The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (6 page)

As he
spoke, a slight flush came and went on her cheekbones. “I’m sorry,” she
murmured. “I take your point. I think I do know something that you might find
useful.”

More
briskly, she continued, “You can guess most of what I’ve been dealing with.
Maxim Igensard has been burning the channels with demands. So have Sigurd
Carsin and Vest Martingale. Every five minutes I get another abject appeal from
Abrim Len.

“I can’t
answer any of them right now. I want to tell them the truth, and I don’t know
what that is, any more than I did yesterday. But Data Storage is working on it.
In a few hours, I should have every file that isn’t locked away under the
director’s personal clearance on my desk.”

Her
gaze said clearly, Even yours, Director Lebwohl.

This
didn’t trouble Hashi, however. He’d always been chary of trusting his work to
Data Storage. Most of it was still held by Processing — and so walled around
with clearance protocols and access routines that it was well-nigh unreachable.

“On top
of that,” Koina said, “Chief Mandich wants me to deal with Suka Bator for him.
Ever since they let that second kaze through, he and GCES Security can’t seem
to talk to each other without yelling.

“But
there is” — she slowed thoughtfully — “one other matter. I’ve received a flare
from Captain Vertigus. Personal and urgent. He wanted to warn me” — she
swallowed a moment of discomfort — “that I might be next.”

Almost
involuntarily, Hashi raised his eyebrows. “‘Next’?”

Koina
didn’t hesitate. “Next to be attacked.”

“Ah.”
The DA director felt suddenly that he had stepped off the surface of reality
into the near-infinite realm of subatomic possibilities. “And how does he
account for his apprehension?”

“He
says,” she answered with admirable firmness, “that the next time the GCES meets
— which should be in about thirty-six hours, unless President Len panics again
— he’s going to introduce a Bill of Severance to take the UMCP away from the
UMC. He wants to make us a branch of the Council. He thinks he was attacked to
try to stop him. And he thinks Godsen was killed because whoever sent those
kazes assumed PR must be working with him. Which makes me a logical target. If
he’s right.

“He
probably shouldn’t have told me,” Koina admitted. “I don’t know what our
position is going to be, but I’m afraid the director will have to fight him.
Holt Fasner won’t let us act like we want to be out from under his thumb. So
Captain Vertigus,” she remarked dryly, “has handed me an interesting problem in
ethics. Do I tell the director? How much do I tell him?

“But
the captain knows all that,” she concluded. “He simply can’t stand to let me be
a target without warning me.”

Hashi
blinked at her as if he were stunned.

A Bill
of Severance. Attacked to try to stop him.

Kazes
are such fun, don’t you think?

The
thought gave him the sensation that he was caught in a swirl of quarks and
mesons; bits of logic so minuscule that they could scarcely be detected, and
yet so necessary that palpable facts were meaningless without them. The
coriolus filled him with a sense of exhilaration that was indistinguishable
from terror — an emotional mix which he found more stimulating, desirable, and
addictive than pseudoendorphins or raw cat.

A Bill
of Severance, forsooth! Now, where did venerable, no, antique,
ancient
Captain Sixten Vertigus come by the sheer audacity to propose an idea like
that? The man was barely sapient.

No
matter. Treasuring his excitement, Hashi kept it to himself.

“How
extraordinarily conscientious of him,” he replied to Koina’s questioning gaze. “I
understand his dilemma — and yours, my dear Koina. If I were to presume to
advise you, I would suggest that this matter should be put before the director
immediately. Sooner.” Which might serve to distract Warden Dios from Hashi’s
delay on other subjects. And the outcome might prove entirely fascinating. What
would Warden do when he learned of Captain Vertigus’ intentions? “His response
may surprise you.”

Koina
studied the DA director, frowning as if she couldn’t quite believe what she
heard. Then, abruptly, she rose from her seat. Putting him to the test before
he could change his mind, she said, “Thank you, Director Lebwohl. I’ll do that.”

Without
waiting for an answer, she set her hand on the door and signalled the tech
outside to unseal it.

Hashi
was in a hurry now. To complete her departure, he protested, “No, Director
Hannish.
I
thank
you
.”

But his
attention was already elsewhere; on his hands as they worked his board, nimbly
running commands to call up the results of his retrieval request from Data
Storage.

You
deserve her.

Nick
Succorso, he half sang, half whistled through his teeth.

Where
are you? What are you doing? What do you
mean?

He was
as happy as he’d ever been.

Which
was more plausible? That Nick had access to knowledge concerning events on
Earth? Or that he’d gained an understanding of Morn’s usefulness as an
informational kaze aimed at the UMCP? The latter, obviously. Yet Hashi found
the idea difficult to credit. He couldn’t imagine how Nick — or Morn herself —
might have become aware that what she knew was explosive.

Surely
the most plausible interpretation available was that when Nick said “her” he
meant Sorus Chatelaine.

What is
the
connection?

Data
Storage supplied it — although Hashi couldn’t have said precisely what “it”
was. A coincidence; a hint, perhaps; the cornerstone of a fact: nothing more.
Nevertheless he treasured it as if it were essential to his exhilaration.

Hard
information on
Soar
and her captain, Sorus Chatelaine, was scant. Like
most illegals, she was purportedly a freighter — in her case, a gap-capable
orehauler. Ship id showed that she’d been built and registered legally out of
Betelgeuse Primary; armed heavily enough to defend herself, but not enough to
make her an effective pirate. Except for her recent appearance at Thanatos
Minor, no positive evidence indicated that she was illegal. The marks against
her were negative in kind.

According
to Data Storage,
Soar
had done virtually no logged and certified work in
the past five years. Before that, she’d been steadily employed by various
mining concerns and stations: after that, nothing. And she’d been identified in
the vicinity of one or two raids under circumstances which made it unclear
whether or not she’d been involved.

Data on
Sorus Chatelaine was even thinner. After graduating with a master’s license
from the space academy on Aleph Green, she’d served aboard several different
gap ships for a few years; then she’d disappeared when her vessel was
apparently destroyed by an illegal. Missing and presumed dead: no confirmation.
That was the last entry in her id file.

But it
wasn’t the last entry to appear on Hashi’s readout.

Somewhere
in the bowels of Data Storage, an enterprising tech had engaged in some
imaginative cross-referencing, and had appended the results to
Soar’s
file.

As a
starting point, the tech noted that
Soar’s
emission signature and scan
profile as recorded by ships sighting her during the past five years diverged
significantly from the characteristics defined by the shipyard which built her.
Indeed, both signature and profile bore a much closer resemblance to those of
one particular illegal vessel which had been presumed lost nearly ten years
ago. Not a definitive resemblance, but an intriguing one. Enough of a resemblance
to suggest that the illegal vessel, after a five-year hiatus, had regained her
freedom to travel in human space by attacking the original
Soar
and
taking on her identity — in essence, by stealing her datacore.

The
name of that illegal vessel had been
Gutbuster
.

And
Gutbuster’s
file held a mine of potential connections.

For
example, Hashi read,
Gutbuster
was the vessel which had killed the
original
Captain’s Fancy
, leaving only one survivor aboard, her cabin
boy, Nick Succorso.

And she
was the vessel which had once damaged the UMCP cruiser
Intransigent
,
commanded by Captain Davies Hyland. His wife, Bryony Hyland, Morn’s mother, had
died in the fight.

According
to
Intransigent’s
records,
Gutbuster
carried superlight proton
cannon. That was almost unprecedented for an illegal vessel: the expense of
such guns, both in credit and in power consumption, was prohibitive.

On the
other hand, she had no gap capability.

Which
explained her five-year hiatus from action. In order to survive, she’d limped
to a bootleg shipyard — or perhaps into forbidden space — to retrofit a gap
drive.

That,
in turn, accounted for the subtle, but unquestionable discrepancies between
Gutbuster’s
known and
Soar’s
recorded emission signatures and scan profiles.

Hashi
was tempted to postpone other, more urgent matters for a while: just long
enough to issue a commendation for the tech who’d compiled this report. He had
no time for such luxuries, however. Strange and unquantifiable ideas spun
through his head as if they could hardly be contained by the mere bones of his
skull or the walls of his office. If the facts and suggestions he’d gleaned
were as evanescent as quarks — micro-events with little more than a theoretical
reality — they nevertheless partook of subatomic energies potent enough to
produce thermonuclear detonations and core meltdowns.

Caught
in a whirl of exhilaration and terror, he snatched off his glasses and covered
his eyes with his hands, not to prevent vision from entering in, but rather to
keep an electron storm of potentialities from escaping.

Kazes
had attacked the GCES and UMCPHQ, using legitimate id made from UMCP SOD-CMOS
chips.

Kazes
are such fun, don’t you think?

Captain
Vertigus proposed to introduce a Bill of Severance.

He
feared threats against the UMCP Director of Protocol.

Morn
Hyland and Nick Succorso had in common a connection with
Soar
née
Gutbuster
— a vessel which just happened to be present at Thanatos Minor when both they
and Joshua arrived there. A vessel which Morn had good reason to hate, but to
which Nick might be linked by bonds of another kind.

And
Hashi was under no illusions about the nature of the relationship between Nick
and Morn. Whatever she may have felt toward him, he was capable of nothing but
exploitation.

You
deserve her.

But
that wasn’t all. Certainly not.

Darrin
Scroyle’s people had heard rumours of an antimutagen for sale from
Soar’s
captain, Sorus Chatelaine.

Nick
was presumably the only man in that quadrant of space with a mutagen immunity
drug in his possession — the only man from whom Sorus Chatelaine might have
obtained an antimutagen.

He’d
been seen talking to Joshua and Milos Taverner.

And he’d
brought a cargo of some kind from Enablement Station: a cargo which he’d sent
by ejection pod to Billingate to prevent the Amnion from reclaiming it: a cargo
which someone had subsequently stolen.

Later
Nick was rumoured to have sold one of his people to the alien sector on
Thanatos Minor. Then that sector had been raided by an EVA team from
Trumpet
.
Captain’s Fancy
had rammed an Amnion warship and died in order to keep
the raiding team alive.

Nick no
longer had a ship. Yet he must have rescued
something.
Something more
valuable to him than his frigate.

If
you can get her, you bastard, you can have her.

Reality
itself seemed to be in flux as Hashi Lebwohl rode coriolus forces around and
around inside his head. Micro-events remapped the macro-world. If he’d been
under less pressure, he might have paused to notice that he enjoyed this
sensation; that he felt more alive at moments like this than at any other time.

The
pressure to act was real, however; ineluctable despite the uncertainty of its
cartography. Yet action was impossible until some manner of readable map, no
matter how intuitive or speculative, had been obtained.

He
needed to
understand.

Very
well, he told himself. Construct a hypothesis and explore its implications.
Theoretical reality is better than no reality at all.

Clamping
his hands harder over his eyes, he began.

He wasn’t
prepared to guess who’d sent kazes against Sixten Vertigus and Godsen Frik.
That ground was too dangerous: he didn’t mean to walk it until he was sure of
each step. But he was quite ready to hazard other speculations — When he did
so, his thin heart nearly stopped.

Kazes
are such fun, don’t you think?