Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  “I understand we’re going to be coming out of soft-space in twenty-four hours,” he said politely, picking up the bowl and giving the food a long, blatantly fraudulent sniff of delectation. “Anywhere exciting?”

  “No,” Sally said. She reached a decision. “In fact, it’s so dull you’ll probably sleep through it.”

  JANYA (NOW)

  Janya was sitting in her lab, coincidentally thinking about Thord, when the ship came out of relative speed and slammed to a halt at the limit of the AstroCorps-defined safety parameters. Aside from a mild judder and a faint noise from the bowels of the ship, the manoeuvre didn’t disturb anything much in the dome. It was mostly down at the bridge levels that an emergency all-stop was really felt.

  Nevertheless, Janya was on her feet as soon as the shake ran through the floor under her seat, and strode out of the lab to look up at the dome. It was set to the standard beige expanse that she usually left it on when they were at relative speed, since the grey nothingness of soft-space was the sort of view that got to you after a while. A few quick taps of the wall controls turned the dome panels transparent and slid the shields back.

  By this stage they were already swiftly approaching all-stop, and from the black, starless gulf they had clearly come out of soft-space in the middle of deepest, darkest nothing, so the dome’s screens were more than up to the task of deflecting any particles they might have the extraordinary statistical luck of running into. Janya stood looking up at the rich void of space – a sight she hadn’t been expecting to see for at least another couple of months – until her pad pinged.

  Before she could raise the organiser, she stopped with a grimace. A pain, mild but insistent, had awakened and pulsed behind her left eye, near her temple. She raised her hand, rubbed. The pulse faded, throbbed, faded again … but didn’t vanish.

  She finished lifting the pad towards her face, frowning, and opened the communicator. “Commander,” she responded to the ping.

  “Crisis,” Clue said brusquely, “probably.”

  “What happened?” Janya asked. She assumed, if the mysterious hostiles that had destroyed Declivitorion had managed to find them in soft-space – as it seemed to be generally accepted that they could – then she and the Commander would not be having this conversation. “Another hull breach?”

  “Looks like it,” Z-Lin confirmed, although even as she spoke Janya was looking at the same report as it skimmed across her organiser screen. She couldn’t decipher it as quickly as the Commander, though. “As for the cause, you’d better tell us,” Clue continued. “You’re closest to it.”

  This was true, Janya saw. The breach seemed to have been next to the ‘seed airlock’, the renovated section of the dome through which Thord and Maladin had passed on their way from the farm below, out into space. It was all heavily reinforced and had held for the better part of two years, so she had a hard time believing any of its seals had chosen this moment to give up the ghost. “I didn’t hear any sort of decompression,” she said with a frown, but headed in that direction. “The last time, when Sticky cut through that alcove in the eejit crèche, the hull rang like a bell.”

  “Waffa says probably a microbreach,” Clue said.

  “Okay. Oh, Commander?” Janya continued. “This might be my imagination, but…” she hesitated, unsure of how to phrase her question.

  “Headache?” Clue saved her the trouble.

  “Everybody?”

  “You, me, Sally and Waffa,” Clue replied grimly, “so I’m guessing yes, and I’m guessing it’s no coincidence. At least this time it hasn’t seemed to have killed any eejits, but we might be looking at a prelude. Waffa’s on his way up to meet you with a couple of the ables, but the rest of us are headed to the farm right now to see if the pups are warming up to let us have it, or if this is just their way of inviting us down there.”

  “If it is, we’d better think about giving them pads instead,” Janya remarked, rubbing at her temple again lightly. “Oh, and that reminds me – I assume we looked at the pads we’d given to our passengers?”

  There was no shortage of organiser pads on board. Even with the ability to store the data and repurpose any of the several hundred crew pads that were in storage after The Accident, there was a good supply of baseline models for passengers and new crew, not to mention the more basic designs that were part of the able-or-eejit uniform. They’d given one to each of the Bonshooni after picking them up at The Warm, and offered one to Thord. The aki’Drednanth had politely declined. Her envirosuit’s communication system could interface with the crew’s organisers and the ship’s comms.

  “Yeah,” Clue replied, “but there was nothing. Dunnkirk had forgotten his on the bridge after we left the edge. He was almost as absent-minded as Contro when it came to the pad, and he only ever used it for comms anyway. Turns out there was no data stored on it at all, aside from a couple of little notes – mostly just reminders about who each of us were, and he hadn’t accessed them since a few weeks out of The Warm.”

  “Maladin’s pad?”

  “In with his belongings,” Clue reported. “A bit more heavily-used, but nothing of value.”

  She hadn’t heard a sound, as it happened, because not only had it been a tiny hull breach, it had also been inside the seed airlock. There were several layers of plating and bulkheads surrounding the chamber – Waffa wasn’t the galaxy’s greatest engineer, but he worked safe – not to mention an arc of the dome’s segmented floorplan, with rooms and corridors further muffling the soft-space decompression. And, she soon learned, as the report had indicated it had been a tiny breach.

  The chamber had been fitted with a door on the corridor-side, another of the heavy emergency blast doors from The Warm, like the access doors down in the farm ring. An eejit was already present at the door, but he was not standing. He was sitting, hands clasped on either side of his head, staring into space. Janya slowed as she approached.

  “Thorkhild?” she said. It was an educated guess. This was Thorkhild’s general maintenance area, and the directionless stare of this particular eejit seemed slightly more like blindness than the standard eejit glaze. Thorkhild, with his serene repair-work and occasional odd pronouncements, was one of the more memorable Midwich Eejits Thord and her Bonshooni friends had helped to configure. “Are you alright?”

  Thorkhild looked up, eyes staring off to Janya’s left. As she often did when she saw Thorkhild’s sightless gaze, she was struck by an insistent memory of the fallen star cultists with their stone eyes. “Uh,” he said. “Uh…”

  Janya changed tack. “Bruce?” she said, shaking her head. She always forgot the synth. “Is there atmosphere behind this door?”

  “Yeah,” Bruce reported. “Microbreach, the flare was enough to disrupt the field and shut us down, but the hole was small enough to seal over with the hull fields. It’ll require a replacement or a patch to get back up to full operational snuff, but the chamber itself is intact,” it gave an uncomfortable synthesised cough. “The ‘flare’ in question was a few particles of the outer airlock hinge,” it went on, “and the head and right shoulder of the eejit with the electronic solderer. Loss of hull integrity during a crash-drop out of soft-space is very brief, but very intense. As you know, I guess. It’s… not a pretty sight in there,” it paused again. “The solderer seems to be damaged but operational and is lodged tip-first in-”

  “He cut a hole in the hull with a solderer?” Janya exclaimed.

  “Well, let’s be fair now,” Bruce said. “He cut a filament-thin microfissure in the counter-to-specifications airlock hinge you guys installed. It was good solid work, don’t get me wrong, but it was the thinnest point on the hull. The fissure was only open as long as it was because of the high-pressure flare of matter, and the solderer couldn’t have made a much larger hole. In fact, if we’d been subluminal at the time, he probably would’ve survived. The fissure was tiny, no real-space decompression. And a bigger cutting tool would have had a hard time cutting through the ma
terial. The last time, the eejits used a bigger cutter and they went straight through the hull, not the new airlock.”

  “Could using that exact tool, in this exact location, possibly be an accident?” Janya asked.

  “You got me,” Bruce admitted. “I guess nothing’s impossible for a truly dedicated eejit.”

  She sighed and turned to look back down at Thorkhild, frowning. “Headache?”

  “Yes,” Thorkhild slurred, “head.”

  “It’s the aki’Drednanth,” she said, “hopefully it will pass soon,” she leaned down closer to the stunned-looking eejit. “Do you know who was in there?”

  “Tub,” Thorkhild said, and shook his head ponderously. “Tub … Tub … Tubby Shaw.”

  Janya stood at the door for a short time, pondering whether she should open it and go inside to check the damage. There seemed little she could do in either case. She also debated with herself as to whether Thorkhild being affected by the aki’Drednanth meant anything, considering that Clue had reported no other eejits seemed to have been hit.

  None had been killed, she corrected herself. Maybe only the sentients have been afflicted with headaches.

  What does that mean about Thorkhild?

  She was still thinking about this, troubled, when Waffa approached along the corridor, a pair of the maintenance and engineering ables from The Warm towering behind him.

  “Clue and Sally went to the farm,” he reported, “to see if we have a diplomatic incident on our hands over the deaths of a pair of aki’Drednanth buddies.”

  Janya took silent note of the plural, but didn’t push. “How are they supposed to know if there’s a diplomatic incident brewing?” she asked instead.

  Waffa shrugged. “They’ll probably figure it out,” he reached the door, and looked down at Thorkhild. “What’s with him?”

  “Head,” Thorkhild said thickly.

  “He wasn’t the one who made the hole, was he?”

  Janya shook her head. “He’s just assigned to this area. He seems to have been hit by the same thing that’s giving us all headaches. You still have yours?”

  “It’s fading,” Waffa said, “but yeah. So if not him, then who?”

  “He says it was Tubby Shaw.”

  “Aw heck,” Waffa sighed. “Poor old Tubby. Although I say ‘old’ … he barely even got a chance, did he? What was he doing all the way up here?”

  “Let’s take a look and see what we’ve got in here,” one of the ables – Janya had no idea of their names, even though they had been part of the crew for eighteen months, ables were ables – stepped forward and put a hand on the heavy door seal. He looked at the pad in his other hand. “All-stop,” he announced, “Torres should be heading out of the torus-cap airlock now. He’ll repair any breach damage on the outer hull and then ping us.”

  “Right,” Waffa said, still looking distractedly at Thorkhild. Janya’s headache had given its last throb a minute or so ago and was now a fading memory, but Thorkhild still seemed to be incapacitated. “You better?” he asked her, evidently thinking along the same lines. Janya nodded, Waffa frowned and looked at the two ables. They were readying a set of repair, diagnostic and cleaning tools they’d brought with them, although Janya noticed one of them had an Automated Janitorial Drone control routine on his pad. The robot would no doubt be doing the dirty work. “Riley, Doncaster,” Waffa said, “you boys get headaches just now when we stopped?”

  The ables shook their heads. “No headaches here, chief,” one of them said.

  “Seems to have been limited to the human crew,” the other said. “And General Moral Decay (Alcohol),” he added.

  “Hmm,” Waffa said, and raised his hand. “Any news from the farm?” he asked into his wristwatch. “Our headaches have gone,” he glanced at Thorkhild. “Mostly.”

  “Looks like the brain-freeze was the pups trying to get our attention,” Z-Lin reported, “but aside from that, and the fact that they’re not actively trying to kill us or even seem very upset about the death and their return to contact with the general Dreamscape, we haven’t learned anything. We’re not sure what was so urgent that they just had to call us up here to freeze our bits off, since they’re not trying very hard to communicate.”

  “I’m pretty sure they think we’re stupid,” Decay’s harmonic dual-windpiped voice added dryly.

  “Did you see if there were any eejits hurt along the way?” Janya asked. “I know you said none had been killed, but what about other symptoms? This might be something that hit eejits but not ables.”

  “Eejits and us?” Waffa said with a joking scowl. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe it was aimed at us, and that’s why we felt it,” Janya said, “but it was also prone to a bit of scatterback, like the last time at Declivitorion, and the eejits were susceptible to that.”

  “Thorkhild’s not a lower-end eejit, though,” Waffa pointed out. “Last time, it killed the dregs.”

  “The medical emergency system hasn’t reported any casualties,” Clue said, “and we did pass by a few eejits who seemed fine. Right now we’re just trying to figure out what’s going on in the Dreamscape that we thought we had nine more weeks to come up with a plan for dealing with,” this last declaration was said with a slightly-raised voice, evidently aimed as much at the aki’Drednanth pups as any of the people on the comm.

  “Thord did mention a few times that Drednanth communication didn’t work the way we thought it did,” Janya said. “Usually when we were trying to ask her what was happening on Aquilar and things like that.”

  “Yeah,” Waffa said, “but then Mal also told me a big part of that attitude is to do with them not wanting to become a real-time communications network for the Six Species, just telling everyone what’s happening everywhere all the time. One of them mentions that this-and-that ship with an aki’Drednanth aboard is docking here-or-there, and this-or-that planet is having problem with crop mites, and suddenly they’re having to tell everyone every piddling thing.”

  “They don’t even let Damorakind use them that way,” Janya agreed. She’d talked about it, a little, with Thord in that final week. The aki’Drednanth had opened up about a lot of things. “And they’re slaves in the Core.”

  Waffa nodded. “And the only way to hide that sort of ability is to just deny it, so hard that it sort of came true,” he said. “In any way that a non-aki’Drednanth could understand, anyway.”

  “The question is, could the pups even tell Thord and Maladin and all the rest of the aki’Drednanth and Drednanth what had happened to Dunnkirk?” Janya asked. “If they were even aware of it in the first place? I know we tried to tell them, but do we know if they care? And had they known about it already? Did they know when it happened? Were they sharing the Dreamscape with Dunnkirk? Or were the Bonshooni not connected to anyone but Thord? For that matter, would Thord be able to tell the difference between Dunnkirk being dead, and Dunnkirk just walking around the ship and not consciously entering the Dreamscape?”

  “I’m not supposed to be answering any of these, am I?” Waffa asked.

  “I don’t think any of us are,” Clue said lightly.

  “Our Head of Science knows the value of questions,” Decay put in. “But only in terms of price-per-pound.”

  Janya ignored the sparkling banter. “Maladin told me once that they were really more like guests,” she said, “sitting on Thord’s porch, not really able to enter the house. Let alone anyone else’s house,” she glanced sidelong at Waffa. “And are we about to get blamed for Maladin, if he’s about to die too – or already dead?”

  “What?” Waffa said guiltily. “Who said anything about Maladin dying?”

  Janya heard Z-Lin’s sigh through the communicator. “Give up, Waff,” she said. “This investigation’s only going to work if we share what we know.”

  “A few minutes ago you just said we might have a diplomatic incident on our hands over the deaths of a pair of aki’Drednanth buddies,” Janya confided. “So,
there was some threat to Maladin as well? Something to do with his sleeper?”

  At that moment, Thorkhild hauled himself upright with a groan.

  “Better, mate?” Waffa asked, clearly relieved to let someone else stand in the spotlight.

  “Yes,” Thorkhild said slowly, opening and closing his hands and looking down at them as if he’d never seen anything so perplexing in his thirteen-and-a-half-month life. He looked up. “Yes, better. Headache.”

  “Yeah, weird,” Waffa agreed. “Look, we need to figure out why Tubby did this. I mean, it’s the exact same trick as the one that killed Jocko, Bumfluff and Sticky. Cutting through the hull from the inside while at relative speed,” he sighed. “Operation Payback. That shit’s never going away. I didn’t think any of them remembered that long.”

  “The Midwich Eejits weren’t even around during Operation Payback,” Janya pointed out. “That happened between Gethsemane and Seven Widdershins, didn’t it? You and Dunnkirk only started printing together after we stopped at Boonie’s Last Stand.”

  “Well however they found out, we can’t keep doing it,” Waffa said. “We’ve been lucky twice now, but sooner or later the breach, or the field collapse, or the soft-space decompression or the crash-stop, is going to peel the whole ship like an orange.”

  “Did you say there were some of Dunnkirk’s augmented eejits involved?” Decay asked over the communicator in surprise. “Not regular old eejits?”

  “One called Tubby Shaw did the actual cutting,” Janya said, “a bizarrely specific and carefully-placed microbreach, according to Bruce. And Thorkhild was sitting outside the airlock, he’d been knocked on his backside by the pups. He’s better now.”

  “Thorkhild,” Decay said in clear frustration, “of course. He had to have been involved. I should have said something.”

  “I’m not sure of his involvement,” Janya said cautiously. “It was apparently Tubby-”

  “He came to my quarters last night,” Decay said. “He’s fixated on the murder, inserting himself into the investigation. Damn it, he even asked if we were going to stop.”