The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict Read online

  “No,” he rasped. “I’m never going to stop. I’m never going to stop hurting you. You’re too frightened. That’s what I like.”

  Before she could upset him anymore, he left her alone so she could use the san or rest, do whatever she wanted to get herself ready for him.

  CHAPTER

  8

  He found, however, that his drive for her flesh had inexplicably soured. Somehow, the memory of his new roommates in the reform school made him think harder about the dangers of his present position. He was risking too much. Granted that his treatment of Morn Hyland felt as good as he said it did, it still wasn’t worth the risk of remaining stationary, hidden, without repairs.

  He had no way to assess absolutely the damage which had been done to his ship. Metal fatigue had strange effects. Bright Beauty’s bulkheads might have been weakened; they might start to leak soon—might even rupture. And Morn was his: he could have her anytime. Therefore it was stupid to remain where he was, risking himself to gain nothing.

  While she took an interminable shower—trying, he supposed with a leer, to get clean of his touch—he began turning some of Bright Beauty’s systems back on.

  First, in self-defense, he programmed a new series of priority codes and alerts, circumscribing what Morn would be able to do when he gave her access to a console; he arranged warnings for himself if she tried to do anything else. When that was done, he started testing his scanners and sifters.

  His tests confirmed what he already knew: Bright Beauty had a dangerous blind spot where her ports and antennae had been smashed. That meant he would have to run her under spin, rotating constantly so the sweep of functioning sniffers and sensors could compensate for the blindness. A problem in more ways than one: tricky for the pilot; more difficult to analyze incoming data. But there would be one advantage. While Bright Beauty was spinning, Morn wouldn’t be able to move around: she would have to stay in her g-seat, strapped against the pull. One less detail to worry about.

  He was almost ready to summon her for her first lessons when a small blip on his screen began flashing.

  His heart nearly failed at the sight. Instinctive alarm poured through him, as if Bright Beauty were under attack. But of course she wasn’t, he knew that, know that, despite the way his hands shook as he keyed in commands, identified the alert.

  Sickbay.

  Morn Hyland was no novice. They’d taught her well in the Academy. During the few seconds he spent identifying the alert, she succeeded in reprogramming the sickbay computer.

  Her instructions copied across his screen. She was telling the sickbay to give her a lethal injection of nerve-juice.

  Morn.

  Angus Thermopyle was a coward: he was at his best when he was afraid. Without thinking about it, without time to think about it, he knew that overriding the sickbay computer from his console would be too slow. There were too many steps to go through; the injection might start before he completed them. And he’d long ago eliminated the automatic safeguards from his medical equipment. Sickbay computers were programmed to preserve rather than endanger the lives of their patients—but scalpels and drugs were such convenient ways of getting rid of crew he despised that he’d deliberately deleted all restrictions from the sickbay systems.

  Taking advantage of the asteroid’s thin gravity, he flung himself out of his g-seat, kicked himself almost floating in the direction of the sickbay.

  At the same time, he grabbed in his pocket for the zone-implant control.

  He’d had a lot of practice during the past few days: he was adept at finding the right buttons on the control. Hardly more than four seconds after he understood the alert, he squeezed the function button which rendered her catatonic.

  But even that took too long. She’d outsmarted him. She’d stretched out on the berth before keying in her instructions: she’d even strapped herself down. The fact that she was now as blank as a disconnected circuit couldn’t save her from the cybernetic probe which reached toward her from the sickbay’s equipment bank, aiming its needle for the vein in the side of her neck.

  As fast as fear, Angus heaved his bulk through the doorway and grappled for the probe. Too quickly to be careful, he snatched at the needle with his fingers, snapped it off.

  At once, the probe stopped. A malfunction light signaled at him from the computer panel.

  He ignored it. Even though Morn was catatonic, he knotted his fists on her shoulders, shook her. “What’s the matter with you?” he raged into her empty face. “Are you out of your MIND?”

  The fact that she couldn’t respond made his desire to hit her unbearable. But when he let go of her to brace himself, cock his arm, one of his hands left a small smudge of blood on her shoulder.

  Oh, shit.

  He jerked up his hand, gaped at it.

  Breaking the needle had scratched his fingers.

  He thought he could see a clear fluid mingling with his blood around the scratch.

  Oh, shit. Nerve-juice was a clear fluid: colorless, tasteless, odorless; attractive only to neurons in their synapses; capable of killing.

  With difficulty, he resisted a lunatic impulse to put his fingers in his mouth and suck at the wound.

  Nevertheless, he knew exactly what to do. Desperation was almost normal for him.

  A rapid slap-and-jerk motion unstrapped Morn from the berth. Careless of her condition, he shoved her to the floor and climbed into her place. Then he turned to the computer’s control panel.

  Emergency.

  Cancel injection.

  Clear malfunction.

  Treat nerve-juice poisoning.

  Source of poisoning: right hand.

  Trying not to hurry, not to speed up the spread of the juice by hurrying, he stretched himself on his back and opened his right hand for the probes.

  With mechanical efficiency, the probes cleaned and sealed his scratch. Attaching a new needle, the cybernetic arm gave him an injection which—according to the monitor—contained a small dose of a block that would cause the nerve-juice to be flushed out of him as waste rather than absorbed as poison.

  Coincidentally, the shot also contained a significant amount of cat to ease his supercharged pulse and respiration.

  The whole treatment took less than a minute.

  Feeling a little light-headed, a little giddy, Angus sat up and looked at Morn Hyland’s crumpled form.

  She was wearing a shipsuit. Even though she intended to kill herself, she’d gotten dressed first. Maybe she could no longer bear the sight of her own body—of the physical frame which had brought the spirit inside so much grief. Despite the shipsuit, however—and despite her contorted posture, arranged for her by the force of his shove and the asteroid’s g—she’d never looked so poignant to him, so lost and desirable.

  Cat was having a strange effect on him. A sense of eerie calm filled him as he took the zone-implant control out of his pocket and released her.

  A twitch ran through her: her eyes jerked open. For a moment she seemed unable to focus her mind on what had happened. Then she saw the way he was looking at her, and her whole face turned to despair.

  “Get up,” he said gruffly, but without violence.

  As if what she felt were choking her, she remained where she was at first, clamped rigidly about herself and unable to move. Slowly, however, the spasm eased. She unbent her limbs, got her legs under her; finally she stood in front of him. But she refused to lift her eyes to his face.

  In his mind, he saw himself hitting her. He felt his arm rise heavily, felt the shock as the back of his fist caught her face. She deserved it. But he didn’t do it. His calm was amazing.

  Maybe he’d accomplished something wonderful by making her desperate enough to attempt suicide.

  “I want you alive,” he said quietly. “If you ever try that again, I’m going to do things to you that’ll make what you’ve already been through look romantic. Don’t think there isn’t anything worse. There is. If I want, I can take you to the nearest b
ootleg shipyard and make you a public screw for every syphilitic illegal in the whole fucking belt.”

  Then he shifted himself off the berth. In a state of grace, as if he’d just granted her absolution, he said, “Come on. I want you to start earning your keep,” and lumbered away toward Bright Beauty’s command module.

  He still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t hit her. Must have been the effect of the cat. Or of the possibility that soon she might be desperate enough to fall in love with him.

  CHAPTER

  9

  In fact, he had every intention of taking her to the nearest bootleg shipyard. He also had every intention of castrating the first man who so much as put a finger on her. He discovered, however, he didn’t have that choice.

  The truth came to him two days later, while Morn was running Bright Beauty through a warm-up, getting ready to lift out of hiding. Morn was a fast learner—much faster than he’d expected. And one thing she’d learned was how to obey him in a way he found reassuring, a way which defused his possessive desire to keep all of Bright Beauty under his control.

  She’d become subdued, pale in her emotions as well as in her looks. Apparently her sheer abhorrence of his lusts had broken down her resistance to him. And at the same time she was reassured, stabilized, by the fact that she now had something to do, a role which involved ships and skill. As if she were actually grateful to him for letting her work, she obeyed him so implicitly and so well that she instilled confidence. Impressed despite himself by the speed, accuracy, and compliance with which she served his ship, he went so far as to disconnect some of his waldos and relays, transferring a number of secondary functions to her console.

  As soon as he did that, of course, he worried about it. But a little ingenious programming enabled him to install a parallel control for her zone implant on his board, so that he could turn her on and off without having to reach into his pocket—a reach which might not be easy in a crisis, under spin and g.

  Calm once again, he actually stopped watching what she did and let her get Bright Beauty ready for lift-off by herself. While she worked on that, he spent some time analyzing his finances.

  Then he spent more time cursing savagely to himself—all the more savagely because he didn’t want her to hear him, so he had to keep his mouth shut.

  Money was why he couldn’t go where he’d intended. No matter how well they knew him—maybe because of how well they knew him—the shipyard just inside forbidden space wouldn’t so much as cycle their airlocks for him on spec. Even their hunger for the goods he supplied, the goods they fenced for him, wouldn’t inspire them to extend credit. If he were unable to pay in advance for the work Bright Beauty needed, the work wouldn’t be done. And if he tried to run a bluff, he risked murder or worse; risked having his ship snatched from him.

  Of course, repairs were cheaper on Com-Mine Station. And some people were even given credit. But that was out of the question. In order for the Station shipyard to do repairs, the workmen would need access to some of his ship’s secrets. And they would never keep what they discovered to themselves: he was sure of that. They would talk; and Security would hear about it; and he might never get out of dock again.

  He couldn’t get Bright Beauty fixed until he had more money.

  He chewed on that for a while, until the implications made him feel cornered and murderous—more like his old self than he had felt for days. Then he snapped at Morn, “Shut down.”

  He appreciated the way she obeyed, without hesitation; so he glared at her like a butcher of babies as she quickly and precisely reversed the warm-up, settled Bright Beauty to cool, and keyed off her console before turning to face him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said dully. “What did I do wrong?”

  Her assumption that she’d made a mistake pleased him, despite his anger. He dismissed it with a snarl. Brutally, trying to startle the truth out of her because for some reason he was reluctant to trust anything she might tell him under the influence of her zone implant, he demanded, “How many people back on Com-Mine know you’re after me?”

  She was startled; he saw that. Several different responses flickered like hints across her face before she spoke.

  “We weren’t after you.”

  “You found me, didn’t you?” he rasped. For some reason, it frightened him to realize he was going to believe whatever she told him. “You can’t expect me to think you were looking for those pissed-out miners. Captain Davies fucking Hyland knew my name. Of course you were after me.”

  “Yes.” She spoke slowly, as if she had trouble remembering that part of her past. “Sort of. We didn’t know anything about you when we came out from Earth. I mean personally. But Com-Mine Security gave us your name. Just a list of ‘suspicious characters’—people to watch out for, ships. They didn’t do that because we’re UMCP. They didn’t know. It’s standard procedure for them—they give the same list to any legitimate oreliner that asks. And a lot of rumors mentioned you. We correlated that with the way you pulled out so soon after we arrived. Almost like you knew who we were. That made us interested in you. Very interested. How did you know who we were?

  “But we weren’t after you specifically. We were on patrol, that’s all. Looking for pirates. Mine jumpers. Bootleg operations. We just happened to find you.”

  The effort of memory hurt her: she had to reach back through so much horror. Therefore she was telling the truth.

  “‘Just happened,’” he snorted. “Don’t try to con me, bitch. I was in a played-out part of the belt. The only people there who need protecting are scavengers. Like those miners. You don’t patrol places like that. You patrol where the money is.”

  Again her expression hinted at horror. She’d killed her whole family. “You forget. We were covert—pretending to be a new oreliner. If we wanted to lure anybody after us, we had to go somewhere unexpected—somewhere that would surprise people who knew the belt.

  “That’s the main thing we were trying to do. Lure somebody like you to follow us.

  “But I suppose we were after you, in a way. Even if we weren’t covert, it’s standard practice for ships like Starmaster to go where they aren’t expected. Shake people up a little. And the way you headed out when we came in made us think you were ripe for shaking. We didn’t know where to find you, but we thought it made sense to scan the nearest played-out parts of the belt first, just to see what we could stir up. Where would a ship go if she wanted to hide?

  “I guess it was a deliberate coincidence. It happened because we were trying to make it happen. We were looking for you. But we weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary.” She spoke tonelessly, without expression, holding herself numb to pain. “Until you blasted those miners, we knew there was always the chance you were innocent.”

  “All right. All right.” His glare was yellow with malice and fear, but he didn’t get out of his g-seat, or make her come to him, or work any of the buttons on her zone-implant control. “If you fuckers left me alone, none of this would have happened. You haven’t answered my question. Who did you tell? Who knew what you were doing?”

  For a moment or two she remained silent, staring at her board. Then she sighed. “Nobody. That’s the whole point of going covert. When we come out from Earth, we don’t know who we can trust. So we don’t tell anybody anything. We do our job and take the rest one step at a time.

  “The last mission my fa—Captain Hyland was on, somebody in Station Center turned out to be feeding information to half a dozen pirates. It’s better if we don’t tell anybody anything.”

  Angus believed her. In fact, the only reason he’d doubted her at all was that the intensity of his need to believe her made him suspicious. Everything hinged on it. At the moment, he had no other hope. He couldn’t run Bright Beauty in this condition indefinitely. Sooner or later, she would fail him if he put that much pressure on her.

  But if Morn were telling the truth—

  If she were telling the truth, he could get away with it. It mig
ht be the riskiest bluff he’d tried in years, but he could get away with it.

  If she were telling the truth.

  And if he could control her.

  If he could break her into small enough pieces.

  Abruptly he heaved himself out of his g-seat. “Come on.” Ignoring the involuntary revulsion that ached across her features before she could suppress it, he headed toward the sickbay. “You kept your mouth shut for the cops. I’m going to make sure you do the same for me.”

  In the sickbay he studied her face, drilled her, dredged the information he needed out of her, and drove himself between her legs in spasms of fear and hope. Eagerly, avidly, he watched her for signs that she was falling in love—that she was growing dependent on her helplessness.

  CHAPTER

  10

  He did his best to believe it was happening. In an odd way, as long as he kept her alive his survival depended on her: he could be truly safe only if he killed her and disposed of her body. And that option was one he no longer considered. He was as likely to destroy Bright Beauty as to murder Morn. Therefore he couldn’t afford to be wrong. He had to break her and be sure of it; damage her so much that he could trust the results.

  Because he was afraid, he was in no danger of trusting them prematurely.

  In the end, however, his success was inevitable. After all, what choice did she have? He’d made himself her entire world; he was everything she felt. He knew how this kind of pressure worked: it had been tried on him more than once. His control of her circumstances—as well as of her physical being—was absolute. With the tap of a button, he could reduce her mind to a brute howl of pain. When she satisfied him, he could reward her, not with pleasure—for some reason, he was reluctant to see what she would look like pleased—but with relief from hurt; with sleep; with the occasional opportunity to choose her own movements, take care of herself in her own way.