The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (105 page)

“There’s
probably some way to turn it off,” he finished, “but I haven’t figured out how.”

Deliberately
he didn’t say, If
Soar
catches us — or if
Calm Horizons
actually
comes after us — maybe we’ll have help. He didn’t dare. Like Morn and Vector,
he knew too much about UMCP corruption. He couldn’t stifle his inherited
respect for Min Donner, but he no longer trusted anything Warden Dios did.

If the
UMCP director had really intended to free Angus, why had he first given Nick Angus’
codes?

“Shit,”
Mikka breathed. “This is a mess. A fucking mess. Whose side are we on? What’re
we supposed to do? Angus rescues us from
Soar
and
Free Lunch
, I
still don’t understand how, and then he starts shouting so loud we can’t hide
from
anybody
. God, that datacore in his head must have made him crazy.”

Davies
reached out to silence the intercom, then stopped himself. “Vector,” he asked, “is
there anything you want to say while you have the chance? Anything else you
want to know?

“Ciro?”

Vector
made a tired sound which might have been intended as a chuckle. “Words fail me,”
he drawled. “I’m just glad I’m not trained for helm. Or targ. This is
your
problem.
You’ll handle it better than I would.”

Ciro
didn’t reply. He may not have heard the intercom at all.

Thanks.
Davies took a bitter breath, let it out slowly. Just what I wanted to hear.

“In
that case,” he muttered thinly, “you’d better brace yourself for another fight.
Secure Angus in sickbay, Vector. Take Morn to her cabin, put her to bed. Then
do the same yourself. No matter what we do, we aren’t safe until we get away
from Massif-5.”

“Right.”
Davies” speaker emitted a small pop as Vector toggled the sickbay intercom.

Mikka
kept the ship-wide channel open, however. As soon as Davies silenced his pickup,
she leaned over hers.

“Ciro,
did you hear all that? Are you all right? Ciro?”

Still
Ciro didn’t say anything.

Was he
asleep? Unconscious?

Or was
Vector wrong?

If
Sorus Chatelaine’s mutagen had become active —

Even
now Mikka moved slowly. Fatigue and gloom weighted her movements as she
undipped her belts and floated up from the command station. “I need to check on
him,” she murmured as if she were talking to herself; as if no one else would
care what she did. “If he’s all right, he would have answered.”

“Mikka!”
Davies protested involuntarily. The thought of being left alone appalled him.
He couldn’t do everything himself; the burden was too much to bear. “I can’t
run helm!”

But the
panic in his voice dismayed him. Despite his weakness, he swallowed as much
distress as he could. “I haven’t had time to learn,” he said more quietly. “If
Soar
shows up while you’re off the bridge, we won’t stand a chance.”

She
didn’t look at him. Squinting with anxiety or yearning, she studied the empty
passage at the head of the companionway as if she were peering into a darkness
as deep as the black hole
Trumpet
had left behind. Yet she didn’t move
away. Adrift above the command station, she stared one-eyed at the passage like
a woman who hoped that the singularity’s attraction might release some fatal
truth, if only she waited for it long enough; wanted it enough.

Watching
her, Davies thought his heart would stop. He’d come to the end of what he could
do. No wonder Morn had chosen to go with Nick instead of turning herself over
to Com-Mine Security. Her son would have done the same: her hunger for the
artificial transcendence of her zone implant made sense to him. Like her, he
didn’t know how to live with his limits.

“Please,
Mikka,” he breathed. “Vector did the best he could. He said the antimutagen
worked. I need you here.”

So
softly that he barely heard her, she answered, “You don’t know what it’s like.
He isn’t your brother. You don’t know him the way I do.

“Vector
cured him, but he’s not all right. Sorus — She hurt him in places I can’t
reach.”

Surrendering
to the drag of her weariness, she sank back to the command g-seat. Her hand on
the seat back settled her against the cushions. She closed the belts around her
again. For a moment she bowed her head: she may have been praying. Then,
burdened and slow, her movements clogged with loss, she lifted her hands to the
board and began tapping keys like a woman who’d abandoned hope.

Places
I can’t reach.

Davies
didn’t think he would be able to put off weeping much longer.

 _

 _

Indications of battle
reached
Trumpet
before she found the fringes of the swarm. Emissions on
particular wavelengths leaked through the thinning barrier of stones:
characteristic spikes of violence registered on the ship’s sensors and sifters.

Matter
cannon, the scan computer announced across one of Davies’ readouts. Two
sources, presumably blasting at each other. One delivered fire in concentrated
barrages, pausing to recharge between them. The other blazed away less
powerfully but more steadily, pouring out a nearly continuous stream of force.

One
source — the one firing constantly — appeared closer to the swarm. The other
lay more directly in line with
Trumpet’s
heading.

Davies
routed everything scan gave him to the displays so that Mikka could follow it with
him. But he didn’t say anything. She didn’t need advice or instructions. After
her years with Nick, she knew far more about actual combat than he did.

In any
case, he felt too weak to talk.
As far as I can tell, I’m Bryony Hyland’s
daughter. The one she used to have — before you sold your soul for a zone
implant.
Driven by distress, he’d sneered at Morn; but he saw clearly now
that he’d been dishonest with her — and with himself. If anyone had offered him
a zone implant here, he would have accepted at once, despite all the time he’d
spent watching her pay for her decisions.

Mikka
herself was too weary to discuss the situation. Mutely they concentrated on
their separate responsibilities.

First
she slowed
Trumpet’s
pace to a walk. Then she began picking her course
forward with extreme care, keeping the gap scout occluded by the largest
asteroids she could find. From behind rocks charged with static,
Trumpet
could peek out toward the embattled ships while taking the smallest possible
risk that either of them might catch a glimpse of her.

They
could hear her already: that was unavoidable. If her scan could see their
cannon firing, their dishes could certainly receive her transmissions. But her
broadcast and the homing signal still reached outward by bouncing off
quantities of stone. For that reason, the combatants might not be able to
triangulate on her position.

As
Trumpet
eased past the horizon of each successive asteroid, Davies sharpened his
efforts to learn everything he could about those ships.

The
same radiant reflection which helped conceal the gap scout prevented him from
determining their positions with any precision. Nevertheless the rough angles
of the rocks did little to distort other kinds of information: thrust
characteristics; energy profiles; emission signatures. Before
Trumpet
reached the last stones she could trust to cover her, stones several times her
size, his computer gave him id.

As
steadily as he could, he coded the display blips which approximated the
locations of the combatants.

One was
Calm Horizons
. An Amnion “defensive” engaged in an act of war. The
computer knew her too well to be mistaken.

From
where she waited, she covered all
Trumpet’s
conceivable lines of escape.

The
other must have been
Punisher
. Her signature matched that of the vessel
Trumpet
had passed when the gap scout had first emerged from forbidden space. If
Trumpet
had been sending out a Class-1 UMCP homing signal all this time, a UMCP cruiser
would have had no difficulty following her here.

Scan
suggested that
Punisher
was on a course which may have been intended to
put her between
Calm Horizons
and
Trumpet
.

Davies
couldn’t imagine how either of them survived. They both poured out enough
destruction to pulverise each other a dozen times over. However, his scan image
wasn’t yet exact enough to tell him what evasive actions they took — or what
condition their sinks and shields were in.

Nevertheless
for some reason
Calm Horizons
wasn’t using her super-light proton
cannon. Even surrounded by reflections and static, the gap scout’s instruments
could hardly fail to recognise that specific type of emission.

Probably
the Amnioni kept her most powerful gun charged and ready so that she could be
sure of killing
Trumpet
.

Suddenly
Davies found that he couldn’t swallow. His mouth was too dry. The pain of his
damaged bones had become an incessant throbbing, like a knife in his side.
Despite his best efforts to control them, his hands shook on his board.

Bryony
Hyland’s daughter. Before you sold your soul —

With a
touch of her finger, Mikka keyed her intercom. For the first time in nearly two
hours, she broke the silence.

“All
right, Vector, Ciro — Angus and Morn, if you can hear me. This is it.” Fatigue
throbbed in her voice, but she seemed to ignore it by an act of will. She was
nothing if not a fighter. “We’re at the edge of the swarm. And we have two
ships in our way. They’re going at each other hard. Maybe they’re fighting over
us. The computer says one of them is UMCP cruiser
Punisher
. The other’s
our old friend
Calm Horizons
.”

She scowled
darkly. “At least now we know what we’re worth. Apparently war isn’t too high a
price to pay.”

Somehow
Warden Dios or Hashi Lebwohl had brought this about. But was it what they
wanted? Or had they simply made some terrible miscalculation?

“I can’t
be sure,” Mikka growled, “but I think by now our broadcast is leaking out where
it can be heard. It’s a good bet both
Punisher
and
Calm Horizons
know what we’re doing. Before long they won’t be the only ones.

“That’s
the good news.

“The
bad news is, we can’t get past them. They have us covered. Unless we want to go
all the way back through the swarm,” back past the raging hunger of the black
hole, “we’re stuck here until one of them finishes the other off.

“I
guess we’d better hope
Punisher
does the finishing. We still don’t know
what the damn cops want, but they aren’t likely to kill us as fast as the
Amnion will.”

Tiredly,
Mikka silenced the intercom. Without a glance at Davies, she went back to work,
looking for ways to improve
Trumpet’s
position which wouldn’t expose the
gap scout to direct scan from either
Punisher
or
Calm Horizons
.

Shamed
by her example, he wrestled for calm.
Bryony Hyland’s daughter
, like
hell. The woman who’d stayed at her post and died to save her ship would have
cringed at the sight of him. There were worse things than zone implants; worse
crimes than selling his soul. Being too weak to remember his parents was one of
them; too weak to remember what he cared about, or why —

Angus
and Morn had saved his life. It was his turn.

Angus
had told him once
, You’re spending too much time on the guns. Concentrate on
our defences.
Weapons wouldn’t save
Trumpet
now: she couldn’t face
down a warship in open space. No matter what Hashi Lebwohl had done for her,
she didn’t have that much firepower.

Davies
let his hands shake. Trembling wouldn’t kill him. He had more important things
to worry about.

Deliberately
he checked the dispersion field generator; ran every status and diagnostic
check he could find. Then he turned to scan again, searching the discernible
spectrum for information he might be able to use.

He
nearly cried out when he caught sight of
Soar
.

Like
Calm
Horizons
, she was too well-known; the computer couldn’t be wrong about her.

She was
scarcely forty k away — a trivial distance in space, but still considerable in
the fringes of the swarm. In fact, it was possible that she hadn’t spotted
Trumpet
yet. Plenty of rock jockeyed and ricocheted in the gap between them. Most of
Trumpet’s
data about her enemy came in by reflection — and there was nothing symmetrical
about the way emissions bounced around the stones.

Soar
appeared to be limping; manoeuvring poorly. But her
guns were charged — poised for use.

Shaking
feverishly, Davies labelled her blip on the display so that Mikka could see it.

Her jaw
sank as she looked at the screen. “Perfect,” she muttered to herself. “Fucking
perfect.”