“Morn—” Mikka bit her voice between her teeth to keep it low. Fresh blood seeped from her temple. “Are you OK? Did you hear all that? What’re we going to do? We’ve got to fight.”
“I can at least refuse to do their work for them,” Vector offered thinly. “They can’t force me to use my mind.”
“Don’t,” Morn whispered back. “Don’t fight. Don’t refuse. Stay alive—don’t give him an excuse to kill you.”
“Why?” Sib protested in a choked moan. “We’re better off dead. You more than any of us. You’re the one they really want to hurt.”
She shook her head vehemently, as if she were stifling curses. “We haven’t got time for this. There’s a lie here. Somebody’s lying. We need to stay alive until we find out what it is.”
Angus had said almost the same thing.
Mikka’s eyes glared out of her stained face. “What lie? Angus is a cyborg. Nick controls him. What else is there?”
“Sickbay,” Morn countered. “Go. We all need it. I’ll try to explain.”
She was right. Apparently she’d been able to postpone the things Nick meant to do to her by feigning collapse, but she still needed treatment to stave off her gap-sickness.
“Quickest first,” Davies put in, riding a new rush of adrenaline. Pain made him light-headed: his fear began to seem like excitement. Morn needed him as well. She couldn’t care for herself without him. “Sib and Ciro, that’s you. Go—get what you need and get out of the way. Then Vector. Then you, Mikka. You can’t survive hard g like that. I’m last. Morn can take as much cat as she needs while the rest of us are being treated.”
As if they were accustomed to accepting his orders, Sib and Ciro pushed themselves into motion along the bulkhead. Vector started after them. But Mikka balked.
“No, I’m last. Morn needs you with her. If we run out of time, I’ll be safe enough on the surgery table. It can probably take care of me even if we’re under attack.”
Davies didn’t argue with her. “Ail right. Just go.”
He would feel better talking in the confines of a closed room. Out here he couldn’t predict what sounds might carry as far as Nick’s ears, or Angus’.
Morn didn’t need to be carried now. He could use his right hand and arm to control his movements. As soon as she pushed off along the passage, he followed.
As his vision cleared, the distance shrank to a more normal perspective. Coasting carefully, he reached the sickbay in a matter of seconds.
It was built into a chamber half the size of one of the cabins, with a heavy door to protect its equipment and occupants from the actions of the rest of the ship. Morn crowded through the doorway after Mikka. There was barely space for Davies to squeeze in behind her and shut the door.
Like the intercom indicators in the passage, the ones here were blank.
Fortunately Trumpet’s sickbay was as good as any he’d seen: compact and efficient; ready for emergencies. Sib had already finished entering a few quick commands on the console near the head of the surgery table. As Davies closed the door, the dispenser produced capsules to help Sib and Ciro recover from stun and vomiting: some mixture of stim and cat, metabolins and analgesics. Sib swallowed one convulsively, handed the other to Ciro, then gestured Vector to the table.
At once Vector took a handgrip, rolled himself onto the padded surface, and lay still while Mikka and Morn attached restraints to immobilize him so that the cybernetic systems could work on his hand.
Sib coded the console for urgent repair, more wounded coming; instructed the computer to concentrate on Vector’s hand. After that he shifted out of the way as gleaming metal arms and needles flexed from the walls to anesthetize, clean, probe, mend, and suture Vector’s slashed palm and fingers.
“Morn,” Mikka insisted.
“Right.” Morn gripped the edge of the table with one hand, pushed her hair back from her face with the other. A look of frenzy glinted from her eyes, a desperation strangely like Angus’. Nevertheless she kept her voice steady, tight; as hard and closed as a fist. “I’ll try to make sense.”
Painkillers and cat glazed Vector’s eyes. Still he concentrated his gaze on Morn’s face as if she alone could save him.
“DA is corrupt,” she began. “We know that. I’ll believe anything I hear about Hashi Lebwohl. But I’m Enforcement Division. I work for Min Donner. Arid she’s honest.”
Mikka scowled at this assertion.
“She has to be,” Morn insisted. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be a cop. If ED was corrupt, somebody in my family—my father, my mother, somebody—would have known. We would have resigned. The whole Hyland clan. And I wouldn’t have followed them to the Academy.”
This was true: Davies believed it as soon as she said it, even though he hadn’t thought of it himself. It matched his memories too closely to be wrong.
“My family trusted Min Donner. And none of them were stupid. Or blind. So I trust her, too.”
“So what?” Mikka retorted.
Morn didn’t hesitate. “Think about it. That message didn’t come from DA. It came from ED. From Punisher. The last I heard, a man named Dolph Ubikwe is in command, and he has the kind of reputation honest cops are willing to die for. He wouldn’t do this. Min Donner wouldn’t order him to do this.
“Unless there’s something else going on.”
Something to hope for.
The appeal in Mikka’s eyes was as plain as beggary. “Like what?”
Vector’s wounds were deep, but not structural. In moments the swabs and needles finished with his hand. Too weak to move well on his own, he let Sib and Ciro release the restraints; let Ciro support him against the wall.
Sib gestured at Davies.
Wary of his ribs and arm, Davies mounted the table gingerly until his back settled against the cushions; then he let his legs straighten. With his good hand, he unsealed his Amnion shipsuit; Mikka and Sib pulled down the strange black fabric until his torso was bare. As they attached the restraints, he reminded Sib, “Morn needs cat.”
“Right.” Sib typed in the commands to care for Davies, then added orders to dispense a supply of oral cat.
Morn watched her son as if she feared that the sickbay systems might hurt him.
Almost groaning, Mikka repeated, “Like what!”
A hypo from the wall tapped into Davies’ forearm, piped out blood for the computer to analyze. He felt rather than saw a nearly subliminal flash of X-ray. Limpet sensors on his skin tested for evidence of internal bleeding. Then cat, analgesics, and antibiotics washed into him from the hypo. Almost at once he began to drift away from his pain.
After that he heard voices as if they could barely reach him; as if the drugs had sent him into the medical version of tach, leaving everyone else on the far side of a perceptual gap.
“I don’t know,” Morn answered. She seemed to keep her tone hard so that she wouldn’t wail. “Some way to stop Nick when DA is finished with him.”
A clamp took hold of his broken arm, adjusted it until the bones were properly aligned. A gleaming extension set the fracture with tissue plasm, metabolins, and a nearly weightless acrylic cast.
“Maybe there’s a restriction we don’t know about built into Angus’ programming. Maybe we’ve stumbled into a covert operation that has to be kept secret.”
Then the clamp shifted to his shoulder; pushed in one direction while the table twisted in another to straighten his ribs.
Next the table retracted to make room for a nozzle which sprayed a more flexible acrylic around his chest. When it hardened—a few moments at most—this cast would shield his ribs, as well as restrict his movements so that he couldn’t hurt himself.
“Or maybe,” Morn finished, “Min Donner is just going along with Hashi Lebwohl until she figures out what he’s up to and can stop him.
“There has to be something.”
Whatever it is, it might help us.
Mikka groaned as if she were close to fainting. “And you want us to stake our
lives on that!” “Yes.”
Yes, Davies echoed.
Sickbay diagnostics informed him that his skull had suffered a small crack, but that there was no internal damage. Other drugs would protect him against shock and concussion while metabolins speeded the healing of his fractures.
Above him, Sib handed Morn a vial of tablets. She glanced at the dosage label, then shook a couple of pills onto her palm. Glaring at them as if she thought they might kill her, she swallowed them.
Drugs muffled Davies’ senses, confused his mind. Nevertheless he did what he could to back Morn up. From the other side of an imposed gulf, he struggled to say, “Angus is fighting it. He isn’t giving Nick any more help than he has to.”
“Bullshit.” The more Mikka bled, the weaker she sounded. “He’s a cyborg. He follows orders. How much help do you think Nick needs?”
Davies glanced at the intercom. Its indicator remained blank.
“Angus knows—” he mumbled across the void, “knows how to program a parallel control. For her zone implant. He’s done it before. He can replace the one Vector broke—whenever he wants.” Had he said everything yet? No, there was more. “But Nick doesn’t know that.” More. “Angus hasn’t told him.”
Morn nodded. Her eyes shed hints of gratitude and pride. Unfortunately he couldn’t answer them. Medication seemed to occupy all the available space inside him, crowding out words.
This was wrong. He was supposed to be taking care of her, not lying here stupefied, as useless as an invalid. For some reason, his restraints had been released; but when he tried to rise, he found that he couldn’t tell the difference between one direction and another. He had to watch while Morn and Sib pulled his shipsuit up onto his arms and shoulders, sealed the front.
Without warning tears blurred his vision. “I’m sorry,” he told Morn. His voice sounded constricted and forlorn, as if he were crying. “Too many drugs. I can’t help you.”
She lifted him off the cushions. He was weightless; she supported him as easily as a baby. “You already have.” With both arms she held him out of the way while Mikka settled toward the table. “And you will again. I took enough cat to put me out for four hours.” Already it had begun to drain the urgency from her voice. In moments it would drain her of consciousness as well. “By then you’ll be able to give me whatever I need.”
He felt that he could sink down into her embrace and never rise again. Only his strange endocrine heritage kept him awake.
“Four minutes,” Sib announced tightly. “You’d better get to your cabins.”
“You, too,” Mikka told him while he and Ciro fixed her in place. “Tell the systems to take hard-g precautions. Then go. Take Ciro with you. I’ll be all right.”
Vector put his undamaged hand like a gesture of reassurance on Ciro’s shoulder. “Come on,” he murmured. “I’m too weak to get there alone. And I need someone to seal my g-sheath.”
“Mikka—” Ciro began as if he wanted to protest, stay with her. Almost at once, however, he pushed away from the table to open the door for Vector.
Morn followed, drawing Davies with her.
Already half-unconscious, they swam leadenly toward their cabin. The air had grown viscid with mortality; it opposed their movements. And the passage had become longer while they were closeted in sickbay. It stretched immeasurably ahead of them, like a corridor in a nightmare. Davies could hardly keep his eyes open. Still he resisted the cloying pull of the drugs. Morn was in worse shape than he was: more deeply exhausted; not bred to crises. They would both die if they fell asleep now.
She lasted long enough to reach their cabin, open the door, swing him inside. After that, however, she went limp, tugged out of herself by cat and weariness.
Through a dim, thick haze of somnolence, he steered her into her bunk, sealed her sheath and webbing. Then, while his mind frayed out into the hungry dark, he made an effort to do the same for himself.
He barely succeeded at closing his seals before drugs and loss carried him away.
ANGUS
There were no words. No words for it at all. He existed in a world from which all language had been removed, all meaning stripped away; all release denied. The message had come in from Punisher, and he had read it, and his last sanity had cracked open like a crushed shell, spilling out passion and escape and doomed outrage wherever he turned.
Warden Dios to Isaac, Gabriel priority.
Dios had-given him back to his mother. The inside of his head had become the crib, where he lay helpless in his anguish. Like a child with nowhere else to turn, he fled for the recesses of himself, seeking darkness and death; seeking the vast void where his unanswerable pain could be extinguished.
Show this message to Nick Succorso.
Yet he wasn’t a child: he was a man and a cyborg, and his zone implants permitted nothing. Death he couldn’t have, and insanity couldn’t save him. Alone on the bridge, with only Nick and ruin for company, he ran Trumpet’s helm from the second’s station, and lay in the crib, and made small mewling noises no one could hear through his locked teeth.
While he piloted the ship—not his ship, never again his—he watched Nick study her; suck up data from Angus’ board, Angus’ codes, and become her master.
“Shit!” Nick remarked from time to time, usually in amazement. “I didn’t know they could make ships like this. I didn’t know it was fucking possible. She’s a goddamn treasure.”
Angus had lost Bright Beauty. He’d lost Morn and his life. Now he lost Trumpet. But his mother didn’t care. Dios had restored him to her; and she cared for nothing in all the world except his weak cries and his capacity to be hurt.
Still none of his agony showed on the outside, none of his excruciation; or only a little—only the appalled, conflicted labor of his heart, the unsteadiness of his hands, the anguish in his eyes. His datacore ruled everything else.
When he’d first received Punisher’s transmission, his datacore had taken him to Nick’s cabin, where he’d handed Nick a flimsy hardcopy of the message. His programming had required him to wait while Nick groped through the implications of the words; it had compelled him to supply Warden Dios’ answers to Nick’s questions. Then it had enforced every instruction Nick gave him: every blow; every protection; every piece of brutality.
Now it drove him to pilot Trumpet through the elaborate chaos of Massif-5’s system on Nick’s orders; guide what had once been his ship at high speed and under heavy g past obstacles by the hundred; on and on for hours at a time, with only an occasional pause to refine the focus of his instruments, or to meet the needs of his flesh.
As he lay in his crib, babbling pain and blood, too profoundly harmed to summon an infant’s thin wail of protest, he also served Nick Succorso and the complex treacheries of the UMCP with the wordless precision of a machine.
Massif-5 was a nightmare, but he didn’t fear it. He had no external fears. And his madness was no threat to his instruction-sets, or his databases: they didn’t need his sanity to aim the ship past the loud infernos of the opposing stars, or among the charted and uncharted hazards which clotted the system.
“What the fuck do you want?” Nick had demanded from his bunk when Angus had entered his cabin. “Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”
Angus hadn’t replied: his datacore gave him no answer, and his own were gone. Instead he’d simply poked the flimsy sheet from the command board’s printout into Nick’s face.
“Shit.”
Nick had hauled himself upright against his g-sheath and snatched the hardcopy. Then his face had turned blank with dumb, stupid surprise. Slowly his mouth had formed words as if he were reading the message aloud to himself; as if he couldn’t understand it without moving his lips.
After a moment he’d stared up at Angus with his eyes glazed. His scars pulled at his face like a mask.
“Where did this come from?” he asked dully.
Angus recited his response as if it were written somewhere in his datacore, waiting for N
ick to need it.
There’s a UMCP cruiser after us. Punisher. We passed her when we first came out of forbidden space near the belt. Just before we went into tach this last time, she got close enough to reach us with that transmission. You saw the blip.
“Isaac,” Nick murmured to himself. He seemed unable to think. “Gabriel priority. What’s that supposed to mean?”
It means you’re in command now. You give me orders. I carry them out.
Nick swallowed heavily; swallowed again. His gaze sharpened. He couldn’t stop staring at Angus. “Why would you do that?”
I can’t help it. I’m a cyborg. The cops welded me. I’m run by a computer that makes me obey anybody who uses my codes.
“A cyborg.” Nick bared his teeth. “A fucking machine.” By degrees the effort to grasp what he was hearing seemed to bring him back to life. “What makes you think I’m going to believe a load of crap like that?”
Angus wailed at the walls of his crib, but he was too small to break free. He’d always been too small. His long flight from the abyss was no more than an illusion; a coward’s desperate, necessary way of lying to himself.
Nothing. But I’m sure you can figure out a way to test it.
“Fine. I can test it.” Nick crumpled the sheet of hardcopy. “Here, Gabriel.” He tossed it to Angus. “Eat this.”
Angus caught it. He chewed it to a compact wad and choked it down as if it were one of Milos’ nics.
Nick’s eyes began to burn. A hard, red pulse tugged at the edges of his scars.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why did they do that to you?”
Angus told him.
Dangerous hope seemed to flare in Nick’s stare. An end to his losses. A new start. He flung out of his g-sheath, bobbed to a zero-g grip so that he could bring his growing excitement and passion closer to Angus’ face.
“Fine. Let’s pretend that makes sense. Why are they giving you to me now?”