The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (7 page)

Suppose
for the moment that Nick Succorso and Sorus Chatelaine were working together;
that they’d conceived a plan to bring themselves almost limitless wealth. And
suppose, further, that Morn Hyland had opposed them, inspired by her old enmity
toward
Gutbuster
, if not by loyalty to the UMCP. Suppose that they’d
decided to rid themselves of her, and to greatly increase their opportunities
for wealth, by producing and then selling the DA immunity drug under
circumstances designed to terrify the population of human space.

According
to this hypothesis, Nick had taken Morn to Enablement so that the Amnion could
make use of her — perhaps by transforming her into some manner of genetic kaze
aimed at UMCPHQ itself. After that everything he, Sorus, and the Amnion did had
been part of an elaborate charade.

Hashi
reconstructed the charade in his mind, even though it made him tremble.

The
Amnion had pursued
Captain’s Fancy
to Billingate in order to create the
illusion that they wished to stop Nick and Morn. To confirm that impression,
Nick had sent her to the Bill in an ejection pod. From Joshua and Milos
Taverner, Nick had learned what had brought a UMCP cyborg to Thanatos Minor.
Then he and his partner, Captain Chatelaine, had begun the rumours that she
possessed an antimutagen.

To
demonstrate the efficacy of her drug, as well as to reinforce the impression
that he was bargaining in order to save his own life, he’d given Morn back to
the Amnion. With their connivance, he’d retrieved her again. After that, he’d
tricked his way aboard
Trumpet
, perhaps with Milos Taverner’s aid.

Hashi’s
pulse pounded in his head; in his eyes. He rode a mad swirl of phosphenes and
alarm. His hypothesis was self-consistent. It fit the available data. It could
be true.

If Nick
succeeded at putting her aboard the gap scout, Morn would survive to wreak
mutagenic ruin on the UMCP. And the knowledge that Sorus Chatelaine had
obtained an immunity drug would spread. It was spreading even now. Genetic
kazes were the stuff of nightmare — the worst horror visceral human DNA could
imagine. Driven by panic, humankind would offer her every kind and scale of
riches in self-defence.

You
deserve her.

Nick
had sent his message to Hashi as a taunt, trusting that no cop would be able to
guess the dark truth. Of course, his plan would fail if the UMCP themselves
made the drug available. But they could hardly do so when a genetic kaze had
gone off in their faces — when they were being torn apart by self-replicating
alien nucleotides.

Shivering
in an ague of speculation, Hashi strove to fault his hypothesis.

I
don’t care what happens to you.

Was it
possible? That was the essential question: every other concern faded to vapour
by comparison. Could Joshua be tricked or manoeuvred into keeping Morn alive?

He had
no orders to preserve her life. Quite the reverse. On the other hand, she was
UMCP personnel. Therefore he couldn’t kill her himself: his programming
protected all UMCP personnel from direct violence. What if she were forced on
him in some way? — for example, if her survival was the price he had to pay for
the success of his mission? What then?

Under
those conditions, Hashi acknowledged feverishly, Joshua’s datacore would not
preclude her rescue.

And the
information she carried within her was as destructive as any mutagen. Quite
apart from other possibilities, it could ruin Warden Dios and all his senior
personnel; perhaps end their lives; quite conceivably destroy the UMCP itself.

Supposition
proved nothing. Nevertheless Hashi suddenly found it not only possible but
credible to think that Morn Hyland might still be alive.

Lethal!
his covert mind shouted at him. Deadly! Such a development would be
fatal
— entirely fatal.

You
need me, but you blew it.

Perhaps
he’d misjudged the depth of Nick Succorso’s malice.

Abruptly
he dropped his hands from his face to his board. Their pressure against his
eyeballs left his vision blurred; but he didn’t need clear sight to hit the
keys he wanted.

Perhaps
he’d been more honest with Koina Hannish than he wished to admit when he’d
spoken of loyalty. Whatever the reason, he didn’t question his decision once it
was made. He’d been passive too long. Instead of hesitating further, he
prepared a new contract for Captain Scroyle and flared it out to the same
listening post which
Free Lunch
had used to contact him.

It was
the richest contract he’d ever offered a mercenary; a king’s ransom in exchange
for
Trumpet’s
destruction and the death of everyone aboard.

The
mere act of coding that message filled him with an inexpressible sense of
conscious alarm and intuitive relief. The risk he took was extreme.
Nevertheless, directly or indirectly, he’d created the threat Nick represented.
He’d hired Nick. More than once. He was responsible for the danger.

As soon
as his transmission was on its way, Hashi Lebwohl left his office and went
looking for Warden Dios. The walk would allow him a chance to recover his
composure. And he wanted to report in person so that he could more easily give
his director an edited version of what he’d learned.

What
followed then would enable him to refine his speculations. In addition, it
would reinforce or undermine his impression of Warden Dios as a man who lived
in the world of the real.

ANCILLARY

DOCUMENTATION

GAP
TRAVEL

The “Juanita Estevez Mass
Transmission Field Generator,” almost exclusively known as the “gap drive,” was
a revolutionary discovery. It virtually re-created the future of humankind. The
frontiers of human space were immediately and profoundly altered. Access to
desperately needed new resources, combined with the simultaneous wealth and
hazard of commerce with the Amnion, ended a prolonged period of economic
deterioration. Instead of being constricted by poverty and the sun’s gravity
well, the horizons were now limited only by the velocity of human ships, the
power of human gap field generators, and the scope of human imaginations. In a
sense, the entire galaxy of the Milky Way now lay within reach.

However,
some of the gap drive’s effects were more subtle. For example, it produced an
insidious distortion in the perception of real space. The ability to travel
imponderable distances almost instantly created the pervasive illusion that
those distances were indeed effectively small.
The entire galaxy of the
Milky Way now lay within reach.
The implications of such a statement were
at once mind-numbing and misleading. In the erode spiral of the Milky Way,
Earth’s approximate distance from galactic centre was 26.1x10
¹⁶
kilometres: 2,610,000,000,000,000,000k. A ship travelling at a velocity of
.
5C
would take roughly fifty-five thousand years to reach galactic centre. At the
speed of light, the trip would still take 27,500 years. Taken at an arbitrary
average, human ships could cross ten light-years with every gap crossing. Even
at that rate, 2,750 crossings would be required to cover the distance.

Being
what they were, however, human beings found 2,750 a conceivable number.
Therefore the space between Earth and the centre of the Milky Way became
conceivable.

The
fallacy in all this was so subtle that most people failed to notice it.

In real
time, effective time, the light-years crossed by the gap drive didn’t exist. A
ship with a gap drive didn’t travel those light-years: it bypassed them through
dimensional translocation. But when the crossing was done, the ship returned to
normal space — and normal space was so vast that its scale was
not
truly
conceivable.

Most
people thought, So what? The gap drive did exist. The only real time involved
in travel was taken up by acceleration to attain the necessary velocity and
then by deceleration at the other end. Amnion space was just a few days away at
the best of times.

True:
Amnion space was just a few days away in a gap ship. And communication was
equally fast: messages conveyed by ship could arrive centuries or millennia
ahead of any speed-of-light transmission. But neither space nor time had
meaning in the strange physics of the dimensional gap. Ships didn’t encounter
each other there: they didn’t communicate or exchange shipments; they didn’t do
battle or give chase. Every action of any kind, human or Amnion, took place in
normal space, at space-; normal speeds. And at space-normal speeds even the
nearest stars were pragmatically out of reach.

In
other words, the discovery of the Juanita Estevez Mass Transmission Field
Generator had a transforming effect on humankind’s relationship with vast
distances — and no effect at all on humankind’s place in normal space.

The
dilemma of piracy was a case in point.

Why was
piracy such a virulent problem? How had it attained such power in human space?
Ships could cross the gap in a matter of instants. If a pirate raided, say,
Terminus, the information could be transmitted to Earth by gap courier drone,
and within hours UMCPHQ could send out a cruiser to support the station. How
could any illegal flourish under these conditions?

Quite
simply, piracy flourished because it took place in normal space. Like the UMCP,
illegals often had gap ships. Nevertheless their every action took place in
normal space. Gap ships could change the sector of space in which they acted
with incredible ease; but the actions themselves still consumed real time and
involved real distances. A UMCP cruiser might well chase a pirate vessel across
the entire galaxy — and yet every effort the cruiser made to give battle
occurred in normal space, where simply hunting through a solar system for
telltale emissions was a job that might take months.

These
hindrances were vastly increased by the fact that gap travel itself was not as
precise as it appeared on paper. Both course and distance for any crossing were
susceptible to several forms of inaccuracy. Minuscule fractions of a degree in
course became hundreds of thousands of kilometres when those fractions were
multiplied by light-years. And the calibration of distance was even more complex.
The distance a ship travelled through the gap varied according to a number of
factors, including speed, rate of acceleration, and the ratio between her mass
and both the actual and potential power of her gap drive.

In
addition the interaction of those elements was ruled by the gap drive’s
hysteresis transducer, which controlled the extent to which the drive’s effect
lagged behind its cause: too much lag, and the ship never went into tach; too
little, and the ship never resumed tard. As a result, tiny fluctuations in
power or hysteresis, or minute miscalculations of mass, became large shortfalls
or overshots. Superhuman precision was required to make any ship resume tard
right where her captain intended when he went into tach.

For
that reason — and because ships came out of the gap with all the velocity their
crossing demanded — Earth required the solar system’s massive non-UMCP traffic
to use a gap range beyond the orbit of the last planet; and ships approaching
any station were expected to resume tard well outside the sphere of that
station’s control space.

Here
again the sheer scale of space subtly undermined humankind’s apparent mastery
of inconceivable distances. Being a pirate was easier — and fighting piracy was
harder — than most people understood.

SORUS

S
oar
survived because her captain, Sorus
Chatelaine, had been forewarned.

The
Amnion shuttle’s passengers had warned her, of course. She’d saved the small
craft after it was thrown off course and out of control by the repercussions of
her brief, one-sided fight with
Captain’s Fancy
. The shuttle’s
passengers were aboard now: they stood in front of her on
Soar’s
bridge,
talking to her — and to
Calm Horizons
— constantly. They told her what
they could about the attack on the Amnion sector; about the rescue of Morn
Hyland; about the powers and exigencies which had come into conflict on the
planetoid.

But
that information might not have been enough to preserve
Soar
. It arrived
perilously late. Fortunately Sorus had been forewarned in other ways. The damage
to Billingate communications showed her that the installation was in trouble —
and she knew how to jump to the kinds of conclusions which kept ships and
illegals alive.

Captain’s
Fancy
should have been under
Calm Horizons’
control. The Amnion had Nick Succorso’s priority-codes — and Succorso himself
wasn’t aboard his ship to countermand them. The Amnion should have been able to
take effective command of the frigate. In fact, his ship had given every sign
that she was indeed responding to those codes; submitting to
Calm Horizons’
instructions. Nevertheless her subsequent, suicidal attack on
Tranquil
Hegemony
demonstrated that her submission had been a ruse.