Read Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War for Free Online Page B

reassemble and reinforce what was left. But it was downhill work, now. Marak had her edge.
    Demaris jerked his head at the medical technicians. One of them jammed a hypodermic through the Geneiid's skin and shot in a neutralizer. Demaris stood idly by, whistling between his teeth.
    It was a touch-and-go business. He'd tried to put himself in the Geneiid's place, and he'd decided that if he were suddenly kidnapped, he wouldn't use his Agency weapon, until it became completely obvious that there was no other resort.
    So far, so good. The Geneiid—he was a Geneiid—was still alive, and he'd been taken with no more trouble than you'd expect. But the man might revive in a panic.
    He whistled a bit more loudly.
 
"Oh, we are the Agency's bravos—
We peddle the wealth of one skill—"
 
    The Geneiid's eyelids fluttered upward. It seemed to Demaris that the man looked at him with an intensity peculiar for even these circumstances.
 
"Ah, we are the Agency's offspring,
the brood of a sinful old maid—
 
    The Geneiid sat up and stared malevolently at Demaris. "How did this happen?" he asked in passable Marakian. The technicians giggled, Sath, looking up from his desk, grinned coldly. Demaris smiled without humor.
 
". . . Unless things were such that it paid."
 
    The Geneiid looked around the office in dawning comprehension that meant one thing to everyone else and something quite different to Demaris. "I see—" he said slowly. "What now?"
    Demaris reflected that there was the best question he'd heard in a long time. He wondered if the other man thought Demaris was in on a deliberate double-cross. If he did, almost anything might happen. He had no idea how he'd react in similar circumstances.
    "I fear, my friend," Demaris said in passable Geneiian, "that the Fates, which might just as easily have conspired against me, have seen fit to trip you up, instead." It wasn't a bad start. From an observer's point of view it was the kind of dialogue you might expect from two opposed professional men in the apparent circumstances.
    Well, it was, Lord knew—it was. No matter what your concept of the circumstances might be.
    The Geneiid looked at the floor in glum anger. Demaris could understand that. It was only by the grace of making the first move that he himself was not sitting in a Geneiian office somewhere, slowly digesting the fact that he was one of two ends being played against Old Man Sullivan's middle.
    "All right," Demaris said. He turned to Sath. "Think there's anything we need to know from him right now?"
    Sath shook his head negatively. "Not immediately. I suggest we save him for later. We've got lots of work to do."
    Demaris gestured to a couple of armed guards. "Put him away where he'll keep." He looked the Geneiid in the eyes. "I'll be talking to you later."
    The man lifted his eyes off the floor, agreeing wordlessly. Rising, he went with his guards.
    Demaris plunged into the work of shaping the battered organization for the final, crippling blow. He entertained no thoughts of not completing his job. Mr. Sullivan would not be handed the weapon of a broken contract to wield when Demaris returned to New York and his revenge.
     
    Only gods and television audiences see the pattern of human events. What he did in his office touched on the histories of four races, but, for Demaris, the movement of men and armed forces translated itself into the shifting of reports from IN to HOLD to OUT, and the roar of rockets became the rattle and ping of bookkeeping machines.
    For two days, he and Sath reassigned, regrouped, deployed, redeployed, canceled, substituted, implemented, and supplied. Only the games-like transposition of figures from one table of organization to another furnished its own synthetic excitement.
    Demaris wondered, in a few brief snatches of stolen relaxation, whether he hated Mr. Sullivan most for double-crossing him or for placing him in a position where the outcome of the battle became a foregone