Lady Death

  She was silent. It was true.

  "What you need to do, when you are ready, is join the Aggressor Agency. They will train you and put you down on Protected planets like the one you just left, and you'll spy and study cultures and detect crimes and, when necessary, fight. You'll be judge, jury, and executioner if that is needed. You won't kill indiscriminately, for the pleasure of killing, but when your job requires it. You'll have a license to kill."

  "Just Protected? Not Candidate planets?"

  Both kinds of planets were on the expanding outward perimeter of the Center. The Candidates had limited space flight, knew of the Confederation, and were a provisional part of it.

  "Candidate problems are more difficult. You have to graduate to those kinds. And then you can graduate to Periphery Agent. There are entire primitive alien cultures out there which can be dangerous to the Confederation. If they are of the species in any of the other Thirteen Civilizations you hand the problem over to them. Otherwise you deal with them. Usually all alone."

  The image grinned. "But you'll have one of the Periphery ships to help you. Wait till you see them. Who knows, maybe you'll eventually be assigned a Star Ranger."

  The star ship reached the proper fraction of the speed of light and went superluminal. Behind it a sphere of white light bloomed and expanded and faded.

  <>

  Another sphere of white light bloomed near the gas giant with the most spectacular rings in this stellar system. Heyalna's ship flew out of it, moving at the same speed and in the same direction as the planet.

  Her position was far enough out so the giant took up only a tenth of the starry blackness in front of her. Her ship was above the planet's ecliptic plane so the rings were at a tilt before her.

  The sights still had the power to awe her.

  "Gods! It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said to no one.

  Imposed on the vision screen were symbols and geometric signs which she had learned to read. It seemed there were several dozen ships in transit directly from one of the millions-year-old star gates of this grand central station to another. A few dozen other ships were refueling by sweeping through the planet's atmosphere and siphoning up hydrogen and helium, for which they paid a price to the city-sized flying intelligences who swam far below the surface of the gas giant. And as always there were several more ships, mostly very large ones, parked in orbit around a small moon while their many and motley passengers flowed through the shopping malls inside the moon and sheltered in one of the two multi-species hotels and had business or other conferences in the conference center.

  She laughed. The humans of every Candidate system were always indignant if they shared "their" stellar system with a subspace station created millions of years before their ancestors had evolved into existence.

  Heyalna was not tempted to join the liner passengers in the mall. Even though she usually greatly enjoyed mixing with the races of the thirteen advanced civilizations. Especially the blue cat-like centaurs whose own Confederation shared much the same space as did the human Confederation. Despite living on planets too different for humans to covet, and vice versa, they were the most numerous visitors to human planets and remarkably similar mentally and emotionally. They even laughed at the same jokes.

  But she missed her children. She hadn't seen any of them since she joined the Uplift Agency some thirty years ago. Why the oldest was approaching the century mark! He might have decided to have a family. Or even have begun one.

  She would spend several months, perhaps even a year, with her children and any grandchildren who had been born while she was away. And she wanted to do a LOT of research about the Aggressor Agency before she approached it.

  Maybe she would get right to that rather than take off a year or so for vacation. In fact, suddenly she was eager to begin the research. She could after all combine that with visiting friends and family.

  Heyalna linked fully to the starship's computer and for a short time they were one super-human intelligence. SHE linked to the subspace net computer, an invisible gravitic whorl in space, and THEY thought hyper-human thoughts. THEY decided on a precise sequence of actions and SHE exerted her superhuman force-field muscles. SHE swept toward an invisible portal in the subspace net, fell through it, and vanished from the Universe.

  Lady Death had gone hunting.