“I’ve got a better question,” Nick put in.
Morn glared at Nick as if he’d insulted her. Davies nearly told Nick to shut up, but he swallowed the impulse. In a situation like this, hungry to reestablish some sense of his own importance, Nick was likely to say something crucial.
Nick grinned with a hint of his old savagery. “Why did they let me go? Milos told them I did work for Hashi fucking Lebwohl. They had reason to be suspicious.”
Angus turned his scowl on Nick. “Somehow I just know you’re going to tell us the answer. Otherwise we might forget how smart and cunning you are.”
“Because,” Nick explained to Morn as if he hadn’t heard Angus; as if Angus and Davies were irrelevant, like Mikka and Sib, Ciro and Vector, “they didn’t know yow were ‘Morn Hyland’ until you took over my ship. None of us actually said your whole name before that. And even then they probably needed time to run it through their computers.”
“Is any of this true?” Angus asked Morn sharply.
“I think so.” Her eyes were dull with doubt and the effort to remember. “I wasn’t in good shape at the time.”
Unselfconsciously Davies nodded in agreement. He could recollect hearing Nick call her simply a “human female” when he spoke to the Amnion.
“Besides,” Nick went on, “they made a deal with me—and they live by deals. They needed a reason to break it, and they didn’t know I was cheating until after they tested my blood. By that time they already knew they wanted Davies. And then they realized who you were.
“Using us to test those gap drive components must have seemed like a stroke of genius. They couldn’t lose. If the acceleration experiment succeeded, we would still be in forbidden space when we resumed tard. They could get the confirmation they wanted, and still catch you and Davies. And me. And if the experiment failed, we were all dead. They got rid of several threats at once, and they learned those components weren’t ready to use on their own ships.”
“And it would have worked,” Davies cut in, “if Angus hadn’t come along. You’re pretty good at figuring these things out after the fact, but you weren’t able to handle them at the time.”
Nick twitched one shoulder in a small shrug, but didn’t respond.
For a moment the bridge was silent. Mikka chewed the private bitterness of her thoughts; Vector watched Morn and Angus as if he were waiting for something; Ciro concentrated hard, like a kid fighting not to drown in waters over his head. Absentmindedly Sib scratched his thin mustache with the muzzle of his handgun; then he remembered to level the gun at Nick again.
Slowly Angus turned away from Nick. He stood facing Morn like a recognition that she was in command.
She made a palpable effort to recover the assurance—the desperate clarity—which had sustained her earlier. With undisguised hunger she looked at her zone implant control; then, as if she were punishing herself, she pushed it back into her pocket. Grimly she dragged her hair away from the sides of her face, tucked it behind her ears.
At last she met Angus’ gaze.
Confronting him with her wounded eyes, she said, “That brings us back to what we were talking about before. It all went wrong for the Amnion when you intervened. So now they have even more reason to want to stop us.” She paused, holding his stare, summoning her courage. Then she asked bluntly, “What are we doing here, Angus?”
Angus’ expression was unreadable. Davies could see the small muscles around his eyes tug and release as if they were signaling, but their message was coded; indecipherable.
After a moment Angus answered, “Hiding.”
“Shit,” Nick sneered. “I’ve already told you what I think of that explanation.”
Mikka glanced at Nick dourly, then said to Angus, “He’s right. That’s bullshit. Why do we need to hide? Why didn’t we head straight for human space as soon as we got clear of Thanatos Minor’s debris? Who’re we supposed to be hiding from?”
“We’re three light-years deep in Amnion territory,-” Morn added. Her tone grew steadier as she spoke. “We’re safe for now, but we’ve given them time. Time to react. Time to hunt for us. Time to organize a blockade—or a chase.
“Why did you do that, Angus?”
When he didn’t respond, she tightened her jaw. Carefully she articulated her real question. “Who are you working for?”
The muscles around his eyes tightened and released like little spasms of pain; the corners of his mouth knotted. Suddenly Davies thought he knew the truth. He’d seen Angus look like that once before—or rather Morn had.
After Nick had crippled Bright Beauty, Morn had regained consciousness in time to see Angus sitting like a battered toad in his g-seat. She’d checked her readouts, learned what had happened. Then she’d said to him, “You’re beaten. He beat you.”
He’d turned a face gray with despair toward her. As if he were trying to be angry, he’d retorted, “Proud of him, aren’t you. Beat me.”
“Angus.” She’d never used his name before. “I can save you. I’ll testify for you. When you go back to Com-Mine, I’ll support you. I’ve still got my id tag.
“Just give me the control. The zone implant control.”
Her desperation had been that profound. Angus had broken her in ways he hadn’t anticipated.
To her dismay, she saw tears in his eyes.
“I’ll lose my ship.”
“You can’t save it,” she shot back. “I can handle Station Security. And the UMCP. But nothing can save your ship.”
Softly, he said, “And give up my ship. That’s the deal, isn’t it. You’ll save me. If I let you have the control. But I have to give up my ship.”
She nodded. After a moment, she replied, “What else have you got to bargain with?”
There, right then, he’d looked the way he did now—trapped and helpless, more bitter than he could bear. In some fashion that Davies couldn’t understand, Angus was trapped again; caught by needs and exigencies he could neither avoid nor satisfy.
When he replied, his tone was casual and false.
“Hashi Lebwohl.”
Ciro opened his mouth in surprise; Mikka gaped like her brother. Disappointment clouded Vector’s blue eyes, and his habitual calm smile drooped.
Like a crackle of static, Nick laughed. “I knew it. It had to be the cops.” He shook his head scornfully. “You miserable bastard, if they can make you do their dirty work, we’re all doomed.”
Morn held Angus’ gaze and remained still as if she didn’t dare betray any reaction. Nevertheless Davies believed he knew what she was thinking. He could hear Vector telling her, The UMCP is the most corrupt organization there is. It makes piracy look like philanthropy. He could feel her anguish. We had the raw materials for a defense, we had all the rungs. And they took it, they suppressed it. Forbidden space is their excuse for power.
For some reason Davies didn’t feel that same distress. His confusion toward his father produced a different response.
“This is one of his operations,” Angus explained as if he were lying—or using pieces of the truth to hide a lie. “He set it all up. He broke me and Milos out of UMCPHQ, got us this ship, sent us to Billingate. I had two jobs. Blow up Billingate’s fusion generator.” He hesitated like a man swallowing panic, then finished, “And rescue you.
“But it’s all covert,” he continued harshly. “We can’t just sail back into human space like we’re expecting a goddamn hero’s welcome. That would ruin our cover.”
“‘Cover’?” Mikka snapped. “What do we need cover for?”
Angus ignored her. “We’re supposed to go on looking like illegals. Like rogues. Lebwohl doesn’t want to be accountable. So there’s no fleet waiting for us. If the Amnion decide we’re worth breaking the frontier treaty for, we’re on our own. Until I get new orders.” A complex and ambiguous rage vibrated in his voice. “We can make our own decisions for a while.”
Morn frowned. Davies felt the strain in her; the arduous struggle to concentrate despite her exhaustion and di
smay. “Don’t you have to report?” she asked with difficulty. “Surely DA wants to know what you’ve done—what you’re doing?”
A small, strange convulsion like a crisis seemed to come over Angus. All his muscles knotted; his eyes bulged. He might have been on the verge of an infarction. Yet his tension passed almost instantly, as if he’d taken a massive dose of cat. When he answered, he sounded unexpectedly simple. His conflict had disappeared—or been vanquished.
“Of course he wants a fucking report. This is Hashi Lebwohl we’re talking about. But I can’t exactly send him one from here, can I?” The question was rhetorical. “It would take three years to get there—if I could send it, which I can’t.” He slapped a gesture at the schematic on the display screen. “We’re already occluded by that star.”
Abruptly Vector left the engineering panel. Frowning to contain his eagerness, he moved to the command station; gripped the edges of the console as if he needed to brace his hands so that they wouldn’t shake. Close to Morn, he faced Angus.
“Where will you go?”
Angus chewed his answer for a moment before replying, “I haven’t decided.”
“Back to human space?” Vector offered.
Angus shrugged bitterly. “We’re safer here. With any luck at all, we could skip around Amnion territory for years without getting caught. They can’t chase us if they can’t find our trace. They can’t pick our emissions out of all this noise, even if they have some way to know we were here.
“But then,” he rasped, “I wouldn’t be able to report, would I?”
“Then let me make a suggestion,” Vector said quickly. “Let me tell you what I want.”
Morn looked at him in surprise. She was too tired to jump to the kinds of conclusions which leaped through Davies.
Angus considered the engineer. “Why not?” he sneered. “Hell, let’s all make suggestions. We’ve got eight hours before we have to decide anything.”
Vector’s blue gaze was impervious to scorn. “Angus,” he said intently, “Morn knows things about me you don’t. We had time to talk aboard Captain’s Fancy.” Nick rolled his eyes in contempt, but didn’t bother to speak. “I think that’s the first time she’d ever heard there might be such a thing as a mutagen immunity drug.”
Unselfconsciously Morn and Davies nodded in unison.
“I know about that drug because I helped develop it. Before I”—Vector grimaced in self-mockery—“went into this line of work, I was a geneticist for Intertech. I was on the project to develop an antimutagen until the UMCP shut it down. Not the United Mining Companies, Angus—the United Mining Companies Police. We were so close to an answer I could taste it, and they took it away from us.
“Obviously DA must have finished our research. Otherwise Nick wouldn’t be able to go visiting in places like Enablement Station. And”—he glanced at Morn—“you wouldn’t still be human. The Amnion must have given you mutagens when they had the chance. They would have changed you, if you hadn’t taken the drug.”
Morn nodded again, watching him closely.
“Angus,” Vector went on, “we’ve got the drug. And I know how to work on it. Hell, I’ve already done most of the work.” Still supporting himself on the command console, but holding his head up so that he could face Angus straight, he announced, “I want a lab.”
Passion made his voice carry and ring as if he were shouting, even though he spoke quietly. “I want a place where I can analyze that drug—discover the formula, learn how to make it.”
The blaze of hope in Morn’s eyes was so radiant that Davies suddenly felt like crowing. Ciro and Sib stared at Vector in astonishment. However, Mikka aimed her black scowl at Angus as if she could already hear his refusal.
“And then?” Angus demanded as if Vector couldn’t sway him; as if no human passion were precious or compelling enough to touch him.
“And then I want to tell people,” the engineer answered urgently. “I want to broadcast it like a proclamation. I want to put it on the public news channels.
“I don’t trust the cops, Angus. They’ve already suppressed this too long. And humankind needs it. Hell, we need it ourselves. We could go to some station that isn’t owned by the UMC, Terminus maybe, and let them process and distribute it. Or we could just transmit the formula ourselves everywhere we go, make it so public that it can’t be suppressed.
“I don’t care how we do it. I just want to do it. This is my chance”—distaste twisted his mouth—“my chance to redeem everything I’ve done since I left Intertech.”
Sib had forgotten Nick completely. Carried along by Vector’s emotion and his own fears, he put in, “And it’s a chance to fight the Amnion. I mean, really fight them, do something effective—not just talk about it, like the cops. Not just shoot a few illegals so the UMC can have more trade and get richer.”
“Yes,” Davies breathed. He still found the concept of UMCP corruption difficult to accommodate, but nothing prevented him from recognizing the power of Vector’s idea, and affirming it.
“Wait a minute,” Mikka protested. “You’re getting ahead of yourselves.” With an intuitive leap, Davies saw that her anger was the distrust of a woman who had learned at considerable cost the danger of hoping for the wrong things at the wrong time. “You can dream all you want, but it’s worthless if you don’t figure out how to make it work. Where do you propose to find a lab? And how do you plan to get access to it once you find it?”
“Oh, that part’s easy.” Nick’s smug grin suggested that he was taunting Angus, daring him to take Vector seriously. “Any illegal lab in human space will let you in, if you tell them what you’re doing—and offer to share the results. As long as you convince them you’re illegal, too.
“Finding a lab, on the other hand—that could be tricky.”
Angus glared at Morn while her eyes shone as if he’d already given his approval. Without shifting his gaze, he responded to Mikka, “You seem to be the only one here with any sense. Why don’t you tell these bleeding hearts why this idea stinks? Explain to them that we can’t go find a lab because we don’t know where to look.”
Mikka opened her mouth to speak; but her brother was faster. Impulsively he blurted out, “Valdor.”
She closed her lips and stared at him as if he’d had the temerity to slap her.
“That’s where—” he began. “Valdor Industrial. We lived there. It’s—” But he couldn’t go on; whatever he was about to say seemed to stick in his throat, caught by Mikka’s shock and Sib’s amazement and Vector’s broad grin.
Flushing with embarrassment, Ciro ducked his head. “He’s right,” Morn whispered.
Davies knew that as well as she did. Lectures, reports, even rumors that she’d heard in the Academy tumbled through his mind. The system where Valdor Industrial revolved around the binary star Massif-5 was a staggering conglomeration of moons and planetoids, asteroids and planets; a morass of orbital masses so complex that navigational errors were nearly as lethal as piracy. Valdor was located there because of the rich availability of the resources it needed for its enterprises, primarily smelting and heavy industry. An enormous traffic carried the station’s output to Earth. And for exactly that reason the whole system swarmed with illegals. By reputation none of the individual bootleg shipyards or other illegal operations hidden in that maze of g and rock could compare with Billingate for size and diversification. Taken together, however, they served many more ships, processed more plunder, concealed more facilities. Illegals who disliked proximity with the Amnion had always preferred Massif-5, with its wealth and hiding places.
Incomprehension tightened Angus’ face. His lost ship, Bright Beauty, hadn’t had a gap drive: in all likelihood, he was entirely ignorant of the Massif-5 system. But his confusion lasted no more than a second. As if he’d somehow instantaneously accessed one of Trumpet’s computers, called up a database on Valdor Industrial, and absorbed its contents, his expression cleared.
“Can you locate a lab there?”
he asked Mikka.
Morn fought visibly to control herself as Mikka considered the question. When Mikka finally muttered grudgingly, “I think so,” a relief as poignant as sorrow came over Morn’s features, and she had to grind her palms into her eyes to hold back tears.
“Shit,” Nick growled to no one in particular. “Now we’re going to let a kid tell us what to do.”
Angus studied Morn intently. He had to swallow several times before he could find his voice.
Darkly he murmured, “It’s probably better than hanging around here. I hate forbidden space anyway.” The malign yellow in his eyes made him look like a man who hated everything. “Even the vacuum smells like Amnion.”
Unable to stop himself, Davies touched Angus’ arm in thanks.
Instantly furious, Angus jerked his arm away; snapped at Davies like a lash, “Fuck you, too. If you think I’ve turned into some kind of bleeding heart, you’re using your asshole for brains.”
“You wish.” Because he was his father’s son, Davies met Angus’ anger with a hard grin. “On the other hand, you’re using your gonads. Fortunately that’s the only part of you I trust.”
Nick chuckled appreciatively.
“Then there’s just one more thing,” Vector interposed. Eagerness still glinted in his gaze, but he’d recovered his air of calm. “I need the drug.”
Morn didn’t speak. Maybe she couldn’t. Nevertheless she lowered her hands, lifted her raw gaze. After digging in her pocket for a moment, she brought up three small gray capsules in her palm and offered them to Vector.
He accepted them almost reverently, as if he knew what they meant to her.
“But you didn’t take them all,” he commented quietly. “If you did, Nick would have noticed they were gone. He would have figured out you had them. Nick—”
“Nick must have the rest,” Davies finished for him.
Abruptly Sib remembered to aim his handgun at Nick.
Everyone on the bridge looked at Nick. He scrutinized the deck in front of him, ignoring their eyes.
“Hand them over, Nick,” Angus ordered.
Nick ignored that as well.