Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (28 page)

But the
Denbrough
was there, or she certainly seemed to be. They’d received an automated nodback and identification from the AstroCorps Rep and Rec modular, as well as a stored notification from Zero-Dark-Magi, the
Denbrough
’s Chrysanthemum of origin. A lot of the communication was scrambled or partial, and
all
of it was suspect, but the landing party had gone down there anyway.

In a sense, it seemed the crew of the
Denbrough
had even succeeded in their goal of ascertaining
Yojimbo
’s whereabouts. The Rep and Rec modular was sagging heavily across the upper decks of the massive, still-mostly-cylindrical bulk of a warship that they were
pretty
sure was the warship in question. It looked as though you could access both vessels from the valley between them and the next ships along, but it was hard to tell from orbit.

Yojimbo
had not sent back any kind of nod or acknowledgement, and seemed to be completely dead.

“They had to be safely decommissioned,” NightMary said, her calm returning. “They posed a security hazard.”

“Why not just ask them to leave, like you asked us to?”

“Perhaps I should rephrase. They posed a security hazard
anywhere
except grounded.”

“And the crews?”

“Did I give the impression that I was referring purely to the decommissioning of the ships?” NightMary asked. “Forgive me, but I have a rather unspecific point of view on issues such as the division between organic and electronic components.”

“Right,” Sally said, “so we can assume they’re all dead.”

“You don’t sound worried.”

“Oh, I’m pretty worried,” Sally said, glancing at Janya again. “I’m just a consummate professional. If they’re dead, I can’t bring them back. In the meantime, we’re still alive – for now.”

The bridge door opened and Janya’s pair of eejit lab assistants, Whitehall and Westchester, stepped into the room. Sally frowned, her feeling of unease deepening when she saw
Janya
frowning slightly as well. The two towering fabricants, about the closest they had to correctly-configured ables, were imprinted with a physicist template – Whitehall – and a biochemist template – Westchester. And while their glitches could be spectacular they were rare, and somewhat controllable, and the two of them recovered quickly.

Right now, though, they looked as blank and confused as a pair of eejits ever had.

They had been assigned, Sally saw after a quick check of her scenario plan that did nothing to alleviate her disquiet, to one of the big guns, and tasked with manually disconnecting the mini-whorl payload delivery system if it looked like a hostile electronic consciousness was about to take over the weapon. Most of the eejits had been set with a standard buddy system minimum of five, because they were eejits, but Westchester and Whitehall were a special case.

“Whitehall,” Janya said, taking care to address the eejit who
wasn’t
likely to be knocked into the next personality-fragment over by an arguably existentialist question, “why are you here?”

“You … sent for us?” Whitehall replied.

“No,” Janya said slowly. “No, we didn’t.”

“You should be watching Mater,” Sally pointed out.

“We disconnected the feeder and locked it down,” Whitehall said, “before leaving it unattended. We thought you needed-”

The ship suddenly seemed to
drop
, and then buck sideways under their feet, her entire hull ringing like a bell at the same moment. Sally grimaced as the emergency exchange buffer, responsible for taking the brunt of catastrophic internal inertia and a fairly mediocre example of the technology at the best of times, rendered them all momentarily weightless in order to keep them from breaking their legs on the bouncing floor. The little framed picture of Ital Constable Zeegon kept on his console fell soundlessly to the floor.

Alerts and alarms and further rumblings began to rock the ship even as Sally and the eejits staggered on their feet. Janya, without the benefit of combat training or superior muscle-mass, fell to the floor and then bounced back to her feet, wide-eyed.

“What-”

Sally was already slapping at her console and swearing. “Hull breach,” she said, “we just lost one of the big guns,” she looked up grimly at the little scientist and the two eejits standing protectively on either side of her, as well as the small cluster of security eejits on the far side of the bridge. “If I had to guess, I’d say it just detonated on itself, and if I had to guess which one it was, I’d say it was Mater.”

Their twin mini-whorl guns, Pater and Mater, were housed in special chambers on the opposite side of the primary bridge deck, each with an independent payload store and semi-independent power supply. They were set as far from the primary bridge, and from each other, as the circumference of the modular would allow. Godfire was powerful stuff, and Sally had time to reflect that if NightMary had really wanted them dead, all she’d needed to do was initiate the mini-whorls in the payload system itself.

Activating the entire stockpile, of course, could have caused an implosion capable of doing serious damage to the upper atmosphere of the planet. Not to mention NightMary’s own orbital infrastructure.

“Was it…?” Janya asked, clinging to another console as the ship gave another shudder and fell still. They seemed to still be in orbit, although the crazy tilt of the night-shrouded planet beneath them was a clear sign that their position had been severely bumped. She glanced sidelong at the eejits.

“Was it us?” Westchester asked, his big beefy forehead wrinkling in as much concern as an eejit was capable of showing under most circumstances. “Did we make Mater blow up?”

“No,” Sally said positively, “don’t worry about it, no way. Not even our worst meat-sacks could sabotage the mini-whorl guns to self-destruct. Too many safety measures. Especially not if all they had access to was the feeder system. As a matter of fact, by manually disconnecting
that
you might just have saved our backsides.”

The doors opened again and Waffa and Contro dashed onto the bridge. “Mater just topped herself,” Waffa said without preamble.

“What about the secondary bridge?” Sally demanded. “I’m getting nothing from my console.”

The secondary bridge was on the far side of the exchange plane, two levels down and
opposite
the primary bridge. That placed it two decks beneath – or above, if you were on that side of the exchange – the big gun chambers. They were still well-separated from critical systems and there were extensive containment measures, but it was just a fact of modular design. The secondary bridge had to be
somewhere
, and so did the mini-whorls.

“Yeah, monitoring’s down in that sector,” Waffa reported, actually accessing one of the Operations consoles rather than his wristwatch for once. “But it doesn’t look like any major damage – aside from Mater being erased, that is. We’re not venting atmosphere or falling out of orbit.”

“As if I would let you crash,” NightMary said.

“Communications with the lander have also failed,” Janya added, having crossed to Decay’s station. “But at least the auto-repair seems to be on top of that, because I have no idea-”

“Um,” Waffa pointed at the ceiling. “Anyone want to tell me who
that
was?”

“That?” Sally grunted. “That was NightMary.”

“Oh. Who is NightMary?”

“Ha ha ha! Sounded like our old Commander!” Contro laughed. “Remember her? ‘There are two kinds of nuclear transpersion physicists! Molren and Damorakind! And I’m only certain about Molren!’ Ha ha ha!”

“I thought much the same thing,” Sally admitted, and then jerked her head at Waffa. “You and Janya and the eejits, go check what’s left of Mater,” she said, “and the secondary bridge. And suit up, just in case our host decides to open the emergency bulkheads in that section.”

“You know the suits also have computer guidance and automation,” Janya said when NightMary didn’t deign to respond to Sally’s insinuation, “that means NightMary could quite easily just open my suit if she decides to.”

“Yes,” Sally admitted, “but I was hoping
you
didn’t realise it. Just check on everything around Mater’s chamber, we can’t rule out the possibility that the damage reports or auto-repair systems have been infiltrated.”

“What are you going to be checking?” Waffa asked. Sally was already jogging off the bridge.

“
Cratch
,” she shouted over her shoulder.

Two minutes later she was standing outside the Barnalk High Ripper’s cell, staring through the depolarised panel in outrage.

“Were we attacked?” Cratch asked, pale blue eyes wide. Sally’s eyes narrowed, one hand slipping up behind her back and returning with a small, matte black gun. She raised it, not taking her eyes from the man sitting on the bed. “Is that regulation?”

Keeping the most-vehemently-
not
-regulation thresh-blaster pointed squarely at Glomulus, she stepped forward. She glanced down at the clear prisoner transfer panel beneath the missing cross-bar, and the flake of bowl-material caught in the metaflux. Then she looked back up at Glomulus. Glomulus smiled, but was otherwise being careful not to move from his seat on the bed.

Sally was tempted to test the panel, but there was a chance its polarity was now turned the
other
way – solid from his side, open from hers – and there was nothing she had that she wanted to risk getting stuck in the monodirectional panel. Not her hand, and
definitely
not her gun.

Actually, she amended, definitely not her
hand
. Cratch might use a gun as a means to an end, but he didn’t think much of them in general. He still had his teeth.

Not only that, but if the panels
were
, as she suspected, reversed to allow Cratch to leave his cell, there was nothing stopping NightMary or Bunzo or Sir Bodkins Shartworthy or whoever from just switching the polarity the moment she touched them. Trapping her.

She sighed. And as long as they were inside the Bunzolabe, there was absolutely no way of controlling Cratch’s imprisonment. She could reset everything and lock it down and shut off the power, and the machine would find
some
way of turning it back on, just like it had this time.

“Give me a steel box with a lock on the outside,” she muttered, pocketing the gun.

“Or a suitcase,” Glomulus said mildly. “Am I right?”

Sally smiled crookedly. “How long have you been awake?”

Glomulus shrugged. “The janitorial – or NightMary, I suppose – said it was three and a half hours until night fell on the ship you were looking for. I guess it’s been … four?”

Sally frowned. “And you stayed in your cell? The whole time between when you woke up and my arrival just now? And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“I must be institutionalised,” Cratch said mournfully.

“Must be,” Sally grunted. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do either way, if NightMary’s got control of the brig and the means of keeping you sedated. I could sit here with a gun trained on you until I fell asleep, but sooner or later I
would
fall asleep.
You
sleep about as much as Decay.”

“That’s not true,” Cratch protested. “I had a nice snooze from the … what was it you got me with?”

Sally waved a hand. “You couldn’t have been under more than fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Lovely,” Glomulus smiled again. “Speaking of Decay, it’s a shame he’s gone. I had a special agreement with that Molran. NightMary reminded me.”

“Blaran,” Sally corrected him idly.

“That’s what
I
said.”

“I
could
just shoot you in the head,” she countered. “I don’t think NightMary would be able to do anything about that.”

“If you were going to just shoot me in the head, I think you would have done it several years ago,” Glomulus tilted his head slightly in the direction of the right-hand wall of his cell. “Speaking of NightMary, what was it she’s done? That sounded like a hull breach.”

“Sounded like a tantrum to me,” Sally replied.

“Maybe when someone can blow up our ship with a tantrum, it’s time to give baby what she wants,” the Rip suggested.

“I only wish I
knew
what baby wants,” Sally said wearily. She was about to say more, when Glomulus turned and glanced past her shoulder.

The janitorial had come from nowhere, and before she could reach for her gun again it had wrapped several manipulators around her arms and torso and pulled her down onto its smooth white carrying tray.

GLOMULUS (NOW)

“We still have a decent-length flight ahead of us,” Z-Lin told them, “along the Chalcedony border. Well over nine months, taking shore leaves and other stopovers and possible operations into account.”

The crew looked back and forth at one another. Glomulus, actually blessed with a monitor connection to the conference room this time, was able to watch them on his screen from the medical bay without any need to resort to spying on Contro’s watch. Which was for the best, because Contro had left his watch in one of his other cardigans, and presumably somewhere in his quarters. It had been a while since Glomulus had been able to tune in on it at all, and there was a very real possibility that the watch would remain lost for the foreseeable future.

“What sort of operations, please?” Zeegon raised his hand.

“Not important. Dunnkirk’s funeral arrangements, for a start. If we find that there have been more attacks, for another, we might need to render aid or provide transportation,” Clue waved a hand. “All of this. Either way, it’s a good nine months of flight through soft-space. It’s what is waiting for us at the
end
of that nine-month stretch that we need to discuss now.”