Keeping her back to Mikka, facing only Nick, she replied scornfully, “I’m not suicidal. If I wanted to betray you, I wouldn’t put myself in this position. As soon as Security arrested him”—despite her anger, she still couldn’t say Angus’ name aloud—“I would have flagged a guard and told him not to let you leave Station. Then I would have had all the time I needed to talk to Security. Safely. You and Security’s traitor would have been arrested.”
Her answer silenced the command second, but it didn’t shift Nick’s study of her. Again he said, “So you see our problem.”
“No.” Her fear and fury continued to grow; she could barely refrain from shouting. “I’m not a mind reader. I don’t know what problems you’ve got unless you tell me.
“My problem is figuring out what you want a cop for.”
When Morn said that, Lind let out a satirical chuckle, and the woman at the targ board snorted “Crap.”
Nick threw back his head and laughed.
“Morn,” Vector remarked like a man discussing routine traffic trajectories, “if you think about it, you’ll understand why we need to know what made you stay with Captain Thermopyle.”
“You’re a cop.” Mikka’s tone was soft and vicious. “He’s a pirate and a butcher—he’s slime.” She might have been quoting Nick. “But you crewed for him. You stayed with him when he got to Station. You backed him against Security. The only thing you did against him was unseal his hatches.
“If you don’t tell us why, we’re going to put you in an ejection pod and jettison you back toward Com-Mine. Let them have you, and good riddance.”
Morn could feel the hostility on the bridge building against her. In an unexpected way, it reassured her. Mikka and the others wanted to uncover her secrets: therefore her secrets were still hidden. She couldn’t imagine why that might be true, but she staked herself on it.
“I told you,” she said, speaking to Nick, always speaking to Nick. “Starmaster was wrecked. I was going to die out there. He found me—and he needed crew. So I made a deal with him. To save my life. I gave him immunity—as much immunity as I had. Starmaster’s captain was my father. Half the crew was my family. I didn’t want to die in their tomb.”
“If that were true,” Mikka countered harshly, “you would have left him as soon as you reached Com-Mine.”
“Jettison her,” Carmel pronounced. “We don’t need this.”
The large, misshapen man at the data console spoke for the first time. In an unexpectedly timid voice, as if he were asking a question, he said, “I agree. If she stays, she’s going to cause trouble.”
Nick glanced around the bridge, then returned his gaze to Morn. As if he were still laughing inside, he said, “You see? You’re simply going to have to do better.
“And don’t tell me”—she heard the threat in his tone—“you did it because of your passion for me. I’ve heard that before. Women like that are fun to play with on station. I don’t take them into space with me.”
Morn was cornered. But nobody had mentioned the zone implant control yet. And she’d spent hours trying to prepare herself for this. She went on fighting.
“You’re right,” she said, not weakly, not as if she were defeated, but angrily, exposing as much of her outrage as she dared. “He knew something about me you don’t.
“He knew I wrecked Starmaster.”
Except for the faint hum of air-scrubbers and the low pressure of thrust through the hull, the bridge was silent.
She didn’t say any more until Nick drawled, “Now why in hell would you do a thing like that?”
Morn glared straight at him. “Because I’ve got gap-sickness.”
That startled him. She could see the blood drain from his scars: he turned as still and ominous as a ready gun. Someone she didn’t know muttered a curse. Mikka Vasaczk drew a hissing breath; Vector watched her solemnly.
“It comes on under heavy g.” The memory—and the fact that she was forced to admit it—filled her with bitterness; but she used gall and self-loathing to focus her anger. “It’s like a commandment, I don’t seem to have any choice about it. It makes me engage self-destruct. I would be dead myself, but my father managed to abort part of the sequence. Only thrust blew—the gap drive didn’t. The auxiliary bridge held. I was the only one there.
“I did the same thing when Bright Beauty went after you. But he knew about the problem—he stopped me in time.
“That’s why I stayed with him. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. If I can’t do heavy g, I’m finished as a cop. Until I destructed Starmaster, I could have hoped for a station job, UMCPHQ maybe. Now the only thing I can hope for is that they’ll give me a zone implant to keep me under control.
“Do you want a zone implant?” she demanded. “Do you want somebody to hit buttons that turn you on and off? I don’t. So I let him rescue me. I stayed with him. I promised not to turn him in. I backed him up when he needed it. And I came to you when I got the chance because”—she nearly choked on the recollection—“because he is what he is. And you’d already beaten him. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You bitch!” Lind was practically frothing; his walleye rolled. “What makes you think we want a gap-sick crazy here?
“Jettison her!” he shouted at Nick. “Blast her back at Com-Mine. Let them have her—let her try her sickness on them. She’s a time bomb.”
“She’ll paralyze us,” Mikka put in. “We can’t trust the gap drive. With her aboard, we can’t trust thrust, either. We won’t be able to maneuver at all—we’ll be a sitting target for anybody with ambitions against us.”
“Mikka’s right,” asserted Carmel. “Com-Mine wants her. If she’s gap-sick, that’s all the excuse we need to give them what they want.”
“That’s enough,” Nick said before anyone else could object. He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone demanded compliance. “You aren’t thinking. You’re crazy yourself, Lind—that’s why you hate crazies so much. Carmel, you’ve argued against every risky decision we’ve ever made. Sometimes you’re so cautious you blind yourself. And you—” He flicked his attention like the end of a whip at Mikka. “You’re just jealous.
“There are a couple of interesting points here you seem to have missed,” he went on more nonchalantly. “The first is that Captain Thermo-pile must have known how to handle her problem, or else he wouldn’t have kept her. She would have been too dangerous. If he could do it, we might find it worth our while to try the same thing.
“The other is that she must have a reason for telling us all this.
“Personally,” he concluded, studying Morn with his scars pale as if he’d never been hungry for her, and never would be, “I would like to know what it is.”
Morn tasted bile and triumph. No one had mentioned the zone implant control. That meant Com-Mine Security hadn’t mentioned it when they demanded her return—and nobody aboard Captain’s Fancy had guessed the truth. Not even Nick.
As long as her fundamental secret remained safe, she could answer the challenges thrown at her.
“Actually,” she replied with more steadiness than she’d felt for days, “I’m not hard to handle. As far as I can determine”—she tried to sound as clinical as she could—“my gap-sickness is specific to self-destruct sequences. I don’t feel driven to hurt myself or attack anyone else. And it passes pretty quickly when g eases. You can lock me in my cabin. Or you can do what he did—you can dope me up with cat until the ship is safe. The rest of the time, there’s nothing to worry about. I might even be useful.
“I told you about it”—she tightened her grip on herself and concealed her triumph with bitterness—“because I think I can trust you. You weren’t planning to send me back when you called me to the bridge, and you aren’t going to send me back now. Unless I do something to make you change your mind—like hiding a problem that could be a danger to you.
“I think there’s a reason you took me away from Security, and it doesn’t have anything to do with
”—she fumbled because she couldn’t say the right words—“with me.” With sex or hunger. “It has to do with the fact that I’m UMCP.”
“Go on,” Nick remarked. His smile had recovered its fierceness. “Crazy or not, you’re as entertaining as hell.”
“You’re a pirate,” she answered boldly. “Your reputation is better than his, and after the things he did to me I’m sure the difference is justified—but you’re still a pirate. And you knew I was a cop. You knew that before you rescued me.
“So what kind of pirate deliberately takes a cop on board? As long as I’m here, I’m a danger to you. I can testify to any crime you commit. Eventually you’ll have to kill me. And even that can get you in trouble. Everybody knows you took me. If I end up dead, you’ll have to account for it the next time you dock anywhere in human space.
“Why would you put yourself in that position?”
“I give up.” Nick flashed his smile around the bridge. “Why?”
Without hesitation she replied, “I can only think of two reasons. One is that you’re a pirate. Whether you admit it or not, that means you do business with forbidden space. And that means I’m valuable to you. You can make quite a deal for me. If you can hand over a cop with her brain intact, you’ll end up so rich you’ll never have to do anything illegal again.
“If that’s true, you’ve obviously got no intention of returning me to Com-Mine. Getting me here was the whole point of framing him.
“But there’s a problem with that explanation. If you were planning to hand me over to forbidden space, you wouldn’t be traveling this slow, no matter what I wanted. You wouldn’t give Security time to reconsider your deal—you wouldn’t take the risk that they might change their minds and come after you. You would be using every kilo of thrust this ship has. You might even be willing to gamble on tach.
“That leaves only one other possibility.”
“Are you sure you want to go on?” Nick asked conversationally. “You’ve probably said enough. I like your first explanation fine. After all, I must want to protect my ‘connection’ in Security. Assuming I really have one. The more I look like I’m running, the worse things look for him. Or her.”
Morn didn’t stop. If he was warning her, she ignored it. “If you’re the kind of man who sells human beings to forbidden space,” she retorted, “you probably don’t care what happens to your connection. I’m worth losing a traitor or two for.
“I like my second explanation better.
“Maybe,” she said, “you’re a pirate—and maybe you aren’t. Maybe your reputation is fake, and piracy is just cover. Maybe you rescued me because you’re under orders.
“It’s common knowledge that Data Acquisition is a euphemism for sabotage and trickery. I’m Enforcement Division—I don’t know anything about DA. But that’s Hashi Lebwohl’s department. I’ve heard rumors about him.” In fact, in the Academy she’d heard any number of rumors about Hashi Lebwohl. “He likes spies. He likes operatives who have access to bootleg smelters and shipyards and maybe access to forbidden space.
“Maybe you work for him.”
A low voice said contemptuously, “Shit.” No one else interrupted her.
“That would explain how you were able to get what you wanted from Security—why they trusted you with Station supplies, why they let you go, why they let you have me.
“In which case, maybe you took me so you can turn me over to DA—so they can find out what happened to Starmaster, or what I know about Bright Beauty.” She’d accused Com-Mine Station of sabotaging Starmaster. If that report reached UMCPHQ, Min Donner—or possibly Hashi Lebwohl—might not trust Security enough to leave Morn at Com-Mine. “But you had to do it in a way that didn’t blow your cover—and wouldn’t ruin the case against him. If anyone ever found out he was arrested for a crime fabricated by the UMCP, he would be released, and the UMCP would lose credibility, authority.”
Morn herself was dismayed by the concept. Almost from birth, her idea of the UMCP had included incorruptible honesty; integrity instead of treachery. But when she engaged Starmaster’s self-destruct, she’d blown herself into a completely different set of presuppositions and exigencies.
Grimly she concluded, “Your connection in Security is a UMCP agent. You aren’t going to send me back to Com-Mine because you don’t want me to tell anybody there the truth.”
By the time she stopped, Nick was no longer looking at her. He’d fallen into a reverie, gazing at the blank screens as if he didn’t see them. The muscles of his face relaxed; they were almost slack, almost vulnerable, as they’d been when he slept. Nobody said anything, and Morn didn’t glance around. She kept her attention on Nick.
Then Vector Shaheed broke the silence. “She’s got you, Nick,” he said calmly. “If you send her back now, she’ll be convinced you aren’t either a pirate or a cop. Your reputation will be ruined. You’ll probably cease to exist. Hell, we’ll all probably cease to exist.”
Somebody above Morn muttered, “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” She ignored him.
Darkness flushed into Nick’s scars as he glared at the engineer, but he didn’t retort. Instead he held Vector’s gaze until it became obvious that Vector wasn’t going to look down. Then Nick faced Morn again.
He wasn’t smiling now. His expression was intense and congested, as if she’d thwarted or exposed him in some way. His threats were plain in his voice as he said, “Give me your id tag. I can tell them you aren’t coming back, but if I don’t give them your codes they’ll chase us for sure.”
Involuntarily Morn winced a little. Nick’s manner scared her—and she didn’t want to give up her tag. Even Angus had let her keep that much of her identity. Without it, she would never be able to use a UMCP—or Security—computer or communications network again. Even ED might not believe that she was Morn Hyland, Captain Davies Hyland’s daughter.
“Wouldn’t it be better if I did that?” she offered, trying not to sound frightened. “I know verification codes they can’t argue with. And if they run a scan on my voice, they’ll have proof I’m doing my own talking.”
Fortunately Nick didn’t have to think long about her suggestion. After a couple of moments he nodded once, stiffly.
“In that case,” she went on, in a hurry to finish before she ran out of adrenaline and began to shake again, “I need to know what they want, what they think I’ve got—why they want me back.”
Behind his threats Nick’s tone was sulky. “Lind, give us playback.”
Lind knew his captain well enough to obey quickly. He danced fingertips across his console, and a flat voice slightly frayed by distance came over the bridge speakers.
Although she had reason to think she was safe, Morn listened in dread, irrationally afraid to hear words that would doom her.
The voice identified itself by name, position, and authorization code: apparently it belonged to Milos Taverner, deputy chief of Com-Mine Station Security. It specified Captain’s Fancy by name and registration. Then it said:
“Captain Succorso, you have a woman aboard, UMCP Ensign Morn Hyland, active assignment UMCP destroyer Starmaster. She has evidence material to our case against Angus Thermopyle, Captain and owner, Bright Beauty.”
For completeness, the voice cited Bright Beauty’s registration.
“Bright Beauty’s datacore may have been altered. Datacore evidence against Captain Thermopyle is inadequate. We suspect a memory chip was removed. We suspect Morn Hyland has it in her possession.
“Return Ensign Hyland to Station for questioning.
“Acknowledge.
“Repeat.”
The voice began again at the beginning. Lind silenced it.
“Is that true?” Nick demanded before Morn had a chance to gauge the scale of her reprieve. “Are you still working for him? Is he using you to smuggle the evidence away, so he can’t be convicted?”
Morn could hardly think. A reprieve. A gift. Security didn’t know about the zone implant control
. Nobody knew. Her secret was safe.
“No,” she replied, forcing herself to talk in order to conceal her relief. “He never let me near his datacore. He didn’t give me anything. If he pulled a chip,” which ought to be inconceivable—not physically difficult, of course, but effectively useless—since it was impossible to know which chip contained what data, in addition to which the removal of a chip could always be detected, and removing a chip was enough of a crime to cost Angus his license to own and operate Bright Beauty, “he must have disposed of it himself.”
“They can prove that themselves,” Vector observed unnecessarily. “They don’t need Morn’s testimony.” After a pause he added, “There’s no other way to tamper with a datacore. That’s the whole point of having them. If what they record could be changed, they wouldn’t be good for anything.”
“So they’re lying.” Carmel had a penchant for assertive statements. “They have some other reason for wanting her back.”
Unexpectedly Mikka put in, “No. That’s too risky. She’s UMCP. They can’t silence her. If we took her back, and she found out they were lying, they would be in shit up to their eyebrows. The tampering must be real. They just don’t know how it was done yet. They think maybe she can tell them.”
“Or maybe,” Morn said to Nick, so giddy with relief that she was willing to take risks, “this is a smoke screen. Your connection knows you won’t take me back. He can say anything he wants. He’s trying to cover his ass.”
Nick aimed a black glance at her, then looked away. After a moment, he started to laugh harshly. “That fucking bastard,” he said in grudging admiration. “If I knew how to tamper with my datacore, we would all be safe forever. And rich. We could make enough credit selling that secret to buy our own station.”
Before anyone else ventured an opinion, he pointed Morn toward communications and commanded Lind, “Record her. If we like what she says, we’ll send it.”
Still obeying promptly, Lind got his console ready.
Sustained by her reprieve, Morn walked the curve of the bridge to Lind’s post. He ignored her, kept his eyes on his hands, as she lifted her id tag over her head and plugged it into his board. There, just for a second, she hesitated. She was taking a dangerous step: as soon as she said her verification code, Nick would have it; he could use it and her tag however he wished. She would be that much more isolated, that much more exposed to him and his crew.