Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict (11 page)

He felt the pain; but until he tasted blood, he didn’t realize he’d bitten into his lip.

Muttering obscenities automatically, as if they no longer had any meaning, he disconnected his ship from the dummy line which fed him
Captain’s Fancy’s
data-stream.

Bright Beauty’s
communication systems crackled awake. Like every receiver in and around Com-Mine Station, his gear caught the codes and frequencies of a distress call. Immediately his speakers broadcast the call.

It froze him in his seat. One part of his mind went completely blank with surprise and alarm as the incoming supply ship from Earth cried for help. Navigational computer wrecked. Somebody on the crew crazy with gap-sickness. Coordinates lost. Control lost. Crisis urgent. Triangulate and pursue. Distressdistressdis—

But the rest of him was thinking furiously.

Incoming supply ship. The richest treasure this side of an asteroid full of pure cesium. And it was weeks early. Probably a trick to protect it from pirates.

That was what Security was talking to Nick Succorso about. Telling him the ship would be early. So he would have a clear shot at it. The change of schedule would backfire. The ship wouldn’t be expecting his attack.

But nobody could have predicted this emergency. Any second now, Station was going to slap a curfew on the docks, forbidding anyone to leave—making it a life offense for anyone to leave—until an official rescue mission could be organized. If he didn’t move fast, Nick would lose his chance—

With his heart triphammering and a rush of sweat soaking his shipsuit, Angus snapped into action.

The distress call went dead only a few seconds later. Apparently the damage to the navigational computer had spread to communications. But by that time he’d already dropped all his lines and uncoupled from Station. By some definitions, he was no longer in dock; he still had to obey Center, but he wasn’t legally bound by Security.

His scan told him
Captain’s Fancy
was doing the same.

Station took a different view of the situation, of course. Center wanted absolute command over every ship in its control space; Security wanted authority over any rescue or salvage. Angus’ receivers picked up a burst of static; the orders blared in his ears.

“Bright Beauty
, this is Station Center. You must redock. An emergency has been declared. Emergency procedures are in force. You may not depart.

“If you ignore this instruction”—Angus heard satisfaction in the metallic voice—“we will be forced to consider you illegal. You will be fired upon.”

Typical authoritarian attitude—arrogant and unjustified. Like the UMC cops and Security, Station Center was in love with muscle. Unfortunately, that didn’t change anything. Angus would still die when the Station started shooting.

Captain’s Fancy
must have received the same orders. Nick ignored them. Blithely, as if she were deaf or invulnerable, his ship pivoted into her normal escape attitude for departure; under easy thrust, she ran out a few dozen kilometers from Station—directly into point-blank range for Com-Mine’s cannon.

She waited for the first warning shots to be fired. Then she winked off Angus’ screens; disappeared as completely as if she’d ceased to exist.

He watched and swore, helpless to stop her.

At the same time, however, he didn’t let anything interfere with his own actions.
Bright Beauty
was already in her escape attitude, and he was pulling her out from the Station with all the thrust she was known to have.

The shit-eaters in Center had that one chance to kill him, but they missed it. As required by law, they sent their first shots across his trajectory, to warn him.

At once, he fed stutter into his drive and started transmitting his own distress call.

There’s a short somewhere. Smoke. Controls locked
—
I can’t navigate. Don’t shoot. I’m trying to come around.

That froze Center. They didn’t have any choice: they had to wait to see whether he was telling the truth.

While his call went out, he growled to Morn, “Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.”

Steeling himself in his g-seat, he engaged
Bright Beauty’s
power boosters.

After that, Com-Mine’s guns couldn’t track him. He wasn’t literally moving too fast for their capabilities: he was simply moving faster than anyone could believe. Surely his ship wasn’t built for that kind of acceleration? By the time Center adjusted its preconceptions—and its targ programming—
Bright Beauty
was out of range.

Angus and Morn were unconscious, of course. The stress was too much to sustain. But the ship’s boosters cut off after a preset interval, reducing g to more tolerable levels; and in the meantime,
Bright Beauty’s
automatic helm set her course by tracing the supply ship’s distress call back along its transmission vector.

Angus recovered first. He stayed where he was, however, breathing deeply and trying to clear his head. Made it. Once again, his ship had saved him. Hurt as she was, she was
his.
If he had to, he would make the entire Station pay for the damage done to her. No one was allowed to harm anything
his.

A short time later, Morn twitched, groaned, lifted her head. Unconsciousness and the strain of g took a moment to fade from her eyes. Then, without hesitation, she put her hands on her console and started tapping in instructions.

He was too stunned and relieved; and too much time had passed: he’d forgotten the danger. He wasn’t looking at his own console, so he didn’t see the blip which began to flash as soon as she set to work.

Luckily, he glanced over at her and saw the look of rapture on her face.

That look was unmistakable.

The whole inside of my head was different. I was floating, and everything was clear. It was like the universe spoke to me.

In sudden panic, he slapped at his console, identified the alert.

She was trying to feed a self-destruct sequence into
Bright Beauty’s
engines.

Bitch. Fucking daughter of a fucking whore.

Gap-sickness.

He was too tired to swear at her aloud. The thought of her illness made him weary and slightly nauseous. A strange burning sensation filled his eyes. He should have gone over to her and hit her, of course, should have pounded her back into her right mind. But he was too tired for that. And anyway,
Bright Beauty
was running under spin. Sighing as if he were sad, he activated the zone-implant control.

Morn’s hands fell off the console, and she slumped in her g-seat.

That was necessary; he had to do it. When he engaged
Captain’s Fancy
, he couldn’t take the risk that she might interfere somehow, hamper or weaken him. There was no reason why he shouldn’t switch her off like a robot with its power supply cut.

And yet he felt about her gap-sickness the same way he felt about
Bright Beauty’s
wounded side.

Somebody was going to pay for it. He would get even with the entire parsec if he had to.

In the meantime, however, he had to take care of himself. He was confident that the place where the supply ship stopped transmitting was at least half a day away under strong thrust: ships crossing the gap were required to reenter normal space that far from any station, to minimize the chance of an accident. And his scanners would warn him as soon as he crossed the supply ship’s particle trail. So he had time for some food and a little rest. If he weren’t at his best, he might not be able to beat
Captain’s Fancy.

He was relying on surprise. Nick Succorso couldn’t know his data-stream had been tapped. And he couldn’t know
Bright Beauty
had been able to get away from Com-Mine Station.

He couldn’t know Angus Thermopyle had no interest at all in the supply ship.

Without gap capability,
Bright Beauty
lacked
Captain’s Fancy’s
ability to leave Com-Mine and the belt for some other star system or station, someplace where she wasn’t known. For that reason, Angus couldn’t risk an attack on the supply ship. If he found her, he would be forced to rescue her crew and salvage her cargo in the legally prescribed manner. DelSec lived on those supplies as much as the rest of Station did. If he pirated them—and DelSec was given any reason of any kind to believe he’d done it—he would be murdered the next time he set foot in Mallorys.

No, Angus was after Nick himself. What he wanted was to catch Nick gutting the lost ship. If he could do that, all his options were good—as long as he destroyed
Captain’s Fancy.
He could rescue the crew (if Nick had left any of them alive); keep as much of the cargo as he wanted for himself (“lost in combat”); salvage the rest; go back to Com-Mine like a hero.

His instincts assured him this was the wrong thing to do.

He ignored them.

First he stopped
Bright Beauty’s
spin and went to get himself a quick meal. Then he returned to his g-seat and began testing all his sensors and sifters and sniffers to make sure they were in proper tune.

Whenever he chewed on his upper lip, he tasted blood again.

CHAPTER

14

T
hree hours sooner than Angus was expecting, the alarm linked to his tracking gear chimed.

He grunted in surprise. It was too soon. The supply ship should never have crossed back into normal space this close to the Station.

And that wasn’t all. Ignoring g, he hauled
Bright Beauty
around and dropped spin to improve his scan. The particle trace didn’t look right. Big haulers like supply ships had throatier engines: they left a wider track across the dark, more garbage at the fringes and more complete dispersion in the core. Studying his displays and readouts made him so suspicious that he felt like throwing up.

And yet—

The sheer coincidence of another ship having passed directly across the supply ship’s transmission vector was staggering.

And if this
was
the supply ship’s trace, he was much closer to her than he’d anticipated. She was closer to Com-Mine; therefore her distress call had taken less time to reach Station; therefore she’d had less time to blunder away from this spot; therefore he could catch up with her more easily.

And by rights Nick’s departure from Station should have taken him well past this point. It was virtually impossible to cut a blink crossing this short. Which meant he was already out where the ship should be. If the ship was there, Angus might not be able to catch him in time. But if the ship was
here
—

If the ship was here, Angus could get to her first. Nick would have to come back looking for her.

The perfect situation for an ambush.

Angus’ dilemma was terrifying. If he guessed wrong, he would lose his only chance to take
Captain’s Fancy
by surprise. Then he would have to live with the consequences of his earlier attack on Nick. And Nick had Security on his side. He had a newer ship. He had an entire crew to back him up. Angus might be forced to hide out in the belt for years.

His sweat made him stink like a swine. Nevertheless he knew exactly what to do. Focusing scan back along the trace, he went looking for the characteristic burst of radiation and dimensional emission which accompanied every crossing from the gap into normal space.

Before long, he found it.

There: the supply ship had entered normal space right there. She was too much of everything—too soon, too close, too easily crippled; her trace was too narrow. But she was
there
, where he could get to her hours ahead of his enemy.

Giving
Bright Beauty
as much boost as he could stomach, he reversed course and followed the trace.

When he plotted the ship’s speed from the density of the particle trail, he saw she was decelerating slowly. That made sense. Unable to navigate, she would naturally want to reduce her own momentum so she would be easier to catch and board. Instead of pushing ahead, however, he began to cut his own speed correspondingly. He didn’t want the supply ship to know he’d found her. She might try to beacon him—and that might betray his position. He intended to sneak up on her, hovering just outside normal scan range and playing dead so he wouldn’t show up on
Captain’s Fancy’s
instruments. He even went so far as to ride straight down the center of the supply ship’s trace, confusing it with
Bright Beauty’s
to hide himself.

He would wait until Nick came. He would wait until
Captain’s Fancy
cut the supply ship’s heart out, eliminated embarrassing witnesses, arranged easy access to the cargo. He would wait until Nick docked with the supply ship’s carcass.

Then he would rip Nick Succorso and everything that bastard loved down to raw electrons and space dust.

He intended to release Morn Hyland so she could watch. He would let her see the blast and try to guess which piece of incinerated debris represented the man she wanted instead of him.

After that—if she was lucky—he would strip off her shipsuit and make her do things that sickened her. He would teach her who owned her until she was in no danger of ever forgetting it.

If she wasn’t lucky, he might do a little surgery on her, rearrange parts of her body somewhat, just for fun.

First, however, he had to find the supply ship.

He didn’t understand it: she kept slowing and slowing—and yet she remained out of scan-range, invisible somewhere ahead of him. At her present rate of deceleration, he should be almost on top of her by now. Yet he couldn’t locate her.

That was impossible. He knew for a fact that his equipment was capable of tracking down one lost EVA suit in a hundred thousand cubic kilometers of black emptiness. The supply ship couldn’t hide from him, even if she had a reason to try, which of course she didn’t because she was dead unless somebody came to her rescue, she had to be here
somewhere
, had to be—

When he found the explanation, it stunned him for a few seconds.

That much delay nearly killed him.

Ahead of
Bright Beauty
, a sudden powerful roar along the trace showed that the ship he was following had cut in full thrust, enough sheer power to pull away from him at an acceleration of several g.

Which was why he hadn’t caught up with her. She’d been piling up speed while he’d been slowing down.

But that was crazy. No crippled supply ship would do something like that. A crippled supply ship with runaway thrusters would jettison her engines rather than let herself race out of reach of help.

Therefore the ship he followed wasn’t a crippled supply ship.

He’d been tricked. There was no supply ship. The distress call was a ruse. He’d set out intending to spring an ambush; but the ambush had been sprung on him, he was already caught—

Stunned, he stared at his readouts and displays, and for a moment he didn’t move. The extent to which he’d been duped paralyzed him. What chance did he have against people who could do
this?
He’d been so thoroughly outmaneuvered that he was as good as dead.

Gaping dismay, he looked over at Morn.

She hadn’t moved, of course. The zone implant blocked the neural impulses which connected her mind to her body. She was conscious, but helpless. Like his ship. Unless he could find a way to save them, they would both be destroyed.

A howl rose in his throat; but he had no time for it.

Bright Beauty
had been running without spin. And all his attention had been focused on the particle trace. He hauled her into a turn, bringing sensors and sniffers to bear on her blind spot.

At once, her klaxons went off, wailing like the damned.

A ship came at him fast. No, worse than that: the ship had already fired, throwing a flight of torpedoes in his direction at terrible speed.

His terror was absolute: it made him superhuman.
Bright Beauty
was still turning, still starting into spin. He gathered boost and unleashed it at an angle, kicked her to the side so hard that she tumbled away as if she were totally out of control, wheeling like a derelict.

Every alarm she had on her seemed to go off simultaneously. She wasn’t made for stress like that. Damaged as she was, she was in danger of breaking apart.

But the torpedoes missed.

Under so much g, he should have gone completely blank; crushed unconscious in his seat. It should have been impossible for him to retain any sense of orientation, of the spatial relationship between himself and his attacker.

Nevertheless, while
Bright Beauty
tumbled, he opened fire.

The spray of his matter cannon went miraculously close to the other ship. She was forced to veer off.

He had no way of identifying his attacker, but she was almost certainly the ship he’d been following—almost certainly
Captain’s Fancy.
Somehow, Nick Succorso had been able to cut his blink crossing short enough to intersect the transmission vector of the bogus distress call. Or he’d blinked far enough past that point to return with another crossing. He’d lured Angus to follow him. Then, when he’d slowed Angus nearly to a standstill, he’d accelerated and looped back to attack.

None of that mattered, of course. It didn’t matter who Angus’ enemy was—not now. The only thing that mattered was that he was trapped and had to fight for his life.

For his life and
Bright Beauty’
s. And Morn’s.

His ship’s tumble was dangerous. It was also much too slow. Under this kind of g, he couldn’t read his screens. Still he knew somehow what the other ship was doing, where she was in relation to him.

As his attacker came around and brought her guns to bear, he hit braking thrust, straightened out
Bright Beauty’s
fall, got her tubes behind her, and gave her as much drive as he thought he could stand without losing his mind to the dark.

Matter fire licked her sides, but didn’t do any real damage. Then she pulled out of range, surprising her attacker with the fact that she was still under control and could perform maneuvers which should have been impossible.

Angus’ head was jammed brutally against his g-seat; but now at least he could look at his displays and screens, his console. Targ plotted the other ship automatically, showing her on a grid even a crazy could have understood.

She was gaining on him. At this rate, she would be in position to open fire in a matter of seconds.

Angus ought to be taking evasive action.

But he already knew
Captain’s Fancy
was fast. If he really wanted to outrun her, he would have to give
Bright Beauty
all the power his drive could generate. Then he would black out. He wouldn’t know whether he was alive or dead until his ship reached the end of her fuel and stopped accelerating.

He didn’t pile on any more boost.

He also didn’t take any evasive action. To do that, he would have to slow down; or else the inertial stress might be enough to make him hemorrhage.

Instead he started seeding the space behind him with static-mines.

He didn’t know it, but his mouth and chin were covered with blood. Every time he bit his upper lip, it bled more.

Static-mines were tiny: a scan officer with his mind on other things might miss them. Angus released them in clusters of ten or twelve, but they scattered so quickly that they shouldn’t create a combined blip for the attacking ship to read.

If she fired at him and hit one—

Or if she simply ran into it—

She fired. His displays showed him the characteristic energy-burst of matter cannon.
Bright Beauty
was struck—another scar along her flank. Yet she was lucky: the hurt was no worse than a slap.

The salvo also caught a few of the static-mines.

He’d keyed them to set each other off. In seconds, his trail was covered by disruptive explosions, a barrage of particle noise, doppler signals, and radio garbage loud enough to randomize every scanner
Captain’s Fancy
had.

In effect,
Bright Beauty
—and space itself—disappeared. The attacking ship was left deaf and blind.

She would stay that way for ten or fifteen seconds, until her computers were able to filter the chaos, distinguish between noise and fact.

At that instant, Angus wrenched
Bright Beauty
to the side, away from her former course. He gave her one quick slam of extra boost.

Then he shut her down.

Everything. Even life-support. Thrust; communication; lights; sensors: everything except minimal computer function and passive scan systems which didn’t give out signs of life; everything except the faint, almost undetectable nuclear hum of charged matter cannon.

He was trying to make himself invisible.

Trying to compensate for the fact that he was outgunned and outmanned and probably outpowered.

Sweat drenched his shipsuit, but he didn’t notice that. He forgot to course; he almost refused to breathe because in his imagination he could taste his air already starting to go bad. His whole body was focused on the dull screens of his passive scan—sifters which sent out nothing, but only accepted and interpreted what came to them across the void. Where was his attacker? By rights, his sense of space told him, she should be
there.
But his equipment said nothing. He was as blind as
Captain’s Fancy.
The only difference, the only hope, was that
Captain’s Fancy
was the one in pursuit, that—

The only difference was that she was still moving under power.

His screens flickered.
There.

Moving cautiously now, hunting, groping—but still using her engines, life-support, internal communications; still sending a shout of data through the residual noise left by the static-mines.

Because she didn’t know where he was, she was about to come under his guns.

Come on, you bastards.

He didn’t so much as whisper aloud: he was irrationally afraid his attacker might hear him.

Come on, you sons of whores. Let me have just one good shot at you. Just one.

His ship made no sound, gave away nothing except the small hum of her guns. Surely the only way Nick could spot her was by picking out her silhouette against the starfield? And surely they were far enough away from each other to make that difficult, nearly impossible? Surely it would take time for the computers to run that kind of analysis on what they saw?

Time: all Angus needed was time. His attacker was already within range. If he fired now, he wouldn’t miss. But he might not kill her. If he waited until she came closer, he would have a chance to catch her with a torpedo.

Just one torpedo would be enough to break her back. He was sure of that. He knew what his torpedos could do.

He waited.

Come on, you shithead motherfucking cocksuckers.

Waited.

Too late, his equipment registered the sudden blast of power as the other ship fed boost to her thrusters.

She’d spotted him. Just when he was about to gut her, tear her entirely to pieces, she’d spotted him. Or she’d guessed what he was doing.