Dark Tempest (4 page)

“After that, the bail-payer returns you to the penal center, and they deactivate the chip so it no longer broadcasts the freeman signal.

“There must’ve been over a hundred bail slaves in total on the salvage station. Our jobs were varied, but never very interesting. I don’t think the foreman was too pleased that I was so young, and not built like the asteroid-mining family I’d come from. It was my first job to pick up the bits that fell off the conveyer belt and put them back into the rending machine, hopefully without it chewing off any of my appendages.”

“You said bail slaves were not allowed to be mutilated?”

Wolff shrugged. “If you mutilate yourself working with machinery, it’s your own fault. After I worked on that for a while I did sorting. It was here I first saw chimaera. I wasn’t allowed to handle them in case I damaged them, but they were the only salvaged part that didn’t go on a conveyer belt. I’d been there about a year when the accident happened. In an annexe off the sorting rooms was the rending machine. It was a big synchrotron cannon set up beside an airlock. Pieces of Teng steel—whole bulkheads and pieces of shielding—would be brought through the airlock and clamped in position, and then the synchrotron cannon would carve them up into smaller pieces to go on the conveyer belt.

“There was this crash. The next thing I knew, everyone was running for the door, shoving into each other and shouting about sealing off the hull breach door. I was fourteen and I would’ve been flattened if I’d tried to go that way, so instead I ran back toward the rending room, to see if I could fix whatever had happened.

“Immediately I saw what was wrong.” Wolff made a gesture above his head. “The synchrotron cannon wasn’t fixed, like the one on the outside of this ship. It was mounted on a forked piece of scaffolding by a computer-controlled hinge on each side, so it could be rotated downward to cut through the Teng steel. One of these hinges had broken and the barrel had swung sideways and was hanging off the remaining hinge at an angle that was slowly bending the metal scaffold of the fork. The feedback relay that would have cut the beam had come loose when the hinge broke, and the thing was burning a hole in the floor.

“I didn’t want to suffocate, so I started climbing up the side of the machinery toward the synchrotron. I was terrified that I was going to get electrocuted, or burn myself and fall into the beam, but I managed to get the maintenance cover off the side of it, and I pulled out one of the circuit boards. This did the trick. The synchrotron immediately lost power and I was standing on this bloody great thing looking down on this blackened crater in the middle of the floor.”

“Then what happened?”

“I tried to climb back down but I lost my footing and fell. I hit my head on the scaffolding and passed out. The foreman found me there with the board still in my hand and shouted, ‘Pilgrennon’s arse!’ and dragged me up to the station manager, who said I deserved some sort of recognition for saving the day. He wouldn’t set me free, but he said, since I seemed to have something of an understanding of machinery, he would allow me to join a salvage team. This was a privilege, and if I abused it, it could be easily taken away.”

Jed looked up from picking flecks of lint from her tunic. “And I suppose you abused it, then?”

“I had learnt a valuable lesson since I’d become a bail slave, one that the ship’s captain had been unable to make sink in. I wanted to get myself out, and when I was offered responsibility, I respected that. So no, I didn’t abuse it.

“So I ended up living and working with an older man, Rogan. It turned out he was in there for murder. He’d been castrated and bailed for life on the mitigating circumstances of having computer qualifications and the man he’d murdered having provoked him.”

“Why is being qualified in computing a mitigating circumstance?”

Wolff shrugged. “It’s saleable. A bail slave’s cheaper than hiring someone and paying them a wage. He seemed to warm to me after a while. I think he learnt a few things about computers from me as well.

“Anyway, that was how I spent the final two years, working on the ships that were brought in. Often they were damaged and we had to dash through the corridors and check everything was safe before the paid labourers who started dismantling everything could come aboard. Sometimes the computers had gone haywire and thought they were under attack and being boarded, and we had to deactivate them safely.

“It never occurred to you to steal one of the ships?”

“’Course it did. Me an’ Rogan used to talk about it all the time. First thing, all the ships that came in were shot to pieces and had come to be broken up for good reasons. And when we’d boiled down the argument, Rogan always said it wasn’t worth it. I would be out, eventually, a free man still with my youth. It wasn’t even worth it for a lifer like him. Rogan was a great arguer—I don’t mean in a squabbling sense—I mean we
debated
. He had the stroppy temperament of a menopausal female and he used to stink out the cell when he took a shit, but he was a good man.”

“He sounds delightful,” said Jed sarcastically.

“I digress. The most startling thing I saw there, indeed, the most startling thing I’ve ever seen, was an Archer’s ship.”

Jed scowled. “Archers’ ships do not get sent to filthy wreckers’ yards.”

“This was one that had been found floating dead in the void by chance. The discoverer had towed it here and sold it to the salvage station. Hauled up, we saw its name was the
Larkspur
, but nobody could tell what was wrong with it. It seemed to have been abandoned. All of the systems were shut down. When me and Rogan stepped on board, the place was unlit and freezing cold. The air was deoxygenated and unbreathable. We had to go in with oxygen tanks.”

Jed interrupted in alarm. “You dare commit this act of sacrilege on an Archer’s ship?”

“I was ordered to! And the Archer turned out to be dead, so how could she mind?”

Jed rose, drawing herself to her full height. Wolff’s words sent hot acid churning in her stomach. “You have defiled the tomb of one of my ancestors and my clan!”

“I’m just telling you the story! I can’t change what happened! How was I to know your laws?”

Breathing hard, Jed sat again with an enforced calmness to her motion. How
dare
he desecrate the Code of the star Archers? But logic told her she needed to know what had happened here.

“May I continue?”

Jed, her hands clenched in fists on her lap, said tersely, “Yes.”

“The manager was annoyed when we reported no chimaera haul—he’d paid over the odds to the ship’s finder and gambled on there being some. So the ship was broken up. The manager sold everything.” Wolff paused, his face betraying an uncertain apprehension. He chose his words carefully. “The frozen body went to a science museum. The ship’s computer had to be gutted, for it was so intrinsically wired to the Archer’s mind it had died with her, and the ship husk with its drive components intact were sold on.”

“You disgust me! You disturbed the resting place of a venerable and worthy Archer and stole the components of her ship and sold her body to a
freak show
!”

Wolff held up his hands in a conciliatory way. “I was acting under orders. I would not have done such things of my own will.”

Jed flung her shoulders against the back of the seat. “What is the name and location of this salvage station? As soon as I resume control of this ship I will go there and raze it and kill everyone aboard!”

“You know I will not tell you that,” said Wolff. “Permit me to continue with my story instead.”

After a pause in which Jed gave no indication of assent, Wolff went on. “I was sixteen when my sentence was complete. An adult by the standards of many. Rogan wished me luck and told me to make something of my life. He said I was worth more than this place, and that if he ever saw me again he’d wring my neck.

“So off I went, with the new skills I’d learnt. I travelled around a bit, fixing machines for food and small pay. This was how I found myself, a fortnight ago, on the orbital complex
Hesperus
, a few hundred acres of floorspace occupied mostly by pubs, casinos, hotels and shops.

“That was where I met Taggart. He found me hacking the bank ATM. He got me drunk and I bragged about my exploits as a bail slave. I boasted of the escapade with the synchrotron cannon, and how I’d stepped on board an Archer’s ship.

“The Archer’s ship seemed to interest him immensely. He wanted to know everything about it—the layout, the console, the airlocks. Then we went to this casino. Taggart put the money in, and it didn’t take me long to work out the computers there, and Taggart was stuffing credits down his trousers. He kept buying drinks, and I don’t remember very much after that. I woke up in a hotel room the next morning. As I was leaving, four men burst into the room and arrested me for theft.

“I assumed Taggart must’ve been working for the bank, and that the masquerade the night before had all been a foray for evidence, and he’d taken recordings of me mucking about with the casino machines and incriminating myself, but when they hauled me into the complex’s justice station, they revealed that I’d actually been accused of snatching a bag, and then they searched me, and they found all these bloody cards and credits inside my coat, belonging to someone called Amelia Jeffries. I don’t know how they got there. At first I believed I must’ve been so drunk that I did steal a handbag and I couldn’t remember doing it, and the custodians could see my confusion. It was there for the jury to see. There was evidence all over me. I couldn’t even remember what I’d done myself. I was an ex-con, and here was someone called Amelia Jeffries who picked me out on an identity parade, and said that I positively was the man who stole her handbag.

“So I was back in the shit for something I didn’t know whether or not I’d done, with no Rogan or merchant ship’s captain to help me. They set my bail for three months. I tried to tell them that I had computer skills, but they told me to shut up, because skilled workers weren’t needed on three-month bail contracts. They needed manual labour.

“I woke up the next morning to the racket of the cell being unlocked. Someone had come to pay my bail. Who was it, some sweating sadistic slave-driver from a forge? I nearly laughed. It was none other than Marcus Taggart. I realised at once that I’d been framed. I said nothing. Nothing I could’ve said would’ve proved anything about Taggart, and I’d only be risking him retracting his offer on my bail.

“Down we went to the docks, and I boarded the ship now docked to your fine
Shamrock
. So there you have it, Archer. The rest you saw with your own eyes.”

Jed looked hesitantly at the man. His explanation seemed to make sense, and it did show him in a somewhat different, although still entirely dishonourable, light. She pushed the modicum of sympathy she’d briefly felt from her mind. Wolff was still stupid, badly bred and a petty felon. “So you are nothing but a tramp, a criminal and a cheap hacker?”

Wolff made a face. “You can’t really call it hacking. Not when the computers involved have AI. No, you have to persuade them. You have to make them like you.”

“Computers do not develop affections for people,” Jed scoffed.

Wolff arched an eyebrow. “And your ship does not like you? What is that, if not a computer?”

“My ship is programmed to do as I say.”

“Ah, but no Archer ship would accept a common man as its instructor. Your computer sympathises with the way you think. After a while it adapts to you, and nobody else can affect it. What better failsafe than loyalty? But the major flaw is that computers are essentially logic and, although they are more resilient in this manner than men, they can be bribed and appeased.” Wolff scratched his leg. “I see you have managed to seek out and destroy my ink cloud virus.”

“You imply you can inveigle the approbation of a ship such as this?”

Wolff smiled slyly, watching Jed sideways. “If I wish to.”

“Accomplice of scum. I would do well to kill you as a precaution.”

“I would have to first overcome you. I would be unable to fully take charge while you were still conscious. This computer is essentially an interface, and not an independently thinking unit.”

“And that? If you are the expert of computers, why let Taggart install that device?”

Wolff looked at the computer on the floor. “That is the work of a charlatan. Taggart did not like to put his life in the hands of others. I was just a bail slave, framed and bought for my abilities. He knew I was in disapproval of his refusal to divulge his intended course.”

“A commendable stance.”

“And one that cost him his life.”

Jed glared at Wolff, and both were silent for a moment. “Can you release it?”

Wolff seemed to choose his words carefully. “I could, if you were to let me.”

Jed had a worrying notion of him inside the workings of her ship, inside her own head, fighting with her over command of the
Shamrock
. “You think me a fool?”

Wolff smiled inscrutably. “I make no such assumption. I merely wish to ensure this ship at least does not voyage toward a suicide finale.”

Jed’s lips pulled back over her teeth. “T’would still be folly to place the wellbeing of my ship in the hands of some wandering varlet.”

“It is not possible to disconnect it now.” Wolff cast his gaze toward the device. “As you said, subroutines in the ship’s running will have become dependent on it. We could get the ship to relocate its temporary files first. If control could be passed back to the ship, that device could be safely disconnected. Can you go into mindlock with it?”