They had some talking to do.

Beckhart clockwork, jerking along, often was oiled by the confusion of its parts. Only the master knew all the secrets of his machinery.

Would there be more?

Silly question.

Beckhart's nature semed to demand twists on twists and gaudy smoke screens that concealed truths as slippery as greased snakes. His plots, however, while labyrinthine, had their own tightness and logic. They were mapped by the finest computers in Luna Command. He ran simulation models against even the most ridiculous contingencies.

Had Beckhart calculated a mole into this scheme?

BenRabi suddenly intuited that he and Mouse were not partners after all. This time they were voyagers sailing parallel but distinct courses. They had been programed to hide from one another as much as from their targets. And they had been intended for exposure from the beginning.

Beckhart knew about the mole.

He wanted them taken captive. He wanted them to spend a year in Seiner service.

Moyshe got mad. That was a year stolen from his life!

"The thing's all biological, eh?" Kindervoort asked.

"What?"

"This instel. Remarkable gimmick. Our detectors didn't quiver when you came aboard. 'Course, that didn't matter in the long run."

He was smug, damn him. So was Chouteau, chubby-happy there in his plastic-antique, made for the Archaicist trade captain's chair.

"How the hell did you get my name?" benRabi demanded. They were in the mood for talking. They might give him something the computers could use to pinpoint the mole.

Kindervoort ignored his question.

"We began monitoring the hyper bands when we broke orbit at Carson's. We wanted to see if we could catch anything from von Drachau's squadron. Imagine our surprise when we found out somebody was sending from the ship."

"You were plain lucky, Jarl," Chouteau said.

"It wasn't luck that we knew they were coming, just that they started broadcasting in a ship small enough for us to pinpoint them."

How had they gotten the word?

Moyshe remembered a raggedy-assed Freehauler boat that had not lifted on schedule. Had the Freehaulers been the mole's couriers? Black Mirage. Remember that ship, Somebody would have to have a talk with her people someday.

Was there a relationship between Seiners and Freehaulers? Both certainly refused to stop giving grief to Confederation's policy makers.

Chouteau called out, "Doctor DuMaurier, come in here. Let's get on with this."

Kindervoort darted behind Moyshe and seized his shoulders. BenRabi did not resist. There was nothing he could do.

A doctor pushed into the room. He poked, pinched, and sprayed Moyshe's neck with an aerosol anesthetic. He removed an unsettlingly ancient lase-scalpel from his medical bag. Then, quoting every doctor who had ever lived since the days when Incas trepanned one another with sharp stones, he said, "This will only take a minute. You won't feel a thing."

"That's what they told me when they put it in," benRabi grumbled. He could not go down without registering some kind of protest.

"We'll just pull the ambergris nodes," Kindervoort said. "Ed, what do you think? Is it proper to sell them back to Navy come next auction?"

Chouteau nodded amiably. "I think so. I like it."

Moyshe wished they would stop. It made him want to scream, "You're being unprofessional!"

They were not professionals. The harvestships apparently had no real intelligence-oriented security people.

There was justice in Kindervoort's suggestion. BenRabi and Mouse, and all the other agents aboard, irrespective of their allegiances, were after the same thing. Access to one of the herds of great nightbeasts that produced the critical element in the node being removed from benRabi's neck.

The Seiners called it ambergris. The name had evolved from that of a "morbid secretion" of Old Earth whales once used by perfumers. The word could mean anything anyone wanted now. The leviathans of the deep no longer had a claim. They had been extinct for centuries.

Star's amber, space gold, and sky diamond were other popular names. By any name ambergris was the standard of wealth of the age.

In the vernacular its name was short and pithy. It was the solid waste of a starfish. Crap.

This crap fertilized a civilization. Confederation could not have existed without it. Without it there would have been no fast star-to-star communication. Speed and reliability of communications ultimately define the growth limit of any empire.

BenRabi did not comprehend the physics of instel. He knew what the man in the street knew. A tachyon spark could be generated in the arc between an ambergris cathode and a Bilao crystal anode. The spark could be made to carry an FTL message. Neither ambergris nor Bilao crystal could be synthesized.

The crystal occurred naturally deep in the mantles of several roughly earth-sized worlds orbiting super-cool stars. Sierra was the only such world within Confederation. Mining the crystal, at depths exceeding thirty kilometers, was overwhelmingly expensive.

Bilao crystal was cheaper than ambergris. The Seiners had a monopoly. They were free market capitalists of the first water. Every node went to the highest bidder.

The demand for ambergris perpetually exceeded supply. Despite gargantuan capital demands, optimists often assembled the hard and software of an installation merely in hopes that an ambergris node would become available.

The combined Seiner harvestfleets, in their best year ever, had gleaned fewer than forty thousand nodes. Most of those had gone to replace nodes already burning out.

The Seiners sold their product at auction, on worlds declared temporarily neutral and threatened by all the firepower the fleets could muster. The bidders always went along with Seiner rules. The Starfishers might refuse to do business with someone who pushed.

Ambergris alone explained the flood-tide of operatives heading toward Carson's after Danion had begun advertising for groundside technicians. The agents had swept in like vultures, hoping to feed on the corpse of a betrayed Payne's Fleet.

That's what we are, benRabi thought. Me and Mouse, we're vultures... No. Not really. We're more like raptors. Falcons flung from Beckhart's wrist. Our prey is information. We're to bring down any morsel that might betray a starfish herd.

Moyshe tried to believe that Confederation should control the harvesting and distribution of ambergris. He tried hard.

Sometimes he had to tell himself some tall ones to get by. Otherwise he asked himself too many questions. He started worrying irrelevancies like Right and Wrong.

His soul, slithering past morality shyly, merely mumbled I want. There was a pain in it that he could not understand. It nagged him worse than did his ulcer.

BenRabi dreaded madness. He was afraid of a lot of things lately. He could not figure it out.

"There. One down." The doctor dropped Movshc's node into a gleaming stainless steel tray. Plunk! Exclamation point to the end of a phase of the mission. He began suturing Moyshe's wound.

"How bad will that hurt when the anesthetic wears off?"

"Not much. Your neck should be a bit stiff, and tender to the touch. See me if it gives you any trouble." The doctor turned to Mouse. Mouse squirmed a little before he submitted. His conscience, benRabi supposed. He had to make a showing.

Doctors were another of Mouse's crochets. He had no use for them, as he often told anyone who would listen.

BenRabi suspected that was why Beckhart never had Mouse altered during his mission preps.

"We don't like spies," the Ship's Commander blurted. The way he said it made it sound both spontaneous and irrelevant, a non sequitur despite what was happening.

We, Moyshe thought. These people always say we.