by Manda Benson
Wolff held the object in his right hand, coiling his arm so it was behind his neck. He took a leaping stride forward and hurled it through the static field and into the vacuum beyond. Jed raised her bow and closed her eyes. The Shamrock showed her the device spinning away into the void. She drew back the string and slowed her heart, and released between beats. A brief light flared, then darkness ruled.
Chapter 20
Into the Eye of the Storm
Who dares look upon,
The black baleful eye of unrest,
Would know incarnate destruction,
That is Dark Tempest!
Gravity pulled the Shamrock ever down in an unstable orbit that could only end in one place. Jed lay with her head against Wolff’s shoulder on the bridge floor. Even the Heralds would not come this close to the storm, lest they became trapped by gravity and pulled under the event horizon, or seared to atoms in the blazar jet. Out of the range of fear, she at last had been able to sleep, although it had been short and uncomfortable. She could not bring herself to leave Wolff’s side, to be alone before that malevolent eye.
Wolff said he was hungry, so they both went down to the cargo level to fetch the food. For the first time for as long as Jed could remember, she found she could muster some appetite to eat the levigated esculents and fibre loaf. The loaf tasted like mould, the soup like watery leaves. Unappealing as the flavours were, they made Jed realise it had been some time since she had last chewed conurin. The photosensitive alloy that covered the bridge windows had become almost opaque to screen out the radiation that streamed from the accretion disc, and the stars and did not show, just the quasar’s glaring pillar of light and the luminous torus below it. It was peculiar that they should sit here eating at the center of the galaxy while all this went on around them, and the taste of the food when there had been no taste for so long made it all the more surreal.
Wolff motioned to the window. “The chimaera young, could we not do something like that?”
“The synchrotron radiation would ablate the hull.”
“Well, how come it doesn’t do that to them?”
Jed used the Shamrock’s senses to study the stream of minute objects travelling in the blazar jet. “They are wrapped up inside some kind of parachute—a photosail that is reflective to all radiation.”
“A photosail, like that stellar galleon we saw in Satigenaria?”
Jed raised her eyebrows. “Exactly like that. I have a photosail to fit the escape pod of this ship, but you threw the escape pod away as I seem to remember.”
“We had to get rid of that myth Archer somehow. So the stellar galleon, how does that work?”
“It’s designed to accelerate a ship by radiation pressure from the stellar wind. They are used exclusively to travel outward within the inner parts of settled star systems. They wouldn’t work anywhere else because the stellar wind isn’t intense enough that far from a star.”
“But that...” Wolff gave a nod to the scene outside.
“That is an event that has not been witnessed anywhere in this galaxy in all the time men have existed.”
“That...light. How far up does it go?”
“It’s called an active nucleus. They’ve been seen in distant galaxies, they’re usually referred to as blazars or quasars. The light is so intense it can be detected by men’s eyes from the surface of planets when the source is over a billion light years distant. The chimaera’s next generation is riding the blazar jet at just below the speed of light. They can probably maintain that speed until they reach the lower habitable regions of the halo, two thousand, five hundred light years away.”
“And the photosail, you can’t attach that to the Shamrock?”
Jed shook her head. “The sail is too small.”
“What about if we put it on the shuttle, the one I came on with Taggart? It’s still docked on the other airlock, isn’t it?”
Jed stared at Wolff. “Yes,” she said carefully, at length. “It would be the right size for that. I don’t see how that would be any use, though, because travelling with the photosail would take two thousand, five hundred years before you could get within range of any civilisation to even make a distress call.”
“Ah, I see.” Wolff leant back on the bridge seating and made that wan, slightly sardonic smile of his, despite his reddened eyes. “But, on the other hand, since the shuttle has no temporal modulator, time dilation would mean two thousand, five hundred years would pass in hardly any time at all.”
Jed pushed the food away and got to her feet. She looked out the bridge window with a sudden sensation of urgency. “Then there’s no time to lose. You need to get to that shuttle before it’s too late. I’ll get the sail.”
“Now just hold on a moment.” Wolff’s voice was gentle, but carried an undertone of surprise. He put his hands on Jed’s shoulders, the grey of his eyes noticeable against the red blood vessels as he peered at her face. “You’re coming with me.”
“Leave the ship? Leave the Shamrock?” Jed gasped, and a sudden humourless laugh escaped her. “I cannot cleave from that which is a part of me!”
“What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can!”
“You saw what happened to the other Archers. Dead.” Jed looked away from Wolff. “Worse than dead.”
“They didn’t separate willingly.”
“It makes no difference! The ship is the mind as the mind is the ship!”
“There was a Jed before there was a Shamrock, was there not? And there can be again.”
“They will hunt me! They will still find me, even if my ship is gone. The computers see all. I have dishonoured the Code!”
“When we come into civilisation again, it will be two thousand, five hundred years at least into the future. The Blood castes will have evolved further by then. You will still be a man of the Blood, but you will not be the best of the best, and the computers won’t notice you as such.”
“It won’t work!”
“Then I shall not go if you will not go with me.”
Jed turned away from him and folded her arms. Her eyes had begun to water, and there was a tight sensation in her throat. “Don’t be a fool, Wolff. If you do not go, the Shamrock will fall below the event horizon and we will both be crushed to oblivion.”
Wolff set his arms akimbo and stared fiercely at Jed. “Ditto!” he shouted.
Jed felt herself drawn by the Shamrock’s senses from the scene of the bridge again. Almost against her will, she turned from Wolff and looked again into the heart of the galaxy, and vertigo and fear locked her in senseless paralysis. She had felt a strange, almost prophetic horror the first time she had seen this place, and now it seemed fitting, it seemed fate, that her end must be here at the site of her own devastating epiphany. So she must choose, choose to hold fast to the Code as it drew her in ever-tightening circles, finally to fall into deepest shadow, or choose to renounce the Code, choose bright absolution, and with it lose all control and everything that she was.
* * * *
On the bridge of the Bellwether, Taggart watched the diagram the computer showed of the Archer ship, diving toward the singularity.
“Follow it! Stop it!”
Winters made faces. “We can’t follow that—not where it’s going.”
“It’s not too late!”
“If we go in any closer—we won’t be able to get out.”
“It matters not! So long as we finish what we started!”
Winters raised all four hands. “Taggart,” he said, “this has gone too far now. There are enough of us—still that we can build another Reeshevern—out of their reach. We are the last! The last! That means they didn’t win. So long as we’re alive, they didn’t win. If we go after that ship and destroy ourselves, it’ll mean they’ve won—even if we do destroy them. It’s time to concede, Taggart.”
Taggart stared at Winters then he made a lunge toward the persons standing next to him—the guards who had gone to the Shamrock with them. His hand jer
ked the neutron pistol from his nearest hip, he raised his arm and a dull thud reverberated over the bridge. One of Winters collapsed on his knees and fell sideways, hard against the ground. His other half cried out and fell to his knees beside himself, putting his hand to his neck. The Winters on the floor breathed a few more gasps, his fingers twining in the shirt of his other, before his hand fell to the ground and his eyes stopped moving, becoming glazed and vacant. A bloody oval had spread over the cloth covering his chest.
People began closing in around Taggart, and he climbed onto the bridge table to escape them. Taggart had a dream the previous night, and in it he had been Sundered. He was never whole in his dreams, not any more. He did not want to have a final dream, if it was like this. He did not want to be Sundered for the rest of eternity. How was it, the method the Geminal scientists had been executed? Taggart put the nozzle of the neutron gun to his forehead. A man couldn’t dream in death without the parts of his brain where dreaming took place. Taggart closed his eyes, and another shot rang out on the bridge.
* * * *
Winters stood, his face contorted with grief. Taggart’s arms and legs had gone slack the instant he shot himself, and he’d fallen, limbs flailing, on his face on the floor in front of the table. Dark blood pooled under his head. In the dull light, it looked like a hole was opening up in the floor, as though the ship was being swallowed by something akin to that nightmarish gap in the sky where the Archer’s ship had gone.
The peoples of the Bellwether looked to him. A men Sundered had brought them here, and now a men Sundered must guide them out.
“Let us leave this place,” he said. “The mission has failed. Some sights were never intended for the eyes of men. Let us go as Geminals, and remake ourselves.”
* * * *
Jed climbed into the shuttle’s tiny cockpit, stumbling against the crate of levigated esculents they’d packed in.
“You’re not bringing conurin?” Wolff asked.
“I won’t need it. Let’s just do this before I change my mind.”
Wolff slammed the airlock door and tightened the hatch on the shuttle. “How do we open the sail?”
“We have to get away from...” Jed’s voice trailed off. “It’s no good opening it this close, it’ll foul with the pectoral wing.”
Wolff sat down beside her. “Okay. Ready.”
Jed breathed deeply. She closed her eyes and fired the Shamrock’s propulsion, steering it up over the singularity and into the path of the blazar. The ship’s warnings of the approaching radiation brought a sharp pain to her. They were like the plaintive cries of a child whose face was being forced into a fire. With the ship between her and the source, she released the airlock. At once the sails opened–one small cone-shaped one beneath, to protect the hull, and the main one above, a large reflective parabola. The sail was opening, the shuttle was accelerating, and her ship was being left behind.
The hull was melting. She couldn’t bear to see the Shamrock burn up in the synchrotron radiation. With a command, she fired the propulsion and sent it pitching down toward the point of no return, and it quickly went out of range.
A scream of blind, unintelligible fear rose in Jed’s throat as her consciousness was cleft from the mind she had depended on throughout her whole adult life—her ship, which she had loved, had fought for, would have died with rather than abandon. As the Shamrock’s senses tore clean from her own, every star in the galaxy’s broad dusty plane went out, and the fearsome gravity of the vortex below was nullified by an unknown oblivion. A dark hand stifled all her bolometric senses, and for a moment she was entombed in the dark, hemmed in by walls of terror.
She felt Wolff take hold of her by the shoulders, and a great shuddering gasp escaped her lungs. As if her senses were steadily regressing to an earlier form, her eyes began to adjust to the wavelengths available to them. She made out the stars in the window beyond the capsule, the galaxy unmoved by her insignificant struggles. The all-seeing eye aft of them, swathed in clouds of violet turbulence, cast its great blazar jet upon the sails, and the slight light that made it through the vitreous alloy filled the cabin with an eldritch pallor. Jed was lost and alone, vulnerable as she rode in this tin capsule on an updraught from the valley of death. She could no longer feel the guidance of the Shamrock’s octahedral compass, and knew not where up or north might lie.
She felt the pounding of blood in her throat, and heard Wolff’s and her own breathing, and felt and smelled his presence there beside her. She found she could still recall memory, and she remembered what they had been through together, and she remembered why she had decided to stay with him.
Wolff’s fingers tensed on the rim of the viewport as he looked back into the stony gaze of the seething maelstrom. He turned his head toward her, sensing her trouble, and clasped her against him, and she saw in him and herself an empathy, a humanity, that could outlast the Shamrock and guide her though she had no lodestar. No longer would she navigate the stars in lonely disdain, a solitary queen beneath their cold scrutiny.
Jed leant her head against his chest and knew, at last, that the nightmare was over.
Manda Benson
Manda Benson is an ex-research scientist who lives with a dog, an axolotl, a pink tarantula, and her two savage guard rabbits in a 100-year-old house that seems to exist in a constant cycle of repairs in the Midlands of England. Her other fiction includes a number of short stories plus two Galactic Legacy novels, Dark Tempest and In the Shadow of Lazarus; a YA SF novel, Pilgrennon’s Beacon; and two children’s books.
Manda‘s Website:
http://tangentrine.com/mandabenson
Reader eMail:
[email protected]
Also by Manda Benson
Moonsteed
Dark Tempest
Lyrical Press books are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2010 Manda Benson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Lyrical Press and the L logo are trademarks of Kensington Publishing Corp.
First Electronic Edition: February 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-61650-124-2
