Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  “Steel and Flame!” Viprion cried.

  The catapult limbs straightened in an instant, hurling the missile. Wolff saw the circumfercirc a few leagues away punctured and caved in silently, the stratum collapsing and rippling like a thin sheet of metal foil, a second before the lights in the observation deck failed and a violent concussion threw him to the floor. A hideous sound reverberated through the walls, penetrating every nerve of his body. Through the window, a sphere of light ripped out from the point of impact. A noise like a thunderclap and a turbulence, followed by the sound of airlock doors slamming, reached the observation deck.

  A sullen sort of light came into being with a snap. His limbs throbbing with adrenaline, Wolff looked across a room strewn with loose objects and torn-out fittings, bathed in areas of inky shadow.

  Viprion got to his feet, and he stood on a slope down toward the point where the missile had hit the circumfercirc. “This is bad,” he said, looking at the floor, his voice calm but unease showing in his face. He looked at the object in his hand then slowly slid the spike into his forehead. His eyes closed in concentration. “The ring stratum has been deformed, probably even broken. You, send word to the castellans of the other radians.”

  The console operator pulled herself up from the floor and began bashing at console keys. Screens flickered.

  “What does that mean?” Wolff sought about the room for Rh’Arrol, and found the morran curled in a ball under the windowsill.

  “The very principle of a piece of material occupying a whole orbit is an unstable one. The circumfercirc is subject to harmonic vibrations. It absorbs the tidal forces to which the stratum is subjected by a standing wave across the ring. If the ring is broken, the standing wave fails, and the ring fragments and falls victim to its own centrifugal inertia.” Viprion spoke irritably, and had already set off down the slope toward the door.

  “What does that mean?” Wolff went after him.

  “It means, ignorant halfBlood idiot, that Carck-Westmathlon will either be flung at a tangent into the interplanetary void, or it will fall into the sun of Satigenaria. Engineering can only take so much abuse. The circumfercirc is doomed.”

  Wolff looked out the window in the corridor. “I have to get back to the Archer’s ship. You need to give me that case back.” He turned to look over his shoulder. “Arrol, you’re coming with me.”

  Viprion quickened his stride. “There is no time. Our best option now is to board one of the runnerships for the transport ring. A transport ship should pass here shortly. We shall make our way to the loading station now.”

  Wolff knew Viprion wanted something from him, but he wasn’t sure what it was or how much he wanted it. He decided to test it. “I want my case of conurin!”

  “There’s no time,” Viprion said.

  Wolff halted mid-stride, and leant his back against the wall. He could not see the Shamrock or the Bellwether through the windows, only stars, and he felt a sudden pull of anxiety that this might not work. “I have faith in the Archer, and she will return for me, but I shall take no action until I have my cargo to return to her.”

  “What are you doing, Gerald Wolff?” Rh’Arrol shrilled.

  Viprion too had stopped, and he thrust his face into Wolff’s, nostrils flared and the whites of his eyes huge and luminous in the depths of his gaunt face. “You stole that conurin, and that’s the only reason the Archer has any loyalty to you. You are holding her to ransom!”

  Wolff shrugged. “It seems to work well enough.”

  Viprion gazed back at Wolff mutely for a moment, perhaps hoping to make him capitulate. At last, the castellan said, “I will accompany you to the lift. If the lift is broken, I can go no farther.”

  They hurried back toward the lift. Rh’Arrol pulled at Wolff’s sleeve with prehensile tentacles. “The runnerships will be boarding and leaving!”

  “The runnerships will move people to the trams on the transport ring and return.” Wolff didn’t know for sure if this was true, but it seemed reasonable to him and the castellan voiced no contradiction.

  A dull green light delineated the lift call button. Viprion jabbed repeatedly at it. Wolff stood behind him for what seemed an interminable time, the breathing of the three of them raucous against the low background thrum of emergency systems. There came a distant groaning of metal under stress, and the floor shuddered beneath Wolff’s feet. At last, the hiss of the lift’s arrival broke the silence, and the doors slid back.

  Wolff sat in one of the chairs and Rh’Arrol crouched on the floor as the box accelerated through the breadth of the Carck-Westmathlon stratum. Viprion paced in silence, back and forth across the lift with his chin held high.

  Wolff and Viprion sprinted through the garden to the door of the castellan’s office. Viprion unlocked it and threw it open. Wolff plunged into the office and wrenched the case from the shelf by its handle. As he turned, he heard a slight noise from the door to the seignior’s quarters.

  The man stood in his doorway, eyes wild and nostrils flared.

  “Seignior,” said Viprion. “There is still time to leave Carck-Westmath. You must accompany us.”

  “You dare to come before me with that interface bolt in your face, Viprion? Feeble scavenger! Brain carrion! I am Carck-Westmathlon! No one shall leave!”

  Viprion fell sprawling on his chest on the desk. His hand caught the dirk in the piece of cheese as he rolled over, and as he got to his feet he plunged the point at the seignior. He missed and fell on the floor, curling up and screaming.

  “What is that you have there, Viprion?”

  With an unwilling tremor, Viprion’s arm uncurled, the dagger still clutched in it.

  “It is dangerous, to run around carrying blades, is it not, Viprion?”

  Viprion’s eyes became wide, and he stared at his hand as though it were not his own. Slowly, and shaking violently as if the subject of a battle between opposing forces, his fist turned, until the dagger’s tip was pointed toward his own heart. Strangulated noises came from his mouth.

  Wolff swung his case and bludgeoned the seignior over the head with it. He staggered backward, losing his grip on Viprion. Wolff heard the castellan gasping, and the knife rang on the floor as he threw it away. Wolff screamed as the seignior paralysed him against the wall, his vision filled with vibrating texture and his eardrums exploding.

  Viprion must have thrown a chair at the seignior, but he missed and the chair hit Wolff’s shoulders and the wall, and the back broke off it. The seignior started laughing, and turned, advancing upon Viprion. He fell over Rh’Arrol, who from the start of the fight had been racing around the room in panic, squealing and trying to escape. Wolff ran at the fallen seignior and desperately kicked with all the force he could gather, crushing the seignior’s head between his boot and the wall. It made a dull, heavy sound, and Wolff saw it distort, the skull squashing.

  Viprion had collapsed with his knees bent under him against the wall. The seignior lay dead, eyes bulging in a travesty of surprise, a thin line of blood tracking from his lips down his chin and colouring the floor by the wall he slumped against. The skin of his scalp had split open along an old scar, toward the back of the crown. Bloodstained surgical metal gleamed beneath, presumably what had insulated the seignior’s brain from his own disruptive signal.

  “So that’s how it works,” Wolff muttered.

  Viprion crouched on the floor with shaking hands set to his temples, eyes closed. He was sweating so heavily the moisture had trickled down the line of his jowl. Blood ran from both nostrils to his chin.

  “Are you all right?” Wolff asked.

  Viprion wiped his nose on his sleeve, and slowly got to his feet. He stared at the dead body, his mouth twisting with some emotion oddly akin to anger.

  “Good, then let’s move.” Wolff did not wait for an answer.

  “It is ironic—infuriating—that his defeat should come at the moment Carck-Westmath itself is lost.”

  “Tough loaf,” said Wolff, notici
ng the food on the table. Since the castellan wasn’t watching, he stuffed the cheese and loaf into his pockets. Viprion stayed only to take a book like the one Jed had, with an owl in a tree on the cover, from a shelf.

  Rh’Arrol squatted on the floor of the lift with impatient waves of colour flushing over its quills.

  The lift began to wobble and sway as it moved back to the outer rim of the circumfercirc. Unnerving noises rumbled through metal all around them, making Rh’Arrol hiss and mutter from underneath a chair and Wolff grip the arms of his seat. The window in the lift door looked out into blank darkness. This must be what it was like to be food, he thought, going through his own digestive tract as a tiny camera inside a lump in some levigated esculents, or one of those repulsive yellow lumps in fibre loaf that always came out looking exactly the same as when they’d gone in.

  “We make immediately to the runnership now,” said Viprion, and he set off at a fast pace down the corridor.

  “Pardon me, castellan,” Rh’Arrol scuttled up beside Wolff and extended aer neck past his hip. “But the nearest loading station is to the withershins of Carck-Westmathlon. You moves with the circumfercirc toward a station almost half a mile away, and toward the point of impact and the dendrites boarded by pillagers, whereas the other is almost a third that distance.”

  Viprion turned toward the morran and spoke with a sudden vehemence. “Be silent!” Rh’Arrol reversed with a clatter of metal and a fearful flush of white across aer cilia. “I know where the loading station of my own city is located.”

  “It is not your commendable suggestion of proceeding to the loading station I disagree with,” Rh’Arrol protested. “Just the choice of loading station.”

  Viprion stopped. “There will be little enough room on the runnerships as it is. There is no point in bringing some worthless conniving urchin along to use up valuable oxygen and space.” The castellan lunged, reaching out to grab Rh’Arrol by the neck.

  “Stop that!” said Wolff. “I agree with the morran. Your direction brings us back toward the mob. If Rh’Arrol says the withershins station is closer, I will take aer route. Go by yourself to the other station if you are so intent on it.” He turned back to Rh’Arrol. “Arrol, you lead the way.”

  The morran’s quills flushed pinkish and bristled, and ae scuttled around Wolff.

  “All right,” said Viprion, in a tone that sounded much too mollified in contrast to his last paroxysm for Wolff’s liking. “If you must go this way, then so shall I.”

  Wolff sensed Viprion stalking behind him as he followed Rh’Arrol. Why was it so imperative that he stayed with Wolff and Rh’Arrol? No, not Rh’Arrol, the morran was just an inconvenience to Viprion.

  More and more joined them from tributary corridors as they drew closer to the loading station, until they were half running amid a herd of people. The corridor opened into a large room with a vaulted ceiling. Three massive, circular doors framed with machinery and safety devices took up the outermost wall. The whole room was filled with people, and the noise they were making showed them to be on the verge of panic.

  Viprion pushed his way into the throng, his chin held high as though he could somehow be contaminated by breathing in air that had passed through the lungs of the lower castes. Two guards with voltage bayonets stood by the airlock, a head or so taller than the milling crowd. They both made a synchronised genuflection when they saw the castellan.

  “Where are the runnerships?” Viprion demanded.

  “All running, castellan. They should return soon.”

  Almost as soon as the guard had spoken, a dark shape passed over the stars outside the small window beside the airlock door. The mob’s motion suddenly stilled, and all focus shifted to that one action, alerted by the few who had seen it. At once there began a steady murmur, rising to a clamour of voices, raised arms and pointing fingers, and Wolff understood why. He looked down to where Rh’Arrol was trying to conceal aerself behind his legs. Men were worth more than morrans here on Carck-Westmathlon. The Blood castes would be evacuated first, then the other men, and the morrans last, if at all.

  The guards stepped aside to give Viprion passage to the door as the airlock flange began to turn. Wolff stepped up behind.

  “Who is this man?” one guard asked.

  “He has knowledge. It is important he lives to tell it.”

  The guard pressed the panel to open the airlock doors. “And the morran?”

  “Let him bring his morran! There’s no time.”

  Not giving the guards any chance to consider this, Rh’Arrol skirted Wolff’s ankles and darted through the airlock.

  The inside of the runnership was an octagonal tube with a width several times Wolff’s height. Two cargo doors on one end led to the hold, and another door at the opposite end was the entrance to the passenger compartment and bridge.

  Viprion pressed an intercom switch on the wall. “This is the Castellan Viprion. Prepare for immediate separation and departure.”

  Wolff stared at him. “What about the others?” He waved a hand toward the docking tunnel formed by the airlocks of Carck-Westmathlon and the ship. “Them out there?”

  “It’s a waste of time letting them board. The longer we sit here, the more we’re at risk.”

  “They are innocent men and morrans, and they are going to die if they are left there!”

  “The runnership will return.”

  “It may be too late for them by then!”

  “They are not of the Blood!”

  Wolff faced the castellan, blocking the way to the airlock with his back. “I can see your blood, Viprion. It’s all down your sleeve. I don’t know if whatever’s in it that sets you apart from men you consider to be lesser than you gives you abilities to see colours invisible to me, but to my eyes it is indistinguishable from that of anyone I’ve ever seen bleed.”

  “Gerald Wolff, shut up!” Rh’Arrol crouched on the floor, sternum lowered and knees arched over its back, quills flushing a fierce vermilion.

  “What about the other morrans on Carck-Westmathlon. Don’t you care about them?” Wolff threw the conurin case down on the floor. “You conniving little arse-wipe!”

  “Close the door!” Viprion shouted through the airlock, and pressed the panel to close it shipside.

  “Goodspeed, castellan!” one of the guards shouted through the noise.

  As the sounds of machinery announcing the separation of the airlocks began, Wolff seized hold of Viprion by fistfuls of the man’s tunic at the shoulders, and pushed him against the wall. “It wouldn’t have cost anything! It wouldn’t have hurt! They could’ve gone in the cargo hold if you were so desperate not to have to suffer their company!”

  Viprion’s arm was twisted behind his back, and it was only this reminder of the neutron pistol he had hidden there that stopped Wolff from hitting him. He flung him aside instead, making him stagger and grab one of the null gravity straps attached to the walls.

  “What is it you want from me, Viprion? Why were you so set on rescuing me, even if it meant you had to save a morran to get me to come quietly, when you think so little of my kind? And don’t tell me that information shite you told the guard back there, ’cause I’ve told you all I know, and you know it!”

  “You are only half of their kind,” was all the reply Viprion offered, and he brusquely straightened his tunic, turned away from Wolff, and went through the door to the passenger section.

  Wolff followed him. The passenger section was wider than the room they’d come from, and windows covered its outer walls, including the floor, and the edges of the extra width, looking toward the front and back of the ship. Square formations of chairs filled in the walls in the places between the windows. He ignored Rh’Arrol, who had started complaining that the lighting in the section was too strong, and climbed up a line of rungs bolted to the wall to look out of a window.

  “You should put on a seatbelt,” Viprion advised. “The inertia from acceleration might prove rather uncomfortable otherwise.�
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  Silent and angry, Wolff chose a seat where he could look out of a window to the fore of the ship, past the cone of its bridge. The runnership’s engines made barely more than a hum as it began to gather speed. The dark forms upon the Carck-Westmathlon stratum dwindled until the circumfercirc became a thick band across his field of view with stars visible at its edges. Pressed hard into his seat by the forces of acceleration, it gave him a tremendous sense of engulfing perspective.

  Gradually, the inertia slackened off as the runnership reached a constant speed. Wolff could feel the peculiar sensation of his queue floating behind his head, and an odd weightless bulk where his toolbelt was. Rh’Arrol, under a chair with aer claws dug into the carpet, made a retching sound.

  Viprion unfastened his seatbelt and pulled himself up on the back of his chair. He gauged the distance carefully before pushing off by unbending his knees. He dived toward a window and caught hold of a rail, to which he tied his tunic’s sash.

  Wolff bent his arms to grip the back of his seat. Straightening his elbows lifted him out of his chair. He stretched himself until he was doing a handstand on the back of the chair.

  “Yes, that’s very acrobatic,” said Viprion sarcastically. “Now sit back down. If you fall you’re going to injure yourself and possibly me as well.”

  Wolff swung his feet into the seat of the chair and kicked against it as Viprion had, aiming at the rail the castellan was tied to. He misjudged the force of his kick and rebounded off the edge of the window, grabbing Viprion by the leg.

  “Get off of me!” Viprion shoved Wolff away as he got his hand to the rail. “Bloody idiot! Steel and Flame!”

  Wolff hung on to the rail. Beyond the ship’s bulky cargo hold, the Carck-Westmathlon stratum retreated into the night. He flinched away from the window as a second shell of light burst forth. In the subsiding fallout, he saw the stratum had been shattered. Gas tore from the disintegrating structure like smoke, exploding into pale spheres. Glittering debris spun in the depressurising atmosphere, and with it drifted torn limbs and amorphous organic matter, and even the helpless bodies of poor men, convulsing and perishing in the vacuum.