“There is no ‘we’ involved. You will not be a party to my control.”
“Ah, but if you were to allow me to assist...”
“Be silent!” Jed turned her head away from him and watched the opposite wall. “Filth.”
“I’m as much a passenger as you.”
Jed spared the bridge, and the navigation console in particular, an uneasy glance. “This Taggart, was he religious? Did he have inflamed political opinions?”
“He never gave any indication of a political bias, if he did have one. I believe he was a REMainderist.”
“The beliefs of REMainderism are compatible with Pagan Atheism, and that is the most widespread spiritual philosophy,” Jed puzzled.
“You are worried that the ship will be used as a missile. I don’t believe Taggart would have done that. He did have a mild religion, but I never got any vibes that he was obsessive about it. And besides, he planned to accompany the ship on this course.”
“Yes, but he’s dead now.”
Wolff suddenly laughed. “Unless he saw his own death through some portent of clairvoyance, and wrote the course as a posthumous vengeance mission.”
“What is an ink cloud virus?” Jed asked at length.
“An ink cloud.” Wolff cast his gaze toward the ceiling, tipping up his chin, and interlocked his fingers. “There’s a legendary species of aquatic animals, called cephalopods, supposedly from Earth. When they are startled, they release a cloud of ink into the water and jet away so an attacker cannot see which direction they have run in. I wrote a remote program that sends its commands into another computer in order to confuse or mislead it, or cause it to act in an unpredictable manner. It can, for example, blind the navigational systems of a ship to the approach of another ship, or fool airlock and partition doors into conflict lock. Or even screw up on-board surveillance equipment.”
Jed glared at the man. She hated his cajoling, patronising parlance. How could a low-caste idiot have such a propensity for making her feel stupid? Wolff held eye contact with her, pushing her almost to the limit with his impassive yet somehow threatening stare. Why hadn’t she shot him? Jed felt a strong temptation to go for her weapon and finish the matter there, unsportsman-like or not.
“Well, then, Jed, that is my story. Got anything to eat on this ship, other than drugs?”
“The evasive insinuation being that your wish is to eat it?”
“Well, naturally. What else am I to do with it?”
“Indirect and excursive speech is evidence of weak resolve.”
“Then humour yourself with that fact, Archer, if you so wish. I care not of my resolve. However, I hunger and do care about where my next meal is coming from.”
Jed forced herself to think. Why should she waste rations on this idiot? But food was not expensive, and it was hardly a scarce commodity aboard the
Shamrock
, and there was no reason to give him greater motive for killing her. “Move,” she ordered. “Recall the way to the upper cargo bay beneath the terminus? Go there.”
She followed the man through the corridors. Jed felt the cold of the unheated storage chamber. Before with the fortification of adrenaline and conurin it hadn’t been so apparent. She folded her arms across her chest. The low temperature didn’t seem to bother Wolff.
They passed the crate behind which he had hidden. He lowered himself first. Jed watched him step away from the rungs and look up with an eyebrow raised in a sardonic fashion she didn’t much care for.
“Now back away from the ladder.”
Wolff took two steps backward and was lost from her vision beneath the floor. Without hesitation she stepped over the edge, breaking her impact with the floor of the lower level by bending her knees. The man looked a little surprised, faintly amused even, at her sudden descent and unwillingness to expose herself to any threat he might pose.
“Pick up one of those canisters.” Jed pointed to the nearest crate.
Wolff turned his back on her to pick up the sealed cylinder, and Jed saw opportunity left open like a gate before her. She seized her gun with her right hand and darted her left hand toward the weapon on his belt. Wolff moved with a reflex that seemed almost of the calibre of her own kind, twisting in an instant to snatch his own weapon, and as he did he grabbed Jed by the wrist. Her feet slid on the floor. She flung out her shooting hand to maintain her balance. Light blazed from her neutron pistol, the shot hitting the
Shamrock’s
bulkhead wall with a
thunk
. Immediately she decreased the GravSim intensity to mitigate her impact with the floor. She fell on her hip, Wolff still gripping her wrist and their weapons aimed respectively as gravity resumed normal service.
The man appeared startled by the sudden fluctuation, and stared at Jed, breathing quickly. “Are you hurt?” he asked politely.
Jed frowned. “Fool.”
“
I
am a fool?” Wolff waggled the end of the neutron pistol he held. “I shall ask you not to try that again, Archer.”
Jed saw his IR-UV bifocals had reflective sidepieces that gave him effective all-round vision with a mere glance toward the wide-angle silvered surfaces. He had watched her. His response was not reflex but calculated defense. She stifled a vocal expletive directed at herself. Stupid! Unobservant!
“Now how about you get up?” Wolff pulled at her wrist. His sweaty grip revolted her. “And we try again, remembering that your duelling advantage over me is negligible.”
Jed got up and pulled back from him. “Take your hand off my arm!”
Wolff relinquished his grip then pushed her hand away. Both cautiously lowered their weapons, watching the actions of the other.
“The canister,” said Jed at length.
Wolff picked up the canister.
“Now two of those packets, and fill that flask from that phytoculture tank.” She pointed to the tank, a squat barrel in one corner with a few pipes running from the wall conduits to it. A spyglass in the front looked in to its illuminated contents—a sea of translucent green organisms suspended in water.
Wolff filled the flask from the tap and bent down on one knee with Jed watching his broad back. He sealed the container and put the four objects in his inside jacket pocket.
“Now back up.” Jed looked back up at the shaft they’d climbed down. “Me first, and you to follow.”
Not taking her eyes off him, she mounted the rungs. Working on balance, she climbed back up, watching him until the last minute before swinging herself back up to the
Shamrock’s
upper level. “Proceed!” she called back to him, placing her hand on the handle of her weapon.
The metallic ring of hands and feet on rungs drifted up from the lower level, and then Wolff’s head came up through the gap. “Easy, tiger.”
He led the way back up to the bridge once more, and placed the food down on the table while Jed slotted the canister into the console heating unit. Within a few minutes the contents were ready.
Jed poured out half the levigated esculents and balanced her bowl on her knee, shoulders hunched over the thick soupy solution coloured like dried blood. It had the bland smell of a thousand different types of sustenance.
Wolff ripped open a hermetically sealed polymer bag and tipped out the roll of fibre loaf it contained. He tore into it with his teeth and fingers, dipping the bread into his bowl. Jed sipped the steaming, nourishing liquid from a spoon.
“Am I putting you off?”
Jed glared at him over the rim of her spoon. Secretly she envied his ravenous glut—biting, chewing and swallowing with stoic rhythm. It had been a very long time since she’d had the appetite to eat like that, or the digestion to cope with such gorging.
“This is good.” Wolff licked up the remainder from the bowl, and poured water into a glass. He held it up to the light, scrutinising its pale green tinge. “Ah, filled with vitamin C and other vital antioxidants. Tastes like shite, of course.”
Jed swallowed a mouthful of her drink. As far as she was concerned, she might just as well have been eating woodpulp in various degrees of dilution. Tastes and flavours were pale shadows beside the effulgence of conurin.
Wolff knocked back the phytoculture’s offering and devoured what was left of his bread. Jed picked over her dish, shredding the bread listlessly and abandoning half the roll in the dish.
Wolff raised his eyebrows. “Do you intend to honour your part of the agreement?”
Jed folded her arms and leaned back on the seating. “There is little to be said. Any other Archer in this galaxy would tell you a story identical to mine.”
“And if any were to, it would still be a new tale to my ears.”
“My ship was built in the Greater Docks of the OverHalo.”
“No, now you’re telling me about your ship. I want to know about you.” Wolff shifted his weight forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“An apprentice to a senior learns the Code until she can afford her own ship.”
“Ah, and who was the senior, your mother?”
Jed gave him an intolerant look. “Archers do not breed.”
“Of course, back to the evils of regular conurin use. Your mother was a ‘common man’, as you call us, and your sire was an unfortunate condescender?”
“A male Archer?” Jed rolled her eyes.
“What you’re saying implies star Archers have no common blood, while I was under the impression they were a distinct race.”
“We have no more blood in common than has the rest of the race of men. We are all doubly recessive in a particular set of genes. Certain dynasties have Archers in their bloodlines.”
“And I suppose those genes are linked to certain traits in appearance, unless one does come across Archers with dark skin, or light hair.”
“That supposition would be correct.”
“So a certain talent was discovered in you at a young age and a senior adopted you?”
“Yes. It progresses from there, as I said.”
“But do you remember nothing of before you were an Archer? Say of planetary life and who your parents were?”
“Not of ancestry, nor of planets. I adopt my ancestry as my ancestors adopted me.”
“But surely you remember something of where you lived? Everyone remembers something about their childhood.” Wolff slackened the belt on his tunic and stifled a belch. “They say you can’t forget growing up on a planet. Did you grow up on one?”
Jed looked uneasily at the man, then at the console. She could tell him what she liked. He had no right to know the events of her life up to the age of nine, and it wasn’t as if he’d find out from some other source.
“I remember nothing.”
Wolff shrugged again. “And your culture, revolving around a particular drug and a strict code, verging almost on religion?”
This angered Jed, and she turned to him fiercely. “Do not compare my culture to
religion
! Blind trust is the folly of the ignorant! True knowledge and understanding—Equilibrium as the Pagan Atheist calls it, can only be attained through discipline and strength of mind.”
Again, that wan smile. It gave Jed an urge to break his nose. “I wasn’t referring to the component of blind trust. I was referring to how religions all seem to have codes inherent to them. You shall chew conurin. You shall meditate and contemplate. Your ship is your temple. You shall be arrogant in your noble ways and spurn the common man. You shall learn of and understand Equilibrium. When you have reached Equilibrium, you shall be truly sated.”
Jed turned her head from him with a grimace. “What knows you of the Code?”
“Little more than what I have here spoken or been told. And of course, what is common knowledge. You deny connotations of religion, yet you speak of the teachings of the Pagan Atheist, and what is that, if not a religious following?”
“Pagan Atheism is a philosophy, not a religion!”
Wolff looked at Jed’s belt pouch again. “Several ancient spiritualities advocate the use of drugs.”
“Conurin is an aid to concentration, A lens through which the thoughts are focused.”
“I daresay it is. It also causes stomach ulcers, loss of appetite and sterility in females. I tried it, once, when I had a lot of computers to fix on the salvage station. It made me vomit and gave me pains in the head.”
“But you repaired the computers?”
“Yes.” Wolff folded his arms behind his head.
“Then you cannot condemn its use.”
“So what did you pay for your ship?”
“Sixty chimaera, excluding the eight within the
Shamrock’s
own engine.”
“That’s a lot of chimaera.”
“I have vended more since.”
Wolff looked out the window for a moment. “Who was the Archer who educated and trained you?”
“Her name was Mathicur of the
Agrimony
.” Jed absently fingered the ornate gold insignia pinned at her shoulder. It had a long straight stem like an arrow, but the tail was shaped like the head and leaves of a thistle.
Wolff’s eyes connected with the design, and he smiled again. “
Hortica
.”
Jed took her hand away from her shoulder and put it in her lap. “That is correct,” she said uneasily.
“A happy childhood? Good? Bad?” Wolff leant forward intently.