Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  They passed the crate behind which he had hidden. He lowered himself first. Jed watched him step away from the rungs and look up with an eyebrow raised in a sardonic fashion she didn’t much care for.

  “Now back away from the ladder.”

  Wolff took two steps backward and was lost from her vision beneath the floor. Without hesitation she stepped over the edge, breaking her impact with the floor of the lower level by bending her knees. The man looked a little surprised, faintly amused even, at her sudden descent and unwillingness to expose herself to any threat he might pose.

  “Pick up one of those canisters.” Jed pointed to the nearest crate.

  Wolff turned his back on her to pick up the sealed cylinder, and Jed saw opportunity left open like a gate before her. She seized her gun with her right hand and darted her left hand toward the weapon on his belt. Wolff moved with a reflex that seemed almost of the calibre of her own kind, twisting in an instant to snatch his own weapon, and as he did he grabbed Jed by the wrist. Her feet slid on the floor. She flung out her shooting hand to maintain her balance. Light blazed from her neutron pistol, the shot hitting the Shamrock’s bulkhead wall with a thunk. Immediately she decreased the GravSim intensity to mitigate her impact with the floor. She fell on her hip, Wolff still gripping her wrist and their weapons aimed respectively as gravity resumed normal service.

  The man appeared startled by the sudden fluctuation, and stared at Jed, breathing quickly. “Are you hurt?” he asked politely.

  Jed frowned. “Fool.”

  “I am a fool?” Wolff waggled the end of the neutron pistol he held. “I shall ask you not to try that again, Archer.”

  Jed saw his IR-UV bifocals had reflective sidepieces that gave him effective all-round vision with a mere glance toward the wide-angle silvered surfaces. He had watched her. His response was not reflex but calculated defense. She stifled a vocal expletive directed at herself. Stupid! Unobservant!

  “Now how about you get up?” Wolff pulled at her wrist. His sweaty grip revolted her. “And we try again, remembering that your duelling advantage over me is negligible.”

  Jed got up and pulled back from him. “Take your hand off my arm!”

  Wolff relinquished his grip then pushed her hand away. Both cautiously lowered their weapons, watching the actions of the other.

  “The canister,” said Jed at length.

  Wolff picked up the canister.

  “Now two of those packets, and fill that flask from that phytoculture tank.” She pointed to the tank, a squat barrel in one corner with a few pipes running from the wall conduits to it. A spyglass in the front looked in to its illuminated contents—a sea of translucent green organisms suspended in water.

  Wolff filled the flask from the tap and bent down on one knee with Jed watching his broad back. He sealed the container and put the four objects in his inside jacket pocket.

  “Now back up.” Jed looked back up at the shaft they’d climbed down. “Me first, and you to follow.”

  Not taking her eyes off him, she mounted the rungs. Working on balance, she climbed back up, watching him until the last minute before swinging herself back up to the Shamrock’s upper level. “Proceed!” she called back to him, placing her hand on the handle of her weapon.

  The metallic ring of hands and feet on rungs drifted up from the lower level, and then Wolff’s head came up through the gap. “Easy, tiger.”

  He led the way back up to the bridge once more, and placed the food down on the table while Jed slotted the canister into the console heating unit. Within a few minutes the contents were ready.

  Jed poured out half the levigated esculents and balanced her bowl on her knee, shoulders hunched over the thick soupy solution coloured like dried blood. It had the bland smell of a thousand different types of sustenance.

  Wolff ripped open a hermetically sealed polymer bag and tipped out the roll of fibre loaf it contained. He tore into it with his teeth and fingers, dipping the bread into his bowl. Jed sipped the steaming, nourishing liquid from a spoon.

  “Am I putting you off?”

  Jed glared at him over the rim of her spoon. Secretly she envied his ravenous glut—biting, chewing and swallowing with stoic rhythm. It had been a very long time since she’d had the appetite to eat like that, or the digestion to cope with such gorging.

  “This is good.” Wolff licked up the remainder from the bowl, and poured water into a glass. He held it up to the light, scrutinising its pale green tinge. “Ah, filled with vitamin C and other vital antioxidants. Tastes like shite, of course.”

  Jed swallowed a mouthful of her drink. As far as she was concerned, she might just as well have been eating woodpulp in various degrees of dilution. Tastes and flavours were pale shadows beside the effulgence of conurin.

  Wolff knocked back the phytoculture’s offering and devoured what was left of his bread. Jed picked over her dish, shredding the bread listlessly and abandoning half the roll in the dish.

  Wolff raised his eyebrows. “Do you intend to honour your part of the agreement?”

  Jed folded her arms and leaned back on the seating. “There is little to be said. Any other Archer in this galaxy would tell you a story identical to mine.”

  “And if any were to, it would still be a new tale to my ears.”

  “My ship was built in the Greater Docks of the OverHalo.”

  “No, now you’re telling me about your ship. I want to know about you.” Wolff shifted his weight forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

  “An apprentice to a senior learns the Code until she can afford her own ship.”

  “Ah, and who was the senior, your mother?”

  Jed gave him an intolerant look. “Archers do not breed.”

  “Of course, back to the evils of regular conurin use. Your mother was a ‘common man’, as you call us, and your sire was an unfortunate condescender?”

  “A male Archer?” Jed rolled her eyes.

  “What you’re saying implies star Archers have no common blood, while I was under the impression they were a distinct race.”

  “We have no more blood in common than has the rest of the race of men. We are all doubly recessive in a particular set of genes. Certain dynasties have Archers in their bloodlines.”

  “And I suppose those genes are linked to certain traits in appearance, unless one does come across Archers with dark skin, or light hair.”

  “That supposition would be correct.”

  “So a certain talent was discovered in you at a young age and a senior adopted you?”

  “Yes. It progresses from there, as I said.”

  “But do you remember nothing of before you were an Archer? Say of planetary life and who your parents were?”

  “Not of ancestry, nor of planets. I adopt my ancestry as my ancestors adopted me.”

  “But surely you remember something of where you lived? Everyone remembers something about their childhood.” Wolff slackened the belt on his tunic and stifled a belch. “They say you can’t forget growing up on a planet. Did you grow up on one?”

  Jed looked uneasily at the man, then at the console. She could tell him what she liked. He had no right to know the events of her life up to the age of nine, and it wasn’t as if he’d find out from some other source.

  “I remember nothing.”

  Wolff shrugged again. “And your culture, revolving around a particular drug and a strict code, verging almost on religion?”

  This angered Jed, and she turned to him fiercely. “Do not compare my culture to religion! Blind trust is the folly of the ignorant! True knowledge and understanding—Equilibrium as the Pagan Atheist calls it, can only be attained through discipline and strength of mind.”

  Again, that wan smile. It gave Jed an urge to break his nose. “I wasn’t referring to the component of blind trust. I was referring to how religions all seem to have codes inherent to them. You shall chew conurin. You shall meditate and contemplate. Your ship is your temple. You shall be arrogant in
your noble ways and spurn the common man. You shall learn of and understand Equilibrium. When you have reached Equilibrium, you shall be truly sated.”

  Jed turned her head from him with a grimace. “What knows you of the Code?”

  “Little more than what I have here spoken or been told. And of course, what is common knowledge. You deny connotations of religion, yet you speak of the teachings of the Pagan Atheist, and what is that, if not a religious following?”

  “Pagan Atheism is a philosophy, not a religion!”

  Wolff looked at Jed’s belt pouch again. “Several ancient spiritualities advocate the use of drugs.”

  “Conurin is an aid to concentration, A lens through which the thoughts are focused.”

  “I daresay it is. It also causes stomach ulcers, loss of appetite and sterility in females. I tried it, once, when I had a lot of computers to fix on the salvage station. It made me vomit and gave me pains in the head.”

  “But you repaired the computers?”

  “Yes.” Wolff folded his arms behind his head.

  “Then you cannot condemn its use.”

  “So what did you pay for your ship?”

  “Sixty chimaera, excluding the eight within the Shamrock’s own engine.”

  “That’s a lot of chimaera.”

  “I have vended more since.”

  Wolff looked out the window for a moment. “Who was the Archer who educated and trained you?”

  “Her name was Mathicur of the Agrimony.” Jed absently fingered the ornate gold insignia pinned at her shoulder. It had a long straight stem like an arrow, but the tail was shaped like the head and leaves of a thistle.

  Wolff’s eyes connected with the design, and he smiled again. “Hortica.”

  Jed took her hand away from her shoulder and put it in her lap. “That is correct,” she said uneasily.

  “A happy childhood? Good? Bad?” Wolff leant forward intently.

  “Average for the circumstances.”

  “And you really remember nothing of before? Were you drugged, or was something used to partially erase your memory?”

  “No, I was not drugged, and no, I really do not remember!” Jed snapped. “Why does this obsess you so?”

  “But who were your mother and your father? You can’t possibly have forgotten them.”

  Jed opened her mouth to end this intrusive discussion, but a warble from the Shamrock’s Alcubierre drive shook the walls and made the air reverberate.

  “We’re decelerating?”

  “That was the Shamrock crossing the light barrier on the downswing.” Jed made a cursory bolometric scan of the nearby stellar systems.

  Wolff looked down at Taggart’s device. “We must be nearing the destination.”

  Beside her, the man reached out a hand, his shooting hand, toward the device. Jed spotted the lapse in guard, reached for her weapon and caught his forearm, pulling it from under him so he lost his balance and fell backward. Wolff made a grab for her wrist, and as she pulled the gun back to evade the snatch he pushed up from the floor, sending them pitching over with a snap of Jed’s teeth and an expletive from Wolff. He fell on her, displacing her breath while she fought to keep her shooting hand out of his reach. His fingers closed on her arm, but she aimed the gun between his eyes.

  Wolff stared back at her with mute grey eyes, breathing resignedly.

  Now, finally, she’d overcome him.

  Could she shoot him dead? Wouldn’t he do the same to her? She thought back to the corridor and how he’d probably prevented Taggart from killing her there. Had he done it through this respect he spoke of, or merely because he wanted her to play an execrable part in some scheme of his? By his own accounts—fraud, hijack, a life spent betraying those who vested trust in him—this man must be the personification of avarice. Could she now murder him in cold blood? And if she failed to now, would she be able to go through with it in the future if she was called upon to do so?

  Keeping her eyes fixed on his face and the gun pointing to his forehead, she ran her hand down the front of his tunic, feeling along the right side of his chest. Wolff’s face took on a countenance verging somewhere between surprise and puzzlement.

  Her hand connected with the gun, her gun, which was of far superior manufacture than the gun he and Taggart had brought aboard, and withdrew it from the holster on his belt. She wasn’t quite sure what emotion his expression now represented, something like disappointed realisation, she supposed.

  “Get off me,” she ordered him, putting the gun back where it belonged. Wolff raised his hands in surrender, before deliberately levering himself up off the floor.

  Jed stood and backed away. She put Wolff’s gun in the waste evacuation chute on the left of the bridge and, with the press of a button, sent it flying out into the void. She turned back to regard the man with patronising victory.

  “This is my ship, Gerald Wolff. You ride not as guest nor as prisoner, but as trespasser, as stowaway and by my grace.”

  “And very graceful you are, too.” Wolff bowed his head in some ridiculous travesty of gratitude. “I am but a captive butterfly, a specimen for your amusement.”

  He took a step toward the window and looked out into the sky.

  She had won, she thought as she glared at his back. She had overcome this stalemate and emerged triumphant. She controlled her own ship once more, and he could have no effect on her actions or decisions.

  Why, then, did she feel as though he had beguiled her and gained the upper hand?

  Why had she not slain him then and there?

  Chapter 4

  A Matter of Reflex

  Steel and Flame in your raw bite

  Hunter of the infinite

  To aim into an unseen night

  And shoot perchance to strike

  Jed listened to the Shamrock’s readings, and touched one of scores of indistinguishable keys on the sloping console. The course program had brought the ship back down from light speed. At least, then, it was not to be used as a missile to attack a place of habitation. Jed knew that such a tactic was useless—any ship coming so close as the Oort cloud to an inhabited system at a superluminal velocity would be detected by tachyon scans and shot down as a precaution. She had worried, however, that Taggart may not have been aware of this. Taggart’s elaborate framing of Wolff told Jed that the dead man must not have been able to employ a computer expert to accompany him voluntarily, either through secrecy or peril. His refusal to divulge the purpose of the mission to Wolff made Jed continue to fear that the Shamrock flew a suicide course.

  “We’re subluminal?” Wolff asked, stepping forward to stand beside her and staring at the pattern of illuminated polygons.

  Jed moved away from him. “My ship decelerates. You hear it fall below light speed.”

  “Can you disable Taggart’s program now?”

  Jed looked down at the device wired in to the Shamrock’s mainframe, but she knew the answer already from the ship’s feedback.

  “No.” Jed turned away from him, her reply a terse snap, and folded her hands behind her back. She didn’t need to watch him. He no longer had a weapon and the Shamrock’s senses were sufficient to inform her should he make any move against her or the bridge equipment. But the ship still steered toward something, and what it would not reveal. Jed willed the propulsion hardware with all the mental force she could spare, but it was as though she was paralysed in the right hand.

  She heard him shuffling his feet. “T’will be all right.”

  Jed turned on him angrily. “Don’t you profess to understand the situation, Gerald Wolff, and do not profess to know me. You alone are responsible for this.”

  “Whatever Taggart was planning he needed a ship for. No harm will come to you, or the Shamrock.”

  “Be silent,” Jed murmured, turning back toward the window and concentrating on the reading that had interested her. A small, sparse gas cloud lay about five light-minutes to the starboard of their course ahead, and tiny, dense forms had g
ravitated toward this cosmic oasis.

  “What’s the matter?” Wolff asked as she turned toward the corridor.

  “Chimaera.” Yes, to hunt would draw her mind from these troubles. She could afford to ignore this fool now. “Keep back!” Jed rebuked him as he tried to follow her.

  “You wish me to remain on the bridge?”

  Jed looked untrustingly at Wolff, and back at the bridge consoles. “No. You go where I can see you.” She backed off into the corridor, her hand on the gun holstered at her waist.

  The corridors were dim and silent as ever, but the sound of Wolff’s breathing and footfall seemed vulgar and intrusive as he made his way along the unlit passage behind Jed.

  The armoury, a great dark cavern with vaulted roof making up the Shamrock’s largest room, covered the rear quarter of the upmost deck, opening to the raw void by means of a forcefield-protected loophole on both sides. Jed took out her usual bow, holding it under her arm while she gathered six hunting arrows into a quiver. Shouldering the arrows, she held out the bow at arm’s length, feeling the tension in the string and the familiar contours of its rigid alloy in her hand, worn to comfort through frequent grip.

  She felt Wolff’s eyes on her, through her own instincts and the Shamrock’s, wondering perhaps at the strange harmony between man and weapon, and grudgingly ignored him, flexing her shoulders against the bow’s tension. She breathed in, out again, and stretched the string back to its full extent, hand-to-shoulder, elbow perpendicular to her spine.

  “What is it made from?”

  Jed glared at him and eased the string back. “Teng steel, contractile polymer alloy and hypertensile string.”

  “You’re implying that this contraption can hurl projectiles at faster-than-light velocities?”

  “No. Arrows have their own propulsion. Fool.” Jed withdrew one of the ready-prepared arrows from the quiver. “The tip is made from diamond and contains a capillary tube. It injects a cocktail of chemicals that cause paralysis in organometallic life. The rear half of the shaft is fitted with a fuel rod of a polymer alloy. When the arrow breaks the containment field blocking the loophole, a chain reaction is initiated, by which an electron and a neutron are annihilated to produce energy and drive the arrow. The protons are retained within the interstices of the polymer lattice, causing a net buildup of positive charge. When the arrow is spent, one merely has to generate a negative electrical field to retrieve it.”