The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict

  By degrees, he beat her down until she was like a child toward him: dependent; urgent to please. He taught her that his survival was hers as well; that any peril he met would hit her first, and harder. And he played on the bizarre ethic to which she’d sworn herself when she became a cop. Again and again, he assured her that she deserved what was happening to her. She’d killed her family, hadn’t she? She’d betrayed them all. No, it wasn’t something she’d done by conscious choice. It was worse: it was something she’d done because of who she was; because of the fundamental flaw which left her vulnerable to gap-sickness.

  With all his cunning, he worked to deprive her of her capacity to think in any terms which didn’t come to her from him.

  And he watched the results, studied them with a coward’s intuitive precision. He saw the darkness accumulating in her gaze; the gradual slackening of her skin; the change in the way she moved, so that every action became a limp. When he fucked her, he felt her begin to respond, driven to swallow her revulsion by self-loathing and the need to satisfy him. When she slept, he heard her whimpering for help which never came.

  At last even his grubby, suspicious nature believed that she’d been damaged enough to risk.

  Still cautious, he prepared his safeguards and coercions. Then, with a UMC cop for crew, he took his ship out of hiding.

  Six days later, Bright Beauty sputtered into Com-Mine Station’s control space and requested permission to dock.

  No one asked any awkward questions at that point. No one had reason to: no one knew Starmaster was lost. Bright Beauty was given permission to dock and instructed to await normal inspection.

  The inspector assigned to clear Angus Thermopyle and Bright Beauty wasn’t particularly interested in his job that day. Even brain-numb on cat, however, he could hardly have failed to notice the anomalous fact that Angus had left Com-Mine Station purportedly alone and now returned with a woman as crew.

  He didn’t ask Angus to explain this detail. He had no wish to risk making a fool of himself. Instead, he got Morn’s name and fed it into the Station’s id computer.

  After that, the situation got messy.

  Bright Beauty was slapped in quarantine, and a whole parade of inspectors trooped through her, asking questions, issuing directives, making demands. As the inspectors went up in rank—therefore in determination to be obeyed—their questions and directives and demands became more aggressive and personal. And all of them were aimed at Morn Hyland.

  What happened to Starmaster?

  How did you survive?

  How did you end up with him?

  Unfortunately, the authorities found themselves in a frustrating position. Center was worried—in fact, outright alarmed—about Starmaster. Security practically salivated for the chance to get their hands on Angus. But they had nothing to go on: no formal record of the truth about Starmaster; nothing but hints. And Morn refused to answer their questions. She was a cop—and she refused.

  Periodically, an inspector tried to appropriate Bright Beauty’s datacore. Angus positively declined to release it until he was required to do so by law—until he was formally charged with a crime.

  Periodically, attempts were made to get Morn away from him. Each time, she brandished her UMCP id tag and dismissed any superior authority. Although she chose not to speak, she tacitly covered Angus with her police mantle.

  The more perceptive Station personnel observed that there was more than a little pain in the way she stood beside Angus. For a cop, she looked unusually vulnerable; almost frightened. If they’d met her alone in the halls of DelSec, they would have assumed she was a derelict. If they were kind, they would have tried to help her.

  But here they could do nothing. Her id tag put her beyond challenge. And Angus held his ground with his hands in the pockets of his shipsuit, glowering at everybody and stonewalling expertly.

  What happened to Starmaster?

  Blew up, he answered for her. For no reason. Must have been sabotage. We’ll give you the coordinates if you want to search the wreck.

  How did you survive?

  Freak accident. The auxiliary bridge held. She still would have died eventually, but I rescued her.

  Angus could see the terrible hurt behind her eyes, but he relied on the zone implant to keep her quiet. And he relied on her silence—and her id tag—to baffle the inspectors.

  Why are you with him? He’s a known pirate. We just haven’t been able to prove it yet. You’re UMCP. What kind of hold has he got on you? Do you actually expect us to believe he’s telling the truth?

  I don’t care what you believe, Angus said with relish. I told you. Starmaster blew up. She was sabotaged. That must have been done here. Before she left Com-Mine Station. Morn nodded dully. Angus glowered at everybody and kept his hand in his pocket. She doesn’t know who she can trust, but she’s damn sure she can’t trust you.

  The inspectors wheedled and demanded, but they were unable to make Morn speak.

  The only question they really wanted Angus to answer was: What happened to your ship? You look like you’ve been in a dogfight.

  Look again. Scan me. That isn’t matter fire. I got hit by a rock.

  An experienced “captain” like you? That must have been some rock.

  I was in the belt. I was running Bright Beauty by myself. I miscalculated. Is that a crime?

  The inspectors were in no mood to give up, however. They tried to trap him.

  Starmaster was after you. You crashed trying to run. Isn’t that the truth?

  No.

  Then how did you happen to be the one who came to the rescue—you with a damaged ship?

  Coincidence. I was close enough. The blast made my scan go crazy. Radio interference. Particle noise. That kind of static doesn’t happen unless there’s been a disaster, so I tracked it back and found her. With an effort, Angus refrained from pointing out how virtuous his conduct had been.

  The dock manifest says you left without buying supplies. Your air scrubbers should have failed a long time ago. How come you’re still breathing?

  Rescuer’s privilege. I took filters from her ship.

  His bluff was working. As long as Morn didn’t come apart under the strain, he was going to be safe.

  Why is she staying with you? What’s your hold on her?

  She’s going to hire somebody to carry a message back to Earth. We’d do it ourselves, but Bright Beauty can’t cross the gap. When UMCPHQ sends out instructions, she’ll know what to do. Until then, she trusts me more than you.

  In the end, the inspectors had no choice. Of course, they didn’t believe the story. Under other circumstances, they might have stretched the law far enough to keep Bright Beauty quarantined at least until Station techs had a chance to visit and analyze Starmaster’s wreckage. But Morn Hyland was UMCP; not under Station jurisdiction. The assumption had to be made that she knew what she was doing, that her actions were reasonable and shouldn’t be interfered with.

  Bright Beauty was cleared.

  Angus Thermopyle took Morn Hyland directly to DelSec.

  His bluff had worked.

  He had no actual desire to go to Mallorys. He wanted to seal his hatches and fuck Morn until she wept. It was still possible that his hold on her might snap, and he didn’t want to risk her in public. But he knew he was going to be watched for a long time—at least until inspectors got back from Starmaster. It was important to behave normally. At that moment, “normal” meant Mallorys, where he could start trying to buy the information he needed to make money.

  He’d been walking down the path to his doom for some time. Now his doom started moving toward him.

  Even though she was unfamiliar with DelSec, he stayed half a step behind Morn’s shoulder so he could keep an eye on her. At once elated and afraid, possessive and angry, he noticed how every man they passed looked at her—noticed it and hated them. In the same way that he’d planned revenge against Starmaster for driving him off Com-Mine Station, he now evolved elaborate, impo
ssible schemes which would teach all these bastards to fear him. It was conceivable that he could claim salvage on Starmaster. Morn’s UMCP id tag might make that possible. With enough money, he would get Bright Beauty rebuilt, better than before. Then he would be invulnerable. He could do anything he wanted.

  Dreams like that helped him endure the crowds he despised in DelSec and Mallorys.

  He hated Mallorys, of course. But it was better than any of the alternatives. As a group, the drunks and ruins and illegals there knew more and cared less than the rest of the people in DelSec. They meant him harm in ways he understood. For that reason, they were less dangerous than they thought.

  Station gravity—roughly .9g—made him feel leaden, bloated; he was in no mood for a drink. His bluff had worked! But everybody on Com-Mine was waiting for him to make a mistake and get caught; all the inspectors, everybody in Security, every prospector or miner who’d ever tried the belt, everybody in Mallorys who knew his reputation and didn’t trust him. And Morn walked as if the weight meant nothing—as if in spite of the many ways it could be hurt, her body carried its beauty easily. All those men wanted her. They wanted to get her away from him.

  He was already feeling frightened and bloodthirsty when he caught sight of Nick Succorso through the heat and din of Mallorys.

  At once, he felt like he’d been hit in the chest by an impact-ram—more so because he couldn’t show it, didn’t dare react in front of all these people, let them see his weakness.

  He would have recognized Nick as an enemy immediately in any case: he knew how to interpret that careless grin, that sharp, buccaneering gleam of humor and superiority. He knew Nick’s contempt for him was instantaneous. He was ugly and luckless and not very clean, and Nick had already begun to sneer at him.

  Under any circumstances, Angus would have gone a long way out of his way to damage Nick Succorso. That was instinctive and fundamental, like his initial panic when he saw Starmaster.

  But this was worse, much worse: this was like watching someone aim a rifle straight into his face and fire. He saw Nick glance at him, dismiss him—and look at Morn. He saw the scars that underlined Nick’s gaze darken, as if his vision had begun to smolder. And he saw Morn’s reaction.

  Her face betrayed nothing. She said nothing. But he knew her intimately—knew every pulse of her heartbeat, every hue of her skin, every shade of horror and hurt in the depths of her eyes. He knew immediately, in front of all those people, without another second for consideration or effort, that Nick Succorso had more power over her than he did.

  Nick had the power to make her want him.

  And yet that recognition was only the beginning: the full truth was still worse. Until this moment, when he saw and understood—or thought he understood—the way Morn and Nick looked at each other, Angus Thermopyle hadn’t known how weak he really was. He hadn’t realized how much power he lacked—and how much he wanted that power, how much he grieved for it. He could make—had made—Morn do anything and everything his lust or loathing conceived. Like a drunk or a derelict, he’d believed that was enough. But it wasn’t enough, oh no, never enough, not now. He’d duped himself, blinded and fooled himself.

  He’d taught her to cooperate in her own degradation. He’d taught her to act as if he were necessary to her. No matter what he did, however, he could never make her want him. The buttons on the zone implant control which tuned her so that every nerve in her body obeyed his desire were impotent compared to the jaunty burn of Nick’s gaze.

  It wasn’t fair. She belonged to Angus. She was his.

  He had no way to know he was wrong.

  CHAPTER

  11

  The truth was that Morn Hyland didn’t see Nick Succorso as a sexual being at all. On that point, everyone who noticed her situation or gave any thought to her reactions was wrong. She hardly noticed Nick was male. If she had, she would have turned her back on him, would have refused him with the same debased instinct for survival which had caused her to refuse any possibility of hope which the Station inspectors might have represented.

  She didn’t want a man. Any male touch would have made her ache to scream and puke, just as Angus himself did. She’d been raped and raped until the violation had reached through her flesh to her spirit; pain and abhorrence had soaked into the marrow of her bones. If Nick Succorso had put his hand on her as a man, she would have flinched away, exactly as she did when Angus touched her.

  Angus had more power over her than he realized.

  Yet he was right when he sensed that something leapt up inside Morn at the sight of Nick Succorso.

  That “something,” however, had nothing whatever to do with Nick’s handsomeness, his virility, his physical appeal. Instead it had to do with his look of raffish eagerness, his scarred and buccaneering appearance of bravado. She wanted him, not as a man, but as an effective force. He might be strong and cunning—not to mention unscrupulous—enough to destroy the man who was destroying her.

  Did she think Nick might set her free, redeem her from her anguish? No. Angus had come too close to breaking her. She no longer had the imagination—or the courage—to dream so far.

  But he’d taught her how to hate. And she had learned that lesson profoundly. Her own hate lived with the pain and abhorrence in the marrow of her bones. The “something” which had leapt up in her at the sight of Nick Succorso was simply the hope that Angus could be beaten.

  As for Nick himself—

  Like Angus, the other people in Mallorys were wrong about him as well.

  Oh, he noticed her beauty immediately and was attracted to it. His virility was no sham: his taste for lovely female flesh never left him. In part for that reason, he had nurtured a wide reputation as a lover. But he had other reasons also. He liked winning, so he did whatever was necessary to make his women respond to him passionately. And he had a hunger for revenge; especially sexual revenge. He yearned to get even.

  The truth—which he kept to himself—was that he didn’t actually like women. In secret, he feared and despised them. Their bodies had value only to the extent that his response to them could draw an even greater response from them. Where such satisfactions weren’t at issue, he had no interest in them. He preferred seeing them hurt.

  The explanation for this was a mystery only in the sense that he never spoke of it.

  Once, when he was barely a man in years, and no more than a boy in experience, he’d been bested by a woman. And as she beat him, cheated him, ruined his dreams, she sneered at him. His scars were the marks of her contempt, the visible sign that she hadn’t considered him worth killing. Everyone else she had killed, every other man on that ship, nearly twenty of them; but him she’d left with only his scars to remember her by. There was nothing he could do that would make her fear him.

  That ship had been the original Captain’s Fancy, the inspiration of the name Nick now used for his pretty frigate. The love he felt for his present ship was an echo of his yearning for that earlier vessel. She’d been his dream from the moment when he’d first become old enough to have such dreams.

  Nick Succorso—which, incidentally, wasn’t his real name—had been born station-bound in the same sense that some people were planet-bound, unable or unwilling to leave for one reason or another. He was the son of a family of administrators living on a station like Com-Mine, but half a hundred parsecs away, a station that tended one of the official (therefore rich) trading routes between Earth and forbidden space. There he’d begun watching scan at an early age, just as most of the children of administrators did on that station, to learn the skills they would need for the rest of their lives.

  Unlike most of his peers, however, he’d fallen in love with what he watched, with the vast gulf of space and the lure of the gap, with the romance of sailing the imponderable stellar winds, with the mysterious lurch-and-translation which took men and ships across dimensions beyond the reach of their former lives.

  Specifically, he’d fallen in love with Captain’s Fancy
.

  She seemed to him the bravest of the best, a trim metal sheath of power which pierced the heavens and the gap. Her lines were sleek, yet she bristled with weapons. Her holds were huge, yet she swept across scan and docked and undocked as gracefully as a creature of the great deep. Her crew were exotic men drawn from the strangest parts of the galaxy, men with the strength to pit themselves against the vacuum and forbidden space, and the wealth they traded was fabulous. Young Nick Succorso ached to sign aboard their ship under any imaginable contract or conditions.

  Good heavens, no! said his mother.

  Are you out of your mind? asked his father.

  As for the captain of Captain’s Fancy, he simply said, No. Regal as a lord in his braid and authority, he dismissed Nick out of hand. If the command second hadn’t taken pity on Nick’s crushed look, Nick never would have been given any explanation at all. But the command second, who meant well, had taken the time to say, Forget it, kid. We never take crew from stationers. Too much trouble. Haven’t got the instincts. Only way you’ll ever get on a ship is, go to one of the academies. Earth. Aleph Green. Orion’s Reach.

  Good heavens, no! his mother repeated.

  Are you out of your mind? demanded his father. What makes you think we’ve got that kind of money?

  Nick was never stupid. He could see his dreams curdling. He would never be able to earn “that kind of money” by himself. The only jobs which paid that well were jobs on ships.

  But he couldn’t bear to see his dreams curdle, so he let something else inside him go sour.

  He began to plot crimes.

  In those days, piracy was a constant and maddening problem across the shipping lanes. The UMC Police were relatively new; their ability to enforce the laws Earth made didn’t reach far. And forbidden space didn’t appear to make any reliable distinction between sanctioned and dishonest trade.

  With the logic of the young, Nick reasoned that wherever there was piracy, there were pirates. And wherever there were pirates, there was a demand for information.