Morn stared at Nick and tried to recover her numbness; tried to conceal herself behind veils of shock.
He enjoyed her stunned expression for a moment. Then he relented.
“Where we’re going, they don’t do work on spec. The fucker who runs the place calls himself ‘the Bill’ because he gets paid before anything else happens. And I’m broke. Captain’s Fancy is broke. We can pay the docking fee, that’s all. We can’t afford to get the gap drive repaired. And we sure as hell can’t afford to get a virus flushed out of our computers. Assuming we’re able to get there at all—which at the moment looks problematical.
“As long as we don’t lose thrust, life support, and scan, we’ve got a chance. For one thing, I can do algorithms in my head. That makes me a pretty fair blind reckoning navigator. And for another, there are ships patrolling to make sure people like us don’t miss our destination.” This, too, was a joke which the bridge crew understood, but which was lost on Morn. “But none of that is going to do us any good without credits.”
“I still don’t see—” Morn murmured dimly. What does this have to do with me?
“If I’m some insidious UMCPDA operative,” Nick said with a flourish, “what the fuck am I doing in this mess? Why haven’t I got money? Why is the almighty Hashi Lebwohl willing to risk losing me like this, when all he had to do was have us met off Corn-Mine by a courier drone programmed to tight-beam credits?
“There’s something you may not understand about me, Morn.” His grin was full of relish—and other obscure perils. “I won’t work for a man who doesn’t pay.”
This time, everyone on the bridge chuckled appreciatively.
Yet Morn continued to flounder. “I don’t get it.” She’d lost her defenses. Angus’ child seemed to use up her mind: she couldn’t understand any other danger unless it was spelled out for her. “What’s the point? Why are we doing this, if we can’t afford repairs in any case?”
Nick looked positively delighted—as happy as he did when he was having sex with her, driving her to transports she couldn’t resist. “I’m out of money,” he repeated. “But I’ve got something I can sell.”
She held her breath, afraid to guess what was coming.
“I can sell you.”
There it was at last, the truth; the reason he’d taken her, the reason he kept her. To buy the kind of repairs he couldn’t get anywhere legally.
“You’re UMCP,” he added unnecessarily. “You’ve got a head full of valuable data. As long as you’re alive and conscious and at least marginally sane, you’re probably valuable enough to buy me a whole new ship.”
Just a few hours ago, she might have lashed out at him. He was planning to sell her like a piece of cargo. Everything she’d forced herself to endure in order to procure safety had been wasted. Driven by accumulating revulsion and stifled rage, she might not have been able to contain herself.
After a while, she’d told Mikka, you hurt so bad that you don’t want to be rescued anymore.
But the knowledge that she was pregnant changed her. A baby. Angus’ son. Her father’s grandson. And in the whole of vast space she had no other family: she’d killed them all.
She would kill this infant, too, as soon as she got the chance. He was malignant inside her, male and murderous: she would flush him down the sickbay disposal and be damned for it. Why should she give him any better treatment than she’d given her father—or than his father had given her?
In the meantime, however, the baby was hers; he was all she had left. If she didn’t defend him, he was going to die. Or he would be used against her. Either way, his life or death would be out of her hands. But he was hers: whether he lived or died was hers to decide. If she gave that up—if she surrendered her right to make this one choice for herself—she might as well lie down and die.
Caught by surprise and unexpectedly vulnerable, she gave her child the only protection she had available. For the second time, but deliberately now, she let herself burst into tears.
It was easier than she would have believed possible.
She heard more laughter, but she ignored it. She didn’t care how many people sneered at her. All she cared about was Nick’s reaction.
He ignored the laughter as well. His mouth went on smiling crookedly, but his gaze lost its relish. Suddenly his eyes looked haunted and lost, as if he, too, were helpless in a way that unnerved him.
“I didn’t mean you.” He was barely able to keep his voice steady. “I meant your information. Your id tag. All those access and security codes. That’s what I need to sell—that’s my price for saving your life.”
Abruptly he was angry, almost shouting. “I don’t work for Hashi Lebwohl or any other fucking cop, and neither do you. Not anymore. You’re mine—and, by hell! you’re going to prove it by giving me something I can sell.”
Then his tone softened again. “So I can get my ship fixed.”
In an effort to stop crying, Morn raised a hand to her mouth and bit her knuckle. Crying made her ugly; she knew that. And she couldn’t afford to be ugly in front of Nick Succorso. Not now; maybe not ever. But her whole heart was full of tears.
She was pregnant. Carrying a baby.
For a moment her grief was so intense that she couldn’t fight it down.
Then, however, she tasted blood on her tongue. Swallowing a sob, she regained her self-control.
“Just get us there,” she said in a gulp. “I’ll do my part.
That promise was the most sincere response she’d ever given Nick.
As if he couldn’t face her expression, he swung away. His fists closed and unclosed in his lap, working for calm.
As soon as he could produce his familiar nonchalance, he scanned the bridge and commented, “The next time you spaceshits feel like laughing at her, try to remember you’re laughing at me, too.”
Lind flinched visibly. The woman at the targ board, Malda Verone, ducked her head, hiding her face behind her hair.
Poised and dangerous, Nick held his people until they were all still, almost frozen. Then he moved. Keying his intercom, he said, “Mikka, I want you. If you can spare the time.”
The intercom didn’t work. He’d already disengaged the controls.
That small mistake seemed to restore his equilibrium. The grin came back into his eyes. “Morn, stop snuffling,” he ordered casually. “You’re ruining my concentration.”
When he chuckled, some of the tension around him dissipated.
Morn felt him watching her with his peripheral vision, but she didn’t look at him.
A minute later Mikka Vasaczk came onto the bridge of her own accord. Clipped to her belt, she wore a handcom, as well as a coiled lifeline with a small magnetic clamp on one end—emergency equipment in case internal g failed.
Scowling impartially, she paused beside Morn. At the sight of Morn’s swollen eyes and damp face, she asked in a neutral tone, “Feeling better?”
Morn rubbed the blood off her mouth and nodded.
“It shows,” Mikka remarked.
Then she dismissed the question of Morn’s condition and went to stand on the other side of Nick’s seat.
“We’re ready,” she reported. “The rest of the seconds are down in the core with the computers. They’ve all got handcoms. They aren’t wizards, but they can do resets. If you want, they can unplug everything, isolate the systems physically.”
Nick accepted the information with a nod. Leaning forward, he said to the bridge, “All right, let’s get started. The sooner we locate our virus, the more time we’ll have to work on it.
“We aren’t going to lose function. All the equipment is hardwired.” Everybody aboard already knew this: he was speaking to clarify his own thoughts. “The worst that can happen is that we’ll have to reset everything. But if we get wiped, we’ll lose anything soft. Including all our data. That means we’ll lose the last of our credits.” He grinned fiercely. “Maintenance will work, but the system won’t know how many of us there are. It won�
��t be able to balance out heat and air comfortably. We’ll lose our logs. We won’t know how much food we’ve got left.
“Targ will lose ship id,” he continued. “That’s not minor. We won’t be able to program weapons accurately if we’re attacked. Communications will lose all our codes. Which will make it hard for us to talk to anybody. But scan and data are the most vulnerable. Scan will still bring in information, but the computers won’t be able to interpret it. And we’ll lose everything we need for astrogation—star id, charts, galactic rotation, station vectors, shipping lanes. Hell, we won’t even be able to tell where forbidden space is.”
Nick’s second snorted harshly. The other crewmembers kept their reactions to themselves.
“We can’t hardcopy the data. We haven’t got that much paper. They probably don’t have that much paper back on Com-Mine. And we would need months to reenter everything—which might not solve our problem anyway. If the virus is still resident, it would just rewipe the data as soon as we restored it.
“So here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll run some commands. If my board goes down by itself, it’s an easy fix. We can dummy it back from the auxiliary bridge. In fact, we might be able to erase the virus that way.
“If my board stays up, we’ll reconnect the other systems one at a time and try them until we hit trouble.
“Questions?” he asked. “Comments? Objections?”
Scan and helm shook their heads. Everybody else sat and waited.
Morn’s mouth had gone dry, and she seemed to have difficulty breathing, as if life support were already out of balance. Any spacefaring vessel was computer-dependent. Her visceral dread of a complete wipe was even greater than her fear of puncture or detonation, her fear of vacuum. On that point, she knew, everybody aboard agreed with her.
But she didn’t expect the command board to crash. As Nick had said, that might be an easy fix—and she felt sure Orn hadn’t left Captain’s Fancy anything easy. No, the virus probably resided in the data computer itself, where it could do the most damage; the computer to which Orn had had the most regular access.
So she wasn’t surprised when Nick’s board stayed up and green. In simulation, he reversed thrust, slammed Captain’s Fancy to the side, opened hailing channels, shut down internal g, fired matter cannon, ran spectrographic analyses of nearby stars: everything worked.
“That damn motherfucker,” he swore amiably. “Why did he have to turn out to be such an insidious bastard?” But he wasn’t discouraged. “All right. Helm is relatively secure at the moment. We’ll leave it alone. I’m going to take maintenance off automatic.” His eyes glinted with combative amusement. “Let’s see how they like it when I turn off the heat in the core.”
Malda giggled nervously.
“They won’t notice any difference for a while,” Mackern said. “The whole ship insulates them.”
Carmel rolled her eyes. In exasperation, Mikka retorted, “That’s why it’s a safe experiment.”
“Mackern,” Nick drawled, “you have no sense of humor.” He was already at work, keying the functions of his board, running programs to bring the internal systems back under his control. In a minute or two he was ready.
Morn couldn’t taste any improvement in the air. It still felt tight in her lungs, congested with CO2. Not for the first time, she thought about the black box back in her cabin. It could help her tone down her anxiety.
Anxiety wasn’t good for babies—
“Belts,” Nick said crisply.
His people checked their belts. Mirroring each other unconsciously, Morn and Mikka gripped the arms of Nick’s g-seat.
He glanced around the bridge. Then he announced, “Core heat off,” and tapped a couple of his buttons.
The faint click of the keys was clearly audible.
With a distant groan of servos, Captain’s Fancy lost internal spin.
At the same instant every spacefarer’s worst nightmare came true.
All power to the bridge failed.
Readouts, boards, illumination: everything went black. The whole ship plunged into a darkness as deep as the blind gap between the stars.
Mute in the void of her own mind, Morn wailed as if Starmaster had just gone down again; as if she’d killed her ship again, and everyone she loved.
ANCILLARY
DOCUMENTATION
INTERTECH
Intertech, a strong research and exploration company based on Outreach Station orbiting Earth, was both the precipitating cause and the primary victim of one of the definitive events in humankind’s history: the Humanity Riots.
In one sense, Intertech’s two functions—research and exploration—were an odd combination: in another, they fit naturally. Of course, the company was originally chartered for pure research. However, its use of the conditions and technologies available in space was highly successful. Focusing on matters of biology and genetics, the company first established itself by developing a germ which fed on plastics, effectively reducing a wide range of polymers to compost. This proved a lucrative contribution to waste-and pollution-management on Earth. Later research provided a variety of medicines, including one with benefits for people suffering from a well-publicized oped rejuvenation and longevity drugs. Intertech’s most profitable discovery, however, was the catecholamine inhibitor—popularly considered a “cataleptic,” therefore called “cat”—which soon replaced most tranquilizers, 1-tryptophan derivatives, sedatives, and lithium compounds in the treatment of stress disorders, insomnia, adrenaline poisoning, and depression.
Cat alone brought in enough money to enable Intertech to expand its function into exploration.
The relevance of exploration to research was unpredictable, but clear. Thanks to the development of the gap drive, vast numbers of star systems were now within reach, each evolved out of its own particular nuclear soup, each with its own special isotopes and chemicals and materials, each composed of new resources and opportunities. In fact, one of Intertech’s first probe ships, High Hope, brought back a new radioactive isotope (subsequently named Harbingium for the nuclear chemist aboard High Hope who first identified it, Malcolm Harbinger) which proved astonishingly useful in recombinant DNA: Harbingium’s emissions were so specific to the polymerase which bound nucleotides together in RNA that they made possible genetic research which had until then remained stubbornly theoretical.
Intertech’s stock—like Intertech itself—was booming. Until the onset of the Humanity Riots.
The Humanity Riots themselves were an interesting demonstration of genophobia. That humankind distrusted anything different than itself had always been common knowledge. As a species—as a biological product of its own planet—humankind apparently considered itself sacred.
In this, Earth’s dominant religions were only more vocal than other groups. No other fundamental distinction prevailed. Life had evolved on Earth as it was supposed to evolve: the forms of life provided by this developmental process were right and good; any alteration was morally repugnant and personally offensive. On this point, conservationists and environmentalists and animal rights activists were at one with Moslems and Hindus and Christians. Prosthetic surgery in all its guises, to correct physical problems or limitations, was acceptable: genetic alteration to solve the same problems was not.
As one crude example, humankind had no objection to soldiers with lasercutters built into their fingers or infrared scanners embedded in their skulls. On the other hand, humankind objected strenuously to soldiers genetically engineered for faster reflexes, greater strength, or improved loyalty. After all, infrared scanners and lasercutters were mere artifacts, tools; but faster reflexes, greater strength, and improved loyalty were crimes against nature.
For this reason, genetic research was routinely conducted in secret: in part to cloak it from commercial espionage; but primarily to protect the researchers from public vilification.
However, humankind’s reaction went far beyond public vilification when Intertech’s “crime ag
ainst nature” became known. That crime precipitated the Humanity Riots.
This happened because the Intertech probe ship Far Rover brought humankind its first knowledge of the Amnion.
The knowledge itself was contained in a cryogenic vessel, in a mutagenic material which—so the theorists finally decided—represented an Amnion effort to establish contact. At the time, it was considered fortuitous that the vessel had been discovered by an Intertech ship. After all, Intertech was uniquely qualified at the time to unlock the code of the mutagen, learn its meaning. Eventually, however, the discovery proved disastrous.
By definition, the material sent out by the Amnion was mutagenic. That meant its code could only be broken by geneticists. But it also meant that the code was contained in the mutagen’s ability to produce change, to effect fundamental genetic alterations—alterations so profound that they restructured nucleotides, rebuilt RNA, transformed DNA; so profound, in fact, that any Earth-born lifeform became essentially Amnioni.
Unfortunately—from Intertech’s point of view—contact with alien life could hardly be kept secret. The company was forced to study the mutagen under intense scrutiny. And that study naturally involved applying the mutagen to rats, monkeys, dogs, and other test animals, all of which quickly grew to be as alien as the mutagen itself. This generated genophobia of seismic proportions. Humankind was already in a state of bedrock outrage when the decision was made within Intertech to test the mutagen on a human being.
When the results of that experiment became known—when the woman who volunteered for the job was transformed like the animals and died horribly in a state of spiritual shock—the Humanity Riots began.
Death to genetics and geneticists.
Death to Intertech.
Death to anything which threatened pure, sacrosanct, Earth-born life.
By the time the riots ended, Intertech was a corporate wreck.
Yet the company’s problems remained. The Amnion still existed. The need to understand the mutagen still existed. By default, Intertech had become a crucial player in a galactic drama—the contest between humankind and the Amnion. Without capital or credit, the company was expected to deal with the challenge Far Rover had brought to Earth.
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