He was rather proud of himself for that.
SALLY (THEN)
It wasn’t until the landing party had departed for the surface, and the wide stretch of abandoned ships carefully arranged around the outskirts of a luxurious spaceport, that NightMary finally got in touch with the bridge.
There hadn’t been any trace of ships in orbit. Not outsider ships, anyway. As Bunzo himself had said, there hadn’t been any AstroCorps vessels docked at the parking arrays and they didn’t find any more of them drifting in orbit. There was also no wreckage, which was at once reassuring and worrying. When they did find evidence of starships in the broad hinterland around the spaceport, and further discovered that the starship graveyard might be several ships deep as well as several hundred square miles in extent, the ‘reassuring’ and ‘worrying’ neatly switched places.
“How many missions did they say had been lost in here?” Sally said with a frown.
“They were just the ones anyone heard about,” Janya said. “There seem to be ships of all kinds down there – and ages.”
The voice came unannounced, without any sort of incoming transmission or opportunity to accept or reject a direct hail. It was a voice from within the ship, only patently not from the ship’s crew. Sally might almost have said the voice sounded like their old XO, high-and-mighty Commander Choya Alapitarius W’Tan, except this throaty female voice was human rather than the soft-choral product of a Molran’s windpipes. And it wasn’t saying things like ‘the following is at least a fourth reminder’ and ‘for the benefit of the hard of hearing’ and ‘file all reports using the template or – I cannot stress this enough – they will be discarded by the system and make additional work for more competent crewmembers’. Which was usually a bit of a giveaway for W’Tan.
“Why have you come?”
Sally and Janya were on the bridge, Waffa and Contro in main engineering. There were contingents of eejits with basic security configurations in place at both locations and everyone was under instructions to maintain a strict buddy system at all times. Nobody quite knew what to be ready for, so they were trying to be ready for anything. Sally had a screen on her tactical console showing a live feed of the Rip’s cell, and she glanced at it out of the corner of her eye at least once every twenty seconds. He was still apparently fast asleep, his cell walls solid and polarised and – aside from the visual feed through the bumper’s filament-thin sensor – powered-down.
She hadn’t been over to check on him personally since they’d put him under back at the boundary buoy, and that was nagging at her. They’d been on high alert as they picked their way through night-side near-planet space to their current geosynchronous orbital location, but all had remained quiet. Bunzo had vanished from their comms with a final jovial “goodnight,” but no other interference had taken place. The dark side of the planet was quiet and thronging with smaller machines, similar to the satellites they’d first encountered but not as large or autonomous.
She’d have to go to the brig and check on him soon. Of course, her brain was telling her this was pointless, because the brig was in shut-down and she would just be looking at blank walls, but at least she’d be able to see those with her own eyes. If she didn’t go and look, she was going to drive herself to distraction.
Sally glanced at Janya after the human-version-of-Commander-W’Tan voice spoke. Here comes round two, she thought, and saw the odd, deceptively frail academic was clearly thinking the same thing.
“This is Chief Tactical-”
“-Officer Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed of the of the starship designated AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400,” the voice said, “although you identify for simplicity’s sake as Astro Tramp 400. Yes, I know who you are. If I didn’t, I probably would have asked that.”
“Just observing protocol,” Sally said mildly. “We’re here looking for survivors or information about another AstroCorps ship-”
“Denbrough,” the voice said, “which was searching for Yojimbo. I know that too. If I’d wanted to know what your mission was, I probably would have asked that.”
“Well, you asked why we’ve come,” Sally said. “We’ve come because it would have been very difficult to complete our mission if we hadn’t.”
“Hm,” the voice disapproved.
“I don’t mean to be glib,” Sally gave it her best diplomatic effort. “Tense situations have that effect on me sometimes.”
“Why didn’t you refuse your mission?” the voice asked. “Based on the survivability statistics surrounding incursions on the Bunzolabe, you would have been well within your rights to refuse orders on the grounds of likelihood of ship loss with all hands. At the very least it would have forced a command review of the orders and crew complement. And the margins are even wider for non-Corps crew, which you are. Unless you have some agenda that has left your tiny, tiny crew unwilling or unable to submit itself to higher AstroCorps authority and the scrutiny that involves.”
“Would you mind introducing yourself?” Sally asked. “We’d be interested in knowing who we are addressing,” she paused. “Are you Mary?” she hazarded.
“I am NightMary,” the voice said, just a little coldly. “Only Horatio calls me Mary.”
“That’s where we heard the name,” Sally nodded. “Sorry, but he didn’t tell us not to call you-”
“I maintain security for the night-side of the planet,” NightMary continued. “Did he tell you that? Did he tell you that I would not approve of your armaments? Did he tell you what happens to disturbers of the peace who come into Sleepytown?”
“No,” Sally said calmly, “he didn’t tell us any of that.”
“You should never have come here this way,” NightMary said, and now her voice sounded a little sad. “It’s still not too late. Leave the landing party on the surface and go. I won’t stop you.”
“Sorry,” Sally said, “but we can’t leave half our crew down there with no hope of escape. They’re depending on us. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t see a relative suppressor in orbit.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, The Bun gave us a set of commands for a quick relative skip from the boundary to near-orbit,” Sally said, “and tracing that backwards would get us almost back to our point of origin. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways for you to stop us so I’m not about to try it – but like I say, we don’t have any intention of leaving the lander down there.”
“It doesn’t matter what your intentions might be,” NightMary said, “there is only one way for you to escape this place alive. And I don’t need to suppress your relative drive with a big, clunky old field. I can make it suppress itself.”
There was a pause that Sally decided, after about eight seconds, was an awkward pause.
“Yeah,” she said, “we have this device cutting off access to-”
“It doesn’t matter,” NightMary snapped. “There is no returning to that foolish robot Bitterpill, not with the codes Horatio gave you. They will already have been altered as you were entering them, and if you attempt to reverse course they will drop you straight into the sun.”
“Just one of the many reasons we really weren’t considering it,” Sally said soothingly. “But we don’t want to leave our friends,” she paused. “Did you say there was only one way for us to escape the Bunzolabe alive?” she went on. “Assuming for a moment that you want us to leave, that would be very valuable information and we’d greatly appreciate it if you told us. It’s the sort of sharing situation we call win-win.”
NightMary didn’t respond for a long time. “You have come to a very dangerous place,” she said, just as Sally had decided she was not going to reply at all, “dangerously uninformed.”
“Sounds like us,” Janya said almost inaudibly.
“Did you make that amazing starship lasagne down there?” Sally attempted to change the subject, sparing Adeneo a not-entirely-disapproving glance.
The spaceport itself se
emed to have mostly been set aside for small landers, Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World’s own deluxe ferry service, and big tourist cruisers capable of making planetfall and turning into hotels in their own right. Of course, nobody came to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World back in its heyday and stayed aboard their own ships, but Sally supposed you had to disembark somehow. The spaceport was like an enormous reception area, and as far as they could tell from orbit, it was in bright and gleaming working order after six hundred and eighty-one years of seclusion. The great mounded plain of starships arrayed around it told a different story, but the spaceport’s lights all seemed to be on and its navigation and other systems seemed to be running smoothly.
It was also utterly deserted. Of organic life, anyway.
They’d debated landing at the spaceport and walking to the wide, slumped disc of the Denbrough, but the hulks were tight-packed and formed what amounted to hilly terrain over which the team would have to climb, both out and back unless they split their party and half of them stayed on the lander. Z-Lin made it very clear that they would be staying together, and as close as possible at all times to the lander and escape, as undependable as anything electronically-controlled might be inside the Bunzolabe. Leaving the lander parked in a haunted spaceport and going clambering over fifty half-collapsed starship hulls to their destination, while an unknown multitude of robotic entities rallied and the starships themselves came back to life under Bunzo’s command … it all hardly bore thinking about, and Sally agreed with the Commander entirely.
But the Denbrough was there, or she certainly seemed to be. They’d received an automated nodback and identification from the AstroCorps Rep and Rec modular, as well as a stored notification from Zero-Dark-Magi, the Denbrough’s Chrysanthemum of origin. A lot of the communication was scrambled or partial, and all of it was suspect, but the landing party had gone down there anyway.
In a sense, it seemed the crew of the Denbrough had even succeeded in their goal of ascertaining Yojimbo’s whereabouts. The Rep and Rec modular was sagging heavily across the upper decks of the massive, still-mostly-cylindrical bulk of a warship that they were pretty sure was the warship in question. It looked as though you could access both vessels from the valley between them and the next ships along, but it was hard to tell from orbit.
Yojimbo had not sent back any kind of nod or acknowledgement, and seemed to be completely dead.
“They had to be safely decommissioned,” NightMary said, her calm returning. “They posed a security hazard.”
“Why not just ask them to leave, like you asked us to?”
“Perhaps I should rephrase. They posed a security hazard anywhere except grounded.”
“And the crews?”
“Did I give the impression that I was referring purely to the decommissioning of the ships?” NightMary asked. “Forgive me, but I have a rather unspecific point of view on issues such as the division between organic and electronic components.”
“Right,” Sally said, “so we can assume they’re all dead.”
“You don’t sound worried.”
“Oh, I’m pretty worried,” Sally said, glancing at Janya again. “I’m just a consummate professional. If they’re dead, I can’t bring them back. In the meantime, we’re still alive – for now.”
The bridge door opened and Janya’s pair of eejit lab assistants, Whitehall and Westchester, stepped into the room. Sally frowned, her feeling of unease deepening when she saw Janya frowning slightly as well. The two towering fabricants, about the closest they had to correctly-configured ables, were imprinted with a physicist template – Whitehall – and a biochemist template – Westchester. And while their glitches could be spectacular they were rare, and somewhat controllable, and the two of them recovered quickly.
Right now, though, they looked as blank and confused as a pair of eejits ever had.
They had been assigned, Sally saw after a quick check of her scenario plan that did nothing to alleviate her disquiet, to one of the big guns, and tasked with manually disconnecting the mini-whorl payload delivery system if it looked like a hostile electronic consciousness was about to take over the weapon. Most of the eejits had been set with a standard buddy system minimum of five, because they were eejits, but Westchester and Whitehall were a special case.
“Whitehall,” Janya said, taking care to address the eejit who wasn’t likely to be knocked into the next personality-fragment over by an arguably existentialist question, “why are you here?”
“You … sent for us?” Whitehall replied.
“No,” Janya said slowly. “No, we didn’t.”
“You should be watching Mater,” Sally pointed out.
“We disconnected the feeder and locked it down,” Whitehall said, “before leaving it unattended. We thought you needed-”
The ship suddenly seemed to drop, and then buck sideways under their feet, her entire hull ringing like a bell at the same moment. Sally grimaced as the emergency exchange buffer, responsible for taking the brunt of catastrophic internal inertia and a fairly mediocre example of the technology at the best of times, rendered them all momentarily weightless in order to keep them from breaking their legs on the bouncing floor. The little framed picture of Ital Constable Zeegon kept on his console fell soundlessly to the floor.
Alerts and alarms and further rumblings began to rock the ship even as Sally and the eejits staggered on their feet. Janya, without the benefit of combat training or superior muscle-mass, fell to the floor and then bounced back to her feet, wide-eyed.
“What-”
Sally was already slapping at her console and swearing. “Hull breach,” she said, “we just lost one of the big guns,” she looked up grimly at the little scientist and the two eejits standing protectively on either side of her, as well as the small cluster of security eejits on the far side of the bridge. “If I had to guess, I’d say it just detonated on itself, and if I had to guess which one it was, I’d say it was Mater.”
Their twin mini-whorl guns, Pater and Mater, were housed in special chambers on the opposite side of the primary bridge deck, each with an independent payload store and semi-independent power supply. They were set as far from the primary bridge, and from each other, as the circumference of the modular would allow. Godfire was powerful stuff, and Sally had time to reflect that if NightMary had really wanted them dead, all she’d needed to do was initiate the mini-whorls in the payload system itself.
Activating the entire stockpile, of course, could have caused an implosion capable of doing serious damage to the upper atmosphere of the planet. Not to mention NightMary’s own orbital infrastructure.
“Was it…?” Janya asked, clinging to another console as the ship gave another shudder and fell still. They seemed to still be in orbit, although the crazy tilt of the night-shrouded planet beneath them was a clear sign that their position had been severely bumped. She glanced sidelong at the eejits.
“Was it us?” Westchester asked, his big beefy forehead wrinkling in as much concern as an eejit was capable of showing under most circumstances. “Did we make Mater blow up?”
“No,” Sally said positively, “don’t worry about it, no way. Not even our worst meat-sacks could sabotage the mini-whorl guns to self-destruct. Too many safety measures. Especially not if all they had access to was the feeder system. As a matter of fact, by manually disconnecting that you might just have saved our backsides.”
The doors opened again and Waffa and Contro dashed onto the bridge. “Mater just topped herself,” Waffa said without preamble.
“What about the secondary bridge?” Sally demanded. “I’m getting nothing from my console.”
The secondary bridge was on the far side of the exchange plane, two levels down and opposite the primary bridge. That placed it two decks beneath – or above, if you were on that side of the exchange – the big gun chambers. They were still well-separated from critical systems and there were extensive containment measures, but it was just a fact of modular desi
gn. The secondary bridge had to be somewhere, and so did the mini-whorls.
“Yeah, monitoring’s down in that sector,” Waffa reported, actually accessing one of the Operations consoles rather than his wristwatch for once. “But it doesn’t look like any major damage – aside from Mater being erased, that is. We’re not venting atmosphere or falling out of orbit.”
“As if I would let you crash,” NightMary said.
“Communications with the lander have also failed,” Janya added, having crossed to Decay’s station. “But at least the auto-repair seems to be on top of that, because I have no idea-”
“Um,” Waffa pointed at the ceiling. “Anyone want to tell me who that was?”
“That?” Sally grunted. “That was NightMary.”
“Oh. Who is NightMary?”
“Ha ha ha! Sounded like our old Commander!” Contro laughed. “Remember her? ‘There are two kinds of nuclear transpersion physicists! Molren and Damorakind! And I’m only certain about Molren!’ Ha ha ha!”
“I thought much the same thing,” Sally admitted, and then jerked her head at Waffa. “You and Janya and the eejits, go check what’s left of Mater,” she said, “and the secondary bridge. And suit up, just in case our host decides to open the emergency bulkheads in that section.”
“You know the suits also have computer guidance and automation,” Janya said when NightMary didn’t deign to respond to Sally’s insinuation, “that means NightMary could quite easily just open my suit if she decides to.”
“Yes,” Sally admitted, “but I was hoping you didn’t realise it. Just check on everything around Mater’s chamber, we can’t rule out the possibility that the damage reports or auto-repair systems have been infiltrated.”
“What are you going to be checking?” Waffa asked. Sally was already jogging off the bridge.
“Cratch,” she shouted over her shoulder.
Two minutes later she was standing outside the Barnalk High Ripper’s cell, staring through the depolarised panel in outrage.
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 21