Book 2 - Starfishers Read Free

gunmetal smile.
“Candy, even.”
    She must be more widely read than he had suspected.
    Moyshe benRabi was the protagonist of Czyzewski’s sole and
almost unknown trial of the novel, a cartoon caricature painted in
broad strokes of Gargantua and Don Quixote. The critics had said
too much so, stopping only on the edge of accusations of
plagiarism.
    Strange that a Sangaree should be familiar with
His Banners
Bright and Golden
 . . . 
    Sangaree. He had to remind himself. He had shared her bed. There
had been feeling in it during those hungry days on The Broken
Wings.
    She might willingly share beds again,
but . . . 
    In the end she would drink his blood. Sangaree nursed their
hatreds forever. For generations, if rumor was true.
    “And the Rat, too, eh?” Meaning Mouse. She would
have a special hell set aside for him. But the feeling was mutual.
BenRabi knew Mouse would plain love a date with her in a medieval
torture chamber. “All you Confies and beekies and McGraws
pretending you need Seiner money . . . Orbit in
an hour, Gun. See you upstairs.”
    More gunmetal smiles as she took her gunmetal-hard body toward
the Ladies.
    She would see him upstairs.
    No doubt. He wondered if he could conjure up a Mark XIV Combat
Suit real quick. Or spider’s eyes so he could watch his back.
This mission was going to be Roman candle all the way.
    And he had hoped for a vacation operation. For nothing to do but
loaf and work on
Jerusalem
.
     
----

----

Two: 3047 AD
The Olden Days, Angel City
    A whisper swifted on lightning feet through Angel City’s
underworld. It said the Starduster was on The Broken Wings.
    A private yacht had slipped into Angel Port after making a
surreptitious worldfall. It was registered to a Dr. Gundaker Niven.
The cognoscenti in the outfit remembered that name in connection
with a blow-up on Borroway that had set the Sangaree back a billion
stellars.
    Port workers with connections started the excitement. The bounty
on Gundaker Niven was immense. The Sangaree would not sit still for
a billion-stellar burn from God Himself.
    The dock workers passed the word that the
Lady of Merit
boasted
just two passengers. One was Caucasian, the other a small
Oriental.
    That got their attention downtown. Niven had something to do
with the Starduster. He might even be the Starduster under an
alias. And the Starduster’s number-one man was an Oriental,
one John Li Piao.
    These men, though, looked like Old Earth shooters, not the
masters of a shadow empire rivaling that managed by the
Sangaree.
    Nevertheless, heads nodded in the board rooms of crime. Orders
went out to the soldiers.
    The Starduster was a unique creature. He was a man in limbo. A
crime czar who had built a kingdom independent of the established
syndicates. He preyed on his own kind rather than pay a single
credit for Sangaree-produced stardust.
    His was the most feared name on the Sangaree hate list.
    Sentences of death had been pronounced on a dozen worlds. Open,
often redundant contracts approaching a hundred million stellars
existed.
    Time and success had made of him an almost mythic devil.
    He had been claimed killed a half dozen times. But he kept
coming back, like a thing undead, like a dying wizard’s
curse. Hardly would the jubilation end before his invisible hand
would again strike swiftly and viciously, ripping the guts from
another syndicate pipeline of profit.
    Was there more than one Starduster?
    The Sangaree Heads, to whom most organized crime could be
traced, sometimes suspected that he was not a man at all, but a
role. Perhaps Piao was the real Starduster. The handful of men who
had been pinned with the Starduster name were as diverse a group as
could be selected from a good-sized crowd. Short, tall, thin, fat,
white, black.
    The Sangaree family dictators knew only one thing for certain.
The Starduster was human. Sangaree might be contentious,
piratical, greedy, and short on conscience, but only a human who
hated would slash at them as