Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (3 page)

“Decay, take a more detailed look at that crew and equipment manifest. Feed it into Sally’s plans and let’s think about how much of the settlement’s equipment we can salvage.”

“Are the rest of us going to think about who the Fergunak have decided their stronger-than-us friends are?” Zeegon asked.

“I don’t think any of us need to think about that,” Clue said, “do we, Mister Pendraegg?”

“I guess not,” Zeegon muttered. “
Fuck
.”

In just over an hour the
Tramp
had descended from the maximum subluminal cruising velocity she’d dropped into from relative, was locked into a geosynchronous orbit above the remains of Bayn Balro, and Sally was headed for the lander bay with Z-Lin, Zeegon, Waffa and Decay.

“Have you done anything with lander 3’s controls?” the towering Blaran was asking.

“No, they’re vanilla,” Zeegon said, “but 3’s still up on blocks with that weird drive thing.”

“‘Weird drive thing’,” Decay repeated. “Didn’t you fix the weird drive thing?”

“No, that was the weird heat-shield-deployment thing,” the helmsman replied. “When I fixed
that
, the weird drive thing started to happen. Seriously though, you’ll be fine with lander 1. It’s just got steering columns as well as a touch interface. You’ll probably find it easier to fly than the standard layout. It’s practically
designed
to be operated with four hands.”

“It’s thick, stormy marine atmosphere down there,” Decay said in exasperation “and I’m not a pilot.”

Zeegon shrugged. “Who is?”

“Guys,” Waffa said, “it doesn’t matter anyway,” he raised his hand and tapped his watch. “Pretty much all of it will be automated, you’re just there to make sure everyone gets on board safely.”

“And take out any Fergunak that happen to get in close,” Clue added, most likely for Sally’s benefit. “But since we’ll be landing on the hub roof in turns, it seems unlikely.”

“How many turns are we going to have to take?” Sally asked, checking her weapons coolly and pretending she hadn’t just heard Z-Lin tell them they’d be landing on the roof.

“Each lander has seats and straps for twelve people, including the pilot,” Z-Lin replied, consulting her pad, “and with five of us on each one that leaves space for seven passengers on each trip, which means two trips each to get all twenty-seven of them,” she looked up. “Leaving the rover docks empty should give us the space we need to either bring up equipment or personal possessions, or additional people if it looks like an emergency. We could probably get the whole lot in one trip if we squeezed, without overloading the engines.”

Five red-uniformed eejits, slack-faced and square-shouldered, were waiting for them at the lander bay. Contro was there too, chatting happily with one of the impassive clones.

“…and that’s when I came up with the jingle ‘zolo premium roast keeps you at your post, but beans on toast is yum the most’!” the nuclear transpersion physicist was saying. The eejit just looked at him vacantly. “I think I’ll send it off to the beans people when we get to a bigger settlement! Or maybe to the zolo people, I don’t know if there are beans people! Hello all!”

The five eejits Clue had commandeered were part of the
Tramp
’s fairly extensive stock that were unqualified to actually perform the tasks for which they had been printed due to configuration failure, but were relatively psychologically stable and capable of following simple instructions. Search, load and rescue were at the top end of their capabilities but as long as they were left with simple tasks and not forced into a position where they had to improvise, they ought to be more help than hindrance.

“Hey there, Chief,” Sally greeted Contro in idle puzzlement before Waffa could take the conversational reins and begin confusing the poor fellow, “what’s up?”

“Nothing!” Contro replied merrily. “Why? Is something the matter?”

“Nope,” Sally said, keeping it simple. “We were just wondering what brings you out of main engineering.”

“Well, it’s right next door! And Sleepy here said we were needed at the landers,” Contro explained, pointing the eejit he’d been telling about his beans on toast jingle. Sleepy didn’t look particularly sleepy – in fact he looked about as awake as eejits generally did, which wasn’t saying much. “I was just talking with him and he said we were meant to come out here.”

“He was talking about him and his colleagues,” Z-Lin, always ready to err on the side of believing Contro was capable of coherent linear reasoning, explained despite both Sally and Waffa making subtle gestures indicating that she should give up. “The request didn’t refer to you as well.”

“Oh! Righto! It’s just that when he said ‘we’, I assumed–”

“Doesn’t matter,” Decay said smoothly, “it’s good that you came anyway, we needed you,” the four humans on the rescue party glanced at the Blaran in surprise, but unanimously kept quiet and waited to see where he was heading with it. “We’ve got twenty-seven Bonshooni coming up,” he went on, drawing Contro aside with a conspiratorial lower left hand on the Chief Engineer’s shoulder, “and the Commander was thinking we’ll need you to rearrange a few of your quarters into a bit of a Bonshoon hotel for them.”

General Moral Decay (Alcohol)
, Sally thought admiringly,
you diabolical son of a whore
. She glanced at Z-Lin, and the Commander returned her look blandly. She evidently had no intention of intervening. Whether or not Contro’s Bonshoon hotel would be a disaster, of course, was another matter.

“Do you think you can sort that out?” the Blaran asked. “Your rooms are the nicest and these poor fellows have been through a lot. Quite a few of them are kids.”

Sally might personally not have overdone it quite so much, but of course with Contro you couldn’t really overdo it. “Of course!” Contro beamed. “Very happy to help!”

“And we’re sure it’s only Bonshooni left?” Sally asked.

“Well, like Choyle said, the last humans were apparently killed trying to prevent the Fergunak from sinking the settlement entirely,” Z-Lin said, “and there were a couple of hundred Blaren but they all died in the whatever-it-was. The rest are all marine biologists and hydro engineers and stuff, all Bonshooni.”

“I don’t suppose they have a spare medic who wants to go out and see the galaxy?” Waffa asked. “So we can put our albino psychopath back in the brig … or ideally just drop his skinny carcass in the sea for the sharks?”

Contro laughed. “Aw, but they might eat him!”

“I’d be okay with that,” Waffa allowed. “I’d even settle for them just biting him until he was dead.”

“No medics,” Clue said dryly, “sorry,” she turned to Zeegon. “Where’s your co-pilot?”

“If you mean Boonie,” Zeegon replied, “I left him on the bridge. I do have a little bit of professional protocol left, you know.”

“You left your pet weasel on the bridge,” Z-Lin summarised, “because you have a little bit of professional protocol.”

“If you want me to go and get him–”

“No, that’s fine,” Clue rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

Z-Lin, Decay and the eejit Contro had been calling ‘Sleepy’ boarded one lander, and Sally, Waffa, Zeegon and the other two eejits boarded the second. Zeegon took the helm and activated the guidance systems, but insisted on taking care of a few of the procedures manually, just to practice. Once the bay was confirmed clear they sealed it, popped the docking port, and the two landers dropped silently towards the planet below.

Sally remembered, apropos of nothing, that Sleepy had in fact been one of several batches of eejits they’d had to make after Twistlock. Waffa had told her about it verbally, as well as – probably – putting it in one of his multitude of reports for her to balance on her to-read pile. It had made an interesting anecdote, and you didn’t get many of them from the eejit fabrication process.

Sleepy’s batch, as the name might suggest, had consisted of seven eejits in an attempt to make a new group of surgeons and specialists to recoup their losses and help treat some of the issues they’d had to deal with. It hadn’t been a huge success. Grumpy had been docile enough, Waffa had said, but had also been prone to seizures that eventually culminated in a fatal aneurysm, and Doc had been given his name ironically.

Sally didn’t recognise the two in their lander, although she suspected Waffa might. All she knew was that they weren’t from Sleepy’s batch. To be fair, although they weren’t technically identical, they had genetic-level homogenised characteristics and they were
clones
. So unless they had distinctive jobs or memorable mannerisms – or, more usually, spectacular flaws – they were generally as interchangeable as their name tags.

Before they hit full re-entry, Sally floated her compact frame across to the pilot’s chair.

“I’m exercising the executive authority reserved for Chief Tactical Officer in a combat or rescue scenario aboard a semi-autonomous spacecraft,” she told Zeegon formally, “to assume control of the lander. You can look it up in the Corps regulations when we get back.”

“You know I’m not going to,” Zeegon said cheerfully. “As far as I’m concerned, the only person with at least eight weapons strapped about her person has just decided to start back-seat driving. What do you want to do, Sal?”

“So gracefully efficient,” Sally approved, and used the momentum from clapping Zeegon affectionately on the shoulder to propel herself back towards her seat. “Waffa, tell Decay to take the first pass,” she continued firmly, strapping herself in. “Zeeg, take us down over those gantries the Consul was talking about. The ones connecting the hub to the part of the settlement the Fergies are trying to sink. We’re going to cut that habitat loose, buy us some more time.”

“Right,” Waffa and Zeegon said simultaneously, and went to work as the lander dived into the atmosphere and began to shudder lightly.

“I take it you’re going to cut that residential block off and let it sink,” Clue said as soon as Waffa had sent his transmission suggesting the other team take the first landing approach. “Just don’t go out of your way to shoot the Fergies. They’re down there, we’re up here.”

“Copy that,” Waffa said, looking at Sally with clear doubt in his eyes. Sally gave him a poker-faced thumbs-up.

In relatively short order, they were through the worst of the turbulence and into windy but otherwise reasonably manageable sea air. The planet that Bayn Balro circled – or
had
circled, before they’d sustained their catastrophic damage – was stormy, but the weather at that moment seemed fairly clement.

The settlement was in bad shape. There really were only two blocks left of what had once obviously been a sprawling series of structures. Aside from the blocks, a collection of scattered pontoons and free-floating debris drifted in the same current as the bulk of Bayn Balro but seemed largely unsalvageable. The hub still appeared intact, a solid off-white dome studded with heavy-duty portholes and surrounded by an obviously-makeshift sea wall of mesh and spars. The wall curved underneath the hub like a safety-net, and extended above the choppy, slow-rolling surface to a height of perhaps thirty feet.

Sally was almost certain a motivated Fergunakil, fifty feet long and cybernetically strengthened even if its gadgets
were
all broken, could tear through it like tissue paper and jump it with even less effort. She remembered Waffa telling her tall tales about the Fergunak where he’d lived during his traineeship. Tall tales, but with at least a kernel of truth to them. At The Warm, or specifically its aquatic habitat … what had it been called? The Cauldron? Something like that. Waffa had told Sally that he’d once seen a young and unaugmented Fergunakil – itself a ‘mere’ thirty feet long – leap almost twice its own body-length straight up into the air, and bring down a remote-controlled drone craft flying overhead for demonstration purposes. The drone had been solidly constructed for battlefield deployment, and had a twenty-foot wingspan. To be honest Sally had been more interested in the specs of the drone back when Waffa had told the story, but the rest had stayed with her and she remembered it now as she looked at the pathetic little net around Bayn Balro’s hub.

The young shark had demolished the drone, effortlessly. Indeed, as she looked, Sally saw several areas along the fence where the mesh was sagging, perhaps missing altogether.

But if they got through the fence, she thought, there was still the reinforced hull of the hub and it looked as though they hadn’t had any luck breaching that yet. Even the portholes were too tough for anything less than a cutting torch, and so far it seemed as though the sharks hadn’t gone that far. It would have taken time, and time would have allowed the settlers to deploy countermeasures.

If a cutting torch won’t work, a couple of thousand atmospheres of pressure probably will
, Sally thought with an inner snarl.

They cruised over the flattened top of the dome and moved on towards the second structure, leaving Decay to land on the hub.

The residential block was square, dark grey, three storeys high and far larger than the hub, and it was already foundering, its outer edge noticeably lower in the water than the inner. This was clearly due to the windows on the sea-level floor having been broken to admit the dark surf. Soon, Sally judged, the block would sink enough to allow the Fergunak to break the second-floor windows. When that happened, even if safety bulkheads had sealed off the interior of the sea-level floor and the stairwells connecting it to the second, the block would sink and – yes – the segmented connecting gantry that appeared to be a combination of walkway and light rail system would drag the hub beneath the waves.

A third body, a large nodule-encrusted cylinder, was also still floating nearby. Decay had already identified it as a lifeboat station. Worse than useless, since each boat could hold one adult and one juvenile Bonshoon and could have been swallowed whole by an adult Fergunakil. There had been some discussion of the rations in the boats, as well as the energy packs and support systems, but the
Tramp
didn’t need emergency supplies urgently enough to risk an attempt at salvaging pods from the cylinder.