Self-destruct. If something had gone wrong, she needed to push the button. Her threats were wasted unless she could carry them out, no one would ever believe her again, the little power she’d gathered for herself would fray through her fingers like smoke.
If she pushed the button, Davies would die. Her son would die. While he was still half insane with dislocated identity and flawed memories. He would never have a chance to become himself; the part of her she considered worth redeeming.
That was better than letting Nick give him to the Amnion.
She stabbed at the self-destruct until her whole hand hurt, and the strain made her arm quiver; but nothing happened.
The button was gone.
The auxiliary command console was gone.
Her hands were empty. Powerless and doomed.
Oh, God.
Forcing her eyes open, she saw the familiar walls of her cabin.
She lay on her berth with her hands clenched over her sternum. They fought each other as if her right struggled to prevent her left from ruin.
Nick knew about her zone implant.
He’d promised Davies to the Amnion.
All her power was gone.
“Are you awake?” a voice asked. She should have been able to recognize it. “I’ve been worried about you. Mikka must have hit you pretty hard. I would have taken you to sickbay, in case you’ve got a concussion, but Nick said no. Can you hear me? If you can, try to say something.”
If she couldn’t recognize his voice, she should have at least been able to look at him and see who he was. But when she made the attempt, pain like impact rifle fire punched the back of her head, and the cabin dissolved in a blur of tears.
Mikka must have hit her hard, all right. In the end, the command second had declared her loyalties. But how could she have done it? Captain’s Fancy must have been under heavy g: otherwise Morn wouldn’t have been asleep. Then how had Mikka been able to leave her seat?
There must have been a delay of some kind. Morn must have been too profoundly exhausted to wake up quickly when thrust cut out and her zone implant released her. And during that delay, Mikka had come up behind her—
“Come on, Morn,” the voice said. “Try. You need to wake up. Don’t make me shake you. I might damage you—and you’re hurt enough already.”
As if she’d known who he was all along, she identified the speaker.
Vector Shaheed.
Try. All right. She could do that. It was necessary.
Swallowing pain and tears, she struggled to ask, “Where—”
“You’re in your cabin,” he answered. “We’re all alive—at least for the time being. I’ll probably never understand how, but we survived.”
Despite a blinding series of detonations from her occipital lobe, she shook her head. That wasn’t what she needed to know.
“Where—”
Had they escaped forbidden space? Were they safe from the Amnion?
“Where is your son?” Vector inquired. “Is that what you’re asking? Nick has him locked up. The last I heard, he’s all right. He looks as murderous as his father, but nobody’s done anything to him. Nobody’s had time.”
Morn knotted her fists to keep herself from moaning. Past the detonations, she croaked, “Where are we?”
“Ah, shit,” sighed Vector. “I was afraid that’s what you wanted to know.
“Oh, well. You’ve got a right to an answer.
“We didn’t make it, I’m sorry to say. The new components failed. We came out of the gap so fast that we exceeded our operational parameters. For a while we couldn’t get astrogation working. The computers couldn’t make sense out of the scan data. But I just talked to the bridge a little while ago. Nick—”
He faltered, then said, “Nick wanted me to report on your condition. When I called the bridge, he told me they’ve finally been able to fix our position.
“We’re still in Amnion space. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we’ve covered most of the distance to Thanatos Minor. In fact, we’re so close that we’ll have to start decelerating in a day or two. Somehow we managed to turn a disaster into a blink crossing.
“But I guess that isn’t good news from your point of view.”
Morn shook her head again. Now she was crying because she needed to. Still in Amnion space. Still in reach of Amnion warships. Nick had made a deal for her son. The warships would demand that he keep his end of the bargain.
Her only hope had been that the Amnion wouldn’t follow if Captain’s Fancy crossed far enough into human space.
Like her power, her hope was gone.
“If I were you,” Vector said softly, “I wouldn’t give up.”
That surprised her. She hadn’t expected him—or any of Nick’s people—to know or care how many hopes she lost. In fact, she didn’t understand why he was here at all: keeping her company, answering her questions; comforting her.
In a small voice, like a damaged child, she asked, “What do you mean?”
What can I do to save him? What’s left?
The engineer shrugged distantly. “Nick is—well, in the absence of full psychoanalysis, let’s just say he’s relatively heartless. Under normal circumstances, trading away your son wouldn’t cause him any sleepless nights. But under any circumstances, trading away your son and getting cheated would make him livid. And the Amnion cheated us. That’s pretty obvious.”
Cheated? Obvious?
Morn stared at Vector and waited for him to go on.
“Nick probably hates you right to the bone. If he weren’t so busy, he’d be hunting for ways to hurt you. Your son is his best chance. But no matter how much he hates you, he isn’t going to keep his end of that bargain when he knows he’s been cheated.”
Still Morn waited.
“Actually,” Vector mused as if he were digressing, “he should have seen this coming. I guess he hates you too much to think straight. Nobody who was thinking straight would have talked the way he did in front of that ‘emissary.’ He made it too obvious that he wanted to get rid of your son. So why didn’t Vestabule try to dicker? Why did he accept Nick’s terms?
“I think it’s because they don’t really want your son. He was just an excuse for another deal. What they really wanted was to give us those gap components.
“Those components weren’t flawed. They weren’t imperfectly compatible. They were designed to fail when we went into tach. The Amnion sold them to us to get rid of us—to erase us.”
Ignoring the twisting of her vision and the pain as keen as splinters of bone inside her skull, Morn propped herself on her elbow in an effort to face Vector more directly.
“Are you telling me you think they believe we’re already dead, so they won’t come after us?”
Vector nodded.
The idea was too seductive to accept. “But why?” she demanded. “Why did they try to kill us?”
“Presumably because they know Nick cheated them.”
“But he didn’t, did he?” she protested, “Not really. I mean, he offered them a chance to test his blood when he knew the results would be useless, but he never promised they would be anything else. He can always claim he kept his end of the bargain exactly.”
“That’s their dilemma,” Vector agreed. “He kept the bargain and cheated them at the same time. They don’t want to get a reputation for acting in bad faith themselves, and yet they don’t want to let him get away with cheating them.
“And how he cheated has got to be of overwhelming importance to them. How can he be immune to their mutagens? If they can’t answer that question, all their dealings with human space are suspect.
“What they wanted most, probably, was to capture us, so they could learn the truth—and get a fresh supply of human beings at the same time. But they couldn’t do that. They could never be sure we didn’t have a gap courier drone ready to take word of what happened to us back to human space.
“So erasing us in the gap was by far their safest choi
ce. That way, no one would ever know we were killed or cheated. And the secret of Nick’s immunity might die with us.
“By the time they learn we’re still alive, we should be safe on Thanatos Minor—if you call that safe. It’s public, at any rate. We’ll have illegals from all over the galaxy as witnesses. The Amnion won’t be able to attack or even capture us without ruining their own reputation.”
Morn didn’t want to trust Vector. She didn’t want to leave herself that open, that vulnerable. But she couldn’t quench the flicker of hope which he fanned to life. If the Amnion were not an immediate problem, then she only had Nick to deal with—
Oh, please. Let it be true. Let it be true.
She had never feared Nick as much as she feared the Amnion.
She still couldn’t see the engineer accurately. Tears kept smearing her vision. But now they weren’t simply tears of pain and despair.
“Vector, why?” Her voice was thick with frailty. “Why are you doing this? I threatened your life. For a while, I was willing to kill you all. Why are you doing this for me?”
She should have been listening more closely to the undercurrents in his voice. She should have found some way to blink her sight clear so that she could read his expression. Then she might have been prepared for his answer.
When he replied, he sounded bleak and arthritic; speaking damaged him like heavy g. “I’m keeping you sane. So he can hurt you more.”
Vector.
Stiffly he climbed to his feet. “I’ve fixed your door,” he said in the same tone. “You won’t be able to rig it again.
“I’ll go tell him you’re awake.”
The door hissed open for him, swept shut. The status lights on the control panel told her it was locked.
By the time it opened again, and Nick Succorso stalked into her cabin, her vision had improved. The back of her head still felt like the site of a thermonuclear accident, but her tears had stopped, and she was able to concentrate. Her vulnerability had gone to ice; at the core, she’d become hard and untouchable, like supercooled rage.
She needed to be hard. Otherwise the sight of his strained features and flagrant scars would have cracked her courage.
He had reason to look like that, she reminded herself. He was the fooled artist, betrayed by a tool he’d thought belonged to him body and soul. She’d given him something which touched him at the heart of his dark and complex needs—and now he knew that the gift was false.
And he was perfectly capable of murdering people for less cause.
He paused briefly just inside the door, letting her see what she was up against; giving her a chance to gauge her danger by the intensity of his expression. Then he came at her like the slam of a piston and struck her so hard across the cheek that she crumpled to her bunk.
Fires like novas blazed through her head. Incandescent pain paralyzed her: white conflagration blinded her. She couldn’t defend herself as he rummaged through her shipsuit until he found her black box; she couldn’t do anything to stop him as he took control of her life away from her.
Gripping the box, he stepped back. Holding it up so that he could watch her while he studied it, he read the function labels.
Ablaze with pain, she was helpless to react when he pressed one of the buttons.
It did nothing to her.
“There,” he rasped as he buried her zone implant control in his own pocket. “Now it’s off.
“Get up.”
She couldn’t. She heard the command in his voice; she understood her peril. But she was too weak to obey, too badly hurt. Without artificial help, she was only human—a woman who was already exhausted, already beaten.
“I said, get up.”
Somehow she levered her arms under her, pried herself into a sitting position. Confused and drained by the clangor of suns, that was as far as she could rise.
“You’re mine now, you bitch,” he snarled. “You’ve diddled me and lied to me for the last time.
“For a while there, I thought you’d turned Vector against me. I even had doubts about Mikka. But you couldn’t manage that. You have limits, don’t you. I’m going to make sure you keep them.” He slapped his pocket. “I’m going to make you suffer—I’m going to make you bleed and die like an ordinary human being, instead of some goddamn superwoman.
“This is your last chance. Get up!”
“Why?” Despite the pain, her core of ice held solid. “So you can hit me again? I’m done with that. I’m done acting like one of your toys. If you want to make me ‘bleed and die,’ you’ll have to come get me. I won’t help you.
“And I’ll make you pay for it. I swear I’ll make you pay for it.”
Somehow.
Like the lash of a solar flare, he caught hold of her, snatched her to him. Almost spitting into her face, he demanded, “How do you think you’re going to do that?”
She glared back at him, ice against his fire.
“You can’t dismantle that self-destruct. Your priority codes are still useless.” That was a guess, but a safe one: he hadn’t had time to solve the problems she’d left him. “Your ship is a bomb waiting to explode. And you don’t know how I’ve programmed it. Maybe I’ve set it up to blow if I don’t input to it every couple of hours.
“You can probably figure out what I did to your codes. Or you can use my control to make me tell you. But you might not be able to do it in time. Thanatos Minor works for the Amnion. You illegals always think you work for yourselves, but you serve them. As soon as we’re in scan range, that shipyard will tell them we’re still alive. Then you’ll have warships after you.
“If you aren’t quick enough, you’ll have to face them with a live self-destruct and no priority codes.”
She could see that he heard her. His rage didn’t diminish, but it changed character. His instinct to fight for his ship and his own survival took precedence over his need to hurt her.
“That’s temporary,” she went on. “You can solve all those problems without me. But until they’re taken care of, you’ll have to keep me alive—you’ll have to keep my brain intact. Maybe that’ll give you time to realize there’s a better reason why you don’t want to hurt me. Or Davies.”
He heard her. He couldn’t help himself. She was talking about issues he couldn’t ignore. And she still had one advantage over him, even without her zone implant: she knew him better than he knew her. He was the one who’d been blinded by their masque of passion. It had revealed him—and concealed her.
Rage turned his skin the color of his scars; the cords of his neck knotted. But he didn’t hit her. Through his teeth, he grated, “What reason?”
“Because,” she articulated distinctly, as if she didn’t care that he was angry enough to extinguish her, “you’re Captain Nick Succorso, and you never lose.”
He glowered at her like the muzzle of a gun. His fists didn’t release her.
“You want people to believe that. You want every illegal or cop who’s ever heard of you to believe it. But it’s bigger than that. You need your crew to believe it. They don’t love you for your charm. Even your women don’t. They love you for your reputation. They love the Nick Succorso who never loses.
“So how do you think you look right now? How do you think your reputation looks? For the sake of a woman who was ‘diddling’ you, a woman you couldn’t figure out because she had a zone implant, you risked your life and your ship in forbidden space—and the result was a disaster. You got yourself in so much trouble that you had to let the Amnion cheat you. In fact, you got yourself in so much trouble that you had to sell them a human being just so they would have the chance to cheat you. And then the mother of that human being took over your ship. She put her finger on the self-destruct and forced you and the Amnion to do what she wanted.
“For a man who never loses, that was a real triumph.”
As she spoke, Nick’s face set like concrete, hardened to blankness. His scars faded; the fury in his eyes receded. In that way, she knew her th
reat was potent. She’d driven him to regain his self-mastery.
His rage had been something she understood. But now she couldn’t read him. He was dangerous in a new way, as if the peril in him had become absolute.
She was absolute herself, on the edge of her resources—and her doom. She didn’t falter.
“What do you think you’ll accomplish by torturing or killing me—or my son? Is that going to restore your reputation? You know better. You’ll still be the Nick Succorso who lost, but now everybody will know that when you lose you punish helpless women and children for it.
“That story will spread, just like all the others. People aren’t going to talk about you as the hero in a war against corrupt cops.” Her voice rose, hinting at bloodshed. “They’re going to talk about you as if you’re Angus Thermopyle.”
That was the first time she’d said Angus’ name aboard this ship. It was only the second time she’d ever said it aloud.
“Or what?” Nick countered with an impersonal snarl, leaving his rage in the background. “You wouldn’t have brought this up if you weren’t going to offer me an alternative.”
Like Captain’s Fancy in the gap, Morn rode the rim of nonexistence and fought to save herself.
“Or,” she told Nick, “you can change the story.”
“How?” His face was concrete; but his quickness betrayed the intensity of his attention.
“You can accept me,” she replied without hesitation, “welcome me, put me back on duty. You can smile and look like a hero. You can even act like we’ve been fucking each other’s brains out for hours.”
He started to sneer a retort; but she overrode him.
“You can give your people a chance to think that we did it together—that we planned this to get Davies and Captain’s Fancy away from the Amnion without ruining your credibility, and without being blasted. How could you have done it otherwise? You didn’t have anything except my son to sell for those gap drive components. But if you sold him, you couldn’t get him back without breaking your bargain. Your only hope was to run a scam—to use me against the Amnion.
Forbidden Knowledge: The Gap Into Vision Page 34