“As do I,” Drakamod replied seriously. “This giela is not waterproof.”
They continued along the echoing space in the same direction the lander had been moving when it finally came to rest, and another few hundred feet passed before Sergio realised the passageway was not only curving, but it was growing narrower. And it was doing both at an increasing rate the farther along they walked.
“Like a nautilus shell,” he remarked.
“I suppose, if the lander had not decelerated, the shape of this chamber would have successfully slowed it, albeit rather destructively,” Drakamod said.
Before the spiral drew much tighter – in either sense – it came to an end at a smooth wall. As Sergio approached it, a jarringly square doorway slid silently open in the lower half of the fifty-foot surface. In it …
Sergio stopped, and actually took a faltering half-step backwards, uncertainty flooding him the way he imagined the dark, shark-infested waters would pour back into this strange docking bay if the Flesh Eater’s crew decided that was what they wanted. He wasn’t used to feeling uncertain in these situations, but he’d never seen a Blaran augmentation quite like Kitander Po Chane.
The Captain of the Flesh Eater was still roughly Molranoid, slender and four-armed and bipedal, somewhere near seven-and-a-half feet tall. His skin, where it was visible in the ostentatiously-swirling white robes he was wearing – or were they rags, or bandages? – was bleached almost as white as the hull material of his bizarre ship. His hands … well, Molran, Blaran and Bonshoon hands were usually quite long, made to seem even longer by the fact that they were narrow, each one sporting only three fingers and a thumb. Bluothesh’s fingers were longer still, ghoulishly so, and they appeared to have been replaced by gleaming ceramic blades.
Atop his upper pair of shoulders and long, pale neck, Kitander Po Chane’s head was distorted, the delicate bones of cheek and jaw jutting painfully, the normally flat top of his skull pushed up into a grotesque parody of a human’s cranium. His nose was the standard pair of Molranoid nostril-slits, his mouth the standard smile-like curve with the long, gleaming fangs extending from the upper jaw. It was perhaps a little misshapen due to the rearrangement of his facial bones, but Sergio had seen worse.
Po Chane’s eyes had somehow been twisted and stretched into huge vertical slits, starting on either side of his nose and almost intersecting with the corners of his mouth, and stretching up into the weird dome-extension of his skull. They opened and closed slowly, more like gills than eyes, and the surfaces under the wrinkled white lids were tarry black. It was as if the Blaran’s head was filled with some sort of oil, and the eyes were just holes in the bag containing the foul liquid.
Sergio had seen more extreme and outlandish Blaren, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen worse.
“Captain Sergio Malachi, I presume,” the deeply-curved smile asked as the gill-eyes opened, closed, opened. His voice was as mellow and pleasantly choral as every Molran and Bonshoon and most Blaren Sergio had ever spoken to.
“Captain Kitander Po Chane?” Sergio was surprised at the calmness of his own voice, but that was always the way of it, once you got to this point. You wrapped yourself in the uniform, and it protected you from all the crazy shooey in the galaxy.
In theory.
“My clan call me Bluothesh,” Po Chane replied.
“Can I take that as an invitation to do the same?” Sergio asked.
The ghastly pale Blaran’s grin widened, far wider and whiter and wetter than normal, and he spread all four long, gleaming hands in a thoroughly non-reassuring way. Sixteen five-inch porcelain knives on the ends of four arms, any one of which was as strong as all four of a human’s limbs put together, had a way of not being reassuring.
“Please do, Captain Malachi,” Po Chane said. “Or may I call you Sergio?”
“If it’ll preserve the general amicability of the occasion, feel free,” Sergio said, and looked around at the slick white walls. “You know, I suspected the hull was actually a projected field,” he went on conversationally, “stretched around the other ships in your group, extended to its farthest extreme and filled out with water. It’s the shape. Classic field alignment, mathematical extension gradient. If you haven’t made the Flesh Eater as big as you can for dramatic effect, you’re holding off for practical reasons,” he hesitated, then took a considered risk and added, “and it’s not to do with maintaining a relative field, is it? You’re stuck at subluminal just as surely as the small vessels in this volume.”
Bluothesh smiled again, and invited Sergio into the passageway behind him with a sweep of one deadly lower hand. “She’s extended to her full capacity,” he said, “with some reinforcing spars and – yes – the water. Very perceptive, Sergio.”
“It was a logical enough inference when we came through the hull just now,” he said modestly. “The adjustability must be through the roof.”
“It is impressive,” Bluothesh agreed. “Why, she was barely six hundred feet long when we found her. That’s part of why she’s beached here – she essentially is a small vessel, scaled up. It’s more complicated than that, the whole beaching, but…”
“And where was it that you found her, precisely?” Sergio asked. They started along the corridor, which was as dank as the dock but reasonably warm, and sourcelessly lit from the rounded white walls and ceiling. It seemed the Flesh Eater was venting water from areas section by section to allow passage for her air-breathing crew. Sergio wondered whether there was a limit to the number of air pockets she could create, and whether there was a cycle that would engulf the lander in water sooner or later. He also wondered how close they were to live Fergunak at that very moment. Neither of these were comforting lines of thought, but he had to admit that there weren’t many comforting lines of thought available.
“Oh,” Bluothesh said, with another wave of a hand – this time an upper hand, and considerately not on the side where Sergio was walking – “not far from here, actually, on the inner border of Chalcedony. I confess that we settled on this location because the Flesh Eater failed–or refused–to take us further. It was pure good fortune that we made it as far as this transit route and were able to deploy our aquatic assets.”
“And this is why you require a human?” Sergio asked, almost painfully aware of the firm grip of Alpha Drakamod on his shoulder.
“Precisely,” Po Chane replied. “The Flesh Eater is stubbornly unresponsive to Blaran or Fergunakil guidance, and the damage done to the small vessels in this volume was also … ah, self-administered, shall we say, in a fit of pique. Or necessity–something to do with the weapon itself, we’re not certain. We are in a position to help one another, Sergio, despite our ideological differences.”
Sergio squinted sidelong at the horrible, towering apparition. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, but for a fellow calling himself Bluothesh you seem remarkably…”
The Blaran let out a short laugh. “The name was an affectation,” he said, “not to mention a luxury of a past life. Now, I use it for nostalgic reasons. I was never particularly chaos-touched, Captain – merely lawless, merciless, and prone to demonstrative violence. None of these things are necessarily mutually exclusive with the ability to reason – not in a clan leader with any prospect of lasting success. I confess that the name is at best a sentimental joke at this point.”
“I see,” Sergio said, trying to give this revelation the thoughtful consideration it probably deserved. The corridor they were navigating curved in the opposite direction to the gallery in which the lander had come to rest, but narrowed in much the same way.
“I like your parrot,” Po Chane said abruptly.
Sergio recognised the moderately clumsy invitation to share a compromising secret of his own. “Alpha Drakamod,” he said, “Captain Kitander Po Chane. Drakamod is the alpha of the school of Fergunak aboard the Draka.”
“Ah,” Bluothesh said, obviously completely unsurprised. “A giela, yes? Eyes and ears of the alpha, condensed
into this elegant and decorative object. It is very old-world nautical, Sergio.”
“That was the idea,” Sergio replied. “Your Second encouraged me to come alone–”
“Mm,” Bluothesh said with amused disapproval, then waved his hand once again. An opening irised wide at the terminus of the passageway ahead of them, and they swept through into yet another opposing spiral, this one extending broader and more gently-curved as they traversed it from inner curl outwards. The door closed behind them and Sergio fancied he could feel water thundering into the hollow trumpet of air they’d left behind. “But technically, you are alone. This is nothing more than a communication device like your pad or your sub-pulse apparatus. It was not expressly forbidden, and – considering that I believe your standard communications have been blocked – was actually a rather brilliant ploy to remain in touch with your vessel,” the horrible glistening black eyes peered down at the grey-clad human with the colourful machine on his shoulder. Wide, narrow, wide … with every opening, it looked like the inky stuff was on the verge of welling out between the puckered lids and oozing down Po Chane’s face. If that happened, Sergio had already decided quietly to himself, he was going to scream and run away into the possibly endless spirals of the Flesh Eater’s inner chambers, waving his arms. “Of course,” Bluothesh concluded, “it rather hinges on your faith that the Fergunak will remain loyal.”
“The successful operation of the Draka rather hinges on that,” Sergio sermonised mildly. “If not the entire Six Species.”
“Ah,” Bluothesh nodded. “And it is the criminal Blaran clans, is it not, who have broken that trust – not the Fergunak.”
“Well–”
“We obey the Six Species charter,” Drakamod spoke up smoothly, “while you do not. If we violate the charter when the landbound stumble into positions of weakness and isolation from their great school, it is a violation that serves to strengthen the whole.”
“Ah,” Po Chane repeated, more animatedly. “Eyes and ears and voice of the alpha, of course! And what would you say is the difference between the evolutionary service provided by the Fergunak when they turn on the weak, and the purposeless cultural ruin inflicted by the scofflaw Blaren when they exercise their autonomy?”
“Your status is a function of your relationship with the Molren,” Drakamod began.
“This is a philosophical topic I’m sure we would be happy to discuss with you at length, Captain,” Sergio intervened, keeping his tone polite, “if we didn’t have the more pressing matters of your current situation, your motives, and your hostile act against two civilian starships to address.”
“Of course,” Bluothesh replied mellifluously. “I understand.”
Since boarding the Flesh Eater, Sergio’s eyes had grown accustomed to an almost entirely monochromatic world. The white-on-white of the ship and her strange Captain, the grey of Sergio’s own uniform … the only flash of colour was the occasional glimpse of Drakamod’s feathers in his periphery. So when they stepped through into a stretch of passageway liberally splashed with the red-amber of Molranoid–in this case, evidently Blaran–blood, for a moment Sergio wasn’t sure what had changed. It was too vivid. And then he saw the body, or at least the scraps of body.
“You’ve met my Second, Fwetala Po Chane,” Bluothesh was saying calmly.
“Captain,” Drakamod said, her own voice as melodic as ever but made more urgent by the tightening of her claw-grip. Of course, there was nothing she could do from this distance, with such a purely decorative giela.
“He may have mentioned how thin our hull is stretched,” Bluothesh went on, “although I think we’re still more than capable of shrugging off any ordnance your little warship can throw at us.”
“I…” Sergio was still as disoriented as a rookie, baffled by the bright arcs of colour and the sudden shift in atmosphere.
Kitander Po Chane’s hand swept out again, expansively. Sergio was dimly aware that it had been one of Bluothesh’s nearer hands, and then Drakamod was flying one last time. She arced into the air and separated as she flew into several colourful pieces, rebounding from the blood-daubed walls and landing on the floor with a distant fizz of electronics.
It was only then, as he watched the pieces of giela roll on the floor, that he felt heat wash down the front of his uniform. Sergio realised the knife-blades had also whispered silkily across his own throat.
Darkness closed in.
XIV
A gleaming, shoulder-high humanoid robot straightened from the standby niche on the bridge where it stood alongside a neatly-folded row of identical machines. Interface and indicator lights flicked on around the giela’s flattened head, and it stepped towards Attacus.
“Captain Athel.”
Attacus recognised the customised voice and turn of phrase as belonging to Alpha Drakamod, if only because he had only talked to perhaps a half-dozen of the sharks during his tour, and the overwhelming majority of those conversations had been with the alpha.
“It’s Acting Captain,” he said, “unless you have something to report?”
“You are now the Captain of this ship,” Drakamod said, her synthesised voice warm even while her words were characteristically devoid of compassion. “Captain Po Chane met us at the dock, and turned abruptly hostile. My giela was destroyed and my final signal-burst showed Sergio Malachi falling victim to the same attack. The former Captain may be alive but critically injured, but it seems unlikely.”
Attacus became aware, through the hollow ringing in his skull, that the bridge crew were all watching him intently. Waiting for him to break down, blow up, retaliate.
Waiting for him to let the monkey out.
“Transfer all remaining giela, pad and pulse data to comms,” he said, his own voice sounding distant in his ears. “W’Fale, get what you can from it. Alpha, was there any tactically valuable information in the exchange preceding the hostilities?”
“Po Chane displayed the body of his Second,” Drakamod reported. “Evidently he had been killed in punishment for telling us that the Flesh Eater’s hull was stretched to capacity.”
“Paper-thin,” Attacus murmured, several puzzling details falling into place. His brain continued to deduce and process and strategise, working around the sudden yawning vacuum inside him. Malachi might only have been injured, taken hostage, he said to himself. That would be the logical thing to do. Assuming this ‘Bluothesh’ subscribes to logic. “The Flesh Eater is a field,” he said, “extended to its practical limits. That’s why she’s that severely attenuated shape.”
“That was the theory the former Captain was formulating,” Drakamod agreed. “Although it’s like no field we’ve experienced. Certainly nothing like a relative field. Highly customisable, inside and outside. Capable of containing the Po Chane ship or ships, and the vessels belonging to the Children of the Bluothesh, and – at least according to Po Chane’s own statement – also capable of withstanding attack from this warship. Even at its current extremity of attenuation.”
“What about the Children of the Bluothesh?” Attacus asked. “No contact?”
The giela shook its head. “No, Captain Athel.”
“Karl’s teeth,” W’Fale said from the comm station. “You should see the augmentations full-fledged Po Chane are getting these days.”
W’Fale copied the imaging data across to the officers’ consoles, and a little rustle of unease swept across the Molranoid-heavy bridge. Attacus studied the Blaran’s ghoulish visage clinically, but had to admit that it was unsettling. It took a lot to disturb a Molran, but Kitander ‘Bluothesh’ Po Chane certainly fit the bill.
“So far, we have only seen Kitander and Fwetala Po Chane,” he said, because he had to say something. “One augmented – or at least decorated – and one not. The latter, dead. Most likely at the hands–” he paused as W’Fale coughed lightly, knowing it was an affectation – Molranoids seldom had the physiological need to clear their throats – then went on, “–of Kitander or his immedi
ate subordinates.”
“Still no sign of life from the ship,” Baadan reported. “The civilian vessels are dark, the Flesh Eater is unresponsive. No comms, no evidence of drive or weapons.”
“And if the former Captain’s guess was right, there won’t be,” Attacus said, and realised he’d just said former Captain. He resisted the urge to stand up and tell the bridge that he was going to consider his options. Nothing would be worse, at this moment, than for him to run out to indulge in his weak, emotion-addled humanity. “Open a channel.”
XV
Sergio awoke – and had to admit he was rather surprised to awake – in darkness even clammier than the passageways he’d walked with Bluothesh Po Chane in what he’d taken, in that final split-second of bleeding-out consciousness, to have been the closing minutes of his life.
The darkness was so complete he couldn’t tell the difference between eyes-open and eyes-closed, except that he could feel his lids moving. It was dark to the point of mole-blindness, but it was easy enough to tell that it was a small space. The moisture surrounding him was feverishly warm, strange-smelling, and quite distinct from the recently-drained Fergunakil habitats that had otherwise characterised his experience of the Flesh Eater so far. The scent was sickly, slightly reminiscent of organic remains – particularly of dismembered human or Molranoid -
Bluothesh killed his Second, he thought abruptly, trying to sit up.
He couldn’t. The space was very small, enclosing him at hips, thighs, ribs and upper arms in what was probably the hard, slick hull material of the Flesh Eater. His uniform was sodden, either with his own blood or with whatever was coating the interior of the chamber he’d been stuffed into.
Through industrious wriggling, he managed to work his hand up to his neck. There was no sign of a wound, as far as his wet and shaking fingers could feel. If he was wet with his own blood, he’d been patched up and refilled without leaving a seam, either in his skin or in his memories.
Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 26