"Before? When, sir?"
"When he left Old Earth."
"That's not the same thing. Earth is part of Confederation. He just joined the Navy."
Danion's commander reflected. "True. But, considering the way Old Earthers look at these things, it indicates a flighty nature. All right. Enough about benRabi. What about his cohort?"
Amy's colorless eyebrows crinkled over her pale blue eyes. "That's more difficult, sir. Mouse is more complicated."
"Are you sure you're not projecting a lack of understanding? His psych profiles make him look pretty simple. Almost black and white. He seems to have hung his whole existence on his hatred for the Sangaree."
"Then why did he stay here? He could've gone back to Confederation with the others. He can't fight Sangaree out here."
"I've been wondering. That's why I asked."
"I can't tell you, sir. He's all facade to me. All charm and silliness. I can't tell when he's serious and when he's joking. The only feeling I get is that the man I'm seeing isn't the real Masato Storm."
"Are you involved with him, too, Lieutenant?"
"Sir!"
"Answer me."
"No, sir! I am not involved with Mr. Storm."
"Makes you part of a vanishing breed, then. Seems he's bedded half the single women on Danion."
"He attracts a certain kind of woman."
"Oh?" The caller smiled. "But not you?"
She was a long time answering. "The temptation is there. He has an animal magnetism. There's curiosity about what everyone else sees in him. But nothing is going to happen. I don't like him very much."
Her answer seemed to satisfy the Commander.
"We're entering a new era, Lieutenant. A time of changes. Our isolationism is under attack. The sharks are wearing us down. The Stars' End idea was a debacle. We're going to have to adjust. Either that or bend over and kiss our tails good-bye. Those two might be useful. They have unusual backgrounds. We don't have a secret service to speak of. They could build one. But that would mean trusting them. And they weren't born Starfishers."
"A lot of us weren't, somewhere along the line. My father... "
"I know. We're all refugees. Thank you, Lieutenant. Consider this discussion exclusive. Don't mention it to anybody. And if you learn anything that might have a bearing on the matter, call my office. I'll have your name red-tagged to my personal recorder. I'll call you back."
"Yes sir."
The Commander left as quickly as he'd arrived. Amy sat and stared into the shadows of the room.
After a while she lifted her thin frame and drifted into the room where benRabi was sleeping. She stared down at him with an expression approaching awe.
She had never seen or met the Ship's Commander before, except in public address announcements.
Her Moyshe, her last chance man... He might amount to something after all.
She would not have become involved with the foreigner at all had her self-image not been pit-deep. She could not make herself believe that she deserved a good man, a real Starfisher. She had expected to watch her life drift away from the foot of a social and career ladder.
The Commander's call changed everything. She would have to get Moyshe moving. And make sure his friend Mouse did not lead him astray.
The differences between the Confederated life that benRabi had chosen to leave and the lives of the Starfishers were deep.
The Starfishers, the High Seiners, spent their adult lives aboard these vast harvestships, drifting the deep-space hydrogen streams, gleaning the droppings of an almost intangible spacebeast they called a starfish. A whole ecology existed in the interstellar rivers. It was vast and slow, in keeping with the low random collision of the molecules from which their type of life had gradually evolved. That life was invisible to the eye or radar. The atoms constituting the "bodies" of the interstellar creatures could be scattered over cubic kilometers.
Starfish were more vast than harvestships, yet the matter in them could be compressed into a volume smaller than that occupied by the body of a ten-year-old. The atoms were as much foci for forces as part of the life process itself. And most of the creatures of the ecology existed, in part, in hyperspace and another, congruent universe.
At the starfish's heart a tiny fusion flame burned.
Starfish swept up hydrogen and random molecules and occasionally passed a node of hard waste. The nodes were incalculably precious.
The Starfishers called them ambergris. Ambergris was the foundation of their economy.
The nodes were used in instel communicators. There was no substitute. The Seiners controlled the only supply, and, consequently, the market and price.
Countless were the organizations which would pay almost any price for near-instantaneous communication across interstellar distance.
Moyshe benRabi and Masato Storm had been sent among the Seiners to try to find a way for their employers, Confederation Navy, to seize the harvestships and ambergris industry. They had succeeded and failed. They had found the information...
And had elected to become Starfishers themselves.
The hydrogen streams boasted a complex ecology. It included the predatory "shark," which subsisted principally upon starfish. Evolution had equipped starfish with only one truly credible defensive weapon. Intellect.
Deep-space evolution had begun eons before the condensation of Old Earth's sun. The modern starfish species had a remembered history spanning billions of years. They had seen countless planet-born races come and go. They knew the value of their waste.
Over the past thousand Terran years, an eye's blink in the life of a starfish, shark numbers had exploded insanely. A new species was coming into being. It reasoned feebly, bred obsessively, and hunted in cooperative packs which now, sometimes, numbered as many as a thousand predators. The survival of the starfish species had come into sudden doubt.
Their Old Ones had deliberated with almost immoderate haste. A decision had been reached. They turned their intelligence to finding a means of contacting the tiny, hard, warm creatures who lived in the metal shells questing around their wakes.
They had struck a bargain with the original Starfishers. Ambergris in return for the protection of human weapons. It had been a good bargain. The sharks had been kept at bay for two hundred years.
Another mere blink of Time's eye.
Then the ever more numerous sharks had developed the tactic of assailing the protectors before the protected.
Danion had enlisted landsmen as emergency replacements for heavy casualties suffered during one such attack. Her leaders had hoped to draw high quality technicians who might be seduced away from their lives in Confederation. Instead, they had attracted scores of spies sent in hopes of capturing control of a harvestfleet. Confederation's Bureau of Naval Intelligence had sent senior field agents Moyshe benRabi and Masato Igarashi Storm.
The two had found what promised to be a home.
Sirens wailed throughout Danion.
Amy jerked out of her seat. "Moyshe! Battle stations! We must be coming out of the flash wave."
BenRabi surged out of the bedroom, climbing into his jumpsuit as he came. "Let's go, honey." He dragged her into the passageway outside, where a pair of electric scooters nursed charger sockets. He seized one, she the other. "See you, love," he said as he sailed away.
He pulled to the center of the passage and opened the scooter up. The walls blurred past. People were running in the pedestrian lanes. Scooters hurtled at him from the opposite direction. There were near collisions at every cross corridor. A voice like that of a god kept booming, "Battle stations. Battle station."
Damn, damn, damn, Moyshe thought. I shouldn't be going back under so soon.
Five vast and tangled ships began nosing out of the intense nova light. The blowfly vessels still swarmed around their wounds, and between them and the derelict tumbling along in their midst, guarded by their shell of fire. One by one, the five great ships rolled to present their heaviest weapons outward from a common center.