Ruby Susan had heard rumours of the Alr’Wady attack, and also of full deep-Chalcedony worlds being similarly afflicted. Worlds that were not as welcoming as the border communities, and had nothing to do with AstroCorps or the Fleet if they could possibly avoid it. The Susannim had heard reports of worlds stripped bare of their infrastructure.
And that wasn’t all.
From Ruby Susan the Tramp was meant to be taking a four-and-a-half-week stretch to New Chalcedon. New Chalcedon was effectively the capital planet of the region, since only the worlds of the Chalcedony border were open to outsiders. Chalcedon itself was closed to the impure. New Chalcedon was the biggest open world in the region, and a major centre of commerce as a result. Here, although their contact with AstroCorps Repair and Recovery, let alone re-crew possibilities would have been limited, they might at least have finally managed to get hold of some replacement components. And a week or so of shore leave in an approximation of actual civilisation might have been on the cards.
“Don’t bother,” was the advice of the Susannim family they matched orbits with and exchanged nods and notes, “it’s gone.”
“Gone?” Decay queried.
“New Chal was destroyed, almost two years ago now,” the Susannim contact, Pyetir, said matter-of-factly. “Wasn’t bat-heads though, wasn’t the Fleet. Word went up and downstream fast, but it hasn’t hit the big outsider systems yet.”
“We hadn’t heard this from the downstream settlements.”
“Most of them don’t much care about New Chal. Bit of a numpty place, you know. Chances are they didn’t talk about it at all.”
“That’s true,” Decay conceded, “we hadn’t discussed our planned stopover at the outsider capital, since standing AstroCorps intercultural guidelines suggest it might be considered inflammatory,” he was visited by a fleeting yet extremely vivid memory of Sally crouching and punching a shirtless human male extremely hard in the gonads, and took a moment to relish it. “If it wasn’t us bat-heads who destroyed New Chal, who was it?” he asked. “Any data?”
“Data, Hell no. Plenty of scuttlebutt, though. Some sort of alien attack. They’re saying Damorakind,” Pyetir paused. “Say, you weren’t insulted by that bat-head thing, were you? I mean, I’ve got friends who’re Molren – well, Blaren – and they’re totally okay with me saying ‘bat-head’, and they call me ‘monkey’ and it’s all good.”
“Relax,” Decay said wryly, “we’re an AstroCorps modular. No feelings here.”
Pyetir laughed awkwardly. “Right.”
“You can tell your sister and / or wife I appreciate her attempts make a diplomat out of you, though.”
This time the Susannim’s laugh was more genuine. “That’s the spirit,” he grew sober again. “We heard Declivitorion also bought it.”
“You can treat that as confirmed,” Decay said, “we came out to the edge past Declivitorion, it had been wiped off the map. Looked like the same sort of alien attack we’d seen elsewhere, but on a much larger scale. If your guys are suggesting Damorakind for the New Chal attack, they’re not alone,” he tapped at his console. “I’m uploading our logs of other attacks and aftermaths,” he said. “For comparison.”
“Obliged,” Pyetir said. “If you’re still headed to the New Chal coordinates, you’ll probably get a look-see of your own. Be prepared for some blockades, though. And not fuzzy border settlement types, either. Last I heard, the big boys were in that volume, flexing their muscles. They might not want you to get close, you know.”
“Wouldn’t want us seeing them bleed?” Decay guessed.
“That’s about it. Your uploads would probably make the difference for them, but we’ll give you some batteries as well. They always want cells, and we don’t usually deliver that direction. Just ask them to think of the Ruby next time they’re fluffing their budgets.”
“Copy that.”
They couldn’t stay at Ruby Susan long. The Susannim habs were shielded like space-bound tanks, as well as being swaddled in their spiderwebs of collector mesh. Even though she could match their crazy dance around the winking red eye of the pulsar and dock with the ramshackle old machinery, the Tramp’s hull was not up to the task of protecting her crew from Ruby Susan’s radiation for very long. They took on some batteries, exchanged and calibrated some last data points, and then they were on their way.
As predicted at Ruby Susan, when they arrived at the New Chalcedon system it was into a cordon of long-established Chalcedony warships. These were pretty small beans compared to AstroCorps warships, and if a Fleet warship had decided to fly through them and dump her recycling plant contents on the dead planet she wouldn’t have had a problem, but they were more than up to the task of stopping a modular. And systematically dismantling her. They didn’t have Godfire, but they had a nasty line in transpersion weaponry and a lot of businesslike launching and acceleration turrets that no doubt boasted various heavy ordnance.
They even had a huge hemispherical relative suppression generator. Not enough to stop unauthorised relative speed flight out of any part of the system, but it was parked squarely over the major commercial lanes and it trapped the Tramp almost as soon as she dropped into cruising subluminal.
Fortunately, although they were from deep Chalcedony space, the blockade personnel were calm and professional. New Chalcedony was not off-limits, they said. It was just dead, so there was little benefit in going there and they had fended off a lot of disaster fetishists and thrill-seekers. When Decay uploaded their own attack reports and data, not to mention when they delivered the batteries from Ruby Susan, the Chalcedonians became downright amiable. The Tramp was permitted through to take her own readings of the disaster site, as well as taking a copy of all the gathered information not deemed too sensitive. When it came to the attack, there wasn’t much classified. What might have been there, once, wasn’t as important as the fact that it was all gone now.
New Chalcedon looked much like Declivitorion. It was a little smaller, but it had also had a pair of moons with some settlements on, and those had been destroyed to a similar volcanic degree. It was almost like looking down at a primordial world – or worse, one that had been slashed open by an outlawed mining practice.
The teeming populations of the orbital habitats, platforms, Mandelbrots and Chrysanthemums had all been comprehensively wiped out, the structures erased. There were a few emergency habs that had been flown in from nearby worlds, but all told there had been less than a thousand survivors. And they had all moved on. It went without saying that there were no spare pieces of equipment for an AstroCorps modular. Teams of researchers were still down on the planet surface trying to ascertain whether its raging volcanoes and choked atmosphere were even capable of being returned to a livable environment on a smaller scale than millions of years. Current theory was that the world was unsalvageable.
There were also a few teams of indomitable prospectors, looking to stake their claims on the new world as soon as the magma cooled and as soon as it was declared a lost cause. These eternal optimists had been the main source of headaches for the people manning the blockade.
The New Chal authorities had heard about Alr’Wady, but welcomed the updated information. Oddly – or perhaps not so oddly – the personnel here were more or less okay with the Fleet gutting an alleged assortment of worlds. When you’d seen total annihilation, the prospect of a bunch of Molren politely lifting your mining equipment and power apparatus off-world and flying away seemed pretty innocuous.
Not only that, but the Chalcedonians had seen the underlying narrative as well.
“The Molren don’t believe it,” Captain Bartholyn Dathory told Z-Lin, Sally, Decay, Waffa, Janya and Janus when they came aboard her flagship. “They never did.”
“Don’t believe…?” Z-Lin inquired.
Dathory waved a beefy hand. “The whole idea of staying mobile, spreading to all these worlds and making settlements while a core keeps on sleeping and flying,” she said. “It’s all about this loft
y idea they have, protection in case of supernova or massive asteroidal collision, what have you. Protection from extinction. You know – with the Fleet hiding out there, a part of the species always survives,” she gave Decay a glance. “A part of all the Fleet species,” she amended, inclining her head curtly.
“A seed,” Janya murmured.
“Bah,” Dathory summarised. “When was the last big asteroidal extinction event? We derail those bastards. Have done for the past couple of thousand years.”
“There was that nasty business on Vurm, sixty-odd years ago,” Decay said.
“Vurm was a pooch-screw,” Dathory declared. “The asteroid that did the damage was masked by almost unique radiation and density signatures and hidden in the middle of the cluster, and they got the other eighteen rocks. Then it happened to sideswipe the planet at just the wrong intersection of oceans, tectonic plates and transpersion plants. There are still people who think the whole thing was a setup,” she waved a hand once again. “Beside the point. Doesn’t matter. The point is, the Molren don’t believe that cheesy old survivalist philosophy either, not really. They don’t really buy into this non-violent, run-and-fade bullplop. It’s a façade. They’re going to fight. Always were. And it’s been coming for a long time. Ever since their last big run-in with the Cancer, when they lost so many and the wacky-wacky-Drednanth pulled their bollocks out of the smelter, they’ve been getting ready for the next time. Getting ready to finish it. A-seed-survives won’t cut it this time, because these aren’t rogue asteroids. And run-and-fade won’t cut it, because these bastards run faster. When push comes to shove, the Molren will shove back,” she smacked fist into palm, and squeezed. “Hard.”
“Some might say ‘about time’,” Waffa suggested.
“Damn right,” Dathory approved. “A lot of Chalcedonians wonder why we haven’t done this before. The Cancer is only going to spread. Why not perform a pre-emptive strike? Cut them out once and for all?”
Because, Decay replied inwardly, every time we’ve tried anything of the sort, Damorakind haven’t even had the decency to hand our arses back to us.
He’d never really understood the deep-seated human impulse to die fighting now rather than pass an issue on to some future generation that might actually solve said issue. He tried not to let prejudice answer this riddle for him, but sometimes his experience with humans got in the way of this noble sentiment. That was when he became incapable of seeing it as anything but raw, howling, teeth-bared monkeyhate. Confront a group of humans with a challenge that could be solved by immediate violence or by generation-spanning thought, and they would go for the violence every time, with a relish that Decay usually considered funny but he knew the Molren had found deeply disturbing from day one.
What did it say about the state of the Six Species if the Fleet was now taking this approach?
Decay could see the logic, certainly. If something was going to kill you whether you acted or not it was arguably the nobler thing, however animalistic, to go out with jaws gnashing. It just became a little jarring when death by inaction was so far removed, and the potential for future solutions was so seemingly boundless. Human generations were so much shorter than Molranoid ones, and humans barely seemed to care about the generations that were alive right now. You’d think procrastination was a no-brainer.
By the same token, put a challenge in front of those same humans that could be solved by no other means than immediate restraint and temperance, and the dear little fluffy-headed creatures would face their inevitable doom with the serene acceptance of a Bonshoon convinced of his ascension to the hallowed halls of Vahoonity. Because if it wasn’t a problem that you could visualise as an animal trying to bite your face off, and could therefore solve by biting the animal’s face off first, then it was a problem that simply did not have a solution.
Of course, he conceded, everybody’s conceptions of the length of time they had to deal with the Cancer may have turned out to be misconceptions.
“We’ve been lucky not to have the Cancer follow our spies and covert ops teams back into heavily-populated space and cut us out,” Z-Lin responded, to Decay’s immense relief. “Sad to say, the Cancer outguns us under normal circumstances.”
“Seems like normal circumstances have just become a thing of the past,” the irrepressible Captain Dathory noted with grim satisfaction, putting Decay’s thoughts to words much like Clue had.
“You believe the rumours, then?” Z-Lin said. “About the Fleet going to war against these new aliens – total war? Stripping the Six Species down and turning us into weapons?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Dathory said. “I’m just a low-level Daughter of Chal, sitting at her console above a world of eleven billion ghosts. But this feels bigger than the Adderbacks, worse than any little incident with dumblers or Fleet Separatists or the Karlists or corsair companies. And if any of us are thinking that it’s anything but Damorakind,” she said with a huff of grim amusement, “I’ll snort my epaulettes.”
“A new assault,” Sally said. “Some new weapon or type of ship, some new government, over in the Core. That’s what the general thought is. It’s the simplest solution. It’s possible that a dumbler species has evolved and developed this level of technology and advanced weaponry, without anyone finding them before, and this is their way of stepping out into the galaxy and making it theirs…”
“Sure, it’s a big galaxy,” Dathory said, “and the Six Species only lives in this quarter of it. But the general eyewitness reports seem to agree that these were Damorakind ships.”
“Let’s be fair, Captain,” Decay cautioned. “There haven’t actually been any eyewitnesses. The only people to survive, in every case, have been those well below the planet surface or otherwise separated from high observational tech. They didn’t see anything, or they’d be dead. Those who saw any part of the attack give contradictory and vague reports, and the fact that a lot of these coincide with Damorakind appearances can be put down to cultural phobia as much as anything else.”
“Granted,” Dathory said with another curt nod, “it’s indicative only. But whatever we’re dealing with, it’s big and powerful and it’s bent on destruction, and it seems about as merciful and interested in talking as the Cancer ever was, so let’s not call a spade a shovel. The fact is that now, it’s finally, fully, totally them or us, and the Fleet says ‘them’, and it’s about damn time.”
“Big Gravity upped stumps and took off with everything not nailed down in MundCorp Research Base,” Waffa said. “Packed it all into some new Worldship and lit out for parts unknown.”
“I saw something in your upload about that,” the Chalcedonian Captain nodded. “And it took on a bunch of corsair squatters?”
“They didn’t seem to be any better informed than we were,” Z-Lin said. “And the Fleet aren’t the only busy ones. The Karlists had been active at Seven Widdershins, too. They wiped out a big group of AstroCorps crewmembers, modulars and material.”
“I saw that in your upload, as well,” Dathory said, her blocky face grim. “Bunch of pricks.”
“Right, but all that stuff was already clearly part of some sort of mobilisation and retooling,” the Commander said, “and it had been delivered by Separatists. So AstroCorps and the Fleet and the Separatists are at work here, and they’re keeping it all under wraps.”
“And the Corps shipped out of Seven Widdershins like their butts were on fire and their pubes were catching,” Waffa added succinctly.
“Well, right,” Z-Lin said again. “Possibly on the advice or instructions of the Worldship Captains. But who knows? The details were even hidden from the synth.”
“That was where we first started getting rumours of comms concerning a coordinated counter-strike against known attacks, though,” Decay added. “It was just kept very quiet.”
“Maddeningly quiet,” Z-Lin agreed. “And then there were those two Fleet Worldships we tried talking to at Standing Wave…” she scowled at the memory. Deca
y, too, remembered that she had been goaded to referring to the representatives as ‘cold-blooded highfalutin’ noseless bastards’.
“This has been going on longer than we ever thought, and is more widespread,” he noted in agreement.
“And if the Karlists are involved, it’s all connected,” Dathory announced.
“Well, let’s not go nuts with the it’s-all-connected,” Z-Lin advised, and Sally nodded. “And let’s not even get into the possibility that the big attacks seem to target technology, and so the Karlists may have actually done Seven Widdershins a favour by taking out their AstroCorps infrastructure. The fact is, if there’s some sort of big Fleet action and any suggestion that Damorakind are involved, the Karlists will get rowdy. We know this. In this case, though, the Seven Widdershins placements and movements were probably part of something bigger, something that the Separatists were on the same page with and something the Fleet Captains weren’t talking about. Maybe even this general mobilisation and gearing up for war. Could be the Karlists just happened to attack the modulars because that’s what they do.”
“In which case, they bit off more than they could chew,” Dathory said with dark glee.
“It might signal a general declaration of hostilities against Damorakind and all their followers,” Sally said, “and the Fleet’s preparing for that.”
“Oh no,” Waffa said disingenuously, “those poor psychotic nutbars will all be wiped out,” Captain Dathory barked a laugh.
“It’s a pretty extreme position for the Fleet to take,” Decay pointed out in an attempt to stem the incipient outpouring of humanity at its most human. “Destroying whole cultures is a noisy job. Normally they’re all about living and letting live. If the Karlists think they can be friends with the Cancer, they can feel free as long as they’re only hurting themselves. And if the Adderbacks or the Boze want to shout and bring Damorakind down on themselves, let them do it without us being collateral damage. But if it comes to a big fight, I guess they’re not going to keep on sneaking around. They’ll fight back with everything, like cornered animals. If Damorakind can hit us anywhere in the galaxy, throughout Six Species space and we can’t get out…”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 28