The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (20 page)

Angus
had already pushed those numbers through his own computer, verified them
against his databases. He wanted Mikka to run them herself simply to show him
that she was competent.

This
was her first opportunity to look at what the gap scout could do. She already
had enough information to guess how far the ship could go in tach; like Nick,
however, she was surprised by
Trumpet’s
thrust-to-mass ratio. Moving more
quickly now, she returned to her course projection. The macro-plot was replaced
by a more proximate line. Without lifting her head from her board, she told
Angus, “We’ve got a window on that heading in twenty-seven minutes. At this
velocity, we can cover 6.2 light-years every time we go into tach. That’s good
— we won’t have to go anywhere near Com-Mine or the belt.”

Then
she looked up at Angus. “But we can do better. I’ve never seen a small ship
with this much thrust. Hell, we’re as fast as
Captain’s Fancy
. And a lot
more agile. If we burn” — she punched in more numbers, scanned the results — “for
the next twenty minutes, we can hit almost
.
3C. We might be able to
cross as much as seven light-years. If we accelerate enough after we hit human
space, we can probably do tach in ten light-year hunks. That’ll save us a lot
of time between here and Valdor.”

Angus
dismissed the suggestion. “In the meantime, Morn goes crazy every time we hit
hard g. Someday gap-sickness is going to take hold of her and not let go. I don’t
want to push her luck.

“Anyway,”
he added, “we’re not in that goddamn much of a hurry. Nobody knows where we’re
going. We don’t have to act desperate about getting there.”

Mikka
opened her mouth to argue; closed it again. The falseness of his answer was
hidden from her. After staring at him for a moment, she shook her head and
turned back to her board.

He
drank coffee and watched her while he waited for his ruin to commence.

Shortly
before
Trumpet
hit the window, he chimed the cabins to announce, “Zero g
in five minutes. Make sure you’re secure. Except you, Nick. Bouncing off the
bulkheads’ll be good for you.

“Davies,
is Morn all right?”

“I’m
fine,” Morn replied promptly. “I’ve given Davies the control. He’ll turn me
back on” — the bridge speaker made her sound little and distant — “when you
tell him it’s safe.”

Stifling
a snarl, Angus toggled off the intercom.

He
waited until the last minute before laying in his tach parameters.

As his
datacore gave them to him, he recognised them: the first small, subtle step in
his imposed self-destruction.

Mikka
recognised them, too, in different terms. Suddenly frightened, she swung her
station to face him. “Angus!” she snapped, “what the hell are you doing?”

He
replied with a blank glare.

“That’s
the Com-Mine belt!” she protested. “We can go farther than that — you’re
cutting our gap crossing short. God damn it, Angus, we’re going to resume tard
right on the edge of the belt. Where Com-Mine Security and any number of miners
and maybe the whole goddamn UMCP will have a chance at us!”

“You
think I don’t know that?” he snorted. She couldn’t override him: her board had
no access to the helm. “But I’m supposed to send a fucking message. Hashi
Asshole wants a report. And Morn wants me to do it. Well,
that’s
the
nearest listening post — right there on the goddamn edge of the goddamn belt.”

The
facts were true. Only the explanation was a lie.

Bitterly
he concluded, “You think I can afford to ignore it?”

“I
think,” she rasped back, “if you were in such a hurry to report, you wouldn’t
have come here in the first place. You would have gone straight for human space
and saved about nine hours.”

“Think
what you want,” he retorted. “I don’t give a shit.”

Before
she could protest further, he keyed commands which flung
Trumpet
into
the centre of his tach window.

As
Com-Mine Security had discovered when they arrested him and took
Bright
Beauty’s
datacore, his many illegalities hadn’t made him rich. In all his
crimes, he’d never accumulated enough credit to buy or retrofit a gap drive. So
he’d never actually piloted a vessel into tach until Warden Dios put him aboard
Trumpet
. Nevertheless his welded resources gave him the knowledge of an
expert. And he already had the instincts.

Despite
his mounting dread and helpless anger, his hands were as steady as servos as he
engaged the gap field generator; slipped
Trumpet
into the gap and out
again without discernible transition, as if nothing significant had happened.

The
change was dramatic, however. The red giant’s mass and emissions vanished;
inevitably the ship slewed off course, pulled aside by stored inertia as
centrifugal and gravitic forces vanished. Angus’ weight sawed him against his
belts while
Trumpet’s
automatic systems used navigational thrust to
absorb the new vectors. In the same instant scan broke into a mad jumble of
dissociated impulses: the instruments were struggling to see a starfield which
was no longer present; to filter out radiant distortion which had been left
three light-years behind.

The
computers had already extrapolated a template from the gap drive parameters,
however. Otherwise they would have had to spend long minutes running SAC
programs on the astrogation databases in order to identify the ship’s position.
Still
Trumpet
was deaf and blind for five seconds before she could begin
to interpret the new readings accurately.

Then
the displays and readouts sprang back into coherence; and Mikka cried out, “Christ!”

At the
same instant the ship’s proximity alarms went off like banshees, wailing of
destruction.

Angus’
instincts were good; as precise in their way as the calculations of his
microprocessor. Together instinct and calculation handled the crossing
correctly. Despite the inertial course displacement,
Trumpet
hit human
space within 5000k of her intended re-entry target.

Unfortunately
the error occurred toward the belt rather than away from it.
Trumpet
resumed tard at more than 70,000kps on a collision course for an asteroid the
size of an Amnion warship.

Years
with Nick had trained Mikka well. She brought up targ and slammed charge into
the ship’s forward lasers almost instantly; too quickly to notice that Angus
could deal with the emergency on his own.

In a
splinter of time too small for his synapses to measure, his zone implants split
him into pieces. He began multitasking like a megaCPU.

At
machine speeds the helm computations were trivial: distance and velocity; the
amount of thrust necessary to pull
Trumpet
away from collision; the
scale of raw g human tissue — not to mention the ship herself — might
conceivably endure. Then compromise, trade off one factor against the others:
that
much g was needed;
this
much was available;
so
much could be
survived.

Angus
had one hand on the helm keys as soon as he recognised the emergency.

But his
datacore also required other, simultaneous actions which necessitated more
complex calculations. The listening post was
there
, roughly three
light-seconds away. In order to tightbeam a transmission,
Trumpet’s
main
dish had to be focused
there
— and programmed to retain orientation while
the ship manoeuvred.

Angus’
free hand fired commands like lightning at the communications keys. His
datacore assigned his report to Warden Dios a priority as high as survival. If
Trumpet
hit the asteroid and died, his report would die with her. Therefore he wasn’t
allowed to wait until he’d resolved the danger of collision.

At the
same time he had one more job to do; one more small step to take toward his own
ruin.

This
was his best chance. Mikka couldn’t see what he did: she was too busy, too
desperate. In seconds the lasers would be ready.

In a
few seconds more the ship would either live or die.

Prewritten
exigencies jumped at the opportunity. Screaming inside while his zone implants
compelled him, Angus activated a homing signal; a constant transmission of
navigational data and gap drive parameters, updated at every change. It was a
dedicated UMCP signal: no one else would be able to interpret it. But it would
enable any cop to follow him wherever he went.

Hashi
Lebwohl or Warden Dios wanted to be sure they were able to get their hands on
him.

Betrayal
—

Angus
had let Morn think he was taking her to a bootleg lab near VI. But a homing
signal denied that; made him a liar. Once the cops caught up with
Trumpet
,
they could invoke Angus’ priority-codes. Put someone else in Milos’ position
over him; some earnest or corrupt cop who didn’t give a shit about Morn’s hopes
— or Angus’ promises. Mikka and Ciro, Vector and Sib would be arrested. Morn
would be silenced. Angus himself might be dismantled. And Nick —

Nick
would probably be given a fucking medal.

Everything
would be lost.

But
Angus didn’t have time to curse his tormentors. Mikka hammered at her board;
her fists seemed to fling bolts of crimson fire toward the looming hunk of
stone. And in the same heartbeat all of his disparate actions took effect.

The
communications readout showed the transmission dish revolving into alignment.
An impersonal blip on the bottom of the screen indicated that the signal was
active.

And
lateral thrust — rapid brisance thrust of a kind usually reserved for cruisers
and destroyers — began to blare through
Trumpet’s
hull, driving Mikka
and even Angus almost instantaneously to the edge of blackout. No ordinary gap
scout could have burned hard enough to avoid that collision. If she hadn’t been
rebuilt specifically for this mission — as full of secrets as Angus himself —
she would have died.

Mikka’s
hands fell from the targ keys as acceleration compressed her like putty in the
corner of her g-seat.

The
pieces into which Angus had been divided reassembled themselves there, on the
boundary of unconsciousness. While darkness piled up inside his head as if it
leaked in from the vast outer void, he had room for one bitter instant of
gratitude.

Mikka
hadn’t seen what he was doing. She couldn’t have.

He had
at least that much reason to believe there were no witnesses to this one act of
treachery.

If he
could have held himself out of the roaring dark for just a few more seconds,
however,
Trumpet’s
scan would have told him that he was wrong.

MIN

“D
irector Donner.”

The
intercom seemed to reach her asleep on the bottom of a deep sea of exhaustion.
Dreams as viscid and impenetrable as the depths of an ocean held her down,
despite the metallic demand of the speaker.

“Director,
can you hear me?”

No, she
couldn’t hear him. Even Dolph Ubikwe’s voice didn’t have the power to plumb her
fatigue. Concealed by the depths, bombs and shame pressed her down. Morn Hyland
had been abandoned: betrayed and then abandoned. Sold to Nick Succorso as if
she were nothing more than a credit-jack; not even worth picking up off the
floor after he discarded her. Godsen Frik was dead, and Sixten Vertigus had
nearly died, and Warden Dios had sent Min here to witness the outcome of Morn’s
abandonment; of Holt Fasner’s manipulations and his own crimes. Trapped in
mortification, she would never hear the intercom.

“Director,
this is the bridge. We’ve got traffic.”

Nevertheless
she did hear. She was Min Donner: she rose to such demands, no matter what they
cost. And Warden had
reason to think Morn Hyland may survive
— He’d told
her so. The game he played was deeper than dreams.

Somehow
her hands found the seals on the g-sheath and webbing which secured her in her
bunk; her legs swung out. As soon as her boots touched the deck, she reached
for the intercom.

Swallowing
shame and abandonment, she called, “Bridge. Captain Ubikwe.” Unselfconsciously
she rubbed the butt of her handgun to reassure herself that it was still in its
holster. She’d slept fully dressed and armed so that she would be ready for
this moment. “What traffic?”

“There’s
two of them,” Dolph Ubikwe answered promptly, “but we haven’t got id yet.”

His
bass rumble made her notice that a few hours of rest had improved her hearing.
Her eardrums felt acutely sensitive, but they no longer reported voices as if
they were caught in a feedback loop.

“They
haven’t announced themselves,” he went on. He sounded tired himself, despite
the intercom’s inflectionless speaker. “On the other hand, we haven’t asked.
And we aren’t broadcasting, so why should they?”