Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  It was therefore necessary that Gerald Wolff be disposed of in the meantime.

  Jed probed the Shamrock’s internal systems and located him by the airlock. A visual of the corridor showed him stripped to the waist, facing in the other direction. His hair fell in a damp-darkened clump over one shoulder. Steam rose from a dish on the floor and Jed detected its infra-red emission through the Shamrock.

  He sang, a song either in a foreign language or so strong a dialect as to be incomprehensible. His voice was rich and proud, and filled with force—too loud for such a confined space. Such a noise felt irreverent in the corridor of an Archer’s ship.

  Wolff knelt and dipped his hands into the bowl, and brought them out to splash water on his face. Much of it flew over his head and splattered the corridor. He mopped his face with a ripped cloth then wet the cloth and wiped it around the general area of his chest and armpits, before dipping it back in the water and dropping it on the floor.

  He snapped a blade onto a general purpose tool and rinsed it in the water before tilting his head and staring with a countenance of intense concentration into an uneven-edged piece of glass propped up between the wall and floor. Jed heard the blade grate against bristly hair as he moved it over his cheek, humming the same tune with his mouth closed.

  Jed had tried to reason with herself, but she knew that the power to kill Wolff was now beyond her strength, and doubted seriously if it had ever within her grasp from the start. Her best option was to abandon him, as she had already attempted on Satigenaria. Toward the galactic center, there would be no settlements, no loyalties for sale. There would be no interference from third parties this time.

  * * * *

  “I see you, Arrol.” Wolff watched the morran’s reflection skulking in the corner of his mirror.

  “Why does you do that?”

  “What, shave? Because hair grows on my face, and I look stupid with it and it gets in my way.”

  Orange colours wavered on the morran’s quills. “Do all men have to do that? Even men of the Blood?”

  “One would assume so. Only the males, of course.”

  Rh’Arrol made a rasping noise and aer quills turned mauve. Wolff looked over his shoulder. “Why is it you are lurking there, and what is it you find so amusing?”

  “You,” the morran said, rolling its eyes and flushing its quills, “and the female man.”

  “What do you know of men, anyway?” Wolff scoffed.

  Rh’Arrol twisted aer head backward on its sinuous neck. “Enough to see it is inappropriate.”

  Wolff finished shaving. He cleaned his razor, dismantled it, carefully stowing it away inside the roll of anti-static cloth he kept his tools in.

  “So what is it you want from life, Rh’Arrol? Surely there can be no satisfaction in copulating when there is no challenge in the quest for a mate?”

  “There are finer things to be had from life! We morrans does not glorify fornication as you men do.”

  “Finer things!” Wolff scoffed. “What finer things can there be? Surely to make more of ourselves is all nature intended of us.”

  Rh’Arrol snorted, and bands of violet and white rushed over aer cilia. Wolff took this to be an expression of mirth. “Me hears rarely of men fornicating solely in order to make more men.”

  Wolff held out his arms, palms up. “What else is there to do? Loiter around the place, breaking computers and stealing things?”

  “Do something that will outlast you! When you is dead, what will there be left for posterity to know you by?”

  Wolff laughed. “A bad smell and a mess that blocks up the waste recyce. That, and a lifetime’s worth of piss and shit. That Gerald Wolff lived? Who should care?”

  “Me should care!” Rh’Arrol produced a device from aer tunic. It looked like a very simple computer with a screen and nothing else, but Wolff could detect no signal from it. “Indeed, I will write of you! You shall be the first man in the dynasty of morrans on Carck-Westmathlon!”

  “I am honoured.” Wolff flourished a hand. “Particularly as Carck-Westmathlon is no more. What is to become of its lineage of morrans now?”

  “It will continue! Wherever this fine ship bears me! Me will tell the story of how a valiant—”

  “Foolish knave!” Wolff interrupted.

  “Saved the life of a conniving, craven morran!”

  “Posterity will remember us well, Arrol! A man who cannot read, being written of by a morran with a dubious grasp of the grammar of men!”

  “Will you tell me how you came to be aboard this ship, then?”

  To humour Rh’Arrol Wolff leant back against the bulwark and recounted the story he’d told to Jed. He glossed over the details somewhat on how he’d boarded the ship, because he knew Jed would be listening and would take umbrage if she thought he was portraying her as weak in front of a morran.

  Rh’Arrol wrote it all down, and stowed the computer away back inside its tunic. “It is done, then.”

  Wolff straightened and stretched. “Indeed, and now, if you’ll excuse me, Arrol, I’ll go and speak with the Archer, and see if I can find out where this ship is headed.”

  The morran scuttled away into the aft corridor. Wolff went the opposite way. Jed stood on the bridge, staring out into space.

  “Hey,” said Wolff.

  “I know why you are here,” said Jed, without looking at him. “You wish to know the Shamrock’s course. That morran of yours, it goes into the maintenance channels of the ship where I cannot see it. It vexes me.”

  “Morrans will be morrans,” said Wolff. “They cannot change their nature.”

  “Morrans have no place on the ships of Archers.”

  “Then,” Wolff suggested, “we should set Arrol down somewhere where there are other morrans. Perhaps it is too much to ask for morrans to be treated as men, but they should at least be permitted to be with their own kind.”

  Jed turned her head to look sharply at Wolff. “Indeed, and where, then, should we set down you?”

  Wolff tried to defuse the conversation by switching it back to the original topic. “Will you tell me where you are going?”

  Jed turned away and looked back out the window. She paused for what seemed like a long time before replying. “Where the Shamrock treads, others dare not follow. The blight that is the settlements of men does not infect the core.”

  “What? The galactic center? Why is it that none but the Archers will venture there?”

  For a moment, Wolff wondered if Jed had heard the question, but then she answered. “It is the only place where large chimaera can be found in any appreciable number.”

  “So large chimaera are dangerous?”

  Jed’s reply was late in coming, and it seemed to be slowed, as though time was passing more slowly on her side of the bridge. “There are things in this galaxy far less comprehensible than chimaera. Things you cannot even imagine. Fear of them protects us.”

  Something was wrong. Wolff remembered a time when Rogan had boarded a damaged ship with a faulty temporal limiter, and his transmission had come back apparently in slow motion. Could the ship be experiencing the effects of a weapon?

  “Jed, I think there’s something wrong with the ship!” Wolff tried to access the Shamrock’s navigational systems, but they were hanging and he could not make sense of anything.

  Jed looked at him. She blinked slowly, as one in a trance. Her hand reached up to touch the metal of her interface crown, and she frowned. “I’m pursued.”

  “Pursued? By whom?” When Jed did not answer, Wolff stepped forward and took hold of her shoulders. “Jed? Jed!”

  She shook her head and tried to put her hands over her temples, but didn’t seem to be able to do it. “Mathicur won’t help me now! She can’t see what’s happened here!”

  “What?” Wolff could feel an uneasy yet familiar sensation in his guts, and he knew this feeling as inertia dampers countering braking thrust.

  Jed suddenly looked up, her eyes wide, lucid and staring s
traight through Wolff. A sharp gasp escaped her then her knees gave way. Wolff tried to hold onto her, but she flinched away from his touch as though it burnt her. She reached out to the floor as she descended, as if unsure of its solidity. Her head bowed forward and her eyes closed.

  “Jed, stop it! Keep control! Don’t go into mindlock!” But Jed made no further response to him. He backed away from her and ran into the port corridor. He started at the view through the window. Flanking the Shamrock was an identical ship, its thorny darkness illuminated thinly by starlight and by the faint glow of friction. “Arrol!” he shouted. “Arrol!”

  Jed had said something about Mathicur, and Wolff remembered her saying this was the name of her mentor. He tried to make out the insignia on the hull of the ship. He hadn’t noticed the one on the Shamrock, but he knew hortica’s mark from the pin Jed wore on her tunic—an arrow formed into the shape of a flower. This looked like an arrow formed from an abstract design. So it was not Mathicur, but an Archer from a rival clan.

  He queried the Shamrock once more, and again drew a blank. A sudden cold terror took hold of him—it was as though the very ship itself feared, and he was not immune.

  “Arrol!”

  The morran irrupted into the corridor, its muzzle smeared with levigated esculents. It took one look at the ship and gave voice to an ear-rending shriek.

  “Arrol!” Wolff grabbed at the morran as it ran back and forth across the corridor’s aperture, and managed to get hold of it by the neck. “Stop it! This aids no one! We have to help Jed! Now Arrol, I want you to think! You’ve been in the maintenance ducts. Do you know anything about the ship we could use to our advantage? Any weapons, for example, or any manual controls we could use in a hostile docking manoeuvre?” There wouldn’t be time to get to the armoury and break into it for weapons. Wolff thought, and something he had seen from the outside of the ship occured to him. Like most large vessels with sessile thrusters, the Shamrock was equipped with a carbon dioxide ballast system to adjust its angular momentum in fine manoeuvres. If he could control the venting gas, he could push the ship away. It might at least buy Jed some time, and him, too.

  “Arrol, have you seen a black pipe running parallel to the wall anywhere?”

  “Yes!” The morran ran to a maintenance panel on the wall. Wolff lifted it off and saw beneath it two pipes, one red and one black. He looked at the pipes, and thought hard, back to the time in the Satigenaria system he’d seen the Shamrock in action. Studying the joints in one of the pipes, he saw that a simple mechanical valve controlled the pressure to the ballast thrusters, and a desperate idea came to him.

  He wrestled with the manual wheel but found it too stiff to turn. Wolff braced himself against the opposite wall and kicked out at the pipe. A jet of pressurised carbon dioxide escaped from it with a sharp hiss.

  “What are you doing?” Rh’Arrol shouted, and ran back up the corridor.

  Wolff pulled his foot back, and struck the valve again. The wheel broke open, and the pressurised white gas geysered from the valve with such force that Wolff feared none of it was getting through to the thruster. When he looked through the small window in the corridor wall, the stars appeared to be drifting downward. Wolff grinned. The ship was doing eskimo rolls. “Now to the armoury, Arrol, if we value our lives!”

  A loud alarm sounded from the nearest computer panel, and, farther down the corridor, Rh’Arrol looked round as a safety door slammed shut between ae and Wolff. Wolff spun about, intending to flee into the aft corridor, but found a second door had blocked his exit, and he’d been hemmed into a small portion of the corridor maybe ten feet in length. As he looked back at the pipe venting carbon dioxide into this confined space, he became aware that he was already consciously labouring in his breathing. He went to the pipe and grappled with the wheel. It gave way, at last, but spun to no effect. Black spots swam before his eyes. Wolff shook his head, and breathed in quick, shallow draughts. His muscles ached and a burning taste filled his mouth. He crouched against the floor, hoping the air might be better there. Dark shapes swarmed across the floor, one of them running over his hand. A buzzing took over his ears, and his sight grew hazed and grey. He clung to consciousness with the mortal fear that sleep offered no guarantee of ever waking again

  Wolff did not remember passing out, but he came around to the whine of the Shamrock’s ventilation system. His throat burnt, and pain raced a course through his whole being. With arms stiff and aching, he forced himself to his feet and staggered to the door. “Open, damn you!”

  The door slid back, and the man stumbled into a corridor almost completely unlit. He tripped on something and slid on a stickiness coating the floor as he made his way into the fore section of the ship. The gas had addled his mind and he could not think. He could see nothing in the dark, and realised his IR-UV bifocals must have fallen off when he’d lost consciousness. There was not time to return for them. Wolff had reached the window, and outside the shadow of a spiny wing blocked out the stars. The airlock door stood open. “Shit! Arrol! Arrol!” Wolff spoke as loud as he dared. “Curse you, morran!”

  He found a scaffolding strut in the storage cupboard, and stumbled onward to the bridge.

  Looking through the doorway, he could at first only perceive the still glow of the stars outside and a few lit patches on the ship’s console. As his eyes adapted, he discerned the shape of the seating and the two figures before it. One knelt, head tilted back, and the other leant in, toward the throat of the first.

  Wolff sprang forward without a sound and swung for the intruder’s head with his weapon. The older Archer pulled back with just a fraction of a second to spare, and rolled across the floor. She got to her feet instantly, using her momentum to push herself upright. Wolff held out the scaffolding strut. “Keep back.”

  A quick movement, and the female had the other end of the pole in her grip. Wolff fought to hang on to it, but she had Jed’s speed and overbalanced him. Wolff fell over Jed. His hand found her arm, and he pulled her back and out the way as the older Archer advanced on them both. “Jed, wake up!” he shouted. A low guttural noise rose from her throat. “Jed, Come on! I can’t win this on my own!”

  “Stand aside,” the older Archer ordered Wolff. “The Code of the Archers is beyond the comprehension of a common man such as yourself.”

  “Oh, I comprehend all right. You and your putrid, festering Blood and the disease you call the Moiety!”

  She scowled and, even in the scant light available, lines etched by age and conurin showed on her face. “What can you possibly understand? Unthinking filth! Stand down or die now!”

  Wolff hurled himself toward her as she came at him. He was heavier, and sheer momentum carried him though the impact, but her knees hit him in the diaphragm as he knocked her down. As she fell back, she got hold of his neck and kicked out, flinging his body over at a 180-degree angle. His back hit the floor with such force that for several seconds he fought the demon on top of him unaided by his senses of sight and hearing. His head was held in a vicious grip, forced back to expose the vulnerable area of his throat. His flailing hands fastened around his attacker’s neck and, winded though he was, he gasped out, “Men of the Blood are nonviolent? Men of the Blood are rational? You’re no better than beasts!”

  He released her neck, and as she plunged for his throat his hands found the interface crown on her forehead. The metal buckled and warped under the pressure of his fingers. She pulled back, and issued a hideous scream. Heat trickled down Wolff’s neck. Immediately she gripped his wrists, fingernails digging into tendons, but Wolff pulled harder, crabbing his hands to lever off the band. One by one the bolts securing it gave, and the crown pulled free with a grate of metal against bone. She collapsed, the strength in her body dissipating to nothing, and Wolff threw her off him.

  Light returned to the Shamrock’s bridge. Wolff felt his neck. He was bleeding, but not badly. At once, he faced Jed.

  Her eyes opened, turned impassively to the ceiling. Then s
he frowned, blinked, and sat up. She saw the old Archer lying on the floor behind Wolff, and her mouth fell open. “What have you done!”

  Wolff got to his feet, indignation overcoming his pain and exhaustion. “Besides defending you? Would you have me do nothing and allow us both to be killed?”

  “It is not your place to interfere with the order! The Code will not permit it!”

  “Well, it is done now. I cannot undo it, and I would not, even if it were possible. Time is short enough. What is to be done now?”

  Jed kept back from Wolff, and in her he thought he could detect a distrustful respect that had not been there before. She looked again at the body on the floor. “Had this been a just and fair contest, the ship of the defeated would have become the possession of the victor. As it would seem that I am now the victor by default, this is the course of action that must be taken.”

  “Take the other ship? But this one is already damaged, and we’re being pursued!”

  “To abandon it dishonours both clans!”

  “All right, then I’ll accept we must do this your way. So if it’s to be done, let it be done quickly. Tell me how I may be of help.”

  “We must dispose of...” Jed’s voice trailed off, but she glanced at the unmoving Archer. “You do it?”

  “Is she dead?”

  Jed kept her distance, her revulsion quite apparent. Wolff realised he’d broached a taboo. “No. You disconnected her by force, and the shock of it made her lose consciousness. If she is fortunate, her mind will have been destroyed and she will not wake.”