Starblood

kill you if you surrender," Timothy said wearily. The hate was still there, but a deep welling sadness had joined it.
    Margle and the remaining man were crouched behind a sofa, unwilling to surrender merely because of a lucky shot.
In
the dark, they could not have seen that his hands were gone. "You're crazy," Margle said, his voice high and sharp, grating on the nerves. He was quiet, waiting for Timothy to speak and reveal his position.
    "Why did you kill Taguster?" Ti asked, remaining at the same place.
    "Why tell you?" Margle asked. There was a giggle in his voice, an edgy little laugh that sounded almost sadistic. Apparently, they could not see him yet.
    "You're going to kill me. Or I'll kill you. Whichever way, telling me why you murdered Taguster won't make much difference, will it?"
    "He was on PBT," Margle said.
    "What excuse does that
give
you for killing him?" To discover that their reason was so thin made the death seem all the more meaningless to Ti and resurrected the hatred which had begun to die in him.
    Margle chuckled, as if lax and unwatchful—although he was not. His kind of man never was. "It was getting too expensive for him. He decided to gather information on us. The Narcotics Bureau has never been able to synthesize the stuff, even with samples they obtained. Taguster was trying to get enough to give them some sort of clue so that, in return, they would make him a legal addict. Then he could get PBT free from supplies the UN has confiscated. One of his paid informers informed to us. We ransacked his house while he was out, found the file he had on us. Not much, but enough to get a good many people sold down the river—which means something might leak to help the UN find out what the stuff is."
    "That shouldn't have bothered you. You could buy the authorities off."
    "Local, not UN. Did you ever try bribing a UN delegate officer, the kind they have in narcotics? Impossible."
    "So you killed him."
    Margle was still trying to pin him down, keep him talking long enough to level a fairly accurate barrage at him. "The Hound did. You were pretty clever about that, you know. Had us worried. But calling the local constabulary—now that was a stroke of pure idiocy. It made finding you much easier."
    Ti knew enough now. There had been a side to Taguster he had not known. It hurt him a bit to think the musician had not fully trusted him, but all of that was past now. Taguster was dead. He moved toward the couch, making no effort to conceal himself.
    "There!" Margle shouted. Both men rose, seeing him in the same instant, and fired point-blank into his twisted body.
    He deflected all the pins.
    Then Ti was behind the couch and on top of them. They danced backwards, opening fire. He returned the pins, getting Margle in the cheek and the gunman in the neck. They died with such precision that it seemed like a grotesquely choreographed dance.
    He left the room and phoned Creel, getting him out of bed. He asked for two reporters and two cameramen to cover all angles of the incident Creel, true to form, asked no questions; he merely wondered if he might come over too. He smiled slightly when Timothy said yes.
    As Ti waited for his people to arrive, a weariness settled over him like a hand sliding onto a glove. He had once made a promise to himself that he would never kill. It had been a way of making amends to the gods—if there were gods—for having been the product of an experiment of war. And now he had broken that promise in order to avenge the death of his only close friend. It was going to take some time before he would be able to think this through, to learn and understand which was the most precious: integrity of one's self, or unlimited love and devotion for another human being.
    He could not cry. He wished he could—that might relieve the tension. But Taguster was dead, his mind and personality beyond retrieval, and the world still turned. The hate would have to be dissolved, burned down, disposed of. A man could not live with such hatred. No matter how he had been hurt. He decided that, after the statsheet people and the police left, he would get roaring drunk. And stay drunk for two or three days. And then everything would be fine. He was sure that would end it…

CHAPTER 5
    A darkly painted personal grav-plate automobile, without benefit of any chrome fixtures, drifted up the mountainside in the dim wash of moonlight that managed to filter through the relatively heavy cloud cover of the humid