Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (26 page)

“They’re the only guns with a self-contained hardware fallback,” Clue said, her own voice raised to a shout to counteract the temporary deafness. The humans and eejits were relatively unscathed, but Decay was pale and wild-eyed in the mirror, his ears flaring, the webbing bloodshot. He would probably require surgery. Blaran ears were many times more sensitive than human ones. “It’s a security measure to allow a lockout in cases of the non-synth computer being compromised. Sally obviously rewrote the protocols to allow it for
synth
lockout as well.”

“Aren’t there really, really good reasons the big guns aren’t on the common circuit?” Zeegon had often felt that the one good thing about being helmsman – specifically shooting the mini-whorlers to smash apart pesky asteroids – had been denied him by the guns’ controls being routed firmly through the tactical console. “Like, they’re really dangerous and something might happen like exactly what just happened?”

“Sally knows what she’s doing,” Z-Lin replied.

“Not what I asked!”

“Just drive.”

Methuselah was at once Zeegon’s newest and his oldest buggy. It contained a piece of solid-state circuitry that had been nine hundred and sixty-nine years old when Zeegon had found it and installed it in the vehicle, thus explaining its name. The computer couldn’t take control of the rover, because quite simply there was nothing to get into. No complex electronics, no guidance systems, no ordnance – only the comm system, and that was no use to anyone. The overwhelming majority of Methuselah’s systems were analogue.

They tore along the ridge as the great heaped layers of jungle collapsed behind them into the chasm left behind by
Boonie’s Last Stand
.

Although Bruce had fallen silent – preoccupied, perhaps, with its failure to prevent the
Tramp
’s weapons from activating, or with the search for Sally’s supposed self-destruct lockout – the Artist was howling through the communicator.

“You fools! I should have vented you into space when I had the chance! I tried to make you a part of something wonderful! This is the discovery of a lifetime! The greatest scientific advance in the history of all our species! And you were right there! You saw it! I showed you everything, and you turned on me! You turned away and destroyed what I created! Death is too good for you! Such stupidity cannot be permitted to exist!”

“Can we tune that out?” Z-Lin asked in a shout-mutter.

“Only if we don’t care whether the guys up on the ship still want to contact us,” Zeegon said. “Do you think he’s actually on board?”

“I don’t know,” Z-Lin replied, “but we have to assume he is–”

“Oh crap hold onto something!” Zeegon interrupted. The passengers, already strapped in and clinging white-knuckled to any available handhold, tensed still further as Methuselah leapt, shuddered and ripped through a tangled heap of logs and saplings where the ridge dipped back below the rotting canopy layer and their makeshift escape route rejoined the drone-built road on the far side of the gap left by the falling tree earlier. The gap that was now more like a slender crack on the edge of the far deeper and wider crater left behind by Pater and Fuck-ton.

They found the road, slewed with a great flying rooster-tail of gravel and woodchips, then finally corrected.

“Good stuff,” Waffa said shakily from the middle seat.

“Can’t take all the credit,” Zeegon said, eyes fixed on the road and shoulders tense with his death-grip on the custom-made steering wheel. “Looks like Sally cleared a path for us. Still almost lost a wheel, though.”

“There she is,” Decay said, snaking his long upper left arm forward and pointing through the windscreen. Sally’s small, uniformed frame swam out of the pouring rain, tugging her backpack straps into place on her shoulders with one hand and waving down the rover with the other. Zeegon slowed to what he considered a safe velocity, and Decay and Waffa opened the side door and helped her leap inside.

“Welcome back,” Clue said, as Decay catapulted Sally into the middle row of seats and her backpack knocked the wind out of Waffa. Zeegon accelerated again, fishtailing with the force of it but keeping them on the waterlogged road.

“Thanks,” Sally grunted, straightening up and fastening her straps. “I assume it worked?”

“If you
meant
to fire the biggest guns on the ship at a location we were barely outside the blast radius of,” Zeegon said without looking back, “yeah. Mission accomplished.”

“Oh good,” Sally said blandly.

“Yeah, well, you’d better hope he doesn’t take the
Tramp
out of orbit,” Zeegon muttered, “or we’re going to be here a long time.”

“No we won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“He needs the
Tramp
even more now,” Sally said, “and he’s not going to be able to find the self-destruct algorithm I left in place. If he leaves, the ship will blow and I
suspect
Bruce won’t let that happen. So he’s way more likely to either get Bruce to ad-lib some way of firing the big guns manually, or do it manually himself, or just turn the small ordnance on us. So either we get to the lander and return to the
Tramp
, or he blows us to smithereens. Either way, we’re not going to be on Jauren Silva for much longer.”

“Relax, Zeegon,” Clue said as the helmsman spluttered and tried to rally a coherent response. “Sally was following agreed hostile protocol. And you saw that lab. There was no way we were going to leave it there, even if the Artist
did
strand us on this planet.”

“Yeah, fair enough,” Zeegon said grudgingly, “just–”

“Um, what am I hearing right now?” Sally interrupted.

“I would have become as a father to you! I would have looked after you, taken you wherever you wished to go! Anywhere in the universe, the very cosmos was open to us, waiting for the first step! Together we could have ushered in a new golden age of–”

“What’s
he
on about?” Sally asked.

“Apparently it was really inconsiderate of us to blow seven colours of Hell out of the secret laboratory dungeon where he was intending to maroon us with a bunch of eerie-arse blobs of possibly-possessed über-darkness from another universe,” Waffa explained.

“And super-unexpected,” Zeegon added.

“I will kill you all! I will destroy you! I will cast you into the darkerness for all time! I will feed you to them! You have no idea of the horrors that await you! Horrors I would have spared you, had you but taken your places and followed where I led! Had you but listened to me! I would have protected you! But now you are theirs! You are theirs for all eternity! You will–”

“Glad I won’t have to eat a boob,” Sally said cryptically.

“Let’s none of us eat a boob,” Z-Lin agreed loudly.

“And why are you all shouting?” Sally demanded, then looked apologetic when several pairs of eyes turned and stared flatly at her. “Oh,” she added. “Right. That.”

They roared onto the wide stretch of drone-laid landing crete, jouncing over the ragged edges that were rapidly being broken up and consumed by the jungle as it re-grew over the site. The whole pad would probably only take a half-dozen landings in any case, badly-set as it was over practically no foundation and just more of the rotten vegetation and chaotic wood lattice that seemed to make up this entire region of Jauren Silva. The lander, despite its slightly more computer-vulnerable computer system, was still waiting for them and didn’t seem to be in any danger of taking off or frying them vindictively with its electrochemical jets.

“Good job, ‘Thuse,” Zeegon said under his breath as he peeled around the lander and reversed them into the rover dock. As soon as the connection was established, he fired up the automatic takeoff sequence from the rover’s main console.

Methuselah was a good buggy. Actually the
technical
term for this class of vehicle – Zeegon’s speciality – was Planetary Insertion Vehicle, or PIV. He mentioned this to anyone he thought might listen, but few people did and so he defaulted to calling them buggies just like everyone else did. He’d tried to have a conversation with Contro about PIVs once, with memorable results. “PIVs are VIPs,” Contro had told him, “to you that is!”

Zeegon had liked that slogan, so he’d had it printed on his uniform. Z-Lin had told him to remove the catchphrase because it was against regulations. There had been a lot more full-Corps crew and a lot more concerted giving-of-shits about regulations back then, and so he had followed her instruction.

He hadn’t bothered to try printing up a new “PIVs are VIPs” uniform shirt since The Accident, because he hadn’t needed to. Once Clue had told him to get rid of the slogan, he’d gone ahead and reprinted it on the
inside
of his uniform shirt. And it had been there ever since.

“Do you think he’s on board the
Tramp
already?” Decay asked as they scrambled out of the buggy and headed for the cockpit and seats. His voice, as far as you could tell with that damnable Blaran calm and that thrice-damnable Blaran two-tone harmonic, was taut and eager, trembling with suppressed rage even as his bloodshot ears were trembling with reaction to the Godfire they’d just ridden out. He was also, Zeegon noticed, bioluminescing a bit. The infused veins and arteries that showed his Blaran gang markings, usually reserved for dance-floor light-shows during crew parties and ordinarily extremely cool to see, were illuminating in slow, pulsing flares like circuit diagrams under the skin of his neck and cheekbones. It was a sign of
intense
emotion to display them unconsciously, and it was even more unsettling than his vocal fury had been. “Do you think he’s there already?”

There didn’t seem to be any way for them to answer that probably-rhetorical question, so nobody tried. The Artist’s enraged howls had cut off as soon as Zeegon had docked Methuselah. Evidently neither Bruce nor the Artist himself felt inclined to transfer the telling-off to the lander’s comm system and continue it. Zeegon helped Waffa and one of the eejits – it was the one that wasn’t Foley or Ricky, the one that had managed to avoid getting himself hurt for the entire duration of the mission, and rather unfairly Zeegon just couldn’t remember his name or if he’d even been given one – to lock down the buggy and secure the dock doors for orbital insertion. Decay caught the still-feverish, still-swollen-faced Ricky under the shoulders and knees with his lower hands and hefted him effortlessly out of the back compartment.

The lander completed its cycle-up and pre-flight checks, once again without any interference or lethal assaults from Bruce, and soon they were tearing into the heavy Jauren Silva overcast. Zeegon caught a brief, dizzying view of the sketchy spiderweb of hopeless little roads and fences the drones had made, almost invisible amidst the titanic vegetation. The hole that had once been
Boonie’s Last Stand
, however, was
extremely
visible.

“Wherever he is,” Zeegon murmured, as the log-strewn crater and then all other surface details vanished into the thick clouds and he turned away from the window, “he’s likely to be
pissed
.”

“Nothing like a mad Molran,” Waffa noted. There was a low
ping
as they cleared the atmosphere, and Zeegon released his straps and kicked off in freefall.

“Have you noticed that Bruce seems to have left him out of the loop on a whole heap of stuff, though?” he remarked, floating across and double-checking the docking seals before angling his upper torso into Methuselah again to tap out a couple of destination commands. “Life on board ship even though he was
with
us on board…” he pushed back again and twirled. “A bunch of little details.”

“Yeah,” Waffa said. “And it seems really unconcerned about these setbacks we’re throwing at them both, too.”

“Could be something to do with the damage it took during The Accident,” Zeegon suggested. “Messing up its priorities and tactical responses.”

“Which sort of makes it the Artist’s own fault, doesn’t it?” Waffa agreed.

“Yeah,” Zeegon returned to his seat. “Or – and I prefer this idea – something in Bruce has retained its original synthetic intelligence personality and crewmember loyalty, and is sort of preserving us the best it can, doing all these little things that the Artist hasn’t noticed. Small acts of rebellion, see?”

“Or it knows the setbacks are actually completely harmless because it can squash us like bugs any time it likes,” Waffa added, “so it’s not worrying too much about them.”

“That idea I hate.”

“Zeegon,” Clue’s voice came through the comm, “we need you on the bridge.”

Zeegon exchanged a puzzled frown with Waffa, but didn’t bother to ask questions. Expecting at any moment to be blasted out of the sky, he unstrapped once again and kicked up into the cockpit module. “What’s up?” he asked. “The auto-route systems seem to be working okay.”

“Yes, tirelessly and with pinpoint precision retracing our path back to the
Tramp
,” Z-Lin said, “adjusting for the orbital shifts and the battle manoeuvres she recently performed, as well as any other unforeseen movements. Done it a hundred times.”

“So … ?”

Clue pointed. “So maybe you can tell me why we just went belting past the
Tramp
,” she said, “and appear to be flying off into deep space,” she sniffed. “Also, explain why it smells like urine and burnt wiring in here.”

“Um.”

“I suspect the issues are linked.”

That was when the access panel beside Zeegon’s head flew open and a moss-green weasel, mad with panic from its first time in zero-gravity, coiled itself around his head and dug its claws into his scalp.

Able Darko had been a powerful, well-built human. The ables – and indeed the eejits – that came from his physical genetic template were big, resilient, and
strong
.

But a human – a normal one, albeit of high physical quality – really wasn’t a match for a Molran. Molren were taller, heavier, stronger and tougher, with much quicker reflexes. Not to mention the fact that they had considerably better eyesight,
far
better hearing, twice the number of arms, and – at a pinch – lethally sharp teeth.