Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

monitoring the thrusters directly.
    None of the bridge crew had anything urgent to do. They were all staring at Morn.
    “Carmel.” Nick continued to focus on Morn while he addressed other people. “What’s scan got from Com-Mine?”
    Carmel was a gray-haired, chunky woman who looked old enough to be Morn’s mother. “No change,” she reported. “Routine traffic. They haven’t sent anything after us yet.”
    “Lind?” Nick asked. As he watched Morn, the hue of his scars deepened.
    “We’re getting regular demands for acknowledgment,” replied a pale, wispy, nearly walleyed man with a communications receiver jacked into his ear. “They want to know if we hear them. And what we’re going to do. But they aren’t making threats.”
    “All right.” Nick slapped his hands on the arms of his seat and pivoted his chair away from Morn. “We’ve got a decision to make, but we have time. They know we took damage. The longer we put on velocity this slowly, the more they’re likely to figure we can’t trust tach. And if we can’t go into tach, they probably figure they can chase us down. If it’s that important to them. Which might encourage them to postpone their own decision for a while.”
    That, Morn thought, might be the real reason Nick had acceded to her request for no heavy g.
    “But whichever way they jump,” he went on, “we need to be ready to jump ahead of them.”
    Abruptly he swung around to face Morn again. “We’ve got a problem.” But his tone wasn’t abrupt: he spoke laconically, as if all he wanted was to engage her in conversation. “Our deal with Com-Mine Security isn’t holding—the deal we made to get you out. They want us to come back. If we don’t, they may decide to come after us.”
    “Why?” she asked neutrally. The crisis was upon her, but it didn’t surprise her: it was just what she’d feared. To that extent, she was ready for it. Yet hearing Nick state it caught her in a new way, despite her alarm. Was it possible he’d made a mistake? Was it possible that he could lose?
    She already knew he had limits—
    He replied casually, but there was nothing casual about his scrutiny as he said, “They think you’ve got something they want.”
    She couldn’t help it: her whole body flushed with panic and remembered passion. Shame burned on her skin, as if he’d stripped her naked and offered to sell her to the highest bidder. The entire bridge crew was staring at her; even Vector watched her. Mikka Vasaczk’s animosity was palpable at her back, even though she was held by Nick’s gaze and couldn’t look away.
    The zone implant control, of course; that’s what Com-Mine wanted. Angus didn’t have it on him when he was arrested. By now, Security had had time to search Bright Beauty; they knew the control wasn’t there. They must have figured out she had it.
    They wanted to arrest her. And they wanted an excuse to execute Angus.
    As if in confirmation, Nick concluded, “They want us to return you.”
    In a small voice, like a bird horrified by a snake, she asked, “What are you going to do?”
    “That’s easy.” The darker Nick’s scars became, the more he smiled. “We’re going to get the truth out of you. Then we’ll be able to decide.”
    “What ‘truth’?” Suddenly she hated the way she flushed, the way her body betrayed her. She hated Nick’s bold hunger and Mikka’s hostility. She had rage in her, and it began to leak past her defenses. “You already know I’m UMCP. You knew that before you picked me up.” She gathered strength as she went on. “What other secrets do you think I’ve got? What ‘truth’ are we talking about here?”
    Nick’s manner remained perfectly nonchalant; only his eyes revealed the intensity of his focus on her. “We’ll take it one ‘truth’ at a time. What makes you think we knew you were a cop when we rescued you? If we’d known that, we would have known you didn’t need rescuing.”
    “Because,” she