Davies started forward, but Angus was already ahead of him. Two quick strides put Angus directly in front of Nick.
“I’m not going to warn you,” Angus rasped. “If you need warning by this time, you’re too stupid to live.”
Nick peered at the deck as if he were bemused by the way the plates were welded together. He put up no resistance—didn’t react at all—as Angus shoved his fingers into one pocket after another until he found Nick’s vial of capsules.
“Good boy.” Angus tossed the vial to Vector. “Tomorrow I’ll teach you to roll over.”
Vector opened the vial, checked the contents, then put Morn’s capsules with the others. “I don’t know if that’s all of them,” he said, “but it should be enough:” His smile had a rueful tinge, as if he could taste the years he’d lost. “If I can’t crack the formula from a sample like this, I’d better go back to engineering.”
Nick’s scars had turned the color of cold ash; a tic pulled at the edge of his cheek. Nevertheless he didn’t raise his eyes from the deck.
Watching him, Davies felt sure that Nick was contemplating murder.
ANGUS
Angus wanted to sit down on the deck and hold his head. Only his zone implants kept him on his feet, preserved the appearance that he was in control of himself. If they hadn’t automatically stepped up their emissions midway through the ordeal of facing Morn, he would have fallen apart already.
He couldn’t believe what was happening.
Had he just agreed to take Vector Shaheed to a lab in the VI system? He’d never been there before; knew nothing about it except what his databases told him. And was it all for the sake of some shit-foolish humanitarian gesture? This wasn’t what he did to bleeding hearts. This wasn’t how he manipulated them—or reacted to them. He had a long and feral history of making such bastards pay for their moral superiority.
In fact, he’d achieved his greatest victory that way. He’d hijacked a ship called Viable Dreams virtually intact and sold her crew to the Amnion in exchange for the knowledge that enabled him to edit datacores; and he’d accomplished it with a fake distress call and a few dead bodies to prove he was in trouble—in other words, by appealing to her captain’s bleeding heart.
What was wrong with him?
It must be his programming: Dios or Lebwohl was pulling his strings again; embedded commands in his datacore had taken over again. Never mind that it didn’t make any sense. Either Dios or Lebwohl wanted him to act like a fucking philanthropist.
And yet he hadn’t felt the coercion—
Not that sort of coercion, at any rate. Electronic impulses forced him to appear self-contained, decided for him what he could and couldn’t reveal, finally stifled any outward sign of his inner torment. But those emissions hadn’t forced him to say the words which accepted Vector’s proposal; the command hadn’t reached him through his datalink.
No, the coercion was of another kind.
It came from Morn.
With her ravaged beauty and her raw gaze, her plain weakness and her strange strength, she compelled him. She was as precious as Bright Beauty, and as vulnerable: so vulnerable that she seemed to make him vulnerable in her place, as if he wanted to protect her, sacrifice himself for her; as if he, Angus Thermopyle, had it in him to want anything from her except to possess her.
He’d agreed to Vector’s suggestion because she desired it.
The thought filled him with so much helpless rage that he stormed and howled like a beast inside the mute cage of his skull. It’s probably better than hanging around here. He had to assume that whatever he accepted or decided here didn’t mean anything. His programming was simply biding its time, waiting for someone to invoke the codes which would return him to UMCPHQ. At that point he would effectively betray Vector and Ciro, Mikka and Sib.
And Davies.
And Morn.
When Davies had put a hand on his arm, he’d said, Fuck you, too. But he hadn’t been talking to his son.
As for Morn, he’d made a deal with her. She’d given him his life: he’d promised not to betray her. That promise still held him, even though he was powerless to do anything about it.
Because he couldn’t collapse on the deck and wail like his torn heart, he looked around the bridge arid nodded grimly as if everything was settled; as if every important question had been answered. “All right,” he told the wonder and anguish on Morn’s face, the hot passion in Davies’ eyes, “that’s enough. You need rest. Shit, we all do.
“We’ve got”—he consulted his computer—“roughly seven and a half hours until we’re in position to head for human space.” He indicated Davies. “You and Sib take Captain Sheepfucker and lock him in one of the cabins. After that you can put yourselves to bed. As long as he can’t hurt anything except himself, the rest of us are probably safe.”
Clutching his gun, Sib stood up from the second’s station. Davies studied Angus for a moment, flicked a glance like a question toward Morn, then shrugged and moved to join Sib. An opportunity to treat Nick as Nick had formerly treated him was one he couldn’t refuse.
Nick’s cheek ticked urgently, but he didn’t protest. While Sib aimed the handgun at the small of his back, he crossed the bridge and climbed the companionway ahead of Sib and Davies.
Addressing Vector and Ciro, Angus went on, “You two get off the bridge. If you think you don’t need sleep, think again.”
Ciro turned toward Mikka, asking silently whether he should stay with her; but Vector took his arm and drew him after Davies and Sib.
As he passed the command station, Vector paused to say, “Thank you.”
He was speaking to Morn, not Angus.
Angus knew exactly how the engineer felt.
With a private snort of bitterness, he faced Mikka.
“You’re my second now. I need somebody with the right kind of experience.” Somebody who thought like an illegal, not a cop. “Also somebody who knows the Valdor system. Captain Sheepfucker already had his chance. But I don’t need you until we’re ready to leave here. If you don’t rest now, you’ll have to stay tired for a long time. Come back in six and a half hours so you’ll have time to get used to your board. Stay away until then.”
Mikka nodded slowly. Her black scowl had been replaced by something more complex and speculative; almost a look of bafflement. For a moment she glanced back and forth between Angus and Morn like a woman trying to measure her options; then she grimaced uncomfortably.
“None of this makes sense,” she said to Angus. “You know that.” There was no challenge in her tone. “I feel like somebody changed all the rules behind my back. When did you turn into a man who cares whether humankind has an immunity drug? You say you’re working for Hashi Lebwohl. When did he turn into a man like that?
“You rescued Davies and Morn. You rescued us. I want to trust you. I just don’t know how.”
Angus growled deep in his throat, but didn’t answer.
“Do you mind being left with him?” Mikka asked Morn.
Morn’s eyes flared with anger or panic; she looked like she wanted to say, Are you crazy? Of course I mind. For some reason, however, she shook her head. “If he wants me dead,” she murmured, “all he has to do is touch me. In the meantime, I need to talk to him.”
Mikka may have thought Morn was crazy. Nevertheless she shrugged. “I’m going to leave my door open,” she remarked as she headed for the companionway. “If you shout, I’ll hear you.”
Morn watched Mikka go as if she were taking all the courage off the bridge with her.
Angus ached at the sight of her visceral distress. At one time he’d loved seeing her like this; loved her horror and revulsion because they confirmed his possession of her. Or he’d believed he loved it; tricked himself into believing it. Now that emotion was gone; lost. He’d suffered too much of her helplessness. His own head had become a crib as cruel and inescapable as the one in which his mother filled him with pain—The gap between his needs and anyone else’s w
as as great now as it had been then. For that reason Morn’s fear and hatred affected him like Bright Beauty’s wounds: they confirmed nothing except the fact that he’d failed.
Choosing to be alone with him here must have been one of the hardest things she’d ever done.
Savage to avoid the anguish he’d once craved from the bottom of his heart, he rasped harshly, “Get out of my seat.”
She didn’t move. When Mikka reached the head of the companionway and passed out of view, Morn brought her gaze slowly to his, let him see the nakedness of her abhorrence. Yet she didn’t do what he told her. She might not have heard him.
“Mikka’s right,” she said stiffly, as if she were fighting for calm. Nevertheless she kept her voice low. “None of this makes sense. You don’t make sense. But I’m not going to ask you to explain it. I don’t care what your reasons are. I’m not even going to try to trust you.
“I just care what you do.”
“Thank you.” In despair Angus mocked Vector’s more tolerable gratitude.
Morn studied him with the same cold and bloody determination her father must have felt when Starmaster went after Bright Beauty; when he fixed his targ on Bright Beauty and ordered Angus’ destruction. Her tone and her loathing seemed as steady as steel.
“Are you really going to send a report when we reach human space?”
Angus glowered, not at her, but at the contents of his datacore. “Yes.”
“What are you going to say?”
He didn’t know the answer—or he wasn’t allowed to reveal it. “What do you want me to say?” he countered.
“Tell them about Davies,” she answered promptly. Perhaps there was no hesitation left in her. She may have had no remaining scruples except the ones on which her definition of herself rested. “Tell them why the Amnion want him. Tell them the Amnion may have gotten a sample of the drug from my blood.
“And be sure to tell them the Amnion are experimenting with gap components to reach near-C acceleration.”
“Yes, sir, Captain Hyland, sir,” Angus sneered. What else could he do? She surpassed him in every dimension. And he was helpless to turn off his anger and grief. “Anything else?”
She shook her head.
“What?” he pursued sarcastically. “No mention of zone implants? No mention of Captain Sheepfucker’s adventures in creative treachery?”
Morn held his gaze. She might have been daring him to outface her. “You can do that if you want. But I hope you won’t.”
“In that case—” He leaned toward her threateningly. His prewritten instructions permitted that: they didn’t care how badly he scared her. “Get out of my seat.”
He couldn’t break her, however; not this way; maybe never again. She complied by rising from the command station and stepping out of his way; but she didn’t drop her eyes—or the focused demand of her hate.
He could play that game. The terror bred in his bones was as good as hate. And his programming gave him an oblique support: it steadied him reflexively when he was afraid. But he found he didn’t want to fight her on those terms. He’d lost his appetite for seeing her lose. So he used the motions of sitting in his g-seat and looking at the information on the command readouts as excuses to turn away from her; let her go.
Warden Dios had said, It’s got to stop. Angus couldn’t imagine what the UMCP director meant, but he had his own answer.
This. This has got to stop.
Morn regarded him in silence for a moment or two. When she spoke, her tone had changed. It was softer, more open; it ached quietly. Like her bruised eyes, it reminded him that her abhorrence was based on pain.
“How do you feel about having a son?” she asked. “About having Davies for a son?”
Angus’ heart clenched in a grimace which didn’t show on his face, a spasm which didn’t touch his body. In more ways than he could bear to examine, Davies was him—another abused child. Afterward she used to comfort him as if it were him she loved, and not the sight of his red and swollen anguish or the strangled sound of his cries. The crib and the torture were different: the cost was the same. If Davies made something more out of it than his father had, that was due to Morn—to her presence in her son’s mind; to the fact that she surpassed his father.
Angus couldn’t bring himself to look up at her. His answer was like a cry from the core of his being.
“How do you feel,” he retorted, “about having gap-sickness—about needing a zone implant so you won’t go ape-shit and try to kill everyone when we hit hard g?”
She sighed to herself. “That bad?” The words might have expressed recognition or rejection: he couldn’t tell the difference. And yet he seemed to hear a smile in her voice as she added, “Then I guess we’re both in pretty poor shape.”
With his peripheral vision, he saw her turn away. But he didn’t watch as she put her hands on the rails of the companionway and left the bridge. It was already too late.
How do you feel about having a son?
She shouldn’t have asked him that; shouldn’t have opened that door. He could feel the slats of the crib closing around him, sealing him to his terror. He’d spent his whole life running away from this, headlong across space and time. Every act of violence, every atrocity, every instance of destruction, had been a form of flight: an attempt to hold his own fear at bay by inflicting it on other people; an effort to stave off his past by consuming others in the present. And now Morn had translated it across the gap of years and crimes to reach him.
As soon as it caught up with him, he was finished.
Stop! he cried out voicelessly. It’s got to stop!
But Warden Dios’ unexplained convictions and ambiguous intentions were irrelevant here. For all its exigencies and compulsions, Angus’ computer was no help to him. His zone implants replied to the physiological symptoms of panic by calming him. Thus unwittingly they contributed to the erosion of the defenses he needed most.
Caught inside Trumpet’s hulls and his own skull, he lay in the crib
with his scrawny wrists and ankles tied to the slats
while his mother filled him with pain—
She’d been a lost woman, as lost as Angus himself. Like her son, she’d thought that she had no choice about the things that were done to her, or the things she did.
She’d been born by accident to a couple of guttergang kids in one of Earth’s dying urban centers. They had no love for her, of course; and like kids they made her know that from the day she was born. But they found that she had a couple of uses. She was a lever with their own parents, a means to extort support or credit—or a place to hide. And she was another kind of lever with the crumbling social infrastructures which still struggled—as misguided and stubborn as most other bureaucracies—to provide some kind of welfare for the destitute. She wasn’t a child: she was just a tool. Her parents, and later the entire guttergang, treated her like a tool. They picked her up when they needed her, and tossed her aside when they didn’t.
This remained true until she was old enough to have other, more recreational uses. Then she was picked up more often, tossed aside less. But this was not an improvement. She grew up illiterate; functionally retarded; dirty and diseased. By the time she was twelve, she was of no use to herself.
And then the guttergang to which her parents belonged was slaughtered in a struggle with a rival power.
Like other women in other corrupt wars, she became plunder.
As plunder she was introduced to an experience which society had once called a “gang bang” and now referred to as “freefall.” After all, a gang bang might be considered a one sided orgy. Over time “orgy” became “oh-gee” and then “zero g”: hence “freefall.” At the hands of the guttergang which had supplanted her own, she tasted freefall any number of times.
This might have killed her; perhaps should have killed her. But it didn’t. The gang kept her alive because of her connection to the welfare infrastructure. And the welfare infrastructure kept her alive
because it was still trying to do its job. After a certain amount of freefall, she naturally became pregnant, which increased the scale of support she received. As an act of conscience initiated by men and women long since dead, for reasons long since forgotten, welfare provided her with a small room to live in, a bit of food, some baby furniture. But the bureaucracy supplied no hope: all its other benefits were taken by the guttergang.
Somewhere in the process she went privately and irretrievably mad.
Little Angus was all that belonged to her.
He was also her only outlet.
Alone with him in her room, waiting for freefall and death, she began experimenting with the cycle of abuse and solace which he identified as the crib.
In a strange way, her impulse to comfort him after she tortured him was sincere. His small body seemed to have an almost limitless capacity for pain; his wild squalls and his red-faced agony gave her an acute frisson of pleasure, at once guilty and addictive. And the way she cuddled him in her arms and cooed over him and eased his hurts as if it were him she loved felt like the care she herself needed from the bottom of her heart and had never received.
The effect on him was quite different, however.
Its consequences were everywhere, no matter how he fled. His dread of EVA, like his abhorrence of confinement, came from that source. Yet the more he tried to escape, the more he carried with him the things from which he ran. Ever since he’d escaped her and the guttergang, he’d striven with a kind of bleak and absolute stubbornness—as unselfconscious and self-destructive as the damned—to replicate on someone else his mother’s look of degraded desperation. As long as he fought to turn the tables on her, he remained her victim.
Now at last the logic of his life seemed to have reached its blind conclusion, its ineluctable cul-de-sac. His victimization was complete. Just, when prewritten requirements and machine compulsion eased their grip on him, he found that Morn had the power to put him back in the crib. His efforts to change roles with her had railed: she surpassed him. And there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t even keep his promises to her. The men who’d programmed him would never let him keep them.