“Yes, little flesh,” the giela folded neatly under a buckled stanchion, smoothly whirred erect like an oversized vehicle jack, and stood with arms extended over its head as a heavy-duty lifter rolled in and took the load. It stepped back and angled its gleaming bullet-head to watch as the lifter extended to push the huge arc of metal back into a semblance of its correct alignment. “Damn it all.”
“There’s nothing in the official counts about ‘practical zero’,” Waffa said.
“Why would there be? It is a cold and negative emotion-thing,” the robot clicked forward, positioned itself by a debris-clogged emergency seal, and communed for a moment with the automated network. “But it is truth,” it concluded, beginning to tug free and toss the mangled metal and crete. “You want to stand to one side, little flesh,” it added. “This seal should not drop into place as both areas are pressurised, but it may malfunction. And if it does, you will be crushed and your meat wasted.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” Waffa grunted, stepping out of the path of the massive seal-block. “It says here there’s sixty-three Bonshooni survivors. With the twenty-seven from Bayn Balro, that makes an even ninety. Almost as many Bonshooni as Blaren, according to this…” he was aware that he was prattling, listing numbers and comparisons and factoids from around the crumbling edges of what he knew, intellectually, was a vast and gaping chasm of truth.
His mother, his friends and neighbours, the entire population of Boco Pano. They were gone. Almost two hundred thousand people had lived in the Boco Pano Chrys, and the entire rambling cluster of extended habitats and mashed-together old modulars had been … had been erased.
“I always wanted to taste Bonshoon,” the robot said whimsically. It waited a moment for Waffa to ask a convenient lead-in question, and when he didn’t it went ahead anyway. “Already have tasted human.”
The urge to wait until the giela was jacking up the next busted stanchion, and then just reach in and disconnect its main power feed, was savage and sudden and tantalising. But Waffa reminded himself that it would serve less than no purpose. It wouldn’t harm the shark – on the contrary, it would experience a severed connection and maybe a little data-throb, but it would also experience the ineffable Fergie satisfaction of knowing that it had gotten to him. In the meantime, the giela would be out of commission until Waffa got over his petulance and plugged the bloody thing back in, and that would only be delaying important repair work that was going to help preserve aquatic and non-aquatic survivors alike.
And his mum, and his friends, and The Warm, would still be dead.
“Real human, or just able?” he asked casually, not looking up from his watch.
It was, as ever, hard to tell from the voice and impossible to tell from the body language of the remote avatar, but the giela did pause in its vigorous dislodging work and turn to look at him.
“Able,” it eventually said, with what Waffa opted to interpret as grudging admiration in its synthesised voice.
“Cheap fabricator-printed knock-off of the real deal, mate,” he said in a dismissive tone.
“You know this from experience, little flesh?”
Waffa shrugged carelessly. “Been in space a long time,” he said. “Been in bigger messes than this, too. You’d want to watch out for the Bonshooni we brought with us, though,” he added. “They’re smokers, and even though they’ve been aired out for a bit, I hear that shit gets into the meat.”
The giela absorbed this in silence, allowing Waffa to get back to his aimless sifting and scrolling. That was when, like some cosmic reward for his forbearance and grace under fire, he found the travel log archives.
After whisking through them for a minute or two, he left the Fergunakil robot to its task with a muttered couple of words, and headed back the way he had come at an easy low-gee lope. Stopping at the junction of the spar, he contacted Clue.
“Hey, Waff,” Z-Lin came back moments later. “What news?”
“Not much good,” Waffa replied, “and less in detail,” he quickly filled the Commander in on the rescue and repair operations, the ‘practical zero’ threshold that was only being mentioned between the lines on the official data, and the broad strokes of the mysteriously-eradicated Mandelbrot array. “I’ve talked to a few of the survivors, as well as a couple of the Fergies,” he concluded. “About the attack, all I’ve really got are stories but they’re … well, they do have a bit of a cohesive thread that runs from area to area in a believable way. I think there might be something to it.”
“Really? We’ve got nothing here,” Clue said, “aside from the idea that it was some sort of supercharged assault fleet that came out of nowhere and then may or may not have vanished back into nowhere when all the outside comms went dead, but nobody can tell because all the outside comms went dead.”
“Yeah. Over this side of the old array, there’s actually a pretty solid rumour that they boarded here,” Waffa said, “although that’s about the only thing the stories all agree on. What they did when they boarded, what they looked like, whether they actually boarded or just sent in some sort of destroyer drones or charges – it’s all up in the air. Seems to be an unspoken agreement that it was Damorakind, though.”
“That’s what we’re getting, too,” Clue agreed. “So far only the Acting Controller’s gone out on a limb and actually said it, and even that smacked a bit of naming the Devil.”
“Yeah,” Waffa repeated. “Nobody’s really talking, same as Bayn Balro, but the general unspoken vibe is that this was a Cancer job,” he paused. “The people in the administration and docking loop who aren’t talking about the attack are also very pointedly not talking about how exactly we managed to slip through the coordinated assault net that nobody’s talking about.”
“Right,” Z-Lin said dryly, “well, add that to the insane experimental superdrive we’re not talking about, I guess,” she paused. “How about your people, Waff?”
“Gone,” he said, “at least the whole Chrys where they lived has been taken out of the universe. I’ve got some sort of good news, though,” he swiped up the archive. “If I’m reading this right, and the damage to the data isn’t hiding anything too vital like a cancellation or accident, then it looks like my mother took a trip out to Aquilar a few months ago, to visit my sister and her family back there. Chances are, she’s still in transit. Either way, chances are she was probably long gone from here when the shit came down.”
“Good,” Clue said, earnestly. “I’m glad to hear it. Although everyone else you must’ve known from the area … I guess it’s too much to hope that you only had eighteen friends and they’re all still here?”
Waffa gave a little chuckle. “Don’t know a single one of the bastards.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay Waff, well it’s still your call what you do next. If you want to stay here and help out, there’s a pretty good chance any relief or relocation will be going to and from Aquilar anyway, so if you want to hold out for transport, we’ll set you up. We’re not going anywhere near the Big A-Hole anytime soon, though, so if you stick with us…”
“I hear you,” if the Big A’s even still there, he thought but didn’t add.
“You don’t need to make up your mind right yet, though,” Clue went on. “We’re going to be here a few days just getting everything sorted out, figuring out who stays and who leaves, and running our engines and printers around the clock to get these guys the juice and medical supplies they need.”
“Okay.”
“Turns out we’ve also got ourselves some ables,” Clue added, and Waffa looked down to see some more data slip onto his watch. “The Warm needs strong backs more than they need AstroCorps-trained eggers, so they were happy to trade about three hundred of our eejits, plus as many more as we can print off that don’t meet our needs, for forty-two honest-to-goodness maintenance, engineering and general duty ables. If the ones we print do meet our needs better than the ones we’ve already got on the shelf, w
e can swap ‘em out and drop some more of our bad stock. It’s the sort of license to print we’ve been trying to loophole ourselves into for way too long.”
“Where did they get starship-capable ables from?” Waffa asked. “Did they just have some lying around?”
“Basically,” Clue replied. “They didn’t have many ables here, but as you can see, most of the humanoid survivors were ables. They maintained a rotation of AstroCorps-grade boys for emergency starship crew replacements. It so happens that one of the big dormitories that didn’t get hit contained a bunch of ables who fit the bill for a lot of our key areas. They got whacked, partially depressurised and thoroughly iced, but they’ve bounced back like eejits – sorry, like ables do.”
“Survivors,” Waffa said approvingly. “We like those.”
“Right,” Z-Lin agreed. “They can’t replace the human crewmembers in command positions, by general regulations, but they’re going to make it a lot easier for us.”
“So we get decent ables, and lose a huge mob of eejits,” Waffa said. “What’s the catch?” Aside from Contro still technically being Chief Engineer, he added a little spitefully, but again didn’t say aloud.
“Well, we’re still going to be short-handed after we deliver our eejits to The Warm,” Clue said, “and that means we’ll probably need to keep on fabricating more of them. And with no way to repair the plant, we’re stuck with circus-grade clownmeat. But that’s really more of a status quo than a catch.”
“I’m heading back to the ship,” he said, bounding on towards the next superjunction without looking back at the Fergunakil giela. There was no transportation system in place here yet, but with the exchanges dead it wasn’t exactly an exhausting chore to get from place to place. “There’s nothing much more I can do here, but I can start the plant up. What’s our next stop going to be?”
“I think Sally and Zeegon are working out an itinerary,” Clue replied. “Pending an actual decision about our destination for this leg and how many refugees we’ll be taking with us. You can take it up with them, if you’ve got any local knowledge that might be useful.”
Waffa signed off, and booted himself along the chilly, echoing causeway towards the dock.
SALLY
“Yoo-hoo? Anyone home? Is this thing on?”
Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed sighed and jabbed at the communicator with a finger as though trying to punch a hole in the console. “What is it, Doctor Cratch?”
“Ooh, Sally,” Cratch sounded pleased, yet scandalised. “Janya doesn’t like it when people call me ‘doctor’, you know.”
“Can’t say I’m in love with it either, but you’re what we’ve got,” Sally replied. “What do you want?”
“I have the first batch of skin and lungs ready to go. And I know they’re the most important replacement parts for injuries related to cold and vacuum, but I just can’t help looking at this slab of packaged organs and see a really messed-up attempt at starting a balloon-inflating business…”
“Will you shut up?”
“Sorry,” Glomulus was clearly far too gleeful to fully suppress himself, but he made a clear effort and his next statement came across as merely jolly. “I’m switching over to blood for the next run. Then I’ll do Molran skin. I’m not sure how well our printers will do with the Molranoid stuff, they’ve been out of commission for a while with only Decay on board. But that is clearly the biggest need on the settlement right now, and this ship of theirs with the injured fellows sleeping on board. I think we could give each of the human survivors a half-dozen lungs and enough skin to make a serviceable, if ghastly, wardrobe of–”
Sally shut off the comm.
“Are there some Fergies on the line I can please talk to?” she asked Zeegon.
“I think the Rip already freaked them out with his ‘sharksicles’ routine,” Zeegon said from the helm, and tapped desultorily at his organiser pad.
They were currently alone on the bridge, doing their best to monitor the crew’s activities on the station, keep track of the Bonshooni passengers on board, figure out a flight plan to the edge of the galaxy, and wrangle eejits in the logistical nightmare that was a rescue and resourcing operation performed largely by crewmembers with IQs in the high-houseplant registers. And, as Zeegon himself had said, to top it all off there wasn’t a single Zaz Burger left on The Warm.
“It’s like whatever demented alien invaders did this, they targeted delicious deep-fried steak-and-onions goodness intentionally and systematically,” he mourned.
The refugees from Bayn Balro, surprisingly, seemed to be leaning in the direction of unanimously opting to stay behind on the stricken settlement. About the most honest and rational explanation Sally had received, amidst all the tough talk about rebuilding and not quitting and regrouping to go back and reclaim the wave, was from Acting Consul Choyle.
“We’re perfectly happy to live in a relatively sustainable environment, which this will be once the repairs and the shoring up is done,” he’d told her a short while ago. “In fact it already is now, for a thousand-odd people. They’ve survived almost a month, they’ll survive indefinitely and we have sustainability expertise they can use. Plus, it’s fair to say that we’ve all gained a healthy dose of thalassophobia, and are all too happy to be in a settlement where it looks like the Fergunak are just not going to be able to live much longer.”
Sally, after discreetly looking up thalassophobia, had been inclined to concur. Not only that, but The Warm and Bayn Balro alike had already been attacked and, quite literally in the case of the former, killed by whatever-the-Hell-this-was.
“If we can live here,” Choyle had confided in her quite earnestly, “call me cowardly but we are perfectly happy to huddle in the ruins in relative safety and wait out the storm. Our children will live. If they live to reach out into the stars again, so much the better. But they will live.”
Again, Sally felt this was fair enough. The Bonshooni were settlers, after all. That meant almost by definition that they would stop somewhere rather than keep moving. That’s why there were settlers, and not nomads.
Nomads, not to be confused with damn fools stumbling from one disaster to the next, she thought to herself, which is what we are.
The Bayn Balro expats were tough enough. They were more suited to holing up, digging in, building habitats and surviving in them, than travelling indefinitely towards whatever lights of civilisation might be left. They’d built a home on a world covered in an ocean full of sentient cybernetic sharks, an ocean that hula-hooped them violently around its own equator with every pass of her bloated, shattered moon.
Sure, they’d apparently taken a lot of drugs to make that seem like a good idea, but they’d done it. The Warm wasn’t going to be a problem for them.
And Choyle was right about the Fergunak. The few remaining in the Chalice were either going to leave in their gunships once they’d done what they could here – and frankly it was staggering they’d done as much as they had – or they were going to die. There was a slim chance that rescue, of a sufficient scale to provide aquatic-environment relief, would come in time to save them … but it was drastically slim. Even if the wider Fergunak gridnet mounted a rescue operation for the schools back around Bayn Balro, the operation would not stop in at The Warm. There was no potential for rescue, settlement or resupply here. The only reason the Fergunak would come here in any great force, Sally’s deeply pessimistic and distrusting Chief Tactical Officer mind insisted, would be if the Larger Dark Moving Below school and their toothy buddies insisted on a payback assault. That was not entirely outside the bounds of Fergunak vindictiveness, but probably not something they would bother the settlers about.
No, if the Fergunak were going to strike out at something that had offended them, it would be the Tramp and her crew. Acting Consul Choyle and his people would be safe as soon as they disembarked.
It occurred to Sally, randomly, that the prefix ‘Acting’ should probably be stricken from the legal lexicon sooner rath
er than later. If the organisational structures of the Six Species were going to continue getting pounded to mincemeat, the modifier would pretty soon lose all meaning.
The door swished open and Waffa stepped onto the bridge.
“What’s it look like out there?” Sally asked, regretting that neither her tactical and diplomatic simulation training nor her Mygonite upbringing were equal to the task of dealing with a loss of this magnitude. The Accident had effectively trumped and shut down any attempt to communicate or commiserate about subsequent traumas without sounding hopelessly naïve at best, insultingly dismissive at worst. Their best alternative was counselling from Janus Whye, and Sally wasn’t sure she’d wish that on a war criminal.
Waffa, however, responded with his usual laconic colourfulness. “It’s a huge gaping frozen death-hole with a data-void cherry on top,” he said, “you know, on top of the hole, somehow,” he plonked himself into the empty weapons officer’s chair next to Sally’s station, and sighed. “Actually, considering what a God damn disaster this is, they’re dealing with it really well. I guess they’ve had nearly a month to run around like headless chooks and then get their crap together.”
“How about your folks?” Zeegon asked. Boonie uncoiled from his warm spot on the helm’s glowing display, slunk across the floor and up Waffa’s leg like a mossy green lizard.
“Well, it was just argh argh argh, damn it Boonie you’re wet,” Waffa exclaimed as the weasel worked his way around the crook of his neck. Boonie showed absolutely no remorse at this, and after a moment Waffa settled back and scratched the jungle-damp weasel’s ears absently. “Anyway, it was just my mum and she’s gone, far as I can tell,” he went on, “but ‘gone’ in a good way. Looks like she shipped out before the Cancer got here. The rest of Boco Pano is gone in the other way, but there’s still a chance mum’s on her way to Aquilar.”
“I’m glad about your mum,” Zeegon said, “but you said ‘Cancer’ first so you owe us a crew quarters each from your set,” the helmsman turned and gave Waffa a faint smile. “You know – when a person gets bitten, goes grey, dies and then comes back to life and goes lurching around the place hungry for human flesh, you lose the bet if you’re the first person to say–”
Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 12