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  He pulled himself out and tried to stand, but he was horribly dizzy. As he put out a hand to steady himself on the rock wall, he heard the clicking. Behind him. In front of him. Above him.

  Animal survival took over. If two predators were on either side and one was up where the exit clearly was, you went for the one. He couldn’t see any of them, not in this darkness, but he got the impression that they could see him. He heard a tinkling bit of cruel laughter as he tried to lash out in the direction of a close-by set of clicks. They would do their clicking at his level, but he quickly realized that they were having their sport with him, that at no time were they where the clicks led his ears to believe they were.

  There was a click, and something cold, hard, and metallic drawn softly and quickly across his back. He whirled and lunged for where he thought the attacker had gone, but all he managed to do was run into the opposite wall of the cave and draw more derisive laughter, made all the worse by its echoing within the cave. They would never let him climb out, but it was narrow and he could feel the airflow toward the exit. If he moved quickly, he might catch the one above off guard or cause the bottom two to be momentarily off balance. It was better than staying here, anyway.

  With all the remaining energy in his aching body he moved as fast as he could up and along the steps and rock gradations toward that airflow. He actually made it most of the way, could almost see the entrance notch, when two small forms on either side of the path rushed out, one in front and one in back, and this time the nails drawn across his chest and back bit deeply and painfully into his flesh while spinning him around. He almost lost his balance and fell, but shock from his previous ordeal and adrenaline now kept him going, ignoring the pain, rushing for that notch and the open sky.

  One of them dropped from the upper area right in front of him, and he pushed on right to it, now visible as a small shadowy shape, pushing at it with all his might. Twenty centimeters times four fingers worth of thick, sharp needle nails penetrated his abdomen, and more went through his crotch, penetrating and ripping at his scrotum. The pain was nearly unbearable, but the attacker was small and light enough that his sheer size and bulk carried him on, screaming in pain, walking right over the one who’d so wounded him and up, out, into the sunlight, into the warmth!

  Bleeding, in agony, he nonetheless managed to get him-self out of the crevice and onto the side of the rocky outcrop itself. He was wounded, perhaps mortally, but if he could just get down there, just get into the tall grass and lie down, at least they might not get his body!

  A small naked form suddenly popped up right in front of him, a form so amazing to his sight that he stopped dead, staring, as she clicked those needles that she had for fingernails. There was a sound on either side of him, and he turned to see absolutely identical copies of this one in front of him crouched on either side, and he heard a fourth behind.

  “My god!” the last part of his sanity and humanity cried out. “You—Oh! My God! Not you!”

  And with that the pack, who understood not a word, tore him to shreds and fought over the tastier internal organs.

  TWO

  A Diva among the Cockroaches

  The joint’s name was, appropriately, La Cucaracha, although much of the lettering was faded or worn away and the electronic enhancements more resembled an electrician’s nightmare than anything coherent.

  Most places this far down in the skids were shadows of places once great and legendary and respectable; this one had only the legends, and most of them were bad.

  In a sense, the place was a reflection of what had once been the proud Confederacy, a federation of more than three hundred colonial worlds encompassing a multitude of races but dominated by those of Terra, also called Earth. It had been a marriage forged in blood and maintained by raw power, but it had held, and in its time it had been the lord of an entire galactic spiral arm.

  Now The Confederacy was mostly a joke; worlds lay in ruins from rioting, panic, and raw fear, particularly among those too poor to book passage out in the way of the new invaders. The naval force that once could vaporize a planet or explode a star was reduced to an evacuation and surveillance service. What good was a military that could only blow up its own kind, that could neither inflict harm nor avoid being swatted like biting flies if they irritated?

  There was still a government, of course, and a loose federation of worlds, but what good was it when you were retreating outward on a spiral arm? What happened when they ran out of worlds to evacuate to, as they pretty well already had? And who was going to put in the enormous resources and skill to create new habitable worlds when it was certain that eventually they, too, would be overrun?

  Here lies The Confederacy; it wasn’t as great as we thought it was, but it was all we had…

  The joint was in a once great city, now fallen into disrepair and overrun by its lowest common denominators, those who couldn’t leave and those who had already given up and lived for the moment. Only here, near the old spaceport, did any semblance of the old days exist, even if in memories.

  The spaceport, now called Hacalu Naval District, was under severe martial law. The joint and the few other remnants of bygone days were inside the district, although that didn’t make it more desirable. Just because it was frequented by dispirited military people and the always anarchic spacers didn’t make it any more “normal,” only physically secure.

  Inside it was always crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of The Confederacy. Most were Terrans, but there were often representatives of the dozen or more non-human races that had once, willingly or unwillingly, been members of the old order. If they could exist in a Terran friendly environment and consume the usual stuff, well, they weren’t turned away.

  The Terrans didn’t discriminate, either. Not the spacers and the old-line Navy folks, anyway. Space took its toll on the professionals, always had. The twists and turns of time standing nearly still during journeys left them with no family or friends that didn’t also move the same way, and the various forces, the radiation and warping and twisting of space-time, changed them all into different, often unique life-forms of their own.

  They were a tough, violent, mutant breed, and they were the only ones left holding any part of civilization together in what seemed to be the last days of independence and freedom any would ever know.

  The place was filled with noise, and body odors less than pleasant, and the remnants of puke and vile concoctions. It was staffed by real people only because the machines could no longer be trusted; still, here you could buy most anything, any pleasure, any vice, anything at all.

  Nobody seemed to notice her when she walked through the entrance and into the hall. Anybody who could stand the smell had already passed the first test. Still, in a place like this, every newcomer was viewed with some curiosity and even some suspicion, particularly when they knew that no ships had come in recently that they didn’t know and when the figure was unlike anyone familiar.

  She was a small, slightly hunched over individual, wearing a black robe, perhaps a black dress, with a bit of tassel and lace about it. It stretched to the floor, giving little indication of what lay beneath, and it rendered the body somewhat shapeless, although it clearly was, or had started out as, Terran. She also wore a hat, one with a fancy shape and brim, from which fell a thin gauzelike film that made it impossible to see her face or tell any more about the features there. Clearly, though, she could see out of it. She moved slowly, with the aid of an ornate carved cane of what might have actually been real wood, in the kind of short shuffling steps that only the very ancient were forced into.

  One huge, silver-haired man with a bushy gray beard and pointed, blackened teeth leaned over to the bartender and gestured slightly at the newcomer. “Is it me or what I’ve been havin’, or is that one there the oldest creature in the known galaxy?”

  The bartender, a rough-looking man with nasty growths on his face and arms, shook his head. “Beats me. There’s some money in those clothes and that
walking stick, but anybody with money wouldn’t walk like that.”

  “Not unless it was an act,” the customer agreed, suspicious. He slid off the stool and casually approached the figure, who was still heading for the bar and might make it in another five minutes at the speed she was going.

  She was either shriveled beyond belief or she was incredibly short; the silver-haired man literally towered over her.

  “Are you sure you’re in the right place, ma’am?” he asked, trying to be polite. He reflected, though, how even the small suggestion of money might mean she wouldn’t get ten steps when she left the place.

  “Cockroaches of a hundred varieties on the floor, roaches on the sign—I think there can not be two of these places,” she responded in a high, tough, ancient voice suited to what had to lie beneath the clothes. “I need to find someone. He’s a frequenter of this place, and we had an appointment to meet here today this very hour.” She started creeping on toward the bar, and he followed.

  “Yeah? Who? Maybe I know him.”

  “You probably do, but that doesn’t mean much. He is called, I believe, simply the Dutchman. Is he about?”

  “The Dutchman! I—yeah, I know him. Sort of. But he’s not here, and the Hollander’s not in port. I’m afraid somebody just tricked you into coming into a real dangerous place, ma’am.”

  “I have been in worse. I know that is hard for you to believe, but you are not a woman and you weren’t out here in the old days. Do you even remember the old days, sonny?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Most of us do. Remember, a lot of us were born centuries ago. We age slow, and with the docs in these ports, we can keep ourselves in fairly good condition even when age does get to us. I’ve lived seventy years, but I was born over three hundred years ago, on Cagista.”

  She cackled, amused, as she finally made it to the bar itself and accepted her self-appointed reception committee’s aid in easing into one of the overworn full stools with back and one arm still intact. She let out a sigh of contentment when she settled in, as if great pain had suddenly been lifted from her.

  “Sonny, you want to compare old age with me? I was born nine hundred and seventy-one years ago next month.”

  His jaw dropped, and he wasn’t at all sure he believed her. “Ma’am? That’s before space flight! That’s back in ancient history! Why, that would mean you’d have been born on Earth!”

  “Well, they’d gone to the Moon, but not much more,” she acknowledged. “Me, I was born in a small town in the west of England called Glastonbury. Nobody’s heard of it these days; like England, like Earth itself, it’s passed into dim legend. It was a legend then. Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. King Arthur built Camelot there and found the Grail and used it to fight evil.” She paused. “None of this means anything to you, though, does it?”

  “I’m afraid not, ma’am. Earth was destroyed before my time. I never even knew anybody who’d even been there before you, let alone somebody actually born there. I told Atair, the bartender, there, that I thought you looked the oldest person I ever did see. Maybe I’m right?”

  Sharing birth years was an old sport among spacers, although not between them and the groundhogs. Space travel did all sorts of things to you when you did it all the time, some positive, some negative, but in addition to the biological effects there was always the problem of time. Like anything else, time, too, was warped and distorted by going to and fro over impossible distances using artificially created wormholes and natural phenomena to attain speeds and distances otherwise impossible. When nothing else could give, time gave as well. Spacers were literally a breed apart, not just because of the physical toll but because they were forced to sever all links to family, home, and clan. Time was linear only to them, relative to all others. How many years had she physically lived to pass through that nine hundred plus? How many had he to reach even his temporal distance from his birth?

  She seemed amused by his impudence at suggesting her age. “Perhaps. Too old, certainly. Old enough to hear parents speak of world war and be schooled in the greatness of the British Empire even if they had dissolved it before I got there. Old enough to see Communism fall and a hundred isms after that. Old enough to see Earth finally bring on its own doom, and old enough to not have been there at the time. And old enough, now, not only to have seen The Confederacy at its start and height, but at its death. Let me tell you, young man, if you live long enough to reflect back on those kinds of events in a stinkhole like this, you’ve lived far too long and it’s pretty damned depressing!”

  “Well, I can see that,” he admitted. “Even in my lifetime. But whoever lured you here wasn’t your friend, I can tell you. You’d get mugged before you got to the street level now that you’ve shown up here. I’ll have them call for a Navy police escort.”

  “That’s all right. I know where I am and what I am doing,” she assured him. “You are Navy, I take it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m a chief warrant officer on the Hucaniarea—that’s a frigate in drydock above. Been here a month and a half getting repairs and refitting. Probably be stuck here another month or more. Name’s Gene Harker. Just `sir’ or `Mister Harker’ to most folks. Not much for a spacer to do when he’s drydocked, I’m afraid. The kind of stuff that can be had in here makes the time pass a little quicker. Wouldn’t take most of it in here, though. You give any of these hard-asses a hair and they steal the whole beard.”

  “I would think that they are all spacers or employees of the Navy and these support establishments,” she resounded. “I shouldn’t think that any would stoop to the level of mugger. Smuggler, certainly, or even hired killer, but not a mere mugger of a little old lady. What the devil could I have that any of them would find useful?”

  “Some of ’em were just born bad, and some are on all sorts of drugs and hackplays and just don’t have the same sense of real life that they would if they weren’t so fucked—sorry, ma’am—fouled up.”

  She gave the soft cackling laugh once again. “Sir, don’t spare any language on my part! I’ve forgotten more foul language in countless tongues than you can possibly know! But every character here who is truly `fucked up’ makes himself as vulnerable as anybody is to them. No, I suspect that few allow themselves to get that off reality, even in this place. Enough to take away the stink, perhaps, but you come here for those things and you buy and take them away with you. If you stay, you stay for business or for the company.”

  “Guy was killed here not four hours ago,” the bartender commented, having edged over closer to them. “Two old captains got into some kind of fight over something that happened twenty, thirty years ago. They got to screaming, and before we could stop them they shot each other. One was vaporized, the other lost a leg and a hand. Don’t think they aren’t dangerous, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t say they weren’t dangerous,” she responded softly. “I simply meant that I am no babe in the woods, and that they are not the only ones in here who might be dangerous.”

  It was said so simply, so softly, so matter-of-factly in that little old lady voice of hers that both men felt an odd chill when they heard it. You just never know about anybody, not really. While it was hard to take anybody who appeared and sounded like she did as any kind of a threat, who knew what she might have under those baggy clothes?

  “You say the Dutchman’s ship is not in port?” she asked, changing the subject. “The message we received was that he would have gotten in this morning.”

  “Pardon, but if you’re talking Die Fliegende Hollander, van Staaten’s ship, then you’re talking more legend than reality,” the bartender told her. “Like its namesake, nobody has ever reported the ship making port. It’s a ghost ship from a long-overrun world. I’ve heard every kind of talk and legend about him from those who come in here, but nobody’s ever really seen it, let alone connected with it. It’s not real.”

  The officer looked thoughtful for a moment, then sighed. “Oh, he’s real enough, I’m afraid,
but he still wouldn’t be coming in here.”

  Both the bartender and the old woman stared at him. “You know of him, then?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes. He’s number one on the most wanted list, if you want to know. He never makes port. He attacks likely prey, small freighters and the like, stealing what fuel and spares he needs, sometimes taking the whole ship and cannibalizing it. He’s got all he needs on that ship. You spot him, he either makes tracks at maximum speed or he attacks and destroys, depending on who and what you are. That’s why they say that spotting the Hollander is signing your death warrant. He’s totally insane, but he’s damned good at what he does. But he doesn’t talk, not to anybody, except to occasionally give an automated warning to prey to abandon ship now or be destroyed. If he has it cold, he’ll sometimes do that much. We’ve chased him from one end of the Arm to the other at one time or another. We think he actually lurks inside the Occupied Zone, somehow keeping just beyond the interest of the Zuni Demons, as we call ’em in the Navy.”

  “Fascinating,” she responded. “So if he were to show up here, somehow, you would be forced to arrest him or something?”

  Harker smiled. “Something like that. I’m not a cop, but I’ve come close enough to him once on the ship to take it kind of personally that he’s still at large. You know how much brass he’s got? His identification signature shows up on screens and instruments as an ancient sailing ship with all sails up!”

  He sensed her smiling, although he couldn’t see it, and he could hear her amusement at this. “Ah, yes, the Flying Dutchman. I used to sing it, you know, when I was young.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Die Fliegende Hollander. It is Dutch for The Flying Dutchman. A captain who, consumed by jealousy, murdered his wife in a rage thinking she had betrayed him while he’d been gone on his voyages, only to discover that she had indeed been true and that only his own inner demons were the evil. Cursed by her family, condemned to sail his ship forever, making landfall only once each century for just a week or so, condemned otherwise to sail alone forever, a symbol of death and a curse even to behold, until and unless a woman of her own free will sacrifices her life to free him. It’s an ancient legend, and a classical one. You’ve not heard of it, either?”