Mikka knew this about Morn: she’d been Nick’s victim as well as Angus’; only her zone implant had kept her sane. But she hadn’t had that support when the Amnion had pumped their mutagens into her veins. She understood doom.
“Ciro.”
She said his name softly. Nevertheless her voice was enough to make him flinch.
“Turn around, Ciro. Look at me. I need to talk to you, and I want you to look at me.”
Ciro pressed himself harder against the wall.
With her eyes, Morn asked Mikka’s permission to go on. Mikka nodded roughly, and Morn nudged herself toward Ciro’s bunk. When she reached it, she closed one hand in the webbing, pulled herself down to sit on the edge of the bunk, then rested her other hand on Ciro’s shoulder.
She made no effort to draw him toward her: she simply let him feel her presence through his tension.
“Ciro,” she repeated. “We beat Nick. Sib tied him up. And Angus doesn’t take his orders anymore. He’s helpless.”
Surprised out of herself, Mikka broke in, “How—?” How in hell did you manage that! At once, however, she set her teeth on her tongue. She didn’t want to interrupt.
A subtle change showed in Ciro’s body. He didn’t move, but Mikka could tell that he was listening.
“The message that gave Nick Angus’ priority-codes came from Punisher” Morn answered quietly. “From Dolph Ubikwe. I told you I thought there was something else going on. Something to hope for. This time I was right.
“Somehow that message programmed Angus’ computer with new instructions. As soon as Nick and the rest of you left the ship, Angus told us the same codes. He handed himself to us. Then he told us how to set him free. How to help him free himself. Now he doesn’t have any priority-codes. They’re blocked—they don’t affect him. He can make his own choices again.”
“Wait a minute,” Mikka protested. She couldn’t help herself: what she heard horrified her. “You had his codes—you had that bastard in your control—and you set him free!”
Morn didn’t look up at Mikka. She didn’t need to.
“He used my zone implant to hurt me. So did Nick. I can’t treat other people that way.”
Mikka pressed a hand over her bandage to contain the pain. She was doomed; they were all finished. Morn couldn’t treat other people that way. Great. Wonderful. So instead she put herself at his mercy. Again. He was still a cyborg, wasn’t he? Now he had the power to treat everyone else the way he’d once treated her.
No wonder she looked haunted. She’d gone over the edge. Like Nick.
Yet she didn’t sound crazy. I can’t treat other people that way. She sounded like a woman who’d made up her mind to take risks which terrified her.
Mikka tried to swallow the futility rising in her gorge. “So what choices is he making?”
Morn lifted her head. For a moment she closed her eyes, as if that might help her bear the pain of her memories.
“Somehow,” she murmured distantly, “a long time ago, he and I made a deal. A commitment to keep each other alive. He gave me the control to my zone implant. I took it and went with Nick. Instead of turning myself in to Com-Mine Security. That way Security didn’t have enough evidence to execute him. And I got what I thought I needed to go on living.
“Apparently that—I don’t really know what to call it—that accommodation still holds for him. He honors it. And maybe he thinks I honored it by letting him free himself.”
Slowly Morn opened her eyes and turned to face Mikka. Now the darkness in her gaze looked like a wail of loss.
“Right now he’s leaving the choices to me.”
Mikka tried, but she couldn’t hold Morn’s eyes. Not for the first time, she felt weak and limited in Morn’s presence; essentially ashamed. Morn should have been the weakest person aboard. Certainly she was the most damaged. And yet she was stronger than anyone else. She just didn’t know it.
Despite the tremor of need which made her voice shake, Mikka asked, “So what choices are you making?”
Morn considered the question for a moment. She seemed to flinch inwardly as she answered, “We’re going after Soar.”
That struck a nerve. Without warning Ciro thrashed around to face Morn. His expression ached with an intensity Mikka couldn’t interpret—hope or despair so extreme that they were indistinguishable from each other.
Now, however, Morn didn’t look at him. Instead she concentrated on Mikka as if she’d forgotten about him.
Intuitively Mikka understood. She, too, refused to look at him—she didn’t want to drive him back into his clenched rejection. Instead she asked Morn sourly, “Now why would you go and do something like that?”
A small frown pained Morn’s forehead. “That ship used to have another name. She was called Gutbuster, and she killed my mother. She killed the only mother Davies remembers. In a strange way, she’s the reason he and I both became cops. So we could try to get the ship that killed our mother.”
Ciro raised himself on one elbow as if he wanted to see Morn’s face better. His free hand started to reach toward her, then fell back.
“He wants that more than I do,” she went on. “Or I want it, but I don’t trust it. Revenge is too expensive. And maybe we have more important things to do.
“But our minds started diverging as soon as he was born. We’ve been changing in different ways. There’s enough of Angus in him to affect the way he thinks. And everything that’s ever happened to him has been twisted—He needs simple decisions. They help him hang on to who he is.”
Morn shrugged. “And I’m supposed to be a cop. I need that. So maybe if I’m going to turn myself into the kind of cop I can believe in, I have to start from the beginning.”
Soft as a whimper, Ciro protested, “No. Don’t—”
Still without turning away from Mikka, Morn spoke to him.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Ciro? We’re going after Soar. And Soar did something to you.” An undercurrent of anger began to surge in her voice, whetting her words like knives. “Sorus Chatelaine wants to use you against us somehow.
“Not just against Nick,” she insisted. “Do you understand that, Ciro? I don’t know what she told you, but this isn’t aimed at him. He’s irrelevant. She works for the Amnion. And they want us dead. We have an immunity drug. We have Davies. We know about their near-C acceleration experiments. If they can’t take us, they need to kill us.
“She’s hunting us right now. No matter where we go, she’ll come after us. We’ll never be safe. That’s as good a reason as any to hunt her ourselves.”
“Please,” Ciro moaned as if she were cutting at him; as if what she said flensed the skin from his bones. His eyes clung to her like pleading. “Don’t do this to me.”
“I’m not,” Morn retorted. “She is. Sorus Chatelaine did this to you. I’m just trying to help you understand it.”
Slowly she shifted on the edge of the bunk until she could face him. Mikka held her breath as Morn moved her hand—so slowly that it seemed inexorable—to Ciro’s chest and gripped the front of his shipsuit. With her fist, she lifted him upright to sit in front of her.
He stared naked dread at her. His eyes were so full of white fear that they appeared to have no irises. His mouth hung open. But he didn’t resist. Somehow she’d taken control of him.
“Maybe you can change it,” she told him. Anger and pain made her strong. “If we leave you alone, and you do whatever it is she wants from you, we’ll all die. One way or another. If we don’t die fighting her, they’ll make us Amnion. All of us, Ciro. Not just Nick. Not just Angus. Mikka and me. Sib and Vector and Davies. A handful of antimutagen pills—which is all we have left—won’t save us.
“If we lock you up so you can’t do anything, we can probably keep her from taking us. But she still might kill us. That ship has a super-light proton cannon. One hit is all she needs.”
Mikka winced. Super-light—? Oh, shit!
“Leave him alone,” she breathed at M
orn. “Don’t you think he’s scared enough already?”
Ciro’s lower lip quivered. His fear seemed to leave him mute.
Morn went on as if she’d forgotten remorse and knew nothing about terror. Each word was as distinct as an incision.
“But if you tell us what she wants you to do, we might be able to use that against her. We might have a chance. And if you tell us what she did to you, we might be able to help you.
“It’s up to you, Ciro,” she finished. “But you’d better make up your mind soon. We don’t have much time.”
Still she didn’t let him go.
“I mean it, Morn,” Mikka warned thinly. Pain and thunder muffled everything. She could hardly hear herself. “That’s enough. It would be kinder if you just tortured him.”
Morn ignored her. Her gaze and her grip on Ciro’s shipsuit didn’t waver.
He squirmed against her grasp. His voice shook. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Maybe.” Morn didn’t shirk the possibility. “Maybe we will. But before it comes to that we’ll do everything in our power to save you. And right now, with Angus and this ship on our side, we have a lot of power.
“Ciro,” she added more gently, “tell us. Please. Give us a chance to show you you’re not alone.”
“Alone?” His voice cracked, but he didn’t stop. Morn had tapped a core of frenzy in him—a passion as knotted and extreme as his sister’s. “You’re going to show me I’m not alone!
“What about Mikka? How alone is she?”
Mikka gaped at him in surprise.
“You’re a cop,” he cried, “a cop, you keep telling us you’re a cop. Well, she’s an illegal. So is Sib. Even Vector’s an illegal. What’re you going to show them! What are they going to have left when you’re done being a cop? Why is it worse for them to die now? At least they can fight. They don’t have to sit around waiting to be executed!”
Morn flinched as if he’d flung acid in her face.
When she heard him—and saw Morn’s reaction—Mikka snapped; she couldn’t endure any more. Flailing her nearly weightless limbs, she swam to the edge of the bunk, grabbed it, hauled herself down, and drove her desperate fury at her brother.
“Don’t give me that bullshit! I don’t care about being executed! I don’t care about anything that might happen days or weeks or months from now, if we’re lucky enough to live that long. I care about you!”
Struggling to control herself, she lowered her voice. “And after that I care about fighting the bastards who got all of us into this mess. I can take responsibility for my own crimes.”
But the effort of restraint seemed to hurt her as much as his fear. She needed to howl; needed to raise her head to the ceiling and wail while her heart tore.
“If you want to betray us,” she rasped bitterly, “then do it. But don’t use me as an excuse. And don’t use Sorus Chatelaine, either. All she did is lean on you. She isn’t here holding a gun to your head.”
Ciro couldn’t match her when she was like this. She could see what was left of his resistance crumbling under her scorn. He was already broken: Sorus had shattered something that he depended on to keep him whole. Morn had brought him out of his defenses in order to put pressure on him. And now his sister snarled at him as if he were contemptible—
“No,” he admitted like a whipped child. “She isn’t. It’s worse than that.”
Like Morn, Mikka stared as if she were paralyzed. Angus had cracked her skull. Why hadn’t he deafened her as well? She didn’t want to hear this. It was more than she could bear.
But Ciro had made his decision. Crouched and beaten on the bunk, with his heart in his eyes and his throat full of pain, he told her and Morn what they’d asked to hear.
“She serves the Amnion because they gave her a mutagen. A special one. It’s slow. Then they gave her an antidote. One that just postpones the mutagen. She stays human as long the antidote lasts. As long as they keep her supplied. But if she doesn’t take it—or if they don’t give it to her—the mutagen starts up again.”
His voice sank as he spoke. And yet no matter how low it was, Mikka could still hear it. The clamoring reverberation in her head gave her no protection. She was powerless to forgive herself. Nick had sacrificed him, and it was her fault. She’d given her brother to Nick as surely as if she, too, had considered him only bait.
“She did the same thing to me. She and some man. I think he might have been Milos Taverner.”
Tears began to spill from his eyes, but he didn’t notice them. Mikka herself hardly noticed them.
“If I sabotage the drives so we can’t run or fight, she’ll take me with her. She’ll keep me supplied.” His throat closed on a sob. “So I can stay human.”
Take me with her. Mikka groaned. “And you believe that?”
“I have to,” he answered simply.
Have to? Of course he did. Sorus Chatelaine had injected a mutagen into his veins. There was nothing else left for him to believe.
Mikka’s need to howl mounted until she couldn’t contain it. Pushing back from the bunk, she brandished her helpless fists and brought up a scream from the bottom of her heart.
At once, Morn caught her by the front of her shipsuit, held her the same way she’d held Ciro. Her eyes were cold and dark, as bleak as ice. Lines of authority marked her face like emaciation. “Mikka! We don’t have time for this!”
Her shout hit Mikka like a slap. Mikka swung a wild blow at Morn’s head. But there wasn’t enough g to anchor her. Her own force tossed her away from the impact, out of control.
By the time she’d reached the wall and recovered, Morn was at the intercom.
Ignoring Mikka now, Morn thumbed the pickup toggle.
“Vector. Are you there? I need you.”
“I’m here, Morn,” Vector answered promptly. Metallic circuits or concentration made him sound abstract; too far away to be reached. “Give me twenty minutes. I don’t want to stop in the middle of this.”
“Vector—” Morn began.
“It’s going to be great,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’m coding a transmission. It’s in my name—maybe that will give it some credibility. In essence, it says that since I left Intertech I’ve finished the research I was doing there. I’ve developed an antimutagen. I’ll include the formula. Maybe suggest test procedures for verification. We can set it to broadcast constantly, wherever we go. Anybody who hears it can produce the immunity drug for themselves.
“God, Morn, I’ve dreamed of doing something like this. I still can’t believe it’s happening. It’s going to make everything else worthwhile.”
“But not now” Morn cut in fiercely. Outrage bristled in her voice. “Vector, I need you! That can wait. This can’t.”
The intercom was silent long enough to make Mikka think that Vector would refuse. Then the tiny speaker crackled.
“All right. I’m on my way. Where are you?”
“Mikka’s cabin.”
At once Morn silenced the pickup.
Mikka clung to a handgrip. After a moment she realized that she was gasping. She couldn’t think; didn’t understand—Somehow Morn’s growing anger seemed to consume all the air in the cabin.
A faint glitter that might have been hope showed in Ciro’s gaze. “What can Vector do?” he asked hesitantly.
Morn faced him as if she were resisting an impulse to shout. “Damn it, Ciro, what do you think antimutagens are for! I don’t know if this can work. An immunity drug isn’t the same as an antidote. It’s supposed to be in your system before you get the mutagen. I don’t know what happens if the mutagen is already there. But,” she promised, “we are going to find out. It is by God worth a try.”
Ciro stared at her, then put his hands over his eyes as if he were afraid to think that she might be right.
To her chagrin, Mikka found that she couldn’t keep up; couldn’t bounce from despair to hope like this. Her torn emotions refused. She needed to do something to contain her turm
oil. So that she wouldn’t start to scream again, she thrust herself toward the door and keyed it open in case Vector didn’t know which was her cabin.
She caught him outside with his hand raised to knock.
Vehemently—she didn’t care how vehemently—she grabbed his shipsuit and swung him through the doorway, then closed the door after him.
Taken by surprise, he flapped his arms in a wasted effort to manage his trajectory. At once, however, Morn moved to help him stop; put both hands on his shoulders to steady him—and herself.
His blue eyes shone: he was as close to excitement as Mikka had ever seen him. But he’d always been a man who knew how to concentrate. As soon as he saw Morn’s face, and Ciro’s, and Mikka’s, he put his personal eagerness aside.
Calmly he asked, “What’s wrong? How can I help?”
Morn took a deep breath, held it for a moment as if she needed time to marshal her courage. Then she gave Vector a quick summary of Ciro’s story.
When she was done, she added, “You know more about mutagens than the rest of us—and antimutagens. Tell us what to do.”
As an engineer, Vector Shaheed may have been only competent. In other areas, however, he was considerably more than that. A slight frown creased his round face—a mild acknowledgment of Ciro’s plight—but he knew how to respond.
“First things first,” he told Ciro in a blunt, avuncular tone: the tone of a man who saw no reason to panic. “Don’t stop taking that antidote. It may be temporary, but it gives us time.
“By the way, how much time do we have?”
Mikka hardly understood him; she was full of chaos and doom. But Ciro faced Vector’s question as squarely as he could. Although his larynx bobbed convulsively, he was able to say, “She gave me enough pills for twelve hours. I’m due for another one in”—he flicked a glance at the cabin chronometer—“nine minutes.” From a pocket of his shipsuit, he brought out a small vial. “This is all I have left.”
Vector nodded. “That should be enough.” Without hesitation he turned toward the door. “I need a hypo. I’ll be right back.”