"How curious you can't imagine."
Inflections in Cassius's speech were necessarily hard to grasp. This time Storm caught it. "You found something?"
"I think we learned most of it. It will be interesting watching the Dees while we discuss it."
"You can't tell me now?"
"We're fifty-one hours from the asteroid. Take time to recuperate. You're still disoriented. The discussion will be a strain."
"No doubt."
For two days Storm slept or endured his son's vague, intriguing hints about what he and Cassius had discovered on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. He tried to make the best of it by retreating to his clarinet and Bible. One of his sergeants had risked his life to salvage them from the phase-disrupted wreck of his singleship.
His eye was too weak for the book, his fingers insufficiently coordinated for the instrument. Mouse read some for him. Time did not drag. He slept a lot.
Mouse wakened him once, so he could watch while Cassius blurred their influential backtrail in the field around a star. Walters meant to make a complete orbit, take hyper briefly while masked by the star's own field, then drift for a day at a velocity slightly below that of light. The asteroid lay in the cometary belt of the chosen star.
The maneuver was intended to shed any unnoticed tail. Perforce, any such shadow would be operating at the limits of detection and would quickly lose contact.
Storm had Mouse move him to the control room for the stellar orbit.
"Cassius, roll her so the sun'll be topside during orbit," he said.
"You've got it." The star wobbled slightly as Cassius adjusted the ship's attitude. It swelled to the size of a sun. Cassius dove in, sliding around so close that the horizon curves vanished and they seemed to be drifting below an endless ceiling of fire. It was an Armageddon sky from which flames reached down with stately grace, as if to capture them and drag them into all that fury. Even smaller sunspots appeared as vast, dark continents surrounded by vaster oceans of flame. Cassius put all his filters up and let Storm stare, brooding, into that furnace that was the ultimate source of all other energies.
Storm said, "How like life itself a star is. It pulses. It struggles to maintain itself in a boundless ocean of cold despair. Every atom vibrates its little nucleus out, fighting the vampire night sucking its life. And the star fights knowing the struggle is hopeless, knowing that all it can do is die defiantly, going nova as its last grand gesture."
Mouse leaned forward, listening intently. His father seemed to be trying to create some order out of his own nebulous philosophy.
"Entropy and Chaos, death and evil, they can't be beaten by star or man, but in defeat there's always the victory of defiance. This sun is telling me, Gneaus, the mortal flesh can be destroyed, but the spirit, the courage within, is eternal. It need not yield. And that's all the victory you'll ever get."
Mouse watched with watery eyes as his father fell asleep, exhausted by the effort it had taken to put his feelings into words. The youth stared up at the fire, trying to see what Gneaus Storm had seen. He could not find it. He rose and took the old man back to his medicare cradle.
Being moved brought Storm back to a twilight awareness.
All his adult life Storm had been anticipating a fierce and final conflict from which he could win no mundane victory. With almost religious faith he believed that the manipulators would someday push him into a corner from which there would be no escape but death. He had always believed that Richard would be the instrument of his destruction, and that he and Richard, by destroying one another, would spell the doom of their kind.
The fires of the Ulantonid War had ignited a blaze of panhumanism of which Confederation was still taking full advantage. It was bulling its way into broad reaches of relatively ungovernmented space in apparent response to a set of laws similar to those defining the growth of organisms and species. Mercenary armies were among those institutions facing increasingly limited futures.
No government willingly tolerates private competition, and especially not competition which can challenge its decrees. The most benign government ever imagined has as its root assumption its right to apply force to the individual. From inception every government continuously strives to broaden the parameters of that right.
Storm believed he and Richard, if lured into a truly bloody Armageddon, would fight the last merc war tolerated by Confederation. The Services now had the strength and organization to disarm the freecorps. All they needed was an excuse.
Cassius's ship reached the chunk of celestial debris that Storm had long ago developed as a prison for Fearchild Dee. It was a living hell, Fearchild's reward for his perfidy on the world where Cassius had lost his hand.
That had not been a matter of the hazards of war.
Fearchild had been a dilettante merc captain commanding forces his father had hoped to turn into a Family army. The Legion had humiliated him in his field debut. He had tried using Dee tactics to recoup.
Merc wars were ritualized and ceremonial. Their ends were celebrated with a formalized signing of Articles of Surrender and the yielding up of banners by the defeated captain. Fearchild had smuggled in a bomb, hoping to obliterate the Legion staff prior to a surprise resumption of hostilities.
Appalled, his officers had turned on him and warned their opposites. Cassius had been the only Legionnaire injured. He had refused to have the hand replaced.
It reminded him that there were dishonorable men in the universe. He could consider its absence and remember just how much he hated the Dees.
It took Cassius and Mouse two hours to transfer Storm and Michael and their medicare cradles to the asteroid's single habitable room. They wakened the injured men only after completing the task.
Michael awoke with a whimper. The instant he discovered Storm's presence, he wailed, "Gneaus, that man is going to kill me."
Cassius chuckled. His prosthetic larynx made it a weird sound. "I will, yes. If I can."
"You promised, Gneaus. You gave me your word."
"You're right, Michael. But Cassius never promised you anything. Neither did Masato, and I've got the feeling he's mad about what you did to his brothers."
Mouse's attempt to look fierce fell flat. Dee did not notice. He was too involved with himself and Fearchild, whom he had just noticed.
"My God! My God!" he moaned. "What are you doing?"
"Thought he'd be up to his neck in houris, eh?" Cassius asked.
Michael stared, aghast. He was not inhuman. He loved his children. His parental concern overcame his trepidation. "Fear. Fear. What're they doing to you?"
"Plug him in, Cassius," Storm ordered. "It should make him more amenable."
Mouse and Cassius lifted a passive Michael onto an automated operating table.
Fearchild's situation did not seem cruel at first glance. He was chained to a wall. He wore a helmet that enveloped his head. A thick bundle of wires attached the helmet to a nearby machine.
That machine restricted Fearchild to limits that kept him barely among the living. Like Valerie in Festung Todesangst, he was permitted no lapses in self-awareness. Nor was he free to slide off into insanity. The machine enforced rationality with a battery of psychiatric drugs. At random intervals it stimulated his pain center with an equally random selection of unpleasant sensations.
They were all cruel men.
Mouse worked in a daze, not quite able to believe this place was real, not quite able to accept that his father had created it.
Cassius adjusted Fearchild's machine so the younger Dee could take an interest in what was being done to his father.