Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  Thord slipped out through the main bridge entrance. Unlike the double-doors leading into the conference chamber, this was just a standard modular door and she scraped lightly on both sides as she departed.

  “Look at this,” Decay murmured, and flipped up some inventory that he had been busy reading through. Z-Lin turned to her own auxiliary command console and studied the data. “Aside from the hull plates and some broken life-support stuff, there are a few other components here. Not the actual synthetic intelligence hub stuff – too sensitive, they took all that out with them – but some basic components that were too big to transport. Including torus sheaths from the supply ships that docked here sometimes.”

  “What are you saying?” Z-Lin frowned. “Are you saying we could make Rakmanmorion a relative drive?”

  “It’s not impossible,” Decay said, bright-eyed. “The torus is here, there’s other big raw components in the remains of the manufactory, and the AstroCorps-sensitive components are all basically modular and replaceable. They’re controlled tech, but they’re not rare – and we have them.”

  “Yes we do,” Z-Lin said. “They’re our spare parts. And our printers are too messed up to make more.”

  “We have a couple of backups for the most important pieces,” Decay said, “and the relative drive is one of the few things on the Tramp that’s in decent working order.”

  “We don’t know when we’ll ever get our hands on more spares,” Clue said. “AstroCorps Rep and Rec are long gone from here, and it’s all small fry until we get to Declivitorion. Which is still more than a year away.”

  “We can always leave Rakmanmorion out here to die,” Decay spread his lower hands. Clue gave him a hard look. “Or we can arrange passenger quarters for him on board and take him home ourselves, or take him with us and drop him home on our way back. And it’s not looking as though he’s got super-compatible environmental requirements, by the way.”

  “You can’t tell me that if The Warm had had these big parts lying around, we wouldn’t have offered to build an extra relative drive or two for them,” Waffa said.

  “Alright,” Clue held up her own hands, “couple more problems. We don’t have the expertise to build a … wait,” she jerked a thumb at the door. “We do, don’t we? We’ve got ables now.”

  “Two of them are actual relative drive installation and repair guys,” Waffa admitted. “We’ve got them in the engine room because they were the closest thing to engineering techs, but they haven’t got much to do. This is literally what they were printed for.”

  Z-Lin raised a finger. “One more. The relative drive takes power. More power than a rocket can provide. And Rakmanmorion’s ship has no fuel left, let alone a reactor. And the Boonie has lost her entire…” she noticed Decay was raising his upper left hand. “What am I missing?”

  “Those big components?” Decay said. “One of them is a regression coil. It’s basically a big battery, if you take the interface off and seal it up. We can charge it from our engine, same as we did on The Warm for their power cells and reservoirs, and then that can be used to kick-start the relative field. It’d sustain for at least a couple of months. It would be a one-way trip, but it’d be enough.”

  “You said he was six weeks from home?” Clue frowned.

  Decay nodded. “His people will have to pick him out of orbit,” the Blaran said. “We don’t have the machinery to land him, and even I would draw the line at adapting a lander for him.”

  “We’re really thinking about doing this, aren’t we?” Sally said.

  “It’s a couple of days to charge the coil and install a relative field generator on his ship,” Decay said, “or it’s at least twelve weeks out of our way to drop him off. With however much extra time it will take to adapt quarters for him, and – fun though it might be – whatever diplomatic efforts we’d have to undergo at Rakmanmorion’s homeworld.”

  “Or three weeks each way to drop him off at Þursheim,” Sally replied.

  “If Þursheim is still there,” Waffa said. “Remember, it’s Schrödinger’s planet right now, or whatever. And if it does turn out there’s no help to be had there, it’ll be even more time to get him home. And even Þursheim is an added six-week detour since we already went off-piste.”

  “All this, versus a potentially irreplaceable set of spare parts that could leave us stranded a hundred thousand years from anywhere if we blow a gasket,” Zeegon pointed out.

  Z-Lin thought about it. “We can agree with Rakmanmorion that we’ll come by and pick the parts out of orbit on our way back from the edge,” she suggested grudgingly. “We can tag them easily enough.”

  Zeegon turned, eyebrows raised. “Will he go for that?”

  “You’re asking me like I know what the Conquerors of Space go for,” Clue replied dryly.

  “Well, look at the state-of-the-art ship they sent out to explore the great unknown,” Sally said. “If we tell him we’re coming to take back our spare parts, what are his buddies going to do? Rub two sticks together at us really hard?”

  “He was happy to just get hull plates,” Waffa agreed. “I think his people will be satisfied to just keep the torus and stuff, and reverse-engineer superluminal tech from there if we take the rest.”

  “That is a pretty damned optimal result from a blind leap into outer space,” Maladin pointed out.

  Clue sighed. “Send Rakmanmorion another packet,” she said, and Decay gave her a nod a moment later. “How are your consumables?”

  “I am reduced by [a third] of my flesh,” Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space replied after an extended pause.

  “Please clarify,” Z-Lin said, although she really didn’t want an answer, “are you referring to your own body mass or your food rations?” she turned to Decay. “Is there anything in the metadata that we could use to synthesise rations for him?”

  “There’s everything,” Decay said, tapping away. “It’s like a ‘how to wipe out our entire species’ guide in here. But I don’t think you’re going to like this.”

  “I had a hunch.”

  “Rakmanmorion’s species are big fellows,” Decay said, “and it looks like the majority of their bodies are … disposable.”

  “My food,” Rakmanmorion’s response removed any need for Decay to continue. “I had packed sufficient [rations] for a [probably standard] mission, but did not anticipate being stranded. I depend on my [non-vital body mass, not including brain and brainstem] for consumption. It will [grow back] in time.”

  “Right,” Z-Lin said, leaning back in her seat and nodding. “So, he’s eating himself.”

  “I think I’ve just decided I don’t want to see this guy after all,” Zeegon said.

  WAFFA

  It was a joy, Waffa reflected, to have an important and relatively difficult job to do, and not to have to do it himself. The ables, who had boarded the Tramp ready-assigned with the nicknames Monty and Stron, had happily gone about preparing the relative torus with no more than a couple of EVA-fitted Automated Janitorial Drones to assist them. In the approximately seventy hours the Tramp spent parked alongside the wreckage of Boonie’s Last Stand, the two ables cobbled together a theoretically-functional relative field generator and fitted it to the hull of Rakmanmorion’s ship. At the same time, the Tramp’s crew – and again, this was mostly the work of ables – worked on getting the regression coil charged and finding an effective way of attaching the improvised battery to the alien craft so the whole lot could be enveloped in the field and fired homewards.

  This challenge was also made easier by the fact that Rakmanmorion, and a little swarm of simple but highly efficient and versatile “[flea]-drones” from his own mission kit, had already begun scavenging regulation hull-plates from the Boonie and attaching them to his craft. In doing so they had solved the main issue of bonding Six Species materials to the unique composite hardware favoured by Rakmanmorion’s civilisation. After that, it was just a matter of affixing the drive and regression coil to the new hull.

&
nbsp; As for Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space himself … well, he was a phlegmatic type, although how much of this was directly related to the fact that he had already eaten about a third of his own body was anyone’s guess and frankly Waffa didn’t like to think about that aspect of it. They talked to him a bit more over the course of the three-day layover, although thankfully they were never at any point forced to lay eyes on him. The alien didn’t – in fact couldn’t – emerge from his primitive spacecraft in person. His species didn’t seem to have designed spacesuits – or they had, and the ship’s main module essentially doubled as one. There was no such thing as extra-vehicular activity to Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space. Extra-vehicular activity was synonymous with his ship breaking open. Instead of personal EVA, it seemed Rakmanmorion’s people had compensated with the surprisingly advanced flea-drone technology.

  It was an example of parallel engineering evolution in action, and Waffa found it very interesting. Indeed, once communication and data-sharing reached that level, he saw to it that flea-drone schematics and assembly instructions were loaded into the Tramp’s database against the day their fabricators were finally capable of printing off more than the most basic components. Rakmanmorion even made them a gift of one of the spare flea-drones from his module’s emergency stores. In fact, he was happy to – since they were giving him astonishing hull plating technology, superluminal travel and a ride home, he considered it a bargain at twice the price.

  And of course, when they found out more about Rakmanmorion himself, it became pretty obvious why the erstwhile Conqueror of Space couldn’t don a spacesuit and jet around outside fixing things. In a purely logistical sense, a spacesuit would have created a whole second ship inside the first one, and required the entire vessel to be able to open up like a flower. Rakmanmorion was a big fellow. Even without seeing him in person they were still able to find out almost everything about him, and his species, from the information encoded in his heartbreakingly naïve dumbler transmission technology. More, at least, than Waffa had ever really wanted to know.

  Rakmanmorion was … well, call him what he was. He was a giant tick. The crew performed a few quick, queasy examinations of his basic statistics, his dietary requirements and his environmental needs, and even Dunnkirk and Maladin admitted that it had probably been a good thing their initial contact had not included a video feed. His planet, that the computer attempted to interpret as “[The Second World]” for esoteric translation engine reasons, was environmentally analogous to the Carboniferous-to-early-Permian eras of prehistoric Earth – all swamps and giant bugs and overabundant oxygen. This era had lingered on The Second World, however, and was even more pronounced, and so the planet had never evolved competing forms of life. No birds, no reptiles, no mammals aside from the strange variants and combinations that served as food. Consequently the bugs had just gone on, getting bigger and smarter and bigger again, in their green, soupy paradise. The Tramp probably couldn’t have supported Rakmanmorion’s oxygen-hungry anatomy even with their farm rings running at full capacity. They would have had to reduce their deck-space by another 40%. And the conversion devices he had built into his ship, while clever, were uncomfortably intimate, more like gill attachments than scrubbers. It would take months to adapt them for installation and use on board the modular.

  Rakmanmorion was somewhere between twenty and thirty feet long, and almost the same in breadth. It was difficult to say for sure because of the different castes outlined in the transmission data, and the aforementioned and often-nightmare’d-about fact that he had started to eat himself. Nobody was quite sure what that meant and nobody was all that eager to find out. This meant that even with thirty percent of his body mass having been recycled, Rakmanmorion filled a lot of his spacecraft’s main pilot module, and this tended to explain why there weren’t any other modules. There was just the engines, the fuel tanks, and the rockets, almost all of which were now cold and empty. Rakmanmorion himself was entirely sedentary and the ship was built around him.

  His species called themselves “[The Small People]”, which prompted some concerns about just how big creepy crawlies got on The Second World. As for the choice of pronoun, the computer – and Decay – seemed fairly certain on this score. Although The Small People had a far more complex system than the classic insectoid and arachnid arrangements seen on a lot of Six Species worlds, it was at least somewhat comparable. Rakmanmorion was of the “[Vermillion Business Expansion] [caste]”, a sort of specialised drone type that combined military-style conformity with a more intellectual, explorative mind-set and – entirely incidentally since only one in a hundred million of them were ever given the chance to breed – male genitalia. He was really quite forthright and proud of the fact that a mere Vermillion Business Expansion such as himself had risen to the lofty role of Conqueror of Space. It was, he opined, a sign of These Modern Times.

  Zeegon, interestingly, found the most common cause with Rakmanmorion entirely by accident. The helmsman made a throw-away remark about Rakmanmorion being in with a shot at getting some loving with his current gig, and everybody had a chuckle until the computer dutifully – and Decay swore it had been a glitch – packaged the remark and transmitted it.

  There had been a long, horrified, awkward silence, until Rakmanmorion’s reply had arrived.

  “If anything will make me [one in a hundred million drone-caste males allocated as breeding stock],” he’d replied, “then it is this. And all the more reason to get home and re-grow my genitals,” after an even longer, even more horrified pause, a second package had arrived. “I was only [joking bawdily] about my genitals,” Rakmanmorion had said, “I have not eaten them,” another pause, and then a third and final transmission. “They are integrated into my brain and mandible, and therefore cannot be eaten.”

  Zeegon had at this point declared Rakmanmorion to be his brother from an awful bloated Permian tick-mother. Rakmanmorion, for his part, called the humans “[spoonbiters]”, and the Bonshooni and the Blaran on board “[chary folk]”, both of which seemed to be related to some odd slang or cultural reference that the computer would probably never make sense of. It wasn’t even as if The Small People used spoons to eat, in any sense that was applicable to human utensils.

  It was uncertain what Rakmanmorion thought of Thord. He called her “The Thord”, and was even more dry and taciturn on the subject of the aki’Drednanth than he was on every other subject on which the crew quizzed him.

  The most detailed study of Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space was performed by the Rip, since he had little else to do during the three-day ‘shore leave’. Glomulus Cratch examined the data on The Small People with an eye to providing Rakmanmorion with quarters and a ride home if the relative engine turned out to be a bust. Although it turned out that accommodating Rakmanmorion would have been far more difficult than building him a superluminal drive, the Tramp’s Chief Medical Officer did claim that feeding him might at least be possible.

  “If we can pipe some food into his module during the installation of the drive, to replace the rations he already ate, it would spare him from having to eat and then re-grow more of himself than was absolutely necessary,” he said at a brief conference in the medical bay. Waffa, finding himself in the confusing situation of having nothing to do, had come along. “Although, of course, there’s always the possibility that he likes eating himself. Or that he can re-grow himself in different colours or styles. You know, bit of a change, like getting a new hairstyle or outfit. Maybe this is a good excuse for him to change his look,” the Rip shrugged. “Plus, maybe he’s delicious.”

  “So you can feed him,” Z-Lin was sceptical. “What can you feed him? Is it awful?”

  “No, he eats rainbows and gumdrops,” Cratch replied. “He’s a giant tick, Commander. Of course it’s awful.”

  Clue sighed. “Let’s hear it.”

  “We’ve already optimised the medical printer to produce Molran organs and blood,” Glomulus said, “for the medical crisis back on Th
e Warm.”

  “No.”

  “Hear me out.”

  “Are you going to suggest we feed him Molran blood and organs?”

  “Pulped up.”

  “Did you think it was the consistency of the food that was going to be the deal-breaker here?” Clue demanded. “And before you give a smarmy answer about it being easier for him to ingest, I meant deal-breaker in the ‘what a horrible, ghoulish, psychotic idea’ sense.”

  “Now now,” Glomulus said mildly, “I admit it’s not nice, but you have to remember that this is printed matter. It’s just carbon and trace elements, it has never actually been part of an actual person. We pumped out pallet-loads of this stuff when it was going to be used by injured Molren. The application is different here, but it’s still just the fabrication of bio-samples for life-preserving purposes. And before you accuse me of being racist, I did try compositions of human blood and organs as well, but they’re too gamey for Rakmanmorion’s digestive system. Molran bio-matter is basically pre-processed, homogenised. It would be pretty bland, but he’d be able to keep it down.”

  “The problem isn’t with Rakmanmorion keeping it down,” Z-Lin said. “The problem is … well, there are two problems here, or let’s say two main ones. Problem number one is that this is a first contact situation with a single drone representative from an obviously large, complex, and quite adaptable arthropoda-based civilisation to which we are already giving superluminal and hull plating technology, and as the acting AstroCorps representative in this I cannot in good conscience begin that relationship by also showing them how easily and readily the Molran species can be turned into a viable food source. You are not an idiot, so you know this.”