Forbidden Knowledge (13 page)

Nick shook his head. “Orn knew what our resources are. He wouldn’t leave us a virus we could cure that easy.”

As if in confirmation, Mackern scowled at his readouts, then sat up straight. “Done. Diagnostics say we’re in good shape.”

Carmel snorted scornfully. No one else bothered to comment.

After a moment a man with a husky voice and no chin said a bit apprehensively, “Sorry for the delay. I wanted to dummy helm to the auxiliary bridge before I ran any tests. That way, if anything shuts down on me, we can hold our course correction. We won’t drift.”

Casually Nick replied, “Good.”

“Helm checks out,” the man continued. “We’re green on all systems. Except the gap drive, of course.”

Nick nodded again. Morn glanced at his board and saw that all the command status indicators were green as well.

Orn’s virus was still dormant.

Grinning more sharply, Nick swung his seat around to face Morn. “Any suggestions?”

She was supposed to help save the ship; she knew that. But she was profoundly numb, almost unreactive, as if beneath the surface her priorities were undergoing their own course correction. For the time being, she had no real attention to spare for
Captain’s Fancy
’s problems.

“In the Academy,” she said from a distance, responding only so that Nick wouldn’t probe her, “they taught me to do two things for a computer virus. Isolate the systems—unplug them from each other so the virus can’t spread. And call Maintenance.”

Nick chuckled sardonically. “Good idea.” To all appearances, he didn’t actually want her help. He was at his best here, matching his wits and his ship against his enemies. What he wanted was an audience, not advice. Over his shoulder, he asked, “You got that, Lind?”

“They don’t answer,” Lind retorted with a sneer. “Must be on their lunch break.”

Gratified, Nick spread his hands and swung back toward the bridge screens.

“You heard the lady. Isolate the systems.”

Around the bridge, his people hurried to obey.

Left alone, Morn made a vague effort to think about the situation. At a guess,
Captain’s Fancy
had seven main computers protected deep in her core: one to run the ship herself (lifts, air processing, internal g, waste disposal, intercoms, heat, water, things like that); five for each of the bridge functions (scan, targ and weapons, communications, helm, and data and damage control); and one, the command unit, to synergize the others. That design was inherently safer than trusting to one megaCPU—and in any case few ships had any need for the raw computing power a megaCPU could provide. So the immediate problem was to determine where Orn’s virus resided. Without risking the spread of the infection.

Of course, he could have planted his virus in more than one computer. Or in all of them.

If she hadn’t felt so far away, she might have been dismayed at the sheer scale of the problem. No one aboard knew how to cure a virus once it was located. If they had to track it through all seven systems—

Nick ran a few commands on his board, presumably to set the maintenance computer on automatic. Then, unexpectedly, he turned to Morn again. As they swelled, his bruises seemed to sharpen the focus of his eyes.

As if he were resuming a conversation which had been interrupted just moments ago, he remarked, “There’s only one problem with your theory that I’m a UMCPDA operative.”

That remark cut through her numbness. All at once, the protection wrapped around her womb was gone; she felt like she’d been kicked in the belly. Why bring
that
up? Why bring it up
now
? What was going on here? What had she missed?

What new danger was she in?

What, she thought before she realized it, would happen to her baby?

Grinning at her incomprehension, he said, “I’m out of money,” as if that explained everything.

Lind, Carmel, and the helm first all laughed, not in disbelief, but in recognition of a difficulty so constant that it had become a joke.

Morn stared at Nick and tried to recover her numbness; tried to conceal herself behind veils of shock.

He enjoyed her stunned expression for a moment. Then he relented.

“Where we’re going, they don’t do work on spec. The fucker who runs the place calls himself ‘the Bill’ because he gets paid before anything else happens. And I’m broke.
Captain’s Fancy
is broke. We can pay the docking fee, that’s all. We can’t afford to get the gap drive repaired. And we sure as hell can’t afford to get a virus flushed out of our computers. Assuming we’re able to get there at all—which at the moment looks problematical.

“As long as we don’t lose thrust, life support, and scan, we’ve got a chance. For one thing, I can do algorithms in my head. That makes me a pretty fair blind reckoning navigator. And for another, there are ships patrolling to make sure people like us don’t miss our destination.” This, too, was a joke which the bridge crew understood, but which was lost on Morn. “But none of that is going to do us any good without credits.”

“I still don’t see—” Morn murmured dimly. What does this have to do with me?

“If I’m some insidious UMCPDA operative,” Nick said with a flourish, “what the fuck am I doing in this mess? Why haven’t I got money? Why is the almighty Hashi Lebwohl willing to risk losing me like this, when all he had to do was have us met off Corn-Mine by a courier drone programmed to tight-beam credits?

“There’s something you may not understand about me, Morn.” His grin was full of relish—and other obscure perils. “I won’t work for a man who doesn’t
pay.
”

This time, everyone on the bridge chuckled appreciatively.

Yet Morn continued to flounder. “I don’t get it.” She’d lost her defenses. Angus’ child seemed to use up her mind: she couldn’t understand any other danger unless it was spelled out for her. “What’s the point? Why are we doing this, if we can’t afford repairs in any case?”

Nick looked positively delighted—as happy as he did when he was having sex with her, driving her to transports she couldn’t resist. “I’m out of money,” he repeated. “But I’ve got something I can sell.”

She held her breath, afraid to guess what was coming.

“I can sell you.”

There it was at last, the truth; the reason he’d taken her, the reason he kept her. To buy the kind of repairs he couldn’t get anywhere legally.

“You’re UMCP,” he added unnecessarily. “You’ve got a head full of valuable data. As long as you’re alive and conscious and at least marginally sane, you’re probably valuable enough to buy me a whole new ship.”

Just a few hours ago, she might have lashed out at him. He was planning to sell her like a piece of cargo. Everything she’d forced herself to endure in order to procure safety had been wasted. Driven by accumulating revulsion and stifled rage, she might not have been able to contain herself.

After a while
, she’d told Mikka,
you hurt so bad that you don’t want to be rescued anymore.

But the knowledge that she was pregnant changed her. A baby. Angus’ son. Her father’s grandson. And in the whole of vast space she had no other family: she’d killed them all.

She would kill this infant, too, as soon as she got the chance. He was malignant inside her, male and murderous: she would flush him down the sickbay disposal and be damned for it. Why should she give him any better treatment than she’d given her father—or than his father had given her?

In the meantime, however, the baby was hers; he was all she had left. If she didn’t defend him, he was going to die. Or he would be used against her. Either way, his life or death would be out of her hands. But he was
hers:
whether he lived or died was
hers
to decide. If she gave that up—if she surrendered her right to make this one choice for herself—she might as well lie down and die.

Caught by surprise and unexpectedly vulnerable, she gave her child the only protection she had available. For the second time, but deliberately now, she let herself burst into tears.

It was easier than she would have believed possible.

She heard more laughter, but she ignored it. She didn’t care how many people sneered at her. All she cared about was Nick’s reaction.

He ignored the laughter as well. His mouth went on smiling crookedly, but his gaze lost its relish. Suddenly his eyes looked haunted and lost, as if he, too, were helpless in a way that unnerved him.

“I didn’t mean you.” He was barely able to keep his voice steady. “I meant your information. Your id tag. All those access and security codes. That’s what I need to sell—that’s my price for saving your life.”

Abruptly he was angry, almost shouting. “I don’t work for Hashi Lebwohl or any other fucking cop, and neither do you. Not anymore. You’re
mine
—and, by hell! you’re going to prove it by giving me something I can sell.”

Then his tone softened again. “So I can get my ship fixed.”

In an effort to stop crying, Morn raised a hand to her mouth and bit her knuckle. Crying made her ugly; she knew that. And she couldn’t afford to be ugly in front of Nick Succorso. Not now; maybe not ever. But her whole heart was full of tears.

She was pregnant. Carrying a baby.

For a moment her grief was so intense that she couldn’t fight it down.

Then, however, she tasted blood on her tongue. Swallowing a sob, she regained her self-control.

“Just get us there,” she said in a gulp. “I’ll do my part.

That promise was the most sincere response she’d ever given Nick.

As if he couldn’t face her expression, he swung away. His fists closed and unclosed in his lap, working for calm.

As soon as he could produce his familiar nonchalance, he scanned the bridge and commented, “The next time you spaceshits feel like laughing at her, try to remember you’re laughing at me, too.”

Lind flinched visibly. The woman at the targ board, Malda Verone, ducked her head, hiding her face behind her hair.

Poised and dangerous, Nick held his people until they were all still, almost frozen. Then he moved. Keying his intercom, he said, “Mikka, I want you. If you can spare the time.”

The intercom didn’t work. He’d already disengaged the controls.

That small mistake seemed to restore his equilibrium. The grin came back into his eyes. “Morn, stop snuffling,” he ordered casually. “You’re ruining my concentration.”

When he chuckled, some of the tension around him dissipated.

Morn felt him watching her with his peripheral vision, but she didn’t look at him.

A minute later Mikka Vasaczk came onto the bridge of her own accord. Clipped to her belt, she wore a handcom, as well as a coiled lifeline with a small magnetic clamp on one end—emergency equipment in case internal g failed.

Scowling impartially, she paused beside Morn. At the sight of Morn’s swollen eyes and damp face, she asked in a neutral tone, “Feeling better?”

Morn rubbed the blood off her mouth and nodded.

“It shows,” Mikka remarked.

Then she dismissed the question of Morn’s condition and went to stand on the other side of Nick’s seat.

“We’re ready,” she reported. “The rest of the seconds are down in the core with the computers. They’ve all got handcoms. They aren’t wizards, but they can do resets. If you want, they can unplug everything, isolate the systems physically.”

Nick accepted the information with a nod. Leaning forward, he said to the bridge, “All right, let’s get started. The sooner we locate our virus, the more time we’ll have to work on it.

“We aren’t going to lose function. All the equipment is hardwired.” Everybody aboard already knew this: he was speaking to clarify his own thoughts. “The worst that can happen is that we’ll have to reset everything. But if we get wiped, we’ll lose anything soft. Including all our data. That means we’ll lose the last of our credits.” He grinned fiercely. “Maintenance will work, but the system won’t know how many of us there are. It won’t be able to balance out heat and air comfortably. We’ll lose our logs. We won’t know how much food we’ve got left.

“Targ will lose ship id,” he continued. “That’s not minor. We won’t be able to program weapons accurately if we’re attacked. Communications will lose all our codes. Which will make it hard for us to talk to anybody. But scan and data are the most vulnerable. Scan will still bring in information, but the computers won’t be able to interpret it. And we’ll lose everything we need for astrogation—star id, charts, galactic rotation, station vectors, shipping lanes. Hell, we won’t even be able to tell where forbidden space is.”

Nick’s second snorted harshly. The other crewmembers kept their reactions to themselves.

“We can’t hardcopy the data. We haven’t got that much paper. They probably don’t have that much paper back on Com-Mine. And we would need months to reenter everything—which might not solve our problem anyway. If the virus is still resident, it would just rewipe the data as soon as we restored it.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll run some commands. If my board goes down by itself, it’s an easy fix. We can dummy it back from the auxiliary bridge. In fact, we might be able to erase the virus that way.

“If my board stays up, we’ll reconnect the other systems one at a time and try them until we hit trouble.

“Questions?” he asked. “Comments? Objections?”

Scan and helm shook their heads. Everybody else sat and waited.

Morn’s mouth had gone dry, and she seemed to have difficulty breathing, as if life support were already out of balance. Any spacefaring vessel was computer-dependent. Her visceral dread of
a complete wipe
was even greater than her fear of puncture or detonation, her fear of vacuum. On that point, she knew, everybody aboard agreed with her.

But she didn’t expect the command board to crash. As Nick had said, that might be an easy fix—and she felt sure Orn hadn’t left
Captain’s Fancy
anything easy. No, the virus probably resided in the data computer itself, where it could do the most damage; the computer to which Orn had had the most regular access.

So she wasn’t surprised when Nick’s board stayed up and green. In simulation, he reversed thrust, slammed
Captain’s Fancy
to the side, opened hailing channels, shut down internal g, fired matter cannon, ran spectrographic analyses of nearby stars: everything worked.