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Chapter 3

Parasite

Parasite! You cloying wretch,

Who beneath my skin adheres,

Tho’ with no virtues your prying fetch,

You expose all my fears.

Wolff settled back on the seating, raising his leg and resting his ankle on his knee. This put Jed on her guard again—Wolff relaxed was somehow more threatening than Wolff parading about the ship with a gun. At least she knew where she stood with the latter version.

“I was born on an asteroid. I don’t remember much about it, now. My mother died shortly after giving birth to me, and it was my grandfather who raised me. He didn’t like me—I don’t mean he was abusive, or anything like that, but there was always this coldness between us. I never knew who my father was—they didn’t speak about it—he must’ve been an outsider.” Wolff hesitated and looked at Jed. “Probably he was of the Blood. In retrospect, I suppose he must’ve raped or deserted her, and that with the circumstances of her death were probably the cause of my grandad’s umbrage.

“My family were miners. I think they’d been in the asteroid for a couple of centuries at least. Apart from me and Grandad, there were the two offspring of Grandad’s deceased sister and their mates, and three children between them. All the time I can remember being there, I used to steal things and pick on the other kids. I don’t know why. Perhaps because that was all Grandad expected from me. Perhaps I was just a horrible little boy and it was in my nature.

“When I was twelve years old I managed to sneak onboard the ship that ran around the asteroids picking up the ore and doling out the pay, and it left without my absence being noticed. They must’ve visited dozens of asteroids by the time they found me. I couldn’t identify my asteroid, and I didn’t know its number. That was how I joined the ship.”

“In what capacity?”

“Well, it was a barge that hauled ores from the mining communities on the asteroids to the refinery in orbit around a ringed Jovian world. In exchange for letting me live on his ship, the captain expected me to help out with the work.” Wolff exhaled, and cast about the bridge in a self-deprecating way. “Those people on that ship showed me nothing but kindness, and I threw it all back in their faces. They were all tall, mild-mannered people, not like the squashed-faced, stout breed of men in the asteroid belt whose only means of argument or defense is violence, and soon enough I realised I could do what the hell I liked and get away with it, and I was back to vandalising and stealing.

“The captain kept his patience for nearly a year before he accepted I was incorrigible. He dropped me at the system’s penal center. He said he hoped it would be for my own good as well as his. Now I know enough about the judicial system to know he must have bribed my custodians. Those guards have no scruples. They’ll bail kids to paedophiles and slave drivers and all sorts.”

Jed interrupted him. “What do you mean, bail?”

Wolff wiped his mouth on his forearm. Was this the reason his shirt had no sleeves? “I don’t know what you know about the judicial system.”

“Archer clans are not governed by common law.”

“I thought not. If you commit a crime,” Wolff said, grinning, “in the real universe, and someone reports it, you can be arrested. If it’s a non-violent crime, a random jury decides whether you are innocent or guilty, and if it’s guilty, they freeze your assets and set your bail. Rich people, or people with lots of friends, can sometimes afford to pay their own bail, but most people can’t. In that case, you’re put up for bail auction, and any member of the public may choose to pay your bail, at which point you are taken into their custody and become their slave for a duration proportional to the bail price. In my case, my bail was paid by a salvage station.”

Jed fidgeted, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. “What about if one committed a violent crime and was found guilty of it? You did say the perpetrators of non-violent crimes were bailed.”

“They’re executed. No one would bail them. In certain mitigating circumstances, they can be castrated and then bailed.”

“So these individuals are sold to anyone, and whichever man takes possession of them can do whatever he or she wills?”

“Within reason. It’s illegal to kill or cause permanent injury to a bail slave in your keeping. It’s not,” Wolff said, meeting Jed’s gaze in way that made her uncomfortable, “illegal to rape a slave, unless you do it in such a way as to permanently injure them.”

“What if the slave revolted or escaped? Or what if, after the bail period was up, the payer of the bail would not release the slave?”

“Revolting was a thought I often had.” Wolff grinned abruptly. “Or my thoughts were often revolting, whichever you prefer. You see, the kind of people who need slave labour have money and property, and they pay people to enforce their security. Slaves don’t have possessions. They get locked up when they’re not working. There’s nowhere to escape to on a salvage station, at any rate. In space, you’re stuck in whatever little atmosphere-containing crate you end up in. What are you to do if you escape? Hide in an airlock and be hungry for half a day until someone finds you? There’s no point.

“As for getting out at the end, I’ll explain. When your bail’s set, the custodians anaesthetise you and put a tiny chip under your skin. You don’t know where, so you can’t dig it out. When your bail is paid, they program the chip with information about your owner. A clock on it ticks down until your sentence is over, and then the chip broadcasts a freeman signal. Holding an expired slave is an offence and it means the slave’s bail-payer can be arrested.

“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?”

“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.

“Average for the circumstances.”

“And you really remember nothing of before? Were you drugged, or was something used to partially erase your memory?”

“No, I was not drugged, and no, I really do not remember!” Jed snapped. “Why does this obsess you so?”

“But who were your mother and your father? You can’t possibly have forgotten them.”

Jed opened her mouth to end this intrusive discussion, but a warble from the Shamrock’s Alcubierre drive shook the walls and made the air reverberate.

“We’re decelerating?”

“That was the Shamrock crossing the light barrier on the downswing.” Jed made a cursory bolometric scan of the nearby stellar systems.

Wolff looked down at Taggart’s device. “We must be nearing the destination.”

Beside her, the man reached out a hand, his shooting hand, toward the device. Jed spotted the lapse in guard, reached for her weapon and caught his forearm, pulling it from under him so he lost his balance and fell backward. Wolff made a grab for her wrist, and as she pulled the gun back to evade the snatch he pushed up from the floor, sending them pitching over with a snap of Jed’s teeth and an expletive from Wolff. He fell on her, displacing her breath while she fought to keep her shooting hand out of his reach. His fingers closed on her arm, but she aimed the gun between his eyes.

Wolff stared back at her with mute grey eyes, breathing resignedly.

Now, finally, she’d overcome him.

Could she shoot him dead? Wouldn’t he do the same to her? She thought back to the corridor and how he’d probably prevented Taggart from killing her there. Had he done it through this respect he spoke of, or merely because he wanted her to play an execrable part in some scheme of his? By his own accounts—fraud, hijack, a life spent betraying those who vested trust in him—this man must be the personification of avarice. Could she now murder him in cold blood? And if she failed to now, would she be able to go through with it in the future if she was called upon to do so?

Keeping her eyes fixed on his face and the gun pointing to his forehead, she ran her hand down the front of his tunic, feeling along the right side of his chest. Wolff’s face took on a countenance verging somewhere between surprise and puzzlement.

Her hand connected with the gun, her gun, which was of far superior manufacture than the gun he and Taggart had brought aboard, and withdrew it from the holster on his belt. She wasn’t quite sure what emotion his expression now represented, something like disappointed realisation, she supposed.

“Get off me,” she ordered him, putting the gun back where it belonged. Wolff raised his hands in surrender, before deliberately levering himself up off the floor.

Jed stood and backed away. She put Wolff’s gun in the waste evacuation chute on the left of the bridge and, with the press of a button, sent it flying out into the void. She turned back to regard the man with patronising victory.

“This is my ship, Gerald Wolff. You ride not as guest nor as prisoner, but as trespasser, as stowaway and by my grace.”

“And very graceful you are, too.” Wolff bowed his head in some ridiculous travesty of gratitude. “I am but a captive butterfly, a specimen for your amusement.”

He took a step toward the window and looked out into the sky.

She had won, she thought as she glared at his back. She had overcome this stalemate and emerged triumphant. She controlled her own ship once more, and he could have no effect on her actions or decisions.

Why, then, did she feel as though he had beguiled her and gained the upper hand?

Why had she not slain him then and there?