Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  “Contro–” Clue started patiently.

  “Shit, I’ll take one,” Bendis said. “Haven’t had toffee in a bloody year. Cheers, mate.”

  Clue grinned and shook her head, and they climbed back up towards the surface, Contro’s cheerful voice echoing off the mineral shaft walls as he prattled about the innumerable merits of Boddington’s and the huge supply he had with him but that he hoped he would be able to replenish before too much longer but imagine if it was actually the last stockpile of Boddington’s Toffees in human civilisation, and wouldn’t that be funny but not really very funny in that sense at least, and how many should he responsibly save for alien archaeologists to discover and replicate do you think, and wasn’t it a shame the printers just couldn’t get it right, and have you ever tasted printer toffee, it was actually jolly decent but sometimes ‘jolly decent’ just wasn’t quite enough was it, and then on back around to the subject of Boddington’s re: its innumerable merits.

  Bendis, surely due to extremely short exposure and the fact that he’d thought there were only eighteen humans left in the galaxy up until a couple of hours before, seemed rather charmed by this monologue.

  They reached the top of the stair and the surrounding warmium gave way to equally-cold habitat-standard metaflux plating once more. It was a small room, barely large enough for the five humans, two ables and the Blaran to stand on the landing together, with a door set into one wall and a metal cabinet bolted to another.

  “There’s air in the bubble, of course,” the Acting Controller said, “but I’m told Thord has vented out a lot of the heat and re-routed that power to where it’s needed, so it’s brass monkeys out there,” he opened the cabinet and started passing out floppy black niqis, headgear that would seal against their thermals and keep their faces warm, while allowing them to see out through filter-fitted eyeholes. They weren’t standard issue on starships – generally speaking, if you needed a niqi as well as a thermal, you put on a spacesuit and called it good. “You’ll want these.”

  Decay pulled the material down over his flattened ears and smoothed it over the top of his head with quiet gratitude. Honestly, he didn’t often envy humans their fur and their tiny, feeble little ears, but the cold sometimes had a psychological impact that no amount of blood chemistry and muscular insulation could counteract.

  Bendis checked that they were all rugged up, consulted and tapped at his organiser a moment longer in some sort of communication with his deputies, then leaned in and pushed the door open. Decay noted, again, the calmly-automatic way the human braced one foot against the adjacent wall under the cabinet in order to provide leverage. They’d been living essentially weightlessly for the past three weeks, and a reinstatement of gravity would no doubt come as a tremendous shock to them all.

  He’d probably drop that giant pad of his in the first ten seconds, at least, Decay thought in uncharitable amusement, and followed Z-Lin out into the open.

  And ‘into the open’ was what it felt like. At first it was difficult to see the bubble, since it was made of very fine regenerative film extruded from the low ring-wall surrounding the habitat. It had probably been ruptured in several places during the attack and had grown back in a matter of minutes, as it was designed to do around micrometeorites and other impacts. Even if the bubble had depressurised for an hour, the collection of low shacks could have maintained an atmosphere while the bubble stretched and swelled back into place like a net of cobwebs puffing up into the air. There were several structures and openings that probably led down into tunnels like the one they’d just exited – if not airlocked, then at least barred by airtight doors and able to be blocked off by emergency seals.

  For that matter, the average aki’Drednanth envirosuit could maintain EVA viability for the time it would take for the habitat to repair itself.

  It was an efficient and sustainable design, hybrid Six Species bio-nano-technology, but useful only for a limited range of situations and environments, and particularly species. They couldn’t have made more than a few surface bubbles this way, or the whole lot would have eventually come floating apart in a stiff solar wind. And heating the film and interior was an added expense and an added destabilising element due to the temperature shear, which was probably another reason Thord had done away with it.

  The bubble was designed to be held aloft in near-zero gravity by the pressure of the atmosphere inside it alone, so it was by necessity extremely light and thin. The ground was untreated, pebbly-surfaced warmium bedrock interrupted only by the secondary structures and the ring-wall, although the latter was not visible from their current vantage. And yes, Decay could tell even through the thermal and the niqi, it was cold. The Warm itself might have been minus-twenty-something, but with most of the heating power leached out of this area the air was chilled nearer to the ambient temperature of The Warm’s practically nonexistent atmosphere. It must have been sixty or seventy degrees below zero, Decay thought. Quite close to ideal, for an aki’Drednanth.

  They stepped out into the bubble, boots creaking and grinding on the frozen ground, and looked around at the desolate space. There was a strangely stifling light from a collection of emergency lamps, and the local sun was peeping over the Chalice. Chilly blue light pierced the field of ice meteorites in sharp rays.

  Decay, much to his private pleasure, saw her first.

  She emerged from one end of a nearby long, tent-like structure of canvas and light hull plates. Thord was wearing her massive beige envirosuit, rather unexpectedly and unnecessarily, but Decay allowed that she no doubt had her reasons. In fact, when he stopped to think about it, it actually made sense. The bubble could fail at any moment, there could be more space-borne debris or another attack from almost any source, and she would need the suit’s air. If the bubble did burst, the eight of them would be lucky to get back into the stairwell before asphyxiating.

  Thord was – there was simply no other more appropriate way of saying it – vast. The average aki’Drednanth, while only a foot or so taller than a Blaran – eight feet, sometimes as much as nine – were essentially cubical in volume. They were nine feet in every direction. And her refrigeration gear added another effortless foot to this, and added to her overall cubishness. Normally aki’Drednanth were powerful but pacific, their movements smooth as muscle effortlessly cancelled out the immense weight of their gear, but at the same time slow and deliberate. This was more to do with the care and affection they showed for their little Molranoid and humanoid cousins, however, than the popular misapprehension that aki’Drednanth were lumbering semi-sentient Ogres.

  Now, moving in the virtually-nonexistent gravity of The Warm, Thord loped and bounded across the warmium ground with slow scooping pushes of her squat legs and her enormous arms, the rounded fawn blocks of her suit swinging and shifting as she stretched and coiled. The legs ended in huge boots that looked more like hooves, while the hands, like a Blaran’s, each sported three fingers and a thumb – although like a human she only had one pair. They were long, thick, and bestial, even if the gauntlets concealed the claws and the thick fur. Aki’Drednanth tended to eschew fine object manipulation, but were more than capable of operating machinery, limb augmentations and giela-like remote devices that enabled it for them.

  Decay had seen a few different variations on the aki’Drednanth envirosuit, the heavy sealed machinery that kept the creatures chilled to their natural and accustomed state of deep freeze. He’d even seen one aki’Drednanth, the legendary Hibernos Rex of the Molran Fleet Council of Captains, wearing the ancient Damorakind-crafted envirosuit that she adopted in ceremonial situations. When the Molren donned their full dress uniforms, Hibernos Rex habitually swapped her Fleet-standard suit for the gleaming obsidian spines and glowing blue highlights of her ancestral slave-garb. An aki’Drednanth in that getup was truly terrifying.

  Thord was wearing the more usual boxy arrangement of articulated refrigeration units, scratched and dented on the outside and decorated with stickers, prints, and
even the occasional riveted-on plaque. The helmet, a huge blocky thing that looked like the shovel on an excavator, was featureless except for a voice synthesiser bumper under the shelf of her chin, and a set of signal lights on each side roughly corresponding to the positions of her eyes. The bumper would be connected either to sensors in the gauntlets that Thord could use to ‘type’ – fine object manipulation aside, many aki’Drednanth had formidable muscular control and could quite easily make tiny shifts in the joints of each finger sufficient to recreate a standard alphabet and to write very nearly as fast as a person could talk – or to the larynx pit where sub-vocal exhalations could be detected and converted. The aki’Drednanth did not have the palate for standard speech, although they did have a decidedly untamed language of their own. In either case, the bumper translated the signals and emitted them as speech.

  The lights, a group of three short horizontal blue-green bars on either side of the helmet, shifted in colour and switched on and off in accordance with a nuanced emotional spectrum that a wise person figured out fairly quickly when dealing day-to-day with an aki’Drednanth.

  These simple devices were how the aki’Drednanth communicated with any non-aki’Drednanth. Among her own kind, Thord’s primary means of communication would be telepathy – silent, highly complex, and blindingly fast, utterly belying the bestial nature of the species. It was Fergunakil technology, of course. Decay didn’t know whether the Damorakind had wanted or needed their aki’Drednanth slaves to speak, but the accessories were of Fergunakil design.

  Thord half-glided, half-pounced across the ground and dropped delicately to stand in front of them on feet and knuckles. She didn’t seem to have any magnetics in her suit, depending entirely on her mass and an exquisitely-honed awareness of her momentum and power to keep herself from pushing too hard and too high.

  “I am Thord,” she said, her bumper’s voice a mellow bass-androgynous rumble with a hint of Molranoid harmonic. “You are the new Controller, and the crew of the modular that has just recently arrived.”

  Decay didn’t know every aki’Drednanth by name. Even a tiny population like the five hundred or so that made up the ‘Fourth’ species – the Fergunak and humanity had joined later, making the aki’Drednanth the Fourth as well as the first non-Molranoid species – was constantly shifting and changing. The great creatures lived and died like any other, legends and theories of their immortality notwithstanding. In purely organic terms they were longer-lived than human or Fergunakil but short-lived in comparison to Molran, Blaran or Bonshoon. Some of them even departed to their ancestral homegrounds of the Great Ice where the bulk of their population dwelled. Sometimes they returned, and sometimes they were replaced with newcomers from the Core. And this was even before you considered the added complication of aki’Drednanth rebirth, which could mean that even when an aki’Drednanth died, she was still able to be an arguably active member of society through the Dreamscape, and that it was entirely possible you hadn’t seen the last of her in the flesh, either.

  Even so, he was reasonably sure he knew the pseudonyms of most of the aki’Drednanth at large among the Six Species, as of his last wide-ranging data-sift little over a year ago. Well enough to tell a well-travelled and integrated ancient like Hibernos Rex from a new arrival or relative recluse, at least. And he was pretty sure he’d never heard of Thord. This didn’t actually mean anything in and of itself, of course.

  As if on cue, she raised a massive gauntlet to the battered helm of her envirosuit. With a clunk and a soft whisking sound of micromotors, the helmet lifted away in segments and folded back against her shoulders and chest.

  GLOMULUS

  As luck would have it, Contro and Janus had meandered off to one side and away from most of the group, almost forming a third point in a triangle already consisting of crew and The Warmies. This put Contro in a good position to see the aki’Drednanth – Contro, and more importantly, his watch.

  It had been a stroke of luck, again, that Contro had been diddling around with his wristwatch and it had therefore ended up on the outside of his thermal. Sometimes in the pocket of his cardigan, and frequently on the ground, but usually in his hands. Glomulus had resigned himself to not seeing anything much of interest, and listening in on what was happening using the little organiser device he had discreetly hacked into some time ago. Now, he was being treated to a veritable video tour.

  Of course, the wristwatch being in Contro’s hands instead of around his wrist meant that the daffy physicist was usually bouncing or flipping or tossing it back and forth, fumbling it and – at one disturbing point – putting it into his mouth. Janus had fortunately been close at hand and had rescued the device, which Contro had “mistaken for a toffee”.

  The organiser had some pretty sophisticated stabilisation and extrapolation software, however, and even bouncing around and flipping end over end had little effect on what Cratch could see on his little monitor in the medical bay. The wristwatch device shot images at high speed and then rotated and angled and composited them into a clear, if slightly laggy point-of-view continuity at the receiving station. It was almost as good as being there, with the added benefit of not having to wear the universe’s lamest superhero costume.

  “And here’s me without a bowl of snacks,” Glomulus mourned light-heartedly to the sterile, empty chamber.

  Thord’s head was huge and heavy and covered with a long, thick, white pelt. Her cranium was much smaller than the lower part with its massive shaggy chin and muscular jaws. Huge vertical tusks like a row of thick eighteen-inch bananas curled up from her leathery black lower lip. It was just as well her eyes weren’t front-and-centre like they were on the heads of most apex predators. If they had been, Thord would have looked out at the world through a yellow picket fence.

  Her eyes and ears, indeed, were small – almost an afterthought – vestigial sense organs long since superseded by the aki’Drednanth’s powerful telepathy. They were tucked away down behind her jaws at the base of her skull, barely visible above the heavy collar. What need did a creature have for sight, smell and hearing, when she could step across the mental landscape and smite the minds of higher and lower animals alike, with pinpoint accuracy and elegance?

  How had such a creature ever become a slave?

  Well. The answer to that varied, depending on who you asked. The common consensus seemed to be that the aki’Drednanth submitted to Damorakind for the same reason they still conducted part of their aki’Drednanth-to-aki’Drednanth communication in bestial howls – there was something interesting and enjoyable in it for them, something satisfying. This wasn’t an insulting assumption or implication that they liked to be slaves, however. A life of subjugation meant little when you considered, one, that aki’Drednanth existed mostly in worlds inside their own minds where not even Damorakind could go; two, that aki’Drednanth were functionally immortal and one lifetime among technically endless was ultimately a flick of an ear; three, that they were reportedly quite prized and well-treated in Damorakind society, used as status symbols and ceremonial guards; and four, that any one of them could just up and leave whenever she liked.

  “Commander Z-Lin Clue,” Glomulus was faintly aware of the Commander introducing the party all over again. “This is Janus Whye, our counsellor; Controversial-To-The-End, Chief Engineer; this is Janya Adeneo, Head Of Science; and General Moral Decay (Alcohol), comms officer. The eej – ables are with Louzhan, I don’t know their names…”

  It was also an issue of practicality, Cratch reflected. By bending to the Cancer rather than fighting back against it, the aki’Drednanth guaranteed that Damorakind felt no driving hostility or need to dominate or destroy them, or threaten their precious home range – the way they did, for example, against the rest of the Six Species. The aki’Drednanth did not need to exterminate the whole crawling Core, or waste effort and resources getting into an arms race when Damorakind inevitably adapted and struck back in an attempt to preserve their existence. They coexisted at what was,
for them, a negligible price.

  Some said this was naïve. Sooner or later, Damorakind would get around to eradicating the aki’Drednanth, once they could be sure of doing so without catastrophic reprisals. And living in ostensible servitude while your masters got around to the business of genocide was tantamount to signing your own death warrant.

  “…just a little bit overwhelmed, none of us have seen one of your kind in a very long time…”

  You were supposed to be able to tell, from the setting of the jaw and the shape of the enormous curving tusks, whether an aki’Drednanth was really male or female. The creatures themselves considered it an irritatingly irrelevant detail into which other species put far too much stock, and generally made a conscious effort to keep the information undisclosed. Out of linguistic convenience they used the female pronoun – not universally, but generally – for much the same reason people used it for starships. And because the female was often the larger and more powerful in the animal kingdom. Glomulus couldn’t really see from the dodgy vantage point of Contro’s wristwatch, though.

  The pale, skeletally-thin doctor was aware of the fact that many aki’Drednanth removed their helmets simply to show that there was an organism inside the suit. It was not unheard-of for people – usually Fergunak using specially-designed giela and for unfathomable reasons of their own – to articulate a similarly-sized and gyroscopically-powered suit and pass it off as an unknown aki’Drednanth. Sometimes humans did it too, although why they did it was slightly less of a mystery. Neither Molran, Blaran nor Bonshoon would ever question an aki’Drednanth and would do what she asked almost without exception, and Glomulus knew this could be extremely lucrative if you could get away with it. Of course, even given their hereditary respect Molranoids were rarely fooled. And the penalties for impersonation were harsh. Not from the aki’Drednanth themselves, who found the whole practice rather amusing, but from the Molren. Molren just had no sense of humour when it came to aki’Drednanth.