Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (41 page)

They’d picked up a few crates of heartsteer meat from the ranchers of Gymerville, on Burned Heart. Z-Lin had been careful to ensure that there was no exclusivity – anyone who wanted a share, got a share. There had been plenty of the delicious, usually-highly-expensive export meat to go around. Not that it had lasted long. Even with the crew eking out their portions as frugally as they could, almost everyone had eaten their freeze-packaged pounds of flesh after the first month.

“You’re sharing your own ration with me?” Decay grinned. “Commander, I’m touched.”

“Can’t exactly smokehouse-char the stuff the way they did back in Gymerville,” she shrugged, “but I figured it’d make a nice enough centrepiece of a roast.”

“All this time, and I had no idea you cooked.”

“Oh
please
,” she said sharply. “First of all, Vladislav and Try-Again Tryla from the mess did most of this. And second, who do you think made your birthday cake when we were en route to Standing Wave?”

“I thought Janus made it,” Decay said, “because I saw him making it.”

“Oh right, I made those pies for Contro before that,” she muttered, slicing at the roast, then raised her voice back to full self-righteousness. “But my point remains.”

“Those were good pies,” Decay admitted.

“Right?” Z-Lin grunted, angled the knife, gritted her teeth and hacked harder. “Anyway, I thought I might as well pay you back for all the cooking you’ve done for us, over the years.”

“Hm,” Decay said, and pointed in amusement at the roast she was clearly struggling with. “Want me to carve that?” he waved all four hands mildly. “If it’ll seal the deal, I can mix the
nerashka
at the same time.”

“Fine,” she handed over the knife. “So,” she went on, inordinately nervous, “end of the road approaches.”

“Well, a couple of weeks to Declivitorion and another week or so out to the edge,” Decay hedged, working on the steak with his lower hands and picking up the bowl of thick
nerashka
sauce with his upper. The sauce was carefully set down in layers – Z-Lin would never admit it now but she hadn’t trusted the eejits to do it right – and was only mixed just before eating in order to release the reactant flavours.

“I remember a time when a month of relative travel would seem like a hike,” Z-Lin said, “rather than the home straight. And Declivitorion will be the biggest place we’ve been to since our last stopover on Hermes.”

“Mm,” Decay said noncommittally, and set down the
nerashka
bowl.

“Thoughts?”

The Blaran shrugged his upper shoulders, and rolled his lower uncomfortably. “Are you asking if I think Declivitorion will have been attacked?” he asked, slicing the last few inches of the roast. “Or if Declivitorion – unlike Hermes – will have any of the parts we need?” he looked up at her with a sardonic twitch of his ears.

“Take your pick.”

“Well, not to sound cynical, but if Declivitorion was likely to have a new computer cortex for us, and a new fabrication plant and a replacement crew, I think we would have found a reason to pass it by. So I guess I’ll believe it when I see it,” he smiled uncomfortably. “It seems more likely we’ll encounter another amusing detour.”

“Why does anyone on this ship still insist on prefacing anything they say with ‘not to be cynical, but’?” Z-Lin wondered.

“Hilariously outmoded tradition?” Decay replied with another shrug. “Let me ask you this – have you and the Captain considered detouring
around
Declivitorion and just forging straight on to the edge? Declivitorion seems like the most likely place for us to make a final stop, and therefore the most likely place for the Fergies to jump us.”

“It’s also far too crowded for them to stage a secret assault-and-disposal,” Z-Lin pointed out, “but for the record – yes, I did
consider
advising that we bypass Declivitorion.”

“You did,” Decay said, the tiny emphasis on
you
almost undetectable unless you were sensitive to it by reason of long history.

“I did. But in the end,
reconsidered
. Predictable or not, it
is
our best shot at resupply. So, that’s the way it is?” she summed up, serving herself some vegetables. “We’ve been up against it so long, we’ve become mistrustful of even the
chance
at improving our lot?”

“Whether I would go so far as to say we’re only likely to stop at Declivitorion if it’s been attacked and lost its entire AstroCorps infrastructure…” Decay said discerningly, helping himself to heartsteer, “well, that’s a bit more cynicism than even I’m willing to exhibit. But yeah, I guess by this point it’s fair to say that we’ve come to expect the direness of our situation to endure. It’s the norm now, not an exception. Statistics are increasingly on the side of the cynics.”

Z-Lin conceded with a shrug, and for a time they busied themselves with loading up their plates and glasses. She had provided a bottle of wine from the so-called officers’ cellar in the reception dome, but in accordance with regulation she was only allowing herself one glass. The remainder of the bottle would have no more effect on Decay than a pint and a half of fruit juice.

“I wonder what Thord and Rime talked about,” she ventured, once they’d started to eat.

“I think we’ve all been wondering that for the past couple of months,” Decay said. “Aki’Drednanth play deep games,” he looked up. “But as much as I appreciate the exclusive meal, I’m sure you didn’t want to discuss Declivitorion over it. Or gossip about Thord’s meeting with Rime,” his smile widened slightly. “And while I’m endlessly flattered by the idea that you might have finally caught
the fever
…” he waggled his ears provocatively, “I doubt you’ve invited me here for romantic purposes.”

Z-Lin rolled her eyes. “You know the only reason you weren’t registered AstroCorps crew on this ship right from the start was because of the Molran regulations about Molran and Blaran segregation,” she said.

“We didn’t exactly call it
segregation
,” Decay said forbearingly.

“Well, fine,” Clue said, knowing the raw pain of Decay’s wife was very close to the surface on this topic. She’d been a junior officer at the party where Decay and Steña had gotten … well, engaged, you could say, but she remembered it more clearly than her uniform insignia from the time. Steña had abandoned her life for this man. And barely three years later, she was gone. “We’re a sensitive and histrionic species. My point is, there are no Molren on board. There is no regulation barring your promotion to Lieutenant at the very least, and your AstroCorps credentials, although old, are still valid.”

“Old,” Decay chuckled. “A hundred and thirty years. Yes, that’s fairly old, for paperwork.”

“A hundred and forty,” Z-Lin said. “You were just a kid when you signed up.”

“Ha,” the Blaran said, a pleasantly choral sound in his double-windpipe. “I remember it well, although the years do slip by. Eighteen months serving on a Blaran-and-Bonshoon-heavy supertug, with a couple of long vacations when we were servicing a Worldship and the entire crew was swapped out for nice clean Molren. And as soon as I was able to transfer to a bigger ship of the line, I was busted down to non-Corps crew so the poor Molren wouldn’t have to acknowledge me. Let alone salute me.”

“Nobody salutes
me
,” Clue said. “I don’t think officers get saluted.”

Decay took a mouthful of steak, and jabbed his fork in the air for emphasis. “They did a hundred and forty years ago, damn it.”

Z-Lin shook her head. “If you signed back on, you could take officer’s quarters. But since you own about sixty crew cabins already, I don’t suppose that matters to you.”

“Well now, if I could take an entire level of the officers’ quarters, that would be a step up,” he said wistfully. “Is it true that you still only use the one apartment up there?”

“By the numbers, that’s me.”

Decay shook his head. “If I could mash together a few officers’ apartments,” he said, “I could build a bar.”

“We already have a bar.”

He glanced pointedly at the bottle of wine. “One where you’re allowed to have more than two drinks.”

“You take about a gallon of strong grain alcohol to even get tipsy.”

“I meant big drinks.”

“If you were an officer, we’d only need a certified medic – or Cratch’s credentials to be unlocked – to make quorum,” she blurted.

Decay sighed, and took another mouthful of food and chewed it before replying. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said sadly. “It’s bad enough with Contro thinking I’m a general. I’m not going to help you stage a mutiny.”

“That’s not–”

Decay raised his upper hands, keeping his utensils in the lower. “I believe you. I don’t care. I’m okay with things the way they are. And seriously, why would you want to promote me, if not for relief-of-command purposes? I know you well enough to say okay, maybe it’s because you really believe it’s the best thing for me, but why else? You’re getting everything you need from me now.”

“We might be one of the few AstroCorps ships and crews left,” she said.

“You really believe what that crazy old bastard told us? The Artist? He’s the one who killed most of the crew.”

Z-Lin had her doubts about that, but this didn’t seem like the place to voice them. “There’s something going on with the Fleet, with the Corps. Ever since Seven Widdershins, the Separatists, the God damn Bloody Hands … you can’t tell me you think all is well out here.”

“You think the Artist killed Aquilar? The Fleet? Fed it all into the underspace, perhaps, as part of his experiments? Is that what you think killed Bayn Balro and The Warm?”

Doubtful though she was of the provenance of The Accident, Clue had no such uncertainty about the attacks they had seen. The damage to The Warm had been nothing like the sort of thing their old friend the Artist would have inflicted. Even if they hadn’t had his own statements as admittedly dubious evidence to the contrary. “No,” she said, “just … even if everything’s fine, we’re on our own for extended periods and like you say – it’s starting to seem less and less likely that we’re going to get our repair and replacement crew any time soon. We’re a month from the edge, and although I personally am holding out hopes that Declivitorion will be as intact as the entire barmy arm has been, we may not get
everything
we need there. And then it’s a long hike back in towards the big settlements. Why should there only be two full AstroCorps officers on board when there could be three?”

“Why not just get Cratch to relieve the Captain of command?”

“I think that might just be opening a door we don’t want to,” Z-Lin pointed out.

Decay grunted lightly, chewed another mouthful of steak and washed it down with some wine. “I’ll take the promotion, if you can guarantee it won’t be revoked once we take on a bunch of Molren.”

“We can’t change AstroCorps regulations–”

“Wait, are we one of the few AstroCorps crews left, or not?” Decay eyed Z-Lin, his smile not fading but taking on a wry tilt. “Let’s come back to this conversation when you’re sure.”

Z-Lin sighed again, seeing that this was not going to get them anywhere. “Alright. Tell me about this bar you’d like to build.”

If she had to be honest, Z-Lin shared Decay’s – and apparently the rest of the crew’s – pessimism about what they were going to find when they reached Declivitorion.

For a planet so far out towards the edge of the galaxy, it was old and very well-established. It had been one of the first major planets the Six Species had settled on a permanent basis, on the grounds that it was a good long way from the Core and – given what little they knew of Damorakind’s expansion practices – this gave them plenty of time to see the Cancer coming.

Declivitorion had, subsequently, become a paradoxically teeming and highly-technological settlement in the middle of nowhere, a hub on the very rim of the wheel. Another benefit of being so far from the main worlds of Six Species commerce, apart from needing to perform commerce with itself, was that people who came all the way out to Declivitorion tended to stay, because – as the crew of the
Tramp
had discovered – the journey
one
way was painful enough. The prospect of doing it again in the other direction was simply too much for many people, and so Declivitorion collected the driftwood that washed up on its shores.

Its relative proximity to the big farming and general supply worlds, furthermore, meant it could mechanise and outfit for starship-servicing all the more comprehensively, and let its population explode. The supercities of Declivitorion housed, at last census, in excess of fourteen billion Molren, Blaren, Bonshooni, humans, and even Fergunak in the planet’s heavily-industrialised seawater canals. There had even been a half-dozen aki’Drednanth, although Thord had claimed they had since taken to their ships and scattered back across the galaxy.

All in all, it was too good to be true. There was a strong AstroCorps presence and the opportunity to replace almost their entire ship piece-by-piece before the final leg of their journey. Z-Lin couldn’t have said for sure how she felt about getting a new crew after so long. Her gut reaction was almost anti-social – they’d gotten along fine on their own and they didn’t need any help from a bunch of clean-cut strangers, damn it – but she knew this was just survivor’s instinct, curling up inside her and growling at anyone who tried to help. The main problem with getting a proper AstroCorps crew again would be dumping all their eejits on a Declivitorion fabrication centre and getting used to a normal-sized able-backup compliment. Not to mention the month of renovations the ship would require for a team to rebuild her butchered crew quarters.

The rest of her shipmates might not acclimatise well either. She doubted they’d opt to stay on Declivitorion, but how did you go back to being a lowly non-Corps subordinate with a single berth, after you’d been the chief of an entire sector with a series of rooms the size of a decent manor house? She’d known that game of snatch-the-quarters was trouble as soon as it had begun.