Now at last the logic of his life seemed to have reached its blind conclusion, its ineluctable cul-de-sac. His victimization was complete. Just, when prewritten requirements and machine compulsion eased their grip on him, he found that Morn had the power to put him back in the crib. His efforts to change roles with her had railed: she surpassed him. And there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t even keep his promises to her. The men who’d programmed him would never let him keep them.
Access-code Isaac! he cried into the void of his datalink. Priority-code Gabriel! Tell me it’s going to stop! Tell me what I’m going to do. Let me at least warn her. Don’t make me be the one who betrays her!
The silence which answered him felt like his mother’s abject, ravenous laughter.
Alone on the bridge, Angus Thermopyle bowed his sore head over his board and waited for Warden Dios or Hashi Lebwohl to destroy him.
Naturally they didn’t do it by killing him; or by letting him die. Their malice was too profound—and too oblique—for that. They went about their purposes in other ways.
His datacore kept his future to itself: it allowed him access to new information only when it pertained to his immediate present. For that reason he couldn’t see the several ways in which his masters prepared his ruin until each one took effect.
However, none of them had become apparent by the time Trumpet reached her window on human space. His zone implants had interrupted his despair with a few hours of sleep, a trip to the galley for food; Rafter that he’d coded his report to UMCPHQ. In addition to describing the outcome of his mission—and of Milos Taverner’s treachery—he’d included the information Morn desired. And he’d left out the things she didn’t want mentioned. His message was ready to be transmitted as soon as Trumpet passed within range of a listening post.
As the gap scout rounded the occlusion of the red giant and approached her window, Mikka Vasaczk chimed him to say that she was on her way to the bridge. He responded with an intraship broadcast forbidding anyone else from joining him. In particular he didn’t want Nick loose on the ship. Or Morn: he ordered Davies to stay with her so that he could take care of her if Trumpet encountered circumstances which required hard maneuvers on the other side of the gap. If he hadn’t needed Mikka, he would have told her to stay away, too. Whatever Lebwohl or Dios were about to make him do, he didn’t want witnesses.
She arrived with two g-flasks of coffee. She handed one to him, then seated herself at the second’s station and belted herself down. Some of the knots in her expression had loosened. She didn’t smile, but she no longer looked like a woman for whom smiling was impossible. Apparently she was glad of a chance to be useful.
After studying her board for a moment or two, she asked, “What do you want me to handle?”
“Targ,” Angus answered brusquely. He’d already eased a certain number of his coded restrictions on her board. “We’re linked on scan, data, and astrogation. As long as we don’t run into trouble, I want you to calculate headings and distances for the Valdor system—put a course up on the main screen. Update it as often as you can. I’m counting on you to keep us away from Station itself, or the shipping lanes. We’re looking for a bootleg lab, not a dogfight with some paranoid orehauler.”
Mikka nodded. Slowly at first, then with more confidence, she began to run commands. In moments a macro-plot began to form on the screen, displaying a purely hypothetical direct line between the red giant and Massif-5. Distances accumulated as the plot completed itself; but the line was only hypothetical because it took no account of gravity wells, intervening bodies, or Trumpet’s gap capabilities.
Angus had already pushed those numbers through his own computer, verified them against his databases. He wanted Mikka to run them herself simply to show him that she was competent.
This was her first opportunity to look at what the gap scout could do. She already had enough information to guess how far the ship could go in tach; like Nick, however, she was surprised by Trumpet’s thrust-to-mass ratio. Moving more quickly now, she returned to her course projection. The macro-plot was replaced by a more proximate line. Without lifting her head from her board, she told Angus, “We’ve got a window on that heading in twenty-seven minutes. At this velocity, we can cover 6.2 light-years every time we go into tach. That’s good—we won’t have to go anywhere near Com-Mine or the belt.”
Then she looked up at Angus. “But we can do better. I’ve never seen a small ship with this much thrust. Hell, we’re as fast as Captain’s Fancy. And a lot more agile. If we burn”—she punched in more numbers, scanned the results—“for the next twenty minutes, we can hit almost .3C. We might be able to cross as much as seven light-years. If we accelerate enough after we hit human space, we can probably do tach in ten light-year hunks. That’ll save us a lot of time between here and Valdor.”
Angus dismissed the suggestion. “In the meantime, Morn goes crazy every time we hit hard g. Someday gap-sickness is going to take hold of her and not let go. I don’t want to push her luck.
“Anyway,” he added, “we’re not in that goddamn much of a hurry. Nobody knows where we’re going. We don’t have to act desperate about getting there.”
Mikka opened her mouth to argue; closed it again. The falseness of his answer was hidden from her. After staring at him for a moment, she shook her head and turned back to her board.
He drank coffee and watched her while he waited for his ruin to commence.
Shortly before Trumpet hit the window, he chimed the cabins to announce, “Zero g in five minutes. Make sure you’re secure. Except you, Nick. Bouncing off the bulkheads’ll be good for you.
“Davies, is Morn all right?”
“I’m fine,” Morn replied promptly. “I’ve given Davies the control. He’ll turn me back on”—the bridge speaker made her sound little and distant—“when you tell him it’s safe.”
Stifling a snarl, Angus toggled off the intercom.
He waited until the last minute before laying in his tach parameters.
As his datacore gave them to him, he recognized them: the first small, subtle step in his imposed self-destruction.
Mikka recognized them, too, in different terms. Suddenly frightened, she swung her station to face him. “Angus!” she snapped, “what the hell are you doing?”
He replied with a blank glare.
“That’s the Com-Mine belt!” she protested. “We can go farther than that—you’re cutting our gap crossing short. God damn it, Angus, we’re going to resume tard right on the edge of the belt. Where Com-Mine Security and any number of miners and maybe the whole goddamn UMCP will have a chance at us!”
“You think I don’t know that?” he snorted. She couldn’t override him: her board had no access to the helm. “But I’m supposed to send a fucking message. Hashi Asshole wants a report. And Morn wants me to do it. Well, that’s the nearest listening post—right there on the goddamn edge of the goddamn belt.”
The facts were true. Only the explanation was a lie.
Bitterly he concluded, “You think I can afford to ignore it?”
“I think,” she rasped back, “if you were in such a hurry to report, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place. You would have gone straight for human space and saved about nine hours.”
“Think what you want,” he retorted. “I don’t give a shit.”
Before she could protest further, he keyed commands which flung Trumpet into the center of his tach window.
As Com-Mine Security had discovered when they arrested him and took Bright Beauty’s datacore, his many illegalities hadn’t made him rich. In all his crimes, he’d never accumulated enough credit to buy or retrofit a gap drive. So he’d never actually piloted a vessel into tach until Warden Dios put him aboard Trumpet. Nevertheless his welded resources gave him the knowledge of an expert. And he already had the instincts.
Despite his mounting dread and helpless anger, his hands were as steady as servos as he engaged the gap field generator;
slipped Trumpet into the gap and out again without discernible transition, as if nothing significant had happened.
The change was dramatic, however. The red giant’s mass and emissions vanished; inevitably the ship slewed off course, pulled aside by stored inertia as centrifugal and gravitic forces vanished. Angus’ weight sawed him against his belts while Trumpet’s automatic systems used navigational thrust to absorb the new vectors. In the same instant scan broke into a mad jumble of dissociated impulses: the instruments were struggling to see a starfield which was no longer present; to filter out radiant distortion which had been left three light-years behind.
The computers had already extrapolated a template from the gap drive parameters, however. Otherwise they would have had to spend long minutes running SAC programs on the astrogation databases in order to identify the ship’s position. Still Trumpet was deaf and blind for five seconds before she could begin to interpret the new readings accurately.
Then the displays and readouts sprang back into coherence; and Mikka cried out, “Christ!”
At the same instant the ship’s proximity alarms went off like banshees, wailing of destruction.
Angus’ instincts were good; as precise in their way as the calculations of his microprocessor. Together, instinct and calculation handled the crossing correctly. Despite the inertial course displacement, Trumpet hit human space within five thousand k of her intended reentry target.
Unfortunately the error occurred toward the belt rather than away from it. Trumpet resumed tard at more than seventy thousand kps on a collision course for an asteroid the size of an Amnion warship.
Years with Nick had trained Mikka well. She brought up targ and slammed charge into the ship’s forward lasers almost instantly; too quickly to notice that Angus could deal with the emergency on his own.
In a splinter of time too small for his synapses to measure, his zone implants split him into pieces. He began multitasking like a megaCPU.
At machine speeds the helm computations were trivial: distance and velocity; the amount of thrust necessary to pull Trumpet away from collision; the scale of raw g human tissue—not to mention the ship herself—might conceivably endure. Then compromise, trade off one factor against the others: that much g was needed; this much was available; so much could be survived.
Angus had one hand on the helm keys as soon as he recognized the emergency.
But his datacore also required other, simultaneous actions which necessitated more complex calculations. The listening post was there, roughly three light-seconds away. In order to tight-beam a transmission, Trumpet’s main dish had to be focused there—and programmed to retain orientation while the ship maneuvered.
Angus’ free hand fired commands like lightning at the communications keys. His datacore assigned his report to Warden Dios a priority as high as survival. If Trumpet hit the asteroid and died, his report would die with her. Therefore he wasn’t allowed to wait until he’d resolved the danger of collision.
At the same time he had one more job to do; one more small step to take toward his own ruin.
This was his best chance. Mikka couldn’t see what he did: she was too busy, too desperate. In seconds the lasers would be ready. In a few seconds more the ship would either live or die.
Prewritten exigencies jumped at the opportunity. Screaming inside while his zone implants compelled him, Angus activated a homing signal; a constant transmission of navigational data and gap drive parameters, updated at every change. It was a dedicated UMCP signal: no one else would be able to interpret it. But it would enable any cop to follow him wherever he went.
Hashi Lebwohl or Warden Dios wanted to be sure they were able to get their hands on him.
Betrayal—
Angus had let Morn think he was taking her to a bootleg lab near VI. But a homing signal denied that; made him a liar. Once the cops caught up with Trumpet, they could invoke Angus’ priority-codes. Put someone else in Milos’ position over him; some earnest or corrupt cop who didn’t give a shit about Morn’s hopes—or Angus’ promises. Mikka and Ciro, Vector and Sib would be arrested. Morn would be silenced. Angus himself might be dismantled. And Nick—
Nick would probably be given a fucking medal.
Everything would be lost.
But Angus didn’t have time to curse his tormentors. Mikka hammered at her board; her fists seemed to fling bolts of crimson fire toward the looming hunk of stone. And in the same heartbeat all of his disparate actions took effect.
The communications readout showed the transmission dish revolving into alignment. An impersonal blip on the bottom of the screen indicated that the signal was active.
And lateral thrust—rapid brisance thrust of a kind usually reserved for cruisers and destroyers—began to blare through Trumpet’s hull, driving Mikka and even Angus almost instantaneously to the edge of blackout. No ordinary gap scout could have burned hard enough to avoid that collision. If she hadn’t been rebuilt specifically for this mission—as full of secrets as Angus himself—she would have died.
Mikka’s hands fell from the targ keys as acceleration compressed her like putty in the corner of her g-seat.
The pieces into which Angus had been divided reassembled themselves there, on the boundary of unconsciousness. While darkness piled up inside his head as if it leaked in from the vast outer void, he had room for one bitter instant of gratitude.
Mikka hadn’t seen what he was doing. She couldn’t have.
He had at least that much reason to believe there were no witnesses to this one act of treachery.
If he could have held himself out of the roaring dark for just a few more seconds, however, Trumpet’s scan would have told him that he was wrong.
MIN
“Director Dormer.” The intercom seemed to reach her asleep on the bottom of a deep sea of exhaustion. Dreams as viscid and impenetrable as the depths of an ocean held her down, despite the metallic demand of the speaker.
“Director, can you hear me?”
No, she couldn’t hear him. Even Dolph Ubikwe’s voice didn’t have the power to plumb her fatigue. Concealed by the depths, bombs and shame pressed her down. Morn Hyland had been abandoned: betrayed and then abandoned. Sold to Nick Succorso as if she were nothing more than a credit-jack; not even worth picking up off the floor after he discarded her. Godsen Frik was dead, and Sixten Vertigus had nearly died, and Warden Dios had sent Min here to witness the outcome of Morn’s abandonment; of Holt Fasner’s manipulations and his own crimes. Trapped in mortification, she would never hear the intercom.
“Director, this is the bridge. We’ve got traffic.”
Nevertheless she did hear. She was Min Dormer: she rose to such demands, no matter what they cost. And Warden had reason to think Morn Hyland may survive—He’d told her so. The game he played was deeper than dreams.
Somehow her hands found the seals on the g-sheath and webbing which secured her in her bunk; her legs swung out. As soon as her boots touched the deck, she reached for the intercom.
Swallowing shame and abandonment, she called, “Bridge. Captain Ubikwe.” Unselfconsciously she rubbed the butt of her handgun to reassure herself that it was still in its holster. She’d slept fully dressed and armed so that she would be ready for this moment. “What traffic?”
“There’s two of them,” Dolph Ubikwe answered promptly, “but we haven’t got id yet.”
His bass rumble made her notice that a few hours of rest had improved her hearing. Her eardrums felt acutely sensitive, but they no longer reported voices as if they were caught in a feedback loop.
“They haven’t announced themselves,” he went on. He sounded tired himself, despite the intercom’s inflectionless speaker. “On the other hand, we haven’t asked. And we aren’t broadcasting, so why should they?”
Don’t get cute with me, Dolph, she wanted to snap at him. Her dreams had made her bitter. I asked a straight question—give me a straight answer. But she controlled the impulse. He didn’t need her sarcas
m. Punisher was already in enough trouble.
Instead she replied quietly, “Keep it simple, Captain. I’m still half-asleep. Where are we?”
“At the moment”—the intercom couldn’t do justice to his subterranean growl—“we’re thirty thousand k off forbidden space on the far side of the belt from Com-Mine. We would have been in position an hour and a half ago, but I haven’t been able to find a hiding place that suits me.” His tone suggested a humorless grin. “We’re just dodging asteroids and trying to look inconspicuous until we locate the right kind of magnetic resonance.”
Now Min had to clench her teeth to hold down a whiplash of anger. A glance at her cabin chronometer told her that she’d been asleep for at least four hours—and she’d ordered Captain Ubikwe to have Punisher positioned in three.
God damn it, you sonofabitch, I told you to wake me up!
He’d been procrastinating; putting off what came next as long as he could—
With an effort, she swallowed that irritation as well. If she weren’t willing to tolerate his insubordinate approach to authority, she shouldn’t have left him in command.
“Don’t hail them yet,” she ordered. “Just keep listening. I’m on my way.”
Roughly she thumbed off the intercom.
God damn and damn it, she needed time. Time to rest; time to make sense of Warden’s orders; time to talk to Dolph privately so that he would understand what was at stake. But Punisher had already encountered traffic out here, where there shouldn’t be any ships. That was why Angus had been programmed to bring Trumpet here at his own pace, in the event that some act of treachery by Milos Taverner had caused Joshua’s computer to supersede its priority-codes. Even illegal prospectors with no brains weren’t likely to be in this sector of the belt, this close to forbidden space and trouble, of their own free will.
The odds that those two ships had arrived here now by chance had to be calculated in negative numbers.
Chaos and Order: The Gap Into Madness Page 14