Six of Moyshe’s best men gathered outside his trailer.
They had donned nighttime black. They were buttoning buttons and
making sure their equipment was in order. Each bore weapons, carried
a hand comm, gas mask, and any odd or end the individual thought
might come in handy. To a man they were still trying to rub sleep
from their eyes.
BenRabi leaned against the frame of the door to his office. He
was still shaky. “You guys willing to get into a fight to
save my friend Mouse?”
“You’re on, Chief,”
someone muttered.
“He’s just an immigrant, you
know.”
“We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t
ready, Jack.”
Another said, “We’re ready, sir.
He’s one of us now.
I never liked him much myself. He stole my girl. But we got to
protect our own.”
A third said, “Klaus, you’re just spoiling for a
fight,”
“So now I got an excuse, maybe.”
“Okay, okay,” benRabi said. “Keep it down.
Here’s the frosting for the cake. I think the Sangaree woman
is involved.”
“Yeah? Maybe this time we’ll do the job
right.”
“I tried before. I didn’t get a lot of
support.”
“Won’t be nobody to feel sorry for her this time,
Captain.”
Moyshe started, looked the speaker in the eye. He saw no offense
was meant. He and Mouse did have brevet-commissions as captains of
police, with Kindervoort’s regular captain’s commission
senior. Seiners seldom used their professional ranks and titles.
He grinned. “I think you’re all fools,” he
said. “And I thank you for it. I’ll be with you in a
minute.” He stepped back inside, scanned the current data on
number of Seiners on-planet. The count was way down. People did not
want to play tourist at night, when most everything was closed. He
tapped out a red code to Traffic aboard Danion, meaning
something was up and no one else was to be allowed down till
further word. He guessed that within four hours there would be no
Seiners on The Broken Wings who were not part of the security
effort. He stepped outside. “Let’s go.”
They whooped like a bunch of rowdy boys.
They worried Moyshe. They thought this would be fun. He had to
calm them down. They could get themselves hurt.
He led them aboard a Marine personnel carrier, took the control
seat himself. The engine hummed first try. He roared toward Old
Town, gears crashing and tracks whining. He was so excited that,
for a few minutes, he forgot to cut in the mufflers.
Rumbling through empty night streets, he tried to anticipate
Mouse. Where would Storm go? That would depend on his quarry. If
Mouse lost her, the warehouse important to their first mission
would seem to him a likely place to pick up the track again. The
Sangaree, always nose-thumbingly bold, or stupid, might be using it
again.
The warren of tall, crowded old brick buildings pressed in as
Moyshe plunged ever deeper into the inky silence of Old Town. The
wareshouse district was a nerve-taunting area. The smell of poverty
and old evil reeked from every alley and doorway. BenRabi became
jittery. He put on more speed. “Almost there, men.”
He swung into the street leading past the warehouse he wanted,
brought the carrier to a violent, shuddering stop.
A bright actinic flash, that left ghosts dancing behind his
eyes, proclaimed nasty business afoot a half block beyond his goal.
The old site had not been renovated. The Sangaree obviously were
not using it.
“Stand by, men. Looks like we’ve found him.”
There was another flash. He eased the carrier over so it would not
block the street. “Everybody out. Stand easy.”
He used a pencil to scratch a diagram on the pavement. He was
amazed at how easily the Old Town layout came back. It had been
years . . . “Nick, you and Clair come in
this way. Klaus, take Mike and Will and come in from over here.
Kraft and I will go straight up the street. Test your comms. Okay.
Move out.”
Bright lase-weapons continued their ineffectual duel. BenRabi
and Kraft stalked forward, clinging to shadow, till they spotted
one of the duelists.
Moyshe studied the fire patterns.
Three gunmen were besieging a warehouse. One man was shooting
back from inside. He had skill enough to keep the three pinned.
“They must have lost somebody already,” Moyshe
guessed. The besiegers seemed to be in the grip of a crisis of
nerve.
“Maybe they’re keeping him pinned for somebody
else.”
“Maybe.”
The situation looked a little strange. The man in the warehouse
was not behaving like Mouse. Mouse would not waste time sniping. He
preferred the attack.
“What do you see?” Moyshe asked. His man was looking
around with infrared nighteyes.
“There’s just three of them. Funny. They look like
pirates.”
“What? Give me those.” Moyshe took the glasses.
Kraft was right. The besiegers wore McGraw jumpsuits. That made no
sense. This was enemy territory for McGraws.
Could be Mouse inside, though—if they were
pirates. They were working with the Sangaree now. Maybe Storm was
hurt . . . Whispering to his handcomm, Moyshe
moved teams into position behind each sniper. “Ready? Shoot
on my mark. Shoot!”
It did not go well. The Seiners did not have what it took to do
a man first hand, in cold blood. They allowed a vicious exchange of
fire before dropping two of the men. The third escaped only after
taking wounds no cosmetic surgeon would ever repair.
And still Moyshe worried. It seemed too easy.
He was changing. He was hardening into the paranoid hunter
Bureau had made of him. He did not recognize the shift right
away.
“All clear, Mouse,” he called.
Ozone stench and the smell of hot brick assailed his nostrils.
Sudden steam surrounded him, rising from a puddle left by the
programed rain of the dinner hour. A quick pair of lasebolts had
missed him low and high. He scrambled for cover.
“What the hell is the matter with that bastard? Has he
gone hyper-bent? Give me that stunner,” he snapped at Kraft,
who was too scared to move. “He must be hurt bad. Here. Take
this.” He shoved his own weapon into the Seiner’s
hands. “Come on. Get yourself together. You’ve got to
help.” To the other teams, via handcomm, he snarled,
“Draw fire, you guys. And I mean give it to him. I’m
going to stun him.”
A stunning would not please Mouse, but benRabi considered the
alternatives even less pleasant.
Beams on low setting tickled the ochre brick of the warehouse,
bluing the night weirdly. The whole street crackled and flickered
and came alive. Legions of shadows danced like spooks at midnight.
The return fire became erratic and completely ineffective. Moyshe
pinpointed the source, armed carefully, held his trigger stud down.
“Get over there,” he growled at Kraft.
The stunner’s spine-tingling whine continued till several
Seiners pushed through the warehouse’s street door.
Minutes later, from the window, someone shouted, “You got
her, Moyshe.”
“Her? What the hell do you mean?”
“It’s a woman. You got her clean. Don’t look
like there’s any nerve damage.”
A stunner sometimes played hell with its victim’s nervous
system. Death or permanent damage could result. It did not happen
often.
“Is it Strehltsweiter?”
“No. Come on over. She’s coming around.”
“What about Mouse?”
“Ain’t no sign of him.”
A woman, he thought as he started walking. What the hell? There
were only two women involved in this business. Amy and Marya. The
man would have screamed if this were either of them.
The Sangaree woman was on The Broken Wings, though. Of that he
was convinced.
The woman was leaning out the window, up-chucking, when Moyshe
entered the room whence she had been shooting. Her shoulders
slumped with defeat. Moyshe watched her from the doorway. She
seemed vaguely familiar from behind.
“Chief’s here, lady,” one of his men said, his tone
not unkind.
The woman pushed herself off the sill, turned.
“Alyce!”
The name came out a strangled toad croak.
“Thomas.”
Hammers of darkness pounded his brain. Hands as light as the
wings of moths tried to bear him up. A voice asked,
“What’s wrong, Moyshe?” from several light-years
away.
Despite the additional impact of seeing the woman in the flesh,
the episode ended in seconds. Cold, shaking, benRabi fought for
self-control.
She deposited her behind on the filthy window sill. Her breath
came in shallow, difficult gasps. Her face remained curiously
immobile despite its obvious effort to portray a variety of
emotions.
Shock? he wondered.
He looked inside himself.
He was shocked. Shivering, he tumbled into a dusty old chair,
stared at this impossible ghost of a romance past. His thoughts
swooped and whirled through a realm of chaos. His soul cried in
torment as it had done so constantly during his ancient
introduction to the Seiners. All the demons he had thought fettered
with his starfish’s help were now breaking their chains and
howling up from their dungeons. The inexplicable mind-symbol he
called the image of the gun flashed in and out of existence like
some barbarous neon advertisement for mental disease.
He did not pass out again. Neither did he regain his emotional
feet. He fought what was happening in his head, fending it while
trying to analyze.
There was something a little changed about all those old spooks.
They were not quite identical with their predecessors. Had time
eroded them? Helped them grow older and more mellow? What?
“Moyshe? What the hell is wrong?” Klaus demanded.
“Woman, what did you do to him?”
Moyshe heard. He did not respond. What could he do? What could
he say? To Klaus or Alyce. He had not expected to see her again,
ever, even in the tight social environment of Luna Command.
Certainly not out here on the fringes of Confederation, a thousand
lights from the scene of their passion and pain. It was too wildly
implausible a coincidence . . . Yet there she
sat, as agonizingly real as death itself.
He ground the heels of his hands Into his temples, feeling the
precursor pain of a savage headache. He gripped his stomach where
his half-forgotten ulcer was coming to sudden, unpleasant life. His
thoughts churned and sprayed like wild white water. His very brain
seemed to be sliding on its foundations. Barriers came crashing
down. Viewpoints shifted. If he did not grab something as
he whipped past, his soul would be left a fanged wasteland as
lovely and desolate as a bombed-out city.
He caught a glimmer of what was happening. He shied off like a
whipped dog. He clamped down, shoving a hundred mental fingers into
the sodden dikes. If he could just hold on till he found
Mouse . . .
“How are you?” Alyce asked.
Her voice was different. It was older. Less musical. More
hardened by life.
Her question had no meaning. It was just noise meant to break a
fearful silence. He did not immediately respond. His men watched
him with wonder and uncertainty, uncomfortably aware that they were
on the brink of seeing a soul laid bare.
“I’m fine,” Moyshe finally mumbled.
“How’re you?”
“Okay, now.” But she was not. She was shaking
violently. It was a common reaction to stunner shock. She would be
feeling as cold as he.
“Why were those men shooting at you?” he asked,
trying to gain some stability by concentrating on business.
“What’re you doing here?”
“It was a girl, Thomas. With your hair and
eyes.”
“Shut her up!”
It began to twist and burn. Down deep inside, the dikes began to
give. The demons howled and laughed. That insane image of the gun
thing superimposed itself over Alyce’s face.
“Mike!” he gasped. “Take two men outside and keep
an eye out for McGraws.”
His second desperate attempt to achieve stability failed. The
dikes were bulging inward. “Why’re you here?” he
squeaked.
“I thought it was all dead,” she said. “I
thought I’d forgotten it. But I can’t, Thomas. Go away.
Leave me alone.”
Leave her alone? Yes. Fine. But how did he get her to leave him
alone?
“Lady, the Chief asked a question,” his man Nicolas
growled. “Answer up.”
“Easy, Nick. No rough stuff. This’s personal, not
business.”
He spoke too late.
“Not business?” Snake-swift, the Seiner laid a hand
alongside the woman’s face. The blow hurled her to the floor.
He caught her hair as she fell, yanked. She screamed, but her cry
did not register with Moyshe.
What did was her hair, face, and throat coming away in
Nicolas’s hand. The Seiner raised his trophy like the
shrunken, wrinkled head of a Cyclops. The unmasked woman seemed
vaguely familiar, but she was not benRabi’s old haunt.
“Moyshe, you done been set up.”
BenRabi could not stifle a squeaky little laugh. “I done
been, Nick.”
Nicolas wheeled on the woman. “You start talking. What
kind of game are you playing?”
“Don’t bother, Nick. We won’t get anything. We
don’t have the equipment.” There were no tears in the
woman’s eyes now. She showed nothing but apprehension. Moyshe
added, “I don’t know if it would be worth the trouble
anyway.”
He did not need equipment. Despite the chaotic state of his
mind, a strong suspicion blossomed. Someone was working on him. He
had a good idea who, and why.
“Hey, Moyshe,” another of the men called.
“Mike says we got trouble. McGraws. A dozen or so. Out by the
carrier.”
He was regaining his composure. “It was a trap. But it
didn’t go according to plan.” He turned to the woman.
“The pirates weren’t in the script, were
they?”
To his surprise, she responded. She shook her head.
“You tell the Old Man to get him a better makeup crew.
Nick, we’ve got to get out of here. See if you can get
Kindervoort on Tac Two. Tell him I need a pickup squad. We’ll
let the Corps worry about their carrier.”
He had cobbled together a false peace within him. He knew it
would not last. He had to finish fast. He would begin crumbling
again soon. The one straw too many had been thrown into the
camel’s back. From here on in each period of tranquility
would be just one more frantic holding action doomed to eventual
failure. The decay would accelerate whenever the survival pressure
slackened.
He had seen it all before, in fellow agents. He was entering the
initial stages of a spontaneous, uncontrolled, unsupervised
personality program debriefing. It could get rough. There were so
many identities in his background that he could lose his anchor to
any of them.
“What about the woman?” Nicolas asked.
“Leave her. She’s not the enemy.”
“Moyshe,” said another, “Jarl says to meet him
by Jellyroll Jones. You know what he means?”
“Yeah. It’s a statue in the old park. Pass the word
to Mike. He knows the place. Nick, lead off. Keep close,
guys.” He turned to the woman. “Good-bye.” He
could not think of anything else to say.
She shrugged, but seemed relieved.
They slid out the back way, ran through a block of shadows.
BenRabi began to worry about the time. He had been away from his
job too long. How much longer? But it looked
easy . . .
There was a shot and a shout.
A second slug ricocheted off brick near benRabi. Cobblestones
became arrowheads piercing his chest as he tried to get closer to
the soil.
Shades of his last visit to The Broken Wings, he thought.
His men returned the fire, their lasebeams scoring the brick of
the walls of the buildings flanking the alley where the ambusher
crouched.
“Come on!” benRabi snarled. “Shoot at
him, dammit!” A fourth slug kicked chips of alley and lead
into his face. He wiped at tiny pearls of blood, wondered why the
assassin was concentrating on him. Was he Marya’s man?
Where was Jarl? Where were Mike and his men?
“Dammit, you guys, don’t you know this ain’t a
goddamned game?”
And where was Mouse, who had started this mess by disappearing?
Emotion began to rage through him again, undirected and confused.
He tried to control it, failed. His personality program resumed its
dissolution. The only anchor left him was a hard, red hot
anger.
A foot scraped cobblestone somewhere behind him. He rolled,
shot, hit a leg. A man yelped, scrambled for cover.
The gunman with the antique firearm kept booming away.
McClennon . . . benRabi took a second shot at
his victim before he got out of sight.
Another shadow drifted into the shelter of a doorway.
Moyshe’s program ceased its disintegration.
His perceptions reached a high usually stimulated only by drugs.
He felt every point and angle of the cobblestones beneath him,
seemed to become one with the dampness left by the programed rain.
He saw the grey and brownness of stone, the expanding sparks and
yellows of another muzzle flash, heard the thud as a bullet smacked
brick behind him. He smelled damp and sulfurousness of swamp the
atmosphere systems could never completely overcome. He could even
taste, it seemed, something salty.
Whoa! That was blood from a chip wound, dribbling into the
corner of his mouth.
He edged sideways. Four meters and he would be in a position
where the would-be assassin would have to expose himself to fire.
He made it. The man shot. Moyshe shot back, heard a yelp. His men
pursued him in his rush into that alley.
Moyshe kicked the revolver away from the would-be assassin.
“This clown is as incompetent as you guys. Come on. Get your
butts moving before I heat them up myself.” He waved his
stunner angrily.
There were shouts from the alley they had abandoned. He spun,
dropped, fired quickly, followed his men. The sting of his flesh
wounds drove him like a hunted beast.
Who am I now? he wondered. This isn’t like me. I’m
not a fighter. Gundaker Niven? Niven was supposed to be a
hardcase.
The adrenalin had him on the verge of another case of the
shakes. He had been through this kind of thing before, for the
Bureau, but never had been able to achieve Mouse’s calmness
under fire. He always got scared, shaky, and constantly had
to battle the impulse to flee.
Maybe that was why he had outlived several Mouselike
partners.
But they, too, had been programed to their roles.
He was doing well this time, he thought. He was showing flashes
of case-hardened calm, and shooting when it was time to shoot. He
had not thought himself capable of that.
Where the hell was that idiot Mouse?
After a dozen twists and turns along his journey he slowed,
started trying to look like a tourist headed for the Jones
monument. His men stalked along behind him.
The monument had not changed. It was the same tall bronze statue
surrounded by the same small park, its boundary stockaded by
imported pines and bushes. Between the trees and the statue there
were a dozen lighted fountains where sea nymphs bathed in endlessly
falling waters.
The park was the heart of an oasis in the desert of Old Town.
Lining the streets facing it were several museums, the Opera, a
library, and smart little shops which catered to the wealthy. Among
them were homes belonging to some of Angel City’s oldest
families. The square was a tenacious place. It refused to admit
that Old Town’s glories had faded. Most decaying cities
contained a few such pearls.
Six of Moyshe’s best men gathered outside his trailer.
They had donned nighttime black. They were buttoning buttons and
making sure their equipment was in order. Each bore weapons, carried
a hand comm, gas mask, and any odd or end the individual thought
might come in handy. To a man they were still trying to rub sleep
from their eyes.
BenRabi leaned against the frame of the door to his office. He
was still shaky. “You guys willing to get into a fight to
save my friend Mouse?”
“You’re on, Chief,”
someone muttered.
“He’s just an immigrant, you
know.”
“We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t
ready, Jack.”
Another said, “We’re ready, sir.
He’s one of us now.
I never liked him much myself. He stole my girl. But we got to
protect our own.”
A third said, “Klaus, you’re just spoiling for a
fight,”
“So now I got an excuse, maybe.”
“Okay, okay,” benRabi said. “Keep it down.
Here’s the frosting for the cake. I think the Sangaree woman
is involved.”
“Yeah? Maybe this time we’ll do the job
right.”
“I tried before. I didn’t get a lot of
support.”
“Won’t be nobody to feel sorry for her this time,
Captain.”
Moyshe started, looked the speaker in the eye. He saw no offense
was meant. He and Mouse did have brevet-commissions as captains of
police, with Kindervoort’s regular captain’s commission
senior. Seiners seldom used their professional ranks and titles.
He grinned. “I think you’re all fools,” he
said. “And I thank you for it. I’ll be with you in a
minute.” He stepped back inside, scanned the current data on
number of Seiners on-planet. The count was way down. People did not
want to play tourist at night, when most everything was closed. He
tapped out a red code to Traffic aboard Danion, meaning
something was up and no one else was to be allowed down till
further word. He guessed that within four hours there would be no
Seiners on The Broken Wings who were not part of the security
effort. He stepped outside. “Let’s go.”
They whooped like a bunch of rowdy boys.
They worried Moyshe. They thought this would be fun. He had to
calm them down. They could get themselves hurt.
He led them aboard a Marine personnel carrier, took the control
seat himself. The engine hummed first try. He roared toward Old
Town, gears crashing and tracks whining. He was so excited that,
for a few minutes, he forgot to cut in the mufflers.
Rumbling through empty night streets, he tried to anticipate
Mouse. Where would Storm go? That would depend on his quarry. If
Mouse lost her, the warehouse important to their first mission
would seem to him a likely place to pick up the track again. The
Sangaree, always nose-thumbingly bold, or stupid, might be using it
again.
The warren of tall, crowded old brick buildings pressed in as
Moyshe plunged ever deeper into the inky silence of Old Town. The
wareshouse district was a nerve-taunting area. The smell of poverty
and old evil reeked from every alley and doorway. BenRabi became
jittery. He put on more speed. “Almost there, men.”
He swung into the street leading past the warehouse he wanted,
brought the carrier to a violent, shuddering stop.
A bright actinic flash, that left ghosts dancing behind his
eyes, proclaimed nasty business afoot a half block beyond his goal.
The old site had not been renovated. The Sangaree obviously were
not using it.
“Stand by, men. Looks like we’ve found him.”
There was another flash. He eased the carrier over so it would not
block the street. “Everybody out. Stand easy.”
He used a pencil to scratch a diagram on the pavement. He was
amazed at how easily the Old Town layout came back. It had been
years . . . “Nick, you and Clair come in
this way. Klaus, take Mike and Will and come in from over here.
Kraft and I will go straight up the street. Test your comms. Okay.
Move out.”
Bright lase-weapons continued their ineffectual duel. BenRabi
and Kraft stalked forward, clinging to shadow, till they spotted
one of the duelists.
Moyshe studied the fire patterns.
Three gunmen were besieging a warehouse. One man was shooting
back from inside. He had skill enough to keep the three pinned.
“They must have lost somebody already,” Moyshe
guessed. The besiegers seemed to be in the grip of a crisis of
nerve.
“Maybe they’re keeping him pinned for somebody
else.”
“Maybe.”
The situation looked a little strange. The man in the warehouse
was not behaving like Mouse. Mouse would not waste time sniping. He
preferred the attack.
“What do you see?” Moyshe asked. His man was looking
around with infrared nighteyes.
“There’s just three of them. Funny. They look like
pirates.”
“What? Give me those.” Moyshe took the glasses.
Kraft was right. The besiegers wore McGraw jumpsuits. That made no
sense. This was enemy territory for McGraws.
Could be Mouse inside, though—if they were
pirates. They were working with the Sangaree now. Maybe Storm was
hurt . . . Whispering to his handcomm, Moyshe
moved teams into position behind each sniper. “Ready? Shoot
on my mark. Shoot!”
It did not go well. The Seiners did not have what it took to do
a man first hand, in cold blood. They allowed a vicious exchange of
fire before dropping two of the men. The third escaped only after
taking wounds no cosmetic surgeon would ever repair.
And still Moyshe worried. It seemed too easy.
He was changing. He was hardening into the paranoid hunter
Bureau had made of him. He did not recognize the shift right
away.
“All clear, Mouse,” he called.
Ozone stench and the smell of hot brick assailed his nostrils.
Sudden steam surrounded him, rising from a puddle left by the
programed rain of the dinner hour. A quick pair of lasebolts had
missed him low and high. He scrambled for cover.
“What the hell is the matter with that bastard? Has he
gone hyper-bent? Give me that stunner,” he snapped at Kraft,
who was too scared to move. “He must be hurt bad. Here. Take
this.” He shoved his own weapon into the Seiner’s
hands. “Come on. Get yourself together. You’ve got to
help.” To the other teams, via handcomm, he snarled,
“Draw fire, you guys. And I mean give it to him. I’m
going to stun him.”
A stunning would not please Mouse, but benRabi considered the
alternatives even less pleasant.
Beams on low setting tickled the ochre brick of the warehouse,
bluing the night weirdly. The whole street crackled and flickered
and came alive. Legions of shadows danced like spooks at midnight.
The return fire became erratic and completely ineffective. Moyshe
pinpointed the source, armed carefully, held his trigger stud down.
“Get over there,” he growled at Kraft.
The stunner’s spine-tingling whine continued till several
Seiners pushed through the warehouse’s street door.
Minutes later, from the window, someone shouted, “You got
her, Moyshe.”
“Her? What the hell do you mean?”
“It’s a woman. You got her clean. Don’t look
like there’s any nerve damage.”
A stunner sometimes played hell with its victim’s nervous
system. Death or permanent damage could result. It did not happen
often.
“Is it Strehltsweiter?”
“No. Come on over. She’s coming around.”
“What about Mouse?”
“Ain’t no sign of him.”
A woman, he thought as he started walking. What the hell? There
were only two women involved in this business. Amy and Marya. The
man would have screamed if this were either of them.
The Sangaree woman was on The Broken Wings, though. Of that he
was convinced.
The woman was leaning out the window, up-chucking, when Moyshe
entered the room whence she had been shooting. Her shoulders
slumped with defeat. Moyshe watched her from the doorway. She
seemed vaguely familiar from behind.
“Chief’s here, lady,” one of his men said, his tone
not unkind.
The woman pushed herself off the sill, turned.
“Alyce!”
The name came out a strangled toad croak.
“Thomas.”
Hammers of darkness pounded his brain. Hands as light as the
wings of moths tried to bear him up. A voice asked,
“What’s wrong, Moyshe?” from several light-years
away.
Despite the additional impact of seeing the woman in the flesh,
the episode ended in seconds. Cold, shaking, benRabi fought for
self-control.
She deposited her behind on the filthy window sill. Her breath
came in shallow, difficult gasps. Her face remained curiously
immobile despite its obvious effort to portray a variety of
emotions.
Shock? he wondered.
He looked inside himself.
He was shocked. Shivering, he tumbled into a dusty old chair,
stared at this impossible ghost of a romance past. His thoughts
swooped and whirled through a realm of chaos. His soul cried in
torment as it had done so constantly during his ancient
introduction to the Seiners. All the demons he had thought fettered
with his starfish’s help were now breaking their chains and
howling up from their dungeons. The inexplicable mind-symbol he
called the image of the gun flashed in and out of existence like
some barbarous neon advertisement for mental disease.
He did not pass out again. Neither did he regain his emotional
feet. He fought what was happening in his head, fending it while
trying to analyze.
There was something a little changed about all those old spooks.
They were not quite identical with their predecessors. Had time
eroded them? Helped them grow older and more mellow? What?
“Moyshe? What the hell is wrong?” Klaus demanded.
“Woman, what did you do to him?”
Moyshe heard. He did not respond. What could he do? What could
he say? To Klaus or Alyce. He had not expected to see her again,
ever, even in the tight social environment of Luna Command.
Certainly not out here on the fringes of Confederation, a thousand
lights from the scene of their passion and pain. It was too wildly
implausible a coincidence . . . Yet there she
sat, as agonizingly real as death itself.
He ground the heels of his hands Into his temples, feeling the
precursor pain of a savage headache. He gripped his stomach where
his half-forgotten ulcer was coming to sudden, unpleasant life. His
thoughts churned and sprayed like wild white water. His very brain
seemed to be sliding on its foundations. Barriers came crashing
down. Viewpoints shifted. If he did not grab something as
he whipped past, his soul would be left a fanged wasteland as
lovely and desolate as a bombed-out city.
He caught a glimmer of what was happening. He shied off like a
whipped dog. He clamped down, shoving a hundred mental fingers into
the sodden dikes. If he could just hold on till he found
Mouse . . .
“How are you?” Alyce asked.
Her voice was different. It was older. Less musical. More
hardened by life.
Her question had no meaning. It was just noise meant to break a
fearful silence. He did not immediately respond. His men watched
him with wonder and uncertainty, uncomfortably aware that they were
on the brink of seeing a soul laid bare.
“I’m fine,” Moyshe finally mumbled.
“How’re you?”
“Okay, now.” But she was not. She was shaking
violently. It was a common reaction to stunner shock. She would be
feeling as cold as he.
“Why were those men shooting at you?” he asked,
trying to gain some stability by concentrating on business.
“What’re you doing here?”
“It was a girl, Thomas. With your hair and
eyes.”
“Shut her up!”
It began to twist and burn. Down deep inside, the dikes began to
give. The demons howled and laughed. That insane image of the gun
thing superimposed itself over Alyce’s face.
“Mike!” he gasped. “Take two men outside and keep
an eye out for McGraws.”
His second desperate attempt to achieve stability failed. The
dikes were bulging inward. “Why’re you here?” he
squeaked.
“I thought it was all dead,” she said. “I
thought I’d forgotten it. But I can’t, Thomas. Go away.
Leave me alone.”
Leave her alone? Yes. Fine. But how did he get her to leave him
alone?
“Lady, the Chief asked a question,” his man Nicolas
growled. “Answer up.”
“Easy, Nick. No rough stuff. This’s personal, not
business.”
He spoke too late.
“Not business?” Snake-swift, the Seiner laid a hand
alongside the woman’s face. The blow hurled her to the floor.
He caught her hair as she fell, yanked. She screamed, but her cry
did not register with Moyshe.
What did was her hair, face, and throat coming away in
Nicolas’s hand. The Seiner raised his trophy like the
shrunken, wrinkled head of a Cyclops. The unmasked woman seemed
vaguely familiar, but she was not benRabi’s old haunt.
“Moyshe, you done been set up.”
BenRabi could not stifle a squeaky little laugh. “I done
been, Nick.”
Nicolas wheeled on the woman. “You start talking. What
kind of game are you playing?”
“Don’t bother, Nick. We won’t get anything. We
don’t have the equipment.” There were no tears in the
woman’s eyes now. She showed nothing but apprehension. Moyshe
added, “I don’t know if it would be worth the trouble
anyway.”
He did not need equipment. Despite the chaotic state of his
mind, a strong suspicion blossomed. Someone was working on him. He
had a good idea who, and why.
“Hey, Moyshe,” another of the men called.
“Mike says we got trouble. McGraws. A dozen or so. Out by the
carrier.”
He was regaining his composure. “It was a trap. But it
didn’t go according to plan.” He turned to the woman.
“The pirates weren’t in the script, were
they?”
To his surprise, she responded. She shook her head.
“You tell the Old Man to get him a better makeup crew.
Nick, we’ve got to get out of here. See if you can get
Kindervoort on Tac Two. Tell him I need a pickup squad. We’ll
let the Corps worry about their carrier.”
He had cobbled together a false peace within him. He knew it
would not last. He had to finish fast. He would begin crumbling
again soon. The one straw too many had been thrown into the
camel’s back. From here on in each period of tranquility
would be just one more frantic holding action doomed to eventual
failure. The decay would accelerate whenever the survival pressure
slackened.
He had seen it all before, in fellow agents. He was entering the
initial stages of a spontaneous, uncontrolled, unsupervised
personality program debriefing. It could get rough. There were so
many identities in his background that he could lose his anchor to
any of them.
“What about the woman?” Nicolas asked.
“Leave her. She’s not the enemy.”
“Moyshe,” said another, “Jarl says to meet him
by Jellyroll Jones. You know what he means?”
“Yeah. It’s a statue in the old park. Pass the word
to Mike. He knows the place. Nick, lead off. Keep close,
guys.” He turned to the woman. “Good-bye.” He
could not think of anything else to say.
She shrugged, but seemed relieved.
They slid out the back way, ran through a block of shadows.
BenRabi began to worry about the time. He had been away from his
job too long. How much longer? But it looked
easy . . .
There was a shot and a shout.
A second slug ricocheted off brick near benRabi. Cobblestones
became arrowheads piercing his chest as he tried to get closer to
the soil.
Shades of his last visit to The Broken Wings, he thought.
His men returned the fire, their lasebeams scoring the brick of
the walls of the buildings flanking the alley where the ambusher
crouched.
“Come on!” benRabi snarled. “Shoot at
him, dammit!” A fourth slug kicked chips of alley and lead
into his face. He wiped at tiny pearls of blood, wondered why the
assassin was concentrating on him. Was he Marya’s man?
Where was Jarl? Where were Mike and his men?
“Dammit, you guys, don’t you know this ain’t a
goddamned game?”
And where was Mouse, who had started this mess by disappearing?
Emotion began to rage through him again, undirected and confused.
He tried to control it, failed. His personality program resumed its
dissolution. The only anchor left him was a hard, red hot
anger.
A foot scraped cobblestone somewhere behind him. He rolled,
shot, hit a leg. A man yelped, scrambled for cover.
The gunman with the antique firearm kept booming away.
McClennon . . . benRabi took a second shot at
his victim before he got out of sight.
Another shadow drifted into the shelter of a doorway.
Moyshe’s program ceased its disintegration.
His perceptions reached a high usually stimulated only by drugs.
He felt every point and angle of the cobblestones beneath him,
seemed to become one with the dampness left by the programed rain.
He saw the grey and brownness of stone, the expanding sparks and
yellows of another muzzle flash, heard the thud as a bullet smacked
brick behind him. He smelled damp and sulfurousness of swamp the
atmosphere systems could never completely overcome. He could even
taste, it seemed, something salty.
Whoa! That was blood from a chip wound, dribbling into the
corner of his mouth.
He edged sideways. Four meters and he would be in a position
where the would-be assassin would have to expose himself to fire.
He made it. The man shot. Moyshe shot back, heard a yelp. His men
pursued him in his rush into that alley.
Moyshe kicked the revolver away from the would-be assassin.
“This clown is as incompetent as you guys. Come on. Get your
butts moving before I heat them up myself.” He waved his
stunner angrily.
There were shouts from the alley they had abandoned. He spun,
dropped, fired quickly, followed his men. The sting of his flesh
wounds drove him like a hunted beast.
Who am I now? he wondered. This isn’t like me. I’m
not a fighter. Gundaker Niven? Niven was supposed to be a
hardcase.
The adrenalin had him on the verge of another case of the
shakes. He had been through this kind of thing before, for the
Bureau, but never had been able to achieve Mouse’s calmness
under fire. He always got scared, shaky, and constantly had
to battle the impulse to flee.
Maybe that was why he had outlived several Mouselike
partners.
But they, too, had been programed to their roles.
He was doing well this time, he thought. He was showing flashes
of case-hardened calm, and shooting when it was time to shoot. He
had not thought himself capable of that.
Where the hell was that idiot Mouse?
After a dozen twists and turns along his journey he slowed,
started trying to look like a tourist headed for the Jones
monument. His men stalked along behind him.
The monument had not changed. It was the same tall bronze statue
surrounded by the same small park, its boundary stockaded by
imported pines and bushes. Between the trees and the statue there
were a dozen lighted fountains where sea nymphs bathed in endlessly
falling waters.
The park was the heart of an oasis in the desert of Old Town.
Lining the streets facing it were several museums, the Opera, a
library, and smart little shops which catered to the wealthy. Among
them were homes belonging to some of Angel City’s oldest
families. The square was a tenacious place. It refused to admit
that Old Town’s glories had faded. Most decaying cities
contained a few such pearls.