Starfishers Volume 3: Stars End Read Online Free PDF Page B

not stupid after all.” Left unthought was Chub’s hope for the same reaction from his own Old Ones.
    By way of support benRabi replied, “This is a new era, Chub. It’s going to take hastiness and danciness to survive.”
    “Sharks coming again.”
    Once more Danion’s weaponry scarred the long night. Moyshe wondered what some alien would think if he happened on its unconcealable mark, a thousand years from now, a thousand light-years away.
    Both sides had used retrospective observation techniques during the Ulantonid War. A battle’s outcome might be fixed, but it could be studied over and over from every possible angle.
    The second assault was more furious than the first. BenRabi stopped trying to think. He had to give his whole attention over to following the situation.
    More sharks dropped hyper, drawn by no known means. The rage took them, too. They attacked everything, including wounded brethren floundering around the battle region.
    This was the root of Chub’s fear. That more and more sharks would be drawn till they simply overwhelmed everything.
    It was the future foreseen by both starfish and Starfishers. The terror that herd after herd and harvestship after harvestship would be consumed was the force that had driven the maverick commander of this fleet to hazard the defenses of Stars’ End.
    The arrivals slowed to a trickle. Chub thought, “We going to win again, Moyshe man-friend. See the pattern? The glorious pattern. They waste their might devouring their own injured.”
    BenRabi searched his kaleidoscopic mind-link universe. He saw nothing but chaos. This, he reflected, is the sort of thing Czyzewski was thinking about when he wrote The Old God. So much of Czyzewski’s poetry seemed reflective of recent events. Had the man been prescient?
    No. He was far gone on stardust when he did the cycle including The Old God. The drug killed him less than a month after he finished the poem. The images were just the flaming madness of the drug burning through.
    “Don’t you get tired of being right?” he asked when the first sharks fled.
    “Never, Moyshe man-friend. But learned long ago to wait till event is certain, predestined, to make observation. Error is painful. The scorn of Old Ones is like the fire of a thousand stars.”
    “I know the feeling.” For some reason the face of Admiral Beckhart, his one-time commander, drifted through his universe. Here on the galactic rim, fighting for his life against creatures he had not suspected existed two years earlier, his previous career seemed as remote as that of another man. Of another incarnation, or something he had read about.
    The assault collapsed once the first few well-fed sharks fled.
    The starfish had suffered far less than their inedible guardians. Not one dragon was missing from the golden herd defended by the harvestships. But another ship had been injured severely.
    A traitorous thought stole across Moyshe’s mind on mouse-soft feet.
    Chub was less indignant than he expected.
    On a strictly pragmatic level, the starfish agreed that getting out of the interstellar rivers would be the best way to conserve Starfisher ships and lives.
    “They’ll never go, Chub. The harvestfleets are their nations. Their homelands. They’re proud, stubborn people. They’ll keep fighting and hoping.”
    “I know, Moyshe man-friend. It saddens the herd. And makes the Old Ones proud that they forged their alliance so well. But why do you say ‘they?’ ”
    “We, then. Part of the time . . .  Most of the time I’m an outsider here. They do things differently than what I learned . . . ”
    “Sometimes you miss your old life, Moyshe man-friend.”
    “Sometimes. Not often, and not much, though. I’d better tend to business.” He had to focus his attention to force his physical voice to croak, “Gun Control, Mindlink. The sharks are going. They’ve given up. You can secure when the last leaves firing range.”
    “You sure, Linker? Don’t look