Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1)

by Andrew Hindle

  “Um, he says hello,” Bason relayed.

  “So you’re back for an unknown period of time due to the Bharriom integration process,” Gandicon said, fixing on what he could almost understand. He withdrew his hands from his pockets, the shaking having subsided. “How is it going otherwise?”

  “Fine,” the Heart said. “I am pleased that the vessels awaken. I hope you will soon be ready to take the next step.”

  “And what is that, exactly?” Gandicon pressed. The boy looked a little crestfallen again, and Mer was clearly missing half of the conversation, so he changed tack. “The heart of the starship – the original one that powered the Grandis 459 – is in the Bonshoo now,” he said, gesturing around at the command deck with an upper hand. “That was … seven billion active pods, did you say, Mer?”

  “The Bonshoo has seven billion operational pods, the Enna Midzis has two billion, and the Grandix has little over a billion,” Mer said in the same calm tone in which it had catalogued the pods previously.

  “I’m just wondering, with seven billion in the Bonshoo and far fewer in the Enna Midzis and the Grandix,” Gandicon went on, “those are the two ships with the spare hearts in. I assume the … depleted crystal will drain sooner than the unused ones anyway, but…” he glanced at Bason for help.

  “How long until the original heart goes, um, flat?” Bason obliged him.

  The Heart smiled again. “It will not,” he said. “Not with the expenditure I believe we have in mind for these vessels, and not even with a full complement of sleepers. Although of course there is a chance that the journey will stretch out, or other needs … no, the crystal should not be worn down. It is brighter now, in fact, than it was when the Grandis 459 first arrived above Dema.”

  “It replenishes?” Gandicon asked.

  “Of course,” the Heart nodded. “It is a living thing. It recovers with rest – up to a point. There are some things that can drain it more fundamentally, but not this. Although the truth is … more complicated.”

  “I had a feeling it would be,” Bason murmured.

  “Still, it is now brighter,” the Heart said. “The flight here … took its toll.”

  “How much can you tell us about the flight here?” Bason asked. “If we’re going to be retracing it…”

  The Heart looked apologetically blank again, but Mer was already responding. “We won’t be going back the way we came. We don’t have that sort of time. The flight out took little over a thousand years – at superluminal speed all the way.”

  “That’s … a long time,” Bason said, “and it amounts to a lot of distance to cover if the Worldships are really only subluminal-capable.”

  “They are,” Mer said. “Regretfully, there is no more information about the technology that carried us here. If it weren’t for the facts of the logs – and even those are severely edited – and the superluminal wake data I managed to assemble, I’d have my doubts as to whether the technology even existed in the first place. Certainly it seems to clash with the principles of luminal-universe physics.”

  “So our ancestors got us here,” Bason said, “then scuttled the Grandis 459 and destroyed every last trace of her superluminal capacity?”

  “Steady on with the ‘ancestors’ bit there, youngster,” Gandicon forced a smile. “I’m only second-generation Dema’i.”

  “That’s right,” Mer replied. “This was – despite the moderate contingency effort that resulted in the creation of the Worldships – intended to be a one-way trip.”

  “This is a contingency?” Gandicon murmured.

  “Your predecessors destroyed the information, the machinery, the navigation details. Even if there was a way back across such a huge distance, there really is no way. There’s no knowing for sure the route we took to get here. All I can do is make estimates based on fragmentary information and the small sphere of local data, and conclude with a general direction. Following the wake isn’t really possible at subluminal speeds, and in any case I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Because the wake is where the aliens might be likely to start hunting,” Gandicon said. “Like a trail of carcassback scent in the water.”

  “Right,” Mer said, “if you say so.”

  “A carcassback is a large marine animal that attracts scavengers and prey and sometimes more dangerous predators–” Gandicon began to explain.

  “Aren’t there any designs, instructions for building a new superluminal drive?” Bason interrupted in exasperation. “Nothing at all?”

  “No,” Mer responded. “That information has been completely purged. Like I said – I know that, by logical deduction, the Grandis 459 must have arrived at Dema by superluminal means, but beyond that purely theoretical knowledge … as far as my own awareness is concerned, it isn’t even possible to accelerate matter beyond the speed of light. I have researched the possibility but I lack the capacity to make advances – perhaps because of built-in limitations. We were meant to stay here, after all. It’s quite likely that the drive was supplied to us at the outset, and was designed to burn out and leave no trace.”

  “Are you saying we’re exiles?” Bason demanded.

  “I’m not saying anything,” Mer replied. “Just laying out the probabilities.”

  “So the only way out really is subluminal,” Gandicon said. This wasn’t precisely news – he’d long since reached the same conclusion with Karturi – but it was still disheartening to hear this absolute confirmation.

  “Yes,” Mer replied.

  “And we can’t go back the way we came,” Gandicon went on. “But saying we did – just taking a slightly different route to avoid the superluminal wake – the actual distance we needed to traverse would be a thousand light years – probably more, depending on how much faster than light–”

  “Oh, it was much more,” the Heart said confidently. “The Grandis 459 flew at a stable cruising superluminal speed of twenty thousand times the speed of light,” he saw the surprised expressions of the two Molren. “I am aware of this information, but unfortunately I cannot add to it.”

  “What’s the phantom saying?” Mer asked.

  “He says the Grandis 459 could fly at twenty thousand times the speed of light,” Bason said.

  “That sounds about right,” Mer confirmed. “It was the estimate I made based on the wake readings I managed to compile.”

  “Alright. It doesn’t take much in the way of mathematics to figure out that that’s twenty million light years,” Gandicon said. “How fast can the Worldships push?”

  “No more than one third of light speed.”

  Gandicon nodded. “So. Sixty million years to get back to where we came from, if we retrace our steps. Twelve thousand Molran lifespans. Give or take a certain amount of time distortion that probably happens at one third the speed of light.”

  “No wonder you’ve designed these things for durability and expansion,” Bason breathed.

  “No,” Mer replied, “that’s not why – look, I’m not entirely sure how long you can keep a Molran in a sleeper pod and expect to take anything like a Molran back out of it, but it’s certainly not sixty million years. It’s probably not even one million.”

  “Okay,” Bason said, “so where can we go? A Molran’s lifespan at one third the speed of light will get us about seventeen hundred light years from here. What’s there?”

  “Not a lot,” Mer admitted.

  “And with a pursuing enemy that is capable of superluminal travel,” Gandicon added, “what safety can that distance offer anyway?” his lower hands began to shake again, and he clenched his fists.

  “Well, therein lies our one real chance,” Mer said. “It’s entirely possible that they won’t be able to see us. It’s the wake they’re going to follow – your carcassback scent. If you go up on shore and travel at the speed of continental drift, the … aquatic predators won’t … look, is this a load-bearing metaphor?” it asked.

  “Gandicon?” the Heart asked suddenly, looking up at him sh
arply. “Are you alright?”

  “I believe I could … use some medical attention,” he admitted, opening and closing his lower hands. “I may be having a … Mer, what are the medical facilities like?”

  “Untested,” Mer replied bluntly.

  “Gandicon?” Bason’s voice called from, it seemed, the far end of the Enna Midzis.

  For the third time in his life, Gandicon Ghåål passed out.

  XXVI

  “Welcome back to the land of the living,” Karturi said dryly as soon as Gandicon’s eyes pushed themselves crustily open. “Although ‘land’ might be a stretch, and ‘living’ is up for debate…” the surface he was lying on rocked slightly as Bason gave it a sharp jab with her lower fists. “You keep trying to leave me alone in space with a pair of disembodied consciousnesses.”

  “Sorry,” Gandicon said, working his jaw and tongue slowly. “What happened? How long was I out?”

  “Only a couple of hours,” Bason replied, “but Mer doesn’t think there’s much it can do anymore. Your body has healed as much as it can, and if resting and recovery doesn’t do it…”

  “Then that’s it,” Gandicon said. “It’s alright, Karturi. I’m well past my quinmillennium. It’s just a fact that a body can only bounce back for so long, before the bounce goes out,” he looked around delicately. “Heart?”

  “He vanished when Mer powered up the medical bay,” Bason said, and offered Gandicon a forced smile. “In a sense, it’s like he gave up his existence to preserve you.”

  “That’s … not exactly what I’d call comforting,” Gandicon remarked. “Since I was basically played out anyway. The Heart would be far more useful to you than I could ever be.”

  “Well, he’s likely to be gone on a permanent basis after the Worldships are fully ramped up anyway,” Bason said, and leaned over the recovery couch. “Listen,” she went on, “while you were unconscious … we’ve found out – Mer found out, from the data uplink to Dema – a little bit more about the shipyard.”

  “A little bit more?”

  “Kind of a lot more, actually.”

  “Okay,” Gandicon squinted up at the young woman. “Why do I get the impression that you’re debating whether this information is going to aid my recovery or knock me back out?”

  Bason laughed humourlessly. “This whole thing, the shipyard, the Worldships, the piecing-together of data that eventually led Mer to contacting me – it was all set in motion by … by the original settlers,” she said, “some of them, anyway.”

  “Stands to reason,” Gandicon said. “Who else would do it?”

  “Well, right,” Bason agreed. “But some of them stayed here, to make sure it happened. Mer doesn’t remember much of the early days, because it was still emerging from the Grandis 459’s computer at that point, but it knows it wasn’t alone out here with the robots for the whole time. There were Molren here.”

  “Again – stands to reason,” Gandicon replied.

  Bason looked mildly annoyed. “They did it because, on some level, they wanted a way to get back. Even if they weren’t meant to. Even though the superluminal drive was beyond their reach, they wanted their descendants to have some sort of option, if the time ever came that they needed to leave Dema and return to wherever they’d come from. The city in the middle of universe, or what have you.”

  “Okay.”

  She took a deep breath. “The groundwork was laid by your grandmother, Lyrensis Ghåål,” she said. “And her son – your father, Hathan Ghåål. He was one of the small group that stayed up here and carried on Lyrensis’s work when Dema was settled.”

  “That’s not possible,” Gandicon told her. “My mother went down to live on Dema with the settlers – before her First Prime. She couldn’t have bred with anyone on the Grandis 459, let alone the shipyard.”

  “At his Third Prime, Hathan Ghåål descended to Dema,” Mer took up the story. “He went straight to your mother. They had known one another as children, and as young Molren, on the Grandis 459. I cannot speculate as to whether your mother and father were lovers then, and had been separated before their First Primes by their respective duties, as settler and shipyard-builder respectively – but, thousands of years later, they found one another again in their Third Primes – and you were the result.”

  “Well,” Gandicon said, “it’s certainly an interesting tale.”

  “Didn’t you know your father?” Bason asked.

  “He died when I was a child,” Gandicon said quietly. “I never knew much about him – was never all that interested, to be honest. Lawkeeps don’t have close parent-offspring bonds. He didn’t live in Bonshoo Drop, anyway. He lived in Idiña, I think.”

  “Yes,” Mer provided, “the Idiñan subcontinent, in the nation-state of Latess Dür, the city called Prognanthis–”

  “We get it,” Gandicon smiled wearily. “Your new data-stream and integration capacity is very impressive,” his smile faded. “But my mother was already named Ghåål when she made planetfall, so unless she and this Hathan were siblings…”

  “Not beyond the realm of possibility, for the waking crew of the Grandis 459,” Mer said. “It was an insular community, and didn’t have cultural taboos against it. Some of the traditional relationships persist to this day, among the Single Sigh and other citizen subcultures.”

  “They rarely breed, however,” Gandicon said. “The inherent issues of heredity – if you’ll excuse the pun – require regulation and in many cases genetic manipulation. Not often done, thanks to the Dema’i tendency to shun higher technology.”

  “True,” Mer allowed, “And in this case, it seems more likely that your parents had performed a partnering ritual, merging their families before your mother descended to Dema, and your father began his life’s work in the shipyard.”

  Bason had pulled out her interface device. “Your mother was born into the Izdan family, at least as far as fragmentary records show–”

  “There are no records of that,” Gandicon frowned.

  “She did say fragmentary,” Mer said in clear amusement. “I’ve been piecing together what I can, over the past ten thousand years. And yes, your data uplink helped – although I don’t like to boast…”

  “And I take it Hathan Ghåål and his friends figured out that a sixty million year return voyage would be beyond our practical capabilities,” Gandicon said. Bason nodded. “Did they come up with an alternative means of getting back?”

  “They did, actually,” Bason grinned. “Your dad found a shortcut.”

  XXVII

  She helped him get more comfortable on the couch, sitting him up and tapping at a few control mechanisms that seemed charmingly retrograde to Gandicon, and probably hopelessly archaic to Bason. They did, however, appear to be fully functional and probably far more advanced than they looked.

  The couch, or some osmotic nodes set into its cushions, administered some kind of warming solution to his arms and back. He grimaced at the metallic sensation it generated in the back of his throat, the chill that tightened his windpipes. Nutrients, and some more medication. Sedative and recombining compounds, he thought, not stim this time. The time for stim was over.

  “Can’t administer that in a more dignified way?” he said, shifting on the med-couch and giving Karturi an accusing glance.

  “Which hole do you want the tube in?” Bason asked sweetly. “Because I doubt you’d want to sip this stuff.”

  “I withdraw the complaint,” Gandicon conceded, then looked at Bason again. “So,” he went on, “My dad found a shortcut, you say.”

  “Mer isn’t exactly clear about it,” Bason said, “it uses astronavigation terminology and concepts from physics we’ve forgotten, but there’s something it calls a ‘Portal’. It’s a … a gateway from this part of space to another. One that is … well, from what Mer was able to make me understand, it leads from here to a point so far away, a thousand years at twenty thousand times the speed of light wouldn’t do it. So far away, it might as well be b
eyond the sphere of the observable cosmos.”

  “It is beyond the observable cosmos,” Mer said, “as I have been trying to explain. It’s not a matter of ‘might as well be’. Portals connect regions of reality in two separate universes to one another, from one part of the urverse to another, entirely separate, part. Or they connect a region of reality to a region of unreality. It’s … probably not something I’m qualified to teach you, given my limitations and your starting point.”

  “It’s probably too late for me to learn new theories of greater physics,” Gandicon agreed, although what Mer was saying did mesh, on several levels, with the stories his mother had once told him. Hadn’t the older generation always said that Capital Mind, city in the centre of the universe, had been a universe all its own? Wholly separated from the stellar void through which Dema spun? Wasn’t that where the concept of the urverse, and the gleaming city in its heart, came from in the first place? “But the short version is that this is a gateway to another part of space. Somewhere a long way off. Not back the way we came, though?”

  “That’s … complicated,” Mer said. “Not back the way you came, no. But – theoretically, at least – it will take you to a safe region of space, a region with … with powerful protection. I don’t know exactly what that means, before you ask, but that’s the gist of it. And from there it is a relatively short distance back to your point of origin, if that’s where you want to go. Even at subluminal speed.”

  “A shortcut,” Bason concluded.

  “So why did the original crew of the Grandis 459 fly for a thousand years, superluminal, rather than using this shortcut?” Gandicon asked. “They could have gotten to Dema much more promptly.”

  “Yes,” Mer said, “that’s also … something of a complication. The short version, as you say, is that the original settlers didn’t know that this Portal – this gate – even existed. It’s been sealed up for tens of millennia already. Now,” it went on, “my navigational logs are flawed, as I’ve said, but it’s possible that the flight path of the Grandis 459 was … more convoluted than you’ve been led to believe. The most likely course they took was a superluminal flight of some months from their point of origin, through one gate, and then a thousand-year superluminal flight to Dema.”