by Manda Benson
Wolff ran toward the Archer, and as he did the mob spilled over the crest perpendicular to his path and began rushing down the valley in pairs, holding laser weapons. One of the forerunners raised his gun at Jed, the man beside him stepping to the side, but before either could take aim, the Archer’s bow released with a loud crack, and her arrow whirred through the air, too fast to be seen. The man flung the weapon to the ground and screamed as purple flame guttered from his lower abdomen around the metal shaft. His hands grappled the arrow’s tail, and he fell to the ground with a strangulated gulp of air. His companion reeled as though blind.
Jed already had another arrow fitted, and the following bandits held back in newfound fear of this adversary from the deep skies, and what she could do with what had seemed a straightforward and rather archaic weapon.
“Jed!” Wolff shouted.
She turned, as did the aggressors.
Wolff pointed at the case as he splashed through the shallows, but Jed was drawing her bow again, this time pointed at him. She held her sight on him as he drew closer, and as he sprinted toward her, he knew she fully intended to shoot him dead.
Wolff heard running footsteps behind him, and a man sprang, arm reaching for the case. With lightning reflex, Jed recalculated and fired. The arrow hit the man straight between the eyes as his outstretched fingers reached toward the handle, and purple sparks geysered from his forehead. Wolff swerved aside, and Rh’Arrol let out a cry. The man fell into the water, and mauve flame tore across the surface.
Wolff slowed as he closed the distance, holding up the case like a shield, but she pointed her third arrow straight at him.
Her face twisted and her bow came aslant, the arrow taking flight and whipping down into the sea a few yards away to rupture into violet fire. Her knees gave way. When she screamed, it was the feral cry of one under true torture.
The purple fire of the arrow striking the water illuminated the face of one of the pursuers over on the opposite side of the water. Distant and brief as the moment was, Wolff recognised the face...the face of Taggart.
“Jed!” Wolff shouted, bending down and trying to draw her hands away from her ears. “Jed, can you hear me?”
He thought she could, barely. Agony was imprinted on her features. The flesh on the back of his neck tingled, and he realised some sort of transmission must be interfering with the Archer’s tightband signal to her ship, using her interface to incapacitate her.
The bandits were closing in on three sides. He smelled the dizzy bouquet of some kind of fluorinated petroleum compound on Jed, and grabbed the tail of one of the arrows protruding from her quiver. The arrow had a silver-white, irregular tip, wet with solvent. This was the same material he’d seen on the chimaera’s tail barbs—potassium.
He grasped the stems of the remaining seven or so arrows, and one by one javelined them out in a broad arc between him and the attackers. The water’s surface broke into a rim of dynamic lilac flame. “Get up!” he roared at Jed. Dropping the case with a splash that sprayed water up his back and onto Rh’Arrol, he bent to take her shoulders in one arm, the other lifting the backs of her knees. Her slight frame wasn’t heavy, and he hoisted her up, her arm looped through her bow, and began the run back in the direction both he and Jed had come from, hoping to find the Shamrock.
Behind him, some of the bandits tried to edge around the spinning, burning arrows, only to find themselves floundering in open water as the edge of the continent’s substratum gave way to the ocean where the collapsed building had stood. “Arrol, leave it!” he shouted back as the morran tried to drag the case after them.
“Bastard,” Jed managed to choke out.
Luminous things drifted in the water. Wolff made for dry land. Long, translucent dorsal fins rose over the milky light of membranous bodies, and as he leapt over the nearest and back onto the street, he saw long indigo and yellow-speckled helices and stringy fronds trailing in the wake. Some part of Rh’Arrol must have come afoul of them, for the morran let out an unearthly shriek.
Wolff looked back in time to see aer crash into the water with a lashing of frantic tentacles, pull aerself up with a squeaky coughing sound, and scramble out of the water to fall again.
“Get up! Or we leave without you!”
“Pity wounded Rh’Arrol, for ae is stung! Poisoned, Gerald Wolff!”
“Stung, drawn and quartered, if ae lets they who follow take aer! You are stung on one leg, yes? Do you not keep another three for such occasions?” Wolff paused to shrug Jed’s weight back into balance.
Rh’Arrol levered aerself up onto the three unharmed legs with a clicky groaning sound, and hobbled after him. Some of the pursuers yelled behind—the things in the water at least proved of some use.
Wolff lurched into the barren streets, making his a direct path through ruins hunched against the watery moonlight. He stumbled on the rubble, and it seemed sure he would trip and drop her. Finally he arrived back at the partly demolished building and the vessel that had borne him here which lay within it. He ducked into the shaft of its airlock, lifting Jed up into the dark corridor and setting her down on the wall. He raised himself to sit on the lip of the airlock, Rh’Arrol cowering in the entrance.
The Archer blinked. Her breathing sounded very loud and uneven in the confined metal space.
“We’re inside the runnership wreck,” said Wolff. “The signal can’t get at you here.”
Rh’Arrol whimpered, cowering in the entrance.
“I know that!” Jed snapped, her voice shrill and croaky. “You think me stupid or something?”
“We must leave this place. If they catch up they’ll kill us. Jed, you have to tell me where your ship is.”
A choking sob. “I’m not going back out there!”
Wolff reached for her in the dark, and pulled her back toward him. “We have to leave. You must see that.”
Jed struggled against him. Her foot caught him in the thigh, but it was an uncoordinated and halfhearted blow. She couldn’t communicate with her ship here either.
“It’s magnetically north-east, about half a mile from here.”
“I’ll get you there safely,” said Wolff, sliding back down through the shaft. She dug her fingernails into him, and let out a dulled cry as he lifted her back into the open, but other than that put up little resistance.
He heard the distant noise of many feet and voices. Every random shot or loud shout made him redouble his pace, but Jed’s formerly insignificant mass weighed down on his shoulders and bowed his back, and pain exploded from his injured knee up his thigh with every step. She did make an effort to cling on, the collar of his shirt clutched in her white-knuckled fingers, but she was all but a dead weight. Acid exhaustion built up in his legs and shoulders as he stumbled on, and he was spurred only by adrenaline and fear. After what seemed like miles, he saw the spiny dorsal wing of the Shamrock, silhouetted over the ruins in the moonlight. Rh’Arrol rushed beside him on aer stiltlike legs as they ran the last part of the gauntlet.
A building had fallen a few yards from the ship’s prow, and dark water lapped in the well it had left. Wolff ascended the partially standing wall on which the ship balanced and hefted his charge up onto the pectoral wing, clambering up after her with Rh’Arrol running over him like a spider. Below him, the attackers spilled out into the arena the Shamrock’s landing had demolished. He flattened himself beside Jed’s supine form as a laser shot hit the wing’s leading edge.
“Jed,” he shouted hoarsely. The Archer hardly seemed to be breathing. Rh’Arrol squealed. A crash somewhere below, and the Shamrock tipped, the wingtip raising and the prow falling. Wolff grabbed Jed as he struggled for purchase on the low-friction outer laminate of the Teng steel. They both fetched up against the hull wall, Wolff spread-eagled with his foot hooked onto the lagging edge of the wing. Rh’Arrol’s legs sprawled out, clinging to the surface. A roar of approval rose from the horde below.
“Jed, open the door.”
The ship juddered in its precarious b
alance. Jed’s face was buried in his shoulder. Wolff remembered chasing the Shamrock as it wandered in from the Outer Reaches, he and Taggart following its ion trail, cloaked with a program of his own devising, the cautious docking manoeuvres, then him breaking into the electronic lock. That skill was of no use to him now. Had he a headstart, he might have managed it, but with the enemy upon them and the ship quaking beneath them, such a delicate operation would be impossible.
“I know where there’s more conurin. Look.” Wolff felt about for her belt pouch, and found a cube. “Here, eat of this if you will.”
Jed made no indication of acknowledgement, but her fingers closed weakly over the cube.
Wolff pulled her to her feet, pressing her back against the hull wall. “Feel this? This is your ship. You want your ship, you take it. If not, we all die and they take your ship. Here.” Wolff turned her around and put her hand to the barely discernible groove marking the airlock door. Her fingers felt thin and delicate beneath his. Laserfire ricocheted from the deflection shielding somewhere above them, and Wolff felt rubble shifting beneath the ship. “Can you feel it? Open it. Open it, and it won’t hurt anymore!”
Her eyes were still closed, but her jaw ground tenaciously against the conurin.
A light on the panel beside the entrance emitted a single, brief flash. Metal slithered beneath his fingers, and they fell forward into the dark corridor. Wolff descried a quick glimpse of Rh’Arrol’s flailing tentacles as ae dived through the opening before it snapped shut again. Heavy groans came from without. The floor tilted, until all three of them slid into the fore wall of the airlock chamber, and Wolff felt the ship sliding, falling prow first.
* * * *
The clamouring throng fell back on itself as the masonry beneath the ship buckled and shattered. The great stern and tail tipped up, the ship sliding and leaning forward until almost vertical.
The prow struck the water, the ventral blade scoring a deep mark in the continent’s substratum, and the ship dived, sending out a fan of spray. The tips of the lagging blades and dorsal vane disappeared into the foaming waters and the tail slid down behind it, the water closing over the propulsion with a slap and swallowing the vessel.
Taggart looked over and into the murky black-green, and saw the dull gold light of the Shamrock receding. “Stop them, Winters!”
Winters, guns gripped in his hands, could only look on beside Taggart.
* * * *
Wolff heard the water rush over the outside of the airlock. He became aware of the dark warmth and clean air in the corridor, and the muted thrum of the Shamrock’s systems. Gravity slowly rolled back to its former position.
Jed lay on the floor beside him, one hand cast outward with the fingers splayed. Her eyes were closed, and she breathed heavily but steadily.
“It’s okay,” he said, laying his hand on her back. “We’re safe.”
Jed’s breathing quickened, and her eyebrows gave a convulsive twitch. Her eyes opened cautiously, and fixed his gaze.
“May you die alone,” she said in a low voice. “And in agony.”
Chapter 9
Running the Gauntlet
Why dost thou hound me so?
Ghost who wanders far from home,
Harbinger of the gathering shadow,
I cannot run this field alone!
Little light and no sound from above penetrated the murky, turbid waters. The roots of Satigenaria One’s buildings formed a gloomy submarine forest, the power to light them gone.
Jed stood at the front of her bridge, arms crossed while staring vehemently into the drifting motes the hull beacons picked out. She felt anger and frustration with Wolff’s succeeding in returning to—recapturing—her ship, but even more so that he’d seen her in a moment of such debilitated weakness, and that she’d suffered the indignity of him rescuing her in the crisis. He’d held her and her ship to ransom, and siphoned off her pathetic helplessness and grown from it, as a leech draws blood.
She inclined her head very slightly, but Wolff was staring right at her, and her gaze locked with his steely eyes. She could see rebellion in his demeanour—knowledge. This man knew she could be defeated, and now she’d lost the element of whatever respect and fear she had formerly held. Their eyes held for a tenuous moment, and Jed looked back to the viewport. As soon as she’d done it she cursed herself for making such an instinctive gesture of submission.
She turned back to him again, standing square. “What is that?” The morran cowered low on its spindly legs in the entrance to the main corridor. “Why have you brought an urchin onto my ship?”
Wolff turned to it. “This is Jed, the ferryman. Introduce yourself.”
“Rh’Arrol.” The morran spoke in a quavering voice.
“I want it off this ship.”
“No,” said Wolff. “I made a pact with aer.”
“I won’t constitute an irritation—” Rh’Arrol began.
“No, you won’t.” Jed glared at Wolff. “Your pacts are yours to honour, not mine.”
“We had an agreement, Wolff.” Rh’Arrol retracted slightly into the corridor.
“And as I’ve said, my intention is not to dishonour that agreement.”
Jed whirled toward the morran. “Dishonour? I speak to you of dishonour, Wolff? Know you, Rh’Arrol, that this man to whom you have so entrusted yourself is none better than a dishonourable cad? A cheating, conniving, fraudulent bastard—a villain of the most craven breed.”
Wolff allowed himself a level pause. “Ay,” said he. “Jed the Deserter.”
Jed glared at him. “I have no commitment to you. The Archers depend upon no one. You, on the other hand, seem to bank your prospects on this one ship.”
The man looked at Rh’Arrol, and back at Jed, then out the viewport. “This gets us nowhere. We depart now, we discuss later.”
“Where is my conurin, fool?”
“It’s in the cargo bay.”
“In the cargo bay?” Jed narrowed her eyes at Wolff. “You only had one case with you. Where is the rest of it?”
“On the ship. It never left the cargo bay.”
Jed realised what he meant and felt sick with humiliation. An unpleasant heat built up on her face and the back of her neck, and for a moment she fought back the urge to reach for her neutron pistol again. She had risked coming down to Satigenaria One, risked leaving the Shamrock, for something that had been under her nose all the time? He had played games with her deepest fears? She turned away in chagrin, clenching her fists hard. A bitter thought came to her–she would do better to raise the gun to her own head.
“What of our bargain?” Rh’Arrol almost shrieked.
“You just shut up and keep out the way for now, and maybe you’ll earn your keep,” Wolff snapped.
“Silence,” Jed rebuked both. She didn’t turn back from the window, but she sensed his footfall behind her.
“We are pursued?”
Jed searched with the Shamrock’s scope. “Yes. Above water. Thirty-eight of them.”
“Can they detect us?”
“Unlikely. The water is full of debris and the ship is giving out little heat in its current state.”
“Perhaps it would be better to remain here in that case.”
“Idiot!” Jed snapped. “The longer I tarry here, the longer they have to assemble a strategy to get down here and locate us!”
“Can you outrun them?”
Jed scowled. “You would presume to instruct me on tactical manoeuvres?”
“You intend to breach and run?”
“You question my judgment?”
Wolff didn’t answer.
“The exhaust mechanism of this ship is damaged,” Jed explained after an uncomfortable pause. “I blew out the ion trap escaping from the ambush on Carck-Westmathlon. Acceleration will be impaired by both that and the viscous drag of the water. Neither staying nor moving will likely prove a good option.”
“Can the ion trap be repaired?”
“T
hat it can, but the robots that maintain the exterior are designed to work in vacuum or air, not in water, and not while moving.”
“Then we must choose.”
“You will choose nothing. Your only use is for making statements of the obvious.” Jed glared at Wolff.
The morran edged forward nervously. It made a quick movement of its head, rattling the armour on its neck, and a peculiar mauve colour flickered over the quills on its flanks. “Archer,” it said in a pious, ingratiating tone of voice. “I think you must know that this man is wanted by the authorities of Carck-Westmathlon.”
“Arrol!” Wolff exclaimed.
“If you hands him over,” Rh’Arrol continued, “perhaps they permits you to leave unmolested. The man who seeks him is none other than the Castellan Viprion.”
Wolff was standing with his hands held up and his mouth open as though he was about to say something. Before he could, Jed demanded, “Is this true?”
“To an extent, it is,” Wolff said. “But that is not the whole truth—”
“Then I will surrender you to them, and your morran with you, for I have no need of urchins, let alone backstabbing quislings.”
Rh’Arrol lowered its body beneath its knees and drew back its head.
“You must listen to me!” Wolff argued. “For it was not Castellan Viprion who ordered the attack on the Shamrock, but the marauding gunship that calls itself the Bellwether. Those men down there are of the Kuiper belt, and they are ravaging this civilisation and killing indiscriminately all who stand in their way, whether they’re of the Blood or not!”
“Men of the Kuiper belt do not have the means nor the nature to overthrow men of the Blood!” Jed shouted at him.
Wolff let out a hollow laugh. “Oh, they have it in their nature, for sure, and someone has given them the means. If they see you I can’t say what they’d do. You must be an anathema to them, the highest of the high, and trapped in their midst! And Castellan Viprion orchestrated it, and he has brought down destruction on himself and on all of Satigenaria through his Blood avarice!”
Jed became fierce, drawing herself up to her full height. “I do not fear men of the Kuiper belt. They are as vermin.”
