“I heard,” Janya herself had a pair of eejit ‘assistants’, as Head of Science. Westchester and Whitehall, the former an attempted biochemist prone to defaulting to a dock worker configuration if you filled his brain too much; the latter an almost-physicist who … well, suffice it to say, she’d been surprised when it happened.
“Is it really that dangerous?” Zeegon asked. “This place we’re going?”
“Hard to say,” Janya replied. “As I mentioned, there are so many myths and legends and conspiracy theories, all of them might be true or none of them. Almost all the actual missions into the place are classified way above anyone on board this modular.”
She sat for a while, as Zeegon struggled to get around to the real reason for his visit. She couldn’t really think of any way to make it easier for him, because she couldn’t be certain what the real reason might be. What if she guessed one, and started to talk about it, and he had been about to ask something else? He’d jump at the chance to talk about the topic she’d raised, his real topic would be buried, and the fact that she’d assumed he wanted to talk about the topic she’d raised would probably tell him things about her. That was how people seemed to work, and she considered it exceedingly unfair.
“It’s about Cratch,” he finally blurted.
“What about him?”
Zeegon took a deep breath. “We – I want you to reconsider letting him out,” he raised his hands. “I know we’ve been through this before, but this thing we’re heading into, this place we’re going…”
“You think it will make things easier to have Glomulus Cratch loose aboard the ship.”
“Yes. No,” Zeegon sighed. “Look, I know what you said earlier, all your points-”
“I wasn’t aware command decisions, let alone legal determinations, were the bailiwick of the Head of Science,” Janya said, although to be honest she couldn’t think of a better candidate, with the possible exception of General Moral Decay (Alcohol). “This is the Captain’s decision. Or the Commander’s,” she added, when Zeegon rolled his eyes. “Or Sally’s. I can’t see her just standing back and letting her prisoner go free.”
“Yeah,” Zeegon said, “but whenever we bring it up to Z-Lin, she says it would be insensitive to you,” he waved a hand, taking in her scar-striped face, “seeing as how he cut on you and all. She makes it sound like you’re kind of the main one standing in the way here. If even you spoke up about letting him out, our position would be that much stronger and Z-Lin wouldn’t have that easy out.”
“You’re using some plurals there,” Janya noted. “Who else is involved?”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s not just me, that’s all. I’m just … nobody wants to say it this way, but look – Cratch is a doctor, alright? He’s disgraced and all, sure, but he’s got medical training and right now all we have are…” he waved a hand, “Wingus and Dingus in the medical bay, and Sally and Clue with a bit of battlefield triage, and Decay who I think did an elective course on humans as part of his veterinary studies. Like, two hundred years ago,” Janya let him get it all out. “It’s just … okay, maybe if we’d had more than Wingus and Dingus on deck, maybe if Cratch had been out of the brig when we were in the bonefields, we could have saved more people.”
“I can only say to that what I’ve said every time,” Janya replied calmly, “so I don’t understand this whole ‘trying your luck again’ thing. Nothing has changed since last time, so I’m not sure what bearing on reality it should have for you to repeat the question.”
“I-”
“I’ve never stated an opinion one way or another as to whether he should be released,” Janya said firmly. “It’s not my call and it’s not my place to sway the decision either way with my feelings about it. I’m sorry if the Commander and the Chief Tactical Officer have let my alleged feelings affect their decision-making process, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is their decision to make. I can deal only with facts as I see them.”
“And the facts, as you see them, are that Cratch should stay in the brig indefinitely,” Zeegon said, “even though we’re basically adrift out here, and there’s only ten of us left.”
“The fact, as I see it,” Janya replied, “is that if you let him out, Glomulus Cratch will kill us all. He won’t go on a rampage. He won’t do it immediately. But we will all die before we get him to a secure facility. Do you want me to say something different?” she spread her scar-lined hands. “give me some new information that has some altering effect on reality.”
“We can take precautions,” Zeegon said.
“Precautions?” Janya twitched an eyebrow. “Like a shock-collar?”
“I mean, like, well okay – there are these shaped incendiary explosives, we could mount them on bracelets and anklets for him to wear, and … what?”
Janya realised she was staring. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that’s just very, very stupid. I thought I was ready for it, but apparently I wasn’t.”
“What’s stupid?” Zeegon flared. “Put them on him, and give us all triggers, then any time he looks like causing trouble-” he mimed pressing a thumb down on a grenade-like detonator. “It’d incapacitate him, and the bracelets I was reading about can tighten and seal the wounds, keep him from bleeding too much…”
“You’ve researched this.”
“Sorry to step on your toes, but you didn’t seem to be about to offer anything,” Zeegon said in huffy frustration.
“That’s because I didn’t have anything that was better than the ship’s brig,” Janya replied. “And neither do you,” Zeegon opened his mouth to protest, but she went on calmly. “You are talking about a human who killed three Molren – three military-trained Molren, and almost simultaneously – using a four-inch function-remote peg, and you want to give him explosives.”
“He’d never be able to tamper with them,” Zeegon said. “They’re tamper-proof. They’d go off. They can also be set to go off if he moves outside a set area, so we can confine him to quarters.”
“And if he calls your bluff, you’ll end up with a medical staff member with no hands and feet,” Janya said, rather than tackle the huge, crumbling cliff-wall that was the very idea of ‘tamper-proof’ security measures, where Glomulus Cratch was involved. “What then?”
“We can replace hands and feet,” Zeegon said. “Able – eejit stock limbs, refabbed with his genetic profile. Identical to the originals,” she couldn’t help but notice his eyes dip to her hand, with its intentionally-slightly-mismatched finger, then rise back up. “You know. Practically.”
“That’s insane.”
“They do it back on the Big A all the time. Even Wingus and Dingus could handle it. It’s just a few buttons, the printers and the traction unit do all the work. The molecular bonding stimulator to make sure the grafts take, no tissue rejection, but most of it happens automatically. Limbs are way easier than organs.”
“The first thing he’ll do in that situation is call your bluff,” Janya reiterated patiently. “He’ll push you, he’ll break every rule you give him, he’ll step out of his house arrest zone until you can’t handle grafting his extremities back on anymore. You’ll lift the arrest just to stop him from detonating himself. By then he will have a good idea of how the bracelets work. His next experiment-”
“Forget it,” Zeegon growled, “I’ll just tell the Commander you still say no.”
“It would be more helpful if you’d listened to my explanation,” Janya said, “because if you had, you would have noticed that right at the start I said it wasn’t my place to decide this or to affect the outcome-”
“Yeah, well you’re affecting it,” Zeegon said. “And we’re going into a danger-marked volume of space with no medic.”
“Regardless of whether Glomulus Cratch is in the brig or in the medical bay,” Janya said, “we will still be entering the Bunzolabe without a medic on board. But I’m sure the Commander will appreciate the insinuation that I’m the one giving yes-or-no permission one way
or another.”
“If Cratch had been out of the brig when we went into the bonefields, Ital might not have been-” this time Zeegon cut himself off.
“Do you talk to him?” Janya asked, attempting to change tack. This was a different sort of cliff-wall. The sort with shards of glass in it.
“Who, the Rip?”
“Yes. When you deliver food, or it’s your turn to do a surveillance sweep. Do you talk with him?”
“This isn’t his idea, if that’s what you mean,” Zeegon said stiffly.
“Of course not. If he suggested an idea like this, everybody would reject it out of hand. You just need to be aware that defending him, finding solutions for him, getting him a milder sentence and more freedoms and benefits – none of this will make him your friend. It won’t mean he’ll spare you, when the time comes. He’s not like the lion who recognises the mouse who pulled a thorn from his paw. He’s more like an actual lion.”
Zeegon left, and Janya could tell he was disappointed even though she was at a loss as to why. He’d had an insane request that she had no power to grant, and she had told him her opinion of the request and explained why it was insane. That was an entirely productive conversation, as far as she was concerned.
People were strange.
She returned to her armchair after seeing Zeegon to the door. She sat back down, picked up her pad, and continued to read.
WAFFA (NOW)
The start of the next day’s shift found Waffa in the examination room where they’d put the remaining pieces of Dunnkirk’s wrecked sleeper pod, aside from the freezer elements that had been used to stow the body. The Chief of Security and Operations was chewing moodily on a caffeine-laced fruit-n-fibre bar. Your complete breakfast, he reflected, in a single preoccupied print-order.
The room was actually a surgical recovery ward, but there were so few Trampsters left it hadn’t been used in a while. It was a secure and sterile environment, and it was a bit more accessible than the labs up in the dome, so they were using it as a makeshift forensic lab. Or whatever you called a lab for a sabotaged piece of machinery.
The Rip had obligingly agreed to restrict himself to the medical bay proper, well away from the security-sealed equipment and the stored body of Dunnkirk alike. They’d decided not to throw him back in the brig, but that was always an option.
He walked around the pod. For the most part, aside from the freezer components carefully removed from the back and the two panels on the side that had been opened, it was more or less intact, if a bit battered from long travel and slightly mismatched from its customisation. If you closed the panels, it all looked fine. Inside the panels, of course, the true extent of the damage became clear. Their saboteur – the general consensus seemed to have been that Thord was the guilty party, if only because of the amazing lack of fuss Maladin and Dunnkirk had made – had pulled out the innards of the pod and smashed them on the floor of the oxygen farm. Another point against Thord, really, since the job would have required tremendous strength or some heavy equipment.
Waffa sat down on a nearby chair, and sighed. They’d gathered up all the shattered pieces they could find and now these were lying on the examination table next to the pod itself. There were still some puddles around the scattering of components, since they’d been unable to separate a lot of it from the ice of the farm floor, so had just swept it all up and let melting do the separation for them.
He finished his breakfast, dusted his hands off and scooted his chair over to the examination table, and prodded at the bits. He couldn’t have put the whole thing back together again in a million years. Even if it was just a matter of gluing and soldering it all into place – and if it was just a matter of gluing and soldering, they could have fixed it before Thord and Maladin rode the seed into extragalactic space – a lot of the machinery was Fleet solid-state stuff, crumbly as black chalk and apt to give humans a nasty rash if it got into their skin. There was no fixing it. Not with the gear they had on board. But he could at least catalogue it.
That was the sort of thing that made Waffa’s world slowly correct itself. It was something he’d found, increasingly, that he needed on this extended tour aboard Astro Tramp 400. When the universe seemed to be running on the fumes of burned logic, there was some comfort to be had in putting one tiny corner of it in order.
He pulled out his pad and called up the sleeper pod schematic.
It was a pretty rough thing, since the full details of sleeper pod construction tended to be guarded by the Fleet, but he didn’t need to know everything. Just enough to see that the pod had been gutted in just the right areas, evidently by somebody who knew what they were doing. Thord, millions of years old and connected to a mass-mind even older and ridiculously experienced in all facets of ancient and modern technology, would probably have no difficulty. He had no idea whether the Drednanth Dreamscape provided tutorials or if it would have just presented itself as part of Thord’s knowledge, but one way or another she would have had the information. The schematic was just to show roughly where each component belonged. That way, he could see if there was still anything lying in the oxy farm.
Waffa didn’t expect to find anything. He’d never really examined evidence in pursuit of a murder case before, so he had no idea what to look for. All he knew was that every little facet of the two Bonshooni and their aki’Drednanth matron, and their wacky plan to take a swim to the next galaxy over, needed to be treated as potentially relevant. So he was rather surprised when he did find something.
He blinked at the jumbled pieces for a moment, then looked at the schematic. He tapped and flicked through a few angles, then used the edge of his pad to separate out some of the crumbs and fragments, as carefully as an addict scraping hop-dust. He couldn’t be bothered to go down the hall into the medical bay proper and micro-film his hands. Who had time for that crap? He peered at the debris again, then pinged Clue and Sally.
“Look at this,” he said a few minutes later once they’d arrived. He nudged at one little pile of components – what looked like a bronze cigar tube, beaten severely in the middle so it was bent crooked with a split in the metal, with a crumbly mass of black chalky substrate inside. “Shell casing and rod. Pretty sure it’s the biometric regulator core. Obviously pulled out of Dunnkirk’s pod and smashed. Without it, the pod would’ve stopped functioning after about twenty-four hours even if all the rest of its bits and bobs had been working.”
“And that?” Sally pointed at the second separated-out pile of black shards.
“Second rod,” Z-Lin said quietly.
“Right,” Waffa agreed. “Banged up and dropped with all this, so it looked like the rod from this core-” he pointed at the first pile, “-but this core still has most of the rod inside, except for these bits that came out when it split. Look,” he nudged at the pieces in the second pile with the corner of his pad again, rearranging them into a flattened cylinder. “It’s a whole rod.”
“Taken out of the other pod’s regulator core?” Sally guessed.
“Well the schematics don’t say anything about a spare,” Waffa said, “so the extra bits have to come from somewhere. And there’s no second casing.”
“So someone took it out of Mal’s pod,” Z-Lin said, “smashed it and dropped it with the pieces from this one, and replaced the shell casing without a core,” she clenched her hands, voice growing colder than the farm ring. “So nobody would notice it among the debris, and it would pass by unnoticed while we were all looking at the visible damage.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Waffa said. “None of us know diddly about sleeper pods. But if Mal’s pod was strapped to that ice block with a dud regulator…”
“We’re looking at a double murder,” Sally growled.
Z-Lin held up a hand, crisply forestalling any cursing or shouting. “Are we sure these regulators weren’t just unneeded components?” she asked. “They customised the pods to enable themselves to enter the Dreamscape while sleeping – maybe they had a
different regulator setup that you’re not seeing on that schematic, because the schematic is of a standard pod. They might have had a workaround.”
“That’s true,” Waffa said. “Most of the bits here are pretty similar but you can tell just from the way the pod’s configured that it’s not exactly like the schematic we have on file,” he raised his pad a little helplessly. “But the main differences are in the neuro-whatsit inhibitor pan, the big old thing that keeps the sleeper’s brain from petrifying. Keeps ‘em awake enough to tune into the Dreamscape. And the freezer array that we already took off this pod, to preserve Dunster’s body. These parts-” he gestured at the scatter of broken components, and the bashed-open panel from behind which they’d come, “-look to be pretty standard,” he shrugged. “Janya had better take a look too, but I doubt she’ll tell us any different.”
“Wouldn’t it let off an alarm if the pod was missing a core and it was going to go tits-up in twenty-four hours?” Sally protested.
“Only if they added an alarm,” Waffa said. “I mean, the basic pod functionality is, if it stops working, it wakes the sleeper up and lets him out.”
“Shit,” Sally growled, “in this case, it’d just space him.”
“I’m thinking Dunnkirk’s pod was maybe totalled to hide the tiny sabotage done to Maladin’s pod,” Waffa said, then deferred to Sally with a gesture of his organiser. “But I’m not a cop.”
“Don’t know if it holds up,” Sally said, scowling. “I thought all three of them had implied pretty heavily that Thord smashed Dunnkirk’s pod, to keep him here for whatever reason. In fact, forget implied – Maladin told me as much, when we were heading to the farm for the launch. He didn’t explain why – he suggested that it was best Dunnkirk stay behind, to provide a connection with us, and the pups. Whatever. That’s why they were all hunky-dory with the pod being all wrecked up in the first place. Only Thord could have gotten away with that.”
“Then maybe whoever did this fine sabotage did it so it would slip by after the big one, like Clue – like the Commander said,” Waffa replied, striving for professionalism and, he felt, mostly succeeding. “We checked the other pod after we found Dunster’s was busted. I mean, we checked it as much as we could, but we were sort of depending on the Bonshooni and Thord to know their equipment. It seemed fine.”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 9
