The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict Read online

  In addition, the datacore revealed the extent of Angus’ “wealth.”

  To the surprise of his prosecutors, his resources turned out to be trivial; almost nonexistent. Regardless of his reputation, he was operating only a few steps ahead of his expenses.

  That unexpected detail didn’t help him, of course. He hadn’t been arrested for his “wealth.” And in other ways the exposure of his secrets was sufficiently damning. Enough evidence was found to convict him of several acts of piracy—although everyone in Security agreed that the evidence was disappointing, since it wasn’t adequate to procure the death penalty. Certainly it wasn’t adequate to explain the more tantalizing aspects of Morn’s story.

  Confronted with this inadequacy—which presumably gave him the opportunity to cast his actions in the most favorable possible light—Angus surprised his prosecutors further by refusing to defend himself, testify on his own behalf. Indeed, he declined to answer any questions at all. With a zone implant, of course, he could have been inspired to talk; but the law—and the UMCP—didn’t consider confession an “authorized use.” Consequently, Com-Mine Security never found out where or how Bright Beauty had been outfitted, or how she’d been damaged. No explanation was obtained for the fact that his reputation so far exceeded the evidence against him. He was unwilling either to account for or to defend the presence of stolen Station food, equipment, and medicine aboard his ship. And no new illumination was shed on his strange relationship with Morn Hyland. In the first weeks of his incarceration, he opened his mouth only when he wanted to complain about the food or the facilities or the treatment in the Station lockup.

  And when he was informed that Bright Beauty was being sent to the Station shipyard to be dismantled for spare parts. Then he pounded on the walls of his cell and started to howl with such fury that eventually he had to be sedated.

  No one knew what had warned him when the Hyland ship had come into Com-Mine Station—or how hard he had tried to get away from her.

  Probably he would have been unable to explain that warning. It was a matter of instinct. He had good instincts, and they started to burn as he watched the sleek oreliner nudge its way into dock.

  It looked like a prize, the kind of treasure ship Bright Beauty could peel apart weld by weld, exposing to theft or destruction the things that made other people think they were superior beings: the money, the possessions, the luck. He had tackled ships like that in the past, had tackled them often, tracking them to their destinations, learning their secrets, then blasting them open in the black void, leaving them ruined, lost forever—had tackled them and raged to himself fiercely as he did so, destroying what other men would have captured as riches because his need for money had limits while his desire to see what matter cannon fire could do was immense. Alone in his ship, or wandering around DelSec, or sitting in Mallorys—Angus Thermopyle was always alone, even when he happened to find some stow- or castaway piece of human garbage to crew for him—he relived the ships he had tackled and hated them.

  But not this time.

  This time, his instincts burned—and he always trusted his instincts.

  As far as he knew, he had no particular reason to be wary. His crimes left little evidence behind; there was no better place than deep space to hide the remains of his plundering. Only his datacore could damage him, and he had long ago taken steps to alleviate that danger—steps which no one would detect because they were theoretically impossible. But because he was a hunter, he had also been hunted. He had the intuitions of prey.

  So he did something that would never have occurred to anyone else on or around Com-Mine Station: he turned his field-mining probes toward the Hyland ship.

  One of those probes was designed to measure the nuclear weight of thin cross sections of solid rock. It informed him that Starmaster’s hull was formed of an alloy he’d only heard about, never seen—an alloy so heavy it could endure matter cannon fire the way stone endured water.

  An alloy so expensive no oreliner could afford it. There were no haulers or handlers in space rich enough to afford it.

  When he saw the readings, Angus Thermopyle fled.

  He didn’t take the time to buy supplies. He didn’t try to find out what the station scuttlebutt concerning the Hyland ship was. He didn’t even bother to repaint Bright Beauty’s name—something he always did before risking the malign vagaries of space. A ship as rich as Starmaster would have friends, muscle. Escorts? Fighters hanging off station to watch for trouble? He took that into account, but it didn’t stop him. Sealing his hatches, he called up Station Center, filed a purely fictitious destination report, and received formal permission to undock. Then, because his instincts were still on fire, he meticulously followed the departure trajectory he was assigned. Cursing like a slavey all the way, he left Com-Mine along a route that would attract as little attention as possible. And he didn’t risk cutting in boost and shifting his course toward the belt until he was absolutely alone at least fifty thousand kilometers past the known range of any scan from the vicinity of Station.

  He was hoping that the belt was far enough away to hide him. The Station had been built at a considerable distance to avoid the meteor storms and other debris which always accompanied asteroid belts through space, the residue of planets that time and gravity had reduced to rubble.

  By the time he changed course, the exertion of manning the whole ship himself had begun to make his hands shake and his eyes fill with sweat. He had too many instruments to read, too many systems to monitor, too much data to absorb. And his computer couldn’t help him. It had extravagant fail-safes: the very mechanisms which enabled him to run Bright Beauty alone would shut the ship down in alarm if he gave the computer control of them. Nevertheless he kept going. His instincts had warned him, and he always obeyed them.

  Angus Thermopyle was a pirate and a mine jumper. He hated everybody, and there was enough old blood on his hands to convict a whole prison full of illegals. He was alone now because the decrepit drunk he’d hired to crew for him had made the mistake of asking the wrong question at the wrong time; so he’d flattened the man’s head with a spanner and left the body in one of the thruster tubes to be ashed the next time the drive cut in. He may not have been rich, but he was probably everything else the people in Mallorys believed him to be.

  He was also a coward.

  So he ran from the Hyland ship under as much g as his body could stand and remain conscious. The muscles of his shoulders began to twitch, and he couldn’t keep the sweat out of his eyes; but he kept running. When he knew that he had pushed himself too far, he didn’t stop: instead, he started pumping drugs into his veins, stim to keep him awake, cat to keep him steady.

  He was afraid, and he ran.

  Before he was close enough to the belt to begin deceleration, he had been driving under heavy g for half a standard day. Now the drugs were giving him psychotic episodes with increasing regularity, and he no longer knew clearly what he was doing. However, he was familiar with those drugs; before starting them, he’d understood what they would do to him. So he’d taken the precaution of locking Bright Beauty’s course. When he was finally forced to surrender control of his ship’s systems to her command computer, the course-lock and her fail-safes managed the hard braking for him. As a result, he arrived without crashing—and without pulling his ship away into madness—at a part of the belt which everyone knew had been mined out years ago; a long stretch of sailing rock where other ships were unlikely to come.

  There he picked a particularly dead asteroid, parked Bright Beauty in a mining crater, shut down everything except life-support, and went to sleep in his g-seat, catted out of his mind.

  If the Hyland ship could find him there, then he was lost anyway. He had never really had a chance to escape.

  He still had no reason to believe the people on that ship even knew he existed.

  Hours later, he awoke screaming because there were skinworms all over him, crawling, gnawing, starting to burrow in—


  The sensation was terrible. It was also normal; a predictable consequence of the drugs. However, for him so much of what was terrible was also familiar that he knew exactly what to do. Although he couldn’t swallow the bright terror rising in his throat or unknot the red pain closing around his heart, his hands were almost steady as he injected more drugs into his veins—analgesics to flush the now-poisonous stimulants and cataleptics away, antihistamines and steroids to soften his body’s reactions. As soon as these new drugs took hold, he slept again.

  The next time he awakened, he had trouble breathing because the air in Bright Beauty was going bad. He’d left Com-Mine Station without supplies. That meant he now had only a little water, less food—and no clean pads for the scrubbers which were supposed to keep his air breathable. Checking the computer’s maintenance log, he confirmed that his present pads were long overdue for a change.

  This development made him rage as if he were on the verge of a breakdown. But that, too, was normal. He still knew exactly what to do. Risking anoxia because he didn’t have the strength to put on an EVA suit, he shut down circulation and took the pads out of the scrubbers. While his head throbbed with CO2 overload and his vision blurred in and out of focus, he used half his water to make a chemical bath for the pads. He left the pads in the bath as long as he could—until he was close to unconsciousness. Then he refitted them in the scrubbers and restarted the circulation.

  Unfortunately, his problems were just beginning.

  He was probably safe where he was; but he couldn’t stay there. His food would last for only two or three more days. He could reuse all his water—but only if he had his purifiers serviced. And the superficial cleaning he’d given the pads might not hold up even that long. He had only two choices.

  Return to Com-Mine Station.

  Or find some other source of supply.

  He never considered returning to the Station. He wasn’t deterred by the prospect of humiliation. If anyone ever found out that he’d panicked and run, only to return limping because he’d run out of food, water, and air, he would be sneered at everywhere in DelSec; but he could live with that. The world had been sneering at him from the first. He took revenge when he got the chance. However, there was still the Hyland ship—

  That ship was to blame, of course. She’d scared him, and he hated everything that scared him. As he lifted Bright Beauty out of the mining crater and eased back from the belt to give his scanning equipment range, he began to plot ways to make Starmaster pay for what was happening to him.

  Ways to wreck a ship with that hull? The bare concept was nonsense—and Angus Thermopyle wasn’t prone to nonsense. Nevertheless thinking about it helped him do what he had to. In a state of cold rage which served as calm, he spent the next two days searching the belt with his sniffers and sifters, prospecting not for ore but for miners.

  Toward the end of that time, he came close to panic again. The pads were starting to give out; his brain was being squeezed in a vise of bad air. His tongue was thick from drinking bad water, and he was urgently hungry. Still his cold, black rage kept him going. And a judicious application of drugs kept him steady.

  At last he found what he needed—a mine on a craggy and pockmarked asteroid with a look of depletion about it, as if it had already had all its riches cut out. Yet the people working there had a ship. It stood on its struts a short distance from their camp, which was in turn a short distance from the hole they’d cut into the asteroid. The ship was cold: it had been shut down a considerable time ago, when the miners had settled in to work this hunk of rock.

  Under other circumstances, Angus Thermopyle would have ignored those miners. He could tell their whole story with a glance at their ship, their camp, and his field-mining probes. This asteroid had once been rich, but it had in fact already been mined; played out. The people on it now—probably a family, people who had to spend long periods of time on ships or in mines tended to do things by families—were essentially scavengers. Too timid or defeated or poor to go prospecting for an original strike, they sweated their bare survival out of the rock by gleaning what little had been missed by previous miners. A pirate or jumper wouldn’t waste his time on them.

  On the other hand, they had food and fresh water and scrubber pads. Angus was having trouble keeping his anger and distress from choking him, and he didn’t hesitate. He went in hard.

  The miners saw him coming. His board picked up shouts of warning and protest, appeal and outrage: he ignored them. As he approached, he used torpedoes to collapse the mouth of the mine, blocking it with dead rock. Then he set Bright Beauty straight down on the camp so that his braking blast incinerated the habitation domes, charred the suited figures outside.

  The radio shouts died in a gabble of static. Got you, you bastards. The camp had been large enough to support perhaps twenty people. With luck, he’d killed them all. He didn’t want any witnesses.

  A quick scan for life readings, distress calls, suit-to-suit communications. None. Good. That left him with a clear path to the other ship. As soon as he put on a suit himself, he could go over there and get everything he needed. Then he would be able to hide out in the belt as long as necessary. Until he got a chance to repay some of his fear.

  He was on his way to the EVA locker when Bright Beauty’s klaxons went off like several dozen screams of pain.

  The asteroid’s tiny gravity didn’t hold him back: with a powerful kick, he sent himself diving for the command module. One hand caught the back of his g-seat; the other slapped instructions at the computer, demanding an explanation. He was already in the seat, strapped down, and keying thrust for takeoff by the time the computer told him what was going on.

  His sifters and sniffers and sensors had detected the approach of another ship. And not just any other ship: a ship the same size and configuration as Starmaster.

  In fact, it was Starmaster. His probes weren’t likely to be mistaken about that alloy. He’d programmed the computer to watch for her. And to make enough noise to wake him from his grave if it spotted her.

  She was coming at him fast.

  How the fucking hell did she get here? How did she find me? No time for that. Coming fast. But not fast enough to catch him. Bright Beauty was bound to be more agile than any oreliner, no matter how much cash that bitch cost. And this was the belt, where agility was worth more than matter cannon fire. He was terrified—but he also knew what he could do. What his ship could do. Let that fornicating hunk of money try to chase him and see what happened.

  The only problem was that he didn’t have enough food. Or water. Or air.

  No time for that either. Survival was the highest priority Angus Thermopyle understood: it took precedence over everything. And he was sure from the core of his bloated belly to the sweat rolling down his jowls that the Hyland ship didn’t intend him to survive. As if he really were calm, he hit thrust and began lift-off. At the same time, he primed his cannon, diverting precious boost to build up charge. And he made sure his communications board was clear, set to receive everything and transmit nothing.

  Starmaster was still a considerable distance away, but her first transmission reached him before he was a hundred meters off the asteroid.

  “Set down.” The voice sounded crisp and commanding above the hull-roar of thrust. “Bright Beauty, you are ordered to set down.”

  Despite the intensity of his concentration on his instruments and controls, Angus was able to mutter a few obscenities under his breath.

  “Angus Thermopyle, you are ordered to set down.” The voice was sure of itself. “This is Captain Davies Hyland, commanding officer, United Mining Companies Police destroyer Starmaster. You have committed murder. If you do not set down to be boarded, you will be fired upon.”

  UMCP. That got his attention. For a second, he actually stopped swearing and took his hands off his console. The cops. It made sense; so much sense that he should have figured it out earlier. Who else was there anywhere who could pool enough money to hull
an entire ship with that alloy? Who else thought they owned the fucking universe? No one. Only the United Mining Companies—and their private cops, the muscle which enforced or invented the law that kept Earth and its huge appetites fed.

  And this was why they were here: to hunt the pirates and jumpers and scavengers who fed off all the mining operations in vast space. In just a few seconds, they would be close enough to ash him.

  “Message repeats,” the radio announced, stupidly unafraid. “Angus Thermopyle, you are ordered to set down. This is Captain Davies Hyland, commanding officer, United Mining—”

  “No,” Angus coughed in desperation. With one heavy finger he stabbed at his console, cut off reception. At once, the noise of his thrusters through the hull seemed to get louder, more frantic. “I don’t care if you come from fucking God. You can’t have my ship.”

  Holding his breath against the stress, he wrenched Bright Beauty around scarcely two hundred meters off the asteroid and slammed on full boost, piling up more g than he ought to be able to stand in order to put the asteroid between him and Starmaster. Then he drove away toward the heart of the belt.

  He didn’t cut thrust, reduce acceleration, until the simple weight of his body under so much g pushed him to the edge of blackout.

  Klaxons howled at him, proximity sensors squalling with overload. Light-headed in physical relief as g eased—relief that didn’t touch his essential terror—Angus skimmed past a small meteor, then deflected Bright Beauty between two larger rocks. At the same time, he rigged his ship for battle.

  Under normal operating conditions, she required two people to run her. In combat situations, she could have used six. But Angus Thermopyle handled everything himself.

  He made no effort to turn his cannon on the UMCP ship. Instead, as fast as his targeting computer could track, he started blazing away at every meteor and asteroid in range, filling the space behind him with chunks of all sizes caroming in all directions; covering his tail with debris. He wasn’t trying to lure Starmaster into a crash; not yet: she was still too far away to be threatened by a little rubble. But she was closing fast—and a destroyer as expensive as she was probably had artillery which would make his cannon look like popguns. He was doing his best to confuse her targ.