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

so rare that they were prohibitively expensive; which meant that most of them lived in AlSec. Men with nothing better to do rarely thought about anything else. Gorgeous women. Astonishing women. Women with zone implants, who did everything a drink-fuddled or cynical mind could imagine. Because they didn’t have any choice, no matter how much they may have hated what was happening to them.
    Women like Morn Hyland.
    So what must have happened was that Angus Thermopyle found a way to follow the Hyland ship when it left Com-Mine Station.
    After all, who knew how much sophisticated tracking equipment he had hidden away aboard his scruffy, rattletrap freighter? With all the mines he was said to have jumped, all the ore he was believed to have pirated, all the ships he was reputed to have wrecked, his financial resources must have been enormous. He could surely afford things over which even a successful swashbuckler like Nick Succorso could only drool. Obviously, he wasn’t spending the money on himself. Anybody who had to sit near him in Mallorys would have sworn he hadn’t changed his shipsuit since the invention of the gap drive. He never bought expensive drinks—or more than a few cheap ones. And he absolutely never bought expensive women. As for his ship, which he called by the odd, inapt name, Bright Beauty , no one ever saw inside her; but her exterior plate and ports and antennae and scanners looked like they had been driven through a meteor shower and then left to corrode. In fact, the only discernible care he took of her—the only hint he gave that he had any interest in her at all—was to keep her name freshly painted in crisp black letters on either side of her command module.
    What was he doing with all that money?
    What else? He must be investing it in his “business,” using it to buy the kind of vacuum sniffers and particle sifters and doppler sensors that most pilots who frequented Com-Mine Station only knew about by rumor; the kind of equipment which would allow him to follow the Hyland ship without making either her or the Station itself suspicious.
    There were still questions unanswered. Everyone knew that a ship the size of Bright Beauty needed at least two people and preferably six to run her. Assuming that Morn Hyland worked for him on his return, Angus must still have had a crew of some kind when he left on Starmaster’s trail. Who was it? Presumably, it must have been someone who had managed to get on and off Com-Mine Station without id processing, since Bright Beauty had no crew of record in the computer. So what happened to him? Or them?
    What happened to the Hyland ship and all the rest of her people?
    No one knew. But Angus Thermopyle must have followed them to their strike. He must have jumped them somehow—wrecked the ship, marooned or murdered the family. And spared Morn because under the persuasion of the zone implant she was as desirable as any vision.
    Because—so speculation ran—he hated her.
    It was nothing personal, of course. He hated everything. He hated everybody. The people who watched for such things could smell it on him. His life was a stew of hate, destructive and unpredictable. Now his hate was fixed on her, and he desired the thing he hated. He wanted her to be what only a zone implant could make her.
    Beautiful and revolted. Capable of any degradation his filthy appetites could conceive—and able to be hurt by it.
    The few men in Mallorys who realized what they considered the truth about her were sickened by it. Being of various moral characters themselves, some of them probably considered it evil. The rest no doubt considered it evil that the control to her implant was in Angus Thermopyle’s pocket.
    On this subject, Nick Succorso kept his opinion to himself. Perhaps his attraction to Morn was so strong that he didn’t think about anything else.
    Despite his attraction, however, and his reputation for success, he was probably restrained from immediate action by the