“He’s done it again,” Waffa boomed. “The God damn Rip’s at it again.”
“Stow it, Waffa,” Sally said with a sharp hand gesture, “he obviously defended himself when the Artist came rampaging in here, and the Artist underestimated him,” she stepped forward. “Right, doc?”
“Right,” Cratch said, “thank you, Sally,” the Chief Tactical Officer rolled her eyes ever so slightly. “Why are they all yelling?” he went on, then snapped his fingers. “Oh right, the whorl guns.”
“You’re a perceptive son of a bitch,” Zeegon thundered.
“So I’m told,” Cratch peeled off his membranes and crossed to wash his hands and apply a second film. “The loss of hearing should be temporary,” he went on, increasing his own volume a little, “just try to talk normally. I’ll check you out and see if any of you need grafts or treatment,” he turned and glanced at Decay, who was staring flat-eared at the remains of the Artist. “I guess the biggest damage was to our Blaran friend,” he went on, “but unless it was really critical damage I think the best I can do is give you some stim, gauze your flappers up good, and let them get better on their own,” he paused. “It may also be worth noting that before he threw Nurse Dingus against the wall, the Artist was after our gonazine,” Glomulus went on, already dealing out a prescription of repair-response stimulant and a roll of gauze. “He also wanted a molecular bonding stimulator, but ours had that … mishap a while ago. May the Gods rest poor Wingus Senior’s confused, troubled soul,” he smothered a smile. “And whatever soul-bearing elements of the autopsy table he happened to take along for the ride when he departed this humble sphere.”
“Cratch,” Z-Lin reproved, lowering her voice.
“I’ve already had all the bad visions I’m going to have,” Decay said, “and I don’t want gonazine to take away any I might have left. But thank you for killing him,” he nodded towards the table.
“Welcome.”
“Did he say anything about why, or how?” Decay pressed. “Was he just trying to depopulate and steal the ship? Was it as simple and as stupid as that?”
“He said a lot of crazy stuff,” Glomulus said, keeping his tone careful and neutral. “We may never know for sure.”
“It’s possible that he was targeting us specifically for the eejits we have on board,” Janya spoke up smoothly, then went on when the landing party crew looked at her in puzzlement. “Whye made an odd discovery,” she said, “about the eejits on board. They seem to be able to feel the presence of darkerness, or the underspace, even when we’re between dives. Either when we’re about to dive, or a lingering feeling afterwards.”
“Really?”
“It’s subtle, mostly,” Janya said, “but interesting. It’s actually most visible if you look at an eejit who’s not doing anything in particular. It’s in their faces.”
Glomulus had, after hearing a few of Janus’s comments, started noticing the change himself. “It’s a bit chilling, actually,” he confirmed, then gave Janya an apologetic little bow of the head.
“The placid eejit standing-face has changed,” Janya went on, “in a lot of cases. We’re guessing it’s to do with their sensitivity, which in turn might be to do with their configuration flaws. But they’ve all started to look wary. Scared.”
“Eejits never look scared,” Clue said, apprehensively.
“That’s true, Commander. It’s possible that this is all related to the damage to the fabrication plant and the unique configurations we’ve been getting out of it since The Accident, like I said,” Janya replied. “It may mean something to the Artist – may have meant something to him – something he could use, or study. Any sort of sensitivity or ability to detect the stuff would be a step ahead of the computer and sensors. Not to mention our own senses.”
“You think he caused The Accident in order to make broken ables – eejits – that are capable of sensing the underspace?” Decay asked. “Maybe navigating it, or acting as foundations for more of the crazy hybrid bonsh we saw on the Boonie?”
“I think he might have come here intentionally because of it,” Janya hedged. “His motives, like Glomulus says, will probably remain a mystery to us.”
“Along with almost everything there is to learn about the underspace itself,” Glomulus added. “We were just discussing the finer points of … what would you call the study of a completely unfamiliar phenomenon and drafting of theories based on once-off data points, Janya?”
“‘Research’,” Janya said, almost – but not quite – too quietly for the partially-deafened crewmembers to make out.
“Right,” Glomulus said innocently. “We’ve done some research. But we haven’t been left with much to go on.”
“Leaving us with speculation,” Clue grumbled in a ear-damaged sotto voce. “Again.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t buy it,” Sally frowned. “If he wants eejits, why’d he just kill a whole mess of them just now?”
“There’s still over six hundred of them left,” Janya pointed out, “and he was clearly berserk … but still, it’s just a theory. Eejits aside, though, the fact that he wanted those tools might mean that we’ll be wanting them,” she went on, “if we dive too many more times. Should we get the drones to take another crack at repairing the bonding stimulator?”
“No harm in trying,” Clue concurred, “although they failed miserably last time. It might be more important to look at the things he might have used the stimulator for, and what problems that might mean coming our way.”
“Pity we can’t ask him,” Waffa muttered, although – like Clue – thanks to his ringing ears the mutter was quite audible.
“Not really,” Janya disagreed before Glomulus could speak. “The Artist killed twelve eejits on his rampage, and would almost certainly have killed more, and I am quite certain that would have included humans, since we were ultimately the targets of his anger. Sedating a Molran is a tall order, especially with the tools available.”
“Actually killing him was tricky too,” Cratch added, “although I concede that you might not want to know about that. But the important point is, if the Artist was dissolving into darkerness and he thought the bonding stimulator was going to fix him, that gives us a framework at least, for the problems we might be facing,” he glanced at Clue. “Speaking of problems we’re facing,” he went on, “were you saying something about us not being in orbit?”
“Potentially not in orbit at all,” Z-Lin said, “but rather a fatal atmospheric insertion trajectory … but Waffa’s got the engines cycling up and we’ll be pulling out of the planet’s gravity well soon,” she glanced at Waffa, who nodded.
“If we were even in it to start with,” he confirmed.
“My shoulder-blade is beginning to settle down again,” Zeegon allowed.
“More or less irrelevant unless we can stop ourselves from diving into the underspace again, of course,” Clue added. “We might come out a few miles above the surface of a star next time.”
“Didn’t the Artist say that life sort of showed up somehow in the darkerness?” Zeegon spoke up again. “And he could aim for it even if he didn’t have a synth helping?”
“He said something about it,” Z-Lin agreed, “although now it seems as though neither he nor Bruce are actually guiding us so whether that’s still the case with this dive, and any future dives – which Bruce suggested might be pending – we just don’t know.”
“We also have this,” Sally said, not quite managing to drop below a military bark, and held up a sample box with a hissing, scratching shadow squirming furiously behind its translucent walls. “It came on the lander from Jauren Silva,” she said, setting it on the desk next to Contro’s watch, where it promptly began to rattle and bounce. “And it just slipped into a blob of darkerness so it might be worth studying. Something tells me we’re not likely to get back to its home planet any time soon.”
“If the Artist really came here in a suit and a modified scooter,” Clue said, “and that’s
where the underspace drive is still operating from, we didn’t see it in the lander bay. He must have entered somewhere else.”
“From what I could tell, the casualties began near the recycling station,” Glomulus said helpfully. “There’s docking blister access there. Or he could have come in from any of a dozen airlocks, as long as Bruce was helping him.”
“The main docking blister locks, along with life support and the exchange, were enabled but rerouted so Bruce couldn’t shut them down or open them all up and kill us,” Sally said, “but if it was telling the truth about not really wanting to do that in the first place, it might easily have regained control of them sometime without telling us, and allowed the Artist to get inside pretty much anywhere. Or the Artist could have manually overridden the docking bay doors. Bruce seems to have some blind spots, particularly when it comes to the Artist,” she gestured at the meat on the table. “It might have tried to stop him from getting in when he turned violent, or it might have just helped him anyway because it just didn’t understand the violence it was performing when it was in the zone with the Artist.”
“He was over four thousand years old,” Cratch remarked. “The Artist,” he added, when the crewmembers looked at him.
“How did you figure that out?” Zeegon demanded, turning from Glomulus to the ruined Molran on the table. “Did you count the rings?”
“Third Prime,” Decay said, pointing. “You can see from the patterning on the ears, and the sheen on the fingernails. You don’t see many Third Prime Molren anymore, not after Big Shooey. This crazy mass-murdering bonsher was older than the Zhraak Dome on Aquilar.”
“That’s…” Z-Lin said quietly, pulled out of her businesslike tactical ruminations by the magnitude of the thought, “you know that means … if he was born when his parents were in their Third Primes…”
“Yes,” Decay said. “His parents may actually have walked on the Earth.”
“This is all great,” Sally said into the reflective silence, “but what do we do? What does any of this even mean?”
“I’m not a haruspex,” Glomulus remarked. “If you want meaning, I’m afraid I’ll have to send you to a specialist.”
“But how do we figure out what’s going to happen next and how we can take control of it?” Sally said, and actually raised her clenched fists to waist-level and gave them a frustrated shake. “I don’t want to go back to reacting.”
“You’ve been pretty active so far,” Clue said mildly, then raised her own hands to placate the Chief Tactical Officer, “and believe me when I say I think that’s been the best course. There’s no telling what the Artist might have done if we hadn’t taken some of the cards out of his hands,” Waffa, still staring fixedly at the blood-soaked pieces of the Artist as though trying to pick out the signifiers of Third Prime, expelled a high, involuntarily explosive giggle. Clue grimaced. “Okay, massive understatement aside, you’ve seen us right this far, Sally,” she glanced at Glomulus. “You too, Cratch,” she added grudgingly.
“I have an idea,” Zeegon said, giving the group a nervous little wave.
“Let’s hear it.”
“Um, well basically the first part revolves around us finding out whether Bruce is actually capable of realising the Artist’s dead,” the helmsman said, “and then finding out how it feels about that.”
“Uh, okay,” Clue said uneasily. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. In fact, now that you mention it, it should have been pretty obvious already and I’m not sure why it thought he was just lying down … but okay. Bruce?”
“Hmm?” the voice from the comm system sounded distracted.
“Uh, are you alright?” Clue asked. There was a taut, worried silence in the medical bay. Glomulus reflected that if the synthetic intelligence came completely unhinged, it could do almost anything – including, but not limited to, flying them directly into the centre of the gas giant from which they were trying to break orbit.
“Yeah,” Bruce replied, “I think so. Just … trying to deal with these damaged relays and disconnects in my … yeah, long story short, I’m okay,” when it continued, it sounded just a little bit stern. “I did hear you suggesting we might dive and surface on top of a star, though,” it said. “As if I would let that happen.”
“Alright,” Janya said sharply, “then what if the next dive drops us into the Core? There can’t be many higher concentrations of life than that.”
“The Artist would never allow it,” Bruce said, its voice serenely self-assured. “He went looking for the Fleet, this much you know. He has control, even without me, at least to some extent. And he created partitions and overrides, to prevent himself from surfacing near Damorakind conglomerations. He’s not insane.”
“Um…” Zeegon said carefully.
“So speaking of damaged relays and disconnects and long stories, I’m just going to say it,” Sally stepped in, “you know the Artist is dead, right? Only you seem to have been ignoring it or unaware of it or something, despite having heard other parts of the same conversation.”
“Dead?”
“Pretty dead.”
“When?”
“Well, he’s dead now, if that’s what you mean,” Sally replied with aplomb. “If you want an exact time of death…”
“How did it happen?”
“It seems to have been self-inflicted,” Sally replied, making steady eye-contact with Glomulus. “He was apparently looking for some way to deal with the side-effects of exposure to the underspace, and he’s just … dismembered himself.”
“Dismembered himself?” Bruce said, surprise making it sound a little more in-the-room.
“Well, we helped, in an autopsy capacity after he was already dead,” Sally admitted. “But it does look like this darkerness stuff is extremely harmful to organisms. Possibly to synthetic intelligences too, and maybe just harmful to everything. We’re still not sure,” she hesitated. “We’re sorry about the Artist.”
“Don’t worry,” Bruce said, brightening up alarmingly. “Just consider it the next step in his transformation. You were but witnesses.”
“Uh, okey dokey,” Clue said, and turned to Zeegon. “Good enough?” Zeegon, pale-faced and wide-eyed, gave an uncertain nod. “What else did you have?”
“The second part of my plan,” Zeegon said, slowly recovering his confidence, “involves us dumping the Artist, and all his machinery, and Bruce’s hub if it’ll let us, and that sample case with the weasel in it, into that gas giant out there and then flying away as fast as the natural laws of this universe will let us,” he skimmed his flattened hand horizontally through the air in a gliding motion for illustration and emphasis. “And if you want justification for dumping everything and running away, besides the awful shadow organs that were dripping out of that corpse right there and that thing Bruce just said about transformations, I would point out that something, not the Artist and not Bruce and certainly not any of us, brought us to this gas giant and there’s no way I can see to be certain that whatever it was didn’t in fact just want us to take exactly this action. Maybe as part of the transformation process we’re meant to be witnessing, I don’t know. Time to stop witnessing, and just leave.”
“Uh, right,” Clue said.
“I also freely admit that my reasons for wanting to flush the weasel specifically are a little more personal than professional,” Zeegon concluded, “but I still feel able to justify that decision by saying that it went inside a blob of darkerness while none of us have done so, so it’s theoretically more likely to have been infected or begun transforming than we are and plus, it’s unlikely to survive away from its home planet that we’re highly unlikely to return to, and it’s only a God damn weasel,” he folded his hands. “I rest my case and respectfully submit this to you, Commander, as ‘Plan A’.”
“For what it’s worth, I like Plan A,” Sally said immediately, “although I’d amend it to include a few hearty blasts from Pater and Fuck-ton just like we did on Jauren Silva.”
“I l
ove this amendment,” Zeegon said, pointing at Sally, “for its thoroughness as well as its pleasing sense of going full circle and providing narrative closure.”
“Alright, we’re all very funny,” Clue said. “Zeegon, wrangle some janitorials and go gather up the bodies. Waffa, you go with him. From now on, buddy system all ‘round. And on that topic, someone go and make sure Contro and Whye are together, and have a few of the more stable eejits to keep them from doing anything stupid. And when we have time, I’m going to want to hear more about this magical ability the eejits have to sense the underspace, that they’ve apparently gained at the expense of their ability to put on their pants the right way around.”
JANYA
Janya, Sally and Z-Lin stood in the corridor by the main docking access to the recycling station level, and looked at the apparatus the Artist had apparently been using as combined vehicle and residence for the past who-knew how long. The crewmembers who had been on the surface of Jauren Silva were now wearing discreet little pads over their ears that would protect them from further damage, give them time to heal, and help transmit sound vibrations more directly and harmlessly through the skull rather than the still-delicate eardrums.
Zeegon was also with them for the time being, ostensibly because he was overseeing the Automated Janitorial Drones as they cleaned up the three eejit corpses on this level, but actually because nothing could have dissuaded him from checking out the adapted scooter the Artist and Bruce had stolen from him.
“Not a bad job,” he conceded.
The scooter and suit were amalgamated into a strange sort of EVA pod, with a faceplate and articulated arms the only thing giving away the life-form within. If it was sealed and locked up, it would have resembled a Molran leaning racily astride a triple-barrelled rocket, his legs melded into the rocket’s body. If you could imagine a centaur of ancient myth – and Janya could – then the Artist’s vessel was somewhat like one of them. Just with a small spacecraft instead of a horse bit, and a bulky metal-and-crete Molran instead of a human bit.
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 24