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

this story.
    One was that the supply ship from Earth arrived on schedule. It hadn’t had any trouble along the way. And it reported that there hadn’t been any other ship.
    The other was that the control to Morn Hyland’s zone implant was never found. Angus Thermopyle didn’t have it on him when he was arrested. That was why he was rotting in lockup instead of facing execution.
    The first matter was easily explained. Nick Succorso must have arranged the whole thing—faked the distress call, stolen Station supplies himself, planted them on Bright Beauty. That was the kind of thing he did. It made the people in Mallorys admire him even more.
    The second issue was more disconcerting, however. It didn’t make sense. Angus could not have gotten rid of the control earlier: if he had done that, she would have been able to escape him—or, more likely, to butcher him with her bare hands for the things he had done to her. And yet he must have gotten rid of it earlier. Otherwise he would have been caught with it.
    The only other explanation was less satisfying. After all, the zone implant and its control were hypothetical, not proven. Perhaps they had never existed.
    But in that case the entire sequence of events degenerated into incomprehensibility. Why did she stay with him, if he had no power over her? And if his power was of some other kind, why did he give it up? What warned him that he was in danger?
    No one knew the answers. However, the people who asked them were only interested out of curiosity. The main thrust of the action was clear enough. Details that didn’t make sense could eventually be forgotten.
    The crowd at Mallorys would have found the real story much harder to live with.

CHAPTER
3
    T here were parts of the story that would always remain obscure, unless Angus Thermopyle explained them; and he refused.
    By the end of his trial, Bright Beauty didn’t have any secrets left. Despite her pretense of being a prospector’s ship, she was indeed equipped with sophisticated particle sifters and doppler sensors, tools that no legitimate prospector would ever need. She was too heavily shielded, too heavily armed. Under boost, her thrust drive could have shifted the orbit of a planetoid. She had cargo holds hidden in places the Station inspectors never imagined. And she had so many relays and servos, compensations and overrides, that it was actually possible for one man to run her alone—although the experts who examined her agreed it would be suicide for any individual to take on that kind of complex strain for more than a few hours at a time.
    In addition, the datacore revealed the extent of Angus’ “wealth.”
    To the surprise of his prosecutors, his resources turned out to be trivial; almost nonexistent. Regardless of his reputation, he was operating only a few steps ahead of his expenses.
    That unexpected detail didn’t help him, of course. He hadn’t been arrested for his “wealth.” And in other ways the exposure of his secrets was sufficiently damning. Enough evidence was found to convict him of several acts of piracy—although everyone in Security agreed that the evidence was disappointing, since it wasn’t adequate to procure the death penalty. Certainly it wasn’t adequate to explain the more tantalizing aspects of Morn’s story.
    Confronted with this inadequacy—which presumably gave him the opportunity to cast his actions in the most favorable possible light—Angus surprised his prosecutors further by refusing to defend himself, testify on his own behalf. Indeed, he declined to answer any questions at all. With a zone implant, of course, he could have been inspired to talk; but the law—and the UMCP—didn’t consider confession an “authorized use.” Consequently, Com-Mine Security never found out where or how Bright Beauty had been outfitted, or how she’d been damaged. No explanation was obtained for the fact that his reputation so far exceeded the evidence against him. He was