Dark Tempest (13 page)

“Yes, but the ride doesn’t leave until later. In fact, nothing can until the ion storm’s over.”

“So where do you go now?”

“To see that horrible castellan again.”

“What does you want to look at him for?”

“Rarrol, when I said see, I meant speak with.”

“My name is Rh’Arrol, Wolff.”

“I know I communicate vocally, but that pronunciation does not work with my vocal cords.”

Rh’Arrol gave him a pained look. “Arrol, then, if you insists on compromise.”

Viprion met them in the passageway outside the garden. “Ah.” His voice dripped with forced ingratiation. “I was just about to eat. I wondered if you would join me.”

“What about the seignior?” Wolff cast about the garden as though the man might be hiding behind a cactus.

“I’ve locked the door through to my office. He can’t open it unless he’s in one of his more lucid moods.”

This didn’t make sense to Wolff. He had gathered that the seignior’s temper was volatile, but he didn’t see how this might affect whether or not he could unlock a door. “I’m not hungry. I’ve just come here to find out why Taggart plotted a course for this circumfercirc.”

“Then perhaps you might like a change of clothes, and to use the private bath we have here for the use of the higher-calibre denizens of Carck-Westmath.” There was a hint of mockery in the castellan’s voice.

Wolff regarded him, awkwardly. “Not if you’re going to be in it at the same time.”

“Carck-Westmath
lon
!” Rh’Arrol rasped from where ae stood behind Wolff.

Viprion arched his eyebrows. He gave no acknowledgement of having heard Rh’Arrol’s remark, not even sparing the morran a glance. “There is little else to be done while we await the passing of the ion storm. In some cultures it is common for educated discussions to be carried out in bathing halls.” The expression the castellan made at Wolff seemed to suggest that by declining, Wolff admitted that he was not capable of supporting educated discussion.

“Yes, well, in my culture it’s considered unhygienic to bathe in other people’s dead cellular matter. And I did hear somewhere that females can get pregnant in such a way.”

Viprion flared his nostrils and pursed his lips, suppressing laughter. “Citizen Wolff, I am not a female, and unless I am very much mistaken, neither are you.”

Wolff pushed his face forward toward the castellan. The man was roughly the same height as him, although of much slighter build. “You’re hiding something, Viprion, and it’s not a sexual identity crisis!”

Viprion stepped back, casually pulled a neutron pistol from his belt behind his back, and aimed it at Wolff’s neck. “If you want to be vulgar and uncouth, Wolff, I think you should know that I can be vulgar and uncouth much more efficiently than you apparently are able. Now get back into my office.”

Wolff staggered through the door, dropping his case and tripping over it. He trod on one of Rh’Arrol’s tails and the morran screamed, eliciting a cold glare from the castellan. “Sit!” Viprion indicated a chair on the opposite side of his desk, and Wolff sat on it.

Viprion sat. He rolled his eyes in their dark sockets in a disparaging way, and hid the weapon back under his tunic. “What is in the case?”

“None of your business,” said Wolff.

Rh’Arrol, crouching in the shadow under a cabinet in the corner, made a squeaky groaning sound.

Viprion dumped the case on the desk and lifted the lid. His eyebrows rose fractionally. He unwrapped one of the cubes, slowly and methodically, without tearing the paper, and slid the waxy, ivory-coloured lump into his mouth. He chewed slowly, grimacing and pacing across the room, and when he turned and spoke, his tongue was coated with the chalky substance. “This is of good quality. How does a criminal such as yourself come into possession of such conurin?” He pirouetted slowly, the soles of his shoes scuffing the floor. “Ah, the Archer’s ship. Now why would an Archer, clan member of one of the purest lineages alive, allow halfBlood scum, patron of
urchins
,” Viprion said, and glared at the cabinet Rh’Arrol was hiding under, “to ride around in her ship?”

Wolff hesitated. If he didn’t tell the castellan what he knew, he might never get back to the
Shamrock
. “Taggart hijacked it.”

“Ah, this Taggart who is dead. How did you come by such information, and what are your own dealings in the matter? Did you kill him?” Viprion set his fists upon the surface of the desk and leant on them. The conurin made him champ and slaver, and the effect was not pleasant to look upon.

“No, I didn’t, and even if I had, you would not be able to prove it. The Archer killed him, and to be honest I would not blame her.”

“But you were among the hijacking party, and the Archer did not kill you? Indeed, she seems to let you come and go from her ship as you please, despite your felonious misdemeanours?” Viprion closed the lid on the case.

“Not exactly. I was not among the hijacking party. I was a bail slave whom Taggart bought.”

“Ah. A bail slave.”

“Taggart framed me.” Wolff met the Castellan’s ridicule with a staunch glare.

Viprion sat, leaning firmly against the back of the seat so it creaked. He picked up a stylus from his desk and began to dig its point under his nails, fingers bent over the palm at the knuckles. “This Taggart, what breed of a man was he?”

“Stout. Not tall and fine-boned as—as you.” Wolff had meant to imply what Viprion would have called the higher-bred or Blood castes, but he didn’t see anything that made Viprion’s kind inherently higher than his or Taggart’s.

“And what did he do?” asked Viprion, not looking away from his finger-picking. “Did he have any obsessions? Was there any object he carried with him and held dear to him?”

“No.” Wolff frowned. “An
object
? What do you mean?”

“It matters not at any rate, since he is dead now. What became of the body?”

Wolff stared at the castellan. That was not an intuitive question to ask, and something in it suggested a morbid interest. “How is that of relevance?”

“Because if you have it, there may still be evidence on it that may shed light upon his motive.” Viprion shot Wolff a scurrilous glance. “Unless your breed of man eats of the dead.”

“No, I do not, I didn’t see what happened to it, and I expect the Archer dumped it out the airlock, unless she homogenised it and put it through the phytoculture tank!”

Viprion cast down the stylus on the desk. “He really gave no intimation of what it was he intended to do here?”

“I didn’t even know that this was his destination. He programmed a course before he died, and it terminated here. I have no idea what compelled him to come. You did mention something about the political situation. What’s happening?”

The castellan looked to the door. “Things are not right under the current seignior. The rank of seignior in the Satigenaria system is a hereditary one, but the bloodline was contaminated.”

Wolff scowled. “And you really believe someone is not fit to rule because they have ‘bad blood?’”

“What do you mean,
believe
? I see it with my own eyes. The man cannot rule as his forebears did. We had a revolt in the Kuiper belt a few years back because of him. I personally had to travel out there to quell it, and it was not without cost to myself and Carck-Westmathlon.”

“Why don’t you depose him, then?”

Viprion snorted abruptly without altering his expression. “You saw what he can do, and besides, he is of the bloodline, he has
some
Blood in him, and there are no other heirs. He’s got this perversion for Lunatics. He keeps trying to impregnate females, but Lunatic men can’t bear the offspring of Galactics. If they don’t haemorrhage to death, their pelvic bones collapse. How is he to be replaced?”

“With someone not of the bloodline, of course.”

Viprion cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “The computer wouldn’t have it.”

The door to the seignior’s quarters flew open with a crash. Wolff twisted and held his arms over his face defensively.

“They’re coming, Viprion, they’re coming!”

The seignior stood in the doorway, his pupils dilated while he made wild movements. His lips were wet and spittle ran down his chin. “Behind the curtain of noise. Can you not hear them?”

For a moment he regained some awareness of his surroundings. He cast about himself in a disoriented way. “Viprion! Get someone in here to clean up this dead morran!”

“Certainly, seignior.” Viprion stood.

The seignior held out his arms out as though they were alien to him. He stared at his fingers with a horrified expression. “It burns us! It burns! Stop it!” He roared at his hand, and beat it against the door.

“Concentrate!” Viprion shouted at the man. The seignior had started up a childish wailing, and Viprion standing before him suddenly looked more the frustrated teacher of an immature brat than the downtrodden delegate. “Work with it, not against it!”

“They are hurting me! Get out to the surveillance and scanning department, Viprion!”

Viprion slammed his hand down on the case as Wolff tried to take it. “I’m confiscating this until I find out what’s going on here.” He put the case on a shelf and ordered Wolff and Rh’Arrol out into the corridor, where he locked the door to his office.

“I thought you said he could only open that door in one of his lucid moods?”

“That was one of his lucid moods,” said Viprion.

“Why are you following a madman’s order?” Wolff asked.

“Occasionally he does his job properly, and I’ve reason to believe this is one such time. Quickly, to the lift.” As they ran down the corridor, Viprion took a jewel-like object, set in metal and with a two-inch spike protruding from its back, from his pocket, and he sank the spine into the dent in the center of his forehead.

* * * *

It seemed long since Jed had truly slept, since the deadlock with Wolff before she could regain full control of the
Shamrock
. The chance to rest herself before heading out of the system was welcome, and she slept for several hours in Wolff’s absence, the ship’s automated systems keeping watch.

Her throat felt raw when she awoke. She was not accustomed to speaking as much as she had done of late. She went out onto the bridge. Wolff’s dirty plate from the meal they had eaten still lay on the floor. Jed looked at it with distaste, and at the glass with his saliva on the rim and traces of phytoculture water still remaining in the bottom. Who was to tell what diseases this malodorous vagabond might carry? The smell of him still lingered in the room, and she could see one of his hairs on the seating.

And here, he had taken something from the items of Taggart’s she’d found, from where the objects had lain on the edge of the left console. If Jed recalled correctly, it was just some sort of electronics transmitter device, not something she would be likely to use or need. The impudence of the act angered her, the thought of that self-assured oaf parading about her ship, stealing things that were not his to take and just thinking, assuming, that she was not observant enough to notice.

Wolff was, as Jed already knew, a criminal, and it was these irritating acts of venial felony that set him in a class below her, but suspicion goaded her onward. Wolff had not been under her surveillance all the time he’d been aboard the
Shamrock
since the sunstorm had begun and he’d last left. He could have gone elsewhere, perhaps to the cargo room or arsenal, while she had been showering. She went swiftly to the cargo bay, and descended the rungs to the lower level. The room had been disturbed. Jed sensed dust stirred, smelled a distant flavour upon the air. She looked about the unlit clutter of casings and crates, and to the door at the back of the room.

When she crossed and lay a finger to the access panel, the polymer felt uneven.

The lock had been tampered with.

This lock led to the vaults. Wolff could have lifted little of what she’d caught. A risible image of the man stuffing little chimaera into his clothing crossed Jed’s mind. He would raise meagre funds from such small fry.

A strong fear made her press her hand to the panel and plunge into the tunnel as the door opened. Her breathing ragged, she stumbled twice as she made her way down. She dipped her head into the lower level. Her haul remained as ever, the golden bodies of the chimaera drifting and glinting in their cases of preserving liquid, but when she rose and went to the storage cupboard, some of the cases were missing.

Jed wrenched open the lid of one of the cases. Empty. She opened the other one. Empty also.

She turned full circle within the dark walls twice, raising the heels of her hands to her temples, mouth open, the silence grating against her ears.

“This can not be!”

In this catacomb of the
Shamrock
’s in which she remembered never having spoken before, her scream was shrill and reedy, more animal than human.

The room shrank, and a claustrophobic terror closed upon Jed like a stifling fist. She ran back up the corridor and into the cargo room, and fell against a crate, the place lurching and heaving as she tried to correct hyperventilation. Had she other stores in her living quarters? Jed couldn’t remember. It had been a long time indeed since such fear had rendered her so completely incapable of lateral thought. She felt to her belt pouch for the few cubes remaining there. Not to waste them now!