“Right.”
“I’m not going to say it’s impossible,” he added. “With sufficient motivation and control over the mechanisms, you could get the gravity exchange to do just about anything. I just … no, I doubt it. That was done manually.”
“Robots?”
“Robots, probably other ship systems…” he glanced upwards. “I’m going to have another crack at the comms.”
After a while Z-Lin stood up, stretched, and strolled across to the deepening rift where the Denbrough curved away, the ship they’d camped on vanished between two even older hulks, and the craggy hull of Yojimbo was visible in the gloom. She held up her organiser pad, thumbed its illumination to full, and peered down at what little she could see of the warship’s … secondary armament prow, she hazarded.
Zeegon joined her. “Think we could get down there?” he asked. Clue shrugged. “You know, I had the perfect rig for this on one of the PIVs,” he went on wistfully, “a sort of gyroscopic crash-cage that we could rig up to a tow-line. Even without the vehicle frame, we could just lower ourselves down there, or just tumble it off the edge and bounce to the bottom. Then get out, see what there is to see, and tow ourselves back up. As it is…” he squinted at the drop-off. “That plating’s pretty smooth. Even if you got down there without breaking a leg, you’d have to get back up.”
“Not sure going down there is a great idea,” Z-Lin said quietly.
“You think there’d just be more of that?” Zeegon gestured towards the Denbrough’s docking blister. “Just a few years more mummified?”
“Possibly,” Z-Lin replied, “but I was looking more at that flash-release flue,” she noticed Zeegon looking as carefully blank as she knew she often did when their helmsman started on about buggies. “That big barrel-shaped part there,” she said, raising the pad higher and attempting to illuminate the flue. “It’s partially crushed under the next ship over.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a very specific sort of fixture,” she said, “that only a very specific sort of warship has. They’re designed for the rapid and total deployment of a mini-whorl stockpile. And not just the little ones we have for our guns – the big bomb-style ones. Empty a cargo-hold of those on a planet, you’d probably turn it into a three-hour black hole.”
“Holy crap.”
“They’re not designed for shooting wars or flying wars,” Clue said. “They’re planet killers. If Yojimbo came in here with that sort of artillery, I’m not sure I want to see what Bunzo did to them.”
“And, what? They’re unstable?”
“Oh, they’re perfectly stable,” Z-Lin said. “I’m not super-confident about the containment and release mechanism, it looks a bit crushed, but the main thing I’m worried about is going anywhere near that part of the ship, which The Bun might take as some sign of interest on our part.”
“Yeah,” Zeegon said fervently. Then he pointed. “Did I see something move down there?”
“Don’t even start.”
“Seriously,” he pointed again, and Z-Lin raised her pad. There was nothing down there, and she gave Zeegon a narrow look. “Seriously,” he said, stepping back from the slope. “It was the robots, right? On the Denbrough, I mean. They did all that … that chopping-up and laying-end-to-end stuff.”
“Probably.”
Zeegon nodded queasily. “When you got that nod from the Denbrough, was there any sign that there was anything else active down here? Or was it just their beacon or whatever?”
“No sign of life,” Clue said, “organic or otherwise. But that doesn’t mean Bunzo can’t switch everything back on whenever he wants. We didn’t get in deep enough to really check how the reactor core looked, or any of the bridge systems. A ship in this sort of condition, there could be all sorts of containment breaches and damage to the reactor that we wouldn’t want to get close to, even without worrying about rogue robots.”
They headed back towards the lander.
“And there was no nod or anything from Yojimbo?” Zeegon asked.
“Nothing,” Z-Lin shook her head. “There was some fragmented data in the Denbrough’s uplink that suggested they had been able to get a nod from Yojimbo when they arrived here, much like we’re getting from the Denbrough now. It’s probably a crew and armament manifest, which we basically already knew, as well as Corps ID tags for the warheads, all that technical crap.”
“Something our glorious AstroCorps commanders might be interested in getting?”
“Not really. Presumably they already knew what was on board the ship when they lost it.”
“And no use to us?”
“None whatsoever. We could use the IDs to access the warheads without any sort of automated security response, if we had any official command codes to feed them once we had access. Only we don’t,” she waved in a general dispirited circle at their hilly-looking surroundings. “And it’s not like we’d ever get any of these ships to fly. They’re beached whales. They’d break up if we turned on their subluminal drives, and that’d probably set off a half-dozen others. I don’t know if even a fully-functional starship could escape a planet’s gravity-well without coming to pieces.”
“The gravity-well, maybe,” Zeegon agreed, “but not the atmosphere.”
Clue nodded. “And not even Bunzo could drop a ship off a planet and into soft-space. Decay’s right about that. Laws of physics, nothing to do with engine and field timing. The whole thing would just rip itself to pieces, even if it wasn’t already half-crushed.”
“And Bitterpill warned us not to take anything off the surface.”
“Right. Considering the survival profile we have, let’s not go spoiling it all by doing anything stupid,” she sat back down. “Even with activation commands, all we could do is set them off.”
“The mini-whorls?” Zeegon said in surprise. “The planet killers?”
Clue nodded. “And we’d be right here getting killed along with it. With the warship dead, you’d need to be sitting on the things.”
“Might still be worth thinking about, if we’re in real trouble,” Zeegon said, then shook his head. “Dang, I’ve been hanging out with Sally too long.”
“Not worth thinking about,” Z-Lin explained. “With the data we have, we can do precisely nothing to anything down here. We’d need commands keyed to those specific IDs, and that would have to come from AstroCorps authority beyond the ship. High Command,” she gave a short laugh. “Or a synth instance with a Corps background.”
Decay emerged from the lander, and returned to sit beside the three humans. Z-Lin glanced at him questioningly, and he shook his head.
“So what else can we do here?” Zeegon asked, looking from Z-Lin to Decay to Janus and back to Z-Lin. “Mission accomplished, right? We came to find out what happened to the Denbrough and Yojimbo. And…” he gestured at the wreck.
“Okay,” Z-Lin said. “The ship was supposed to stay in orbit on the night-side of the planet, so in a few more hours she’s going to be gone from overhead even if we don’t get back in contact.”
“If they’re still up there,” Zeegon said.
“The ship’s still up there,” Decay assured him.
“How do you know?”
“Well, because I can see it,” Decay replied, and patted the pair of electronic lenses hanging around his neck.
“Those could be hacked,” Janus pointed out.
“The digital equivalent to a drawing on the lens,” Zeegon nodded, “yeah.”
“Okay,” Decay said patiently, “except you can also see a little light moving up there that perfectly corresponds with the Tramp’s location. So unless The Bun destroyed our ship, then moved something about the same size and shape and albedo as our ship into the orbit it used to occupy…” he spread his upper hands.
“Did I tell you my joke about albedo?” Janus asked.
“Please don’t,” Z-Lin requested.
“I thought I had high albedo-”
“Please don’t?”
> “-but it turned out-”
“I’ll have you actually court-martialled.”
“-I just had a raging photon.”
Decay guffawed.
Zeegon lay back and laced his hands behind his head. It was a deceptively-relaxed movement that Z-Lin recognised as a coping mechanism. As if by acting as though this was a pleasant shore leave on a balmy resort planet, it would somehow become one. “It’s pretty nice here,” the helmsman said, “at least until the marauding killer robots and runaway fun-park machinery comes for us. So what’s the plan?”
“We’ll still have the lander,” Z-Lin said, “but the sun will come up and we’ll have the planet’s bulk to get around if we decide to take off and return to the Tramp. Not to mention those parking arrays and whatever else is up there between us and the sun.”
“Why not head back to the Tramp now?”
“Not until we know what’s happening up there,” she said. “For all we know, we might fly into their sights and get blown out of the sky.”
Decay’s pad chimed quietly from his pocket. All eyes turned to the Blaran as he consulted the little computer.
“We’re back in contact with the ship,” he confirmed after a few seconds. “Apparently the auto-repair system used some sort of shonky work-around with the EVA suits and … here we go. Audio only, and probably temporary – this is primeval stuff. It might actually be getting to us because it’s too low-tech for Bunzo to grasp.”
“Well it’s still coming out of the pad,” Z-Lin warned. “He’ll be able to get that.”
Decay nodded and held up the pad in his upper left hand, so they could all hear.
“Hey,” Waffa’s voice was distant and patchy and clearly shouting. “We’re … all systems … sabotaged by this aspect of … called NightMary. We’re not venting atmosphere and I reckon we’ll be able to get out and … hull, nobody was hurt though, not even any eejits which was a bit … one of the big guns, it’s a total loss, that whole sector was just … out into space.”
There was a bit more crackling and indecipherable babble at this point, as well as the far-away sound of someone bellowing about getting the new hull in place so they could get those fucking bulkheads out of the arse-beshitted way, and why in the name of Satan’s pee-hole was it so dark.
“Oh yeah,” Waffa’s voice returned, “and Westchester just … bit too much non-biochemistry-related stuff, and force-reset to blind docky again.”
“No casualties?” Z-Lin stressed.
“No casualties,” Waffa confirmed. “Orbit stable. You guys?”
“We’re all alive,” Z-Lin said. “The Denbrough’s not, though. We’re about ready to call it.”
“Right,” Waffa said. “Oh, and it looks like … walkabout, and it’s come back empty. Which was a bit weird.”
“Say again, Waffa,” Decay said, tapping at the pad. “Something’s gone walkabout?”
“The second lander,” Waffa repeated. “Vanished out of the docking … after our encounter … seems to have come back empty. Just a heads up, our host … be figuring out how to remote control … leave you stranded. That-”
The pad fell silent.
“Lost them,” Decay concluded unnecessarily.
“Did he say ‘NightMary’?” Zeegon asked.
“Doesn’t sound creepy at all,” Decay noted.
Z-Lin stood up. “Right,” she said, “we’re leaving.”
That was when they found that the lander’s computer system, engines, guidance and life support had gone offline, apparently irretrievably.
And that was when they realised Janus had been taken.
GLOMULUS (THEN)
“What are you hoping to achieve here, NightMary?”
The Automated Janitorial Drone extruded some more cleaning and repair attachments, folding them over Sally’s arms and legs and holding her firmly as she flexed and snarled in the robot’s embrace. Glomulus had to admit that its resemblance to an armchair wasn’t quite so convincing once a person was actually sitting in it. Especially not with the intentionally-stripped charge diode that curled up from under the seat and threatened to administer a nasty electric shock to the side of Sally’s leg.
Sally growled something indecipherable and snapped off an applicator nozzle with one hand. Unfortunately, there were twenty more attachments holding that arm in place and all she managed to do was cut her hand on the sharp metal stump.
“Satisfaction of my curiosity,” NightMary said. The diode brushed Sally’s leg, and she arched in the janitorial’s embrace. The growling from her throat became a brief, strangled groan, and then returned to furious under-the-breath swearing as she continued to struggle. “In five minutes I will advance from light injury to severe, and in ten minutes your jailer will be dead. It will come as a relief to her. By the five-minute mark she will most likely have lost too much blood to recover anyway. I am quite adept at these procedures, although there is always some minor variation according to body mass, blood pressure, other congenital defects…”
“Keep talking, Mary,” Sally snarled, and then hissed furiously as the janitorial gave her another shock. On the other side, a pair of manipulator needles rose up and slowly pushed their way into her hip. Sally began to rumble ominously.
“It’s NightMary.”
“Go to Hell, Mary.”
“Of course, by simply standing up and stepping out into the corridor, you would make me deactivate this drone and release my prisoner,” NightMary went on, opting to ignore Sally. “Even if I did not keep to my word, you would be quite capable of wrecking this robot.”
“Are you kidding?” Glomulus said with a wide smile. “In five minutes either Sally is going to die brutally or she’s going to demolish one of the ship’s janitorials with her bare hands. Why would I want to prevent either one of those eventualities from eventuating, especially by doing something that’s likely to go down as a black mark on my record, viz, stepping out of the brig in an unsanctioned transfer?” a pair of needle-sharp electronics pliers began to pinch and twist at Sally’s upper arm, soaking the sleeve of her uniform with blood even as the diode electrocuted her again, clearly with a more potent burst this time. Sally bared her teeth, and some more straps and cables snapped tight across her middle, reeling in on either side and squeezing her stomach. “This is the most entertaining thing to ever happen in front of my cell.”
“Her life is in your hands, Glomulus Cratch.”
“Actually, it’s in your hands,” Glomulus corrected her. “I’ve had Sally’s life in my hands a time or two, so I flatter myself that I know the difference. Anything you do to her is your own fault, unless you actually are a robot.”
NightMary gave a hiss, and a laser cutter swept down the side of Sally’s face. It was a shallow cut – for now – but hair fell from Sally’s topknot and blood began to trickle heavily down her cheek. The cutters were technically incapable of contacting and engaging on flesh, but NightMary was obviously overriding all the drone’s safety protocols. “You think you can manipulate me?” she demanded. “Reprogram me? Fool me as though I’m a representative of the Holy Synth?”
“Ooh, actually,” Glomulus said, “if you were a synthetic intelligence, there’d be no way I could manipulate you. But since you’re a person … sure, why not? People are easy. Even great big old people living in a bunch of surveillance satellites.”
“Don’t think you can sidetrack me with cheap insults,” NightMary warned. “This is not-”
“Oh, and by the way,” he added, “I don’t think the synth has called itself ‘the Holy Synth’ in … well, even longer than you’ve been around.”
“The things you don’t know about the synth, child – the things I know – you might be surprised.”
“It’s an amazing universe.”
“So you like to say,” the janitorial said, tightening its grip on the bleeding, snarling woman.
“I expect it’s in my files,” Glomulus said. NightMary brought a loading clamp around and up from
the janitorial’s base, clamped it around Sally’s knee, and began to winch it tight. The servos whined, and Sally hissed furiously. “‘Glomulus Cratch, medical doctor, certification stripped. Enjoys marvelling about what an amazing universe this is’.”
“Your files fail to mention how amusing you are.”
“Oh, the really important ones, that you can’t get into, they’re all about how amusing I am,” Glomulus tilted his head. “Bit of a soothsayer, are you?”
“I don’t need to see the future to know yours.”
“It’s funny, really. The same thing that makes this all your fault – you being a human trapped inside a machine, capable of acts of malice and capable of doing what you are doing and pretending you’re doing it because I’m not coming out of this cell – is also what makes it possible for me to play you like a cheap fiddle.”
“I see.”
“It’s really a case of me winning no matter what I do.”
“Hm.”
“Couldn’t lose if I tried.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s great to be me,” Glomulus put his hands on his knees and leaned forward keenly. “You know what you could do,” he went on in a conversational tone, “although obviously at this point we both need to be wary of the fact that I could just be using some sort of psychological ploy to see if you’ll do what I tell you, or do what I want through use of reverse psychology-”
“Let us raise the stakes,” NightMary said. “Your reference to psychology has reminded me of your friends down on the surface. I believe one of them is a horticultural mood analyst, posing as ship’s counsellor.”
“I assure you, I don’t have any friends on the…” Glomulus paused. “Did you say horticultural mood analyst?” he said in dawning hilarity. “Is that what Janus Whye was?”
“He was one of three on board,” NightMary said, “getting a ride to a colony that-”
“Does he actually sing to actual plants?”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 24
