“What can I help you with, Commander?”
“We’re going back into the Bunzolabe.”
“I’d heard.”
“You had something of a battle of wills with Bunzo last time.”
“NightMary,” he corrected her mildly, “but to all intents and purposes, yes. I suppose I did,” he allowed himself to preen a little. “And for my part, might I say, I won? I mean, it’s hardly my fault if-”
“You’re coming down to the surface with us this time.”
“I – excuse me?”
“The crew has rather neatly switched places on who wants to stay on board the ship and who wants to go down to the surface,” Clue said. “Everyone seems to believe that the other was the preferable alternative.”
“Even you?”
“My vote would have been to stay with Bitterpill,” the Commander said, “or ideally not to have come back here at all. But in this case, it happens to be the better course for me to remain on the ship with Janus, Zeegon and Decay, while Sally, Waffa, Janya and Contro go to the surface.”
“Contro!”
“He managed rather well last time with only minor issues from the life support and a mild fear of juggling,” Clue said, “and he may have had that before we even came to the Bunzolabe. And his record for unique contact and communication scenarios is pretty good. And most importantly, I don’t have to explain or justify myself to you so why am I even talking? Sally wants you in her sight when they go down there, and she says there are some pretty compelling reasons for you to be … if not an asset with Bunzo, then at least a game piece of some interest to the machine. So you’re going.”
“Fair enough.”
“Right.”
“Of course, you’re assuming that we’re going to get anywhere near the planet,” Glomulus went on, “and that Bunzo or another of his personality facets isn’t going to just blow us out of the sky as soon as we appear.”
“Janus was pretty confident he wouldn’t,” Z-Lin said, “if only because if he was going to kill us, he’d want to do it in a more creative, lingering and horrible way.”
“Sounds awesome.”
“Doesn’t it.”
“I’ll consider it a little shore leave, then,” Doctor Cratch smiled, then grew serious. “And now, if you’ll forgive my lapse into analysis – I wouldn’t want to step on our esteemed counsellor’s toes, after all – I get the distinct impression that you’re leading with news you really wish was more contentious, in order to distract attention away from the actual reason you came here,” he tilted his head, and Clue grimaced. “Sorry.”
“There’s one other thing we need you to do,” she said grudgingly, “before we get to the Bunzolabe. Captain’s orders.”
“Ooh,” Glomulus said eagerly. “The Captain himself, eh? And what does our mysterious, glorious leader wish from this humble house-arrestee?”
Instead of answering, the Commander gestured curtly for him to follow her. Then she led him into the surgical recovery ward where Dunnkirk’s sleeper-frozen body and the pieces of his pod had been stored as their voyage dragged on and nowhere along the Chalcedony border seemed willing or worthy to take his worldly remains. Glomulus hadn’t really been in here, more out of respect for the fact that he wasn’t supposed to than respect for the dead Bonshoon. He was fairly sure some of the crew still thought he’d been responsible for Dunnkirk’s death, somehow, even though the investigation was closed and it seemed pretty obvious that there had been some sort of astonishingly shonky cover-up, even by Astro Tramp 400’s pretty low standards.
Maybe, he thought, he was about to see the final sorry act in this squalid little comedy.
“You need to revive him,” Z-Lin surprised him by saying. No, actually, it wasn’t a surprise – Glomulus was thunderstruck.
After about ten seconds he became dimly aware that the rest of Z-Lin’s orders were sticking in her throat, so he gave a polite cough and forced his voice to idle condescension. “He’s dead, Commander.”
She spared him a withering glance, but at least it gave her voice back. “He’s perfectly preserved at the moment of death,” she said, “or only a very short time afterwards. Moreover, the main point of structural damage for a dead Molranoid and the first point of bodily breakdown-”
“His blood has been removed.”
“Exactly. His blood was removed and carefully stored. Viable. If it had been left in his corpse, it would have congealed, settled, burst the blood vessels and their seals, ruined the organs. But it was removed, leaving his body in optimal condition.”
“Yes, but Commander, still dead.”
“And preserved with this sleeper pod freezing apparatus.”
“Yes, with damage that would have made it fatal anyway, which was the only reason we used it on him – he was already dead. And he’s been in there, moreover, for almost exactly a year by this stage,” he studied the Commander. “You don’t want me to bring him back to life,” he concluded.
“I’m glad you’re finally giving me that benefit of the doubt.”
“But you do want me to disconnect him from the sleeper, run some stimulating agents through him, put his blood back in, and hook him up to an intensive care unit, then sort-of-kind-of activate the sleeper units again,” Glomulus stressed. “This is what you’re asking me to do. Get his pumps flowing and his organs squelching and his brain-stem flickering. And keep him that way. Dead but breathing.”
“Yes.”
“Indistinguishable from a Molran in a sleeper pod.”
“Yes.”
“Even though actually keeping his body frozen and his blood bagged will preserve all his organs and tissues far more effectively than maintaining him in a persistent vegetative state, which will start to cause degradation within about three or four days.”
“Yes.”
“And even though this sounds like the sort of thing I’d try to convince you to do.”
“Try not to remind me of that.”
Glomulus cracked his knuckles, so fascinated by this request that he barely even noticed the pain in his augmented fingers. “Shore leave and a fun little science project,” he said.
JANYA (THEN)
“Okay,” Z-Lin said as they trundled the capsule – what Zeegon was calling ‘the torture pod’ – into the medical bay, “get everything set up here as much as possible, and we’ll go and get Cratch. Just … do what you can to keep the pod from killing him.”
Janya, Contro, Sally, Z-Lin, Zeegon and Decay were all in the medical bay, each of them blank-faced with their individual versions of shock at the abrupt brutality of what they had witnessed. The eejit nurses Wingus and Dingus, and Janya’s assistants Westchester and Whitehall, were also present. Technically, of course, Janus was there too although everyone was doing their best to pretend that fact did not exist. Waffa was still outside with a crowd of repair and maintenance eejits, doing his best to repair the damage NightMary had done in her apparent fit of pique.
“I think it’s entirely out of our hands whether it kills him or not,” Janya said, “and the only thing we can really do is not touch it.”
“I know that,” Clue snapped, then ran a hand across her eyes. “Damn it, I’m sorry.”
“No need to be,” Janya said. “Although if what Sally says about the apparent contest between NightMary and Glomulus is true, have you considered the possibility that as soon as Glomulus steps out of the brig, she will have won and will simply kill Janus out of hand?”
Z-Lin stared at Janya. It was a look she was beginning to find as familiar as it was tiresome. “I hadn’t considered it until now,” she said in outrage.
“It seems like a rather likely possibility to me,” Janya remarked.
“I tend to agree,” Decay said.
“Yeah,” Sally added, “now that you mention it … yeah.”
“So what do we do about it?” Clue asked.
“Well, we can bring Glomulus up here and hope Janus doesn’t die,” Janya said, “and if
he does we can consider it a tragic slaying at the hands of the Bunzolabe machine, which won a meaningless victory of some sort by finally bringing Glomulus out of his cell. Or we can open the pod and administer a lethal dose of abbronax, putting Janus out of his misery and leaving Glomulus in the brig, essentially stealing the aforementioned meaningless victory from the hands of NightMary.”
“More options please.”
“We can take the entire apparatus and all the medical equipment we can move down to the brig,” Janya went on calmly, “and see if Glomulus can succeed in performing life-saving surgery from inside his cell without NightMary killing Janus first.”
“Wouldn’t work,” Sally said, “the brig cells have a bunch of built-in suppressors that would stop half of the medical equipment from even activating.”
Janya hadn’t been aware of this. “Oh.”
“And a lot of this stuff is too big and integrated to move down there anyway,” Decay added. “Janus is going to need organs, skin … there’s no medical printer down there, so we’d be running back and forth with samples.”
“What do you do if a prisoner gets sick or injured while in the brig?” Janya asked.
“Usually,” Sally replied, “we knock him the Hell out and take him to the medical bay.”
“This isn’t providing the options we need,” Clue announced. “We need one where Janus survives and I don’t actually care about any other elements of the outcome, for example what Glomulus thinks or whether NightMary contracts gonorrhoea of the central processing unit.”
“We could partially dismantle the pod and attempt to disconnect NightMary from her control of it,” Janya said, “or at least cripple its more dangerous functions and leave it running as an intensive care unit until such time as we can get Janus into surgery. This has the drawback of me not having the first clue how to actually do it.”
“Anything else?”
Janya spread her hands. “Sever the computer’s connection to the subluminal drive,” she said, “shut down this automatic escape protocol that Bunzo has forced on us, and just take us to relative speed right now. Get us out of here. Out of range, out of NightMary’s sight, and then we can do whatever we like. Janus will probably still die, but it takes a lot of other factors out of the equation. I should add, again, this option has the same drawback as the last.”
“Plus, Bunzo will have heard it,” Zeegon added.
They all looked around, but the comm system didn’t seem to be inclined to speak up.
The ship was at maximum cruising velocity and was powering away from Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World on an outward trajectory that would bring them to the edge of the Bunzolabe in about two and a half hours. Their route now took them by the shortest path out, as opposed to the longest path in that they had approached by.
“What did Waffa say about the hull?” Z-Lin asked. “When will we be able to hold a relative field?”
“He seemed reasonably confident they would have the hull patched and the new gun nailed down within the hour,” Decay said. “The main repairs are inside.”
“And the engine is in tip-top shape!” Contro exclaimed cheerfully. “Relative engines are good to go, although I’m not sure where they would go and I jolly well hope they take us with them, ha ha ha! Honestly though, engines these days.”
“Yes,” Z-Lin looked thoughtful.
“You’re the Commander,” Decay pointed out.
“Thank you, General,” Clue growled. “Alright. Sally, Zeegon, you’re with me. Down to the brig to fetch Cratch. We’ll keep him in there until we’re out of the Bunzolabe, one way or another. Decay, Contro, you go and talk to Waffa, see if you can get him to bring his schedule forward and get everyone inside and ready for a crash-field jump to soft-space, on a manually-set trajectory. Janya, you stay here with the…”
“The science department?” Janya said helpfully.
“Yeah, and get everything as ready as you can for emergency surgery and massive tissue and organ replacement. Get the printer running, call up Janus’s profile, cue up as many different bits and pieces to print as you can before we get back. If we can’t save his life I want to be able to assemble a whole new Janus out of the spare parts, so I can push him out the airlock for not sticking to the God damn buddy system.”
Decay winced. “Commander, you know that’s not fair-”
“I know, but I’m the Commander and that’s not fair either,” Z-Lin said, and marched from the room. “Sally, Zeegon, let’s go talk to the Ripper.”
Zeegon paused in the doorway, and looked at Janya with an unreadable expression in his eyes. They were almost always unreadable, but she guessed that this time he was being sincere, or remorseful, or some other contextually nonsensical thing.
“I didn’t want it to happen this way,” he said.
“Obviously,” Janya said. “I don’t think anyone wanted Whye to be dismembered by an insane machine just so Glomulus could be released from his cell.”
“I’m just saying that if we could keep him in there, and still save Janus-”
“Yes,” Janya said, “but we can’t. Although my personal recommendation would have been the abbronax.”
Zeegon blinked. “You really think that the Rip – that Glomulus is inevitably going to kill us all?” he asked. “That saving Janus is just delaying the part where Glomulus kills him?”
“Yes.”
Zeegon stared at her. “Wow.”
After the rest of them had gone, Janya remained in contact with Decay as he dealt with the maintenance and repair issues, and then attempted to do to the Tramp what he had apparently done with the lander. Or been allowed to do with the lander.
“NightMary has imposed this lockout thing,” the Blaran said, “but that only comes into effect when we leave the Bunzolabe and their sphere of influence. Until then, I’m pretty sure Bunzo is still flying the ship manually. Or he’s here, and he’s bumped the ship’s navigation systems to fly us out of here. The interesting part about it is what the Sally-Forth Engine is doing to the navigation.”
“What is it doing?” Janya asked.
“Well, it’s basically disconnected it,” Decay said. “Bunzo’s managing because he can see the ship from the outside, so he’s just steering it along like a toy, not really paying much attention to what’s happening inside. Because so much of it is dark, because of the engine. Now, no doubt he could fix that, but so far he’s not bothering.”
“How do you know that?”
“I admit, it’s one part educated guess and one part wishful thinking,” Decay confessed, “but we’ve run several diagnostics and a couple of other experiments that ought to have brought Bunzo down on us. He really seems to have been serious about letting us leave.”
“Either that, or he’s lulling us into a false sense of security,” Janya said, “and will reverse his decision once we get closer to the boundary.”
“Toying with us?” Decay mused. “Possible. Of course, there’s an easy way to test that theory.”
“Taking us to relative speed now?”
“Exactly. It wouldn’t take much of a skip to get us out of the Bunzolabe, and from there we could even just let NightMary’s exile program take over and drive us further away. It’s not like we’re going to come back here after a year anyway.”
“If that’s what NightMary’s exile program does,” Janya cautioned. “It might drop us onto the surface of the planet on top of all those other ships, because the computer mapping of the course is nothing but a forgery created by Bunzo.”
“Again, possible,” Decay said, “but I suspect you’re right that NightMary will kill Janus as soon as Glomulus steps out of that cell. Our only option is to bring this pod out of her control and get Cratch to work. That means taking us into soft-space.”
“And if NightMary has set an automatic lockout on the pod as well,” Janya asked, “so it seals and finishes the job of dismembering Janus as soon as contact with her is lost? She may even have uploaded some fragment of
her consciousness here to keep tabs on us.”
“Sally seemed confident that there was no large-scale upload,” Decay said. “Quite aside from the fact that we just don’t have the cortex capacity on this ship, she said there might be a fundamental difference between a synth-level computer intelligence and a digitally-rendered human mind, making it difficult or impossible for the human mind to copy itself in that way.”
“An automated response program, then, in the form of a command set or computer virus,” Janya insisted. “That would be fairly simple for her to install – we already know that her exile program can control ship systems without her being ‘present’.”
“Probably,” Decay said. “That’s why Sally fixed a pair of incendiary grenades to the sides of the pod. So when his death becomes inevitable, Janus will die fast and leave nothing behind but ashes.”
Janya leaned down and was only slightly surprised to see the Blaran was right. There was a flat, dense grey-black grenade fastened to the capsule’s undercarriage. Knowing Sally, the second one was stuck somewhere out of sight, on some power cell or regulator coupling or other, where it would do the most damage.
She straightened. “Fair enough.”
Bunzo spoke to them for the last time about forty minutes later. The pod had remained stable although it was no doubt continuing its slow, awful work inside, Waffa had reported the hull was ‘pretty much sorted’, and Decay and Z-Lin had agreed on a crash-field jump trajectory. Glomulus Cratch, for the time being, remained in his cell. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t be sure of that last part because his cell appeared to be in full security lock-down, all its walls opaque and sealed, and they had not managed to wrestle control of the metaflux back from NightMary yet. Still, Sally was fairly certain Glomulus was in there, and Janya was inclined to trust the former law enforcement officer’s opinion.
“You really are free to go,” Bunzo said. “You paid the price. There’s nothing more to be said. If you want to jump to relative speed early, you have all the clearance you need.”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 31