They were not innately cruel. They simply did not see humans as anything but animals to be exploited. Do the cattleman, butcher, and customer consider themselves cruel to the beef animal? Sangaree thought their customers better than cattle. More like what Renaissance Europeans thought of black Africans. Semi-intelligent apes.
BenRabi lay on his bunk and wondered about his partner. Mouse claimed his assignments were all counter-Sangaree. To date they had been, and Mouse had prosecuted them with a savage zeal, with cruel little touches, like the injection of Marya's children. But what was he doing here, now, working against the Starfishers? That did not compute.
Following the announcement of von Drachau's raid, Mouse had been in the clouds, as if he were a skying addict himself.
The Sangaree were the demons of the Confederation era. They passed as human easily. Their Homeworld lay somewhere outside The Arm. Compared to humanity, they were few in number. It was rumored that they could breed only under their native sun.
The Sangaree produced little for themselves. They preferred instead to raid, to deal in drugs and slaves and guns.
Confederation resented them bitterly. Man was their prime victim. The nonhuman races considered them merely a nuisance.
Someone softly knocked on Moyshe's door. "Come in," he said. "Mouse. Thought it was you." It was the first he had seen Mouse since Kindervoort's inquisition.
"The word's around," Mouse told him "They've all decided that we're evil, mean, bad, wicked, nasty, crude, rude, and unattractive spies." He laughed.
"The Sangaree woman passed the word, I suppose."
"Maybe. Why don't you slide out there and see what's going on? It's good for a laugh. Hell, you'd think we were as rare as dodos and smelled like skunks."
"Don't we? Morally?"
"Ahh... Moyshe. What the hell is it with you these days? Hey! You should see the competition laughing up their sleeves. But we get the last laugh. They're on their way. Kindervoort's troops snatched a couple beekies this morning. Same way he got us. Knew they were coming. Looks like he knew about everybody, except Strehltsweiter."
"Mouse, they've got to have a mole in Luna Command. Somebody deep."
"That's what I figure. It's the only answer that adds up. Moyshe, you should see the kids with their holy attitudes. Like they think they're a plane above us. Poor innocents." Mouse smiled at a memory. "You know that Williams girl? I shocked the hell out of her. Asked her her price. She missed the point. That's real innocence."
"Ah, youth. Mouse, what happened to our innocence and idealism? Remember how it was in Academy? We were going to save the universe."
"Somebody found our price." He frowned, dropped onto the spare bunk. "That's not really true. We're doing it, you know. It's just that the mechanics of it aren't what we thought they'd be. We didn't understand that everything has to be a trade-off, that whenever we changed things to what we thought they should be, we had to do it at somebody else's expense... Hell, you've got me doing it."
"What?"
"Thinking. Moyshe, what's happening with you? You always were a moody guy, but I've never seen you like you've been lately. Ever since we left Carson's... "
BenRabi's defenses stood to arms. He did not dare open up. Two reasons: you just did not do that these days, and he was not sure what was happening himself. So he masked the shadowed walls of Festung Selbst behind a half-truth.
"I'm just depressed. Maybe because I didn't get my vacation. Maybe because of Mother... I had a bag full of things I wanted to take home. Some stamps and coins I picked up in Corporation Zone. Some stuff I managed to get back from The Broken Wings. This beautiful hand-carved bone trivet from Tregorgarth, and some New Earth butterflies that would be worth, a mint anywhere else... "
"Bullroar, my friend. Bullroar." Mouse peered at him from beneath lowered brows. "I'm getting to know you, Moyshe benRabi. I can tell when something's got you by the guts. You better do something. It'll eat you alive if you keep it locked up inside."
Mouse was right about one thing. They were getting to know one another. Too well. Mouse was reading him now, and wanting to help. "Maybe. When's your next chess thing? I'll come lose a few games, tip a few brews with the troops."
Mouse frowned. He knew a light show when he saw one.
Getting too damned close!
Mouse glanced at Jerusalem, at which benRabi had been scribbling. "Well, I didn't mean to porlock, Moyshe." He rose. "I don't know if we'll have any more tournaments. Kindervoort says we'll make Danion sometime tonight. That's why I came over. Thought you'd want to know."
BenRabi brightened. "Hey, good." He pushed the Jerusalem papers back, rose, started pacing. "The waiting is getting to me. A little work... "
The rendezvous with the harvestship was anticlimactic. There were no brass bands, and no curious crowds at the receiving bay. The only Seiners around were those who had been sent to show the landsmen to their quarters and brief them about their job assignments. No one of any stature came to greet them. Moyshe was disappointed.
His guide did his work quickly and efficiently and told him, "You'd better turn in. This is the middle of our night. I'll be back early to help walk you through your first day."
"Okay. Thanks, Paul." Moyshe examined the man. Paul was much like the Seiners he had met before.
The man examined him, too, and struggled with prejudices as he did so. "Good night, Mr. benRabi."
"See you in the morning."
But he did not. Amy showed up instead, and took both benRabi and Mouse under her wing.
"Keeping an eye on us, eh?" Mouse asked.
She colored slightly. "Yeah. Sort of. Jarl said he wanted to keep you together so you'd be easier to watch."
"You don't have to be embarrassed. We understand."
"This isn't my kind of thing, Commander Storm. I'm a plumber, not a counterspy."
"Call me Mouse. Please. Or Mr. Iwasaki."
"Whatever you want. Mouse. Are you ready for breakfast?" She turned to Moyshe.
"I'm still Moyshe benRabi. All right? Yes. I could eat three breakfasts."
Work commenced immediately after tool issue and a brief class in how to find one's way around the harvestship. It never let up.
Moyshe forgot his screaming need in the pressure of the following week's labors. The memories that had been gnawing the underbelly of his soul vanished from consciousness. He flew easy, not thinking, not observing, not questioning. He stayed too busy or too tired. The Seiners were true to their promise to work the landsmen hard.
The mind-quirk he thought of as the image of the gun bothered him some, but only mildly, as he wandered through daydreams while replacing wrecked piping or damaged flow meters. He seized the vision, played with it, wrapped a few extended daydreams around it. It helped pass the time.
Kept busy, he began to enjoy life again.
"Something strange is going on here, Mouse," he whispered once when Amy was out of hearing.
"What's that?"
"This ship isn't hurt as bad as they want us to think. Look around."
"I couldn't tell. I never did any time in the line. All I know about ships is you get on, and after a while you get back off someplace else."
"What it amounts to is, there's a lot of damage, but nothing that would put something this size out of action. They could've handled it themselves. Just might have taken them a couple of years."
"So?"
"So, maybe we're here for some other reason. My intuition has been sniffing around that ever since Carson's."
"Why would they bring outsiders in if they didn't absolutely have to?"
"I don't know. The only reason you overstaff a ship is so you have personnel redundancy in case you take battle casualties. But on a ship this big two hundred people, or even a thousand, don't mean a thing. And who would the Seiners fight? Confederation? Not with a bunch of fifth columnists aboard."