Her only fear is that Mikka won't tell her when the trade takes place. But it turns out Mikka does tell her, roughly two and a half hours later. Mikka whispers, "He's gone" and informs Morn that in trade for Davies they received from the Amnion impressive gap drive equipment and adapters, soon to be ready for use. Morn quietly opens her cabin door, steps into the deserted hallway, and quietly closes the door behind her. She walks through the hallway to the auxiliary bridge. Liete Corregio is in the room with her back to Morn, studying the command board. Morn sneaks forward and knocks Liete unconscious, taking Liete's handgun. She unseals Liete's shipsuit and arranges it so that Liete's arms are restrained. Morn is now ready to rig the ship...for self-destruct.The time had come for her to wait.
That should have been impossible. Her son was being traded to the Amnion. They would run tests on him until his psyche tore and his spirit snapped. Then they would make him one of them. They might very well turn him into an improved version of Marc Vestabule. Waiting should have been inconceivable.
It wasn't. Her zone implant made her capable of anything.
On some level, she knew that its emissions were as addictive as any drug, and as destructive. But that didn't matter: they were also effective. With them, she could have put herself to sleep. Or she could have tuned her body to the pitch of orgasm until her brain went into noradrenaline overload, and everything she would ever think or feel boiled away.
However, she had a more complex form of suicide in mind.
After a few adjustments to her black box, she sank into a trance of concentration in which her mind was charged simultaneously with vitality and peace: a trance that allowed her to remember everything she'd ever learned about Captain's Fancy--every code, every command sequence, every logic tree--as well as every precaution Nick has taken for Enablement Station.
Instead of going hysterical with apprehension and helplessness, she spent her time preparing to fight the entire ship.
She opens the intercom to hear if Nick should happen to address the crew, and focuses on commands both subtle and compulsory to feed into the computer while avoiding attracting any attention. Morn designs these commands to have override authority upon the ship's computer systems. Next, she finds ways to enter overriding commands that dummy Vector's destruct sequence to her board. She also looks for ways that she can control the doors and life support of the auxiliary bridge. And she conceives a way to block Nick from shutting her down.
With her academy training and memory ability being used to the fullest, we now see how the zone implant imposes more superhuman ability than just allowing her to go for extended sleepless periods. It shows she can quickly become a force to be reckoned with on the scale of a ship-wide power struggle. This is a chapter that kept me guessing on what would happen next, practically all the way through.
