The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

every action took place in
normal space. Gap ships could change the sector of space in which they acted
with incredible ease; but the actions themselves still consumed real time and
involved real distances. A UMCP cruiser might well chase a pirate vessel across
the entire galaxy — and yet every effort the cruiser made to give battle
occurred in normal space, where simply hunting through a solar system for
telltale emissions was a job that might take months.
    These
hindrances were vastly increased by the fact that gap travel itself was not as
precise as it appeared on paper. Both course and distance for any crossing were
susceptible to several forms of inaccuracy. Minuscule fractions of a degree in
course became hundreds of thousands of kilometres when those fractions were
multiplied by light-years. And the calibration of distance was even more complex.
The distance a ship travelled through the gap varied according to a number of
factors, including speed, rate of acceleration, and the ratio between her mass
and both the actual and potential power of her gap drive.
    In
addition the interaction of those elements was ruled by the gap drive’s
hysteresis transducer, which controlled the extent to which the drive’s effect
lagged behind its cause: too much lag, and the ship never went into tach; too
little, and the ship never resumed tard. As a result, tiny fluctuations in
power or hysteresis, or minute miscalculations of mass, became large shortfalls
or overshots. Superhuman precision was required to make any ship resume tard
right where her captain intended when he went into tach.
    For
that reason — and because ships came out of the gap with all the velocity their
crossing demanded — Earth required the solar system’s massive non-UMCP traffic
to use a gap range beyond the orbit of the last planet; and ships approaching
any station were expected to resume tard well outside the sphere of that
station’s control space.
    Here
again the sheer scale of space subtly undermined humankind’s apparent mastery
of inconceivable distances. Being a pirate was easier — and fighting piracy was
harder — than most people understood.

 
     
     
    SORUS
     
    S oar survived because her captain, Sorus
Chatelaine, had been forewarned.
    The
Amnion shuttle’s passengers had warned her, of course. She’d saved the small
craft after it was thrown off course and out of control by the repercussions of
her brief, one-sided fight with Captain’s Fancy . The shuttle’s
passengers were aboard now: they stood in front of her on Soar’s bridge,
talking to her — and to Calm Horizons — constantly. They told her what
they could about the attack on the Amnion sector; about the rescue of Morn
Hyland; about the powers and exigencies which had come into conflict on the
planetoid.
    But
that information might not have been enough to preserve Soar . It arrived
perilously late. Fortunately Sorus had been forewarned in other ways. The damage
to Billingate communications showed her that the installation was in trouble —
and she knew how to jump to the kinds of conclusions which kept ships and
illegals alive.
    Captain’s
Fancy should have been under Calm Horizons’ control. The Amnion had Nick Succorso’s priority-codes — and Succorso himself
wasn’t aboard his ship to countermand them. The Amnion should have been able to
take effective command of the frigate. In fact, his ship had given every sign
that she was indeed responding to those codes; submitting to Calm Horizons’ instructions. Nevertheless her subsequent, suicidal attack on Tranquil
Hegemony demonstrated that her submission had been a ruse.
    The
codes were false. Perhaps they’d never been true. Or perhaps they’d been
changed recently. In either case, it was clear that Captain’s Fancy had
feigned helplessness, not in order to prepare an attack on Soar — as
Sorus had assumed — but rather to defend the raiding party from Trumpet which had entered the Amnion sector.
    In
other