Donaldson, Stephen R - Gap 1 - The Gap into Conflict

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The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story by Stephen R. Donaldson Version 1.0
CHAPTER 1
Most of the crowd at Mallorys Bar & Sleep over in Delta Sector had no idea what was really
going on. As far as they were concerned, it was just another example of animal passion, men and
women driven together by lust - the kind of thing everybody understood, or at least dreamed about.
The only uncommon feature was that in this case the passion included some common sense. Only a few
people knew there was more to it.
Curiosity wasn't a survival trait in DelSec; it certainly wasn't the pleasure it might
have been in Alpha, ComMine Station's alternative entertainment/lodging Sector. Laidover miners,
discredited asteroid pilots, drunks and dreamers, and a number of men who never admitted to being
ore pirates - the people who either didn't fit or weren't welcome in Alpha - all had learned
incuriosity the hard way. They considered themselves too smart to ask the wrong questions in the
wrong places, to notice the wrong things at the wrong times. None of them wanted trouble.
For them, the story was basically simple.
It began when Morn Hyland came into Mallorys with Angus Thermopyle.
Those two called attention to themselves because they obviously didn't belong together.
Except for her illfitting and outdated shipsuit, which she must have scrounged from someone else's
locker, she was gorgeous, with a body that made drunks groan in lost yearning and a pale, delicate
beauty of face that twisted dreamers' hearts. In contrast, he was dark and disreputable, probably
the most disreputable man who still had docking-rights at the Station. His swarthy features were
broad and stretched, a frog-face with stiff whiskers and streaks of grease. Between his powerful
arms and scrawny legs, his middle bulged like a tire, inflated with bile and malice.
In fact, no one knew how he had been able to keep his docking-rights - or his tincan
freighter, for that matter - as long as he had. According to his reputation, anyone who ever
became his companion, crew, or enemy ended up either dead or in lockup. Most people who knew him
predicted he would end up that way himself - dead, or in lockup until he rotted.
He and Morn looked so grotesque together; she staying with him despite the clear disgust
on her face, he ordering her around like a slavey while his yellowish eyes gleamed that none of
the men nearby could resist a little harmless scheming, a bit of gap-eyed speculation. If I could
get her away from him - If she were mine. But the story was just beginning. No one was surprised
by the nearly tangible current which sparked across the crowd when she and Nick Succorso spotted
each other for the first time.
In a number of ways, Nick Succorso was the most desirable man in DelSec. He had his own
ship, a sleek little frigate with a gap drive and an experienced crew. He had the kind of
piratical reputation that allowed him to seem bold rather than bloodthirsty. His personal
magnetism made men do what he asked and women offer what he wanted. And the only flaws in his
cavalier handsomeness were the scars under his eyes, the cuts which underlined everything he saw
and grew dark whenever he saw something he intended to have. Some people said he'd inflicted those
cuts himself, just for effect - but that was merely envy and spite. No one could be as desirable
as Nick without inspiring a few snide remarks.
The truth was that he'd received those scars years ago, the only time he'd ever been
bested. They'd been put on him to mar him, a sign of contempt for his upstart arrogance: the woman
who gave them to him hadn't considered him worth killing.
But he'd learned from them. He'd learned never to be beaten again; learned to make sure
that all his contests were unequal, in his favor. He'd learned to wait until he was in control of
what happened. Common sense.
Members of his crew later admitted that they'd never seen his scars go as dark as when he
spotted Morn Hyland. And her pale beauty ached toward him instantly - passion or desperation -
bringing brightness to eyes which were dull in Angus Thermopyle's company. The only surprise was
that neither of them did anything about it. The electricity between them was so strong that the
spectators wouldn't have been taken aback if Morn and Nick had thrown off their clothes and jumped
for each other right there in the bar.
Most of the crowd had no idea what restrained them. She was a mystery, of course. But he
certainly didn't have a reputation for restraint.
Nearly two weeks later, however, they did what everyone was waiting for. When Com-Mine
Security broke into Mallorys and charged Angus Thermopyle with a crime serious enough to make an
arrest succeed even in DelSec, Morn Hyland was suddenly at Nick's side. And just as suddenly they
were gone. Lust and common sense. Their charged flesh drew them together; and she got away from
Angus at just the right moment. They left to become the kind of story drunks and dreamers told
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each other early in the Station's standard morning, when Mallorys was quiet and the thin alloy
walls seemed safe against the hard vacuum of space and the luring madness of the gap.
The last anyone heard, Angus was rotting as predicted under a life sentence in the Station
lockup.
That, of course, was not the real story.
CHAPTER 2
Some of the people who lurked in the dim light knew better. They were the ones in the
corners who drank less than they appeared to, smoked less, talked less. Pushing their mugs around
in the condensation which oozed off the plastic because the air processing in DelSec was never as
good as it should be and nobody could sit in Mallorys without sweating, these men knew how to
listen, how to ask questions, how to interpret what they saw - and when to go somewhere else for
information.
Most of them were a bit older, a bit less self-absorbed; perhaps a bit more profound in
their cynicism. If they were pilots, they were here because this was the life they could afford
and understand, not because drink or drugs, incompetence or misjudgment, had cost them their
careers. If they were miners who couldn't get or no longer wanted work, they were here to stay
near the taste and dreams of prospecting, the vision of a strike so vast and pure that it was
better than being rich. If they were born or naturalized inhabitants of the Station, they were
here to keep company with the clientele for their particular goods or services - or perhaps to
keep tabs on the market for the whispers and hints they purveyed.
Such people looked at what they saw with more discerning eyes.
When Morn Hyland and Angus Thermopyle came into Mallorys, the men in the corners noticed
the way her whole body seemed to twist away even when she sat close beside him. They heard the
dull, almost lifeless sound of her voice when she spoke - a tone of suppression unexpected from
someone who had presumably spent weeks or months away from people and drink. And they observed
that he kept one hand constantly fisted in the pocket of his grease-stained shipsuit.
After Angus took her out, some of these men also left - but not to follow. Instead, they
went to have unassuming, apparently casual conversations with people who had access to the id
files in Com-Mine Station's computers.
The story they gleaned concerned something more interesting than animal passion and common
sense.
By one means or another, they learned that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation
for the fact that Morn Hyland wasn't known in DelSec. She'd never been there before. During her
one previous layover on ComMine, she'd stayed in AlSec.
She'd come out from Earth on one of the really wealthy independent oreliners, a family
operation so successful that she and all her relatives did everything first class because they
could afford it. Crossing the gap, the Hylands had docked at Com-Mine Station, not to pick up
company ore for the orbiting smelters around Earth, but to buy supplies; they were headed for the
belt themselves.
And since they weren't experienced miners and had never been out to the belt before, there
could only be one explanation for what they were doing. Somewhere they had bought or stolen the
location of an asteroid rich enough to tempt them away from their usual runs. They had caught the
dream themselves and were on their way to test it against the bitter rock of the belt.
A common tale, as far as it went. Back on Earth, civilization and political power required
ore. Without the resources which stations like Com-Mine supplied, no government could maintain
itself in office. By some standards, the United Mining Companies, Com-Mine's corporate founder,
was the only effective government in human space. As a natural consequence, every city or station
of any size spawned at least one earnest, spurious, or reprobate dealer in belt charts, the
treasure maps of space. Men and women with some kind of hunger in their bellies were forever
buying "accurate," "secret" charts and then risking everything to cross the gap and go
prospecting.
But not a successful outfit like the Hyland family. If they left a profitable ore-
transportation business and converted their liner for mining, two things were certain.
They had a chart.
The chart was good.
AlSec must have been on fire with that kind of news. Otherwise DelSec would never have
heard about it. Specifically, Angus would never have heard about it. As a general rule, the snobs,
corporate barons, government officials, intellectuals, and high-class illegals who frequented
AlSec didn't share information with the denizens of Delta Sector. And Angus Thermopyle had
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probably never been in AlSec in his life.
Human nature being what it was, greed and a casual indifference to scruple would have
inspired any number of mine jumpers or pirates to follow the Hyland ship, Starmaster, when she
left Com-Mine Station. But jumpers and pirates had harried Com-Mine's legitimate prospectors and
liners for so long - and the battles which took place as outgoing ships fought to keep from being
followed had become so fierce - that now the Station itself as a matter of policy fired on any
ship which tried to pursue any other ship out of dock. To all appearances, the Hylands got away
safely.
Appearances must have deceived them, however. Or else they were simply outsmarted. They
had no experience with the belt, or mining, or jumpers, or pirates. And Angus Thermopyle had
become as rich as the stars without ever doing a lick of honest work - and without ever having to
share his wealth with any partners, backers, or crew. The Hyland ship never came back. But Morn
Hyland came back.
She came back with Angus. With a dull, almost lifeless tone to her voice, and an air of
being repulsed by his physical closeness.
And he kept one fist knotted like a threat in the pocket of his shipsuit.
The men who observed these things had no other way to account for them, so they jumped to
the one conclusion which made sense to them; a conclusion which suited both Angus' reputation and
their own cynicism.
Without any viable external evidence, they chose to believe that he'd given her a zone
implant. He had the control in his pocket.
Zone implants were illegal, of course. They were so illegal that unauthorized use carried
the death penalty. But - also of course - mere questions of legality didn't stop people who worked
the belt from having them on hand for emergencies.
In essence, a zone implant was a radio electrode which could be slipped between one of the
skull sutures and installed in the brain, where its emissions were remarkably effective. It had
been invented by a doctor trying to control grand mal epileptic seizures: its emissions blanked
out the neural storm of the seizure. People thought that was where the name "zone" came from: an
active implant gave an epileptic the look of being "completely zoned." But in fact medical
research had quickly discovered that a variety of results could be obtained by varying the
implant's emissions - by tuning the implant to different zones of the brain. Violent insanities
could be tamed. Manic behaviors could be moderated. Catatonia could be relieved - or induced.
Recalcitrance could be turned into cooperation. Pain could be reinterpreted as pleasure.
Volition could be suppressed. Without interrupting consciousness or coordination.
Given a broad-spectrum zone implant, which employed several electrodes, and an
unscrupulous control operator, independent human beings could be transformed into intelligent,
effective, and loyal slaves. Even the more common, narrower-spectrum implants could achieve
comparable results by turning people into physical puppets, or by applying intense neural
punishments and rewards.
Unauthorized use of a zone implant carried the death penalty automatically, inevitably;
without appeal.
But despite the law - and the possibilities of abuse - even otherwise reputable miners and
pilots, orehaulers and -handlers, considered zone implants necessary medical equipment.
The reason was simple. Medical science had developed ways for complete idiots to diagnose
and treat complex diseases; ways for lost or vision-struck belt pilots to repair the damage done
to their bodies by faulty or inadequate equipment; ways for crushed limbs and even crushed organs
to be prosthetically restored. Unfortunately, however, no amount of research had discovered a cure
for gap-sickness, that strange breakdown of the mind which took perhaps one out of every hundred
people who crossed the dimensional gap and reduced him or her to a psychotic killer or a null-wave
transmitter, a raving bulimic or a gleeful self-flagellant, a pedophiliac or a pill-junkie.
Apparently, one out of every hundred people had some kind of undetectable vulnerability in the
tissue of the brain; and when that vulnerability was translated across light- years of space
through the imponderable physics of the gap, something happened to it. Otherwise healthy
individuals lost command of their lives in invariably startling, often grotesque, and sometimes
murderous fashions.
There was no cure for gap-sickness. But there was a way to cope with it.
The zone implant.
Ships and prospecting and mining operations were too fragile: every individual's life
depended on everybody else. For that reason, perfectly sane and law-abiding people considered it
an unacceptable risk to cross the gap or ride dark space without access to zone implants. just in
case the person standing right over there suddenly picked up a hose and started to spray mineral
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acid in all directions.
"Authorized use" of a zone implant occurred when the whole crew of a ship or the entire
population of a mining camp testified that they would all have died if they hadn't used the
implant to control a case of gap-sickness - and when the person with the implant confirmed that he
or she hadn't been deprived of volition in any other situations.
The UMC Police enforced the principle of "authorized use" with almost gleeful
impartiality.
In part for that reason, actual, proven cases of abuse were rare. But there were always
stories. So-and-so hit a rich strike on an asteroid so far away that it was off the charts, so far
away that he and his crew didn't have enough provisions to stay and mine it - a problem he solved
by giving everyone else zone implants and making them work without food or water or sleep until
they died. Such-and-such was prospecting alone and contrived to smash his leg with his ship's
cargo boom; in pain and delirious, he neglected normal medical treatment and instead supplied
himself with a zone implant in order to change the pain into pleasure - with the result that he
became so happy he lost his mind and bled to death.
What the men in the bars and sleeps of DelSec talked about most often, however, was women.
Women were rare on mining stations. Single women were even rarer. And available women were so rare
that they were prohibitively expensive; which meant that most of them lived in AISec. Men with
nothing better to do rarely thought about anything else. Gorgeous women. Astonishing women. Women
with zone implants, who did everything a drink-fuddled or cynical mind could imagine. Because they
didn't have any choice, no matter how much they may have hated what was happening to them. Women
like Morn Hyland.
So what must have happened was that Angus Thermopyle found a way to follow the Hyland ship
when it left Com-Mine Station.
After all, who knew how much sophisticated tracking equipment he had hidden away aboard
his scruffy, rattletrap freighter? With all the mines he was said to have jumped, all the ore he
was believed to have pirated, all the ships he was reputed to have wrecked, his financial
resources must have been enormous. He could surely afford things over which even a successful
swashbuckler like Nick Succorso could only drool. Obviously, he wasn't spending the money on
himself. Anybody who had to sit near him in Mallorys would have sworn he hadn't changed his
shipsuit since the invention of the gap drive. He never bought expensive drinks - or more than a
few cheap ones. And he absolutely never bought expensive women. As for his ship, which he called
by the odd, inapt name, Bright Beauty, no one ever saw inside her; but her exterior plate and
ports and antennae and scanners looked like they had been driven through a meteor shower and then
left to corrode. In fact, the only discernible care he took of her - the only hint he gave that he
had any interest in her at all - was to keep her name freshly painted in crisp black letters on
either side of her command module.
What was he doing with all that money?
What else? He must be investing it in his "business," using it to buy the kind of vacuum
sniffers and particle sifters and doppler sensors that most pilots who frequented Com-Mine Station
only knew about by rumor; the kind of equipment which would allow him to follow the Hyland ship
without making either her or the Station itself suspicious.
There were still questions unanswered. Everyone knew that a ship the size of Bright Beauty
needed at least two people and preferably six to run her. Assuming that Morn Hyland worked for him
on his return, Angus must still have had a crew of some kind when he left on Starmaster's trail.
Who was it? Presumably, it must have been someone who had managed to get on and off Com-Mine
Station without id processing, since Bright Beauty had no crew of record in the computer. So what
happened to him? Or them?
What happened to the Hyland ship and all the rest of her people? No one knew. But
Angus Thermopyle must have followed them to their strike. He must have jumped them somehow -
wrecked the ship, marooned or murdered the family. And spared Morn because under the persuasion of
the zone implant she was as desirable as any vision.
Because - so speculation ran - he hated her.
It was nothing personal, of course. He hated everything. He hated everybody. The people
who watched for such things could smell it on him. His life was a stew of hate, destructive and
unpredictable. Now his hate was fixed on her, and he desired the thing he hated. He wanted her to
be what only a zone implant could make her.
Beautiful and revolted. Capable of any degradation his filthy appetites could conceive -
and able to be hurt by it.
The few men in Mallorys who realized what they considered the truth about her were
sickened by it. Being of various moral characters themselves, some of them probably considered it
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evil. The rest probably considered it evil that the control to her implant was in Angus
Thermopyle's pocket.
On this subject, Nick Succorso kept his opinion to himself. Perhaps his attraction to Morn
was so strong that he didn't think about anything else.
Despite his attraction, however, and his reputation for success, he was probably
restrained from immediate action by the prospect of what Angus might do if he were challenged. To
Morn Hyland, of course. But also to whoever challenged him. He had a history of getting rid of his
enemies. So instead of leaping to her rescue, Nick waited and plotted. He may have been a criminal
or a rogue hero, an operative or a mercenary; but he certainly wasn't stupid. And he had no taste
at all for defeat.
What he wanted - so the discerning cynics assumed - was to have Angus arrested by Security
with the control to Morn's zone implant in his pocket. Angus would get the death penalty; the
implant would be removed; and then Morn Hyland would be free to give Nick Succorso the only reward
he could possibly want.
Herself.
The hard part was to arrange for Angus to be arrested. He wasn't an easy victim. Piracy,
treachery, and murder were what he did best.
Nevertheless Nick arranged it.
Once again, the only explanations available were purely speculative. In the Station
lockup, Angus wasn't talking to anybody. And Nick Succorso and his crew were gone, taking Morn
Hyland with them. But here speculation was on fairly solid ground. Knowing Nick, it was possible
to guess with considerable confidence what he would do.
His background was vague. His id files managed to look both perfectly legitimate and
plainly spurious, revealing nothing. All most people knew was that one day he docked his pretty
frigate, Captain's Fancy, in Com-Mine Station, passed inspection, led his crew into DelSec,
selected Mallorys Bar & Sleep apparently at random, and became a regular whenever he was on
station. Only the men in the corners, the men who pried below the surface, heard how he had passed
inspection.
Being neither asleep nor blind, the Station inspectors had noticed almost immediately that
Captain's Fancy had a hole the size of a gaming table in her side.
You've been hit, they said. That looks like matter cannon fire.
It is, he replied.
Why were you being shot at?
I wasn't.
No? The inspectors suggested intense skepticism.
No. I was trying to get inside one of those awkward asteroids - too small for heavy
equipment, too big to be chewed up by hand-cutters. So I decided to try blasting it apart.
Somehow, the matter beam hit a glazed surface and reflected back. Nick grinned amiably. I shot
myself.
That doesn't sound very plausible, Captain Succorso. Hand over your computer's datacore,
and we'll verify your story.
No, he said again. Now his grin didn't look so amiable. I'm not required to let you look
at my datacore unless you have evidence of a crime. That's the law. Has there been a crime?
In the end, Nick passed. The ship that shot him must have been burned out of space in
return, so it was never able to report that a crime had been committed.
Smiling to make DelSec's women's hearts flutter, basking in the devotion of his crew, and
spending money as if he had a UMC credit line, he settled into Mallorys and concentrated on
enjoying himself while Captain's Fancy was repaired. He seemed to have a talent for enjoying
himself, and his good humor - like his unmistakable virility - was infectious. Only people who
watched the scars under his eyes could tell that he was engaged in anything more serious than a
continuous carouse. And in Mallorys that "anything" could be only one thing: he was listening,
sifting, sorting, evaluating; making contact with sources of information.
Whenever he left Com-Mine Station, he left suddenly. And when he came back, he celebrated.
By some coincidence, unfamiliar ships had a tendency to go "overdue" while he was away.
Even a null-wave transmitter could have predicted that everything inside Nick would leap
up at the sight of Morn Hyland. If he was a pirate, he was the glamorous kind, the kind who
slashed and burned his way to virtue in romantic videos. And she was beautiful and pathetic - a
maiden in distress if ever there was one, abused and helpless. Not to mention the fact that she
belonged to someone else, a pirate rumored to be even more successful than Nick Succorso himself.
But only the people who didn't know any better were surprised that he didn't try to rescue her
right away. The men in the corners could guess what he would do.
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He wouldn't try to steal her directly. He was too smart for that. In other words, he had
too much respect for Angus Thermopyle's defenses. And Angus kept his vulnerabilities - as well as
his debaucheries - private by sealing them safely aboard Bright Beauty. Station Security itself
would have come to his assistance if Nick had tried to get past his alarms.
No, Nick would sit and listen, watching Morn Hyland until his scars turned black and
waiting for his chance; waiting for Angus Thermopyle to make a move.
He wanted to see that move coming and know what it would be. He wanted to do what Security
had never been able to do - penetrate Angus' secrecy. And when he knew what Angus' move would be,
he would follow it so that he could betray it. The moment in which Angus was arrested might be
Nick's only realistic opportunity to carry Morn away.
He wanted her.
He also wanted to prove himself against Angus Thermopyle.
If he had other reasons, he never gave a hint of them to DelSec.
As it happened, his chance came sooner than he may have expected. Maybe Angus felt cocky
with Morn beside him and wanted to show off. Or maybe he was getting greedy - if in fact he could
conceivably be any greedier than he was already. Or maybe the bait was just too attractive to be
ignored. Whatever the reason, he made his move scarcely two weeks after he first brought Morn into
Mallorys.
The incoming supply ship from Earth - arriving several weeks early for some reason - was
in trouble. Every receiver in or around the Station picked up the distress call before it went
dead. Apparently one of the crew had been taken by gap-sickness. As the ship reentered normal
space, this unfortunate individual had become entranced by the idea of installing a crowbar in the
memory bank of the navigational computer. By the time his shipmates got him under control, the
ship could no longer steer and had no idea where she was. The fact that the distress call went
dead seemed to imply that the damage to the computer - perhaps a fire - had spread to the
communication gear.
In other words, a full standard year's worth of food, equipment, and medicine was floating
out there somewhere against the background of the stars, ripe to be rescued, salvaged, or gutted.
Of course, as soon as the emergency was understood, Com-Mine Center slapped a curfew onto
the docks, forbidding any ship to leave until she could be sworn in as part of the official
search; until Security personnel could be put aboard to watch the actions of the crew. That was
standard procedure. And it was generally respected, even by pirates and jumpers. Ships that shared
in the search also shared in the reward, regardless of which vessel actually performed the rescue,
while ships that violated curfew, refused to cooperate, or went off on their own became targets by
law and could be fired on with impunity.
This time, only Bright Beauty and Captain's Fancy took that chance. Somehow, both Angus
Thermopyle and Nick Succorso managed to uncouple from their berths seconds before the injunction
of the curfew, thus preserving at least the illusion of authorized departure.
Center wasn't impressed by illusions, however. Commands to return and redock were
broadcast: warning shots were fired.
With contemptuous ease, Captain's Fancy winked off the scanners of the Station.
Nick Succorso disappeared by performing a delicate maneuver called a "blink crossing." No
one in Mallorys doubted his ability to do this. In essence, he engaged his gap drive - and then
disengaged it a fraction of a second later, thereby forcing his ship to "blink" past fifty or a
hundred thousand kilometers. It was risky: there was always the chance that dimensional stress
would tear the ship apart, or that he would come out of the gap in a gravity well he couldn't
escape. But it worked. He got away.
From the look of her, Bright Beauty would never have withstood that much pressure. In any
case, she had no gap drive. Angus Thermopyle took a completely different approach. As soon as the
first warning shots were fired, he started transmitting a distress call of his own.
Every receiver in or around the Station picked that one up too. There's a short somewhere.
Smoke. Controls are locked - I can't navigate. Don't shoot. I'm trying to come around.
No one believed him, of course. But Center couldn't afford to ignore the possibility that
he might be telling the truth. That idea had to be considered, at least for a few seconds. And
during those few seconds Angus cut in thrust boosters no one knew he had. No one thought he had
them because no one believed Bright Beauty could survive that kind of acceleration.
Like Nick, he got away.
After that, there were no more answers for a while. The people who were following the
story could speculate, but for two days they had nothing to base their speculations on.
Then Bright Beauty came limping back. Her sides were scarred with matter cannon fire, and
her thrust drive stuttered badly. Nevertheless she passed inspection. Angus Thermopyle faced down
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a board of inquiry. After a few hours, he brought Morn Hyland back to Mallorys. Neither of them
gave anything away.
Captain's Fancy coasted into dock later the same day. She also had been hurt, but Nick
Succorso didn't seem to care. He talked her past inspection. He laughed circles around a board of
inquiry. He and his crew also returned to Mallorys free and eager, ready to enjoy themselves.
The official search was still going on. So far, no trace of the supply ship had been
found. After this much time, there was little chance that any trace would ever be found.
But that night Station Security broke into Mallorys to arrest Angus.
They had evidence that a crime had been committed. So they said. That gave them the right
to board Bright Beauty without permission and take the ship's datacore. The datacore enabled them
to find her secret holds. And in the secret holds were food, equipment, and medicine which could
only have come from the missing supply ship.
Arrests in DelSec were few. The people who frequented places like Mallorys Bar & Sleep
were prone to resent the intrusion of overt law and order into their lives. Even in groups,
Security couldn't always pass through DelSec without harassment.
But a supply ship had been robbed - presumably gutted. Com-Mine Station needed those
supplies to live. DelSec needed those supplies. Every man and woman in Mallorys would have
suffered for this particular crime. And every one of them disliked or feared or even hated Angus
Thermopyle.
At first, the arrest didn't go smoothly. Before Angus was taken, he and Morn Hyland began
to scuffle: he was apparently trying to hold her back. Nevertheless she managed to break away just
as Security closed on him. At once, the crowd opened for her, pried apart by Nick Succorso's crew.
And then she and Nick were gone; they disappeared as effectively as a blink crossing.
Captain's Fancy was allowed to slip out of dock unmolested; but that wasn't hard to
explain. Nick must have done a certain amount of bargaining with Security before he handed over
his evidence against Angus. Obviously, his right to leave was part of the bargain.
So the fair maiden was rescued. The swashbuckling pirate bore her away with all her
beauty. For weeks, the sots and relics in Mallorys could hardly talk about anything except what
the maiden and the pirate were doing with each other. People who were accessible to romantic
emotions contemplated what had happened with a lump in their throats. And even the cynics sitting
in the corners were gratified by the outcome. Nick Succorso had done exactly what they expected of
him. There were only two flaws in this story.
One was that the supply ship from Earth arrived on schedule. It hadn't had any trouble
along the way. And it reported that there hadn't been any other ship.
The other was that the control to Morn Hyland's zone implant was never found. Angus
Thermopyle didn't have it on him when he was arrested. That was why he was rotting in lockup
instead of facing execution. The first matter was easily explained. Nick Succorso must have
arranged the whole thing - faked the distress call, stolen Station supplies himself, planted them
on Bright Beauty. That was the kind of thing he did. It made the people in Mallorys admire him
even more.
The second issue was more disconcerting, however. It didn't make sense. Angus could not
have gotten rid of the control earlier: if he had done that, she would have been able to escape
him - or, more likely, to butcher him with her bare hands for the things he had done to her. And
yet he must have gotten rid of it earlier. Otherwise he would have been caught with it.
The only other explanation was less satisfying. After all, the zone implant and its
control were hypothetical, not proven. Perhaps they had never existed.
But in that case the entire sequence of events degenerated into incomprehensibility. Why
did she stay with him, if he had no power over her? And if his power was of some other kind, why
did he give it up? What warned him that he was in danger?
No one knew the answers. However, the people who asked them were only interested out of
curiosity. The main thrust of the action was clear enough. Details that didn't make sense could
eventually be forgotten.
The crowd at Mallorys would have found the real story much harder to live with.
CHAPTER 3
There were parts of the story that would always remain obscure, unless Angus Thermopyle
explained them; and he refused.
By the end of his trial, Bright Beauty didn't have any secrets left. Despite her pretense
of being a prospector's ship, she was indeed equipped with sophisticated particle sifters and
doppler sensors, tools that no legitimate prospector would ever need. She was too heavily
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shielded, too heavily armed. Under boost, her thrust drive could have shifted the orbit of a
planetoid. She had cargo holds hidden in places the Station inspectors never imagined. And she had
so many relays and servos, compensations and overrides, that it was actually possible for one man
to run her alone - although the experts who examined her agreed it would be suicide for any
individual to take on that kind of complex strain for more than a few hours at a time.
In addition, the datacore revealed the extent of Angus' "wealth."
To the surprise of his prosecutors, his resources turned out to be trivial; almost
nonexistent. Regardless of his reputation, he was operating only a few steps ahead of his
expenses.
That unexpected detail didn't help him, of course. He hadn't been arrested for his
"wealth." And in other ways the exposure of his secrets was sufficiently damning. Enough evidence
was found to convict him of several acts of piracy - although everyone in Security agreed that the
evidence was disappointing, since it wasn't adequate to procure the death penalty. Certainly it
wasn't adequate to explain the more tantalizing aspects of Morn's story.
Confronted with this inadequacy - which presumably gave him the opportunity to cast his
actions in the most favorable possible light - Angus surprised his prosecutors further by refusing
to defend himself, testify on his own behalf. Indeed, he refused to answer any questions at all.
With a zone implant, of course, he could have been inspired to talk; but the law - and the UMCP -
refused to consider confession an "authorized use." Consequently, Com-Mine Security never found
out where or how Bright Beauty had been outfitted, or how she'd been damaged. No explanation was
obtained for the fact that his reputation so far exceeded the evidence against him. He was
unwilling either to account for or to defend the presence of stolen Station food, equipment, and
medicine aboard his ship. And no new illumination was shed on his strange relationship with Morn
Hyland. In the first weeks of his incarceration, he opened his mouth only when he wanted to
complain about the food or the facilities or the treatment in the Station lockup.
And when he was informed that Bright Beauty was being sent to the Station shipyard to be
dismantled for spare parts. Then he pounded on the walls of his cell and started to howl with such
fury that eventually he had to be sedated.
No one knew what had warned him when the Hyland ship had come into Com-Mine Station - or
how hard he had tried to get away from her.
Probably he would have been unable to explain that warning. It was a matter of instinct.
He had good instincts, and they started to burn as he watched the sleek oreliner nudge its way
into dock.
It looked like a prize, the kind of treasure ship Bright Beauty could peel apart weld by
weld, exposing to theft or destruction the things that made other people think they were superior
beings: the money, the possessions, the luck. He had tackled ships like that in the past, had
tackled them often, tracking them to their destinations, learning their secrets, then blasting
them open in the black void, leaving them ruined, lost forever - had tackled them and raged to
himself fiercely as he did so, destroying what other men would have captured as riches because his
need for money had limits while his desire to see what matter cannon fire could do was immense.
Alone in his ship, or wandering around DelSec, or sitting in Mallorys - Angus Thermopyle was
always alone, even when he happened to find some stow- or castaway piece of human garbage to crew
for him - he relived the ships he had tackled and hated them.
But not this time.
This time, his instincts burned - and he always trusted his instincts.
As far as he knew, he had no particular reason to be wary. His crimes left little evidence
behind; there was no better place than deep space to hide the remains of his plundering. Only his
datacore could damage him, and he had long ago taken steps to alleviate that danger - steps which
no one would detect because they were theoretically impossible. But because he was a hunter, he
had also been hunted. He had the intuitions of prey.
So he did something that would never have occurred to anyone else on or around Com-Mine
Station: he turned his field-mining probes toward the Hyland ship.
One of those probes was designed to measure the nuclear weight of thin cross sections of
solid rock. It informed him that Starmaster's hull was formed of an alloy he'd only heard about,
never seen - an alloy so heavy it could shed matter cannon fire the way steel shed water.
An alloy so expensive no oreliner could afford it. There were no haulers or handlers in
space rich enough to afford it.
When he saw the readings, Angus Thermopyle fled.
He didn't take the time to buy supplies. He didn't try to find out what the station
scuttlebutt concerning the Hyland ship was. He didn't even bother to repaint Bright Beauty's name -
something he always did before risking the malign vagaries of space. A ship as rich as Starmaster
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would have friends, muscle. Escorts? Fighters hanging off station to watch for trouble? He took
that into account, but it didn't stop him. Sealing his hatches, he called up Station Center, filed
a purely fictitious destination report, and received formal permission to undock. Then, because
his instincts were still on fire, he meticulously followed the departure trajectory he was
assigned. Cursing like a slavey all the way, he left Com-Mine along a route that would attract as
little attention as possible. And he didn't risk cutting in boost and shifting his course toward
the belt until he was absolutely alone at least fifty thousand kilometers past the known range of
any scan from the vicinity of Station.
He was hoping that the belt was far enough away to hide him. The Station had been built at
a considerable distance to avoid the meteor storms and other debris which always accompanied
asteroid belts through space, the residue of planets that time and gravity had reduced to rubble.
By the time he changed course, the exertion of manning the whole ship himself had begun to
make his hands shake and his eyes fill with sweat. He had too many instruments to read, too many
systems to monitor, too much data to absorb. And his computer couldn't help him. It had
extravagant fail-safes: the very mechanisms which enabled him to run Bright Beauty alone would
shut the ship down in alarm if he gave the computer control of them. Nevertheless he kept going.
His instincts had warned him, and he always obeyed them.
Angus Thermopyle was a pirate and a mine jumper. He hated everybody, and there was enough
old blood on his hands to convict a whole prison full of illegals. He was alone now because the
decrepit drunk he'd hired to crew for him had made the mistake of asking the wrong question at the
wrong time; so he'd flattened the man's head with a spanner and left the body in one of the
thruster tubes to be ashed the next time the drive was engaged. He may not have been rich, but he
was probably everything else the people in Mallorys believed him to be.
He was also a coward.
So he ran from the Hyland ship under as much g as his body could stand and remain
conscious. The muscles of his shoulders began to twitch, and he couldn't keep the sweat out of his
eyes; but he kept running. When he knew that he had pushed himself too far, he didn't stop:
instead, he started pumping drugs into his veins, stim to keep him awake, cat to keep him steady.
He was afraid, and he ran.
Before he was close enough to the belt to begin deceleration, he had been driving under
heavy g for half a standard day. Now the drugs were giving him psychotic episodes with increasing
regularity, and he no longer knew clearly what he was doing. However, he was familiar with those
drugs; before starting them, he'd understood what they would do to him. So he'd taken the
precaution of locking Bright Beauty's course. When he was finally forced to surrender control of
his ship's systems to her command computer, the course-lock and her fail-safes managed the hard
braking for him. As a result, he arrived without crashing - and without pulling his ship away into
madness - at a part of the belt which everyone knew had been mined out years ago; a long stretch
of sailing rock where other ships were unlikely to come.
There he picked a particularly dead asteroid, parked Bright Beauty in a mining crater,
shut down everything except life-support, and went to sleep in his g-seat, catted out of his mind.
If the Hyland ship could find him there, then he was lost anyway. He had never really had
a chance to escape.
He still had no reason to believe the people on that ship even knew he existed.
Hours later, he awoke screaming because there were skinworms all over him, crawling,
gnawing, starting to burrow in -...
The sensation was terrible. It was also normal; a predictable consequence of the drugs.
However, for him so much of what was terrible was also familiar that he knew exactly what to do.
Although he couldn't swallow the bright terror rising in his throat or unknot the red pain closing
around his heart, his hands were almost steady as he injected more drugs into his veins -
analgesics to flush the now-poisonous stimulants and cataleptics away, antihistamines and steroids
to soften his body's reactions. As soon as these new drugs took hold, he slept again.
The next time he awakened, he had trouble breathing because the air in Bright Beauty was
going bad. He'd left Com-Mine Station without supplies. That meant he now had only a little water,
less food - and no clean pads for the scrubbers which were supposed to keep his air breathable.
Checking the computer's maintenance log, he confirmed that his present pads were long overdue for
a change.
This development made him rage as if he were on the verge of a breakdown. But that, too,
was normal. He still knew exactly what to do. Risking anoxia because he didn't have the strength
to put on an EVA suit, he shut down circulation and took the pads out of the scrubbers. While his
head throbbed with C02 overload and his vision blurred in and out of focus, he used half his water
to make a chemical bath for the pads. He left the pads in the bath as long as he could - until he
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was close to unconsciousness. Then he refitted them in the scrubbers and restarted the
circulation.
Unfortunately, his problems were just beginning.
He was probably safe where he was; but he couldn't stay there. His food would last for
only two or three more days. He could reuse all his water - but only if he had his purifiers
serviced. And the superficial cleaning he'd given the pads might not hold up even that long. He
had only two choices.
Return to Com-Mine Station.
Or find some other source of supply.
He never considered returning to the Station. He wasn't deterred by the prospect of
humiliation. If anyone ever found out that he'd panicked and run, only to return limping because
he'd run out of food, water, and air, he would be sneered at everywhere in DelSec; but he could
live with that. The world had been sneering at him from the first. He took revenge when he got the
chance. However, there was still the Hyland ship.
That ship was to blame, of course. She'd scared him, and he hated everything that scared
him. As he lifted Bright Beauty out of the mining crater and eased back from the belt to give his
scanning equipment range, he began to plot ways to make Starmaster pay for what was happening to
him.
Ways to wreck a ship with that hull? The bare concept was nonsense - and Angus Thermopyle
wasn't prone to nonsense. Nevertheless thinking about it helped him do what he had to. In a state
of cold rage which served as calm, he spent the next two days searching the belt with his sniffers
and sifters, prospecting not for ore but for miners.
Toward the end of that time, he came close to panic again. The pads were starting to give
out; his brain was being squeezed in a vise of bad air. His tongue was thick from drinking bad
water, and he was urgently hungry. Still his cold, black rage kept him going. And a judicious
application of drugs kept him steady.
At last he found what he needed - a mine on a craggy and pockmarked asteroid with a look
of depletion about it, as if it had already had all its riches cut out. Yet the people working
there had a ship. It stood on its struts a short distance from their camp, which was in turn a
short distance from the hole they'd cut into the asteroid. The ship was cold: it had been shut
down a considerable time ago, when the miners had settled in to work this hunk of rock.
Under other circumstances, Angus Thermopyle would have ignored those miners. He could tell
their whole story with a glance at their ship, their camp, and his field-mining probes. This
asteroid had once been rich, but it had in fact already been mined; played out. The people on it
now - probably a family, people who had to spend long periods of time on ships or in mines tended
to do things by families - were essentially scavengers. Too timid or defeated or poor to go
prospecting for an original strike, they sweated their bare survival out of the rock by gleaning
what little had been missed by previous miners. A pirate or jumper wouldn't waste his time on
them.
On the other hand, they had food and fresh water and scrubber pads. Angus was having
trouble keeping his anger and distress from choking him, and he didn't hesitate. He went in hard.
The miners saw him coming. His board picked up shouts of warning and protest, appeal and outrage:
he ignored them. As he approached, he used torpedoes to collapse the mouth of the mine, blocking
it with dead rock. Then he set Bright Beauty straight down on the camp so that his braking blast
incinerated the habitation domes, charred the suited figures outside.
The radio shouts died in a gabble of static. Got you, you bastards. The camp had been
large enough to support perhaps twenty people. With luck, he'd killed them all. He didn't want any
witnesses.
A quick scan for life readings, distress calls, suit-to-suit communications. None. Good.
That left him with a clear path to the other ship. As soon as he put on a suit himself, he could
go over there and get everything he needed. Then he would be able to hide out in the belt as long
as necessary. Until he got a chance to repay some of his fear.
He was on his way to the EVA locker when Bright Beauty's Klaxons went off like several
dozen screams of pain. The asteroid's tiny gravity didn't hold him back: with a powerful kick, he
sent himself diving for the command module. One hand caught the back of his g-seat; the other
slapped instructions at the computer, demanding an explanation. He was already in the seat,
strapped down, and keying thrust for takeoff by the time the computer told him what was going on.
His sifters and sniffers and sensors had detected the approach of another ship. And not just any
other ship: a ship the same size and configuration as Starmaster. In fact, it was
Starmaster. His probes weren't likely to be mistaken about that alloy. He'd programmed the
computer to watch for her. And to make enough noise to wake him from his grave if it spotted her.
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