Read Online Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict by Stephen R. Donaldson - Free Book Online

still came naturally. Her gaze blurred, and her nose wrinkled as she smelled the mess she had made in the suit. Carefully she swung her legs over the edge of the surgery berth, eased herself into a sitting position. Just for a second, he thought she was actually going to thank him for the opportunity to use the sanitary cubicle.
    But movement helped clear her head. Her frown sharpened. Gripping the edge of the berth to steady herself, she looked at him again. “Why am I free? Why did you put me to sleep?”
    He bared his teeth. “I told you. You’re my crew now. You’re mine. You’ve been impressed.” He relished the word. “When I tell you to do something, I expect it done.”
    He could see suspicion mounting to panic in her face. “You bastard,” she breathed for the second time. “I’m not your crew. I’m UMCP. I’m going to leave you rotting in lockup if it’s the last thing I do. What have you done to me?”
    Angus didn’t answer directly: he was having too much fun. Instead, he showed her the control in his hand.
    The shock when she recognized the small box was everything he could have wanted. It was like her horror of the way she had murdered her family, like that in helplessness and extremity; and yet profoundly different in other, crucial respects. Terror and loathing burned across her face. Her hands sprang to her mouth; she made an attempt to cry out.
    Then she hurled herself at him.
    Unhindered by the asteroid’s negligible gravity, she came at him like a crazy. In her frenzy, she was so wild that she looked rabid—frantic enough to tear him apart.
    But he had good reflexes. They’d often saved his life. And as a matter of instinct he was already braced against the bulkhead, ready. He shoved himself to the side, moving almost as fast as she did.
    At the same time, he pushed one of the main function buttons on the zone-implant control.
    That one was for emergencies: it was intended to save the people around her from her fits of gap-sickness after everything else failed. When he pushed it, she went instantly catatonic.
    Limp as an empty shipsuit, she collided with the bulkhead and flopped backward. The asteroid’s small tug pulled her down slowly, so that she fell like a grotesque feather against the edge of the surgery berth and settled toward the floor.
    “You stink!” Angus raged at her, squeezing the control triumphantly. “Go get clean. When I tell you to do something, I expect it done.”
    She could hear him: he knew she could hear him. Her eyes retained the color of consciousness. That was the blessing—or the curse—of the zone implant’s cataleptic function. It didn’t affect her mind: it only short-circuited the connection between what her mind wanted and what her body did. She could hear him; yet she lay on the floor in a heap of flaccid limbs. If he’d taken a welding torch to her belly, she wouldn’t have reacted in any way.
    Her state wasn’t particularly rewarding for him, however. After a moment, he keyed off the control. At once, a spasm ran through all her muscles, making her twitch like an epileptic.
    Helpless to do anything else, she burst into a fury of tears.
    Once again, she seemed to find a chink in his character, a small way in which he was unlike himself. He let her cry for a little while, gave her a chance to understand his power over her. Then, almost without gloating, he said, “You had enough? Go get clean. Down there.” He pointed along the passage toward the san and the head.
    She flinched as if he’d tried to put a hand on her. Hugging herself against the bulkhead, she looked up at him. So thinly that he could hardly hear her, she asked, “What do you want from me? You’ll get the death penalty for this. You might be able to get off with life imprisonment for what you did to those miners. You might be able to convince a court you had some kind of reason—or you were just crazy. But you can’t get away with this. Nobody ever gets away with