Forbidden Knowledge (28 page)

Nick leaned forward. “Scorz, copy this. ‘Further explanation is necessary. No Amnioni will board
Captain’s Fancy
if I am kept in ignorance. What are your requirements?’ Send it.”

Hands quivering slightly, the communications second obeyed.

Enablement’s reply was almost instantaneous. “The Amnion require possession of the new human offspring aboard your ship.”

In that moment, Morn felt the bottom drop out of her heart.

Wheeling his seat, Nick swung around to face her. His eyes burned with malice and triumph. “Tell them,” he told Scorz, “‘Your emissary is acceptable.’”

Then he flung a burst of laughter straight into her panic.

Clenching his fists, Davies took a step forward.

At once Mikka aimed her gun at his head; Liete pointed hers into his belly.

“Oh, hell,” Nick chuckled to Mikka, “let them stay. I want them to hear what this ‘emissary’ says. That should be the most fun I’ve had all day.”

Liete kept her thoughts to herself; but a mixture of relief and anguish twisted Mikka’s features as she lowered her weapon.

As hot as a welding laser, Nick’s gaze held Morn’s.

“I don’t really care that much about making you tell the truth,” he said softly, almost sweetly. His mouth stretched tight over his teeth. “I prefer revenge. Something tells me you’re about to find out what it costs when you lie to me.”

The only thing that kept her from jumping at Nick and trying to claw his eyes out was the look of dumb, desperate terror on Davies’ face.

CHAPTER       
14

T
he Amnion require
—

The targ third was disappointed: he liked rape as much as demolition, and he wanted Morn to himself. But Pastille was smart enough to see broader possibilities of distress. He laughed soundlessly, like a mute echo of Nick, showing his unclean teeth.

No one else except Nick looked at Morn.

—
require possession
—

Liete’s voice held a barely audible rub of tension as she dismissed Pastille and Simper from the bridge. They obeyed, handing their guns to Mikka on the way. Liete walked off around the curve, dissociating herself from Morn and Davies—or perhaps from Nick and Mikka.

Mikka stowed two of the impact pistols in a gun locker. Like Liete, she kept her own weapon.

Scorz concentrated on the communications board. Alba studied Davies some more; deliberately she pulled the seal of her shipsuit an inch lower. Ransum, the helm second, made a show of testing her station, her hands fluttering like scraps of paper in a breeze. The man on targ, Karster, stared at the back of Nick’s head. With nothing to do, the scan second sat in a meditative pose—hands folded in his lap, eyes closed.

Vector, too, had his eyes shut; the muscles of his face were slack. Without his phlegmatic smile, his face seemed to lose some of its roundness, sagging over its bleak, underlying bones.

—
possession of the new human offspring
—

Ignoring Nick, Morn said to her son, “Hang on.” Her throat worked convulsively, jerking out words. “We’re in this together. He’s just making threats to scare you. He wants to punish you for not being his.”

“Try me,” Nick put in harshly.

Morn stepped between him and Davies; she turned her back on Nick to aim all her artificial conviction at Davies. “He can’t hurt you without hurting me. And he can’t hurt me without hurting himself.”

“If you believe that”—anger throbbed in Nick’s voice—“you’re sicker than I thought.”

“I’m his lover,” she continued to Davies, “the best lover he’s ever had. He’ll have to give me up if he hurts you. He’ll lose me completely. He can always kill me, but he’ll never be able to make me do what he wants again.”

“You
lied
to me!” Nick shouted.

Morn nearly turned on him; nearly retorted, You bastard, I’ve never told you the truth about anything. —
require possession
— She was frantic to deflect Nick’s malice from her son; frantic enough to take any risk—

But the sight of Davies held her.

As she watched, his resemblance to Angus increased. Catalyzed by fear and incomprehension, he seemed to take on the inheritance of his father by an act of will. The color of his eyes was wrong, but their porcine squint became pure Angus; and the darkness behind them, the fathomless dread, mimicked exactly the old, acid seethe of fear which drove Angus’ brutality.

She’d sold her soul to the zone implant in an effort to survive the consequences of that brutality. Simply seeing Angus’ image in front of her cramped her heart, as if she no longer had enough room inside her for her own pulse, her own blood.

But he wasn’t Angus Thermopyle, he
wasn’t
, he was Davies Hyland, her son. He may have had Angus’ genes and body; his perceptions may have been flavored by Angus’ particular endocrine stew; his knowledge of himself may have been tainted by her memories of Angus. Yet he’d received his mind from
her.
All his starting points were different than his father’s. She had to believe that he would also reach different conclusions.

“Nick.” Scorz’s voice reached Morn through her turmoil. “Enablement’s talking again.”

Morn heard a slight susurrus of bearings and servos as Nick pivoted his seat. Instinctively she turned as well.

Again he commanded, “Audio.”

“Enablement Station to presumed human Captain Nick Succorso,” reported the bridge speakers, “the Amnion emissary awaits acceptance aboard your ship.”

“Tell them”—despite his fury, Nick had resumed his nonchalant, dangerous poise—“‘The Amnion emissary will be accepted as soon as an escort has been arranged.’ Send it.

“Mikka,” he went on immediately, “you’re the escort. Don’t let that thing aboard until you’re sure there’s only one of it. Keep it covered the whole time—we don’t have to pretend to be nice about this.

“Liete, it’s your job to make sure Morn and the asshole here don’t do or say anything to get in my way.”

A small spasm like a clench of protest tightened Mikka’s scowl. Nevertheless she grunted an acknowledgment and left the bridge. Liete responded by coming down the curve to stand behind Morn and Davies with her hand on her impact pistol.

Davies was still too naive to keep his thoughts to himself. And his mind had been formed from Morn’s: his thoughts grew from her need and revulsion. “Someday,” he muttered, “I’m going to give him a new asshole to remember me by.”

Nick snorted another laugh.

The Amnion require possession
—

Morn put her hand in her pocket and increased the intensity of her zone implant’s emissions.

With Davies at her shoulder, and Liete Corregio’s gun at her back, she waited for the emissary.

Abruptly Nick said to the bridge, “All right, listen. We’ve got things to think about before Mikka gets back.” He’d set his fury aside for the moment. “The Amnion want to make a deal. I would hate,” he drawled, “to miss an opportunity like this. But we’ve already got everything we asked for. Including”—he held up the credit-jack—“enough money to repair the gap drive. Hell, we’ve got enough money to
replace
that fucker. So what’re we going to bargain
for
?”

Liete didn’t hesitate. “A chance to get out of here.”

“Why?” he demanded. “They’ve already told us we can go. Why should we ask for something they’ve already promised?”

Vector opened his eyes. “No, Nick. Liete’s right.” His gaze was dull, and he didn’t smile; if anything, the flesh of his face seemed to droop more heavily from its underpinnings. “It’s not that simple. You said yourself, if they keep us long enough, they’ll have time to finish testing your blood. But the situation is worse than that. If we leave slowly enough, they’ll still have time. And then they’ll come after us.

“They’ll catch us.” His voice sounded as arthritic as his joints. “Right now, we couldn’t outrun a lifeboat—if it had a gap drive. And we’re”—his hands opened and closed on his board—“half a
light-year
from Thanatos Minor. A full year for us at our best speed. They’ll have that long to hunt us down, while we’re trying to survive on six or nine months’ worth of food.”

“Get to the point,” Nick said with the same insouciant, ominous drawl.

“The point,” Vector sighed as if he were hardening himself against Morn’s urgent stare, “is that if you don’t give them Davies just to recompense them for being cheated, we’re all finished. We haven’t got a prayer.”

“Who is
he
?” Davies asked Morn, none too quietly, as if he were making up a list of enemies and wanted to include Vector.

—
possession of the new human offspring
—

“Not now,” she hissed to him. “Please.”

Nick ignored her and Davies. Instead he countered Vector, “What if we trade them for repairs on the gap drive?”

“I thought of that.” Despite his slumped posture and slack features, Vector didn’t flinch from facing Nick. “But it won’t work. It’ll take too long. From what I’ve heard, their equipment has all the same pieces ours does, but the designs are incompatible. We’ll have to let them tinker with our drive until they can rig a fix. We could be here for days. And that gives us another problem. We’ll have to let them aboard. We’ll have Amnion on the ship the whole time. We’ll be too vulnerable. They could sabotage us—or just take over—whenever they want.”

The engineer made
Captain’s Fancy
’s ruin seem inevitable; but Nick dismissed that. Still more casually, as if he were arriving at a point he’d foreseen all along—as if he were springing a personal trap—he asked, “What if we trade them for parts, and you do the repairs?”

Vector continued to hold Nick’s gaze; but his mouth slumped open. After a moment he murmured, “Nick, I’m not that good.”

“You’d better be,” Nick replied almost cheerfully, “because that’s the only shot we’ve got. I’ll give you three hours.”

At the edges of her vision, Morn saw sweat suddenly beading on Vector’s face, reflecting small, wet bits of light from his round visage. But she wasn’t thinking about him now, or about what he said. He was right, of course: without a usable gap drive,
Captain’s Fancy
was as good as dead; too far from human space to escape when Nick’s cheat was discovered. But that dilemma had nothing to do with her now. Her problem was entirely different.

Nick was going to do it; he was serious. He had every intention of giving Davies back to the Amnion.

Only her zone implant enabled her to swallow a wail. For a moment she hung right on the edge of attacking Nick—of performing some mad act which would get her killed right away, while she was still human and safe; which might get Davies killed as well when he tried to defend her. Better to die in a fight on the bridge of Nick’s ship than to become Amnion—

But her implant’s artificial clarity held her. Instead of crying out or attacking, she went further.

The influence of her black box was a form of insanity; and from its neural stimulation, its coerced impulses, she began to weave a fabric of recourse so extreme that it made wails and violence look sane by comparison.

She could do it. If she was careful, she could do it.

And if she failed—

If she failed, nothing on
Captain’s Fancy
or Enablement Station would prevent her from exacting retribution. She would let nothing prevent her.

Liete stood too close: Morn couldn’t speak to Davies without being overheard. She had to trust that he would be able to retain his own sanity when Nick gave him back to the Amnion.

Despite the extremity of her intentions, she still had the capacity—her zone implant gave her that—to be shocked when Mikka Vasaczk brought Enablement’s emissary to the bridge.

Either the creature at Mikka’s side had once been human and had been given a mutagen which wasn’t entirely successful, or it had begun as Amnion and its people had failed in their attempts to make it appear human. Morn guessed the former, if only because the human parts of the creature were so convincing.

In general, as well as in some details, it—or he—was recognizably a man. He had one human arm, and most of his chest was unflawed. Above his boots, the skin of his shins was pale and ordinary. Half his face looked and moved like any other man’s. And he breathed the ship’s atmosphere with only a modicum of respiratory difficulty.

But his shipsuit—like Davies’, made from an alien material which shed light—had been cut away to accommodate the thick knobs of Amnion skin that had taken over his knees. His other arm was also bare: Amnion tissues needed no covering. And the inhuman half of his face was made for the sulfuric light and acrid air of Enablement Station. An Amnion eye stared unblinking from that side; some of the teeth under it, revealed by a partially lipless maw, were pointed like the guards’.

“Nick”—Mikka spoke tonelessly, all her emotions clamped down—“this is the Amnion emissary.

“That,” she said, pointing Nick out to the creature at her side, “is Captain Nick Succorso.”

Still holding her gun, she stepped back to stand watch beside the aperture.

“I wish to sit,” said the creature in a voice like flakes of rust.

Everyone stared at him. Davies scowled like the smoke from an oil fire, disturbed for reasons he might not have been able to name. A look of nausea twisted Alba’s face. Vector’s sweat and pallor gave him the appearance of an invalid. Ransum drummed her fingernails on her board as if their staccato beat kept her tension in check. Karster and the scan second were plainly appalled; maybe they’d never seen anything Amnion before. Gripping the arms of his seat, Scorz muttered dumb obscenities to himself.

The scars under Nick’s eyes appeared to curve like little grins. “Too bad,” he replied. “We don’t have any extra seats.”

The human half of the emissary’s face twitched at this announcement; the Amnion side didn’t. With exactly the same inflection, he repeated, “I wish to sit.”

Nick leaned forward as if his hostility made him eager. “Are you deaf? Is that why they gave you this job? Because you can’t hear? That’ll make you a tough sonofabitch to negotiate with. I said we don’t have any extra seats.”

The creature turned his head. He seemed to take note of Liete’s gun as well as Mikka’s. His discrepant eyes followed the curve of the bridge around in a circle. If he had any particular interest in Davies, or Morn, he didn’t show it.

As if he were unalterable—as if the Amnion had made him incapable of change—he said, “I wish to sit.”

“In that case,” Nick snapped, letting his anger show, “you might as well leave. If you’re going to waste our time demanding courtesies we haven’t got, we don’t have anything to talk about.”