Book 2 - Starfishers by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online

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