Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
     
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Five: 3048 AD
Operation Dragon, Lifting Off
    “Sorry I startled you.” A she-wolf’s grin made it plain that the Sangaree woman felt no remorse whatsoever. “I’m Maria Elana Gonzalez. Atmosphere Systems. Distributions Methods. Sometimes I do a little Hydroponics Ecology. I don’t have a Master’s for either, though. Too busy with other things.” She smiled her gun-metal smile.
    Yes , benRabi thought, the lady has other interests. Stardust and murder .
    “Moyshe benRabi,” he replied, in case she had forgotten.
    “An unusual name.” She smiled that smile. “Jewish?”
    “So I’m told. I’ve never been in a synagogue in my life.”
    “You wouldn’t be a writer?” She knew damned well