A Dark and Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson Read Free Book Online

information, too, wasn't enough to do him any good.
    He needed to be able to maneuver. Urgently he strove to remember everything he might have known about, ejection pods. Was there some way to get at the controls, override the presets? Surely a pod designed for emergencies might encounter emergencies of its own; therefore there must be some way for the pod's occupant to take command.
    Think, you idiot.
    Remember.
    If he'd known his father, he might have recognized Angus Thermopyle's instinctive reaction to futility and fear.
    But he hadn't known his father. He couldn't remember anything that might help him as the pod cut in thrust -
    acceleration, not braking - and began to veer away from Tranquil Hegemony. He could only stare at the screens with his heart hammering in his throat and sweat streaming off his forehead, and wonder who was being betrayed now.
    If Captain's Fancy and Tranquil Hegemony were talking to each other — shouting at each other? — he didn't hear it: the pod's receivers were tuned to the wrong frequencies, or the messages were tight-beamed. But he saw his course shift away from the Amnion ship; felt lateral thrust as well as acceleration until his new trajectory stabilized and thrust cut out.
    Then the screens showed him that he was now running straight for the unreadable stone of Thanatos Minor.
    When Tranquil Hegemony didn't fire on him, he knew he'd been granted a temporary reprieve.
    In response his heart started beating even harder, and sweat ran into his eyes like oil.
    At his present velocity, a landing on Thanatos Minor would crush him to undifferentiated pulp — if it didn't consume him in a fireball first. Precisely for that reason, Thanatos Minor would blast him out of space before he hit, to avoid being damaged by the impact.
    There was nothing he could do about it.
    Nevertheless he was out of Tranquil Hegemony's reach, at least for the time being. Any death was preferable to the one Nick Succorso had intended for him. And, according to the screens, he now had nearly six more hours to live.
    Six more hours to try to wrestle some kind of understanding up out of the blind abyss which filled his head.
    Six more hours to figure out who was being betrayed.
    By whom.
    His urgency didn't let go of him for an instant.
    Davies had betrayed his father's ship.
    No, it wasn't him: it was Morn. Not his father's ship: his grandfather's.
    But when he insisted on the distinction, he lost the memory; so he let the strange discontinuity between himself and his mother blur.
    He'd betrayed Starmaster himself.
    Not deliberately. He'd done it because he suffered from gap-sickness, and no one knew that. There was no test to reveal it: no test except the gap itself. In his case, the stimulus which triggered the flaw in his brain was heavy g.
    And Starmaster was under heavy g with a vengeance, slamming herself against the vacuum for both speed and agility as she chased Angus Thermopyle's Bright Beauty through the careening rock of the belt. Thermopyle had just fried an entire mining camp, butchered every last man, woman, and child for no known reason; their lorn cries, truncated by destruction, had reached Starmaster as they died. Now Starmaster was in pursuit, blazing with purpose and clarity.
    This was the work the ship had been designed for; the work to which he'd committed himself despite his ingrained doubts about himself. He was on duty on the auxiliary bridge - emergency backup for any station which might fail - and his own purpose should have been clear; it would have been clear if he hadn't been taken over by something greater, something so lucid, precise, and compulsory that it reduced everything else to a corrupt muddle. There on the auxiliary bridge the universe spoke to him -
    - and his memories stopped.
    He could find no way past that clarity. It must have seared his mind; changed the chemistry of his brain somehow; burned out synapses. He knew that his — no, Morn's, he was separate from her now —