A Dark and Hungry God Arises

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “No.” Nick had only one reason for caring what happened to Davies Hyland. “I want id on the ship.”

  “That’s easy. We’ve got traffic data.” As a precaution against accidents, Operations transmitted information on all ships and movements in Billingate’s control space. Arkenhill hit keys, consulted his readouts. “She calls herself Soar. Captain Sorus Chatelaine. Port of registry, Terminus.”

  “She’s a ways from home,” Mikka observed dryly. Terminus was farther from forbidden space than any other human station—at least a hundred light-years farther than Earth.

  Nick turned to Sib Mackern. “What does data say about her?”

  Sweat and lack of sleep made Mackern’s pale mustache stand out and his eyes recede. His hands faltered as he worked his board. After a moment he reported, “Nothing, Nick. We’ve never heard of her before.”

  Involuntarily Nick’s fingers curled into fists. Sib sounded like a weakling—and Nick despised weaklings. He had to stifle an impulse to hit the data second.

  “Cross-reference it,” he snapped. “Name, captain, registry, id codes. Give me a real answer.”

  Among illegal ships, there was often a considerable discrepancy between public and private id. Ships and captains could change their names as often as they liked. But they couldn’t change their registrations—or the id codes embedded in their datacores. Not without swapping out the datacores themselves.

  Even that was possible, of course. But then there would be other kinds of discrepancies—

  “Do it by configuration, too,” Mikka added for him. “Try their emission signature or anything else scan picked up on them.”

  Now it was his second that Nick wanted to hit. Not because she was wrong, but because she helped him when he shouldn’t have needed it; because he did need it. His brain wasn’t working, and he hated that more than he despised weaklings.

  Morn, you goddamn bitch, what have you done to me?

  Who betrayed me for you? Who let you out?

  “Here it comes,” Scorz put in abruptly. “Final approach and docking instructions.”

  Nick held his breath while the communications second relayed the details to command and helm.

  She was being treated like a visitor. A ship without cargo. A fugitive. An illegal in search of recreation. Or a dealer in information.

  Certainly not as a ship that needed—and could pay for—massive work on her gap drive.

  Cursing explosively, Nick strode to Scorz’ station. “Give me a channel!”

  Scorz tightened the receiver in his ear, tapped keys. Almost immediately he said, “Stand by for Captain Succorso,” and leaned away from his pickup to give Nick room.

  “Operations!” Nick snapped. “This is Captain Succorso. Who’s garbling your reception? Didn’t you hear me say I need repair? Didn’t you get my credit confirmation? I want a berth in the shipyard!”

  “Captain Succorso.” The reply which came over bridge audio was laconic; insufferably unconcerned. “Our reception isn’t garbled. And we aren’t deaf. We just don’t like ships that come in chased by angry Amnion. You’re lucky we’re letting you dock at all. But the Bill wants to talk to you.” A pause. “He wants to confirm your credit in person.”

  All at once Nick’s dread became as heavy as a blow to the stomach. For a second or two he felt that he couldn’t breathe; that his voice would crack like a kid’s if he tried to talk.

  He couldn’t wait for the shock to pass, however. Half coughing, he rasped, “Make sense, Operations. This is a goddamn credit-jack,” coded to be read by a computer, “not a physical transfer. He won’t learn anything by looking at it.

  “I need repairs. I can pay for them. Dock me in the shipyard!”

  Operations forced him to wait for an answer. When it came, the voice from the speakers seemed to be laughing secretly.

  “Apparently that credit-jack has been revoked.”

  “You sonofabitch!” Nick hunched over the pickup, trying to drive his anger into the face of the man he couldn’t see. “It can’t be revoked. It’s money! You can’t revoke money!”

  The radio voice permitted itself an audible chuckle. “Try telling that to the Amnion warship behind you.”

  With a definitive click, Operations cut transmission.

  An unnatural silence filled the bridge, as if the air-scrubbers and servos had shut down.

  Karster usually kept his questions to himself. Perhaps to compensate for the fact that he looked as unformed as a boy, he tried to act like he already understood everything. He couldn’t stand the silence, however.

  “Confirm it in person?” he asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Mikka replied as if she were suddenly tired, “the Bill wants to know what’s going on before he makes up his mind about us.”

  Nick wheeled on the command second. If she kept this up, he was certainly going to hit her. “You said it yourself,” he snarled. “It’s not that simple. He’s got fucking Morn’s fucking brat.”

  The Bill wanted to know what was going on so that he could milk the situation for all it was worth. And so that he could get even with Nick for bringing him this kind of trouble.

  Nick had promised Davies to the Amnion.

  Trying to demonstrate that he’d never intended to break his bargains with them—as well as to conceal the true nature of his dishonesty toward them—he’d also promised them Morn.

  But the Bill had Davies. If Nick’s credit-jack had been revoked, he had nothing with which to buy the brat back.

  Except Morn.

  He’d come to a place where he had to cheat somebody—and whoever he cheated would kill him for it.

  Unless—

  The idea hit him like a bolt of his old lightning, the electricity which kept him and everything he valued alive.

  —unless he cheated the cops instead.

  Hashi Lebwohl had assigned him to undermine Billingate, do the shipyard potentially permanent harm. And the DA director had told him how to do it. A dangerous gamble: the kind Nick specialized in. That Lebwohl was willing to take such risks had impressed Nick in spite of himself.

  It was a risk which could be turned against Lebwohl and the entire fucking UMCP.

  Would they respond to his last message? He didn’t know. Maybe not. But if they did, so much the better. They were much more of a threat to Thanatos Minor and the Amnion than to Nick himself. As far as they were concerned, Morn was the only excuse he needed for whatever he did. He could always say he was trying to rescue her.

  And if they didn’t respond, they couldn’t interfere.

  The consequences would be incalculable, of course. But that wasn’t Nick’s problem. Let Lebwohl clean it up. Or Dios himself. They deserved it.

  In the meantime it just might work.

  For a moment he simply stood still, tasting his own resources, letting the bolt’s charge bring him back to himself. Then he turned away from Mikka as if her doubts no longer mattered.

  “Arkenhill,” he asked with a semblance of his old relaxed, deadly insouciance, “how far back are those warships?”

  The scan second had this information at his fingertips. “Tranquil Hegemony is about half an hour. She burned for a while after we passed her—after the pod changed course. Closed most of the distance. But she’s down to our speed now—normal approach velocity for Billingate.” To show that the hostility of her intentions wasn’t aimed at the shipyard.

  “Calm Horizons has been coming up on us as fast as a lumbering tub like that can and still leave room to decelerate. In fact, she cut it a lot finer than we did.” Which she could do because she was Amnion—and because she’d been moving much slower than Captain’s Fancy’s imponderable .9C. “She should be in dock”—Arkenhill checked a screen—“call it eight hours from now.”

  Nick shook his head. “They won’t come all the way in. They’re going to hang off in prime range for that damn super-light proton beam, just to remind us—and the Bill—we can’t hope to cr
oss them and live.

  “So,” he continued as if he were thinking aloud, “I’ll have a little more than half an hour to talk to the Bill before Tranquil Hegemony arrives. And I can stall for four or five hours after that—until Calm Horizons is in position to support Tranquil Hegemony.

  “By then I’d better be ready to get us out of this mess. One way or another.”

  He scanned the bridge. No one disagreed with him—and no one except Mikka and Ransum met his gaze. The helm second’s face conveyed nothing more profound than worry and tension. However, Mikka’s expression was dour and defiant, almost openly skeptical. Minute by minute she allowed more of her distrust to show.

  “Scorz,” Nick said over his shoulder, approximating a poised casualness he still didn’t feel, “call me when we’re ten minutes out of dock. I’ll be in my cabin.”

  Getting ready.

  Then he moved to the command station and leaned close to Mikka’s ear. Maybe she was the one who’d betrayed him. Ignoring the way she pulled her head back as if she didn’t want him to touch her, didn’t want to feel his breath on her cheek, he murmured intimately, “I’m going to do my job. You do yours. But the next time you look at me like that, you’d better be prepared to back it up.”

  Leaving that threat behind him, he walked off the bridge.

  When Captain’s Fancy docked, he was waiting in the access passage of her airlock as if he were eager.

  He tried to believe that he’d recovered his sure genius for victory: to some extent he succeeded. Yet his new energy felt as artificial as the resources Morn’s zone implant gave her.

  Why were the Amnion so bloody determined to get their hands on her brat? What did he represent to them? Was he just an excuse—a way to unmask Nick’s real treachery? Or did Davies have some value Nick hadn’t guessed?

  Because he couldn’t answer questions like that, he couldn’t gauge his own position accurately—or the Bill’s. How much did the Bill have to gain by pleasing the Amnion in this situation? How much did he stand to lose by refusing to help Nick?

  The sensation that Morn had done him more damage than he could sustain continued to gnaw deep in his guts despite his efforts to believe he was ready.

  “Dock in two minutes,” Scorz announced over the intercom. “Secure to disengage spin.”

  Nick was ready for that, at least. With his hands on the zero-g grips, he waited for the transition between Captain’s Fancy’s internal spin and Thanatos Minor’s pull.

  The rock’s gravitic field was roughly .8g. In itself, Thanatos Minor lacked the mass to produce so much gravity. However, one of the curious side effects of the kind of fusion generator which powered Billingate was an increase in the planetoid’s effective density. It had almost enough g to be comfortable.

  As Nick’s boots began to drift from the deck, imitating freefall, Scorz said unnecessarily, “One minute.”

  Nick clenched his teeth against his visceral distrust of dock. He was illegal: his survival depended on movement—Captain’s Fancy’s as well as his own. Even when he was safe, he disliked surrendering his ship to the clamped paralysis of a berth. But now he was faced with the very real possibility that he and his ship would never move freely again.

  Then the hull relayed a jolt of impact. Transmitted through the bulkheads, the sound of the grapples and limpets carried clearly across the ship. From Billingate’s lock came the hiss of air-lines. As if they were magnetized, Nick’s boots pulled him toward the new floor.

  “Dock secure, Nick.” This time the voice over the intercom was Mikka’s. “We’re switching to installation power now.” Familiar with every hum and glow of his ship, he noticed the nearly subliminal flicker of the lights as the current changed. “Shall we keep drive on standby?”

  Damn her. That was something else he should have thought of for himself. Resisting an impulse to snarl, he answered, “Good idea. Let’s act like we expect to be assigned a shipyard berth almost immediately.” Then he added, “Lock up behind me. Nobody goes in or out until I get back.”

  “Right,” she acknowledged.

  At the control panel, Nick checked the airlock, then hit the sequence to open the doors. His hands did everything abruptly, as if he were eager—or afraid.

  As soon as he entered the lock and closed the doors, an indicator told him that Mikka had sealed the ship.

  Reaching to key the outer door, he heard Sib Mackern over the intercom. “Nick?”

  Nick thumbed the toggle. “What?”

  “I’ve got alternative id on Soar. The ship that picked up Davies. It’s tentative—you might call it hypothetical—but I thought you would want to know.”

  Nick dismissed the suggestion. “Tell me later. I haven’t got time now.” He was in a hurry. The timer was running on his last half hour before the Amnion arrived and began throwing their weight around.

  He silenced the intercom; opened Captain’s Fancy’s outer door.

  It was like being back on Enablement. Billingate’s airlock stood open, admitting him to the scan field passage which would search him for weapons or contaminants. And at the end of the passage, two guards waited. The only significant difference was that these guards were purportedly human—and they already had their guns trained on him.

  Both of them looked like their doctors had forgotten—or never known—the distinction between bio-prosthetic and bioretributive surgery.

  Nick was accustomed to such sights, but they still filled him with contempt. Any man who couldn’t shoot straight unless his gun was built into his arm, or couldn’t decide when to shoot unless Operations radioed orders directly into his brain, was something less than human, no matter how much he thought he’d been enhanced. But the doctors hadn’t stopped there. In addition to prosthetic firearms and transmitters, both guards had optical monitors where one or the other of their eyes should have been. They were machines, nothing more: pieces of equipment pretending to be human. For recreation, Nick thought mordantly, they probably stuck their fingers in power receptacles.

  “Captain Succorso?” one of them asked as if his vocal cords had been replaced by a speaker.

  Nick grinned maliciously. “Who were you expecting? Warden Dios?” Striding between the guards, he said, “I’m going to see the Bill. Be good boys and stay here. Make sure nobody steals my ship.”

  He knew the way; but the guards didn’t let him find it for himself. After a momentary hesitation while they listened to orders from Operations, they came after him, bounding against the rock’s g until they caught up with him. One at each shoulder, they steered him along the access passages into the reception area for the visitor’s docks.

  In Reception they passed more guards, as well as data terminals which would have enabled Nick to secure lodgings, establish local credit, hire women off the cruise, or prepare id verification through finger-or voiceprint. He had no interest in those amenities, however. Moving at a pace that made him bounce from stride to stride, he half led, half accompanied his escort toward the nearest lift which ran down into the core of the rock; to the depths where the Bill had hived his lair.

  Down there, a thousand meters of stone, concrete, and steel kept the Bill and his profits safe from any attack short of a prolonged super-light proton barrage. Calm Horizons and Tranquil Hegemony could probably dig him out, but only by blazing away at Thanatos Minor until the entire surface was slagged and the reactor in the heart of the rock reached meltdown temperatures.

  The Bill may have been as larcenous and uncaring as a billy goat, but he was smart enough to be afraid. Otherwise he wouldn’t live down here—and Nick’s credit-jack would be good.

  The ride down in the lift made Nick wish he carried a transmitter that could reach Captain’s Fancy. But here even the kind of nerve beepers he used routinely in places like Com-Mine Station were worse than useless: they didn’t function, but they did arouse suspicion.

  On either side, the guards kept their guns aimed at his ribs as if they expected him to do something crazy at any m
oment.

  “So how’s business?” he asked as if he wanted to start a conversation. “Do you clowns get enough activity around here to keep you from dying of boredom?”

  One of the guards smiled to show that he had no teeth: they’d been rotted away by nic or hype. The other remarked, “As long as we think we might get to shoot you, we’re happy.”

  Nick shrugged. “Sorry to disappoint you. You can’t shoot me now—the Bill wants to talk to me. And once we do that he’ll realize that keeping me alive is more important than you are.”

  “You have to pay him first,” the guard with no teeth chuckled, “and you ain’t got no credit.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Nick sneered cheerfully, trying to diffuse the tension which tightened around his chest as the car descended. “Some things are more valuable than credit—although a BR like you probably can’t understand that.”

  “What do you think?” the second guard asked the first. “I think he’s trying to insult us.”

  “Don’t think,” Nick advised. “You’ll get confused.”

  Involuntarily, despite his air of confidence, he held his breath as the lift sighed to a stop.

  Another access passage. More guards. Nick hardly noticed them. The mass of rock piled above him had never felt so heavy. It seemed to lean down on him, making his shoulders sag and his step falter in spite of the light g. Until his jaws began to ache, he didn’t realize that he was grinding his teeth.

  He needed energy now; needed his wits and his superiority. The problems he’d left behind aboard Captain’s Fancy could be ignored temporarily. Another victory or two would restore his crew’s confidence in him. Eventually he would discover who had betrayed him. But the problems ahead could kill him in a matter of minutes. If he didn’t measure up to his reputation, he was finished now.

  Do you think I’m done with you, Morn? he asked the echoing corridor. Do you think I’ve finished hurting you? You’re out of your mind. I haven’t started yet.

  That came first, before he tried betraying the cops.