Starfishers Volume 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 .
     
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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