Forbidden Knowledge (18 page)

And before anyone had a chance to recover, Alba Parmute, who considered EVA a personal affront, neglected to deactivate her board at precisely the same time that the scan second forgot to override while configuring the new sensor. That caused another complete wipe and more delays.

Mikka was in a fury. Since she hated stupidity more than she distrusted Morn, she demoted Alba to data third and promoted Morn to her own watch.

Liete accepted Alba with resignation. On
Captain’s Fancy
, as on most ships, the true function of the command third was to endure problems which had defeated everyone else.

Nick watched all this with a smoldering glower which said as plainly as words that he was deciding whom to replace when—or if—he reached Thanatos Minor.

Every time Morn plugged her id tag back into the data board to run another playback, she asked herself why she was doing this. But she knew the answer: it was because she had no choice. Nick wouldn’t have tolerated a refusal.

Caught by her bitterness at being helpless and her revulsion at sharing her bed, she tried to comfort herself by researching self-destruct. That solace failed her, however:
Captain’s Fancy
had no built-in or preprogrammed way to blow up.

Nick was going to use her to betray all human space. She couldn’t bear it—and she couldn’t prevent it. Her belly had developed a small, tight bulge which would soon grow unmistakable; her nausea disappeared as her body learned to enjoy its new hormonal mix. And yet she was unable to achieve a decision. Her baby was becoming more and more real to her. The idea of keeping him made her want to weep: the idea of aborting him made her want to puke.

Gradually her two dilemmas became blurred: the need to kill herself or
Captain’s Fancy
; the need to kill her son. They were separate, but they depended on each other. She couldn’t make up her mind about one until she resolved the other.

Because she spent so much time under the influence of her zone implant, emotionally muted so that she wouldn’t try to disembowel Nick whenever he approached her, or to disable the entire data station while Mikka Vasaczk watched, she was slow to recognize that there were changes at work in her.

Nick was predominantly gentle in her cabin, as if he’d been cured of doubt. Daunted by Orn’s example, other men left her alone—even the targ third, who looked like he was accustomed to kill for sex. She had work to do, steady and demanding work which filled her time and deflected her distress. And Mikka’s trenchant authority kept her concentration sharp.

Such things gave her time in which to pull herself together. On a level below her own awareness, inspired by hormones or old loyalty, or perhaps by some blind, intransigent unwillingness to let the Angus Thermopyles and the Nick Succorsos in her life break her, she began gathering up the ragged strands of herself and plaiting them into something new.

In retrospect, she wasn’t quite sure when she’d stopped carrying her black box. One day she experimented with leaving it behind: after that she kept it hidden in her cabin. Soon six weeks had passed since Orn Vorbuld’s death, and the time limit for a safe abortion was running out.
Captain’s Fancy
was almost prepared to attempt minor manual course corrections.

And Morn was no longer the same woman.

The difference took effect one day when Nick came to the bridge during the changeover between Mikka’s watch and Liete’s. He nodded normally to Mikka as Liete relieved her; he gave Morn a grin that was only a little sharper, a bit more deeply tinged with blood, than usual. Yet his presence itself was unusual: ordinarily he waited for Morn in her cabin while Mikka’s watch was relieved. As Morn followed the rest of the seconds off the bridge, he gestured the communications third away from his station and seated himself there.

She hardly had time to be sure she’d seen him accurately. She was already on her way to the auxiliary bridge.

She was in a hurry: she could be sure she didn’t have much time. Nevertheless the distance to the auxiliary bridge gave her a few moments for consideration. She felt that she was thinking for the first time in weeks. Her original idea was to activate the auxiliary communications board and dummy it to its counterpart. That would enable her to observe what he did. Even if she missed his actual transmission, she might discover in which direction he’d beamed his message.

As soon as she analyzed the idea, however, she realized that Liete would know as soon as she activated the auxiliary communications board. Liete would tell Nick—and Nick wouldn’t have any trouble guessing what Morn was up to.

But she had an alternative.

Nobody could edit a datacore. Every fact
Captain’s Fancy
possessed, every action she took, was permanently stored. And that meant—

It meant that no matter how much information Nick purposely deleted from his transmission history, the datacore remained whole. Therefore playback restored the ship’s information in an unedited condition.

If he hadn’t thought of that—if he hadn’t repeated
all
his deletions after each playback—she could look at whatever he’d tried to suppress.

From the auxiliary data station, she could copy the message he was sending right now.

That she’d activated the auxiliary station would show on Liete’s command board. But what she was actually doing wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t have any trouble explaining away her desire to make use of the auxiliary data station. She could think of an excuse that fit within her duties.

Under other circumstances, she would have kicked herself for not grasping all this earlier. Now she didn’t have time.

The auxiliary bridge was fortuitously deserted. She had her id tag jacked into the console as soon as she hit the seat. To cover herself, she opened the intercom and asked Mikka’s permission to do some research; but she didn’t wait for an answer. Her fingers ran the keys. When Mikka asked her what kind of research she had in mind, she replied that she wanted to see if she could identify the defaults or protocols Orn’s virus used to wipe the systems. By the time the command second said, “Okay,” Morn had already begun restoring the transmission Nick had just erased.

What she learned struck her as hard as one of Nick’s blows; but it didn’t paralyze her; it didn’t make her freeze, or stop.

The message itself was ciphered, of course. She couldn’t read it—and had no time to try. But she recognized its destination and security codes, the codes which ensured it would be received by the right person, and no one else. In addition, the resources of the data board enabled her to plot its transmission vector. In moments she saw that the message had been tight-beamed to a set of coordinates she knew well.

The coordinates of a UMCP listening post.

One of the thousands of listening posts which had been set to help guard the border of forbidden space.

She was a cop: she knew how those listening posts worked. At intervals determined by UMCPHQ’s priorities, a courier drone arrived at the post. The post dumped its accumulated data to the drone. The drone crossed the gap back toward Earth. It gave up its data to the UMCP transmission relay coasting outside Pluto’s orbit; positioned there so that hundreds of drones serving thousands of listening posts—not to mention stations and colonies—could avoid the planets, satellites, rocks, and ships which cluttered the solar system. The relay in turn beamed the data to UMCPHQ. Under the right conditions, the entire process could be astonishingly quick: significant delays occurred only when the courier drone had to carry its data at space normal speeds.

And Nick had left his dish aimed at the listening post.

He was expecting an answer.

The implications chilled her. She felt that she was losing contact with reality, as if g had disappeared from under her—as if
Captain’s Fancy
had lost internal spin, or gone awry in her trajectory across the void. Nick had sent a message to the UMCP. He was expecting an answer.

Oh, my God.

But she wasn’t given a chance to sort her way through the morass. Before she could try to gauge the extent of Nick’s treachery, she heard him ask sardonically, “Any luck?”

Blanking her readouts, she swung her seat to face him.

He leaned in the doorway, grinning at her. After all this time, the sight of her still pulled his lips back from his teeth, darkened his scars. Maybe her disconcertion made her look frightened: maybe the idea that she was frightened excited him. Or maybe he was so caught up in the masque of her passion that he couldn’t break free.

But she wasn’t frightened; not now. She had gone past that without knowing it. And past trying to secondguess the consequences of her actions. She was thinking for the first time in weeks, and her questions were about to be answered. Deliberately she stared straight at him. Her tone was neutral with concentration.

“You sent a message to the UMCP.”

Instantly his whole body became still and ominous, poised like a bomb.

As if the subject were one of purely intellectual curiosity, she asked, “Does your crew know you do things like that?”

His gaze was as steady as hers; his grin had no love in it. “You’re the only one who isn’t in on the secret. And you still aren’t—so don’t push your luck.”

She ignored that. It was either true or false—and she doubted he would tell her which. Instead she said, “I thought you were planning to sell me on Thanatos Minor. My information, anyway. Have you changed your mind?”

Only his mouth moved. Every other muscle held its poise; as far as she could tell, he didn’t so much as blink.

“Who told you we’re going to Thanatos Minor?”

“Nobody,” she said evenly. “I figured it out.”

“How?”

She shrugged and indicated the auxiliary data console. “I had to learn the equipment before I could do my job. Studying what astrogation says about our trajectory was good practice.”

His grin stretched a little tighter. “And how did you find out I ‘sent a message to the UMCP’?” He made the name sound like an obscenity.

She told him.

He received the information without moving. When she was done, he demanded, “How long have you been spying on me?”

She answered that question as well. On this subject, she no longer had any reason to lie.

“This is the first time. I didn’t realize I could do it until a few minutes ago.” She let a hint of bitterness into her tone as she added, “I’ve had a lot of other things on my mind.”

Then she returned to her own question. “Why are you talking to the UMCP?”

As if she’d gained her point, he shifted his weight off the doorframe. Casually, like a lazy predator, he moved to the command station and sat down. She turned to face him all the way, tracking him like targ.

For a moment his fingers massaged his scars as if he wanted to rub the blood out of them. Then he said, “I can get more money for what you know if I hold an auction. But you can’t hold an auction unless you’ve got at least two bidders. I’m giving your old buddies a chance to keep what you know secret by paying for the privilege.”

That was a lie: she recognized it immediately. It was plausible in itself; but it didn’t explain how he knew the location of the listening post.

She didn’t challenge his dishonesty, however. Let him think she was taken in: she had other issues to consider. Flatly she countered, “They won’t do it.”

“Why not?” he asked as if he weren’t particularly interested in her answer.

“Because they can’t be sure you won’t take their money and still sell me when you get to Thanatos Minor.”

He shrugged. “I already thought of that. I told them if I accept their bid I’ll give you access to communications. You can report to them—tell them I’m keeping my end of the bargain. In fact, you can tell them anything you learn while we’re getting our repairs done.”

She shook her head. “Not good enough. An offer like that doesn’t guarantee anything. They’ll want a guarantee.”

Her argument didn’t appear to bother him. “It’s worth a try. If they turn me down, we haven’t lost anything.”

Oh, yes, you have, Nick Succorso, she thought. By God, you have.

But she didn’t say that. As the change in her came into focus, she found herself thinking faster, more clearly.

Carefully, neutrally, she offered, “I’ve got a better idea. Tell them if they pay enough you’ll take me somewhere else. And you’ll let me report to them that you really have changed course. Let me convince them you’re keeping your part of the bargain.”

Between one heartbeat and the next, he lost his air of nonchalant disinterest. He stiffened in his seat; his gaze sharpened on her. In a harsh, slow drawl, he asked, “Now, why would you want me to do a thing like that?”

If he thought he could make her falter, he was mistaken. Facing him as squarely as ever, she replied, “Because I don’t want to go to Thanatos Minor.”

“Why the hell not? Do you think you’re still a cop? Do you think you’ve got a right to
care
who I sell your secrets to? You gave that up several billion kilometers ago. What makes you so fucking scrupulous all of a sudden?”

There her dilemmas came together. In his hot glare and her own danger, she saw how they depended on each other; and her intuitive indecisiveness vanished. Abruptly certain, she held his gaze as if he were the only one of them who had any experience with doubt.

“I’m pregnant,” she announced distinctly. “I’m going to have a boy. He’s due about the time you’re planning to get your gap drive fixed—and I don’t want to have him on Thanatos Minor. We’ll both be too vulnerable. He could be used against me. Either one of us could be used against you.”

Praying that he would believe her—that he wouldn’t demand an examination in sickbay to confirm what she said—she concluded, “Nick, he’s your son.”

CHAPTER       
9

F
rom the auxiliary command seat, Nick met her gaze. His tone was as deadly as the one he’d used with Orn Vorbuld.

“Abort it.”

Morn was glad that she’d never made the mistake of thinking he would welcome any child, even a son. And she was glad for a chance to defy him at last. In fact, she was delighted—so keenly pleased that her heart sang. Her greatest danger at the moment wasn’t that she might back down: it was that she might let too much visceral joy show.

Softly she said, “I don’t want to.”

“I don’t give a fuck in hard vacuum what you want,” he retorted. His grin looked bloody and threatening. “I said,
abort
it.”

“Why?” Her reply was almost sarcastic in its sweetness. “Don’t you want a son? Reputation is only one kind of immortality. And it fades after a while. People forget what you’ve done. They forget the stories about you. You can have more than that. A son will preserve your genes.”

“Fine. Terrific. With my luck, the bastard will grow up to be a cop.” Nick had swung his seat toward hers: his hands gripped the contoured armrests. “In any case, you can’t raise a kid on a ship like this. You’ll have to feed it, take care of it. You’ll always be thinking about it—you won’t be able to work. It’ll get in the way. I’ll be stuck with it for
years.

“It’ll be impossible. I’ll have to leave you behind.

“Listen to me, Morn. I’m only going to say this once. I want you to abort that little shit.”

There it was:
want.
His command word.
When you hear the word ‘want,’ you don’t ask. It isn’t up for discussion. You just do.
She was glad that she’d been able to drive him to this point so easily.

Without flinching, she answered, “No.”

He snatched in a deep breath: he was about to explode. His pulse throbbed in his scars, making them as dark as the core of his passion. He’d killed people for defying him like this: she was sure of that.

But she was also sure he wouldn’t kill her. Not yet; not while she was so valuable to him; not while he believed the masque. She sat still and waited for him to blast her. Or to restrain himself.

He let his breath out with a discernible tremor. “Just this once,” he rasped between his teeth, “I’m going to let you tell me what your reasons are.”

The time had come for lies. Because she was glad, they came readily.

“Nick, you know what they are. You don’t need me to explain them. I’m a woman. And I love you. I want to have your baby.

“You aren’t used to women who love you. You’ve been betrayed too often. But you’ve seen how I feel about you. I catch fire every time you touch me. Even when you hit me,” she added because she was gleeful enough to take any risk, “I go wild.

“And I haven’t got anybody else. I killed them all—
I
killed them all
, Nick. I’ve got gap-sickness, remember? I
aborted
my whole ship. I’m not going to do that again.

“Right now, you’re all I have. And I already know I won’t have you for long.” This was part of the masque—the false instrument playing on the deluded artist. “No man is ever satisfied with just one woman, and you’re more of a man than anyone I’ve ever met. Sooner or later, I won’t be enough for you. The same way Mikka wasn’t enough, and Alba, and all the others. In the end, you’ll replace me. But I’ll never be able to replace you.

“When you’re gone, I want to have something left. I want to have
your son.
I want to bear him and raise him, so that I’ll always know you were real.” She emphasized her
want
in opposition to his. “No matter how much time passes, or my memory fades, I’ll know I didn’t dream you. He’ll remind me that at least once in my life I knew what passion was.”

Her lies touched him: she saw that. His hands flexed on the armrests; an oblique grief moistened the fire in his eyes. He believed the masque: he was accessible to this appeal.

At the same time he was too stubborn, too suspicious—and too intelligent—to lose his way so easily. He had to swallow twice before he could find his voice. Then he said, “Crap.”

She wasn’t daunted. Without hesitation, she responded, “Try me.”

“I intend to,” he growled. “What did you have in mind?”

Her defiance affected her like rapture; it almost made her laugh. After all this time, she finally had a use for her revulsion. But laughing would have had the wrong effect. Instead she leaned forward earnestly and braced her elbows on her knees, shifting her appeal that much closer to him.

“Nick,” she answered, nearly whispering, “you need me. You want to sell me—or what I know—so you can pay for repairs. And you want me to have an abortion. We both know you can get what you want. You can hit me right now—you can knock me out and take me to sickbay. I couldn’t stop you. You don’t even need to worry about how I’ll feel about it. You don’t need my cooperation to sell me. You can just dope me with cat until we get to Thanatos Minor and then hand me over. I’m sure they’ve got drugs that will make me tell them everything I know.

“But you don’t have to go that far. You can just ignore me. I say I want to keep your baby? I say I don’t want to have him on Thanatos Minor? That’s my tough luck. When we get there, you can dope me, baby and all, and sell me the way I am. If you’re afraid I’ll do something to
Captain’s Fancy
in the meantime, you can take my id tag. That’ll paralyze me pretty effectively.”

As she spoke, he watched her with growing steadiness, confidence. Deliberately she reminded him of his power over her. To set him up.

The things he could do to her no longer scared her.

When the fury had begun to fade from his scars, and his eyes were calmer, she sprang her trap.

“But if you do either of those things—if you force me to have an abortion, or if you force me to have my baby on Thanatos Minor—I’m going to tell whoever you try to sell me to that you’ve been bargaining with the UMCP.”

His sudden stillness told her that she’d hit him where he could be hurt.

“Then,” she continued, “what I know won’t be worth shit. There isn’t anybody in space stupid enough to think that people like Min Donner and Hashi Lebwohl will just sit on their hands while you sell their secrets. The minute you tried to get the UMCP into the auction, you warned them of the danger they’re in, and everything I know became obsolete.”

She went on leaning toward him as if she were begging rather than threatening: he leaned away from her as if he were appalled. Remorselessly, reveling in his distress, she explained, “Every code, every route, every listening post will be changed. Every agent and ship will be warned. It doesn’t matter what was really in that message of yours. It doesn’t even matter that I can’t prove anything. Just the doubt will be enough. That’s something you can’t take away from me—not unless you destroy my mind, and then I won’t have any secrets left.

“All I have to do is tell whoever wants to buy me that you beamed a message to a UMCP listening post, and you won’t be able to get enough for me to buy new scrubber pads.”

She had him. She
had
him. She was so sure of it that she nearly cheered.

And as soon as she had him, he got away.

Nick Succorso was a survivor—a man who always found a way to keep himself alive. But he was more than that, much more. According to his reputation, he was a pirate who never lost. Once Mikka Vasaczk had swayed the entire crew by shouting,
Have any of you EVER seen Nick beaten?

He wasn’t beaten now.

He absorbed the worst Morn could do to him; he was hurt by it. When she was done, he sat still and stared at her for a moment, holding himself as if he couldn’t breathe; as if she’d hit him so hard that all the air was knocked out of him.

But then the fighting light came back into his eyes. A wild grin bared his teeth.

Abruptly he laughed—a harsh sound like an act of violence.

Frozen with sudden alarm, Morn returned his stare and couldn’t move.

“You think you’ve got me, don’t you?” he grated. “You think you’ve given me a choice I can’t refuse. I can let you keep your baby—I can stay away from Thanatos Minor. Then you’ll go on loving me. My ship won’t get fixed, but I’ll have all the fucking sex I can stand. Or I can force you to abort. In which case you’ll sabotage me so bad I’ll have to sell my soul to the Bill just for supplies, and my ship still won’t get fixed.

“I can’t imagine why I don’t fall all over myself to take you up on an offer like that.”

Now Morn was the one who held her breath.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t
want
a woman who thinks she can push me around.

“Or maybe,” he said in fierce, combative exultation, “it’s because I’ve got options you haven’t considered.”

For a moment her brain reeled; then it snapped back into clarity. She didn’t try to speculate on what he meant. Instead she asked, “Like what?”

With a surge as if he were moving to attack her, he shifted forward in his seat, thrusting his face toward hers, mimicking her posture. The inflexible skin of his scars pulled his grin into a grimace.

“Forbidden space has an outpost in this sector,” he said like a wash of mineral acid. “You know that. You noticed it while you were figuring out where we’re headed. We’ve still got a window on it—just barely. We can go there if we change course now.

“Do you know what they pay for live human beings? I can sell you outright, no matter how obsolete your information happens to be, and get enough cash to flush out that damn virus. While I’m at it, I can sell a loser like Alba Parmute and get enough more to repair my gap drive.”

That threat was worse than anything she’d expected, anything she’d imagined.
Sell her? To forbidden space?
Would he
do
that? She couldn’t tell: she still didn’t know him well enough to guess his limits. Fighting panic, she hurried to contradict him.

“And as soon as you start selling your crew, they’ll never trust you again. Even illegals like yours are going to take exception. They may mutiny. You can’t watch your back twenty-four hours a day. At the very least, they’ll talk. They’ll ruin your reputation. You won’t be the Nick Succorso who never loses. You’ll be the Nick Succorso who sells his own people to forbidden space.”

“That won’t happen,” he replied like a knife, “if I just sell
you
. You’re UMCP—you’re the enemy. Selling
you
will make me a goddamn hero.”

“But”—Morn felt that she was laboring against heavy g to keep up with him—“you still won’t have enough money. You’ll be able to flush out the virus, or get your gap drive fixed, but not both. You won’t have anything else to sell.”

Nick’s eyes burned at her. He nodded once and dropped back in his seat. His scars had lost some of their color: they were pale and livid, like old bruises.

Yet his grin looked more ferocious than ever as he pronounced, “Stalemate.”

He was right. They had each found the flaws in the other’s position. Their threats canceled each other.

“Nick,” she said slowly, “I want to keep my baby. And I
don’t
want to be sold to forbidden space.” The idea was profoundly terrifying. She would have preferred to attempt EVA with a faulty suit. “If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m listening.”

At that, he laughed again like a promise that she would never be safe. Then he leaned forward once more and pointed his index finger like the barrel of an impact pistol straight between her eyes.

Almost in a whisper, he said, “You’re damn fucking right I’ve got a ‘suggestion.’

“This is
your
problem.
You
refused a direct order. So
you
get to solve it.”

Still aiming his finger at her, he left his seat to move toward her.

“Give me a cure for that virus.”

She gaped at him, unable to retort.

“If you do that,” he went on, right in front of her now, “if you fix my ship so that she can maneuver and fight again, I’ll let you keep your baby. I won’t sell you to forbidden space. We’ll go somewhere besides Thanatos Minor.

“If you
don’t
—” He let the ultimatum hang for a moment. Then he breathed, “You’ll give yourself an abortion. And you’ll keep your mouth shut about messages to the UMCP.”

“Nick—” Her throat knotted; she had trouble dredging up words. “What makes you think I can cure a computer virus?”

Without warning, he moved his finger; he flicked her hard in the tender junction of nerves under her nose. While her eyes filled with involuntary tears, he said softly, “What makes you think I care?”

Then he got up and walked off the auxiliary bridge; left her alone at the data station with tears streaming down her cheeks as if she were beaten.

•      •      •

She had options, of course. It would be easy to activate the auxiliary data board and trigger another wipe. Then, if she were quick enough, she might be able to snatch an EVA suit and get off the ship before anyone caught her. That would give her a chance to ditch her id tag outside, where no one could ever find it. If she succeeded—and if she used the suit’s maneuvering thrusters to put as much distance as possible between herself and
Captain’s Fancy
—she might avoid the horrible things Nick and his crew would do to her before they died.