Dark Tempest Read online

  “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.

  She shot, not at the chimaera, nor at some conjecture entertained, but for the place where she knew the chimaera would be in the fraction of a second it took for the arrow to hit the field and be accelerated. As she felt the release, the air the arrow disturbed as it took off, she knew no doubt.

  The contraction of the limb polymer alloy flung the arrow forward at twice the speed of sound. It pierced the containment field with an electrostatic shockwave, like a pebble breaking the surface of a pellucid pool, and a flash of light sent it on its course as the chain annihilation was initiated. Jed, complacent in her certainty, had not the time to lower the bow before she knew her prize was won. The arrow hit the chimaera in the thorax, extinguishing the light in its tail.

  With a single prompt to the Shamrock, she activated the electrostatic field that would bring her prey home. Far out in the dusty cloud, the other chimaera drew back from the casualty then scattered into the night, flicking their tails down and breaking away.

  Jed lowered the bow, her fingers upon the string where the arrow had been, with the galaxy and her ship around her, and the dimly lit armoury, and Gerald Wolff with his pathetic curiosity, like a child trying to construe a magician’s trick. She checked the scanners for the returning arrow. The chimaera was mature and healthy, a good catch. Conurin magnified sensation as well as concentration, and the fire deep in her stomach and her increased heart rate gave Jed a detached sensation that she was no longer limited by the confines of her own body, as though she was out there and soaring with the chimaera.

  “Did you hit it?” Wolff asked.

  Jed glared at him. Four words seemed all that was needed to bring the glory crashing back down.

  “Yes. I ‘hit it.’” Jed reduced the negative field as the arrow approached to decelerate it. “You will see it now, if you look.”

  Wolff watched her for a moment, and he stepped cautiously to the gap and watched the returning arrow as it sped back to the Shamrock. He was worried she would push him through the loophole—she could see it.

  The arrow stopped close to the containment field, trapping the chimaera against the ship. The spear had punctured the chimaera’s metallic thorax, and its limbs were retracted close to its body. The organometallic creature was about twelve feet long from the bulb at the tip of the tail, which provided its propulsion to its foremost point. A few other thruster-like limbs stuck out around the base of the slender, eight-foot tail shaft and on either side of the rostrum. Three elaborate gold-coloured photovoltaic wings with scarlet panels framed the thorax–one on either side above the legs, and one dorsal wing. The rounded head had narrow indentations on either side where the optical sensors were, and two slender sensory antennae pointed forward. The rostrum and chewing mandibles were drawn into the underside of the head.

  Jed pulled a lever beside the loophole to flip the chimaera into a containment basket. When the basket closed, she shut the loophole and started the mechanical cycle to bring it inside the ship. The container slid back into a tight-fitting airlock, the outer door closed, and an inner door beside the portal opened. Jed took up a pole from the weapon rack to pull the basket out of the airlock, because metal that had been left in the void was cold enough to burn.

  Behind the vitreous alloy plates, the lustrous form began to move.

  “Is that a closed vacuum?” Wolff asked.

  “Yes. Our nitrogen-based atmosphere damages them. You see those bright barbs on the tail? They’re made of
solid potassium metal. Moisture in the atmosphere would react with it if it was allowed to come into contact.”

  “Potassium?” Wolff frowned.

  “Only mature adults of one of the sexes has them. It’s been suggested that the metal might act as an electron source in some kind of metabolic redox process. Much of this species’ behaviour and lifecycle is a mystery.”

  Jed looked at Wolff as he stared at the chimaera. Something in his demeanour made her recall that distant time when she had been ordered to stand and observe, when she had first seen one of these mysteries from the depths of the night shot down and pulled aboard the Agrimony, and how it had made her feel. How she had wondered at the thousands of suns this strange filigree beast of metal had seen, as it drifted aloof in the open void, and how it could now never return, how it would always be a slave to the self-obsessed race who had taken its freedom in their quest to reach ever higher, ever farther. Man, forever striving for infinity’s asymptote.

  Why was she was telling this man these things? Perhaps she saw an old vestige of herself in his aimless curiosity. Not that Jed’s pearls of Archer wisdom would be much use to him. He was a halfBlood male, and he couldn’t learn how to control an Archer’s ship, or to shoot chimaera. Maybe men would laugh at him, call him an idiot, when he walked among them, speaking of the Archers who were such an enigma to them. Maybe he would embroider his tale. Perhaps he would be the one who held the weapon in local legend, or perhaps he might even say he seduced an Archer, and that her name was Jed.

  It felt strange to think of him returning to the habitats of men, a world now so distant to Jed the memories were senseless fragments of an evanescent dream.

  As they returned to the bridge, Jed felt the ship slowing further, and looked to the sun they were now aimed straight at.

  Wolff looked also. “You know this system?”

  “It is the sun of Satigenaria. I have traded here before.”

  “Surely we cannot be heading for the sun itself?” Wolff’s voice held a note of uncertainty, and perhaps even fear.

  “So your faith in Taggart’s deliverance wavers?”

  “He would not program a course directly for a star. Taggart was no fool.”

  “Then perhaps as you said, he foresaw his own death through some intellectual portent, and rather than avert it, wrote in a failsafe to secure his own vengeance.”

  Jed twitched. A slow-moving and inconspicuous object had just come into detection range. Wolff seemed to notice. “Where are we?”

  “We have passed the Kuiper belt, and our vector remains aimed directly at the Satigenarian sun.”

  Wolff shifted his weight ever so slightly, onto one foot. “You bluff, Archer.”

  “I lie not.” Jed raised her chin and blinked, not looking at him.

  “You insinuate your ship dives toward the star?”

  “I insinuate nothing. If you have not the artifice to make alternative deductions, Gerald Wolff, then you are blinded by your own myopia.”

  “Some planetary conjunction bisects our course?”

  “This system contains only two planets, the innermost fifty radians starboard of our course, and the other nearly at opposition. Where we journey is a place closer than the innermost planet, but if one were to accurately aim a projectile at the sun anywhere within the ecliptic, one would be sure to hit it.”

  “Damn you,” Wolff muttered. “A planet innermost from the innermost planet, which permanently occupies the whole span of its orbit—an artificial construction to house the population, a circumfercirc.”

  She’d frustrated him, but Jed was irritated that he’d managed to solve her riddle. She said sourly, “Three, to be precise.”

  The Shamrock drew closer to the object, and Jed could now see what it was. Soon it came into view, the sharp reflective arc of its parabolic sail making a strange silver crescent in the front viewport.

  Wolff’s mouth fell open. “What in Pilgrennon’s name is that?”

  “A stellar galleon,” replied Jed nonchalantly. “And whilst you are aboard this ship, I will not have you use the name of the Blood paragon in disrespect.” As the Shamrock passed, the galleon’s sail revealed itself to be many large mirrors, supported by rigging of silvery hypertensile wire to form one huge parabolic surface with which to catch the stellar wind. A giant mast, three miles in height, speared through the golden hull of the comparatively tiny ship to support the sail, streams of coruscating metallic flags trailing from the galleon’s lagging blades as it wandered by on the outward journey to the Oort cloud.

  Jed watched through the window, but as the galleon passed she felt Wolff’s attentions turning on her back. The Shamrock’s interior acuities confirmed it–the man was watching her.

  “Why do you stare so?” she said, without looking round.

  She heard Wolff shifting his posture. From the Shamrock, she envisioned him to be leaning his weight back on his heels and grinning theatrically. “If I may not touch, would you deny me the privilege of looking?”

  Jed turned around, twisting her mouth and sighing through her nose. “You stink, Gerald Wolff. Away and cleanse yourself.”

  Wolff flashed his irritating and, Jed thought, lecherous smile, shrugged and sat.

  The Satigenaria Circumfercirc became visible some minutes later, dark bars casting an acute silhouette before the star’s orangey glare. Behind the sun, the narrow inner edges of the rings faintly reflected the star’s brilliance.

  “There are three rings, you say?” Wolff watched the sun through the photomitigators impregnating the Shamrock’s vitreous alloy.

  “Three concentric rings, each within a few leagues of the other. The innermost is for purposes of photovoltaic power generation. The outermost circumfercirc is a superconducting rail, used to guide large ion-driven ships around the habitable ring.”

  Jed felt the forward thrust offline then the braking thrust gradually coming on. The Shamrock passed the thin spoke of the outer ring, a vessel riding along it beneath their course, like a swollen maggot on a silver stem. The enormous machine was built around the ring, threaded onto the wire-rail. A soft blue plasma glowed behind its bulk, and tiny motes of light chased after it like hunting damselflies—runnerships with normal thrust propulsion, each twelve times the length of the Shamrock, accelerating to ferry cargo and passengers onto and off of the tram on its non-stop voyage around and around the sun. All below the massive vessel and its track, and ahead of the dwarfed Shamrock, lay the immense girth of the central ring, an ineffable dark tract that swallowed up first the sun then the whole sky.

  Wolff did not speak. He stood still beside Jed and gazed at the panorama, the rasping of breath through his nostrils obnoxiously loud in the silence.

  Tiny pinpoints of light showed up on the black stratum, their numbers multiplying and forming strange artificial constellations as they approached. It was some time before the full extent of the dark cityscape and its monolithic structures became apparent. Each spire protruded several miles out into the void, and tesselated polyhedrons of light broke up their dark surfaces. Thin, glittering strands of hypertensile alloy worked a fine mesh over the conurbation, like a dew-laden spider’s web.

  Jed had to admit this view was an impressive one, if not as a spectacle of nature then as a testimony to man’s skill at manipulating it. Beside her, Wolff exhaled. Jed felt the easing braking thrust cut out. The Shamrock drifted, unchecked by its propulsion. It could be that Taggart’s program was complete.

  “What now?” the man asked.

  The Shamrock was already picking up an identification request from the circumfercirc. Jed opened the channel and spoke aloud to the bridge transmitter. “This is the star Archer vessel Shamrock of hortica entering at vector stated. I request permission to dock.”

  It took a moment for the request to be processed and the affirmation to return.

  “You intend to dock?” Wolff asked.

  “If I am to disconnect this interference device, it is better done docked and secu
re than with the ship drifting in open space.”

  “Don’t they grant you docking permit grounded on their assumption that you intend to trade?”

  “My motives are none of their concern. If they turn me away they lose commerce in the future, so I think it is best for everyone involved if they oblige me and mind their own business.” With a tentative command, Jed fired the auxiliary thrusters. They worked, as well as they ever had. The Shamrock slid forward without question, and Jed aligned it with the docking terminus, and eased the ship forward into the reach of one of its dendrites. A venting of carbon dioxide ballast thrust, and the airlock flanges connected.

  “This, I believe,” said Jed, “is where you get off.”

  “Now wait a moment.” Wolff stood.

  Jed fixed him with a cold, uncompromising gaze. Wolff seemed to choose his words carefully. “I want to find out what’s going on, and why Taggart wanted to come to this circumfercirc in the first place.”

  “What you do without this ship is not my concern. Go and do as you wish.”

  “I rather hoped you would wait.”

  “And why should I do that?”

  “Fair enough,” said Wolff, and sat back down.

  “What?”

  “I don’t wish to disembark here. I shall wait until this ship alights somewhere more promising.”

  “You have no right to be on this ship!” Jed snarled.

  “Ay. Same as tapeworms have no right to be in people’s digestive tracts.” Again, that irritating smile.

  “I cannot disconnect this interference device with you here!” Jed thrust her hand toward Taggart’s device.

  A stupid grin broke out on Wolff’s face. “I’ll turn the other way.”