Star's End

by Glen Cook

  “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 programmed 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?”

&nbs
p; “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 programmed 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 adrenaline 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 programmed 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.

  Seventeen: 3050 AD

  The Main Sequence

  Jellyroll Jones, as great men went, was an accident. He never had been a hero. He
came in near the foot of the list of space-age memorables. His most singular act had been that of arriving on The Broken Wings before anyone else. Native school children were taught to consider him a hero, in the mold of a space-faring Magellan, but his myths bore no relation to the truth. His discovery had been sheer happenstance, and against his will. His ship had crashed here because of damage the guns of a Palisarian Directorate police corvette had done his astrogational computer. He and his crew—the women represented by the fountain nymphs—had hidden here for a few months. Unable to take the heat, humidity, and stench any longer, they had radioed for help. The corvette had collected them. Old Jellyroll had died in prison.

  Moyshe paused in a shadow. He studied the statue and the dancing tips of water columns visible above the trees.

  “Jarl’s on,” his comm man told him.

  Moyshe took the hand radio. “Jarl? Where are you? We’ve got people after us.”

  “Be there in five minutes, Moyshe.”

  BenRabi heard strange sounds behind Kindervoort’s voice. “What’s going on, Jarl?”

  “Roadblock. Trouble with the natives. We’re talking them down.”

  “Don’t take too long. We’re only a jump ahead.”

  Nicolas, hand comm against his ear, shook his head. “Mike’s three blocks from here. Says they might be pulling out. Maybe they read our signals.”

  “Jarl, we look okay for now. They’re maybe running. We’ll be waiting on the north side. You get anything on Mouse?”

  “Not yet, Moyshe. Out.”

  “Out.” BenRabi returned the hand comm, studied the park through nighteyes. It seemed peaceful enough. He started toward Jellyroll.

  Flash.

  “Shit. Not again.” From the frying pan into the fire twice?

  Maybe not. The shot had not been directed his way.

  There were more shots. Someone was fighting in there. Mouse? It looked like a baby battle, a duel, two men moving between shots. One was armed with a stunner only.

  “Nick, hold on here. I’ll check it out.” Moyshe trotted toward Jellyroll.

  The action seemed to be among the fountains beyond the statue. BenRabi pushed through the trees. He tried to spot the duelists, but they had stopped shooting. Was it over? He slipped toward the statue. Jellyroll would make a good, high observation point.