Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict Read Online Free PDF Page A

Station.
    He was hoping that the belt was far enough away to hide him. The Station had been built at a considerable distance to avoid the meteor storms and other debris which always accompanied asteroid belts through space, the residue of planets that time and gravity had reduced to rubble.
    By the time he changed course, the exertion of manning the whole ship himself had begun to make his hands shake and his eyes fill with sweat. He had too many instruments to read, too many systems to monitor, too much data to absorb. And his computer couldn’t help him. It had extravagant fail-safes: the very mechanisms which enabled him to run Bright Beauty alone would shut the ship down in alarm if he gave the computer control of them. Nevertheless he kept going. His instincts had warned him, and he always obeyed them.
    Angus Thermopyle was a pirate and a mine jumper. He hated everybody, and there was enough old blood on his hands to convict a whole prison full of illegals. He was alone now because the decrepit drunk he’d hired to crew for him had made the mistake of asking the wrong question at the wrong time; so he’d flattened the man’s head with a spanner and left the body in one of the thruster tubes to be ashed the next time the drive cut in. He may not have been rich, but he was probably everything else the people in Mallorys believed him to be.
    He was also a coward.
    So he ran from the Hyland ship under as much g as his body could stand and remain conscious. The muscles of his shoulders began to twitch, and he couldn’t keep the sweat out of his eyes; but he kept running. When he knew that he had pushed himself too far, he didn’t stop: instead, he started pumping drugs into his veins, stim to keep him awake, cat to keep him steady.
    He was afraid, and he ran.
    Before he was close enough to the belt to begin deceleration, he had been driving under heavy g for half a standard day. Now the drugs were giving him psychotic episodes with increasing regularity, and he no longer knew clearly what he was doing. However, he was familiar with those drugs; before starting them, he’d understood what they would do to him. So he’d taken the precaution of locking Bright Beauty’ s course. When he was finally forced to surrender control of his ship’s systems to her command computer, the course-lock and her fail-safes managed the hard braking for him. As a result, he arrived without crashing—and without pulling his ship away into madness—at a part of the belt which everyone knew had been mined out years ago; a long stretch of sailing rock where other ships were unlikely to come.
    There he picked a particularly dead asteroid, parked Bright Beauty in a mining crater, shut down everything except life-support, and went to sleep in his g-seat, catted out of his mind.
    If the Hyland ship could find him there, then he was lost anyway. He had never really had a chance to escape.
    He still had no reason to believe the people on that ship even knew he existed.
    Hours later, he awoke screaming because there were skinworms all over him, crawling, gnawing, starting to burrow in—
    The sensation was terrible. It was also normal; a predictable consequence of the drugs. However, for him so much of what was terrible was also familiar that he knew exactly what to do. Although he couldn’t swallow the bright terror rising in his throat or unknot the red pain closing around his heart, his hands were almost steady as he injected more drugs into his veins—analgesics to flush the now-poisonous stimulants and cataleptics away, antihistamines and steroids to soften his body’s reactions. As soon as these new drugs took hold, he slept again.
    The next time he awakened, he had trouble breathing because the air in Bright Beauty was going bad. He’d left Com-Mine Station without supplies. That meant he now had only a little water, less food—and no clean pads for the scrubbers which were supposed to keep his air breathable. Checking the computer’s