Slowly, as if he, too, had only jelly to support him, he turned back to the second’s station.
Morn recognized that instant transformation. His datacore had taken control: emissions from his zone implants had stifled his coughing, forced down his despair, smothered his triumph. He was a welded cyborg, ruled by decisions made for him days or weeks ago by men who didn’t care what he felt or how he suffered; who cared only how he could be used. Briefly his raw human distress had burst its bounds! But now the inexorable pressure on the neural centers of his brain had recaptured him.
Whatever he did here, it would be because Warden Dios or Hashi Lebwohl—or their proxy, Nick Succorso—required it of him, not because he chose it.
She understood from experience. Oh, she’d never been welded. But Angus had imposed the same kind of submission on her. Later, voluntarily, she’d imposed it on herself. Time and again she’d felt an appalled outbreak of need and pain collapse in the face of electromagnetic coercion.
I’m not your son.
Davies opened his mouth. He was going to say something hostile; try to defend her by attracting Angus’ malice to himself; she saw it on his face. With an effort that caused her to shudder as if she were shaken by fever, she brought up her hand in a warning gesture, cautioned him to silence.
He looked at her with his father’s fear and fury clenched in his features. Nevertheless he clamped his jaws shut. The only sound from him was a low, visceral snarl.
Artificially steady, Angus began tapping keys on the second’s board.
Morn couldn’t do anything except gape as a flimsy sheet scrolled from the console’s printout.
Angus tore off the hardcopy slowly, as if it were precious. His datacore demanded precision. Ineffably meticulous, he pivoted in the asteroid’s slight g and left the second’s station. Despite the pressure of his zone implants, he appeared almost at ease, almost graceful, as he moved.
His boots touched the deck in front of Davies. He stopped himself with a palm on Davies’ shoulder.
Davies didn’t move. Stiff with incomprehension, he bore the contact without flinching; without striking out. His attention was fixed on the sheet Angus carried.
Still slowly, as if the situation had become too urgent for haste, Angus handed the sheet to Davies.
For no reason she could name, Morn found herself holding her breath like a woman who wasn’t sure whose son Davies truly was, hers or Angus’.
Davies peered at the hardcopy. He seemed unable to read it. Perhaps he was having trouble focusing his eyes. Or perhaps he simply couldn’t believe what he saw.
“Jesus,” he sighed—a long, soft exhalation, as if he were draining out of himself. By degrees he turned toward Morn.
Angus turned with him: they faced her together. The resemblance between them was uncanny. Davies was less bloated: he had less muscle, less fat. His black shipsuit contrasted strangely with Angus’ grimy outfit. But those differences were trivial. Only Davies’ eyes—eyes like Morn’s—distinguished him from his father.
Suddenly Davies flailed his arms at the ceiling and yelled as if he were crowing, “We’ve got him! We’ve got him!”
She jerked backward involuntarily. She couldn’t help herself: his unexpected savagery hit her like an attack. His shout echoed in her ears. For a moment she couldn’t hear anything else. Between them, he and his father had deafened her.
Angus’ cheeks were still wet: his eyes bled tears he couldn’t control. He didn’t glance at Davies. Instead his yellow gaze clung to her as if he were begging her for something.
Understanding? Forgiveness?
Help?
Her heart labored for several beats before she was able to find her voice.
“What is it? What does it say?”
With an effort Davies forced himself to speak more quietly. “It’s from Punisher.” Yet his eyes burned, and his whole body appeared to emit a furious joy. “We’ve got his codes. Angus’ codes. Now we can beat Nick!”
Dumb with supplication, Angus stared at Morn like a beaten animal.
The words were plain enough. We’ve got his codes. Yet she couldn’t grasp what they meant. Angus’ codes. Panic and hope and old pain filled her chest until she could hardly breathe, crowded her heart while it struggled to beat.
Now we can beat Nick!
What do you mean?
Her question was inaudible. She’d asked it of herself, not of her son. Or of Angus.
And she didn’t know the answer.
She tried again.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean”—Davies’ hand shook with eagerness as he shoved the flimsy sheet at her, urging her to take it—“we can countermand him. We can cancel his orders. We can give Angus new ones.
“We can beat Nick.”
Fighting a constriction in his throat, Angus said thickly, “It’s not that simple.” His gaze was flagrant with need, but he couldn’t articulate his appeal.
Dumbly Morn accepted the hardcopy so that she could read it herself.
Warden Dios to Isaac, it said, Gabriel priority.
Familiar codes identified Punisher as the source of the transmission. But ciphers she didn’t recognize surrounded the words themselves; encysted them. They might have been some specialized machine language. Certainly they didn’t resemble any normal UMCP routing or command sequence.
Show this message to Nick Succorso.
Punisher had given control over Angus to Nick. Now Angus had given it to Davies.
And to Morn.
All at once everything mattered too much. She couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Without forewarning or preparation, with nothing to go on except instinct and desperation, she’d arrived at a crisis in which any error would be fatal.
God help her, she wasn’t ready.
Davies was so full of excitement that he bounced toward the ceiling. He couldn’t contain himself: he didn’t see the danger. The intensity of his desire to protect her blinded him.
The burden fell on her.
Ready or not.
Her heart beat in her ears, as loud as drums, and heavy as thunder: the venous funeral march of her inadequacy. It didn’t matter whether she was ready or not. No one cared. She couldn’t afford to care herself.
Nevertheless she was as careful as the pounding in her ears and the frenzy in her soul allowed.
“Isaac,” she pronounced unsteadily, “this is a Gabriel priority instruction. Answer my questions.
“Is this the message that came in earlier—the one Nick told us about?”
He swallowed once, convulsively. Beggary bled from his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Did you obey it?”
“I didn’t have any choice.”
“You showed it to Nick?” she insisted, wanting to be clear; wanting him to tell her precisely where she stood.
Angus nodded as if his neck were in pain. “Yes.”
“Of course he did,” Davies put in impatiently. He was too excited: he didn’t seem to have noticed that the situation had become lethal; that his life as well as hers was at stake in every sense. Moment by moment Angus’ betrayal grew more terrible. “Those are his priority-codes. He can’t refuse them.”
Morn ignored him.
“And since then”—she needed to be sure, needed to hear Angus say these things—“he’s been telling you what to do? You’ve been taking his orders? That’s why you turned against the rest of us?”
“Yes.” If his zone implants had allowed it, he might have sighed.
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly in an effort to calm herself. Fear yammered in her ears—a whole mob of panics clamoring to be heard. The hardcopy shook-in her hand.
“Then why are you showing it to us now? Did Nick tell you to do this? Is it some kind of trick?”
That struck a spark in Angus. Hints of anger showed past his mute supplication. “He doesn’t know.”
Davies settled to the deck. “Is that what you’re worried abou
t?” he asked tensely, as if he were running to catch up with her. “You think this is part of some game Nick is playing?”
Morn didn’t answer. She had no attention to spare. Everything in her was concentrated on Angus.
“Then who ordered you to do this? And how did they do it?” The sheet trembled. “This doesn’t say anything about giving us your codes.”
“I don’t know who.” A small tremor ran through Angus as if he were trying to shrug. “I can only tell you how.
“It’s that coding,” he explained harshly, “that machine language. I can’t read it, but my datacore can. When I entered those strings, it ordered me to show the message to Davies.
“But not right away,” he added. “I couldn’t do it if Nick would see or hear me. I didn’t know I was supposed to do it until he left the ship. My datacore didn’t tell me—” Another tremor. “They don’t want him to know.”
“In any case,” Davies objected, “it doesn’t matter. We have the codes. We can use them, no matter what Nick knows.”
For a moment Morn turned away from Angus’ appeal to face her son. She held his gaze, let him see the demand in her eyes, until his enthusiasm receded into a scowl. Then she shifted back to Angus.
“What did you mean, ‘It’s not that simple’?”
The tension in his shoulders and arms told her that she was moving closer to his need; to the thing he wanted to ask of her.
“You can countermand him,” he replied in a hoarse rasp. “Fine. He can countermand you. You’ll cancel each other out. What happens then? Maybe you can beat him, maybe you can’t. But I’ll be paralyzed—I’ll be useless.”
Morn could almost hear him wailing, Please, please! as if his pain was beyond language. The sheer scale of the harm which Warden Dios and Hashi Lebwohl had done to him shocked her.
But Davies couldn’t contain himself. “We still have the advantage,” he interrupted. “Nick doesn’t know he’s in trouble. We can attack him first. Angus can open the weapons locker. We’ll meet Nick in the airlock with guns. Nail him before he reaches Angus. Lock him away where Angus can’t hear him. Kill him if we have to. Let’s see him countermand that.”
Angus never looked aside from Morn. His datacore had required him to give his codes to Davies; but she was the one he focused on.
“It’s not that simple,” he repeated. Pressures which should have driven him into madness—or at least into motion—gripped and released in his muscles, yet his zone implants held him stationary. “What if he calls me from the Lab? What if he uses the exterior intercom to talk to me while you’re waiting in the airlock?” His moment of anger was oven “I have to obey him. If he asks me what’s going on, I’ll tell him.”
Davies opened his mouth; closed it again: Morn’s expression stopped him. Like Angus, he stared at her as if he wanted to ask her for something, beg—
Now she knew the question Angus wished her to put to him. It came to her as clearly as if it were written on the hardcopy in her hand. Yet as soon as she identified it she quailed.
Everyone might live or die according to what she did—Mikka and Ciro, Sib and Vector, as well as Nick and Angus, Davies and herself. That was terrible enough. And yet mere death seemed simple in its own way: its implications could be understood. Angus’ betrayal and need thronged with larger issues.
She’d promised herself that she would cling to the legacy of her parents, her family: that she would commit herself to the convictions and dreams she’d learned from them: that she would be a cop in the pure sense, even though the cops were corrupt, even though men like Warden Dios and Hashi Lebwohl were capable of inflicting such extreme hurts on humankind—and on individual humans. Precisely because she was weak and flawed, she would make the effort to be strong.
Now that seemed impossible.
Unable to take the next step, she turned aside.
“But why are we going through all this?” To herself she sounded plaintive, almost self-pitying; overtaken by vulnerability. Nevertheless she continued, “If Warden Dios wanted us to have those codes—or Hashi Lebwohl—why not just give them to us?” This was important, perhaps crucial, despite the fact that it didn’t touch Angus. “Why hand them to Nick first? He might have killed us before Angus ever got a chance to enter those code-strings.”
Davies was nearly frantic with urgency or vexation. “That doesn’t matter, either.”
She jerked her head toward him. A flare of anger burned across her fear. “It matters,” she snapped. “Who are we working for now? Who’s trying to use us? Whose side are we supposed to be on?”
Davies didn’t flinch or hesitate. “Our own,” he answered as if he were sure. “The side we choose.”
She fought an impulse to yell at him. Wake up! she wanted to shout. Grow up! There’s a rift in UMCPHQ. Maybe in all of human space. Warden Dios gave Hashi Lebwohl orders, and Lebwohl subverted them because he didn’t want to obey. Of Dios didn’t want Lebwohl to know what his real orders were, so he hid them. Or Min Donner didn’t like what either of them did, but she didn’t want to risk overt insubordination, so she sneaked her own orders into the transmission. It matters! Where we go from here, everything we do or try to do from now on, depends on who wants Nick to control Angus. Who wants us to take that away from him.
And why!
After no more than a heartbeat or two, however, she found that she no longer needed to yell. Her anger had served its purpose: it had denatured some of her fear. Unwittingly Davies had goaded her into becoming ready for the next step.
Without transition her hearing cleared. The drumming thunder and the echo of shouts were gone. She could hear Davies’ urgency and Angus’ clenched, constricted respiration. The small electronic insistence of the command systems reached her; the phosphors humming in the display screens; the background susurrus of the air-scrubbers. And behind them, almost masked by tangible reality and emotional distress, she identified the subliminal crackle of treachery.
Once again she faced Angus.
He remained still, dumbly aching. His datacore denied him the means to articulate his appeal. If she didn’t ask him the right question, he would never be able to tell her the answer.
“All right,” she said as if she, too, were sure. “We countermand Nick. He countermands us. We get a stalemate. You get paralyzed.
“What alternatives do we have?”
Just for an instant Angus dropped his gaze as if he couldn’t bear what he had to say. But then he brought his yellow, pleading eyes back to her face.
“Kill me.”
Suddenly bitter, Morn snapped, “Not counting that one.”
A spasm like an outbreak of pain pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Help me.”
“‘Help’ you?” She didn’t let go of her bitterness; she needed it. “What does that mean?”
“Help me,” he said, picking up the words like litter off a ruined street, “get away. From my datacore.”
His eyes spilled tears which meant nothing to him.
A flush of instantaneous panic set fire to Davies’ skin. He opened his mouth to start shouting.
Morn forestalled him. It’s not that simple. The same memories which stung her son cried, through her, demanding terror. To combat them, she clutched at Angus’ extremity; at the helpless appeal on his face. She remembered the rending anguish with which he’d wailed, I am not your fucking SON!
“Somehow,” she answered like acid, “I knew that was coming.” Her deepest dread had told her. “Help you get away from your datacore. Set you free. So you can make your own decisions.
“How?”
Electronic emissions stifled the spasm in Angus’ cheek. They held him still as if he’d been sculpted in bone.
“You can cut it out. I’ll tell you how.
“But if you do that,” he went on, not hurrying, not emphasizing what he said in any way, “you’ll lose me. Everything in my databases, all the extra things I can do. I’ll just be—” His programming allowed him a stiff shrug
like a wince. “The whole system will freeze if you pull the chip. Some of the stasis commands are hardwired. My zone implants act on them automatically. I’ll lock up, and you wouldn’t be able to reach me. Eventually I’ll die.”
He stopped.
Davies watched her in dismay.
“Or?” she prompted grimly.
“Or,” Angus replied through a throat congested with wildness, “you can help me change it.”
“Change it?” Davies had moved to the nearby rail of the companionway: he couldn’t hold down his protest without some anchor. He had Morn’s anger, her primal, necessary outrage: he’d suffered her hurts everywhere except in his own body. “That’s impossible.” He needed it to be impossible. “You can’t rewrite those SOD-CMOS chips. They can’t be altered. If they could, what’s the point of having them?”
But his anger wasn’t hers: not really. Her share of his mind stopped in an Amnion crèche on Enablement Station. From that moment until Angus had freed him, he’d spent all his time as a prisoner; isolated from her.
While she—
“Why are we even listening to this?” he went on hotly. “You won’t help him. You can V. Not after Bright Beauty. You’re just getting his hopes up for nothing. He probably already knows what he’s going to do to you—to both of us—as soon as he’s free.
“Stop this,” Davies insisted; demanded; begged. “Give him orders. Or let me do it. Nick is the real problem. Let’s start getting ready for him.”
She shook her head.
While her son had been a prisoner, she’d taken over Captain’s Fancy, held the whole ship and most of Enablement hostage, to get him back. Later, locked in her cabin and nearly autistic with dread, she’d sat pulling her hair out for hours until Sib Mackern had found the courage to release her. More than once, she’d been through withdrawal. And then Nick had delivered her to the Amnion. With their mutagens in her veins, she’d sat waiting for the ribonucleic convulsion which would deprive her of her humanity as well as her mind.
Her anger was of another kind.
“Davies,” she said distinctly, “shut up. We need to hear this. We need to know what our choices are.