Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1)

by Andrew Hindle

  “This is a somewhat overinflated replica,” he said apologetically, misinterpreting the Lawkeep’s body language. “The real heart of the starship, and its two backup crystals, are in a storage unit in the Grandix basements. I’m not sure exactly where. They were placed in special storage to prevent further degradation. We used to have the original on display, but it is considerably smaller than this replica, and not quite so brilliantly colourful.”

  “This whole ship is a replica,” the young Lo-Rider girl said, before Gandicon could further incriminate himself by asking whether they might see the original heart. Hearts, he said to himself with a stirring of excitement, there were multiple hearts. So the hallucination was right about that. “Or it’s only a piece of the original. The Grandis 459 was meant to carry two million people, but the habitats and life support we’ve seen could barely have supported a hundredth of that. And it would’ve been pretty cramped with even twenty thousand crew.”

  “Well,” the guide said, “you’re right, of course. The Grandis 459 was powerhouse, navigation hub, command and control, and a place for the crew – which, yes, was rather fewer than two million – indeed, rather fewer than twenty thousand for that matter, although by all accounts there was some overcrowding and unpleasant measures needed to be taken, by the time they arrived in orbit over Dema. We estimate the Grandis 459 held almost eighteen thousand waking crew at the last. The overwhelming majority of the settlers were stored in a much larger cargo structure that the Grandis 459 was pulling.”

  “‘Stored’?” another of the tourists asked.

  “You know, Jatherton,” her companion said. “Bria told us about it. The settlers were in sleeper pods.”

  “That’s right,” the guide said. “It’s not widely known, but the settlers came here in storage. The cargo section was five times the size of the ship we’re currently touring, and dedicated to high-density storage capsules for close to two million Molren, with highly-contained power distribution and maintenance space and very little else. When they reached orbit the passengers were woken up in sequence, the cargo section partially dismantled, and the passengers ferried down to the surface,” he patted the wall perfunctorily, “in the Grandis.”

  Gandicon frowned. Sleep was, as far as Molren were concerned, just something the local life-forms did. Adapted as the native animals were to living on a planet with regular cycles of day and night, foraging and predation, the inefficient biological rhythm of weariness and rejuvenation made a certain amount of sense for the local biosphere. For Molren, on another hand, it would be a step backwards in effectiveness and efficiency to adopt the practice. An approximation, however, could be induced for the purposes of extending the effective lifespan. It was more like cold storage than sleep, but the name stuck in a casual context.

  It made sense, Gandicon thought, when carrying large numbers of passengers for an extended time, keeping them alive with a minimum of expended energy and nutrients. It was actually a commonly-understood detail of the exodus – or it had been in Gandicon’s youth, despite what the guide said. At least insofar as anything was known about their journey to Dema at all. Many of the passengers had made the journey in storage. He just hadn’t realised quite how many.

  “Where’s the cargo section of the ship now?” the tourist, Jatherton, spared Gandicon the awkwardness of having to ask the question himself.

  Gandicon looked around, suddenly feeling the subconscious tingle of eyes on his back.

  The girl was watching him. She knew, he was suddenly certain, that he wanted to know the answers to these questions. She was watching him letting the other people ask them. Watching him listen. What exactly she thought of it, he couldn’t tell – and that bothered him, because it meant she was discerning something about him while her own motivations remained opaque.

  “In a storage orbit,” the tour guide was telling Jatherton, “in the local asteroid belt.”

  IX

  After the official tour, the visitors were encouraged to continue poking around, exploring and reading up on anything they still felt curious about. It was, Gandicon supposed, an unspoken understanding that anywhere restricted for reasons of security or safety would be sealed.

  Most of the group promptly vanished to continue with whatever they were in this part of the city to do, having dropped into the Grandix building to pass the time. Gandicon found himself strolling through the corridors and stark metal chambers of the Grandis 459 in the company of the probably-Lo-Rider girl.

  “That was well spotted,” he told her, just before the silence between them stretched to uncomfortable levels. “The logistical issues with the ship, and the size of her estimated crew. Takes a certain amount of technical awareness, as well as deductive reasoning–”

  “Wouldn’t expect it of me?” the girl asked dryly, glancing at him sidelong.

  Gandicon returned the look frankly. “To be perfectly blunt,” he said, “no.”

  She grinned, and flicked her tongue briefly – mocking, but not insulting – down the length of her gleaming eye tooth. “My name’s Bason Karturi,” she told him. “My mother was a Lawkeep.”

  Gandicon was surprised, but now that she mentioned it several little nonverbal cues and physiological quirks fell into place. He’d discounted the probability based on her appearance and his own preconceptions about Lawkeep standards, and that was unworthy of him. He’d made slip after slip since arriving at the Grandix building, most of them involving this Karturi girl.

  “Your mother bred with a Lo-Rider?” he asked.

  Bason Karturi’s grin broadened, and she uttered a short laugh. “My fashion sense bred with a Lo-Rider,” she said in amusement. “My father was a citizen with some Three-Sider leanings. Perfectly respectable, even for a Lawkeep to take up with. They were both killed when I was eighty-three – an earthquake, if you can believe it.”

  “The Mosanaville rift?” Gandicon asked. It was the only tectonic event he could recall off-hand in the last four hundred years that had caused significant casualties.

  Karturi shook her head. “Morrowjack. A strike-slip. It was a single jolt, really, but it caused an instability in a transporter pylon and the damn thing fell right on top of the dart they were riding in. Freak accident. They were the only casualties, although Morrowjack was declared unstable and taken off the grid afterwards.”

  “Unfortunate,” Gandicon said, his discomfort growing more acute. He wasn’t entirely certain, now that his vaunted culture-sense had been undermined, how he should react to the news of her parents’ death. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Lawkeeps held to be particularly important, although of course for practical reasons there were drawbacks to losing parental figures and Lawkeeps were not entirely without sentiment. Eighty-three, moreover, was young but not tragically young, to lose one’s parents. But it was all purely guesswork at this stage.

  “I was raised by Lo-Rider family members after Morrowjack,” she said. “That’s where I got most of my unseemly technophilia and cultural sensibility.”

  Gandicon felt the need to reclaim a little of his own Lawkeep credibility, so he remarked, “I saw you making entries on your little handheld thing,” he winced inside, hating the clumsy description but unable to readily identify the technology Karturi had been using. “And you set down at least two small electronic devices while the guide was explaining the navigation and control cores…”

  “They weren’t electronic,” Bason Karturi said, sounding bored. “They were subspectral triangulation nodes.”

  Gandicon shook his head. “I have no idea what that means.”

  She rolled her eyes a little, but she was smiling with a rather endearing mixture of forbearance and enthusiasm. Clearly, explaining things to old fools was fine as long as they were her favourite things. “Very, very small machine complexes,” she said, “designed to establish a connection with nearby comms-capable technology and outline a network once there are enough dots to join up,” she pulled out her handheld device and tapped it, then held
it out to Gandicon. He took it, but was unable to understand any of the data flowing across the interface. “Do you know what the machine mind is?”

  He gave her a narrow look. “Steady on,” he said, “of course I do.”

  “Alright then,” she said, “it’s just that this is … somewhat related.”

  Gandicon frowned. “Sentient computing – some level of machine mind is necessary technology for supercity infrastructure,” he said, “and I can only imagine it was vital for piloting something like the Grandis 459, but … are you saying it’s active in here?”

  Karturi laughed again. “No,” she said, as though he’d just asked her if the Three-Quarters Man lived in the Grandix building. “The closest thing to it is the Koi-Jack municipal hub, and it’s sentient in about the same way as the dart net is. It’s clever, but it’s not self-aware. It’s a common misconception that there are degrees of sentience in artificial systems, as there are arguable cues and levels of complexity in animal brains and stimulus-response models. But it’s not the same with machines – with any machines we know of, anyway. There’s a very specific protocol, a fixed level, a system has to surpass before it’s a self-actualising mind. Anything less, and it’s just an adaptive computer system.

  “The machine mind might have once been built into the ship – like you say, it was probably vital to run the thing – but it looks like when the ship separated and became a landing shuttle, that’s all she became. The machine mind, if it exists, has been disconnected for thousands of years,” she squinted at him, and held out her hand for the data device. “So,” she said, as he handed it back to her, “how are you going to get there?”

  “Get where?” Gandicon asked, pleased at how steady his voice was.

  Bason shrugged her meaty upper shoulders. “The Bharriom crystal storage vault down in the basement,” she said. “The cargo section in the asteroid belt. Back to the city in the centre of the universe. Take your pick.”

  X

  Gandicon Ghåål studied Bason Karturi for a few seconds.

  “I asked one question too many,” he said eventually. “That was it, wasn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t any one question,” Bason disagreed, “it was a lot of little things. Like I told you,” she said, “my mother was a Lawkeep.”

  Gandicon grunted. “Alright,” he said, and they started together along the corridor, “I’d like to see the actual heart of the starship. I came rather a long way to see it, I was a bit surprised to find they’d stuck a replica up here.”

  Bason nodded. “I don’t suppose you’re going to want to tell me why you want to see the heart,” she said, “even though we’re both perfectly well aware that there’s a really juicy reason that you’re unwilling to share with me,” Gandicon smiled, and Bason nodded again. “You’re full-blooded Lawkeep, aren’t you?”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Alright,” Karturi echoed his grunt of a few moments ago, “I’ll tell you why I’m here, then. In confidence and in the knowledge that you’ll take measured and appropriate steps. And in the hope that those steps will include sharing your information with me, as logic dictates.”

  “Go ahead,” Gandicon said, feeling gratified. Karturi’s mother had taught her well, in her early years. “The code of law requires a burden of knowledge–”

  “I’m here because the machine mind commandeered my home’s parallel data node system and told me this planet is going to be destroyed.”

  Gandicon stopped dead, and sighed. “Fine,” he said, “I don’t suppose there’s any point in trying to hide my recognition of that story.”

  “None whatsoever,” Bason said, sounding pleased.

  “I thought you said the machine mind had been disconnected for thousands of years.”

  “Well, that’s what I came here to find out,” Karturi replied. “That’s what I’m trying to triangulate here. Turns out there’s no machine mind in the Grandix building. Nothing more complex than the city admin computers. So the machine mind source – the thing that contacted me – has to be the main body of the ship.”

  “Up in the asteroid belt,” Gandicon said.

  “Up in the asteroid belt,” Karturi agreed. “So what about you?”

  “What about me?” Gandicon hedged.

  “Did the machine mind hack into your gyrophone and black-grey you the same message?” she stuttered her lower hands up and down in rapid-fire vertical sequence. “Planet hold-pause danger hold extreme hold approaching pause-pause cheeky young whippersnappers hold-pause–”

  “You have a real lip on you,” Gandicon said, amused. “Don’t you?”

  Bason looked sceptical. “Are you going to try to tell me you don’t have a gyrophone?”

  He laughed. “Actually I do,” he said, “but it belonged to my mother. I haven’t used it in three thousand years. I think the local greystation went null before my Second Prime.”

  “Vortex’s balls,” Bason chortled.

  Gandicon laughed again, surprised at how easy it was – and, on the heels of that thought, how long it had been since he’d genuinely done so. “Frankly I’m amazed you even knew what it was, let alone how black-grey protocols worked.”

  “So where did your message come from?” Bason asked. “I assume it said the same thing mine did?”

  “I suppose it did, at that,” Gandicon admitted. “They are coming, the death of your world approaches on silent wings of black steel, perhaps they will be a hundred years, perhaps a thousand, if they learn you are here, they will be upon you tomorrow…”

  Karturi’s eyes widened. “Wow,” she said, “that’s … quite a lot more lyrical than the message I got,” when Gandicon gave her a look of polite inquiry, she recited, “superluminal shadow-signal degradation / reverse / high risk of back-trace and planetary intercept / unable to plot density curve / sub-real conversion to normal signal = null.”

  “Poetic.”

  “What I took it to mean was that something in this old starship’s engine had left some sort of volatile or reactive trail,” Karturi said, “which was going to trigger a faster-than-light event – a natural phenomenon, in other words, like a solar flare or a supernova, only faster and nastier. And that it was going to destroy Dema.”

  “From my source, it seems some sort of hostile alien civilisation is spreading in this direction,” Gandicon said, “and when they find us – perhaps when they stumble on this trail from the ship that your machine mind’s data was talking about – they’ll be here fast, and they’ll apparently be unstoppable.”

  “Our military infrastructure is minimal,” Karturi said, “and very much a legacy subculture. The Lawkeeps are about the closest we have to a military or a police force. I did a bit of digging and it seems pretty likely that the reason we came here in the first place was because it was far enough away from everything that we wouldn’t need to fight anymore.”

  “Turns out it may not have been far enough,” Gandicon said, “or our forebears failed to take all the variables of encroaching sentients into account,” he frowned. “My source called them the children of our ancestral enemy, whatever that means. This evidently goes back to the days before our migration.”

  “Maybe we were fleeing from persecution,” Bason said, not sounding particularly interested. “You keep mentioning your source.”

  They rounded a corner and entered an almost-deserted cafeteria, and Gandicon sighed. “Let’s eat,” he said, “and I’ll tell you all about my source.”

  XI

  They ate mediocre dumplings and shared a jug of rather tasty fruit juice that Bason insisted was artificial but Gandicon was fairly sure was the real thing. He had, however, learned not to underestimate the young woman or the big city’s over-mechanised lack of authenticity – not to mention his own inability to cope with either – so he didn’t make an issue of it. He was surprised, again, at how relaxed he felt and how just letting go of some things improved his outlook.

  It also improved his likability, at least insofar as his s
hort-time exposure to single-sample-size Bason Karturi was concerned. He told her about his hallucinations, his visions of the glowing blue child, the things the visitation had told him and the way it seemed to intersect with everyday physics. Karturi listened to this without mockery or doubt – indeed, as he continued, the girl grew steadily more excited.

  “You know what you’re probably seeing?” she asked him. Gandicon lifted his ears politely and sipped his juice. “It sounds like a Bharriom phantom.”

  Gandicon had no idea what that was, but he pieced it together. “So when he told me to find the hearts…”

  “Right. He was telling you to get closer to the source of his transmissions, so he could focus in on you more effectively.”

  “If that was the case, wouldn’t he have been showing up more successfully now I’m at least in the same building as the heart of the starship?” Gandicon asked. “Not to mention the two apparent spares?”

  Karturi shook her head. “Not necessarily,” she said, “and this is just a guess, keep in mind – I think that here in the Grandix building, over there in Bonshoo Drop, halfway here in a dart, those are all on the same level of magnitude – they’re all the same distance from the Bharriom’s perspective. When he said you need to find them, he may have meant you needed to actually touch them,” she looked around, as though hoping to see the glowing child. “Have you seen the boy – the phantom – since getting here?”

  “No,” Gandicon confessed. “Although I imagine if I wait around and don’t make any progress, he’ll reappear and nag me.”

  Bason smiled, but she looked more impressed than he’d ever seen her in their admittedly short association. “The source of Bharriom crystal’s energy is largely unknown,” she said, “probably even before we came to Dema, but even less so now. We never really understood it, we only understood enough to harness some of the crystal’s output. But it fundamentally differs from ordinary crystalline energy structures. It’s probably better described as a synaptic lattice – a mind, in crystalline form. A mind of an entirely different order to sentient minds as we know them. Different from us, different from the machine mind. Capable of … a great deal, depending on the amount of crystal at hand.”