Jed let out an angry protest as Wolff appeared beside her, an arrow fitted to one of the spare bows. He held it incorrectly—the bow in one hand and the tail of the arrow in the other, square on to his shoulders so the arrow pointed diagonally from left to right across his chest. When he released it into the deflection field, it ignited askew, and flew away to miss by nearly an hour of arc.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I might hit something.” Wolff leant his head through the gap in the wall to look at the following ships.
“You hit naught but that within three inches of your nose!”
Wolff reached for another arrow, but Jed kicked them away. “Cease this wasting of these arrows of mine! If you must hone your worthless aim, use one of the cutting lasers! They at least have magnification detectors!”
Jed ground more bitter conurin between her teeth, and tried to concentrate over the noise he made in search of the laser. Launching another arrow, she smote a third ship. Wolff moved up beside her, the four-inch aperture and long, cumbersome barrel of the laser balanced on his shoulder. Jed cursed him as he knelt down to lean the weapon through the gap.
“Shoot over me,” he told her.
“Get in the way and I shall shoot through you instead.” Now the flotilla was falling behind. The small two-chimaera ships had the upper hand as far as acceleration at low speeds was concerned, but the
Shamrock
had more stamina once it got up to relativistic velocities, even with a blown-out ion trap.
One of the pursuers was firing something, and Jed could detect it on the tachyon scanners. Before she was even aware of what she was doing, she was taking aim. The arrow intercepted the unseeable missile mere leagues from the
Shamrock’s
stern, and it exploded in a flash of blue light that streaked away from them. Wolff yelled out and fired the laser at the blue thing.
“What was that?” he demanded. “It looked like something hit us and bounced off!”
“It was a superluminal antimatter missile,” said Jed breathlessly. “What you fired at was the optical illusion of the light of its approach reaching your eyes after the object did. It’s called a reverse ghost.”
“Superluminal—you mean it was moving faster than light? How d’you hit it?”
“Instinct.”
Jed felt the ship’s revelling thrust as its exalted momentum grew, riding ahead as those who had chased it fell back. The greater ship left them far behind and fading, their light redshifting and dwindling away. The thunder of the ship taking the upswing of the light barrier excised their puny race from the scanners.
“We’re safe now?” Wolff’s gaze remained on the patch of vacuum they’d left for a moment. In the dim light, she felt his fingertips connect with hers, and looking to him she saw his relief. She wondered where her anger had gone. Nothing unites like war, it was said.
Wolff touched the panel to close the window. “So, it was expedient, was it?”
“Yes.” Jed realised her breathing had become rapid and ragged between words. “It showed presence of mind I perhaps failed to give you due credit for.”
Her pulse slowed, the adrenaline of the fight metabolising away. She felt her heart thumping, decelerating, the conurin’s enrichment still fortifying her senses. In her complacency, assurance of her own safety realised, a latent craving stirred within her, and an angry lust, poisoning her reason.
Jed turned her head away from Wolff and tried to regain control. This irrational feeling was imbalance,
disequilibrium
, and everything in her training compelled her to restrain it and crush it back with the rest of the emotions that could never be allowed to run amok. However hard she tried, she could not block out the perception of Wolff’s presence behind her, as though the man belittled the whole armoury, and she could not regain her equilibrium.
“Where has that urchin gone?” she asked, trying to think of anything but this.
“I don’t care,” Wolff answered. She heard him put down the laser, gently, and Jed leant her bow against the arsenal door. The
Shamrock
sensed him take a tentative step toward her.
“I didn’t know I had a mind, let alone that it was present.” Wolff was very close now, and Jed felt his breath. She could see him moving his hand toward her, but a shiver still ran down her back when his fingers touched her arm.
The noise of his breathing and the smell of him filled her senses, and the plight of this ship and the galaxy through which it fled became insignificant from this intense perspective. She gripped Wolff’s back, his deep-set, grey eyes fixing upon her. He was not an unattractive man, with his strong, symmetrical features and thin, unsmiling mouth.
Once all the fights in the small, conceited world of some distant ancestor of men, all battles had been for the right to a mate. Jed felt it in herself, and in Wolff, she saw the same ancient victor’s prerogative.
She wanted to rid herself of this feeling, this fiery, irrational part of Jed she’d never considered, the part that was all visceral emotion and instinct. Never before had she fought like this within herself. This was not Equilibrium.
The lighting faltered, and the pitch of the
Shamrock’s
engine rose a fraction in response to her mind’s revolt.
The cold metal of the bulwark pillar against her back made a stark contrast to Wolff’s fervid warmth as they both fumbled and struggled with an awkward urgency. Lost in the conflict of her own thoughts, the room she’d known all her adult life seemed suddenly alien and unfamiliar, unclear in the heat. All her senses were lensed and focused on his mass against hers, his hot breath on her face and the rub of the stubble on his chin, the press of his lips against her own, the febrile stirring in his loins, and the hot throb of him against her.
“Stop!” Jed fought to lever his body away from hers. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can,” Wolff muttered. “Everyone can do it.”
Jed knew she could stop him if she’d wanted to. The neutron pistol was still holstered at her waist. She could stop him for good. So why didn’t she? She tried to twist her back to ease the pressure of him. “It’s not supposed to feel like this.” This was not what the Code said! Archers didn’t do it. Perhaps Archers couldn’t do it. What if something had been done to her, beyond the reach of memory, to prevent her from doing it?
The feeling was like orbiting a star so close, as she had sometimes done, that she could see the seething forms in the photosphere, filtered through the
Shamrock’s
senses–awe, wonder, intensity, and something that was almost horror. And when he moved, it stimulated every raw sense Jed and the
Shamrock
were capable of feeling.
It was with a savage ecstasy, so sharp it was almost an unbearable pain, that she surrendered herself to the conflagration.
Chapter 10
Aftermath
Lost from meaning, and unwhole,
I hesitate to go forth,
In the desolation of my soul,
I cannot find my North.
Jed awoke trapped under Wolff’s arm, and for a moment she couldn’t think what had happened and she panicked. Then the disgust at the prior events, unmitigated by conurin as it had been at the time, flooded back as horrified recollection.
She pulled her weight forward on her elbows and tried to move away, but her movements roused him. His arm tensed around her. “
Stay
,” he pleaded, in a barely audible voice.
Jed’s back was pressed against his chest, which felt hairy and sweaty. What had she done? He’d...
stuck himself
up her. They’d come back up on to the bridge, then into the sleeping quarters. What had
possessed
her? The Code... Mathicur... Steel and Flame!
She didn’t want to do it, but she had to look, for she could hardly believe she’d done such a thing herself. She twisted her neck to look over her shoulder. The man looked back at her in the gloom of the sleeping quarters, in her own bed. When he saw her face, he shut his eyes and made an expression so full of regret and loss it frightened Jed because it made her think of something she dared not let herself remember.
She lay back down and pushed her face into the pillow, wishing she could take back what was done, wishing for once that the universe was not of Steel and Flame, that the line connecting cause and consequence could be stretched and broken.
The only thoughts to have crossed her mind, Jed thought, had been of Wolff’s acts of valiance.
At that moment the memories had not occurred to her, say, of his hijack of the
Shamrock
with Taggart, or how he had made off with her conurin supply as insurance. No, she had thought only of the time he’d saved her back on Satigenaria, how he’d leapt to her side in battle, and how he’d persuaded Taggart to spare her life. But this man, she had seen from the beginning, was a selfish chancer who acted only in the name of his own wellbeing, and somehow conurin and fear had made her forget that. Spare the Archer, spare the ship. The
Shamrock
was his one reliable mode of transport. Only Jed could pilot it. Wolff’s part in her life stemmed only from his own conceited plight, and the events of last night, well, they had been but mere gratuitous acts of flippancy—to reassure her, or to reassure Wolff, whichever was irrelevant. She had defiled her ship, and she had insulted her heritage.
He shifted, clasping her to him in the half-light of her sleeping quarters.
“Does the
Shamrock
keep vigil and observe its course?” Lying against him, Jed felt the deep thrum of Wolff’s voice in his larynx.
“It does.”
“Then be still.”
Jed exhaled in a short sigh, settling her head under his chin. She felt the steady rise and fall of his chest, and the regular thump of his heartbeat in syncopation with her own. There was something in Jed that she knew she should neither desire nor welcome, and yet it was there and it was having an effect on her. The primal comfort of knowing she was not alone had been taken from her many years ago, and as an Archer it was her duty to stand apart. All throughout Jed’s life there had been the cold steadfastness of the Universe, the monolith of Physics, unchanging, and somehow empty and oddly disturbing through the years spent in isolation. It was a relief, for once, not to have to face it by herself. In this warmth and unpredictability lay the same wonder in a less sublime beauty. Jed didn’t have to be in awe of Gerald Wolff’s body. His pulse was just a crude mechanical process that supplied oxygen for his physiology, and the infra-red he gave out was just a product of an inefficient metabolism mediated by enzymes needing an inconvenient temperature. He was part of a Universe where not everything was of Steel and Flame, and his closeness made Jed wonder how she’d become so divorced from all that was so natural as the comforts of the biology of her own species.
She tried to stop herself. She was an Archer, and it was not her business to think these things. These feelings were for peasants, not men of the Blood. It was something in the expression he’d made that called up the forbidden memory. She didn’t want the memory, but already she had delved too far and it came and could not be blocked. It was her father, who used to make that expression. She remembered him doing it. There was a long flight of steps up a hill from Jed’s parents’ estate, leading to the ancestral crypts in the side of the mountain, and she used to go there alone sometimes, just to sit and watch the effects of the sun and shadows on the land, and he’d found her there, sitting on a tomb and staring into space, concentrating intensely. He’d made that face of forlorn despair, as though he knew Jed was already lost to him, and nothing he could do, however hard he tried, would make it otherwise.
Already her throat had constricted. She must not think of these things. She forced herself to take regular breaths and concentrated on the
Shamrock’s
navigational feed. She craved conurin, but she knew to take it in this state of disequilibrium would be to invite disaster.
Wolff’s arm was around Jed’s waist, and he tightened it briefly, but Jed swam against an overwhelming tide. She didn’t want to feel like this, and, in a way, the force of the emotions of the previous night had drowned out the unease. She wanted to understand the affection behind Wolff’s actions, but she could not. Why did she feel so cold inside? Why could she not lower the gate and let him be a part of her, emotionally instead of physically?
“Your...” Jed searched for a polite way of putting it, and couldn’t find one. “...dick is digging in my back.”
Wolff suddenly roared with laughter. “Would you have me dig it somewhere else, then?” He put his weight onto his hands and straightened his arms so he was straddling her with his chest. When Jed looked at him he was grinning like an idiot.
“You are making slime all over everything.” Jed made a dismissive motion toward his loins. “It’s disgusting.”
“Some of the slime’s yours,” Wolff chided. “Surely all this slime is too great in volume to have been made by one man?”
Jed looked him in the face. “Stupid fool,” she said, and looked away, noticing the simple black pattern where his tattoo wrapped around the underside of his arm. “Why have you let someone draw all over you?”
“That?” Wolff leant to his side, and pointed to the image of the snake with its tail in its mouth etched around his bicep, made from a simple pattern of converging and diverging lines. “That’s an ouroboros.” He removed his hand from behind Jed’s back, and sat facing away from her. Another snake stretched down the length of his spine, its hood spreading between his shoulder blades. “That’s a cobra. Rogan copied it from a picture in a book. I did an eagle on him.”