The Gap Into Madness: Chaos and Order

  “Which we won’t be,” Davies put in fiercely, “because we haven’t got thrust.”

  Anger shivered in his voice. He may have thought Angus had betrayed him.

  “So I’m taking helm,” Morn continued reasonably, as if what she said made sense; as if anything she did made sense. “He’ll have scan and targ. He knows targ well enough to handle scan at the same time.”

  Enclosed by the helmet, echoes seemed to beat about Angus’ head, blinding him to the distinction between what he remembered and what he did. Unable to stop himself, he cried into his pickup, “You’re crazy! I’ll lose my ship!”

  “Angus,” Morn retorted tightly, “we’re dead where we sit. Craziness is the only thing that might get us out of this. Why else are you going EVA? Stop complaining about it. Take your own chances. I’ll take mine.”

  “And I’ll lose my ship!” he shouted back. “Is this the same deal over again? You get helm, but I have to give up my ship?”

  Morn didn’t answer. Instead Davies’ voice crackled trenchantly in his helmet speakers.

  “Take it or leave it, Angus. She’s right. And she isn’t completely crazy. She’s already come through hard g once.

  “Are you sure you aren’t the one who’s lost his mind? I checked the weapons inventory—all you’ve got is that portable matter cannon. It’s a goddamn popgun, Angus. Soar’s sinks will shrug it off like water. You’ll hardly scratch her.”

  He had no time for this. Without noticing what he did, he’d already moved into the airlock and closed it behind him; already started the pumps cycling to suck out the air. Scan must be clearing by now. Soar would be able to see—

  Oh God.

  His resistance crumpled. He already had too many fears hunting like Furies in his head. Raw with distress, he accessed his computer; instructed it to steady his pulse, calm his breathing. His hands entered commands to open the airlock as soon as the air was gone. Then he spoke into his pickup again.

  “All right. We’ve all lost our minds. We might as well be crazy together.”

  “Pay attention. I can’t afford explanations right now.”

  “Thrust didn’t fail. I powered down the drive. It’s set for cold ignition. All you have to do is hit the keys and point her in the right direction.”

  I’m not your son. By degrees the stress of hearing his voice cramped around his head made him vicious. I am not your fucking son! His tone sharpened as he went on.

  “I want you to play dead. Don’t make a flicker, don’t experiment with anything, don’t focus targ. Sit there. Until I tell you.” Until I blow that fucker’s heart out. “Then hit those keys. Hit them fast. Get us out of here. Burn us back the way we came, full acceleration, all the g you can take.”

  “I’ll do it,” Morn replied promptly. She sounded distant with concentration. “I’ve got the keys. I’m laying in a course now. We’ll be ready.”

  “And give me scan data,” Angus demanded. “Talk to me—tell me everything you pick up. I need to know what’s going on.”

  “Right,” Davies muttered as if he was speaking to himself. “It’s still a mess out there. You’ll probably see better than we can. But the storm’s definitely receding. The scan computer projects we’ll start getting data we can use in eighty seconds.”

  Eighty seconds. Shit! That wasn’t enough. He was never going to make it.

  He didn’t have any choice. He had to make it.

  The airlock cycled open, leaving him face-to-face with a nearly invisible curve of rough stone.

  He could only discern the shape and relative angles of the asteroid because the rock seemed somehow darker than the void around it; more absolute. And because erratic flickers of static limned its outlines at unpredictable intervals, leaving faint afterimages like ghosts on his retinas.

  At once his terror mounted to an entirely new level.

  He hated EVA, loathed it. From the core of his heart to the ends of his fingers, he’d always feared it. Whatever made him small made him vulnerable. Only babies could be tied down in cribs and searched with pain to the limits of their being.

  Nevertheless he kicked out of the airlock and floated up the side of the ship along the rock as if he were driven by his datacore’s commands instead of his own desperation.

  DAVIES

  Stricken with dismay, Davies watched as Morn belted herself into the command g-seat.

  He didn’t know which horrified him more: being abandoned by Angus, or seeing Morn’s hands on the command board. Memories of gap-sickness flocked in his head, fatal as ravens: clarity and ruin seemed to thrash like wings against the inside of his skull.

  When she felt hard g, the universe would speak to her, commanding self-destruct; and she would obey. That was the nature of the flaw which the strange physics of the gap had searched out in the tissue of her brain. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. The voice of the universe overwhelmed every other need and desire.

  But of course Trumpet wasn’t about to experience hard g. Not now: maybe never again. Somehow Angus had lost or damaged the thrust drive. He’d crashed the gap scout so hard that she’d nearly broken open.

  After that he’d fled as if his datacore or his own terrors had ordered him to cower and rave elsewhere.

  Succorso is crazy.

  He’s also a fucking genius!

  What in hell was that supposed to mean?

  “Jesus, Morn,” Davies breathed so far back in his throat that he hardly heard himself. “Don’t do this. Please don’t.”

  Apparently she couldn’t hear him. Or she didn’t care what he said. She was concentrating hard on the console, running her fingertips lightly over the keys and indicators; reminding herself of what she’d learned in the Academy about Needle-class gap scouts. Untended and unloved, her hair straggled across the sides of her face, half hiding her from her son.

  “Morn—” He had to plead with her somehow. There must be some way to reach her some need or fear or appeal he could name that she would acknowledge. His heart and all his synapses burned as if she’d punched the settings of her black box to full strength, filling him with a frantic, artificial, helpless rush of extremity; as if he were still in her womb, writhing and struggling through the imposed dance of her zone implant’s emissions.

  “Morn,” he began again, louder now, impelled by noradrenaline. “Morn, listen. We need to do better than this.

  “Nick and Sib must have failed. They’re probably both dead. And Angus has run out on us. We’re the only ones left. Mikka and Vector and Ciro—they’re sheathed in their bunks, they can’t defend themselves.” Or help us. “We’re all they have.

  “Whatever we do, it’s got to be better than this. They don’t deserve to die just because you’ve got gap-sickness.”

  Morn’s concentration didn’t shift. Past the scrim of her hair, she murmured, “You think I can’t handle it.”

  Too tense and dismayed to restrain himself, Davies cried back, “I think you’re too dangerous to try!”

  She nodded. “So do I.” Her hands tested a sequence of commands. “Have you got a better idea?”

  She was too far away: her focus made her distant. The scale of the gulf she’d set around her daunted him completely. A minute ago he might have been able to come up with several alternatives. Now, however, his brain seemed to hang open like his mouth. He was so full of anguish that he couldn’t answer.

  “Angus hasn’t run out on us,” she pronounced quietly, as if she addressed him from another star system. “He’s planning something—something so wild he can’t bear to explain it. He’s going to need us here—he’s going to need our help.

  “Can you run this whole ship by yourself?”

  Her question held nothing except distance and concentration. If she meant to criticize him, she didn’t show it. Nevertheless he felt stung, as if she’d tossed acid at him. Of course he could run the ship himself—

  But of course he couldn’t. Only Angus had that much ability; that many resources.

/>   Involuntarily Davies bared his teeth and wrapped his arms across his chest to contain his inadequacy.

  “You’ve been studying targ,” Morn went on. “You’ve paid attention to scan. Can you handle helm at the same time?” You’re as weak as I am. “You probably don’t know any more about it than I do.” You have the same limits. “That means if you take helm you won’t have the attention to spare for scan and targ.

  “And that means we’re going to die even if Angus succeeds. Maybe you don’t call that self-destruct, but the results will be the same.”

  It’s different, he retorted voicelessly, as if he’d fallen dumb. It’s at least a way of trying to stay alive. It’s not the same as doing something you know is suicidal.

  But he couldn’t shout his protest aloud because he knew she was right. He simply wasn’t good enough to manage helm, scan, and targ simultaneously. Trusting the ship to him was as suicidal as gap-sickness because he was flawed with mortality.

  She wasn’t done, however. From somewhere out past Fomal-haut or deep in forbidden space, she offered softly, “Maybe we won’t burn hard enough to set me off. And maybe all the time I’ve spent with my zone implant active has changed something inside my head. Nobody understands gap-sickness.”

  Slowly she turned to look at him. As if she were speaking directly to the core of his heart—as if she knew him so well that she could slip past all his fear to touch him at the center—she said gently, “You want me to be the kind of cop Bryony Hyland’s daughter ought to be. What do you think she would have done?”

  She had the power to daunt him. He couldn’t beat it back. The more she controlled herself, the more he quailed. He knew what the mother he remembered would have done.

  “If Soar captures us,” Morn asked, “do you think Mikka and Vector and Ciro will be glad I didn’t kill them? Do you think you’re going to like what the Amnion have in mind for you?”

  She was too much for him: harsh and kind; brutal and inarguable. Goaded by frustration, a frenzy rose in him like hysteria. He didn’t try to hold it back.

  “No, I won’t like it! Don’t you think I know that? None of us are going to like it! If they take us, one of us will have to be brave enough to kill everybody else.

  “But I know what gap-sickness feels like! If you understand everything else, why don’t you understand that? I know what it means when the universe speaks to you! And I know how much it hurts afterward. If you do that to yourself again, it’s going to tear me apart.”

  Somehow he’d found a place where she could still feel pain. Like a ship from the gap, she seemed to spring fury at him out of nowhere. Her rage resumed tard so nearby that he felt its heat in the bones of his face.

  “This is the best I can do!” she cried like the hull-roar of thrust, the quantum howl of matter cannon. “If you aren’t able to run Trumpet by yourself, shut up and let me work!”

  Without transition she swung away from him, leaving him scorched. Savagely she pounded her board with the blade of her hand to toggle her intercom pickup.

  “Mikka and Ciro, Vector, pay attention.” She didn’t try to moderate her anger; or muffle the tremor of fear and grief running through it. “I don’t have much time. You asked for reports. This is all I can tell you right now.”

  As she talked, however, her distress seemed to ease; or it faded into the urgent concentration she turned on the command board. Sentence by sentence her voice grew calmer, restoring the gulf which separated her from Davies.

  “We came up on another ship, Free Lunch. From Billingate. We assume she’s working with Soar. We fired on her—she fired back. That was the first attack, the first nard g. We ran.

  “Angus wasn’t sure how to tackle her, so he took us back the way we came. Toward Soar. He thought we had a better chance against her.

  “When we met her, we tried evasive maneuvers. But then we lost thrust. We couldn’t stop—we hit an” asteroid. You felt that collision.

  “Now Angus is trying some other kind of tactic. We don’t know what it is. But Soar is blind—at least for a few more minutes. Trumpet has a dispersion field that turns matter cannon fire into distortion. Soar can’t see us, and we can’t see her. We’re safe until her scan clears. Then she’ll come after us.”

  Roughly Morn dredged her hands through her hair as if she needed to pull her thoughts away from her console in order to finish what she was saying.

  “If Angus tells us what he has in mind—and if I have time—I’ll pass it on. In the meantime, Davies and I aren’t going to let Soar take us. If we run out of other choices, we’ll try to set up a feedback loop in the gap drive, see if maybe we can drag Soar into tach with us when she gets close. We’ll never come out again—but she won’t either.

  “Hang on. We aren’t finished yet.”

  Roughly she silenced her pickup and returned her full attention to the command board.

  Again Davies stared at her. He felt that he’d been staring at her in horror or amazement for hours. When she said the words “set up a feedback loop in the gap drive,” his distress was transformed.

  The helpless discrepancy of identity beneath his protest and rejection underwent a strange tectonic shift. Sure, set up a feedback loop. Why hadn’t he thought of that? If she could find enough residual energy in the ship’s systems, enough juice in the energy cells—

  The idea should have scared him. If Morn’s gap-sickness, commanded self-destruct, she could turn the gap drive in on itself and be sure of death.

  But he wasn’t scared: his visceral dread had become wonder. The fact that Morn knew how to kill Trumpet was only part of the shift; only the catalyst. If she could contrive a feedback loop, so could he. He could destroy the ship himself.

  Which meant that if she died or went mad, he could still save the ship and his friends from Soar. He could spare them all from ending as Amnion.

  Could spare himself.

  In the grip of an epiphany, he glimpsed the true passion behind his bloody hunger for revenge on Soar/Gutbuster/Sorus Chatelaine. His wildness and determination had more to do with what Soar wanted him for than with what Gutbuster had done to Intransigent and Bryony Hyland.

  He wished absolutely to destroy Sorus Chatelaine in all her guises so that she wouldn’t capture him and turn him into a weapon against humankind.

  The understanding seemed to ease his anger at Morn; his fear of her. If he wasn’t helpless to meet his deeper dreads, he could deal with his more immediate alarm as well. He could work with her—

  She studied her keys and readouts as if her son had ceased to exist. The screens told him that the boson storm—matter cannon energies transmuted to secondary and tertiary quantum discontinuities—was starting to fray, pulled apart by particle dissipation and the sharp gauss of the swarm. Before long Soar would recover her sight.

  If Angus was able to restore thrust—

  Was that why he’d fled from the bridge? Was he trying to effect some last, desperate repair which would give Trumpet back her power?

  Davies needed an answer.

  Clearing his throat, he asked with as much calm as he could muster, “Why do you think Angus hasn’t run out on us?”

  Morn didn’t glance up. “Because he doesn’t want to die.” She’d recovered her distance, walled herself around with emptiness. “An hour after his brain fries and his corpse falls apart, he’ll still be fighting to live. I don’t know where he’s gone, but he is going to do something.

  “If we’re lucky, it might give us a chance.”

  That explanation made sense to him: it fit with what he remembered of Angus. On the other hand, it didn’t help him comprehend why she seemed to know Angus better than he did, even though he was crowded to bursting with her memories.

  The scan displays reminded him that he had no time for such questions. In minutes Soar’s sensors and sifters would recover their ability to identify their surroundings.

  Without warning the command intercom crackled. Harsh as a blow, Angus’ voice struc
k the bridge.

  “You listening? Pay attention, bastard.” He must have been talking to Davies; must have thought Davies had the command station. “I’ve got orders for you.”

  Quickly Morn searched her readouts. “He’s in an EVA suit,” she whispered. “Using suit communications. But he hasn’t left the ship yet.” Then she keyed her pickup.

  As if she’d been expecting this, she answered, “We hear you, Angus. We’ll do whatever you tell us. I think that dispersion storm is starting to dissipate. Soar might be able to see us again in three or four minutes.”

  When she spoke to Angus, she didn’t sound distant. She sounded the way Davies remembered feeling when she’d asked Angus to give her the zone implant control, back aboard Bright Beauty.

  Angus’ shock at hearing Morn’s voice was palpable despite the metallic inadequacy of the intercom speaker.

  “You can’t do this, Morn! God damn it, what’s happened to your brains? We need hard g.

  “Get out of there. Let Davies do it.

  “Davies, don’t let her stay!”

  With a snarl of his own, Davies bared his teeth and started running commands which might force scan through the distortion. At the same time he called up a checklist of the weapons locker’s contents. Surely Angus didn’t intend to go EVA without guns.

  Morn glanced at him, saw what he was doing. He had the impression that under other circumstances she might have smiled. Relief or gratitude? Hope? He didn’t know.

  “He can’t handle it alone,” she told Angus. “You know that. We’ll be defenseless, even if we’re moving.”

  “Which we won’t be,” Davies put in so that Angus could hear him, “because we haven’t got thrust.” He wanted Angus to know where he stood.

  “So I’m going to take helm,” Morn went on. “He’ll have scan and targ.”

  “You’re crazy!” Angus’ voice seemed to echo with anguish. “I’ll lose my ship!”

  Morn thumped the sides of her board with her palms; pulled her hair back from her face. “Angus,” she returned sharply, “we’re dead where we sit. Craziness is the only thing that might get us out of this. Stop complaining about it. Take your own chances. I’ll take mine.”