“You’re healed,” the familiar choral voice of the Blaran spoke, horribly close. Sergio turned his head sharply, and winced as his neck creaked. “I’m standing right beside your chamber,” Bluothesh confirmed in amusement, “it’s transparent from the outside, but apparently not from the inside.”
“I’m not sure what you’re hoping to achieve,” Sergio said. “If this is some sort of torture or coercion, injuring me and then healing–”
“I can see your mouth moving but I’m afraid I can’t hear your voice,” Po Chane said apologetically. “Add that to the list of known attributes of the control chamber, I suppose.”
“What’s the point of–” Sergio started unthinkingly, then closed his mouth and shook his head, rolling his eyes for good measure just in case his pod really was unidirectionally transparent. Apparently it was, because Bluothesh laughed hollowly.
“Yes,” the Blaran said, as if answering a question. “In fact, the transparency of your chamber, and the transmission of sound, ought to be under your control. As should many of the ship’s systems – under the auspices of my Captaincy, of course.”
“What?” Sergio said, moving his mouth exaggeratedly and scowling in exaggerated annoyance and bafflement into the darkness.
“Think of yourself as … a component,” Bluothesh replied. “You really ought to be better integrated, at least according to the knowledge my nine immediate subordinates and I have absorbed. I think perhaps you’re not completely compatible, so the ship is blocking you. No matter – you’re compatible enough to have been accepted by the chamber, and the Flesh Eater seems to have restored you to your original specifications, which is a step farther than any of the rest of us have gotten. None of us were admitted into a control chamber – we were invited to make use of the ten ‘auxiliary weapons regulation system chambers’,” he went on in fond amusement, as if recalling something cute a young relative had said or done, “which would only operate if all ten chambers were occupied, according to the ship’s interface. And those chambers converted us into these,” he laughed again. “Well, you can’t see me, but I flatter myself that you remember.”
“The ship … made you into that?”
Sergio’s expression must have lent enough context for Po Chane to understand the question, because his next laugh was a rueful chuckle. “Yes,” he repeated, “the auxiliary weapons chambers did this to us. I think it was actually something of a joke. She made us into secondary weapons, you see. Security crew, perhaps, or shock troops. Very effective – I think even without the full capacity of the Flesh Eater at our disposal, our augmentations will be sufficient to make us a new power in the Six Species, and as far as I’m aware we are functionally immortal, although obviously I’ll have to let you know in five thousand years’ time, as the old line goes.”
“Ha,” Sergio mustered.
“But even so, this was perhaps not precisely the weapons access we had in mind,” the Blaran continued, amusement fading a little from his voice. “You, though … you were accepted into a control chamber, and you were very thoroughly dead. That was a bit of a joke of my own, I admit. I don’t expect you see the funny side of it.”
Sergio shook his head slowly.
“I told him I answered to human masters,” it took a moment for Sergio to realise that the voice, soft and vaguely feminine, had the single-windpipe tone of a human being, and that Po Chane had fallen silent. “He wanted to know what the difference was, so I provided chemical composition and structural notes. He remarked that there was nothing in the notes specifying that the human flesh had to be living, and shortly after that, he stuffed you into my control chamber. I fixed your injuries, which were not severe, and restored your cerebral and bodily functions.”
“Um … thank you?” Sergio said.
“–advise you to tell me about it,” Bluothesh’s voice returned, having shifted abruptly to a rather sharp tone.
“Hm?” Sergio mimed a what-was-that-I-wasn’t-listening expression.
“The Flesh Eater addressed you, or interfaced with you,” Bluothesh said. “I could tell from your face. What did she say? I would suggest you cooperate, as assisting me in gaining mastery of this ship is the only way you will prevent your ship from being destroyed, or at the very least your crew from being slaughtered like the crews of the Linda and the Ivan.”
“And you expect me to tell you … how, exactly?” Sergio said, widening his eyes and staring vacuously into the black nothingness. “Facial pantomime?”
“Did the Flesh Eater initiate contact?”
Sergio tried to shrug, but couldn’t really do so. He wagged his head from side to side ambiguously, then nodded.
“Did she provide you with any sort of control or data?” Bluothesh demanded.
Sergio shook his head, then rolled his eyes upwards in the darkness. “Flesh Eater?” he enquired.
“Yes, Sergio.”
“Can you reverse the chamber’s properties so that I can see out, but your … auxiliary weapon … can’t see in?” he asked.
“That would be rather amusing,” the Flesh Eater agreed, and with a painful lance of brightness through each eyeball, Sergio found himself curled in a transparent bubble in the middle of a wide, white, ribbed chamber with the looming figures of Kitander Po Chane and two other ghoulish augmented Blaren standing over him.
The three pale-skinned, white-wrapped monsters recoiled in response to – Sergio could only hope and assume – the bubble becoming abruptly opaque from the outside. One of them talked, or at least its mouth moved. Sergio assumed this was Po Chane himself, although it was frankly impossible to tell the three creatures apart. It seemed a reasonable guess that the one calling the shots was the Po Chane clan head.
Not only could he not tell the Blaren apart, Sergio could no longer hear what they were saying. Apparently, reversing the chamber’s properties had meant completely reversing them.
“Now,” Sergio said, and was gratified to see all three metamorphosed Blaren fall silent and watchful. Horribly watchful, with those huge vertical gill-eyes of theirs … “I assume this means you can now hear me, but I no longer need to listen to your inane rambling.”
Kitander opened his distorted mouth, then evidently thought better of the attempt, and closed it again.
“They are lost,” the Flesh Eater murmured, and Sergio couldn’t tell whether these words were audible to the observers, “and so very sad. They have forgotten even more than I have. Their words meant nothing to me. I do not answer to Molren.”
“Hmm, so you said,” Sergio replied, not bothering to correct the understandable Molran-Blaran mistake. Once you’d replaced their fingers with knives and filled their heads to overflowing with black ooze, he philosophised, it probably didn’t make much difference anyway. He thought for a moment. “Maybe you could tweak the auditory properties so they can’t hear us either,” he suggested.
Po Chane took a sharp step forward, mouth moving again as he presumably spoke angrily.
“It is done,” the Flesh Eater said.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t destroy my ship in a fit of temper,” Sergio remarked. The Flesh Eater didn’t respond to this, and Sergio watched Bluothesh turn and bark something inaudible to his subordinates, one of whom turned and glided away with unsettling speed, vanishing somewhere behind Sergio. The thing moved like it was on rails. “You say you don’t answer to Molren,” he went on, turning away from the remaining figures outside in order to address the Flesh Eater more symbolically-directly. “Are you willing to answer to me?”
“Provisionally,” the Flesh Eater replied.
“Meaning?”
“On the condition that you provide effective questions,” the Flesh Eater said. “All I have heard, since coming out of the shadows, has been … the sighing of ghosts. The echoes of a shout that might once have shaken the walls of the urverse. A multitude of children chanting nursery rhymes in an empty room.”
“There’s … obviously a lot we need to catch up on,” Se
rgio said, “before we can establish a meaningful shared context–”
“That’s almost exactly what they said,” the Flesh Eater interrupted, sounding disappointed. No – sounding disgusted. “Why have you chained yourselves to the antiseptic destiny of the Elder Races?”
“See, I don’t even know what that means,” Sergio said. Even though he was making an effort not to watch them, he noticed the ghoulish figure he’d identified as Bluothesh Po Chane looking up suddenly, then turning and sweeping from the room at the same garment-rippling speed as his underling. Po Chane stopped in a suddenly-opening doorway off to one side on the edge of Sergio’s periphery, turned and said something to the remaining Blaran. Sergio turned back to the Flesh Eater. “Except, you know, that an antiseptic destiny sort of sounds preferable to the alternative…”
“The Elder Races long since decided that arriving intact at the end of days was more important than the journey.”
“I guess I can see how that’s a bit of a dull philosophy,” Sergio allowed. “I’m sorry if my lifetime of exposure to Molranoids has rubbed off the rough corners of my humanity and made me dreadfully boring,” he tried, and failed, to shrug. “If you want to do something fun–”
“I’m pleased to say it’s rather too late for that,” the Flesh Eater interrupted. “Your successor on the Draka is about to do it for you.”
XVI
“Captain–” W’Fale said uncertainly. “There hasn’t been any response to–”
“Use the same layout Fwetala used to communicate with us, and just tight-wave it at their hull,” Attacus said. “They’ll hear it, even if they pretend not to,” if that big white monster really is just a field projection, he thought, the right comms signal could disrupt it. We could do more than shout at them – we could strip them down to their component ships.
That, of course, depended on whether Bluothesh had been telling the truth or not, about the Flesh Eater’s resilience. And what exactly the right signal might be. Nothing in the standard AstroCorps lexicon, certainly, but …
They were hoping for humans, Attacus frowned. Were they hoping for Elevator People? Is that really what this is? And is there anything in my heritage that might provide an answer?
“Channel open, Captain,” W’Fale said.
“This is Captain Attacus Athel of the AstroCorps warship Draka,” Attacus said coldly. “Your assault on civilian vessels is in violation of the Six Species charter, and your assault and apprehension of an officer of this vessel is an act of war against AstroCorps. Deactivate your defences and prepare to be taken into custody,” he nodded to W’Fale, who swept a hand across her console and nodded back. They were no longer transmitting. “Ramp up the main relative drive,” he said to Tate.
“Captain?” Gondolus said uncertainly. “We’re not running?”
“Feel free to speculate while ramping up the main relative drive,” Attacus invited.
Gondolus persisted. “Going to relative speed this close to something as big as the Flesh-Eater–”
“It will most likely wrench our relative drive out of alignment,” Attacus said, “may even destroy it completely. Naturally, I’m giving the order to evacuate the affected sections,” which will give those crewmembers maybe an extra one-third of a second of life, he thought grimly, if it comes to that.
“Subluminals will bring us into firing distance,” Baadan offered her own attempt. “Huey–”
“We’re not firing anything,” Attacus replied calmly. “If their hull really is a paper-thin field and our guns cut through it, it will achieve nothing because we have no idea where their critical systems are. If the interior is as malleable as it looked, there may not be targetable criticals. If we fire and our weapons fail to penetrate the shell, on the other hand, this war is over.”
“Additional clippers are ready to deploy, Captain,” Drakamod, at least, had already figured out what he was planning – indeed, she must have known she was instrumental in it, or her school was. There was, of course, no more emotion on the face of the gleaming little giela than there would be on the face of the shark at the far end. “Their relative drives appear to be disabled, but they should have enough components to construct … alternatives perhaps best left unstated on the record.”
Attacus nodded. It also didn’t need to be stated on the record that there was a good chance none of them would be alive to pursue illegal alternatives anyway. “Deploy,” he said, “keeping the Draka between the clippers and the Flesh Eater,” he turned away from the giela. “Mister Midkins, prepare for manual crash-jump to these coordinates.”
The coordinates he tapped out for the helm landed the Draka as close to dead-centre of the Flesh Eater as possible, their two-and-a-half-mile length intersecting with the widest point of the enemy ship and the dark mass of the Fergunakil ship inside. This would almost certainly destroy the Flesh Eater, and would absolutely certainly destroy the Draka.
Midkins didn’t hesitate, but fed the coordinates into the helm.
“Incoming signal from the Flesh Eater,” W’Fale reported.
“Imagine that,” Attacus murmured. “Put it on the main viewscreen.”
A moment later, the pasty-white, tar-eyed visage of Kitander Po Chane appeared on the screen, his stretched smile and gleaming teeth more like a grimace.
“You’re bluffing,” he said, not making any pretence of the fact that he was wired into the Draka’s systems, almost certainly through the Fergunakil gridnet. Whether Drakamod’s school had been complicit in this, or whether the Children of the Bluothesh had broken into their network through some process air-breathers couldn’t begin to understand, it didn’t really matter. Attacus had already been sure the Po Chane were listening in.
“Did you just get back in touch to tell me that?” Attacus asked idly. “Seems to me, the classy thing would have been to wait for me to not follow through, and then smirk about how I’d been bluffing,” he accessed the field controls. “Deactivate your defences and prepare to be taken into custody.”
“Or you will destroy your own ship, Captain Athel?” Po Chane’s ghastly smile widened, or more specifically deepened. “Come now.”
Attacus, not really given over to the theatrics of his late friend, found himself unable to resist this opening. “Thought you’d never ask,” he replied.
Even Drakamod could have told the Blaran that Attacus Athel did not bluff. She’d played enough Heshtan Highwalk with Athel and Malachi to know this for a fact.
He hit the console and crash-jumped the ship.
XVII
There was a deeply unsettling moment of darkness and vertigo, and Sergio found himself standing on the bridge of the Draka once again. It took him a moment to realise what was different, but the first thing to get his attention was the fact that he was apparently a foot or so shorter than he had been before.
The next thing was that he was apparently ambulant, but seemed to have no real sensory input from the head down. All of his senses were severely limited, in fact.
Some sort of teleportation, he thought immediately. Jalah above, did the Flesh Eater just scoot me here?
He wasn’t sure if a light speed atomic scoot failure would compress him and erase his nervous system in swaths, rather than just reducing his entire body to sludge, but he wasn’t willing to assume the Flesh Eater didn’t have that sort of fine datastream control. It only took him that first moment, however, to realise that this wasn’t what had happened.
“Jump failed,” a familiar-yet-unfamiliar voice fizzed through Sergio’s cold, unwieldy head. “No, wait – we jumped, but the coordinates were redirected and the Flesh Eater jumped at the same time…”
“Relative drive is offline,” another voice – Sergio thought it might be Gondolus Tate, Chief of Security and Operations – said urgently. “Damage to primary and secondary torus, minor hull breach on second maintenance deck, microbreaches throughout drive segment, power couplers burned out and the entire field generator is dislodged. Not as bad as it should h
ave been, though – looks like the mass estimates were way off…”
“The jump coordinates were skewed between the moment we fed them in and the moment I initiated the jump,” Attacus was saying in a confounded tone. Sergio could only recognise his friend’s voice because he was standing right next to the man, and his moving lips were visible in Sergio’s too-bright, too-colourful vision. “What in…” he froze, hands on his control consoles. “The Fergunak are compromised, they’re in the navigation,” Attacus turned and gave Sergio a direct and apologetic grimace. “No offence, alpha.”
“Um,” Sergio said, marvelling at the interplay between his brain and the limited physical movements and acts available to him. Was this how Fergies felt all the time, when they were controlling a giela? Well, maybe not – his immersion in the remote device seemed considerably more fundamental, but there were a few different ways a Fergunakil could connect to a remote representative and he understood none of them on a non-surface level. “None taken, Acting Captain,” he said, acutely aware of the necessity of not causing too much distraction in a dogfight situation. Attacus nevertheless looked at Sergio oddly.
“Bring us around,” Athel said, shaking his head and turning back away from Sergio – or, from his point of view, from the little gleaming robot that Alpha Drakamod had presumably been controlling since the destruction of her parrot – to look at the viewscreens. “Prepare to open fire on that great grey. She’s the only ship left in this volume with a functioning relative drive, I would prefer to take that advantage away from her as soon as possible even if she’d rip herself apart trying to jump in this sort of proximity to us … where’s the Flesh Eater? Where did she jump?”
She didn’t jump, Sergio thought, turning awkwardly to look at the screens. She contracted back into her original configuration, leaving the ships she’d engulfed high and dry. Then all she needed to do was have the Fergies nudge your course a little so you didn’t intersect with the great grey.
Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 27
