Dark Tempest. Manda Benson

be brought through the airlock and clamped in position, and then the synchrotron cannon would carve them up into smaller pieces to go on the conveyer belt.

      “There was this crash. The next thing I knew, everyone was running for the door, shoving into each other and shouting about sealing off the hull breach door. I was fourteen and I would’ve been flattened if I’d tried to go that way, so instead I ran back toward the rending room, to see if I could fix whatever had happened.

      “Immediately I saw what was wrong.” Wolff made a gesture above his head. “The synchrotron cannon wasn’t fixed, like the one on the outside of this ship. It was mounted on a forked piece of scaffolding by a computer-controlled hinge on each side, so it could be rotated downward to cut through the Teng steel. One of these hinges had broken and the barrel had swung sideways and was hanging off the remaining hinge at an angle that was slowly bending the metal scaffold of the fork. The feedback relay that would have cut the beam had come loose when the hinge broke, and the thing was burning a hole in the floor.

      “I didn’t want to suffocate, so I started climbing up the side of the machinery toward the synchrotron. I was terrified that I was going to get electrocuted, or burn myself and fall into the beam, but I managed to get the maintenance cover off the side of it, and I pulled out one of the circuit boards. This did the trick. The synchrotron immediately lost power and I was standing on this bloody great thing looking down on this blackened crater in the middle of the floor.”

      “Then what happened?”

      “I tried to climb back down but I lost my footing and fell. I hit my head on the scaffolding and passed out. The foreman found me there with the board still in my hand and shouted, ‘Pilgrennon’s arse!’ and dragged me up to the station manager, who said I deserved some sort of recognition for saving the day. He wouldn’t set me free, but he said, since I seemed to have something of an understanding of machinery, he would allow me to join a salvage team. This was a privilege, and if I abused it, it could be easily taken away.”

      Jed looked up from picking flecks of lint from her tunic. “And I suppose you abused it, then?”

      “I had learnt a valuable lesson since I’d become a bail slave, one that the ship’s captain had been unable to make sink in. I wanted to get myself out, and when I was offered responsibility, I respected that. So no, I didn’t abuse it.

      “So I ended up living and working with an older man, Rogan. It turned out he was in there for murder. He’d been castrated and bailed for life on the mitigating circumstances of having computer qualifications and the man he’d murdered having provoked him.”

      “Why is being qualified in computing a mitigating circumstance?”

      Wolff shrugged. “It’s saleable. A bail slave’s cheaper than hiring someone and paying them a wage. He seemed to warm to me after a while. I think he learnt a few things about computers from me as well.

      “Anyway, that was how I spent the final two years, working on the ships that were brought in. Often they were damaged and we had to dash through the corridors and check everything was safe before the paid labourers who started dismantling everything could come aboard. Sometimes the computers had gone haywire and thought they were under attack and being boarded, and we had to deactivate them safely.

      “It never occurred to you to steal one of the ships?”

      “’Course it did. Me an’ Rogan used to talk about it all the time. First thing, all the ships that came in were shot to pieces and had come to be broken up for good reasons. And when we’d boiled down the argument, Rogan always said it wasn’t worth it. I would be out, eventually, a free man still with my youth. It wasn’t even worth it for a lifer like him. Rogan was a great arguer—I don’t mean in a squabbling sense—I mean we debated. He had the stroppy temperament of a menopausal female and he used to stink out the cell when he took a shit, but he was a good man.”

      “He sounds delightful,” said Jed sarcastically.

      “I digress. The most startling thing I saw there, indeed, the most startling thing I’ve ever seen, was an Archer’s ship.”

      Jed scowled. “Archers’ ships do not get sent to filthy wreckers’ yards.”

      “This was one that had been found floating dead in the void by chance. The discoverer had towed it here and sold it to the salvage station. Hauled up, we saw its name was the Larkspur, but nobody could tell what was wrong with it. It seemed to have been abandoned. All of the systems were shut down. When me and Rogan stepped on board, the place was unlit and freezing cold. The air was deoxygenated and unbreathable. We had to go in with oxygen tanks.”

      Jed interrupted in alarm. “You dare commit this act of sacrilege on an Archer’s ship?”

      “I was ordered to! And the Archer turned out to be dead, so how could she mind?”

      Jed rose, drawing herself to her full height. Wolff’s words sent hot acid churning in her stomach. “You have defiled the tomb of one of my ancestors and my clan!”

      “I’m just telling you the story! I can’t change what happened! How was I to know your laws?”

      Breathing hard, Jed sat again with an enforced calmness to her motion. How dare he desecrate the Code of the star Archers? But logic told her she needed to know what had happened here.

      “May I continue?”

      Jed, her hands clenched in fists on her lap, said tersely, “Yes.”

      “The manager was annoyed when we reported no chimaera haul—he’d paid over the odds to the ship’s finder and gambled on there being some. So the ship was broken up. The manager sold everything.” Wolff paused, his face betraying an uncertain apprehension. He chose his words carefully. “The frozen body went to a science museum. The ship’s computer had to be gutted, for it was so intrinsically wired to the Archer’s mind it had died with her, and the ship husk with its drive components intact were sold on.”

      “You disgust me! You disturbed the resting place of a venerable and worthy Archer and stole the components of her ship and sold her body to a freak show!”

      Wolff held up his hands in a conciliatory way. “I was acting under orders. I would not have done such things of my own will.”

      Jed flung her shoulders against the back of the seat. “What is the name and location of this salvage station? As soon as I resume control of this ship I will go there and raze it and kill everyone aboard!”

      “You know I will not tell you that,” said Wolff. “Permit me to continue with my story instead.”

      After a pause in which Jed gave no indication of assent, Wolff went on. “I was sixteen when my sentence was complete. An adult by the standards of many. Rogan wished me luck and told me to make something of my life. He said I was worth more than this place, and that if he ever saw me again he’d wring my neck.

      “So off I went, with the new skills I’d learnt. I travelled around a bit, fixing machines for food and small pay. This was how I found myself, a fortnight ago, on the orbital complex Hesperus, a few hundred acres of floorspace occupied mostly by pubs, casinos, hotels and shops.

      “That was where I met Taggart. He found me hacking the bank ATM. He got me drunk and I bragged about my exploits as a bail slave. I boasted of the escapade with the synchrotron cannon, and how I’d stepped on board an Archer’s ship.

      “The Archer’s ship seemed to interest him immensely. He wanted to know everything about it—the layout, the console, the airlocks. Then we went to this casino. Taggart put the money in, and it didn’t take me long to work out the computers there, and Taggart was stuffing credits down his trousers. He kept buying drinks, and I don’t remember very much after that. I woke up in a hotel room the next morning. As I was leaving, four men burst into the room and arrested me for theft.

      “I assumed Taggart must’ve been working for the bank, and that the masquerade the night before had all been a foray for evidence, and he’d taken