Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man
Page 34
“Sally,” Glomulus said reprovingly. “A little simple observation. Honestly.”
“Are you all going to go out to the edge of the galaxy on this together?” Contro asked, pointing at the great slab of the seed. “One big happy family?”
“Bloody Hell,” Waffa said, “I didn’t even think of that.”
“They’re barely a year old,” Z-Lin said, “and they’ve spent their entire lives in this freezer. Not much point returning to the Drednanth already, surely. And – unless I’m mistaken – that’s what riding the seed into space is going to do to you, yes?” she waved towards the sleeper pods. “You’re not going into a sleeper.”
“No,” Thord said. “They will remain here. Within another six months, they will be able to talk with you as fluently as I, and pass on their own wishes under the AstroCorps priority zero protocol,” she looked down at her netting-clad hand. “You may need to construct more interface scribers,” she said, and turned to glance at her suit, crouching open nearby. “And, in time, more envirosuits. They are all formed of fairly common components and should be easy enough to fabricate and assemble – aside from the power supplies. Maladin and Dunnkirk picked up four of these from Standing Wave, surreptitiously. Two more should be easy enough to come by, and the seventh can remain in my own suit.”
“You’re not even taking the suit with you?” Janus asked.
“It would be something of a waste,” Thord said, “and would only delay the inevitable. The envirosuit is a refrigeration unit, not a spacesuit, despite its seals and its small emergency air supply. And returning to the Drednanth is, as you might imagine, not a pleasant experience for the mind within the aki’Drednanth flesh. Not something I would wish to prolong.”
“Not wanting to be all touchy-feely and human about it,” Z’Lin said, “but aren’t we more likely to only need one, maybe two suits?”
“It would be wise,” Thord agreed with equanimity, “to hold off on the effort of acquiring more suit components and constructing anything until you know how many adults you will be equipping.”
“Alright,” Z-Lin nodded, “that’s probably enough cooing and sighing over the adorabubble millions-of-years-old aki’Drednanth lil’uns. Thord can tell us whatever else we might need to know en route. Let’s mulch our dead eejits and get away from this tomb.”
DECAY
They spent about six hours in orbit around Declivitorion, gathering what information they could and fixing things up around the ship. The mental blast from Thord and her litter of pups had killed twenty-one of their lower-end eejits all told, and had given the rest – with the exception of the ables and the eejits brewed with Thord’s psychic guidance – splitting headaches. Thord agreed to help fabricate as many more eejits as they could before they reached the end of the line, in order to maximise eejit effectiveness and minimise the load on the oxygen farms. They would, after all, in all likelihood need to expand the frozen habitat still further as the aki’Drednanth grew, which would affect productivity before they reached whatever disembarkation point the juveniles chose.
This raised several other concerns, specifically one of aki’Drednanth upbringing.
The absence of Thord would make little difference to the year-old pups, since – well, for a start, they were already psychologically mature, and secondly because aki’Drednanth were usually left to fend for themselves shortly after birth. Thord’s presence in this litter’s life up to a year of age was practically smothering, and they most likely would not miss her when she spaced herself. What happened next, however, was that the seven juveniles would fight each other until at best one or two were left alive. They would eat the rest of their sisters, and after that they would be considered worthy of an aki’Drednanth existence.
For aki’Drednanth, infancy was the final reincarnation test. And nobody on board seemed to be entirely sure what – if anything – they should do about it.
Technically, they could designate resources enabling them to comfortably feed and shelter all seven of the litter. There was no need for them to fight. Since, however, these were already downright ancient aki’Drednanth in the bodies of pups they had essentially fabricated and configured for themselves in Thord’s womb, it was entirely likely that they would not allow a plentiful and sharing touchy-feely non-aki’Drednanth environment to affect their instincts. They would fight anyway, because that was what they did.
So, really, whether they approved or disapproved of the creatures’ way of life, it didn’t really matter. They were just giving the seven aki’Drednanth a lift to wherever they wanted to go, and if there was only one left when they got to their destination, that was the way it went. Besides, if they ever felt tempted to interfere against the will of the aki’Drednanth, there were five thousand dead Fergunak drifting around Declivitorion to suggest that it might just be a bad idea.
Decay’s own thoughts, as they concluded the sorrowful task of Declivitorion’s post mortem and accelerated back towards maximum cruise and the final week or so of their odyssey, were a little more abstract.
It was somehow sad, although the Blaran had to admit he was looking at it from the blinkered point of view of a species that nurtured its young and had a strong parental bond. Normal aki’Drednanth offspring, such as the seven in the Tramp’s oxygen farm, were entirely rebuilt versions of a Drednanth mind’s previous aki’Drednanth incarnation. There was no real connection to the parents at all, not even a genetic one – even from the moment of genesis, the Drednanth mind infused the cells and altered them on an atomic level the rest of the Six Species simply did not understand. No wonder the mother had no trouble walking away. She had essentially spent the past year growing a group of strange, fierce adult creatures in her body. Her biological material had been reduced to the level of carbon blocks in a printer.
The relationship between parent and oona’aki’Drednanth was a little stronger, but by necessity of the competitive juvenile instinct, she still couldn’t stay to protect her true-newborn. Decay had often wondered how it even worked. Was the entire litter born oona’aki’Drednanth and then fought for supremacy as normal? Surely a single oona’aki’Drednanth in a litter of wily old reincarnations would have no hope. Did the oona’aki’Drednanth get preferential treatment? It was a moot point, since there were apparently no oona’aki’Drednanth among Thord’s litter.
He’d read that there were rare cases of reincarnations being born to aki’Drednanth who had actually been their parents in a previous life, even when they had been born as oona’aki’Drednanth. Apparently the aki’Drednanth considered that a bit weird, but what exactly they said or did about it, if anything, nobody knew.
Decay realised, as they flitted back into the grey, that he was busying himself with the moral and logistical questions because he didn’t like the idea of sending Thord out into space without a suit. Even if she was going to return to a state of pure consciousness in the Great Ice to be reborn in some future time, it took some adjustment. And the pair of sweet but entirely nutty Bonshooni they were intending to strap to the seed and send with it, dreaming away a practical eternity in souped-up sleeper pods … the less said about that, the better.
He also didn’t like to think about the return trip that was looming in their immediate futures. And he wasn’t even a human with an optimal life-span of only a couple of hundred precious years. He was just easily bored.
“We could always just go ahead and separate them,” Clue said, during one of their informal debates that week. “We could give each one a segment of the oxygen farm without too much in the way of productivity loss. Even expand the farm rings if it came to that. Let each one grow as if all the others were already dead.”
“That might work,” Decay said, “if they weren’t, you know, telepaths.”
“I don’t mean really fool them,” Clue said, “I just mean, let them all grow to adulthood. They might be a bit weaker for it, in the unlikely event that millions-of-years-old Drednanth haven’t figured out how to stay in shape without murdering the
ir siblings as puppies, but … we’re flying blind here, Decay. It’s not nice, it may be against their instincts, but a battery of seven aki’Drednanth mind-eaters might keep us alive. It kept us alive at Declivitorion. One survivor-type picking her sister’s bones clean in our freezer will not keep us alive.”
“You’re suggesting keeping them on board as well as keeping them all alive,” Decay said. “What if they want to get off?”
“I guess it depends whether or not we’re past the priority zero point,” she sighed. “But you’re right, it doesn’t really matter. If she wants to get off, she’ll get off. They all will. All they need to do is turn our brains to porridge one by one until we let them off.”
“They’re all aki’Drednanth who have lived before, if you choose to believe that,” Decay said, “and I tend to think we don’t have much choice but to believe it,” Clue nodded. “If you try to raise them this way and they let you, they’ll be aware that they’re not being raised right. They won’t thank you for disregarding that facet of their existence.”
“Maybe I’ll pull one out from under the tusks of her sisters and let her tell me that herself,” Z-Lin snapped.
The debate was satisfyingly circular, pleasingly irresolvable, and in that manner they reached the edge.
The thing about the edge of the galaxy was that it didn’t just happen. There was no little sign on a moon, last fuel for 1,500,000 light years. There was no point at which you could stand, starry skies behind you and a black gulf in front. There was not, despite what many Bonshooni who had never been out here believed, a shimmering aurora veiling the emptiness. If there was a veil, it was as invisible as the dark matter that apparently teemed there.
For the past few stops, since about Greentemple, they had been working their way out along a thinner and thinner arm – the erstwhile barmy arm that had started at Zhraak Burns – and the stars in the sky had grown more sparse. A solar system, of course, was a solar system basically anywhere in the galaxy. It was a lot of empty darkness, a star in the middle, a scattering of sand grains across the black that only revealed themselves as planets if you knew exactly where you were going and got very, very close. When you were in it, you couldn’t see much else. The surrounding stars were thicker or thinner depending on how close you were to the core. Sometimes, if you were in the right place, you could see the galactic disc.
You couldn’t see it from here, not without the observatory’s instruments. There was no system. The closest star was some twenty light years behind them, and it was uninhabited. This was just … end of the line. It was as far as they could go before the engines started sucking fumes, choking on exotic energy. Any ship to fly out much farther than this couldn’t do it on conventional transpersion, and not inside a conventional relative field. It was old school, and slow, and it was perched on top of a power station and battery mass approximately the size of a Worldship. Or it was even slower still.
There were stars out there, in the intergalactic void. Rogue stars, miniature galaxies, all sorts of exciting weirdness that people had been able to study and see through an assortment of technological means. Oh, there were plenty of them. But the thing about the intergalactic void was, it was so big even the occasional star system just got swallowed up in the emptiness. It wasn’t enough to make the engines of a starship work, it wasn’t enough to act as a feasible stepping stone bridge. It had been tried, and nobody was really sure what had happened to the ships that had tried it.
No. This was it.
They pulled up, and they parked, and they got ready to offload Thord, Dunnkirk, Maladin and the Drednanth seed.
And that was when they found that one of the sleeper pods was smashed.
“Wow, it’s dark out there,” Zeegon said, stepping into the conference room. He was the last person to enter, having brought the ship to all-stop and coordinated with the ‘tamping down’ of the engine core until the time came for them to limp and cough their way back into stellar space.
Everyone but Glomulus and Waffa were in the conference room, the former in his medical bay and the latter putting the final finishing touches on the modest little rig that was going to reinforce the seed, house the now-single sleeper pod, its power supply and the minimal anti-impact countermeasures. A little cow-catcher of metaflux hull plating – in this case collected from the wreck of the Boonie rather than their own stores – was more than ample for the task of protecting seed, pod and power supply from the dangers of intergalactic space. Of course, if they ran into anything larger than a speck of dust out there in the emptiness, they would be very unlucky indeed. A cow seemed … statistically improbable.
Thord was once again sitting at one end of the table with the Bonshooni on either side of her. Maladin looked confused and angry, Dunnkirk looked distraught. Both expressions seemed understandable enough, in Decay’s opinion, if a little jarring on the two normally-affable fellows.
“Are we thinking maybe it was … uh, one of the kids?” Z-Lin said delicately as Zeegon sat down. “I know they’re adults and all, on the inside, but they have their instincts, they’re good and active, maybe one of them was teething or…”
“It was not the offspring,” Thord said.
“I’m looking into the logs,” Sally said, “and … Bruce is proving a bit unwilling to commit.”
Bruce was another subject they had talked about in the days since Declivitorion. It naturally refused to tell them how it was sustaining full synthetic intelligence, although it did not display any signs of instability or any hint that it might become a danger. Its airlock-chomping days, it swore with all the sober earnestness of a recovering addict, were over.
The prevailing theory was that it had somehow activated when they’d come into close proximity with Boonie’s Last Stand, even though the hub manufactory had been completely clean and all the sensitive synth material had been removed by AstroCorps Rep and Rec. Maybe it had found components in space, and assembled itself a hub while running on automatic pilot.
Decay didn’t really believe that, he was pretty sure nobody else did either, and Bruce wouldn’t tell them where its hub was. Which he supposed was fair enough.
“Okay, so to trot out the usual suspects,” Z-Lin said, “we’re pretty sure Cratch had nothing to do with this since he hasn’t set foot in the oxy farm. It might have been an attempted eejit clean-up job, but since those two almost died of hypothermia right at the beginning, they’ve generally been keeping out too.”
“Janitorial being an evil ornery son of a whore?” Zeegon suggested.
The Commander shook her head. “Janitorials don’t go into the farms either, unless specifically programmed to – and even then, they don’t hang around. We’d still be looking for the programmer.”
“Can it be repaired?” Maladin said, reaching across Thord’s lap and taking hold of Dunnkirk’s upper left hand.
“Yes, we are not with care who did this thing,” Dunnkirk said earnestly. “We willn’t ask question. But can it will be fixed?”
Z-Lin shook her head, shoulders slumped. “Components we don’t have replacements for,” she said, “smashed beyond repair.”
“Whoever did this waited until we were well out of range of any sort of help,” Sally said. “Not that anything short of a Fleet ship would have sleeper components, and they might not have helped us anyway. But they made sure we were out past the big tech worlds. There might have been something on Declivitorion, but…”
“So,” Decay said, “do we backtrack and look for help? Try this again when we get a replacement sleeper?”
“Oh God please, no,” Zeegon whispered quite audibly, then looked ashamed. “Hey, what about the isolation pod from Bayn Balro? Not the pod itself, since we had to space that … but the gear. Sedatives, medical stuff. Could that be altered into something close? We might even be able to backtrack to Declivitorion, see if the Fergie ships have any smokeberries in their holds, right? That stuff is basically what they use to put people under in a sleeper pod.”
Janus raised a hand hesitantly. “What about the Dreamscape?” he asked. “I mean, like, is it at all possible that one of you could go out without a pod, like Thord is, and recombobulate in the Dreamscape, the way an aki’Drednanth returns? Exist as consciousness?”
Maladin seemed to snap out of a reflective pause. Now he and Dunnkirk both looked stricken, and exchanged a look before Maladin answered. “A Bonshoon cannot make that journey,” he said, standing up. Thord did the same. “I can enter the Dreamscape while in the sleeper pod. If Dunnkirk comes in a suit, or any other device, sooner or later it will succumb and he will lose consciousness and slip from the Dreamscape, into death.”
“Not return,” Dunnkirk said, tears glinting in his eyes.
“It sounds like you’ve made a decision,” Decay said.
“We discussed it just now,” Maladin said. “No point in dragging this out.”
“It is time,” Thord agreed.
With a suddenness that surprised Decay, and without further debate, they were assembling at the big modified door to the oxygen farm.
“Right,” Waffa said, “okay. Here’s how we do this. We’ve got the pod prepped, all the bits and pieces are attached. We’re going to vent the atmosphere from the seed room, and the second stage chamber, the, uh, ‘seed airlock’, up in the dome above. Then after we’re equalised, we open the internal door, and the outer door, uncouple the seed, and the catchers on the dome will reach in, hook to the end of the seed, and…” he coasted his thermal-gloved hands sideways and up. “On flimsy, and according to Bruce, you should just glide on out, with a good kick of momentum to see you on your way,” he paused. “Um, you’ll probably be … returned, by then,” he said to Thord. “We’ll get one of the boys,” he glanced at the two Bonshooni. “Which of you … ?”