Wolff gripped Jed by the shoulders, forcing her to face him. Her muscles were rigid and she trembled with anger. “Jed, go back to your ship.”
“He has desecrated
hortica
and the Code!” Jed’s voice hurled flecks of spittle into Wolff’s face. “He must die for his sacrilege!”
“If he gains control of the ship and you’re not on the
Shamrock
, he could undock and leave us trapped here.” Wolff spoke in a low voice, hoping Viprion would not hear him and get ideas. “You need to get back
now
.”
Jed’s eyes darted from Wolff’s face to look over his shoulder at Viprion.
“Let me kill him, Jed.”
Fractionally, he sensed tension leaving her body, and she stepped back away from him. “Kill him,” she said in a low breath. “It’s the only way you’ll get the interface off him in one piece. There is still hope.” She turned, still looking over her shoulder, and went aft toward the airlock.
Viprion swayed on his feet, and his eyes made darting motions. Odd sounds came from the bridge computer. Wolff pulled his multipurpose tool out of his belt and switched the knife into position. “Samphrey.” He held out his hand to the girl. “Go back to the
Shamrock
. Follow Jed.”
Samphrey took one step toward Wolff, her face full of confusion.
Viprion grabbed her by the arm. “The Archers took my sister from me!” His voice was a fervent scream, terrible to hear in the space of the bridge. “They will not have my cousin too!”
“Viprion, you made an oath!” Wolff shouted back at him. “An oath and I heard it with my own ears! You made an oath, in the name of the Blood paragon and in the name of the Pagan Atheist, with me and Samphrey as your witnesses!”
Viprion reached out his hand to steady himself, looking at it as though it didn’t belong to him. “Listen not to this fool Gerald Wolff, Samphrey. He is not of the Blood, and he is a criminal who trespasses upon the sanctity of the Archers themselves.”
“What does it matter if I am of the Blood or not? You made that oath to Jed of the
Shamrock
, an Archer, a man of the highest Blood there is, and now you renege upon it!”
Viprion pointed at Wolff. “Do not worry yourself, fool, with matters that don’t concern you and that you can’t even hope to understand.”
Wolff stepped back. He set back his shoulders and stood at his full height. “You are a Blood traitor Viprion, the lowest of the low!”
“Bastard halfBlood swine!” Viprion pushed Samphrey aside and came at Wolff, who held out his knife at the ready. As the man leapt to him, gravity ceased, and Viprion soared into the air, his foot aimed at Wolff’s head. Wolff tried to duck, but there was nothing to duck against. Then Samphrey crashed into him, knocking him back toward the door.
“Quickly!” Wolff took hold of Samphrey’s hand. The moment gravity returned and his feet touched the ground, they both ran aft. As they turned into the airlock, Viprion was close behind them, and he grabbed Samphrey around the waist.
“Viprion, let her go!” Wolff held onto Samphrey by her arms, and she held him back. He pulled her over the threshold, toward the
Shamrock’s
door.
“You would abandon your own Blood in favour of
this
?” Viprion pulled back and Samphrey screamed, in pain as much as in protest.
“You’re hurting her!”
“
I
am hurting her? Are you sure it is not the halfBlood peasant dragging on her arms that’s hurting her?”
“Gerald Wolff might be a halfBlood,” Samphrey yelled, “but his half of the Blood is better by far than your whole!”
Viprion snarled and pulled harder on Samphrey. Her fingers slid down Wolff’s forearms, her nails leaving deep scratches in the skin. Her eyes were closed tight in a grimace, and a cry escaped her, then Wolff lost his grip on her and fell back against the
Shamrock’s
door. The last thing he saw was Viprion’s eyes, burning with anger, before the
Larkspur’s
door closed.
Wolff got to his feet in the gap between the two airlocks. He hit the door with the flat of his hand. “Samphrey!”
A whirr of machinery startled him. He looked up to see the locking flange that held the ships docked together rotating. “Jed!” he shouted, and he turned to the other door and beat on it with his fist. “Jed, open the door!”
A noise deafened him and the airlock fell away from under his feet. The
Shamrock
’s
bronze flank spun beneath him, and dead cold bit into his flesh. The air was being torn from his lungs, scorching his throat and nose, and it crystallised into an expanding cloud of tiny grains before his eyes. His skin burnt with an icy fire and the dread silence pressed on his eardrums. On the periphery of his failing vision he saw the
Larkspur
, miniscule in the distance. The
Shamrock
’s aft section came distorted and hideous to his eyes, bathed in vile radiation.
Jed
, he tried to say in his last breath, but no sound came from his lips.
Chapter 19
Nemesis
The moons the planets’ children are,
And the stars are those planets’ concern,
All about the death-black fulcrum’s gyre,
In endless circles they all turn.
“Jed?”
Jed put her hand to the blistered skin on Wolff’s forearm. He winced, fresh blood welling up in his eyes.
His voice was hoarse. “Jed, I can’t see. Please tell me we’re on the
Shamrock
and not the
Bellwether
.”
“I pulled you back through the airlock. You were only exposed to the vacuum for a few seconds, but you lost consciousness. The
Bellwether
has not come in range of my senses since the Herald attacked us. We are close, now. Not far from the galactic center.” Jed paused and looked out through the bridge window. “Something strange here is happening. Something I have not ere seen.”
Wolff turned his head. His eyelids flickered and tears of blood ran down his face. “I can’t see.”
Jed folded her hands around the tube of synthskin in her lap and regarded it for a moment. “I can lend you my sight,” she said, “and that of my ship.”
A smile broke onto Wolff’s face as Jed relayed the information to him. “All this I can receive, through a bail slave chip?” The smile dropped into a grimace. “Don’t look at me, I look disgusting.”
“The burns on your skin, those will heal. I don’t know if your eyesight will ever be fully normal without better medical assistance.”
“I tried to stop Viprion. I tried to bring Samphrey back.”
“I know.” Jed squeezed the tube, pressing a transparent blob of the synthskin onto her index finger. She smoothed it onto the reddened epidermis of his nose.
Wolff winced. “What shit’s this?”
“It’s to seal the wound and prevent it from getting infected.”
“What is it I’m looking at?” Wolff asked as Jed attended to his face with the synthskin. “The chimaera?”
“Yes.”
“There must be...billions of them?”
“More than billions.”
The chimaeras’ golden bodies drifted all around the
Shamrock
. Not one of them was less than half the ship’s length, and the numbers of the ones with the potassium barbs on their tails was roughly equal to the ones without. Many bloated, dull-red suns hung in the sky, and the chimaera flowed like a river toward the nearest. The individual forms were indiscernible over the distance, but there were so many of them they formed a pale arc around it as they traversed its gravity well.
“They are not interested in the ship,” Jed said. “Chimaera that big can chew through the material of the tail column, and they usually attack if they get the opportunity.”
Some distance ahead of the ship, a dark shape flopped across the living river and the pattern broke, the chimaera exploding away from the predator then springing back to their prior positions. The predator reared its dark head, and sunlight reflected from the undersides of its wings as it pulled up from the ecliptic.
“Heralds,” Wolff said.
“They’re hunting the chimaera. To them, the ship looks like one. I can keep it safe among them so long as I watch where the heralds are.”
“Why aren’t you hunting them?”
Jed stopped, her hand on Wolff’s neck. “’T would be pointless. The ship won’t get out of here with two chimaera broken, and there is nowhere we can go to repair it.”
Wolff’s hand landed on her wrist, the light squeeze of his blistered fingers hot and clammy. “Why are you giving me medicine, if that is so?”
“Because the
Bellwether
may still be out there somewhere, and I still do not know its intentions, and if it should attack again, the small use you are alive is better to me than the no use you are dead.”
Wolff let out a choking laugh. Jed could see the ice burns in his nostrils, caused by the expansion of his breath after the depressurisation. “Nothing you do is ever irrational, is it?” he rasped.
For some time, neither of them said anything. Jed had finished covering Wolff’s face and neck with the synthskin salve. His scalp did not appear to be too badly burned. Probably his thick, light-coloured hair had protected him.
He lay back on the bridge seating, closing his eyes as she started applying the salve to his arms. “That device. How did it cause the circuitry of the ship’s computer to corrode?”
“I know not,” said Jed. “What was it that Viprion said?”
“It’s in the air they breathe.”
“Corrosion of that sort occurs normally with age, usually in an unfavourable atmosphere.”
“Something catalysed it,” Wolff murmured. “Do you have any medicine for my throat?”
“No. A signal conveyed by gravity couldn’t have catalysed corrosion, if that’s what you meant.”
“Perhaps the signal was to something already there, that was activated and caused corrosion.”
“The air is full of bacteria,” Jed pondered. “As are men and morrans. Then there are the artificial bacteria, machines. In the bodies of men and in the systems of ships.”
Wolff opened his eyes for a moment. “In the ship?”
“Robots, they are in essence. You have seen the robots on the ship? They carry out repairs and sanitation. These robots are just another layer of the ship’s maintenance technology, but so small they can’t be seen.”
“Are there many kinds of these robotic bacteria?”
“Of course. They have been a part of man for time immemorial. That’s all the Moiety is, truly. Mechanical bacteria that live in men for their mutual benefit.”
“Viprion said the Geminals evolved in isolation on a planet, and that men came to this world and found them and destroyed their way of life, all because they could grow something that they could make conurin out of.”
Jed nodded. “A synthetic intermediate.”
“This happened centuries ago I’m guessing. Could it be that the Geminals made a rogue version of one of these mechanical bacteria strains, and seeded it into the plants so that it contaminated all the conurin?”
“That is conceivable,” Jed concurred. “If the strain of bacteria was capable of reproduction, it could be feasible that is has by now spread over the entirety of civilisation. Conurin use is ubiquitous among the Blood castes, and from Viprion’s description it would sound as though this planet was put into use as a mass production farm.”
“So much that it was ravaged by cultivation and rendered permanently uninhabitable, was what I understood.”
“But why did they make it so it was triggered by a signal carried by gravity? Why not tachyons?”
“I suppose because gravitational radiation is instantaneous and can be used as an area attack. Tachyons can’t be broadcast as such, they just go instantaneously to what they are aimed at. To target an area with tachyons, one has to program one to go in every spatial location within that area. It would use massive amounts of energy.”
Wolff’s face tensed, and he raised a hand slathered with synthskin, curling wet fingers into a fist. “It still doesn’t make sense. Damn it! Why is Taggart chasing us toward the galactic center?”
Jed had lost her grip on Wolff’s other hand, and she got to her feet facing the bridge window.
“That is why.”
Behind her, Wolff sat to attention on the seating. His eyes blinked rapidly, trying to discern what lay outside the ship, and Jed relayed her own vision to him once more.
The river of chimaera snaked away into the far distance, and beyond them lay a great disc made up of dark dust and incandescent gases. The blue of oxygen and the pink of hydrogen mingled in flocculent clumps and orbit-spun threads, tendrils of clotted matter dragged into ever-decreasing spirals.
Wolff shifted on the seat. “What is it?”
“It’s an accretion disc. What do you see at the center?”
“
Nothing
.” Wolff’s frown creased the drying synthskin on his face. “Just a hole in the disc.”
“That’s correct, nothing. That is what lies at the center of the galaxy. It is Dark Tempest, the immense singularity that holds everything in orbit around it.”