They would be disappointed.

He supposed there weren't many techs romantic enough, or hungry enough, to plunge into an alien society for a year. That might mean returning to a home changed beyond recognition. After the lighters lifted there would be no turning back. No one would be able to quit because he did not like his job.

Moyshe shuffled into the check-in line four places behind his partner. Mouse was shaking.

Moyshe never ceased to be amazed. Glacial. Glassteel. Conscienceless. Stonedeath. He had thought Mouse many cold, hard things. Yet there were unpredictable moments when the man let slip the humanity behind the facade of adamant. BenRabi watched as if witnessing a miracle.

This might be the only time during the operation that Mouse would let the hardness fall. And that only because he was poised on the brink of a shuttle fly.

Liftoffs terrified him.

"Dr. Niven." A whisper. Warmth caressed benRabi's arm. He looked down into eyes as hard and dark as Sangaree gunmetal coins.

"Pardon, ma'am?" He put on his disarming smile. "Name's benRabi. Moyshe benRabi."

"How quaint." She smiled a gunmetal smile. "Candy, even."

She must be more widely read than he had suspected.

Moyshe benRabi was the protagonist of Czyzewski's sole and almost unknown trial of the novel, a cartoon caricature painted in broad strokes of Gargantua and Don Quixote. The critics had said too much so, stopping only on the edge of accusations of plagiarism.

Strange that a Sangaree should be familiar with His Banners Bright and Golden...

Sangaree. He had to remind himself. He had shared her bed. There had been feeling in it during those hungry days on The Broken Wings.

She might willingly share beds again, but...

In the end she would drink his blood. Sangaree nursed their hatreds forever. For generations, if rumor was true.

"And the Rat, too, eh?" Meaning Mouse. She would have a special hell set aside for him. But the feeling was mutual. BenRabi knew Mouse would plain love a date with her in a medieval torture chamber. "All you Confies and beekies and McGraws pretending you need Seiner money... Orbit in an hour, Gun. See you upstairs."

More gunmetal smiles as she took her gunmetal-hard body toward the Ladies.

She would see him upstairs.

No doubt. He wondered if he could conjure up a Mark XIV Combat Suit real quick. Or spider's eyes so he could watch his back. This mission was going to be Roman candle all the way.

And he had hoped for a vacation operation. For nothing to do but loaf and work on Jerusalem.

Two: 3047 AD

The Olden Days, Angel City

A whisper swifted on lightning feet through Angel City's underworld. It said the Starduster was on The Broken Wings.

A private yacht had slipped into Angel Port after making a surreptitious worldfall. It was registered to a Dr. Gundaker Niven. The cognoscenti in the outfit remembered that name in connection with a blow-up on Borroway that had set the Sangaree back a billion stellars.

Port workers with connections started the excitement. The bounty on Gundaker Niven was immense. The Sangaree would not sit still for a billion-stellar burn from God Himself.

The dock workers passed the word that the Lady of Merit boasted just two passengers. One was Caucasian, the other a small Oriental.

That got their attention downtown. Niven had something to do with the Starduster. He might even be the Starduster under an alias. And the Starduster's number-one man was an Oriental, one John Li Piao.

These men, though, looked like Old Earth shooters, not the masters of a shadow empire rivaling that managed by the Sangaree.

Nevertheless, heads nodded in the board rooms of crime. Orders went out to the soldiers.

The Starduster was a unique creature. He was a man in limbo. A crime czar who had built a kingdom independent of the established syndicates. He preyed on his own kind rather than pay a single credit for Sangaree-produced stardust.

His was the most feared name on the Sangaree hate list.

Sentences of death had been pronounced on a dozen worlds. Open, often redundant contracts approaching a hundred million stellars existed.

Time and success had made of him an almost mythic devil.

He had been claimed killed a half dozen times. But he kept coming back, like a thing undead, like a dying wizard's curse. Hardly would the jubilation end before his invisible hand would again strike swiftly and viciously, ripping the guts from another syndicate pipeline of profit.

Was there more than one Starduster?

The Sangaree Heads, to whom most organized crime could be traced, sometimes suspected that he was not a man at all, but a role. Perhaps Piao was the real Starduster. The handful of men who had been pinned with the Starduster name were as diverse a group as could be selected from a good-sized crowd. Short, tall, thin, fat, white, black.

The Sangaree family dictators knew only one thing for certain. The Starduster was human. Sangaree might be contentious, piratical, greedy, and short on conscience, but only a human who hated would slash at them as bloodily as the Starduster did.

Even his motives were obscure. The narcotic he stole did not always find its way back into trade channels. Greed had no obvious hold on him.

The yachtsmen rented a groundcar and vanished into Angel City's warehouse district. Gundaker Niven was a chunky man of medium height. He had hard, dark eyes of the sort that intimidated civilians. He had thick, heavy hands. He jabbed with forefingers for emphasis whenever he spoke. A wide scar poured from his right ear down over his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.

"Take it out with a kilo of D-14," he growled, punching a finger at a dilapidated warehouse. His words came out slurred. The right side of his mouth did not move. "Burn them and run."

His driver was a small man with Fu Manchu mustaches. He had the same cold eyes. "But this ain't no shatter run. All that would do is show us how good they die."

"Working for Beckhart is getting a meter too tall for me, Mouse. This underworld stuff isn't my specialty. It's too rough. Too complicated. Suppose the real Starduster has people here?"

The smaller man laughed. "He does. You can count on it."

"Oh, Christ!"

"Hey! Working for the Old Man is an honor. When he asks for you, it means you've made it. Didn't you get sick of that military attaché dodge?"

"No. I was drafted into this."

"Come on! Engineering coups in the outbacks. How dull can you get? There's no rise to give it spice. When things go broomstick you go hide in the embassy."

"You think it's all champagne and ballroom conspiracy? I got my spleen burned out on Shakedowns. Inside the embassy."

"Still ain't the same. Yeah. The Starduster has people here. But by the time the word floats up and the shit comes down we'll be long gone."

"That's what you told me on Gorki. And New Earth was supposed to be a piece of cake."

This was their third mission teamed. Admiral Beckhart's specialized, secretive division of the Bureau of Naval Intelligence had found that they complemented one another well.

"So you should be used to it."

"Maybe. Gundaker Niven. What the hell kind of name is that?"

"You take what they give you. This ain't the diplomatic service. You're in the big time now."

"You keep telling me. But they don't job you. You stay Mouse every go. They never crank you through the Medical mill. They don't have the Psychs scramble your brain."

"They don't need to. I'm not the front man. I'm just around to drag your ass out of the fire when it gets hot."

"I don't like the feel of this one, Mouse. Something's wrong. There's going to be trouble."

"Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward."