She sat as still as her shivers and the fear storming through her permitted. Transfixed, she studied the spot on her forearm where the mutagen had been injected as if it were venomous; as if the wound was made by a fang.
A breathing mask protected her lungs against the mordant air: that was her only defense. The Amnion hadn’t given her anything to soften her terror, or muffle the violence of the change. Of course not. They had no reason to: here, in the section of Billingate which they had built for themselves, the concept of compassion was as alien as the Amnion themselves. They lacked the psychological, the societal, perhaps even the genetic tools to think in such terms. From their point of view, what they imposed on her was no doubt profoundly good. It satisfied the ribonucleic imperative which shaped their purposes. So of course they did nothing to make her plight easier. They wanted to study her distress as well as her transformation as accurately as possible, in order to refine their methods accordingly.
Where had they gone wrong with Marc Vestabule? Why was it that they could alter human beings entirely, but not by increments? What element of the human mind—or genetic code—made necessary this all-or-nothing sense of identity? Why were the Amnion unable to master the brain without changing the body?
When they learned the answer to this question, they would be able to create Amnion that could pass as human beings.
Perhaps they could discover the secret by studying Morn as she changed.
Staring at the sore red injury on her forearm, Morn waited to discover the secret for herself.
How bad would it be, when her genetic abhorrence met its ruin—when her cellular being was blasted apart and made new? Would she be afraid enough to go mad at the crucial moment? Was her fear itself her last defense? Was terror her sole protection against becoming the most effective traitor possible, the most useful imaginable weapon against her own species?
And was that the only mystery which gave her human life—or any form of life—its uniqueness in the wide universe? If an Amnioni were set in this chair and subjected to a mutagen which would alter its essential being, would the creature feel the same way she did? Or did the chemistry of alien nuclear identity bring with it other defenses, other mysteries?
Such questions obsessed her because she had no answer for the one that really mattered.
Was Nick’s immunity drug going to work?
If it failed, she had nothing left to hope for except that fear would destroy her mind before she knew what she had become.
On the other hand, if the drug worked she would be no better off. Not really. She would gain only a little time. The Amnion would inevitably notice that the change didn’t take place on schedule. Then, because they were careful—and wanted to learn—they would draw some of her blood and test it in order to determine why the mutagen had failed. They might or might not allow her an opportunity to swallow another of the capsules hidden deep in the pocket of her shipsuit. In the end, that was irrelevant. If this facility lacked the resources for refining new mutagens, her humanity might be prolonged for a while; but that possibility was ultimately irrelevant as well. The significant, the damning fact was that the enemies of her kind would learn from her the secret of the immunity drug. By stealing these capsules from Nick’s cabin, she had made certain that the Amnion would gain the knowledge they needed to counteract the drug.
To keep herself whole for a few more hours—a day or two at best, if neither this facility nor the warships were equipped to design new mutagens—she’d betrayed her entire species.
She didn’t care, did she? Not now: not here. How could she? At any moment the red patch on her forearm might swell and suppurate, carrying a change as dramatic as a volcanic eruption to every cell in her body. The UMCP had betrayed humankind long before she did. Whether the Amnion learned about it or not, the drug had already been withheld from the men and women who needed it most. Her own treachery only completed the job begun by people who had sworn to protect the human race.
And in the meantime it might gain her a few more hours.
She looked no further ahead than that. Nick Succorso had deprived her of any larger future; he’d cost her everything except the immediate crisis. Deflecting Davies’ ejection pod from Tranquil Hegemony to Billingate hadn’t solved anything: she knew that. It had simply been the best she could do.
Gain a few more hours.
By the same token, stealing a few of Nick’s capsules had also been simply the best she could do. When she’d stuffed a little wadding into the bottom of his vial so that the absence of six or eight capsules wouldn’t be too obvious, her sole intent had been to prevent him from noticing the theft in time to stop her. And when she’d questioned him about his dealings with UMCPHQ, she’d wanted nothing more than to understand the scale of the corruption which engulfed her. She had no other goals.
Her only alternative was to give up—and she wasn’t going to do that.
Not while Nick was still alive.
Not while he and people like him—the UMCP—remained free to barter her son and her species for their own purposes.
Her family had taught her convictions which she couldn’t set aside without an abrogation of identity as profound in its own way as anything the Amnion might do to her.
Her family had also taught her how to hold a grudge.
So she stared at the small red pain on her forearm and waited while fear stormed through her. Her nerves were strung so tight that she shivered as if she were feverish—as if her body were fighting frenetically to fend off an organic invasion.
Sweat dribbled like saliva from the edges of the breathing mask. The mask itself felt stifling over her mouth; claustrophobic. If she could have looked at her own face, she might not have recognized herself. Bruises and emotional starvation distorted her beauty; her eyes were as deep and fatal as wounds; her hair straggled wildly, as damaged and unkempt as a nerve juice addict’s.
Yet within her an essential passion burned as if it were unquenchable. Nothing short of an absolute transformation could snuff it out.
For perhaps the first time since Nick had taken the control to her zone implant, she didn’t miss it. With its artificial strength, she could have escaped the Amnion by committing neural suicide. Or she could have spared herself this ordeal of dread and horror by muffling her emotions; re-creating the state of psychic numbness which had enabled her to endure her son’s birth.
She didn’t want to die, however. And she believed that anything which softened her terror would help the Amnion get what they desired out of her.
She had come to a place inside herself where neither death nor imposed capabilities and addiction were as important as the struggle to keep her humanity intact. Was fear the defining mystery of life? Then let her be afraid. That was preferable to any kind of surrender.
Feverish shivers built into a shudder; tremors shook her muscles as if the convulsion had begun. She might have been suffocating on her own CO2. For a moment she was so frightened that she seemed to see the red patch on her skin swelling like an infection. It would suppurate and burst; mutagenic pus would seep from the wound, gnawing at her flesh and her DNA until she screamed and went wild in stark simple revulsion; until her horror became as vast as the void between the stars, and all things died—
But then the shudder passed. Her vision cleared, and she saw the truth. The redness around the place where the mutagen had been injected was fading. Her skin was as pallid as the underlying bones—and as whole.
In the Academy, she’d been told what to expect from Amnion mutagens. They were supposed to be faster than this; swift as well as violent.
Maybe the immunity drug was working.
What had Nick told her?
It’s not an organic immunity. It’s more like a poison—or a binder. It ties up mutagens until they’re inert. Then they get flushed out—along with the drug.
The immunity is effective for about four hours.
Maybe she was going to live.
For a while longer.
&nb
sp; And it was possible that the Amnion sector of Billingate lacked the resources to design new mutagens which could overcome the drug. It was possible that she would be able to take another capsule before her enemies tried her again. If she kept track of the time. If she did what Nick had once done: if she held a capsule in her mouth and didn’t bite down on it until after her blood was drawn. And if the Amnion failed to guess how her immunity had been accomplished.
When she allowed herself to think that, flashes of dopamine ran through her blood like little epiphanies; bits of hope. Her breathing shuddered inside the mask as if she were about to faint.
A few more hours.
That was all she asked.
Please.
ANGUS
is tongue hurt as acutely as his zone implants allowed: it should have hurt much worse. He had shit and sweat ground into his blisters. Every inhalation stank; his whole mouth tasted like ash and excrement.
As he took Trumpet into Billingate, Angus Thermopyle fought the fragmentation imposed on him by his welding; did what he could to stay sane.
Hashi Lebwohl had made him schizophrenic, as dissociated as a multi-tasking computer. What was left of his volition handled the details of approach to Thanatos Minor. Databases fed him information indiscriminately, whether he asked for it or not: facts about Trumpet; UMCP speculations concerning the Bill and Billingate; classification on the Amnion warships; charges against the other illegals in the vicinity; descriptions of fusion generator disasters. At the same time preprogrammed exigencies monitored and sifted everything Milos said and did; recorded every byte of Milos’ complex transmissions and labored to decode it.
Such things were abstract. He did them without choosing them; occasionally without understanding them.
Other pieces were more personal.
With every inch of his skin from the crown of his skull to the soles of his feet, he felt Trumpet alive around him: capable of anything; built full of possibilities and surprises. Schizophrenic with a vengeance, he approached the cold rock of Thanatos Minor almost gleefully, reveling in the power of his ship, and in his ability to command her. His tactile pleasure was so acute that his palms itched as if they could remember the time before his hands had been cut open to install his lasers. An emotion like joy flushed across his face as he tapped keys, tested systems, listened to servos.
Then it fell into the cracks between the pieces of himself, the fragmentation gaps, and was lost.
From out of the cracks came crying instances of confusion like kids abandoned in their cribs.
Why did he have to look at all this stuff about fusion generators? According to his databases, some of these generators used magnetic containment vessels for the forces they unleashed; and some of those bled gravitically, increasing the effective mass of bodies around them. He knew that already. Why did he have to review it now?
And what in hell was Warden Dios up to?
We’ve committed a crime against your soul.
What the fuck did that mean? Why had Dios switched his datacore? Who was the UMCP director trying to betray now?
It’s got to stop.
More fragments—
Randomly among them, like electrons bereft of their nuclei, ran small bursts of fury; hints of violence as precise and pure as the noradrenaline in his synapses—and as meaningless as the unguessable physics of tach. An organic human brain was the wrong tool for the work he did. Only expert programming and pervasive zone implants enabled him to go on multi-tasking when he should have been flung apart like a ship in an explosive decompression.
It made no difference to his datacore whether he stayed sane or not. Machine requirements controlled him by electronic compulsion: madness or sanity meant nothing. Nevertheless he fought to hold the pieces of himself together.
He wanted the joy of running Trumpet.
He wanted to see Morn Hyland again.
He wanted revenge on Milos.
And Warden Dios had given him something to hope for.
We’ve committed a crime against your soul.
It’s got to stop.
Angus knew nothing about men who said such things. As far as he could tell, they didn’t exist. He had to assume that Dios was driven by malice, just like everybody else.
Nevertheless he considered it possible, just barely conceivable, that he wasn’t the target of Dios’ malice. Not this time. Dios’ plotting might be aimed at someone else. In which case everything might change when the differences between his datacore and Lebwohl’s began to make themselves felt.
Screams Angus couldn’t utter rang in his head: screams of rage and frustration, loss and hope; the screams of a small boy being tortured in his crib.
They kept him from losing his mind. On a level his zone implants couldn’t reach, those voiceless cries focused his hard-earned cunning and his malign intelligence, his hate and his strange expertise, in a struggle to bridge the gaps between the pieces of himself.
Because he lacked the power to vary Trumpet’s preordained course, or to stifle the databases he didn’t want, he concentrated on his second.
Prewritten commands required him to record everything Milos said and did. Apparently Lebwohl and Dios didn’t trust the former deputy chief of Com-Mine Station Security. Fine. Neither did Angus. But his distrust—no, his visceral and compulsory loathing—was both more global and more specific. Lebwohl and Dios presumably suspected that Milos might betray Angus’ mission. Angus knew in his bones that Milos would go farther; much farther. Weeks of stun and starvation and abuse—not to mention the taste of nic and shit—had made Angus a more searching judge of Milos’ character than any cop.
He wanted to know everything about Milos because he intended to castrate and then disembowel his second with his bare hands, and any fact he could glean, any hint of intention or weakness, was a tool which might help him reach his goal.
In this way, he fought to make himself whole.
Trumpet was still six hours out of dock when Milos finished his communications. The nic dangling from his mouth disguised his smugness; the characteristic mottling on his scalp and the uncharacteristic stains on his shipsuit hid it. Nevertheless Angus felt it pour off his second like an electromagnetic aura. He knew Milos intimately, understood every shade of his second’s stolid fastidiousness. Milos was smug. The things he did to humiliate Angus fed an old hunger. And his transmissions—tight-beamed and coded for secrecy—had given him a sense of power which he probably thought didn’t show.
One part of Angus glowered at this; he ached to strip it from Milos’ bones. Another worked with mechanical efficiency to decipher those messages. Yet another calibrated the distance to Milos’ g-seat and the distance to Billingate, measuring possibilities. And another waited—
Trailing smoke, Milos lifted himself from his seat; he bobbed in the absence of g. “I need rest,” he said as if he weren’t talking to Angus. “Let me know if anything changes, Joshua.”
Like a badly inflated balloon, he floated toward the companionway which gave access to the rest of the ship.
Angus felt an almost tangible relief as Milos left the bridge. Now maybe he could concentrate on cracking those codes.
The idea that he could improve on—or even affect—the efforts of his computer was an illusion, however. His microprocessor ran at its own speeds, for its own reasons. And it made other decisions for him as well. Despite his fragmented fury and need, he found himself growing unexpectedly sleepy. Apparently his programming had decided that he, too, needed rest.
Helpless to do anything else, he leaned his head back against the g-seat and drifted into the dark interface between his mind and the machinery which ruled it.
As he lost consciousness, he swore viciously at Hashi Lebwohl; but that changed nothing.
If he dreamed, his datacore took no notice of it.
He came back to wakefulness four hours later, as alert as if he’d never been away. As soon as he opened his eyes, he realized with an odd sense of dislocation that
he knew everything that had happened while he slept. Traffic information from Billingate; Trumpet’s relative position; the movements of other ships: all were recorded—and accessible. When he reviewed the data, he half expected to learn that he’d spoken to Operations while he slept; that his programming controlled him so perfectly that it didn’t need him to be conscious at all. However, his recordings showed that Trumpet had been entirely passive, apart from her automatic responses to Billingate’s approach protocols.
Ignoring the sensation that he existed simultaneously in several different places across the gap, Angus began preparing himself for the state of affairs which awaited him on Thanatos Minor.
Operations didn’t broadcast political bulletins, of course; but Angus felt sure that the shipyard was awash in plots and counterplots. This was apparent from the presence of Captain’s Fancy in one of the visitor’s berths and Tranquil Hegemony over in the alien sector, as well as from the fact that another Amnion “defensive,” Calm Horizons, had parked herself in prime firing range over the installation. Captain Nick Sheepfucker had come here from the direction of Enablement, trailing two of the biggest hostiles Angus had ever seen. That implied covert agendas and conflicts—
—which in turn might make Angus’ mission a hell of a lot easier.
His datacore told him nothing about Captain’s Fancy. He only knew Morn Hyland was aboard because Dios had said so.
But he’d overheard Lebwohl tell Donner and Frik that his programming made no provision for Morn’s survival. That alone would have been enough to make him want her alive.
If he’d been in charge of his own actions, his position would have been more complex. Morn was potentially lethal to him: she had information which could wipe out his last hope. For that reason—among others which he didn’t want to think about because they were profoundly disturbing—he’d made a deal with her and kept it.
Left to himself, unwelded, what would he have wanted to do about her now? Kill her where she stood? Yes. Ask her to rejoin him? Yes! Beg her to believe that he’d kept faith with her as long as he could? Yes! and yes! again.