This Day All Gods Die

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  But she didn’t leave the bridge. She needed the pain—not to punish her, but to teach her the consequences of her own actions. If she hadn’t been so frantic to escape pain and consequences, she wouldn’t have accepted her zone implant control from Angus; wouldn’t have fled Com-Mine Station with Nick. Instead she would have turned herself over to Com-Mine Security; put a stop to everything which had engulfed her—and Angus—since then.

  Rotating around her strapped arm as if it were her personal center of gravity, she swung away from Mikka and drifted to the command station. Carefully she belted herself into the g-seat as if she belonged there. For a moment she closed her eyes and concentrated on simply breathing; exhaling the worst of her hurt.

  When she looked at Mikka again, she’d recovered her composure.

  Gently again, she asked, “What were you trying to do?”

  Mikka had removed her hands from the second’s console as if to disavow responsibility. Despite the absence of g, she slumped like a woman who couldn’t support her own weight. But she was still Mikka Vasaczk, not some callow UMCP ensign appalled by gap-sickness and zone implants and Angus Thermopyle. Regardless of her own distress, she made the effort to reply.

  “Get into the drive databases,” she muttered thinly. “Find schematics. Diagnostic routines. Repair protocols. Anything that tells us how to work on the drives.

  “Wrecking electronics is easy. Like murder. You don’t need brains. All you need is a spanner. But you can’t repair anything if you don’t know what you’re trying to fix.”

  “No luck?” Morn pursued, although she already knew the answer. She wanted to keep Mikka talking until Vector arrived.

  Mikka wobbled her head negatively. “Everything that has to do with the ship is locked away. We can run helm—for whatever good that’s going to do us. Targ, scan, communications. But the ship is hidden. I can’t get into damage control. Hell, I can’t even access maintenance. I can’t find out how much food we have. I can’t tell you how long our fuel would have lasted if we were able to use it.”

  “Are we still broadcasting Vector’s message?”

  “Sure. Now that it’s useless, nobody can hear it, we’re screaming it in all directions.” Mikka paused, then added bleakly, “Hell of a drain on our energy cells.”

  The energy cells were all that kept Trumpet alive.

  “Speaking of which,” Vector remarked casually, “I’ve been draining them as fast as I can.”

  Morn turned her head, saw him at the head of the companionway. He looked at Mikka, and his eyes narrowed. Then he shrugged himself into motion. He was carrying a tray laden with g-flasks and food-packets in retaining clips. Steam curled past his shoulders as he floated down the treads.

  “Coffee,” he went on in his most avuncular manner. “Hot soup—black bean, if you can trust the smell. Steamed sirloin bars, according to the label. Wasting power like mad. The only things I didn’t cook are the nutrient capsules.”

  He drifted in front of the second’s station and stopped himself on the edge of the console, forcing Mikka to notice him.

  “I thought you told me you were going to get some sleep,” he said sternly.

  She scowled up at him: a reflex; devoid of force. She didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, well.” He shrugged again. “Who am I to talk? If any of us had the intelligence God gave curdled milk, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”

  With a show of cheerfulness, he started distributing packets and g-flasks.

  As soon as the steam reached Morn’s nose, she nearly went blind with hunger and eagerness. Her pain seemed to vanish: for a moment her universe shrank until it contained only coffee, soup, and meat. One-handed, trembling with anticipation, she set the coffee in a holder in the arm of her g-seat, pushed a couple of packets down into her lap, then raised the soup unsteadily to her mouth.

  Black bean, hell. It didn’t smell like that—or taste like it. It was pure Heaven. She hardly noticed that the heat stung her tongue as she drank.

  Her nerves hadn’t felt a thrill like this since the last time she’d turned on her zone implant.

  She took several swallows before she recovered enough awareness to realize that Vector was watching her intently. Making sure she was all right—

  “Vector Shaheed,” she murmured, “you are a saint. You deserve to live forever.”

  He grinned at her briefly, then coasted away to the auxiliary engineering console and anchored himself to the seat with his zero-g belt while he ate.

  Morn tore open a sirloin bar with her teeth, chewed a bite of the meat. Drank more soup. Swallowed her nutrient capsules. Sipped some coffee. And found that she felt better answers might be possible after all. Food certainly seemed to be one of them. Her arm resumed its sharp pulsing almost at once: if anything her pain grew stronger as her body took in sustenance. Nevertheless it had become less threatening. She could endure it better.

  At last she looked over at Mikka.

  Mikka sat with her head bowed over her coffee, her face in the steam. For a while she appeared content simply to breathe the aroma. But then she took a few small sips. Slowly her head came up, and she reached for her soup.

  As she ate, her skin lost some of its pallor. Her movements regained a measure of clarity. She straightened her back a bit against the support of her g-seat.

  Morn gave a private sigh of relief. She didn’t want to lose Mikka.

  Finally she was done eating. She secured her g-flasks, crumpled her empty packets to dispose of later, and rested her hands lightly on the command board.

  “Now,” she announced. “I don’t know how much time we have left, but there’s nobody else on scan yet.” Numbers along the scan display confirmed the absence of blips within the sensors’ reach. “This might be the best chance we’ll ever get to make some plans.”

  “What plans?” Mikka snorted. Food had apparently given her the energy for bitterness. “The drives are dead.”

  Nothing was possible without power.

  “And we might not be able to fix them,” Morn added for her. “Angus might not be able to fix them. He might not even be willing. If he ever wakes up. We don’t know whose side he’s really on, who’s responsible for his core programming,” although she suspected it was Warden Dios. “If we start listing all the things we don’t know and can’t tell, we’ll be here for hours.”

  The pain of her arm nagged at her in waves, each crest higher than the last; reminding her of consequences.

  “But I still think we should try to figure out where we stand,” she insisted. “What’s important to us. What we want to accomplish. If we don’t, we’ll never accomplish anything at all. Even if we get the chance.”

  Mikka tapped a couple of keys on her board, refining the scan display. She didn’t respond.

  After a moment Vector cleared his throat. “That makes sense to me,” he offered. “But I’m afraid I don’t have much to contribute. I was never a very good engineer. And I can’t fight worth a damn.” He shrugged eloquently. “For me it’s all simple. My whole life is in that antimutagen. The formula. And the broadcast. I’m really not worried about anything else.” A shadow seemed to pass across his gaze. “Except I don’t want any more of us to die. I still haven’t recovered from losing Sib.”

  Poor, frightened, valiant Sib Mackern, who had accompanied Nick Succorso in an EVA attack on Soar so that Nick wouldn’t be able to turn on Trumpet; so that Trumpet would have a better chance to survive.

  Sib’s gesture, like Nick’s crazy lust for revenge, had seemed hopeless, doomed; an exercise in futility. And yet it had achieved something vital. Soar had lost her super-light proton cannon. Nick and Sib must have damaged it somehow. They’d kept Trumpet alive with their deaths.

  Morn had watched the Amnion inject their mutagens into her. She’d endured a terror as profound and personal as her own DNA while she waited to learn whether Nick’s immunity drug would preserve her humanity. And then—for reasons which still seeme
d entirely incomprehensible—Angus had rescued her. Across the light-years, and despite the intervening layers of corruption, someone at UMCPHQ wanted her alive.

  She knew from experience that she was too mortal—too rich with fear—to recognize doom when she saw it.

  With a nod she acknowledged Vector’s reply. For a moment she was silent while she settled her broken arm as comfortably as she could across her chest. Then she began.

  “Sometimes I think the only things I’ve ever been really good at are holding grudges and being ashamed of myself.” She needed to say this so that Vector and Mikka would understand her. “It makes perfect sense that I love self-destruct when I’m gap-sick. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life, one way or another. Eating myself alive with misguided anger, and then punishing myself for it. Making myself a zone implant addict. Shattering my own arm—”

  Vector murmured a demurral; but Morn didn’t pause to hear it.

  “I’m looking for better answers.”

  A deeper surge of pain seemed to concentrate her mind. The distress of her damaged bones forced her to be clear.

  “The UMCP has the same problem,” she pronounced. “As far as I’m concerned, suppressing Intertech’s immunity research was self-destructive. So was sending Angus against Billingate under Milos Taverner’s control.” More than anything else, that single action had led to Calm Horizons’ incursion into human space. “If you’re a cop, you can only damage yourself when you try to manipulate the definition of your responsibilities.

  “In some ways, the crucial question is, where does the damage come from? Is Min Donner honest? Is Warden Dios? Has the harm been imposed by Holt Fasner, or is it more internal—more organic? Is there anyone we can trust?

  “But in other ways,” she asserted, “that question is irrelevant. We’ll probably never know the answer. Or we won’t know in time. We need to make our own decisions for our own reasons.”

  Another crest of pain rose remorselessly through her. The tide was coming in with a vengeance. Soon she would have no choice but to retreat to sickbay for medication. But not yet. In the spaces between the waves she felt clear and sure. She seemed to see the consequences of what Holt Fasner or Warden Dios had done precisely, as if they were delineated on one of the screens in front of her.

  “We may not be able to figure out what we’re actually going to do until we see who comes after us.” This had to be said as well. “I’m not sure which would be worse, Punisher or a ship from VI. Punisher fought for us against Calm Horizons. But she also gave Nick Angus’ priority-codes.” At the same time she’d made it possible for Davies and Morn to free him from those codes. “And Valdor is a UMC station. For all we know, they could be taking orders directly from the Dragon.”

  Deliberately she dismissed the possibility of pursuit by Calm Horizons. To avoid distracting herself with prospects of terror, she chose to believe that the Amnion couldn’t follow a UMCP homing signal. Soar and the Amnioni must have found Trumpet at Deaner Beckmann’s lab by some other means.

  “But we can worry about that later. For now, I’ll tell you what my priorities are, what’s important to me. Then you can tell me whether you agree.”

  Vector nodded. Food and coffee had rubbed the smudge from his gaze. He watched Morn steadily, almost without blinking.

  Mikka kept her head turned toward her console. Her fingers twitched erratically over the keys as if she felt driven to enter commands and didn’t know how. Tension knotted the muscles along her jaw. The bandage covered one eye and hid the other; concealed her reaction.

  Morn paused to let a harsh crest roll past her. Then she continued.

  “First, I want to make sure we keep transmitting that formula. Maybe no one out here can hear it. That’s not the point.” She faced Vector. “You said you’ve always wanted to be the ‘savior of humankind.’ Maybe you were joking—sometimes I can’t tell—but our broadcast is probably as close as you’ll ever get.”

  Vector smiled ruefully. “I know.”

  But Morn didn’t stop. “If it’s Punisher that comes after us,” she went on, “and if Min Donner is honest, then we can probably trust Punisher’s datacore. Our message will be recorded. At some point it’ll be played back. The formula might spread, even if we end up dying out here.”

  Now she turned to Mikka.

  “Second, I want to keep you two and Ciro away from some confused cop’s notion of summary justice. The UMCP needs to hear what you know—about those high-g acceleration experiments the Amnion are doing, if nothing else. Probably the GCES should hear it. And they all need to hear what I have to say about you.

  “I may have committed a crime or two myself, but I’m still a cop. The UMCP and the GCES ought to be told what you’ve done”—she quoted the official phrase exactly—“‘in support of a sworn officer of the law in the performance of her duty.’”

  At first Mikka didn’t react. Then, slowly, she lowered her hands from her board. Her head turned until Morn could see her good eye frowning like a sibyl’s.

  “You would do that?” she demanded in a clenched voice. “A cop like you? If you got the chance? After what you just told us about the cops damaging themselves by manipulating the definition of their responsibilities?”

  Another cutting surge caught Morn as Mikka spoke. From shoulder to wrist, hot iron seethed in her arm. For a moment she lost her balance; stumbled without transition into a sea of pain and dark rage. Try me! she wanted to shout. Try me. Do you think I’m lying? Do you think I came through all this just so I could feed you bullshit?

  But Vector was already answering for her.

  “Stop that, Mikka!” he said with unaccustomed vehemence. “You aren’t paying attention.

  “Morn can’t testify for us without explaining why she was aboard Captain’s Fancy in the first place. If you paid attention, you might understand what that means.” He faltered, then continued more quietly, “Eventually she’ll have to explain why she kept her zone implant control.”

  Why she’d helped conceal evidence of a capital crime by accepting her black box from Angus. Why she’d committed the crime of using a zone implant on herself.

  Now Vector turned toward Morn. “Are you sure this is a better answer?” He sighed his concern. “It sounds like more self-punishment to me. Aren’t you offering to damage yourself so that the rest of us will look good?”

  The surge receded. Morn’s head cleared with a suddenness that made her gasp. Abruptly she recovered her footing.

  She was in a hurry now. She needed to finish this before the next wave caught her.

  And yet Mikka and Vector asked important questions; questions which searched her more deeply than any of the issues she’d prepared herself to face. As deeply as Angus’ appeal for freedom from his priority-codes. They required answers.

  Instead of rushing to reach the point where she Could withdraw to sickbay, she stood her ground.

  “I don’t think it’s self-destructive to tell the truth,” she stated. “And justice doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t based on the truth. My job is enforcement, not judgment. That means I’m supposed to arrest you because I have reason to believe you’ve broken the law. But it also means I’m supposed to tell the truth at your trial. The whole truth, if I can. If I look bad in the process, I probably deserve it. I’ve broken the law myself.

  “If it’ll help you feel better, I’ll arrest you right now.” She was entirely serious. “Although you might not notice any difference. As the arresting officer of record, I have certain rights. Legally they can’t take my prisoners without ‘cause.’ And they can’t do anything to you without my testimony. That might give you some protection.”

  Unless they killed Morn herself to silence her.

  To her surprise, Vector burst out laughing. He clasped his hands together, rolled his eyes upward. “Take me now, O Lord.” His voice shook with mirth. “First I’m declared a saint. Then I’m placed under arrest on a ship lost in the middle of nowhere with both drives ru
ined. Life holds no greater riches. If I go now, I’ll die happy.

  “Morn Hyland,” he chuckled as he subsided, “you are an amazing woman. Absolutely amazing.”

  Mikka ignored him. Poised in her g-seat, she waited until he was done: she might have been holding her breath. Then she leaned forward to speak.

  “Do you remember,” she asked Morn softly, intently, “back when we were on Captain’s Fancy? After Nick killed Orn? It was practically the first conversation we ever had. You asked me how often I’ve been raped. Then you said, ‘After a while you hurt so bad that you don’t want to be rescued anymore. You want to eviscerate that sonofabitch for yourself.’

  “I believed you. The way you said it, I knew you meant it. You were a woman who could cut a man’s guts out. That’s when I first realized Nick was in trouble. He made a serious mistake bringing you aboard. I wasn’t even particularly surprised when you took over the whole damn ship to rescue Davies.”

  Involuntarily Morn closed her eyes. She felt another wave of pain approaching; felt the bitter waters rise around her head. She didn’t want to remember that conversation with Mikka. She didn’t want to think about Orn Vorbuld’s attack on her—or his death. Rage already had too much power over her.

  Mikka wasn’t finished, however. Her tone hardened.

  “But you didn’t do that to Angus, did you,” she said as if she were challenging Morn. “You could have eviscerated him, but instead you freed him from his priority-codes.

  “Now you say you want to testify for us. Plead ‘extenuating circumstances,’ or some such shit.” She paused, then admitted more weakly, “And I still believe you.

  “Why is that? You should have ripped Angus apart while you had the chance. How can you talk about standing up for us and make me believe you?”