In that case, the UMCP had perpetrated an atrocity so colossal that it beggared her imagination; so profound that it altered the meaning of everything she’d ever valued or believed; so vile that it transformed the moral order of human space from civilization and ethics to butchery and rape, from Captain Davies Hyland to Angus Thermopyle.
Now what was she supposed to hope for? That Vector was lying? If so, she would never be able to prove it. And she would never be able to eradicate what he’d told her from her brain: it would always be there, tainting her thoughts, corrupting her as surely as forbidden space. No matter how much personal integrity her father—or she herself—had possessed, he and she may have been nothing more than tools in malign hands.
Alone in Captain’s Fancy’s galley, with a mug of cold coffee in front of her and nowhere to go, Morn Hyland spent an hour or two grieving for her father—and for everything he represented in her life. She’d only killed his body; and only because of an illness she hadn’t known about. Vector Shaheed had damaged his image, his memory.
That grief was necessary. Until it was done, she couldn’t summon enough anger to return to her cabin and the zone implant control.
CHAPTER 5
When she tried to return to her cabin, however, she discovered that she had a problem she hadn’t anticipated. Her black box was still on, transmitting sleep to the centers of the brain. As soon as she reentered the control’s range, she began to grow drowsy.
And her door lock was set to a five-second delay. Her zone implant had that much more time in which to overwhelm her.
Fool! she swore at herself. Fool. Her lack of foresight was going to ruin her. If she fell asleep before she could reach the box and switch it off, she would be unconscious until somebody rescued her again. Nick or his people would inevitably grow suspicious. And she couldn’t simply avoid her cabin. Nick would insist on taking her there for more sex.
In any case, she needed the control.
Too angry and desperate to hesitate, she retreated down the corridor until she reached the point where her zone implant let go of her. Then she headed for her cabin at a run.
Angus had taught her to do such things.
Key the lock.
Wait: five interminable seconds. Her urgency frayed away, and her self-command sank toward the bottom of a quagmire of helpless rest. By the time the door slid open, she was staggering, barely able to hold up her head, keep her eyes open.
Plunging forward, she hit the edge of the berth, thrust her hands under the mattress.
The control wasn’t there.
Yes, it was. She’d misjudged its position. When she hunted, her fingers touched it; grabbed it.
As she toppled to the floor, her thumb caught the button which canceled her implant’s emissions.
For several minutes she lay still, breathing hard while she drifted up out of panic and sleep. Then she resumed her quest for survival.
When Nick brought his hunger back to her cabin, she was busy experimenting with the zone implant control: training her fingers to reach the buttons she wanted; testing the effect of the control’s various functions.
Her door barely gave her enough warning. She was engrossed in trying to tune the zone implant subtly and accurately enough to speed up her brain, her ability to think, without making herself obviously hyperactive. Nevertheless a part of her mind was listening for the lock’s chime. Just in time she snapped off the control and thrust it deep in her pocket.
Nerves jangling from the stress of too many transitions, she turned to face the door.
Nick came in grinning, jaunty and relaxed. Nothing in his eyes, or in the suffused hue of his scars, suggested anger. Apparently he’d satisfied his desire for revenge and was willing to forget about it now.
That eased one of her many fears.
“Scan’s still clear,” he remarked as he relocked the door. “I’m pretty sure we aren’t being chased. If anybody wanted to catch us, they wouldn’t be this casual about it. We can afford to wait a while before we burn again.”
Morn did her best to smile at him. That was hard without the zone implant’s help. If anything, the nausea she tasted when she thought about his hunger was growing worse. Vector’s attack on the UMCP made everything worse. And the strain of jumping through synaptic hoops left her as ragged and drained as a long, bad hallucination.
Fortunately her hand was still in her pocket. Moving cautiously, her fingers found the buttons she needed.
“Maybe I was too tired to think straight last time,” he went on, grinning satyrically, “or maybe I’ve had so much on my mind since then that I don’t trust my own memory. But I could have sworn you’re the best woman I ever had.” His scars were so dark that they seemed to stand out from his face—three black welts angling under his right eye, two under his left. “I want to see if you can do that again.”
Morn swallowed hard because her throat was full of bile, and said in a husky whisper, “Try me.”
She engaged the zone implant control, took her hand out of her pocket. Then she unsealed her shipsuit and let it fall.
When he saw her naked, he breathed once, softly, “Morn.” Sweeping her into his arms, he bore her backward to the bunk.
This occasion was a reprise of the last one. He was the fooled artist, exalted by her unquenchable and misleading response: she was the false instrument, pretending it was his manhood which drove her wild. What they did together didn’t diverge from the template she’d established earlier until he’d expended his hunger in a climax so poignant that it brought tears to his eyes.
This time, however, he didn’t fall asleep afterward. Instead he lay beside her and held her tightly in his arms while his breathing slowed and his tears dried on his scars. At last he murmured at her ear, “I was right.” His tone was almost tender. “There’s nobody like you. No woman has ever wanted me enough to give herself up like that.”
“Nick,” she replied, “Nick,” rubbing her breasts against him and caressing his penis because the control was still on and he’d left her short of the neural apotheosis which would have cauterized her brain, brought her true desire and rage to an end.
His tone was almost tender: his smile was almost fond. “If I didn’t know better,” he told her, “you might make me believe there really is such a thing as love.”
She began to grow frantic. Until he was ready to let her get dressed, she couldn’t reach the zone implant control. It was still in the pocket of her shipsuit. So she took the risk of pushing him too far: even though he was sated, she ran her mouth down his belly and began to lick him between his legs.
Her ploy worked. Grinning again, he said, “Later,” and rolled off the bunk.
She was afraid he wouldn’t leave. If he didn’t—if he lingered for any reason—she might expose herself. She couldn’t suppress the passion which the zone implant imposed on her.
Fortunately he didn’t linger. Perhaps he didn’t yet trust her enough to want her for anything more than sex. As he slipped back into his shipsuit, he said, “We’re going to burn for two more hours. That’ll be about as fast as we can go and still have thrust left if we need to maneuver. Then we’ll be done with heavy g. We’ll all have time to relax.” At the door, he added, “Don’t let yourself get sick. You and I are going to do a lot of relaxing together.”
The moment he left, she flipped off the bunk, found the control, and canceled it.
This transition wasn’t as damaging as the last one. Just recently she’d learned how to vary the intensity of the zone implant’s functions. Now she engaged rest at a low level to soften her neural distress.
A short time later the bridge crew gave her an acceleration alert. When Captain’s Fancy stopped internal g, she sealed herself in her blankets and set the control’s timer for two hours and ten minutes. As soon as she felt thrust ignite through the hull, she put herself to sleep.
• • •
She passed that crisis as well.
She might conceivably have pa
ssed it without the zone implant. She had no way of knowing exactly how much g was required to trigger her gap-sickness. Any thrust drive was ruled by the law of diminishing returns: the faster Captain’s Fancy went, the smaller became the difference between her velocity and the pressure of her thrusters; therefore the same amount of thrust produced steadily less acceleration, until velocity and pressure achieved a state of balance. After that the drive was just a waste of fuel: Captain’s Fancy could coast as fast without it. In consequence the second period of burn was inherently less stressful than the first.
If Morn had stayed awake, she might have learned what her own limits were.
When the control timer clicked off, however, and she drifted back to consciousness, she was glad she hadn’t risked the experiment. Her body ached as if she suffered the same arthritis which stiffened Vector Shaheed, and her head felt sodden and sore, like the aftermath of being drunk. She didn’t believe she could have stayed sane without her zone implant’s protection.
The rest of Captain’s Fancy’s people experienced a completely different kind of relief.
They’d escaped Com-Mine Station without additional damage. They were done with the ordeal of heavy g for the foreseeable future. And they were almost certainly not going to encounter any other ships out here, not traveling at space-normal speeds this far from Station—a distance too small for gap drives, but rapidly becoming too great for any ordinary traffic that relied on thrust.
To all appearances, they were safe.
Of course, there was always the danger that a pursuit ship would attempt a blink crossing. Nick’s people had performed that maneuver themselves: they knew it was possible. But any pursuer who went into tach to close the distance was in for a surprise. Captain’s Fancy had already veered far off any trajectory Station could have plotted for her; she was veering farther all the time. Directional thrust sank its teeth into the vacuum steadily, bringing the ship by slow degrees around to her eventual heading.
Nick Succorso left only a skeleton crew on the bridge: command, scan, data. For the rest of the ship, he threw a party.
To celebrate the rescue of the lovely and astonishing Morn Hyland, he said. From the vile clutches of Captain Angus sheepfucker Thermo-pile, he explained. And to commemorate the start of the first vacation this ship and her crew had ever had, he added. Captain’s Fancy’s stores offered a large array of recreational drinks and drugs. Before long nearly everybody aboard was either drunk or stoned.
That kept some of Morn’s problems at bay for a while.
Carousal was only a stopgap, however; a way for men and women without zone implants to effect transition. When it was done, and its aftereffects had been endured, Nick’s people had to face a new difficulty.
They had to think of some way to pass the time.
They weren’t accustomed to long voyages. Captain’s Fancy was a gap ship, not an in-system hauler. In all probability, she’d never spent more than a month out of port since Nick first acquired her. Her crew had to think of some way to occupy themselves.
And most of them had volatile temperaments. They were illegals—better trained to fight for their lives than to fend off boredom. For them, a “vacation” without expensive sex or bars or intrigue or any of the other resources a station offered soon lost its attractions. A week of mood-altering substances, sleep, and mutual harassment was all right. After that trouble and tempers began to fester.
Once in a while, Morn heard sounds like blows in the halls. At awkward moments obscenities were piped throughout the ship, filling Captain’s Fancy with manic humor or fury. The people she encountered when Nick took her to the galley or the mess seemed to grow more slovenly, truculent, and damaged every day.
Toward the end of the second week, Vector Shaheed made an occasion to remark to Nick, “I think we’re about ready.”
Nick grinned confidently and shook his head. “Soon.”
Vector shrugged and went away.
A few days later Mikka Vasaczk took the risk of coming to the door while Nick was in Morn’s cabin. Nick left Morn naked and panting on the bunk to let his second in.
Mikka entered with a glare, but it wasn’t aimed at Morn. She had a dramatic bruise over one eye; the knuckles of both hands bled. Before Nick could speak, she snapped, “This has gone on long enough. That damn libidinous null-wave transmitter you installed as data third clubbed me with a spanner. She said I was keeping men away from her. Me. If half these people weren’t your abandoned lovers, we wouldn’t be having this problem.”
She scowled at Nick balefully.
He flashed a smile back at Morn, then said to Mikka, “All right. I guess they’re ready for a little discipline.
“Round them up. Use a gun if you have to. I don’t care if they’re asleep or dead drunk. I’ll talk to them in an hour. We’ll put them to work.”
His second didn’t salute or reply. Wheeling her hips, she turned and left.
When his people were assembled, Nick talked to them about their behavior and attitudes as if he found the whole subject secretly hilarious. Then he ordered a complete overhaul of every part of the frigate which could be worked on outside a shipyard.
“It’s going to take you at least a couple of months,” he concluded, “so you’d better get started.”
That solved the ship’s problems for a while. Not everyone accepted the order graciously, but even the angriest and most discontented crewmembers didn’t want to cross Nick Succorso. And soon they were too busy to cause any more trouble.
Unfortunately Morn’s difficulties were only made worse.
For one thing, Nick now had even more time to spend with her. The work could be left to Mikka’s supervision: he personally had nothing to do except test the limits of Morn’s responsiveness. There were days when he hardly left her cabin.
At first, he stayed with her only for sex and sleep: that was bad enough. But gradually, as he grew accustomed to her response—as he began to trust it—deeper hungers rose toward the surface in him. He started talking to her; as days passed into weeks, he talked to her more and more. She had to keep her black box concealed under the mattress and hope he didn’t find it: he left her so few opportunities to turn herself on and off that she was forced to perform most of her functions while he slept.
At times she sensed a need in him so deep that it was virtually bottomless—a need for his own efficacy or virility which could only be temporarily assuaged, never truly relieved. It showed not only in the way he went about sex, but in the way he talked. Apparently what he enjoyed most was repeating stories other people (so he said) told about him—stories of escapes and rescues, victories and acts of piracy; buccaneering stories, dramatic and brave. He never confirmed whether these stories were true, but his relish for them remained constant. He needed them—and his need drove him to her. In fact, the more she fed his hunger, the more compulsory it became: the more she listened to him and responded to him, the more he desired her.
She hated that: she hated him and everything he did. Sometimes her revulsion grew so acute that she lay awake while he slept, gritting her teeth and imagining how good it would feel to cut his guts open and pull his testicles out through his abdomen.
Nevertheless she suffered his presence; she burned with passion at his touch; she encouraged him to talk. She could see what the things he did meant.
She was becoming valuable to him.
Despite her increasing nausea, she protected her own survival by giving him what he wanted.
And his attachment did have one apparent benefit: as long as he was pleased with her, she had the freedom of the ship. As long as she was always available for him, she could go where she wished, look where she wished. Nobody stood in her way. Even Mikka Vasaczk left her strictly alone.
When she took advantage of her freedom, she found Vector immured in his engines, or Carmel and Lind up to their elbows in wiring; video showed her people in EVA suits crawling across Captain’s Fancy’s shell; lifts were regularly out of s
ervice while they were taken apart and put back together again by the second engineer, a gangling youth with unruly hair and bad skin whom everybody called Pup, even though he obviously hated it.
Familiarity with her surroundings wasn’t enough to ease her distress, however. She wanted something more.
She wanted access to the ship’s computers—to the logs; even to the datacore. From them she might be able to learn where she was, where she was going. She couldn’t test Vector’s story one way or the other, but she might find evidence of UMCP complicity in Angus’ arrest. She might be able to learn who Nick Succorso really was.
That knowledge might conceivably have helped her; but she didn’t get it. Because of the overhaul, the computers were always attended. Even the auxiliary bridge was never deserted, although it was tucked out of the way in the drive space, next to the console room where Vector monitored his engines.
In fact, her freedom of the ship was really a disadvantage. It didn’t provide her with what she wanted. On the other hand, it subjected her to a nerve-wracking series of encounters with Orn Vorbuld.
Vector’s badly repaired friend must have been watching her all the time: that was the only explanation she could think of for his ability to locate her whenever she was alone. He was the ship’s computer expert: he was probably capable of rigging the maintenance computer’s sensors to keep track of her. Eventually she began to hesitate when she had an opportunity to leave her cabin because she knew that, sooner or later, she would have to fend him off.
He seldom spoke to her; but he never let her pass without touching her. On the first occasion, he only repeated the caress he’d once given her hair. But on the second, he managed to rub a hand across her breasts before she moved out of his reach. On the third, he squeezed her breasts so hard that they ached for an hour afterward.