The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge

The engineer shrugged without opening his eyes. “Sure.” As always, he spoke mildly. Nevertheless he looked old and bleak, almost haggard despite the roundness of his face. “From his point of view, it was a reasonable thing to do. Like buying life insurance.”

  Abruptly Nick started laughing again—a rough sound with death in it. “There’s no question about it, Orn, you motherfucker. I don’t get mad easily, but you have definitely found a way to piss me off.”

  “Nick—” Mikka said. She may have been trying to warn him. Or stop him.

  He ignored her. Whirling suddenly, he kicked Orn’s head so hard that everybody in the mess heard Orn’s neck break.

  “Nick.” This time Mikka said his name like a moan. But he still ignored her.

  Grimly he left the room. As he passed her, he said to Morn as if he held her accountable, “I hope they taught you something about computers in the Academy.”

  Morn hugged herself and tried to believe that she wasn’t going to be the next person Nick killed.

  CHAPTER 6

  In the aftermath of the fight, Morn Hyland felt weary and sore, drained to the bone.

  She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off Orn’s corpse. Like everyone else in the mess, she studied him as if she were praying to see him move, hoping for some sign that he wasn’t dead. But he lay with his face in a small puddle of the blood from his smashed nose and the cuts Nick had given him. Everyone had heard his neck snap.

  They were all going to die because of him.

  Unlike the crew, however, she didn’t regret his death. Such men didn’t deserve to live, no matter how expensive it was to get rid of them.

  And Nick had said, I hope they taught you something about computers in the Academy. At last she was going to get access to the ship’s systems—which meant that she might learn the answers to some of her questions.

  The idea failed to lift her spirits.

  How could she help save Captain’s Fancy? She was no computer wizard. And it wasn’t worth the effort. If the ship survived, so would she—and then she would have to go on dealing with men like Orn Vorbuld and Nick Succorso; fighting them off or surrendering to them until her black revulsion cracked its containers and devoured her mind. She should have thought of some way to save herself from Orn. She should have—but she hadn’t. It was beyond her.

  “All right, boys and girls,” Mikka Vasaczk said harshly, “the party’s over. We’ve all got work to do. You know what the stakes are, so pay attention.”

  Around the mess, people raised their heads. Some of them plainly wanted orders; they wanted to be told what to do, as a defense against their fear. Others were already too scared.

  “What work?” The woman who spoke was an artificial blonde with sullen features. “I don’t know how to cure a computer virus. None of us does. We just use the systems, we don’t design them. Orn was the only one who could do that.”

  Mikka replied with a smile as humorless as the blade of Orn’s knife. “Fine. If you think Nick’s beaten, you go tell him. All I want is a chance to watch. He’ll make you think Vorbuld got off easy.”

  Without warning her voice cracked into a shout like a cry from her dour and unyielding heart.

  “Have any of you EVER seen Nick beaten?”

  Now she had them: every eye in the mess was fixed on her. There were no more protests.

  Mikka took a deep breath to steady herself, then repeated, “We’ve all got work to do. I want the firsts on the bridge. Mackern, you’re promoted to data first.”

  Mackern was a pale, nervous man with a nearly invisible mustache. His only apparent reaction to his promotion was a desire to disappear into the bulkheads.

  “That makes you second, Parmute,” Vasaczk continued to the artificial blonde.

  “The rest of you, get back to the overhaul. Shut it down—secure everything. I want us tight and ready for maneuvers in an hour. Anybody who isn’t done by then can trade jobs with Pup.”

  The boy they called Pup met her threat with a flash of hope. For him, any trade would be an improvement.

  “Do it now,” Mikka finished grimly. “The timer is running.”

  Still looking ashen and old, Vector Shaheed pushed his swollen joints away from the wall. At once the whole crew started to move as if he’d broken them out of a stasis-field.

  In ten seconds Morn and Mikka were alone with Orn Vorbuld’s body.

  With an air of grim restraint, Mikka turned to Morn. Her eyes held a fierce gleam, fanatical and deadly. “This is your fault,” she rasped. “Don’t think I’m going to forget that. Don’t ever think I’m going to forget.”

  Morn held Mikka’s glare without flinching. Everything was beyond her; for the moment, she didn’t care whether she survived.

  “Goddamn it,” Mikka chewed out, “what do you use for brains? Do you do all your thinking with your crotch? Any imbecile could have told you not to tackle Orn alone. Hell, Pup could have told you. You should have talked to Nick before things got this bad. If you’d warned him in time, we might have been able to avoid this mess.”

  Morn shrugged. She had no reason to justify herself to Nick’s second. And yet she found that she couldn’t refuse. The nature of Mikka’s anger touched her. She could imagine her mother being angry in just that way, if someone had threatened Morn.

  Stiffly she asked, “How many times have you been raped?”

  Mikka dismissed the question with an ungiving scowl. “We aren’t talking about rape. We’re talking about brains.”

  Morn wasn’t deflected. “After a while,” she said, “you hurt so bad that you don’t want to be rescued anymore. You want to eviscerate that sonofabitch for yourself. Eventually you don’t even care that you haven’t got a prayer. You need to try.

  “If you don’t try, you end up killing yourself because you’re too ashamed to live.”

  Nick’s second opened her mouth to retort, then closed it again. For a moment she continued to frown as if nothing could reach her. When she spoke, however, her tone had softened.

  “Go to sickbay. Don’t come to the bridge until you’ve done something about those bruises.” Unexpectedly she dropped her gaze. “If you feel better, you’ll think better. Maybe you can think of some way to limit the damage.”

  Turning on her heel, Mikka left the mess.

  Limit the damage.

  Morn remained with Orn for a minute or two. She wanted to see if it was possible to feel any grief or regret for him.

  No. For him her only regret was that she hadn’t been able to beat him herself.

  Think better.

  Because she saw no danger in it, she obeyed Mikka. After all, she was alone. Under the circumstances, no one was likely to intrude on her. She could easily erase the results of her examination from the sickbay log before she went to the bridge. And she needed the stim sickbay would probably give her: she needed artificial help to counteract her accumulating despair. Since she still didn’t feel reckless enough to carry her zone implant control with her, she would have to rely on stim.

  Dully she went to sickbay and stretched out on the table to let the cybernetic systems supply whatever treatment they decided she required.

  She got stim, as well as an analgesic which softened her hurts. In addition, one of the drugs stilled the nausea which had become a constant part of her life, so familiar that she was hardly aware of it. Distracted by that simple relief, she almost forgot to take the elementary precaution of checking the results of the examination before expunging them.

  At the last moment, however, she remembered.

  What she learned hit her as hard as Orn; revolted her as much as Nick; threatened her as acutely as Angus.

  The records informed her that she was pregnant.

  Her child was a boy.

  The computer told her exactly how old he was.

  Too old to be any son of Nick Succorso’s.

  In her womb like a malignancy, dark and inoperable, she bore the child of Angus Thermopyle.

  Well, she thou
ght on a rising note of hysteria, that explained the nausea.

  It was insane. What was she doing pregnant? Most spacefaring women made sure they were infertile, whether they wanted children or not. Life in space was too fragile: any risk to themselves was a risk to the entire ship. In any case, no ship—except, perhaps, the most luxurious passenger liners—had the facilities for rearing infants. Most women found the whole prospect too horrible to contemplate. If they wanted children, they had them on station.

  But for Morn the problem was infinitely worse. Like Captain’s Fancy, her baby was doomed. The end would almost certainly not be quick, however: it would be protracted and appalling. Once the computers wiped, the ship would lose astrogation, navigation. The vessel itself might coast the black void until the end of time—a sailing coffin because everyone aboard had died of thirst or hunger. But that wouldn’t happen for many long months. In the meantime Morn’s plight would deteriorate steadily.

  As her pregnancy progressed, she would become less attractive to Nick—less worth preserving. She would become physically more vulnerable. And the closer Nick and his people came to death, the more they would blame her for it. In all likelihood, she and her baby would be the first to die.

  And this was Angus’ son, Angus Thermopyle’s child. The fetus was already as brutal as his father, damaging her survival in the same way that Angus had damaged her spirit.

  How could she be pregnant? What had happened to the long-term birth control injections she’d accepted routinely back in the Academy? They were supposed to be good for up to a year, and she’d had her last one only—only—

  Only a year ago.

  Without warning she began to weep.

  Oh, shit!

  She’d forgotten all about getting another injection. Her periods had never been particularly difficult. And from the Academy she’d been assigned to Starmaster, her father’s command, a ship on which most of the people she’d lived and worked with were family. She hadn’t wanted sex with anybody aboard. Engrossed in the excitements and responsibilities of her first post, she hadn’t given much thought to sex at all.

  An immediate abortion was the only sane solution. The sickbay systems could do it in a matter of minutes.

  But she couldn’t force her hands to key in the necessary commands. She couldn’t force herself to lie back down on the surgical table.

  As suddenly as it flared up, her weeping subsided.

  Instead of fear or dismay or outrage, she was filled with a strange numbness—a loss of sensation as inexorable as the effects of her zone implant. She was in shock. Orn’s attack; the fight; the danger to Captain’s Fancy: her emotional resources were exhausted. The decision to have an abortion was beyond her.

  Fortunately it could be postponed. Nothing had to be decided right this minute. The sickbay could rid her of the fetus whenever she wanted.

  Angus’ son.

  Numb or not, she was too ashamed—and too afraid—of what she carried to risk letting anyone else find out about it. However, Angus had taught her more than she realized. She didn’t expunge the sickbay log. That was too risky: it might attract suspicion. Instead she edited the records so that whoever chanced to check them would see she’d come here as ordered, but wouldn’t find any evidence of her zone implant, or her baby.

  Like Angus, Nick had disconnected his sickbay from Captain’s Fancy’s datacore. The sickbay log had no copies. Soon nothing incriminating remained to threaten her.

  Temporarily safe, she left sickbay.

  Maybe she should have gone by her cabin to pick up her black box. Nick would expect her to help tackle the problem of Orn’s virus, and she was too numb to think: she needed help. But she needed her numbness as well. If she used the zone implant to sharpen her brain, she would have to face the dilemma of her pregnancy.

  Cradling the sense of shock as if it were an infant in her womb, she went to the bridge.

  Nick was there, sitting in his command seat, drumming his fingers on his board while he waited for his people to check their systems. When Morn crossed the aperture to stand beside him, he gave her a quick, fierce grin like a promise that he didn’t regret killing Orn for her; that he was too excited by the challenge of saving his ship to fear failure. For once, his scars throbbed with a lust which had nothing to do with her. Instead of marring him, his bruises seemed to accentuate his vitality.

  Then he shifted his attention back to his crew.

  Morn looked at the display screens for information. But they were blank, probably because the ship’s speed made them effectively useless. So she scanned the bridge.

  Only the engineering station was vacant: Vector and his second were probably in the console room. All the other firsts were at their posts.

  “Status,” Nick commanded in a tone of veiled eagerness, as if he were having a wonderful time.

  His mood ruled the bridge. The dread Morn had observed in the mess had no place here. Even Mackern, occupying Orn Vorbuld’s seat for the first time, worked his board with a degree of concentration which approximated confidence.

  Almost immediately Carmel answered. “Scan checks out fine. At this velocity, we might as well be blind ahead. We’re outrunning our effective scan time. And the starfield is dopplering noticeably. But the computer compensates for that. We can fix our position well enough.”

  “Communications the same,” reported Lind. “There’s nothing out there to hear except particle noise”—the residual crackle and spatter of deep space—“but if there was, we could pick it up.”

  “Targeting and weapons the same,” put in a woman named Malda Verone. She sounded vaguely disinterested; under the circumstances her systems were the least vital ones aboard.

  Nick nodded and waited.

  Hunching over his board, Mackern said, “I’m running diagnostics. We’ve got all the usual debug programs.” He pulled at his mustache while he worked. “So far, they don’t show anything.”

  Nick shook his head. “Orn knew what our resources are. He wouldn’t leave us a virus we could cure that easy.”

  As if in confirmation, Mackern scowled at his readouts, then sat up straight. “Done. Diagnostics say we’re in good shape.”

  Carmel snorted scornfully. No one else bothered to comment.

  After a moment a man with a husky voice and no chin said a bit apprehensively, “Sorry for the delay. I wanted to dummy helm to the auxiliary bridge before I ran any tests. That way, if anything shuts down on me, we can hold our course correction. We won’t drift.”

  Casually Nick replied, “Good.”

  “Helm checks out,” the man continued. “We’re green on all systems. Except the gap drive, of course.”

  Nick nodded again. Morn glanced at his board and saw that all the command status indicators were green as well.

  Orn’s virus was still dormant.

  Grinning more sharply, Nick swung his seat around to face Morn. “Any suggestions?”

  She was supposed to help save the ship; she knew that. But she was profoundly numb, almost unreactive, as if beneath the surface her priorities were undergoing their own course correction. For the time being, she had no real attention to spare for Captain’s Fancy’s problems.

  “In the Academy,” she said from a distance, responding only so that Nick wouldn’t probe her, “they taught me to do two things for a computer virus. Isolate the systems—unplug them from each other so the virus can’t spread. And call Maintenance.”

  Nick chuckled sardonically. “Good idea.” To all appearances, he didn’t actually want her help. He was at his best here, matching his wits and his ship against his enemies. What he wanted was an audience, not advice. Over his shoulder, he asked, “You got that, Lind?”

  “They don’t answer,” Lind retorted with a sneer. “Must be on their lunch break.”

  Gratified, Nick spread his hands and swung back toward the bridge screens.

  “You heard the lady. Isolate the systems.”

  Around the bridge, his people hurried
to obey.

  Left alone, Morn made a vague effort to think about the situation. At a guess, Captain’s Fancy had seven main computers protected deep in her core: one to run the ship herself (lifts, air processing, internal g, waste disposal, intercoms, heat, water, things like that); five for each of the bridge functions (scan, targ and weapons, communications, helm, and data and damage control); and one, the command unit, to synergize the others. That design was inherently safer than trusting to one megaCPU—and in any case few ships had any need for the raw computing power a megaCPU could provide. So the immediate problem was to determine where Orn’s virus resided. Without risking the spread of the infection.

  Of course, he could have planted his virus in more than one computer. Or in all of them.

  If she hadn’t felt so far away, she might have been dismayed at the sheer scale of the problem. No one aboard knew how to cure a virus once it was located. If they had to track it through all seven systems—

  Nick ran a few commands on his board, presumably to set the maintenance computer on automatic. Then, unexpectedly, he turned to Morn again. As they swelled, his bruises seemed to sharpen the focus of his eyes.

  As if he were resuming a conversation which had been interrupted just moments ago, he remarked, “There’s only one problem with your theory that I’m a UMCPDA operative.”

  That remark cut through her numbness. All at once, the protection wrapped around her womb was gone; she felt like she’d been kicked in the belly. Why bring that up? Why bring it up now? What was going on here? What had she missed?

  What new danger was she in?

  What, she thought before she realized it, would happen to her baby?

  Grinning at her incomprehension, he said, “I’m out of money,” as if that explained everything.

  Lind, Carmel, and the helm first all laughed, not in disbelief, but in recognition of a difficulty so constant that it had become a joke.

  Morn stared at Nick and tried to recover her numbness; tried to conceal herself behind veils of shock.

  He enjoyed her stunned expression for a moment. Then he relented.