The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (41 page)

Sib
didn’t appear to feel any reluctance. His apprehension needed an outlet. “Nick’s
in his cabin. Sleeping, probably. Or maybe he just sits there grinning at the
walls.” Sib shuddered at the thought, but he made a palpable effort to keep
himself calm. “There’s nowhere he can go without passing the galley, so I
decided I could afford to get something to eat.”

For a
moment he stopped as if Nick were the only question that mattered. When first
Morn and then Davies looked up at him, however, he went on, “Vector’s still working
— he acts like he’s forgotten that even engineers need food and sleep.
Sometimes I forget how much his joints hurt when there’s g. He seems to have a
lot more energy when he’s weightless.

“I
guess Mikka and Ciro are in their cabin.” The harmonics of strain sharpened in
his tone. “I haven’t seen them since Angus sent her off the bridge.”

A frown
pinched Davies’ forehead. He swallowed a gulp from his g-flask, cleared his
throat, and said abruptly, “We’re looking for theories.” He indicated Morn with
a glance. “What do you think Angus’ problem is?”

Sib
shrugged with an air of helplessness. To all appearances he’d been out of his
depth ever since Nick promoted him to be
Captain’s Fancy
’s data first.
Nevertheless he tried to answer.

“He and
Nick are natural enemies. They hate each other. But the way they hate each
other —” His voice trailed off into dismay. Then, however, he rallied. “They
would rather be allies than take sides with anybody else.”

Morn
shook her head. Her impression of Angus was that his essential hatred was
undifferentiated — at once so diffuse and so global that it made no real
distinction between illegals and cops. It simply attached itself to anyone
available. In any case, she couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which
Angus might forget — never mind forgive — the fact that Nick had framed him;
beaten him.

Unfortunately
there were other possibilities —

Why
was
Angus here, aboard a UMCP ship, surrounded by people he didn’t like or
need? And why had he accepted the idea of heading for a bootleg lab? Because he’d
made some kind of deal with Hashi Lebwohl: so he said — or at least implied. To
save his life, he’d agreed to carry out a covert attack on Billingate, and to
rescue — Morn herself? Nick? — if he could.

Nick
was an occasional DA operative: he’d worked for Lebwohl. Did Angus have further
orders he hadn’t mentioned, orders which required him to ally himself with Nick
in order to carry out some additional part of his deal?

Without
transition the galley seemed to become uncomfortably warm, as if the foodvends
were overheating. Morn felt sweat trickling down her spine, running like lice
across her ribs.

“We’re
in trouble.” She was hardly aware that she spoke aloud. “We’re in deep trouble.”

Davies
turned toward her, opened his mouth to ask her what she meant. Sib was caught
up in his own fears, however; he thought Morn was sharing them with him.

“I
know,” he agreed. “But I don’t think it matters what Angus is doing.
Nick
hasn’t
changed. He’s still —” His throat worked convulsively. “He’s still willing to
sell any of us. As soon as he gets the chance.”

Fighting
nausea, she warned Davies to silence with a brusque gesture. Her memories were
a black hole: they threatened to drag her down. She wanted to hear whatever Sib
might say; wanted
anything
which might help her cling to the present.

“You
told me once” — her voice throbbed with effort — “you’ve seen what the Amnion
do. You called it ‘evil’.”

Sib
bobbed his head. “Yes.” He tried to smile, but the attempt only made him look
lost. “That’s not a word you hear illegals use very often. But I know what I’m
talking about.”

He
wanted to tell his story: that was plain. He couldn’t face it without
squirming, however, despite its importance to him. He spoke in awkward bursts
and pauses, like a man who didn’t know how to forget pain. Blinded by
recollection, he stared through Morn as if he were alone with his past.

“I
never really belonged on a ship like
Captain’s Fancy
. You knew that — I’m
sure you could see it as soon as you came aboard. Nick used to tell me I didn’t
have the guts for it, and he was right. But that’s not the only reason I didn’t
belong.

“My
family was merchanter. We had our own ship — this was about fifteen years ago”
— Morn guessed that Sib may have been near Davies’ age at the time — “and like
practically everybody else who owned a ship, we were orehaulers. Actually we
did most of our work where we’re going now, in-system around Valdor Industrial,
but we had a small gap drive, so we could pick our markets when we needed to.
We weren’t exactly getting rich, but we weren’t doing badly, either.”

Like
Morn, he seemed to feel the galley getting warmer. Sweat formed slow beads on
his temples and oozed on his cheeks.

“Our
last run, we were hired to pick up a load of selenium and most of the miners
from an operation on one of the moons of a planet that orbits Lesser Massif-5.
The planet was about as far away from Valdor as it ever got, but its orbit was
ready to carry it between the suns — which was like dropping it into a smelter.
The mine had to be abandoned, at least for a year or two.

“We
picked up the miners, no problem, and as much of the selenium as we could hold,
and headed back around the suns for Valdor. But we had to swing wide to avoid a
particularly violent asteroid swarm, so we ended up closer to the fringes of
the system than we liked — we were too far away from the main shipping lanes
and the UMCP patrols to be comfortable about it. But we’d done things like that
before, when we had to. We didn’t know any reason why this time should be
different. Add a month or two to the trip, then we would be back in port.”

Sweat
gathered on his forehead. His eyebrows were dark with moisture. He wiped at it
with the back of his hand, then clutched his fingers together in front of him.

“Of
course, it
was
different. This time a blip that looked like just part of
the swarm turned out to be illegal. Right when we stopped worrying about it,
she came after us. They hit us with some kind of gun, I still don’t know what
it was, but it peeled us open like a storage container. We couldn’t begin to
defend ourselves, our own guns went out at the first hit. Then they grappled on
and burned their way aboard.

“They
took the selenium. You would expect that, under the circumstances. But they
didn’t kill any of us. I mean, not after the fighting was over. We thought we
were going to be torched, or maybe just shoved out the airlock, but we weren’t.

“I was
hiding between the hulls, in an EVA suit. I’ve never been really brave, but for
some reason when we were hit I had the crazy idea I might be able to reach one
of the guns and get it working again, so I climbed into a suit and went
outside. That’s the only reason I’m still here. Still human —”

For a
moment his voice trailed away. His hands seemed to writhe against each other as
he forced himself to go on.

“We —
my family — all those miners — We weren’t killed. I’d never heard of illegals
like that, I didn’t know they existed. They weren’t ordinary pirates, they were
traitors, they worked directly for the Amnion.” He seemed unconscious of the
sweat trickling into his eyes. “Instead of killing us, they lined us up and
started injecting us with mutagens.”

Davies
snarled deep in his throat — an involuntary growl of anger and protest. Morn
put her hand on his arm to keep him still, but her eyes didn’t leave Sib’s
face.

“I had
a video link with the bridge,” Sib said as if he were haunted by the memory;
hunted by it. “I saw everything. If they were just being killed — my family —
the others — I would have gone back inside and tried to fight for them. I might
have. I was desperate enough. But I saw them injected. I saw them change. It
paralysed me. I started screaming — I couldn’t help that — but I cut off my
pickup first.

“My
whole family and all those miners, the ones who weren’t already dead — They
were made into Amnion. Eventually they boarded the other ship and left me.”

With an
effort, he pulled his fingers apart, separated his hands. But then they seemed
to have nowhere to go. Slowly they crept together, clung to each other again.

“I kept
on screaming until I lost my voice. I thought as long as I could hear myself I
wouldn’t go insane.” He swallowed like a spasm. “For some reason I was afraid I
might be turned into an Amnioni just by watching it done to my family. But of
course that didn’t happen.

“None
of it had to happen.” Blinking at a blur of sweat, he brought his gaze back
into focus on Morn. There was no anger in his tone: he lacked her ability to
hold a grudge; didn’t have that defence against what had happened to him. “We’d
been sending status reports to Valdor ever since we encountered the asteroid
swarm. And as soon as we spotted that ship, we started yelling for help.

“We
knew someone heard us because we got an answer. From the cops. UMCP cruiser
Vehemence,
Captain Nathan Alt commanding. She wasn’t all that far away, maybe half a
billion k.

“She
told us she couldn’t respond. She said she was on an impossible vector,
g-stress would kill her if she tried to turn hard enough to reach us in time.”

A
clutch of loss lifted his shoulders like a shrug. “She never did reach us. I
probably should have died — that would have been simpler — but just when I was
starting to run out of air, I was found by an illegal that came to scavenge
before the hulk was picked clean by an authorised salvage. That’s how I became
illegal myself. The cops didn’t respond. And my whole family was gone. I didn’t
have any reason to do anything else.

“When I
got the chance a few years later,” he finished softly, “I joined Nick.”

Morn
nodded, a blaze in her eyes. For the moment she’d forgotten Angus and
corruption; forgotten Nick. Instead she seemed to feel all the anger Sib needed
for himself and couldn’t find. The cops didn’t respond. She might have become a
pirate herself under those conditions.

How
many illegals were like Sib? — like Vector? How many of them had been driven to
violence by the inadequacy or malfeasance of the organisation she’d tried to
serve? How much of the piracy which threatened humankind’s survival against the
Amnion had the cops themselves caused?

When
was it going to
stop?

Then
Davies interrupted her inward fuming. “Captain Nathan Alt,” he muttered
harshly. “I” — he glanced at her, caught himself — “you’ve heard of him.”

He was
right: the recollection came back to her as soon as he mentioned it. And it was
important.

“I
remember Captain Alt.” Her voice shook until she controlled it. “By the time I
went through the Academy, he’d become a legend. He was court-martialled because
he didn’t help a ship under attack in the Massif-5 system.

“The
story we heard” — it was part of a seemingly endless series of lectures on the
duties and responsibilities of being a cop — “is that Min Donner hit him with
every charge she could think of. His datacore confirmed he couldn’t have
changed course hard enough to reach that ship in time — not without damaging
Vehemence
and maybe killing some of his own people. But Director Donner said he
should have made the attempt anyway. Better yet, he should have anticipated the
situation. He’d received that ship’s status reports — he knew she was being
pushed toward a part of the system where she might get into trouble.”

Davies
nodded once, hard, as if he shared the ED director’s conviction.

“The
court believed her,” Morn finished. “He was stripped of his commission and
drummed out of Enforcement Division.”

Sib
couldn’t meet her gaze: his eyes slid off as if they’d lost their grip. Some
necessary part of him had screamed itself away into the void while his
relatives were injected with mutagens. And yet somewhere he’d found the courage
to help her when she’d needed it most; the courage to risk his life against
Nick —

“I’m
sorry, Morn,” he murmured toward his twisted hands. “That doesn’t help. What
good are cops, if they don’t even try to do their jobs?”

“You’ve
got it backward,” Nick drawled from the passage outside the galley. “It’s worse
when they do try to do their jobs.”

Sib
flinched in surprise, jerked up his head. Together Morn and Davies turned on
their stools, pulling against their zero-g belts to look at Nick.

He floated
at the edge of the niche which contained the galley, holding himself stationary
on a handgrip. Because he was weightless, he could move in complete silence.
And Sib had been looking down. As a result, Nick had been able to come up
behind Morn and Davies without being noticed.

She
panicked as soon as she saw his face.

His
eyes burned as if they were lit by madness; as if a magnesium flare of insanity
had gone off inside his skull. A grin like a snarl stretched his mouth back
from his teeth. His scars were sharp with blood, as distinct and dark as the
work of claws.