Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict (2 page)

Despite his attraction, however, and his reputation for success, he was probably restrained from immediate action by the prospect of what Angus might do if he were challenged. To Morn Hyland, of course. But also to whoever challenged him. He had a history of getting rid of his enemies. So instead of leaping to her rescue, Nick waited and plotted. He may have been a criminal or a rogue hero, an operative or a mercenary; but he certainly wasn’t stupid. And he had no taste at all for defeat.

What he wanted—so the discerning cynics assumed—was to have Angus arrested by Security with the control to Morn’s zone implant in his pocket. Angus would get the death penalty; the implant would be removed; and then Morn Hyland would be free to give Nick Succorso the only reward he could possibly want.

Herself.

The hard part was to arrange for Angus to be arrested. He wasn’t an easy victim. Piracy, treachery, and murder were what he did best.

Nevertheless Nick arranged it.

Once again, the only explanations available were purely speculative. In the Station lockup, Angus wasn’t talking to anybody. And Nick Succorso and his crew were gone, taking Morn Hyland with them. But here speculation was on fairly solid ground. Knowing Nick, it was possible to guess with considerable confidence what he would do.

His background was vague. His id files managed to look both perfectly legitimate and plainly spurious, revealing nothing. All most people knew was that one day he docked his pretty frigate,
Captain’s Fancy
, in Com-Mine Station, passed inspection, led his crew into DelSec, selected Mallorys Bar & Sleep apparently at random, and became a regular whenever he was on station. Only the men in the corners, the men who pried below the surface, heard how he had passed inspection.

Being neither asleep nor blind, the Station inspectors had noticed almost immediately that
Captain’s Fancy
had a hole the size of a gaming table in her side.

You’ve been hit, they said. That looks like matter cannon fire.

It is, he replied.

Why were you being shot at?

I wasn’t.

No? The inspectors suggested intense skepticism.

No. I was trying to get inside one of those awkward asteroids—too small for heavy equipment, too big to be chewed up by hand-cutters. So I decided to try blasting it apart. Somehow, the beam dispersion hit a glazed surface and reflected back. Nick grinned amiably. I shot myself.

That doesn’t sound very plausible, Captain Succorso. Hand over your computer’s datacore, and we’ll verify your story.

No, he said again. Now his grin didn’t look so amiable. I’m not required to let you look at my datacore unless you have evidence of a crime. That’s the law. Has there been a crime?

In the end, Nick passed. The ship that shot him must have been burned out of space in return, so it was never able to report that a crime had been committed.

Smiling to make DelSec’s women’s hearts flutter, basking in the devotion of his crew, and spending money as if he had a UMC credit line, he settled into Mallorys and concentrated on enjoying himself while
Captain’s Fancy
was repaired. He seemed to have a talent for enjoying himself, and his good humor—like his unmistakable virility—was infectious. Only people who watched the scars under his eyes could tell that he was engaged in anything more serious than a continuous carouse. And in Mallorys that “anything” could be only one thing: he was listening, sifting, sorting, evaluating; making contact with sources of information.

Whenever he left Com-Mine Station, he left suddenly. And when he came back, he celebrated.

By some coincidence, unfamiliar ships had a tendency to go “overdue” while he was away.

Even a null-wave transmitter could have predicted that everything inside Nick would leap up at the sight of Morn Hyland. If he was a pirate, he was the glamorous kind, the kind who slashed and burned his way to virtue in romantic videos. And she was beautiful and pathetic—a maiden in distress if ever there was one, abused and helpless. Not to mention the fact that she belonged to someone else, a pirate rumored to be even more successful than Nick Succorso himself. But only the people who didn’t know any better were surprised that he didn’t try to rescue her right away. The men in the corners could guess what he would do.

He wouldn’t try to steal her directly. He was too smart for that. In other words, he had too much respect for Angus Thermopyle’s defenses. And Angus kept his vulnerabilities—as well as his debaucheries—private by sealing them safely aboard
Bright Beauty.
Station Security itself would have come to his assistance if Nick had tried to get past his alarms.

No, Nick would sit and listen, watching Morn Hyland until his scars turned black and waiting for his chance; waiting for Angus Thermopyle to make a move.

He wanted to see that move coming and know what it would be. He wanted to do what Security had never been able to do—penetrate Angus’ secrecy. And when he knew what Angus’ move would be, he would follow it so that he could betray it. The moment in which Angus was arrested might be Nick’s only realistic opportunity to carry Morn away.

He wanted her.

He also wanted to prove himself against Angus Thermopyle.

If he had other reasons, he never gave a hint of them to DelSec.

As it happened, his chance came sooner than he may have expected. Maybe Angus felt cocky with Morn beside him and wanted to show off. Or maybe he was getting greedy—if in fact he could conceivably be any greedier than he was already. Or maybe the bait was just too attractive to be ignored. Whatever the reason, he made his move scarcely two weeks after he first brought Morn into Mallorys.

The incoming supply ship from Earth—arriving several weeks early for some reason—was in trouble. Every receiver in or around the Station picked up the distress call before it went dead. Apparently one of the crew had been taken by gap-sickness. As the ship reentered normal space, this unfortunate individual had become entranced by the idea of installing a crowbar in the memory bank of the navigational computer. By the time his shipmates got him under control, the ship could no longer steer and had no idea where she was. The fact that the distress call went dead seemed to imply that the damage to the computer—perhaps a fire—had spread to the communication gear.

In other words, a full standard year’s worth of food, equipment, and medicine was floating out there somewhere against the background of the stars, ripe to be rescued, salvaged, or gutted.

Of course, as soon as the emergency was understood, Com-Mine Center slapped a curfew onto the docks, forbidding any ship to leave until she could be sworn in as part of the official search; until Security personnel could be put aboard to watch the actions of the crew. That was standard procedure. And it was generally respected, even by pirates and jumpers. Ships that shared in the search also shared in the reward, regardless of which vessel actually performed the rescue, while ships that violated curfew, refused to cooperate, or went off on their own became targets by law and could be fired on with impunity.

This time, only
Bright Beauty
and
Captain’s Fancy
took that chance. Somehow, both Angus Thermopyle and Nick Succorso managed to uncouple from their berths seconds before the injunction of the curfew, thus preserving at least the illusion of authorized departure.

Center wasn’t impressed by illusions, however. Commands to return and redock were broadcast: warning shots were fired.

With contemptuous ease,
Captain’s Fancy
winked off the scanners of the Station.

Nick Succorso disappeared by performing a delicate maneuver called a “blink crossing.” No one in Mallorys doubted his ability to do this. In essence, he engaged his gap drive—and then disengaged it a fraction of a second later, thereby forcing his ship to “blink” past fifty or a hundred thousand kilometers. It was risky: there was always the chance that dimensional stress would tear the ship apart, or that he would come out of the gap in a gravity well he couldn’t escape. But it worked. He got away.

From the look of her,
Bright Beauty
would never have withstood that much pressure. In any case, she had no gap drive. Angus Thermopyle took a completely different approach. As soon as the first warning shots were fired, he started transmitting a distress call of his own.

Every receiver in or around the Station picked that one up, too.
There’s a short somewhere. Smoke. Controls are locked
—
I can’t navigate. Don’t shoot. I’m trying to come around.

No one believed him, of course. But Center couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility that he might be telling the truth. That idea had to be considered, at least for a few seconds. And during those few seconds Angus cut in thrust boosters no one knew he had. No one thought he had them because no one believed
Bright Beauty
could survive that kind of acceleration.

Like Nick, he got away.

After that, there were no more answers for a while. The people who were following the story could speculate, but for two days they had nothing to base their speculations on.

Then
Bright Beauty
came limping back. Her sides were scarred with matter cannon fire, and her thrust drive stuttered badly. Nevertheless she passed inspection. Angus Thermopyle faced down a board of inquiry. After a few hours, he brought Morn Hyland back to Mallorys. Neither of them gave anything away.

Captain’s Fancy
coasted into dock later the same day. She also had been hurt, but Nick Succorso didn’t seem to care. He talked her past inspection. He laughed circles around a board of inquiry. He and his crew also returned to Mallorys free and eager, ready to enjoy themselves.

The official search was still going on. So far, no trace of the supply ship had been found. After this much time, there was little chance that any trace would ever be found.

But that night Station Security broke into Mallorys to arrest Angus.

They had evidence that a crime had been committed. So they said. That gave them the right to board
Bright Beauty
without permission and take the ship’s datacore. The datacore enabled them to find her secret holds. And in the secret holds were food, equipment, and medicine which could only have come from the missing supply ship.

Arrests in DelSec were few. The people who frequented places like Mallorys Bar & Sleep were prone to resent the intrusion of overt law and order into their lives. Even in groups, Security couldn’t always pass through DelSec without harassment.

But a supply ship had been robbed—presumably gutted. Com-Mine Station needed those supplies to live. DelSec needed those supplies. Every man and woman in Mallorys would have suffered for this particular crime. And every one of them disliked or feared or even hated Angus Thermopyle.

At first, the arrest didn’t go smoothly. Before Angus was taken, he and Morn Hyland began to scuffle: he was apparently trying to hold her back. Nevertheless she managed to break away just as Security closed on him. At once, the crowd opened for her, pried apart by Nick Succorso’s crew. And then she and Nick were gone; they disappeared as effectively as a blink crossing.

Captain’s Fancy
was allowed to slip out of dock unmolested; but that wasn’t hard to explain. Nick must have done a certain amount of bargaining with Security before he handed over his evidence against Angus. Obviously, his right to leave was part of the bargain.

So the fair maiden was rescued. The swashbuckling pirate bore her away with all her beauty. For weeks, the sots and relics in Mallorys could hardly talk about anything except what the maiden and the pirate were doing with each other. People who were accessible to romantic emotions contemplated what had happened with a lump in their throats. And even the cynics sitting in the corners were gratified by the outcome. Nick Succorso had done exactly what they expected of him.

There were only two flaws in this story.

One was that the supply ship from Earth arrived on schedule. It hadn’t had any trouble along the way. And it reported that there hadn’t been any other ship.

The other was that the control to Morn Hyland’s zone implant was never found. Angus Thermopyle didn’t have it on him when he was arrested. That was why he was rotting in lockup instead of facing execution.

The first matter was easily explained. Nick Succorso must have arranged the whole thing—faked the distress call, stolen Station supplies himself, planted them on
Bright Beauty.
That was the kind of thing he did. It made the people in Mallorys admire him even more.

The second issue was more disconcerting, however. It didn’t make sense. Angus could not have gotten rid of the control earlier: if he had done that, she would have been able to escape him—or, more likely, to butcher him with her bare hands for the things he had done to her. And yet he must have gotten rid of it earlier. Otherwise he would have been caught with it.

The only other explanation was less satisfying. After all, the zone implant and its control were hypothetical, not proven. Perhaps they had never existed.

But in that case the entire sequence of events degenerated into incomprehensibility. Why did she stay with him, if he had no power over her? And if his power was of some other kind, why did he give it up? What warned him that he was in danger?

No one knew the answers. However, the people who asked them were only interested out of curiosity. The main thrust of the action was clear enough. Details that didn’t make sense could eventually be forgotten.

The crowd at Mallorys would have found the real story much harder to live with.

CHAPTER

3

T
here were parts of the story that would always remain obscure, unless Angus Thermopyle explained them; and he refused.

By the end of his trial,
Bright Beauty
didn’t have any secrets left. Despite her pretense of being a prospector’s ship, she was indeed equipped with sophisticated particle sifters and doppler sensors, tools that no legitimate prospector would ever need. She was too heavily shielded, too heavily armed. Under boost, her thrust drive could have shifted the orbit of a planetoid. She had cargo holds hidden in places the Station inspectors never imagined. And she had so many relays and servos, compensations and overrides, that it was actually possible for one man to run her alone—although the experts who examined her agreed it would be suicide for any individual to take on that kind of complex strain for more than a few hours at a time.

In addition, the datacore revealed the extent of Angus’ “wealth.”

To the surprise of his prosecutors, his resources turned out to be trivial; almost nonexistent. Regardless of his reputation, he was operating only a few steps ahead of his expenses.

That unexpected detail didn’t help him, of course. He hadn’t been arrested for his “wealth.” And in other ways the exposure of his secrets was sufficiently damning. Enough evidence was found to convict him of several acts of piracy—although everyone in Security agreed that the evidence was disappointing, since it wasn’t adequate to procure the death penalty. Certainly it wasn’t adequate to explain the more tantalizing aspects of Morn’s story.

Confronted with this inadequacy—which presumably gave him the opportunity to cast his actions in the most favorable possible light—Angus surprised his prosecutors further by refusing to defend himself, testify on his own behalf. Indeed, he declined to answer any questions at all. With a zone implant, of course, he could have been inspired to talk; but the law—and the UMCP—didn’t consider confession an “authorized use.” Consequently, Com-Mine Security never found out where or how
Bright Beauty
had been outfitted, or how she’d been damaged. No explanation was obtained for the fact that his reputation so far exceeded the evidence against him. He was unwilling either to account for or to defend the presence of stolen Station food, equipment, and medicine aboard his ship. And no new illumination was shed on his strange relationship with Morn Hyland. In the first weeks of his incarceration, he opened his mouth only when he wanted to complain about the food or the facilities or the treatment in the Station lockup.

And when he was informed that
Bright Beauty
was being sent to the Station shipyard to be dismantled for spare parts. Then he pounded on the walls of his cell and started to howl with such fury that eventually he had to be sedated.

No one knew what had warned him when the Hyland ship had come into Com-Mine Station—or how hard he had tried to get away from her.

Probably he would have been unable to explain that warning. It was a matter of instinct. He had good instincts, and they started to burn as he watched the sleek oreliner nudge its way into dock.

It looked like a prize, the kind of treasure ship
Bright Beauty
could peel apart weld by weld, exposing to theft or destruction the things that made other people think they were superior beings: the money, the possessions, the luck. He had tackled ships like that in the past, had tackled them often, tracking them to their destinations, learning their secrets, then blasting them open in the black void, leaving them ruined, lost forever—had tackled them and raged to himself fiercely as he did so, destroying what other men would have captured as riches because his need for money had limits while his desire to see what matter cannon fire could do was immense. Alone in his ship, or wandering around DelSec, or sitting in Mallorys—Angus Thermopyle was always alone, even when he happened to find some stow- or castaway piece of human garbage to crew for him—he relived the ships he had tackled and hated them.

But not this time.

This time, his instincts burned—and he always trusted his instincts.

As far as he knew, he had no particular reason to be wary. His crimes left little evidence behind; there was no better place than deep space to hide the remains of his plundering. Only his datacore could damage him, and he had long ago taken steps to alleviate that danger—steps which no one would detect because they were theoretically impossible. But because he was a hunter, he had also been hunted. He had the intuitions of prey.

So he did something that would never have occurred to anyone else on or around Com-Mine Station: he turned his field-mining probes toward the Hyland ship.

One of those probes was designed to measure the nuclear weight of thin cross sections of solid rock. It informed him that
Starmaster’s
hull was formed of an alloy he’d only heard about, never seen—an alloy so heavy it could endure matter cannon fire the way stone endured water.

An alloy so expensive no oreliner could afford it. There were no haulers or handlers in space rich enough to afford it.

When he saw the readings, Angus Thermopyle fled.

He didn’t take the time to buy supplies. He didn’t try to find out what the station scuttlebutt concerning the Hyland ship was. He didn’t even bother to repaint
Bright Beauty’s
name—something he always did before risking the malign vagaries of space. A ship as rich as
Starmaster
would have friends, muscle. Escorts? Fighters hanging off station to watch for trouble? He took that into account, but it didn’t stop him. Sealing his hatches, he called up Station Center, filed a purely fictitious destination report, and received formal permission to undock. Then, because his instincts were still on fire, he meticulously followed the departure trajectory he was assigned. Cursing like a slavey all the way, he left Com-Mine along a route that would attract as little attention as possible. And he didn’t risk cutting in boost and shifting his course toward the belt until he was absolutely alone at least fifty thousand kilometers past the known range of any scan from the vicinity of Station.

He was hoping that the belt was far enough away to hide him. The Station had been built at a considerable distance to avoid the meteor storms and other debris which always accompanied asteroid belts through space, the residue of planets that time and gravity had reduced to rubble.

By the time he changed course, the exertion of manning the whole ship himself had begun to make his hands shake and his eyes fill with sweat. He had too many instruments to read, too many systems to monitor, too much data to absorb. And his computer couldn’t help him. It had extravagant fail-safes: the very mechanisms which enabled him to run
Bright Beauty
alone would shut the ship down in alarm if he gave the computer control of them. Nevertheless he kept going. His instincts had warned him, and he always obeyed them.

Angus Thermopyle was a pirate and a mine jumper. He hated everybody, and there was enough old blood on his hands to convict a whole prison full of illegals. He was alone now because the decrepit drunk he’d hired to crew for him had made the mistake of asking the wrong question at the wrong time; so he’d flattened the man’s head with a spanner and left the body in one of the thruster tubes to be ashed the next time the drive cut in. He may not have been rich, but he was probably everything else the people in Mallorys believed him to be.

He was also a coward.

So he ran from the Hyland ship under as much g as his body could stand and remain conscious. The muscles of his shoulders began to twitch, and he couldn’t keep the sweat out of his eyes; but he kept running. When he knew that he had pushed himself too far, he didn’t stop: instead, he started pumping drugs into his veins, stim to keep him awake, cat to keep him steady.

He was afraid, and he ran.

Before he was close enough to the belt to begin deceleration, he had been driving under heavy g for half a standard day. Now the drugs were giving him psychotic episodes with increasing regularity, and he no longer knew clearly what he was doing. However, he was familiar with those drugs; before starting them, he’d understood what they would do to him. So he’d taken the precaution of locking
Bright Beauty’
s course. When he was finally forced to surrender control of his ship’s systems to her command computer, the course-lock and her fail-safes managed the hard braking for him. As a result, he arrived without crashing—and without pulling his ship away into madness—at a part of the belt which everyone knew had been mined out years ago; a long stretch of sailing rock where other ships were unlikely to come.

There he picked a particularly dead asteroid, parked
Bright Beauty
in a mining crater, shut down everything except life-support, and went to sleep in his g-seat, catted out of his mind.

If the Hyland ship could find him there, then he was lost anyway. He had never really had a chance to escape.

He still had no reason to believe the people on that ship even knew he existed.

Hours later, he awoke screaming because there were skinworms all over him, crawling, gnawing, starting to burrow in—

The sensation was terrible. It was also normal; a predictable consequence of the drugs. However, for him so much of what was terrible was also familiar that he knew exactly what to do. Although he couldn’t swallow the bright terror rising in his throat or unknot the red pain closing around his heart, his hands were almost steady as he injected more drugs into his veins—analgesics to flush the now-poisonous stimulants and cataleptics away, antihistamines and steroids to soften his body’s reactions. As soon as these new drugs took hold, he slept again.

The next time he awakened, he had trouble breathing because the air in
Bright Beauty
was going bad. He’d left Com-Mine Station without supplies. That meant he now had only a little water, less food—and no clean pads for the scrubbers which were supposed to keep his air breathable. Checking the computer’s maintenance log, he confirmed that his present pads were long overdue for a change.

This development made him rage as if he were on the verge of a breakdown. But that, too, was normal. He still knew exactly what to do. Risking anoxia because he didn’t have the strength to put on an EVA suit, he shut down circulation and took the pads out of the scrubbers. While his head throbbed with CO
₂
overload and his vision blurred in and out of focus, he used half his water to make a chemical bath for the pads. He left the pads in the bath as long as he could—until he was close to unconsciousness. Then he refitted them in the scrubbers and restarted the circulation.

Unfortunately, his problems were just beginning.

He was probably safe where he was; but he couldn’t stay there. His food would last for only two or three more days. He could reuse all his water—but only if he had his purifiers serviced. And the superficial cleaning he’d given the pads might not hold up even that long. He had only two choices.

Return to Com-Mine Station.

Or find some other source of supply.

He never considered returning to the Station. He wasn’t deterred by the prospect of humiliation. If anyone ever found out that he’d panicked and run, only to return limping because he’d run out of food, water, and air, he would be sneered at everywhere in DelSec; but he could live with that. The world had been sneering at him from the first. He took revenge when he got the chance. However, there was still the Hyland ship—

That ship was to blame, of course. She’d scared him, and he hated everything that scared him. As he lifted
Bright Beauty
out of the mining crater and eased back from the belt to give his scanning equipment range, he began to plot ways to make
Starmaster
pay for what was happening to him.

Ways to wreck a ship with
that
hull? The bare concept was nonsense—and Angus Thermopyle wasn’t prone to nonsense. Nevertheless thinking about it helped him do what he had to. In a state of cold rage which served as calm, he spent the next two days searching the belt with his sniffers and sifters, prospecting not for ore but for miners.

Toward the end of that time, he came close to panic again. The pads were starting to give out; his brain was being squeezed in a vise of bad air. His tongue was thick from drinking bad water, and he was urgently hungry. Still his cold, black rage kept him going. And a judicious application of drugs kept him steady.

At last he found what he needed—a mine on a craggy and pockmarked asteroid with a look of depletion about it, as if it had already had all its riches cut out. Yet the people working there had a ship. It stood on its struts a short distance from their camp, which was in turn a short distance from the hole they’d cut into the asteroid. The ship was cold: it had been shut down a considerable time ago, when the miners had settled in to work this hunk of rock.

Under other circumstances, Angus Thermopyle would have ignored those miners. He could tell their whole story with a glance at their ship, their camp, and his field-mining probes. This asteroid had once been rich, but it had in fact already been mined; played out. The people on it now—probably a family, people who had to spend long periods of time on ships or in mines tended to do things by families—were essentially scavengers. Too timid or defeated or poor to go prospecting for an original strike, they sweated their bare survival out of the rock by gleaning what little had been missed by previous miners. A pirate or jumper wouldn’t waste his time on them.

On the other hand, they had food and fresh water and scrubber pads. Angus was having trouble keeping his anger and distress from choking him, and he didn’t hesitate. He went in hard.

The miners saw him coming. His board picked up shouts of warning and protest, appeal and outrage: he ignored them. As he approached, he used torpedoes to collapse the mouth of the mine, blocking it with dead rock. Then he set
Bright Beauty
straight down on the camp so that his braking blast incinerated the habitation domes, charred the suited figures outside.