Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (34 page)

He’d asked her if that meant she was an idiot, and they’d had a really satisfying argument for the next hour or so. He thought there was a very real chance of his sealing the deal. And not like that time on Barlowe’s Rock in the sad, flailing weeks after they’d escaped the bonefields, back when freshly-single and confused EV Rover Assistant First Grade Zeegon Pendraegg had been drinking with his friends-of-convenience from the EV Rover Assistants division, and he’d
allegedly
almost gotten lucky with a girl who had
allegedly
actually been a surgically-altered able.

These space-hound girls, though, they loved a pilot. Even a modest modular helmsman was a not-so-minor celebrity. And they didn’t look too closely at the fine print that might have things to say about critically low crew numbers and dead man’s boots protocols. And regardless of whether the Six Species were under attack from a mysterious new force out of the Core, AstroCorps goodwill was still viable currency at R&R spots like the Wavefront.

Every world and culture had its own interpretation of economics, from the
yachut
system favoured by the Fleet – glorified socio-karmic and professional points-keeping rendered into tangible tokens for trade – to the infinite variety of barter and currency forms across the settled worlds. It was impossible to keep track and impractical to attempt any sort of meaningful exchange rate with even the big currencies, since even some planets had varying traditions from nation to nation

For the
Tramp
, the simple exchange of deeper in-spiral information and a few minor haulage contracts for the next leg of their flight was enough to earn the crew a solid R&R tab in all the high-quality establishments on the Wavefront. And since there was only about six of them partaking when a normal modular crew averaged about three hundred and fifty, an R&R tab went a pretty long way. So long, in fact, that after their first heavily-diminished-headcount shore leave – Hermes, just after their escape from Twistlock and some two hectic months after The Accident – Z-Lin had taken steps to ensure that only a certain allocation of AstroCorps goodwill went to the crew. The rest was defrayed in an assortment of informal tabs and trades, and nobody argued, especially over the next three days as the hangovers roamed the ship’s corridors.

And Cosine, who looked like she had heard every permutation of “sin and tan” joke in the galaxy and come out of it without her roots showing, had absolutely no problem helping Zeegon to eat and drink his share, and that was how they had ended up two hours later in her warm, aromatic crash-pad.

“Who said anything about
drinking
with Molren?” she asked, and sat up on her own couch to rummage underneath it. “They don’t do any of the fun stuff.”

“I don’t know,” Zeegon said, “I’ve known a few who let their hair down from time to time,” a vivid flash of Gila Rodel and his bright mop of purple able-hair crossed his mind’s eye, and he giggled a little shrilly. “Metaphorically speaking. Heck, I knew one who was so relaxed, she married a Blaran and that meant she totally
becomes
a Blaran,” he looked into his drink, suddenly morose. “She’s dead now…”

“Oh boy, here we go,” Cosine looked up and rolled her eyes, then went back to searching through the detritus under her couch. “Okay,” she uncovered a heavy package, hefted it onto the table between them, and folded it open to reveal a densely-packed mass of bulbous, powdery-skinned berries. “They’re the real thing,” she said eagerly, then misjudged Zeegon’s increasingly-queasy expression. “But don’t worry. These ones have been treated, about ninety percent of the xoro-pheno-whateveriwhoosits have been purged from them, so they just taste awesome and have the same basic effect on humans as the real thing does to Molranoids,” she saw he was still staring. “Pilots take the treated stuff,” she said reassuringly, “all the time. It has even milder after-effects than booze,” she waved towards his glass, which was drooping in his sticky hand. “It’s not even
addictive
in these quantities. I just thought it would help cheer you up. But, you know, if you really don’t want to have a nice time…”

“Yeah, I think having a nice time just fell off the damn table,” Zeegon murmured, leaning out over the edge of his couch and almost overbalancing as he grabbed the box. He hadn’t seen smokeberries up-close all that often, and he hadn’t gone aboard the last place that had had them – he’d just flown the lander, proverbially and literally – but he had a horrible crawling suspicion that he’d seen the
packaging
before. “Where did you get this stuff from?”

“Kurtis – you know, Kurtis from Monkeybones – gives it to us whenever he gets it,” Cosine said, “a flat fee comes out of our pay and we have to give him a cut but we’re expected to sell it and regain any loss we take, but I was totally going to give you a freebie, I mean, whatever.”

“Where did
Kurtis from Monkeybones
get it?” Zeegon asked. He was scrabbling at the packaging, trying to unfold the flap with the manufacturing and travel seal on it. It was crusted with something that he knew –
knew
– was sea-salt, but he wanted desperately to be something else, something better, like hideously toxic residue from the treatment process, or somebody’s dried sexual fluids. “This particular batch?”

“All the big joints on the Wavefront got a bunch of cases each,” Cosine said with a frown. “A school of sharks came by here less than a week ago in their torpedoes, from
stonk
-knows-where to wherever sharks go. Practically gave away a butt-ton of smoke to everybody. I mean,
heaps
of the stuff, for practically nothing. The council had this mad scramble to regulate it and dole out treatment compounds before some
bonsh
wit overdosed on the hard stuff. You know this stuff is hydro, the best comes out of tanks, like the gear from Seaworld, Fergies would get the good smoke, always do.
What
?”

Zeegon folded the package closed with unwilling, shaking hands and sighed. Yes, that was it. He’d seen that sign, sun-faded but quite distinct, on the roof of the hub, and attached to the landing coordinates he’d fed into the lander from the settlers’ comms. “Bayn
freaking
Balro,” he said, ripped off the upper flap of the package and climbed to his feet.

He found the others in a bar called Chunderpints, just a quick jog down the heated-and-enclosed-yet-still-chilly Wavefront promenade. Janya – who by lucky chance was actually celebrating her birthday that very night – had insisted they go to the bar as an exercise in cultural anthropology, and to see if a bar with such a terrible name could possibly live
down
to it. The tiny, ferociously-intelligent scientist actually appeared to be squiffy, as far as you could tell with her.

“She’s more subdued, she doesn’t do that flashy-flicker light-thing as much as she did before,” Adeneo was saying, placing her index finger deliberately on the rim of her wine glass for emphasis. “I have no idea what that might
mean
, I just recognise it as a
fact
,” she looked up – her grey eyes were as sharp as ever, although she was most certainly the worse for drink – and saw Zeegon standing beside the group. “You’re back,” she declared. “I thought you were meant to be having sex.”

Yep
, Zeegon nodded to himself as Sally cackled in delight,
definitely sloshed
.

“Modular pilots do it at relative speed,” Waffa opined.

“Maybe he prematurely entered soft-space,” Janus suggested, to general acclaim.

“Fergunakil gunships delivered a mess of Bayn Balro smokeberries here,” Zeegon cut through the merriment, and put the scrap of packing card on the table amidst their drinks, “less than a week ago.”

There was a stunned silence, and for a moment they all sat and stared at the piece of card as though it was a venomous animal. Eventually Sally leaned forward and snatched it up.

“Shit,” she said, turning the card backwards and forwards and clearly recognising the logo as well as the salt that would have resulted from the package being dunked in the ocean before recovery. “Shit, shitting
shit
.”

“Wow,” Janus said in genuine amazement. Sally tossed the card down on the table and Whye picked it up, listless where Sally had been incensed. “That really destroyed my soft-space joke. I mean, like, completely
smashed
it.”

“Sorry man,” Zeegon put a hand on the counsellor’s shoulder. “It was a good one,” he sat down in an unoccupied chair with a heavy sigh. He noticed, almost incidentally, that Janus, Janya, Waffa, Sally and Contro had been sitting alone. Despite their popularity at the outset of the evening, it seemed that the rest of them had been just as much a bunch of brooding downers as Zeegon himself had been about to become, and had effectively driven away the unwanted peripherals. This seemed to be a recurring pattern for their shore leaves.

He also noticed, in the process of looking around the table, that Contro appeared to be unconscious with his eyes open.

“How did the Fergunak get here ahead of us?” Janya asked. “For that matter, how did they even get off that planet with the smokeberries?”

“They must’ve gotten some Fergie rescue team or something,” Waffa theorised, “some sort of full-scale operation. Maybe one of the ships that went out of The Warm came back with the cavalry, and then they back-traced to Bayn Balro from
our
info and got them all back into space again. Then some of them … shit, I don’t know. Found out we were heading towards the edge, and followed us here with the smokeberries as some sort of messed-up mind game? Letting us know they’re on our trail? And then they overtook us at some point while we were in soft-space. Their ships are a
bit
faster than the
Tramp
, and if they took a straight jag without any stops they could have gained
weeks
on us.”

“You don’t think it’s possible they just got rescued, took the drugs from the settlement as it sank, and headed out to various random spots to sell it for profit and get on with their lives?” Janus suggested. “Even as I say this, I realise it’s pretty farfetched.”

“I think they were pretty happy in that damn ocean,” Waffa said darkly. “Only reason they’d even leave would be to come after us.”

“I was sort of hoping somebody would suggest this is just an earlier shipment of Bayn Balro smoke,” Zeegon said, “that Fergies
just happened
to deliver here less than a week ago for apparently rock-bottom prices. They certainly didn’t make a profit this time, from what I heard. Is he alright?” he added, nodding towards the Chief Engineer.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, he’s fine,” Waffa said distractedly. “Just had a shot of bootstrap schnapps,” he landed a gentle elbow in Contro’s ribs.

“Ha ha ha! I think I’m going to chunderpint!”

“I think we’d better take this to the Commander,” Sally said, as Contro leaned over the arm of his chair and vomited, apparently
while still laughing
, onto the floor. “Shore leave’s cancelled.”

They did end up spending another day at Standing Wave, while Sally and Z-Lin looked for answers about the Fergunak smokeberry-runners and – with increasing frustration – any sort of information or assistance from the Worldships. When
Bloji
and
Dark Brutan
pulled slowly out of synchronous orbit around Devil-May-Care the following local afternoon, not that the distinction made much difference on the sunless moon, Z-Lin announced that they were moving on.

“Cold-blooded highfalutin’ noseless bastards,” she opined as they
ping
ed and
shush
ed their way up through Standing Wave’s sleeting upper atmosphere in the lander and headed back towards the
Tramp
.

“Now now,” Decay said, with a mildness so similar to Clue’s on-bridge diplomacy that it could only be intentional. “Some of your best friends don’t have noses,” he reached up and pinched his delicate nasal flaps together for emphasis.

“Some of the most officious bureaucratic know-it-all pricks in the universe don’t have noses, either,” she growled. “Happy to give us a bay-full of acidic cinderblocks to deliver to Shosha Ranch, unable to spare us a single fabricator because we might try to print ‘non-sentient primate homunculi’ with it.”

Zeegon, the pilot’s seat, frowned in confusion. “Isn’t that sort of what ables
are
?”

“
Yes
,” Z-Lin grated, “and the more up-themselves member-vessels of the Fleet have been using that as an excuse to make shit difficult for AstroCorps for the past two thousand years.”

Aside from the ‘acidic cinderblocks’, presumably some sort of noxious chemical components that Zeegon didn’t ask too many questions about, they had a few random crates and a mass data upload for their next stop. Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost. He’d never been there before and from conversation with the others it didn’t seem as if any of them had either, but the very name of the place gave him an unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Or that might have just been the present the Fergunak had left for them on Standing Wave.

“Sorry about your birthday party,” Janus said to Janya. “Kind of a bummer, huh?”

Janya waved it off. “Same time next year,” she said vaguely, “if we’re all still around by then.”

“Hey, let’s keep positive and take baby steps,” Zeegon said over his shoulder. “It’s my birthday in, like, three weeks. If we’re still alive by
then
, we can start planning the next party.”

“Preserving the Six Species,” Janus said, “one birthday party at a time.”

“Yeah, baby steps,” Clue agreed. “If we can get out of Devil-May-Care’s general vicinity and up to speed, we can be back in soft-space within the next two hours. Then we should be basically safe from
external
threats for the next nine tedious, tedious weeks.”

“Soft-space,” Waffa said under his breath. Sally sniggered.

“Oh,
shut up
,” Zeegon said, but was unable to stifle a grin.