“No sign of her in this volume,” Baadan was reporting. “The great grey is launching gunships and powering up her transpersion torch.”
“They can’t use both at once,” Attacus said tensely, “not without irradiating their own Fergunak into the middle of next week.”
“Looks like they don’t care,” Baadan said. “The gunships are setting collision courses and powering their own weapons, there’s nothing they can do with living pilots that they can’t do with dead ones.”
“Fire at will on the gunships,” Athel commanded. “Pull us back out of range of that torch, and stand us off from the other component ships. Keep an eye on the Fergunak. Not one of them impacts our hull.”
The scene before them tilted, the craggy and slightly-buckled mass of the great grey leviathan sliding off to one side even as she continued to disgorge tiny motes of single-pilot gunships in the light of the Draka’s prism-arcs. Her transpersion vents, already radiating a slight mist of charged shooey particles but not yet at full torch, rotated as far as they could to follow the warship, but didn’t bother to flare off. The Draka pulled out of range before either the reactor could reach full yield or the vents could get a proper bearing, so there was little point. This served the purpose of saving the Fergunak on board the gunships, but not for very long. A few seconds later the first lean grey vessel pursued the Draka into firing range, let off a couple of high-cad torpedoes,6 and was destroyed – along with the torpedoes themselves – by a volley from the warship’s mid-range accelerator guns.
Well, it’s war, Sergio thought, as he watched the shredded metal and ice fly into the darkness. At this range, and in the harsh light of the prism-arcs, the flesh of the creature that had almost-filled the gunship was indistinguishable from the water that had nourished it.
Let’s make it a short one.
“Acting Captain,” he spoke up once the immediate motions were underway, causing Attacus’s head to snap around again, “a word in your ready room?”
“Alright,” Athel said, frowning. He stood up. “Baadan, you have the bridge.”
“Captain–”
“Let’s get to the bottom of what’s happened to our Fergunak,” Attacus said firmly. “And the ones we came here to rescue,” he stepped away from his console and Baadan hurried to take his place. “If there are any of them left by the end of this. If the great grey looks like she’s about to try pulling away to jump distance, keep us close – but not close enough for them to torch us.”
Sergio walked across the deck, unsteady on his narrow robotic feet until he mastered the strange sensation of just initiating a walk manoeuvre and allowing the machine’s systems to put one foot in front of the other. It was similar enough to, and different enough from, the automatic balance and movements of normal bodily walking, to be immensely confusing. He made it to the exit without falling, but it was a close call. As he passed the little rack of spare giela he saw that the next three in line had blinking signal-interrupted lights on their carapaces, and assumed something was blocking the Draka’s Fergunak from logging in.
Was it the Flesh Eater that was simultaneously enabling his presence on board his ship, and preventing the Fergunak from interfering? He supposed it must be.
Attacus didn’t wait for him to totter along the short walkway to the ready room, but grabbed the giela by the gleaming shoulder as soon as the bridge doors closed behind him. Sergio stumbled and once again almost fell, but managed to consciously relinquish control of the mechanism so it remained upright under its own gyroscopic control. He turned in response to Athel’s grip.
“Alright,” Attacus said coolly, “now you can tell me who the Hell you are.”
“Attacus, it’s me,” Sergio said. “Sergio.”
Athel squinted at the – from his perspective – shoulder-high robot. “You’re Sergio.”
“I’m transmitting from the Flesh Eater somehow,” Sergio tried to adjust his senses to get any sort of feeling of his real body, which as far as he knew was still in its chamber over on the strange white ship, but the attempt just gave him a weird cold feeling of queasiness in his nonexistent stomach. “She apparently hooked me into a giela,” he sighed inwardly as he discerned Attacus’s ongoing sceptical look. “Are we going to have to go through a time-wasting but hilarious identity confirmation where I tell you about our first–”
“Is the Flesh Eater still in this volume?” Athel interrupted.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sergio replied. “If she’s departed, then she’s downloaded my consciousness into this machine whole – more or less – or she can maintain a real-time giela uplink over a physically impossible distance – or between reality and soft-space, which is also physically–”
“Is she a Flesh-Eater component of the Destarion?”
“I’m not sure of that either,” Sergio admitted, “but I’m finding it harder and harder to convince myself that she’s not. I’ve been installed in a ‘control chamber’, a sort of interface pod, which the Blaren were previously unable to access. Apparently I was dead when Po Chane put me in there, but the Flesh Eater patched me up.”
“Yes,” Athel said, “Drakamod mentioned you being dead.”
“Po Chane used me as a knife sharpener,” Sergio confirmed. “My parrot too. I’m back in one piece now, though, which is more than I can say for my parrot.”
“But why?” Athel demanded. “Why any of this?”
“She says she deals only with humans,” Sergio said. “The Flesh Eater. And she seems … scornful? Pitying? – of the other species. The Po Chane who attempted to install themselves in ‘auxiliary weapons regulation system chambers’ got themselves converted into the forms we’ve seen, the ten Po Chane clan leaders.”
“Bluothesh used his entire leadership to experiment with an unknown relic?” Attacus said in astonishment. “Why didn’t he use some lower-level or expendable guys? Isn’t that how corsairs operate?”
“Who knows how this clan does business?” Sergio said. “Maybe they didn’t want to share the potential power. Maybe they didn’t want to risk disgruntled underlings wrecking shit. That certainly seems to mesh with the way he reacted to his Second trying to tip us off about the hull, right?”
“Drakamod mentioned that too,” Attacus said, “and it appears to have been sound information, although its tactical benefit has so far been–”
“That’s not important right now. It looks as though the Flesh Eater converted the Po Chane leadership into secondary weapons, and if the Linda and the Ivan are both really depopulated, they’re quite effective secondary weapons. The problem is, they’re also somewhat autonomous. They can’t control her very much, but she can’t seem to control them fully either.”
“Which left them with the Flesh Eater fully extended around their ships,” Attacus said, “but stranded here.”
“Forcing the Po Chane to use the Fergies to lure in some other ships,” Sergio agreed. “The Linda and the Ivan were no good to them…”
“No humans,” Athel nodded.
“And while the Flesh Eater knocked out the civilians’ weapons and relative drives – I think – she didn’t do much to attack them,” Sergio went on. “Either that, or she disabled their relative drives and just ignored their weapons, since they couldn’t hurt her at all. With the crews in the process of being slaughtered, there was nobody over there to fire anymore by the time we arrived.”
“That makes sense,” Athel said. “The Flesh Eater might not even have any weapons of her own. She’s an assault shuttle of some kind, but she needed to manufacture her own secondary weapons. Her Flesh-Eaters.”
“Bluothesh and his minions,” Sergio nodded his unwieldy robotic head.
“Sending them out to kill the crew of the civilian ships, while leaving the ships themselves intact, could be called a successful test of a very dangerous anti-personnel weapon,” Attacus said. “But they still need human control to fully command the ship herself. Weapons aren’t crew.”
“S
o far I’m not providing them with the sort of control they were hoping for,” Sergio said, “but I think–”
His voice abruptly thickened and his limbs cramped up and then numbed to complete intangibility, and the bright auras of the giela’s visual feed were replaced with the flat white of the Flesh Eater’s interior.
He’d lost contact with the Draka and been returned to his body.
XVIII
Something had changed.
Sergio tried to blink, tried to look around in the cramped chamber in which he’d been trapped since his alleged resurrection. It still felt tight, claustrophobic, although it was apparently still transparent from his perspective. Now, however, the closeness of the clammy pod seemed intensified, holding him more securely than ever before … and yet he could feel no specific pressure-points, no bodily discomfort. In fact, he couldn’t even feel the clamminess anymore. It was like being held in a great padded hand, halfway between waking and sleep.
Bit by bit, he realised that he’d swapped one set of strange sensory signals for another. The giela was gone, and he was back looking out of the control chamber, but it wasn’t the way it had been before. He was trapped, looking out at the white interior of the ship from inside a small rounded pod, but he didn’t seem to be physically folded into the space the way he had been. It was difficult to quantify. He was at once aware of his body – in the numb, echoing sort of way that he’d been aware of his giela surrogate – and separated from it.
He looked out, feeling like he was using his eyes even though he no longer had a solid sense of them as gelatinous globes inside his skull, and saw Bluothesh Po Chane staring at him from very close to the surface of the pod. He couldn’t tell whether the once-Blaran was seeing him, or simply had his strange oily eyes fixed on the exterior of the pod. A pair of bladed hands – Po Chane’s upper hands – were resting on the surface. The space behind the Blaran seemed smaller than it had been, and Sergio wondered if his earlier supposition had been correct. They hadn’t jumped when Attacus had attacked, but had dodged, folding back into a smaller configuration in the process and disgorging the vessels within.
It wasn’t Kitander Po Chane’s voice Sergio heard, however, when the pale apparition slowly began to open his twisted mouth.
“I’m sorry, Sergio,” the voice of the Flesh Eater was as he remembered, with a tinge of regret added in for good measure. “Your guess is accurate – I was required to retract my hull to standard configuration, little more than six hundred feet in length, in response to your friend’s unorthodox attack. Very impressive … and yet, it required me to make several abrupt changes and focus my communications systems on redirecting your warship away from the great grey leviathan. The rest of my internal components and water, unfortunately, caused further logistical issues. At the same time, I regret, my secondary weapons–”
“Give it to me straight,” Sergio said. Or thought he said. “What did the Po Chane do?”
“Nothing, really,” the Flesh Eater replied. “They were incapable. They attempted, however, to wrest further control of my systems from me, and in the process necessitated your further integration into the control chamber. This provided no direct benefit to either them or you, of course, as you are not fully compatible, but the effect on you personally has been…”
“This doesn’t sound like ‘nothing, really’,” Sergio remarked, attempting to move, to get a sense of his extremities, to get a sense of anything, and failing. “Of course,” he thought to himself, and the words were functionally indistinguishable from his speech. “Of course I wouldn’t be able to feel my…” giving up on trying to internalise his thought process, he went on addressing the Flesh Eater. “It sounds like I’ve had my body turned into computer components.”
“In a sense,” the Flesh Eater admitted. “Your consciousness remains, as do parts of your nervous system, insofar as the two are interconnected. But your senses have been redirected through my own systems, and the majority of your organic body … could not be preserved when I changed configuration. The gravitational and concussive forces as I underwent emergency configuration shift – distracted by the Po Chane as I was – would have destroyed your body anyway.”
“I see.”
“I was able to interface you with your ship,” the Flesh Eater said helpfully, “before I had to recall you to complete the shoring process. I trust that was advantageous.”
“Not particularly,” Sergio was forced to admit, “although I suppose it was better than nothing. Maybe once you’re done with the shoring process, you can reconnect me to the Draka. Also, what’s the shoring process?”
“Think of it like a full setup and operations diagnostic after a crash-installation of a piece of computing equipment,” the Flesh Eater said. “It worked fine for the immediate emergency situation, but then you need to ramp down and start from the bottom up to make sure everything is…”
Sergio let the ship’s words wash over him, not particularly caring what process she’d used to turn him into a computer program. He was finding it difficult to muster up much outrage or panic, or indeed any deep-seated or intense emotional response to what had been done to him. He’d known, on some level, that there would be no coming back from the strange ship. He’d suspected it right from the start, even as he took the lander across, but the suspicion had solidified into a certainty when he’d fallen afoul of Bluothesh and awakened in the control chamber. This had been his final swashbuckle, parrot on shoulder and boots planted defiantly. The last heroic gambit of Captain Sergio Malachi.
But it was more than just resignation to his fate. He recognised the numb echoing feeling now – it was phantom sensation, as he’d felt when he’d lost the last two fingers of his left hand and before they’d been replaced out of the resequencer. Only now, he was feeling it all over his body. The loss of all his old animal muscle memory and glandular secretions was probably also contributing to his unusual calm.
He wondered if this was how Molren felt all the time.
Well, whatever it was, it was a fact. And now all that remained was saving the Draka. Saving Attacus. Because it was Attacus that the Flesh Eater wanted. Sergio knew this with a cold certainty.
“…regret that you were psychologically and chemically incompatible,” the Flesh Eater was saying, “although technically, as I mentioned with regards to your nervous system, the two factors are strongly interrelated–”
“What happens next?” Sergio asked.
“Well, whatever you would prefer,” the Flesh Eater said. “I can store you like this more or less indefinitely, even though your current capacity to control my systems is as optimal as it’s going to get. Certainly if I gain access to…”
“To better humans?” Sergio suggested.
“No offence,” the ship said, with every surreal indication of genuinely caring about Sergio’s hurt feelings. “I’m not going to discard you, Sergio. Like I said, even before we return home, I have the capacity to preserve you this way. Or … or I can painlessly purge you.”
“Home,” Sergio thought, before realising once again that his thought-speech discrimination had gone the way of his body. He wondered how much of his earlier thought process had been spoken aloud, and whether there was even any difference now that his mind was laid bare. He wondered if there had been any difference from the start. These whirling considerations, at least, didn’t seem to be given voice – possibly because they were too low-level and abstract. “I have to avoid,” he said, “have to keep from articulating – have to – can’t let the Flesh Eater know I – damn it.”
The Flesh Eater laughed. “Communication protocols are a matter of will at this point. And a matter of fine-tuning the thresholds. I will, of course, not intrude upon your innermost thoughts. Even if you speak them aloud, I can assure you they are of no interest to me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,” Sergio’s treacherous non-mouth blurted.
“As to what happens to you next,” the Flesh Eater continue
d serenely – and giving every sign of not having heard, which was either astonishing honesty or truly evil deception, or else something in between that was worryingly devoid of sanity – “the choice is yours.”
Sergio looked out again. Bluothesh was still leaning against the chamber, apparently at rest, mouth slightly open but not appearing to be talking.
“Can you make it so Po Chane and I can both see and hear each other?” Sergio asked.
“You can do it yourself,” the Flesh Eater said. “This, too, is an act of will. It may take some concentration to return yourself to organic processing speeds – at present, we are communicating at much higher registers.”
Sergio looked at Bluothesh again. The Blaran was, he realised, not standing at rest – he was suspended. Slowed to a geological crawl by the accelerated sensory viewpoint of his new brain. When he’d opened his mouth to talk earlier, it hadn’t just been slow – it had been slowing. Now, that running-down appeared to have gotten as close to total as made no sensory difference.
“Neat,” Sergio murmured. Then he concentrated, not entirely sure what he was concentrating on, and dragged himself back into the glacial slur of verbal and bodily communication.
“…iiiiiiiff you can hear me,” Bluothesh wound hilariously back into life, “but your friends in the warship are making a grave mistake–” he stopped, and drew back suddenly.
“You were saying something about making a grave mistake?” Sergio inquired.
“Where are you? Where did you go?”
“Your interference caused the Flesh Eater to integrate me into her computer system,” Sergio said, “so thank you for that. Now, I understand that what my friends in the warship are actually doing is fighting a war that you have started against AstroCorps and the Six Species, and in the process are killing a lot of innocent Fergunak whose gridnet you corrupted using this ship–”
“Innocent Fergunak?” Bluothesh repeated, his distorted grin widening and gleaming.
Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 28
