Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  Decay raised his hairless eyebrows. “You wrote it in Xidh,” he remarked. To his credit – although it was difficult to imagine what Glomulus could possibly do – he didn’t lean closer to read the delicate swirls and pictograms of the sentence Cratch had written three times on the senso-flimsy:

  I will escape from the brig, decapitate the shit-dancing bat-head and fuck its nose-holes until its brain finally dies.

  I will escape from the brig, decapitate the shit-dancing bat-head and fuck its nose-holes until its brain finally dies.

  I will escape from the brig, decapitate the shit-dancing bat-head and fuck its nose-holes until its brain finally dies.

  “That’s the idea,” Decay said coolly, “although ten times is probably more likely to get the concept firmly imprinted on your behavioural template. If that’s really what you want,” his ears flicked, and he glanced back up at the convict with a bright smile and a swift but clearly-deliberate stroke of his tongue down his elongated eye tooth. A Molranoid insult, albeit a mild and quite dated one. “I didn’t know you could write Xidh so fluently.”

  “Well, now it’s a secret shared by you, me, and anyone who reads my tracking and supervisory database for warning markers,” Glomulus smiled.

  Decay smiled back – although again, really, how could you tell? “I’m also pleased to see the ‘shit-dancer’ detail there,” he said, making a vague little gesture with his upper right hand. “It suggests that you can be taught the difference between a Molran and a Blaran, after all.”

  “Oh yes, I have this excellent method for remembering,” Cratch replied. “I just remind myself that Steña Oyana MassKoi was a Molran, until she decided to take a ride on the wild child, and then she became a Blaran.”

  “Yes,” Decay said equably, “that’s a sensible way of keeping it all straight,” he inclined his head infinitesimally, and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” Cratch said, “I just meant to say…” Decay paused, and turned back, ears lowering. “I’m glad the female died,” he went on in an earnest, sincere voice. “The one that married you, I mean. Steña. It was fast. And her degradation is over. They might’ve even let her into Molran Heaven, right?”

  “I’m glad too,” Decay replied, after a long pause.

  Glomulus lifted his own pale eyebrows. “You don’t say.”

  “It’s always good to have confirmation,” the Blaran noted, “that you and I are each on the right sides of this wall.”

  He turned and strolled away along the corridor. He’d left the flux open, Glomulus mused, the plate solid but two-way transparent. He could have punished Cratch by leaving it transparent from the outside in but a solid wall from the prisoner’s perspective. A touch of the control panel would have done it.

  This way there was still nothing to see, but it was a dynamic nothing. And his next inspector wouldn’t sneak up on him, except in the unlikely event of a remote polarity change from one of the bridge consoles. Which he wouldn’t put past Sally, for example, but still seemed unlikely.

  “A miss,” he murmured contemplatively, looking down at his precious sheet of flimsy. “A very palpable miss.”

  Z-LIN (NOW)

  Commander Z-Lin Clue stood at the entrance to the oxygen farm arc that they’d all come to think of as ‘Thord’s room’, and would probably now have to start thinking of as ‘the rumpus room’. At least until such time as the juveniles within began to whittle down their own numbers and the idea of it being a rumpus room became too sad to tolerate.

  She sighed. It felt like she spent a lot of her time sighing. The burden of command was one thing, but this was the death of a civilian. A real civilian, a passenger, not like the under-qualified, technically-uncertified but nevertheless active non-Corps crew under her charge. A passenger, no less, who had been companion – and perhaps much, much more – to an aki’Drednanth. Unless the seven pups in the farm decided to back them up over this, the information would most likely cascade through the Drednanth Dreamscape as soon as they returned to subluminal space. However that sort of information happened to cascade anywhere, which was a bit beyond Clue’s sphere of expertise.

  And if the Drednanth got upset, then the Molren would be upset. And the last thing they needed at that time was the Fleet being pissed at them as well. They already had more than enough enemies … although Z-Lin accepted the fact that she, of all people, probably shouldn’t complain too loudly about that.

  Frankly, the idea that at least five or six aki’Drednanth might soon also be dying on board her ship wasn’t something she wanted to focus on, even if that was a series of deaths the Drednanth would probably wholeheartedly approve of. It was almost easier to think of the very real possibility that the potential unfriendlies among AstroCorps and the Fleet had all been destroyed at this stage, by an unknown but possibly-Damorakind menace.

  And it made her want to sigh all over again that she had just drawn a line between her civilian-but-non-Corps crew and actual civilians, with rights and identities and an existence outside this modular’s battered old hull.

  All told, they had been flying for eight years. Eight years, two months, five days. It was an easy one to remember, because their launch had been at year’s turn. Although to call it a launch was missing an opportunity to say that time we scrambled onto a modular in the middle of the night and sort of shot our way out of a chrysanthemum while being fired on by three separate governments, and everybody thought it was a year’s turn lightshow.

  They’d been celebrating their fourth year in space back when they had met up with the Dark Glory Ascendant. It was weird to think that that awkward series of incidents was now a halfway mark in their mission.

  It wasn’t unheard-of for long-haul AstroCorps tours to last ten years. Some even stretched to twenty, although those did tend to be far more professional, on-the-books and full-Corps efforts than their odd assortment, and the longer a tour the more Molranoid-heavy the crew tended to become. For a Blaran like Decay, a young fellow with millennia in front of him, a twenty-year tour was nothing.

  Even for a human, with a life expectancy of a mere tenscore, it was doable. A commitment, to be sure, but doable. Heck, from here it would take them the better part of five years to get Janus to his long-overdue appointment on … what had the planet even been called? Admittedly the urgency had gone out of that journey, even for Janus himself, when the rest of his team had been killed and all their samples destroyed … but dropping him off was still officially on their to-do list. It was just constantly a few steps down the priority chain, and that was before they had been skipping-stoned across the galaxy by the Artist. And if you asked Janus about it, he generally seemed pretty fatalistic and relaxed. He was an odd one, and that was coming from the Commander of this ship. Z-Lin had long suspected it was because, deep down, he really wanted to be a ship’s counsellor instead of a horticultural mood analyst.

  Clue had most certainly been on shorter tours than this before. She’d been a space-hound from a very early age, from a long line of space-hounds, and she knew perfectly well that things happened between the stars. Horrible things, usually. And even without the help of a mad Molran inventor and his teleportation drive, you could very easily spend your entire life skipping from place to place and never again run into a single living soul. If you were lucky. They’d been very fortunate, on balance, that their navigation hadn’t been entirely fried when the exchange had turned the interior of the ship into a molecular liquidiser. And again, she could hardly complain about the duration of their journey – she should probably, in fact, be grateful that everyone seemed too preoccupied with their own problems to notice her acceptance. Usually.

  The point was, since their modular was running on something of a blended crew format, there was a lot of leeway in terms of autonomy and course correction. It also happened to make things easier when recruiting people of special skill-sets, and conducting operations that may or may not be in breach of certain official guidelines. Did it make things awkward when the c
ivilians started yammering about not being military personnel and questioning their orders and asking to go home to visit their old mums? Yes. But there were definitely benefits, too.

  The problem with having a full AstroCorps crew, she’d reflected on occasion, was that it rather paradoxically bound the ship to stricter parameters. If, for example, the Tramp had been manned by a full-Corps certified crew, they probably would have had to return to home base for a full inquest after losing even a fraction of their ranking officers. Losing all but ten people, and filling up the ship with misprinted ables, and then just setting their eyes on some largely-hypothetical horizon and continuing to fly with teeth gritted and knuckles white on the control consoles … well, their adventure probably would have ended even more spectacularly than it had begun, with a court-martial on top.

  It all depended on the mission, obviously, as to whether starships reported back to larger settlements more often or less often, even with a full-Corps complement. And the Tramp had run into some exceptional circumstances, it had to be said. Declivitorion was a big place, even though it was right out on the edge of the galaxy. It should have been their ticket to a fresh start, even if it had also posed some unusual challenges. Who could have expected it to have been completely destroyed?

  Actually, she didn’t like to think about that, either.

  Wait, she remembered Decay asking her, not too long ago, are we one of the few AstroCorps crews left, or not?

  Z-Lin recognised the fact that she was loitering, and had been loitering for almost ten minutes now, not wanting to go inside. It occurred to her that it didn’t really matter. The aki’Drednanth were already aware of her. If they could band together to burn the brains of an entire school-fleet of Fergunak, they could certainly tell when someone was standing at their door. They were everywhere on the ship.

  While the investigation into Dunnkirk’s murder went on, they were continuing through soft-space towards their first stop on the long path back from the edge, Mobi. First in a long line of mining settlements that, like the farm worlds of the barmy arm they’d followed out to the edge, were sparsely-populated – not to mention more than a little isolated and quirky.

  The flight would take nine weeks. Nine weeks to find out who killed Dunnkirk and how to deal with it. Of course, Mobi wasn’t that big. If they hadn’t settled this in nine weeks, they could always pass Mobi by and head to the next system in. Then again, Z-Lin thought, if Sally couldn’t solve a murder in nine weeks, she’d probably disembark at Mobi and take up mining.

  There was a problem with the case, Clue brooded, still aware that she was standing outside the heavy freezer door and putting off going in. Basically everyone on board had been with somebody else. They could all vouch for each other. The only one without an alibi, aside from Janya, was the Captain himself.

  Damn it, Skell, she thought to herself, I hope you know what you’re doing. And not just for your own sake.

  In fact … not for your sake at all.

  She adjusted the thermal for what must have been the eighteenth time, and stepped into the farm.

  They hadn’t had a chance, yet, to recommission the chamber that had previously held the Drednanth ‘seed’, Thord’s huge combination ice-sculpture, and knowledge repository. With the space now occupied by seven increasingly-active aki’Drednanth pups, it seemed unlikely they’d get a chance to replace the interior shelves and re-stock them with oxygen blocks any time soon, but the farm was running reasonably close to normal efficiency at this stage so there was no great urgency.

  It was a much larger space than it had seemed with the seed occupying a lot of the floorspace, especially with a pair of massive Bonshooni and a colossal aki’Drednanth squeezed in alongside. The pups had moved back into the main chamber after the successful launch of the seed, but Z-Lin hadn’t been in to see them since their leap to relative speed and the unpleasant series of events that had occurred shortly afterwards. She also hadn’t had a chance to sleep.

  “Hello?” she said, her breath misting thinly in the air. There was a solid layer of crushed ice and gritty snow on the floor, picked up from The Warm where they had taken their passengers on board in the first place. Waffa had used it to seat the seed properly in the otherwise unpadded holding space. Now, it was banked up in a series of little ridges and lumps, and – yes – the pups were concealed behind, and in one case beneath the drifts. As she stepped fully into the room and hauled the door closed behind her, a couple of fluffy white-furred heads poked out to observe her calmly. A third shuffled out on fuzzy rear paws and soft grey knuckles from behind the huge empty shell of Thord’s envirosuit, which a janitorial had dragged back into the farm arc after her departure. “Sorry to interrupt your whatever-it-was you were doing in here.”

  The seven knee-high aki’Drednanth – there were still seven, she confirmed after a quick head count, and then cursed herself for her humanocentric cynicism – emerged from their various hiding places and stood, low-set eyes blinking large and dark on either side of their heavy but still-tuskless jaws. One of them, the one that had emerged from beneath the snowdrift, shook herself off and gave a mewling half-yawn, half-growl from the back of her frosty grey-black throat.

  “So,” Clue said to fill in the silence that followed, “you guys aren’t … fighting over stuff yet? We’re going to get another couple of food dispensers churning out aki’Drednanth chow in a day or two, if you … need more,” she trailed off.

  Given the reality of their situation, the non-Corps nature of their crew and the tension they were all already under, Z-Lin had agreed with Sally and Waffa that full transparency about the investigation was the only reasonable course. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be transparent about, and the result was inevitably going to be supposition, suspicion, finger-pointing and a whole lot of tension. She’d determined that the transparency should apply to the aki’Drednanth even if the tension might be something they managed to avoid. In fact, being aki’Drednanth, they probably got a double dose of transparency. No matter what people said about aki’Drednanth not being able to read minds as such, there was a lot going on behind the words as such that made Z-Lin uneasy.

  For that matter, they might not even be so young and innocent as to ignore the atmosphere among their strange hairless surrogate family. It was easy to look at them and see cuddly little white cubs, but Thord had said it herself. They were ancient, and had been since before they were born. All the more reason to come clean with them now.

  “You girls know Dunnkirk,” she said, “the Bonshoon who was friends with your … with Thord.”

  She already knew they could understand what she was saying. Maybe they’d spent the last twenty or thirty years of their countdown to re-fleshulation learning how to speak AstroCorps standard. They had access to the minds of every Drednanth and aki’Drednanth to ever speak to a human, after all, even if these particular ones had never done so.

  One by one, and from all sides, the aki’Drednanth pups padded and crunched across towards her. Clue fought down the urge to flee. It wasn’t as if that would do any good.

  “Yes.”

  Z-Lin managed not to piss her thermal. The pup that had been behind Thord’s envirosuit had also emerged, and Clue realised she was wearing one of the blue webbing gloves from the suit’s voice synthesiser. It hadn’t been the ghost of Thord speaking. It had been the pup, playing with the glove and speaking through the suit. To be honest, Z-Lin felt ill-at-ease trying to stop her.

  “Okay, but we’re getting that voice remodulated at least,” the Commander said gruffly to herself, then coughed and glanced around at the aki’Drednanth. “Yes? Right, yes. Dunnkirk. I-”

  “Yes no,” the heartbreakingly-familiar voice came once again from the open-fronted but still monolithic envirosuit. “Yes no yes no yes no yes stonk stonk stonk shit shit.”

  Right, Clue thought, not talking. Fiddling with the gear. The pups, old and wise and full of knowledge as they might be, still lacked the fine motor control that
could only be ingrained with growth. “Okay,” she said mildly, “there’s no need to be nasty.”

  Glomulus Cratch being in Whye’s office at the time of the murder had been at once positive and negative. It had provided him with an alibi, as he had been prompt to point out himself, but there were really only so many explanations for a corpse in the medical bay, and the order Clue had receiver to get Cratch out of there was depriving them of the easiest one. It was also keeping half of the crew, possibly more, from lynching their only real medic. On the other hand – and this was where you started needing as many hands as Decay – it was putting the murderer-hat on somebody else. Somebody who probably wasn’t already a murderer. Not one as infamous as Cratch, anyway. Somebody whose turning out to be a murderer might finish the job of tearing the Tramp apart.

  Which left her in the delightful command position of being required to conduct an investigation, but also find a way of hiding the perpetrator’s guilt for the greater good. It had occurred to her almost immediately, in fact, that this was most likely the reason Cratch had been put in Janus’s office. But that just raised even more uncomfortable questions, and she still couldn’t figure out if it made him more or less likely to be the killer.

  These things were always good news and bad news, as the Rip himself liked to say.

  The aki’Drednanth with the glove had fallen silent, paw held out and leathery grey fingers extended, looking down at the glove as if unsure how it had made the sounds and what she ought to do about them. She had needle-like puppy-claws, Z-Lin noticed, but they seemed to be able to extend and retract. Now the pup was doing that, fascinated. Learning how to do it again, perhaps, after half a million years as pure consciousness.