A compulsory ache rose in her: she could hardly think. Already the change in him was no longer clear to her. “Do what?”
“Why do you make me wait five seconds before your door opens?”
She’d prepared herself for that question long ago. Husky with need, she replied, “I don’t want you to catch me doing anything”—she flicked a glance toward the san—“ungraceful.”
Apparently that answer was good enough: the subject didn’t really interest him. Dismissing it, he moved closer. At his sides, his fingers worked, curling involuntarily into claws and then straining straight.
If the zone implant’s control over her had been less perfect, she would have been afraid.
Abruptly he surged forward, caught her by the wrists, jerked her half upright on the bunk. His eyes burned at her.
“Do you know how I got these scars? Have you heard that story?”
She shook her head. The realization that she’d engaged the control too soon, that she’d made herself helpless at the wrong moment, brought a moan up from her throat.
“A woman did it. She was a pirate—and I was just a kid. Normally she would have merely sneered at me and walked away. But I had information she wanted, so she didn’t sneer. Instead she seduced me to help her catch a ship. And I believed her. I didn’t know anything about contempt—or about women. I thought she took me seriously.
“But after she got that ship, she didn’t need me anymore. That was when she started laughing at me. She butchered all the crew, everybody she found aboard, but she left me alive. First she cut my face. Then she abandoned me, left me alone on that ship to die slowly, so that I would understand just how much contempt she had for me. Maybe she thought I would kill myself or go crazy before I died of thirst.
“Are you laughing at me?”
Morn stared back at him. She should have at least tried to look frightened or indignant, but she was stupid with inappropriate desire.
“Why did you stay with Captain fucking Thermopile?” His hands twisted pain through her wrists, and his eyes blazed. “Why did you come to me? What kind of plot is this? How are you going to betray me?”
At last she understood. He feared that he was growing dependent on her. Women were things he used and then discarded when he’d had enough of them. If they had useful abilities, he made them part of his crew. But he didn’t invest himself in them; he didn’t need them.
Until now.
Now he’d begun to realize how much power she had with him. And he was scared.
“Answer me,” he demanded through his teeth, “or I’ll break your goddamn arms.”
“Try me,” she whispered from the depths of her false and illimitable passion. “Find out if I’m laughing. You know what that feels like. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”
A sound like a throttled cry came out of him. Releasing one of her wrists, he drew back his arm and hit her so hard that she slammed to the mattress, and the walls grew dark around her.
Then he flung off his boots, ripped his shipsuit away, and landed on her like a hammer.
Artificially responsive, she accepted the way she was hurt and answered it with ecstasy.
Take that and be damned, you bastard!
She hated him far too much to laugh at him.
When he was exhausted and asleep, she took out her control and changed its functions to soften her wounds, numb her revulsion; ease the horrors of transition. After that she climbed past him out of the bunk, put on her shipsuit, hid the black box in her pocket, and went to sickbay.
She didn’t encounter anyone along the way. That was probably a good thing; but she didn’t care who saw her like this.
Reaching her destination, she locked herself in. Then she instructed the medical systems to treat her black eye and swollen face, her bleeding lips, her bruised arms and ribs, her torn labia. She didn’t turn off her zone implant until sickbay had done its best to take her hurts away.
But she didn’t get an abortion. And she didn’t try to hide her pregnancy. The only information she deleted from the log pertained to the exact age of her fetus—and to the electrode buried in her brain.
That done, she returned to her cabin. Shivering with transition and disgust, she stripped off her shipsuit, scrubbed herself in the san until her skin was raw, then got back into the bunk.
She hadn’t decided to keep little Davies. She simply wanted to preserve the evidence that Nick Succorso had beat up a woman with a baby.
In case she needed it.
Apparently she didn’t need it. As soon as he woke up, she saw that his doubt was at rest. His eyes were clear, his scars were as pale as whole skin, and he’d recovered his grin. The bruises Orn gave him had started to fade.
He was mildly surprised at her condition: she should have looked much worse. He approved of her explanation, however. At peace with himself, entirely unchagrined, he instructed her to go to the auxiliary bridge so that Alba Parmute could begin teaching her her duties. Then he headed for the bridge to learn how the datacore playback proceeded.
Morn was ready to get to work: she was full of readiness and murder. She had decisions to make, and decisions required information. She left her cabin immediately.
At Nick’s orders, Parmute was waiting for Morn when she reached the auxiliary bridge.
It was up in the drive space beside the engineering console room where Vector Shaheed or his second monitored Captain’s Fancy’s relatively gentle navigational thrust. The auxiliary bridge itself was narrower and less vertiginously curved than its counterpart, since it was formed around the bulkheads of the ship’s core; but it contained all the same g-seats, consoles, and screens. Past its arc, the walls of one end were visible from the other. Sitting in front of the data board, Morn could see all the other stations without craning her neck.
The habitual sullenness of Alba Parmute’s face and manner reinforced the impression that she was another of Nick’s discarded lovers. Nevertheless her desire to find somebody else to share her bed showed in the artificiality of her hair and makeup, as well as in the blatant way she displayed her body: she wore her shipsuit only half sealed, and her breasts bulged ominously in the gap. Morn had no sympathy for her, however. Disgusted at the thought of Nick and all things male, Morn found Alba’s obvious hunger pathetic.
Unfortunately Alba’s pouting mood—and her apparently perpetual state of libidinal impatience—failed to conceal the fact that she wasn’t particularly bright. She was able to explain Morn’s responsibilities in only the most concrete terms: how the duty-rotation worked; whom she took orders from; which buttons to push; which codes engaged the various data functions; what damage-control utilities Captain’s Fancy had available. Any underlying how or why she ignored: she did all her work by rote herself, and expected Morn to do the same. By comparison, the self-doubting and ill-equipped data first, Mackern, was a wizard.
Nick and his ship had been more dependent on Orn Vorbuld than Morn had realized.
She was no wizard herself; but she soon found it easy to believe that she could be more valuable to Captain’s Fancy than Alba Parmute was.
After enduring the general uselessness of Alba’s instructions for half an hour, Morn grew frustrated enough to dare asking to be left alone on the auxiliary bridge. So that she could “practice her duties.”
She was UMCP: she may have been untrustworthy. But Alba was bored—and anyway Morn wasn’t male. The data second shrugged and went away.
That was Morn’s chance, her first chance. She was determined not to waste it.
The compartments where she kept the black pieces of her hate were breaking down. Nick’s violence—and the fact that she was pregnant—damaged her defenses. Bits of revulsion and self-loathing, outrage and dire need, leaked together inside her, fomenting bloodshed. Alone on the auxiliary bridge, in front of the data console as if its readouts could display her fate, she risked looking for answers.
But she didn’t neglect the caution she’d learned from Angus
. Careful and bitter, she keyed the intercom to the bridge and asked permission to activate the auxiliary data board so that she could study the equipment.
“Go ahead,” Nick answered. With his doubts at rest, he was in an indulgent mood. “Study as much as you want. Just don’t do anything. If you trigger another wipe, you’re fired.”
Beating her knuckles against the console for self-control, she replied as cheerfully as she could, “Thanks.” She had no intention of doing anything which might activate Orn’s virus. She wasn’t going to lay a finger on Captain’s Fancy’s data: she was just going to look at it.
The system was unfamiliar, but not much different than the ones she’d used in the Academy, or aboard Starmaster. And Alba had given her the basic codes. As soon as the auxiliary board was ready, she checked on the progress of the datacore playback.
The information she needed had already been restored.
Navigational data. Astrogation and scan.
Like any new computer, this one had programming tics and quirks she didn’t know about. For five or ten minutes, she floundered around in the system, flashing only gibberish across the displays. But then she found her way into a summary of the programming parameters, where she quickly learned the things Alba Parmute had neglected or been unable to tell her.
After that she began to obtain useful results.
Navigational data enabled her to plot Captain’s Fancy’s trajectory away from Com-Mine Station. Astrogation and scan enabled her to fix the ship’s present position and to call up a list of possible destinations—places which could be reached along this course.
The list was long. It included everything from points dead ahead around in a vast curve back to Com-Mine itself. But she restricted the field considerably by assuming that Nick intended to maintain lateral thrust for at least two more months and by discounting any goal that would take more than seven or eight more months to reach—in effect, by eliminating from consideration everything past the midpoint of the huge circle implied by Captain’s Fancy’s arc.
When she was done, the list had become short.
So short that it made her blood run cold.
It included only a red giant with no significant satellites; the farthest tip, virtually uncharted, of the asteroid belt served by Com-Mine Station; one of the hostile outposts which guarded forbidden space; and a hunk of dead rock as big as a planetoid, hanging a few million kilometers inside the borders of forbidden space—far enough inside to be absolutely off limits for any human ship, and yet far enough away from the outpost to be accessible to any human ship willing to risk the consequences.
That rock had a name: Thanatos Minor.
Morn had heard of it. Its name made her shiver as though her heart were freezing.
She’d heard it in the Academy, whispered by people who were appalled by what it represented: a depth of betrayal so unfathomable as to work toward the destruction of the human species for mere gain.
Thanatos Minor. No wonder forbidden space sheltered it, condoned it, despite diplomatic protests, ambassadorial outrage—despite the fact that its very existence was prohibited by signed treaty. Forbidden space threatened every human being alive, even though the threat was genetic rather than military; even though no human ships were ever attacked, and no alien vessels ever crossed the border outward, and no accords were ever broken—except by such telling omissions as the refusal to extirpate Thanatos Minor. And Thanatos Minor served that threat more effectively than warships and matter cannon.
At least by reputation, the rock was a shipyard and clearinghouse for pirates. Ships were built there (ships like Bright Beauty?): ships went there for repairs. And pirates like Nick Succorso and Angus Thermopyle took their plunder there, to one of the few markets rich enough to buy ore and supplies on the scale they offered; a market fueled by forbidden space’s unquenchable appetite for human resources, human technologies, and—if the rumors were true—human lives.
Morn ignored the red giant, the outpost, the asteroid belt. As surely as if Nick had given her the answer himself, she knew where Captain’s Fancy was headed.
Thanatos Minor, where he would sell her secrets for money and repairs; where everything she knew about the UMCP would, in effect, be sold to forbidden space.
That wasn’t just crime: it was treason. A betrayal of humankind.
She had no loyalty to the United Mining Companies Police. Vector had argued that her superiors and heroes to the highest levels were corrupt—and it was at least conceivable that he was right. He certainly believed his own evidence. Whether they were corrupt or not, however, she’d already turned her back on them: she’d accepted the zone implant control from Angus and gone with Nick instead of giving herself up to Com-Mine Security. She was no longer a cop in any effective sense.
But none of that mattered here. She couldn’t know whether the UMCP had betrayed humankind. She had to consider whether she was prepared to betray humankind herself.
And if she answered, No!—what then? Then the question became: How could she prevent Nick from forcing that betrayal on her?
Automatically she calculated the remaining distance: nearly six months at half the speed of light along Captain’s Fancy’s present course, including deceleration time—more heavy g.
What could she do?
What else, besides sabotage Captain’s Fancy?
The best she could hope for was self-destruct, immediate death. Any other form of sabotage would leave her adrift in black space with a ship full of people who knew that she’d effectively killed them all. But the mere thought of self-destruct filled her with dark, cold terror. It meant murdering herself so absolutely that everyone connected to her died as well.
Or she could simply kill herself and let Nick go on without her.
She felt so trapped and cold that she was hardly able to continue breathing. Involuntarily her knuckles hit the edge of the data console until they cracked, and both her hands turned bloody. There was no way out of this mess that didn’t involve self-murder; a surrender to the moral gap-sickness which had consumed her life ever since Starmaster had first sighted Bright Beauty and gone into heavy g.
No, she thought. No. It’s too much. I can’t bear it.
She hadn’t come all this way just to kill herself. She hadn’t suffered Nick’s touch all this time, endured beating and revulsion, just to kill herself.
Trapped.
Finally the cold in her heart grew so intense that she had to clamp her arms across her chest and huddle over her stomach for warmth.
She was still in that position—hunched down as if to protect her baby—when Vector Shaheed found her.
He must have been passing outside on his way to his console room. From the doorway, he asked, “Morn?”
She should have said something to make him go away. She should at least have concealed her hands. But she couldn’t.
“Morn? Are you all right?” He came closer; he touched her shoulder. Then his grip tightened. “What the hell are you doing to yourself?”
Like a flare of cold fire, she rose to face his look of mild surprise, mild concern.
“You should have told me,” she rasped thickly. “Back when I first asked you. You should have told me where we’re going.”
Turning her back on him, she left the auxiliary bridge and went back to the artificial courage of her zone implant.
When a chime from the intercom informed her that it was time for her to take her turn on the bridge, she obeyed, even though her fingers were so stiff with crusted blood and pain that she could hardly move them. Reckless and uncaring, she carried her black box switched on low in her pocket, not to numb her physical hurt, but to muffle her emotional distress. The damage to her knuckles was useful: it helped keep her in the present. And her zone implant prevented the present from overwhelming her.
Muted by subtle electronic emissions, she stepped onto the bridge to take her place as Captain’s Fancy’s data third.
Liete Corregio was command third:
this was her watch. Nevertheless Nick met Morn as she arrived. He gave her a sharp grin which she hardly knew how to answer, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he dangled her id tag by its chain for a moment, then flipped it to her.
That told her the datacore playback was finished.
It might have told her other things as well, but she was in no condition to notice them.
Wincing involuntarily, she caught her id tag and closed it in her fist.
Then she did her best to keep her features blank against his reaction when he saw the state of her hands.
His eyes turned instantly hard; his grin locked into place. Without transition his body passed from movement to poised stillness. Casually—too casually—he asked, “Morn, have you been fighting again?”
For a heartbeat or two, the effects of her zone implant almost broke. She’d been fighting, all right. And nothing was resolved. But the control held. A shade too late, she shook her head.
“I fell. Caught myself on my fists.”
As if that were the end of the matter, she pulled the chain over her head and dropped her id tag into her shipsuit.
He didn’t appear to know whether to believe her or not. Noncommittally he said, “Go to sickbay. Liete can wait for you.”
Again Morn shook her head. “If it hurts enough, it might teach me to be more careful next time.” Then she added, “I want to do my job.”
Slowly the danger eased out of him. He may have decided to believe her. Or he may have believed that she hadn’t lost whatever fight she’d been in. Her black box helped her look like she hadn’t lost. With a shrug, he dismissed the subject.
To the command third, he said, “You’re on.” Then he left the bridge.
Morn looked at Liete Corregio, received a nod, and went to seat herself at the data station.
Every time she touched the keys in front of her, her knuckles hurt as if they were broken.
That was what she desired.
Liete was a small, dark woman with blunt features and a voice that barely carried across the bridge. In addition her manner conveyed so little obvious authority that at first Morn wondered whether Liete had obtained her position by being another of Nick’s discarded lovers. But the command third looked too plain to suit Nick Succorso’s romantic tastes. And before long Morn became convinced that Liete Corregio was nearly as competent as Mikka Vasaczk. She lacked Mikka’s overt aggressiveness, but not her certainty or skill. Apparently Nick’s tolerance for women like Alba Parmute didn’t extend to the command positions aboard his ship.