The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (48 page)

Mikka
had said that the Lab was located on an asteroid
big enough to be a moon
in the middle of the swarm.

With
all that rock running interference,
she’d
explained,
it’s damn near impregnable. You have to go in slow — and some of
those asteroids have matter cannon emplacements dug into them.

Nick
tapped in commands. Angus watched without interest as his board lost helm.

“I’ll
take her from here,” Nick explained. “I know where the Lab is. And I know how
to talk us in. You’ll just get us blown apart.”

Show
this message —

Angus
had shown it all; every word; every scrap of code. But Nick had ignored the
machine language to concentrate on the words.

“You
have targ,” Nick went on. “Screens, dispersion sinks, all our defences. Data
and damage control.” Those functions came to life on Angus’ console. “Your
reflexes are probably faster than mine. If we get in trouble, you’ll have to do
our fighting for us. I’ll handle the rest.”

Mikka
had said that the Lab did
a lot of med research. Most of the BR surgery you’ve
ever heard of was invented here. But that’s just a sideline to finance what
they’re really doing.
Which was Deaner Beckmann’s real research.
Gravitic
tissue mutation.

He
wants to evolve genetic adaptations that will allow organisms to survive the
stress of working close to singularities. Because he thinks humankind’s future
lies inside. But
people
can’t go there if they can’t take the pressure.
So he wants to make a few changes.

Like
the cops.

Warden
Dios to Isaac —

It’s
got to stop.

The Lab
might be the only illegal installation in existence where Angus could be
unwelded. But he didn’t have that choice.

The
swarm’s image on scan grew sharper quickly — too quickly, considering the
dangers. A sane ship would have decelerated in order to approach the vast stone
torrent more carefully. But no sane ship would have crossed this system as fast
as
Trumpet
did: she had no sanity aboard. Nick was crazy with freedom
and power, and his excitement burned like fission as he brought the gap scout
around to begin matching the vector and velocity of the asteroid swarm.
Movement through that careening chaos of rock would be impossible unless the ship
first assumed the same course at the same speed.

A flat
hand of g pushed Angus into his seat as
Trumpet
turned, but he could
bear it. Nick had to work within his own limitations. If he pushed himself too
hard, he might lose consciousness; might lose everything. And Angus was much
stronger. In addition,
Trumpet’s
bridge gimballed smoothly on
frictionless bearings, adjusting its orientation to compensate for g. Any
strain Nick could stand, Angus could stand easily.

Davies
and Morn could endure it, too, if they were sealed in their bunks. Vector, Sib,
Mikka, and Ciro ought to be able to survive the same way.

By
degrees lateral thrust eased. The ship had come into line with the swarm’s
trajectory through the cluttered void. Almost immediately, however, that force
was replaced by deceleration.
Trumpet
had too much velocity; at this
speed she would crush herself on the first asteroid she encountered.

Angus
couldn’t feel the difference. G was g, always pulling in the same direction as
the bridge revolved to meet it. The ship knew the change, however. She made it
obvious. Braking roared through the hull, a raw, almost subliminal howl of
energy, at once louder and more profound than the oblique stress of lateral
thrust.

The
screens flickered and broke up for a second or two while scan algorithms
recalculated for deceleration; Angus’ readouts offered him a heartbeat of
gibberish. Then the displays sprang clear. Data began to pour in: distance,
size, composition, relative velocity from half a hundred obstacles at once. A
particle storm of input raged past
Trumpet’s
hull, was interpreted by
her computers, and appeared in front of him as if it were coherent; as if so
many instances of mass thrashed by so many conflicting forces could be seen as
anything other than chaos.

Proximity
alarms began to signal in the background. Nick was bringing
Trumpet
too
close too fast. Angus, who wouldn’t have hesitated to attempt the same
manoeuvre himself, didn’t trust Nick to handle it. Yet Nick ran helm precisely,
despite his relative unfamiliarity with the ship. Filled by a rising chorus of
klaxons, she finished her deceleration as she breached the fringes of the
tumbling river of rock. Then she started dodging among the stones toward the
distant heart of the swarm.

The
screens became an impossible jumble of positions and vectors. For any ship to
navigate past so much mad rock — and to do so at this speed — would have been
an enormous challenge if the asteroids had been stable in relation to each
other; if time and distance and entropy had deprived them of individual motion,
so that they travelled as one. But of course they didn’t. Conflicting gravitic
fields from Massif-5’s stars and planets, from the nearby singularity, and from
the swarm itself affected each of the asteroids differently, according to its
mass and composition. As a result, each rock shifted constantly within the
general plunge. Stones the size of ships or stations rolled against each other
and either cracked apart or rebounded on altered vectors: the whole swarm
seethed as if it were seeking to coalesce. Only the sheer confusion of
collisions and g prevented the asteroids from collapsing around their centre
like a black hole.

Navigation
was still possible. If it weren’t, the Lab could never have come into
existence. But movement had to be done slowly, as close as feasible to the
exact velocity of the immediate stones.
Trumpet
was in danger as much
from Nick’s pace as from the surrounding torrent.

He ran
the ship as if he were trying to prove something to Angus; as if he meant to
show Angus that he was as good as any cyborg. Swearing gleefully, brandishing
his teeth and scars, he drove the gap scout among the mute thunder and rebound
of the rocks as if he were superhuman; elevated once again by instinct and
skill to the stature of the man who never lost.

Proximity
alarms squalled at him like pierced souls. An asteroid as big as a warship
knocked against its neighbour and was instantly, silently, transformed into a
small fleet of gunboats reeling off into the jumble. Energies from the ripped
solar winds, fed by magnetic resonance, fired lightning in long, blinding
sheets against
Trumpet’s
shields. The displays broke apart as scan
scrambled to redefine itself in new patterns. Nevertheless Nick found his way
unerringly toward the swarm’s defended centre.

He ran
helm like a magician. In that sense, at least, he knew what he was doing.
Warden Dios had known what he was doing.

Show
this message to Nick Succorso.

With no
duties except to study his readouts and stay ready, Angus rode out his personal
nightmare and the ship’s like the damned familiar of some demented wizard,
dangled by curses from the wand of his master.

Punisher’s
transmission had been embedded in codes which Nick hadn’t been able
to read any better than Angus could. If that part of the message had been meant
for him, he’d missed it or ignored it. Unless he ordered Angus to show it to
him again, it was lost.

Yet it
was etched in the neurons of Angus’ brain. He could have recited it from memory
at any moment. He stared at it on his readout, not because he’d forgotten it,
or had any hope of understanding it, but because he had nothing else.

“It
gets easier,” Nick explained as if he had a lump in his throat. Despite his
exaltation, he was feeling the strain. “The Lab has been clearing space for
itself for years. Cutting up asteroids for fuel and minerals, rare earths, that
sort of thing. Clearing the approach. Improving the field of fire for those
emplacements Mikka told you about. We should be able to pick up a signal from
one of their transmission remotes soon. After that we’ll be under their guns
most of the way in.”

Angus
had no idea why Nick spoke at all, except to show off his expertise. Before
long, however, the screens began to indicate that he was right. The stone
confusion diminished slightly. One k at a time, scan range improved. The middle
should have been the densest part of the swarm; but it wasn’t.

As the
swarm thinned, Nick slowed his pace.
Trumpet
ducked and dodged toward
her destination less recklessly. He spent more time studying his communications
readouts, searching the bandwidths for a transmission source close enough to
reach him past the moil of rock, through the disruptive barrage of static.

Warden
Dios had called Angus a
machina infernalis.
An infernal device. He’d
said,
We’ve committed a crime against your soul.

Whatever
was left of Angus’ soul writhed in protest.

Abruptly
Nick stabbed a key. “There!” He snatched up a PCR from its socket in his board
and jacked it into his left ear.

His
hands continued to run helm commands while he focused one of
Trumpet’s
dishes on the transmission source he’d just identified.

“Got
it.”

One
screen showed the source: a remote on an inert ball of rock with a relatively
stable trajectory. Presumably the remote was shielded against collisions and
lightning, and programmed to reorient its antennae as needed. But no signal
from that rock could reach deep enough into the swarm to find the Lab. It was
part of a whole network of remotes, all bouncing signals back and forth to each
other until they gained a clear window on the Lab.

As Nick
listened, a different tension came over him. The sharp concentration with which
he navigated became false insouciance. In a tone of feigned relaxation he
announced, “Lab Centre, this is Captain Nick Succorso, UMCP gap scout
Trumpet
.
Ship id follows.” He hit a series of keys. “Don’t panic — we aren’t spies. We
stole this ship from a covert UMCP operation against Thanatos Minor in
forbidden space. Otherwise we would all be dead.

“Voiceprint
comparison will confirm my id. I’ve been here before. But none of the rest of
us have.” More keys. “Crew manifest follows.”

A
glance at his own readouts told Angus that Nick’s “manifest” made no mention of
Morn or Davies. Or of Angus himself.

He
could have listened in to Centre’s side of the conversation by using the second’s
personal communications receiver. Nick hadn’t told him to do that, however.

With
one part of his broken mind, he hunted for matter cannon emplacements so that
he could fix targ. With another he studied indecipherable strings of machine
code as if they held the secret of his life.

“I know
that, asshole,” Nick told his board pickup casually, dangerously. “I’m not
fucking stupid. Give me a chance, and I’ll tell you why it’s worth the risk.”

But his
tone was misleading. Now he became cautious, despite his earlier hurry. With a
few soft gusts of braking thrust, he slowed
Trumpet
to hold her within
range of the remote; out of reach of the Lab’s defences. Then he waited.

The
transmission distance was negligible to microwave remotes. The Lab delayed
responding so that its authorities could talk to each other. Or so that guns
could be made ready.

When
Centre spoke again, Nick stiffened.

“No, I
will not give you a datacore dump,” he drawled as if he were immune to threats
or apprehension. “I’m not here to sell my soul. I just want to use your
facilities for a while. Maybe just a couple of hours. Maybe a couple of days.”

Without
shifting his concentration, he adjusted
Trumpet’s
orientation to avoid a
slow scattershot volley of errant scree from a broken asteroid.

Jamming
hard things —

This
time Centre answered more promptly.

Nick’s
gaze sharpened at what he heard. After a moment he retorted, “Is your whole
operation completely out of touch with reality? Doesn’t the name ‘Vector
Shaheed’ mean anything to you? It’s right there on my crew manifest. Vector
Shaheed. He’s fucking famous, for God’s sake.” Nick’s mouth sneered, but he
kept his scorn for Vector out of his voice. “He’s a geneticist — he wants to
use your genetics lab.”

Down
his throat —

Angus
had stopped listening.

Perhaps
Nick had ignored the machine language of
Punisher’s
message because he
simply couldn’t read it. In that case, it probably hadn’t been meant for him.
Even Hashi Lebwohl wouldn’t have sent out instructions or promises in a code
his operative couldn’t decipher. So who was the message for?

What
was it for?

Presumably
it was written in machine language because it was intended for a machine.

And
laughing.

What
machine?
Trumpet
?

Angus’
brain had gone blank when he’d read the words. He hadn’t noticed — couldn’t
have noticed — whether the ship’s computers had reacted to the transmission.