The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict Page 5

  Better to forget about her. Forget about looting the ship. Take all the filters and supplies he could get, and leave fast.

  Suddenly he was profoundly tired. His suit still had plenty of fresh air; but he’d been hungry and thirsty for several days, and Starmaster had nearly killed him. Muttering obscenities at Morn Hyland, hating her because it was all her fault, because she was the only one left of the ship and crew that had made him panic and run as if he were a coward, he slung her over his shoulders and went looking for an EVA locker.

  Ominous and slow, like a capped volcano, he suited her, checked her tanks, and carried her against the asteroid’s small gravity back to Bright Beauty. There he took her into the cubicle of his sickbay. Roughly he strapped her down, so that she couldn’t move, and left her, still in her suit because Bright Beauty’s air was so foul. Let her come to consciousness alone and not know where she was and be terrified: she deserved it. After pausing to find out what his sniffers and sensors could tell him, he returned to the UMCP ship.

  Forcing himself to work long past the point where he wanted to lie down in exhaustion, Angus retrieved his rifle and then set about taking everything that could conceivably be of any value out of Starmaster. Enough filters to keep his air clean for years. Food stores of a much higher quality than he would have been willing to pay for. Expensive liquor. Clothes. Spare parts. Medicines. And guns. And tools. Finally he ran a line which allowed him to pump water across to his ship. When he was done, Bright Beauty was better supplied than she’d been since the day when he’d first stolen her.

  He was wild for rest; but even then he didn’t stop. Morn Hyland was awake now. Stripping off his suit, he climbed into his g-seat and tuned a receiver to her transmitter so that he could listen to her fear. That kept him going while he lifted off the asteroid and went hunting with glazed eyes and unsteady hands for a place to hide.

  He took the first place he found. By then, Morn’s voice was stretched and frayed, barely audible; she sounded like she’d lost her mind. He made sure her straps were still secure, shot her full of cat so she wouldn’t disturb him. Then he climbed into his bunk and collapsed.

  CHAPTER

  5

  When he woke up, the air in Bright Beauty was so fresh that he could smell himself stink. Too much work. Too much sweat. Too many days in the same shipsuit. Angus Thermopyle wasn’t particularly interested in personal cleanliness, but occasionally he felt good enough to take a shower. For some reason, he felt good now. He felt a sense of anticipation.

  Munching some of Starmaster’s rations, he checked his scan and the computer log to verify that there were no ships anywhere near his hiding place. Then he went to the sickbay to look at Morn Hyland.

  She was awake too; the cat had run out of her. When he took off her faceplate, she made a small whimpering noise. “Please.” She could hardly force her throat to produce words. “What are you doing? What are you going to do to me?”

  He smiled, waved the food bar he was eating, and moved away.

  Nearly humming, he stripped, entered the san cubicle, and sprayed himself clean.

  Because he was clean—and wearing a fresh shipsuit—when he returned to the sickbay, he was able to tell that Morn herself stank. She’d fouled her suit. Fouled it rather dramatically. Her eyes were raw and dark, full of fear; but he could see in her face that she was still capable of self-disgust.

  “You stink,” he announced happily.

  His tone made her flinch. Apparently the desire to die had been scared out of her.

  He looked at her features closely. Just to see what she would do, he ran the tips of his fingers along her cheek. She closed her eyes as if she were fighting a need to vomit.

  Grinning, he stepped back. “You hungry?”

  She opened her eyes and stared dismay at him.

  “Want to get up and move around?”

  No answer except dismay.

  “Want to get clean?”

  That reached her. A tiny hope twisted her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Good.” He folded his arms, rested them on his belly. He was going to enjoy this. “Tell me what you did to them.”

  She surprised him. Something that looked like anger shone out through her tears; the muscles of her jaw knotted. In a voice so cracked and worn he could hardly hear it, she said, “You bastard. If you’re going to kill me, do it. Don’t make me lie here like this.”

  He wanted to hit her. That also would have been enjoyable. But he refrained because he wasn’t ready to go that far yet. She was still wearing a suit.

  Grinning again, he leaned closer to her and rasped, “You’re right. I’m a bastard. The worst bastard you’ll ever meet. And I’m going to let you lie there and stink until you tell me what you did to them. You had your guns all lined up. You were going to blast me apart. Then you crashed.

  “I want to know why. What did you do?”

  The memory hurt her. He was glad to see that. She turned her head as far away as she could inside the EVA suit. Tears dripped past her nose.

  Angus sucked his upper lip for a moment, then asked, “What’s your name?”

  She still didn’t speak. Probably trying to be tough. Or maybe she assumed he already knew the answer. After all, he must have seen the badge on her shipsuit.

  Roughly he reached one hand to her neck and jerked up her id tag. His computer could have read her entire public file from that tag, but all he wanted was the name.

  “Morn Hyland. Captain Davies motherfucking Hyland was your father. That right?”

  Now she was crying with her mouth as well as her eyes.

  “I shot him. But he was dead anyway.” Angus bent over her, whispered in her ear. “His ship crashed. He was going to die no matter what happened. I didn’t cause that. I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was your doing.

  “What did you do to them?”

  And she still didn’t speak. For the second time, he wanted to hit her. But that could wait. Instead he did something out of character. Without realizing it—entirely without realizing it—he took another small step along the course of his doom. He tried to explain himself.

  Almost softly, he said, “You know who I am. What I’ve got to lose. You know I can’t afford to let you loose until I know what I’m up against. I can’t do anything for you until I know what kind of danger you represent.”

  Almost gently, he returned her tag, then put a hand on her chin and turned her face toward him.

  The stark horror was back in her eyes.

  Her whisper was faraway and forlorn, lost in darkness. “I initiated self-destruct. From the auxiliary bridge.”

  His fingers clamped onto her jaw as if he could force her to tell the truth. He thrust his face close to hers. “You did what?”

  “We were chasing you.” Her gaze didn’t react to his proximity: the things that appalled her were so bright she couldn’t register anything else. “Dodging asteroids. G was awful. I thought we were going to break up. I was at my station. Auxiliary bridge. I thought the straps on my seat were going to tear. Or I was going to rupture.

  “Then it stopped.

  “I could see you on the screens. But I didn’t care. You destroyed that mining camp. I’d already seen you kill all those miners. I didn’t care. I should have cared, but I didn’t. The whole inside of my head was different.

  “I was floating, and everything was clear. Like a vision. It was like the universe spoke to me. I got the message, the truth.” Her stare remained fixed; but now she had to fight to keep her sobs down. “The truth.

  “I knew exactly what to do. What I had to do. I didn’t question it.

  “I keyed the self-destruct sequence into the computer. That was supposed to blow up both drives. We would have been turned to powder.”

  “You aren’t an officer,” Angus objected. “You’re practically a kid. How did you know the self-destruct codes?”

  “We all knew the codes. Any one of us could do it. So Starmaster wouldn’t
be captured. That was our first priority. Not be captured. Under any circumstances. If forbidden space got us—a ship like that—We can all be trusted. We’re all reliable. Most of us are family. They wouldn’t let anybody who wasn’t reliable on a ship like that.

  “But fa—Captain Hyland caught what I was doing. He tried to abort. Only the thrusters exploded. I could hear him yelling at me over the intercom—yelling at me because I was his daughter and I was destroying his ship, I was destroying him. His sister and brothers. My cousins. Destroying them.

  “And then it wasn’t clear anymore. There wasn’t any vision. We weren’t in any danger. It was all a lie. I killed my whole family for no reason.”

  Fighting to contain her grief, she did her desperate best to shout, “Get me out of this suit!”

  He ignored the demand. “Stop whining. Let me think.” Suddenly he was sure of his suspicions. He’d taken a maniac aboard Bright Beauty, a human time bomb. And yet it didn’t make sense.

  “How many times have you crossed the gap?”

  “Twice,” she answered, cowed not by his irritation but by her own despair.

  “Twice,” he echoed viciously. “Of course. Cops like you have to be deep-space certified. So they test you in the Academy. To weed out the crazies who get gap-sickness. And then you had to reach Com-Mine Station. You’ve only crossed the gap twice because this is your first deep-space assignment. It doesn’t make sense.”

  But while he was still speaking, he guessed the truth. Gap-sickness came in every conceivable shape and disguise. He had heard of people who crossed the gap once—or even several times—and then lived perfectly normal lives until the right stimuli came along, until the right combination of circumstances occurred to trigger their personal vulnerability, their peculiar flaw.

  Combat? G-stress?

  “How many times”—he took hold of her face again, forced her gaze toward him—“have you been under heavy g since the first time you crossed the gap?”

  She gaped at him, anguish changing into comprehension in her eyes.

  “Answer me. You did all kinds of g work in the Academy. They trained you for everything they could think of. Did you do that before or after your first gap crossing? When was the last time you were under heavy g?”

  “Before,” she husked weakly. Her voice seemed to stick in her teeth. “The gap comes last. Only if you want to crew in deep space. Earth can’t afford to risk people who want to work in-system. Can’t risk wasting all that training and expense for people who aren’t going to be in any danger.”

  She must have understood what he was getting at, because she concluded with thin, cracked lucidity, “Chasing you was the first time I’ve been under heavy g since before my first crossing.”

  “Great. Wonderful.” Angus tried a few obscenities, but they seemed inadequate. “Bitch. I never should have rescued you. I must have been out of my mind. It’s not bad enough you’re a fucking cop. And a witness. It’s not bad enough you’re going to turn me in the first chance you get. On top of that, you’re going to go crazy and try to kill me as soon as we hit heavy g.” He gouged his fingers into the sides of her face, then released her. “I should have left you to die.”

  Again she surprised him. Her gaze steadied, and her voice gave an improbable suggestion of strength, of sarcasm. “It’s not too late. You can still kill me. No one will ever know.”

  A smile stretched his features, making him look more than ever like a malign frog. He wasn’t accustomed to the way he felt: happy; eager. She might turn out to be exactly what he needed.

  “If I did that,” he replied, “I wouldn’t have a crew.”

  “Crew?” The idea seemed to focus her stubbornness. “I’m not going to crew for you. I’m not—”

  Yet in spite of what she felt, her voice trailed away. He wasn’t paying any attention to her refusal.

  Deliberately, obviously, so that she could watch everything, he instructed the sickbay computer to prepare an anesthetic and pump it into her. While the needle probed her veins, he savored her dismay.

  As she lost consciousness, she breathed in appeal, “Get me out of this—”

  “Oh, I will,” he promised. “I will.”

  If he’d been that kind of man, he would have chuckled.

  Thanks to the advances of medical technology, even Bright Beauty’s tiny sickbay was sufficiently well-equipped to administer a zone implant.

  He had to unstrap her in order to get her head and shoulders out of the suit. That was the hard part, hampered as he was by her dead weight and the confines of the cubicle. The rest was simple. All he had to do was tell the sickbay computer what he wanted and then get out of the way. Cybernetic systems took care of the rest.

  Long ago, he’d disconnected the sickbay computer from his ship’s datacore. Law-abiding ships had that right, to protect the privacy of their passengers and crew: as long as the sickbay computer didn’t feed directly to the datacore, no permanent record was kept of who needed treatment and why; so private citizens didn’t need to worry that their medical records would be used against them. After all, crucial information—such as the presence of gap-sickness—was recorded on id tags. And any captain could add data to anyone’s id file as necessary. However, Angus’ intentions had nothing to do with abiding by the law. He simply wanted to neutralize his sickbay computer as a source of evidence against him.

  In fact, he’d carried his precautions to the extent of programming the computer with an automatic erase, so that it immediately “forgot” every treatment it dispensed, every procedure it performed. According to his official sickbay log, he was the only person who had ever been aboard Bright Beauty—and he had never used his sickbay.

  Confident of his own security, he left the cybernetic systems alone while they worked on Morn Hyland, preparing her for his use.

  Instead of watching what was done to her, he lifted Bright Beauty gently out of hiding and went in search of a better covert, a place where he could feel safe for the time it would take to train his crew. Before long he found the kind of asteroid he liked: played-out and deserted, riddled with abandoned tunnels and workings which would attract nobody. Deep in one of the old mine shafts, out of reach of any ordinary scan, he parked his ship. Just in case he lost control of what he was doing, he shut down her drive and locked everything in the command module with priority codes. Then he went to check on his patient.

  The sickbay computer was done with her: in fact, it had already washed the anesthetic out of her body, and she was starting to wake up. He just had time to pick up the implant control and make sure it was functioning properly before she began to stir, moving her arms groggily and blinking her eyes.

  “You stink,” he said before she was altogether able to understand him. “Go get clean.”

  With an effort, she got her eyes into focus. At the same time, she seemed to realize that her limbs were free—that he had undone the straps. She frowned at him, struggling to think. Reflexively, she pulled her legs up, stretched her arms.

  “What’re you doing?” Her voice sounded rusty, as if she hadn’t used it for a long time. “Why did you put me to sleep?”

  Watching her closely, he rasped, “I said, you stink. Go get clean.”

  “Yes, sir.” She was fresh from the Academy: assent to authority still came naturally. Her gaze blurred, and her nose wrinkled as she smelled the mess she had made in the suit. Carefully she swung her legs over the edge of the surgery berth, eased herself into a sitting position. Just for a second, he thought she was actually going to thank him for the opportunity to use the sanitary cubicle.

  But movement helped clear her head. Her frown sharpened. Gripping the edge of the berth to steady herself, she looked at him again. “Why am I free? Why did you put me to sleep?”

  He bared his teeth. “I told you. You’re my crew now. You’re mine. You’ve been impressed.” He relished the word. “When I tell you to do something, I expect it done.”

  He could see suspicion mounting
to panic in her face. “You bastard,” she breathed for the second time. “I’m not your crew. I’m UMCP. I’m going to leave you rotting in lockup if it’s the last thing I do. What have you done to me?”

  Angus didn’t answer directly: he was having too much fun. Instead, he showed her the control in his hand.

  The shock when she recognized the small box was everything he could have wanted. It was like her horror of the way she had murdered her family, like that in helplessness and extremity; and yet profoundly different in other, crucial respects. Terror and loathing burned across her face. Her hands sprang to her mouth; she made an attempt to cry out.

  Then she hurled herself at him.

  Unhindered by the asteroid’s negligible gravity, she came at him like a crazy. In her frenzy, she was so wild that she looked rabid—frantic enough to tear him apart.

  But he had good reflexes. They’d often saved his life. And as a matter of instinct he was already braced against the bulkhead, ready. He shoved himself to the side, moving almost as fast as she did.

  At the same time, he pushed one of the main function buttons on the zone-implant control.

  That one was for emergencies: it was intended to save the people around her from her fits of gap-sickness after everything else failed. When he pushed it, she went instantly catatonic.

  Limp as an empty shipsuit, she collided with the bulkhead and flopped backward. The asteroid’s small tug pulled her down slowly, so that she fell like a grotesque feather against the edge of the surgery berth and settled toward the floor.

  “You stink!” Angus raged at her, squeezing the control triumphantly. “Go get clean. When I tell you to do something, I expect it done.”

  She could hear him: he knew she could hear him. Her eyes retained the color of consciousness. That was the blessing—or the curse—of the zone implant’s cataleptic function. It didn’t affect her mind: it only short-circuited the connection between what her mind wanted and what her body did. She could hear him; yet she lay on the floor in a heap of flaccid limbs. If he’d taken a welding torch to her belly, she wouldn’t have reacted in any way.