The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (38 page)

With
every passing hour, the taste of freedom turned more sour in his mouth. What
good did it do him to make his own decisions if he had to carry them out like
an idiot?

The men
who’d programmed him scorned his desire for escape. Even when they loosened
their control over him, they didn’t let him go.

Warden
Dios had said,
It’s got to stop. We’ve committed a crime against your soul.
He
must have been lying: every transmission from
Trumpet’s
homing signal
proclaimed that this particular crime was far from over. Yet why had he lied?
He’d called Angus a
machina infernalis.
What kind of man lied to a
machine?

Angus
wanted to believe that Dios hadn’t lied. He needed to believe
some
thing.
But each slow, imposed step of
Trumpet’s
voyage to Valdor insisted that
he was deluding himself.

And
cowards who deluded themselves paid for it with abuse, humiliation, and death.

Eventually
he stopped talking to the people around him or answering questions — even when
Morn asked them. If he couldn’t say,
You’ve been betrayed, we’ve all been
betrayed,
he couldn’t bear to speak at all.

From
time to time Ciro brought him sandwiches and coffee. Under pressure from his
sister, Ciro had taken on the duties of a cabin boy. Apparently he considered
this a demotion, and he didn’t like it. Nevertheless he was plainly capable of
discipline as well as loyalty. And he’d already shown that he had courage. He
only allowed himself a hint of sullenness as he served Angus and Mikka at the
command stations, or offered food to anyone else who happened to be on the
bridge.

Mikka
remained at the second’s station for several hours after
Trumpet
left
the Com-Mine belt behind. If Angus wanted a little help, she gave it. The rest
of the time she spent familiarising herself with the ship. When she reached the
end of her stamina, he sent her off the bridge to sleep and ran the ship alone
until she came back.

He
could have asked almost anyone aboard to take her place, but he didn’t. He had
no intention of giving Nick access to
Trumpet’s
databases and
programming again. Morn couldn’t stay on the bridge while
Trumpet
went
into tach; and she needed Davies with her. Between crossings, Vector virtually
lived at the auxiliary engineering console, belted to the stool so that he
wouldn’t drift away, but he wasn’t working for the ship. Instead he used the
console to reconstruct as much as he could of his research at Intertech, and
then to write programs which would help him analyse Nick’s antimutagen. And Sib
Mackern had assigned himself the job of guarding Nick. He was no good with a
gun — Angus had already seen him in action — but he seemed to consider Nick the
worst danger
Trumpet
was likely to face, and he was determined to
prevent Nick from doing any more damage.

As for
Nick, he appeared to have slipped into a state of cheerful lunacy. He
understood what was said in his presence well enough to sneer at it, but he
didn’t talk himself. When he wasn’t in his cabin, he floated the bridge,
bobbing around and around the command stations like some frail old fool who’d
lost contact with gravity or reality. At intervals he smiled to himself as if
he’d slipped into senility while his medtech wasn’t looking. His scars were
pale under his eyes, the colour of cold ash. Despite the fact that Sib was always
with him, always watching, he ignored the nervous man as if Sib were invisible.

Angus
trusted none of this. For one thing, he didn’t believe that Sib was actually
capable of handling Nick. And for another, he felt sure that Nick’s amiable
dissociation was nothing more than a pose. Nevertheless he didn’t lock Nick
away. His datacore didn’t give him that option. Instead he was forced to rely
on Sib — and anyone else who happened to be nearby.

Twelve
hours passed; then twenty-four; thirty. Mikka’s calculations and Angus’ agreed
that
Trumpet
was still roughly ten hours from the fringes of the Valdor
system at her present pace. Five minutes after he informed his passengers that
he intended to coast for an hour before the next crossing, Morn and Davies came
to the bridge.

Perhaps
by coincidence, everyone else was there as well. Mikka had resumed the second’s
station. Nick orbited her seat and Angus’ under Sib’s anxious stare. Ciro had
just brought another light meal from the galley. And Vector concentrated on the
auxiliary engineering console as if he’d forgotten that he was human and needed
rest — as if his awareness had shrunk down to his hands and the small screen,
precluding people and distraction; precluding sleep. While he worked, his mouth
pursed and relaxed, pursed and relaxed, according to some rhythm of its own.
Angus had the impression that the geneticist whistled soundlessly through his
teeth as he entered data or wrote programs, then paused when he considered the
results.

Morn
surveyed the bridge; she and Davies accepted foodbars and g-flasks of coffee
from Ciro. In the absence of internal spin, they couldn’t stand anywhere. But
her training had taught her the knack of floating in a stable position.
Apparently Davies had the same ability.

After a
bit of her foodbar and a sip of coffee, she turned to Angus.

“How is
it going?” Her tone was carefully neutral. “Where are we?”

She
didn’t look much better than she had a day or two ago. She hadn’t yet had
enough food and rest to cure her core exhaustion. However, she wasn’t suffering
from withdrawal; and the release of that particular strain showed in the small
muscles around her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the lessened fever of her
movements. In addition, she’d used the san until her hair and skin gleamed with
cleanliness. She might have been trying to scour away her hours as a prisoner
of the Amnion. Or perhaps it was Nick’s touch she wanted to scrub from her
nerves.

Or the
memory of what Angus had done to her.

Simply
seeing her made his stomach hurt like knives twisting inside him.

Instead
of speaking, he keyed an astrogation plot to one of the main screens and let
her interpret it for herself.

She
looked at it, glanced toward Davies. The two of them nodded like twins: they
both drew on the same education and experience to understand the display.

“When
will we get there?” she asked Angus.

He
scowled without replying. I’ve been betrayed. You’ve been betrayed. Something
has got to stop, that’s obvious, but it sure as hell won’t be the crimes of the
fucking UMCP.

“Angus
—” Morn began as if she meant to warn him; threaten him.

Davies
swam closer to the command station.

“I don’t
know what his problem is,” Mikka put in brusquely. “At a guess, I would say
sleep deprivation is making him psychotic.” Nick snorted at this, but didn’t
interrupt. Flashing a glare in his direction, Mikka continued to Morn, “He
doesn’t answer questions anymore.

“But he
gave me projections.” Now Mikka had Davies’ attention as well as Morn’s. “He
had to — I couldn’t plan a course through the system until he told me when we
would reach it. I don’t think there’s a complete chart on Massif-5 anywhere in
human space, but even the ones we have would be useless if we didn’t know the
time. We can just about estimate the positions of the twelve planets and Valdor
itself, but without the time we couldn’t predict where even the twenty-five or
thirty largest planetoids, comets, and asteroid swarms are in their orbits.

“He
told me we’ll hit the edge of the system in” — she checked a readout — “9.3
hours. For the first fifteen or twenty hours of this trip, I thought he was
crazy to take it so slow. But now I can see at least one advantage. If you don’t
count a few hundred uncharted asteroids and maybe even a singularity or two,
arriving nine hours from now is going to give us a relatively clear insertion
into the system. We won’t have to start right out dodging major gravity wells
and rock.

“After
that —” She shrugged. “Then it gets messy.”

Everyone
except Vector and Nick watched her while she spoke, letting her tell them what
they already knew as if hearing it from her might help them get ready; defuse
their fears.

“Massif-5
is a binary system,” Mikka said stolidly, “and all that stellar mass has
attracted a staggering amount of rock and rubble. There are twelve main
planets, all on different orbital planes. Some of them move at really
astonishing velocities in loops around both stars, others circle just one or
the other, and a couple circuit the whole well. They all have moons — some as
many as thirty — and four of them have rings. In addition there are asteroid
swarms flung in all directions like shrapnel. There are maybe a hundred
planetoids, some of them with truly crazy orbits around the stars and several
of the planets. We have nine comets on record, some of them pretty big. Then
there’s the debris — everything from fist-size rocks burning at
.
2 or
.
3C
to the drifting hulks of wrecked ships.”

Angus
growled to himself as he studied the problem. He wasn’t especially worried
about his ability to navigate the system —
he
could do that better than
anyone — but he hated the prospect of taking
Trumpet
through that maze
slowly enough to be safe.

“All
that would be a hell of a challenge in any case,” Mikka continued, “but
unfortunately there’s more. Apparently singularities breed in the gravitic
stresses of binary systems. The good news is that only five have been found. So
far. The bad news is that their orbits are unstable — and they have so much
pull that they distort the orbits around them. Which means,” she added grimly, “that
any given piece of information in our databases could well become obsolete at
any time.

“In
other words, the system is a fucking nightmare.”

She
knew what she was talking about. She and Ciro had been born on Valdor
Industrial.

“Of
course” — she shrugged again — “it’s also a treasure house. That’s why Valdor
was put here in the first place. Massif-5 has resources on a scale you can’t
imagine. But now there’s another reason. VI has become the main research
facility in human space for studying singularities, trying to find some way to
harness all that power.”

Her
tone hardened. “Which is also why there are more pirates and bootleg operations
in this system than in most of the rest of human space put together.”

Running
commands with blunt ease, she brought up a 3-D schematic of the Valdor system
on one of the displays. “We’re going there.” A couple of keys made a small
swirl of dots roughly a third of the way across the system blink amber. “As you
can see, it’s not exactly close to our point of insertion.

“It’s
an asteroid swarm that doesn’t have enough inertia to escape the gravity well.
Unless a singularity pulls it aside, it’ll curve inward and finally plunge into
Lesser Massif-5 maybe twenty years from now. But in the middle of it, protected
by several thousand other pieces of rock, is an asteroid big enough to be a
moon.

“That’s
where the lab we’re headed for is located.”

Davies
was listening hard, but his manner no longer resembled Morn’s. She was focused
on Mikka; but he looked repeatedly away to see what Nick was doing or to watch
for Angus’ reaction. Angus suspected that he hadn’t slept much since he’d come
aboard: he seemed to burn at too high a temperature for rest.

He held
Morn’s zone implant control: he turned her on and off for every gap crossing.
But what did he do while she was helpless?

Angus
couldn’t refrain from imagining what Davies might do with his power; what Angus
himself would do in his son’s place.

The
idea left him sick with desire.

Desire
and dismay. He’d already proven that he couldn’t beat Morn: that his efforts to
degrade and master her were nothing more than wasted attempts to get out of the
crib. He’d spent his whole life in that struggle, but he’d never been able to
break free.

He
hardly heard Davies ask Mikka, “Have you been there?”

Mikka
shook her head. “All I know is rumours and scuttlebutt — the kind of stories
you would expect to hear in a system full of illegals. Nick says he went once.
If he did, I haven’t heard him talk about it.”

Nick
waved a hand dismissively, but everyone ignored him.

“The
people who
do
talk,” Mikka said, “don’t give it a name. They just call
it the Lab. But it’s more like a complete research facility.

“I don’t
know if the cops know about it.” She didn’t wait for Morn or Davies to tell
her. “I assume they do. It’s been there for twenty-five years. But they’ve
never tried to shut it down. With all that rock running interference, it’s damn
near impregnable. You have to go in slow — and some of those asteroids have
matter cannon emplacements dug into them.

“In any
case, it’s not a good target. It doesn’t have any dealings with the Amnion. It’s
more like one of those med labs on Earth that researches ways to make rich
people look richer by experimenting on protected animals — like human beings.

“In
fact, this place does plenty of med research. They study zone implants. They
make cyborgs. A lot of BR surgery was invented here. So were the techniques
that let people survive self-mutilation. But it’s not primarily a med lab. That’s
just a sideline to finance what they really do.”