“I would rather be dead.”
Her free hand slid into her pocket and brought out her zone implant control. Wrapping her fingers over all the buttons, she put the black box behind her and held it there; shielded it with her body so that Angus couldn’t fire his laser at it without killing her first.
“Morn,” Vector whispered in horror. “Don’t—I’ll help you somehow. They need me—they want my research. I’ll stop working if they hurt you.”
She ignored him.
So did Nick and Angus. Instead Nick tensed, flashed a glare at Angus. “Why didn’t you take that thing away from her? I told you to grab it.”
Angus didn’t bother to answer. Sweat dripped away from his eyes like tears. His face was livid with stress, as if he were strangling on his own tongue.
“Well, stop her,” Nick rasped. Without transition his mad glee had become fury. “That’s an order. I want her alive. After what she’s done to me, I want her alive.”
Angus might have moved to obey. The distress in his gaze seemed to imply that he took orders from Nick, even though he hated them. But Morn didn’t wait to find out.
“You aren’t listening,” she retorted. “I haven’t got anything left. So there’s nothing you can do to stop me. If you come”—somewhere she found the strength to shout—“one step closer, I’m going to clench my fist. I’ll burn out my brain before you get anywhere near me!”
“No!” Vector croaked desperately.
Morn glimpsed his movement out of the corner of her eye, but the warning came too late. Anchoring his weightlessness against the auxiliary engineering console, he hacked her across the side of her neck with the blade of his hand, then grappled frantically for her zone implant control.
Ripped it out of her grasp.
And turned.
Launching his mass from the platform of the console, he slammed her black box against the bulkhead; drove it onto the hard surface with the heel of his palm.
Blood splashed from the impact as the box shattered into half a dozen sharp fragments, shredding the skin of his hand. Squirming red globules stained the bulkhead, swam through the air in all directions. The jolt seemed to shoot pain through his arthritic joints.
He hadn’t hit Morn hard enough to stun her. Even though she was already lost, already doomed, she recovered in time to see his blue eyes glaze over as if he were about to faint. Beads of his blood struck her face like little wounds.
The sight of his mangled hand and the shattered box made hysteria bubble and froth inside her: as extreme as lava; as corrosive as acid.
Vector must have thought he was saving her life—repaying his debt to her by freeing her from external coercion. Nick couldn’t replace her black box. He didn’t know its transmission frequencies, its hardwired codes.
But Angus did. He could make another zone implant control for her whenever he wanted.
DAVIES
Muzzy-headed with pain and cold fury, Davies hissed an obscenity when Mikka pulled him up from the edge of the table. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been able to float weightless, but he was still belted to the galley stool. Mikka’s effort to raise him set the bones of his upper arm grinding against each other like the teeth of a saw; sent long knives of hurt probing between his ribs.
A spasm raked his face like claws. Locking his teeth together so that the pain wouldn’t surge up from his chest and choke him, he snarled again, “Shit!”
Mikka released him slowly, letting him do what he could to hold himself. From what seemed like a great distance, she asked, “How bad is it?”
He closed his eyes to help him concentrate. Through the dark he tried to measure the severity of the damage. Then he muttered, “Sonofabitch broke my arm. And some ribs.” As he spoke, he identified another hurt. “Feels like he split my skull.”
“You’re not alone,” she retorted harshly. “Unfortunately I can’t help you. We’ve been ordered to the bridge.”
Ordered. To the bridge. Davies tried to make sense of the words and found he couldn’t. He was distracted: pain and a hot, primal desire to strike at least one killing blow interrupted his attention. And the smell—
Vomit.
The reek seemed so close to his face that he thought he might have done it himself.
When he opened his eyes again, his vision labored in and out of focus as if it couldn’t support the pressure of his heartbeat. After a moment, however, he succeeded at clearing his sight.
Across from him, Sib Mackern sprawled facedown on the table. His posture looked unnatural for zero-g: ordinary muscular contraction would have caused him to float against the attachment of his belt. Apparently he was stuck in a puddle of his own puke. Viscid bile and lumps of food smeared his face and the tabletop: fine, rank beads seemed to orbit above him like constellations.
He was breathing, but he wasn’t conscious.
In the galley and the passage, the scrubbers strained to clean gouts and streamers of drifting vomit from the air, but they hadn’t succeeded yet. The pads would have to be replaced soon, or Trumpet’s air would start to go bad.
“What happened—?” Davies’ voice caught as the stink and his own pain made him gag. “What happened to him?”
“Stun,” Mikka retorted shortly. “Nick took that prod away from Ciro. If it were any bigger—if it delivered more charge—he would be dead. Ciro, too.
“Can you move? If you get out of my way, I’ll pick him up.”
Davies wanted to snort, Move? Sure. I can probably get as far as sickbay. If you and God help me. But he didn’t have the strength for it. And she didn’t deserve his bitterness—
Where had she been when Nick and then Angus attacked Morn?
Where were they now?
What the hell was going on?
Gritting his teeth despite the pain in his head, Davies struggled to bring the rest of his mind into focus.
“You said—” He tried to remember what Mikka had said. “We’ve been ordered to the bridge.” He swallowed a lump of anger. “Says who?”
“Says Nick.” She had too much bitterness of her own: she wouldn’t have noticed Davies’. “He’s taken over. Apparently Angus has secrets he hasn’t bothered to explain. Like why he suddenly lets Nick give him orders. Or how he did that.” With his peripheral vision, Davies saw her point at the slagged handgun bobbing above the foodvends.
“Or,” she finished, “how he got to be so strong.”
Snagged by the timbre of despair in her tone, Davies turned against his pain until he could look at her.
The sight made him flinch and cough as if he’d driven a rib into one of his lungs.
She’d been hit, all right—hit hard. Glints of bone showed through the pulp above her right eye. That eye had already swollen shut, but the wound hadn’t stopped bleeding yet. Seeping from the red-black mess of her forehead, a wet sheen covered the whole right side of her face. Her skull must have been a mass of fractures.
She needed sickbay more than he did. She had a concussion: in all likelihood she was already on her way into shock. And there must have been bleeding inside the bone. If she developed a cerebral hematoma, she could die.
“Fuck the bridge,” he told her. Coughing hurt, but he could bear it. It wasn’t as bad as the danger she was in. “You need treatment. Go to sickbay. I’ll get myself there in a minute.”
And Sib, too. He might have swallowed some of his vomit; might be dying—
She shook her head. “You don’t understand.” She sounded bleak and beaten, lost in a void of dismay. “Nick ordered us to the bridge. Right now. No matter what condition we’re in.” In a tight voice, as if she could hardly force up words, she explained, “He’s got Morn.”
Davies flung a look like a cry at her.
She replied with a small shrug. “We’re finished. Even Vector is hurt. She’s the only one of us who isn’t either bleeding or unconscious”—Davies could see her brother in Mikka’s eyes, somewhere beyond help—“and I think she’s gone into h
ysterics.”
“Then she needs me.” A rush of serotonin and noradrenaline cleared his brain; he didn’t hesitate. He’s got Morn. His right arm was useless. Shifting so that he could reach the cleats with his left, he undipped his belt from the stool. I think she’s gone into hysterics.
Almost at once weightlessness seemed to ease the pain in his arm. With his ribs twisting against each other, he kicked his way out of the galley and headed for the bridge.
Despite the pressure inside him, he moved carefully, protecting his injuries. Zero-g grips along the walls helped him control his drift until he reached the companionway. There he caught one of the handrails and paused to scan the bridge.
Nick sat at the command station, grinning like a skull; he flashed his teeth and his dark scars at Davies as if they were pennons. Angus had taken the second’s g-seat: he sat motionless, all his muscles locked down; he didn’t turn his head to glance at his son. Belted to the stool in front of the auxiliary engineering console, Vector hunched forward as if he were in danger of fainting. He’d opened his shipsuit and pulled it off his shoulders so that he could wrap his right hand in one of the sleeves. Blood soaked the fabric. Pale in the flat white light of the bridge, his bare skin looked flaccid, almost lifeless.
None of them seemed to feel the slightest interest in helping Morn.
She floated near the ceiling, bobbing gently against the metal, with her face hidden between her knees, and her arms clamped around her shins. The strain with which she clung to herself was palpable. She’d made herself small because she had no other protection: all her defenses and hopes were gone.
For a moment Davies couldn’t move. He could only stare up at her, dismay throbbing through him, while he thought, as distinct as a jolt of stun, That’s not hysterics. That’s insanity. She’s snapped.
Nick must have taken her zone implant control. Feeling his power over her again must have been more than she could bear.
It was more than Davies could bear. Forgetting his broken arm and snapped ribs, his cracked head, he dove off from the companionway; aimed himself with all his strength at Nick.
Angus stopped him.
Davies didn’t see how it happened. Angus must not have been belted down; must have turned his head in time to spot Davies’ movement. Before Davies reached Nick, Angus collided with him, knocked him off course.
For an instant his brain went blank at the impact on his arm and ribs. Red flushed across his vision. By the time his sight cleared, Angus was behind him, holding him with one forearm like a steel bar across his throat.
“Stop it!” Angus grated in his ear. “You’ve lost—there’s nothing you can do. Don’t make me hurt you again.”
“He’s my bodyguard,” Nick remarked to Davies. “Nobody comes at me until they get past him. Offhand I would say he’s pretty damn good at his job.”
Angus and Davies hit the bulkhead, rebounded toward the display screens. One more impact made no difference to Davies: he could hardly feel it. But it shifted Angus’ position behind him.
A good squeeze would be enough to crush Davies’ windpipe. Anybody could have done it: it didn’t require Angus’ strange strength. Davies was already choking. His broken bones cut inside him like knives. Nevertheless he focused his whole life in the blow as he slammed his left elbow into Angus’ belly.
Angus absorbed it with a low grunt; his grip on Davies’ throat held tight. Perfectly in control, he snagged the toe of one boot on the back of Nick’s g-seat, slowing his momentum and turning himself in the air so that he struck the screen softly, cushioned Davies’ body with his own.
“Stop it,” he repeated. “At least find out what’s going on before you give Nick an excuse to kill you.” Then, as if he knew what Davies needed to hear, he hissed, “Vector broke her zone implant control. That’s how he tore up his hand.”
Davies discovered that he wasn’t breathing. Broke—? As he and Angus recoiled slowly from the screen, he looked at Vector.
Vector met his gaze and nodded.
Broke her zone implant control.
Davies went limp as the worst of his fears drained away.
Until he remembered that Angus knew how to program a parallel control into his board.
“I wish you hadn’t told him that,” Nick drawled laconically. “I like seeing him upset. It would have been fun to let him go on thinking I could force her to tear his balls off for me.”
“Then make your fucking orders more fucking explicit!” Angus shot back. He sounded enraged; almost frantic. Davies could feel his muscles shivering with hindered violence. “If you don’t tell me to do it, it won’t get done!”
Nick grinned at Angus’ anger. “That’s OK,” he retorted. “I like seeing you upset, too.”
Davies seemed to feel tremors run through Angus; neurons misfiring like a suppressed storm. He didn’t care, however. He looked at Morn, waiting for Angus to let him go. He still couldn’t see her face: she was clamped too tightly around herself. But he could take her in his good arm, hug her against him: she might be able to feel that. If he spoke to her, she might hear—
“Stay away from her,” Nick told him sharply. “Looks like she’s gone autistic on us, doesn’t it. Well, let her. I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking you can comfort her. It won’t save her.”
Davies couldn’t stifle his rage, even for Morn’s sake. “You bastard! She needs help!”
“Help?” Nick snorted at once. “You’re an optimist, you know that, you little shit? In case you haven’t figured it out, we’ve got an addict on our hands. She didn’t crack like that because I got her fucking control. She cracked because Vector broke it, and she can’t live without it.
“Well, now she’s in real trouble. When we reach Massif-5, we’ll have to be ready for hard g all the way to the Lab. That means she has to be ready for gap-sickness. If she isn’t catted out of her mind, she’ll spend the whole trip trying to kill all of us. You couldn’t help her if I wanted you to.
“Which I don’t. I’m going to make her pay blood for every lie she ever told me. This is just the beginning.
“If you go anywhere near her, Angus will break your other arm for you. You got that?”
Davies swallowed curses; swallowed bile and blood and pain. Nick was right, of course. Morn’s gap-sickness would make Valdor’s system a personal hell. Without her zone implant she had no defense except drugs against a madness which her son could remember as if it were his.
Aboard Bright Beauty she’d told Angus about it.
I could see you on the screens. But I didn’t care. 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 thé message, the truth. I knew exactly what to do. What I had to do. I didn’t question it.
Then she’d keyed the self-destruct sequence into her board on Starmaster’s auxiliary bridge.
From that crisis—from the undetectable flaw which the gap had found in her brain, a weakness triggered by heavy g—all her sufferings had followed as if they were inevitable.
Nevertheless Davies felt a keen frisson of hope as soon as he heard Nick mention cat.
Nick thought she needed drugs. He didn’t know it was possible to rig a parallel zone implant control to replace her black box. He hadn’t discovered that fact for himself.
And Angus hadn’t told him.
In surprise Davies wrenched his head to the side so that he could stare at his father.
Angus confronted Nick as if he were waiting for new orders. Still Davies could see his face—
Davies hadn’t looked when Angus had attacked him in the galley; hadn’t had a chance. Now for the first time he saw the black anguish which congested Angus’ face, the yellow murder in his eyes. Despite the steadiness of his movements, the poise of his posture, he appeared frantic and homicidal, as if he were crazier than Morn; as if he’d already been driven completely and irremediably insane.
He took
orders from Nick. But he hated them.
Davies understood none of it. Nevertheless his heart leaped. Nick didn’t know it was possible to program a parallel zone implant control, so he couldn’t order Angus to do it for him.
If you don’t tell me to do it, it won’t get done!
Morn, did you hear that? Do you know what it means?
Giddy with relief, Davies nodded to Nick. “All right,” he croaked. “I don’t want to make it worse for her.”
Nick studied him for a moment, then shrugged at Angus.
With a twitch like a spasm of revulsion, Angus let his son go.
At once Davies kicked away toward Vector and the auxiliary engineering console. While Angus returned to the second’s station, Davies anchored himself by bracing one knee under the console so that he could keep his good arm free. Glowering to conceal his relief, he massaged his aching throat.
When Vector glanced at him, he nodded once, thanking the engineer for several things simultaneously.
Morn floated above him in a clenched, fetal ball, as unreachable as if she were on the other side of the dimensional gap. He left her there for the same reason that she’d once let Nick give him back to the Amnion: because he had no choice. And because he didn’t want to risk betraying his hope.
“You’re obviously in command,” he rasped to Nick. “If Angus takes your orders, the rest of us can’t fight you.”
Nick grinned or grimaced as if his scars were on fire. “That’s fucking right.”
“But you don’t need me here,” Davies went on stubbornly. “I should be in sickbay. It won’t cost you anything to let me go.”
“Tough shit,” Nick snapped back. “I don’t care how much any of you hurt. In fact, I want you to hurt. It’s a small price to pay for what you’ve done to me. So you’re going to stay here and”—he broke into a shout—“pay it until I’m done with you!”
Angus swallowed as if he were having trouble breathing.
Almost immediately, however, Nick relaxed again. “Who knows? You may find it interesting.
Chaos and Order: The Gap Into Madness Page 30