Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (48 page)

Take Janus Whye, for example.

Glomulus had received baffling special dispensation to be out of the medical bay for
counselling
, of all things. He’d really only put it together when he learned they were headed back to Bunzo’s. Janus had been ordered by Clue, who had been ordered by the Captain, and had the whole thing been to provide Glomulus with an alibi for Dunnkirk’s meticulous murder? He thought so. Not because the Captain wanted to protect Cratch, but because the crew was going to need him, even more so than usual, and their first move after a murder took place in the medical bay would have been to lock him up, possibly after blowing off his hands and feet.

As it happened, this time he had only needed to perform a minor procedure on their helmsman and his pet weasel, and treat a bite from the latter. A lucky escape for everyone, indeed, and a mighty blow struck against the immortal mechanical spectre of Horatio Bunzo.

Of course, about that … there had also been the unique operation he’d been asked to perform on Dunnkirk’s body. That would have been pretty difficult for him to do from the brig, as well.

And that had led to this, and this had led to the next, and Bunzo’s rage had led to Glomulus’s bracelets, and Zeegon’s injury, and all of it came around in a horrible, wonderful dance.

He was sitting in the medical bay, waiting without much expectation to see if any of the mission-end reports or debriefing material found its way to him. Contro had probably been at the meeting but he had left his watch in a pocket of another cardigan somewhere, and so Glomulus had not been able to tune in on the watch’s feed. Typical.

Sixty-five times – sixty-six now, if you counted Bunzo reacting badly to that little joke about his wife – he’d had his hands blown off. It took him about two months to fully break in a new pair, at least before he’d programmed his augmented sets which never really fully broke-in at all. Same for the feet, although now the feet were still only on set sixty-five. Two months of discomfort … it was lucky, in a sense, that usually they weren’t even slightly broken in by the time the next guy blew them off. Otherwise he’d calculated that it would have been eleven years of back-to-back hand-regrowth therapy.

Glomulus had time to make those sorts of calculations.

Instead, he’d been out of the brig and saddled with the bracelets and anklets for less than nine months all-told, before their encounter with the universe-hopping Artist and his bizarre star drive. His last mishap with the subdermals had actually been a few weeks before
that
, even. Since the Artist and Jauren Silva, and again excluding the events in the Bunzolabe, he hadn’t actually been pruned once. Basically, the entire series of sixty-five had taken place over the course of about seven months.

In
fact
, the majority of them had taken place in the first three or four
weeks
, after he’d patched up Janus and the rest of the crew’s minor ailments following their first run-in with Bunzo. His macho little stand about the automated-detonation house arrest thing had accounted for a significant proportion of them, he admitted to himself with a wince.

The month or so after they’d first escaped the Bunzolabe and were all getting used to the new living situation, yes. Those had been the days and weeks of stab-stab, pop-pop.

Not that Glomulus had done much stabbing. That last incident, with Sally and the concealed knife, might have
looked
like a stabbing was imminent but it had really been carefully orchestrated to make her detonate, so he could test out his new hand configuration. And, as luck would have it, he hadn’t been pruned since. Maybe they
were
actually getting to be more of a team.

It was lucky, because as Janya had told him, his new schematics had been wiped and any new limbs fabricated from the able-stock on the Tramp would be back to his own inborn specifications. Strong, fast, effective … but not enhanced. He was back to factory settings.

But it hadn’t been the Tramp’s systems that had restored him this last time, had it?

Glomulus looked down at his hands, marvelling quietly. He’d been surprised to find that the hands Bunzo had re-grown for him had been his
augmented
hands, just as they had been the moment before detonation. They hadn’t been taken from the reset template, but off some sort of molecular snapshot, just as Bunzo had said. And that hadn’t been all.

Glomulus reached down nonchalantly and pulled out the heavy bracelet from the console storage slide. Sally had let him keep the extras, after triple-checking them and declaring the mechanisms to be completely harmless. The notch where the small sensor-and-detonator capsule was meant to be was a hollow scoop in the side of the metal.

Well,
small
… that was a matter of perspective. Compared to a cluster-gauss grenade, sure. The capsules were small. But try swallowing them.

Ordinarily, prying the charge out of one of the bracelets would have set them all off instantly. That was basic anti-tampering. But when he’d come to in Bunzo’s ghastly little sideshow fabricator, Glomulus had seen through the haze of pain that the replacement bracelet components were
already
deactivated. So he’d been able to fumble the capsules out.

Say what you like about Bunzo, his molecular and nervous reintegration was brilliant. Glomulus’s hands were still augmented, still not quite a match to his arms and still excruciatingly painful, but he’d recovered full use immediately and he was pretty sure these ones hurt less than any pair he’d had since that first one, when they’d still had the bonding stimulator. And for that matter, his control over machinery was nothing short of scary, either. Wrist and ankle weren’t supposed to be able to detonate individually, but Bunzo had somehow managed to blow the wrist-charges, while leaving his ankle-charges activated and untouched. That had caused some complications with the printing and authorising of replacements, but Sally had eventually managed it.

So they’d returned to the
Tramp
, and they’d printed another set of bracelets for him, and Sally had installed and initialised them. And as he’d suspected, when he very carefully brought the capsules from Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World back up, he found that they had initialised too.

Six charges, keyed to the crewmembers’ subdermals, where there had once been – could
only
be – four. Bunzo’s printer had recreated not just his hands, but the unique security bracelet bond as well.

But what to do with them? It was only a matter of time before they were found. And the capsules, unlike the old bracelets, were
definitely
contraband. If things hadn’t been so frantic, they probably would have found them already. The only safe recourse had been to get them out of the medical bay.

Well, he’d taken care of that, at least. Cause to effect to cause. And he should be able to get them back reasonably easily if he needed them. In the meantime, he’d just have to continue to excel in not giving the crew any excuse to … pop-pop.

He half-heartedly activated the feed from Contro’s watch again. They had to have finished their meeting by now. They’d failed to restore proper communication capacity to the medical bay for some probably-Sally-related reason, and had ‘forgotten’ to authorise his personal attendance at the briefing, but when he’d finally managed to get through to the conference room he had been promised full disclosure at the appropriate time.

This time did not appear to be forthcoming.

“Yeah, but if he was suffering, then I guess it’s for the best,” Waffa’s maudlin voice, accompanied by the smiling lower half of Contro’s head as he fiddled with the watch and tried to fasten it around his wrist again, was a disturbing combination. “Poor guy. He did an amazing thing, and he saved us all. At least until we get around to this next crazy damn mission, and all die horribly.”

“So that’s two amazing things!” Contro said enthusiastically, and the watch screen swung out to reveal the two of them were sitting alone in main engineering.

“I bet he did a lot of amazing things,” Waffa said, and then sat looking preoccupied. The ‘crazy damn mission’, whatever it might happen to be, went undiscussed for the moment. Glomulus expected he would find out about it at some opportune moment.

“I did an amazing thing the other day!” Contro exclaimed. “Well it wasn’t so much amazing as it was funny! It was actually a few weeks ago, after we’d left Gola, do you remember that stuff they were eating there…”

Glomulus listened without much interest as Contro prattled on. He wasn’t expecting much else of interest to occur. The crew had been through the wringer, and now they were mechanically finishing their working shifts as if nothing had happened. They would do this for a few days, then they would gradually unwind, and the whole nasty incident would go into the vault. Then they would go on with their working shifts in earnest, building up to the next job, the next slippery stepping-stone across the river of not-actually-water that the good Commander liked to philosophise about sometimes. It was -

“He said something to me before I left,” Waffa said suddenly. “Thorkhild. Maladin. I was trying to figure out what it meant, but it was obviously Drednanth-level stuff that he was translating in what was left of his head. Bad translation with a broken translator. I didn’t tell Clue about it. To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m telling you, except…”

Except it’s Contro
, Glomulus thought giddily,
and you can tell him anything because even if he blurts it later, all you need to say is ‘it’s Contro’
.

“What did he say?” Contro asked eagerly, although he had asked Waffa if the shoes he was wearing were actually his in almost exactly the same tone five minutes earlier.

“He said
Aquilar was destroyed
,” Waffa said, “
and you were there
.”

RAKMANMORION, CONQUEROR OF SPACE (NOW)

He heard the distant, fizzy
vwaa vwaa vwaa
of alien voices.

Spoonbiter voices
, he thought.

Spoonbiters had a way about them. He hadn’t had much exposure to the alien coalition that apparently existed beyond the skies of The Second World, but the spoonbiters had been by far the most numerous and the most outspoken. The Small People were generally a quiet and contemplative race, particularly once they had started to feed their way down into a fugue state – which, to be fair, was when Rakmanmorion had made his first contact with aliens. Their communication was chemical first, linguistic second. So the spoonbiters, the [humans], came across as far more noisy and jabbersome than perhaps they really were.

They were also fast, and spoiled, and rude, and they interrupted and demanded things querulously, imperiously and incessantly. Spoonbiters, in truth. Although Rakmanmorion had to admit this was most likely down to a problem in translation, mixed with a generous dose of species-and-culture gap. The spoonbiters, and the chary folk – the [Blaran and Bonshooni] – who had lived with them in their great dark starship, had all seemed civil and hospitable people. Not to mention generous. Rakmanmorion would most likely never have seen his home again, had he not encountered the [Astro Tramp 400].

Slowly, he allowed his eyes to focus. He had been deep in fugue, and the nutrients he felt coursing thrugh his skull and the withered nubbin of his thorax were alien and a little nauseating. Or they would be, if he had a stomach.

There was a spoonbiter leaning over him. The front of its head was covered by some sort of plastic mask, and he remembered the aliens telling him that the atmospheres they had evolved in were thinner. The air breathed by The Small People would no doubt prove soupy and dangerous to them. He’d seen pictures of spoonbiters in the data uplink they had provided, and the covering over the front of its head was a blessing.

The spoonbiter made some more furry
vwaa vwaa vwaa
noises. Finally, as Rakmanmorion’s mind began to clear and he rose up more fully from the fugue, he became aware of his own vessel’s translation system providing a transcript of what the alien was saying.

“Rakmanmorion? Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space? Do you hear us as we make noise? Are you deaf? If we make more noise will that stop you from being deaf?”

“I can hear you,” Rakmanmorion said. “I am rising from fugue, it may be a short time before my senses recover.”

“Can we make it faster somehow? Unacceptable. Try rising from fugue in a better way.”

“I will try, my friends,” Rakmanmorion said forbearingly. He knew that there was a language barrier here that neither his technology nor even that of the aliens could overcome. These were creatures from
other worlds
. “You have returned as you said you would.”

“Of course. You thought we wouldn’t. Feeble. We came for our equipment that you took, our spare parts that we need back. What is fugue?”

“It is the suspended state I enter when I have exhausted all of my bodily reserves and external sources of energy,” Rakmanmorion said. “It is a deep sleep, a sort of petrifaction, allowing me to-”

Another spoonbiter head leaned in from the other side. “Stop talking and listen to us talk now.”

“I missed you, spoonbiters.”

“We missed you too, horrible alien creature. Did our machinery get you to the planet well enough? Did you stay in orbit because your own species failed? Or had your planet already been destroyed by the time you got here?”

Rakmanmorion’s memories were sluggishly returning, settling into place in brain-matter almost dried to a husk before the alien nutrients revived him. Yes. The Second World was no more.

“Your drive brought me to the edge of my home,” he said, “although I was already deep in fugue by that time. I had used all of my reserves, and when the ship returned to subluminal space it had completely lost power. I drifted, with the final traces of battery power running down in my computer and surveillance equipment. Some of it was solar powered and it was able to take up a brief charge again, before failing.”