STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS Page 5

  “Your taste in women has been running toward the youngish side lately, Friend Zarpfrin,” said Chivon Lasster distractedly. The liquor wasn’t working. She wondered if she should try a pill. She didn’t want to call up Andrew today … he was getting to be an addiction she didn’t care to have.

  Zarpfrin smiled gently, “As I pride myself upon my eclectic taste, I take offense at that remark. To paraphrase an old and neglected poet, if variety is the spice of life, season on! Good day, Friend Lasster. I commend you again for your performance.”

  “I have learned at the feet of a true master.”

  Overfriend Zarpfrin left, humming a popular tune. Zarpfrin had always been by nature a convivial, if Machiavellian, sort. If not for Tars Northern and the days of the project, he might actually be happy now. He certainly seemed to relish the intrigue and conflict of the Jaxdron war. But if Tars Northern was the emptiness and bitterness in Chivon Lasster’s life, then he was the thorn in Zarpfrin’s side, and Zarpfrin hated thorns.

  Lasster sighed and put down her drink, unfinished. She went back to her desk and attempted some administrative work to get her mind off this unsavory matter. Solo work was always a comfort to the efficient woman; she could lose herself, and any troubles, in juggling rows of detail.

  After a few minutes, though, it was apparent that she was not running at optimum efficiency. There was something bothering her about all this, some niggling worm of a thought she might call intuition if not for her rigid upbringing. There were troubled emotions deep down as well.

  The official position of the Macrostate upon emotions in its constituency was simple. The full spectrum of human feelings was acknowledged; however, only certain types were considered healthful for the greater good. Anger, pride, ambition, hatred, altruism, loyalty: these could be expressed, but emotions not considered fruitful for society were frowned upon. Therefore private disciplines, medications, and more complex methods were used to eradicate these unsocial, painful conditions.

  The wealthier members of any Microstate could afford individual psychcomp service. Chivon Lasster did not like to avail herself of her Computer Companion during working hours, but since her productivity was presently curtailed, use of the CompComp was in order.

  She connected the necessary chip array to the console, which then gave her access to a database that belonged to her alone, deep in the core of the titanic subterranean computer.

  She tapped out her code. Lights paraded across the console. A fountain of color spewed up, taking holographic form.

  A man.

  She kept sensory toned down. Keep this intellectual, she thought, as the man opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Hello, Andrew,” she said to the simulacrum. “I need to talk.”

  He was dressed in a neat suit. He was quite handsome in an older, fatherly fashion, with white fleecing the sides of his long, styled hair. His blue eyes shone with compassion.

  “Times have been hard,” he said. “The war is worrisome, and your position here burdens you. And yet I sense that this is not why you need soothing. Pardon my directness, Friend Chivon Lasster, but as your personally designed CompComp, I know you well, and it is my deduction from present sensory input that it is something else that troubles you, something that even we have not spoken of for a while.” He paused and sat down on the console, a ghost on a machine. “It is Tars Northern that still troubles you, despite your medication, despite your mental control exercises.”

  “Yes,” said Chivon Lasster, admitting it to the CompComp finally as she buried her face in her hands. “Yes, God help me, that’s true.”

  Chapter Six

  The starship captain brooded over the readings suspended in the small vu-tank. “What do you think, Jitt?” he asked the man sitting in the nearest jockey chair.

  “Captain Northern, most respectfully, after much study of the freighter with the help of our highly developed sensor system, I submit that an attempted pirate action would simply be much too dangerous to even contemplate, though we have detected trace amounts of attilium and needed supplies.” Fear quivered on the small man’s dark face.

  Tars Northern chuckled deep in his throat. “Tell me true, Yellowspine, is this based on actual computations of comparative firepower? Or is this simply one of your lily-livered premonitions, derived to keep your own ass high and dry?”

  “Truly, Captain,” said Dansen Jitt. “Firepower is no problem. A surprise attack would give us the needed edge. Yet I cannot help but think: What if there is a sensor baffler within the freighter, concealing extra Federation forces, skulking in wait for us? What if this is a trap? What if they have new, powerful weapons that will fry us all and the Starbow into crispy cinders? What if—”

  “What if the King of Fomalhaut Three had ovaries!” said a tall blond Amazon of a woman at the doorway to the control cabin. “He’d be Queen!”

  “No,” said Jitt, his eyebrows knitting with increasing worry. “He’d be a hermaphrodite, which is not uncommon in these days of advanced genetic engineering.”

  Kat Mizel shook her head and walked up to the captain, handing him a drink. “Thought you might need a relaxant, Tars,” she said, with a tender sparkle in her eyes.

  “If I wanted one, Kat, I would have asked for one,” said Captain Northern in an annoyed tone. He set the drink in a holder without tasting it, turning a granite face away from her. When Tars Northern smiled, he was startlingly handsome, with the kind of eyes, the sort of contemptuously sensuous mouth that women dreamed about. But when he frowned, as he did then, he was ice.

  “Look, Tars,” said the woman, “just because of one argument you’re acting like a little child? Darling, I’m saying I’m sorry. How about a little warmth?” She slipped her hand around his neck, onto his opposite shoulder, sexily toying with an epaulet of his casual uniform.

  Northern reached back and plucked her hand away, then spun and fixed her with a steely glance. “Mizel, this is not the time or the place. We are about to begin an important operation, goddammit. Have you no sense of priorities?”

  Angrily she flung her long blond flair back, and struck a defiant position, a lithe hip thrust forward, head bent down over large breasts, matching him glare for glare with her violet eyes. “I’m going with the boarding party, then, Tars.”

  Captain Northern shrugged eloquently. “I’m delighted. Do us all a favor and get shot, okay?” He picked the drink out of the holder and casually flipped it back at her. Instinctively she caught the cup, but its contents spilled out onto her grab-boots. Kat Mizel shrieked, bounced the cup off the floor, then stalked away, cursing. A servo-robot buzzed forward to clean up the mess.

  Dansen Jitt poked his head warily from the shelter of his arms, peeking first to make sure the woman was gone. “A very demanding young lady,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Tars Northern, with a broad smile. “Maybe that was the severe danger you saw in the cards, Jitt.” Northern played with controls. “Now then. According to the scanner, the Federation Freighter Ezekiel will emerge from Underspace beyond the ecliptic plane of this star system in precisely one hour and thirty-two minutes. Dr. Mish is very eager to obtain that attilium, you know, Jitt. We wouldn’t want to disappoint him, would we?”

  Dansen Jitt sighed. “I don’t know why you ask me for my psychic opinion, Captain. You always pooh-pooh it. You just don’t appreciate my abilities.”

  “When a watchman always cries wolf, Dansen Jitt, the wise man waits for the cry ‘Wolf pack!’”

  “You really don’t care about the attilium, do you? You just want the supplies and the money.”

  Northern shrugged and continued perusing the readouts.

  “And the thrill of tweaking the Federation’s nose by using this godforsaken starship. God, this thing does give the creeps sometimes, Captain. I can’t sleep nights for the nightmares. It’s just not made for humans, I tell you. I don’t think�
��”

  “You know, Jitt, we’re due for a trading stop on Wishaway,” said Captain Northern without looking at his navigator. “Perhaps you’d like to collect your share of the ill-gotten booty of our travels and invest in some real estate there for a retirement.”

  Jitt’s eyes filled with queasy terror. “Wishaway! Captain, the only kind of real estate the Wishaway Colony government would let me buy would be a grave plot!”

  “Sounds dreadfully familiar, Jitt. Just what do you do to make all of these worlds so very fond of you?”

  “I suppose that since this is such a routine pirate escapade,” Jitt said, his tiny eyes downcast, “my excellent intuitive abilities can be ignored. In fact,” he continued, blinking as though just hit by a realization, “I do believe they are all cleared up. False alarm, Captain Northern.”

  “Oh, excellent, Jitt,” said Northern, smiling. “Since you now know that the boarding will be a regular tea party, you’ll be happy to know that I’m placing you in charge of the detail responsible for retrieving the attilium from the vessel’s holds.”

  Dansen Jitt, for once, was speechless. Tars Northern suspected that it was not from gratitude.

  “Suit up, Lieutenant Jitt. I’ll maintain the conn. And that’s an order, my friend.”

  “I wish you hadn’t thrown away that drink,” murmured the little man as he got up to go.

  When the raid came upon the Federation Freighter Ezekiel, Laura Shemzak was of two minds about it.

  First, she admired the precision and the genius of the attack methods. The pi-mercs (known as Star Hounds by the navvies with whom she associated) caught the Ezekiel just after its reemergence from Underspace, while the ship’s energy fields were still in confused transition. She’d been restlessly pacing on the Observation Deck when the klaxons began to wail, so she got a glimpse of the pinnace sucker-ships darting through the weakened defenses and drilling into airlocks. The pi-merc starship quickly delivered the coup de grace to the Ezekiel’s engines, its ray conducted and stepped up by the sucker-ships. Laura picked herself up from the floor, astonished at the technological abilities displayed by a band of renegades.

  Second, however, she was mad as hell.

  The Lieftian system, holding Jonquil IV, Rameses Base, was just a brief stopover point. Her destination, Shortchild, was perhaps two days down the line, but this freighter was the only conveyance for a week.

  The hell with whatever the pi-mercs were stealing. They had shot the boat out from under her! No one did that to Laura Shemzak!

  She hauled herself up to where the Observation Deck bubbled out, giving her a vantage point on one of the three sucker-ships. It had bored into an airlock and hung there like a remora gripped to a shark, shimmering softly with residue energy from the field blast that had torn the hell out of the freighter’s engines. That airlock was on Level Three, Deck Five, as she recalled. She’d been on the Ezekiel for only three days, but she knew it from stem to stern, partly because of her inquisitive nature, but mostly due to her restless energy, which had taken her all through the vessel.

  She took the lift to Deck Five.

  The whole ship was in pandemonium. Smoke hung in acrid wreaths. Passengers and crew alike darted here and there. Some were sprawled on the floor, but Laura noted immediately that they were not dead. A cursory examination of several revealed the use of stun beams. Apparently the pi-mercs were not as ruthless as they were efficient.

  Laura saw the first of the boarders close to the airlock on Deck Five through which they had invaded the starboard side of the freighter. A single gun-wielding pi-merc guarded the entrance to their pinnace.

  Laura hung back, skulking in a recessed doorway. One guard was one too many for her plans. She had to act, and act quickly, or her hopes of ever seeing her brother again would fade rapidly from improbable to impossible. She took a quick glance from her hiding place.

  By the fit of the guard’s silvery, patched suit, she was humanoid and decidedly female. Her helmet’s tinted faceplate concealed her features.

  Although there was no external sign, the marauding band had to be in contact with some kind of Underspace radio. No doubt it was tongue-controlled from behind that polarized visor. Laura rolled back the sleeve of her jump suit.

  Then, utilizing the pressure-point code around the blip-ship jack, she peeled back the skin of her forearm and adjusted the channel frequency modulator, a device implanted specifically for blip-ship connection but easily manipulated manually in unattached situations like these. Useful in the field. Tones were born in her ear; she searched the wavelengths. Distortion gave way to a close-by communications interplay:

  “ … located. Blasting operations under way.”

  “You’ve got four point two minutes to get your larcenous tails back here,” said another voice, a woman’s. “Next time, no straw draw. I hate to back up. On top of all this, I’m the only woman among a bunch of tin generals!”

  “Captain’s orders, Lieutenant Mizel.”

  Laura took a gamble. She homed in on the frequency and played upon the data stream with her formidable complement of implanted blip-ship communication array like a maestro, jamming here, tapping there. Utilizing the radio implant in her bicuspids, she spoke just above the subvocal.

  “Lieutenant,” she said in a pained voice, “wounded … just down the corridor … help!”

  She watched the guard, who raised her energy rifle even as Laura sent the message. “Copy! Who’s that?”

  Laura remained silent; she fumbled for the door control behind her. The doorway hissed open, revealing a small linen storage closet.

  The noise did its job, attracting the guard, who advanced cautiously. Laura had no stun weapon of her own, but she did have her wits. Just as the muzzle of the guard’s weapon nosed into view, Laura jammed the comm channel with high-pitched interference. Another talent of the Radio Lady, she thought grimly. The guard reacted with a jerk. Laura leaped Out of her hiding place and grabbed the rifle by its barrel. A martial-arts move later, and the guard was sprawled upside down in the closet. With two deft finger jabs, Laura ensured that the woman was unconscious.

  What had the lieutenant said? Four minutes? Not much time.

  Laura deftly undid the snap fasteners, valves, and bolts of the suit. The helmet, lifted, disgorged a wealth of blonde, a face of Nordic beauty. “Ride’s over, dear Valkyrie,” she said, stripping the suit. “Goddamn, woman, how can you walk?” she added as she stuffed the suit’s front with towels to make up for her lack of natural padding. Otherwise, the woman’s height about matched, so the suit was a reasonable if somewhat loose fit.

  Leaving Lieutenant Mizel tied up and gagged in the closet, Laura picked up the energy rifle and assumed a position by the ravaged airlock.

  Within seconds, the first of the pi-merc party returned. “Tried to reach you, Lieutenant. What’s up?”

  Laura tried to match her memory of the lieutenant’s voice. “Radio interference on this end, I think. Where are the others?”

  The others were on the heels of their companion. They dragged bags and valises stuffed full of filched treasure.

  “Piece of cake, Lieutenant,” said one, tossing his bag into the sucker-ship. He had a clipped British accent. “These chaps have been using cardboard for security doors!”

  “Mon D ieu!” cried another, sounding French. “The cardboard battle is not over until I am safely returned to my fortress!”

  “Get your goddamned European asses in, then,” grumped another, “or I’m going to kick ‘em there. I’m not going to get myself killed on a milk run.”

  The squabbling as the party reboarded covered Laura’s attempt to remain in the background. She continued her guard duty, even stunning one of the Ezekiel’s mates who took it upon himself to make one last effort to stop the pi-mercs. When the party of six was safely ensconced in the pinnace, Laura ducked inside and assumed t
he only remaining empty seat.

  “Excellent,” said the Englishman, standing and sealing the lock behind him. “A sterling expedition, gentlemen,” he said, taking off his helmet. He had short hair and a plain face.

  “Put your goddamned rear end where it goddamned belongs, Wellesley!” growled the grizzled-looking man who had assumed the pilot’s position. “We’ll have plenty of time for glory back on the Starbow.”

  “Arthur,” said the Frenchman, after securing his gravity harness and removing his helmet, “I hope you agree that tactically I am still your better.”

  “Shut your goddamn flytraps!” said the pilot. “I’ve got a ship to run.”

  He turned a stern gaze down to the controls. Deftly manipulating retrorockets and repulsor beams, he separated the sucker-ship from its prey and pushed out into the void.

  “Bloody fine endeavor, George!” said the Englishman as the boat was jockeyed back into space. Laura was sitting by the Frenchman. As all attention was on the ship’s maneuvers, she scanned the interior of the sucker-ship. Utilitarian. The only item of possible use in these close quarters was a power gun in the Frenchman’s holster.

  “Thank you, Arthur,” said the crew-cut pilot. “Just a few minutes until docking procedure commences with the Starbow. We’ll be last back, I’m afraid.”

  “Lieutenant Mizel,” said one of the others, “is your helmet stuck?”

  “Oui!” said the Frenchman. “You would deprive us of your beauty after such a success?”

  “Stuck,” Laura murmured. “Would you give me a hand?”

  “But of course, mademoiselle,” the man replied courteously, reaching up to help undo the seals. Laura leaned over and unsnapped the man’s holster, quietly drawing the pistol.

  “There!” said the Frenchman. “I do not see any difficulty. Allow me!” Deftly the short man removed the helmet. His smile flip-flopped as he saw the face underneath. “Sacré bleu, Lieutenant Mizel. You have changed!”