Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (4 page)

Demaris grunted and stood up, taking his card. Of all the clerks at the Agency, Bill Kaempfert was the only one he could stomach, because Kaempfert was the only one who'd actually done any fighting. He almost turned around to club Puce as the man tried to prove something or the other about himself by loudly—and anything but absently—humming a chorus of "Heroes All."

Then he shrugged and let it go. The fool was proving his adolescence by somehow making the rollicking tune acquire heroic chords.

Demaris walked into Make-up and Indoctrination to the accompaniment of his own misinterpreted music.

Make-up peeled off his skin as neatly as a glove, and put it away for his return. Scalpels clicked against his bones. Weapons sent over a last-resort personal arm that the surgeons buried in his rib cage. Make-up delved into its resources and so disguised the weapon's unavoidable metal that only the most careful comparative fluoroscopy would detect it.

And the Monster chugged on its dolly beside the operating tank, revamping his brain.

When he emerged, at eleven o'clock that night, he spoke English with difficulty. His tongue and vocal cords were not adapted to the language.

The Earthman—the
dakta
—nodded in satisfaction as Demaris sat up groggily.

"Nice control," the
dakta
said to himself, noting the weak but sure movements of Demaris' limbs. Demaris, who had to translate from English to Marakian before he could be sure of the
dakta's
exact meaning, was only a bit slower in reaching the same conclusion. He tested the flexibility of his double-jointed fingers, and worked his double-opposed thumbs for a moment.

"Oh, they'll work fine," the
dakta
assured him. " 'Fdoo seisomysell."

Demaris groped for the meaning of the idomatic phrase, which, like most such, had been tossed off casually. "Par-don," he said. "Would you please speak more slowly?"

"I say—'If I do say so myself.' "

"Oh, yes. Of course. Everything seems to be all right."

"That's quite an accent," the
dakta
apologized, obviously not having caught Demaris' statement.

Demaris strained for clarity. "I say—'Everything seems O.K.' "

"Oh! Oh, yes, sure. We really piled it on—much more thorough than usual. A matter of costuming to lend reality to an actor who might not have learned his part too well."

Demaris shook his head with annoyance at his own incomprehension. He sorted out the
dakta's
syllables in his mind, trying to extract their meaning.

"Would you like me to repeat?" the
dakta
volunteered.

Demaris shook his head in disgust. There was really no point in this clumsy communication. The Monster had superimposed a Marakian personality where an Earthman had been, and there was not much that Earthmen and Marakians had to say to each other.

"Never mind," he said, enunciating as clearly as possible.

 
"We do or die for the Agency—
As much of the first as we can—
Heroes who, mashed to glue,
Spent their saved-up back pay,
Are strange to the mem'ry of man."
 

The trip out to Marak in the Agency ship took about a week, T.S.T. In that time Demaris recuperated completely, until, by the time the ship ducked down on Marak's nightside, he was at his physical peak. He grinned with delight at the steelhard claws which sprang out from his fingertips at will. He paced his cabin relentlessly, a constant growl of satisfaction rumbling up his throat as he felt his supple tendons coiling and uncoiling in fluid motion.

Yet, the bitterness was still there. Paradoxically, it was sprung from the same source as his satisfaction. If Earthmen could take one of their own kind and turn him into a duplicate of any other bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical being—if they had learned that much, and mastered biology to such a point—why did Earthmen have to wear disguises at all? Why did Earth's fighting men have to fight for every race but their own, and why was Earth itself so helpless?

No, not helpless—spineless.

Some day. Some day, maybe, things would be different.

The growl in Demaris' alien throat became a caged cough of rancor.

The ship dropped him in a sparse area, flitting down and leaping back to the sky as soon as his contact turned up. Demaris watched it dwindle, and only after it was gone did he notice his contact's hungry eyes following it.

"I haven't been home in a long time," the contact apologized in perfect Marakian. "I've got another three years to go here."

Demaris grunted. "Believe me—six months and you'll be begging to sign up for a new tour."

"I suppose so," the contact agreed. "I don't guess it's changed much?"

"Not the slightest."

The contact expressed himself in listless oaths. "Well," he said with a final profane twitch of his mouth, "let's put the show on the road. I've got a car stashed out in some shrubbery down there."

Demaris fell in behind him. Neither of them spared any particular attention to the thoroughly familiar countryside. They threaded their way through the broken thickets, automatically keeping clear of shrubs that would have left cockleburrs in their glossy fur.

The Marakian Overchief was growing old. His fur was beginning to lose its sheen, and his skin hung loosely around his neck. Nevertheless, his eyes were incisive and his voice was penetrating. He studied Demaris thoroughly for several moments before he said anything beyond a perfunctory greeting. Then he grunted with satisfaction.

"Good. You look as though you can handle things. I don't know where Resvik dug you out, but that's unimportant."

The contact, standing beside Demaris, made a noncommittal gesture. "As I've said from the beginning, we're not prepared to go deeply into Koil's past activities. Some of them might be interpreted as having been extra-legal. But he's thoroughly familiar with all the aspects of what's expected of him, and he's got the training required."

The Overchief surveyed Demaris again, and shook his head in agreement. "He looks it. He ought to, for the price you're asking."

"It's fair," the contact said.

"Oh, yes—I'll grant you that. Well—is there anything else, Resvik?"

"No, sir. I'll get back to my duties. It's been a pleasure, Overchief. Good luck, Koil." He slipped out of the office, closing the door gently behind him.

The Overchief gestured toward a bench, and Demaris sat down, quietly watching the Overchief stalk back and forth behind his desk. The first actual contact with the head of an alien culture was usually the most ticklish part of one of these things. But, again as usual, it seemed to be going smoothly.

"Now—what's your full name?" the Overchief asked.

"Call me Todren Koil," Demaris answered.

The Overchief grinned thinly. "All right, we'll call you that. What we want you to do is harry Genis. Within reason, you can do it your own way. I want their navy kept busy—too busy to deploy against our main push. If you do your job right, they shouldn't even suspect we're moving in on Farla until we're well on our way. I have no expectation that you'll be able to keep their fleet completely tied down after we make our move, but you should be able to hamper them somewhat. That's all we need—an edge. Your job's done the day we put a ship on Farla itself! By then we'll have the old Farlan perimeter well enough defended so that anything they do won't catch us with our fur wet. Clear?"

Demaris gestured affirmatively.

"I don't suppose you're wondering why we hired you?" the Overchief asked. "No. I can see that. Resvik's undoubtedly informed you about the"—he coughed—"high quality of our military leadership. I
don't
expect an affirmative comment from you," he added, not without a strong trace of the bitterness he must have felt. Resorting to mercenaries after his own officer-training system has proved deficient is never pleasant for a military leader. "All right," he said with a savage rumble, "what will you need offhand?"

"Some light, mobile stuff. Not much of it. A squadron of
Pira
Class boats ought to do it. I'll do all my work through your intelligence agency. I'll need liaison and authorization. We may have to supplement their demolitions and infiltration groups—I'll see how their existing forces work out under my methods. I think I can get in a lot of damage before Genis even begins any full scale retaliation. Give me about fifteen days to start the operation rolling. By then, I'll know whether I need to ask for anything else."

"Done." The Overchief touched the switches of his desk communicator. "Send in Tjetlyn Paris," he said.

Demaris felt the tension oozing away from him in direct proportion to his mounting excitement. He could feel himself settling into the old familiar state of pleasant anticipation. It might not be for Earth's sake, but for Mammon's. It might extend the Agency's reputation, instead of Earth's. It might be for cash on delivery—but it was action, nevertheless—action, and, in war, the only peace he could hope to have.

He looked up at Tjetlyn Paris with quicksilver burning through his veins.

Paris was a youngish Marakian of about his own age. He came in the door and stood waiting for the Overchief to speak.

"Sath, this is Tjetlyned Todren Koil," the Overchief said, indicating Demaris. "Todren, Paris Sath. He's your liaison and Second in Command. He'll take you down to our intelligence offices and introduce you to the existing routine. Your authorization will be there ahead of you. From here on, it's your operation to work out between you."

Demaris acknowledged Sath's presence with a shake of his head. The Overchief had made him the Tjetlyn's superior by one grade, but Demaris had no illusions about that. No Agency man ever worked without his employer's setting a watchdog over him.

Deep within the Marakian interior, the Earthman smiled. That didn't always work out the way it was meant to. Old Connie Jones, for instance, working with Farla's paranoid culture, had so maneuvered his personal watchdog assassin that, in the end, the assassin had seen the expediency not only of not killing Jones but of taking the victorious fleet back to Farla and staging a revolution.

Quis custodiet
—But that wouldn't work here, nor was it necessary. Marak was not Farla, though the two races were descended from the same ancestor, There was no danger here of an attempt to kill the mercenary once he'd done his work.

Demaris wasn't sure he wouldn't have welcomed that added fillip.

"At your orders, Tjetlyned." Sath said. Demaris shot a look past him at the Overchief and saw that he was pointedly ignoring both of them.

Ugh. He'd been daydreaming at the wrong time. He nodded quickly to Sath, and they slipped out the door together.

 
"Ah, we are the Agency's offspring,
The brood of a sinful old maid.
There isn't one chance that she'd sell us out—
Unless things were such that it paid."
(alternate chorus)

Three months later, Sath laid a fresh set of reports on Demaris' desk. "Here we are, Koil. Top sheet's the summary." He dropped down on the bench beside the desk and wearily dug a flask out of his belt. "Have some?" he offered, holding up the flask.

Demaris twitched an ear negatively, and took his own brand out of a drawer. "Can't stand that gunk you use." He tilted the flask and touched his tongue to the mild stimulant. Recapping the flask, he yawned broadly. He looked at the report in disgust.

"Same thing?"

Sath nodded. "Yep. In the past fifteen days, our demolitions teams have immobilized such-and-such a tonnage of Geneiid naval vessels. Our infiltrators have immobilized this-and-that additional tonnage by misrouting supplies, disrupting communications, altering fleet orders, et cetera. We can truthfully report that our organization has been doing an excellent job, and that we are performing far above the expectations set down by Staff."

Demaris grimaced. "And how far behind schedule is the push against Farla?"

Sath coughed. "Well, if you plotted the curve of Staff's failure against our curve of success, they'd be almost superimposed."

Demaris shook his head. "Still the same trouble?"

"Yep. Seems like Genis has just as good an intelligence service as we do. Tit for tat, right down the line."

Demaris clicked his fingertips against the surface of his desk. The situation stank. For every boat that shipped a team of saboteurs into Genis, a Geneiid boat dropped its cargo down on Marak's planets. Like two giants stabbing pins through each other's ganglia, Marak and Genis were immobilizing each other.

War in space—war in terms of planetary englobements, massive landings, and blockades—was impossible. The problem of supply and reinforcement became insurmountable over interstellar distances. As the attacker's supply lines lengthened, the defender's shortened, until eventually the attrition on the attacker became too great. You could only stage a mass attack on a hopelessly weak foe—such as Farla. Otherwise, it was your infiltrators and demolitions men, crippling your enemy at home, who first had to weaken him. And if your sabotage was balanced by equally effective enemy action, then both of you slowly bled away, matching each other corpuscle for corpuscle, neither ever gaining a relative upper hand.

Demaris wondered how long this could keep up. Agency men weren't supermen. Man for man, there was no reason why they should be any better than their opposite numbers. The Agency's selling point was the right man in the right place, at the right time.

Well, so far he was holding his own. But how much longer would the Overchief be satisfied with that?

Demaris grinned to himself, at himself. Face it. What galled him most was his inability to beat his Geneiid adversary. The Agency and its considerations were secondary.

"So, anyway—" Sath was saying, "I just got a call from the Overchief. He wants to see us."

Demaris inhaled slowly.

The Overchief was showing the strain. Farla should have been penetrated and taken by now. Instead, the Marakian fleet lay hamstrung in its berths. That the Geneiids were racked by the same frustration was of little comfort to him.