"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."
Three: 3048 AD
Operation Dragon, Blake City Starport
The terminal's sounds crowded benRabi. The smells and swirling colors dazzled him. The nervousness started.
It always did at the mouth of the lion's den. Or, this time, the dragon's lair. The briefing tapes had claimed that starfish, seen in space, resembled dragons two hundred kilometers long.
He shuffled forward with the line, finally reached the table. One of the Seiner men asked a few questions. He replied numbly.
"Sign and thumbprint this please, Mr. benRabi. Give it to the lady with the rest of your paperwork."
Shaking, he completed his contract. The Seiner girl at table's end smiled as she shoved his papers into the maw of her reducing machine. She said, "Just through that door and take a seat, please. The shuttle will be ready shortly."
He went, bemused. That pale Seiner girl, with her pale hair and harsh cheekbones, reminded him of Alyce, his Academy love. That was not good. More than a decade had passed, and still the pain could penetrate his armor.
Was that why he had trouble with women? Every affair since had, inevitably, fallen into emotional chaos. Each had become a duel with swords of intentional hurt.
But there had been no prior affairs to stand comparison. Maybe he was just consistent in picking unstable women.
He took a chair in the waiting room. Out came the tattered notebook, a traveling companion of many years. This time, he swore, he would finish Jerusalem.
The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: The footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird.
—The Prose Edda
Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he was sure that was the best possible opening quote. It had an indisputable universality.
Every life had its Loki capable of binding it with chains as tenuous but strong.
Those wormwood memories of Academy returned. They were indestructible memorabilia of an affair with a fellow midshipman who had been the daughter of the Vice Commandant and the granddaughter of the Chief of Staff Navy.
He had been an idiot. A pig-iron, chocolate-plated fool. How had he made it through? In the context of Alyce, he still thought his survival a miracle.
And the cost? What if he had not, as ordered, dropped the affair? What if he had persisted? She had demanded that he do so, defying what to him had been terrifying concentrations of authority.
To her those people had been family. Mother and grandfather. To him they had appeared as behemoths of power.
And the night beast with guilt-fangs longer than any of his other haunts: What of the child?
Come on, he grumbled at himself. What is this? Let's ditch the memories and romantic nonsense. He was a grown man. He should get back into Jerusalem; that would be a blow against the dread empire of his soul.
One of his favorites, from Pope's Dunciad:
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word...
"Ladies and gentlemen."
He looked up. What now? Ah. A last-chance-to-get-out briefing.
It was conducted by an officer with a voice so infuriatingly scratchy that it had to be technically augmented. "We don't want you on our ship. You're not our kind of people," the officer said for openers.
"Why're you here? What are your motives?"
Good questions, benRabi thought.
"Two reasons. You're either bemused by the Seiner myth, which is a holonet fabrication, or you're here spying. I'll let you in on the secret now. This isn't going to be any romantic adventure. And you're not going to get at any information. All we're going to give you is a lot of hard work inside a culture unlike any you've ever known. We're not going to ease you into our world. We're not going to coddle you. We don't have the time."
The man was deliberately trying to upset them. Moyshe wondered why.
"We've assembled you for one reason. It's the only way we can meet next year's harvest quotas."
BenRabi had a sudden feeling. A premonition, he thought. The man had more than harvests on his mind. Some worry, or fear, was racketing around his brain. Something terrible and big had him half spooked.
Admiral Beckhart liked using benRabi because he had these intuitions.
Moyshe also sensed a ghost of disappointment in the speaker, along with a taint of distaste for landsmen. He spoke as if tasting the sour flavor of betrayal.
It was inarguable that these Seiners were desperate. They would never have sought outside technicians otherwise.
BenRabi quelled a surge of compassion.
The speaker's home was a harvestship somewhere out in the Big Dark. To survive it needed a massive input of competent technicians. The man was sour because of all of Confederation's billions, only two hundred people had come forward. And most of those could be considered suspect.