by Manda Benson
“The typical idiotic remark I have come to expect from a man of your calibre.” Did he do this with the sole intention of annoying her? Why did the stupid, perverse man not get on with his own life and leave Jed to get on with hers?
“So I can’t leave until you have a heart-to-heart with your ship, and you can’t do that until I leave, and I don’t want to leave. This sort of deadlock is becoming a frequent situation round here.”
Jed looked at Wolff, then outside at the side of the docking pipe, then back at Wolff again. “What is it with you?” she spat.
“I will call a truce. I will leave so you can repair your ship, on the understanding that you don’t leave until I return.”
Jed narrowed her eyes. She hated having to yield to compromises like this. “I should have killed you while I had the chance,” she muttered.
“You can kill me now.” Wolff spread his arms out in jest, as though inviting her to shoot him. There was an ever-so-slight tension in his face.
Jed gave a sigh of exasperation.
“Ah, so you no longer have it in you?”
“Killing to prove one’s point is dishonourable. Killing in self defense is not.”
“As it is said, you will have to make a choice. You either take a step forward and kill me, or you take a step backward and give me some leeway.”
Jed tried to control the anger boiling up inside her. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. When she opened them, she looked up at the man standing, awaiting her decision at the other side of the bridge. “I leave when I have repaired the ship. If you have not returned by then, I leave regardless.”
“That will suffice.”
Jed shied away as Wolff reached his hand toward her. “Just go,” she said.
Wolff headed off into the main corridor. Jed closed the door behind him and knelt on the floor. She must forget Wolff now. The quicker she dealt with this, the better. Examining the connection, she knew she’d have to remove the code from the Shamrock’s computer first then disconnect the device manually. Pressing her fingers against her interface crown, she prepared to go into mindlock with her ship.
Chapter 5
Carck-Westmathlon
Some gamble on chance with wealth untold,
And some reap the profits although,
Some lose all atoms in their hold,
So tread carefully, for fire lies below
Wolff stepped out of the Shamrock’s starboard airlock into a tenebrous cylindrical corridor of unwholesome atmosphere. He sniffed at the air as he emerged from the branch to which the Archer’s ship was docked. Through the enhanced vision of his IR-UV bifocals, he saw a similar tunnel leading to a disused dendrite. A white-and-red sign marked its entrance. Wolff stared at the characters on it—some kind of danger warning. Beyond it, he made out a meshwork of hair-thin IR beams, stretching like a sparse web across the girth of the corridor. Dull glassy bulbs embedded in the walls suggested an automatic laser weaponry array. Wolff smiled to himself, and dipped his head to step through the widest interstice. Carefully, albeit rather desperately, he made his way to the opposite wall and urinated on it.
He examined what he could see of his new environment while he attended to his business. It appeared a standard docking pipe with localised gravity and no other branching corridors, with the usual obvious security systems, of course. How did a docking dendrite compare in fortification to an Archer’s vessel?
As he rearranged his clothing and turned away from the wall, something gave underfoot. A snap and a clang, and pain and panic gripped Wolff. He fought to suppress his reflex withdrawal before it brought his head into contact with one of the IR beam paths. He reached down. Iron jaws clamped hard just below his knee. He scrabbled at the trap with his fingernails, feeling rusted metal. The trap pressed nerves to bone with an unbearable tension, and he felt the warm damp of blood soaking into his trousers.
A voice with a shrill, metallic timbre and a sardonic lilt to it came from the corridor ahead. “Prithee, sirrah, observe our security here.”
Something giving off heat jerked back with a clank a few feet ahead, and coloured light shimmered over something akin to fibre optic filaments. The IR detector array behind Wolff snapped off.
“What troubles you, man?”
“Bloody beast trap! What sort of thing to put in a docking pipe is that?”
“Deterrent for unwary trespassers and pillagers alike, sssir.”
Wolff cringed, his back bent over the sprung trap. Spasms convulsed over the muscles of his leg. “To whom have I the honour of speaking?”
“Rh’Arrol, thsssir, and what payment does you offer for your freedom?” A ratchety clicking sound followed.
A shadowy shape, about five feet high and warm, merged from the gloom of the corridor. Jointed plates of metal on a wide cranium and upcurved neck glinted in the dull light. Wolff knew this creature. He’d never seen one at close quarters before, but he’d heard of them and their conniving, thieving ways and their dread of the light.
He fumbled his torch loose from its strap on his tool belt. The creature let out an ear-piercing screech as he aimed the beam in its face. The light illuminated an untidy nest made from soiled bedding, and a few heaps of unidentifiable objects piled about the dendrite terminus. The creature wheeled about, hissing and turning its long neck away from the light, the long prehensile tentacles on its lower jaw rising in contorted figures and other appendages snaking like tails from under the thicket of translucent spines on its rump. It crashed into the wall, and under a dirty quilt it dragged itself with four clawed legs that bent over its back at the knees and splayed out in all directions.
Wolff switched off the torch. “Morran.” He raised his hands, grimacing against the pain. “My name is Gerald Wolff. I am unarmed.”
“Would be evident, sirrah,” said the quilt in a scratchy hissing voice.
“You can stop calling me sir and sirrah and the likes, pretentious morran.”
“Certainly, patronising man.”
“Now release me!”
“You will be released when you pays the charge!”
Wolff flashed the torch on the morran again and it drew itself back under its cover with a flurry. Tapering, blue-tinged tentacles protruded from underneath. “I have nothing of value, and I will not barter with you until you release me from this trap.”
Claws scraped on the floor. The morran approached warily in shadow, its quill-like cilia glistening. It straightened its legs and stretched its neck upward until its nose was level with Wolff’s bent-over face. Its breath touched his skin faintly.
“You has the look and the manner of one of noble birth in the terms of your species, yet you enters through the cargo level?”
A snort of bemused surprise escaped Wolff. “That it has been said of me, although if it has issued from the mouth of a morran before I was not aware. But I have none of the concomitant non-heritable opulence, I assure you. You may think I look like an aristocrat. You surely cannot claim that I dress or smell in a way that befits one.”
Wolff sensed the morran turning its head in the dark, but it didn’t say anything else.
“This torch,” he lied, “has a fingerprint recognition system built into its controls, like a hand weapon. No one other than me can use it. The fuel cells can last for years. How would you like it, morran, of I were to throw this torch into your stinking den with it switched on?”
The morran paused for a moment, and appeared to consider. Round, forward-set eyes glinted in the dark as it stooped, knees folding over its back like a spider’s articulated limbs. Lithe, muscular tentacles wormed over the fabric of Wolff’s trousers to prise the trap open. He felt the weight of the blood-soaked fabric as the trap was reset. The metal had bitten in just above the protection of his boot.
“Gaahhh—” said Wolff.
Rh’Arrol scuttled back with a clanking of armour, its body lowered beneath tensed legs in a wary posture. Wolff descried whippy tentacles and glowing bristles in the quick
movement. The creature let out a rapid succession of clicks, merged into one long sound.
“Now, if you wish to barter. I want to speak to whoever’s in charge,” Wolff told it. “Will you take me to that man?”
“I might.” Yellow and mauve flickered over the quill-like olfactory cilia growing from the creature’s hindquarters.
Wolff felt in his pocket. He found a small end of bread from the meal he’d eaten with Jed, and proffered it to the morran.
Rh’Arrol’s head jerked back in disgust as it sniffed it. “You thinks me some urchin of poverty?”
“All right,” said Wolff, and put the bread back in his pocket. “Do you care for devices?”
“What kinds of devices?”
Wolff thought he heard a hint of curiosity there. He put his hand in his other pocket and pulled out an assortment of rubbish.
The morran craned its neck up to look at the things in his hands. “String?” it snapped.
“Not just string.” Wolff fumbled at the things in the gloom. “I’ve got, well, a few washers and screws and things.”
“I desires not washers and screws and things,” said Rh’Arrol. “What this?”
“It’s a handkerchief. It’s been used.”
The morran wrapped a tentacle around Wolff’s thumb and drew his hand down. Another tentacle pulled a metal object about four inches long out from the handkerchief. Gold and platinum glinted in the darkness.
“Oh, that’s just an expensive toy,” said Wolff. He stuffed the remaining things back into his pocket. “It’s got some sort of antigravity motor in it, see here.” He took hold of the insect-shaped object, and pressed the switch underneath the thorax. When he dropped his hands, it remained suspended where they had been. Rh’Arrol’s eyes glittered with avarice.
“That suffices.”
“I’m not giving you this in exchange for just services as a guide. If you accept this you’ll owe me more.”
“Is it yours to gives to me?”
Wolff sighed. “Yes, it is mine. How I came about it may not have been honourable, but it’s mine.”
“I takes this, I does something for you. Yes?” Rh’Arrol pulled the toy down with its dextrous tentacles, and hid it down the front of the dull indigo smock that covered its torso.
“So we have an agreement?”
Rh’Arrol hissed, and reversed into the docking pipe. Wolff followed the morran, each pace bringing fresh pain gnawing at the wound in his leg.
His escort scuttled into a compartment at the end of the corridor, and it wasn’t without trepidation that Wolff stepped into the dark with those tentacles, as well as the spitting and clicking.
As soon as a door closed, the floor lurched and the compartment tipped up. Wolff put his hand out to steady his balance and accidentally struck Rh’Arrol. The morran shrieked and thrashed tentacles in his face.
Gravity returned to normal, and the door slid open to let them out into a better-lit corridor. A few men passed quickly, as though going somewhere. One, a brutish, lumpy female, swarthy because of genetics and a grubby lifestyle, glared at Wolff as she shambled past.
“Bastard!” Wolff cursed, putting his hand to a stinging ear.
“Keep appendages to self!”
The docking pipe was fixed to the floor, and a thick vitreous alloy plate in the ground showed scaffolding bars and the localised gravity generators along one side of the now apparently vertical docking pipes, and the thorny bronze immensity of the Shamrock docked way down beneath them. The décor didn’t comply with the style of the Archers’ ships, nor the salvage station in which he’d whiled away his prison sentence. The surfaces were decorated with twisted chrome and abstract mosaics.
The corridor was not well lit, but Rh’Arrol still shuttered its wide golden eyes against the light as it moved out into the corridor on its spindly legs. Plates of metal armour covered the coarse, light blue hair of the crown, neck and back. Pendent, furry ears and paired prehensile tentacles hung from the back of the head above the jaw. The face had the countenance of a snake, but with a furry muzzle and cleft upper lip with V-shaped nostrils. The smock and armour exposed a pronounced sternum and four short thighs. The knees were naturally protected by keratinous plates, and the lower legs, inky blue-black and glossy like plastic, terminated in thickly clawed toes.
“What sex are you?” Wolff asked it, taking his hand away from his ear. He leant his weight on his injured leg and winced.
“I am ale, and you?” Rh’Arrol made a loud spitting noise, turning its head from side to side, trying to ascertain the dimensions of the corridor with some sort of echo-location.
“I’m male. Ale? How many genders does your species have?”
“Six.”
“Six? Doesn’t that pose a few problems as far as breeding’s concerned?”
“No. Unlike your species we not particularise.”
“Gregarious as well, I suppose.”
“The advantage being that gene pool is triply enriched.”
Wolff looked at the clock attached to his belt. It would likely take Jed more than an hour to remove Taggart’s program. “Steel and Flame, how do you mate with five other individuals at once?”
“I not, that would be silly,” the morran retorted. “I relay.” The morran had begun to make its stumbling way along the wall of the corridor, feeling with its tentacles. Wolff followed.
“Relay?”
“In your species, male mates with female, she give birth. In my species, male mates with me, I mates with semale, semale mates with emale, emale mates with gremale, gremale mates with female, and female give births.”
“Does that make you a him or a her?”
“Neither, sirrah. Me’s an aem or an ae.”
“Oh,” said Wolff. “I suppose your other sexes are e and se and gre, then?”
“Correct.”
“Are there many females and gremales, and fewer of the sexes toward male?”
“Oh, yes.” The morran assumed a strutting pace, its head still turned away from the light. “I am rare. and there are only five males in Carck-Westmathlon, and me’s had sex with all of them.”
“Carck-Westmathlon? Is that the circumfercirc’s name?”
Rh’Arrol clicked distractedly to aerself. “No, just the name of this quarter.”
“I see.” Wolff smiled. “And do the men who live here call it that?”
“It is not entirely a morran word. Carck and mathlon yes, but West is a word from the vocabulary of your species. Carck means ‘free’ in your language. Math means ‘large in scope’, and lon means ‘of water.’”
“Western free place of big water?”
“Big place of free water, fact. Pay rent. Forty leagues in height, thirty in depth, and a-hundred-and-nine in span. History has it that this void construction was one of the first to cycle waste products through modified bacteria in order to purify water and generate feedstock to go toward new synthesis.”
“You seem very well educated,” Wolff commented. Incongruously so. Half of Rh’Arrol’s speech seemed to be quoted from textbooks, the other half an uneducated morran attempt to speak the language of men.
“Oh yes.” Proud colours tainted Rh’Arrol’s chromatic quills. “Me’s writing a book on genealogy and the lineage of morrans on Carck-Westmathlon.” The morran was now sniffing and clicking at a junction in the passage.
“Indeed. Are you sure you know where you’re going, Rh’Arrol?”
Rh’Arrol clicked. “Yes, you wishes me takes you to the man-who-is-leader—the Seignior. Fortunate for you that he lives in this sector. Well, it’s this way, although I could be wrong in this wretched light. Men, and their stupid propensity for it!”
“Why do you choose to live here, then?” Wolff followed the blundering creature.
“While the men sleep, the corridors darker, and we wake and emerge.”
“Ah, so you’re nocturnal. A tenancy in the docking pipes would seem convenient.”
“Is safe enough.”
Wolff kept up the conversation in a detached sort of manner, glancing repeatedly at his clock. “Where exactly are we going?”
Rh’Arrol surveyed the approaching wall with a barrage of sound, and butted aer nose against a panel. Another cavity opened in the wall. Inside, Rh’Arrol switched off the light, closed the door, and set the pneumatic lift on its way up.
“The ship is yours?” The morran’s huge golden eyes narrowed in the gloom, aer voice lowering. “I know of only one breed of man that uses a ship of that specification, and they are seen even less often than they are spoken of.”
Wolff sat down on a chair inside the lift. “No, the ship is not mine.” He gazed at the rapidly flickering readout on the lift wall. “I am a passenger.”
“This is destination, or does you intend to return to the ship?”
“Oh, I intend to return. Soon, I hope. But first I have some business here.”
Wolff thought again of the Archer, Jed. Ever since the Larkspur had been hauled aground at the salvage station, he had been deeply intrigued by her kind. The Larkspur had been a ship, very much like the Shamrock, with dark corridors and an engine with an immensely powerful chimaera array. On the bridge the thin, frail body of its commander had lain, mummified over several centuries by the deathly cold penetrating the ship, a thin silver band still on her forehead. Wolff remembered the Archer’s face, hard and pale as a marble sculpture, almost as though the female still slept after so long drifting in the void. Like Jed, she was fine-boned, with the almost complete melanin absence in the skin that the light of no sun had seemed to ever touch. Very dark hair, almost black, thickly mingled with the grey of age had been styled in the same precise, symmetrical manner as Jed’s. She had worn the same skullcap of dark polymer, and the same richly patterned overtunic of some soft material, fringed at the hems and coming down to the knees and elbows, over black close-fitting garments covering the arms and legs.
Wolff had felt a kind of fearful wonder as he looked upon the body on the bridge, that he, Gerald Wolff, stood here in this sepulchre, a place this Archer would never have allowed any other than herself and her apprentices to tread.
