“You are only half of their kind,” was all the reply Viprion offered, and he brusquely straightened his tunic, turned away from Wolff, and went through the door to the passenger section.
Wolff followed him. The passenger section was wider than the room they’d come from, and windows covered its outer walls, including the floor, and the edges of the extra width, looking toward the front and back of the ship. Square formations of chairs filled in the walls in the places between the windows. He ignored Rh’Arrol, who had started complaining that the lighting in the section was too strong, and climbed up a line of rungs bolted to the wall to look out of a window.
“You should put on a seatbelt,” Viprion advised. “The inertia from acceleration might prove rather uncomfortable otherwise.”
Silent and angry, Wolff chose a seat where he could look out of a window to the fore of the ship, past the cone of its bridge. The runnership’s engines made barely more than a hum as it began to gather speed. The dark forms upon the Carck-Westmathlon stratum dwindled until the circumfercirc became a thick band across his field of view with stars visible at its edges. Pressed hard into his seat by the forces of acceleration, it gave him a tremendous sense of engulfing perspective.
Gradually, the inertia slackened off as the runnership reached a constant speed. Wolff could feel the peculiar sensation of his queue floating behind his head, and an odd weightless bulk where his toolbelt was. Rh’Arrol, under a chair with aer claws dug into the carpet, made a retching sound.
Viprion unfastened his seatbelt and pulled himself up on the back of his chair. He gauged the distance carefully before pushing off by unbending his knees. He dived toward a window and caught hold of a rail, to which he tied his tunic’s sash.
Wolff bent his arms to grip the back of his seat. Straightening his elbows lifted him out of his chair. He stretched himself until he was doing a handstand on the back of the chair.
“Yes, that’s very acrobatic,” said Viprion sarcastically. “Now sit back down. If you fall you’re going to injure yourself and possibly me as well.”
Wolff swung his feet into the seat of the chair and kicked against it as Viprion had, aiming at the rail the castellan was tied to. He misjudged the force of his kick and rebounded off the edge of the window, grabbing Viprion by the leg.
“Get off of me!” Viprion shoved Wolff away as he got his hand to the rail. “Bloody idiot! Steel and Flame!”
Wolff hung on to the rail. Beyond the ship’s bulky cargo hold, the Carck-Westmathlon stratum retreated into the night. He flinched away from the window as a second shell of light burst forth. In the subsiding fallout, he saw the stratum had been shattered. Gas tore from the disintegrating structure like smoke, exploding into pale spheres. Glittering debris spun in the depressurising atmosphere, and with it drifted torn limbs and amorphous organic matter, and even the helpless bodies of poor men, convulsing and perishing in the vacuum.
Wolff turned to the castellan. “Now they are all dead, while this ship flies empty, because of your pride!” He flung his fist at the man. Viprion caught Wolff’s hand with calculated accuracy, absorbing the force by letting his whole body drift back. His knee came up to wedge his foot against Wolff’s chest, and a deft push separated the two men. Viprion was still tied to the handrail. The tension in his belt worked for leverage, transferring all the momentum to Wolff and sending him flying from the window toward the fore section.
Wolff managed to grab a chair to check his fall, wrenching his shoulder painfully. He turned about to see the
Bellwether’s
ungainly bulk rising over the ruins of the circumfercirc. Viprion was not looking at Wolff. His palm was pressed to the window. A thin line of silver crossed the sky on the opposite side of the ship to the circumfercirc. Wolff turned his head to look through the forward windows—the massive shape of the ion-driven tram was right ahead, blue plasma glowing on its tail. He looked back to the rear of the runnership, and the
Bellwether
beyond.
“It’s chasing us!” Wolff spun himself over. He grabbed the back of a chair in the next row and thus began hauling himself back toward the aft window. Already the
Bellwether
was charging its devastating weapon. Rh’Arrol screamed as the apparatus on the battleship’s prow released. The runnership plunged, and Wolff lost his grip on the seat and sailed across the passenger bay. He hit some chairs and reoriented himself just in time to see the missile hit the ion tram. The enormous vessel’s fabric crumpled into the impact point, as though the ship was being sucked in on itself by some incomprehensible force, then the whole ship exploded in a sphere of light.
Breathing hard, he pulled himself down by the arms of a chair. That tram must’ve been more than fifty miles long, and made from Teng steel, and the missile the
Bellwether
had fired had moved slowly enough for him to see it fly over the runnership. He’d never seen anything come near to that amount of destruction.
He stared at Viprion’s back. The man’s hand was still pressed against the window, and in the intense light the tram’s explosion had generated, Wolff had seen something. The light had been so bright it had shone through the flesh of his hand, showing the form of the bones, and something dark, solid and square, concealed in his palm and exposed through the vitreous alloy.
Wolff climbed up the chairs hand over hand, trying to speed himself up by kicking the floor. He got hold of Viprion before he could react and dragged his hand away from the window. Viprion tried to close his fingers over the thing, but Wolff twisted his arm about and forced him to drop it. It floated into the aisle, turning over and over. Wolff kicked off from the wall, reaching for it. Viprion fought and swore, the belt he’d used to his advantage before now hindering him.
Wolff caught the thing and examined it. “It’s a transmitter, isn’t it? You’ve been transmitting a mayday beacon to the ship that destroyed the circumfercirc! You’re insane!”
Wolff put the transmitter down on the floor, carefully so it stayed still. He braced himself against a seat and smashed the device with his heel.
Viprion sprang at Wolff and the two of them rolled over, drifting away from the seating. Wolff saw a glowing blue mote shoot over the
Bellwether’s
prow and shouted out. The next rotation, the mote was bigger and not quite so blue. Then a loud clang rang through the runnership’s hull, and a wall was heaving itself up beneath him.
Wolff twisted over and bent his knees when he landed, but the shock of the impact still jarred through ankles, knees and hips and made him gasp and draw his injured leg up. Viprion crashed into him and they somersaulted down the aisle. Somewhere along the way, Rh’Arrol became entangled with them and turned into a screaming snake-locked demon. Aer legs and head were curled up tight, and ae hit Viprion in the diaphragm, making him release Wolff.
All three of them hit the wall at the fore section, and for a moment Wolff was pinned there, impotent against the g-force and unable to draw breath. When the pressure slackened enough to permit him to lift his head, what lay beyond the windows was obscured by a filthy haze.
Viprion grimaced. “That Archer’s ship blew out its ion trap. Well, at least it will be easy to follow her with carbon particulates escaping from the engine.”
Wolff dragged himself hand over hand on the rungs, to the nearest window. Forward of the runner’s cockpit compartment, he could see the fusion glow of the
Shamrock’s
tail, dimmed through the fumes coming off it. Far ahead lay a gibbous slice of bright blue albedo. “I think she’s going to attempt slingshot out of the system!”
Viprion crawled up the vertical floor and tried to drag himself into a chair. “That means she’ll be approaching relativistic speed. This runnership has no inertia dampers. It’ll kill everyone on board!”
“That’s convenient for her.” Wolff braced himself against the rungs as the planet loomed closer. He saw continents and weather systems in its glowing atmosphere. He tried to convince himself that Jed wasn’t going to accelerate toward the light barrier with the runnership in tow, but he could see no reason why she wouldn’t. The conurin was all she wanted, and he didn’t see how the inertia could damage that.
Filaments of light tore past in the opposite direction—small ships. The light from the Archer’s ship suddenly shifted, and the change in direction yanked the runnership on the magnetic winch cable. Wolff lost his grip on the ladder a second before a huge impact. The next thing he knew, he was flying toward the stern with a velocity that would surely kill him, the detail of the bullseye dent in the window and the glowing world beyond it lucid in his terror-stricken mind.
White stuff exploded from the wall at the back of the passenger compartment, and Wolff went into it headfirst and bounced off. He ricocheted off two walls before he came to his senses, stunned and floating in the center of the compartment. The runnership was spinning longitudinally around him, while he hung still in the middle of it. As the windows turned over and over, he saw a zoetrope stop-frame effect of the
Bellwether
drawing back the limbs on its horrible weapon, and the
Shamrock
, at which the weapon was aimed, apparently squaring up to the massive battleship. A thread of sharp light connected the
Shamrock’s
synchrotron blaster mast to the dark missile on the
Bellwether’s
weapon, and then the
Bellwether’s
prow ruptured into a sphere of light.
Rh’Arrol came from nowhere with a shrill sound, and hit Wolff in the stomach. He fell on a window, arms flailing for purchase, and saw the engulfing blue horizon of the planet fly past. When the two ships blinked by, already they were much farther away.
Wolff smelled vomit, and he sincerely hoped it had come from someone’s mouth rather than a gorier alternative. “Viprion!” he shouted.
“What?” Viprion sounded both ill and petulant.
“We’re falling toward the planet.”
“I don’t know if the pilots have survived.”
Wolff turned his head to look along the window and out over the runner’s prow. The cabin compartment had been shattered and crushed beyond recognition.
“They haven’t.” The
Bellwether
must have anticipated the
Shamrock’s
manoeuvre, and come around the planet in the opposite direction to intercept it, and the runnership had crashed into it. He turned to the other window, and back toward the glowing arc of the planet’s horizon. Small craft filled the sky around the broken runnership. Close to the line that separated night and day, on the surface of the ocean, lay a stretch of tessellated hexagons–an artificial continent, and even at this distance, he saw patterns of glowing red etched into the stratum.
“They’re razing the planet,” he said.
Viprion slid his interface bolt into his forehead. “The controls are inoperable. Our orbit is decaying. We’ll have to prepare for a crash landing.”
Rh’Arrol made a spitting, whining noise from under a seat.
Wolff stared out upon the continent, which already looked larger and closer. Would Jed follow him here? Was his ransom great enough?
Chapter 8
Satigenaria
Order begets anarchy,
Rule engenders rivalry,
Whether despot or democracy,
Throughout all Man’s construction,
Feudalism or bureaucracy,
In every splintered faction,
Always will there ever be,
Insurrection.
Jed steadied herself against the
Shamrock’s
airlock door, gulping the acrid air. Satigenaria One had already fallen under the might of the marauders, and flaming hues accompanied sunset’s conflagration. Dark columns of smoke rose against the horizon’s turbulent pyre, and the innards of the once-proud city glowed an infernal red, punctuated with jagged black ruin, the great architecture of the city-continent strewn to the four winds.
Here and there tall buildings had come crashing down, folding in on themselves, and had smashed through the floor into their submarine foundations. Waters lapped from the gaps in the floating continent, rising into the streets with the tide.
Jed could not bring herself to leave the
Shamrock’s
flank, and Satigenaria’s red light dwindled and died from the horizon, twilight lingering over the ebbing flames. Night fell, and the zodiac turned on its gyre above the poisoned skies, the galaxy’s engulfing span infinitely aloof from the passion and despair of mortal creatures, those of flashpoint existence and ephemeral fleet. Jed shivered in the freezing air, consumed by fear and vulnerability under the cavern of the sky and surrounded by the horizon’s menace.
She stepped away, taking her hand from the Teng steel shielding, and with halting, unstable steps, she climbed down the heap of loose rubble upon which she’d landed, digging the point of the bottom limb of her bow into the ground to steady herself.
The
Shamrock’s
rearing synchrotron cannon mast and great dorsal blade showed silver in the moonlight, perched on the scorched crags. She hadn’t seen her ship’s exterior from this distance since she’d left the
Agrimony
, and seeing it like this brought back all-too vivid memories of her first encounter with it. When she closed her eyes, she could still feel the brimming jubilation, the realisation of freedom, her rapid pulse, and the tearing of air in her lungs as she ran down the transparent-roofed docking pipe toward that graceful bronzy spear—the moment she had coveted all her life as an Archer’s apprentice. Her forehead had felt sore beneath her newly attached interface band, but she could already feel the
Shamrock’s
welcoming calls. She had paid her own ransom, and the
Agrimony’s
incarceration and Mathicur’s tyranny lay far behind, excised from her life forever. Her desperation was to be within that ship and safe. That was her ship, her world and her life, and now she was leaving it in quest of a rogue who had desecrated the
Shamrock’s
sanctuary and stolen a commodity she couldn’t live without.