A whisper swifted on lightning feet through Angel City’s
underworld. It said the Starduster was on The Broken Wings.
A private yacht had slipped into Angel Port after making a
surreptitious worldfall. It was registered to a Dr. Gundaker Niven.
The cognoscenti in the outfit remembered that name in connection
with a blow-up on Borroway that had set the Sangaree back a billion
stellars.
Port workers with connections started the excitement. The bounty
on Gundaker Niven was immense. The Sangaree would not sit still for
a billion-stellar burn from God Himself.
The dock workers passed the word that the Lady of Merit boasted
just two passengers. One was Caucasian, the other a small
Oriental.
That got their attention downtown. Niven had something to do
with the Starduster. He might even be the Starduster under an
alias. And the Starduster’s number-one man was an Oriental,
one John Li Piao.
These men, though, looked like Old Earth shooters, not the
masters of a shadow empire rivaling that managed by the
Sangaree.
Nevertheless, heads nodded in the board rooms of crime. Orders
went out to the soldiers.
The Starduster was a unique creature. He was a man in limbo. A
crime czar who had built a kingdom independent of the established
syndicates. He preyed on his own kind rather than pay a single
credit for Sangaree-produced stardust.
His was the most feared name on the Sangaree hate list.
Sentences of death had been pronounced on a dozen worlds. Open,
often redundant contracts approaching a hundred million stellars
existed.
Time and success had made of him an almost mythic devil.
He had been claimed killed a half dozen times. But he kept
coming back, like a thing undead, like a dying wizard’s
curse. Hardly would the jubilation end before his invisible hand
would again strike swiftly and viciously, ripping the guts from
another syndicate pipeline of profit.
Was there more than one Starduster?
The Sangaree Heads, to whom most organized crime could be
traced, sometimes suspected that he was not a man at all, but a
role. Perhaps Piao was the real Starduster. The handful of men who
had been pinned with the Starduster name were as diverse a group as
could be selected from a good-sized crowd. Short, tall, thin, fat,
white, black.
The Sangaree family dictators knew only one thing for certain.
The Starduster was human. Sangaree might be contentious,
piratical, greedy, and short on conscience, but only a human who
hated would slash at them as bloodily as the Starduster did.
Even his motives were obscure. The narcotic he stole did not
always find its way back into trade channels. Greed had no obvious
hold on him.
The yachtsmen rented a groundcar and vanished into Angel
City’s warehouse district. Gundaker Niven was a chunky man of
medium height. He had hard, dark eyes of the sort that intimidated
civilians. He had thick, heavy hands. He jabbed with forefingers
for emphasis whenever he spoke. A wide scar poured from his right
ear down over his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.
“Take it out with a kilo of D-14,” he growled,
punching a finger at a dilapidated warehouse. His words came out
slurred. The right side of his mouth did not move. “Burn them
and run.”
His driver was a small man with Fu Manchu mustaches. He had the
same cold eyes. “But this ain’t no shatter run. All
that would do is show us how good they die.”
“Working for Beckhart is getting a meter too tall for me,
Mouse. This underworld stuff isn’t my specialty. It’s
too rough. Too complicated. Suppose the real Starduster has people
here?”
The smaller man laughed. “He does. You can count on
it.”
“Oh, Christ!”
“Hey! Working for the Old Man is an honor. When he asks
for you, it means you’ve made it. Didn’t you get sick
of that military attaché dodge?”
“No. I was drafted into this.”
“Come on! Engineering coups in the outbacks. How dull can
you get? There’s no rise to give it spice. When things go
broomstick you go hide in the embassy.”
“You think it’s all champagne and ballroom
conspiracy? I got my spleen burned out on Shakedowns. Inside the
embassy.”
“Still ain’t the same. Yeah. The Starduster has
people here. But by the time the word floats up and the shit comes
down we’ll be long gone.”
“That’s what you told me on Gorki. And New Earth was
supposed to be a piece of cake.”
This was their third mission teamed. Admiral Beckhart’s
specialized, secretive division of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence
had found that they complemented one another well.
“So you should be used to it.”
“Maybe. Gundaker Niven. What the hell kind of name is
that?”
“You take what they give you. This ain’t the
diplomatic service. You’re in the big time now.”
“You keep telling me. But they don’t job you. You
stay Mouse every go. They never crank you through the Medical mill.
They don’t have the Psychs scramble your brain.”
“They don’t need to. I’m not the front man.
I’m just around to drag your ass out of the fire when it gets
hot.”
“I don’t like the feel of this one, Mouse.
Something’s wrong. There’s going to be
trouble.”
“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly
upward.”
“Holy shit! I’m looking for toilet paper and he
throws the Bible at me. It’s sour, Mouse.”
“Because we got no backup? Hang tight, Doc. We don’t
need it. The Sangaree outfit here wouldn’t make a pimple on
the ass of a Family like the Norbon. They’ve only got five or
six people on the whole damned planet. They get the work done with
local talent.”
“Stickers can burn you just as dead as any Homeworld
shooter. Beyond-the-resurrection. What’s out here,
anyway?”
“Got to go with you there, Doc. Not a million people on
this rat hole. Three lousy domes, and enough swamp to supply the
rest of Confederation.”
“It even stinks in here.”
“It’s in your head. Going to circle the
block.”
They idled on, learning the warehouse district’s tight,
twisty out-of-the-ways first hand. Street maps and eidetic
holo-memories had been given them, but only exploration made a
place real. Every city had its feel, its color, its smell, its
style. Psych’s familiarization tapes could not capture the
intangibles of reality.
Knowledge and preparation were the corner- and keystones of
their trade.
“I need a bath,” Niven complained. “I can
smell swamp muck on me.”
“Let’s head back to the Marcos. My stomach’s
okay now. I’m hungry. And a game or two would get me back in
the groove. Tomorrow’s soon enough to take the
case.”
The Marcos was The Broken Wings’ best hotel, and one of
the best in The Arm. And that despite the limits imposed by the
space and conservation regulations of a dome city.
Dome cities are planet-bound space vessels. Which translates as
uncomfortable.
The lobby of the Marcos had been decorator-engineered to provide
an illusion of openness. The wall facing the entrance was masked by
a curving hologramic panorama from another world.
Mouse froze.
“What’s the matter?”
The smaller man stared straight ahead. He did not reply.
“The Thunder Mountains seen from Edgeward City on
Blackworld,” Niven murmured, recognizing the scene.
It was a stark view, of black mountains limned by the raging
star winds of a pre-nova sun. Blackworld was one of the least
hospitable and most dramatically beautiful of the outworlds.
“Just surprised me, Doc.” Mouse glanced around the
lobby. “It was the Cathedral Forest on Tregorgarth when we
checked in.”
People stared. The two gave the impression of being invaders
instead of guests. Their appearance labeled them hardcases barely
able to get by on their wits. Men of that breed belonged in the
warehouse district, not at the watering hole of the genteel.
The watery-eyed bellhop, who watched them stroll through the
hologram to the elevators, did not belong either. He limped when he
walked, but he was too solid, too macho, to be staff. His uniform
was a size too small. His stance was a centimeter too
assertive.
“Something’s gone broomstick,” Mouse said. The
elevator doors closed with startling severity, as though issuing a
declaration of war.
Meticulous preliminary research characterized a Beckhart
operation. They had seen holos of, and reports on, all regular
hotel staff.
“I saw him. What do we do?”
“Cut out a floor short.”
Why not just get the hell out? Niven wondered.
“Well take the stairs. We’ll catch them from
behind.”
“You’re taking a lot for granted.”
“Anything to save a kick in the teeth.”
Their floor was the fifth. The penthouse level. It contained
four suites. Only theirs was occupied.
“The empty car will tip them,” Niven remarked after
Mouse had punched Four.
“Yeah. You’re right.”
“So?”
“Tell you what. Let’s slide down and see if we can
snatch the gimp. Shoot him with Nobullshit and see what he’s
got to say.”
That was pure Mouse thinking, Niven reflected. Running was an
alien concept.
They were both in Old Earther role. Holonet stereotype Old
Earther role. But they had not received a full Psych-brief. Their
speech patterns tended to meander between that appropriate to the
role and that of Academy graduates. Their mission-prep had included
only a limited Psych-brief. They remembered who they were. They had
to think to maintain consistent images.
“We’re getting sloppy,” Niven observed.
“Let’s tighten up.”
The elevator stopped on Three. They exchanged glances.
“Better stand back, Doc.”
Mouse’s eyes and face blanked. A subtle air of crouch, of
tenseness enveloped him. He seemed to have gone to another
world.
He had entered “assassin’s mind.” Which meant
that he had become a biochemical killing robot.
Mouse was a physical combat specialist.
A dowdy, blubbery woman with two poodles and a make-believe
fortune in cultured firestones waddled aboard. “Five,
please.” And, before Niven caught the wrong note,
“You’re new. Offworlders?”
Niven responded with an affirmative grunt. He had to think of
some way to distract the woman while Mouse relaxed.
“How marvelous. Let me guess. One of the Inner
Worlds?”
Niven grunted again. He stared at the door, hoping rudeness
would be distraction enough. He took Mouse’s arm gently as
the door opened on Four.
“Stay where you are!”
A tiny needlegun peeped from a fat hand. The woman sloughed the
dowager character. Suddenly she was as hard-edged as they.
“Move together.” The doors closed. “Thank
you.”
Niven looked beyond costume and props and saw the enemy.
She was the Sangaree Resident for The Broken Wings, Sexon
S’Plez. Christ, you’re slow, he told himself. The fat alone
should’ve warned you.
Plez was suspected of being a proctor of the Sexon, which was
one of the First Families of the Sangaree. That would make her the
equal of a Planetary Senator . . .
The assignment of a heavy-duty Resident to a backwater world was
what had stimulated Luna Command into sending in its shock
troops.
How had she gotten onto them so fast? Niven wondered.
Two nervous heavies in ill-fitting hotel livery awaited the car
on floor Five. They were a tall, pale, ginger-haired pair who had
to be brothers.
“Which one’s Niven?” the older asked.
“Out.” The woman gestured with her weapon.
Wavering guns peered from all the brothers’ four
hands. Careful, Niven thought. He raised his hands slowly. These men
were amateurs. They might start panic-shooting.
“Chunky’s Niven. The gook must be Piao.”
The Starduster’s associates were as shadowy as he, but one
of the few names known was John Li Piao, reputed number-two man and
chief bone-breaker. The face of the man who wore that name, though,
was as much an enigma as the Starduster’s.
“I don’t want you should get upset,” Niven
said, trying to project terrified and outraged innocence, and
having no trouble with the fear, “but I think you’ve
got the wrong . . . ”
“Stuff it, animal!” the woman snarled. The Old Earth cant is catching, Niven thought.
The brothers’ eyes narrowed. Their lips tightened. The
insult included them. Animal was the Sangaree’s ultimate
racial slur.
Niven put on a bewildered face. “What’s going on,
anyway? I’m just a social researcher. Studying the effects of
dome constriction . . . ”
The brothers laughed tightly. One said, “Crap.”
Mouse had gotten caught in the limbo between normalcy and
assassin’s mind. The state was one of semi-consciousness. It
would take him time to push himself one way or the other. Niven
knew which way Mouse would go. His stomach knotted.
“ . . . to study the effects of dome
constriction on immigrant workers.” Mouse needed a
distraction. “For Ubichi Corporation. This man is my
secretary. We’re not carrying any cash.” That was the
course, he thought. Protesting innocence of a connection with the
trade would cause laughter. Protesting being robbed might make them
hesitate the instant Mouse needed.
He did not feel that Mouse was doing the right thing. But Mouse
did not know how to back down. He was a hitter. It would get him
killed someday.
It might get them both killed, but he could not change
Mouse’s ways.
The older gunman wavered. “The yacht was a Ubichi
charter.”
“Cover . . . ” the woman began.
Too late.
Mouse exploded.
Flying, with a scream that froze them an additional second.
A fist disarmed the woman. Her weapon dribbled into the
elevator. One foot, then the other, pistoned into the older
brother’s face. He triggered. Needles stitched the wall over
Niven’s head.
The younger brother managed only a half turn. Mouse bounced into
him. He chopped weapons away with his left hand. His right went for
the man’s throat.
A gurgling scream ripped through a shattered windpipe.
Knowing what would happen did not help Niven. Mouse was
fast.
The woman was running before Niven recovered her weapon. He
crouched, trying to aim.
He was too sick to hold his target.
She had kneed him savagely. The agony numbed his mind.
He hit the button for One, left the brothers to Mouse. Maybe he
could get her in the lobby . . .
Reason returned before the doors opened.
There was nothing he could do. Not in front of fifty witnesses.
Aching, helpless, he watched the fat woman collect her limping
accomplice and depart.
He began shaking. It had been close. Too damned close.
Mouse was human again when Niven reached Five. He was shaking
too. “Get her?”
“In the lobby? With fifty witnesses?”
“From the elevator. They couldn’t see you through
the holo.”
“Oh.” That had escaped him. “What about those
guys?”
“Got to do something with them.”
“Hell, turn them loose. Won’t make any
difference . . . ” He took another look.
His sickness returned, centered higher. “Did you have
to? . . . ”
Defiantly. “Yeah.”
Mouse was driven by a murderous hatred of everything Sangaree.
It splashed over on anyone who cooperated with them.
He refused to explain.
“Better get them out of the hall. Staff might come
through.” He grabbed a leg, started dragging.
Mouse dabbed at bloodstains.
“The outfit won’t like this,” Niven said as he
hauled the second corpse into the suite. “Number’s
going to be on us now.”
“So? We’ve been on the bull’s eye before.
Anyway, we bought some time. They’ll want to salvage the fat
broad before they move. And they’ll bring in somebody new.
They’re careful that way. We’ll hustle them
meanwhile.”
“How? The number’s on. Who’ll talk? Anybody
who knows anything is going to know that we’re
dead.”
“You ain’t dead till they close the box.”
“Mouse, I don’t feel right about this
one.”
“Doc, you worry too much. Let it stew. We keep our heads
in and our backs to the wall, maybe a little something will blow
our way. Just be on your toes. Like they said in the olden days,
when you get handed a lemon, make lemonade.”
“I don’t think the hardcase course took,”
Niven said. “You’re right, I mean. I shouldn’t be
so worried.”
“Know what your problem is? You ain’t happy unless
you’ve got something to worry about. You’re spookier
than an old maid with seven cats.”
A whisper swifted on lightning feet through Angel City’s
underworld. It said the Starduster was on The Broken Wings.
A private yacht had slipped into Angel Port after making a
surreptitious worldfall. It was registered to a Dr. Gundaker Niven.
The cognoscenti in the outfit remembered that name in connection
with a blow-up on Borroway that had set the Sangaree back a billion
stellars.
Port workers with connections started the excitement. The bounty
on Gundaker Niven was immense. The Sangaree would not sit still for
a billion-stellar burn from God Himself.
The dock workers passed the word that the Lady of Merit boasted
just two passengers. One was Caucasian, the other a small
Oriental.
That got their attention downtown. Niven had something to do
with the Starduster. He might even be the Starduster under an
alias. And the Starduster’s number-one man was an Oriental,
one John Li Piao.
These men, though, looked like Old Earth shooters, not the
masters of a shadow empire rivaling that managed by the
Sangaree.
Nevertheless, heads nodded in the board rooms of crime. Orders
went out to the soldiers.
The Starduster was a unique creature. He was a man in limbo. A
crime czar who had built a kingdom independent of the established
syndicates. He preyed on his own kind rather than pay a single
credit for Sangaree-produced stardust.
His was the most feared name on the Sangaree hate list.
Sentences of death had been pronounced on a dozen worlds. Open,
often redundant contracts approaching a hundred million stellars
existed.
Time and success had made of him an almost mythic devil.
He had been claimed killed a half dozen times. But he kept
coming back, like a thing undead, like a dying wizard’s
curse. Hardly would the jubilation end before his invisible hand
would again strike swiftly and viciously, ripping the guts from
another syndicate pipeline of profit.
Was there more than one Starduster?
The Sangaree Heads, to whom most organized crime could be
traced, sometimes suspected that he was not a man at all, but a
role. Perhaps Piao was the real Starduster. The handful of men who
had been pinned with the Starduster name were as diverse a group as
could be selected from a good-sized crowd. Short, tall, thin, fat,
white, black.
The Sangaree family dictators knew only one thing for certain.
The Starduster was human. Sangaree might be contentious,
piratical, greedy, and short on conscience, but only a human who
hated would slash at them as bloodily as the Starduster did.
Even his motives were obscure. The narcotic he stole did not
always find its way back into trade channels. Greed had no obvious
hold on him.
The yachtsmen rented a groundcar and vanished into Angel
City’s warehouse district. Gundaker Niven was a chunky man of
medium height. He had hard, dark eyes of the sort that intimidated
civilians. He had thick, heavy hands. He jabbed with forefingers
for emphasis whenever he spoke. A wide scar poured from his right
ear down over his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.
“Take it out with a kilo of D-14,” he growled,
punching a finger at a dilapidated warehouse. His words came out
slurred. The right side of his mouth did not move. “Burn them
and run.”
His driver was a small man with Fu Manchu mustaches. He had the
same cold eyes. “But this ain’t no shatter run. All
that would do is show us how good they die.”
“Working for Beckhart is getting a meter too tall for me,
Mouse. This underworld stuff isn’t my specialty. It’s
too rough. Too complicated. Suppose the real Starduster has people
here?”
The smaller man laughed. “He does. You can count on
it.”
“Oh, Christ!”
“Hey! Working for the Old Man is an honor. When he asks
for you, it means you’ve made it. Didn’t you get sick
of that military attaché dodge?”
“No. I was drafted into this.”
“Come on! Engineering coups in the outbacks. How dull can
you get? There’s no rise to give it spice. When things go
broomstick you go hide in the embassy.”
“You think it’s all champagne and ballroom
conspiracy? I got my spleen burned out on Shakedowns. Inside the
embassy.”
“Still ain’t the same. Yeah. The Starduster has
people here. But by the time the word floats up and the shit comes
down we’ll be long gone.”
“That’s what you told me on Gorki. And New Earth was
supposed to be a piece of cake.”
This was their third mission teamed. Admiral Beckhart’s
specialized, secretive division of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence
had found that they complemented one another well.
“So you should be used to it.”
“Maybe. Gundaker Niven. What the hell kind of name is
that?”
“You take what they give you. This ain’t the
diplomatic service. You’re in the big time now.”
“You keep telling me. But they don’t job you. You
stay Mouse every go. They never crank you through the Medical mill.
They don’t have the Psychs scramble your brain.”
“They don’t need to. I’m not the front man.
I’m just around to drag your ass out of the fire when it gets
hot.”
“I don’t like the feel of this one, Mouse.
Something’s wrong. There’s going to be
trouble.”
“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly
upward.”
“Holy shit! I’m looking for toilet paper and he
throws the Bible at me. It’s sour, Mouse.”
“Because we got no backup? Hang tight, Doc. We don’t
need it. The Sangaree outfit here wouldn’t make a pimple on
the ass of a Family like the Norbon. They’ve only got five or
six people on the whole damned planet. They get the work done with
local talent.”
“Stickers can burn you just as dead as any Homeworld
shooter. Beyond-the-resurrection. What’s out here,
anyway?”
“Got to go with you there, Doc. Not a million people on
this rat hole. Three lousy domes, and enough swamp to supply the
rest of Confederation.”
“It even stinks in here.”
“It’s in your head. Going to circle the
block.”
They idled on, learning the warehouse district’s tight,
twisty out-of-the-ways first hand. Street maps and eidetic
holo-memories had been given them, but only exploration made a
place real. Every city had its feel, its color, its smell, its
style. Psych’s familiarization tapes could not capture the
intangibles of reality.
Knowledge and preparation were the corner- and keystones of
their trade.
“I need a bath,” Niven complained. “I can
smell swamp muck on me.”
“Let’s head back to the Marcos. My stomach’s
okay now. I’m hungry. And a game or two would get me back in
the groove. Tomorrow’s soon enough to take the
case.”
The Marcos was The Broken Wings’ best hotel, and one of
the best in The Arm. And that despite the limits imposed by the
space and conservation regulations of a dome city.
Dome cities are planet-bound space vessels. Which translates as
uncomfortable.
The lobby of the Marcos had been decorator-engineered to provide
an illusion of openness. The wall facing the entrance was masked by
a curving hologramic panorama from another world.
Mouse froze.
“What’s the matter?”
The smaller man stared straight ahead. He did not reply.
“The Thunder Mountains seen from Edgeward City on
Blackworld,” Niven murmured, recognizing the scene.
It was a stark view, of black mountains limned by the raging
star winds of a pre-nova sun. Blackworld was one of the least
hospitable and most dramatically beautiful of the outworlds.
“Just surprised me, Doc.” Mouse glanced around the
lobby. “It was the Cathedral Forest on Tregorgarth when we
checked in.”
People stared. The two gave the impression of being invaders
instead of guests. Their appearance labeled them hardcases barely
able to get by on their wits. Men of that breed belonged in the
warehouse district, not at the watering hole of the genteel.
The watery-eyed bellhop, who watched them stroll through the
hologram to the elevators, did not belong either. He limped when he
walked, but he was too solid, too macho, to be staff. His uniform
was a size too small. His stance was a centimeter too
assertive.
“Something’s gone broomstick,” Mouse said. The
elevator doors closed with startling severity, as though issuing a
declaration of war.
Meticulous preliminary research characterized a Beckhart
operation. They had seen holos of, and reports on, all regular
hotel staff.
“I saw him. What do we do?”
“Cut out a floor short.”
Why not just get the hell out? Niven wondered.
“Well take the stairs. We’ll catch them from
behind.”
“You’re taking a lot for granted.”
“Anything to save a kick in the teeth.”
Their floor was the fifth. The penthouse level. It contained
four suites. Only theirs was occupied.
“The empty car will tip them,” Niven remarked after
Mouse had punched Four.
“Yeah. You’re right.”
“So?”
“Tell you what. Let’s slide down and see if we can
snatch the gimp. Shoot him with Nobullshit and see what he’s
got to say.”
That was pure Mouse thinking, Niven reflected. Running was an
alien concept.
They were both in Old Earther role. Holonet stereotype Old
Earther role. But they had not received a full Psych-brief. Their
speech patterns tended to meander between that appropriate to the
role and that of Academy graduates. Their mission-prep had included
only a limited Psych-brief. They remembered who they were. They had
to think to maintain consistent images.
“We’re getting sloppy,” Niven observed.
“Let’s tighten up.”
The elevator stopped on Three. They exchanged glances.
“Better stand back, Doc.”
Mouse’s eyes and face blanked. A subtle air of crouch, of
tenseness enveloped him. He seemed to have gone to another
world.
He had entered “assassin’s mind.” Which meant
that he had become a biochemical killing robot.
Mouse was a physical combat specialist.
A dowdy, blubbery woman with two poodles and a make-believe
fortune in cultured firestones waddled aboard. “Five,
please.” And, before Niven caught the wrong note,
“You’re new. Offworlders?”
Niven responded with an affirmative grunt. He had to think of
some way to distract the woman while Mouse relaxed.
“How marvelous. Let me guess. One of the Inner
Worlds?”
Niven grunted again. He stared at the door, hoping rudeness
would be distraction enough. He took Mouse’s arm gently as
the door opened on Four.
“Stay where you are!”
A tiny needlegun peeped from a fat hand. The woman sloughed the
dowager character. Suddenly she was as hard-edged as they.
“Move together.” The doors closed. “Thank
you.”
Niven looked beyond costume and props and saw the enemy.
She was the Sangaree Resident for The Broken Wings, Sexon
S’Plez. Christ, you’re slow, he told himself. The fat alone
should’ve warned you.
Plez was suspected of being a proctor of the Sexon, which was
one of the First Families of the Sangaree. That would make her the
equal of a Planetary Senator . . .
The assignment of a heavy-duty Resident to a backwater world was
what had stimulated Luna Command into sending in its shock
troops.
How had she gotten onto them so fast? Niven wondered.
Two nervous heavies in ill-fitting hotel livery awaited the car
on floor Five. They were a tall, pale, ginger-haired pair who had
to be brothers.
“Which one’s Niven?” the older asked.
“Out.” The woman gestured with her weapon.
Wavering guns peered from all the brothers’ four
hands. Careful, Niven thought. He raised his hands slowly. These men
were amateurs. They might start panic-shooting.
“Chunky’s Niven. The gook must be Piao.”
The Starduster’s associates were as shadowy as he, but one
of the few names known was John Li Piao, reputed number-two man and
chief bone-breaker. The face of the man who wore that name, though,
was as much an enigma as the Starduster’s.
“I don’t want you should get upset,” Niven
said, trying to project terrified and outraged innocence, and
having no trouble with the fear, “but I think you’ve
got the wrong . . . ”
“Stuff it, animal!” the woman snarled. The Old Earth cant is catching, Niven thought.
The brothers’ eyes narrowed. Their lips tightened. The
insult included them. Animal was the Sangaree’s ultimate
racial slur.
Niven put on a bewildered face. “What’s going on,
anyway? I’m just a social researcher. Studying the effects of
dome constriction . . . ”
The brothers laughed tightly. One said, “Crap.”
Mouse had gotten caught in the limbo between normalcy and
assassin’s mind. The state was one of semi-consciousness. It
would take him time to push himself one way or the other. Niven
knew which way Mouse would go. His stomach knotted.
“ . . . to study the effects of dome
constriction on immigrant workers.” Mouse needed a
distraction. “For Ubichi Corporation. This man is my
secretary. We’re not carrying any cash.” That was the
course, he thought. Protesting innocence of a connection with the
trade would cause laughter. Protesting being robbed might make them
hesitate the instant Mouse needed.
He did not feel that Mouse was doing the right thing. But Mouse
did not know how to back down. He was a hitter. It would get him
killed someday.
It might get them both killed, but he could not change
Mouse’s ways.
The older gunman wavered. “The yacht was a Ubichi
charter.”
“Cover . . . ” the woman began.
Too late.
Mouse exploded.
Flying, with a scream that froze them an additional second.
A fist disarmed the woman. Her weapon dribbled into the
elevator. One foot, then the other, pistoned into the older
brother’s face. He triggered. Needles stitched the wall over
Niven’s head.
The younger brother managed only a half turn. Mouse bounced into
him. He chopped weapons away with his left hand. His right went for
the man’s throat.
A gurgling scream ripped through a shattered windpipe.
Knowing what would happen did not help Niven. Mouse was
fast.
The woman was running before Niven recovered her weapon. He
crouched, trying to aim.
He was too sick to hold his target.
She had kneed him savagely. The agony numbed his mind.
He hit the button for One, left the brothers to Mouse. Maybe he
could get her in the lobby . . .
Reason returned before the doors opened.
There was nothing he could do. Not in front of fifty witnesses.
Aching, helpless, he watched the fat woman collect her limping
accomplice and depart.
He began shaking. It had been close. Too damned close.
Mouse was human again when Niven reached Five. He was shaking
too. “Get her?”
“In the lobby? With fifty witnesses?”
“From the elevator. They couldn’t see you through
the holo.”
“Oh.” That had escaped him. “What about those
guys?”
“Got to do something with them.”
“Hell, turn them loose. Won’t make any
difference . . . ” He took another look.
His sickness returned, centered higher. “Did you have
to? . . . ”
Defiantly. “Yeah.”
Mouse was driven by a murderous hatred of everything Sangaree.
It splashed over on anyone who cooperated with them.
He refused to explain.
“Better get them out of the hall. Staff might come
through.” He grabbed a leg, started dragging.
Mouse dabbed at bloodstains.
“The outfit won’t like this,” Niven said as he
hauled the second corpse into the suite. “Number’s
going to be on us now.”
“So? We’ve been on the bull’s eye before.
Anyway, we bought some time. They’ll want to salvage the fat
broad before they move. And they’ll bring in somebody new.
They’re careful that way. We’ll hustle them
meanwhile.”
“How? The number’s on. Who’ll talk? Anybody
who knows anything is going to know that we’re
dead.”
“You ain’t dead till they close the box.”
“Mouse, I don’t feel right about this
one.”
“Doc, you worry too much. Let it stew. We keep our heads
in and our backs to the wall, maybe a little something will blow
our way. Just be on your toes. Like they said in the olden days,
when you get handed a lemon, make lemonade.”
“I don’t think the hardcase course took,”
Niven said. “You’re right, I mean. I shouldn’t be
so worried.”
“Know what your problem is? You ain’t happy unless
you’ve got something to worry about. You’re spookier
than an old maid with seven cats.”