Dark Tempest. Manda Benson

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