“Not if you wash it,” Z-Lin replied serenely.
“Hah, wash it,” Gila Rodel chuckled. “May have to try that. We call it humandruff,” he laughed again, tilted his head and scrabbled briskly at his hair with one hand, presumably letting flakes of humandruff fall on his own console. Then he leaned over, brushed theatrically at the surface he’d just humandruff’d on, and tapped at it with a lower hand. “Uh, yeah, so, just park anywhere, modular. I’ll light up a bay for you and upload the whole sad story to your pet waskon over there,” he looked up, and grinned through his fringe. “MundCorp out.”
Z-Lin leaned back in her seat when the Blaran vanished off the screens.
“So, Blaren have taken over the base,” she said. “And did he say ‘TransMundus’?”
“I’m afraid so,” Decay said stiffly. “Corsair group – maybe related to the MundCorp Worldship, but not necessarily. It’s a common term. Mund, mundus. But they’re the real deal. These are some of the Blaren who make the Six Species classify us as a criminal caste.”
“So, actual dancers,” Sally said quietly.
Decay gave her a grim nod. “Corsairs have been trying to get into MundCorp for centuries,” he said, “and now it looks … wait, they’re uploading a data package.”
“I hope I don’t need to tell you to keep that shit isolated from our system,” Z-Lin said. “Corsairs like to disguise computer-busters into their data packets.”
“I switched us to a secure buffered comm set as soon as I saw the hair,” Decay said, “but if they were going to sneak something on board through the nod, they would have done it by now. They could have done it when our guard was still down and we made initial contact. I’ll isolate this anyway.”
“Speaking of which,” Sally said, “isn’t MundCorp Research Base supposed to have a synth?”
“Didn’t get any sort of synthetic intelligence handshake,” Decay said, tapping away at his console. “Whatever happened to the Molren on board, looks like they took everything with them. Yeah,” he tapped some more, and some baffling information came flashing and rolling across Sally’s screens. “Apparently, Big Gravity shut up shop and moved their entire operation onto … wow. A new Worldship?”
“I didn’t realise they were still commissioning those big buggers,” Waffa remarked.
“Anyway, they’ve gone mobile and they’ve taken the guts of their operation with them. Whether that means the relic that was meant to be in there, or if that was just a myth, there’s no data on that. But the synth, yeah. They took the hub and all the heavy computers with them when they went. They just left a skeleton system that the TransMundus has logged into.”
“They’re squatting?” Zeegon concluded.
Decay whistled through his teeth. “Looks like,” he said, reaching up to stroke his left ear.
“What’s a waskon?” Contro asked. “That Blaran with the hairdo called somebody on board a pet waskon. Probably Decay, since he was the one who got sent the upload thingy.”
Decay gave Contro a smile. “Wild animal – from Gethsemane, actually. One of the few they successfully managed to breed and genetically dick around with and declaw and modify, you know, chill it out until it was just a really, really good attack animal, with only occasional cases of losing its shit and ripping its owners into tiny pieces. The tougher Blaren, the corsairs, use it as a nickname for the rest of us, who are just normal, inoffensive members of the species and don’t go around stealing and murdering and breaking the law all up and down the galaxy.”
“Oh!” Contro laughed. “Not much of a nickname, is it? Is it meant to be insulting, or flattering?”
“Depends how it’s used,” Decay said idly. “Sort of like monkey, really.”
“So, but hey, aren’t the Blaran corsairs meant to be pretty friendly with humans?” Janus said hesitantly. “I mean, with AstroCorps?”
“Yeah,” Zeegon said, “AstroCorps usually has to act as middlemen between these guys and the Fleet, don’t they? We’re the only ones both sides will talk to.”
“We can’t discount the possibility – the probability – that the balance of power has shifted,” Decay said, “considerably. If there’s nothing on the other side anymore, we’re not middlemen. We’re just … the other side.”
“Recommendations?” Z-Lin said. “Do we just turn and keep on flying? There wasn’t much we needed from this place anyway, apart from news and maybe one of their little refreshment tugs. They could’ve given our exchange another once-over too, but…” she shrugged.
“If we do dock,” Sally said, “recommend we let them know we have a big frosty passenger.”
“Yes,” Decay said positively, giving Sally an approving point. “Yes. They’d never … okay, let’s say I’m ninety percent sure they’d never act against an aki’Drednanth. And even if they did…”
“They can mess around with our computer and they have us outmanned and outgunned,” Sally said, “and a Blaran can kill three humans at a time with one pair of arms tied behind his back … but Thord can just…” she snapped her fingers.
“Thord can snap her fingers?” Contro asked. “What will that do?”
Sally sighed.
“It’s also worth pointing out,” Decay added, “that these guys will be far less concerned with the corporate sharing protocols. Provided they’re not hostile, it’s entirely likely they’d give us a good crack at this place for whatever’s left. We’d have to offer something in return, but we’re not entirely without resources. And they have no particular logical reason to bear us ill will or any desire to shake us down for parts or information, as far as I can tell.”
“Alright,” Z-Lin said, “see if there’s anything else in that data package that sets off any alarm bells, and let us know. Otherwise, we could use information and they’re not absolutely guaranteed hostile … let’s take her in and dock at the port they light up for us. See where they’re going with this.”
GLOMULUS
Doctor Cratch had long since begun to suspect that their full-of-surprises little ship was still in possession – somehow – of a fully-active and sentient synthetic intelligence.
When the ship started hiccoughing, that suspicion became full-blown and glorious certainty. Glomulus leaned back from his monitor where he was lazily waiting to see if Contro was going to realise he’d forgotten his wristwatch, and waved his hands in the air in a celebratory minimalist dance of triumph.
“Hello, Bruce,” he said.
Perhaps predictably, Bruce didn’t answer. But the signs had been clear. The monitors had flickered. So had the lights, although that had been even more brief and Glomulus had noticed the lights occasionally crapped out when they were entering close quarters with a space station or exchanging high-density comms with someone. Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space had periodically turned Cratch’s medical bay into a strobe-lit disco.
Not only that, but the emergency monitoring bumpers had activated, then deactivated, then activated once again. And the doors had audibly safety-locked, then unlocked. It was all quite subtle, and would only make sense to someone who had been neck-deep in the ship’s computer system for a number of years, picking his or her way through the databases and protocols. Some of that time while the ship was running on full synth. As she most certainly was now. Frankly, he thought it was amazing that Sally hadn’t noticed before this. Maybe she had, and was keeping it to herself. Anyway, if she hadn’t noticed, she could hardly miss it anymore.
But that wasn’t all. The ship had hiccoughed for a reason.
The only thing Doctor Cratch could think of was that someone – someone other than him – had started diddling around in the ship’s high-level command code, and Bruce had smacked them down. Or – yes, this seemed more likely – had played like it was just a dumb little modular computer and was letting the infiltrators think they were in, when in fact their invasive packets had been tagged and logged for erasure as soon as Bruce decided it was convenient. Whoever had spiked their punch was going to
be in for a surprise when they came aboard to close the deal and found their victims awake and pissed.
Bruce just couldn’t quite manage to pull off a counter-incursion that subtle without tipping its hand, just a little.
So. This meant they’d arrived – Glomulus knew this from the announcement an hour or so ago – and were either approaching MundCorp Research Base or had once again been hilariously detoured by their mercurial AstroCorps officers. And from the small sample of warnings and notices hitting the medical consoles, it looked like they’d entered a red giant system, so that sort of meshed with MundCorp. The base was sitting in orbit around a red giant, he recalled.
But what had happened next?
Glomulus stood, stretched, and favoured the studiously unresponsive console with another little mocking bow-and-grin. He looked around the medical bay but – apart from the very-strongly-theorised Bruce – he was alone. Wingus and Dingus, the eejit nurses, were off-duty and presumably off sitting somewhere quietly, maybe trying to figure out which way around the spleen was supposed to go in that anatomical lift-out dummy he had given them a while ago. He tapped the internal communicator.
“Hello the bridge,” he said jovially. “I take it we’ve arrived and everything is ship-shape? Or rather MundCorp Research Base-shape, ha ha?”
“Yes, Doctor Cratch,” Z-Lin’s voice came back a few seconds later. So, Glomulus thought, can we assume Janya’s not on the bridge to correct you on that ‘doctor’ bit? “It looks like the base is in one piece but the staff cleared out a while ago, taking most of the hardware with them. Something about a new Worldship mobilising.”
“Interesting,” Cratch enthused. “And the current residents?”
“Blaran corsairs.”
“Ooh,” Glomulus pressed his clasped hands to his narrow chest dramatically. “Avast and shiver me hull-plates, ye scurvy space-dogs. Are we going aboard, me bold and beautiful mateys?”
“Looks like,” Clue replied dryly. “Try not to crush anyone’s head like a grapefruit between your hands unless you really, really need to.”
“I never crush anyone’s head like a grapefruit between my hands unless I really, really need to, Commander,” Glomulus said in an injured tone. She’d already cut off communication, though, so Cratch went back to scouting the ship’s systems and waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was sometimes a good idea to wait for the other shoe to drop, Glomulus remembered Sally saying from time to time. Because when the opposition had both shoes on the ground, you could kick him quite hard in the testicles.
Something like that. It really lost a lot in not coming from the mouth of Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed.
There wasn’t much to see from the medical bay, unfortunately. Even with his feelers out and the medical bumpers periodically flickering in response to whatever toxic code the corsairs had snuck into the Tramp’s system, he was without eyes and ears. He felt them dock with the big old double-Worldship hull, or whatever docking extrusion the new MundCorp representatives were offering. He didn’t have eyes in the Tramp’s docking blister, so all he could do was wait and see.
Humming to himself quietly but – if he did say so himself – rather jazzily, Glomulus opened all the doors leading into and out of the medical bay. There was technically nothing preventing him from leaving his little domain anymore – the heavy bands on his wrists and ankles would not arm if he broke house arrest – but he still opted not to wander far afield without direct authorisation. There was just too much risk of one of the others deciding he was somewhere he wasn’t meant to be. He wondered if he’d get said authorisation this time, before they were done with MundCorp Research Base.
In the meantime he just opened all the doors, stood in the doorway and listened down the corridor for a short while. Then he returned to the medical bay proper and readied an anaesthetic-administering device he had quietly adapted from the isolation pod they’d inherited from the ragtag collection of smoked-out survivors of Bayn Balro.
Then he sat, quietly in an out-of-the-way corner, and waited.
About half an hour passed. From his vantage point, Glomulus saw a set of corridor guide-lights illuminate along the floor leading into the medical bay.
“Never even knew we had those,” he marvelled to himself. Another couple of minutes went by, then he heard the telltale two-toned voice of a Molranoid approaching. A Blaran no doubt, since that was what Clue had said they were looking at here.
“…apparently heading to primary bridge,” the voice said, “we’ll be able to confirm ident against the logs … stand by.”
Never been on board a modular before, sparky? Glomulus thought. Why would you board at the docking blister and get an elevator all the way up here to get to the -
He almost gave the game away by laughing when the corsair wandered confusedly into the medical bay. By sheer iron willpower, though, he managed to keep quiet. He stepped in behind the ludicrously orange-haired Blaran and adroitly administered the series of progressive anaesthetic injections by the simple expedient of hammering the entire set into his back alongside his spinal cord, lumberjack-style. It took a lot to knock out a Molranoid and get past its body’s sequence of safety barriers and drug firebreaks, so the injections were rather aggressive and Cratch was required to step back while the corsair gurgled and thrashed like a giant insect. The drugs were tailored to put down a Bonshoon who had in all likelihood outweighed this lad by a good hundred and fifty pounds, though, so in about ten seconds the Blaran was out cold.
“Wow,” Cratch said, stepping up to the supine Molranoid and chuckling. “You look – and I say this both without hyperbole, and as a man who knows – like a clown.”
Still chuckling, he manhandled the corsair up onto the nearest autopsy table, gave him a quick once-over and divested him of two carbon flechette blasters, an electromagnetic whip and a really, really big knife, then sat down and waited some more.
“Fall back, Scross,” the corsair’s forearm-mounted pad said a few minutes later. The voice on the other end was Blaran, but rather hoarse and shaky. “Fall back. There’s an aki’Drednanth on board and she’s not one of the warm fuzzy ones.”
Really, Doctor Cratch thought, and leaned over to tap his own internal communicator console again. “Commander?”
“Doctor,” Clue’s voice was calm. “Problem?”
“Not really,” he said. “Got a hostage in the medical bay, if you’re interested.”
“Very good. Rodel and his boys were just disembarking,” Z-Lin went on. “We’ll hold onto your hostage until we’re sure they’re all off, and there aren’t any other surprises on board. I trust that’s–” she cut off, presumably turning back to talk to whoever she was facing off against. ‘Rodel’, Glomulus supposed.
He tapped his communicator again, trying to make the interruption as unobtrusive as he could. “Everything alright there?” he asked.
“Fine,” Z-Lin replied after a moment. “Thord didn’t pull Captain Rodel’s head all the way off.”
Another ten or fifteen minutes later they were undocking, and Z-Lin, Waffa, Decay and – unexpectedly, since he had not actually seen any of their three long-haul passengers in person yet – Maladin were standing around the autopsy table. Wingus and Dingus were also on-hand.
“I thought all that stuff was in executive lockdown,” Waffa said, giving the sedative-panel a distrusting look.
“Most of it is,” Glomulus said with aplomb. “This must have been unsealed by whatever messing around these guys were doing with the computer.”
Clue didn’t look as if she necessarily believed that for a second, but nodded as she checked the anaesthetic levels. “Solid job, Doctor Cratch.”
“Mind if I ask what exactly happened out there?” Glomulus asked, jerking a thumb towards the doors.
“Not much to tell,” Z-Lin replied in a voice that said there’s plenty to tell but I’m not in the mood for God damn story-time right now. “Bunch of Blaren in crazy toupees took over the base when the MundCorp guys
shipped out, they’ve been waiting here and preying on supply ships and anyone else who came along. Slipped some sort of lockout code into our comms, but it didn’t work as planned. They sent this guy to secure the bridge and find out why the lockout hadn’t worked and dig out some information they were apparently interested in. Looks like he got severely lost.”
“Your way with understatement is one of your most admirable features, Commander,” Glomulus inclined his head.
“Well then, in that case I’ll conclude by saying that Gila Rodel didn’t believe we had an aki’Drednanth on board, he’d apparently checked our crew manifest and seen what a mess we were in and decided we were trying the ‘we have an aki’Drednanth’ ploy. Thord then made a personal appearance in the docking blister, and demonstrated her displeasure at being forced to get all dressed up in an envirosuit and come down for a meet-and-greet.”
“Thord was resting,” Maladin said, the Bonshoon’s defensive tone tinged with amusement and smugness.
“Rodel should survive,” Waffa added, his own voice giving away nothing but clear satisfaction. “MundCorp had a pretty good medical setup, at least as far as I could judge from the stuff we used to deliver. Unless they took it all with them when they left, it’s just a shame we didn’t get a chance to have a snoop around.”
“Okay,” Glomulus gestured at the table. “What are we going to do with the Great Pagliacci here?”
Z-Lin glanced across the room. “All the actual medical gear is stripped out of that isolation pod from Bayn Balro, right?”
“Right,” Glomulus nodded. “We took everything out and deactivated it after the tragic incident with the dinosaurs.”
She ignored this. “Seal him into it, throw in a couple of those heater-gel packs, make sure his pad’s sending out a signal his boys will be able to pick up, and we’ll space him once we get to a safe distance and are ready to jump,” she turned to leave, then turned back. “You might as well come to the bridge too,” she said to Cratch, “once you and Waffa are done getting him all settled,” she turned, then stopped again. “Oh,” she added, “and all his weapons?”
Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 24