Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  “A man by the name of Taggart planned a convergence at these coordinates. I do not know the magnitude of the impending attack, but this man was a criminal and I believe this settlement should be assumed under great threat.”

  “I see,” said Viprion dryly. “In that case we will go at once to the surveillance and scanning department.” He set off down the corridor, away from the direction Wolff had come.

  Wolff looked at his watch again. “Will this take long?”

  “The Archer’s ship?”

  “If I do not arrive back there within the hour, it may depart without me.”

  “There may be some way to delay it. I know not of this Taggart,” Viprion said, looking straight ahead. “Where is he?”

  “Oh, he is dead,” said Wolff.

  “I see.”

  “Although I am sure Taggart would have a reason to come to Carck-Westmathlon over any other settlement in this area. If one could be thought of, it may help.”

  Viprion twisted his mouth and shook his head. “This circumfercirc has no specific assets. It may be that he has—had—or believed he could find allies here, which would not be unfounded had he some knowledge of the political situation.”

  Wolff heard Rh’Arrol clicking again, behind him. “If you must lead that morran about like a pet,” said Viprion, “make it silent.”

  “Be quiet, Rh’Arrol,” said Wolff.

  “How should you likes it?” retorted the morran indignantly. “If I were to say ‘Shut your eyes, they offend me’?”

  Someone appeared far ahead of them. It seemed as if she had fallen into the corridor from one of the doors leading off it. She cast about herself, looking flustered. “Castellan! Castellan,” she said, panting, as she reached Viprion. “I report unusual solar activity. We’ve got an ion storm on our hands in half an hour.”

  “You know the drill,” said Viprion. “Close off all exposed points. Retract the docking dendrites and raise electrostatic shielding to full. No ships are to dock or depart from the circumfercirc until the storm abates. To the surveillance and scanning department, now.”

  “Close the docking dendrites?” Wolff asked. “The Shamrock—the Archer vessel—will it be prevented from departing?”

  “Is it armed?” The man looked at Wolff.

  “It has a synchrotron cannon of some sort, I believe.”

  “Then yes, it will be sequestered.” The informant took off in the direction she’d come from, and Viprion followed. Wolff made a grab for the Castellan’s arm. “What is going on?”

  “The sun just sneezed.” Viprion looked at Wolff sideways with his sly steel-grey eyes. “Harken, Gerald Wolff, a storm is brewing.”

  * * * *

  Jed felt awareness returning to herself and the bridge, dimly at first, from a concentration so acute corporeal encumbrances had melted to insignificance. She raised her head, flexed limbs stiffened by inactivity, felt blood flow quicken and tasted the air.

  With a thought, the ship’s small maintenance robots swarmed out of hatches low down on the walls and pulled the connection cables away from the Shamrock’s mainframe. They set upon Taggart’s device like flies upon a carcass, quickly dismantling it, the pieces carried away into the walls to be fed into the onboard recycling plant.

  Jed stood, arched her back and stretched, and scanned the interior of the ship for infra-red presences. Wolff was not on board. She’d been in mindlock with the ship, Jed calculated, for about an hour and a half. To be whole again, at last! She checked the navigational systems, the details of the course to Satigenaria that had so eluded her at the time, the vessel’s blackbox recording of the past day. Everything was there. The Shamrock’s power was once more at her beck and call.

  But here was more. Here was a chunk of recording that Jed had not been aware of, hidden deep within the Shamrock’s memory. Here was a piece of herself she had not known about. Jed shuddered. Now she could see the ship that had followed her while she had been in orbit, and all the ghost readings of the Shamrock’s scanners, and hear Wolff’s subversive whisper to her ship, growing louder as the chasing vessel drew closer, inveigling the ship’s loyalties from Jed.

  Again, the question returned to her. Why had she not killed him at her first opportunity? Some obscure instinct to do with Wolff’s halfBlood origins had stayed her hand, and she felt disgust at it. How could she have honoured instinct over her training, her ultimate instinct? What kind of worthless Archer did that make of Jed?

  But, by tomorrow, she would be far away from Wolff. He would not have the means to follow her, and she would not allow him to beguile her through the Shamrock again. She would leave behind the ignominy of the past day’s events, and grow wiser and stronger from it.

  Jed’s exterior scanning systems stirred. Finally, she had regained her complete equilibrium with the ship.

  But something was wrong. The Shamrock had changed its orientation. She couldn’t get her bearings. In fact, she couldn’t discern any constellation, and she became aware that the ship was surrounded by metal.

  The Satigenaria circumfercirc must have drawn in its docking dendrites while she’d been in mindlock.

  Chapter 6

  Storm Gathering

  Hedge not your bets upon my trust,

  Nor idle upon my alliance,

  Devious be as devious must,

  And outwitting it a science.

  “You stay here,” Wolff instructed Rh’Arrol as he stepped into the pipe connecting the Shamrock’s airlock to the Satigenaria circumfercirc.

  “I had no intention of accompanying you,” came the morran’s pious mutter.

  When the morran had gone, Wolff addressed the door.

  “Jed, open the door.” The corridor lay dim and silent. Could she hear him? If she did not open the door, would he have to use his computer skills once more to force his entry?

  “Jed, open the door, please.” The airlock door slid back, and he stepped into the corridor behind it and headed toward the bridge.

  Taggart’s computer had gone. Its electrodes had been removed from the Shamrock’s bus conduit and the frontal panel replaced. The Archer was nowhere to be seen.

  Wolff sidled over to the seating and chanced a surreptitious glance behind it, lest she be hiding there with intent to ambush him, but no, the bridge was empty. Its viewports looked out into the closed shield, the docking pipes retracted into the body of the station like the tendrils of a sea anemone sitting out a tsunami.

  Wolff noticed again the door on the opposite side of the bridge, which presumably led to a lesser corridor—and probably the ship’s living quarters. Taking nimble sidesteps, he peered into the entrance. The tunnel was narrower and slightly better lit than the primary corridors to the airlock. It had a smell of regular use to it, and what appeared to be mandalas depicting stylised galaxies had been engraved into the five doors leading off from it.

  Wolff flared his nostrils, tasting the air. It had a higher humidity than the dry, cycled air in the bridge and primary corridor and the cold staleness of the armoury and cargo bays.

  The second door on the right hand side stood retracted into the wall. Wolff took a step forward, and Jed’s head and arm appeared around the doorframe. Her hair was wet and hung down almost to her shoulders in tousled clumps, and moisture glistened on the white skin of her forearm. Of course, she held the gun in her hand, and although she had removed the dark, glossy skullcap usually covering the top of her head, the metal band was still around her forehead, and he reasoned that her interface with the Shamrock was probably bolted to her skull.

  “Keep back.” Jed waved the gun from side to side.

  “The computer is back under your control?”

  “That it is, but not afore the ship became entombed within this docking shield. This is your doing.” The distrust in her face was quite apparent.

  “An ion storm approaches. This is not my doing.”

  “An ion storm. I see. This sun has an unusual cycle.”

  “We—the Shamr
ock—will remain?”

  Jed allowed herself a moment’s pause. “Until the ion storm abates.”

  This banter had become a cryptic mutual agreement. Wolff would endeavour to be on board the Shamrock when that time came, while he knew Jed would do her best to ensure it was not so.

  “You having a wash?” Wolff raised his eyebrows.

  Jed glared at him with dark, tempestuous eyes. “Yes. You would do well to follow my example.” She jerked back into the room, and the door slid shut behind her.

  Wolff stepped quietly over to the door, and ran his fingers over the condensation on its engraved surface. Under whimsical impulse, he placed his palms and his ear to the metal, and listened. No sounds gave any clue to what went on behind it. He supposed the Shamrock’s senses encompassed its inner surfaces as well, and he wondered if Jed could see what he was doing. Perhaps the door had a one-way transparency, and she stood sneering five inches in front of him, wearing only a headband and a gun. Wolff allowed a thin smile to play at the corners of his mouth. Let her form her idle speculations upon his motives and meanings.

  He turned away. He fully intended to return to Carck-Westmathlon and find out what it was that had made this system the target of whatever Taggart’s intention was. What he needed right now was insurance. Perhaps a stolen ready-prepared chimaera would procure him a ride out to somewhere he could start afresh, but that was not Wolff’s desire. Already he had decided upon this ship as his ride out, and although Jed’s entire haul might well prove a point of negotiation with the Archer, he wouldn’t be able to carry it.

  He traversed the bridge once more, and retraced his steps into the primary corridor. The back of the arsenal, he remembered, led to the cargo holds and the unknown lower levels of the Shamrock.

  “Come now, Shamrock,” Wolff whispered. He activated a small device attached to his belt. It gave out a radio signal which disrupted the ship’s most local readings. Now he was invisible. To Jed, it would appear as though he’d gone back out through the airlock. He could, he supposed, hide aboard the ship thus until it departed.

  But why play aces he might need later when he could get by on lower suits?

  When he’d hidden in the uppermost level beneath the arsenal, he remembered the entrance had been sealed off, and it was to this door that he now made his way. The door made a tight seal against the frame, but from the way the dust had settled, Wolff could divine that the corridor had recently been accessed. He shrugged off his jacket and draped it over a crate of esculent canisters. He scrutinised the locking mechanism and the seal in the light of his torch. This lock was electronic, but it was on a separate circuit to Shamrock’s mainframe. The Shamrock itself had no direct influence over whether this door was opened or closed.

  Wolff picked up his laser penknife, and twisted its neck to select the setting. He etched out the perimeter of the lock’s polymer cover with the narrow emerald beam and, sliding his fingernails into the cut, prised the cover away. Beneath it, the matte, flat surface had perhaps an inch square in the center of minute geometric circuitry. Round beads of silver metal marked the contacts with the cover panel, and tiny coloured squares embedded in the polymer showed the positions of resistors and diodes.

  Wolff traced the routes of the circuitry tracks and saw at once that the stimulation of a particular wire and the cessation of current through two others would release the locking mechanism.

  He snapped a piece from a bundle of hair-fine ductile alloy wire. A touch of the ends against a heated metal claw rendered them soft, and once they were pressed to the relevant contacts, a squirt from a coolant aerosol fixed the temporary short circuit in place. Taking his laser penknife, he burned away through the tracks of the other two connections. As soon as the last one was severed, a green light flashed up on the side of the locking mechanism, and the door retracted into the wall.

  The corridor was completely unlit and the air smelled stale, like a long-sealed crypt. Wolff shone his torch over the featureless black metal of the walls as he gathered his tools. He shuddered. The similarity to a crypt didn’t end there. The rectangular tunnel led down into an impenetrable darkness. He had to stoop to enter it, and moved forward, feeling along the wall as the tunnel sloped downward. He emerged into a small annexe. Piles of machinery leant against the walls and two doors led away.

  A strange glow illuminated the walls. Wolff switched off his torch and pocketed it. The light emanated from a hole in the floor, casting a dynamic incandescence on the dark metal of the ceiling above. It had a glimmering quality, like that cast by light shining through a large body of water.

  Moving closer to the source of the light, he saw that the hole led to a lower level via a set of rungs. He lowered his legs into the gap and, bracing himself on the edges of the floor with his hands, tested his weight on a rung. Taking the uppermost rung in his hands, Wolff began his descent. The Archer’s narrow form would easily have fitted through such a gap, but Wolff was broad across the shoulders and had to let himself down at full arms’ length, scraping his back on the edge of the floor. He remembered this entrance, the same as on the Larkspur. No light had shone from its counterpart.

  A watery aquamarine light met him as his head descended below the level of the floor, and a low bubbling melody reached his ears. Wolff nearly lost his grip on the ladder at the sight that greeted him when he looked over his shoulder.

  The chamber was immense—it must have been an entire, complete level of the Shamrock in itself. Serried glass cases lined every wall, arranged in two levels up to the high ceiling. The light came from behind the tanks, distorted by the gas bubbles streaming through the water, and in every tank he could see floated the suspended, mutilated head and torso of a single chimaera, their golden carapaces gleaming in the light.

  Wolff lowered himself the remainder of the way, and dropped to the floor. He looked around the room in wonder once more, trying to take it all in. The floor and ceiling were fabricated from the same dark, lustrous metal as the corridor above and much of the Shamrock’s internal surfaces. The chimaera here must have numbered into the hundreds. Some were enormous, heads as wide as he was high, but in one tank a glittering myriad of tiny arrow-sized chimaeras spun and convected in the aeration current.

  A table stood farther down the room, with another chimaera upon it—the one Jed had shot just after the downswing. The tail had been amputated and its pale shaft lay on the floor, the potassium barbs missing. The vivid scarlet of the thorny fans adorning its body had tarnished in the air, and the plates of organometallic skin were now stiff and flaky brown. Its legs and sensory antennae had not yet been torn off, and the joints were beautifully made, articulated perfectly in a way no forging artisan of metal could emulate, but useless under the encumbrance of gravity.

  It was a broken butterfly with tattered wings—a deposed monarch in fading robes, chained in this dungeon far from its starry dominion.

  The antennae reached out toward the place Wolff stood, circling in the air as if trying to construe him, this alien creature of flesh, hair, heat and water.

  Wolff moved closer and stooped, inclining his head toward it, hands on knees.

  Did the oxygen in the atmosphere of the Shamrock burn this creature’s golden scales? Did the pressure of the atmosphere weigh heavy on it after the airless void? Do you feel the sting of the arrow, the Archer’s blade? Did it know or understand how men sought it for their own ends? What was the loneliness of the void, the flavour of an emission spectrum, the rich nourishment of ionised hydrogen? Did it wonder, in that primitive circuitry of its brain, and ask itself if Wolff stood here, fragile man, in curiosity?

  Or was it just a machine that came weirdly from nature, and pained no more than a computer and thought no more than an insect? Do you observe our plights, and laugh at our bickering lives, sailing free in your endless river of stars? How strange I must seem.

  The man reached out and allowed himself a brief, cautious hesitation, before laying his hand on that golden exoskull. Mob
ile antennae described lazy circles—hunter and hunted, the ancient symbiosis.

  The arrow’s point of entry still showed on the creature’s flank, but a white silicone-like substance had occluded the hole punched by the violent point. He ran his hand over the stiff thorns of the fans, pressing the flexible gold laminae and stroking the coarse ruff of copper-wire hair of this giant metal moth.

  Turning back to the hall, he strained his eyes to resolve the most distant wall. Some of the tanks were dark and unoccupied. This Archer had made a good haul, but she hadn’t yet achieved her full complement of chimaera. He remounted the ladder and once more made the tight manoeuvre through the gap, leaving the eerie hall. They were not what he had come here for.

  He selected the left door and his guess was right. The door opened into a small chamber, with cases stacked against the far wall. Crouching before the pile, he lifted the catch on the top case and raised the lid. Its contents had gone, but a vestige remained of a bitter, desiccated smell that burnt the membranes of his nostrils, and a few small, uneven lumps of a chalky material hid in the crevices of its lining. Moving it aside, he opened one of the lower cases. This one was not empty. The smell was stronger, and the box was half filled with paper-wrapped half-inch cubes. Cubes from the right side of the case were missing, its levels eaten down into in square graduations. Wolff smiled to himself. How easy was it to obtain conurin on demand? Not likely very easy. This drug was expensive. Archers and people such as the Castellan Viprion were among the few able to afford it. Jed was addicted to it, would kill for it, or would turn to killing in order to obtain it. Examining the other cases, he found one more empty and three full.

  Wolff dragged the four cases back down the corridor. He hid the three full ones behind an esculent canister crate, wedging them in against the wall. It didn’t matter where they were. As long as they were all missing she would assume he had taken them, and as long as he had one in his possession when the time came for him to return, that would be incentive enough for her.