There was a long, expectant silence in the docking bay, as the Tramp’s engines and life support returned to their ever-present background hum and the crew performed frantic internal bodily stock-takes, trying to figure out whether anything was missing, or anything had been added, using nothing more than the feeble apparatus of their nervous systems. It was a task to which the human – and indeed Blaran – collection of senses and impulses was really not equal, but did its very best because the thought of not checking was simply terrifying. The stars wheeled slow and stately as the ship turned over, and the familiar-looking stormy green curve of a planet rolled into view below them.
“Now what?” Waffa muttered.
Z-LIN
Despite its initial striking similarity, the planet they’d surfaced above was not Jauren Silva. It was, in Decay’s unique assessment, just another random planet with more plants, insects and water than it knew what to do with, and the Blaran had dubbed it Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3558 before even checking the scans.
It was as if the mysterious one-or-many denizens of the darkerness had known roughly what sort of planet they might want to get to, Z-Lin reflected, since they had travelled to one before and the Artist and his twisted works had been based on one. And so they had been helpfully trying to send the Tramp back there. But the underspace had just been so monumentally, fundamentally clueless about the fact that there were lots of different planets in the universe, that they’d just deposited the Tramp next to one that was close enough.
The crew were wryly amused by this, although they’d been so relieved to be out of the underspace and free of any detectable signs of contamination that they would have laughed at just about anything. Adding to their hysterical good cheer, Z-Lin had checked their location and discovered it to still be within the same galaxy from which they’d departed, and actually not all that far from honest-to-goodness chart-marked civilised habitation. It was, they agreed, another classic Captain’s shortcut, with the added twist of not actually involving the Captain at all this time.
Their good cheer was tinged with perhaps a little more hysteria than necessary, of course, due to the Artist’s rambling on the subject of civilised inhabitation being gone.
“I guess we’ll find out if he was right,” Clue had said as positively as she’d felt was justified. It was not, she’d been forced to admit, all that inspiring as far as morale-raising catch-cries went – but the crew was aware of her limitations in the proverbs department. And in the meantime, it wasn’t as if they weren’t used to flying alone through the trackless wilderness of deep space.
They’d used the Tramp’s computer to take the readings and confirm their location against the charts, after Sally had grudgingly deactivated the game changer and helped return all the systems to their normal configurations. Waffa had declared the computer stable, responsive and once again on full synth standby – functional, but non-sentient. And to continue the run of good news, reports also began to come in from around the ship that the eejits seemed to have returned to normal, or the nearest eejit equivalent. Their dopey resting-faces had returned, universally, replacing the creepy wariness that had accompanied the intrusion of the darkerness into the Tramp's sphere. The underspace, or the metaphorical gate between here and there, appeared to be gone.
“It was still trying to keep us alive, wasn’t it?” Waffa said sadly, when he and Z-Lin and Decay were making their way back through the ship towards the bridge. “Bruce, I mean. The Accident … trying to get rid of the Artist and his poxy drive … locking us in. Everything. But it was broken, so it all went wrong.”
“We couldn’t have kept the hub,” Clue said. “Even if we could risk it killing us all the next time it decided we were in danger. It had to stay down there.”
“Yeah,” Waffa sighed. “The gate needed to be closed.”
“The old-timers used to say, when someone invented something that should never be invented, or went somewhere they were never meant to go, the vultures would end up eating their bones,” Decay philosophised. “That was the Infinites making sure the rules weren’t broken,” he paused. “Not more than once, anyway,” he added.
“On the other hand,” Z-Lin said, “once something has been invented, the chances of someone coming back to it and trying to improve it are pretty good. We humans have a saying. ‘You can’t un-have a dream’.”
“Really?” Decay raised a hairless eyebrow.
“Apparently.”
“Sounds like humans,” the Blaran admitted.
The subject of the Captain and his famous shortcuts had reminded the crew, in vague terms, that the chain of command was still arguably extant on board Astro Tramp 400, and so Clue was obliged to leave the bridge and go to make her report. She did so, as ever, by assembling a full annotated log of events and resource losses – not least of which had been a dozen eejits whose bodies would need recycling and whose roles would need refilling, with Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 rounding it out to a baker’s dozen although his replacement had already been printed – and then submitting the whole data file directly through the interface panel beside the door to the Captain’s quarters, up in the dome.
The file went through, dropped as ever into the echoless vault of the Captain’s virtual in-tray. It was like slipping a note into a suggestion box, with slightly less chance of actual response or hope of implementation.
As ever, Clue paused outside the smooth, pale door. As ever, she reached up to press on the Captain’s door chime. She paused with her fingers hovering, trembling, over the pad. As ever, she curled her fingers into a fist, closed her eyes, and sighed.
“Damn it,” she murmured.
And then Commander Z-Lin Clue strolled back down through the ship, which was still drifting in high orbit over Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3558 while the crew waited for orders.
After paying a brief visit to main engineering and having a short and unenlightening conversation with the hero of the hour, she crossed to Whye’s office and knocked on the counsellor’s door.
“Hi, uh, Commander,” Janus said with his usual awkward surprise when she stepped inside. He stiffened, visibly steeling himself to lurch out of his seat.
“At ease, Counsellor,” she said wryly. “You’re non-Corps anyway, so you don’t need to get all formal.”
“I was wondering if people were going to start making appointments to come and have – you know, counselling or something…” Janus said, “but it’s totally cool if you come in without a reservation, I’ve got, like, this whole empty schedule. And I’ve been doing more tutorials, the last one was really productive, and I think I’ve learned a lot from the recent, you know…”
“I didn’t come for counselling, Janus,” she said, and sat down with a smile, “although I will make an appointment soon, I promise. No, I was actually just coming by to congratulate you for your hard work. With the eejits, talking to them – counselling them even, I heard.”
“Oh,” Whye said bashfully, “that. Yeah.”
“Studying it all the way you did and putting it all together, that was good work. It was…” she thought about it. Cold-blooded science was how she might have phrased a similar congratulatory statement to Adeneo. But Janus was more sensitive than that. “Inspired,” she settled on.
“Oh, I don’t know how much use it was with the eejits,” Whye said, “at the end of the day they just had blanker minds, so they picked up impressions more. No amount of talking would have taught us more than that.”
“At least we were able to use them to sort of confirm that we’d managed to seal whatever rift the Artist’s drive had made,” Clue said. “We’re back in real space and there’s no more darkerness in sight – to any of us. And that was the least of what you did. You basically cracked the whole case. You know, coming up with the idea of closing the underspace gate. Saving the universe, if you’ll excuse the hyperbole.”
“It was Contro who actually gave me the idea,” Janus said, “and communicated with the underspace once we got d
own there.”
“Yes, and I just went over to main engineering to congratulate him as well,” Clue said dryly.
“How did that go?”
“He said ‘aw, that’s so nice!’,” Z-Lin replied, in what she felt was a passable impression of the daffy transpersion physicist’s breathless, bright-eyed cheerfulness, “and then he offered me a toffee.”
“‘Boddington’s is bestingtons’,” Janus said with an absolutely straight face, and an impersonation of Controversial-To-The-End that made her own sound amateurish. He may not have been a very qualified counsellor, but Janus Whye was a scarily accomplished mimic.
Clue shuddered. “Anyway,” she went on, “I wouldn’t want you to think I was overlooking the fact that it was you who came up with the whole plan in the first place, so–”
“No, no, it was Bruce’s idea,” Janus demurred. “It’s okay, I’m fine without acknowledgement.”
“Look,” Clue leaned forward, defaulting to her usual firmness when she wasn’t sure whether a crewmember was joking or actually having a real emotional meltdown, “even if you did both come up with the idea independently and simultaneously, Bruce couldn’t seal the ship without cutting a guy up into fifty pieces, so you get the credit. It’s not like I’ve given you an official commendation or a promotion or anything – that sort of stuff is meaningless and I can’t apply it to non-Corps crewmembers anyway…” she waved a hand. “Still,” she said, “it’s the best I could do. Go ahead and tunnel out an extra set of quarters for yourself or something.”
“Doc Cratch couldn’t take the Artist into custody without cutting him into fifty pieces,” Janus pointed out.
“I don’t give him a whole Hell of a lot of credit either,” Clue said.
“To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a human taking down a Molran before, let alone a mad Molran,” Whye said hesitantly. “Although to be even more fair, taking down one Molran is maybe not such a big deal when you've killed however-many-it-was.”
“Doing it with one’s bare hands is still impressive,” Clue conceded, otherwise not giving the line of discussion any opportunity to flourish into fully-fledged gossip.
“That’s for sure.”
“Brutan Barducci whupped Lareth Ruel Ganon in a shipboard wrestling championship we held once,” Clue reminisced, before adding, “although only by sacrificing his collarbone to get a good grip on Ruel’s ear, and once you get hold of a Molran’s ear their hearts and souls are sure to follow, as they say. Plus, Ruel was, well…”
“Overconfident.”
“I was going to say a damn idiot,” Clue stood back up, and gave Whye a little pat on the shoulder. “Good work, Janus.”
“Toffee?”
“Shut up.”
Zeegon was back at the helm when Clue returned to the primary bridge. Boonie, the lichen-green Jauren Silvan ‘space weasel’, was curled on the helmsman’s armrest and engaged in a battle of wills with the Burning Knight noddyhead perched on the corner of his console. It probably would have been adorable to watch, if it wasn’t a massive violation of AstroCorps quarantine, biohazard and bridge operations regulations.
All things considered, though, at that moment Z-Lin decided she couldn’t care less. The little critter was clean enough. And he seemed surprisingly even-tempered as long as he could stay close to Zeegon, with whom he had apparently panic-bonded in the course of his traumatic reveal on board the lander.
“What’s the Captain say our heading is?” Zeegon asked, just a little bit sarcastically.
“Right into your mouth, Mister Pendraegg,” Clue said crisply, not breaking stride. “Should be enough room to go in diagonally, don’t you think?”
She stepped up to the tactical station while Decay was laughing at Zeegon and the helmsman was attempting to rally a smartarse comeback.
“Commander,” Sally said, looking up from the open panel on the top of her console, where a variety of filaments and nodes protruded messily. “Help you?”
“The Captain only wants to know one thing,” Z-Lin said, looking down at her organiser pad and then at the half-gutted mechanism in front of the Chief Tactical Officer. “Was there a runaway loop protocol or something else to blow up the ship? Or was that whole thing just a magnificent bluff?”
“If it was a bluff, magnificent or otherwise, it’s going to have to stand,” Sally said. Clue favoured her with a narrow stare, and Sally looked back blandly. Evolution and the relentless march of human civilisation had given the Chief Tactical Officer a galaxy-class poker face. “We still don’t know whether we can trust our computer,” she added. “Or will be able to, if it ever comes back to full synth. Or if some other agency is ever going to try to steal the ship. It’s best if only I know – that’s just a logical security measure, right?”
“Right,” Clue said wryly. “You never can tell who to trust, can you?”
“Oh, not an issue,” Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed replied. “It’s my duty to trust nobody.”
GLOMULUS
The music lilting over the medical bay airwaves was subdued as Glomulus Cratch finished the final autopsy on the final brutally-slain eejit, logged the minimal but relevant information, and sent the beefy, blood-soaked body into the recycling system.
“Next up,” he said, spinning on the spot and ending up facing Nurse Dingus with a jab of his index fingers, “a pot-luck print-out party where we hope the clone fabrication Gods are with us and are willing to provide halfway competent new crewmembers as we try to replace the men who heroically laid down their lives,” he tsked sadly. “Their funny, funny lives,” he brightened, and turned the other way. “Nurse Wingus, if–”
He stopped when he saw not Wingus Jr., but Janya Adeneo stepping into the pristine white room.
“Glomulus,” she said coolly.
“Ah! Welcome,” Cratch said, giving a grand but minimalist bow. “I’ve just tallied up the butcher’s bill and sent all the mortal remains back to the meatworks. In a respectful way.”
“Good,” Janya said, crossing to a console and pulling up his autopsy reports. “The injuries were all Molran-inflicted, then,” she asked, “nothing that might suggest the computer used any drones or life support mechanisms to help?”
“No,” Glomulus said, sufficiently surprised that he felt his cheerful theatrics slip a bit. “Nothing like that. Were you expecting there to be?”
“Not really,” she said, studying the screens intently. “And what about the computer?” she looked up. “The instruments, readings, the sensors? All working within parameters?”
“If any of the machinery is falsifying data,” Glomulus said, “it’s on a level too complicated for little old me to spot. And computer diagnostics are for Sally and Waffa to worry about,” Adeneo went back to the autopsies, and a silence that was uncomfortable even for Cratch descended over the medical bay. Dingus cleared his throat, then went back to standing in lumpen tranquillity when this failed to have any enlivening result on the two humans. “Never really did figure out what he wanted the gonazine and molecular bonding stimulator for,” Glomulus eventually said to break the hush, “did we?” he waited. Silence. “The Artist,” silence. “I figured he was trying to direct or slow down this becoming of his, until such time as he felt he was ready for it,” he carried on lightly. “He didn’t want to go dissolving into whatever-it-was, before his master plan was put into motion here. That would have been most inconvenient. And he had a whole lot of feet to bite and unsuspecting travellers to waylay before he could get around to the whole master-plan thing anyway, I’ll bet. I guess we’ll never know now,” he forced a laugh. “So many feet to bite,” he mourned, “so little–”
“That was quite a move,” Janya said. “Breaking the Artist’s skull open with your thumbs. Well beyond the tolerances of human flesh and bone. Nobody else seems to think anything of it, except Z-Lin who thought it was weird, and she left it up to me,” she looked up from the screen again, eyeing Glomulus with unreadable grey eyes. “The Captain found
it noteworthy as well, according to Clue,” she added, “but who can guess what he thinks about anything?”
“Indeed,” Cratch waited.
“I checked your medical file,” Janya went on, bringing up some more information with a sweep of her hand. “I didn’t understand a single line of it – not that sort of scientist, I keep telling them – but I could spot the edits, in the sections about your … bracelet incidents,” she looked up again, and glanced at his wrists, the detonators there, “in the files where your hand-and foot-grafts had been recorded. And from there it was easy enough to see that they’d been tweaked. I couldn’t see how, but I could see it had been done. They’re just customised able limbs, after all,” she said, bringing up a medical report alongside the autopsies, “altered a bit to fit your musculature and skin and nerves. Adding further tweaks was … if not easy, then apparently possible.”
“Maybe I should have let the Artist kill me,” Glomulus said easily.
Janya shrugged. “Maybe,” Cratch waited again. “Anyway,” she went on, stepping away from the console and facing the Barnalk High Ripper calmly, “no enhancement will allow your flesh to actually survive the detonation of those bracelets and anklets.”
Glomulus looked pointedly at Janya’s own pale, scar-lined hands. “Is today that day, then?”
Janya’s eyebrows twitched. “I reset your template,” she said, “with override authorisation from the Commander. Next time you get pruned, the printers will be giving you your normal hands back. Although some might take issue with the word ‘normal’, and argue that the hands you were born with are enough.”
“You’re not going to … ?” Cratch raised his hands and tapped long fingers suggestively against palms, miming the subdermal detonation sequence.
“Just don’t give anyone an excuse to trigger their implants.”
“They generally don’t need much of an excuse.”
“Then don’t give them any excuse, and keep your fingers crossed – while you still have them – and hope none of us come down with a sudden random desire to see your hands and feet blow up. Your fancy little super-hands template is gone. The Captain might have retained a copy in his files, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 30