The Gap Into Madness: Chaos and Order

  She’d already killed her father’s ship and most of her family.

  Trembling with fear, she copied Trumpet’s assigned departure protocols from the log, then dummied them back to her helm program so that they would run automatically. After that, she set the command overrides to slow or stop the ship if her preset course threatened to damage her.

  Morn had no idea what else to do.

  “Jesus, Morn.” Abruptly Davies silenced his intercom pickup so that Angus wouldn’t hear him. He turned his station partway toward her. “Do you know what he’s doing!”

  She shook her head. The course projection overlay held her, and her heart may have failed. She couldn’t guess what Angus had in mind.

  “He’s taken one of the singularity grenades,” Davies murmured in awe or dismay. “Manual launch. He thinks he can suck those ships into a black hole. My God, he must be planning to throw it at one of them.”

  Which might have worked, if Trumpet had faced only one enemy. And if by some miracle he could have contrived to place the grenade where it would absorb enough power from its target.

  But now—

  Morn fought a desperate desire to hit the keys he’d prepared now; initiate cold ignition and move while Trumpet still had a little room. Angus wasn’t ready: he hadn’t given the order. He was dying outside the ship, he might never give the order, perhaps his dread of EVA had already broken him. Nevertheless he was Trumpet’s only real hope; her last chance. Premature thrust might ruin what he was trying to do. Morn clenched her fists until her fingers burned, and waited.

  Without warning Davies’ readouts snatched at his attention. Hints of Soar began to appear. “There she is!” Emission data sharpened on the screens. When he saw it, he yelped, “They’ve seen each other! They’re going to fire!”

  He pounded his pickup. But Morn was faster. She had too much death on her hands.

  “Give me orders!” she cried into her intercom. “Angus, tell me what to do!”

  Davies shouted at Angus, but she hardly heard him.

  Scan didn’t detect targ from either ship. They weren’t tracking Trumpet.

  An instant later the screen displayed matter cannon blasts like inaudible screams. Trumpet’s picture of the surrounding swarm dopplered in and out of distortion as the computer labored to filter the chaos.

  “They’re not firing at us!” Davies gaped at the data. “They think we’re finished. They’re fighting each other.

  “We were wrong! They aren’t working together.”

  The gap scout seemed to have more enemies than Morn could count.

  But Soar still hadn’t used her super-light proton cannon. Maybe she couldn’t—

  Time seemed to freeze between one barrage and the next. There was room to live or die between the ticks of the command chronometer. Morn planted her fingers on the cold ignition keys, braced herself despite the plain doom written in her course projection. To some extent, Soar and Free Lunch would be taken by surprise. Davies was right: they thought Trumpet was dead or crippled. Otherwise they would have opened fire on her already. And surprise would give the gap scout a few seconds. Distortion would give her a few seconds. Neither assailant would be able to refocus targ instantly.

  Whatever else happened, Morn had to stay out of gap-sickness; needed absolutely to keep herself sane. As soon as she hit those keys, she herself would become the most immediate threat to the ship. If the universe spoke to her again, she was ideally placed to obey. With helm under her hands, she could send Trumpet into collision with either of the other ships; with a rock; she could dive into the heart of the black hole Angus hoped to create.

  How had she survived the last time? Her gap-sickness had come to life when she’d hit the bulkhead; she’d felt it overwhelming her mind with crystalline compliance. And then it had faded away, dying in her bloodstream like the waste of expended neurotransmitters.

  Why?

  What could she do to make that happen again?

  All she remembered was pain: the crack of her head against metal; the heavy abrasions on her back.

  Her injuries still hurt. But she was sure that they didn’t hurt enough.

  “I can see the grenade,” Davies choked out, gasping like his father. “He’s launched it somehow. Not at Soar—at Free Lunch. That makes sense. She’s closer.

  “I don’t know how he does it.” Despite the way he breathed, his tone hinted at wonder, admiration. “He may be crazy, but he’s got good aim. The grenade’s right on target.”

  If Trumpet’s sensors could identify the grenade, so could Free Lunch’s. But that ship might not think to look.

  An idea caught at the back of Morn’s mind.

  “My God,” she breathed like her son. “That’s why he took the portable matter cannon. To detonate the grenade.”

  Detonate it with enough added energy to make it effective.

  “Is that possible?” Davies whispered.

  Morn didn’t know. “Can we hit it ourselves?” she asked. “Set if off when it’s close enough?”

  “No chance,” Davies panted. “Everything’s moving. There’s too much distortion. And cold ignition won’t give us stable thrust. We’ll be lurching like mad. We would be lucky to get within fifty meters of a target that small.”

  Then how could Angus hope to hit it?

  He was a cyborg: human and machine. Maybe his eyes and his computer and his zone implants together were better than targ—

  Free Lunch fired again, emptying her guns at Soar. Soar returned the barrage. The force they flung against each other would have torn any undefended vessel apart. If a blast hit the grenade too soon—

  It hadn’t reached the field of fire yet. While Soar and Free Lunch blazed back and forth, the grenade continued sailing toward its target.

  Again scan broke apart. At this distance, quantum discontinuities combined with particle bleed-off from the sinks to create emission fury all along the spectrum. More distortion: a few more seconds of cover.

  “Now!” Angus’ voice shrieked across the bridge. “Do it now I Hit those keys!”

  With all her strength, Morn obeyed.

  At the same instant Davies activated his guns, set them to pull charge from the drive.

  A shudder ran through Trumpet as if she’d taken an impact blast. Morn jerked against her belts, flopped back into her g-seat. Energies powerful enough to crack cold thruster tubes came to life in the drive. From Soar’s perspective, or Free Lunch’s, Trumpet may have appeared to be embedded in the rock; but she was only resting there. Stone scraped a nerve-rending cry along her hull as she flung herself dangerously into motion.

  Pressure built up on Morn’s bones: acceleration and maneuvering g. As soon as Trumpet cleared the asteroid, the gap scout began curving along her programmed course, turning to head away from the depths of the swarm.

  Into the path of Angus’ target: a ship that wanted her dead.

  More shudders shook her like explosions in the tubes—metal and polymerized ceramics straining to absorb too much heat too fast and adjust to each other. Morn’s head dug into the cushions of her g-seat; her back drove its abrasions against the padding.

  She couldn’t remember any defense except pain. As far as she could tell, only the pressure of g saved her; only the fact that her head and back hurt—She couldn’t float.

  Lurching like a derelict, Trumpet moved into the distortion toward the field of fire.

  She was accelerating as hard as she could. She should have been able to generate more g than this; far more. But cold thrust was unstable. It couldn’t come near its full power until the tubes were hot. And Davies charged his guns, drawing energy off the drive. She acquired velocity too slowly to open the universe in Morn’s head.

  -At this rate of acceleration Trumpet might as well have been stationary. Either Soar or Free Lunch could nail her the moment they got a clear look at her.

  Her energy cells lacked the capacity to satisfy her matter cannon. But they held enough power to project he
r dispersion field. If Davies’ timing was perfect, he might be able to keep her alive until thrust stabilized; until she began to burn in earnest, and Morn went mad—

  Even if the ship lasted that long, Angus might not survive the boson storm. Quantum discontinuities might reduce his equipment’s signals to gibberish. His human eyes might not be able to pierce the emission chaos.

  Blips on Trumpet’s screens seemed to spell out her death. She neared the field of fire between Soar and Free Lunch. In another few seconds she would run directly under Free Lunch’s guns. Scan and alarms shouted that both opposing vessels were charged for another barrage.

  Both were hurt: their sinks overloaded, wailing of particle torture; their hulls scored and dented, ports and antennae smashed; their energy profiles rippling with stress. But Soar bore more damage than her attacker.

  Earlier wounds left her vulnerable.

  “Soar’s got us,” Davies announced through his teeth. Sweat dripped in his voice; concentration strained his eyes. Scan detected targ from Soar’s direction, saw cannon swiveling in their mounts. Nevertheless he was done shouting. “Free Lunch is still aiming at her.”

  For Sorus Chatelaine, killing Trumpet must have been more important than defending herself.

  Emission numbers jagged off the scale. At once Davies slammed keys fiercely with the heel of his palm, raising the gap scout’s dispersion field.

  Morn felt the timeless, fatal concussion of impact. Trumpet was hit—

  For the third time scan failed completely as the entire discernible spectrum tore apart.

  —no, not hit, that jolt came from the thruster tubes. Half a dozen warnings squalled simultaneously, but none of them cried of matter cannon impact or vacuum.

  The next instant the thrust parameters scrolling down Morn’s readouts stabilized; took on a smooth energy curve; began to mount. Suddenly Trumpet started to burn.

  G squeezed Morn deeper into her seat. Blood roared in her ears as the pressure built. The skin of her face stretched over its bones. Her heart labored to sustain its beat.

  Now or never. If her gap-sickness took her now, she would never get another chance to answer it.

  She had no answer.

  At least both Soar and Free Lunch were as blind as Trumpet If the gap scout died now, it wouldn’t be because she’d been hit. It would be because her course ran her straight into Free Lunch. Or because she struck an asteroid at full burn. Or because the universe began to speak—

  With an odd, dislocated sorrow, Morn realized that she might never know whether Angus had succeeded or failed; whether his desperation had proved greater than hers.

  But she knew. She did know.

  She knew because g suddenly doubled; tripled.

  At the same instant Trumpet staggered and began losing momentum as if she’d driven headlong into an obstacle as thick and fluid as water.

  Gravitic stress klaxons filled the ship with demented wailing, but Morn didn’t need them to tell her what happened.

  Angus had detonated his singularity grenade. And his matter cannon had given it the power to make it live.

  Trumpet was being sucked into a black hole.

  Now time existed only in tiny increments of seconds. Morn’s heart didn’t have a chance to beat: g and gap-sickness filled her personal cosmos too swiftly to be measured by heartbeats.

  Alarms screeched, warning of event horizons and implosion. Vibration rattled Morn’s teeth, her bones, her brain. Trumpet’s drive should have been strong enough to pull her away. If she wasn’t already past the point of no return, she should have been able to veer off, break free. But of course Free Lunch had already been caught: her energies fed the black hole as it swallowed her. Its hunger reached outward, ravening for fuel, too swiftly for Trumpet to outrun it.

  Morn had no answer. Now she didn’t need one. Full of clarity and death, She would dive into Deaner Beckmann’s dream, and then she would never be confused again.

  But Davies wasn’t done. He had a response she hadn’t thought of; could hardly imagine. Even though he needed every gram of his strength and will, every iota of his own desperation, to move his arms, he forced his hands to his board.

  Stopped draining thrust for the guns.

  Then he reversed the flow: sent the matter cannon charge—and everything in the energy cells—back into the drive.

  It was enough. With that one extra kick of force, Trumpet began to win free.

  More g: more than enough to crush out consciousness. Blackness filled Morn’s head.

  It would pass. Automatic overrides would slow and then stop the gap scout as soon as they could. But that changed nothing. When the dark passed, Morn would be gap-sick and deadly. Neither Davies nor Angus would live to understand what they’d accomplished.

  She needed some way to confront the universe, and remain herself.

  She couldn’t move her hands to her board: that was out of the question. She didn’t have her son’s bulk of muscle. And g was worse. The roaring in her ears had become absolute night, carrying her ineluctably into its depths.

  Instead she fought her right arm slowly up the back of her g-seat. A centimeter at a time, a degree at a time; there was no time, her heart hadn’t beat again yet, if as much as a second had gone by she didn’t know it. Through midnight and roaring and urgency she raised her arm, shoving it along the pads which cushioned her from being crushed.

  When her hand crossed the top of the g-seat, she stopped. She’d done enough. G finished the job.

  Without support her hand—her whole arm—had no defense. The singularity and Trumpet’s thrust sank their teeth into her flesh.

  They ripped her hand and arm past the seat back with ten times her limb’s weight, dislocating her shoulder, shattering her elbow, cracking bones in her wrist.

  She didn’t know it. She was already gone.

  MIN

  Belted into one of the support personnel g-seats against the bulkhead behind Dolph Ubikwe’s command station, Min Donner watched Punisher engage the encroaching Amnion defensive.

  Tension and urgency were palpable in the air; so thick that they seemed to clog the scrubbers, tainting the atmosphere with CO2 and fear. Scan and data conferred in bursts, reported their findings in voices like muted cries. Communications barked at Valdor Industrial, demanding help and information. Intercoms crackled incessantly as the bridge stations asked and answered questions for the whole ship. The hull carried a visceral roar of thrust. At times Punisher’s spine seemed to groan under the strain. Matter cannon fire filled the ship with a characteristic sizzling sound, as if the laws of physics were being panfried.

  The men and women around Min seemed to wince and cower as they worked. She moved that way herself. The bridge crew were veterans to one degree or another, hardened by six months spent fighting for their lives in the Massif-5 system. And Min was so familiar with combat that she hardly noticed its more mundane difficulties. Nevertheless they all flopped like sacks in their g-seats, jerked from side to side by the complex dance of conflicting navigational vectors. Punisher seemed to jitter in space as if she were constantly trying to twitch out of harm’s way.

  Over the babble of voices and needs, the incessant demands and the thronging decisions, Captain Ubikwe presided like a man impervious to chaos. His bulk appeared to have settled in his g-seat as if he couldn’t be moved; as if he were the stable point around which Punisher’s alarms and struggles revolved. Min had to catch herself repeatedly on the arms of her g-seat because she couldn’t know which direction the cruiser would jump in next; but she never saw Dolph lean or recover.

  She liked watching him. He was good at this. Of course, she would have preferred to take command herself; use the ship as a personal weapon. Her hands burned for action. But since her rank required her to respect Dolph’s relationship with his ship, she was glad that he was who he was. She was lucky to be with him, instead of some more cautious or unimaginative commander.

  The fire was out; that was the good news. Pl
asma sealant pumped between the bulkheads had succeeded at smothering the hot blaze. Hargin Stoval and two of his team were in sickbay, suffering from heat prostration and burns—they’d red-lined the tolerances of their suits and some of the systems had failed. And damage control still hadn’t finished measuring the ravages of the blaze. But Punisher herself—and most of her people—were safe.

  If going into battle exhausted and damaged, with one sensor bank blind and the core off true, against an Amnion warship carrying super-light proton cannon, could be called “safe.”

  The bad news was that Punisher’s stores of plasma sealant were nearly exhausted. If she needed to seal a breach in this fight, she was as good as dead.

  Punisher had gone after the alien vessel too slowly to catch her. That had worried Min, even though she’d maintained an air of grim confidence; it had worried her badly. However, Dolph’s judgment of the situation proved accurate when the Behemoth-class defensive had commenced hard deceleration along the center of the asteroid swarm where Deaner Beckmann had built his bootleg lab. Soon Punisher narrowed the gap.

  The alien began stabbing barrage after barrage in Punisher’s direction as soon as she came within range. At intervals the defensive’s super-light proton cannon spoke, uttering destruction in coherent shafts ten thousand k long. If she could have fired continuously, instead of needing nearly two minutes between blasts to recharge that cannon, she would have killed her opponent already. One solid hit was all she required.

  Punisher answered as best she could, using guile and agility to compensate for the fact that her guns simply were not as powerful as the Amnioni’s. For the most part, she relied on evasive action to keep her alive.

  That was Sergei Patrice’s job. If the helm officer ever gave the Amnion warship a clear look at Punisher, and then held his position long enough for the defensive to focus her targ, he might not live long enough to know that he’d made a mistake.

  Already the defensive had fired three deadly blasts. Two had shot wide by an adequate margin, but the third had skimmed a microwave dish off Punisher’s tail and nearly cracked one of her thruster tubes. A broken tube now, under these conditions, would have made the cruiser virtually impossible to manage.