Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  “Right,” Waffa and Zeegon said simultaneously, and went to work as the lander dived into the atmosphere and began to shudder lightly.

  “I take it you’re going to cut that residential block off and let it sink,” Clue said as soon as Waffa had sent his transmission suggesting the other team take the first landing approach. “Just don’t go out of your way to shoot the Fergies. They’re down there, we’re up here.”

  “Copy that,” Waffa said, looking at Sally with clear doubt in his eyes. Sally gave him a poker-faced thumbs-up.

  In relatively short order, they were through the worst of the turbulence and into windy but otherwise reasonably manageable sea air. The planet that Bayn Balro circled – or had circled, before they’d sustained their catastrophic damage – was stormy, but the weather at that moment seemed fairly clement.

  The settlement was in bad shape. There really were only two blocks left of what had once obviously been a sprawling series of structures. Aside from the blocks, a collection of scattered pontoons and free-floating debris drifted in the same current as the bulk of Bayn Balro but seemed largely unsalvageable. The hub still appeared intact, a solid off-white dome studded with heavy-duty portholes and surrounded by an obviously-makeshift sea wall of mesh and spars. The wall curved underneath the hub like a safety-net, and extended above the choppy, slow-rolling surface to a height of perhaps thirty feet.

  Sally was almost certain a motivated Fergunakil, fifty feet long and cybernetically strengthened even if its gadgets were all broken, could tear through it like tissue paper and jump it with even less effort. She remembered Waffa telling her tall tales about the Fergunak where he’d lived during his traineeship. Tall tales, but with at least a kernel of truth to them. At The Warm, or specifically its aquatic habitat … what had it been called? The Cauldron? Something like that. Waffa had told Sally that he’d once seen a young and unaugmented Fergunakil – itself a ‘mere’ thirty feet long – leap almost twice its own body-length straight up into the air, and bring down a remote-controlled drone craft flying overhead for demonstration purposes. The drone had been solidly constructed for battlefield deployment, and had a twenty-foot wingspan. To be honest Sally had been more interested in the specs of the drone back when Waffa had told the story, but the rest had stayed with her and she remembered it now as she looked at the pathetic little net around Bayn Balro’s hub.

  The young shark had demolished the drone, effortlessly. Indeed, as she looked, Sally saw several areas along the fence where the mesh was sagging, perhaps missing altogether.

  But if they got through the fence, she thought, there was still the reinforced hull of the hub and it looked as though they hadn’t had any luck breaching that yet. Even the portholes were too tough for anything less than a cutting torch, and so far it seemed as though the sharks hadn’t gone that far. It would have taken time, and time would have allowed the settlers to deploy countermeasures.

  If a cutting torch won’t work, a couple of thousand atmospheres of pressure probably will, Sally thought with an inner snarl.

  They cruised over the flattened top of the dome and moved on towards the second structure, leaving Decay to land on the hub.

  The residential block was square, dark grey, three storeys high and far larger than the hub, and it was already foundering, its outer edge noticeably lower in the water than the inner. This was clearly due to the windows on the sea-level floor having been broken to admit the dark surf. Soon, Sally judged, the block would sink enough to allow the Fergunak to break the second-floor windows. When that happened, even if safety bulkheads had sealed off the interior of the sea-level floor and the stairwells connecting it to the second, the block would sink and – yes – the segmented connecting gantry that appeared to be a combination of walkway and light rail system would drag the hub beneath the waves.

  A third body, a large nodule-encrusted cylinder, was also still floating nearby. Decay had already identified it as a lifeboat station. Worse than useless, since each boat could hold one adult and one juvenile Bonshoon and could have been swallowed whole by an adult Fergunakil. There had been some discussion of the rations in the boats, as well as the energy packs and support systems, but the Tramp didn’t need emergency supplies urgently enough to risk an attempt at salvaging pods from the cylinder.

  With a slight reprogramming of the autopilot, Zeegon swung into a little circuit of the troubled water between the hub fence and the residential block.

  “There,” Sally, looking out through the lander’s forward screens, pointed. Zeegon glanced up from finalising his work on the controls, and paled.

  “Holy crap,” he gasped. “Is that just one of them?”

  A sleek shape, a tapered diamond with wing-like fins on either side, moved like a cloud shadow under the connecting gantry and grew, rising towards the surface until the great jagged sails of its dorsal fin and tail broke the water like a pair of small grey-black yachts chasing each other through the waves.

  “Thirty-five tons of fun,” Waffa said grimly, joining them. “Haven’t seen a Fergie before?”

  Zeegon shook his head. “Not in water. Just their ships, you know. I thought it was a bit of waterlogged debris or a patch of kelp or something. Look, there’s another one.”

  A second vast shadow skimmed beneath them, merged with the one on the surface, and reappeared on the other side. As the lander looped around, the second Fergunakil broached the surface and glided into a synchronised loop with the first, keeping pace unnervingly with the lander’s flight pattern. A third shark appeared, and a fourth.

  “I can see the damaged part where they tried to cut the connection before,” Sally said, pointing. “It looks like the sharks have dragged up some chains from somewhere to hold it together, but a couple of good shots from the incendiaries will melt it off.”

  Keeping it well above a hundred feet, Zeegon looped them back over the gantry and opened the main bay doors. Sally settled the big-bore incendiary cannon straps across her back and chest, descended towards the lander’s empty rover bay, and then paused. She turned, pulled an evil-looking little pug blaster from her pocket, and slapped it into Waffa’s hand. He blinked at it. He had to know that it probably wouldn’t even annoy a Fergie, except that Fergunak were just so damned easy to annoy.

  His expression cleared. “If you fall,” he guessed, “to shoot you so the sharks don’t get you first?”

  “To shoot yourself,” Sally corrected him, “so I have someone to shout at all the way to Hell.”

  Waffa followed her into the bay and helped her secure herself with webbing. Jokes aside, she would need both hands for the cannon and a single overcorrection in the flight would send her tumbling into the waves. And now there must have been a dozen huge dark shapes down there. As they watched, one of them came right to the surface and turned broadside, coasting along sideways with its swollen, mottled-black belly and a single great flipper glistening in the sunlight. Its gills were fitted with infected-looking metal-compound cybernetic fixtures but the Bonshoon Consul’s statement seemed to have been right – the machinery itself looked inactive.

  The monstrous fish continued sideways, and even from a hundred feet up Sally could see its lifeless matte-grey eye gazing up at the little ship on its searing pad of electrochemical fire. It was watching them, studying the intruders, waiting to see what they would do next. Under its vast, ancestrally-terrifying mouth, at about gill-level, the Fergunakil’s little cartilaginous hands unfolded from their place on its belly and made an unreadable gesture before curling back up.

  “Don’t fire warning shots at them,” Waffa said, evidently noticing Sally’s hand resting on another of her trusty guns. “Just shoot the gantry. If you shoot at them to try to scatter them–”

  “I know,” Sally said grimly. “It’ll just put them into a frenzy.”

  Waffa clapped her on the shoulder and returned to the main passenger compartment behind the pilot’s seat.

  The incendiary cannon made short work of the gantry
. The Fergunak did not interfere with the cutting, although they were gathering in increasing numbers away on the open sea nearby, churning the waves with their slicing fins.

  To prevent them from binding the severed ends back together and sinking the hub anyway, Sally then climbed back into the cockpit area and directed Zeegon over the lopsided residential block. She pulled three small, flattened-ovoid canisters from a special padded satchel she’d brought with her, descended into the rover bay once more, and dropped one of the devices onto the solid crete roof. It detonated with a flat crump, opening a glowing crater in the sea-spray-wet surface. Sally dropped the second canister into that hole, waited, then dropped the third. With a great blast of water vapour and a surge of bubbles and inrushing water, the block dropped rapidly into the sea.

  “Demolition mines,” Sally said with a grin as she returned to the passenger compartment. “Part of your complete breakfast.”

  “Do I even want to know why you have them on a starship not much bigger than that block of flats?” Waffa asked.

  “Of course you want to know,” Sally said cheerfully. “You’d be insane to not want to know.”

  Waffa waited, but Sally grinningly decided not to elaborate. Zeegon and Waffa exchanged glances, Zeegon shook his head with a grin of his own, and turned them back around towards the hub.

  WAFFA

  Things appeared to have gone smoothly, and Decay reported that they’d taken on five of the eight young Blaren and a pair of injured adults, and were getting ready to take off. The rest of the survivors had sealed the hub’s roof access panel to protect them from the lander’s jets, and had been instructed to open up when the second team arrived and knocked. Sometimes, Decay philosophised, the low-tech solution was best.

  Then Z-Lin got on the comm. “They’re smokers,” she reported.

  Waffa saw Sally’s expression turn coldly neutral, and she leaned over to use Zeegon’s communication panel. “All of them?” she asked.

  “All the adults we saw on the hub,” Clue replied. “Apparently the majority of the second platform was a great big aquatic smokeberry farm. Sally, Waffa, for your information, I’ve advised them that they’re not to bring any contraband on board and that anyone found smuggling will be left behind. They consented to this, and also to loading the juveniles first.”

  “Right,” Waffa said. “So that’s three youngsters and four more adults we can take this time.”

  “Actually,” Z-Lin said, and their lander peeled up past them and seared its way into the sky, “there’s one more wounded and a second guy who had some kind of eye-and-throat infection. That was from before the attack, but he’s in an isolation pod. Your eejits will be able to manhandle it into the rover bay and as long as you can secure it there, that should mean you can get five adults in this trip. The pod’s got its own safety webbing.”

  “Copy,” Sally acknowledged.

  They landed without incident. The roof was scarred and burned from the first lander’s arrival and departure, but seemed in no danger of giving way. It was designed as an emergency evacuation point, after all – flat for a wide stretch, before curving gently down into the dome itself. Waffa, Sally and the two eejits disembarked while Zeegon prepared their return flight plan.

  The access panel was already swinging open, contrary to the instructions Z-Lin had left behind, as the humans and eejits were hurrying across towards it. The roof had probably been slippery with spray and algae an hour ago, but the first landing had burned that away and left the surface nicely roughened. The hatch opened fully as Waffa approached, and a Bonshoon stuck its head out. It – she, Waffa realised once he got a bit closer – blinked wide green eyes, flicked her webbed ears once in an agitated gesture, and smoothly pushed the two-hundred-pound reinforced-crete hatch the rest of the way back with a careless movement of her upper left arm.

  Bonshooni were essentially the same as Molren and Blaren – tall; flat-topped heads; elongated eye teeth set in a wide, perpetually-smiling mouth; four arms – albeit generally a little on the thicker-bodied side. They were the same species, technically, although even more technically they were a subspecies and Waffa had heard that even interbreeding was becoming a thing of the past for the three races. Engineering, social psychology and medical science were all helping evolution along in that regard.

  “Hi,” he said, giving the Bonshoon woman a nod and a brief finger-flick salute.

  “I never thought I’d be so happy to see a human,” she said, in the too-loud voice of someone listening to music on a headset. Or with a stomach full of stimulant-narcotic berries. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, we lived across the corridor from some humans and they were really very nice.”

  “Were they the ones who got eaten by Fergunak trying to cut that gantry and save you all from drowning?” Sally stepped up.

  “No, those ones were stonkers,” the Bonshoon said. “Always sleeping and complaining about needing to sleep, you humans and your sleeping, it’s like you’re unconscious half the time. You’re a female. That one’s a female,” she raised her voice still further and craned her neck to shout back into the hatch. “That last one you said was a female wasn’t a female. You can tell because of the mammaries, just like ours, except horizontal. And they’re made of fatty tissue instead of–”

  “Get your berry-beshitted arse on that lander,” Sally advised her.

  The Bonshoon woman hauled herself easily out of the hatch and straightened, an easy two feet – head, shoulders, shoulders – over the Chief Tactical Officer. Sally looked up at her calmly.

  The Bonshoon lowered her eyes.

  “Toss me up my bags,” she called down into the hatch, and a pair of large blocky cases flew up through the hole in rapid succession. Drug-addled or not, the evacuee caught each one deftly in a pair of hands, and turned back to Sally. “Ready,” she said.

  “If there’s berries in there–”

  “There aren’t any berries,” she said, surly. “I tossed all my berries.”

  Right, Waffa thought, if by ‘tossed’ you mean ‘ate’ … “Send up the last three little ones next,” he said, “then the rest of you can help our crewmen to load up and secure your buddy in the isolation pod.”

  The Bonshooni were cooperative – the idea of a starship arriving completely at random and being their only ticket off a shark-infested ocean planet with a miles-tall tidal wave on the way had a lot to do with that – and soon the eejits and two beefy settlers, one male and the other female, were manhandling the battered old isolation pod up out of the hatch and across the roof. The juveniles, one a pudgy six-footer on the verge of the Molranoid equivalent of teenagerhood, a second about the same age and the third a squirming infant no more than a month old, were loaded up along with the uncle of the latter. The parents, it seemed, had perished in the attack … although with Bonshooni, you never could really tell. They had strange family systems and as many different labels for interrelationships as they had interrelationships. The ‘uncle’ might have been a friend, a lover, a sibling, or even the biological father of the infant – there was no way to be sure and if the Bonshooni didn’t think it was important then it wasn’t the business of the Tramp’s crew to figure it out.

  “Load an extra guy into my seat,” Waffa instructed the eejits, turning and heading back towards the hatch. “I’ll wait for the other lander and help them. I want to check out the hub, see if I can find any information,” he made his way down the service ladder, and eyed one of the dwindling collection of survivors as they were milling and hefting their belongings in huge, beefy arms. “That’s okay with you guys, right?”

  “Of course,” the Acting Consul, a male as huge and round and ruddy as his voice had been, nodded earnestly. He was helping the others, having grandly declared that he would be the last Bonshoon off the hub. “None of us are very good with the sensors and records and stuff – we were up against it just trying to get the beacon reconnected and our transmitters going – but if you want to try, go ahead. We – I
also have a backup of our records and logs here on a data block,” he raised one of his own bags, most of which seemed bureaucratic in nature.

  “I’ll check it out, see what we can salvage,” Waffa said, swinging out over the ladder and descending into the structure. “You’ll want to come in and close that hatch again, they’ll be taking off.”

  “Oh, right.”

  The upper level of the hub had most likely been their communications centre, or at least a backup one. The consoles from which Acting Consul Harga Choyle had transmitted Bayn Balro’s distress call, and the beacon setup and allied junk, was stacked in one corner and the rest of the space had been repurposed into an evacuation staging area for the twenty-seven Bonshooni and their belongings. Actually quite efficient, Waffa admitted grudgingly, for smokers. He crossed to the stairs and descended into the next level.

  The thick, sweet smell of smokeberries, like vanilla-scented cigar smoke, filled his nostrils and made him feel giddy. He knew there was no harm in the smell, though. A bowl of smokeberries would give a Molranoid an enduring euphoria, two would give it an assortment of visions or insights of dubious scientific merit, and three would put it as close to sleep as a Molranoid ever got. The drug in smokeberries was a natural extraction, genetically enhanced, of the medication that laced a Molranoid’s blood when in suspended animation.

  A half-bowl of berries was more than enough to kill even the most heroically-proportioned, Able-Darko-esque human. One berry alone, crushed into a dish of ordinary food, could give a human a permanent psychotic break. Molranoid drugs and human beings did not mix.

  And it looked like these guys had been planning on shipping out huge quantities – had probably been exporting them for some time, in fact – and evacuating with the lot when things went bad. The majority of boxes and containers on this level, clearly arranged for transport and vacuum- or freeze-packed, were filled with berries.