Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (16 page)

“Okay.”

“Turns out we’ve also got ourselves some ables,” Clue added, and Waffa looked down to see some more data slip onto his watch. “The Warm needs strong backs more than they need AstroCorps-trained eggers, so they were happy to trade about three hundred of our eejits, plus as many more as we can print off that don’t meet our needs, for forty-two honest-to-goodness maintenance, engineering and general duty ables. If the ones we print
do
meet our needs better than the ones we’ve already got on the shelf, we can swap ‘em out and drop some more of our bad stock. It’s the sort of license to print we’ve been trying to loophole ourselves into for way too long.”

“Where did they get starship-capable ables from?” Waffa asked. “Did they just have some lying around?”

“Basically,” Clue replied. “They didn’t have
many
ables here, but as you can see, most of the humanoid survivors
were
ables. They maintained a rotation of AstroCorps-grade boys for emergency starship crew replacements. It so happens that one of the big dormitories that
didn’t
get hit contained a bunch of ables who fit the bill for a lot of our key areas. They got whacked, partially depressurised and thoroughly iced, but they’ve bounced back like eejits – sorry, like ables do.”

“Survivors,” Waffa said approvingly. “We like those.”

“Right,” Z-Lin agreed. “They can’t replace the human crewmembers in command positions, by general regulations, but they’re going to make it a lot easier for us.”

“So we get decent ables, and lose a huge mob of eejits,” Waffa said. “What’s the catch?”
Aside from Contro still technically being Chief Engineer
, he added a little spitefully, but again didn’t say aloud.

“Well, we’re still going to be short-handed after we deliver our eejits to The Warm,” Clue said, “and that means we’ll probably need to keep on fabricating more of them. And with no way to repair the plant, we’re stuck with circus-grade clownmeat. But that’s really more of a status quo than a catch.”

“I’m heading back to the ship,” he said, bounding on towards the next superjunction without looking back at the Fergunakil
giela
. There was no transportation system in place here yet, but with the exchanges dead it wasn’t exactly an exhausting chore to get from place to place. “There’s nothing much more I can do here, but I can start the plant up. What’s our next stop going to be?”

“I think Sally and Zeegon are working out an itinerary,” Clue replied. “Pending an actual decision about our destination for this leg and how many refugees we’ll be taking with us. You can take it up with them, if you’ve got any local knowledge that might be useful.”

Waffa signed off, and booted himself along the chilly, echoing causeway towards the dock.

SALLY

“Yoo-hoo? Anyone home? Is this thing on?”

Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed sighed and jabbed at the communicator with a finger as though trying to punch a hole in the console. “What is it, Doctor Cratch?”

“Ooh,
Sally
,” Cratch sounded pleased, yet scandalised. “Janya doesn’t like it when people call me ‘doctor’, you know.”

“Can’t say I’m in love with it either, but you’re what we’ve got,” Sally replied. “What do you want?”

“I have the first batch of skin and lungs ready to go. And I know they’re the most important replacement parts for injuries related to cold and vacuum, but I just can’t help looking at this slab of packaged organs and see a really messed-up attempt at starting a balloon-inflating business…”

“Will you shut up?”

“Sorry,” Glomulus was clearly far too gleeful to fully suppress himself, but he made a clear effort and his next statement came across as merely jolly. “I’m switching over to blood for the next run. Then I’ll do Molran skin. I’m not sure how well our printers will do with the Molranoid stuff, they’ve been out of commission for a while with only Decay on board. But that is clearly the biggest need on the settlement right now, and this ship of theirs with the injured fellows sleeping on board. I think we could give each of the human survivors a half-dozen lungs and enough skin to make a serviceable, if ghastly, wardrobe of–”

Sally shut off the comm.

“Are there some Fergies on the line I can please talk to?” she asked Zeegon.

“I think the Rip already freaked them out with his ‘sharksicles’ routine,” Zeegon said from the helm, and tapped desultorily at his organiser pad.

They were currently alone on the bridge, doing their best to monitor the crew’s activities on the station, keep track of the Bonshooni passengers on board, figure out a flight plan to the edge of the galaxy, and wrangle eejits in the logistical nightmare that was a rescue and resourcing operation performed largely by crewmembers with IQs in the high-houseplant registers. And, as Zeegon himself had said, to top it all off there wasn’t a single Zaz Burger left on The Warm.

“It’s like whatever demented alien invaders did this, they targeted delicious deep-fried steak-and-onions goodness intentionally and systematically,” he mourned.

The refugees from Bayn Balro, surprisingly, seemed to be leaning in the direction of unanimously opting to stay behind on the stricken settlement. About the most honest and rational explanation Sally had received, amidst all the tough talk about rebuilding and not quitting and regrouping to go back and reclaim the wave, was from Acting Consul Choyle.

“We’re perfectly happy to live in a relatively sustainable environment, which this will be once the repairs and the shoring up is done,” he’d told her a short while ago. “In fact it already is now, for a thousand-odd people. They’ve survived almost a month, they’ll survive indefinitely and we have sustainability expertise they can use. Plus, it’s fair to say that we’ve all gained a healthy dose of thalassophobia, and are all too happy to be in a settlement where it looks like the Fergunak are just not going to be able to live much longer.”

Sally, after discreetly looking up
thalassophobia
, had been inclined to concur. Not only that, but The Warm and Bayn Balro alike had already been attacked and, quite literally in the case of the former, killed by whatever-the-Hell-this-was.

“If we can live here,” Choyle had confided in her quite earnestly, “call me cowardly but we are perfectly happy to huddle in the ruins in relative safety and wait out the storm. Our children will live. If they live to reach out into the stars again, so much the better. But they will live.”

Again, Sally felt this was fair enough. The Bonshooni were
settlers
, after all. That meant almost by definition that they would
stop
somewhere rather than keep moving. That’s why there were
settlers
, and not
nomads
.

Nomads, not to be confused with damn fools stumbling from one disaster to the next
, she thought to herself,
which is what
we
are
.

The Bayn Balro expats were tough enough. They were more suited to holing up, digging in, building habitats and surviving in them, than travelling indefinitely towards whatever lights of civilisation might be left. They’d built a home on a world covered in an ocean full of sentient cybernetic sharks, an ocean that hula-hooped them violently around its own equator with every pass of her bloated, shattered moon.

Sure, they’d apparently taken a lot of drugs to make that seem like a good idea, but they’d
done it
. The Warm wasn’t going to be a problem for them.

And Choyle was right about the Fergunak. The few remaining in the Chalice were either going to leave in their gunships once they’d done what they could here – and frankly it was staggering they’d done as much as they had – or they were going to die. There was a slim chance that rescue, of a sufficient scale to provide aquatic-environment relief, would come in time to save them … but it was
drastically
slim. Even if the wider Fergunak gridnet mounted a rescue operation for the schools back around Bayn Balro, the operation would not stop in at The Warm. There was no potential for rescue, settlement or resupply here. The only reason the Fergunak would come here in any great force, Sally’s deeply pessimistic and distrusting Chief Tactical Officer mind insisted, would be if the Larger Dark Moving Below school and their toothy buddies insisted on a payback assault. That was not entirely outside the bounds of Fergunak vindictiveness, but probably not something they would bother the
settlers
about.

No, if the Fergunak were going to strike out at something that had offended them, it would be the
Tramp
and her crew. Acting Consul Choyle and his people would be safe as soon as they disembarked.

It occurred to Sally, randomly, that the prefix ‘Acting’ should probably be stricken from the legal lexicon sooner rather than later. If the organisational structures of the Six Species were going to continue getting pounded to mincemeat, the modifier would pretty soon lose all meaning.

The door swished open and Waffa stepped onto the bridge.

“What’s it look like out there?” Sally asked, regretting that neither her tactical and diplomatic simulation training nor her Mygonite upbringing were equal to the task of dealing with a loss of this magnitude. The Accident had effectively trumped and shut down any attempt to communicate or commiserate about subsequent traumas without sounding hopelessly naïve at best, insultingly dismissive at worst. Their best alternative was counselling from Janus Whye, and Sally wasn’t sure she’d wish that on a war criminal.

Waffa, however, responded with his usual laconic colourfulness. “It’s a huge gaping frozen death-hole with a data-void cherry on top,” he said, “you know, on top of the hole, somehow,” he plonked himself into the empty weapons officer’s chair next to Sally’s station, and sighed. “Actually, considering what a God damn disaster this is, they’re dealing with it really well. I guess they’ve had nearly a month to run around like headless chooks and then get their crap together.”

“How about your folks?” Zeegon asked. Boonie uncoiled from his warm spot on the helm’s glowing display, slunk across the floor and up Waffa’s leg like a mossy green lizard.

“Well, it was just
argh
argh
argh
, damn it Boonie you’re wet,” Waffa exclaimed as the weasel worked his way around the crook of his neck. Boonie showed absolutely no remorse at this, and after a moment Waffa settled back and scratched the jungle-damp weasel’s ears absently. “Anyway, it was just my mum and she’s gone, far as I can tell,” he went on, “but ‘gone’ in a good way. Looks like she shipped out before the Cancer got here. The rest of Boco Pano is gone in the
other
way, but there’s still a chance mum’s on her way to Aquilar.”

“I’m glad about your mum,” Zeegon said, “but you said ‘Cancer’ first so you owe us a crew quarters each from your set,” the helmsman turned and gave Waffa a faint smile. “You know – when a person gets bitten, goes grey, dies and then comes back to life and goes lurching around the place hungry for human flesh, you lose the bet if you’re the first person to say–”

“–Cratch?” Waffa suggested.

“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” Zeegon conceded, “but the correct answer was ‘zombie’, and you still owe us each a cabin.”

“No deal. Bendis and his staff have been muttering it behind their hands for weeks already.”

“But you’re the first
Tramp
ster to say it.”

“Are we
Tramp
sters now?” Sally asked in amusement.

“Just something Decay and I were trying on for size,” Zeegon shrugged, turning back to his console. He plucked up a cheezy chunk and tossed it over his shoulder without looking back. Boonie extended elegantly from Waffa’s shoulder on his back legs, almost horizontally, and caught the little ball of artificially-flavoured carbo-starch in forepaws and teeth. “Hey,” he went on, “so do you know anything about a planet called Eshret?”

“I know about a lot of stuff,” Waffa replied. “It might jog my memory if you toss us one of those cheezies.”

“They’re just print-outs.”

“Didn’t ask,” Waffa caught the cheezy chunk almost as deftly as Boonie had, and munched for a moment before saying, “yeah, Eshret, it’s a sandboondie a week or so from here, pretty much the same way we’ve been headed so far. Clue said something about you guys charting a course?”

“Out to the edge,” Sally said.

“The edge?” Waffa blinked. “That’s going to take
years
.”

“Probably a couple,” Sally agreed, “yep.”

“Bloody Hell.”

“All us non-Corps peons will get our chance to disembark,” Sally said, “and there’ll be plenty of stops along the way. But this is a classic AstroCorps mission. We’ve picked up a passenger of the wacky-wacky persuasion.”

“No kidding.”

“She’ll be moving into one of the oxygen farms with a big piece of luggage,” Sally said. “I mean
seriously
big. So we’re going to have to decommission an entire farm arc.”

“Are we taking bets about Contro getting his tongue stuck on anything? I want a chance at double-or-nothing on that lost cabin,” Waffa snapped his fingers a couple of times, fumbled the next cheezy chunk that Zeegon tossed to him, and grunted as Boonie uncoiled and snagged it before he could bend down. “One more, tiger.”

“Way ahead of you on the Contro-getting-his-tongue-stuck pool,” Zeegon said. “I’ve got my hopes pinned on ‘algae block’, if you want to double-down you’ll have to take something less likely, like ‘sleeper pod lid’ or ‘wacky-wacky-Drednanth butt’.”

“I’ll go with ‘coolant conduit lining’,” Waffa said, “I can already see maintenance jobs in my future.”

“Deal. So when you say ‘sandboondie’,” Zeegon went on, flinging another cheezy chunk, “I assume you mean it’s a desert planet.”

“Eshret? Yeah,” Waffa nodded, catching and eating. “There’s nothing there, though,” he said through his mouthful, “at least there wasn’t in … wow, ‘56, when I was last here. An unmanned research post, a secondary beacon, maybe a water reclaimer. All I really remember was the little lab thing, my sister did a school project about it. Funny, the crap that sticks in your head. Anyway, it’s habitable, but you’d want to be…” he paused, and gave a short laugh.