Sally looked as though she would prefer to darn well shoot somebody, and Waffa looked the same, and Contro was more than a little tempted to pull out his Tonsil Job and start laying about him too, but they stepped back and let Bilo lurch over to Glomulus. He picked the skinny doctor up easily, and carried him across to a big upright box just inside the arch. It was colourful and decorated with stars and crescent moons. Bilo propped Glomulus into the box and closed the door.
“What-” Sally asked, mystified.
“This is something I have been perfecting since you were last here,” Bunzo said. “I was lucky enough to have access to excellent fabrication technology, and my knowledge and aptitude make exponential leaps from time to time. Behold!”
There was a chugging sound, and then a scream. Sally swore, lunged forward and hip-and-shouldered Bilo out of the way. She hauled the door open and Glomulus fell out, toppled to his knees and retched, raising a hand to his mouth. Then he retched again, raising the other hand. Then Contro realised he had hands!
“My word!” Contro exclaimed. “What an amazing trick!”
“High-speed printing and cohesion,” Bunzo said modestly, “nothing more.”
“And the bracelets,” Bilo said, pointing. “Don’t forget them.”
“Oh yes,” Bunzo added idly, and as Sally helped Glomulus up Contro noticed the doctor did indeed once again have the heavy exploding bracelets around his wrists. “With a sufficient sample I can reconstitute and integrate ‘most anything you like. Even complex stuff like the security bracelets. This is far more than just a medical printer – it’s a one-stop matter manipulator.”
“You alright, Cratch?” Sally asked, stepping back and eyeing Glomulus cautiously.
“I’m fine,” he said shakily. “A little bit of a shock, the way it suddenly … yes, I think I’m fine,” he opened and closed his hands, looking stunned. “They’re just like they were five minutes ago,” he marvelled. “Like they hadn’t been blown off at all.”
“They are like they were five minutes ago,” Bunzo said indulgently. “The real-time molecular imaging was performed when you entered the spaceport. Pretty fancy, no?”
“Very fancy,” Glomulus said, and coughed. “Although self-preservation, if not honesty, compels me to add that these bracelets seem to have been reprinted without the actual sensor and the explosive charge,” he raised his hands and clanked the bracelets together apologetically. “Also, as you can see from the light panels, they’re inactive – probably because of the missing charge.”
“Oh,” Bunzo said idly, “that’s odd … but you can surely replace the charges when you get back to your ship. And get back you shall! With this new fabricator as a prize – yes, that’s right, it’s yours!”
“Ours?” Sally squinted.
“Help me bring the Levelled Blade down here to the surface,” Bunzo said, “and you and your crew can leave. With the printer.”
“What?” Sally frowned. “How do you know that name? I could swear it’s not on any of our official records. Did you dig it up from somewhere on board?”
“Oh, we hear things,” Bunzo said. Bilo stopped trying to lead them into the cavernous Funporium – now that Contro really stopped and looked, it seemed as though the space beyond the miraculous magic fabricator just sort of sloped away under the floor like a cave, and was dusty and filled with funny draped objects he really wasn’t all that keen on seeing close up – and stepped back towards them again. “Just leave Mother’s Rebellion to me and Bilo, and you’ll be free.”
In a flash, Sally had a gun in one hand and her organiser in the other.
“Commander, do you read?”
“Loud and clear,” Z-Lin’s voice said.
“He’s definitely making a move for the pups. Keep your eyes open up there.”
“Right.”
“Come now-” Bunzo said, as Sally pocketed the pad.
“Fall back to the lander,” Sally said, and shot Bilo in the head.
WAFFA (THEN)
“He mustn’t have seen it coming,” Zeegon said. “He thought the whole Sally-Forth Engine thing was a lot of fun until he was caught by it.”
“Let’s try not to gloat for a moment,” Z-Lin advised from her seat at an auxiliary console. “Do we know where this jump is taking us? What were the coordinates?”
“Not far from here,” Zeegon said blithely. “And not into a sun as far as I can tell.”
“How far can you tell?” Decay asked.
“Shut up, that’s how.”
There was a chime, and Westchester’s voice came from the comm. “This is the medical bay, Westchester on behalf of Nurse Wingus. Um, there’s been an … accident?”
“Janus?” Z-Lin leaned forward.
“The patient is stable,” Westchester reported, “Nurse Dingus says he’s fine … it’s the medic who has hurt himself.”
Waffa, Sally and Z-Lin hurried to the medical bay, where they found Glomulus lying in the corridor just outside. He’d stepped out through the door, setting off his explosive wrist and ankle bracelets. The special charge capsules had gone off in a fierce but controlled blast, removing his hands at the wrists and feet at the ankles, and cauterising the wounds while the bracelet base-plates remained behind and tightened over the stumps. Still, the shock had knocked him unconscious and he couldn’t survive indefinitely without proper surgical replacement.
The nurses, Wingus and Dingus, were standing over the prone body, looking as worried as blank-faced eejits could. Janya’s assistants, recognising this as something completely outside their sphere of expertise, were standing further along the corridor. Janya herself was also there, standing between them, arms folded and with a cool look on her face that was too calm to be I-told-you-so … but it was close enough.
Sally took over. “Alright,” she said, “Wingus, Dingus, get him up and take him through to the main room and get him on a table. I’ll go and prep the printers. Waffa, you go and get authorisation from Clue to run off four more security bracelets. Remember, they’re the G-17 model with the proximity trigger. Otherwise our implants won’t set them off.”
“I remember,” Waffa said. Even amidst the panic of their escape and the bustle of activity around getting Cratch installed in the medical bay and ready to do the rebuilding work on Janus, they’d found time to do a crash course on the bracelets and how they worked. The set of four was unique – you couldn’t print more of them until the first four were destroyed, and even that required command clearance. There had been a lot of rules and details and warnings, but Waffa had only really paid attention to the subdermal activation code. They’d all had some fun with test simulations, although Waffa had his doubts as to whether any of them would actually be willing to detonate them once they were installed on a man’s arms and legs. Even if that man was the Barnalk High Ripper.
As for Janus, at the moment he seemed to be okay. Waffa stopped by the recovery ward on his way back with the new bracelets.
Janus still wasn’t a pretty sight. He’d only been prepped at this stage. Glomulus had extracted the counsellor’s mangled body from the disintegrating pod, installed him on an operating table, sedated him and repaired the most immediately life-threatening issues. His organ damage was being compensated by machinery for the time being, and he would be able to survive for a while.
Long enough for Cratch to test his house arrest system, apparently, Waffa thought with a growl.
The bracelets made Waffa a little bit nervous. They were keyed to the subdermal implants they’d all had installed, and there was practically no way an accidental bump could set them off, and of course they were inactive until installed and initialised. Otherwise Sally couldn’t rig them to blow when they passed outside of the medical bay. He’d just feel better once they were all safely clamped back around the Rip’s arms and legs, that was all.
The reprinting and bonding process went smoothly, at least until the end. Glomulus woke up just as Sally was tight-lippedly fastening the final bracelet
and disposing of the original ash-smudged base-plate.
“Ooh,” he murmured, raising a hand to wipe at his face, then figgling his fingers dazedly in front of his eyes. “Did you give me more of that horrible sedative?”
“Yes,” Sally said with deceptive calm. “And we don’t want to have to dose you again, because you have surgery to perform.”
“I’ll be fine,” Glomulus pushed himself up on his elbows. “It was stabilising him that was the difficult part. The rest is just drag and drop, putting all the bits back together again.”
“Really?” Sally’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Just drag and drop, no problem?”
“Sure. So I felt a little bit of a stretch of the legs was in order. Oh, I know you told me about the house arrest limits, but imagine my surprise when I stepped outside-”
“How about with no molecular bonding stimulator, you jackass?” Sally suddenly roared. Glomulus blinked, turning from Sally to Waffa to Z-Lin to Janya.
“Wingus was clearing up after your replacement surgery,” Janya said, “and he … fused himself to an autopsy table. We’re not sure how he managed to take it so far, but by the time the medical alerts went off, he was already dead.”
“And the stimulator is fried,” Waffa added.
“So now you have to do Janus’s surgery without a stimulator, and without a second nurse,” Sally growled. “And if you try that idiotic stunt with your bracelets again, you’ll probably never get full use of your hands and feet back with the next set. If you’re no good to us as a medic, you can go back into the brig.”
“You probably shouldn’t have taken me out of the brig in the first place,” Glomulus said, then raised his long hands defensively. “But don’t worry, I can take care of our beloved tree-hugging friend with the wandering organs. There are methods for the reintegration of limbs and tissues without the use of molecular bonding technology. Back in my student days I wrote and studied … it would be a bit clumsy, but I’m sure I could still do the surgery using unbounded hands. We’d have to move quickly, of course.”
“Do we want to know why you looked into limb replacement as a student?” Z-Lin asked.
“Of course you do,” Glomulus said, indignation putting a slight edge on his drug-glaze. He pushed himself to a sitting position, then lurched to his feet with a groan. Sally stepped forward to help, but he waved her back. “It’s a fascinating read, even if I do say so myself.”
“It is, actually,” Janya admitted. “It will still take a couple of months for the new limbs to fully acclimate, but … where’s he going?”
Cratch had stumbled, pretended to trip, and then shambled for the exit. Before any of them could stop him, he’d vanished down the corridor. Waffa heard the pop-pop of the Rip’s new bracelets detonating, and the slithery crash of his angular body falling to the floor.
“Son of a bitch,” Sally snarled.
Waffa was kept busy going back and forth for new bracelets for a while. In the end, Z-Lin declared they didn’t have time to dick around. They couldn’t hold him by the arms indefinitely, they couldn’t keep him sedated indefinitely, and in the meantime Janus was stable but still dying slowly. This, as little as they liked it, gave the advantage to Cratch.
In the end, with Janus’s life slowly trickling away on the operating table, Z-Lin agreed with the Rip that they would remove the medical bay safeguards. He would be permitted to leave, but had to agree on the professional need with the officers. The rest of the crew still had their subdermals so any unauthorised appearance could and would be dealt with. And if he didn’t stop arsing around with his bracelets, get his hands into decent working order as best he could without a stimulator, and get to work patching up Janus Whye, he would go back into the brig and the panels would close and the lights would go out. Indefinitely.
Glomulus Cratch declared these terms fair.
Z-LIN (NOW)
Z-Lin stepped out of Waffa’s interlinked expanse of quarters, sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair.
Well, she thought, at least now it basically can’t get any more weird and horrible. It occurred to her that it might be tempting fate to say this, so she turned and stepped aside for the eejit.
Thorkhild – she had to think of him as Thorkhild, otherwise everything began to come unravelled – stepped out through the doorway and stopped alongside her. He was a bit clumsier with his blindness now, not as at-home with the ship and his remaining senses as he had once been, but still approximately five hundred times smoother than the hapless eejit Waffa had blinded, tagged, and thrown into the mulcher to save Thorkhild’s life.
She reflected, not for the first time, at the tidy set of blinkers they’d all put on concerning the eejits. From the arbitrary auto-recycle for sufficiently-botched configurations, to the grades of disposability awarded to the entire group based on their handicaps and their ability to do their jobs … all of it. Yes, these were wetware, equipment. And what Waffa had essentially done was throw away a broken tool to spare a less-broken one, because the regulations said he had to throaw away something. But it got very difficult to ignore the fact that if you did anything remotely like this to human beings, it would be monstrous beyond comprehension.
This was all a bit moot now, since Thorkhild had arguably left the building. If not as comprehensively as his unfortunate ringer, then in a somehow profounder sense.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked him.
“Please,” Thorkhild said. “Please yes.”
“We know you didn’t do it. Thorkhild, I mean. We know … but the alternative was saying that we haven’t found the killer, or we knew who it was but weren’t doing anything about it, and it all seemed like … it all just, ah, crap,” she ran her hand through her hair again. “I’m supposed to be saying Commandery shit right now. What is this?”
“I should not be,” Thorkhild pronounced.
“We have a pack of rogue aki’Drednanth who seem to be behind this, and if we get on the wrong side of the Drednanth in any way, a rock and a hard place doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s like we’ve made a deal with the Devil.”
Thorkhild didn’t say anything about this, and Z-Lin sighed. What’s happening to us? She thought. What sort of evil are we flying with?
When Z-Lin and Thorkhild reached the lander bay, the landing party was docking. Janya and her assistants, and a pair of other eejits, were busy positioning the bulky mechanism containing Dunnkirk’s mostly-dead body for delivery to the surface.
“This is all very unfortunate,” Bunzo said over the comm, his voice slowly accelerating and rising in volume, “but you’ll note that I let you spoil my party and allowed you to return to your silly little ship. Now I want to know what your game is, and I want to know who you have selected to send down to me, and I want to know if you intend to help me to acquire your aki’Drednanth passengers or if I will have to land your modular and pick them out of the wreckage, and just to show you I’m not joking, I think I’m going to have to take your crew-”
“Wait, Bunzo,” Z-Lin said loudly. The party stepped out of the docking bay, looking curiously at the sleeper equipment and the hefty backpack one of the eejits was carrying. Waffa stared at Thorkhild, and then turned narrow eyes on Clue. “We have a proposition for you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Please hear me out before getting mad,” Z-Lin said, and put her hand on the sleeper pod. “I know you will have heard that our Bonshoon passenger was killed, but as you can see, he’s functionally alive, just installed in a sleeper pod. It was a ridiculously complicated situation, with the aki’Drednanth like you say, and their agenda … and I know, this won’t be satisfactory, but I’ve also just heard that you have some pretty impressive fabrication and medical facilities down there. So maybe he doesn’t need to stay in the pod. I don’t know. Up to you.”
“Oh my God, Clue, have you lost your mind?” Sally breathed.
“Probably,” Z-Lin said, glancing back and forth among their wide-eyed little compa
ny. “Maybe I’m just going along with the crowd. Anyway, we have more to offer,” she went on, raising her voice and turning to gesture towards Thorkhild.
“Bunzo already said he wouldn’t accept ables,” Waffa said quickly.
“And that’s the least of our concerns,” Z-Lin added, “isn’t it?” she glared at the Chief of Security and Operations. “Our main concern is not leaving a living creature behind on a planet ruled by a mad computerhuman, to be tortured and mutilated forever as a ghoulish pound-of-flesh tribute in thanks for letting the rest of us go unmolested.”
“Right,” Waffa muttered, “that was the unspoken part of what I was saying, yeah.”
Z-Lin raised her voice again. “No offence, Horatio.”
“None taken,” Bunzo said with a chortle returning to his voice, “but I warn you, I will not abide trickery. Allow me to demonstrate the consequences-”
“Please, there’s no need, and I asked that you hear me out before getting angry,” she said. Bunzo subsided with an audible hrumph.
“Anyway, he’s not going to let any of us go,” Waffa went on. “And as for giving us that fabricator thing? Pure dickery. He must’ve been running it from his mass-cortex and power plants. We’d never get it to work up here. It would take more energy and computing power than the Tramp’s got.”
“Would you let me handle this?” Z-Lin asked coolly.
“I don’t want clone-flesh,” Bunzo said, his voice querulous.
“You’ll want this one,” Z-Lin told him. “It’s actually a partially-refleshulated Bonshoon. An expert in the Drednanth Dreamscape, going by the name of Maladin.”
Sally, Bunzo and at least three other people all said “What?” at the same time at this point, and Z-Lin silenced those she could with a glare. Waffa also looked stunned, although Z-Lin knew he’d had his suspicions. He’d been sheltering Thorkhild for some time now, after all.
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 34