The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (99 page)

Morn
felt the timeless, fatal concussion of impact.
Trumpet
was hit —

For the
third time scan failed completely as the entire discernible spectrum tore
apart.

— no,
not hit, that jolt came from the thruster tubes. Half a dozen warnings squalled
simultaneously, but none of them cried of matter cannon impact or vacuum.

The
next instant the thrust parameters scrolling down Morn’s readouts stabilised;
took on a smooth energy curve; began to mount. Suddenly
Trumpet
started
to burn.

G
squeezed Morn deeper into her seat. Blood roared in her ears as the pressure
built. The skin of her face stretched over its bones. Her heart laboured to
sustain its beat.

Now or
never. If her gap-sickness took her now, she would never get another chance to
answer it.

She had
no answer.

At
least both
Soar
and
Free Lunch
were as blind as
Trumpet
.
If the gap scout died now, it wouldn’t be because she’d been hit. It would be
because her course ran her straight into
Free Lunch
. Or because she
struck an asteroid at full burn. Or because the universe began to speak —

With an
odd, dislocated sorrow, Morn realised that she might never know whether Angus
had succeeded or failed; whether his desperation had proved greater than hers.

But she
knew. She
did
know.

She
knew because g suddenly doubled; tripled.

At the
same instant
Trumpet
staggered and began losing momentum as if she’d
driven headlong into an obstacle as thick and fluid as water.

Gravitic
stress klaxons filled the ship with demented wailing, but Morn didn’t need them
to tell her what happened.

Angus
had detonated his singularity grenade. And his matter cannon had given it the
power to make it live.

Trumpet
was being sucked into a black hole.

Now
time existed only in tiny increments of seconds. Morn’s heart didn’t have a
chance to beat: g and gap-sickness filled her personal cosmos too swiftly to be
measured by heartbeats.

Alarms
screeched, warning of event horizons and implosion. Vibration rattled Morn’s
teeth, her bones, her brain.
Trumpet’s
drive should have been strong
enough to pull her away. If she wasn’t already past the point of no return, she
should have been able to veer off, break free. But of course
Free Lunch
had already been caught: her energies fed the black hole as it swallowed her.
Its hunger reached outward, ravening for fuel, too swiftly for
Trumpet
to outrun it.

Morn
had no answer. Now she didn’t need one. Full of clarity and death, she would
dive into Deaner Beckmann’s dream, and then she would never be confused again.

But
Davies wasn’t done. He had a response she hadn’t thought of; could hardly
imagine. Even though he needed every gram of his strength and will, every iota
of his own desperation, to move his arms, he forced his hands to his board.

Stopped
draining thrust for the guns.

Then he
reversed the flow: sent the matter cannon charge — and everything in the energy
cells — back into the drive.

It was
enough. With that one extra kick of force,
Trumpet
began to win free.

More g:
more than enough to crush out consciousness. Blackness filled Morn’s head.

It
would pass. Automatic overrides would slow and then stop the gap scout as soon
as they could. But that changed nothing. When the dark passed, Morn would be
gap-sick and deadly. Neither Davies nor Angus would live to understand what they’d
accomplished.

She
needed some way to confront the universe and remain herself.

She
couldn’t move her hands to her board: that was out of the question. She didn’t
have her son’s bulk of muscle. And g was worse. The roaring in her ears had
become absolute night, carrying her ineluctably into its depths.

Instead
she fought her right arm slowly up the back of her g-seat. A centimetre at a
time, a degree at a time; there
was
no time, her heart hadn’t beat again
yet, if as much as a second had gone by she didn’t know it. Through midnight
and roaring and urgency she raised her arm, shoving it along the pads which
cushioned her from being crushed.

When
her hand crossed the top of the g-seat, she stopped. She’d done enough. G
finished the job.

Without
support her hand — her whole arm — had no defence. The singularity and
Trumpet’s
thrust sank their teeth into her flesh.

They
ripped her hand and arm past the seat back with ten times her limb’s weight,
dislocating her shoulder, shattering her elbow, cracking bones in her wrist.

She
didn’t know it. She was already gone.

MIN

B
elted into one of the support personnel g-seats against the bulkhead
behind Dolph Ubikwe’s command station, Min Donner watched
Punisher
engage the encroaching Amnion defensive.

Tension
and urgency were palpable in the air; so thick that they seemed to clog the
scrubbers, tainting the atmosphere with CO
₂
and fear. Scan and data
conferred in bursts, reported their findings in voices like muted cries.
Communications barked at Valdor Industrial, demanding help and information.
Intercoms crackled incessantly as the bridge stations asked and answered
questions for the whole ship. The hull carried a visceral roar of thrust. At
times
Punisher’s
spine seemed to groan under the strain. Matter cannon
fire filled the ship with a characteristic sizzling sound, as if the laws of
physics were being pan-fried.

The men
and women around Min seemed to wince and cower as they worked. She moved that
way herself. The bridge crew were veterans to one degree or another, hardened
by six months spent fighting for their lives in the Massif-5 system. And Min
was so familiar with combat that she hardly noticed its more mundane
difficulties. Nevertheless they all flopped like sacks in their g-seats, jerked
from side to side by the complex dance of conflicting navigational vectors.
Punisher
seemed to jitter in space as if she were constantly trying to twitch out of
harm’s way.

Over
the babble of voices and needs, the incessant demands and the thronging
decisions, Captain Ubikwe presided like a man impervious to chaos. His bulk
appeared to have settled in his g-seat as if he couldn’t be moved; as if he
were the stable point around which
Punisher’s
alarms and struggles
revolved. Min had to catch herself repeatedly on the arms of her g-seat because
she couldn’t know which direction the cruiser would jump in next; but she never
saw Dolph lean or recover.

She
liked watching him. He was
good
at this. Of course, she would have
preferred to take command herself; use the ship as a personal weapon. Her hands
burned for action. But since her rank required her to respect Dolph’s
relationship with his ship, she was glad that he was who he was. She was lucky
to be with him, instead of some more cautious or unimaginative commander.

The
fire was out; that was the good news. Plasma sealant pumped between the
bulkheads had succeeded at smothering the hot blaze. Hargin Stoval and two of
his team were in sickbay, suffering from heat prostration and burns — they’d
red-lined the tolerances of their suits, and some of the systems had failed.
And damage control still hadn’t finished measuring the ravages of the blaze.
But
Punisher
herself — and most of her people — were safe.

If
going into battle exhausted and damaged, with one sensor bank blind and the core
off true, against an Amnion warship carrying super-light proton cannon, could
be called “safe”.

The bad
news was that
Punisher’s
stores of plasma sealant were nearly exhausted.
If she needed to seal a breach in this fight, she was as good as dead.

Punisher
had gone after the alien vessel too slowly to catch her. That had
worried Min, even though she’d maintained an air of grim confidence; it had
worried her badly. However, Dolph’s judgement of the situation proved accurate
when the Behemoth-class defensive had commenced hard deceleration along the
centre of the asteroid swarm where Deaner Beckmann had built his bootleg lab.
Soon
Punisher
narrowed the gap.

The
alien began stabbing barrage after barrage in
Punisher’s
direction as
soon as she came within range. At intervals the defensive’s super-light proton
cannon spoke, uttering destruction in coherent shafts 10,000k long. If she
could have fired continuously, instead of needing nearly two minutes between
blasts to recharge that cannon, she would have killed her opponent already. One
solid hit was all she required.

Punisher
answered as best she could, using guile and agility to compensate
for the fact that her guns simply were not as powerful as the Amnioni’s. For
the most part, she relied on evasive action to keep her alive.

That
was Sergei Patrice’s job. If the helm officer ever gave the Amnion warship a
clear look at
Punisher
, and then held his position long enough for the
defensive to focus her targ, he might not live long enough to know that he’d
made a mistake.

Already
the defensive had fired three deadly blasts. Two had shot wide by an adequate
margin, but the third had skimmed a microwave dish off
Punisher’s
tail
and nearly cracked one of her thruster tubes. A broken tube now, under these
conditions, would have made the cruiser virtually impossible to manage.

Unfortunately
helm had other problems as well. Patrice’s assignment was the most complex on
the bridge. To cover
Punisher’s
lost scan bank, her window of blindness,
he’d resumed rotational thrust, sweeping the heavens with the cruiser’s other
sifters and sensors. That made the task of sustaining
Punisher’s
battle
orientation — and of executing her evasive actions — brutally difficult.

The one
advantage of helm’s efforts was that they allowed Glessen on targ to keep the
Amnioni under constant fire. As
Punisher
revolved, all her guns came to
bear in turn. They could be recharged when they revolved away.

If this
kind of attack didn’t break through the alien’s defences, no weapon
Punisher
possessed would.

“How’re
we doing, Porson?” Captain Ubikwe’s voice was a comfortable rumble, relaxed and
focused, but it pierced the muted din of battle easily. The whole bridge heard
everything he said. “Are we making a dent in her yet?”

“Negative,
Captain.” Anxious Porson laboured over the scan console, struggling to sort out
and interpret all the information
Punisher
needed. As far as Min could
tell, his chief worry seemed to be that he would make some critical mistake. “That
whole ship must be one big particle sink. We’re hitting her — we’re hitting her
regularly — but we might as well be pouring fire down a sump. She isn’t even
taking evasive action. She just sits there, shrugging off what we give her and
sending it back. If I didn’t know better, I would think she’s using our fire to
charge her guns.”

“That
isn’t possible,” Bydell murmured. The data officer was scared in a more
personal way than Porson, but she concentrated like death on helping scan make
sense of everything the instruments registered. “It’s the wrong kind of power.
Too random.”

It was
more likely, Min thought, that the Amnioni had crosslinked her sinks, trusting
that she wouldn’t be attacked from any other direction while she fought off
Punisher
.

“Keep
after her,” Dolph ordered calmly. “If nothing else, we’ll distract her until we
figure out what we’re going to do.”

Glessen
nodded. He fired constantly, maintaining a steady assault with all his guns
instead of concentrating their force in barrages — no easy job, considering the
way
Punisher
hauled and wrenched from place to place. Nevertheless he
managed targ phlegmatically, as if he saw no essential difference between his
duties now and his training in combat simulators.

“By the
way, Director Donner,” Dolph asked over his shoulder, “what
are
we going
to do? If we can’t overload her sinks and start hurting her, what can we hope
to accomplish?”

Min
considered several answers, discarded them. “I don’t know yet,” she replied,
pitching her voice to carry through the noise. “Until we locate
Trumpet
,
our only objective is to keep that ship occupied while we wait for help.”

The
Amnioni must have stationed herself over this part of the swarm for a reason.
Min couldn’t imagine how the defensive might know any more than
Punisher
did about where
Trumpet
was. Nevertheless the alien acted like she knew
something. Min was prepared to trust that oblique information, at least for a
while.

VI
would send out ships. Then the Amnioni would be trapped. If she didn’t run, she
would die.