“It was Bruce who requisitioned your most excellent scooter,” the Artist chuckled, “allowing me to more comfortably return to my free-flying suit arrangement and take me out of the immediate vicinity, which in turn allowed business to return to normal on board as much as–”
“You took my scooter?” Zeegon yelped.
“Actually, it was Automated Janitorial Drone 17 who took your scooter,” Bruce spoke up with a little synthesised cough. “It just did so on my instructions. I’m afraid that the more recent incident was something of an instructional relic in the drone’s memory, as well as a standing command to procure spare parts, which of course you had custom-made so it had to wait for you to–”
“Screw your bonshy scooter,” Decay said calmly. “He’s telling us he caused The Accident.”
“It was no accident,” the Artist laughed. “You still don’t see what this is about. But you will. Well … okay, maybe you won’t,” he amended, “but – ah,” he interrupted himself at another door-sound from the comm, and several gasps from the crew. “Am I to take it that you have arrived?”
There was a confusing and jumbled period of unidentifiable sounds from the communicator, which Sally could only wait out and hope it just meant the crew were moving around and looking at something inside the station.
“What are we looking at?” Clue – with her usual blessed professionalism – eventually asked. “It looks like a standard R&D testing core, a sterile horizontal cylinder with a friction-sealed door at each end and a single rotatable wall-ceiling-floor fitted with construction and design extrusions – the door at the far end, as far as we can see from this vantage point and with the objects in the workspace blocking the view, seems to be broken and many of the fixtures currently in the ceiling are hanging down and non-functional … but what is it?”
“Still basically just that,” the Artist said smugly, “and you’re right, a lot of it is no longer functional. I moved beyond the limitations of what this technology could provide. But this is where it happened. This is Testing Core 3, of Boonie’s Last Stand. My informal workspace, which I had to sneak out and use during dead-shifts and lulls. My actual work took place largely in my quarters, but there’s nothing there now. Here was where the actual activation took place.”
“I can see that,” Z-Lin said faintly.
The Artist gave a self-deprecating little laugh. “I have always rather envisioned that this entire station will become a museum one day,” he said. “This will naturally be the centrepiece, but visitors would also tour up and through and have the opportunity to look into my quarters. ‘Testing Core 3 was where the Artist first realised his dream of travel through the underspace’,” he intoned in a gratingly melodic tour-guide voice. “‘In utmost secrecy, and despite heavy opposition and criticism, he’–”
“Can you bring people through here?” Waffa interrupted. “What about all the blobs?”
The Artist stopped his recital in evident annoyance. Sally reflected that even the few mentally unstable Molren – the very, very few mentally unstable Molren – she had encountered in her life had been models of rationality and levelness of temper in comparison to humans. And that included most sane humans. Molren were just like that. Blaren and Bonshooni tended to be slightly more quicksilver and prone to both positive and negative personality extremes – that was part of the nature of their subspecies-schism from the Molran root – but they were still pretty consistent.
Hearing a Molran – most likely a Molran, she reminded herself, since they still had no solid verification one way or another – shifting so rapidly in moods was more than a little disturbing. Hearing that choral two-tone voice swinging from anger to amusement to dreamy contemplation … there was something profoundly abnormal about it.
“Naturally some velvet ropes will need to be set up around the residue,” he said impatiently.
“Why haven’t they faded?” Clue asked. “I thought the blobs were supposed to dissolve into nothingness in the bombardment of the laws of reality or whatever.”
“In some cases they are dissolving,” the Artist said, regaining his equilibrium and shifting from tour guide back to teacher, “just very slowly. Some of them are residue from early test dives that stabbed into extremely deep underspace – in terms we can understand, which of course don’t really apply, you might say they are very dense darkerness – and so are taking a longer time to recede. Others are actually in a state of constant flux, building up and receding around an experimental generator.”
“Like a permanently open door?” Zeegon asked sickly. “An open door to that awful God damn place which phased through our ship’s hull and got inside the Boonie’s crew? A door to that?”
“Zeegon,” Clue said gently, and Sally relaxed a little. The last thing they wanted was to provoke the Artist by criticising his work. That was evidently what his superiors on Boonie’s Last Stand R&D had done, and he seemed infinitely indifferent to whatever horrible thing had happened to them. And indeed to every other soul on board.
The Artist seemed not to have noticed Zeegon’s exclamation. “I’m working on a way to stabilise the field,” he said happily, “so a traveller might simply step into one of these stable nodes, and then emerge from a corresponding … ‘blob’ … anywhere in the universe. Or put on a miniaturised version of the diver and step into a departure node, like this one here – or this one – and then emerge wherever he or she might wish. With the diver, you would essentially be a small underspace vessel and would bring a temporary node with you when you surface. This will change everything.”
“No,” Decay’s voice suddenly said, dull and flat and filled with purpose. “No, no. We’re going back to the lander. I’m going back to the lander. This field trip is over.”
“Okay, hold on,” Zeegon said – quite bravely, in Sally’s opinion given that there was a mad Molran on the line and a lethally furious Blaran right there in the room with him, “so it’s eerie as Hell and might – okay, probably has adverse effects. But would one more jump be so bad? In the Tramp, I mean, sure, we can go back, right,” he was evidently making eye contact with Decay at this point and scrambling to avoid a confrontation with the towering, sharp-fanged alien. “Jump us to Aquilar, and let Bruce and the Artist go on their way.”
“Leaving a madman and a mad synth on the loose with a teleporter that brings blobs of this crap into our universe, and possibly capable of infecting every synth everywhere with the same nutosity, and makes people insane when they use it?” Decay snapped.
“Aquilar is gone,” the Artist, once again not seeming to care that Decay was insulting him, spoke in the same cheerfully wistful voice he had been employing when describing his underspace-node daydream. Bruce, interestingly, didn’t speak up either.
“Maybe with the proper study,” Clue also seemed to be doing her best to put a brave face on a horrible situation, “the drive can be stabilised, the effects lessened, synths made to work with it … all of that. Some way to stop the darkerness from getting in. Some sort of protective field, like we have built into the relative engines. Shed the residue so it doesn’t come out. Contain it in these nodes and make it safe. Damn it, I don’t know.”
“Did he say ‘Aquilar is gone’?” Waffa asked.
Decay, through a clearly vast expenditure of Blaran willpower, brought his fury under control. “Okay,” he said into the worried silence that had descended when the team realised the Artist had said actually something super-creepy. “I never thought I’d say this, but the research and development that this station did, that’s what this drive still needs. All those things you just mentioned, Commander. The Fleet – not AstroCorps, the Molran Fleet – is the only place that could do it. Skip to them. We’ll be sitting comfortably in a Worldship as those smug bastards underspace us to the gates of space within a month,” he snorted, anger once again fizzing to the surface. “That’s what you think’s going to happen here, right? Everything hunky-dory and happily-ever-after?”
“The
Fleet is gone,” the Artist said.
“Why do you keep saying that?” Decay demanded, nervousness clearly audible under the exasperation.
“Because it’s true,” the Artist’s laugh was eerily childlike. “Do you think they weren’t the first people I went looking for? The first group I thought might listen to me when my superiors on the Boonie wouldn’t? Even deaf and blind in the darkerness, I could have found them. I would have found them, if they still existed. They are gone, little Blaran. The Six Species are no more. The aki’Drednanth set them to sleep and the Fergunak took them to the Cancer. And the Cancer devoured them, right down to the last child.”
“Holy shit,” Zeegon said clearly.
“That’s not true,” Decay said with a wobble in his voice. “Not the aki’Drednanth. They wouldn’t,” he paused, obviously looking around at his crewmates for agreement, and just as obviously seeing only discomfort and doubt. “Why would they do it now? It would defeat the whole purpose of defecting to the Fleet in the first place.”
This time the Artist’s laugh was heartier. Too hearty. “Oh look,” he said, his voice bright with savage pleasure. Maybe he hadn’t ignored Decay’s insults quite so stoically after all, Sally noted. “A Blaran shit-dancer who has more blind, adoring faith in the aki’Drednanth than a Molran does.”
“We’re on the move,” Clue reported. There were sounds of brisk footsteps on the Boonie’s deck. Sally wondered if the Artist wanted them to leave – and if not, whether Bruce would stop them.
“You know the aki’Drednanth left the majority of their kind – and more, so much more – behind in the Core,” the Artist said, apparently not caring where the team went. Sally heard the elevator again. “Left them to the mercy of the Damorakind. You know this.”
“Descending,” Clue said.
“I still don’t get this,” Zeegon said, sounding breathless. Obviously they were leaving Testing Core 3 behind them at speed. “Showing off and convincing us of his greatness and all, sure, but why invite us down here if he wasn’t going to come down and join us?”
“Divide and conquer,” Sally said simply over the comm. She was following the tyre tracks Methuselah had left on the road now, where the downpour and a series of smaller washouts hadn’t eradicated them already. She calculated they would still manage to drive it. “He’s going to try to take the Tramp.”
“How long have you known this?” Clue exploded.
“I’ve suspected it since roughly the moment we established it was just him and Bruce up there,” Sally said, “and I’ve been certain ever since we arrived in orbit and he muscled us down here. He knows AstroCorps landing protocol would place most of our mid-level command on the surface, leaving the Captain on board with useful but essentially harmless crew,” well, she amended to herself, ostensibly harmless, anyway.
“Too convoluted,” Zeegon said discerningly. “Why would he bring us down here and show us his secret lair, when he could get the Tramp way more easily by just spacing us all?”
A few reasons spring to mind, Sally thought. He needs a few of us to run the ship, but the people left on board will be enough. Maybe he couldn’t get all the airlocks to fail that way, that’s why Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 got himself killed in the first place.
Or, you know, he’s just insane.
“Don’t worry,” she assured everyone instead, “he’s not going anywhere in the Tramp. If he tries, she’ll blow.”
This time, the silence on the comm was even more thunderstruck and Clue’s explosion all the more concentrated as a result. “What?”
“The game changer was a diversion,” Sally said. “Bruce can waste time trying to pick its way back into irritating nonessential systems, and even if it succeeds we haven’t really lost anything.”
“But I know now,” Bruce pointed out complacently. “I can still hear you through the station sound system, remember?”
“I remember,” Sally replied. “That’s why we wouldn’t have really lost anything.”
“But then why would you tell me now?”
“There’s not much point having the ship rigged to blow in the event of you trying to take it,” Sally replied, “if you don’t know about it. Bit of an extreme measure, isn’t it? The idea is to not have the ship blown up. And also not leave us stranded here with a short-haul lander that, at best, we could rig up with an underspace drive and insanity-swim our way to it-doesn’t-matter-where-because-we’d-be-crazy-when-we-arrived.”
“Stop saying we’re crazy!” Bruce howled.
“I stand corrected,” Sally said drily. “But the point is, it doesn’t matter. You won’t find the loop–” she cut herself off as if realising she’d said too much.
“So, it’s a runaway loop protocol of some sort,” Bruce gloated. “That ought to narrow it down. A bit hackneyed, o’course.”
“Or that might be another misdirecting tactic,” Sally remarked.
“Nice try.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sally paused in her hike, unslung the backpack from her shoulders, and set it on the wet, spongy ground in front of her. “If he’s going to try to take the ship, he’s going to have to go through Janya, the Captain … and the Rip.”
“Don’t forget the shrink,” Zeegon added.
“A counsellor, a librarian, a hermit, and a man in the brig,” the Artist snorted. “I hardly think that’s going to pose much of a threat.”
“And you’re comfortable leaving us in your lab and future historical museum on – what was it again, General?” Clue said.
“Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3557,” Decay – naturally enough the only one of the five of them not sounding out of breath – supplied promptly.
“You’re okay leaving us here on Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3557 with your precious lab,” Clue said, “while you take our ship and do who-knows-what to our friends, and leave us here indefinitely?”
“Bruce will take care of you and see to it that you do no damage to my work,” the Artist said complacently. “And since the lander will not sustain you indefinitely, you would be best served by settling in the Boonie’s crew habitats anyway, if you want to survive. In case you hadn’t noticed, Jauren Silva is not a world with the most pleasant of environments.”
“I might even see my way to restoring partial exchange function to the manufactory,” Bruce said, “and providing a more human-level of gravitational pull.”
“We’re at the buggy,” Z-Lin said.
“We will locate the loop,” the Artist said, “and your ship will be long gone by the time you return to the lander.”
“Then you won’t mind this next bit,” Sally said with a grunt. “Are you guys out?”
“Yes,” Clue reported over the roar of Methuselah’s engines. “The waters have receded a lot but it’s going to be a tricky one.”
“Give me a challenge next time,” Zeegon said happily.
“Alright,” Sally said, “I marked the ridge for you, you’ll want to head up and then around, and reconnect with the road. I haven’t made it back to the lander yet, so feel free to pick me up on the way through. I think I’ve had my exercise for the day.”
“Copy that,” Z-Lin replied.
“I am already aboard and Bruce is making preparations to leave,” the Artist chuckled. “I’m not sure what you’re hoping to achieve.”
“Then let me put an end to the suspense for you,” Sally said, and hit the controls on the side of the game changer.
“Oh. My gun ports are opening,” Bruce reported idly.
“No!” the Artist shrieked. “Stop them!”
“Can’t,” Bruce replied, “I seem to be locked out.”
In high orbit, the Tramp revolved ponderously. The massive twin mini-whorl guns, Pater and Fuck-ton, poked their blunt snouts into vacuum and opened fire with a primal howl of reality parting from unreality that only became audible as the pulses hit atmosphere. The Artist’s shrieks were drowned out as two, four, six, eight blasts of concentrated grey Godfire rained down from the sky
, sucking vents in the clouds and smashing right at their intersection point into the sagging green-encrusted hull of Boonie’s Last Stand.
With a thunderous crump that Sally felt through her feet on the road halfway back to the lander, the manufactory was utterly obliterated, its component particles corkscrewed into the nothingness on the far side of relative speed. It left behind a gaping hole in the jungle into which several waterfalls began merrily cascading … and away from which a rover buggy sped, with three humans, three eejits and one Blaran inside it clinging for dear life.
ZEEGON
Methuselah was spry for an old fart, but they’d barely made the ridge when the Tramp ate a not-inconsiderable hole in Jauren Silva just a few hundred feet behind them.
“God damn it, were they mini-whorls?” Zeegon screamed over the rumble of disintegrating canopy and the near-decompressed ringing in his ears. “Did Sally just shoot our arses off with mini-whorls?”
“They’re the only guns with a self-contained hardware fallback,” Clue said, her own voice raised to a shout to counteract the temporary deafness. The humans and eejits were relatively unscathed, but Decay was pale and wild-eyed in the mirror, his ears flaring, the webbing bloodshot. He would probably require surgery. Blaran ears were many times more sensitive than human ones. “It’s a security measure to allow a lockout in cases of the non-synth computer being compromised. Sally obviously rewrote the protocols to allow it for synth lockout as well.”
“Aren’t there really, really good reasons the big guns aren’t on the common circuit?” Zeegon had often felt that the one good thing about being helmsman – specifically shooting the mini-whorlers to smash apart pesky asteroids – had been denied him by the guns’ controls being routed firmly through the tactical console. “Like, they’re really dangerous and something might happen like exactly what just happened?”
“Sally knows what she’s doing,” Z-Lin replied.
“Not what I asked!”
“Just drive.”
Methuselah was at once Zeegon’s newest and his oldest buggy. It contained a piece of solid-state circuitry that had been nine hundred and sixty-nine years old when Zeegon had found it and installed it in the vehicle, thus explaining its name. The computer couldn’t take control of the rover, because quite simply there was nothing to get into. No complex electronics, no guidance systems, no ordnance – only the comm system, and that was no use to anyone. The overwhelming majority of Methuselah’s systems were analogue.
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 19