Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  It must have been exciting to get sick when you were a Gosanite.

  He’d idly considered asking what might happen if they told the good folk of the Holy Gosana settlement that he could remove and re-grow his hands into pristine new ones that had never touched dead flesh, but all things considered it was probably best to downplay that particular facet of his lifestyle. Inconvenient questions like “why can you do that?” would inevitably follow.

  There were no other modulars docked to the platform, of course. The settlement of Holy Gosana was a series of habitats and an entertainment block, home to about twenty thousand miners – about six families, Glomulus judged a little uncharitably. But they didn’t get ships very often. Most of the big deliveries took place on the Grand Polar orbital platform, and any freight between Grand Polar and the smaller settlements like Holy Gosana happened by tug without any real docking required. Grand Polar, however, was a port and nothing but a port, all business and no pleasure. Holy Gosana, as unwelcoming as it was to anybody who had happened to perform an autopsy, was a lot more fun.

  Then, Glomulus considered Private Dancer to be a quite racy and evocative name for a planet in and of itself, lending its whole settlement system an automatic sense of the erotic. Not that he’d ever really thought about the place or its name. Not before they had come within a few weeks’ journey of it.

  Private Dancer itself was uninhabitable, a spectacular planet-and-moon pair similar to the one they’d witnessed at Bayn Balro. Unlike that ocean-planet and ice-moon pairing, however, Private Dancer was larger, and rocky. And planet and moon were in even closer proximity to one another – so close, in fact, that they didn’t need separate names. The planet and the moon had technical designations, but their name was a collective one for the system, and both bodies were intertwined by great roaring cascades of asteroids and shatter / accretion debris, their boundaries truly blurred.

  Indeed, they were more like twin planetoids than planet-and-moon anyway. Current theory was that they had enjoyed more stable cooperative positions until a collision some tens of millions of years previously had bumped them into a destructive bola orbit. Both planets were now in the process of breaking up, gravitational shear ripping apart their crusts and basically doing to both planets naturally what the cortering process had done to Mobi artificially.

  It really was rather beautiful. And it provided the orbiting clans of lift-and-separate engineers with a lucrative, if dangerous livelihood, dredging the vast intraplanetary maelstrom for materials.

  They stayed above Private Dancer for a few days, taking advantage of what relaxation opportunities there were on the old orbital mini-Chrys. From what Glomulus was able to gather, it was an uneventful shore leave for all concerned. It probably went without saying, of course, that no resting place was found or approved for Dunnkirk here, and so he remained in stasis while they uncoupled from Holy Gosana and cruised back into the night.

  It was another five weeks from Private Dancer to Alr’Wady, and they passed for Doctor Cratch in much the same manner as the two and a half years since his release from the brig. He was involved in a couple more conferences where a lot was argued about but nothing was really agreed or solved, and he treated a couple of minor electrical burns when Waffa and a pair of his eejit assistants ran into difficulties fixing a transpersion cable housing or a monitoring station or something, but it was all rather routine. One eejit broke an arm when he got his sleeve caught in a lander engine calibrator, and another got a mild dose of hypothermia because he’d been sent to deliver food to the aki’Drednanth but had not been explicitly instructed to leave again afterwards. The pups of Mother’s Rebellion had raised the alarm themselves since the medical monitoring coverage in the farm rings was still sparse. Bruce had then taken an interest and alerted the crew verbally, before the aki’Drednanth could give everyone a headache again or attempt another amusing game of transcriber glove charades.

  As the weeks crawled by, Glomulus began to wonder if he should begin brewing a new batch of gazz thrash for their passengers, but he wasn’t sure if there was an age limitation. It was mildly narcotic – extremely mildly, for a full-grown aki’Drednanth – but Mother’s Rebellion were still very small, only approaching waist-height. In the end, he decided to wait until they were bigger, or until he had opportunity to communicate with them directly.

  Then they arrived at Alr’Wady to find that it had been attacked, and almost utterly wiped out.

  This, Glomulus could only assume, had caused considerable consternation among the crew when they’d arrived, but he was invariably out of the loop on these things and generally only found out after the excitement had passed. In a way it was good – he didn’t have to deal with all the uncertainty and guesswork, because all the information was delivered to him at once. By the time he found out the planet had been attacked, they already knew more about what had happened and so he got all the information, alarming and reassuring, at the same time.

  The more he thought about it, however, the more he wondered if it was reassuring. Because Alr’Wady had been attacked not by unknown aliens, but by a Worldship of the Fleet. The attack had resulted in a well-nigh miraculous zero deaths and only a few hundred thousand injuries, as well as some overcrowding on the remaining habitats and a thousand or so people abducted … but it had been done by a Worldship of the Fleet.

  Alr’Wady was a cold-but-quiet, largely-lifeless planet on the lower end of the habitability spectrum. Its native biosphere was mostly lichen, which produced a thin but breathable atmosphere. The mining that went on there, mostly heavy nuclear collision-mining of the polar regions, was part of a long-term project to thicken the air and warm the surface, making the entire planet more hospitable for freeform settlement. It was one of the few active ‘terraforming’ initiatives in the Six Species, and was mainly taking place because they’d been going to crash-bam the polar ice caps anyway. Terraforming was a very small cultural industry in the Six Species, since habitable planets were plentiful and accessible due to relative speed drives, and the exchange and other artificial habitat technology of the Fleet made it easier to just live in space than it was to terraform dodgy planets. Alr’Wady was just a win-win case.

  It seemed a Worldship had arrived in orbit some ten months previously, and announced unilateral acquisition of Alr’Wady’s mining infrastructure for emergency purposes. When the Alr’Wadi authorities had objected to this under their umbrella of civil rights as Chalcedony citizens, the Captain of the Worldship – one Gortifer Renn, of the Worldship Dagab’s Fall – had declared that they didn’t have time to dick around.

  Dagab’s Fall had then disgorged a disproportionate number of Fleet warships evidently commandeered for the occasion from numerous other Worldships, and had blasted seven shades of tar out of Alr’Wady’s moon. They’d then calmly, while the Alr’Wadi stood and stared, set about dismantling the big polar nuclear arcs and hauling them into the Worldship’s cavernous belly, not delaying particularly long for the miners to evacuate before each lift.

  ‘Cap’n Gort’, as the dominantly human population were now calling him in dark mutters, had stripped Alr’Wady bare of its entire mining apparatus and all of its stockpiles, as well as a lot of the power and collection infrastructure from the growing polar oceans. He’d also forcibly conscripted about a thousand of Alr’Wady’s best and brightest in the engineering fields related to the equipment he was stealing. These were mostly Molren from the ice-field nuclear stations and Fergunak from the chilly waters of the planet.

  Dagab’s Fall had loaded up, convoyed with the mass of warships displaced by Alr’Wady’s mining infrastructure, and vanished into space, silent and unseen as Molren always were. The circulating stories were various levels of wild depending on who you asked, but this seemed to be the general gist of it.

  The Alr’Wadi had been recovering, settling down and attempting to make the best of their chilly, overcrowded habitats ever since. They were hardy folk, and seemed to be making do quite well, bu
t they did request that the Tramp take on a load of refugees in need of more intensive medical attention and rehabilitation than Alr’Wady could provide. They’d also requested heavy nuclear ordnance that they might use to accelerate the terraforming process, but the Tramp had nothing useful for them. This news was accepted stoically, since apparently help was on the way from the bigger Chalcedony worlds in any case and they could survive in the meantime.

  The Alr’Wadi had also made it quite clear that Dunnkirk’s remains could not – or should not – be disposed of in Alr’Wady space, but in light of their circumstances and the Tramp’s assistance they also made it off-the-record clear that nobody was ever likely to know if they did commend the Bonshoon’s body to space. Still, once again the Trampsters opted to hold onto their friend until such time as a more decent place and means could be found.

  The remaining Fergunak – the Skirling Chambers school of the northern polar ocean and the Unspeakable Cold Chasms and the Wandering Lost and Wounded schools of the southern – were incensed about losing some of their members and some of their valuable technology in the hostile acquisition. The humans and Molren who had been taken, in contrast, seemed to have gone more or less willingly according to most of the stories, possibly because Cap’n Gort had seen fit to explain things to them but had decided the aquatics weren’t capable of reason. This was a standard attitude towards Fergies that Glomulus had to admit seemed fairly justified.

  The Fergunak had declared that help was on the way from their own kind, and they needed nothing from the modular. The Trampsters took this to mean that Dagab’s Fall would most likely end up being hunted by all three schools, and while they were certainly sympathetic about this they did not put themselves forward in any way, just in case these Fergies had heard from any of the survivors from The Warm. You never could tell, really, which Fergunak were going to talk to which, and where they might travel. The survivors from Bayn Balro had, after all, scattered in all directions and the Tramp had only run into the Larger Dark Moving Below. Whether it would come to open battle between the three schools and the Worldship, and which side might come out victorious, was an interesting matter for speculation but not something any of them wanted to witness first-hand.

  The addition of one hundred and eighteen elderly human miners for the next leg of the flight, the five-week leap to Ursos and Arctos, made things a little crowded and tense on board the modular. The good news was that the farm was well and truly recovered by now and they had oxygen to spare for a five-week stint of moderate overcrowding. The miners were tough and well-used to being stacked into cramped quarters by this stage, and the crew allowed their expanded living areas to be temporarily co-opted with only minor griping.

  The even better news, for Glomulus, was that their passengers had plenty of minor age- and environment-related ailments to keep Doctor Cratch well-supplied with visitors. A disappointingly small number of them spoke like hilariously grizzled old prospectors, and Doctor Cratch got the distinct impression that those who did were doing so for his benefit, but he appreciated it nevertheless.

  They dived back into soft-space, and their inward journey continued.

  Z-LIN (THEN)

  The Denbrough, a modular almost identical to their own, had been constructed in space and was intended only for space travel. She was capable of surviving certain astronomical events and phenomena, but that was mostly a matter of the hull not breaching under impact or localised pressure. She was designed to handle the stresses involved with acceleration, deceleration, entering and exiting soft-space, and making manoeuvres in accordance with the tolerances of the organic crew inside.

  She wasn’t a building. She wasn’t even a lander. A modular, although small for a starship, was big for a planetbound artificial structure. She was a couple of thousand feet across, seventeen decks including the domes and the exchange, and if you put her on a planet – even one with normal gravity, like Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World – she would collapse under her own weight.

  Normally when this happened it damaged the engines, the relative torus and the exchange, and when those three components got together they could have a real party. The sort of party that had hull plates instead of confetti. Although at this Z-Lin had to correct herself. There wasn’t really a normally, when it came to a starship and a planet intersecting. ‘Normal’, in that case, was called ‘a crash’. And it didn’t leave much behind. There were very few cases of controlled starship landings, because starships just weren’t designed for it. The hint, as the old saying went, was in the name.

  And this … this junkyard of carefully-laid-to-rest ships, end-to-end and side-by-side and one piled on top of another, there was nothing normal about this. None of them seemed to have suffered any sort of catastrophic failures, although the Denbrough’s engines and exchange were definitely offline. She had just sort of … squashed herself onto the top of the larger ship underneath her, and partially onto another ship that looked like a small Molran cruiser. The cruiser’s upper surface was the point they had used as a landing pad, since it was reasonably flat and seemed to have collapsed as far as it was going to.

  This was also where they were all now sitting, under the night sky between the lander and the wreck. The Denbrough’s docking blister, slightly lopsided with the lower couple of deck-access ports subsumed into the wrecks beneath, loomed above Z-Lin where she sat, arms wrapped around knees, thinking unproductive thoughts.

  How Bunzo had managed to get all of these ships down in one piece, short of some massive space elevator and freight system of which there was absolutely no evidence, was a mystery.

  “It might have been relative skipping,” Decay said as he strolled up, seeming to read the Commander’s mind. “I’ve read about it in some journals, you know. About the synth. Coming out of relative speed close to a large body is technically safe, or so they say, as long as the ship and the body don’t intersect. It’s entering soft-space close to a planet that can cause damage. It’s just that due to the generally high risk of accidents, the regulations tend to err on the side of caution and just tell pilots not to do it.”

  “Probably wise,” Clue allowed.

  “The main danger in leaving soft-space too close to a planet, aside from the possibility of planet and ship occupying the same space, is other vehicles.”

  “And Bunzo would be able to control the traffic,” Clue said.

  “Right. It’s also practically impossible to skip out of relative speed close enough to a moving target, like a planet, to just let your ship drop lightly onto the surface,” the Blaran said. “You’d need to exactly match speed and trajectory, not only orbit but also rotation, and then make the jump.”

  “And to do this little damage to the ships,” Z-Lin said, “it couldn’t even be a matter of inches. Even a light fall onto a planet surface, for something like a modular, would make her collapse like a house of cards.”

  “It would be a matter of microns,” Decay agreed. “So little space, and at such precisely-matched velocities, that they might as well already be touching. Then it would just be a matter of letting the weight settle, and he could even tweak the internal emergency measures and the exchange and things, to further minimise the damage. There are articles about synthetic intelligence being capable of that sort of mass-synchronous calculation,” he looked up at the wreck of the Denbrough. “Judging from the way Bunzo’s command sequence got us right to the planetary mass-margin, he might have been able to drop us right here on the surface if he’d wanted to.”

  “That’s encouraging,” Z-Lin said. “Any more news from the ship?”

  They’d lost contact with the Tramp almost two hours earlier, but had maintained optimism and gone about their mission, finding their way inside the half-deflated modular and picking their way through to search for anything resembling survivors.

  What they’d found, after about twenty minutes, hadn’t exactly resembled survivors. In fact, what it had resembled was the reason they were all once again outsi
de, getting some fresh, balmy night air while they thought about what to do next. And hoping that whatever they did think of to do next turned out to be exciting enough to make them forget what was inside the Denbrough.

  “Nothing,” Decay answered glumly. “I think it’s going to be impossible to regain the connection from this end, even without an intelligent machine actively interfering.”

  “Do you think he is?” Z-Lin asked.

  “No way of knowing, really. Have I mentioned that I’m not really a comms officer?” he sat down next to her on the smooth, weatherbeaten cruiser hull, and nudged her with a lower elbow. “I’m trained as a data analyst and archivist. I was just promoted to comms when everybody else died.”

  “Yeah, I think you did mention that,” Z-Lin smiled wearily. “You also have about a century of experience over the rest of us,” she paused. “That landing trick Bunzo might have pulled,” she went on hesitantly, “with the internal buffers and the exchange. Do you think that might have been what … did that to the crew?”

  “No,” Decay said, with his usual lack of sugarcoating. “The internal systems are designed to preserve life and limb. A failure would have reduced all but a handful of the organics to their component molecules and dispersed them – well, as we know.”