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

maintenance log, he confirmed that his present pads were long overdue for a change.
    This development made him rage as if he were on the verge of a breakdown. But that, too, was normal. He still knew exactly what to do. Risking anoxia because he didn’t have the strength to put on an EVA suit, he shut down circulation and took the pads out of the scrubbers. While his head throbbed with CO 2 overload and his vision blurred in and out of focus, he used half his water to make a chemical bath for the pads. He left the pads in the bath as long as he could—until he was close to unconsciousness. Then he refitted them in the scrubbers and restarted the circulation.
    Unfortunately, his problems were just beginning.
    He was probably safe where he was; but he couldn’t stay there. His food would last for only two or three more days. He could reuse all his water—but only if he had his purifiers serviced. And the superficial cleaning he’d given the pads might not hold up even that long. He had only two choices.
    Return to Com-Mine Station.
    Or find some other source of supply.
    He never considered returning to the Station. He wasn’t deterred by the prospect of humiliation. If anyone ever found out that he’d panicked and run, only to return limping because he’d run out of food, water, and air, he would be sneered at everywhere in DelSec; but he could live with that. The world had been sneering at him from the first. He took revenge when he got the chance. However, there was still the Hyland ship—
    That ship was to blame, of course. She’d scared him, and he hated everything that scared him. As he lifted Bright Beauty out of the mining crater and eased back from the belt to give his scanning equipment range, he began to plot ways to make Starmaster pay for what was happening to him.
    Ways to wreck a ship with that hull? The bare concept was nonsense—and Angus Thermopyle wasn’t prone to nonsense. Nevertheless thinking about it helped him do what he had to. In a state of cold rage which served as calm, he spent the next two days searching the belt with his sniffers and sifters, prospecting not for ore but for miners.
    Toward the end of that time, he came close to panic again. The pads were starting to give out; his brain was being squeezed in a vise of bad air. His tongue was thick from drinking bad water, and he was urgently hungry. Still his cold, black rage kept him going. And a judicious application of drugs kept him steady.
    At last he found what he needed—a mine on a craggy and pockmarked asteroid with a look of depletion about it, as if it had already had all its riches cut out. Yet the people working there had a ship. It stood on its struts a short distance from their camp, which was in turn a short distance from the hole they’d cut into the asteroid. The ship was cold: it had been shut down a considerable time ago, when the miners had settled in to work this hunk of rock.
    Under other circumstances, Angus Thermopyle would have ignored those miners. He could tell their whole story with a glance at their ship, their camp, and his field-mining probes. This asteroid had once been rich, but it had in fact already been mined; played out. The people on it now—probably a family, people who had to spend long periods of time on ships or in mines tended to do things by families—were essentially scavengers. Too timid or defeated or poor to go prospecting for an original strike, they sweated their bare survival out of the rock by gleaning what little had been missed by previous miners. A pirate or jumper wouldn’t waste his time on them.
    On the other hand, they had food and fresh water and scrubber pads. Angus was having trouble keeping his anger and distress from choking him, and he didn’t hesitate. He went in hard.
    The miners saw him coming. His board picked up shouts of warning and protest, appeal and outrage: he ignored them. As he approached, he used torpedoes to collapse the mouth of the mine, blocking it