A Dark and Hungry God Arises Read online

  Billingate had few worries along those lines. Because it had been hived into the bleak rock of Thanatos Minor, a planetoid which sailed the vacuum a few million kilometers inside the borders of forbidden space, it had little or nothing to fear from overt assault. It was protected—albeit obliquely—by treaty. It was also defended by Amnion warships: the quadrant of space it occupied lay along the most heavily patrolled boundary with human space. And it was defended as well by the ships which depended on it. In human space, any illegal might reasonably flee rather than face a UMCP destroyer or battlewagon. In forbidden space, flight was less attractive because it led deeper into the fatal realm of the Amnion. Safety from imposed mutation existed only at the fringes of Amnion territory. Illegals were inclined to feel cornered when they were threatened near Billingate; therefore they were predisposed to fight back.

  This shipyard did not need secrecy to protect it.

  So pirates with enough credits went to Billingate to purchase vessels—or recreations. Illegal gap ships went to Billingate for repairs. And any brigand who could get there went to Billingate to fence his or her loot. Thanks to its location, Thanatos Minor provided an ideal clearinghouse for the raw materials, technologies, and organic tissues which the Amnion craved. The human species was betrayed more consistently, more often, and more profitably there than anywhere in human space—or human history.

  For this reason, Billingate had grown populous—UMCPDA estimated between four and seven thousand inhabitants—as well as rich.

  For the same reason, it had also become known.

  The stories which reached the ears of private citizens and corporate officials, station security officers and UMCP ensigns, sequestered researchers and GCES undersecretaries alike, had a specificity which the tales of bootleg shipyards generally lacked. Because Billingate had been built entirely by illegals for illegals, it had good cause to be regarded as “the sewer of the universe.” Internal crime was violently interdicted because it reduced profitability; but every vice known to humankind thrived there, restricted only by the available credit of its participants. Slavery was common. Chemical dependencies of every kind could be readily nourished. Sacrificial prostitution prospered for the amusement and enrichment of the men—and women?—who owned nerve junkies or null-wave transmitters too reduced to defend themselves. Bio-aesthetic, -prosthetic, and -retributive surgery enhanced or destroyed human capabilities.

  It was better to be dead than poor on Thanatos Minor.

  Over this morass of human desuetude and corruption, a man called simply “the Bill” presided on the strength of his evenhanded malice, his political acumen (that is to say, his ability to gauge the motivations and breaking points of his people), his talent for protecting the shipyard’s profits by making sure that he got paid first; and on the authority he gained by being perceived as Billingate’s “decisive” by the Amnion. It was he who ruled Thanatos Minor, settled disputes, punished offenders, kept the books—and made Billingate function with some approximation of efficiency, despite the manifold weaknesses and eccentricities of its populace.

  Rumor suggested that he had been surgically provided with a double phallus so that he could penetrate women in both nether orifices simultaneously.

  Unfortunately all this information served no purpose except to increase the outrage with which Billingate was viewed in the more conservative, genophobic, or ethical strata of human society: it did nothing to threaten Billingate itself. The UMCP was prevented by clear treaty from entering forbidden space to extirpate Thanatos Minor. Likewise, of course, the Amnion were precluded by treaty from permitting Billingate’s existence; but this was an unequal, essentially toothless restriction, since the Amnion could—and did—deny all knowledge of the Bill’s operations. On that basis, any UMCP incursion into Amnion space would be deemed an act of war.

  In the corridors of UMCPHQ, as well as in the chambers of the Governing Council for Earth and Space, it was frequently argued that war was preferable to this kind of peace. As long as places like Billingate were able to exist, the UMCP could never prevail against piracy. However, the official position of the United Mining Companies was that the benefits of trade justified the costs of piracy—and war would put an end to trade.

  Speaking for the UMCP, Director Dios took the same position for different reasons: he argued that the costs of war would be far greater than the benefits of eliminating piracy. War, he claimed, would produce an exponential increase in bloodshed and lost lives, without any guarantee of success. Despite the strength of the organization he headed, he was known to question whether humankind could ever win a war with the Amnion.

  DAVIES

  e had no idea why he was still alive.

  Of course, there was no physical reason why he should be dead. Nick Succorso’s goons hadn’t damaged his body. They’d kept him locked in silence while the ship performed a long and brutal deceleration. They’d made him wait for hours as the ship coasted. Then they’d rousted him from his cell, manhandled him across the ship, and sealed him in an ejection pod. But none of that had threatened his life.

  And the pod itself was designed to keep him safe. It enclosed him as tightly as a coffin, allowed him virtually no movement—and certainly no access to its controls. He could see nothing except the status screens which were supposed to help him hope; monitors which were intended to reassure him, but which instead told him his heart and lungs were working too hard. Trajectory and thrust were preset: how could anybody who needed an ejection pod be expected to navigate? Nevertheless its pads and restraints protected him from the g of launch: its systems cooled the heat of his terror, supplied him with plenty of oxygen to compensate for his ragged, urgent breathing.

  Yet he should have died. Stress which had nothing to do with the treatment his body received should have killed him.

  He was being sent to the Amnion—to a waiting warship called Tranquil Hegemony—where he would be studied down to his nucleotides to help the enemies of his species perfect their mutagens; and then he would be made one of them. Perhaps he would become simply a monstrous and immaterial part of their genetic imperialism. Or perhaps he would become a human-seeming and direct agent of their will. In either case, everything that he knew or could recognize about himself would be gone; betrayed and transformed.

  Didn’t men and women go mad under that kind of pressure? Didn’t their hearts burst? Didn’t dread clog their lungs until they could no longer breathe?

  Of course they did.

  But for him the situation was much worse. Born without transition into a sixteen-year-old body, he had no idea who he was. His mind was a copy of his mother’s: his body replicated a man he’d never met. Unable to satisfy his instinctive and fundamental need for an image of himself, he had no basis on which to think, to feel, to make choices.

  As far as he could remember, he was a woman in her early twenties, a UMCP ensign on her first mission; young and inexperienced, but passionate; a dedicated fighter in the struggle to preserve humankind’s right to live or die for what it was. Yet that was nonsense. He was obviously male; so obviously male that his crotch responded when he looked at Morn Hyland—a beautiful woman, not his mother, no, not his mother at all, how could she be? His memories were incomprehensible because they belonged beyond question to someone else.

  And they weren’t complete. He had a black hole in his mind where he should have had transitions: at the point where his memories should have revealed how he came into being, what his birth meant, why his existence under these conditions was necessary, his recollections frayed away to nothing.

  Morn had tried to offer him answers. She’d explained that he’d been brought into being by an Amnion “force-growing” technique which had taken him from her womb to physiological maturity in approximately an hour. And he’d been imprinted with her mind—education, memories, reflexes, and all—because he had none of his own. In addition she’d told him that she’d made the decisions which had afflicted him like this for the simple reas
on that otherwise he and she would both have died.

  He believed that, not because he understood it, but because it fit the person he remembered having been.

  But she’d given him nothing adequate to explain how such decisions had become necessary. And he couldn’t recall it for himself.

  Beyond question he should have gone nova under so much pressure, like a superheated sun.

  He had no idea why that hadn’t happened. He felt like a superheated sun. The source of his intransigent grasp on consciousness and sanity lay hidden somewhere in the black hole of his memories; swallowed by the dark.

  Now the ejection pod carried him across the dark to his doom. There was nothing he could do about that; nothing at all; nothing of any kind. Yet he went on fighting for his life.

  Fighting to remember.

  What had Morn told him?

  What you remember, she’d said, stops right at the point where I first came down with gap-sickness.

  But she’d insisted her son didn’t have the same sickness.

  Nick hated him, she’d claimed, because she lied to him. By saying that Davies was his, Nick’s, son.

  But that wasn’t enough. Davies had heard its inadequacy in her voice.

  He’s a tormented man, and I used that against him.

  He never wanted me to have you. He wanted me for sex, that’s all. So he ordered me to abort you. I told him every lie I could think of that might change his mind.

  The truth was deadly. It would have killed them both. Because Davies’ father was the only man in human space that Nick hates worse than the cops.

  Nick himself had supplied Davies with the rest of the story.

  Nick had talked about Angus Thermopyle.

  He’s a pirate and a butcher and a petty thief. Right now, he’s serving a life sentence in Com-Mine Station lockup.

  That may not make you think very highly of your mother. She’s supposed to arrest men like Captain Thermopile, or kill them, not fuck them until she gets pregnant.

  But it wasn’t like that. Captain Thermopile gave her a zone implant. After she demolished Starmaster, he rescued her from the wreckage. Davies remembered none of this. He gave her a zone implant to keep her under control. He turned her on until she would have been willing to suck her insides out with a vacuum hose, and then he fucked her senseless.

  That’s your father, Davies. That’s the kind of man you are.

  But here’s the interesting part. Why wasn’t your father convicted? If she had a zone implant, he must have had a zone implant control. Why wasn’t it found on him when he was arrested?

  The answer is, she’d learned to like it. She wanted it, Davies. It wasn’t found on him because he’d already given it to her. She loved using it on herself.

  So what did she do with it when he was arrested? She didn’t turn it over to Com-Mine Security like a good little cop. They would have removed her zone implant—and your father would have been executed. She couldn’t let them take it away from her. So she hid the control and escaped with me. She used it to seduce me so that I would rescue her—not from Captain Thermopile, but from Com-Mine Security.

  All she’s done since then is perfect her addiction.

  His time was running out. The pod’s blips and chronometers measured his movement toward the Amnion warship like a countdown to death.

  Did she tell you she refused to abort you because she wanted to keep you? That isn’t strictly true. The only real reason is that she couldn’t get an abortion without letting the sickbay test her. It would have recorded her zone implant.

  That’s your mother, Davies. That’s the kind of woman you came from.

  And Davies thought, No. No. If that were true—if all that were true—she could have had an abortion and then erased the sickbay log. And she wouldn’t have tried to help me. She wouldn’t have said, As far as I’m concerned, you’re the second-most important thing in the galaxy. You’re my son. But the first, the most important thing is to not betray my humanity.

  He believed that because he recognized it.

  Nevertheless he knew what Nick said was true. It just wasn’t enough.

  Nothing was enough. The status screens showed him only that he was closing on Tranquil Hegemony. A minute or two remained, no more. In the distance hung the black rock of Thanatos Minor; but that information, too, wasn’t enough to do him any good.

  He needed to be able to maneuver. Urgently he strove to remember everything he might have known about ejection pods. Was there some way to get at the controls, override the presets? Surely a pod designed for emergencies might encounter emergencies of its own; therefore there must be some way for the pod’s occupant to take command.

  Think, you idiot.

  Remember.

  If he’d known his father, he might have recognized Angus Thermopyle’s instinctive reaction to futility and fear.

  But he hadn’t known his father. He couldn’t remember anything that might help him as the pod cut in thrust—acceleration, not braking—and began to veer away from Tranquil Hegemony. He could only stare at the screens with his heart hammering in his throat and sweat streaming off his forehead, and wonder who was being betrayed now.

  If Captain’s Fancy and Tranquil Hegemony were talking to each other—shouting at each other?—he didn’t hear it: the pod’s receivers were tuned to the wrong frequencies, or the messages were tight-beamed. But he saw his course shift away from the Amnion ship; felt lateral thrust as well as acceleration until his new trajectory stabilized and thrust cut out.

  Then the screens showed him that he was now running straight for the unreadable stone of Thanatos Minor.

  When Tranquil Hegemony didn’t fire on him, he knew he’d been granted a temporary reprieve.

  In response his heart started beating even harder, and sweat ran into his eyes like oil.

  At his present velocity, a landing on Thanatos Minor would crush him to undifferentiated pulp—if it didn’t consume him in a fireball first. Precisely for that reason, Thanatos Minor would blast him out of space before he hit, to avoid being damaged by the impact.

  There was nothing he could do about it.

  Nevertheless he was out of Tranquil Hegemony’s reach, at least for the time being. Any death was preferable to the one Nick Succorso had intended for him. And according to the screens, he now had nearly six more hours to live.

  Six more hours to try to wrestle some kind of understanding up out of the blind abyss which filled his head.

  Six more hours to figure out who was being betrayed.

  By whom.

  His urgency didn’t let go of him for an instant.

  Davies had betrayed his father’s ship.

  No, it wasn’t him: it was Morn. Not his father’s ship: his grandfather’s.

  But when he insisted on the distinction, he lost the memory; so he let the strange discontinuity between himself and his mother blur.

  He’d betrayed Starmaster himself.

  Not deliberately. He’d done it because he suffered from gap-sickness, and no one knew that. There was no test to reveal it: no test except the gap itself. In his case, the stimulus which triggered the flaw in his brain was heavy g.

  And Starmaster was under heavy g with a vengeance, slamming herself against the vacuum for both speed and agility as she chased Angus Thermopyle’s Bright Beauty through the careening rock of the belt. Thermopyle had just fried an entire mining camp, butchered every last man, woman, and child for no known reason; their lorn cries, truncated by destruction, had reached Starmaster as they died. Now Starmaster was in pursuit, blazing with purpose and clarity.

  This was the work the ship had been designed for; the work to which he’d committed himself despite his ingrained doubts about himself. He was on duty on the auxiliary bridge—emergency backup for any station which might fail—and his own purpose should have been clear; it would have been clear if he hadn’t been taken over by something greater, something so lucid, precise, and compulsory that it reduced everything e
lse to a corrupt muddle. There on the auxiliary bridge the universe spoke to him—

  —and his memories stopped.

  He could find no way past that clarity. It must have seared his mind; changed the chemistry of his brain somehow; burned out synapses. He knew that his—no, Morn’s, he was separate from her now—her life must have gone on from that point. She could remember what happened next. Angus Thermopyle knew. Nick knew some of it. But for Davies Hyland the path was closed; blocked by a neural gap he couldn’t cross.

  For him, it was easier to figure out who was being betrayed.

  Not the Amnion.

  And not himself. Or his mother. Not this time.

  Nick Succorso.

  Davies had seen the loathing on Nick’s face and trusted it: he was utterly sure that Nick would never risk cheating the Amnion to save Morn’s son. And Morn had already worked miracles on Davies’ behalf.

  If he survived the next few hours, that knowledge might prove useful.

  He had no particular reason to think he would—except that if Morn could work the miracle of diverting him from Tranquil Hegemony, she might also have conceived a way to keep him alive. The more he thought about her, the more powerful she appeared: a source of miracles as well as understanding. Maybe that was why the stresses of the past days hadn’t destroyed him. Maybe buried away inside him somewhere was a visceral awareness of what she could accomplish, how much he could rely on her.

  And maybe the son of a woman like Morn Hyland could work miracles of his own.

  Eventually the pod’s screens told him that he was going to be rescued.

  A ship came toward him. Not a pursuit craft from Tranquil Hegemony: a vessel from Thanatos Minor. And she didn’t fire. According to the screens, he was still an hour off the rock when she intersected his trajectory.

  Her blip absorbed his on the screens.

  Because of his training in the Academy—no, Morn’s, dammit, Morn’s—he knew what was happening as the pod began to decelerate. A monitor reported decreasing velocity; he felt g shove him against the pads and restraints. But the pod slowed without braking thrust. The other ship must have matched speeds with him, accepted the pod into one of her holds, then clamped it down so that she could control it.