“That’s odd.” Wolff pushed himself out into the corridor and prised the cover off the ganglion. The wires and circuitry inside were furred up with orange deposits. “It looks like it’s oxidised. Come on, let’s go up to the bridge.”
Wolff set off, pushing from one side of the corridor to the other. When he looked behind him, Samphrey was trying to pull herself along the maintenance rail, hand over hand. “Here, let me help you.” Wolff bounced back to her and held out his hand.
“It’s not proper for you to help me.” Samphrey hesitated. “I’ve to do it by myself.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Wolff assured her.
“Well, all right, then.”
“Okay.” Wolff took hold of the girl by the waist and turned her to point in the right direction. “Remember to keep your hands or your legs between you and where you’re going, otherwise you can hit your head. Ready?”
He pushed her forward, and she reached out to the rail on the far wall as she floated toward it. Wolff jumped after her, and in this way they made their way up to the end of the corridor.
Wolff held on to the rail and looked around the corner to the bridge. He could see starlight through the windows, and no lights shone from the consoles. A sharp odour of burnt circuitry flavoured the air. Samphrey shone the torch over the bridge, but there was nobody there.
“I—” Samphrey said, and closed her mouth.
“What?”
“Sorry.”
“Did you want to say something?”
Samphrey compressed her lips, her mouth forming a line. “It’s not my place.”
Wolff shrugged. “Say it.”
“If the Archer was shooting at us, she would probably have been in the armoury.” After she spoke, she watched Wolff with an odd, defensive anticipation.
“Good idea. Let’s go there.”
They went back down the corridor toward the arsenal. The windows there cast dim beams through the dust hanging in the air, and in the center of the room where the beams converged floated a human shape—the Archer. She was perfectly still, floating with her back toward the floor, her legs bent at the knees, one arm raised at the elbow and the other hanging behind her.
“Is she dead?” Samphrey said.
“I don’t know,” Wolff answered. “It could be a trap.”
Samphrey shone the torch upon the nearest wall, illuminating a handrail and an access port stained with more brown marks. “That orange stuff, what is it?”
“It looks like metal oxides, but oxides don’t normally form unless there’s a lot of dampness. You sometimes see them, only traces, on very old ships.”
“Perhaps something has worked as a catalyst and made all the ship’s wiring corrode.” Samphrey’s voice was deeply uneasy.
Wolff looked back to the motionless Archer. “I’m going to have to get her down. The problem is that if one of us drifts into the center of the arsenal, there’s nothing to hang on to and we’ll be stranded there.” He turned to face Samphrey and pointed to the rail. “I’m going to need you to help me. Tie your sash on here. That torch, you can attach it to your arm with that strap on it.”
Samphrey did as he asked, but as she tied the knot she said, “Wouldn’t it be easier for you to hold on to me? I’m smaller.”
“No, it won’t matter when there’s no gravity.” In reality, Wolff did not want Samphrey to be the one who reached out to the body in case the Archer was still alive and this was a trap.
“Hold on to my ankle and lean away from the wall.”
Wolff pushed away from the rail and reached out. His fingers were a foot away from the Archer’s wrist. “Samphrey, can you push away from the wall?”
Samphrey moved, and through her Wolff felt the smooth sensation of the material of her belt sliding along the hand rail. His hand closed around the Archer’s forearm.
“Okay, pull back now, please.”
He pulled the Archer back toward the rail, taking hold of her tunic at the neck. He felt a long, arrow-shaped pin, similar to the one Jed wore on her tunic. Starlight fell on the Archer’s face. She was young, barely an adult. He felt her throat.
“She’s dead.”
A loud click that seemed to come from the corpse’s head made him pull his hand back. The interface band drifted slowly upward from the dead Archer’s face, leaving a line on her forehead from its pressure, with three old scars evenly spaced along it.
Chapter 18
Steel and Flame
No deceiving tongue the true shall serve,
Nor illusion false and vain,
Trust shall be earned and trust deserved,
In men of Steel and Flame
Jed held the interface crown, gazing upon the inner surface that had been against the dead Archer’s forehead. “The ship’s computer was
burnt
?”
“Corroded,” Wolff answered. “The conducting tracks in the circuitry are so thin that oxidation of that sort on their surface goes right through and breaks the circuit. The burning can be assumed to have been caused by capacitors and parts of the circuitry when they were damaged.”
Jed turned over the band in her hands. “But this can’t corrode. It’s made of surgical-grade tungsten. Yet the Archer died, and this detached from her?”
Wolff turned to Viprion, who sat with legs stretched out on the
Shamrock’s
bridge seating. “This thing you said about, the Moiety. Could that have corroded?”
Viprion gave his head a vigorous shake. “The Moiety’s organic. It’s made from the same materials as you and I. Most likely her brain died of the shock when the computer she was connected to overloaded.”
“I pulled the crown off another Archer,” said Wolff. “She did not die.”
“The Moiety denatures soon after brain death, and the crown detaches as a failsafe,” Jed explained. “If an Archer were to die for whatever reason, it means that if that Archer has an apprentice, she can don the crown and take control of the ship. It is better that way than the ship be lost and the apprentice die on it.”
“Then we have a functional interface band?” Wolff reached toward the crown. “The
Shamrock’s
chimaera array is damaged, if we could take control of the ship by one of us using this, we could tow it back out into the halo and find somewhere to have it repaired.”
“By your own admission, the other ship is ruined!”
“Where is the crown I broke, for the
myth
ship we are towing?”
Jed pointed to the shelf behind the seating. Wolff found the damaged band there, plying the deformed crescent with his thumbs. “I can see the part of it that holds the code that identifies it as belonging to the ship. I could take this out and replace it in the other one. Synchronise a working interface band with a working ship.”
Jed looked sharply at Wolff, then at Samphrey, who was standing over by the bridge windows and listening to the conversation with a look of unease. “There is only one here among us whom the Code will permit to take the crown.”
Samphrey’s face changed, showing a deep yearning held back by intense dread.
“Samphrey’s training is incomplete, she is too young. Grafting a mind to a computer that has spent so long grafted to another is not without risk. The ship behind us belonged to an Archer of
myth
, who was not young. We would be better to find somewhere we can set down, and try to replace the chimaera that are damaged with two from my own haul.”
Wolff raised his eyebrows. “That would be a lengthy and difficult operation. I have seen chimaera handled before. They are easily damaged, and to attempt to install and connect them in a vacuum or an unknown atmosphere without specialist equipment, when none of us has training, and the
Bellwether
pursues us, that would not be straightforward.”
“I will do it,” Samphrey said.
Jed and Wolff turned and looked at the girl. Jed said, “Samphrey, if we do this thing, there will be no undoing it. That ship will be yours for the rest of your life, for better or for worse.”
“I’ll do it,” Samphrey repeated. “It’s the only way we are going to escape. You can still teach me, when we are away from this place.”
Jed’s face took on the impassive, glazed-eyed look that Wolff now understood was symptomatic of her conferring with the
Shamrock’s
systems. Perhaps she was scanning the skies, perhaps she was merely thinking more deeply on the matter.
She passed the intact band to him. “Then do it, for it would seem it is the only option. But first, recover the Archer’s corpse from the ruined ship, so that we may cast it adrift and give her the funeral the Code demands.”
* * * *
Wolff dragged the dead Archer into the corridor of the
myth
ship, which Jed had decided should be renamed the
Larkspur
of
hortica
. He stepped quietly up to where the corridor opened onto the bridge, where Jed and Samphrey stood. Viprion, leaning on the wall just beyond the corridor, turned and raised his eyebrows at Wolff, tilting his head so as to look down upon him, and stalked into the corridor.
Jed spoke first. “Who are you?”
“I am Samphrey of
hortica
.” Samphrey stood stiffly before Jed, her voice proud, yet with an undertone of nervousness.
“What are you?”
“I am of Steel and Flame. I am
hortica
. I am an Archer!”
Jed faced the table in the center of the bridge, on which lay the interface crown along with a small ornamental knife and her leather-bound book with the stylised bird in the tree on the cover. She spread out her hands, palms up. “You will swear, on the Blood, on the Pagan Atheist, and in Pilgrennon’s name.”
“I swear fealty to
hortica
.”
“I swear, in the name of Pilgrennon the Blood paragon.”
Samphrey took the book, The Teachings of the Pagan Atheist, in her hands and held it vertically before her face, pressed between her palms. “I swear on the Pagan Atheist and in the name of Steel and Flame.”
Slowly, smoothly, Jed picked up the knife from the table and stroked it across her left palm, on the fleshy area at the base of the knuckles. She rotated her hand, closing it into a fist, and blood dripped onto the interface crown, staining its inner surface where the three prongs had retracted into it.
Samphrey knelt before Jed. “I swear, on the Blood, and on the Moiety.”
Jed lifted up the crown with the tips of her fingers, and raised it high in the air so a line of blood spilled over the inside of her wrist and tracked down her left arm. “Then, you will renounce all that you are and all that you were, for you are Samphrey of the
Larkspur
of
hortica
.” And Jed lowered the crown to Samphrey’s forehead, and Wolff saw the girl’s eyes close and the stiffening of her shoulders into a flinch.
“
Mylen
.”
Viprion was standing in the aft corridor.
Samphrey turned away from Jed, her concentration broken.
“Viprion,” said Jed, “do not intrude upon the ways of the star Archers.”
“Mylen?” Samphrey took a step away from Jed, toward the corridor. “That was the name of my cousin, who went to
myth
seven years afore today.”
“Samphrey, you are to become an Archer now, your past and your relations are of no relevance! Do not dishonour your own ceremony, and what is to be your ship, with the name of
myth
!”
“She was my sister...” Viprion murmured. “And then you must be that Samphrey who was also my cousin, whom I knew not well and did not see for some years, but I also did hear had been taken as an apprentice by the same Archer.” He looked at Wolff, he looked at Samphrey, then at Jed and the semicircle of dull silver that balanced on her upheld fingertips, where Samphrey’s forehead had been.
Viprion dived over the back of the seating. Samphrey cried out as he pushed her out of the way. He snatched the interface crown from Jed.
“Viprion!” Wolff shouted, and Jed had realised what he was trying to do and grabbed his forearms, but she couldn’t stop him from putting his head forward, into the crown. With a snap, the tungsten semicircle tightened around his cranium and his body crashed to the floor. He made no movement to break his fall with his arms, and Jed stepped back from him, a look of alarm upon her face.
Viprion’s limbs trembled violently. His face was an unholy rictus, eyes rolling, saliva running from his mouth onto the bridge floor. He looked as he had when the seignior had incapacitated him on Carck-Westmathlon.
Samphrey ran to Viprion and crouched down over him. “Will he be all right?”
Jed pushed the girl back by the shoulder, making her fall down. Her voice came as a shout. “Do you not realise what he has done? He has squandered our one chance of escape, and all you can think of is his welfare?”
The bridge lighting faltered, and an alien pattern of lights ran across the bridge consoles. Viprion put his hand to the floor and levered himself up, eyes wild, nostrils flaring.
“Viprion, what are you doing?” Wolff demanded. “Can he control the ship?”
Jed’s teeth were bared. “I can’t see why not, once he grafts to it, he’s of the Blood.” She reached to the table, not taking her eyes off Viprion, and her fingers closed on the knife she’d used to cut herself. “He must die before he gains full control!” As she uttered these words she made a lunge past Wolff toward Viprion, who rose unsteadily from the floor, a demented grin stretching his lips back over his teeth.