Dark Tempest (6 page)

“Average for the circumstances.”
 

“And you really remember nothing of before? Were you drugged, or was something used to partially erase your memory?”

“No, I was not drugged, and no, I really do not remember!” Jed snapped. “Why does this obsess you so?”

“But who were your mother and your father? You can’t possibly have forgotten them.”

Jed opened her mouth to end this intrusive discussion, but a warble from the
Shamrock
’s Alcubierre drive shook the walls and made the air reverberate.

“We’re decelerating?”

“That was the
Shamrock
crossing the light barrier on the downswing.” Jed made a cursory bolometric scan of the nearby stellar systems.

Wolff looked down at Taggart’s device. “We must be nearing the destination.”

Beside her, the man reached out a hand, his shooting hand, toward the device. Jed spotted the lapse in guard, reached for her weapon and caught his forearm, pulling it from under him so he lost his balance and fell backward. Wolff made a grab for her wrist, and as she pulled the gun back to evade the snatch he pushed up from the floor, sending them pitching over with a snap of Jed’s teeth and an expletive from Wolff. He fell on her, displacing her breath while she fought to keep her shooting hand out of his reach. His fingers closed on her arm, but she aimed the gun between his eyes.

Wolff stared back at her with mute grey eyes, breathing resignedly.

Now, finally, she’d overcome him.

Could she shoot him dead? Wouldn’t he do the same to her? She thought back to the corridor and how he’d probably prevented Taggart from killing her there. Had he done it through this respect he spoke of, or merely because he wanted her to play an execrable part in some scheme of his? By his own accounts—fraud, hijack, a life spent betraying those who vested trust in him—this man must be the personification of avarice. Could she now murder him in cold blood? And if she failed to now, would she be able to go through with it in the future if she was called upon to do so?

Keeping her eyes fixed on his face and the gun pointing to his forehead, she ran her hand down the front of his tunic, feeling along the right side of his chest. Wolff’s face took on a countenance verging somewhere between surprise and puzzlement.

Her hand connected with the gun, her gun, which was of far superior manufacture than the gun he and Taggart had brought aboard, and withdrew it from the holster on his belt. She wasn’t quite sure what emotion his expression now represented, something like disappointed realisation, she supposed.

“Get off me,” she ordered him, putting the gun back where it belonged. Wolff raised his hands in surrender, before deliberately levering himself up off the floor.

Jed stood and backed away. She put Wolff’s gun in the waste evacuation chute on the left of the bridge and, with the press of a button, sent it flying out into the void. She turned back to regard the man with patronising victory.

“This is my ship, Gerald Wolff. You ride not as guest nor as prisoner, but as trespasser, as stowaway and by my grace.”

“And very graceful you are, too.” Wolff bowed his head in some ridiculous travesty of gratitude. “I am but a captive butterfly, a specimen for your amusement.”

He took a step toward the window and looked out into the sky.

She had won, she thought as she glared at his back. She had overcome this stalemate and emerged triumphant. She controlled her own ship once more, and he could have no effect on her actions or decisions.

Why, then, did she feel as though he had beguiled her and gained the upper hand?

Why had she not slain him then and there?

Chapter 4

A Matter of Reflex

Steel and Flame in your raw bite

Hunter of the infinite

To aim into an unseen night

And shoot perchance to strike

Jed listened to the
Shamrock
’s readings, and touched one of scores of indistinguishable keys on the sloping console. The course program had brought the ship back down from light speed. At least, then, it was not to be used as a missile to attack a place of habitation. Jed knew that such a tactic was useless—any ship coming so close as the Oort cloud to an inhabited system at a superluminal velocity would be detected by tachyon scans and shot down as a precaution. She had worried, however, that Taggart may not have been aware of this. Taggart’s elaborate framing of Wolff told Jed that the dead man must not have been able to employ a computer expert to accompany him voluntarily, either through secrecy or peril. His refusal to divulge the purpose of the mission to Wolff made Jed continue to fear that the
Shamrock
flew a suicide course.

“We’re subluminal?” Wolff asked, stepping forward to stand beside her and staring at the pattern of illuminated polygons.

Jed moved away from him. “My ship decelerates. You hear it fall below light speed.”

“Can you disable Taggart’s program now?”

Jed looked down at the device wired in to the
Shamrock’s
mainframe, but she knew the answer already from the ship’s feedback.

“No.” Jed turned away from him, her reply a terse snap, and folded her hands behind her back. She didn’t need to watch him. He no longer had a weapon and the
Shamrock’s
senses were sufficient to inform her should he make any move against her or the bridge equipment. But the ship still steered toward something, and what it would not reveal. Jed willed the propulsion hardware with all the mental force she could spare, but it was as though she was paralysed in the right hand.

She heard him shuffling his feet. “T’will be all right.”

Jed turned on him angrily. “Don’t you profess to understand the situation, Gerald Wolff, and do not profess to know me. You alone are responsible for this.”

“Whatever Taggart was planning he needed a ship for. No harm will come to you, or the
Shamrock
.”

“Be silent,” Jed murmured, turning back toward the window and concentrating on the reading that had interested her. A small, sparse gas cloud lay about five light-minutes to the starboard of their course ahead, and tiny, dense forms had gravitated toward this cosmic oasis.

“What’s the matter?” Wolff asked as she turned toward the corridor.

“Chimaera.” Yes, to hunt would draw her mind from these troubles. She could afford to ignore this fool now. “Keep back!” Jed rebuked him as he tried to follow her.

“You wish me to remain on the bridge?”

Jed looked untrustingly at Wolff, and back at the bridge consoles. “No. You go where I can see you.” She backed off into the corridor, her hand on the gun holstered at her waist.

The corridors were dim and silent as ever, but the sound of Wolff’s breathing and footfall seemed vulgar and intrusive as he made his way along the unlit passage behind Jed.

The armoury, a great dark cavern with vaulted roof making up the
Shamrock
’s largest room, covered the rear quarter of the upmost deck, opening to the raw void by means of a forcefield-protected loophole on both sides. Jed took out her usual bow, holding it under her arm while she gathered six hunting arrows into a quiver. Shouldering the arrows, she held out the bow at arm’s length, feeling the tension in the string and the familiar contours of its rigid alloy in her hand, worn to comfort through frequent grip.

She felt Wolff’s eyes on her, through her own instincts and the
Shamrock
’s, wondering perhaps at the strange harmony between man and weapon, and grudgingly ignored him, flexing her shoulders against the bow’s tension. She breathed in, out again, and stretched the string back to its full extent, hand-to-shoulder, elbow perpendicular to her spine.

“What is it made from?”

Jed glared at him and eased the string back. “Teng steel, contractile polymer alloy and hypertensile string.”

“You’re implying that this contraption can hurl projectiles at faster-than-light velocities?”

“No. Arrows have their own propulsion. Fool.” Jed withdrew one of the ready-prepared arrows from the quiver. “The tip is made from diamond and contains a capillary tube. It injects a cocktail of chemicals that cause paralysis in organometallic life. The rear half of the shaft is fitted with a fuel rod of a polymer alloy. When the arrow breaks the containment field blocking the loophole, a chain reaction is initiated, by which an electron and a neutron are annihilated to produce energy and drive the arrow. The protons are retained within the interstices of the polymer lattice, causing a net buildup of positive charge. When the arrow is spent, one merely has to generate a negative electrical field to retrieve it.”

“I see. So if chimaera and nothing but chimaera travel faster than light, how does a mere arrow, governed by the cardinal laws of physics, intercept them?”

Jed held up the arrow to the pale light the arsenal’s high ceiling offered, and pointed to the foremost part of the shaft. A dull, gold-coloured shape, half an inch in width, had been moulded into the head. It had a bulbous shape to it, and unevennesses in its form showed where excrescences had been trimmed off.

Wolff stared at the head of the arrow. “You’ve killed it?” The man raised his eyebrows and removed his IR-UV bifocals.

“It lives, so long as it has power.”

“What about when it’s not in use?”

“Not an unnatural state for it. Chimaera can drift inert for centuries if sunlight or adequate fuel sources are scarce.” Jed touched the wall panel and part of the starboard bulwark slid back. Wolff stared at the expanse of starry dark. He held up his hand to it. “There’s no window there.”

“No, it’s a static containment field.”

Wolff withdrew his hand quickly, and Jed knew he had felt the same tingling, prickly resistance she’d felt herself the first time she’d tried to put her hand through the loophole on the
Agrimony
all those years ago.

“Solid objects with enough inertia can penetrate it.”

Jed could see the nervousness in Wolff’s eyes. “Could a man fall through it?”

“A stupid great oaf who hurls himself about the armoury? Certainly.”

Wolff stood back and watched as Jed turned her attention once more to her bow. “I hear it is a matter of reflex.”

Jed raised her head from nocking her arrow. “A matter of the variety of reflex with which precious few are equipped.”

“May I watch?” Wolff asked. There was an impious humbleness to his demeanour, which Jed didn’t much like. Passiveness and submission were not to be trusted, too often being foil for ulterior motives.

“Keep back, and be silent.”

The man backed away, stepping over to the forward bulkhead in silence.

Jed looked out into the dark. In a few minutes, the
Shamrock
would come within range of the grazing chimaera.

She took a cube of conurin from her belt pouch and chewed on it, watching the movements of the tiny motes of energy on the
Shamrock
’s tachyon scanners. She felt her awareness rising, the Universe without and the man with his distracting breathing and smelling paling to insignificance. It was just Jed and the chimaera now. The ship, the arrow, and everything else was peripheral.

She held up her bow arm and rested the shaft of the arrow on the lever above her thumb, drawing her hand back against the elastic force in the string, hand under chin, so the head of the tiny chimaera rested just above her thumb and the knuckle of her index finger.

She focused on the diamond tip of the arrow, pointed out through the gap in the metal of the bulwark wall. With the
Shamrock
’s conurin-heightened senses, she watched the five potential targets executing their complex paths, and she singled out her quarry.

No computer could hit the evasive chimaera. The computer saw and heard over this distance, and that was her medium. Technology could accelerate an arrow up past light speed in a fraction of a second, but Jed had what it could never emulate—instinct, reflexes and a sense for the unpredictable conditioned from a million years of natural selection.

Jed breathed deep and focused on Equilibrium, the potential energy in the bow opposed by the tensed muscle in her left arm, her concentration balanced, her mind empty. She followed the strange and distant creature as it weaved its unknowable, irrational path as Mathicur of the
Agrimony
had long ago taught her.

Not to miss now. Not to do herself injustice here before this fool.

She nearly released the arrow, but doubt impinged upon her thoughts and made her stop. The
Shamrock
’s tachyon scanning confirmed the chimaera’s path was not the one she’d anticipated. Letting her intemperate feelings about this man contaminate her concentration had thrown her Equilibrium. Jed was ashamed. Soon they would be out of range. Emotions were not for Archers, and disgust and shame were as much emotion as were hatred and superiority. She regained her Equilibrium, closing her eyes and breathing, and so expunged Wolff once more. Jed counted heartbeats, slowing her own pulse in the fierceness of her conurin-assisted focus to release her shot in the still silence between beats.

Five light-minutes of void, or twenty inches of air, or an immeasurable hypothetical distance within the privacy of her mind. Stillness. Equilibrium. Chimaera.
Shamrock
.