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?
Chapter 4
A Matter of Reflex
Steel and Flame in your raw bite
Hunter of the infinite
To aim into an unseen night
And shoot perchance to strike
Jed listened to the Shamrock’s readings, and touched one of scores of indistinguishable keys on the sloping console. The course program had brought the ship back down from light speed. At least, then, it was not to be used as a missile to attack a place of habitation. Jed knew that such a tactic was useless—any ship coming so close as the Oort cloud to an inhabited system at a superluminal velocity would be detected by tachyon scans and shot down as a precaution. She had worried, however, that Taggart may not have been aware of this. Taggart’s elaborate framing of Wolff told Jed that the dead man must not have been able to employ a computer expert to accompany him voluntarily, either through secrecy or peril. His refusal to divulge the purpose of the mission to Wolff made Jed continue to fear that the Shamrock flew a suicide course.
“We’re subluminal?” Wolff asked, stepping forward to stand beside her and staring at the pattern of illuminated polygons.
Jed moved away from him. “My ship decelerates. You hear it fall below light speed.”
“Can you disable Taggart’s program now?”
Jed looked down at the device wired in to the Shamrock’s mainframe,