Dark Tempest by Manda Benson Page A

fingers upon the string where the arrow had been, with the galaxy and her ship around her, and the dimly lit armoury, and Gerald Wolff with his pathetic curiosity, like a child trying to construe a magician’s trick. She checked the scanners for the returning arrow. The chimaera was mature and healthy, a good catch. Conurin magnified sensation as well as concentration, and the fire deep in her stomach and her increased heart rate gave Jed a detached sensation that she was no longer limited by the confines of her own body, as though she was out there and soaring with the chimaera.
    “Did you hit it?” Wolff asked.
    Jed glared at him. Four words seemed all that was needed to bring the glory crashing back down.
    “Yes. I ‘hit it.’” Jed reduced the negative field as the arrow approached to decelerate it. “You will see it now, if you look.”
    Wolff watched her for a moment, and he stepped cautiously to the gap and watched the returning arrow as it sped back to the Shamrock . He was worried she would push him through the loophole—she could see it.
    The arrow stopped close to the containment field, trapping the chimaera against the ship. The spear had punctured the chimaera’s metallic thorax, and its limbs were retracted close to its body. The organometallic creature was about twelve feet long from the bulb at the tip of the tail, which provided its propulsion to its foremost point. A few other thruster-like limbs stuck out around the base of the slender, eight-foot tail shaft and on either side of the rostrum. Three elaborate gold-coloured photovoltaic wings with scarlet panels framed the thorax–one on either side above the legs, and one dorsal wing. The rounded head had narrow indentations on either side where the optical sensors were, and two slender sensory antennae pointed forward. The rostrum and chewing mandibles were drawn into the underside of the head.
    Jed pulled a lever beside the loophole to flip the chimaera into a containment basket. When the basket closed, she shut the loophole and started the mechanical cycle to bring it inside the ship. The container slid back into a tight-fitting airlock, the outer door closed, and an inner door beside the portal opened. Jed took up a pole from the weapon rack to pull the basket out of the airlock, because metal that had been left in the void was cold enough to burn.
    Behind the vitreous alloy plates, the lustrous form began to move.
    “Is that a closed vacuum?” Wolff asked.
    “Yes. Our nitrogen-based atmosphere damages them. You see those bright barbs on the tail? They’re made of solid potassium metal. Moisture in the atmosphere would react with it if it was allowed to come into contact.”
    “Potassium?” Wolff frowned.
    “Only mature adults of one of the sexes has them. It’s been suggested that the metal might act as an electron source in some kind of metabolic redox process. Much of this species’ behaviour and lifecycle is a mystery.”
    Jed looked at Wolff as he stared at the chimaera. Something in his demeanour made her recall that distant time when she had been ordered to stand and observe, when she had first seen one of these mysteries from the depths of the night shot down and pulled aboard the Agrimony , and how it had made her feel. How she had wondered at the thousands of suns this strange filigree beast of metal had seen, as it drifted aloof in the open void, and how it could now never return, how it would always be a slave to the self-obsessed race who had taken its freedom in their quest to reach ever higher, ever farther. Man, forever striving for infinity’s asymptote.
    Why was she was telling this man these things? Perhaps she saw an old vestige of herself in his aimless curiosity. Not that Jed’s pearls of Archer wisdom would be much use to him. He was a halfBlood male, and he couldn’t learn how to control an Archer’s ship, or to shoot chimaera. Maybe men would laugh at him, call him an idiot, when he walked among them,