Out of the frying-pan into the fire.
At least she has her smartsCaptain’s Fancy was a trap: she recognized that.
Though it won't be too easy, Nick is not stupidNick Succorso took hold of her by the shoulders: he was about to put his arms around her. This was what he’d rescued her for - to possess her. The first crisis of her new life was upon her, when she was so full of alarm that she wanted to strike at him, drive his touch away.
Nevertheless she had the presence of mind to stop him by saying, “No heavy g.”
Not like she can tell him.“Please. No heavy g. Not without warning me.”
She may have been cornered, but she wasn’t beaten.
Her gambit succeeded. He stopped, stared at her oddly. She could see that he was suspicious. He wanted her. He also wanted to know what was going on. And he needed to get his ship away from Com-Mine.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “You sick or something?”
And to keep her zone implant a secret she may need to do some really drastic things, particularly for her as a cop.“I’m too weak. He -” She managed a shrug as eloquent as Angus’ name. “I need time to recover.”
We get acquainted with Mikka Vasaczk.To deflect his suspicions, she was prepared to tell Nick as much about Starmaster as he wished, even though the ship was entirely classified and Morn herself was a cop. As a last resort, she would tell him how Starmaster died. But she would never tell him that Angus had given her a zone implant—and then let her have the control.
Never.
Mikka even gives her a warningNick’s second, a woman named Mikka Vasaczk, was in a hurry. Maybe she was eager to get to the bridge herself. Or maybe she knew she was being supplanted and didn’t like it. Whatever the reason, she was brusque and quick.
That suited Morn.
As if she wasn't deep in trouble anyway.“You’d better be careful. Nick has better sense than you think.”
Her first move with the zone implant is smart, though very risky.If Nick knew—or guessed—that she had a zone implant, how long would she be able to keep the control itself secret? More than anything, she needed energy. Energy to force down her fear; energy to face him. Energy to distract him.
The zone implant could give her that. It could suppress her brain’s necessary ability to acknowledge fatigue. Unfortunately she only knew what the implant could do: she didn’t know how to use it. Of course, she could read the labels imprinted above the buttons; but she didn’t know how to tune them, how to combine them to produce specialized effects. She could only make her implant function at its crudest.
Unless she studied zone implants specifically, which doesn't seem likely, that's a terribly risky thing to do. Making a gap in the circuitry of a device you don't know well can break some other connection that went through the same place. Perhaps it could be more careful to cover that place with a dielectric, preferably in such a way that couldn't be removed without causing damage. The mending kit could have something suitable. Though I guess for Morn's situation her behavior was most adequate – many people could just lie down and wish to die.She took tweezers and used them to open the cover of her zone implant control. Then, with a needle from the kit, she scraped a gap in a tiny section of the control’s circuitry—the section which enabled the control to render her helpless by blocking the link between her brain and body. Angus had used that function often: it allowed him to do what he wanted to her flesh while her mind could only watch and wail.
As well as she could, she made sure that nobody would ever again have the power to simply turn her off. Her electronics training in the Academy was good for that, anyway.
Her fingers were trembling by the time she was done, and she was terrified that she’d made a mistake.
She had a nagging sense that she was asking too much of herself, that no human being could do what she intended and get away with it; that the law against “unauthorized use” was absolutely reasonable.
Perhaps she's not far from the truth, well, she doesn't know that she's in an SRD's book, where insanity and doing what no human being is supposed to do is pretty much normal.On the other hand, she was here because Angus had driven her half insane. There was no escape that didn’t also involve insanity.
She tries to use to implant to make herself feel better, be more prepared.
Grimly she pushed another button.
Wrong one, wrong one, this button brought pain, the entire surface of her skin seemed to catch flame. Angus had told her that her father was flash-blinded when she blew upStarmaster’s thrust drive. His face must have felt like this, all fire and agony, every nerve excoriated beyond bearing.
Her muscles convulsed in a spasm of fire and remembrance. She stabbed wildly at the control, trying to hit CANCEL.
She missed. Instead she got the button she’d already tried, the one that made her rest.
The effect astonished her. In an instant she was transformed.
It was magic, a kind of neural alchemy. Out of absolute pain, it created something she needed more than energy, something which would enable her to deal with Nick—something which Angus had never tried on her, either because he didn’t know what it would do or because he didn’t want it.
In a sense, the combination she’d keyed didn’t ease the pain, not entirely. Instead the hurt was translated almost miraculously into something quite different—a sensual ache which focused itself in the most sensitive parts of her body, so that the tips of her breasts burned as if they could be quenched by kisses, and her mouth and loins became hot and damp, hungry for penetration.
There's an interesting musing about Angus, quite a characterization of him.She’d found it, the answer to her immediate problem: a way of responding to Nick that wasn’t predicated on revulsion. For the time being, she now had the means to endure his touch.
Such unusual help, a device that controls your own mind.No wonder Angus had never used this particular function. It would have made her paradoxically invulnerable: accessible to everything his hate required; inaccessible to terror.
And an unusual source of knowledge she has as wellNow she could rest. At the moment, the only guess she had to make was, when would Nick come? How much time did she have? Thrust complicated the direction of Captain’s Fancy’s g; it made movement around the cabin awkward. All the more reason to roll into the berth, velcro herself secure, and let her exhaustion take her away. When he arrived, she would have to face his suspicions. Whatever they were. Until then—
She didn’t do it. Angus Thermopyle had taught her more things than either of them had realized. There were still precautions she could take, ways to camouflage the truth.
That Angus was quite helpfulWhen he came for her, she was as ready as possible, under the circumstances.
She had to compartmentalize her mind to do it. Angus Thermopyle in one box; everything he’d done to her in another. The harsh death of Starmaster. Her gapsickness. Revulsion. Fear of discovery. Everything dangerous, everything that could paralyze or appall her, had to be separated and locked away, so that she could be at least approximately intelligent in her decisions.
Willpower was like the zone implant: it dissociated mind and body, action and consequence.
Angus had taught her that, too, without knowing it.
But he's interested in information first of all.Nick Succorso looked like he belonged in the romantic stories people told about him back on Com-Mine; like the stories were true. He had smoldering eyes and a buccaneer’s grin, and he carried himself with the kind of virile assurance that made every movement seem like an enticement. His hands knew how to be gentle; his voice conveyed a caress. Those things alone might have made him desirable. But in addition he was dangerous—notoriously dangerous. The scars under his eyes hinted at fierceness: they showed that he was a man who played for blood. When his passions made those scars turn dark, they promised that he was a man who played for blood, and won.
He entered her room as if he were already sure that she could never say no to him.
Right, that sounds like a good way to shift the direction of thinking – different terms.he reached for the id tag on its fine chain around her neck.
He couldn’t read the codes, of course, not without plugging the tag into a computer. And he couldn’t access any of her confidential files without plugging her tag into a Security or UMCP computer. However, like virtually everyone in human space, he knew what the embossed insignia meant.
“You’re a cop,” he said.
He didn’t sound surprised.
Didn’t sound surprised.
Through the pressure mounting inside her, she thought, He should be surprised. Then she realized: No. He had an ally in Com-Mine Security. He could have known from the day he first saw her that she was a cop.
That possibility might help protect her. It would encourage him to think about her in terms of covert operations and betrayal, not helplessness and zone implants.
“You rescued me.” Her voice was husky, crowded with desires which transcended reason or fear. “I’ll be anything you want me to be.”
Ouch“Is this the approach you used on Captain Thermopile? Is that why he kept you alive?”
“No,” she said automatically, “no,” without thinking. But she needed to think, had to think, because the next words she would say without thinking were, He didn’t use this combination.
The cheap won't do.she offered the cheapest answer Nick might accept. “You’ve seen him. I left him for you. I couldn’t feel this way about him.”
She knew nothing about him. Maybe he would be vain enough to accept that.
He wasn’t. Or his vanity was too profound to be satisfied cheaply. He didn’t move; his smile was crooked and bloodthirsty. “Try again.”
She finds an explanation that works“Your name is Morn Hyland,” he said almost kindly. “You’re UMCP. And Angus Thermo-pile is the slimiest illegal between forbidden space and Earth. He’s sewage—and you’re one of the elite, you work for Min Donner. He should have obliterated you. He should have taken you apart atom by atom and never risked coming back to Com-Mine. Tell me why he kept you alive.”
Still“Because he needed crew,” she answered. True enough to be believed. “He was alone onBright Beauty. And I was alone on Starmaster—I was the only survivor.” False enough to protect her.
The chapter ends on“That’s not good enough.” His voice seemed to stick far back in his throat; it came out in a rasp. “But it’s a start.
She had no conception of the romantic way her escape from Angus Thermopyle to Nick Succorso was viewed back on Com-Mine. The idea that anything about her situation was romantic might have made her hysterical.
You can get some other chapter.
However, I seem to recall it well enough.
