Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict (9 page)

Nick had the power to make her want him.

And yet that recognition was only the beginning: the full truth was still worse. Until this moment, when he saw and understood—or thought he understood—the way Morn and Nick looked at each other, Angus Thermopyle hadn’t known how weak he really was. He hadn’t realized how much power he lacked—and how much he wanted that power, how much he grieved for it. He could make—had made—Morn do anything and everything his lust or loathing conceived. Like a drunk or a derelict, he’d believed that was enough. But it wasn’t enough, oh no, never enough, not now. He’d duped himself, blinded and fooled himself.

He’d taught her to cooperate in her own degradation. He’d taught her to act as if he were necessary to her. No matter what he did, however, he could never make her
want
him. The buttons on the zone implant control which tuned her so that every nerve in her body obeyed his desire were impotent compared to the jaunty burn of Nick’s gaze.

It wasn’t fair. She belonged to Angus. She was
his.

He had no way to know he was wrong.

CHAPTER

11

T
he truth was that Morn Hyland didn’t see Nick Succorso as a sexual being at all. On that point, everyone who noticed her situation or gave any thought to her reactions was wrong. She hardly noticed Nick was male. If she had, she would have turned her back on him, would have refused him with the same debased instinct for survival which had caused her to refuse any possibility of hope which the Station inspectors might have represented.

She didn’t want a man. Any male touch would have made her ache to scream and puke, just as Angus himself did. She’d been raped and raped until the violation had reached through her flesh to her spirit; pain and abhorrence had soaked into the marrow of her bones. If Nick Succorso had put his hand on her as a man, she would have flinched away, exactly as she did when Angus touched her.

Angus had more power over her than he realized.

Yet he was right when he sensed that something leapt up inside Morn at the sight of Nick Succorso.

That “something,” however, had nothing whatever to do with Nick’s handsomeness, his virility, his physical appeal. Instead it had to do with his look of raffish eagerness, his scarred and buccaneering appearance of bravado. She wanted him, not as a man, but as an effective force. He might be strong and cunning—not to mention unscrupulous—enough to destroy the man who was destroying her.

Did she think Nick might set her free, redeem her from her anguish? No. Angus had come too close to breaking her. She no longer had the imagination—or the courage—to dream so far.

But he’d taught her how to hate. And she had learned that lesson profoundly. Her own hate lived with the pain and abhorrence in the marrow of her bones. The “something” which had leapt up in her at the sight of Nick Succorso was simply the hope that Angus could be beaten.

As for Nick himself—

Like Angus, the other people in Mallorys were wrong about him as well.

Oh, he noticed her beauty immediately and was attracted to it. His virility was no sham: his taste for lovely female flesh never left him. In part for that reason, he had nurtured a wide reputation as a lover. But he had other reasons also. He liked winning, so he did whatever was necessary to make his women respond to him passionately. And he had a hunger for revenge; especially sexual revenge. He yearned to get even.

The truth—which he kept to himself—was that he didn’t actually like women. In secret, he feared and despised them. Their bodies had value only to the extent that his response to them could draw an even greater response from them. Where such satisfactions weren’t at issue, he had no interest in them. He preferred seeing them hurt.

The explanation for this was a mystery only in the sense that he never spoke of it.

Once, when he was barely a man in years, and no more than a boy in experience, he’d been bested by a woman. And as she beat him, cheated him, ruined his dreams, she sneered at him. His scars were the marks of her contempt, the visible sign that she hadn’t considered him worth killing. Everyone else she
had
killed, every other man on that ship, nearly twenty of them; but him she’d left with only his scars to remember her by. There was nothing he could do that would make her fear him.

That ship had been the original
Captain’s Fancy
, the inspiration of the name Nick now used for his pretty frigate. The love he felt for his present ship was an echo of his yearning for that earlier vessel. She’d been his dream from the moment when he’d first become old enough to have such dreams.

Nick Succorso—which, incidentally, wasn’t his real name—had been born station-bound in the same sense that some people were planet-bound, unable or unwilling to leave for one reason or another. He was the son of a family of administrators living on a station like Com-Mine, but half a hundred parsecs away, a station that tended one of the official (therefore rich) trading routes between Earth and forbidden space. There he’d begun watching scan at an early age, just as most of the children of administrators did on that station, to learn the skills they would need for the rest of their lives.

Unlike most of his peers, however, he’d fallen in love with what he watched, with the vast gulf of space and the lure of the gap, with the romance of sailing the imponderable stellar winds, with the mysterious lurch-and-translation which took men and ships across dimensions beyond the reach of their former lives.

Specifically, he’d fallen in love with
Captain’s Fancy.

She seemed to him the bravest of the best, a trim metal sheath of power which pierced the heavens and the gap. Her lines were sleek, yet she bristled with weapons. Her holds were huge, yet she swept across scan and docked and undocked as gracefully as a creature of the great deep. Her crew were exotic men drawn from the strangest parts of the galaxy, men with the strength to pit themselves against the vacuum and forbidden space, and the wealth they traded was fabulous. Young Nick Succorso ached to sign aboard their ship under any imaginable contract or conditions.

Good heavens, no! said his mother.

Are you out of your mind? asked his father.

As for the captain of
Captain’s Fancy
, he simply said, No. Regal as a lord in his braid and authority, he dismissed Nick out of hand. If the command second hadn’t taken pity on Nick’s crushed look, Nick never would have been given any explanation at all. But the command second, who meant well, had taken the time to say, Forget it, kid. We never take crew from stationers. Too much trouble. Haven’t got the instincts. Only way you’ll ever get on a ship is, go to one of the academies. Earth. Aleph Green. Orion’s Reach.

Good heavens, no! his mother repeated.

Are you out of your mind? demanded his father. What makes you think we’ve got that kind of money?

Nick was never stupid. He could see his dreams curdling. He would never be able to earn “that kind of money” by himself. The only jobs which paid that well were jobs on ships.

But he couldn’t bear to see his dreams curdle, so he let something else inside him go sour.

He began to plot crimes.

In those days, piracy was a constant and maddening problem across the shipping lanes. The UMC Police were relatively new; their ability to enforce the laws Earth made didn’t reach far. And forbidden space didn’t appear to make any reliable distinction between sanctioned and dishonest trade.

With the logic of the young, Nick reasoned that wherever there was piracy, there were pirates. And wherever there were pirates, there was a demand for information.

Destinations. Cargoes. Arrival dates. Departure trajectories. Route clearances.

Nick worked scan. Indirectly, at least, he had access to that kind of information.

Even as a youth, hardly a young man yet, he was someone whose chances came to him when he needed them, when he was ready for them. As soon as he was sour enough, and had made his plans sufficiently concrete, and had developed his access to information, he met the woman who scarred him.

The scars came later, of course. She knew what she was doing and did it well. First came casual conversation. Casual drinks. Casual sex. His first casual mention of
Captain’s Fancy
passed as if she hadn’t heard it. Only after he’d told her enough about his plans, his information, his needs—only then did she let him see the hunger in her eyes.

She wanted that ship.

And he was really just a kid. He didn’t have any trouble convincing himself that she wanted
Captain’s Fancy
the same way he did.

So he betrayed the ship he loved. He thought he would end up as part of her new crew. Eventually—so the dream went—he would end up as her new captain.

For what he later swore was the last time in his life, he was wrong.

The woman took him with her aboard her own ship. He was with her as she ambushed
Captain’s Fancy
, crippled the merchanter, forced the vessel to surrender. He accompanied her when she boarded the drifting hulk.

Already reality diverged from his dream.
Captain’s Fancy
wasn’t supposed to be ruined like this. As for the regal captain and his crew—Nick wanted them humiliated, of course; but he was a bit young to stomach such frank slaughter.

Nevertheless reality continued to diverge.

The woman didn’t take him with her when she left. After killing the crew, emptying the holds, gutting the communication gear, she laughed at Nick and scarred him and abandoned him.

He pleaded, of course. He believed he loved her. He believed she loved him. He was young enough to have persuaded himself of almost anything for the sake of his dreams. But his ideas of love only made her giggle in scorn. Her knife told him what she thought of having him in her bed. When she left, there were tears streaming through the blood into his mouth.

After that, he was alone on a wreck a million kilometers from the station, with no skills, no knowledge—and no engines. By rights, he should have died.

He didn’t. Instead, he became the Nick Succorso he was now. By the time he’d contrived to be rescued—some rather ingenious manipulation of
Captain’s Fancy’s
residual emissions produced the effect of a beacon and eventually attracted a passing cruiser—he’d assumed the id files and certifications of the ship’s cabin boy, the real Nick Succorso, and had taught himself the skills to back up his new credentials.

Once rescued, of course, he’d given the UMCP everything he knew about the woman who cut him. That enabled them to harry her out of his part of space. He never saw her again.

Naturally, however, he never forgot her. From the time of his first legitimate shipboard post until the day when he snatched the present
Captain’s Fancy
for himself, from the moment of his first successful raid until now, she was always with him. His scars grew dark under his eyes whenever he saw something he wanted, something that wasn’t his; the slashes on his cheeks turned the color of curdled blood.

Under other circumstances, he wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help Morn Hyland. Women in pain were the next best thing to women who loved him. Both pain and love helped him get even.

But under
these
circumstances—

Nick Succorso was drawn to the idea of rescuing Morn for several reasons. Angus Thermopyle himself was one of them. Nick knew Angus’ reputation, of course: he knew Angus wasn’t just a competitor; he was a dangerous competitor. And Nick was prepared to tolerate competition only as long as it wasn’t good enough—wasn’t dangerous enough—to get in his way; to cast him in the shade. He saw Morn Hyland immediately as a handle on Angus, a lever to use against the competition.

His other reasons were more complex.

Her relevance—if any—to his concerns as the master of
Captain’s Fancy
was unclear. Did he see her as a source of wealth? Did he mean to exact ransom from the Hyland family? From Com-Mine Station? The UMCP itself? He may have had a source of information about her that wasn’t generally available. If so, he didn’t mention it.

However, her relevance to his personal buccaneering was plain enough.

In some of its details, her condition was obvious at a glance. She was attached to a man she hated, fixed to an illegal who repelled her. What did that imply about her? On this point, his reasoning was unique in Mallorys. For him, her attachment implied, not that she was subject to coercion, but that her capacity to respond was so intense, so overwhelming, that she couldn’t control it. She couldn’t help herself.

And if she had
that
kind of response to someone like Angus Thermopyle, if her own passions left her
that
abject—

Nick Succorso’s scars darkened and his mouth actually went dry at the thought of how Morn’s passions might make her respond to him.

So Angus Thermopyle was wrong about Nick—as wrong as he was about Morn herself. But he was also right. The danger was real. Without a word to each other, with no more contact between them than a gaze or two, they had banded together against him.

And he had to face it all, realize it all, and swallow it, show nothing. Instinct was of no use to him here. He was cornered by his situation, trapped with a perception he would have cheerfully committed murder to avoid. He needed money. Therefore he needed Mallorys; needed the people who came to Mallorys and sold secrets. In addition, Security was watching him. Even in DelSec, there were spies. He was being studied for any sign of a mistake, scrutinized for any evidence of weakness. He couldn’t afford to give himself away by retreating; by revealing that he recognized his danger.

He stayed where he was, keeping his mask of belligerent disinterest in place, simply because he was afraid of the consequences if he did anything else.

Gruffly he ordered Morn to a seat at one of the condensation-stained tables—a seat with her back to Nick Succorso. He made sure the way he talked to her was loud enough to be overheard, so her obedience would be noticed. Then he sat down beside her and squeezed her against him possessively. Look at us, you bastards, you motherfucking sons of shit. Look at her. She’s
mine.
Mine!

He put on a good performance. Nobody in Mallorys knew that he’d witnessed the way Morn and Nick looked at each other, that he’d felt the electricity between them. But his success gave him no satisfaction. It was Morn he wanted, her desire, her willingness—the parts of herself which he’d been unable to extort from her; the parts which she’d just given away.

He was going to have to kill Nick. There was no other answer. There was no other way to hurt her enough, to punish her for doing this to him.

Through a haze of rage and grief, he ordered drinks he didn’t want and paid for them. He heard people talking around him. Some of them spoke to him. He spoke to some of them. The ones who mattered knew why he was here, what he wanted; he didn’t need to go looking for them, not yet.

By no flicker of attention or shift of expression did Morn betray she knew Nick Succorso was alive. But Angus read the heightened hue of her skin and thought he understood it.