Glomulus pointed innocently to the little pile of weapons. “That’s it,” he said, “but you can feel free to search for others I might have stashed.”
“We will,” Decay said calmly.
“Most of them were no good for me,” Cratch went on, earnest. “The knife is pretty, but I don’t suppose I’ll be allowed to keep it.”
“You are an infinitely perceptive son of a whore,” Z-Lin acknowledged, and left the room.
Decay picked up the blasters and the whip, pocketed them, and then picked up the long-handled knife. “It’s designed for two-handed use anyway,” he said, giving the blade a twirl. “Two right hands.”
“I could figure something out,” Glomulus implored playfully.
Decay gave a brief snort of laughter. “No doubt.”
They lifted ‘Scross’ into the isolation pod and threw in a couple of heating packs to prevent the worst of the chill that the pod was not designed to exclude. It would be enough to keep him alive for ten hours, Glomulus judged, maybe fifteen if he was tough and didn’t mind a bit of frostbite. That was a moot point since the pod only had a cellular air supply system that would last about six hours … but then none of that really mattered either. If his corsair buddies were going to save him, they’d do it within half an hour of his ejection. Or they would leave him to die.
With the nurses’ help, they pushed the pod onto a janitorial and trundled it to the nearest airlock. Not without a certain trepidation – or so Glomulus detected in Waffa’s breathing and heart rate as they worked – they manhandled the pod into the airlock. Doctor Cratch, mindful as always of the subdermal implants that Waffa might decide to activate at any moment once Glomulus’s immediate usefulness had expired, opted not to make a comment about faulty maintenance and the possibility of their being chewed up by the airlock doors.
Glomulus and Waffa went to the bridge.
“Here’s our anti-incursion hero,” Sally announced as they entered. “Well done, doc. You actually sedated a person instead of murdering them? You’re really diversifying.”
“Variety is the spice of life,” Glomulus said, giving a little pose-and-hand-jiggle. “Anything is possible, given the right tools. It’s just a mystery how he managed to get so thoroughly lost, when the dreaded space pirates presumably ordered the computer to direct him to the bridge.”
“Yes,” Sally said neutrally, “that is a puzzler.”
Yes, Glomulus thought, making smiling-but-full eye contact with the Chief Tactical Officer. “Thord already went back to her room?” he went on, and looked around. Maladin had once again accompanied the crew to the bridge, but he was the only relative stranger Cratch could see.
“Yes,” the Bonshoon said. “She was … cross.”
“I see you take understatement lessons from our glorious Commander.”
“How’s that full system check going?” Clue asked from her seat. Glomulus, who wasn’t often honoured with a visit to the bridge, noted with mild interest that she was sitting at one of the backup stations rather than the Captain’s console. Queen Regent to the last, he thought.
“Looks clean,” Decay reported.
“All systems report uncontaminated,” Sally confirmed.
“We’re good to go,” Zeegon reported from the helm. In the viewscreens, the great ruddy arc of the system’s sun was dominating the left side and the pockmarked double-blob of MundCorp Research Base was visible on the right like a little red-grey moon. Both were shrinking steadily as, from the Tramp’s perspective, they backed away at maximum subluminal velocity.
“Scumbags away,” Waffa said from his station, and hit a control to open the airlock where they’d stashed Scross.
There was a contemplative twenty-second silence on the bridge. It was the sort of silence where things got locked into deep conversational vaults and were never spoken of again.
“Well, this has been weird,” Commander Z-Lin Clue concluded, as they watched the tiny pod gleam bravely in the light of the big red sun, glinting and dwindling fast as they accelerated away. “Hit it, Zeeg.”
They settled back into soft-space. Maladin gave Glomulus a strange, unreadable nod, and strolled off the bridge.
It wasn’t until almost six weeks later – they were on their final approach to Standing Wave – when Thord came to the medical bay for the first time.
Doctor Cratch, known for stealth of movement capable of catching Molranoids off-guard, was surprised by the aki’Drednanth’s absolute silence. She was just there, looming near the doorway, when Glomulus returned from the windowed recovery ward where he had been enjoying his lunch to the accompaniment of some quiet music and an inspirational view of the grey nothingness. Highly attuned to the sounds of anyone stepping across his threshold, he was momentarily shocked to stillness. At the very least, given what he’d seen and heard of the big girl through his dedicated months of snooping, he would have expected her to clunk her huge blocky envirosuit on the doorframe once or twice.
He recovered quickly, sidled forward and tossed his leftovers into the recycling chute. “I wondered how long it would be until you came to see me,” he said.
“I wanted to wait,” Thord said, unusually pensive – in Glomulus’s opinion – for an aki’Drednanth, and certainly one with Thord’s shipboard reputation for being feisty. “Until we were closer to the edge,” she added.
“We’re not exactly close,” Glomulus demurred, “less than halfway, I’d say, all told. But closer, certainly. And already a lot of adventures behind us,” Thord didn’t seem inclined to respond to this, and Cratch continued chattering a little helplessly. “Didn’t want too much exposure to my sparkling personality?” he smiled. “Most of the others feel the same way.”
“Fridge told me about you,” she said without further preamble.
“Really? When? Oh,” he wiggled his fingers. “Some earlier time when we were at subluminal, using your wacky-wacky powers, right?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. I’m surprised you’ve come to me while we’re at relative speed, though,” he went on. “Not that I’m any threat to you, but … aren’t you all alone right now?”
“Not entirely,” Thord said, with a soft fade-in, fade-out of the lowermost bar of her eye-panels that demonstrated muted amusement.
“Ah, right. You have Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” Glomulus noted.
“Yes.”
“So what did Fridge say about me?”
“Many things. It is not important. She said that you were a deep thinker, and a great friend to the aki’Drednanth. A scholar of sorts.”
“An enthusiastic amateur – don’t let Janya Adeneo hear you call me a scholar,” Glomulus smiled and sat down at a console, gesturing the great suited figure to enter further. “I have some gazz thrash in the sample freezer,” he said, and was rewarded with Thord’s entire interface panel brightening to yellow. “A lot of the ingredients are synthesised, but it’s been crystallising now for … ooh, eight months or so, so they might have lost their vat-taste. I started micro-brewing them after we set out from The Warm.”
“Impressive.”
“I’m no more a chemist than I am a scholar,” he said modestly, “but … well, did Fridge happen to mention my gazz thrash?”
“She did not.”
“Like her mother used to make, that’s what she said. Got icicles in her eyes, she told me. You can go ahead and get confirmation on that next time we stop.”
“You are a droll fellow,” Thord said, but the warm yellow glow of delight had lingered gratifyingly. “I will be pleased to try your home-brewed gazz thrash.”
Humming happily, Doctor Cratch trotted over to the freezers and rummaged in them for a while, eventually emerging with a large sample canister usually given over to liquid nitrogen storage. And, to be fair, nitrogen was one of the lesser ingredients in a good gazz thrash, if only as a catalysing agent that mostly boiled away during the formation of the crystallised slush. It gave a delicate aftertaste, or so Glomulus had
been told. Presumably an aftertaste of delicious nitrogen.
“Straight from the bottle?” he asked, raising the steam-cascading canister in his heavy-duty sample tongs.
“Thank you,” Thord settled on her haunches, reached out and took the canister. It looked like a small can of soda in her gauntleted hand. She opened it deftly, tilted her head a little and let the helmet fold open and retract around her massive shoulders. Glomulus sat, enjoying his first in-person look at the great, shaggy, frost-steaming head, the enormous curved tusks, the jutting lower jaw and tiny, gleaming, ice-crystal-beautiful eyes. She opened her mouth wide and angled her head down – he caught a glimpse of a wide, pointed, zebra-striped tongue – and poured the boiling slush generously down her throat.
The stripes, he thought to himself as she scrunched the gazz thrash back and forth in her giant maw discerningly for a few seconds, were the aki’Drednanth equivalent of tattoos, and made in much the same basic way as human tattoos. As far as he knew only warriors had them – warriors of a particularly rebellious and anti-establishment nature. Glomulus knew Thord was only an innocent thirty-something … and yet, if you followed aki’Drednanth beliefs, she was in fact a far older soul. One who had not drawn breath in a thousand millennia.
“It is very good,” she concluded, putting the lid carefully back onto the canister and letting her helmet fold shut once more with a hiss of atmosphere. “No vat taste … but I am desensitised to artificial food. Anything that has been made with some time and care tastes good.”
“You’re bold, drinking something I’ve made.”
“Yes, you have a reputation on board,” Thord said, settling more comfortably. “I think if you poisoned me, it would be very difficult to blame somebody else.”
“That’s true,” Cratch admitted. “And they’d be liable to permit me to defend myself from outside the ship.”
“With no hands or feet,” Thord added, “I am told.”
“Exactly. Not to mention a little brain-damage-induced catatonia as a special parting gift from you.”
“I think from what Fridge told me,” Thord said, “I would be able to reward you with a more thoughtful gift. It is the work of moments, with a certain mind, to awaken the subconscious cortex and plunge the thoughts into a permanent nightmare state.”
“It sounds like a perfectly diabolical punishment,” Glomulus said. “Although I might have trouble telling the difference.”
“Yes,” Thord opened the canister and her helmet again, and took another liberal mouthful of the frigid slush. She closed her helmet, put the canister down, and continued. “You have taken a dark and difficult path.”
“All paths are dark and difficult,” Glomulus said, “for the first few people to go down them. I like to think I’m laying cobblestones and putting up lamps and signposts along the way.”
“Colourful and philosophical,” Thord remarked.
“Thank you?”
“Do you believe this about your path?” she went on.
“Does colourful philosophy need to be believed?” he asked back. “In fact, does anything need to be believed, in order to affect reality?”
Thord sat for some time, presumably watching him closely or possibly mind-scanning him with her spooky frontal lobes. Or, maybe, having a quick snooze in her suit. Doctor Cratch had to admit that he would feel tempted to snooze if he had a suit like that. It would have to be warmed, however, not cooled.
“You want to enter the Dreamscape,” she said, picking up the canister. She had time to open canister and helmet, and empty the last of the gazz thrash into her mouth while Glomulus was sitting in mute surprise. She resealed her helmet and negligently tossed him the container. It was still near-burning cold even though it had been sitting in the open for a time, and he was caught by surprise. He fumbled and juggled the heavy tube, swearing involuntarily like an idiot. “This was something you were going to do with Fridge,” she said, when he finally managed to swing and set the canister down on the console next to him. “Something perhaps you were going to try.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Do you need to believe it,” Thord asked, “in order to affect reality?” she rose ponderously to her feet. “Thank you for the gazz thash.”
“Another ten months, maybe a year before we reach the edge,” Glomulus said. “I should be able to brew you a second batch.”
“Make more,” she said. “If you have difficulty filling the requisition for ingredients, I will place the order personally.”
“That’ll make it easier,” Glomulus admitted. “Although I think they might draw the line at you and me doing any wacky-wacky mind-melding. Some realities are more difficult to affect than others.”
Thord paused near the doorway, and turned slightly to show her amusement in another muted flicker of light. “There is a long path ahead of us all, Glomulus Cratch,” she said. “Soon we may be glad to have a layer of cobbles, a lighter of lamps, a maker of signposts,” she hitched in her envirosuit and eased sideways through the door as soundlessly as she had entered. “And a brewer of good gazz thrash,” she added, as she started down the corridor.
“Like mother used to make,” Glomulus called after her. “It’s funny, because aki’Drednanth … mothers … never mind then.”
He was busying himself with the next distillation and crystallisation – as promised, the requisition of certain ostensibly controlled substances was vastly easier with Thord’s quiet seal of approval – a few days later when they dropped back into the universe near Standing Wave.
ZEEGON
Standing Wave was a little astronomical oddity in an otherwise uneventful and inhospitable system. The moon, for reasons of density, momentum and composition, orbited the gas giant of Devil-May-Care at a rate somewhat slower than the rest of the surging ring system that immediately surrounded her. She did orbit – the name of the moon was a minor bit of poetic licence – but it was slow enough that the smaller bodies and dust particles of Devil-May-Care’s rings swept around her and sleeted through her anomalously thick, sturdy atmosphere.
She was cold – for thirteen months of her twenty-month year she was hidden behind Devil-May-Care and from the sun – but she was liveable. And yes, her orbit was sluggish and she was still slowing down. Why, in another twenty or thirty million years, she’d slow down enough for her orbit to finally decay and send her back into the boiling pink-brown clouds of Devil-May-Care. In the meantime, she was home to almost twenty million humans, five million Blaren and three million Bonshooni. A token scattering of Molren and Fergunak – the latter restricted to a great series of interlinked tanks, aquariums and canals rather uncreatively known as Seaworld – made up the rest of the modest population.
Tourist season was the seven months of decidedly iffy sunlight that Standing Wave got each year.
It was not tourist season now.
Zeegon settled back on the cosy, intimate little couch and enjoyed the feeling of being inebriated – not hammered, just quietly buzzed – for the first time since Prufrock. He also enjoyed the feeling, thus far an entirely platonic and audio-visual experience but with the promise of later conversion to a more immersive 3-D format, of being with a female who was neither Z-Lin, Sally, Janya, probably-Thord nor a four-hundred pound Bonshoon refugee.
“Fill you up, flyboy?”
“Please,” he said, raising his empty glass, “and if you can never utter a phrase that hideously clichéd again, that would be awesome.”
His drinking buddy – somehow the two of them had been whittled down from the six Trampsters who’d started out on the Wavefront R&R strip together and the small crowd of hospitable people eager to help them drink and eat and be merry – chuckled endearingly. “Oh come on. It’s not like I’ve ever met an actual AstroCorps helmsman before. If I don’t get to trot out the corny crap now, I’ll be left with a lifetime of regret.”
All the moonlets and meteors large enough to be a threat to Standing Wave had been sifted out of her orbital
path and dashed on her surface long before settlers showed up, and now the rest sort of just washed through the uppermost reaches of her atmosphere in a harmless but breathtaking way.
For the past eight hundred years or so, the inhabitants of Standing Wave had been continuing to clear the moon’s path through the rings by collecting a lot of the more valuable rocks and trace elements as they swept around them, but there was always more. The resulting view was, of course, absolutely stunning no matter whereabouts on the moon you happened to be standing.
“I keep telling you, I’m not AstroCorps,” he said, wobbling his glass at just the wrong moment and getting a splash of something unnecessarily sticky over his wrist for his trouble. “Not Academy-tip-top-officially. Just helmsman, non-Corps.”
“Those fish-eyed stonkers from the Fleet aren’t AstroCorps either,” his friend said, “but they’re not down here drinking with the monkeys, are they?”
“That doesn’t even – what was that even meant to mean?”
“I don’t know, it sounded all defiant and loyal and romantic in my head.”
Romantic is promising, Zeegon thought fuzzily. Heck, I’d even be prepared to believe loyal and romantic, on a strictly ad hoc basis.
Standing Wave was currently accompanied in orbit by Bloji and Dark Brutan, a pair of Fleet Worldships each about half the diameter of the little moon. Zeegon wasn’t actually sure if they were Fleet or Separatist, like the ones they’d just missed at Seven Widdershins. Whichever they were, they were cruising along above Devil-May-Care’s ring-plane, not really visible in the perpetual darkness of Standing Wave’s pseudowinter.
Occasionally one of the deep-space leviathans would encounter a meteor or piece of debris outside Devil-May-Care’s orbital plane, and blast it out of the way with a silent flare like heat lightning. Then, if you were fortunate – or unfortunate – enough to be standing out in the cold and looking up at just the right moment, you would be treated to the eerie sight of Devil-May-Care’s looming bole being lit up by the blast, and the silhouettes of Bloji and Dark Brutan in the foreground through the incandescent ever-shifting curtain of Standing Wave’s sky.
Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 25