Mouse was right. The outfit didn’t whisper for days.
Niven’s tension dissolved. He started living his cover.
He began reviewing psychiatric statistics at Angel City’s
medical center. Bureau planners had calculated the cover mission
both to gather information of potential interest and to keep the
opposition undecided.
On the surface there was no logical reason for a prime agent to
spend all his time developing a mental-illness profile for an
outpost city. And even less sense in it for the Starduster.
He found the data intriguing. He began enjoying it.
Then he met the woman.
She materialized at the edge of his vision for an instant. She
was long, willowy, dark-haired. High, large, firm breasts locked a
stunning holographic picture into his mind forever.
She vanished before he could get a better look.
His papers hit the floor. He grabbed, wondering if wishful
thinking had bitten him. Those
knockers . . .
It was lust at first sight.
Then she was peeking back around a grey metal cabinet in
open-mouthed curiosity. Niven looked up into dark eyes. He dropped
his notes again. Bewilderment danced across her features.
“Is something wrong?”
“Just clumsy. You startled me.” He had never been
comfortable with women. Especially those who attracted him so
strongly, so suddenly.
It had been years since a woman had aroused him instantaneously.
He considered himself with amazement.
The tough program did not keep his stomach from knotting, or his
hands from shivering. It was silly. Adolescent. And he could not
help himself.
He knew that he would bitterly recriminate himself for his
weakness later. He always did.
He fumbled with the papers again.
She smiled. “Better let me do that.” She knelt,
shuffled his notes together. Mona Lisa, he thought as he peered down her deeply cut blouse.
Her mouth is exactly the same. And her face has the same shape. But
freckled.
She wore no makeup. And didn’t use anything but shampoo on
her hair. She wore it brushed straight down. It hung wild and free,
and had a hint of natural curl. She’s turned me into gelatin, he thought. He wanted to say
something. Anything. He could think of nothing that did not sound
juvenile, or insipid. But he wanted to know her. Wanted her.
“You work here?” he gobbled. His throat was tight
and dry. He expected her to laugh.
He knew she was no employee. He had spent two days in Records
already. She was the first person he had encountered, excepting the
ratty old nurse who had explained the system, and who stole through
now and then to make sure he did not leave obscene graffiti or drop
a grenade down the toilet.
While he was keeping the cover, Mouse was alley-prowling,
searching for the key that would open the operation. Prepared sound
tapes made it seem he was hard at work in their suite.
“No. I came in to do some research. How about
you?”
“Research. A project for Ubichi Corporation. Oh. Gundaker
Niven. Doctor. Social Psychology, not Medicine.”
“Really?” She smiled. It made her that much more
desirable. “I guess you’ve heard it before. You
don’t look it.”
“Yeah.” He did not have to force much sour into his
reply. He was a born homeworlder. That much of the cover was easy
to keep. “You’re from Old Earth, everyone
thinks . . . ”
The social handicap of an Old Earth birth, properly exploited,
could be converted to a powerful asset. For no logical reason
Outworlders felt guilty about what had become of the motherworld.
Yet Earth’s natives had made it the hell it was.
Escape was available to the willing. The willing were few.
People with adventure in their genes had gotten out in the first
centuries of space travel, around World Commonweal’s Fail
Point, during First Expansion, and other early migrations. Modern
departures came primarily through the Colonial Draft, as
Earth’s planetary government sold huge blocks of conscripted
labor in return for forgiveness of indebtedness. Those few natives
who wanted out usually chose military service.
Niven did not suspect that she might be Sangaree. He thought he
had scored the Old Earth point.
“You must be an exceptional
man . . . Excuse me. That’s
rude.”
“That’s prejudice.”
She handed him his notes, huffed, “I said I was
sorry.”
“Forgiven. I don’t expect an outsider to understand
Old Earth. I don’t understand it myself. Won’t you
introduce yourself?”
"Oh. Yes. Marya Strehltsweiter. I’m a chemopsychiatrist.
I’m doing my internship here. I’m originally from The
Big Rock Candy Mountain.” For an instant she fell back inside
herself. “I have one more year to go.”
“I’ve been there,” Niven said.
“It’s magnificent.” Oops, he thought. That was a
screw-up. Dr. Gundaker Niven had never visited The Big Rock Candy
Mountain.
“I miss it. I thought The Broken Wings would be exotic and
romantic. Because of the name. You know what I mean? And I thought
I’d get a chance to know myself. I never had time at
home.”
Niven frowned his response. He wanted to keep her talking, to
hold her, but did not know what to say.
“The old story. I got pregnant young, got married, dropped
out of school. Had to find work when he took
off . . . Did that and went back to school
both . . . ” She smiled conspiratorially,
winked, “It didn’t do any good to get away. The pain
came with me.”
“Friend of mine told me you can’t run away. Because
the things you want to get away from are always inside
you.”
“An Old Earther said that?”
“We’re not Neanderthals.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re right. It’s down the
chute. If it weren’t for Luna Command and Corporation Center
it would be back in the Dark Ages. I’ve had it. Want to duck
out for lunch?” He surprised himself. He was seldom that
bold.
“Why not? Sure. It’s a chance to talk to somebody
who hasn’t spent their whole life in this sewage plant. You
know what I mean?”
“I can guess.”
“You on expense account? Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not trying to be mercenary. But it seems like forever
since I ate in a decent place.”
“We’ll find one.” Anything, lady. Just
don’t fade away before I get organized and start talking my
talk.
“Where the hell have you been?” Mouse demanded.
Niven had wandered in after midnight. “I was getting scared
they’d burned you.”
“Sorry, Mom. Won’t happen again.”
“Shee-it. Doc found him a girlfriend.”
“Hey! You don’t have a copyright
on . . . ”
“All right. I know. Be cool. But give me a yell next time.
Just so I don’t get hemorrhoids from worrying. I got
it.”
“What? The clap?”
“Why we’re here. It’s stardust.”
“We knew that. Why else this silly-ass double
cover?”
“Not little stardust. Not small-time stardust. Stardust
big enough to rate a Family proctor in an outback
Residency.”
“You mean the fat broad?”
“Yeah. She was here because Angel City depots distribution
traffic for this whole end of The Arm. I’m talking a billion
stellars’ worth a month.”
“You’re talking out your butt. There isn’t
enough ship traffic to handle that kind of smuggling.”
“Yes there is. If you don’t really smuggle it. If
you send it out from a legit source labeled as something legit. If
you own the Customs people and the ships and crews and
shippers . . . ”
“Start over. You skipped chapter one.”
“What’s Stink City known for? Besides the
smell?”
“Organic pharmaceuticals.”
“Point for the bright boy. All the good organics they
dredge out of the muck outside. The main reason Angel City is here.
The Sangaree have gotten control of the whole industry. And most of
the local officials.
“They parachute the raw stardust into the swamp. The
dredgers bring it in. The field traffic controllers are paid to
ignore strange blips on their detection systems. The stuff gets
refined here, in the best labs, then they ship it out along with
the finest label organics. Their people at the other end intercept
it and get it into the regular stardust channels.”
“How did you dig that out?”
“Ran into a man who knew. I convinced him he should tell
me. Now, figuring how the Old Man works, he probably guessed most
of it before he sent us out. So what does he want? The source. Us
to find out where the stuff comes from before it gets
here.”
Niven frowned over the drink he had mixed while talking.
“It is big, then. So huge it would take a cartel of
Families . . . And you tried to tell me the
Sangaree outfit here was . . . ”
“The biggest, Doc. We just might be on the trail of the
First Families themselves. And I know what I said. I was
wrong.”
“I’m thinking about retiring. We’re really in
it, and that’s the only way out.”
The Sangaree were a race few in number. They had no government
in the human sense. Their major form of organization was the
Family, which could be described as a corporation or boundaryless
nation led by persons who were related. So-called
“possessionless” Sangaree formed the working class.
The Family was strongly elitist and laissez-faire capitalist.
Sangaree cut one another’s throats almost as gleefully as
they chopped up the “animal” races.
A Family Head was an absolute dictator. His followers’
fortunes depended upon his competence. Succession was patrilineal.
The existence of proctors only mildly ameliorated the medieval
power structure.
The First Families were the five or six most powerful Families.
Intelligence had never accurately determined their number. As a
consortium they determined racial policy and insured their own
preeminence among their species.
Very little was known of the Sangaree that the Sangaree did not
want known.
“Oh, hey,” Mouse enthused. “Don’t even
joke about getting out. Not now. Not when we’ve got an
opportunity like this. This might be our biggest hit ever.
It’s worth any risk.”
“That’s subject to interpretation.”
“It is worth anything, Doc.”
“To you, maybe.” Niven nursed his drink and tried to
regain the mood he had had on arriving.
Mouse would not let be. “So tell me about your friend. Who
is she? Where did you meet her? She good-looking? She give you any?
What’s she do?”
“I ain’t telling you nothing. You birddog your
own.”
“Hey! Don’t get that way. How long you known
me?”
“Since Academy.”
“I ever take your girl?”
“I never caught you.” He mixed another drink.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jupp did.”
Mouse flashed him a black look. “Who?” He shook his
head, indicated his ear. The room might be bugged. “Carlotta,
you mean? She came after me, remember? And he didn’t give a
damn.”
Jupp von Drachau had given a damn.
Their mutual acquaintance and Academy classmate had been
crushed. He had hidden it from his wife and Mouse, though. Niven
had been the receptacle into which he had poured all his pain.
Niven had never told Mouse that he was the reason that von
Drachau had abandoned wife and son and had thrown himself into his
work so wholeheartedly that he had been promoted ahead of men far
senior. Navy was the one institution that von Drachau trusted
implicitly.
He was not alone in that trust.
The Services were the Foreign Legion of the age. Their people
shared a hardy camaraderie based on their conviction that they had
to stand together against the rest of the universe. Service was a
place to belong. For people like yon Drachau it became a cult.
Niven never would tell Mouse.
The evil had been done. Let the pain fade away.
It was not what Carlotta had done. Faithful,
till-death-do-us-part marriage was an Archaicist fantasy. It was
the way the hurt had been done. Carlotta had made a public
execution of it, flaying Jupp with a dull emotional flensing knife,
with clear intent to injure and humiliate.
She had paid the price in Coventry. She was still one of the
social outcasts of Luna Command. Even her son hated her.
Niven still did not understand what had moved the woman. She had
seemed, suddenly, to become psychotic, to collapse completely under
the weight of her aristocratic resentment of her nouveau-riche
husband.
Von Drachau, like Niven, was Old Earther. Even before the
collapse of his marriage he had been climbing meteorically,
surpassing his wife’s old-line, fourth-generation Navy
relatives. That seemed to have been what had cracked her.
“Well, don’t get in too deep,” Mouse warned,
interrupting Niven’s brooding. “We might not hang
around long.”
Later, as he drifted on the edge of sleep, trying to forget the
trials of life in Luna Command, Niven wondered why Mouse had
discussed their mission openly, yet had stifled any mention of von
Drachau.
Protecting their second-level cover? Associates of the
Starduster certainly should not be personal friends of a Navy Line
Captain.
Or maybe Mouse knew something that Admiral Beckhart had not
mentioned to his partner, Niven thought. The Old Man liked working
that way.
The bastard.
“Probably both,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Talking to myself. Go to sleep.”
Beckhart always used him as the stalking horse. Or moving
target. He blundered around, stirring things up for Mouse.
Or vice versa, as Mouse claimed.
He wondered if anybody had been listening. They had found only
one bug in their sweeps. It had been inactive. It had been one of
those things hotel managers used to keep track of towel thieves.
But it was good tradecraft to assume that they had missed something
live.
Niven was not in love with his profession.
It never allowed him a moment to relax. He did not perceive
himself as being fast on his mental feet, so tended to overpress
himself pre-plotting his situational reactions. He could not, like
Mouse, just fly easy, rolling with the blows of fate like some
samurai of destiny.
For him every venture out of Luna Command was an incursion into
enemy territory. He wanted to go out thoroughly forewarned and
forearmed.
Life had not been so complicated in his consular residency days.
Back then friend and foe alike had known who and what he was, and
there had been a complex set of rituals for playing the game.
Seldom had anyone done anything more strenuous than watch to see
who visited him and who else was watching. On St. Augustine he had
worn his uniform.
There were different rules for scalp hunters. Beckhart’s
friends and enemies both played by the war rules. The blood
rules.
And for reasons Niven did not understand, Beckhart’s
command was involved in a war to the death with the Sangaree.
Niven had had all the indoctrination. He had endured the
uncountable hours of training and hypo-preparation. He even had the
benefit of a brutal Old Earth childhood. But somehow his Academy
years had infected him with a humanism that occasionally made his
work painful.
A tendency to prolonged introspection did not help, he told
himself wryly.
The campaign against the Sangaree could be justified. Stardust
destroyed countless minds and lives. Sangaree raidships pirated
billions and slaughtered hundreds. Through front men the Sangaree
Families obtained control of legitimate business organizations and
twisted them to Illegitimate purposes.
The humanoid aliens had become a deadly virus in the corpus of
human civilization.
Yet the very viciousness of Navy’s counterattacks caused
Niven grave doubts. Where lies justice, he wanted to know, when we
are more barbarous than our enemies?
Mouse was fond of telling him that he thought too much and felt
too little. The issue was entirely emotional.
Morning brought an indifferent mood. A depression. He simply
abdicated all responsibility to Mouse.
“What’s the program today?” He knew his
partner meant to break routine. Mouse had had Room Service send up
real coffee. Niven nursed his cup. “How are you going to get
this past the auditors?”
“My accounts go straight to the Old Man. He stamps the
accepted.”
“Must be nice to be the Number-One Boy.”
“It has its moments. But most of them are bad. I want you
to hit the Med Center again. Business as usual. But try to audit
their offworld drug traffic if you can. There’s got to be
records of some kind even if they only give us a side view. I think
most of it is going out of the Center labs, so it’s got to
leave some kind of paper trace. If we can’t find the source,
maybe we can pinpoint the ends of the pipes.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to spend some of the Old Man’s
money. For hidey holes. For tickets out. You know. The insurance.
That new Resident will show up pretty soon. We’ve got to be
ready when it hits the ventilation.”
“Are you getting close?” Feelings warred within
Niven. He wanted out of Angel City and the mission, but not right
now. There was Marya to get to know.
“No. Like I said, just buying insurance. I’ve got
the feeling this’ll get tight fast when they have somebody to
tell them what to do.”
“What do you mean, get tight? It already is. I had
sticktights all day yesterday. Some of them stayed so close we
could have worn the same shoes.”
“That’s what they get for using local talent. But I
think that’s part of their camouflage. We’d figure a
place this important would have a battalion of high-powered types
baby-sitting it. If somebody hadn’t gotten onto S’Plez,
they might have rolled along forever.”
“I’ve got a feeling too, Mouse. And it ain’t a
good one. What happens if we get caught in a crunch between them
and the Starduster?”
Mouse whipped a finger to his lips. “Let’s not get
back to tertiary cover yet,” he breathed. Then he grinned.
“Going to suicide? Look, if you have trouble, make the
fallbacks. If I can’t make them myself, I’ll drop you a
note somewhere. Otherwise, I’ll catch you here tonight. It
should be our last here, anyway.”
Niven hit the lobby convinced that Mouse knew a lot more than he
was telling. But that would be typical. Mouse was Beckhart’s
fair-haired boy. His perfectly expendable fair-haired boy.
He glanced back at the holorama. It was portraying one of the
furious electrical storms in Ginunga Gap on Camelot. A herd of
wind-whales quartered toward him through the rain and
lightning.
For Beckhart the Bureau’s work was a game. A vastly
recomplicated form of the chess to which Mouse was addicted. The
universe was his board. He would sacrifice his most precious pawn
for a minuscule advantage.
He had been taking on the entire Sangaree race for a generation.
And, with the implacability of a glacier, he was winning.
The prices of little victories left Niven appalled.
It took some sweet talk on his part to get to the Med
Center’s commercial records. He never was quite sure what
made the old nurse give in. Somewhere along the line he said the
right things. Pretty soon her death mask fell apart and reassembled
itself in imitation of a smiling face. Then she fell all over
herself explaining the data-retrieval system.
The information was there. A bonanza, and only thinly disguised.
More than Mouse could have prayed for. This was the data center
from which the whole operation was controlled. And it was not
guarded by so much as a data lock.
The Sangaree were notoriously sloppy administrators. They had
entered the interstellar community as predators, and had never
really adapted to the demands of modern commerce. Action-oriented,
they tended to ignore boring details, especially on worlds they
believed safely in their pocket.
Like making sure no one without an absolute need had access to
their records.
There had been a time when the need for protection would not
have occurred to them at all, just as certain hues might not occur
as existing to a color-blind man who had spent his entire life
among others with the same affliction. But they were learning.
Beckhart was teaching them via the Pavlovian method. The weakness
was his favorite angle of attack.
The Sangaree did keep one secret. They wrote it down nowhere,
and defended it to the death. The need to protect it was the one
thing that could bring all the Families together. Even Families in
vendetta would set aside their enmity long enough to keep
Homeworld’s location from becoming known.
On Borroway Sangaree children had murdered their younger
brothers and sisters and had then committed suicide rather than
face human interrogation, and that just because they had been
afraid they might know something the human animals would find
useful.
The hospital records were perfect. Niven unearthed few names,
but did gather business intelligence pinpointing critical
distribution points on more than two dozen worlds. Crimped there,
the pipelines would require years of healing.
He found it incredible that a people could be so ingenious in
marketing and so inept in administration. But the Sangaree were
pure power people. They provided the muscle, money, guns, and
merchandise. They let human underlings take most of the risks. And
lumps.
From the Sangaree viewpoint their human associates did not much
matter. The tips of the kraken’s tentacles were nothing but
ignorant, expendable animals. They could be replaced by others just
as ignorant, greedy, and expendable.
Only one or two people on a market world could point toward
Angel City. Only from the back of the beast itself could the
entirety of the monster be seen. And the beast was solidly in
Sangaree pay.
Marya caught him before he finished. “What in the
world?” she demanded when she found him immersed in the data,
far from his usual orbit.
Mouse was right. The outfit didn’t whisper for days.
Niven’s tension dissolved. He started living his cover.
He began reviewing psychiatric statistics at Angel City’s
medical center. Bureau planners had calculated the cover mission
both to gather information of potential interest and to keep the
opposition undecided.
On the surface there was no logical reason for a prime agent to
spend all his time developing a mental-illness profile for an
outpost city. And even less sense in it for the Starduster.
He found the data intriguing. He began enjoying it.
Then he met the woman.
She materialized at the edge of his vision for an instant. She
was long, willowy, dark-haired. High, large, firm breasts locked a
stunning holographic picture into his mind forever.
She vanished before he could get a better look.
His papers hit the floor. He grabbed, wondering if wishful
thinking had bitten him. Those
knockers . . .
It was lust at first sight.
Then she was peeking back around a grey metal cabinet in
open-mouthed curiosity. Niven looked up into dark eyes. He dropped
his notes again. Bewilderment danced across her features.
“Is something wrong?”
“Just clumsy. You startled me.” He had never been
comfortable with women. Especially those who attracted him so
strongly, so suddenly.
It had been years since a woman had aroused him instantaneously.
He considered himself with amazement.
The tough program did not keep his stomach from knotting, or his
hands from shivering. It was silly. Adolescent. And he could not
help himself.
He knew that he would bitterly recriminate himself for his
weakness later. He always did.
He fumbled with the papers again.
She smiled. “Better let me do that.” She knelt,
shuffled his notes together. Mona Lisa, he thought as he peered down her deeply cut blouse.
Her mouth is exactly the same. And her face has the same shape. But
freckled.
She wore no makeup. And didn’t use anything but shampoo on
her hair. She wore it brushed straight down. It hung wild and free,
and had a hint of natural curl. She’s turned me into gelatin, he thought. He wanted to say
something. Anything. He could think of nothing that did not sound
juvenile, or insipid. But he wanted to know her. Wanted her.
“You work here?” he gobbled. His throat was tight
and dry. He expected her to laugh.
He knew she was no employee. He had spent two days in Records
already. She was the first person he had encountered, excepting the
ratty old nurse who had explained the system, and who stole through
now and then to make sure he did not leave obscene graffiti or drop
a grenade down the toilet.
While he was keeping the cover, Mouse was alley-prowling,
searching for the key that would open the operation. Prepared sound
tapes made it seem he was hard at work in their suite.
“No. I came in to do some research. How about
you?”
“Research. A project for Ubichi Corporation. Oh. Gundaker
Niven. Doctor. Social Psychology, not Medicine.”
“Really?” She smiled. It made her that much more
desirable. “I guess you’ve heard it before. You
don’t look it.”
“Yeah.” He did not have to force much sour into his
reply. He was a born homeworlder. That much of the cover was easy
to keep. “You’re from Old Earth, everyone
thinks . . . ”
The social handicap of an Old Earth birth, properly exploited,
could be converted to a powerful asset. For no logical reason
Outworlders felt guilty about what had become of the motherworld.
Yet Earth’s natives had made it the hell it was.
Escape was available to the willing. The willing were few.
People with adventure in their genes had gotten out in the first
centuries of space travel, around World Commonweal’s Fail
Point, during First Expansion, and other early migrations. Modern
departures came primarily through the Colonial Draft, as
Earth’s planetary government sold huge blocks of conscripted
labor in return for forgiveness of indebtedness. Those few natives
who wanted out usually chose military service.
Niven did not suspect that she might be Sangaree. He thought he
had scored the Old Earth point.
“You must be an exceptional
man . . . Excuse me. That’s
rude.”
“That’s prejudice.”
She handed him his notes, huffed, “I said I was
sorry.”
“Forgiven. I don’t expect an outsider to understand
Old Earth. I don’t understand it myself. Won’t you
introduce yourself?”
"Oh. Yes. Marya Strehltsweiter. I’m a chemopsychiatrist.
I’m doing my internship here. I’m originally from The
Big Rock Candy Mountain.” For an instant she fell back inside
herself. “I have one more year to go.”
“I’ve been there,” Niven said.
“It’s magnificent.” Oops, he thought. That was a
screw-up. Dr. Gundaker Niven had never visited The Big Rock Candy
Mountain.
“I miss it. I thought The Broken Wings would be exotic and
romantic. Because of the name. You know what I mean? And I thought
I’d get a chance to know myself. I never had time at
home.”
Niven frowned his response. He wanted to keep her talking, to
hold her, but did not know what to say.
“The old story. I got pregnant young, got married, dropped
out of school. Had to find work when he took
off . . . Did that and went back to school
both . . . ” She smiled conspiratorially,
winked, “It didn’t do any good to get away. The pain
came with me.”
“Friend of mine told me you can’t run away. Because
the things you want to get away from are always inside
you.”
“An Old Earther said that?”
“We’re not Neanderthals.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re right. It’s down the
chute. If it weren’t for Luna Command and Corporation Center
it would be back in the Dark Ages. I’ve had it. Want to duck
out for lunch?” He surprised himself. He was seldom that
bold.
“Why not? Sure. It’s a chance to talk to somebody
who hasn’t spent their whole life in this sewage plant. You
know what I mean?”
“I can guess.”
“You on expense account? Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not trying to be mercenary. But it seems like forever
since I ate in a decent place.”
“We’ll find one.” Anything, lady. Just
don’t fade away before I get organized and start talking my
talk.
“Where the hell have you been?” Mouse demanded.
Niven had wandered in after midnight. “I was getting scared
they’d burned you.”
“Sorry, Mom. Won’t happen again.”
“Shee-it. Doc found him a girlfriend.”
“Hey! You don’t have a copyright
on . . . ”
“All right. I know. Be cool. But give me a yell next time.
Just so I don’t get hemorrhoids from worrying. I got
it.”
“What? The clap?”
“Why we’re here. It’s stardust.”
“We knew that. Why else this silly-ass double
cover?”
“Not little stardust. Not small-time stardust. Stardust
big enough to rate a Family proctor in an outback
Residency.”
“You mean the fat broad?”
“Yeah. She was here because Angel City depots distribution
traffic for this whole end of The Arm. I’m talking a billion
stellars’ worth a month.”
“You’re talking out your butt. There isn’t
enough ship traffic to handle that kind of smuggling.”
“Yes there is. If you don’t really smuggle it. If
you send it out from a legit source labeled as something legit. If
you own the Customs people and the ships and crews and
shippers . . . ”
“Start over. You skipped chapter one.”
“What’s Stink City known for? Besides the
smell?”
“Organic pharmaceuticals.”
“Point for the bright boy. All the good organics they
dredge out of the muck outside. The main reason Angel City is here.
The Sangaree have gotten control of the whole industry. And most of
the local officials.
“They parachute the raw stardust into the swamp. The
dredgers bring it in. The field traffic controllers are paid to
ignore strange blips on their detection systems. The stuff gets
refined here, in the best labs, then they ship it out along with
the finest label organics. Their people at the other end intercept
it and get it into the regular stardust channels.”
“How did you dig that out?”
“Ran into a man who knew. I convinced him he should tell
me. Now, figuring how the Old Man works, he probably guessed most
of it before he sent us out. So what does he want? The source. Us
to find out where the stuff comes from before it gets
here.”
Niven frowned over the drink he had mixed while talking.
“It is big, then. So huge it would take a cartel of
Families . . . And you tried to tell me the
Sangaree outfit here was . . . ”
“The biggest, Doc. We just might be on the trail of the
First Families themselves. And I know what I said. I was
wrong.”
“I’m thinking about retiring. We’re really in
it, and that’s the only way out.”
The Sangaree were a race few in number. They had no government
in the human sense. Their major form of organization was the
Family, which could be described as a corporation or boundaryless
nation led by persons who were related. So-called
“possessionless” Sangaree formed the working class.
The Family was strongly elitist and laissez-faire capitalist.
Sangaree cut one another’s throats almost as gleefully as
they chopped up the “animal” races.
A Family Head was an absolute dictator. His followers’
fortunes depended upon his competence. Succession was patrilineal.
The existence of proctors only mildly ameliorated the medieval
power structure.
The First Families were the five or six most powerful Families.
Intelligence had never accurately determined their number. As a
consortium they determined racial policy and insured their own
preeminence among their species.
Very little was known of the Sangaree that the Sangaree did not
want known.
“Oh, hey,” Mouse enthused. “Don’t even
joke about getting out. Not now. Not when we’ve got an
opportunity like this. This might be our biggest hit ever.
It’s worth any risk.”
“That’s subject to interpretation.”
“It is worth anything, Doc.”
“To you, maybe.” Niven nursed his drink and tried to
regain the mood he had had on arriving.
Mouse would not let be. “So tell me about your friend. Who
is she? Where did you meet her? She good-looking? She give you any?
What’s she do?”
“I ain’t telling you nothing. You birddog your
own.”
“Hey! Don’t get that way. How long you known
me?”
“Since Academy.”
“I ever take your girl?”
“I never caught you.” He mixed another drink.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jupp did.”
Mouse flashed him a black look. “Who?” He shook his
head, indicated his ear. The room might be bugged. “Carlotta,
you mean? She came after me, remember? And he didn’t give a
damn.”
Jupp von Drachau had given a damn.
Their mutual acquaintance and Academy classmate had been
crushed. He had hidden it from his wife and Mouse, though. Niven
had been the receptacle into which he had poured all his pain.
Niven had never told Mouse that he was the reason that von
Drachau had abandoned wife and son and had thrown himself into his
work so wholeheartedly that he had been promoted ahead of men far
senior. Navy was the one institution that von Drachau trusted
implicitly.
He was not alone in that trust.
The Services were the Foreign Legion of the age. Their people
shared a hardy camaraderie based on their conviction that they had
to stand together against the rest of the universe. Service was a
place to belong. For people like yon Drachau it became a cult.
Niven never would tell Mouse.
The evil had been done. Let the pain fade away.
It was not what Carlotta had done. Faithful,
till-death-do-us-part marriage was an Archaicist fantasy. It was
the way the hurt had been done. Carlotta had made a public
execution of it, flaying Jupp with a dull emotional flensing knife,
with clear intent to injure and humiliate.
She had paid the price in Coventry. She was still one of the
social outcasts of Luna Command. Even her son hated her.
Niven still did not understand what had moved the woman. She had
seemed, suddenly, to become psychotic, to collapse completely under
the weight of her aristocratic resentment of her nouveau-riche
husband.
Von Drachau, like Niven, was Old Earther. Even before the
collapse of his marriage he had been climbing meteorically,
surpassing his wife’s old-line, fourth-generation Navy
relatives. That seemed to have been what had cracked her.
“Well, don’t get in too deep,” Mouse warned,
interrupting Niven’s brooding. “We might not hang
around long.”
Later, as he drifted on the edge of sleep, trying to forget the
trials of life in Luna Command, Niven wondered why Mouse had
discussed their mission openly, yet had stifled any mention of von
Drachau.
Protecting their second-level cover? Associates of the
Starduster certainly should not be personal friends of a Navy Line
Captain.
Or maybe Mouse knew something that Admiral Beckhart had not
mentioned to his partner, Niven thought. The Old Man liked working
that way.
The bastard.
“Probably both,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Talking to myself. Go to sleep.”
Beckhart always used him as the stalking horse. Or moving
target. He blundered around, stirring things up for Mouse.
Or vice versa, as Mouse claimed.
He wondered if anybody had been listening. They had found only
one bug in their sweeps. It had been inactive. It had been one of
those things hotel managers used to keep track of towel thieves.
But it was good tradecraft to assume that they had missed something
live.
Niven was not in love with his profession.
It never allowed him a moment to relax. He did not perceive
himself as being fast on his mental feet, so tended to overpress
himself pre-plotting his situational reactions. He could not, like
Mouse, just fly easy, rolling with the blows of fate like some
samurai of destiny.
For him every venture out of Luna Command was an incursion into
enemy territory. He wanted to go out thoroughly forewarned and
forearmed.
Life had not been so complicated in his consular residency days.
Back then friend and foe alike had known who and what he was, and
there had been a complex set of rituals for playing the game.
Seldom had anyone done anything more strenuous than watch to see
who visited him and who else was watching. On St. Augustine he had
worn his uniform.
There were different rules for scalp hunters. Beckhart’s
friends and enemies both played by the war rules. The blood
rules.
And for reasons Niven did not understand, Beckhart’s
command was involved in a war to the death with the Sangaree.
Niven had had all the indoctrination. He had endured the
uncountable hours of training and hypo-preparation. He even had the
benefit of a brutal Old Earth childhood. But somehow his Academy
years had infected him with a humanism that occasionally made his
work painful.
A tendency to prolonged introspection did not help, he told
himself wryly.
The campaign against the Sangaree could be justified. Stardust
destroyed countless minds and lives. Sangaree raidships pirated
billions and slaughtered hundreds. Through front men the Sangaree
Families obtained control of legitimate business organizations and
twisted them to Illegitimate purposes.
The humanoid aliens had become a deadly virus in the corpus of
human civilization.
Yet the very viciousness of Navy’s counterattacks caused
Niven grave doubts. Where lies justice, he wanted to know, when we
are more barbarous than our enemies?
Mouse was fond of telling him that he thought too much and felt
too little. The issue was entirely emotional.
Morning brought an indifferent mood. A depression. He simply
abdicated all responsibility to Mouse.
“What’s the program today?” He knew his
partner meant to break routine. Mouse had had Room Service send up
real coffee. Niven nursed his cup. “How are you going to get
this past the auditors?”
“My accounts go straight to the Old Man. He stamps the
accepted.”
“Must be nice to be the Number-One Boy.”
“It has its moments. But most of them are bad. I want you
to hit the Med Center again. Business as usual. But try to audit
their offworld drug traffic if you can. There’s got to be
records of some kind even if they only give us a side view. I think
most of it is going out of the Center labs, so it’s got to
leave some kind of paper trace. If we can’t find the source,
maybe we can pinpoint the ends of the pipes.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to spend some of the Old Man’s
money. For hidey holes. For tickets out. You know. The insurance.
That new Resident will show up pretty soon. We’ve got to be
ready when it hits the ventilation.”
“Are you getting close?” Feelings warred within
Niven. He wanted out of Angel City and the mission, but not right
now. There was Marya to get to know.
“No. Like I said, just buying insurance. I’ve got
the feeling this’ll get tight fast when they have somebody to
tell them what to do.”
“What do you mean, get tight? It already is. I had
sticktights all day yesterday. Some of them stayed so close we
could have worn the same shoes.”
“That’s what they get for using local talent. But I
think that’s part of their camouflage. We’d figure a
place this important would have a battalion of high-powered types
baby-sitting it. If somebody hadn’t gotten onto S’Plez,
they might have rolled along forever.”
“I’ve got a feeling too, Mouse. And it ain’t a
good one. What happens if we get caught in a crunch between them
and the Starduster?”
Mouse whipped a finger to his lips. “Let’s not get
back to tertiary cover yet,” he breathed. Then he grinned.
“Going to suicide? Look, if you have trouble, make the
fallbacks. If I can’t make them myself, I’ll drop you a
note somewhere. Otherwise, I’ll catch you here tonight. It
should be our last here, anyway.”
Niven hit the lobby convinced that Mouse knew a lot more than he
was telling. But that would be typical. Mouse was Beckhart’s
fair-haired boy. His perfectly expendable fair-haired boy.
He glanced back at the holorama. It was portraying one of the
furious electrical storms in Ginunga Gap on Camelot. A herd of
wind-whales quartered toward him through the rain and
lightning.
For Beckhart the Bureau’s work was a game. A vastly
recomplicated form of the chess to which Mouse was addicted. The
universe was his board. He would sacrifice his most precious pawn
for a minuscule advantage.
He had been taking on the entire Sangaree race for a generation.
And, with the implacability of a glacier, he was winning.
The prices of little victories left Niven appalled.
It took some sweet talk on his part to get to the Med
Center’s commercial records. He never was quite sure what
made the old nurse give in. Somewhere along the line he said the
right things. Pretty soon her death mask fell apart and reassembled
itself in imitation of a smiling face. Then she fell all over
herself explaining the data-retrieval system.
The information was there. A bonanza, and only thinly disguised.
More than Mouse could have prayed for. This was the data center
from which the whole operation was controlled. And it was not
guarded by so much as a data lock.
The Sangaree were notoriously sloppy administrators. They had
entered the interstellar community as predators, and had never
really adapted to the demands of modern commerce. Action-oriented,
they tended to ignore boring details, especially on worlds they
believed safely in their pocket.
Like making sure no one without an absolute need had access to
their records.
There had been a time when the need for protection would not
have occurred to them at all, just as certain hues might not occur
as existing to a color-blind man who had spent his entire life
among others with the same affliction. But they were learning.
Beckhart was teaching them via the Pavlovian method. The weakness
was his favorite angle of attack.
The Sangaree did keep one secret. They wrote it down nowhere,
and defended it to the death. The need to protect it was the one
thing that could bring all the Families together. Even Families in
vendetta would set aside their enmity long enough to keep
Homeworld’s location from becoming known.
On Borroway Sangaree children had murdered their younger
brothers and sisters and had then committed suicide rather than
face human interrogation, and that just because they had been
afraid they might know something the human animals would find
useful.
The hospital records were perfect. Niven unearthed few names,
but did gather business intelligence pinpointing critical
distribution points on more than two dozen worlds. Crimped there,
the pipelines would require years of healing.
He found it incredible that a people could be so ingenious in
marketing and so inept in administration. But the Sangaree were
pure power people. They provided the muscle, money, guns, and
merchandise. They let human underlings take most of the risks. And
lumps.
From the Sangaree viewpoint their human associates did not much
matter. The tips of the kraken’s tentacles were nothing but
ignorant, expendable animals. They could be replaced by others just
as ignorant, greedy, and expendable.
Only one or two people on a market world could point toward
Angel City. Only from the back of the beast itself could the
entirety of the monster be seen. And the beast was solidly in
Sangaree pay.
Marya caught him before he finished. “What in the
world?” she demanded when she found him immersed in the data,
far from his usual orbit.