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

targ function so that we could use our guns.
    She succeeded, Morn. That’s why Intransigent survived, why I’m here talking to you. She restored targ in time. We hit Gutbuster with everything we had. And because Gutbuster needed power to maneuver, she couldn’t use her proton beam again. We fought until she couldn’t stand any more damage. Then she pulled away.
    But your mother was lost. By the time she finished saving us, the automatic locks wouldn’t let her out of targeting control. Depressurization exceeded their tolerances.
    You know how people die in vacuum, Morn. It isn’t pretty. But it’s beautiful to me, as beautiful as your mother herself. She gave her life for her shipmates. If I die that way myself someday, I’ll die proud.
    And I promise you this. Now the look of an eagle shone through Davies Hyland’s tears, as familiar as his certainty and his strong arms. No one in the UMCP will ever rest until your mother has been avenged. We will stop Gutbuster and every ship like her. We will stop every illegal who sells out humanity.
    By the time his story ended, Morn had decided that she, too, would be a cop. She was too ashamed of herself to make any other choice. She already felt—an emotion which lost credibility as soon as it was put into words—that she’d killed her mother with her secret grudge. So she told herself that she owed it to human space, to her father, to the image of her mother, and to herself to join those who opposed the betrayal of humankind. But those were only words. The truth was that she was trying to recant.
    However, it was a matter of historical record that Gutbuster was never stopped. Morn learned this during her years in the UMCP Academy. Indeed, that ship was never encountered again. She died of her wounds in the void; or found the problematic safety of forbidden space and never returned; or transformed herself in some way (perhaps by replacing her datacore), changed her registration and codes so that she couldn’t be recognized. The promise Morn received from her father was never kept.
    At the time, in the Academy, she took that failure as a reason to rededicate herself to her calling. If Gutbuster and similar ships still existed, perhaps flourished, then people like Morn were needed more than ever; people who had both reason for passion and experience to give their passion focus. She made herself one of the best cadets in her class—an honor to her father, and to her mother’s memory. If she had any questions about what she was doing—if she felt any uncertainty about her father, or the UMCP, or about her own courage—she kept that hidden, even from herself.
    By the time she joined Starmaster and Captain Davies Hyland in their quest to preserve the integrity of human space, any doubts she might have retained were hidden so deep that only a man like Angus Thermopyle could have dredged them up.
    But she’d killed her father. She’d brought what was left of her family to ruin.
    That struck her in the deepest part of her shame—in the part which believed she’d deserved to be abandoned; the part which believed her resentment had killed her mother.
    When she needed them most—helpless in Bright Beauty’s sickbay, with a zone implant in her head and Angus leering over her—her parents didn’t answer her appeal.
    How could they? Nothing they’d ever given her or done for her had prepared her for the crisis of gap-sickness; for the knowledge that the destructive flaw which endangered those she loved existed, not in illegals and forbidden space, but in herself.
    The look in her eyes as she came back from her search for courage was one of unmitigated and irremediable anguish.
    “Even if I can’t do it,” she said as if her heart were hollow, “somebody else will. It doesn’t matter what you think of me. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m as bad as a traitor. But there are better cops than me—stronger—They’ll stop you. They’ll make you pay for this.”
    Her