The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (3 page)

Min
made a quick gesture of refusal. “She’s your ship, Captain. We’re better off
with you in command. And I need rest.” In fact, she hadn’t slept for two days;
hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. “If you’ll detail someone to show me my quarters,
I’ll get out of your way.”

A touch
of gratitude softened Dolph’s face as he sat down again, but he didn’t thank
her. Automatically he hit keys on his board, checked his readouts. “Bosun will
take you.” The young man still stood by the aperture. “If you’ve got more
orders for us, better spell them out. We were busy before you came aboard, but
we’re a hell of a lot busier now.”

Min
didn’t hesitate. “I want to be on the other side of the gap in two hours,” she
answered promptly, “and in the belt in three. That means you’ll have to cut it
fine.”

She
knew the risks. If internal spin froze in the gap,
Punisher
might resume
tard half a hundred or half a million kilometres off course, tossed askew by
the interplay between inertia and hysteresis — almost certainly a fatal problem
near an asteroid belt. And if spin froze while
Punisher
navigated the
belt, some kind of collision would be inevitable. To protect herself the ship
would be forced to do almost everything without g. And she hadn’t been designed
for that. Her people weren’t used to it.

But
whatever Angus Thermopyle did or failed to do was out of Min’s control, beyond
her knowledge. Somewhere in the vicinity of Thanatos Minor, the chronometer was
running on a deadline which she didn’t know how to meet. That fact gave her a
greater sense of urgency than Warden’s actual orders did.

“As
soon as we hit normal space,” she continued, “I want communications on maximum
gain across all bandwidths. If it’s out there, I want us to hear it.

“Assuming
we don’t encounter any surprises, take us into the belt over on the far side —
say, ten thousand k from the border — and find some rock we can hide behind,
anything with enough magnetic resonance to confuse opposing scan. Wake me up
when something happens or when we’re in position, whichever comes first. I’ll
go into more detail then.”

Captain
Ubikwe lifted his head and bared his teeth, dismissing her. “Consider it done.”

Softly
but distinctly, so that everyone could hear her, she pronounced, “I do.
Otherwise I would have taken command.”

To
spare him the distraction of answering her, she turned away and let the bosun
guide her through the aperture back into the main body of the ship.

On the
way to her assigned quarters, she made a mental note to consider transferring
Dolph’s targ officer to her personal staff. She wanted people around her who
were willing to raise objections.

If
Warden had let Min raise enough objections, she might not be here now, dragging
a damaged ship with a battered crew across the gap on a mission which would
turn out to be either so useless or so critical that it should have been given
to someone else.

HASHI

H
ashi Lebwohl was not a dishonest man. It was more accurate to say
that he was a-honest. He liked facts; but truth had no moral imperatives for
him, no positive — or negative — valuation. It had its uses, just as facts had
theirs: it was a tool, more subtle than some, cruder than others.

It was
a fact of his position as the UMCP director of Data Acquisition that he was
expected to satisfy certain requirements. Warden Dios himself liked — indeed
demanded — facts. For that reason among others, Hashi respected his director.
Warden Dios made no effort to play fast and loose with reality, as the late and
unlamented Godsen Frik had done endemically; or as even Min Donner did, in ways
which she characteristically failed to recognise. Warden lived in the world of
the real. Under no circumstances would Hashi Lebwohl have hesitated to do his
job by supplying Warden with facts. And he was seldom reluctant to share his
understanding of the way in which facts linked with each other to form more
complex, less tangible realities.

On the
other hand, he felt no obligation whatsoever to tell Warden Dios — or anyone
else — the truth.

He
received his first hints of what had happened on Thanatos Minor long before
anyone else; quite some time before any other information reached UMCPHQ. Yet
he withheld the facts for nearly an hour. And he kept the truth entirely to
himself.

The
hints went to him, first, because they were coded exclusively for his use, and
second, because no one in UMCPHQ Communications knew that they had anything to
do with Billingate or Joshua. They were nothing more or less than flares from
DA operatives, and such messages were always routed straight to the DA director
the moment they came in.

The
earlier of these two signals was a cryptic transmission from Nick Succorso
aboard
Captain’s Fancy
. Initially Hashi didn’t mention it because it
contained no useful information. Later, however, he suppressed its contents
because they disturbed him.

If
you can get her, you bastard
, Nick had sent,
you
can have her. I don’t care what happens to you. You need me, but you blew it.
You deserve her.
Then, for no apparent reason, Nick had added,
Kazes are
such fun, don’t you think?

A pox
upon him, Hashi thought in bemusement. Curse his black soul. Her? Who?
You
can have her
. Was he talking about Morn Hyland? Was he deranged enough to
think that Joshua had been sent to Billingate to rescue her?

No. His
reference to kazes contradicted that inference. Clearly he meant to warn or
threaten Hashi concerning some woman who was involved with kazes. Yet that,
too, made no sense. What could Nick possibly know about events here? How could
he be aware that UMCPHQ and the GCES had suffered terrorist attacks?

Perhaps
the “her” he referred to was
Captain’s Fancy
herself? Perhaps he meant
to suggest that if Hashi or the UMCP made any attempt to interfere with
Captain’s
Fancy
the frigate would become a kaze aimed at UMCPHQ?

You
deserve her
.

“Deserve”
her?

You
need me, but you blew it
.

Apparently
Nick Succorso had lost his mind.

At last
Hashi put that flare aside. He found himself unable to divine Nick’s
intentions. And that troubled him. He disliked his sense of incomprehension.

The
later signal was another matter.

No one
outside his domain, and perhaps no more than three people within it, knew that
Angus Thermopyle, Milos Taverner, and Nick Succorso were not the only men he’d
helped send to Thanatos Minor; or that the fourth had been dispatched for
precisely this reason, to observe events and report on them.

The
transmission was from a purportedly legal merchanter called
Free Lunch
; “purportedly”
because Hashi had equipped her with false id and records so that she could
travel freely in human space while she nurtured her private reputation — also
more putative than real — as an illegal. According to her captain, Darrin
Scroyle, he and his ship had escaped the vicinity of Thanatos Minor just ahead
of the shock wave of the planetoid’s destruction.

So
Joshua had succeeded. That was good, as far as it went. But Captain Scroyle’s
message conveyed other facts as well, the implications of which inspired Hashi’s
decision not to pass his information along to Warden Dios immediately. He
needed time to consider the situation in the light shed by Captain Scroyle’s
revelations.

Under
Hashi Lebwohl’s absolute supervision, Data Acquisition employed agents and
operatives of all kinds. Some were freelance rogues, like Nick Succorso. Others
were spies in the more traditional sense, hunting secrets under deep cover
among the tenuous spiderweb societies of humankind’s illegals.

And
others were pure mercenaries. Unlike the rogues, they were men and women of
peculiar honour, who gave their loyalty and their blood to anyone who paid
their price. They could be trusted to do a specific job for a specific price,
to question nothing, to complain about nothing — and to say nothing about what
they’d done when the job was finished.

The
only disadvantage to such an arrangement, from Hashi’s point of view, was that
the next job any given mercenary accepted might well be for some other
employer; perhaps for one of humankind’s enemies. As much as he could, he
avoided this embarrassment by keeping his mercenaries busy — and by outbidding
other employers.

Darrin
Scroyle was a mercenary. He and
Free Lunch
were among the best of the
breed: daring, heavily armed, and fast; capable of both recklessness and
caution, as occasion warranted; willing for violence on almost any scale, and
yet able to act with subtlety and discretion.

When
Free
Lunch
reached human space and passed her message through a listening post
by means of a gap courier drone to UMCPHQ, Hashi gave Captain Scroyle’s report his
full credence.

The
gist was this.
Free Lunch
had left Billingate as soon as Captain Scroyle
had become convinced that events were near their crisis. That was as Hashi had
ordered: he didn’t want
Free Lunch
caught up in whatever explosion
resulted from Joshua’s mission. But during her departure from Billingate’s
control space,
Free Lunch
had scanned the planetoid and its embattled
ships with every instrument she had, and had observed several significant
developments.

A team
in EVA suits had emerged from docked
Trumpet
in order to sabotage
Billingate communications. After that they had broken into the Amnion sector —
and then escaped.

Captain’s
Fancy
had destroyed
Tranquil Hegemony
, not
by matter cannon or lasers, but by ramming — apparently to prevent the Amnion
warship from killing the EVA team.

A
shuttle had left the Amnion sector to be picked up by
Soar
.

And
Free
Lunch
had seen
Calm Horizons
moving to intercept
Trumpet’s
escape, supported by a small flotilla of illegals sent out by Billingate.

That
was bad enough; full of surprises and unexplained possibilities. But there was
worse.

Before
their departure, Captain Scroyle and his people had spent as much time as they
could around the installation, studying scan and communications, listening to
rumours, looking for information. They had witnessed
Captain’s Fancy
’s
arrival from the direction of Enablement Station, harried by warships. They had
seen Captain Succorso’s ship launch an ejection pod which had veered away from
Tranquil
Hegemony
in order to be intercepted by
Soar
. And they had heard
stories—

The
story that the Amnion had revoked Captain Succorso’s credit on Billingate.

The
story that he, the Amnion, and the Bill were locked in a three-way conflict
over the contents of the ejection pod.

The
story that Captain Succorso had spent time together in a bar with Captain
Thermopyle and his second from
Trumpet
.

The
story that the Bill’s guards had been attacked and the contents of the pod
stolen.

The
story that
Soar’s
captain, a woman named Sorus Chatelaine, had a mutagen
immunity drug for sale.

The
story that Captain Succorso had bartered one of his own people, a woman, to the
Amnion in order to obtain — so the rumour went —
Captain’s Fancy
’s
freedom to leave Billingate.

Taken
all at once, such information might have given Godsen Frik the vapours with a
vengeance — the worst case of collywobbles in his adult life. It had a
different effect on Hashi Lebwohl, however. In a sense, he lived for such
crises: oblique events with disturbing implications which called for all the
cunning, misdirection, and initiative he could supply. The fact that he took
nearly an hour to consider the situation before sharing what he knew — or some
of what he knew — didn’t mean that he was frightened. It simply meant that he
wanted to give his best attention to this particular conundrum.

Soar
and
Captain’s Fancy
.
Trumpet
and
Calm
Horizons
.
Tranquil Hegemony
and an Amnion shuttle.

Joshua,
Nick Succorso, the Bill, Milos Taverner, Sorus Chatelaine, the Amnion. Not to
mention Morn Hyland, who must have played some crucial part in Nick’s decision
to visit Enablement, and who therefore simply could not be irrelevant to Nick’s
conflict with the Amnion — or with the Bill.

If
you can get her, you bastard, you can have her.

Morn?

No: not
possible.

There
were too many players; too many pieces moving across the game board. In
particular Hashi wanted to know more about this Captain Chatelaine and her
ship. Was she Nick’s “her”? Could the rumours about her conceivably be true? If
they were, where could she have obtained a mutagen immunity drug, except from
Nick himself? Then why would he have given it to her?