The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (37 page)

“But I’ll
tell you what really makes me feel like I enlisted on the wrong side.” He
shoved a fist into one of his pockets, pulled out a crumpled sheet of hardcopy.
“While you were sleeping, we passed a UMC listening post.”

For a
second Min choked on her stew. But she didn’t lift her head; didn’t let him see
her struggle to swallow.

“Not
UMCP,” he insisted, “United Mining Companies. What the hell it’s doing out
here, I can’t tell you.
You
could probably tell
me,
but I’m not
sure I want to hear any more secrets right now.

“The
post log was holding a message for us. Not you — us. It’s coded for
Punisher
.”
Which was his only conceivable excuse for not waking her up right away and
giving her the message directly. “But it’s not from Command Operations. Hell, it’s
not even from Centre. It’s from Warden Dios himself.

“It
makes me sick.”

“Fine.”
Min slammed down her spoon so hard the stew slopped over the edges of the bowl.
“
You
be sick.” She stuck out her hand. “
I’ll
read the message.”

Abruptly
she caught a glint of malicious humour from his eyes. “Here.” He dropped the
hardcopy on the table beside her hand. “After you read it, you can be sick on
the floor. The bosun doesn’t mind — he’s used to messy galleys by now.”

Stifling
obscenities, Min picked up the sheet and smoothed it out so that she could see
what it said.

He was
right: the transmission was from Warden Dios. And coded for
Punisher
. As
if he didn’t trust her to obey him —

The
first part of the message contained warnings. Sorting through the codes and the
official locutions, she gleaned the information that
Free Lunch
was a
mercenary working for Hashi Lebwohl. Contracted to DA as an observer, Captain
Scroyle had returned from Thanatos Minor just ahead of the carnage. Now,
however, he had a new assignment. For reasons which Warden didn’t bother to
explain,
Free Lunch
was now under contract to destroy
Trumpet
.

Hashi,
you sonofabitch! You God
damn
son of a bitch.

Punisher
was instructed to take any steps necessary to protect the gap
scout.

In
addition, Min learned that
Soar
, a ship reported in the vicinity of
Thanatos Minor by Captain Scroyle, had been tentatively identified as
Gutbuster
.
Gutbuster
had been an illegal armed with super-light proton cannon,
formerly presumed dead or lost; but now Hashi or his people thought she might
be operating as
Soar
, with stolen id and a retrofit gap drive.

Warden
guessed she might be the vessel heading out of forbidden space in pursuit of
Trumpet
.
If that were true, she was an enemy to fear:
Gutbuster
had several kills
to her charge, and only the lack of a gap drive had prevented her specialised
cannon from doing even more damage.

All
that was bad enough. What followed was worse.

With
the highest possible priority, and on Warden Dios’ personal authority,
Punisher
was commanded to flare a signal to
Trumpet
as soon as she could get
within reach.

The
text of the signal was brief.

It
said:

Warden
Dios to Isaac, Gabriel priority.

Show
this message to Nick Succorso.

That
was all. The words were embedded in coding that Min didn’t recognise and couldn’t
read — some kind of machine language, apparently, intended to enforce
compliance from Isaac’s computer. But those twelve words were enough to make
her vision go grey around the edges and fill her heart with gall.

Succorso
wasn’t stupid. He would figure out what the signal meant. He might not know why
it was sent to him, but he would know how to use it.

Morn
Hyland was aboard
Trumpet
with the two men who had abused her most. And
her only protection was the fact that a programmed UMCP cyborg was in command.
Because of who he was, Angus wouldn’t let Nick hurt her. Because he was welded,
Angus wouldn’t hurt her himself.

But
after he got this message —

Succorso
would take command. In his own way, he was about as trustworthy as Milos
Taverner. With a ship like
Trumpet
— and with a cyborg backing him up —
he might be impossible to stop.

Morn
certainly wouldn’t be able to stop him.

Warden.
Warden.
You’ve betrayed us. Morn. Angus. Me. Humankind. You’ve betrayed
us all.

“The
truth is,” Dolph said abruptly, “I trust you.” He made no effort to keep his
voice down: he might have been making an announcement to the whole mess. “I’ve
always trusted you — I can’t stop now. And at the moment Warden Dios’ ‘personal
authority’ doesn’t mean shit to me. He let Hashi Lebwohl hire a mercenary to
attack his own people. I don’t know what that means — or what
this
means”
— he slapped a gesture at the sheet of hardcopy — “but I can guess who’s behind
it. Holt Fasner. Or Cleatus Fane doing the Dragon’s dirty work.

“So it’s
up to you. You decide. We’ll do whatever you tell us. And fuck the
consequences.”

Min
held his gaze with her eyes burning and her palms afire; she clutched her
handgun as if it were the only thing left that made sense to her. In her name
he was prepared to defy a direct order from the director of the UMCP —

“You
know,” she murmured, nearly whispering, “I could court-martial you right here
for saying that.”

A grin
bared his teeth. “I know. But you won’t.” For the second time he told her, “You
aren’t that much of a hypocrite.”

Oh,
really? Full of sudden disgust, she had to clench her teeth and grip her gun
hard to prevent herself from flinging her stew across the galley. Then what
was
she? What did all her years of dedication and loyalty come to now?

Warden was
forcing her to commit an act of treason. Treason to humankind. Or treason to
her oath of service.

What
did he want from her? Did he assume that the faithful Min Donner, so faithful
that some people called her his “executioner,” would blindly go ahead and carry
out his orders? Or did he believe, hope, pray that her commitment to the ideals
which the UMCP supposedly served would compel her to disobey him?

How
could she decide without knowing what he wanted?

Who
was
she?

While
Dolph waited for her reply, she found an answer. It was there in his face,
although he didn’t know it — and might have disavowed it if he did. At a word
from her, he was willing to commit a crime which would doom him and his whole
command. And he was willing for the simple, sufficient reason that he knew her.
She was the UMCP Enforcement Division director in the purest sense of the term:
as disinclined to treason as to lies; and passionately loyal to her own people.

For
that same reason, she had no choice now. She was
Enforcement
Division,
not DA or Administration, Command Operations or PR. Put crudely, she was the
fist of the UMCP, not the brain; not even the heart. And a fist that imposed
its own decisions on other people was only a bully, nothing more.

If
there was treason here, it was Warden’s, not hers. She didn’t make policy. It
would be a crime of another kind — a violation of her essential commitments —
if she arrogated to herself the responsibility for choosing humankind’s future.

So she
knew what to do. She hated it; but she did it.

“You’re
right,” she told Dolph. “It’s up to me.”

She
seemed to feel pieces of her heart breaking off as she announced, “I want you
to flare that signal to
Trumpet
before she reaches Massif-5.” Each raw
chunk she lost had Morn’s name on it, or Warden’s. “Which means you’re going to
have to catch up with her first.”

Which
in turn would put even more pressure on his ship and his crew. With
displacement affecting navigation,
Punisher
would have to work hard to
gain on the agile, undamaged gap scout.

“The sooner
you get started, the better.”

Dolph
Ubikwe’s name may have been on one of the pieces which cracked away.

He didn’t
appear lost, however. Under his fat, his features hardened; his shoulders
hunched up as if he were absorbing blows. But he didn’t protest or complain:
the glare in his eyes held no grievance. He appeared to be measuring her — or
measuring himself against her, wondering if he could match her.

After a
moment he let out his breath in a long sigh. “Shit, Min. And all this time I
thought being one of the good guys was supposed to be fun.”

Puffing
out his cheeks lugubriously, he heaved his bulk out of the chair.

The
acceptance behind his sarcasm touched her more than she could bear to show. In
plain gratitude, however, because he’d given her one less bereavement to carry,
she made an effort to respond in kind.

“One
more thing, Dolph.” She didn’t look up at him: she didn’t want him to see her
face. “The next time something like this happens” — she flapped Warden’s
message — “don’t keep it to yourself. It just upsets you, and when you’re upset
you’re a pain in the ass.”

“Aye,
sir, Director Donner, sir.” He sounded like he was grinning. “Whatever you say.”

She
longed for the ability to grin herself, but she was too full of grief. She’d
made her decision. If humankind suffered for it, she would shoulder the
responsibility.

Nevertheless
as Captain Ubikwe left the galley to carry out her orders, she couldn’t shake
the conviction that she’d sent him to do Morn Hyland more harm than any mortal
man or woman could sustain.

ANGUS

O
nce
Trumpet
had attained a steady course and velocity away
from the Com-Mine belt, and he and Mikka Vasaczk had recovered from the
immediate effects of g-stress unconsciousness, Angus began taking his ship by
easy stages across the light-years toward the Massif-5 system and Valdor
Industrial. He didn’t rush her between crossings. And he made no effort to pick
up more velocity so that she could cover greater distances. Instead he waited —
sometimes half an hour, sometimes an hour or more — after
Trumpet
resumed tard before he reengaged her gap drive and sent her leapfrogging the
void.

As a
result, a trip which might have been accomplished in twelve hours was going to
take the better part of two days.

He told
Mikka and the rest of his passengers that he did this to minimise the strain on
Morn. Every time
Trumpet
resumed tard, the ship had to be ready for
emergency manoeuvres. The chance always existed that navigational imprecision
might drop her down a gravity well, or place her uncomfortably close to an
obstacle. And of course no astrogation database could possibly include every
rogue lump of rock prowling the vast dark. In consequence Davies had to put
Morn to sleep before each crossing so that sudden g wouldn’t send her into
gap-sickness.

Angus
told his companions that he wanted to spare Morn the ordeal of being paralysed
by her zone implant control all the way to Valdor Industrial.

And he
used the same excuse to explain why he did nothing to evade pursuit from any of
the three ships which
Trumpet’s
sensors had recorded when she’d come out
of the gap on the edge of the Com-Mine belt. One of those ships was parked
right over the listening post Angus had used; another drove toward human space
from the direction of Thanatos Minor; the third showed every sign of being a
UMCP warship primed for battle. Any or all of them might come after
Trumpet
— yet Angus did nothing to confuse his trace.

He didn’t
want to subject Morn to evasive manoeuvres, he said. Not after what she’d been
through. And
Trumpet
would be difficult to follow in any case. A pursuer
would have to quarter the vacuum for hours after each crossing in order to pick
up her particle trail. And even that effort would be wasted if the pursuer
couldn’t estimate accurately how far the gap scout went with each crossing. On
top of that, even if the pursuer guessed
Trumpet’s
destination and
simply headed for Massif-5, there was no guarantee — perhaps no likelihood —
that the gap scout could be located in that huge, complex, virtually unchartable
system.

Nick
sneered at this explanation. Mikka faced it with a scowl of disapproval. Morn
insisted that she was willing to spend as much time locked in artificial dreams
as necessary to help
Trumpet
reach Massif-5 safely.

Angus
ignored them.

It was
all bullshit, of course. In fact, it was
stupid.
It outraged his
instincts, appalled his fears. He could feel ships of every kind harrying him
like Furies across the dark as if they were already within reach of scan;
perhaps within reach of fire.

But the
truth was that his programming wouldn’t let him either hurry or dodge. As if
Trumpet’s
homing signal weren’t enough of a betrayal, his datacore required him to behave
with the mindless predictability of a moron; to ensure that any ship that
followed him would find him impossible to lose.