Two and half minutes before Free Lunch could see. Was Trumpet blind, too? Or did she know how to penetrate this charged storm? Was she moving now, taking a position to tear her opponent apart?
“Too long,” Darrin decided. Because his people were afraid, he made a particular effort to sound calm. “We can’t wait.
“Helm, back us out of here. You’ll have to assume nothing’s changed since we went blind. I don’t care—just do it. I’m not interested in being a sitting target. Try to put that asteroid between us and the center of the storm. Maybe the rock will shield us enough to clear scan.”
“Right, Captain.” The helm first’s tone spiked like a nervous tic, but he started working immediately.
G nudged Darrin against his belts as Free Lunch reversed course. If the bigger rocks in the vicinity hadn’t shifted too much, helm ought to be able to move the ship safely—at least for a couple of k—by following her most recent thrust vectors backward. That might be enough—
Was he going to run? A little occlusion might reduce the particle barrage to manageable levels. Then Free Lunch would be able to see, navigate: she would be free to burn—
Get out of this damn maze while she still could.
But as soon as he asked the question he knew he wouldn’t do it.
He’d accepted a contract.
He’d survived so long because his instincts were good—and because the rules he lived by were simple. He trusted his code. Get paid what the job was worth. Then do it. The truth was, he couldn’t really know what this job might be worth. He may have evaluated it wrongly. But then, he never knew what any job might be worth; not really. Surprises, miscalculations, even disasters happened all the time: too often to be faced on any terms except simple ones. He trusted his code because the alternatives were worse. Otherwise life didn’t make much sense.
As always, he preferred to make his own commitments and-stand by them than to live by anyone else’s rules.
“It’s working, Captain,” scan reported abruptly. “That asteroid is starting to cast a shadow we can see. I should be able to get real information in a few seconds now.”
Darrin returned his hands to his board, put questions aside.
“Hold us where we are, helm,” he ordered. “But stay alert. If Trumpet wants to come back at us, we need to be ready to burn.
“Concentrate, Alesha. They brushed off a direct hit once. We have to hope they can’t do that too often.”
Almost at once, scan announced, “Clearing now, Captain. Range is still only one k—no, two. But Trumpet isn’t there. We have at least that much empty space around us.”
He meant empty of ships. The images he rebuilt on the displays showed plenty of rock. The blast which had blinded Free Lunch hadn’t been of a kind to push asteroids around.
Darrin had asked himself his questions, reminded himself that he already knew the answers that mattered. Now he didn’t hesitate. “All right, people,” he pronounced firmly. “Timé to get serious.
“We knew Trumpet is formidable. Hashi told us that. He just didn’t trouble to explain how formidable she is. From now on, we’ll treat her like we would a warship.
“I’m guessing she was blinded as much as we were. That means she isn’t moving in on us. She’s running for clear space so she can see. And the safest way she can do that is retrace the way she came. Retrace it exactly.
“We’re going to dive back into that distortion storm. As much acceleration as you dare, helm. If the storm hasn’t dispersed enough for us to handle it, targ, we’ll start firing matter beams in all directions. We’ll keep firing until scan clears. Then we’ll see if she’s there. We’ll see if maybe we hit her by accident—or if she can make more of those storms.”
“What if she can?” Alesha asked tensely.
Darrin snorted. “Then we won’t see her. But I’ll take the risk. I think she won’t be able to see us, either.
“If scan clears,” he went on, “or stays clear, and we don’t spot her, we’ll sniff out her particle trace and go after her. When we catch up with her, we’ll try lasers or torpedoes on her. She must be vulnerable to something.”
Most of his people didn’t look at him, but he knew they were listening. After years of experience together, he trusted their determination as much as their competence. They didn’t always agree with him, but they always did their jobs as well as they could. That was their code as much as his.
Without pausing he continued.
“One more thing. We’re heading back down into the swarm. That’s where Soar is. As I read our contract, there’s only one breach worse than not killing Trumpet ourselves, and that’s letting some other ship capture her. Especially Soar. So we might have to take Soar on.
“She doesn’t have any amazing new defenses against matter cannon. That I’m sure of. But rumor has it she carries a super-light proton cannon.” Everyone on the bridge had heard the same rumor, but Darrin repeated it anyway. “If we start shooting at her, we’d better make damn sure we give it everything we’ve got.
“All right?” he finished. “Questions? Are you ready?”
No one questioned him. Of course not. He was their captain. He’d kept them alive for a long time; taught them his code; trusted them; made them moderately wealthy. Most of them loved him as much as he loved them.
After a moment Alesha drawled, “Let’s get it over with. I’m so sick of this swarm I could almost puke.?”
Helm laughed nervously as he poised his hands on his keys.
Quickly data extrapolated a course from scan recordings of the vicinity made before Trumpet had appeared; he copied it to one of the screens while he routed it to helm.
When Darrin gave the order, his ship went to fulfill her contract.
MORN
Acceleration held her to the deck—pressure full of clarity and dreams. Through the pain of impact moved grand visions, majestic as galaxies, pure as loss; phosphenes spoke to her of truth and death. She was in the presence of ultimate things.
And while she dreamed and labored, Angus fought to save the ship, even though she couldn’t see or hear him.
He snatched Trumpet out of her wild cartwheel when instincts or databases screamed at him that he was about to hit rock. Somehow retaining his sense of orientation despite Trumpet’s vertiginous career, he hammered thrust against the spin, pulling the gap scout away from her attacker’s guns, away from the scan madness which her dispersion field had created out of matter cannon fire; back the way she’d come; down into the depths of the swarm.
If he took the time to check on Morn, she didn’t know it. She was unconscious on the deck, small beads of blood oozing from half a dozen abrasions on her back and scalp.
Davies shouted things like, “Who was that?” and, “Where’re we going?” and, “Damn it, Angus, talk to me!” but Angus ignored him. He was deep in the uncluttered concentration of a machine, focused like a microprocessor on keeping his ship alive while she hurtled among the asteroids at three times her former velocity. If he made plans, or his programming made plans, they were buried where no one could argue with them.
I’ve seen that signature before!
In moments Trumpet cleared the worst of the distortion. One at a time her instruments recovered their sight. The swarm became real again around them as if it had been re-created from the raw materials of the boson storm.
“Gutbuster’s back this way!” Davies yelled when scan and Deaner Beckmann’s charts enabled him to identify where the gap scout was, where she was headed. “If you keep going like this, we might run right into her before I have a chance to fire!”
Angus may have known better. It was possible that some mechanical part of his mind had already calculated Soar’s likely position and taken it into account.
In an entirely different way, Morn also seemed to know better. Instances of clarity opened in her unconsciousness like flowers which spread their blooms at the first touch of sunrise. So much certainty: so little fear. Life questioned noth
ing; death dreaded nothing. If she remained here, all things would become plain.
But of course she couldn’t stay here. The time had come to move on. Fear was essential to the blood in her veins, the delicate web of electrical impulses in her brain. It was her mortality: she wasn’t human without it. Her tangible flesh hurt too much to go on without fear.
Angus struggled to save the ship. In the same way, she fought to pull herself past the wall of darkness in her head.
She’d been under heavy g. She’d hit the bulkhead hard enough to go mad; Angus had used enough thrust to make her crazy. For a moment she seemed to pass the wall into gap-sickness.
I was floating, and everything was clear. It was like the universe spoke to me. I got the message, the truth. I knew exactly what to do.
I keyed the self-destruct sequence—
She heard herself speaking as if she were Davies. She knew how he felt. Her whole existence revolved around self-destruct sequences.
As far as she could tell, only the pressure of g saved her; only the fact that her head and back hurt, and she weighed at least thirty kg more than she should have. She couldn’t float. The certainty was still with her: she remembered the sound of commandments, immanent and inevitable. But as she strove to climb the wall and open her eyes, the universe seemed to lose its hold on her. Flashes of clarity burst in her bloodstream like embolisms; died away like failed hopes.
She opened her eyes as the force of thrust eased and her body began to shed its artificial mass.
From her perspective, Angus towered over her at the command station. Beyond him across the bridge, Davies worked the second’s console: on his screens he labored to project a position for some other vessel.
Soar? Or the other ship, the stranger?
Morn wanted to know the answer, although she didn’t care which it was.
With an effort she lifted her head. “Angus.” Coruscations spangled the back of her head, rippled down her spine. “What happened? Where are we? Are we intact?”
Davies jerked his head toward her. “Morn?” he croaked in dismay. “Christ!” Apparently he hadn’t realized she was still there. He’d been concentrating too hard to notice her. “Are you all right?”
Angus had no time to spare for Davies, but he did for Morn. When he heard her voice, he wheeled his g-seat as if he were trying to fling it free of its mounts. Rage mottled his skin; feral stains seemed to flush from his face down his neck into his torso. His eyes burned with coercion or hysteria.
“I told you to get off the bridge!” he roared. “God damn it, Morn, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? You think we need you here? You think we can’t make decisions or push keys unless you tell us what to do? Or are you just tired of living? It’s been too long since you got to play self-destruct?” Clutching the edges of his board, he strained toward her against his belts. “Do you think I came all this way just so I could watch you lose your fucking mind?
“This is my ship! When I give you an order, you are going to carry it out!”
His fury was fierce enough to draw blood. Perhaps because fading embolisms of clarity still ran in her veins, however, he didn’t frighten her. She was already bleeding: the bulkhead had drawn blood. Facing him as squarely as the pain in her skull allowed, she murmured, “I guess that means we’re still intact.”
He rocked back in his g-seat as if her reaction punctured him; deflated him somehow. “Yes, we’re still intact.” Surprise and speculation changed the mottling on his skin to dull grime. “This kid of yours doesn’t have the sense to focus targ before he fires, but he has good timing with a dispersion field. That ship hit us hard without actually hitting us at all.”
His eyes searched her as if he wanted to see inside her head.
“What’re you trying to do to yourself?” Davies demanded thickly. “Why didn’t you go? Don’t you know how dangerous—?”
His protest trailed off.
“You didn’t get gap-sickness.” Angus’ voice was harsh with doubt. “Or you were out long enough for it to pass. Or I didn’t give you enough g to trigger it. Or you used that damn zone implant so much you cauterized your brain. Shit, Morn, you—”
Whatever he might have said, he didn’t finish it.
Groaning at the abrasions, Morn shifted her shoulders; climbed slowly into a sitting position. He was right: something had prevented her gap-sickness from taking hold. The g had been hard enough to make her crazy; she knew that. Had she been unconscious long enough to mute her illness? Had she driven herself so hard with her black box that she’d damaged neurons? Maybe. There was no way to tell.
Now that the crisis was past, she felt a touch of relief.
And a hint of sadness, as if she’d lost something she valued when the clear commandments of the universe receded.
She knew how Davies felt.
“So where are we going?” she asked while she tested the extent of her scrapes and bruises.
“That’s right,” Davies muttered. “You ask him.” He sounded suddenly bitter. “He won’t tell me.”
Like a man throwing up his hands, Angus growled, “Back. Into the swarm.” Grimacing in disgust or bafflement, he referred to the screens. “You can see that.”
Davies snarled a curse, but Angus ignored him.
“You haven’t studied Beckmann’s charts like I have,” Angus went on. “From where we are, there isn’t any reasonable course out of this mess except the one where we met that other ship. Unless you like clearing rock out of your way by running into it. We’re stuck between Soar and that other bastard. We could duck and dodge, maybe hide for a while, but eventually they’re going to find us.
“I want to deal with them one at a time. If they hit us together, even dispersion fields aren’t going to keep us intact. So I’ll try Soar first, see what we can do. I know more about her.” With his own bitterness, he added, “And there’s always a chance Captain Sheepfucker damaged her. That might help us.
“Besides,” he went on harshly, “I know that other ship. We’ve seen her before.”
He didn’t pause. Anger and desperation drove him. “Her name’s Free Lunch. She was at Billingate the same time we were. She got out a couple of hours ahead of us. We heard her name from operational transmissions in Billingate’s control space. Scan picked up her emission signature.
“Do I have to tell you what that means?” he snarled. Morn shook her head, but he didn’t stop. “She knows us from Billingate. And she knows Soar. So it’s no fucking coincidence that she turned up here just in time to start shooting at us.”
“She’s working with Soar,” Morn said for him. Oh, God, more enemies. How many allies did Sorus Chatelaine have?
“If we try to face both of them at once,” he finished, “we’re dead.”
He shrugged violently, as if he were restraining an impulse to hit something. Then he said more quietly, “And Sib’s back there. For whatever that’s worth. If Soar or Captain Sheepfucker didn’t kill him—and he’s out of the way when the shooting starts—and we can beat Soar—and Free Lunch doesn’t catch us too soon—and we’re able to find him—”
Angus let the rest of the sentence die into the background whine of Trumpet’s drives, the whisper of air-scrubbers, the nearly subliminal hum of charged matter cannon.
The thought of Sib Mackern alone in the vast crackling turmoil of the swarm, slowly dying inside his EVA suit while he waited for his air to run out or Trumpet to come for him, gave Morn a sharper sadness: the pang of it seemed to settle against her heart like a blade. He might be better off if Nick killed him, or Soar did. The distress of his old fears and losses deserved some clean end.
How long could he scream without dying inside?
How many allies did Sorus Chatelaine have?
By an act of will she set her questions aside. Speaking more to Davies than to Angus, she said softly, “So this isn’t for revenge anymore. We’re going after Soar because that’s better than the alternatives.”
Davies app
eared to swallow a retort. He needed his hunger for revenge on Gutbuster and Sorus Chatelaine: she understood that now. It protected him from deeper terrors, keener madnesses. His own peculiar gap-sickness—the strange, demented gulf separating who he was from what he remembered—lurked in him avidly, waiting its time to strike. If he couldn’t fight for his image of who he should have been, he might disappear between the dimensions of himself and never return.
Trying to help her son, she asked Angus, “Do you know how you want to tackle her?”
He shook his head; for a moment he didn’t reply. He may have been consulting his databases or programming. Then he said, “Depends on how far away we spot her. How much cover we can use. Whether we get a clear field of fire. I can’t be sure.
“But this time,” he told Davies, “don’t be so goddamn eager to shoot.” His tone was gruff. Yet Morn thought she heard something more than disdain in it. Amusement, maybe? Recognition? “There’s only one real defense against a super-light proton cannon. You have to take out the gun before they can use it.
“Sometimes your shields hold. If you’re far enough away. And sometimes, if you’re too fucking lucky to die, you can shove a matter blast right down the throat of the proton beam. That seems to fray it somehow, take the edge off. Then maybe your shields can hold. But nobody gets that lucky very often.
“So don’t waste your time pulverizing a few rocks. Focus. If we get a good look at her, scan can identify her emitters.”
Awkwardly, as if Morn’s presence disturbed his concentration, Davies sent schematics to one of the displays, reminding himself of the configuration and emission signature which characterized super-light proton cannon.
Holding her breath against the throb in her head, Morn rose from the deck and reached for a handgrip. Maneuvering thrust held her against the bulkhead, but Trumpet wasn’t turning hard enough to threaten her. Nevertheless she cleated her zero-g belt to an anchor. That was the only precaution she could take—short of leaving the bridge.
For a moment she studied Angus’ scan plot. Then she asked, “How long do you think we have?”