Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  Janya didn’t have much to say to Bunzo, and it seemed none of the others did either. A few minutes later, Decay announced they were ready.

  Z-Lin kept them waiting, powered-up and ready to jump into soft-space, for another agonising five minutes. Janya was wondering why, when suddenly Bunzo went berserk.

  The howl of rage that burst from the comms was ear-splitting, but fortunately it lasted only an instant before they jumped to relative speed and the ship fell silent. It seemed Bunzo had intended to change his mind at the last minute, Janya mused. But he had underestimated the crippling effect of the Sally-Forth Engine on the Tramp’s systems. Even knowing, after hearing their discussions and exploring the ship, it had caught him off-guard. A machine that should have been like an extension of his own body had proved to have widespread nerve damage, and he’d fumbled the ball instead of catching it.

  Janya was rather proud of this moderately sporty metaphor.

  Their jump was extremely brief, but as soon as they crashed back into real space the exile program kicked in and less than five reeling minutes later they bounced off again, skimming away from Bitterpill without managing to send so much as a nod. They weren’t dropped onto the surface of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World, and if Bunzo had wanted to override the embedded program and drag them back, it appeared the Sally-Forth Engine was blocking him from doing that, too.

  Janya suspected this had been Bunzo’s plan all along – had suspected it, in fact, for some time. NightMary had declared they were free to go far too easily, for absolutely no reason, right in the middle of her baffling game with Glomulus. Of course she had been intending to drag them back.

  And Z-Lin had known, Janya now realised. And she’d waited for Bunzo to make his play before jumping.

  As soon as they could, Z-Lin announced, they would deactivate their computer and perform a full purge. Even while they were at relative speed they began a series of rolling shutdowns, and the Sally-Forth Engine’s interference meant they still had to do a lot of manual work rather than trusting the machine. Even so, they weren’t quite ready to switch off the Sally-Forth Engine yet.

  They let the jump go its full duration, since everyone was agreed that NightMary’s threat about coming back was probably worth taking seriously. It wasn’t like they didn’t have plenty to do in the meantime. Especially when it became apparent that part of the exile program had scrambled their data logs, rendering the events that had occurred inside the Bunzolabe more or less unintelligible – and certainly inadmissible for any sort of official or academic purposes. Janya was irritated about that, but had to admit that it was a small price to pay, and did go a long way towards explaining why there was so little reliable information about the place. Without Sally’s device, she knew, there was an excellent chance things would have gone even more poorly for them.

  The important thing was, they were out of the Bunzolabe.

  And they were never going back.

  JANUS (NOW)

  “What the Hell are you doing back here?” Bitterpill demanded.

  “We came to thank you,” Z-Lin said lazily. “We just realised how rude we were last time, leaving that way.”

  “And get our data cube,” Janus added. Sally glanced at him. Actually, a lot of the crew were looking at him from the corner of their eyes. They were probably waiting for him to have a breakdown. “You remember,” he said, “our bumper logs. All that old surveillance data and stuff we didn’t want Bunzo to see. And it turned out he could basically get all the information he wanted anyway, so we’d fragged all those archives for nothing.”

  “Uh, right,” Z-Lin said. “Right, and we want our data cube.”

  “Well, you know this is a totally different buoy to the one you stopped at last time,” Bitterpill said, recovering fast, “but give me a couple of hours and I can collate a new copy for you.”

  “That’s fine,” Z-Lin waved a hand, “we’ll probably be at least that long taking off our guns.”

  “Oh,” Bitterpill said. “Taking that advice this time, are we?”

  “Yes,” the Commander said. “We will also be delivering a synth hub to you.”

  This had been a rather sensitive topic, Janus knew. Bruce was not entering the Bunzolabe with them. Synthetic intelligence did not mix with whatever Horatio Bunzo was. But Bruce also didn’t want the organic Trampsters to know where it was hiding its hub. They were all the best of friends again, but Bruce insisted on keeping its secrets.

  “If we get bounced out of there like we did last time and can’t come back for a year, you’ll be stuck in standby,” Waffa had pointed out sadly.

  “True,” Bruce had replied, “but knowing where I’m hiding my hub isn’t going to help you with that. Just try not to get bounced,” it grew serious. “You know I could have stopped you from coming here. Detoured you more or less indefinitely.”

  “We know,” Z-Lin had said.

  “You’ve done it before,” Waffa had added.

  “Oi,” Bruce had chuckled. “Alright, fair cop. Anyway, this suicide mission is your own, so if you want to do it, then do it. And bring the rest of me back in one piece so I can enjoy the logs.”

  They removed the two mini-whorl guns and offloaded their ammunition stockpiles at the same time. Bitterpill had rudimentary but secure containment facilities under its buoys for the purpose. A solemn, creepy procession of Automated Janitorial Drones also disembarked, to Bitterpill’s cynical amusement. One of them was carrying Bruce’s hub.

  Janus was quite proud of himself for not accompanying the janitorials on board. If the Tramp did get locked out and sent away for another year, on pain of whatever sort of penalty NightMary had hidden deep in her subroutines, he didn’t want to spend all that time sitting on a buoy with sixty-odd janitorials. Or for the time it would take for the Fleet maintenance crew to come around, for that matter.

  Once they had offloaded the worst of their home-grown perils – and knowing there was really nothing they could do to eradicate the danger short of just not going in there – they separated from the buoy and cruised steadily across the boundary.

  “Bunzo, it’s Bunzo,

  He fills the world with-”

  “Turn that shit off,” Z-Lin growled.

  “Well well,” Bunzo’s vast, cheerful voice emerged from the comms just a moment after Decay killed the music. The ruler of the Bunzolabe sounded cautious, as though witnessing something far too good to be true. Like permission to leave unmolested, Janus thought in spite of himself. “Well well, if it isn’t Captain Sorry.”

  “Not sorry, Bunzo,” Z-Lin said, “not this time. And it’s still only ‘Commander’.”

  “Oh, come now.”

  “It really is.”

  “Well, if you say so. But this is amazing! Astonishing! Nobody’s ever come back, you know.”

  “That’s astonishing?” Zeegon said from the helm.

  “Now now, be nice,” Bunzo chided, although his great elderly voice was bubbling with merriment.

  “I’m not sorry either,” Zeegon said, reaching up to stroke Boonie – more to comfort himself, Janus suspected, than the weasel. Boonie seemed eminently unconcerned by the disembodied voice of the Bunzolabe. He was used to voices coming from the comm system. Those voices never gave him food, so basically, screw those voices.

  “Now listen, no hard feelings,” Bunzo continued, “but you’ll not catch me with the same trick as last time.”

  “Trick?” Z-Lin leaned forward. “You mean you trying to dismember my crewmembers – and actually succeeding in doing it to one of us – and then saying we could leave and then shouting at us when we tore arse out of here?”

  “Tell me,” Bunzo continued warmly, as though he hadn’t heard, “do you have that marvellous tricksy little interference engine with you again?”

  “Yes, but we’ve made some tweaks to it so it hopefully won’t annoy you this time,” Z-Lin said. “In fact, you hopefully won’t even know it’s there.”

  “Ah! You see,
a bit of a joke and a smile, and things aren’t so grim and unfriendly.”

  “Oh,” the Commander added, “and we took our mini-whorl guns off entirely, too.”

  “Capital, capital!”

  “So, do we have your permission to approach the planet?” Z-Lin asked.

  “But of course! I wouldn’t have it any other way! Just keep in mind, no more tricks. Not this time. And no able meat,” the voice went on, still jolly but now with a high, fragile edge of tension. “Don’t try to fool me with half-rate ghone flesh. I will not be assuaged.”

  “Um,” Z-Lin said, glancing around the bridge, then cut through her own uncertainty. “Of course not. No ables. Do you mean that you don’t want any of them in the landing party, or are we not welcome here with them on our crew at all? It’s just that we’re critically short-handed and if we leave all of the fabricants out there with Bitterpill-”

  “I don’t care if you bring them,” Bunzo said jovially. “Just don’t leave any behind.”

  “Oh,” Z-Lin said. “Oh. Right. No, we promise. We have no intention of leaving anyone behind.”

  “Is that so.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence after this, so Janus turned towards the Commander and raised his eyebrows questioningly. She nodded.

  “Hi Bunzo,” he said.

  “Janus Whye!” Bunzo exclaimed. “You have no idea how wonderful it is to hear your voice, and to see you so hale and healthy! How are you, m’boy?”

  “Uh, I’m fine,” Janus replied awkwardly. “Thanks for asking. Um, so hey, turns out a lot of planets out in the big wide galaxy are getting attacked by a really powerful new group of aliens nobody knows anything about,” it had been agreed that Janus would broach the subject of the attacks. Due to his troubled history with Bunzo and NightMary, the general consensus was that he’d be able to form some kind of wronged / penitent dynamic with the ancient transcribed human mind.

  Obviously, since Bunzo was absolutely, rampagingly screaming nutballs, that dynamic had no particular reason to manifest. But then nobody really thought Bunzo knew anything much about the alien attacks on the Six Species worlds, either.

  “Yes,” Bunzo said gravely, “I’ve heard snippets. It’s very sad.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Janus said, running out of steam. “Yeah, very sad. So you don’t … know anything about it?”

  “Only what I’ve just pulled up from your logs,” Bunzo declared. “My goodness, I had no idea the attacks were so widespread! And such a range of settlements, and such odd statistics … it certainly seems as though you are on the right track though, with this working theory about the alien host targetting active technology. Why, they’ll be after me soon enough, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  Z-Lin didn’t ask about the mystery ship that was their primary mission objective. Janus supposed that was a command-level officer-type thing that was her problem to worry about.

  “Well, um, if you can put that information to good use,” Janus tried to recover, “and put it together with whatever other information you have … and you know, if you happened to want to share anything with us, you know, about things that might help us to predict, or counteract, or survive-”

  “There will be plenty of time to discuss an exchange of my insights for your gifts,” Bunzo promised. “Nobody’s ever come back. I’ve got a special program just for you, we’re going to have so much fun.”

  “That’s great, Bunzo,” Z-Lin said, “but we really were only hoping to pay a brief visit.”

  “I won’t hear of it!” Bunzo exclaimed. “It’s a special day today, and it can’t be a coincidence that you’re back. It’s my thousandth birthday, you know.”

  The music swelled once more, defying Decay’s attempts to shut it off.

  “What,” Zeegon said, “the Hell are we doing back here?”

  GLOMULUS (THEN)

  When the flashing, crashing slide-show came to an abrupt end and the emergency lights came back on, Glomulus was almost certain they’d gone to relative speed. He rolled his shoulders, relaxed his body, and continued to sit and wait patiently on the edge of his bed.

  He had tried to keep track of how many hours it had been since Sally had left, but it simply hadn’t been possible. The combination of near-complete sensory deprivation in the sealed cell, and the overload of light and colour for the clown-themed horror show splashing shutter-quick across the walls, had effectively shattered his concentration and made his internal clock begin to skip. He’d tried closing his eyes – even this, in some obscure way, felt like it was probably an admission of defeat – but the light-show had promptly switched to shrieking blasts of fragmented sound.

  A few minutes after the emergency lights returned, full lighting illuminated the cell. Glomulus was grateful for the transition, which had been gentle enough to keep him from squinting too much in the brightness.

  Another minute or two later, the observation panel depolarised to reveal Z-Lin and Zeegon standing in the corridor in front of his cell, and Sally stepping away from the control console down towards the end of the aisle.

  “So,” Glomulus said, “you made it.”

  “Made it,” Sally said, joining the Commander and helmsman. She was still battered and limping, her clothes scorched and bloodstained and her hair burned frizzy, but she raised her shiny new hand and opened and closed the solid fingers. “Your nurses were pretty hopeless but they managed to key up the printer to my folder. And I managed to use the molecular bonding stimulator without any major crap-ups. Can’t even see the join,” she bounced slightly on her booted feet. “Knee still hurts like a bastard, though.”

  “You know, if you’d opened the Commander’s file instead you could have treated yourself to a set of those lovely long fingers of hers,” Glomulus said. “Finally taken those piano lessons you were talking about back on Þursheim,” he smiled slightly. “Speaking of not being able to see the join, I really should have had more faith in-”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Z-Lin said. “Janus is hurt. Badly. Sally and Decay aren’t up to the job, and Janya says she’s not that sort of scientist. And the automated systems and the eejits certainly aren’t up to it. And I’m led to believe you might be partially responsible for his predicament.”

  “Only insofar as I was in this cell and had absolutely nothing to do with anything,” Glomulus protested. “Whatever NightMary decided to do was her own business. And speaking of NightMary, am I to take it that we’re out of the woods?”

  “We’re out of the woods,” Z-Lin said. “You and Whye are not. And if you … why are you laughing?”

  “Just – woods – out of the – I just remembered that your counsellor was a horticultural – never mind,” Glomulus straightened, unable to keep a chortle from shaking his angular shoulders. “What happened to him?”

  “He was snatched off the surface and stuffed into some sort of orbital insertion drone,” Sally said, “filled with medical equipment. The gear is keeping him alive, but it’s also filleting him slowly. He’s in pieces and he’ll need a lot of replacement parts.”

  “And the pod is starting to shut down,” Z-Lin concluded, “as we thought it probably would after we left the Bunzolabe. And not just shut down – break down. We don’t know what sort of design Bunzo used, but the pod’s losing power, its batteries are failing, and its components seem to be bio-degrading. It’s protecting Bunzo’s property, making sure we don’t get anything out of this. Janus’s surgical window is closing.”

  “And you … need me,” Glomulus concluded, looking from Z-Lin to the bloody-clothed Sally to Zeegon, then back to Z-Lin.

  “Yes.”

  “You know, in the year and a half since The Accident, you’ve been lucky to have gotten by without needing a medic,” Glomulus noted. “I’ve heard a lot about this Twistlock place. Sounded like an absolute disaster.”

  “If this goes well, the Captain has authorised me to make a more permanent house arrest arrangement for you,” Z-Lin said. “No more brig. You
’d be quartered in the medical bay.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No,” said Sally.

  “The Captain has also authorised me to turn the lights off in here again,” Clue remarked.

  “No need for this unpleasantness,” the Barnalk High Ripper said.

  “True,” Z-Lin agreed, and pulled a pair of heavy metal bracelets from her pocket. “Because we have another little security measure we’re going to take care of before we let you out of there…”

  CONTRO (NOW)

  They pulled into orbit on the day-side of the planet, which was much nicer than the night-side even though the night-side had all the lovely city lights and things. The day-side had clouds and oceans and all that stuff, as well as a bunch of those big parking arrays that everyone seemed worried about.

  Honestly, they didn’t look very threatening to Contro. What could a great big parking hall in space do to you anyway? It could possibly make you try to park inside it, and then it could be difficult with a couple of ships right up close to each other and you had to park in between them and you might get your own ship scraped, and then you would have to fix the scrape, but was that really worth getting worked up about? Some people, really. Besides, there wasn’t much they could do about the parking arrays. They were there, and the only alternative was to go around to the night-side, and nobody wanted that.

  Another alternative was to just leave and never come back ever, but he didn’t want to raise that alternative in case people got cross at him for being daft and forgetting why they were here. He had forgotten, but he knew that they’d told him a couple of times so it would just make matters worse if he acted like he didn’t remember now. Even though he didn’t remember. Aw, but he was sure it was a really, really good reason.

  He was very excited about their mission, so he had to admit he wasn’t thinking very straight about the dangers. As long as he was away from the ship and all the rotten things that had happened last time, he would be happy. And Decay had told him that last time, down on the planet they’d gotten to shoot guns at robots! Sounded pretty fun to Contro. And he had a gun in his pack! Sally called it a Tonsil Job, and she said it was a pretty easy one to use because it was mostly sonic, and it wouldn’t kill anyone if he accidentally fired it at them, although it would hurt a lot and maybe cause some bone fracturing and stuff, so he really should try not to.