Dark Tempest. Manda Benson

      

       DARK TEMPEST

      By MANDA BENSON

      LYRICAL PRESS

      An imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.

      KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/

       Chapter 1

       Hijack

       Be we not of Steel and Flame,

       Of feeble flesh and bone,

       With the stars’ pure light as ours to tame,

       Surveying our dominion alone.

      

       A deeper mind of infinite sight,

       Crafts ice candles in the hungry night,

       And we of fractious fear and flight,

       Are entertainments for that dust-hewn might.

      

       Our ephemeral strife, against such ancient jest,

       Defines our saga: but a mayfly’s quest.

      The onset of confusion was so sudden and intense Jed couldn’t remember what she’d been doing beforehand, nor form any speculation on what might have caused it.

      She opened her eyes and got to her feet in one silent movement. The dull glow of console lights picked out the flight pattern below the span of the bridge window. Outside, the glittering starfields of the Perseus Arm spread before her like dewdrops in the Shamrock’s path. Only the dull murmur of its computer hardware and subluminal engine drive penetrated the ship’s interior.

      Something was wrong. She couldn’t remember the course tensors. The atlas data came to her sluggish and vague when she tried to find them, and the Shamrock felt numb, like a limb that had been lain on for too long.

      Jed pressed her fingers to the metal of the interface crown on her forehead, a thin band of silver circling from temple to temple an inch above her eyebrows. No, her connection was not at fault. The three tines remained in place, as they had been ever since being shot through her skull to bury their dendrites in her frontal lobe.

      She went to the starboard side of the bridge’s window arc, and looked back upon the Shamrock’s flank, the bronze colour of its Teng steel hull dim in the starlight. The pectoral wing jutted toward the nebulous glow of the galactic center, and way back along the ship’s length, a faint plasma bloomed, a product of subluminal thrust. She saw it, she felt it, but none of the feedback she was receiving confirmed it.

      The Shamrock’s bridge began to take on hostile dimension. This remote scene could have been anything, and Jed felt no connection to it. This ship could be the Agrimony, and she could be standing on it alone, with no control over anything.

      Steel and Flame, why could she not work it out? Jed tried to steady her breathing, fighting down a swell of blind panic as all her instincts began to revolt. Her training did not allow her to lose her grip on her own vessel.

      She plied the diagnostic computer for a status report on the engine and got no response, not even an error. It was as though the sensors and processing routines involved in the action had ceased to exist, as though a portion of Jed’s mind had been cauterised. The interior systems brought up the same result. At last she managed to trigger a response from the ventilation computer, and only then because its status had changed. The recycling vents in the starboard corridor were overcompensating. Carbon dioxide must be leaking from somewhere.

      Jed scoured the Shamrock’s readings available to her for signs of a fault, but the data she could access were insufficient to form a conclusion.

      She turned to face the distant, alien rear of the bridge. The main corridor beyond lay in Stygian shadow, a sparse line of dim red lights marking each wall. It could just be a burnt-out circuit, she told herself, some part of the interface control array. Or perhaps the ship’s carbon dioxide ballast was leaking, but as far as Jed knew, there was no access point to the ballast system in that location, and already her imagination ran riot.

      She reached simultaneously to her belt for her neutron pistol and to the pouch at her side for a half-inch cube of conurin. The bitter, chalky taste made her grimace as she chewed, but already the drug reinforced her perception, heightening her own and the Shamrock’s senses.

      She advanced to the corridor, one hand guiding her progress along the familiar wall surface, the other tensed and gripping the weapon.

      As she passed the equipment store on the approach to the main airlock, Jed smelled a difference in the air. The grate of air through lungs made her start, distant but prominent in the silence of her concentration.

      She crossed the corridor, passing the entrance to the equipment store and flattening herself to the wall behind the bulbous escape pod.

      An intruder stood there—a male, tall and thinly graven in the weak starlight of the corridor viewport. Clothed in dark material, he had his back to her, hair tied in a silver line down his nape.

      An icy terror ran through Jed’s blood, turning her limbs flaccid and heavy, and it took all her resolve to keep herself from falling or letting out a noise. She held herself in against the wall while she tried to regain herself. Steel and Flame, she reminded herself, Steel and Flame! This was not Mathicur’s way. The thought of Mathicur’s disgust at seeing her respond to this situation so was some reassurance to Jed.

      She forced calm, measured breaths. The man had not seen her. If she could shoot him before he saw her she could finish this.

      Jed raised her weapon to the still figure in the aft corridor, her concentration unbroken and intense. Her hand shook and the muzzle described crazy patterns in the air.

      The scrape of a foot and a rush of air from behind—Jed tried to turn too late. A thick, meaty arm clamped around her neck and she fell backward onto the assailant. She plunged the gun back, but a hand twisted the weapon from her grip and it clattered to the ground. She breathed sharp gulps and strained her eyes to their limits trying to look behind her. The grip around her neck panicked her to the point of wanting to scream herself hoarse and lash out at everything within reach.

      The tall man standing by the viewport had turned, and approached.

      The man who had seized Jed—he must have been hidden in the equipment store—rearranged his grip roughly to pinion her arms behind her back. Clumsy, thick fingers dug into the insides of her elbows, and a powerful smell of alcohol masked a stench of sweat and urine.

      “More there any of you are?” He shook her.

      Jed cursed herself for her stupidity, which her training should have overcome had she applied it properly. She, an Archer of the ancient clan hortica, had allowed herself to be overpowered by a drunkard who couldn’t even speak properly.

      Sliding his IR-UV bifocals from his nose, the tall man scrutinised Jed’s features in the starlight. The grey of his hair and eyes, the whiteness of his skin, and the black of his clothing made a monochrome image in the pallid light. Something distantly aristocratic lay in that countenance of high eyebrows and thin-lipped mouth—a man of the Blood.

      “She’s an Archer. One Archer, one ship. Is that right?” When Jed did not answer, the man smiled slightly and said, “I see you speak nearly as well as Taggart here.”

      “Shut you up, Wolff!” snarled Jed’s captor. “How know you that an Archer she?”

      The