by Manda Benson
“No, I do not, I didn’t see what happened to it, and I expect the Archer dumped it out the airlock, unless she homogenised it and put it through the phytoculture tank!”
Viprion cast down the stylus on the desk. “He really gave no intimation of what it was he intended to do here?”
“I didn’t even know that this was his destination. He programmed a course before he died, and it terminated here. I have no idea what compelled him to come. You did mention something about the political situation. What’s happening?”
The castellan looked to the door. “Things are not right under the current seignior. The rank of seignior in the Satigenaria system is a hereditary one, but the bloodline was contaminated.”
Wolff scowled. “And you really believe someone is not fit to rule because they have ‘bad blood?’”
“What do you mean, believe? I see it with my own eyes. The man cannot rule as his forebears did. We had a revolt in the Kuiper belt a few years back because of him. I personally had to travel out there to quell it, and it was not without cost to myself and Carck-Westmathlon.”
“Why don’t you depose him, then?”
Viprion snorted abruptly without altering his expression. “You saw what he can do, and besides, he is of the bloodline, he has some Blood in him, and there are no other heirs. He’s got this perversion for Lunatics. He keeps trying to impregnate females, but Lunatic men can’t bear the offspring of Galactics. If they don’t haemorrhage to death, their pelvic bones collapse. How is he to be replaced?”
“With someone not of the bloodline, of course.”
Viprion cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “The computer wouldn’t have it.”
The door to the seignior’s quarters flew open with a crash. Wolff twisted and held his arms over his face defensively.
“They’re coming, Viprion, they’re coming!”
The seignior stood in the doorway, his pupils dilated while he made wild movements. His lips were wet and spittle ran down his chin. “Behind the curtain of noise. Can you not hear them?”
For a moment he regained some awareness of his surroundings. He cast about himself in a disoriented way. “Viprion! Get someone in here to clean up this dead morran!”
“Certainly, seignior.” Viprion stood.
The seignior held out his arms out as though they were alien to him. He stared at his fingers with a horrified expression. “It burns us! It burns! Stop it!” He roared at his hand, and beat it against the door.
“Concentrate!” Viprion shouted at the man. The seignior had started up a childish wailing, and Viprion standing before him suddenly looked more the frustrated teacher of an immature brat than the downtrodden delegate. “Work with it, not against it!”
“They are hurting me! Get out to the surveillance and scanning department, Viprion!”
Viprion slammed his hand down on the case as Wolff tried to take it. “I’m confiscating this until I find out what’s going on here.” He put the case on a shelf and ordered Wolff and Rh’Arrol out into the corridor, where he locked the door to his office.
“I thought you said he could only open that door in one of his lucid moods?”
“That was one of his lucid moods,” said Viprion.
“Why are you following a madman’s order?” Wolff asked.
“Occasionally he does his job properly, and I’ve reason to believe this is one such time. Quickly, to the lift.” As they ran down the corridor, Viprion took a jewel-like object, set in metal and with a two-inch spike protruding from its back, from his pocket, and he sank the spine into the dent in the center of his forehead.
* * * *
It seemed long since Jed had truly slept, since the deadlock with Wolff before she could regain full control of the Shamrock. The chance to rest herself before heading out of the system was welcome, and she slept for several hours in Wolff’s absence, the ship’s automated systems keeping watch.
Her throat felt raw when she awoke. She was not accustomed to speaking as much as she had done of late. She went out onto the bridge. Wolff’s dirty plate from the meal they had eaten still lay on the floor. Jed looked at it with distaste, and at the glass with his saliva on the rim and traces of phytoculture water still remaining in the bottom. Who was to tell what diseases this malodorous vagabond might carry? The smell of him still lingered in the room, and she could see one of his hairs on the seating.
And here, he had taken something from the items of Taggart’s she’d found, from where the objects had lain on the edge of the left console. If Jed recalled correctly, it was just some sort of electronics transmitter device, not something she would be likely to use or need. The impudence of the act angered her, the thought of that self-assured oaf parading about her ship, stealing things that were not his to take and just thinking, assuming, that she was not observant enough to notice.
Wolff was, as Jed already knew, a criminal, and it was these irritating acts of venial felony that set him in a class below her, but suspicion goaded her onward. Wolff had not been under her surveillance all the time he’d been aboard the Shamrock since the sunstorm had begun and he’d last left. He could have gone elsewhere, perhaps to the cargo room or arsenal, while she had been showering. She went swiftly to the cargo bay, and descended the rungs to the lower level. The room had been disturbed. Jed sensed dust stirred, smelled a distant flavour upon the air. She looked about the unlit clutter of casings and crates, and to the door at the back of the room.
When she crossed and lay a finger to the access panel, the polymer felt uneven.
The lock had been tampered with.
This lock led to the vaults. Wolff could have lifted little of what she’d caught. A risible image of the man stuffing little chimaera into his clothing crossed Jed’s mind. He would raise meagre funds from such small fry.
A strong fear made her press her hand to the panel and plunge into the tunnel as the door opened. Her breathing ragged, she stumbled twice as she made her way down. She dipped her head into the lower level. Her haul remained as ever, the golden bodies of the chimaera drifting and glinting in their cases of preserving liquid, but when she rose and went to the storage cupboard, some of the cases were missing.
Jed wrenched open the lid of one of the cases. Empty. She opened the other one. Empty also.
She turned full circle within the dark walls twice, raising the heels of her hands to her temples, mouth open, the silence grating against her ears.
“This can not be!”
In this catacomb of the Shamrock’s in which she remembered never having spoken before, her scream was shrill and reedy, more animal than human.
The room shrank, and a claustrophobic terror closed upon Jed like a stifling fist. She ran back up the corridor and into the cargo room, and fell against a crate, the place lurching and heaving as she tried to correct hyperventilation. Had she other stores in her living quarters? Jed couldn’t remember. It had been a long time indeed since such fear had rendered her so completely incapable of lateral thought. She felt to her belt pouch for the few cubes remaining there. Not to waste them now!
Where to next? Wolff had her conurin, whatever his intentions for it were, and she must track him down in order to recover it. Had he taken it merely as insurance? Did he intend to give it back when he returned? What if he did not return? Was he holding her up to ransom? At last, rage overpowered fear, and Jed pulled herself up from the crate and climbed back up the rungs on shaky hands. How could she find him? Would she have to go out into the Satigenaria Circumfercirc, and physically separate herself from the Shamrock, and go where people might see her? No, she could not! The metal of the shield walls would block her radio contact with the ship. She would be blinded, and that in itself was unthinkable.
She returned to the bridge. The Shamrock had to be free. She could not think, immured like this. With a command, she separated the Shamrock’s airlock from the circumfercirc’s docking aperture. As she diverted power to the synchrotron cannon, she knew deep within herself that
she was acting irrationally, running blind, but there could be no other way. She could not sit here and wait to see if Gerald Wolff would return with her conurin.
Pure white light exploded from the cannon’s mast, thrusting its dazzling knife into the shielding seam and casting acute spiny shadows from the ship’s wings onto the interior walls of the dendrite cover. With the external sensors, Jed felt the slam of disrupted air against the Shamrock as the vacuum ripped into the chamber. Incandescent filaments spun into the darkness, glowing before resolidifying, and she held the cannon’s onslaught. Whole mutilated panels of metal fell away beneath a glare of pure energy. Jed shut down the synchrotron cannon. A ragged hole had been torn in the wall, and its red-hot semi-solid edges wilted from the vacuum, coagulating to form a smoother rim around the point of destruction.
With a roar of ballast thrust, the ship tore forward and through the gap. Jed chewed hard on one precious cube of conurin and felt herself lift from the moorings, the outer transport ring a perfect line of etched silver. Below the Shamrock, the Satigenaria Circumfercirc was a wall of rutted darkness filled with holes of light.
He was here somewhere. He would not make sport of Jed of the Shamrock.
She turned, so the Shamrock’s prow pointed toward the circumfercirc stratum, and cut the thrust. With a single prompt, the communicator was open. “Carck-Westmathlon, this is the Shamrock. I demand the man who walks among you, Gerald Wolff, be returned to my custody immediately!”
A moment later, a cold voice rang through the bridge of the Shamrock. “Shamrock, this is the Castellan Viprion. You have destroyed the stormshield. This I can only interpret as an act of aggression against the circumfercirc.”
“Hand over Wolff or I shall not hesitate to inflict more damage.”
* * * *
Viprion slowly turned to face Wolff. “You heard her. I cannot risk further damage from that ship.”
“I understand perfectly.” Wolff turned to the door. “I shall need my conurin case back, first.”
“We had an agreement!” Rh’Arrol shrieked.
“Be silent! You think I intend to dishonour it?”
Rh’Arrol shut up.
“The morran will go with you to a lesser transport shuttle,” said Viprion. “And so shall I.”
“What?” Wolff stared at the castellan.
Viprion’s face had become blank. The gem-like object he’d stuck in his forehead became a clouded green. “There’s a battleship out there. Where did it come from? Clear the transmission.”
“This is the Bellwether. As your scanners have no doubt informed you, our weaponry array is capable of boring straight through the stratum of your circumfercirc. Our scanners indicate an Archer ship in close vicinity. Our demands are that you moor it intact and surrender it to this vessel.”
“What?” Viprion exclaimed. “The Bellwether? It doesn’t have clearance to be here.”
The console operator pointed to a screen. “That’s it! It’s come in undetected during the blackout in the ion storm!”
The screen showed a massive, blunt-headed shape. Wolff reached over and switched the communicator back to Jed’s frequency. “Shamrock?”
“Filth!” was the Archer’s response.
“Jed, there’s a battleship by the name of the Bellwether in pursuit of you, about half a parsec to the north-east. They’ve ordered Carck-Westmathlon to capture the Shamrock.”
* * * *
“What folly is this?” Jed augmented a second transmission band, directly to the large ship she saw where Wolff directed her. “I demand you make clear your intentions.”
“This is the Bellwether, Archer. We intend to capture your vessel. You would do well to come quietly.”
Jed thought she detected a very subtle change in the transmitted voice between the words ”capture” and “your,” almost as if the first part of the sentence had been audially recorded and the second part tacked on afterward, but this seemed of little relevance at the present juncture. She “saw” the Bellwether’s twelve-mile hull, weaponry bristling on the wing defenses, sensed the force this battleship wielded.
“You shall not have this ship alive.”
Far below, a magnetic harpoon deployed from one of Carck-Westmathlon’s engineering towers. Jed fired both auxiliary thrusters, trying to clear her ship from its range. The harpoon struck on the main propulsion funnel, pulling the Shamrock down by the tail and rotating its prow, where the synchrotron cannon was mounted, away from the circumfercirc and so removing her primary line of defense.
Jed re-opened the channel to Carck-Westmathlon. “Release this vessel!”
As if to defy her, a second harpoon fired and struck the Shamrock on the aftmost section of the dorsal surface, the dull ring of its impact conducting through the ship’s shielding. Jed increased the power to the auxiliary thrusters, up to maximum, but the ship was still being drawn back toward the circumfercirc, straining like a pike on a fishing line.
Jed thought quickly. Already a fear had been stirred in her—a fear not only of being powerless in the hands of men such as Wolff and Taggart, but even of being dragged from her ship and taken where she could not interface with it, of people touching and staring at her, and a sense of going insane as the Shamrock’s acuity was wrenched from her senses. She would not have that. She would sooner destroy her ship than be taken to such a fate. She thought of the hydrogen fuel tank, and of initiating a closed fusion avalanche in the drive chamber. That would wipe out the Bellwether, herself, and the entire Carck-Westmathlon section of the circumfercirc.
That would not be necessary. There was another way. She ran a fast calculation, working on the strength of the hypertensile alloy filament and the force an uncontained fusion explosion could employ. It would cost her nearly an eighth of the fuel tank’s contents, but it would unleash just enough thrust to break free.
She opened the fuel gates. Supercritical hydrogen boiled into the reactor tubes and tore into a fusion frenzy. She felt the furnace burning like acid in the Shamrock’s viscera, an almost palpable pain compelling her to release the contents of the fusion chamber before it damaged the ship, but she held on, until the precise fraction of a second before venting the critical gas by breaking the ion exhaust mechanism. The hot gas ripped into the vacuum, exploding like a solar flare. The blast front carried the Shamrock forward, tearing away the harpoon cables.
Behind, the explosion left a faint pinkish shell of hydrogen and helium residue, still expanding and cooling.
* * * *
A sudden intense light flared outside the tower viewport. “Castellan! Something has exploded. Its traces are similar to those left by a dirty hydrogen bomb.”
Viprion’s head turned to the window, a faint ragged trace where the Shamrock had been. An instant later a concussion shook the floor beneath their feet. “Lashback from the winch recoil,” said Viprion. “How much damage?”
The speaker checked a screen. “Looks like a lot of the communications rigging is down, and two of the larger prominences have sustained damage. The computer predicts more damage to the communication systems of Carck-Westmathlon and the surrounding boroughs as the ion shell produced by the expansion reaches the circumfercirc.”
Wolff moved closer to a window that slanted to offer a view of the protruding towers and bridges of the circumfercirc cityscape. A cloud of debris glittered above the stratum, falling away into the interplanetary void under its own centrifugal inertia. The dispersion of the fragments and the revolution of the circumfercirc’s orbit left no clue as to where, precisely, the damage had been done.
“The ship?” Wolff asked. “Did the Archer’s ship self-destruct?”
“Unlikely,” snapped Viprion. “If that had been the case the explosion would have blown out this side of the circumfercirc and probably have triggered a solar storm strong enough to break up the remainder of it. It looks like she just blew out her ion exhaust.”
“Oh.” Wolff saw small ships coming in close to the towers. Little white sha
pes were drifting down on threads from them like ghostly four-limbed spiders, and breaking in through the hole the Shamrock had made in the docking dendrite shield. Four gunships lurked within the scope of the viewport. “You appear to be under siege,” he added.
Rh’Arrol shrieked. “I live in that dendrite!”
“What?” Viprion looked out. “How did those gunships get in here? And that vessel, the Bellwether, appears to be a grade-A battleship. Access this far in-system is offlimits to it. It shouldn’t have been allowed clearance past the Kuiper belt.”
“The Kuiper belt proves a weak link again,” Wolff said.
“Instigate a communication to the Bellwether,” Viprion ordered.
“Channel open.”
“Bellwether, this is Viprion, castellan of Carck-Westmathlon. State your intentions.”
“Marcus Taggart walks among you. We will speak only to him.” The voice issued, thin and tinny, from a grid in the console.
“He’s found me!” Viprion said.
Wolff stared at him. “Who?”
“The seignior! I’m intruding on his control.” Viprion gripped the bolt in his forehead with both hands, trying to pull it out.
Wolff leant over the operator and put his thumb to the communications switch. “Marcus Taggart is dead. Your mission has failed! Now go away!”
Wolff felt a sublime shift in focus, and when he took his hand away from the console, Viprion, Rh’Arrol, and the console operator all stared at him.
Viprion had pulled the device out of the hole in his forehead. Angry fear coloured his face. “You fool!”
Wolff looked past him, and realised with an unpleasant shift of perspective that the Bellwether was visible through the window as a vast hammerhead-shaped gap in the stars. Something in the hulk was moving. A light glowed in the concavity of the prow, and glowing lumps of matter precipitated from it and clumped into a ball, suspended above the foresection of the ship. The light shrank, a dense darkness forming in its center, around which the form of the ship and the light of the stars behind buckled and lensed. The knot of matter began to draw back toward the Bellwether’s prow, toward a mast as though affected by some unseen force, and Wolff saw with horror that the hammerhead-shape at the front of the ship was bending back, like the limbs of some titanic catapult.
