[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
legitimate business organizations and twisted them to Illegitimate purposes.
The humanoid aliens had become a deadly virus in the corpus of human
civilization.
Page 28
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Yet the very viciousness of Navy s counterattacks caused Niven grave doubts.
Where lies justice, he wanted to know, when we are more barbarous than our
enemies?
Mouse was fond of telling him that he thought too much and felt too little.
The issue was entirely emotional.
Morning brought an indifferent mood. A depression. He simply abdicated all
responsibility to Mouse.
What s the program today? He knew his partner meant to break routine. Mouse
had had Room Service send up real coffee. Niven nursed his cup. How are you
going to get this past the auditors?
My accounts go straight to the Old Man. He stamps theaccepted .
Must be nice to be the Number-One Boy.
It has its moments. But most of them are bad. I want you to hit the Med
Center again. Business as usual. But try to audit their offworld drug traffic
if you can. There s got to be records of some kind even if they only give us a
side view. I think most of it is going out of the Center labs, so it s got to
leave some kind of paper trace. If we can t find the source, maybe we can
pinpoint the ends of the pipes.
What about you?
I m going to spend some of the Old Man s money. For hidey holes. For tickets
out. You know. The insurance. That new Resident will show up pretty soon.
We ve got to be ready when it hits the ventilation.
Are you getting close? Feelings warred within Niven. He wanted out of Angel
City and the mission, but not right now. There was Marya to get to know.
No. Like I said, just buying insurance. I ve got the feeling this ll get
tight fast when they have somebody to tell them what to do.
What do you mean, get tight? It already is. I had sticktights all day
yesterday. Some of them stayed so close we could have worn the same shoes.
That s what they get for using local talent. But I think that s part of
their camouflage. We d figure a place this important would have a battalion of
high-powered types baby-sitting it. If somebody hadn t gotten onto S Plez,
they might have rolled along forever.
I ve got a feeling too, Mouse. And it ain t a good one. What happens if we
get caught in a crunch between them and the Starduster?
Mouse whipped a finger to his lips. Let s not get back to tertiary cover
yet, he breathed. Then he grinned. Going to suicide? Look, if you have
trouble, make the fallbacks. If I can t make them myself, I ll drop you a note
somewhere. Otherwise, I ll catch you here tonight. It should be our last here,
anyway.
Niven hit the lobby convinced that Mouse knew a lot more than he was telling.
But that would be typical. Mouse was Beckhart s fair-haired boy. His perfectly
expendable fair-haired boy.
He glanced back at the holorama. It was portraying one of the furious
electrical storms in Ginunga Gap on Camelot. A herd of wind-whales quartered
Page 29
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
toward him through the rain and lightning.
For Beckhart the Bureau s work was 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.
Page 30
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Marya caught him before he finished. What in the world? she demanded when
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]