Read Gap [1] The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict for Free Online

be close enough to ash him.
    “Message repeats,” the radio announced, stupidly unafraid. “Angus Thermopyle, you are ordered to set down. This is Captain Davies Hyland, commanding officer, United Mining—”
    “No,” Angus coughed in desperation. With one heavy finger he stabbed at his console, cut off reception. At once, the noise of his thrusters through the hull seemed to get louder, more frantic. “I don’t care if you come from fucking God. You can’t have my ship.”
    Holding his breath against the stress, he wrenched Bright Beauty around scarcely two hundred meters off the asteroid and slammed on full boost, piling up more g than he ought to be able to stand in order to put the asteroid between him and Starmaster. Then he drove away toward the heart of the belt.
    He didn’t cut thrust, reduce acceleration, until the simple weight of his body under so much g pushed him to the edge of blackout.
    Klaxons howled at him, proximity sensors squalling with overload. Light-headed in physical relief as g eased—relief that didn’t touch his essential terror—Angus skimmed past a small meteor, then deflected Bright Beauty between two larger rocks. At the same time, he rigged his ship for battle.
    Under normal operating conditions, she required two people to run her. In combat situations, she could have used six. But Angus Thermopyle handled everything himself.
    He made no effort to turn his cannon on the UMCP ship. Instead, as fast as his targeting computer could track, he started blazing away at every meteor and asteroid in range, filling the space behind him with chunks of all sizes caroming in all directions; covering his tail with debris. He wasn’t trying to lure Starmaster into a crash; not yet: she was still too far away to be threatened by a little rubble. But she was closing fast—and a destroyer as expensive as she was probably had artillery which would make his cannon look like popguns. He was doing his best to confuse her targ.
    It worked for a while. Out of the black, light came in bright flares, matter fire hitting rock; the rock went incandescent as it burst into its component particles; static sizzled across Bright Beauty’s scan; light collapsed to black again. Angus rode a meson torrent deeper into the belt and snatched his ship past obstacles that could have crushed her, and went on firing himself, madly throwing up scree like a screen against Starmaster’s guns.
    But the destroyer learned fast. She turned his own tactics against him. There was a lull in the fire—fifteen seconds, twenty, twenty-five—during which no attempt was made to hit him. Then a dead stone lump the size of a small space station hardly a thousand kilometers ahead took a shaft of incandescence through its center and broke apart so violently that chunks as big as ejection pods came at him like thunderbolts.
    His proximity alarms went wild, then dead as their circuits overloaded.
    In the sudden silence, Angus ducked, squirmed, twisted—and almost made it. Bright Beauty was agile, and he was desperate. At the last instant, however, one rock slapped her in the side and sent her tumbling like a derelict through the belt.
    The next collision was gentler, just a kiss that flattened out some of the gyration. He didn’t feel it. G and anoxia had stretched him too thin. He was unconscious. As far as he knew, he was still trying to scream.

CHAPTER
4
    M oments later, he came back to himself. Just in time: Bright Beauty was plunging toward the kind of collision that would crumple her like an empty can. Hardly aware yet of what he was doing, reacting by plain instinct and fear, he punched at his console, fought the spin, got his thrusters aimed for braking. Only a few hundred meters off an asteroid almost large enough for colonization, he wrestled his ship under control.
    Running on automatic pilot himself, still gasping for air and barely able to focus his eyes, he checked for damage. Bright Beauty had a cabin-size dent in her