Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict by Stephen R. Donaldson Page A

couldn’t get Bright Beauty fixed until he had more money.
    He chewed on that for a while, until the implications made him feel cornered and murderous—more like his old self than he had felt for days. Then he snapped at Morn, “Shut down.”
    He appreciated the way she obeyed, without hesitation; so he glared at her like a butcher of babies as she quickly and precisely reversed the warm-up, settled Bright Beauty to cool, and keyed off her console before turning to face him.
    “I’m sorry,” she said dully. “What did I do wrong?”
    Her assumption that she’d made a mistake pleased him, despite his anger. He dismissed it with a snarl. Brutally, trying to startle the truth out of her because for some reason he was reluctant to trust anything she might tell him under the influence of her zone implant, he demanded, “How many people back on Com-Mine know you’re after me?”
    She was startled; he saw that. Several different responses flickered like hints across her face before she spoke.
    “We weren’t after you.”
    “You found me, didn’t you?” he rasped. For some reason, it frightened him to realize he was going to believe whatever she told him. “You can’t expect me to think you were looking for those pissed-out miners. Captain Davies fucking Hyland knew my name. Of course you were after me.”
    “Yes.” She spoke slowly, as if she had trouble remembering that part of her past. “Sort of. We didn’t know anything about you when we came out from Earth. I mean personally. But Com-Mine Security gave us your name. Just a list of ‘suspicious characters’—people to watch out for, ships. They didn’t do that because we’re UMCP. They didn’t know. It’s standard procedure for them—they give the same list to any legitimate oreliner that asks. And a lot of rumors mentioned you. We correlated that with the way you pulled out so soon after we arrived. Almost like you knew who we were. That made us interested in you. Very interested. How did you know who we were?
    “But we weren’t after you specifically. We were on patrol, that’s all. Looking for pirates. Mine jumpers. Bootleg operations. We just happened to find you.”
    The effort of memory hurt her: she had to reach back through so much horror. Therefore she was telling the truth.
    “ ‘Just happened,’” he snorted. “Don’t try to con me, bitch. I was in a played-out part of the belt. The only people there who need protecting are scavengers. Like those miners. You don’t patrol places like that. You patrol where the money is.”
    Again her expression hinted at horror. She’d killed her whole family. “You forget. We were covert—pretending to be a new oreliner. If we wanted to lure anybody after us, we had to go somewhere unexpected—somewhere that would surprise people who knew the belt.
    “That’s the main thing we were trying to do. Lure somebody like you to follow us.
    “But I suppose we were after you, in a way. Even if we weren’t covert, it’s standard practice for ships like Starmaster to go where they aren’t expected. Shake people up a little. And the way you headed out when we came in made us think you were ripe for shaking. We didn’t know where to find you, but we thought it made sense to scan the nearest played-out parts of the belt first, just to see what we could stir up. Where would a ship go if she wanted to hide?
    “I guess it was a deliberate coincidence. It happened because we were trying to make it happen. We were looking for you. But we weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary.” She spoke tonelessly, without expression, holding herself numb to pain. “Until you blasted those miners, we knew there was always the chance you were innocent.”
    “All right. All right. ” His glare was yellow with malice and fear, but he didn’t get out of his g-seat, or make her come to him, or work any of the buttons on her zone-implant control. “If you fuckers left me alone, none of this would have happened.