Dark Tempest by Manda Benson

watch?” Wolff asked. There was an impious humbleness to his demeanour, which Jed didn’t much like. Passiveness and submission were not to be trusted, too often being foil for ulterior motives.
    “Keep back, and be silent.”
    The man backed away, stepping over to the forward bulkhead in silence.
    Jed looked out into the dark. In a few minutes, the Shamrock would come within range of the grazing chimaera.
    She took a cube of conurin from her belt pouch and chewed on it, watching the movements of the tiny motes of energy on the Shamrock ’s tachyon scanners. She felt her awareness rising, the Universe without and the man with his distracting breathing and smelling paling to insignificance. It was just Jed and the chimaera now. The ship, the arrow, and everything else was peripheral.
    She held up her bow arm and rested the shaft of the arrow on the lever above her thumb, drawing her hand back against the elastic force in the string, hand under chin, so the head of the tiny chimaera rested just above her thumb and the knuckle of her index finger.
    She focused on the diamond tip of the arrow, pointed out through the gap in the metal of the bulwark wall. With the Shamrock ’s conurin-heightened senses, she watched the five potential targets executing their complex paths, and she singled out her quarry.
    No computer could hit the evasive chimaera. The computer saw and heard over this distance, and that was her medium. Technology could accelerate an arrow up past light speed in a fraction of a second, but Jed had what it could never emulate—instinct, reflexes and a sense for the unpredictable conditioned from a million years of natural selection.
    Jed breathed deep and focused on Equilibrium, the potential energy in the bow opposed by the tensed muscle in her left arm, her concentration balanced, her mind empty. She followed the strange and distant creature as it weaved its unknowable, irrational path as Mathicur of the Agrimony had long ago taught her.
    Not to miss now. Not to do herself injustice here before this fool.
    She nearly released the arrow, but doubt impinged upon her thoughts and made her stop. The Shamrock ’s tachyon scanning confirmed the chimaera’s path was not the one she’d anticipated. Letting her intemperate feelings about this man contaminate her concentration had thrown her Equilibrium. Jed was ashamed. Soon they would be out of range. Emotions were not for Archers, and disgust and shame were as much emotion as were hatred and superiority. She regained her Equilibrium, closing her eyes and breathing, and so expunged Wolff once more. Jed counted heartbeats, slowing her own pulse in the fierceness of her conurin-assisted focus to release her shot in the still silence between beats.
    Five light-minutes of void, or twenty inches of air, or an immeasurable hypothetical distance within the privacy of her mind. Stillness. Equilibrium. Chimaera. Shamrock .
    She shot, not at the chimaera, nor at some conjecture entertained, but for the place where she knew the chimaera would be in the fraction of a second it took for the arrow to hit the field and be accelerated. As she felt the release, the air the arrow disturbed as it took off, she knew no doubt.
    The contraction of the limb polymer alloy flung the arrow forward at twice the speed of sound. It pierced the containment field with an electrostatic shockwave, like a pebble breaking the surface of a pellucid pool, and a flash of light sent it on its course as the chain annihilation was initiated. Jed, complacent in her certainty, had not the time to lower the bow before she knew her prize was won. The arrow hit the chimaera in the thorax, extinguishing the light in its tail.
    With a single prompt to the Shamrock , she activated the electrostatic field that would bring her prey home. Far out in the dusty cloud, the other chimaera drew back from the casualty then scattered into the night, flicking their tails down and breaking away.
    Jed lowered the bow, her