The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict Page 7

  At the time, in the Academy, she took that failure as a reason to rededicate herself to her calling. If Gutbuster and similar ships still existed, perhaps flourished, then people like Morn were needed more than ever; people who had both reason for passion and experience to give their passion focus. She made herself one of the best cadets in her class—an honor to her father, and to her mother’s memory. If she had any questions about what she was doing—if she felt any uncertainty about her father, or the UMCP, or about her own courage—she kept that hidden, even from herself.

  By the time she joined Starmaster and Captain Davies Hyland in their quest to preserve the integrity of human space, any doubts she might have retained were hidden so deep that only a man like Angus Thermopyle could have dredged them up.

  But she’d killed her father. She’d brought what was left of her family to ruin.

  That struck her in the deepest part of her shame—in the part which believed she’d deserved to be abandoned; the part which believed her resentment had killed her mother.

  When she needed them most—helpless in Bright Beauty’s sickbay, with a zone implant in her head and Angus leering over her—her parents didn’t answer her appeal.

  How could they? Nothing they’d ever given her or done for her had prepared her for the crisis of gap-sickness; for the knowledge that the destructive flaw which endangered those she loved existed, not in illegals and forbidden space, but in herself.

  The look in her eyes as she came back from her search for courage was one of unmitigated and irremediable anguish.

  “Even if I can’t do it,” she said as if her heart were hollow, “somebody else will. It doesn’t matter what you think of me. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m as bad as a traitor. But there are better cops than me—stronger—They’ll stop you. They’ll make you pay for this.”

  Her throat closed. The glaze across her eyes was fading. She began to look sharper, more dangerous; her nipples were poised on her breasts as if they could do damage.

  Instinctively, Angus put his hand in his pocket, closed his fingers around the control. His grip was damp with sweat.

  But she was wrong. He had no doubt that she was wrong. Oh, the fucking cops would stop him if they could. They would gut his ship and kill him gladly. But not because of what he did to her—or to those miners. Reasons like that were only excuses, as empty as her tone. The UMCP didn’t protect people. Why should it? It protected money. It protected itself. It protected the power to despise people like Angus himself.

  The cops would try to stop and kill him, not because he shed blood, but because he cut into UMC profits.

  Under the circumstances, he had no idea why he’d left her alone so long; why he’d given her time to go looking for courage. He didn’t have any reason for it. Nevertheless he was either excited or angry; and that confusion held him. And he had the control to her zone implant in his pocket: he was secure. Let her find courage, if she could. The braver she was, the more pleasure he would get out of breaking her.

  When he thought about breaking her, he grew erect again.

  Instead of arguing with her, he removed his hand from his pocket. A twitch of his fists parted the seals on his shipsuit, allowing him to jut out.

  “They’ll never get the chance,” he rasped, showing his yellow teeth. “I told you. I’m a bastard. The worst bastard you’ll ever meet. And I’m good at what I do. I’ve been dancing circles around the fucking cops all my life. If they ever catch me, it’ll be long after you’re dead.

  “In the meantime, I’m going to have some fun with you. You’re my crew now. You’re going to learn to take orders. And I’ve got old scores to settle. A lot of them. I’m going to settle them on you. By the time I’m done, you’re going to want to run away so bad it’ll damn near kill you, but I won’t even let you scream.”

  She glanced down at his crotch. Her mouth betrayed an unmistakable desire to wail. And yet she fought not to let him appall her. Her withdrawal may not have brought her courage; nevertheless she possessed a strength of her own which had never been tested before. Her voice shook as she said, “If nobody else stops you, I’ll have to do it. I’ll get the chance somehow. I can’t fight a zone implant. You’ve got that on your side. But I can’t crew for you while you’re keeping me passive. You’ll have to let me move on my own—think on my own. I’ll get the chance.”

  Her defiance was secretly disturbing—and secretly stimulating. He wanted to hit her again; but he knew that would be an inferior pleasure. To crush her spirit would give him a positive joy. Furthermore, it was necessary. She was right: she wouldn’t be able to crew for him under the control of the zone implant. The requirements of the job were too complex—and the functions of her implant were too crude. If he had to tell her what to do all the time, she would be useless. If he needed her help with Bright Beauty, he would be vulnerable. He wouldn’t be able to leave his hiding place until he was sure she was broken.

  And yet her spirit was part of what made her so desirable.

  He didn’t hesitate, however. He’d already taken too many steps in a direction he didn’t understand. Still jutting from the seam of his shipsuit, he took out the implant control and snapped it on.

  Helpless to resist, she lapsed into a pliant state similar to hypnosis; a state in which she could no longer choose her own movements.

  He had to swallow several times to moisten his throat. As he tapped buttons on the control, he rasped, “Sit up.”

  Eyes disfocused, features slack, she sat up on the edge of the berth.

  He reached into one of the compartments along the bulkhead, selected a scalpel, and handed it toward her. “Take it.”

  Her fingers closed involuntarily. Only the darkness in her gaze hinted that she knew what she was doing.

  He had to clench his fists to keep himself still. He was approaching orgasm again. “Put the edge on your tit.”

  The control compelled her. She didn’t need to watch what she was doing. Blindly she moved the scalpel until the blade rested against her nipple, intense silver against brown. The nipple was erect and hard, as if it were ready to be cut.

  “You can understand me,” he said thickly. “I know you can, so pay attention. I can make you cut yourself. If I want to, I can make you cut off your whole tit.” He was tempted to have her draw blood, just to demonstrate his power; but he was afraid if he did so he would come right away. “Remember that when you think about breaking my neck.

  “I’m going to break you. I’m going to break you so hard you’ll start to love it, need it. Then I’m going to break you some more. I’m going to break you until you don’t have anything but me to live for.”

  Her eyes were still out of focus; but he could see anguish in their depths, a wail she was unable to utter.

  She looked so lost that he almost turned off the zone implant. It would be an exquisite display of possession to make her do what he wanted by plain fear rather than with the implant—to make her return the scalpel to its compartment, then come to him, kneel in front of him, and open her mouth so that he could thrust himself down her throat. His thumb was on the switch to release her.

  But at the last moment, instinct prevailed. He couldn’t take the risk of ignoring her threats. She might be stronger than he could predict. If she was—The idea took some of the stiffness out of him.

  Angrily, he kept her under control.

  Moving like a robot—responsive to nothing but the implant’s functions—she replaced the scalpel in its compartment. When he instructed her to smile, she obeyed; but the lift of her lips remained as expressionless as the rest of her face. Obediently she knelt in front of him.

  His organ was no longer as intensely eager as it had been a few moments ago. Down in the black bottom of his heart, he was disappointed. His cowardice had cost him something he wanted. But disappointment made him angry—and anger had its uses. Suddenly furious, he forced open her mouth and drove himself into her, gagging her fiercely until he came.

&nbs
p; Then a sense of depletion as sudden as his rage took everything else away. Without a glance at her, he pushed the buttons which put her to sleep; he left her naked on the floor of the sickbay. Thinking he was tired, he lumbered away toward his berth to get some rest.

  But he wasn’t tired. What he felt wasn’t fatigue: it was loss. After several restless minutes, he left his berth and went, fuming bitterly, to Bright Beauty’s bridge and the command console. There he keyed on the cameras and screens so that he could look at the damage Starmaster had done to his ship.

  She had a cabin-size dent in her side. Her steel skeleton was no longer true. One part of her nose looked like it’d been hit by an impact-ram.

  She could be repaired. He knew where to go to get her patched and welded and sealed: fixed. But she would never be the same again.

  As he studied her wounds, Angus Thermopyle’s eyes began to spill tears.

  CHAPTER

  7

  From that point on, he no longer hit Morn Hyland. She was his, and he was ready, eager, to use her hard; but he didn’t want her damaged.

  Driven by anger and grief, and by a vague, inexplicable sense that he was no longer in control of his life, he used her so hard that several days passed before he could begin teaching her how to help him with Bright Beauty. He’d never had much to do with women. In fact, he’d never doubted that he could live perfectly well without them altogether. But now his brain teemed with lust. Perversions which had never occurred to him before now seemed exciting, even compulsory. The more he saw of her helpless beauty, and the more he exercised himself on her flesh, the greater her hold on his imagination became—the more power she seemed to have over him.

  It was madness to stay where he was: stationary, hidden, defenseless. He should have been on his way to the nearest bootleg shipyard days ago. It was weeks or months away under hard boost, inside the borders of forbidden space, where cops never went; he should have gotten started immediately. But he kept thinking of things he could do to Morn—of ways to enjoy her imposed compliance—of outlets for his most intimate and personal rage. The firm line of her thighs and the soft pillow of her belly haunted his dreams: he was kept awake by the way her breasts lifted to him despite the intensity of her loathing. For several days, he was simply unable to think about anything else.

  Finally, during one of the periods when he released her from the zone implant’s control so that he could take a look at her despair, abhorrence, nausea—look at them and savor them—she asked, “Why are you doing this? Why do you hate me so much?”

  They were in the sickbay because its berth was easier to use than any of the others. She sat on the floor, against the bulkhead, with her legs hugged to her chest in misery and her face hidden between her knees. He’d seen sewer rats on Com-Mine Station and elsewhere, derelicts, nerve-juice addicts, even null-wave transmitters, with more energy and hope than she showed. She was breaking, as he’d promised she would. Already it seemed impossible that she would ever have the courage to threaten him again.

  And yet she was still groping—still reaching for something—

  “Why are you doing this? Why do you hate me so much?”

  She was like Bright Beauty: she had surprises in her.

  “What difference does it make?” he growled, just for something to say. “How come you’re the one with gap-sickness, instead of me? Who knows? Who cares? I’ve got you. That’s all there is.”

  She lifted her head a little: her eyes showed, black as rot and ruin, past her kneecaps. Her voice twitched as if she were afraid or crazy. “You can do better than that.”

  He sucked his upper lip, thinking casually. For some reason, he felt expansive, almost magnanimous. It was possible that she was crazy. Possessiveness warmed him as if it were a species of affection.

  Abruptly he said, “All right. I’ll tell you something about me. A little story to help you understand.” He was sneering. “I had a roommate once.”

  Morn Hyland stared at him without any reaction at all.

  “Back on Earth,” he explained. “In reform school. I was a snot-nose kid—didn’t know enough to keep them from catching me. Fuckers. Caught me helping myself in a foodvend. But of course they didn’t care I was doing it because I was hungry. All they cared about was reforming me. Make me ‘a productive member of society.’ Break me. So they locked me up in school.

  “I hated it. One thing I promised. Nobody is ever going to lock me up again—”

  That was a digression, however: Angus had no wish to think about being locked up. If he did, he would lose his present sense of indulgence and fall into a fury. Over the years, he’d done some desperate things—reckless things, things that probably made him look brave. But courage had nothing to do with them. He’d done them to escape the danger of being locked up.

  “I had a roommate,” he resumed. “They told me I was lucky I only had one. Crowded three or four into a room was more like it. But it wasn’t luck. They put me alone with that shithead because they thought he’d be good for me.

  “They were all cops.” The taste of their power over him made him want to spit. “Like you. They talked about protecting and reforming, but what they really liked was muscle. Just like you. Muscle to kill me. Or break me—it’s the same thing. I was just a street rat who got caught raiding a foodvend. I couldn’t defend myself. They thought they could beat me.

  “My roommate was supposed to be a good example. One of their big successes. They got him for lifting paper from his stepfather’s wallet, and after only five years in reform school he was on the path of virtue. They wanted him to help reform me.

  “His name was Scarl. He was a big fucker—the kind of illegal who eats shit and smiles. Lots of teeth. He wanted to reform me, for sure. Anything to make himself look good. He already figured out the way to beat them was be their little darling, make them think he was sugar—make them take care of him. I was his big chance to show off.

  “It was pathetic. He sure did want me to believe he was my friend. So he made a big deal out of taking care of me. Taught me how the school worked. Didn’t let the big shits pound me. Showed me how to get perks—how to lift treats—how to be on the nice-kid list. After a whole day of him every day, I wanted to puke.

  “But I got him.” Angus had arrived at the part of the memory he liked. “I got him. Good old Scarl never knew what hit him.

  “We had lockers. It was supposed to be good for kids to have something private. Everybody hid the keys, like what was in the lockers was precious. But he wasn’t good at hiding things. I took his.

  “Then I raided some of their rooms, the cops’. Lifted a bunch of small stuff—vials of nerve-juice, fancy pens, whatever I found. And one of them had a really great collection of dirty pictures.” He bared his teeth at Morn. “That’s where I still get most of my ideas.”

  She didn’t react, however.

  “I put it all in Scarl’s locker, locked it up. Then I put his key back. He never missed it.

  “Next morning they went crazy. They stormed into all our rooms. Made us give up our keys and stand there naked until they got around to searching our lockers.

  “When he saw all that stuff in his locker, good old Scarl fainted.”

  Angus forced a guffaw, but it wasn’t particularly successful. For some reason, the pleasure of what he’d done to Scarl had lost its flavor. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, as if someone had cheated him.

  Trying to muster relish for his story, he concluded, “Those dirty pictures finished him. They were too embarrassing for the school. He got shipped out. Maybe they sent him to the big boys’ lockup.” Unfortunately, he felt no relish. “I got put in a room with a bunch of motherfuckers who liked to cornhole me when they didn’t have anything better to do.

  “It was like that until I finally got a chance to break out and get away.”

  Her stare hadn’t shifted. She was still peering at him darkly over her kneecaps, still waiting. When he stopped, she watched him scowl for a while.
Then she asked, “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Huh?” He’d forgotten her question.

  “You betrayed your roommate.” Her voice was husky with the stress of all the things he’d done to her. “But he was the one who protected you. Betraying him probably hurt you worse than it did him. What does it have to do with me?”

  Cursing the loss of his expansive mood, Angus sealed his shipsuit. “It felt good. That’s what it has to do with you. It felt good.”

  He started to leave in disgust; his back was turned when she said softly, thinly, “Stop this.”

  He paused.

  “So far you’ve got ‘authorized use.’ For this zone implant. I’ll testify to that. I’ll say you had to do it. To save both of us. Just stop this. Just stop.”

  Angus turned to look at her, but now she was not looking at him.

  “What happened to being a cop? What happened to all those threats? I thought you were going to find some way to do me in.”

  “I’m afraid,” she murmured as if she were pleading. “I want to live.”

  The way she clutched her knees and hid her features suddenly gave him the impression she’d come face-to-face with an essential cowardice.

  “I’ll crew for you back to Com-Mine Station. I’ll testify—I’ll say you did the right thing. They’ll believe me. I’m UMCP. I won’t say anything about those miners. I’ll”—her voice caught, but she forced herself to go on—“I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll be your lover. Just so you stop. Stop hurting me.”

  For one strange moment, Angus found himself listening to her as if he could be persuaded—as if she had the power to make him pity her. Had he broken her already? Was she really that far gone? Almost immediately, however, the odd emotion she aroused turned to fear and anger.