The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (88 page)

The
Bill was rejected by a significant margin. The Members were too shaken to
approve it. They heeded Cleatus Fane’s assertion that severance would disrupt
the efforts of the UMCP to protect them. Any kind of centralised authority
seemed preferable to terrorist attack.

In
their fear, the Members felt too vulnerable to accept responsibility for their
own survival.

The
fact that Cleatus Fane himself had been the kaze’s apparent target gave his
arguments added weight. The threat came, not from humankind’s enemies, but from
the UMC’s. Therefore the UMC should deal with it.

When
the extraordinary session was adjourned, Captain Vertigus limped out of the
hall. However, his carriage was erect, uncowed. He might have been on his way
to make humankind’s first contact with the Amnion.

Koina
Hannish couldn’t contain her indignation. To that extent, her professional mask
failed her. “How did he get
in?
” she demanded repeatedly of Forrest Ing.
“Is this the best ED Security can do? Why did I work so hard to put Chief
Mandich in charge of Security here, if he isn’t capable of stopping a kaze? A
kaze
I
warned him about?”

The
deputy chief, poor man, had no answer.

But her
ire had another, truer question behind it. Implicit in her outrage was the
assumption that if a kaze hadn’t gained entrance to the chamber, the Bill of
Severance might have passed.

Hashi
deemed that plausible. He’d heard Captain Vertigus’ arguments, and they were
better than Cleatus Fane’s. Even Members bought and paid for by the UMC might
have been swayed.

Nevertheless
the DA director considered the session a success.

Warden
Dios had assured Koina she was in no danger. Apparently he’d meant that the
danger wasn’t aimed at her personally. The earlier attacks on Captain Vertigus
and Godsen Frik didn’t imply that she was next. They had another significance
entirely.

In the
aftermath of Nathan Alt’s death and Sixten Vertigus’ defeat, Hashi Lebwohl
could see that significance clearly. Events in flux had resolved themselves: he
was sure of their position.

On the
other hand, he had no idea what might happen next.

MIN

S
he was already on her way to the bridge when
Punisher’s
fire
alarms began yowling like banshees.

The
cruiser was nearing the huge asteroid swarm where Deaner Beckmann had hived his
bootleg lab, and Min wanted to be at the centre of information and command.
Nevertheless the unexpected squall of the klaxons seemed to change everything.
Her instincts hadn’t warned her: she hadn’t felt the ship’s ambient vibrations
mounting toward an emergency.

Surprised
by disaster, she launched herself forward in the zero g equivalent of a run.

Dolph
Ubikwe hadn’t arrived yet when she coasted onto the bridge, stopped herself on
a handgrip. Command Fourth Hargin Stoval sat at the command station, barking
orders at the intercom. Data and engineering shouted back and forth: the other
bridge stations clung fiercely to their tasks while her people fought to assess
and answer the damage.

“Status!”
Min demanded as soon as Stoval paused for breath.

He hadn’t
seen her enter the bridge. When he heard her voice, however, he flung his
g-seat around to face her and snapped a salute. “Director Donner. We’re on
fire.” He named a section of the ship’s infrastructure near the core. “So far
we don’t have a clue what started it, but it’s pretty bad. Hot enough to feed
off every bit of plastic, debris, and oil it can find. We already have two
dead, others hurt.”

He
hesitated momentarily, then said, “I should get down there. If you’ll take the
bridge, Director —”

Min
jerked a nod. “Go.” From what Dolph had said about him, she guessed that Stoval
was the best man aboard to take charge of the damage-control parties. Captain
Ubikwe wouldn’t feel slighted if she watched over his command for him briefly.

As
Stoval unbelted himself and headed off the bridge, she left her handgrip for a
new hold on an arm of the command station. From that position she could see the
console and readouts without assuming Dolph’s authority.

After a
quick glance at the indicators and screens, she turned to the other officers. “Anything
else I should know right this minute?”

The
bridge crew came from a mix of watches: individual duty rotations had shifted
to compensate for lost personnel. Glessen on targ and Cray on communications
shook their heads. “We’ve reached the trailing edges of the swarm, sir,”
Patrice reported from helm. “In another hour we’ll approach the main body.”

Porson,
the scan officer, punched vehemently at his board until Min gave him her
attention. Then he muttered, “Looks like we’ve lost that entire sensor bank for
good, Director. The one we’ve been working on ever since you came aboard. Fire
must have got the wiring.”

“Compensate,”
Min instructed him. “Tell helm what you need to cover us. We can’t afford blind
spots.

“Data,”
she went on, “this is your department. What happened?”

The
data officer was a young woman named Bydell. When Min spoke to her, she
flinched. “Engineering —” she began. “The computer —” She was too young for her
duties; too vulnerable to the prolonged strain
Punisher
had endured. “I
don’t know —”

She
conveyed the impression that she was coming apart.

“Reconstruct
it,” Min answered firmly. Bydell’s distress was Dolph’s problem. Min didn’t
know his people well enough to take their individual personalities into
account. But she had no intention of letting them slip into paralysis while
their ship burned. “That’s what computer simulations are for. Let’s not make
Captain Ubikwe wait for answers when he gets here.”

“Aye,
sir.” The data officer did her best to confront her board like a woman who knew
what she was doing.

Min
turned back to the command board, tapped a few keys to call up new information,
then paused to think.

Any
fire was bad enough aboard a ship; but this one was more than that. If it
spread, it might do severe damage to
Punisher’s
control systems. Worse,
it could conceivably breach the core — If Stoval didn’t put it out quickly, it
could cripple the ship.

Already
one of the sensor banks was gone. She confirmed that on the command console,
even though she didn’t doubt Porson for an instant. One whole scan array had
failed, leaving
Punisher
blind forward across an arc of nearly 30º.

A bit
of weight nudged her toward her boots as helm began adjusting the ship’s
attitude in relation to her course.

Min
clenched her fists against the familiar fire in her palms and waited for
Captain Ubikwe.

 _

 _

He arrived no more than
five minutes after she did. Surging onto the bridge as if he were shouldering
off fears and weakness, he coasted straight to the command station, pulled
himself into his g-seat, and clasped his belts. “Thanks, Director,” he said to
Min. His voice projected the power and certainty of a pneumatic hammer. “Sorry
I kept you waiting. I took the time to talk to Hargin. We’ve got the moral
equivalent of an inferno in there. What’s the situation here?”

Min
glanced at Bydell and decided to take a chance. “Data was just about to tell
us,” she drawled calmly.

“Right,
sir,” the woman said as if she were gulping for air.

“I didn’t
see what happened,” she began at once. “We didn’t get any warning — at least
not any warning we understood. But I’ve been running simulations, trying to
construct a scenario that fits. This is what I’ve been able to come up with.”

We’ve
got micro-leaks in some of the hydraulic systems
,
the bosun had told Min when she’d first come aboard.
We haven’t had time to
trace them.
But she’d already known that: she’d read
Punisher’s
reports. And there hadn’t been anything she could do about it.

Now she
was learning what her decision to take this ship despite the cruiser’s
condition cost.

The
sequence of events, as Bydell reconstructed it, was this. Acid from one
hydraulic line and oil from another had drifted together. That should have been
impossible, of course: such lines lay in sealed conduits. But if lines could
crack, so could conduits. While
Punisher
ran in zero g, without internal
spin or navigational thrust, the leaks had accumulated until they formed
considerable quantities of fluid. Then the cruiser began veering and hauling
her way through Massif-5, ducking obstacles by the hundreds to follow
Trumpet
.
Pools of acid and oil were sloshed and pulled in every direction until they
found cracks. And those cracks led to other conduits, more cracks.

In the
meantime
Punisher’s
people were still at work on the wiring to one of
the main sensor banks. External repairs had been jury-rigged earlier: now the
internal lines were being restrung. To do the job, repair techs needed repeated
access to a portion of the ship’s infrastructure. Unfortunately the bulkhead
door they used was sticking. At times its servos cycled for three or four
seconds before they built up enough pressure to shift the door.

While
they laboured they generated heat as well as pressure, more and more heat as
the action of the door deteriorated.

Somehow
considerable quantities of oil and acid had come together in the lines around
the straining servos. When the fluids caught fire, they exploded with such
force that they crumpled the bulkhead, killed two techs, flash-burned two more,
and started a blaze which
Punisher’s
people, hampered by zero g and
navigational thrust, didn’t know how to control.

In the
process, of course, the sensor bank was lost.

Captain
Ubikwe felt the strain: it showed in one of his familiar outbreaks of
irascibility. “Damn it,” he muttered as if he didn’t think anyone was
listening, “this is too much. I’m starting to believe in curses. How long has
it been since any of us were on a ship that actually caught fire?”

No one
responded. Min flexed her fingers and counted the beats of her pulse to keep
herself from issuing orders.

“
Damn
it,” he repeated. “We’ve got decisions to make.”

Abruptly
he changed his tone. “Confirmation on that sensor bank, Porson? It’s really
dead?”

“Worse
than useless, Captain,” scan replied. “I can’t even get static out of it. The
computer has already routed around it like it isn’t there.”

Dolph
nodded. “How are we compensating?”

“I’m
stretching the arc on the other banks, Captain,” Porson continued, “but I can
only pick up a few degrees. The rest is up to helm.”

“Sergei?”
Dolph asked the helm officer.

“Usual
procedure, Captain,” Sergei Patrice answered, “if anything about this situation
is ‘usual.’ I’m rotating the entire ship around her core. You can feel the tug
— we’ve picked up a couple of pounds of g. So what we have in essence is a
one-second blind spot sweeping our scan field. We can make it shorter or
longer, whatever you want.

“But,
Captain —” Helm hesitated.

“Spit
it out,” Captain Ubikwe rumbled. “I’m already in a bad mood. You aren’t likely
to make it worse.”

“Sorry,
Captain.” Patrice grinned humourlessly. “I just thought I ought to say — we can’t
go into combat like this. We can’t afford the inertia. At some point we’ll have
to choose between defending ourselves and being able to see.”

Dolph
smiled back at him. “I was wrong. You can so make it worse.”

At once
he thumbed his intercom.

“Hargin,”
he called. “Can you hear me? Hargin Stoval. I want a report.”

The
intercom speaker brought distant shouts over a roaring background to the
bridge. Then the connection popped as the pickup on the other end was
activated.

Stoval’s
voice shed frustration and alarm like sparks. “We aren’t getting anywhere,
Captain. The automatic systems can’t handle it. And it’s so damn hot, we can’t
get close enough to use portable extinguishers.

“This g
hurts us,” he added. “Seems to concentrate the fire. It’s hotter all the time.”

Captain
Ubikwe grimaced. “I hear you, Hargin. Stand by. We need to change something. I’ll
let you know as soon as I decide what.”

He
clicked off his pickup and turned to Min.

“Director
Donner.” His tone was steady, incisive, but the dull, combative smoulder in his
eyes made him look desperate. “This is your mission. I have to ask you. Is
there any reason why we shouldn’t cut all thrust and let ourselves coast while
we fight this fire?”

Min
allowed herself a sardonic snort. “If I tried, I could probably think of six.
But none of them will matter if we let a fire cripple us. Do what you have to
do, Captain. We’ll deal with the consequences later.”