The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (92 page)

Despite
the emission carnage, however, Darrin was sure he hadn’t hurt the gap scout. No
normal matter cannon blast caused results like that. If
Trumpet’s
drives
had blown — if the ship had broken down to her component atoms —
Free Lunch’s
computers would have understood; would have filtered out the distortion in order
to see the results.

The gap
scout was gone. Darrin couldn’t be sure that he’d so much as touched her.

What in
the name of sanity was going on?

“How
did she
do
that?” Alesha demanded. A note of panic sharpened her voice. “We
hit her dead on, I swear it. Even if she’s nothing but a particle sink, we hit
her hard enough to smash her.”

Darrin
held up his hand to stop her. He needed silence; needed to think.

Alesha
frowned at him, bit her lip; but she obeyed.

No one
else spoke.

Darrin
scratched his chest, trying to pull his confusion into some form of order.

Trumpet
had fired at almost the same instant she came onto
Free Lunch’s
scan — too quickly for her targ to focus accurately. So she must have known
Free
Lunch
was near; her targ officer must have been riding with his fingers on
the keys, poised to attack.

How had
she known?

When
the Lab ceased operational transmission in a blaze of static which suggested
total disaster, Darrin had realised that the stakes in this contest were higher
than he’d suspected; perhaps higher than Hashi Lebwohl had suspected. The only
ship close enough to do the installation any damage had been
Soar
.
Presumably
Soar
had come here from lost Billingate hunting
Trumpet
.
Had
Trumpet
shared her cargo with Deaner Beckmann? Was that the reason
his facility had experienced a disaster?

Had
Soar
attacked the Lab?

Deaner
Beckmann had been betrayed: that was plain.

Who was
next?

Darrin’s
instinct for survival screamed at him. It was time to cut and run. The stakes
had become too high. Too high for what he was being paid; too high for what he
knew about the other players. If
Trumpet
could do
that
, what else
could she do? If an illegal ship like
Soar
was willing to attack an
illegal installation like the Lab, what else would she do?

Darrin
Scroyle had survived for so many years because his instincts were good.

“Any
luck?” he asked scan.

“We can’t
handle it, Captain,” the man on scan answered.

“The
computers don’t know what to do with it. But it is dispersing. We should start
getting data we can interpret in” — he consulted a readout — “make it two and a
half minutes.”

Two and
half minutes before
Free Lunch
could see. Was
Trumpet
blind, too?
Or did she know how to penetrate this charged storm? Was she moving now, taking
a position to tear her opponent apart?

“Too
long,” Darrin decided. Because his people were afraid, he made a particular
effort to sound calm. “We can’t wait.

“Helm,
back us out of here. You’ll have to assume nothing’s changed since we went
blind. I don’t care — just do it. I’m not interested in being a sitting target.
Try to put that asteroid between us and the centre of the storm. Maybe the rock
will shield us enough to clear scan.”

“Right,
Captain.” The helm first’s tone spiked like a nervous tic, but he started
working immediately.

G
nudged Darrin against his belts as
Free Lunch
reversed course. If the
bigger rocks in the vicinity hadn’t shifted too much, helm ought to be able to
move the ship safely — at least for a couple of k — by following her most
recent thrust vectors backward. That might be enough —

Was he
going to run? A little occlusion might reduce the particle barrage to
manageable levels. Then
Free Lunch
would be able to see, navigate: she
would be free to burn —

Get out
of this damn maze while she still could.

But as
soon as he asked the question he knew he wouldn’t do it.

He’d
accepted a contract.

He’d
survived so long because his instincts were good — and because the rules he
lived by were simple. He trusted his code.
Get paid what the job was worth.
Then do it.
The truth was, he couldn’t really know what this job might be
worth. He may have evaluated it wrongly. But then, he never knew what any job
might be worth; not really. Surprises, miscalculations, even disasters happened
all the time: too often to be faced on any terms except simple ones. He trusted
his code because the alternatives were worse.
Otherwise life didn’t make
much sense.

As
always, he preferred to make his own commitments and “stand by them than to
live by anyone else’s rules.

“It’s
working, Captain,” scan reported abruptly. “That asteroid is starting to cast a
shadow we can see. I should be able to get real information in a few seconds
now.”

Darrin
returned his hands to his board, put questions aside.

“Hold
us where we are, helm,” he ordered. “But stay alert. If
Trumpet
wants to
come back at us, we need to be ready to burn.

“Concentrate,
Alesha. They brushed off a direct hit once. We have to hope they can’t do that
too often.”

Almost
at once, scan announced, “Clearing now, Captain. Range is still only one k —
no, two. But
Trumpet
isn’t there. We have at least that much empty space
around us.”

He
meant empty of ships. The images he rebuilt on the displays showed plenty of
rock. The blast which had blinded
Free Lunch
hadn’t been of a kind to
push asteroids around.

Darrin
had asked himself his questions, reminded himself that he already knew the
answers that mattered. Now he didn’t hesitate. “All right, people,” he
pronounced firmly. “Time to get serious.

“We
knew
Trumpet
is formidable. Hashi told us that. He just didn’t trouble
to explain how formidable she is. From now on, we’ll treat her like we would a
warship.

“I’m
guessing she was blinded as much as we were. That means she isn’t moving in on
us. She’s running for clear space so she can see. And the safest way she can do
that is retrace the way she came. Retrace it exactly.

“We’re
going to dive back into that distortion storm. As much acceleration as you
dare, helm. If the storm hasn’t dispersed enough for us to handle it, targ, we’ll
start firing matter beams in all directions. We’ll keep firing until scan
clears. Then we’ll see if she’s there. We’ll see if maybe we hit her by
accident — or if she can make more of those storms.”

“What
if she can?” Alesha asked tensely.

Darrin
snorted. “Then we won’t see her. But I’ll take the risk. I think she won’t be
able to see us, either.

“If
scan clears,” he went on, “or stays clear, and we don’t spot her, we’ll sniff
out her particle trace and go after her. When we catch up with her, we’ll try
lasers or torpedoes on her. She must be vulnerable to
some
thing.”

Most of
his people didn’t look at him, but he knew they were listening. After years of
experience together, he trusted their determination as much as their
competence. They didn’t always agree with him, but they always did their jobs
as well as they could. That was their code as much as his.

Without
pausing he continued.

“One
more thing. We’re heading back down into the swarm. That’s where
Soar
is.
As I read our contract, there’s only one breach worse than not killing
Trumpet
ourselves, and that’s letting some other ship capture her. Especially
Soar
.
So we might have to take
Soar
on.

“She
doesn’t have any amazing new defences against matter cannon.
That
I’m
sure of. But rumour has it she carries a superlight proton cannon.” Everyone on
the bridge had heard the same rumour, but Darrin repeated it anyway. “If we
start shooting at her, we’d better make damn sure we give it everything we’ve
got.

“All
right?” he finished. “Questions? Are you ready?”

No one
questioned him. Of course not. He was their captain. He’d kept them alive for a
long time; taught them his code; trusted them; made them moderately wealthy.
Most of them loved him as much as he loved them.

After a
moment Alesha drawled, “Let’s get it over with. I’m so sick of this swarm I
could almost puke.”

Helm
laughed nervously as he poised his hands on his keys.

Quickly
data extrapolated a course from scan recordings of the vicinity made before
Trumpet
had appeared; he copied it to one of the screens while he routed it to helm.

When
Darrin gave the order, his ship went to fulfil her contract.

MORN

A
cceleration held her to the deck — pressure full of clarity and
dreams. Through the pain of impact moved grand visions, majestic as galaxies,
pure as loss; phosphenes spoke to her of truth and death. She was in the
presence of ultimate things.

And
while she dreamed and laboured, Angus fought to save the ship, even though she
couldn’t see or hear him.

He
snatched
Trumpet
out of her wild cartwheel when instincts or databases
screamed at him that he was about to hit rock. Somehow retaining his sense of
orientation despite
Trumpet’s
vertiginous career, he hammered thrust
against the spin, pulling the gap scout away from her attacker’s guns, away
from the scan madness which her dispersion field had created out of matter
cannon fire; back the way she’d come; down into the depths of the swarm.

If he
took the time to check on Mom, she didn’t know it. She was unconscious on the
deck, small beads of blood oozing from half a dozen abrasions on her back and
scalp.

Davies
shouted things like, “Who
was
that?” and, “Where’re we going?” and, “Damn
it, Angus,
talk
to me!” but Angus ignored him. He was deep in the
uncluttered concentration of a machine, focused like a microprocessor on
keeping his ship alive while she hurtled among the asteroids at three times her
former velocity. If he made plans, or his programming made plans, they were
buried where no one could argue with them.

I’ve
seen that signature before!

In
moments
Trumpet
cleared the worst of the distortion. One at a time her
instruments recovered their sight. The swarm became real again around them as
if it had been re-created from the raw materials of the boson storm.

“
Gutbuster’s
back this way!” Davies yelled when scan and Deaner Beckmann’s charts enabled
him to identify where the gap scout was, where she was headed. “If you keep
going like this, we might run right into her before I have a chance to fire!”

Angus
may have known better. It was possible that some mechanical part of his mind
had already calculated
Soar’s
likely position and taken it into account.

In an
entirely different way, Morn also seemed to know better. Instances of clarity
opened in her unconsciousness like flowers which spread their blooms at the
first touch of sunrise. So much certainty: so little fear. Life questioned
nothing; death dreaded nothing. If she remained here, all things would become
plain.

But of
course she couldn’t stay here. The time had come to move on. Fear was essential
to the blood in her veins, the delicate web of electrical impulses in her
brain. It was her mortality: she wasn’t human without it. Her tangible flesh
hurt too much to go on without fear.

Angus
struggled to save the ship. In the same way, she fought to pull herself past
the wall of darkness in her head.

She’d
been under heavy g. She’d hit the bulkhead hard enough to go mad; Angus had
used enough thrust to make her crazy. For a moment she seemed to pass the wall
into gap-sickness.

I was
floating, and everything was clear. It was like the universe spoke to me. I got
the message, the truth. I knew exactly what to do.

I keyed
the self-destruct sequence —

She
heard herself speaking as if she were Davies. She knew how he felt. Her whole
existence revolved around self-destruct sequences.

As far
as she could tell, only the pressure of g saved her; only the fact that her
head and back
hurt
, and she weighed at least thirty kg more than she
should have. She couldn’t float. The certainty was still with her: she
remembered the sound of commandments, immanent and inevitable. But as she
strove to climb the wall and open her eyes, the universe seemed to lose its
hold on her. Flashes of clarity burst in her bloodstream like embolisms; died
away like failed hopes.

She
opened her eyes as the force of thrust eased and her body began to shed its
artificial mass.