Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers by Glen Cook

that he was. Or that he pretended to be. He had whispered to her about it . . . “The name sounds so literary, somehow.”
    “I try, yes.” Was she going to expose the Pale Imperator?
    No. She did not push it. Nor did she thrust with anything from her arsenal of needles.
    “What made you decide to sign up?” she asked.
    “Unemployment.”
    “A space plumber? You’re kidding. You must be on the blacklist.”
    “Yeah. Sort of. Somebody’s. What about you?”
    “The money.”
    The vibrations of hatred had begun mellowing out. She was controlling herself superbly.
    BenRabi let it flow. He hurt too much to fence, or to probe about her mission. The armed truce persisted till the lighter reached the Starfisher.
    Moyshe did not forget that she was Sangaree, that she would drink his blood happily. He simply tabled the facts for the time being.
    Hundreds of her people had died because of him. Her children were dying. She would do something. The Sangaree tradition of honor, of Family responsibility, would compel her . . . 
    But she would not act right away. She had come here on a mission. She would complete that first. He could relax for a while.
    As introspective and morality-stricken as he sometimes became, he could not feel guilty about The Broken Wings. Nor about its aftermath. Humanity and Sangaree were at war, and the Sangaree had fired the opening shot. That it was a subterranean war, fought at an almost personal level, did not matter. Nor did the fact that only humanity perceived a war, that the Sangaree were just in business. Battles were battles. Casualties were casualties, no matter how or why they went down.
    Most of his associates and contemporaries hated the Sangaree, but to him they were just people. People he had to hurt sometimes, because of what they did and represented.
    He snorted. The most bigoted man alive could say the same thing and mean it.
    The whole stardust trade turned his stomach.
    “The trouble with me is, I don’t love or hate anything,” he murmured.
    “What?”
    “Sorry. Thinking with my mouth in gear.”
    His mood left nothing counting. Nothing could move him. The pain tablets had kicked him into nirvana. Or into a depthless black pit where the light of emotion simply could not shine. He was not sure which.
    He did not care. He did not give a damn about anything. Instead, he immersed himself in the mystery he called Mouse.
    BenRabi believed he knew Mouse better than did anyone but the Admiral. A lot of one another had leaked across during their teamed operations. These little flare-ups in the secret war were slowly melting them, molding them . . . 
    And still Mouse remained a mobile enigma.
    Mouse scared hell out of benRabi.
    Mouse was the only man he knew who had killed someone with his bare hands.
    Killing had not become a social dodo. But the personal touch had been removed. Murder had become mechanized, its soul and involvement eliminated. It had been that way for so long that most civilians could not endure the emotions they suffered if they entered a killing rage.
    Their brains shorted. They went zombie. And nothing happened.
    Anybody could push a button and hurl a missile to obliterate a ship of a thousand souls. A lot of timid little anybodies had.
    The same anybody could sleep without dreaming the following night. The involvement was with the button, not the bang.
    Ample opportunities arose in nice remote space battles with Sangaree, McGraw pirates, or in the marque-and-reprisal antics of minor governments, for that kind of killing. But to do a man face to face, with hands or knife or gun . . . It was too personal.
    Confederation men did not like to get too close to anyone. Not even to end a life. A man knew he was in too deep if the urge arose.
    The People of Now wanted no faces on their haunts.
    BenRabi was free-associating, and unable to escape the flight of his thoughts. Mouse. Interpersonal relationships. The two joined forces to kick him into a pit of