was wrong with his head. Skeletons were coming out of
their closets in there. Especially the Alyce affair. The
unbreakable walls of Tyre were crumbling.
It had been years since he had thought about Alyce. Why now?
That hasty Psych programing before the mission? Or were the edges
of his sanity just fraying?
He had two bad days. There were moments when he did not know
where he was or why, or, sometimes, just who he was.
He sometimes felt his life was managed by guardian devils. The
Fates pursued him like indefatigable hounds, with malice their only
joy.
The ship dropped hyper without warning. “Are we finally
there?” he asked the air. He stepped into the corridor. Most
of the landsmen were there.
Jarl Kindervoort’s voice filled the ship.
‘Passengers, remain in your quarters. Strap in for
acceleration. We’re about to engage a Confederation squadron
that has been following us.”
“Engage?” Moyshe said. “What the hell? Mouse?
What’s going on? Jupp’s not supposed to move for two
weeks yet.”
Mouse shook his head warningly. People were listening. The
Sangaree woman appeared to be in a black rage.
“Wheels within wheels,” benRabi whispered.
“Beckhart’s doing it to us.”
“Let’s hope we didn’t suddenly get
expendable,” Mouse’said. “What’s going
on?”
“Oh, damn! I figured you knew. Beckhart? Maybe Jupp
thought he saw a chance? Maybe that frontier thing
broke?”
“What? That’s bullshit. The Ulantonids know better.
It’s the Old Man. Got to be.”
“Better strap in. Say any prayers you know.” BenRabi
had seen several battles while in the line. They had ruined his
taste for space warfare. Defeats were too total and final.
The vessel shuddered while he was strapping in. He recognized a
heavy missile salvo departing. The ship clearly mounted weaponry
not customary for her class.
Would the nasty surprises never end?
For a few seconds his mind fell apart completely, into absolute
chaos. A tiny part of him seemed to be outside, watching the
disorder.
All-clear bells and his door buzzer sounding bracketed the
reassembly process.
A crewman stepped into his cabin. “Mr. benRabi? Will you
come with us, please?”
He was as polite as the spider inviting the fly.
There was going to be trouble.
A half-dozen people wearing guns backed him. BenRabi joined them
in the passageway.
Another group had collected a stoic Mouse.
How had they blown it?
Kindervoort was directing the pickup himself. He looked like a
man with a compulsion to explain. And to ask. Moyshe hoped he would
not get primitive.
Mouse seemed to fear that. But hatchetmen lived by the Old
Testament: eye for an eye, live by the
sword . . .
“Got you, boys.” Kindervoort grinned toothily. He
had an overbite.
BenRabi had an irrational aversion to the man. It had nothing to
do with the situation. More like loathing at first sight.
Kindervoort had a colorless, fleshless face. His skin lay
stretched drumhead tight over prominent cheekbones and a lantern
jaw. Shadowed hollows lay between. He achieved a deathshead look
when the light was wrong.
BenRabi automatically disliked anyone with that gaunt, graveyard
look.
“Ah, here you are,” said the Ship’s Commander
as they shuffled into his darkly decorated office.
The furniture was of mahogany-toned imitation woods crafted in
antique styles. The walls and ceiling had been artificially
timbered to suggest the captain’s cabin of a sailing ship.
There were reproductions of antique ship’s lanterns, a
compass, a sextant, a chart of Henry the Navigator, framed prints
featuring caravels, clippers, and the frigate Constellation.
“Any trouble, Jarl?”
“No sir. The Bureau doesn’t employ fanatics. May I
present Commanders Masato Igarashi Storm and Thomas Aquinas
McClennon, of Confederation Navy? They’re senior field agents
of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence. Commanders, Ship’s
Commander Eduard Chouteau.”
BenRabi pursed his lips. He had been afraid Mouse’s real
name might be Storm. Mouse had been conspicuously absent from
Academy during their final year of school. That had been the year
of the Storm-Hawksblood war in the Shadowline.
Moyshe had visited Blackworld after that war’s end. There
had been a Masato Igarashi Storm there at the time, but their paths
had not crossed. That Masato had taken command of his
father’s mercenaries after Sangaree treachery had killed his
father, brothers, and most of the family officers.
Kindervoort certainly had him pat, though the name McClennon
seemed like a stranger’s, like that of someone he had known a
long time ago, in an age of innocence.
He felt less like Thomas Aquinas McClennon than he did Moyshe
benRabi, Gundaker Niven, Eric Earl Hollenkamp, Walter Clark,
or . . . How many men had he been?
“Take seats, gentlemen,” Chouteau said. “And
relax.”
BenRabi dropped into a chair, glanced at his partner, Mouse, who
also seemed stunned. The simple knowing of a secret name bore so
many implications . . . The spookiest was that
someone might have penetrated the Bureau deep enough to have gained
access to its primary data system. That meant a mole of a
generation’s standing.
“Worrying about your Navy friends?” Kindervoort
asked. “Don’t. They’re all right. They cut and
ran. And I mean fast. Guess they figured there wasn’t any
point to a slugfest when they couldn’t gain anything even if
they won.” He chuckled. So did Chouteau.
Had to be a deep mole. Nothing else would explain their
perpetual success at evading Confederation.
Kindervoort planted himself in front of benRabi. He leaned
close, frowning. Moyshe avoided his deathshead face by staring at
Chouteau.
The Ship’s Commander leaned back in his fat, comfortable
chair and half closed his eyes.
Kindervoort said, “But we’re not worried about von
Drachau or Admiral Beckhart, are we?” He chuckled, again,
moved to Mouse. “Why we wanted to see you was these tracers
you’ve got built in. Walking instels they inflict on us.
Ingenious.”
They did have a mole.
Moyshe had thought he was the only human instel. Beckhart had
pissed and moaned like the expense of it was coming out of his own
pocket. Redundancy had not seemed plausible after that.
He hadn’t really wondered why Mouse was along. Beckhart
had issued an assignment. Nobody questioned the Old Man. Not in any
way that might look like contradicting his will.
Mouse looked like death warmed over. Swell. It would do him good
to get short-sheeted sometimes too.
How come Mouse had not been hurting?
Knowing Beckhart, the Pyschs had programed the headaches. Maybe
to divert attention from Mouse. Had Mouse known?
They had some talking to do.
Beckhart clockwork, jerking along, often was oiled by the
confusion of its parts. Only the master knew all the secrets of his
machinery.
Would there be more?
Silly question.
Beckhart’s nature semed to demand twists on twists and
gaudy smoke screens that concealed truths as slippery as greased
snakes. His plots, however, while labyrinthine, had their own
tightness and logic. They were mapped by the finest computers in
Luna Command. He ran simulation models against even the most
ridiculous contingencies.
Had Beckhart calculated a mole into this scheme?
BenRabi suddenly intuited that he and Mouse were not partners
after all. This time they were voyagers sailing parallel but
distinct courses. They had been programed to hide from one another
as much as from their targets. And they had been intended for
exposure from the beginning.
Beckhart knew about the mole.
He wanted them taken captive. He wanted them to spend a year in
Seiner service.
Moyshe got mad. That was a year stolen from his life!
“The thing’s all biological, eh?” Kindervoort
asked.
“What?”
“This instel. Remarkable gimmick. Our detectors
didn’t quiver when you came aboard. ’Course, that
didn’t matter in the long run.”
He was smug, damn him. So was Chouteau, chubby-happy there in
his plastic-antique, made for the Archaicist trade captain’s
chair.
“How the hell did you get my name?” benRabi
demanded. They were in the mood for talking. They might give him
something the computers could use to pinpoint the mole.
Kindervoort ignored his question.
“We began monitoring the hyper bands when we broke orbit
at Carson’s. We wanted to see if we could catch anything from
von Drachau’s squadron. Imagine our surprise when we found
out somebody was sending from the ship.”
“You were plain lucky, Jarl,” Chouteau said.
“It wasn’t luck that we knew they were coming, just
that they started broadcasting in a ship small enough for us to
pinpoint them.”
How had they gotten the word?
Moyshe remembered a raggedy-assed Freehauler boat that had not
lifted on schedule. Had the Freehaulers been the mole’s
couriers? Black Mirage. Remember that ship, Somebody would have to
have a talk with her people someday.
Was there a relationship between Seiners and Freehaulers? Both
certainly refused to stop giving grief to Confederation’s
policy makers.
Chouteau called out, “Doctor DuMaurier, come in here.
Let’s get on with this.”
Kindervoort darted behind Moyshe and seized his shoulders.
BenRabi did not resist. There was nothing he could do.
A doctor pushed into the room. He poked, pinched, and sprayed
Moyshe’s neck with an aerosol anesthetic. He removed an
unsettlingly ancient lase-scalpel from his medical bag. Then,
quoting every doctor who had ever lived since the days when Incas
trepanned one another with sharp stones, he said, “This will
only take a minute. You won’t feel a thing.”
“That’s what they told me when they put it
in,” benRabi grumbled. He could not go down without
registering some kind of protest.
“We’ll just pull the ambergris nodes,”
Kindervoort said. “Ed, what do you think? Is it proper to
sell them back to Navy come next auction?”
Chouteau nodded amiably. “I think so. I like
it.”
Moyshe wished they would stop. It made him want to scream,
“You’re being unprofessional!”
They were not professionals. The harvestships apparently had no
real intelligence-oriented security people.
There was justice in Kindervoort’s suggestion. BenRabi and
Mouse, and all the other agents aboard, irrespective of their
allegiances, were after the same thing. Access to one of the herds
of great nightbeasts that produced the critical element in the node
being removed from benRabi’s neck.
The Seiners called it ambergris. The name had evolved from that
of a “morbid secretion” of Old Earth whales once used
by perfumers. The word could mean anything anyone wanted now. The
leviathans of the deep no longer had a claim. They had been extinct
for centuries.
Star’s amber, space gold, and sky diamond were other
popular names. By any name ambergris was the standard of wealth of
the age.
In the vernacular its name was short and pithy. It was the solid
waste of a starfish. Crap.
This crap fertilized a civilization. Confederation could not
have existed without it. Without it there would have been no fast
star-to-star communication. Speed and reliability of communications
ultimately define the growth limit of any empire.
BenRabi did not comprehend the physics of instel. He knew what
the man in the street knew. A tachyon spark could be generated in
the arc between an ambergris cathode and a Bilao crystal anode. The
spark could be made to carry an FTL message. Neither ambergris nor
Bilao crystal could be synthesized.
The crystal occurred naturally deep in the mantles of several
roughly earth-sized worlds orbiting super-cool stars. Sierra was
the only such world within Confederation. Mining the crystal, at
depths exceeding thirty kilometers, was overwhelmingly
expensive.
Bilao crystal was cheaper than ambergris. The Seiners had a
monopoly. They were free market capitalists of the first water.
Every node went to the highest bidder.
The demand for ambergris perpetually exceeded supply. Despite
gargantuan capital demands, optimists often assembled the hard and
software of an installation merely in hopes that an ambergris node
would become available.
The combined Seiner harvestfleets, in their best year ever, had
gleaned fewer than forty thousand nodes. Most of those had gone to
replace nodes already burning out.
The Seiners sold their product at auction, on worlds declared
temporarily neutral and threatened by all the firepower the fleets
could muster. The bidders always went along with Seiner rules. The
Starfishers might refuse to do business with someone who
pushed.
Ambergris alone explained the flood-tide of operatives heading
toward Carson’s after Danion had begun advertising for
groundside technicians. The agents had swept in like vultures,
hoping to feed on the corpse of a betrayed Payne’s Fleet. That’s what we are, benRabi thought. Me and Mouse,
we’re vultures . . . No. Not really.
We’re more like raptors. Falcons flung from Beckhart’s
wrist. Our prey is information. We’re to bring down any
morsel that might betray a starfish herd.
Moyshe tried to believe that Confederation should control the
harvesting and distribution of ambergris. He tried hard.
Sometimes he had to tell himself some tall ones to get by.
Otherwise he asked himself too many questions. He started worrying
irrelevancies like Right and Wrong.
His soul, slithering past morality shyly, merely mumbled I want.
There was a pain in it that he could not understand. It nagged him
worse than did his ulcer.
BenRabi dreaded madness. He was afraid of a lot of things
lately. He could not figure it out.
“There. One down.” The doctor dropped
Movshc’s node into a gleaming stainless steel tray. Plunk!
Exclamation point to the end of a phase of the mission. He began
suturing Moyshe’s wound.
“How bad will that hurt when the anesthetic wears
off?”
“Not much. Your neck should be a bit stiff, and tender to
the touch. See me if it gives you any trouble.” The doctor
turned to Mouse. Mouse squirmed a little before he submitted. His
conscience, benRabi supposed. He had to make a showing.
Doctors were another of Mouse’s crochets. He had no use
for them, as he often told anyone who would listen.
BenRabi suspected that was why Beckhart never had Mouse altered
during his mission preps.
“We don’t like spies,” the Ship’s
Commander blurted. The way he said it made it sound both
spontaneous and irrelevant, a non sequitur despite what was
happening. We, Moyshe thought. These people always say we.
The worm within him bit. He shifted uncomfortably. Somehow,
Chouteau had taunted his need. Weird.
He tried to recapture it, to discover what it was that he
wanted, but, like a wet fish, it wriggled through his fingers.
Nearly a minute later, Chouteau pursued his remark. “But
Danion needs your expertise to survive. And we love her
enough to give you another chance.” He became less
distant.
“Listen up. We’re going to keep you alive. But
you’re going to work till you drop: Till you forget why it
was that you were sent here. And when we’re done with you,
we’re going to ship you home just as ignorant as you were
when you signed on.
“Men, don’t give us any more trouble. Be satisfied
being ignorant. We need you bad, but won’t let you push.
Danion’s big. A couple men more or less wouldn’t make
much difference. Doctor, aren’t you finished yet?”
“Just have to sew him up, sir. One minute.”
“Commander McClennon, Commander Storm, go back to your
cabins. Try not to aggravate me for a while.”
BenRabi rose, touched the small bandage behind his ear. The
numbness had begun to fade. He could feel a mild burning. It made
him think of bigger cuts on his body and soul.
The doctor finished with Mouse. “There you go, Commander.
Try not to strain it too much. I suggest you let your lady friends
do the work for a few days.” He spoke with a gentle sarcasm
that may have masked envy.
“Word’s getting around about you, Mouse,”
benRabi said.
Mouse did not respond. He was in no mood for banter.
They beat an unescorted retreat, seeking their cabins like
wounded animals seeking the security of their dens. In the passage
outside benRabi’s cabin, Mouse asked, “What do we do
now, Moyshe?”
BenRabi shrugged. “I don’t know. I was hoping
you’d think of something. Go for the ride, I guess.
They’ve stalemated us.”
“Just for now.” Mouse stood a little taller.
“We’ve got a year. They can’t keep their guard up
forever, can they?”
“They probably can.” But a little false
encouragement felt good. “Still, you never know. Something
might turn up.”
“Look at that.”
The Sangaree lady was watching them from her doorway. She
smiled, waved.
“Gloating,” benRabi said.
“Think she knows what happened? Think she helped do us
in?”
BenRabi shrugged, looked at the woman. Their gazes seemed to
ring like meeting swords. Her smile broadened. “Yes.
I’m sure she did.”