The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (51 page)

Alesha
seemed able to study his face, watch him think, for hours at a time. “What’s
left?”

“Something
organic,” he replied promptly. “Something living. Maybe even something that
needs an ejection pod’s life support to survive.”

He
could be sure of this because he was sure of himself.

“Like
what?” she asked.

“That
doesn’t matter.” He waved both hands to dismiss the question. “We don’t need to
know. The point is that we can guess where
Trumpet
is headed.”

For a
moment she frowned in confusion. Then her eyes widened, and she gave a sigh of
recognition.

“Deaner
Beckmann. The Lab. Because the cargo is organic.”

Proud
of her — and secretly pleased with himself — Darrin nodded firmly.

“So we’re
going to stop following this nice trail they’ve left us. Instead we’re going to
choose our own point of insertion into Massif-5.” He turned back to his board
and indicated a spot in the schematic, even though she couldn’t see it. “There.
Which is about as risky a gap crossing as we can make and still plan on living
through it.”

His
crew and his ship had done such things before, when circumstances required it.
He trusted them. Nevertheless he spent a moment reconsidering his decision
while he explained it.

“That
will put us — oh, roughly a million k on the other side of Beckmann’s swarm.”
If she could find a flaw in what he meant to do, he wanted her to say so now. “By
the time we set it up — change course and velocity, go into tach, resume tard,
pull back around to the swarm — we can be pretty sure we won’t beat
Trumpet
.
But we’ll be hours ahead of
Punisher
.

“And we’ll
be in position. We can use the swarm for cover while we hunt
Trumpet
. If
we’re lucky,
Punisher
won’t even spot us there.”

Once
again he put his back to the board, waiting for Alesha’s reaction.

“What
about that other ship?” she asked.

He
frowned thoughtfully. “That’s a problem. We can’t know where she is at this
point. But here’s how I see it.

“If she
knows about the Lab — if she can guess
Trumpet
is headed there — she isn’t
Amnion. She’s a human ship working for them, maybe because she likes what they
pay her.”

His
mouth twisted ruefully. More than once he’d asked himself if he would accept a
contract from the Amnion. Was his commitment to the code really as simple as he
liked to believe? He didn’t know. All his life he’d avoided the question by
making sure the situation never arose.

“That
means several things,” he continued. “It means she doesn’t carry as much
firepower as a warship.
Trumpet
might be able to survive an engagement.
And it means she probably won’t attack while
Trumpet
is anywhere near
the Lab. She won’t want to have Beckmann’s guns turned on her. Also she might
not want him to know whose side she’s on.

“If she’s
anywhere close enough to give us trouble, I think we’ll have time to figure out
what we want to do about her.”

Alesha
nodded as he finished, agreeing with him. Apparently she couldn’t find any
flaws. Slowly one of her rare smiles grew across her face.

“Have I
ever told you that I think you’re good at this?”

Grinning,
he drawled, “You’ve mentioned it from time to time. Not that I mind hearing it.”
Then he let the way he felt about her make him grave. “I just hope you’re
right. I’m not in the mood to do anything stupid. I like living too much.”

Without
warning, her eyes turned moist. Blinking, she dropped her gaze. “I know how you
feel.” At last she answered his earlier question. Are we getting paid what the
danger is worth? “I’m growing old. That seems to make everything harder. I don’t
want to lose you.”

Because
he was the master of his vessel, responsible for her and all her people, he was
tempted to say, Don’t worry, you won’t lose me. Whatever happens will happen to
both of us. But he knew Alesha better than to offer her false comfort.

Instead
he used his console intercom to talk to the bridge, give his orders. Then he
went to bed.

He
might not get another chance.

MIN

B
obbing and weaving down the corridor, Min Donner fought to remember
her zero-g reflexes and cursed Dolph Ubikwe for summoning her from her cabin.
It was craziness to be out here, working her way along the passages, when the
klaxons might sound at any moment, warning her that she was about to be slammed
to pulp on the ship’s steel.

She’d
been station-bound too long. And when she travelled, she was usually aboard
ships with internal spin. She’d grown accustomed to comfortable g; to weight as
well as mass; to environments where her nerves and even her veins knew which
way was up.
Punisher’s
version of freefall — punctuated by abrupt jolts,
hull roar, and pressure whenever the cruiser shifted course — was making her
sick.

Either
that, or she’d become old without realising it.

Punisher
hadn’t been designed to run this way. She fought without g, of
course: centrifugal inertia restricted her manoeuvrability. But for other
duties she’d been built to use spin. There were too many people aboard, engaged
in too many different activities. They could all move and work, sleep and
recreate more effectively when they were anchored by their own weight.

But
Captain Ubikwe had ordered the ship to secure for zero g so that she could
catch up with
Trumpet
. Core displacement was distorting navigation
across the gap. Each time
Punisher
resumed tard, she lost too much time
reacquiring the gap scout’s homing signal. And the displacement was getting
worse. With every passing hour, it became more and more likely that
Free
Lunch
or — was it
Soar
! — would reach
Trumpet
first. If they
knew or could guess where she was headed.

Punisher’s
crew had been sailing under what were, in effect, battle conditions
for the better part of twenty-four hours before the cruiser achieved insertion
into the Massif-5 system.

And now
she had no choice except to go on without g. For ships moving at
Punisher’s
speed, and
Trumpet’s
, Valdor Industrial’s system was a lethal maze of
obstacles and hazards. The added burden of centrifugal inertia was too
dangerous.

Without
Trumpet’s
homing signal to guide her, the encroaching ship from
forbidden space may well have lost the trail a long way back. But
Free Lunch
might conceivably be ahead of
Punisher
. Min couldn’t begin to guess
where the lies she’d been told ended. As far as she knew, it was perfectly possible
that Hashi Lebwohl still controlled where Angus was headed, and had already
passed that information to
Free Lunch
.

For
that reason
Punisher’s
communications people were doing their best to
break the code in which Warden Dios’ message for Nick Succorso had been
embedded.

Maybe
those code-strings don’t mean anything, Dolph had said. But if they do, I want
to know it.

The
cruiser urgently needed to understand what was going on.

In the
meantime
Punisher
forged ahead. Despite her far greater mass, the difficulties
of reacquiring
Trumpet’s
signal, and the effects of a truly unfortunate
insertion into the system, Captain Ubikwe’s command strove to keep up with the
swift, agile gap scout.

It was
craziness
for Min to be out of her cabin under these conditions. She should have
stayed webbed into her bunk. But this wasn’t the first crazy thing she’d done,
when it needed doing. If she lived long enough, it wouldn’t be the last. Dolph
had chimed her intercom and summoned her. Without hesitation she’d unsealed
herself to respond.

He
wanted her to meet him in sickbay.

He hadn’t
offered her an escort, and she hadn’t asked for one. She knew the way. And the
fewer people who were exposed to this kind of danger, the better. It was bad
enough that he took the same risk he asked of her.

Something
had happened.

Again.

She
didn’t waste energy wondering what it was. Instead she concentrated on trying
to regain her reflexes; on piloting herself down the corridor with as little
wasted motion as possible.

The
instant she heard the klaxons, she dove for the nearest handgrips; cleated her
zero-g belt. The bridge crew would give the ship as much warning as they could,
but sometimes that wasn’t much. One grip in each fist, her back against the
bulkhead, she waited for thrust to hammer her in some direction she couldn’t
predict and might not be able to survive.

Straight
deceleration: she recognised it as soon as it hit. It wrenched her forward so
hard that her aft hand pulled loose. If she hadn’t attached her belt first, the
sudden weight would have flipped her face-first into the wall. But the belt
caught her; snatched at her like the recoiling crack of a whip. Fortunately she
remembered to go limp when her grip failed. Otherwise she might have ripped the
muscles in her back.

Five
seconds of hard burn. White lighting yawed across her field of vision, then
cracked into bits of darkness. Her pulse moaned in her ears: her body twitched
and jerked under the strain. Then it ended. She spent a moment bouncing back
and forth across her belt’s attachment while her mass dissipated its stored
inertia.

At this
rate she might need sickbay herself. She could already tell that some of these
bruises were going to
hurt.

Resting,
she waited for the bridge to tell the rest of the ship what would happen next.

Another
bleat of the klaxons: less intense than the first; shorter. Almost immediately
forward thrust eased to life, firing the dark to regain lost velocity. Because
this push was more gentle, it took longer; but after a couple of minutes the
ship-wide intercom piped an all clear.

“Secure
from collision stations,” a woman’s voice told the ship. “We have twenty-eight
minutes until we start jockeying for position on the next obstacle. Use the
time.”

The
intercom clicked silent like the sound of the carabiner on Min’s zero-g belt as
she undipped it from the bulkhead cleat. At once she kicked herself into motion
again.

Damn
it, Dolph, she muttered silently. What’s the damn hurry? Why couldn’t you wait?

She
knew, however, that Dolph had called her from his quarters rather than the
bridge. Probably he’d been resting. When he’d asked her to meet him, he might
not have been aware that
Punisher
was near a patch of open space.

Grimly
she wondered what the hell was urgent enough to make him risk himself as well
as her like this.

 _

 _

She saw a hint of the
answer when she floated out of one of the main personnel lifts into the passage
which led to sickbay, twenty meters off to her right.

The
corridor was festooned with g-hammocks: at least twenty-five of them arced at intervals
up and down the walls on both sides of the entrance to sickbay. And they were
all occupied. Sickbay itself had space for ten, counting surgical tables as
well as berths. This was the overflow.

Some
kind of accident? Explosive decompression? Matter cannon attack? That wasn’t
possible. Min would have felt it. Any damage powerful enough to hurt this many
people would have sent shock waves of concussion and clamour throughout the
ship.

Concentrating
too hard to curse, she coasted past the hammocks; slapped the palm-plate which
opened the sickbay doors. They slid shut automatically behind her as she
entered.

Dolph
was waiting for her inside, along with another man identified by his uniform
and insignia as
Punisher’s
medtech. They sat with their belts cleated to
mobile stools which were slotted into tracks in the deck and run by servos so
that sickbay’s personnel could work under zero g or combat. The two tables were
empty, but all eight of the bunks were in use.

The
medtech saluted Min. “Director Donner.” His id patch said “Foster.” He sounded
wan; stretched too thin.

“Hope
you weren’t hurt,” Dolph grunted in greeting. “I didn’t think this could wait
until we hit clear space.”

Min
returned Foster’s salute from the anchor of a handgrip, but her attention was
fixed on Dolph. “What’s happened?”

He met
her gaze for a moment, pursed his black lips. “A couple of things.” Then his
eyes slid down to the deck as if he was too tired to go on looking at her. “But
let’s take them one at a time.” He gestured toward the medtech. “Foster.”

“They
aren’t hurt, Director,” Foster said on command. “I mean the ones outside. I
couldn’t monitor that many of them if they were, but they aren’t. They’re sick.
I’ve” — he faltered briefly — “never seen anything like it.”