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

You haven’t answered my question. Who did you tell? Who knew what you were doing?”
    For a moment or two she remained silent, staring at her board. Then she sighed. “Nobody. That’s the whole point of going covert. When we come out from Earth, we don’t know who we can trust. So we don’t tell anybody anything. We do our job and take the rest one step at a time.
    “The last mission my fa—Captain Hyland was on, somebody in Station Center turned out to be feeding information to half a dozen pirates. It’s better if we don’t tell anybody anything.”
    Angus believed her. In fact, the only reason he’d doubted her at all was that the intensity of his need to believe her made him suspicious. Everything hinged on it. At the moment, he had no other hope. He couldn’t run Bright Beauty in this condition indefinitely. Sooner or later, she would fail him if he put that much pressure on her.
    But if Morn were telling the truth—
    If she were telling the truth, he could get away with it. It might be the riskiest bluff he’d tried in years, but he could get away with it.
    If she were telling the truth.
    And if he could control her.
    If he could break her into small enough pieces.
    Abruptly he heaved himself out of his g-seat. “Come on.” Ignoring the involuntary revulsion that ached across her features before she could suppress it, he headed toward the sickbay. “You kept your mouth shut for the cops. I’m going to make sure you do the same for me.”
    In the sickbay he studied her face, drilled her, dredged the information he needed out of her, and drove himself between her legs in spasms of fear and hope. Eagerly, avidly, he watched her for signs that she was falling in love—that she was growing dependent on her helplessness.

CHAPTER
10
    H e did his best to believe it was happening. In an odd way, as long as he kept her alive his survival depended on her: he could be truly safe only if he killed her and disposed of her body. And that option was one he no longer considered. He was as likely to destroy Bright Beauty as to murder Morn. Therefore he couldn’t afford to be wrong. He had to break her and be sure of it; damage her so much that he could trust the results.
    Because he was afraid, he was in no danger of trusting them prematurely.
    In the end, however, his success was inevitable. After all, what choice did she have? He’d made himself her entire world; he was everything she felt. He knew how this kind of pressure worked: it had been tried on him more than once. His control of her circumstances—as well as of her physical being—was absolute. With the tap of a button, he could reduce her mind to a brute howl of pain. When she satisfied him, he could reward her, not with pleasure—for some reason, he was reluctant to see what she would look like pleased—but with relief from hurt; with sleep; with the occasional opportunity to choose her own movements, take care of herself in her own way.
    By degrees, he beat her down until she was like a child toward him: dependent; urgent to please. He taught her that his survival was hers as well; that any peril he met would hit her first, and harder. And he played on the bizarre ethic to which she’d sworn herself when she became a cop. Again and again, he assured her that she deserved what was happening to her. She’d killed her family, hadn’t she? She’d betrayed them all. No, it wasn’t something she’d done by conscious choice. It was worse: it was something she’d done because of who she was; because of the fundamental flaw which left her vulnerable to gap-sickness.
    With all his cunning, he worked to deprive her of her capacity to think in any terms which didn’t come to her from him.
    And he watched the results, studied them with a coward’s intuitive precision. He saw the darkness accumulating in her gaze; the gradual slackening of her skin; the change in the way she moved, so that every action became a limp. When he fucked her, he felt her begin