by Manda Benson
Wolff got to his feet in the gap between the two airlocks. He hit the door with the flat of his hand. “Samphrey!”
A whirr of machinery startled him. He looked up to see the locking flange that held the ships docked together rotating. “Jed!” he shouted, and he turned to the other door and beat on it with his fist. “Jed, open the door!”
A noise deafened him and the airlock fell away from under his feet. The Shamrock’s bronze flank spun beneath him, and dead cold bit into his flesh. The air was being torn from his lungs, scorching his throat and nose, and it crystallised into an expanding cloud of tiny grains before his eyes. His skin burnt with an icy fire and the dread silence pressed on his eardrums. On the periphery of his failing vision he saw the Larkspur, miniscule in the distance. The Shamrock’s aft section came distorted and hideous to his eyes, bathed in vile radiation. Jed, he tried to say in his last breath, but no sound came from his lips.
Chapter 19
Nemesis
The moons the planets’ children are,
And the stars are those planets’ concern,
All about the death-black fulcrum’s gyre,
In endless circles they all turn.
“Jed?”
Jed put her hand to the blistered skin on Wolff’s forearm. He winced, fresh blood welling up in his eyes.
His voice was hoarse. “Jed, I can’t see. Please tell me we’re on the Shamrock and not the Bellwether.”
“I pulled you back through the airlock. You were only exposed to the vacuum for a few seconds, but you lost consciousness. The Bellwether has not come in range of my senses since the Herald attacked us. We are close, now. Not far from the galactic center.” Jed paused and looked out through the bridge window. “Something strange here is happening. Something I have not ere seen.”
Wolff turned his head. His eyelids flickered and tears of blood ran down his face. “I can’t see.”
Jed folded her hands around the tube of synthskin in her lap and regarded it for a moment. “I can lend you my sight,” she said, “and that of my ship.”
A smile broke onto Wolff’s face as Jed relayed the information to him. “All this I can receive, through a bail slave chip?” The smile dropped into a grimace. “Don’t look at me, I look disgusting.”
“The burns on your skin, those will heal. I don’t know if your eyesight will ever be fully normal without better medical assistance.”
“I tried to stop Viprion. I tried to bring Samphrey back.”
“I know.” Jed squeezed the tube, pressing a transparent blob of the synthskin onto her index finger. She smoothed it onto the reddened epidermis of his nose.
Wolff winced. “What shit’s this?”
“It’s to seal the wound and prevent it from getting infected.”
“What is it I’m looking at?” Wolff asked as Jed attended to his face with the synthskin. “The chimaera?”
“Yes.”
“There must be...billions of them?”
“More than billions.”
The chimaeras’ golden bodies drifted all around the Shamrock. Not one of them was less than half the ship’s length, and the numbers of the ones with the potassium barbs on their tails was roughly equal to the ones without. Many bloated, dull-red suns hung in the sky, and the chimaera flowed like a river toward the nearest. The individual forms were indiscernible over the distance, but there were so many of them they formed a pale arc around it as they traversed its gravity well.
“They are not interested in the ship,” Jed said. “Chimaera that big can chew through the material of the tail column, and they usually attack if they get the opportunity.”
Some distance ahead of the ship, a dark shape flopped across the living river and the pattern broke, the chimaera exploding away from the predator then springing back to their prior positions. The predator reared its dark head, and sunlight reflected from the undersides of its wings as it pulled up from the ecliptic.
“Heralds,” Wolff said.
“They’re hunting the chimaera. To them, the ship looks like one. I can keep it safe among them so long as I watch where the heralds are.”
“Why aren’t you hunting them?”
Jed stopped, her hand on Wolff’s neck. “’T would be pointless. The ship won’t get out of here with two chimaera broken, and there is nowhere we can go to repair it.”
Wolff’s hand landed on her wrist, the light squeeze of his blistered fingers hot and clammy. “Why are you giving me medicine, if that is so?”
“Because the Bellwether may still be out there somewhere, and I still do not know its intentions, and if it should attack again, the small use you are alive is better to me than the no use you are dead.”
Wolff let out a choking laugh. Jed could see the ice burns in his nostrils, caused by the expansion of his breath after the depressurisation. “Nothing you do is ever irrational, is it?” he rasped.
For some time, neither of them said anything. Jed had finished covering Wolff’s face and neck with the synthskin salve. His scalp did not appear to be too badly burned. Probably his thick, light-coloured hair had protected him.
He lay back on the bridge seating, closing his eyes as she started applying the salve to his arms. “That device. How did it cause the circuitry of the ship’s computer to corrode?”
“I know not,” said Jed. “What was it that Viprion said?”
“It’s in the air they breathe.”
“Corrosion of that sort occurs normally with age, usually in an unfavourable atmosphere.”
“Something catalysed it,” Wolff murmured. “Do you have any medicine for my throat?”
“No. A signal conveyed by gravity couldn’t have catalysed corrosion, if that’s what you meant.”
“Perhaps the signal was to something already there, that was activated and caused corrosion.”
“The air is full of bacteria,” Jed pondered. “As are men and morrans. Then there are the artificial bacteria, machines. In the bodies of men and in the systems of ships.”
Wolff opened his eyes for a moment. “In the ship?”
“Robots, they are in essence. You have seen the robots on the ship? They carry out repairs and sanitation. These robots are just another layer of the ship’s maintenance technology, but so small they can’t be seen.”
“Are there many kinds of these robotic bacteria?”
“Of course. They have been a part of man for time immemorial. That’s all the Moiety is, truly. Mechanical bacteria that live in men for their mutual benefit.”
“Viprion said the Geminals evolved in isolation on a planet, and that men came to this world and found them and destroyed their way of life, all because they could grow something that they could make conurin out of.”
Jed nodded. “A synthetic intermediate.”
“This happened centuries ago I’m guessing. Could it be that the Geminals made a rogue version of one of these mechanical bacteria strains, and seeded it into the plants so that it contaminated all the conurin?”
“That is conceivable,” Jed concurred. “If the strain of bacteria was capable of reproduction, it could be feasible that is has by now spread over the entirety of civilisation. Conurin use is ubiquitous among the Blood castes, and from Viprion’s description it would sound as though this planet was put into use as a mass production farm.”
“So much that it was ravaged by cultivation and rendered permanently uninhabitable, was what I understood.”
“But why did they make it so it was triggered by a signal carried by gravity? Why not tachyons?”
“I suppose because gravitational radiation is instantaneous and can be used as an area attack. Tachyons can’t be broadcast as such, they just go instantaneously to what they are aimed at. To target an area with tachyons, one has to program one to go in every spatial location within that area. It would use massive amounts of energy.”
Wolff’s face tensed, and he raised a hand slathered with synthskin, curling wet fingers into a fist. “It still doesn’
t make sense. Damn it! Why is Taggart chasing us toward the galactic center?”
Jed had lost her grip on Wolff’s other hand, and she got to her feet facing the bridge window.
“That is why.”
Behind her, Wolff sat to attention on the seating. His eyes blinked rapidly, trying to discern what lay outside the ship, and Jed relayed her own vision to him once more.
The river of chimaera snaked away into the far distance, and beyond them lay a great disc made up of dark dust and incandescent gases. The blue of oxygen and the pink of hydrogen mingled in flocculent clumps and orbit-spun threads, tendrils of clotted matter dragged into ever-decreasing spirals.
Wolff shifted on the seat. “What is it?”
“It’s an accretion disc. What do you see at the center?”
“Nothing.” Wolff’s frown creased the drying synthskin on his face. “Just a hole in the disc.”
“That’s correct, nothing. That is what lies at the center of the galaxy. It is Dark Tempest, the immense singularity that holds everything in orbit around it.”
“A black hole.”
“That’s why Taggart seeks to find this place. The gravity of that singularity affects every star, every planet, every moon, circumfercirc, ship, asteroid, the list does not end. He intends to destroy civilisation in its entirety with this tiny device.”
“Such must be the wrongs that were committed against his people.”
“I did once come here, before,” said Jed. “There were no chimaera here, only large Heralds. It was not a good place to hunt. The accretion disc was not so turgid then, if I remember.”
“Perhaps it has a cycle, as do some stars.”
“You should rest now.”
“Will you not rest?”
Jed looked back at Wolff. “I cannot. If I don’t keep vigil, there is nothing to stop one of the Heralds coming at us.”
* * * *
Jed watched the chimaera bound toward the bright accretion disc as Wolff slept fitfully. She could not sleep, and she could not leave, and progress was slow in the damaged ship. She leant on the window, and a deep despair she felt pulling on her as much as she did the singularity. In coming where none dared follow, she had immured herself in her own trap. The thought of a distress call came to her again. Mathicur would kill her if she found Jed here with Gerald Wolff. She pressed her forehead against the vitreous alloy and closed her eyes. She had been to this place once before. Look, Mathicur had ordered her, and it had been too horrible, too immense, too engulfing and alarming. Jed saw something nightmarish and hideous about that point in time and space where everything became nothing. Something about seeing it in the middle of that sickly torus and knowing it was there had eroded away the final vestigial illusions of safety Jed had still held before she had come here. It was as though her memories of her life before, of her father holding her in his arms with that reassurance of absolute security and safety, were all swallowed by this Dark Tempest. It was the end of childhood, and Jed was not prepared and she did not welcome it.
No, she would not bring Mathicur here. She would never regain what Dark Tempest had taken from her, and now she knew and accepted deep inside her that what had taken away her soul had brought her back, and it would claim her mind and body. She opened her eyes, her mind empty, and looked her nemesis in the eye, and she was at Equilibrium. A shockwave spread across the accretion disc, the gas clouds ripping into reams of tattered fibres.
“Something is happening!”
Wolff was on his feet and at her side, then a pillar of light shot up into space, perpendicular to the disc’s plane. Arcs of blue gas leapt from the center of the torus, bending into parabolic shapes under some weird magnetic field. “The black hole is emitting energy?” Wolff gasped.
Jed examined the view with the Shamrock’s tachyon scanners. Massive radiation of every frequency and wavelength streamed from the accretion disc. “It’s the accretion disc that’s emitting stuff, not the singularity.”
Wolff stared at the spectacle, his mouth open, absorbing whatever information it was his eyes did see and the images Jed was supplying him with. “The matter must be spinning so fast down there that it’s like an enormous synchrotron.”
But something had drawn Jed’s attention away from the singularity. The movement of the chimaera surrounding the Shamrock had changed. Like dancers answering the call of music, the chimaera separated into pairs, male and female, and took up their places. One pair drifted not far from the Shamrock’s bridge windows, and Jed watched as first the one with the potassium barbs began to turn about its forward center point, slewing its long tail around and around, spinning faster and faster. Its partner, too, suspended above it, began to rotate in the counter direction, and when she cast about with her eyes and the ship’s senses, every chimaera pair in range behaved likewise.
The male chimaera’s tail glowed, and with a flare of light, its propulsion exploded. The tail began to burn out, disintegrating from the tip in toward the body, the potassium barbs consumed to fuel a bright purple beam of light that connected the spinning chimaera to its dance partner.
“They’re mating.” Jed breathed in awe. “They must be. No one has ever seen this before.”
“The light? Is that how they transmit their genetic material?”
“It must be so! The ones with the potassium tail barbs must be males! They use a redox reaction to generate light from it, and use that as a carrier wave to transmit their genetic material to the females.”
The male chimaera’s tail had burnt away now, and the beam of light broke off. The pair began to drift apart, as did all the others. The males, their source of locomotion destroyed in the act of procreation, tumbled helpless toward the accretion disc. The females, still spinning, held their position a little longer before following them.
“I don’t understand.” Jed leant against the window, trying to see the chimaera as they dwindled away. “They’re falling toward the singularity. Their spawn or eggs or whatever they have will fall under the event horizon and be wasted.”
“Look,” said Wolff behind her, his voice filled with wonder. “With the tachyon senses, into that light coming up from the center.”
He was right. Riding in the blazar jet were billions upon billions of tiny motes—the fry of the chimaera—being carried off into the halo at near the speed of light by the intense radiation.
The Archer and the halfBlood both gazed upon the blazar, the chimaera, and the storm at the center of the galaxy, until the ship’s senses alerted Jed to another object.
“The Bellwether,” she said.
Wolff’s shoulders collapsed. “Curse Taggart!” He cast about the bridge. “Where is that device? Why do we not use it for him? We are doomed anyway, and why spend the last moments of our life running from him?”
Jed turned to Wolff, and his fierce grey eyes met her. “Use it?”
“There is nothing by the hand of man in this galaxy that is good.”
“There is nothing in it that is evil, either. Can you say that every man in this galaxy has wronged you and deserves to die for it?”
“All men. They argue over insignificant matters, the Blood, the Moiety.” Wolff gestured to the scene outside the bridge windows. “There are bigger things in this galaxy than men, who think they are above nature and that it is theirs to plunder, even you, Archer. I see your pride, but I see you, and I see that you do not like what you are. I see children brutalised in the name of the Code. I see men of the Blood, masquerading, conniving, scheming, and I see men not of the Blood, who crawl, and fight, and hate.”
“I cannot leave this ship. I am a part of it. I did not choose the path of the Archer, and it was not my choice to make, but it was the only choice. It is what I was born to be.”
“But it is wrong.” Wolff clenched his fists and gazed down upon the surface of the bridge floor.
“We are as we are, it is the only way. The moment our science became so powerful we could rid ourselves of predators and disease, r
ise above natural selection, we sentenced ourselves to this fate. The lower castes only exist as vessels of genetic material that should have been selected out.” Jed turned from him and leant against the bridge window, looking out on the chimaera falling into the accretion disc. “If civilisation was destroyed today, there would be survivors on planets and in places where machines are not depended upon for survival. They would only re-evolve their technology and their caste system, and what’s more in the meantime they would evolve to be different from each other, as the Geminals did, and when they did encounter each other, they would wage war.”
“I have no faith in men,” Wolff said. “They do not deserve to be the custodians of this galaxy.”
“You cannot stop men from breeding. However egalitarian anyone’s intentions may be, the end result will always be the same, so long as men do not obey Darwin’s laws. There is nothing you, or I, or any man can do to make it different.”
Wolff laid one hand on Jed’s shoulder, the other on the elbow of her other arm, and leant against the ship, close to her back. “What are we to do now then?”
“We must destroy this thing, so that if the Bellwether captures us, they shall not have it. Then...” Jed watched the chimaera a little longer. “I would choose a swift death in freedom, over death at Taggart’s hands or a lingering starvation.”
In the armoury, Jed gave the command to the ship to open the loophole. She took up her bow and a combat arrow, before glancing once at Wolff.
The man’s eyes had stopped bleeding, although they were still heavily bloodshot and inflamed about the lids. The radiation burns on his face and the whitish synthskin covering his wounds had not taken from that look marking him as a man of the Blood. It was still the same face Jed had come to know, had come to trust, had come to care for, as much as she did for the Shamrock itself.
