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he couldn't recall it for himself.
    Beyond question he should have gone nova under so much pressure, like a superheated sun.

    He had no idea why that hadn't happened. He felt like a superheated sun. The source of his intransigent grasp on consciousness and sanity lay hidden somewhere in the black hole of his memories; swallowed by the dark.
    Now the ejection pod carried him across the dark to his doom. There was nothing he could do about that; nothing at all; nothing of any kind. Yet he went on fighting for his life.
    Fighting to remember.
    What had Morn told him?
    What you remember, she'd said, stops right at the point where I first came dawn with gap-sickness.
    But she'd insisted her son didn't have the same sickness.
    Nick hated him, she'd claimed, because she lied to him.
    By saying that Davies was his, Nick's, son.
    But that wasn't enough. Davies had heard its inad-equacy in her voice.
    He's a tormented man, and, I used that against him.
    He never wanted me to have you. He wanted me for sex, that's all. So he ordered me to abort you. I told him every lie I could think of that might change his mind.
    The truth was deadly. It would have killed them both.
    Because Davies' father was the only man in human space that Nick hates worse than the cops.
    Nick himself had supplied Davies with the rest of the story.
    Nick had talked about Angus Thermopyle.
    He's a pirate and a butcher and a petty thief. Right now, he's serving a life sentence in Com-Mine Station lockup.
    That may not make you think very highly of your mother.
    She's supposed to arrest men like Captain Thermo-pile, or kill them, not fuck them until she gets pregnant.
    But it wasn't like that. Captain Thermo-pile gave her a zone implant. After she demolished Starmaster, he rescued her from the wreckage. Davies remembered none of this.
    He gave her a zone implant to keep her under control. He turned her on until she would have been willing to suck her insides out with a vacuum hose, and then he fucked her senseless.
    That's your father, Dames. That's the kind of man you are.
    But here's the interesting fart. Why wasn't your father convicted? If she had a zone implant, he must have had a zone implant control. Why wasn't it found on him when he was arrested?
    The answer is, she'd learned to like it. She wanted it, Davies. It wasn't found on him because he'd already given it to her. She loved using it on herself.
    So what did she do with it when he was arrested? She didn't turn it over to Com-Mine Security like a good little cop. They would have removed her zone implant — and your father would have been executed. She couldn't let them take it away from her. So she hid the control and escaped with me. She used it to seduce me so that I would rescue her - not from Captain Thermo-pile, but from Com-Mine Security.
    All she's done since then is perfect her addiction.
    His time was running out. The pod's blips and chronometers measured his movement toward the Amnion warship like a countdown to death.
    Did she tell you she refused to abort you because she wanted to keep you? That isn't strictly true. The only real reason is that she couldn't get an abortion without letting the sickbay test her. It would have recorded her zone implant.
    That's your mother, Davies. That's the kind of woman you came from.
    And Davies thought, No. No. If that were true - if all that were true - she could have had an abortion and then erased the sickbay log. And she wouldn't have tried to help me. She wouldn't have said, As far as I'm concerned, you're the second most important thing in the galaxy. You're my son. But the first, the most important thing is to not betray my humanity.
    He believed that because he recognized it.
    Nevertheless he knew what Nick said was true. It just wasn't enough.
    Nothing was enough. The status screens showed him only that he was closing on Tranquil Hegemony. A minute or two remained, no more. In the distance hung the black rock of Thanatos Minor; but that