Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  Wolff turned to the castellan. “Now they are all dead, while this ship flies empty, because of your pride!” He flung his fist at the man. Viprion caught Wolff’s hand with calculated accuracy, absorbing the force by letting his whole body drift back. His knee came up to wedge his foot against Wolff’s chest, and a deft push separated the two men. Viprion was still tied to the handrail. The tension in his belt worked for leverage, transferring all the momentum to Wolff and sending him flying from the window toward the fore section.

  Wolff managed to grab a chair to check his fall, wrenching his shoulder painfully. He turned about to see the Bellwether’s ungainly bulk rising over the ruins of the circumfercirc. Viprion was not looking at Wolff. His palm was pressed to the window. A thin line of silver crossed the sky on the opposite side of the ship to the circumfercirc. Wolff turned his head to look through the forward windows—the massive shape of the ion-driven tram was right ahead, blue plasma glowing on its tail. He looked back to the rear of the runnership, and the Bellwether beyond.

  “It’s chasing us!” Wolff spun himself over. He grabbed the back of a chair in the next row and thus began hauling himself back toward the aft window. Already the Bellwether was charging its devastating weapon. Rh’Arrol screamed as the apparatus on the battleship’s prow released. The runnership plunged, and Wolff lost his grip on the seat and sailed across the passenger bay. He hit some chairs and reoriented himself just in time to see the missile hit the ion tram. The enormous vessel’s fabric crumpled into the impact point, as though the ship was being sucked in on itself by some incomprehensible force, then the whole ship exploded in a sphere of light.

  Breathing hard, he pulled himself down by the arms of a chair. That tram must’ve been more than fifty miles long, and made from Teng steel, and the missile the Bellwether had fired had moved slowly enough for him to see it fly over the runnership. He’d never seen anything come near to that amount of destruction.

  He stared at Viprion’s back. The man’s hand was still pressed against the window, and in the intense light the tram’s explosion had generated, Wolff had seen something. The light had been so bright it had shone through the flesh of his hand, showing the form of the bones, and something dark, solid and square, concealed in his palm and exposed through the vitreous alloy.

  Wolff climbed up the chairs hand over hand, trying to speed himself up by kicking the floor. He got hold of Viprion before he could react and dragged his hand away from the window. Viprion tried to close his fingers over the thing, but Wolff twisted his arm about and forced him to drop it. It floated into the aisle, turning over and over. Wolff kicked off from the wall, reaching for it. Viprion fought and swore, the belt he’d used to his advantage before now hindering him.

  Wolff caught the thing and examined it. “It’s a transmitter, isn’t it? You’ve been transmitting a mayday beacon to the ship that destroyed the circumfercirc! You’re insane!”

  Wolff put the transmitter down on the floor, carefully so it stayed still. He braced himself against a seat and smashed the device with his heel.

  Viprion sprang at Wolff and the two of them rolled over, drifting away from the seating. Wolff saw a glowing blue mote shoot over the Bellwether’s prow and shouted out. The next rotation, the mote was bigger and not quite so blue. Then a loud clang rang through the runnership’s hull, and a wall was heaving itself up beneath him.

  Wolff twisted over and bent his knees when he landed, but the shock of the impact still jarred through ankles, knees and hips and made him gasp and draw his injured leg up. Viprion crashed into him and they somersaulted down the aisle. Somewhere along the way, Rh’Arrol became entangled with them and turned into a screaming snake-locked demon. Aer legs and head were curled up tight, and ae hit Viprion in the diaphragm, making him release Wolff.

  All three of them hit the wall at the fore section, and for a moment Wolff was pinned there, impotent against the g-force and unable to draw breath. When the pressure slackened enough to permit him to lift his head, what lay beyond the windows was obscured by a filthy haze.

  Viprion grimaced. “That Archer’s ship blew out its ion trap. Well, at least it will be easy to follow her with carbon particulates escaping from the engine.”

  Wolff dragged himself hand over hand on the rungs, to the nearest window. Forward of the runner’s cockpit compartment, he could see the fusion glow of the Shamrock’s tail, dimmed through the fumes coming off it. Far ahead lay a gibbous slice of bright blue albedo. “I think she’s going to attempt slingshot out of the system!”

  Viprion crawled up the vertical floor and tried to drag himself into a chair. “That means she’ll be approaching relativistic speed. This runnership has no inertia dampers. It’ll kill everyone on board!”

  “That’s convenient for her.” Wolff braced himself against the rungs as the planet loomed closer. He saw continents and weather systems in its glowing atmosphere. He tried to convince himself that Jed wasn’t going to accelerate toward the light barrier with the runnership in tow, but he could see no reason why she wouldn’t. The conurin was all she wanted, and he didn’t see how the inertia could damage that.

  Filaments of light tore past in the opposite direction—small ships. The light from the Archer’s ship suddenly shifted, and the change in direction yanked the runnership on the magnetic winch cable. Wolff lost his grip on the ladder a second before a huge impact. The next thing he knew, he was flying toward the stern with a velocity that would surely kill him, the detail of the bullseye dent in the window and the glowing world beyond it lucid in his terror-stricken mind.

  White stuff exploded from the wall at the back of the passenger compartment, and Wolff went into it headfirst and bounced off. He ricocheted off two walls before he came to his senses, stunned and floating in the center of the compartment. The runnership was spinning longitudinally around him, while he hung still in the middle of it. As the windows turned over and over, he saw a zoetrope stop-frame effect of the Bellwether drawing back the limbs on its horrible weapon, and the Shamrock, at which the weapon was aimed, apparently squaring up to the massive battleship. A thread of sharp light connected the Shamrock’s synchrotron blaster mast to the dark missile on the Bellwether’s weapon, and then the Bellwether’s prow ruptured into a sphere of light.

  Rh’Arrol came from nowhere with a shrill sound, and hit Wolff in the stomach. He fell on a window, arms flailing for purchase, and saw the engulfing blue horizon of the planet fly past. When the two ships blinked by, already they were much farther away.

  Wolff smelled vomit, and he sincerely hoped it had come from someone’s mouth rather than a gorier alternative. “Viprion!” he shouted.

  “What?” Viprion sounded both ill and petulant.

  “We’re falling toward the planet.”

  “I don’t know if the pilots have survived.”

  Wolff turned his head to look along the window and out over the runner’s prow. The cabin compartment had been shattered and crushed beyond recognition.

  “They haven’t.” The Bellwether must have anticipated the Shamrock’s manoeuvre, and come around the planet in the opposite direction to intercept it, and the runnership had crashed into it. He turned to the other window, and back toward the glowing arc of the planet’s horizon. Small craft filled the sky around the broken runnership. Close to the line that separated night and day, on the surface of the ocean, lay a stretch of tessellated hexagons–an artificial continent, and even at this distance, he saw patterns of glowing red etched into the stratum.

  “They’re razing the planet,” he said.

  Viprion slid his interface bolt into his forehead. “The controls are inoperable. Our orbit is decaying. We’ll have to prepare for a crash landing.”

  Rh’Arrol made a spitting, whining noise from under a seat.

  Wolff stared out upon the continent, which already looked larger and closer. Would Jed follow him here? Was his ransom great enough?

  Chapter 8

  Satigenaria

  O
rder begets anarchy,

  Rule engenders rivalry,

  Whether despot or democracy,

  Throughout all Man’s construction,

  Feudalism or bureaucracy,

  In every splintered faction,

  Always will there ever be,

  Insurrection.

  Jed steadied herself against the Shamrock’s airlock door, gulping the acrid air. Satigenaria One had already fallen under the might of the marauders, and flaming hues accompanied sunset’s conflagration. Dark columns of smoke rose against the horizon’s turbulent pyre, and the innards of the once-proud city glowed an infernal red, punctuated with jagged black ruin, the great architecture of the city-continent strewn to the four winds.

  Here and there tall buildings had come crashing down, folding in on themselves, and had smashed through the floor into their submarine foundations. Waters lapped from the gaps in the floating continent, rising into the streets with the tide.

  Jed could not bring herself to leave the Shamrock’s flank, and Satigenaria’s red light dwindled and died from the horizon, twilight lingering over the ebbing flames. Night fell, and the zodiac turned on its gyre above the poisoned skies, the galaxy’s engulfing span infinitely aloof from the passion and despair of mortal creatures, those of flashpoint existence and ephemeral fleet. Jed shivered in the freezing air, consumed by fear and vulnerability under the cavern of the sky and surrounded by the horizon’s menace.

  She stepped away, taking her hand from the Teng steel shielding, and with halting, unstable steps, she climbed down the heap of loose rubble upon which she’d landed, digging the point of the bottom limb of her bow into the ground to steady herself.

  The Shamrock’s rearing synchrotron cannon mast and great dorsal blade showed silver in the moonlight, perched on the scorched crags. She hadn’t seen her ship’s exterior from this distance since she’d left the Agrimony, and seeing it like this brought back all-too vivid memories of her first encounter with it. When she closed her eyes, she could still feel the brimming jubilation, the realisation of freedom, her rapid pulse, and the tearing of air in her lungs as she ran down the transparent-roofed docking pipe toward that graceful bronzy spear—the moment she had coveted all her life as an Archer’s apprentice. Her forehead had felt sore beneath her newly attached interface band, but she could already feel the Shamrock’s welcoming calls. She had paid her own ransom, and the Agrimony’s incarceration and Mathicur’s tyranny lay far behind, excised from her life forever. Her desperation was to be within that ship and safe. That was her ship, her world and her life, and now she was leaving it in quest of a rogue who had desecrated the Shamrock’s sanctuary and stolen a commodity she couldn’t live without.

  Holding up her bow and hefting her quiver of arrows onto her shoulder, she broke into a run, racing like a shadow through Satigenaria’s sundered glory. Every step brought her farther from the ship’s reassuring presence. With every yard she put between herself and its senses, she felt the time lag more pronounced as its signal relayed back and forth from her. The speed of light was too slow by far, and Jed felt each tiny fraction of a second. Soon her ship’s senses no longer reached her position properly, and without its enhancement the world seemed colourless and devoid of dimension.

  Jed stopped beneath a seared archway, pausing to collect herself. She flattened her back against the blackened concrete, pulling her bow in close to her chest, and surveyed the desolation. A stiff, heated breeze blew, carrying an overwhelming myriad of burnt smells. Jed felt agoraphobic and exposed without the Shamrock’s reassuring walls and all-round enhanced vision. She reached for a cube of conurin, trying not to fret about how long the rations would last. She let the paper blow away, a pale husk of fragile, untouched whiteness among the ash and ruins, as she chewed on the chalky fibre of its contents.

  With her mono-visor over her right eye, she scoured the dark ruins for infra-red. The remains of some fires still glowed, but she sought out the warm spots marking men. Seeing none, she straightened, looked out upon the deserted streets, and shrugged the quiver on her shoulder, setting the vanes rattling on the arrows’ protruding tails. Once more she went forth, over the loose masonry underfoot, and once more, she felt compelled to stop, to look up at the unbounded openness of the dark sky, and feel a fearful awe with no roof to protect her from its emptiness.

  The stars glittered with a faltering, frosty light, distorted by the atmosphere. The galactic center was rising on the horizon, forming a pool of slick russet-gold light in the distant lapping waters of the ocean. Here, seen head on from Satigenaria’s OverHalo bearing, the dusty, glowing turbulence took on a maleficent ferocity which had never before been in evidence to Jed.

  The Shamrock’s scanning signal reached her once more. It reported an anomaly in the carnage–hard and spherical, cooling at a different rate to the surroundings.

  She moved forward over the rubble to duck beneath the upper half of the window frame of what remained of the ground floor of a small building. The stench of scorched flesh sent her stomach into convulsions. The warped hull of the runnership bulged up through where the ceiling had once been, its aft hull leading through the wall it had shattered on entry. Deep scrapes scarred the metal where it had run aground, dispersing its huge momentum.

  Jed withdrew an arrow and fitted it into position, its point gleaming wetly in the silver light. She circled the vessel with cautious sidesteps, until she found the airlock on the opposite side.

  The outer door stood open, the mutilations of a forced egress visible on its edge. Jed eased the tension out of the bow, and replaced the arrow in the quiver, pushing it down until she was sure of the contact of the point in the fluid the quiver held. Her hand found a stone of about the right size, and she skimmed it fast through the hatch. A dull gong announced the stone striking some interior wall.

  She stood for a full minute, feeling her heart thump in her breast and scanning the sky and dark horizon. The Shamrock’s senses couldn’t penetrate the vessel’s shielding. Men could be taking refuge within the hull, but Jed had not the nerve to risk crouching on the rubble and angling her back to peer inside, leaving her hands trapped and her back exposed, and cutting off her radio contact with the Shamrock. She would have to assume that Wolff, if indeed he had escaped aboard that vessel, was now loose on this world.

  A clearing in the rising smoke unveiled the waxing beta-moon’s opalescent face. The fires had all but exhausted their fuel, and the city lay at last silent, cast in a tranquil and deathly moonlight.

  The ranks of buildings still standing fell back as she hurried onward, until she heard the lap of the ocean and saw the thin glitter of water in the moonlight. The edge of the continent was not far, and here the tide had broken through the gap punched by a falling building. A brackish smell tinged the air. An intact rim remained before the edge of the continent, warped from the damage and flooded over. Partial structures protruded from the sea itself.

  From the city behind her, a fervid battle-cry drifted through the air. Jed whirled about, pulling an arrow from her quiver and fitting it to the bow in one swift motion.

  * * * *

  Viprion’s voice sounded hoarse as he shouted through the noise of the flames. “Is there anyone here? Help!”

  Wolff bent and touched the earth. Embers glowed among the dark rubble like a coal hearth. Charcoal coloured his fingers. He glanced back at the twisted bulk of the runnership, its surface scored by ablation burns and fire.

  Rh’Arrol arched aer neck, tilting aer face to the sky. Aer quills were dark and colourless, and Wolff knew the morran was afraid.

  Viprion staggered into a valley, still calling out. A bank of smog passed over the face of the moon, reducing the castellan to a dishevelled silhouette stumbling over an infernal plain.

  Wolff followed him, the case of conurin in his hand. Rh’Arrol trailed behind, one of its tentacles gripping his wrist around the handle of the case.

  The fires died away as they climbed a rise in the land, but the
air remained acrid.

  Things lay on the floor. Wolff at first thought they were litter scattered from the demolished buildings, but then he trod on one of them, and it squashed under his foot and he felt and heard it burst. The clouds parted again, and the moonlight revealed a pulpy mound in front of him.

  Rh’Arrol, leaning toward it, jerked back aer neck and made an ugh noise, and a sudden bolt of bile green shot over aer flanks. Wolff suddenly recognised the thing on the floor as a human foetus—misshapen from being stamped upon by someone wearing heavy boots, but still recognisable, with limbs and fingers and sunken dark eyes, and an almost cartoonish largeness to its broken cranium. Then he saw something else lying to one side, the body of the mother it had been torn from. Viscera trailed from her ruptured abdomen, and curls of hair dark with blood covered her face.

  “Viprion! Stop shouting!”

  Viprion turned around. The colour drained from his face when he realised what the thing on the ground was. The man clapped his hand over his mouth as he gave a lurch at the middle, and Wolff saw him half vomit and force it back down.

  He kicked over the dead female, swallowing forcibly. “She’s not of the Blood,” he said, as though this in some way excused her murder.

  “Your Kuiper belters?” Wolff asked. He began to discern more victims in the moonlight, a decapitated man lying in a doorway with no building behind it, someone who’d lain in a ditch and burnt into a contorted, skeletal black wire figure...and here a naked child lying face down in a pile of rubbish, with its ears hacked off and its body covered with stab wounds and burns.

  His hand covering his face, Viprion pulled up the child by its singed hair. He immediately gasped and dropped the head. Wolff caught sight of the face, hideously mutilated, upon its flayed features still recognisable a rictus of agony.