Then Mikka's voice tells Nick that Morn can now walk, though her mind hasn't erased all cataleptic effects of the "cat" remaining within her. Nick orders Mikka to meet him at the airlock. Mikka shuts off the intercom without another word to him, a sign of disrespect that angers Nick. He meets with Mikka and Morn before they make it to the airlock, and he notes that Morn is shuffling her feet uncertainly forward. It irritates Nick to notice that Mikka has cleaned up Morn and put her into a fresh shipsuit, as he considers that a dignity that Morn doesn't deserve.
He takes Morn, and orders Mikka to take command on the bridge. He also tells Mikka to organize a raiding party and grant those crewmembers time off to rest for a task he'll have for them. He tells Mikka he's the ship's only hope, and admits he doesn't yet know what he wants the raiding team to do. Mikka gives Nick an angry look as she hands Morn to him, and then walks away.
Then Nick keys the doors of the airlock, and walks onto the floor of Billingate, while gripping Morn tightly. Nick feels Morn looks pitiable and desirable at the same time. He continues to grip Morn tightly by her left arm, even after she complains that it hurts. After they pass guards in the Reception area, Nick is surprised that he and Morn don't see any more of the Bill's guards as they move through the corridors toward the Amnion sector.
Nick loosens his grip on Morn's arm because his hand is tired (but not because he has pity or empathy), and asks Morn if she knows where they are and where they're going. She doesn't answer, but he tells her he's had another talk with Marc Vestabule of the Amnion. He mentions Marc proclaimed they can paralyze Captain's Fancy, and wants to hear what Morn knows about that. Morn asks Nick why he thinks she knows the answer. Nick replies because she's a cop with information he doesn't have, and because she talked with the Amnion when she had control of his ship. Morn responds that she will tell Nick why the Amnion can paralyze his ship, if he will tell her why he talked to the UMCP before going to Enablement and why the UMCP hired him.
Nick claims to Morn he wanted the cops to pay him for not selling her knowledge to the Bill. Morn doesn't believe that; she states that Nick must have had UMCP permission to take her off Com-Mine Station. She points out that Nick needed a source in Com-Mine to frame Angus Thermopyle, and required someone at UMCPHQ to give him codes to make the phony supply ship look genuine enough to bait Angus. So Nick must have already had a deal set with the cops, Morn reasons aloud, with herself as part of that deal. So she concludes that Nick was hired by the cops for some other purpose, and Morn wants to know what that purpose was.She astonished him; surpassed him. Why wasn't she terrified?--stricken to the core? She should have been sobbing in revulsion and supplication, not trying to bargain with him.
The corridor was empty in both directions. The Amnion kept themselves apart from the rest of the installation and nobody with any sense went looking for them. The Bill's bugeyes were watching, of course; but they probably couldn't pick out voices at this range. Nick let go of Morn's arm, clutched her shoulders, and swung her around to face him.
"Look at me, damn you." Why aren't you out of your head with fear? "Look at me."
Her gaze came up to his slowly. When he saw her eyes, the mad, dark passion in them almost made him flinch. The extremity of her suffering, the depth of her abuse, was matched by a focused, absolute, and predatory conviction. She looked like a woman who could come back from her grave--or from Amnion mutagens--to destroy him.
Roughly he shoved her away. Helpless to defend herself, she stumbled against the wall; he caught her on the rebound and compelled her into motion again. He needed movement to control the dread rising in his guts.
Nick tells her Hashi Lebwohl wanted him to sell the mutagen immunity drug to the Bill, giving him the real thing to test on a live subject, and then giving him a fake drug that would get the Bill in trouble when the Bill tried to sell it to others. Nick hopes this knowledge of police corruption hurts Morn, and he adds he may sell the Bill only the real immunity drug, and not the fake drug, to punish Hashi for ignoring his calls for assistance. He asks Morn to tell him how the Amnion can paralyze his ship.
Nick is shocked enough to ask Morn why she's helping him. She reveals she doesn't want the Amnion to get any of them, and she didn't expect Nick to be grateful. Here again, we are informed that Morn is loyal to higher motives than Nick, because Morn still wants to protect humanity, and Nick is primarily concerned about his own reputation and glory. They arrive at the Amnion sector, the entrance described by Stephen Donaldson as "a faceless door in a blank wall". Nick views the door as an airlock, and remembers with revulsion the acrid air the Amnion breathed on Enablement Station. He vows he won't breathe that air ever again."Oh, that," she muttered as if she hadn't felt a word he said; as if she were too numb or blind to be reached by his malice. "You should have figured that out for yourself."
Here it comes, he thought. Now she would try to get back at him.
"Back on Enablement, I needed to show them Captain's Fancy's self-destruct was real. If I let them believe I was bluffing, they wouldn't have returned Davies. So I dumped a copy of everything in the auxiliary command board into my transmission. Including," she finished like an act of violence, "your priority codes. They can override every instruction you key in."
Nick thought his heart was going to stop.
Of course, he also had those codes. He could override their override. And they could override again--
Paralysis. Eventually the computers would shut down to protect themselves from burnout.
For a moment the shock left him white and blank. She wasn't trying to hurt him. Her revelation didn't damage him: it helped him. What the Amnion knew about his ship was only dangerous as long as he didn't know they knew it. Once he got back to Captain's Fancy, he could simply write in a new set of priority codes. The whole job would take less than an hour.
Morn had given him an unexpected and imponderable reprieve.
