“ ‘Change it’?” she asked Angus.
He hadn’t reacted to her exchange with Davies. His attention had contracted until it included only his need, his supplication, and her: there was no room for anything else. As soon as she spoke to him, he answered, “I can edit it. If you’ll help me get at it.”
“How?”
She meant, How can you do that? But she also meant, How can you conceivably know how to do that? How is it possible that you can do a trick which no one else in human space can even imagine?
He seemed to understand her. “The Amnion taught me.” Each word cost him an effort, as if he had to bring it to the surface from a terrible depth. Or as if he dreaded her reaction to it.
In a dead voice, the voice of a machine, he explained, “It was years ago. I hijacked an orehauler. Viable Dreams. Crew of twenty-eight. But I didn’t kill them. I wasn’t after their cargo.”
Abruptly Morn wanted him to stop. She felt herself growing colder, as if the void through which the swarm plunged were leaking into the ship. She didn’t think she could bear to hear more.
“I took them to Billingate,” he went on mechanically, “and sold them to the Amnion. All twenty-eight of them.
“As far the Amnion were concerned, that was the richest prize any illegal ever offered them. They paid me by teaching me how to edit Bright Beauty’s datacore.”
Strange chills started in the core of her belly and spread outward, making her bones tremble, her heart shiver. Nick had given her to the Amnion. He’d tried to give Davies. But Angus had sold twenty-eight—
He produced another stiff shrug. “That’s the only reason Com-Mine Security didn’t execute me while they had the chance. The only reason I’m here. Like this.” His tears didn’t mean that he was weeping. They were the essential sweat of his anguish. “Bright Beauty’s datacore didn’t have any evidence they could use.”
Chills reached her shoulders, shuddered along her arms. Somehow she’d been touched by a piece of absolute cold—the utter and irredeemable ice of the abyss.
A man who’d sold twenty-eight human beings to the Amnion wanted her to give him back his freedom.
“You bastard,” Davies panted through his teeth, “you vile bastard. How do you live with yourself? How can you stand it?”
Angus didn’t reply; but Morn knew the answer. Her comprehension was as intimate as rape. He didn’t stand it. He’d spent his whole life fleeing from himself, running from violence to violence in an obsessed effort to escape his own darkness.
“How?” she repeated. Her voice quivered as if she were hypothermic. “How do you do it?”
Her question was entirely unlike her son’s.
Angus understood her. “SOD-CMOS chips don’t change state,” he recited. “They add state. Physically, they can’t be edited. Everybody knows the only way to affect them is, write in a filter that masks some of the data during playback. The data is still there. It just doesn’t show.
“But that’s useless. The filter shows. It plays back along with the rest of the data. Everybody knows that, too.”
Morn shivered as if Angus were sneering at her.
“The trick,” he continued inflexibly, “is to write a transparent filter. It shows, but nobody sees it because everything else looks normal. But even that’s impossible. The chip only adds state. Everything in it is linear. Sequential. Even a transparent filter becomes obvious because it was written after the data it masks. Otherwise the filter wouldn’t work.”
He seemed to pause involuntarily, caught at the cusp of a logic-tree; trapped between UMCP programming and his own desperation. The colder Morn felt, the more his face streamed with sweat. His eyes rolled, giving off glints of yellow.
“Go on,” Davies muttered. He sounded out of breath, almost exhausted; strained taut. “Don’t stop now.”
Abruptly Angus said, “Unless you know how to write a filter that looks exactly like the lattice of the chip itself.” His voice scraped like a rusty blade in his throat. “Now it isn’t transparent, it’s invisible. You can’t see it during playback because it’s just like the physical chip—and you never see the physical chip. You only see the data.”
Morn clasped her arms around herself to contain her shivers, but they were too strong. Long tremors shook her. Her teeth clicked against each other until she clenched them tight.
“I can’t do that,” Angus told her, “but the Amnion can. Their instruments and coding are that good. All they did was teach me how to use the information.”
His eyes oozed need like running sores.
“If my datacore and Bright Beauty’s were made the same way,” he finished, “if the lattice is the same, I can write in a filter to block my priority-codes. Mask them. Nobody else will be able to give me orders.”
Full of gelid, shivering detachment, she thought that probably they were made the same way. The UMCP was humankind’s only authorized supplier of SOD-CMOS chips. She couldn’t think of any reason why their manufacturing methods might have changed.
“Shit.” Davies stared at Angus in horrified fascination: despite his instinctive rejection, he’d been snagged by what Angus proposed. “Can you go deeper? Can you filter the original programming? Substitute your own?”
Angus shook his head. “No.” He treated the question as if it came from Morn. “I don’t know what code it’s written in. I can only work with data I recognize.”
“Like your priority-codes,” Davies said for him.
“Like my priority-codes,” Angus acknowledged stiffly.
No, Morn groaned to herself. She couldn’t do it. It was too much. Absolutely too much. How often had he abused and humiliated her—raped her—hit her? Davies was right: she couldn’t set Angus free.
Yet there was one more question she had to ask, in spite of her dismay and the tearing cold. One more crucial detail—
“Angus, who knows you can do this?”
Which one of the plotters and counterplotters back at UMCPHQ could have planned for this?
Now he didn’t respond. An ice of his own held him frozen. Thronging with supplication arid agony, his gaze clung to hers, but no sound came from his mouth. He’d run into one of his prewritten restrictions, and his zone implants closed his throat. He might have been strangling on words he couldn’t say.
Harsh with self-coercion, she rasped, “Isaac, this is Gabriel priority. Answer my question.
“Who knows you can do this?”
A shrug like a spasm shook him. “Warden Dios.” He might have been shouting, crying, I’m not your son. “As far as I know, he’s the only one.” I am not your fucking SON! “But he didn’t make me explain it. And he said he couldn’t tell anyone else. Too dangerous. He used the word ‘suicide.’ ”
Suicide? Morn paused as if she’d fallen into the still point between one wave of chills and the next. This gambit—giving Angus’ priority-codes to Davies, cursing her and her son with the burden of decision—had been set in motion by Warden Dios. But it wasn’t aimed at Hashi Lebwohl. Or Min Donner. They were his subordinates: they simply weren’t strong enough to threaten him. There was only one power in human space great enough for that.
Only Holt Fasner could destroy the director of the UMCP.
She was in the early stages of zone implant withdrawal. Prolonged doses of cat had postponed the crisis; but now it’d caught up with her, sinking its claws into her nerves, drawing her chills into a high-pitched wail of cold.
Warden Dios had given Davies control over Angus.
Why? What did he want from her son? What did he think Davies could do to save him from the Dragon?
How much more suffering did he think she could survive?
Davies pushed toward her from the rail of the companionway. The small impact as he gripped her shoulders moved her backward, away from Angus. Shivers rose against his hands; she trembled as if she were about to shake apart in his grasp.
He brought his face close to hers, forcing his resemblance to his father on her.
/>
“Morn, I keep saying the same thing.” His voice was soft and fatal—a whisper like the sound of atmosphere venting to the void. “None of this matters. Not here. Not to us. We can’t guess whose side we’re supposed to be on. We don’t know whose game this is, or what they want from us. That isn’t our problem.
“Our problem is Nick. We need to get ready for him.
“We don’t know when he’s coming back. Once he puts Vector to work, he might decide to wait here for the results. Playing with us to pass the time.
“We can’t let him catch us before we’re ready.”
His fingers dug into her shoulders as if he thought the pressure might stifle her chills.
“Start giving Angus orders,” he insisted softly. “Or I’ll do it, if you hurt too much. We need to move.”
Angus didn’t argue. Apparently he’d come to the end of his appeal. Sweat beaded on his skin, squeezed out by the pressure of his need, but he stood still, saying nothing, asking nothing.
He wanted Morn to set him free.
All her life she’d been a woman who knew how to hold a grudge. She’d never forgiven her parents for leaving her in the name of their service to the UMCP. Because she was a child then, she’d never forgiven herself. When her mother had died saving Intransigent from Gutbuster, she’d made the decision to be a cop herself, hoping to turn her old, unanswered grievance outward; appease her guilt. That commitment had failed, however, when her gap-sickness had destroyed Starmaster. On some primal level—beyond reason or logic—her guilt had been confirmed. Starmaster died because she hadn’t forgiven her parents. That was the source of her gap-sickness; the flaw in her brain. Welded to her grudge, she’d brought about her parents’ deaths.
And then Angus had taken her: the incarnation and apotheosis of the punishment she deserved. She’d turned her grudge against herself with a vengeance. After all the harm she’d done—and all she’d received—she hadn’t been able to conceive any way out of her plight except by accepting her zone implant control from Angus and casting in with Nick; by dedicating herself to the profound falsehood of confirming Nick’s illusions. She’d disdained rescue so that she would continue to be punished.
But Davies had changed her. Having a child had forced her to step outside her grudges and self-brutalization in order to consider other questions; larger issues. Vector had told her that the cops were corrupt. At the time that information had horrified her. But how was their suppression of Intertech’s antimutagen research different from her use of her black box against Nick? Or against herself? If she wanted her life and her son’s to be any better than Nick’s—or Angus’—she had to begin making decisions of another kind.
As far as I’m concerned, she’d once told Davies, you’re the second most important thing in the galaxy. You’re my son. But the first, the most important thing is to not betray my humanity. And later, when he’d wanted to lock Nick out of Trumpet, she’d said like a promise, You’re a cop. From now on, I’m going to be a cop myself. We don’t do things like that.
Fine sentiments. But they meant nothing if she didn’t act on them.
Yet if acting on them meant setting Angus free—
Shivering in revulsion, she turned the question back on him. Past her son’s shoulder, she asked, “Why should we help you? Davies is right—we can find some way to deal with Nick that doesn’t get you paralyzed. You’ll work for us, you’ll have to, you’ll take our orders instead of Nick’s, and we won’t need to be afraid of you all the time.” Use him as a tool, the same way Warden Dios and Nick did. Less brutally, perhaps. Or with more subtlety. But still as a tool. A thing. “Why should I think for a second that either of us will be safe with you?”
“Morn!” Davies protested, grinding his fingers into her shoulders and shaking her.
She ignored her son. The necessary focus of her attention was as constricted as Angus’. For the moment nothing mattered except his answer.
“Because I could have stopped you,” he said on the heels of Davies’ outcry. All trace of belligerence had left his face: only his need remained, naked and pure.
“Bullshit!” Davies flung away from Morn, wheeled to face Angus. “You couldn’t stop anything. You were beaten, Nick beat you, you didn’t have any choices left. You would have sold him your soul to keep yourself alive, but he didn’t give you the chance. You handed her the control and let her go”—his fists lashed the air—“because there was nothing else you could do!”
Angus shook his head as if his neck were breaking. Still he spoke only to Morn.
“I could have proved I was framed. I knew about Nick’s link with Com-Mine Security. I could have traced the link to Milos. All I had to do was say something, and Security would have stopped you. You and Nick. Even if they didn’t believe me, they would have stopped you. Until they learned the truth. Then you were finished.
“That link was real. It would nail Milos. And he would sell anything to save himself. Maybe they would have executed me—if I couldn’t bargain with them—but I would have taken you and Nick down with ms.
“But I didn’t. And I didn’t do it later, after you were gone. I didn’t defend myself at all. Not even to save Bright Beauty.” Dumb pain ached in his eyes. “I let them do whatever they wanted to me. So they wouldn’t go after Nick. So you could get away.”
He surprised her; almost shocked her. For a heartbeat or two the cold let go of her, allowing her to concentrate.
“Why?”
Why did you care?
His voice dropped until she could barely hear him. “Because I made a deal with you.” He sounded incongruously vulnerable, like a wounded child. “I gave you the zone implant control. You let me live. And I kept my end. Whether you kept yours or not.”
In a small, sore whisper, he admitted as if he were laying bare his heart, “When I hurt you, I hurt myself.”
“Angus,” Davies began harshly, “God damn it—” But then his protest trailed away. He seemed to have no words for what he felt. With his back to Morn, he stood as if he were huddling into himself, crouching against a pain he couldn’t understand.
She put her hand on his shoulder. When she felt his muscles knotting under the strange fabric of his shipsuit, she knew what she had to do.
She had to make this decision; make it now and act on it. Warden Dios had sent it to her son, but it didn’t belong to him.
He’d been force-grown with her mind, but he wasn’t her. His father was part of him as well. And he was caught between them—between his memory of her pain and his recognition of Angus’. Anger was his only defense. When it failed, he was lost.
This decision was beyond him.
She, on the other hand—
You’re the second most important thing in the galaxy. You’re my son.
She was the woman Angus had raped and degraded. Whether he knew it or not, he’d given her the right to choose his doom.
But the first, the most important thing is to not betray my humanity.
Everything she’d learned came to this: revenge was too expensive. Humankind couldn’t afford it.
Deliberately she set a lifetime of grudges and self-punishment aside.
“We’ll do it,” she told Angus, although her voice nearly stuck in her throat, and the hammering of her heart brought her chills up again with redoubled force. “We’ll trust you.”
More for Davies’ benefit than for Angus’, she added, “It’s not just you. We’ll trust whoever wrote your core programming.” Shivering like the damned. “I think it was Warden Dios. I think he’s trying to find some way to fight Holt Fasner. And if he is, I think we should help him.”
Shivering as if the cold had become metaphysical—a tremor of the soul which only incidentally affected her body.
Nevertheless she finished, “We’re cops. We don’t use people.”
Angus began to clench and unclench his fists while his mouth slowly pulled back into a feral grin.
She started to weep as soon as Davies turn
ed and put his arms around her.
NICK
Nick Succorso walked in the light g of the Lab’s asteroid like he was riding a cloud. He was elevated by triumph, nearly giddy with aspiration. Hungers which had hag-ridden his life were about to be fed; were being fed. Trumpet had become his. For reasons which meant nothing to him and didn’t interest him, Warden Dios had given him his own pet cyborg. Mikka and Vector were stuck taking his orders. Soon he would possess an effectively limitless supply of UMCPDA’s mutagen immunity drug—all the wealth he would ever need. Morn herself was his as surely as Trumpet and Angus, ripe to be hurt.
And Soar was here, Sorus Chatelaine was here.
His heart and head were so full that they seemed to lift him from step to step, almost carrying him off his feet. He could hardly keep track of the deck.
With Mikka and Vector at his shoulders, Sib and Pup behind him, he left Trumpet’s airlock to enter the access passage which led into Deaner Beckmann’s installation.
Mikka glared murderously past her bandage, but Vector had perfected his look of mild calm, and his face showed nothing. As for Sib and Pup, Nick didn’t give a shit what they thought or felt. He intended to sacrifice them in any case. Get even with them for daring to turn against him. Only Vector truly mattered. Mikka was just cover. And he’d made sure that she didn’t know Soar was in. She wouldn’t interfere because she wouldn’t be able to guess his intentions.
The passage was featureless: a straight concrete corridor toward another airlock, lit by long, flat fluorescents which flickered as if their power source were unstable. Nick didn’t see any scan fields and detection sensors. The Lab relied on other defenses, and he’d already passed most of them.
Bouncing to the interior lock, he thumbed the intercom and announced, “Captain Succorso. We’re here. Sorry to keep you waiting.” He glanced backward to confirm that Trumpet had resealed herself, then added, “My ship’s lock is tight.” The installation didn’t need to hear this from him. Routine dock communications covered such points as a matter of safety. Nevertheless he always checked. “You can let us in.”