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

unwilling either to account for or to defend the presence of stolen Station food, equipment, and medicine aboard his ship. And no new illumination was shed on his strange relationship with Morn Hyland. In the first weeks of his incarceration, he opened his mouth only when he wanted to complain about the food or the facilities or the treatment in the Station lockup.
    And when he was informed that Bright Beauty was being sent to the Station shipyard to be dismantled for spare parts. Then he pounded on the walls of his cell and started to howl with such fury that eventually he had to be sedated.
    No one knew what had warned him when the Hyland ship had come into Com-Mine Station—or how hard he had tried to get away from her.
    Probably he would have been unable to explain that warning. It was a matter of instinct. He had good instincts, and they started to burn as he watched the sleek oreliner nudge its way into dock.
    It looked like a prize, the kind of treasure ship Bright Beauty could peel apart weld by weld, exposing to theft or destruction the things that made other people think they were superior beings: the money, the possessions, the luck. He had tackled ships like that in the past, had tackled them often, tracking them to their destinations, learning their secrets, then blasting them open in the black void, leaving them ruined, lost forever—had tackled them and raged to himself fiercely as he did so, destroying what other men would have captured as riches because his need for money had limits while his desire to see what matter cannon fire could do was immense. Alone in his ship, or wandering around DelSec, or sitting in Mallorys—Angus Thermopyle was always alone, even when he happened to find some stow- or castaway piece of human garbage to crew for him—he relived the ships he had tackled and hated them.
    But not this time.
    This time, his instincts burned—and he always trusted his instincts.
    As far as he knew, he had no particular reason to be wary. His crimes left little evidence behind; there was no better place than deep space to hide the remains of his plundering. Only his datacore could damage him, and he had long ago taken steps to alleviate that danger—steps which no one would detect because they were theoretically impossible. But because he was a hunter, he had also been hunted. He had the intuitions of prey.
    So he did something that would never have occurred to anyone else on or around Com-Mine Station: he turned his field-mining probes toward the Hyland ship.
    One of those probes was designed to measure the nuclear weight of thin cross sections of solid rock. It informed him that Starmaster’s hull was formed of an alloy he’d only heard about, never seen—an alloy so heavy it could endure matter cannon fire the way stone endured water.
    An alloy so expensive no oreliner could afford it. There were no haulers or handlers in space rich enough to afford it.
    When he saw the readings, Angus Thermopyle fled.
    He didn’t take the time to buy supplies. He didn’t try to find out what the station scuttlebutt concerning the Hyland ship was. He didn’t even bother to repaint Bright Beauty’s name—something he always did before risking the malign vagaries of space. A ship as rich as Starmaster would have friends, muscle. Escorts? Fighters hanging off station to watch for trouble? He took that into account, but it didn’t stop him. Sealing his hatches, he called up Station Center, filed a purely fictitious destination report, and received formal permission to undock. Then, because his instincts were still on fire, he meticulously followed the departure trajectory he was assigned. Cursing like a slavey all the way, he left Com-Mine along a route that would attract as little attention as possible. And he didn’t risk cutting in boost and shifting his course toward the belt until he was absolutely alone at least fifty thousand kilometers past the known range of any scan from the vicinity of