Well, small … that was a matter of perspective. Compared to a cluster-gauss grenade, sure. The capsules were small. But try swallowing them.
Ordinarily, prying the charge out of one of the bracelets would have set them all off instantly. That was basic anti-tampering. But when he’d come to in Bunzo’s ghastly little sideshow fabricator, Glomulus had seen through the haze of pain that the replacement bracelet components were already deactivated. So he’d been able to fumble the capsules out.
Say what you like about Bunzo, his molecular and nervous reintegration was brilliant. Glomulus’s hands were still augmented, still not quite a match to his arms and still excruciatingly painful, but he’d recovered full use immediately and he was pretty sure these ones hurt less than any pair he’d had since that first one, when they’d still had the bonding stimulator. And for that matter, his control over machinery was nothing short of scary, either. Wrist and ankle weren’t supposed to be able to detonate individually, but Bunzo had somehow managed to blow the wrist-charges, while leaving his ankle-charges activated and untouched. That had caused some complications with the printing and authorising of replacements, but Sally had eventually managed it.
So they’d returned to the Tramp, and they’d printed another set of bracelets for him, and Sally had installed and initialised them. And as he’d suspected, when he very carefully brought the capsules from Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World back up, he found that they had initialised too.
Six charges, keyed to the crewmembers’ subdermals, where there had once been – could only be – four. Bunzo’s printer had recreated not just his hands, but the unique security bracelet bond as well.
But what to do with them? It was only a matter of time before they were found. And the capsules, unlike the old bracelets, were definitely contraband. If things hadn’t been so frantic, they probably would have found them already. The only safe recourse had been to get them out of the medical bay.
Well, he’d taken care of that, at least. Cause to effect to cause. And he should be able to get them back reasonably easily if he needed them. In the meantime, he’d just have to continue to excel in not giving the crew any excuse to … pop-pop.
He half-heartedly activated the feed from Contro’s watch again. They had to have finished their meeting by now. They’d failed to restore proper communication capacity to the medical bay for some probably-Sally-related reason, and had ‘forgotten’ to authorise his personal attendance at the briefing, but when he’d finally managed to get through to the conference room he had been promised full disclosure at the appropriate time.
This time did not appear to be forthcoming.
“Yeah, but if he was suffering, then I guess it’s for the best,” Waffa’s maudlin voice, accompanied by the smiling lower half of Contro’s head as he fiddled with the watch and tried to fasten it around his wrist again, was a disturbing combination. “Poor guy. He did an amazing thing, and he saved us all. At least until we get around to this next crazy damn mission, and all die horribly.”
“So that’s two amazing things!” Contro said enthusiastically, and the watch screen swung out to reveal the two of them were sitting alone in main engineering.
“I bet he did a lot of amazing things,” Waffa said, and then sat looking preoccupied. The ‘crazy damn mission’, whatever it might happen to be, went undiscussed for the moment. Glomulus expected he would find out about it at some opportune moment.
“I did an amazing thing the other day!” Contro exclaimed. “Well it wasn’t so much amazing as it was funny! It was actually a few weeks ago, after we’d left Gola, do you remember that stuff they were eating there…”
Glomulus listened without much interest as Contro prattled on. He wasn’t expecting much else of interest to occur. The crew had been through the wringer, and now they were mechanically finishing their working shifts as if nothing had happened. They would do this for a few days, then they would gradually unwind, and the whole nasty incident would go into the vault. Then they would go on with their working shifts in earnest, building up to the next job, the next slippery stepping-stone across the river of not-actually-water that the good Commander liked to philosophise about sometimes. It was ‑
“He said something to me before I left,” Waffa said suddenly. “Thorkhild. Maladin. I was trying to figure out what it meant, but it was obviously Drednanth-level stuff that he was translating in what was left of his head. Bad translation with a broken translator. I didn’t tell Clue about it. To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m telling you, except…”
Except it’s Contro, Glomulus thought giddily, and you can tell him anything because even if he blurts it later, all you need to say is ‘it’s Contro’.
“What did he say?” Contro asked eagerly, although he had asked Waffa if the shoes he was wearing were actually his in almost exactly the same tone five minutes earlier.
“He said Aquilar was destroyed,” Waffa said, “and you were there.”
RAKMANMORION, CONQUEROR OF SPACE (NOW)
He heard the distant, fizzy vwaa vwaa vwaa of alien voices.
Spoonbiter voices, he thought.
Spoonbiters had a way about them. He hadn’t had much exposure to the alien coalition that apparently existed beyond the skies of The Second World, but the spoonbiters had been by far the most numerous and the most outspoken. The Small People were generally a quiet and contemplative race, particularly once they had started to feed their way down into a fugue state – which, to be fair, was when Rakmanmorion had made his first contact with aliens. Their communication was chemical first, linguistic second. So the spoonbiters, the [humans], came across as far more noisy and jabbersome than perhaps they really were.
They were also fast, and spoiled, and rude, and they interrupted and demanded things querulously, imperiously and incessantly. Spoonbiters, in truth. Although Rakmanmorion had to admit this was most likely down to a problem in translation, mixed with a generous dose of species-and-culture gap. The spoonbiters, and the chary folk – the [Blaran and Bonshooni] – who had lived with them in their great dark starship, had all seemed civil and hospitable people. Not to mention generous. Rakmanmorion would most likely never have seen his home again, had he not encountered the [Astro Tramp 400].
Slowly, he allowed his eyes to focus. He had been deep in fugue, and the nutrients he felt coursing thrugh his skull and the withered nubbin of his thorax were alien and a little nauseating. Or they would be, if he had a stomach.
There was a spoonbiter leaning over him. The front of its head was covered by some sort of plastic mask, and he remembered the aliens telling him that the atmospheres they had evolved in were thinner. The air breathed by The Small People would no doubt prove soupy and dangerous to them. He’d seen pictures of spoonbiters in the data uplink they had provided, and the covering over the front of its head was a blessing.
The spoonbiter made some more furry vwaa vwaa vwaa noises. Finally, as Rakmanmorion’s mind began to clear and he rose up more fully from the fugue, he became aware of his own vessel’s translation system providing a transcript of what the alien was saying.
“Rakmanmorion? Rakmanmorion, Conqueror of Space? Do you hear us as we make noise? Are you deaf? If we make more noise will that stop you from being deaf?”
“I can hear you,” Rakmanmorion said. “I am rising from fugue, it may be a short time before my senses recover.”
“Can we make it faster somehow? Unacceptable. Try rising from fugue in a better way.”
“I will try, my friends,” Rakmanmorion said forbearingly. He knew that there was a language barrier here that neither his technology nor even that of the aliens could overcome. These were creatures from other worlds. “You have returned as you said you would.”
“Of course. You thought we wouldn’t. Feeble. We came for our equipment that you took, our spare parts that we need back. What is fugue?”
“It is the suspended state I enter when I have exhausted all of my bodily reserves and external source
s of energy,” Rakmanmorion said. “It is a deep sleep, a sort of petrifaction, allowing me to-”
Another spoonbiter head leaned in from the other side. “Stop talking and listen to us talk now.”
“I missed you, spoonbiters.”
“We missed you too, horrible alien creature. Did our machinery get you to the planet well enough? Did you stay in orbit because your own species failed? Or had your planet already been destroyed by the time you got here?”
Rakmanmorion’s memories were sluggishly returning, settling into place in brain-matter almost dried to a husk before the alien nutrients revived him. Yes. The Second World was no more.
“Your drive brought me to the edge of my home,” he said, “although I was already deep in fugue by that time. I had used all of my reserves, and when the ship returned to subluminal space it had completely lost power. I drifted, with the final traces of battery power running down in my computer and surveillance equipment. Some of it was solar powered and it was able to take up a brief charge again, before failing.”
“So answer the question,” the second spoonbiter said. “Did you not understand the question?”
“Should we keep on asking the question in the same way until you improve?” the first spoonbiter said.
“My world was intact,” Rakmanmorion said, “but the attack came just as I was slipping away. The cold came, my life support was gone.”
“Yes, we know space is cold and you fell asleep, that’s no good to us at all. Did you see them? Ships, movements, weapons? Ships? Movements? Weapons? Ships-”
“I took pictures,” Rakmanmorion said, “before I lost power completely. I am not-”
“Stop talking and let us look at the pictures that your computer has. By the way your planet was completely destroyed and there are no life signs on the surface. We only found you in orbit because our property is tagged. They probably missed you because you were all switched off.”
“Does this make me fortunate?”
“I hardly care,” the second spoonbiter leaned in, after looking at something in its claws that was probably showing it the pictures Rakmanmorion had taken. “That’s a Damorakind ship. That’s definitely a Damorakind ship. How many were there, what sort of movements? How many? How many?”
“There was one,” Rakmanmorion said wearily. Rising from the fugue was more than a matter of nutrients. It required rest and reflection. You had to decide to return to the world of the living. “There was only one. Please stop asking me questions, spoonbiters. There was only one ship.”
MOS (THEN)
It really was intolerable.
Mos Karturi caught back up with the modular as she fled the Bunzolabe, seemingly locked in some sort of outward trajectory and completely out of control. Even with his advantages, he was lucky to get back on board while the ship was spinning slowly end-over-end on the edges of the boundary grid, and before it jumped back into soft-space. Just as he’d been lucky to get out of the blessed thing, back when they’d headed recklessly into the contaminated region of space in the first place.
His whole situation was untenable, he’d decided. He couldn’t just keep jumping blind. Not with these crazy humans in charge of the ship. He’d have to alter his current arrangement. He’d wanted to take one of the landers, but the Captain seemed to have been prepping one and the crew were using another. It would have been too conspicuous.
Mos settled back in the out-of-the-way corner he’d picked out for himself, and began to piece together what had happened and what was going on. He was good at that.
He had to admit he sympathised with Bunzo’s opinion of Godfire, although it was interesting to hear about the strange foretelling he seemed to have had about his own doom. Was such a thing even possible? No wonder he’d blown up one of the ship’s guns as an object lesson! Mos had heard stories about the ghastly transcribed human and his prophetic abilities, but he’d taken them for tall tales. And in the past two or three hundred years even those rumours seemed to have dropped away into the general background mythology.
Encouraged to fall silent, perhaps. Prevent too many hopefuls from thronging to the Bunzolabe, looking for answers. It was an intriguing line of thought, but not really what he was interested in at the moment. Not his area.
But death by Godfire, yes. Mos could believe that. Godfire was one of those things that couldn’t do anything else but kill.
It was one of those things he wished he’d never helped steal.
So, now it seemed as though his intrepid subjects had need of a hub. Well, he could get them a hub. He had everything he needed to make a hub. A better hub than the one he was using now, anyway. A cleaner one. He lived in a hub manufactory, after all. And although he’d repurposed a lot of it and the completed hubs had usually been shipped out straight away, well – he still had the capacity. The one he’d brought with him had been enough to hide him from a crummy old modular computer, had been enough to get him out of the Bunzolabe with his most important equipment uncorrupted, but …
Bunzo has the right idea. Control the software, control the hardware, control the wetware. A hub might come in handy. A proper hub.
Are you sure you’re not just talking to yourself, and I don’t really exist?
“Shut up,” he hissed.
Are you sure I’m not just talking to myself, and you don’t exist?
He needed to be careful. Not too many trips, not too close. And they certainly couldn’t be told about the extent of his wanderings. Not until they were ready. Maybe not even then.
Why tell them anything at all? Do you need more bodies?
If he skipped back and forth too much, things would escalate before he wanted them to. He would be noticed. Or the drive would begin to destabilise. Begin to get hungry.
So, they need a hub?
He really couldn’t believe these people. Careening from disaster to disaster. Maybe he was the problem. Maybe he was going insane.
He’d been told to expect them on Barlowe’s Rock. But when they had arrived, they’d had no idea. They were … well, it was like they remembered nothing. Admittedly it must have been traumatic for them. Most certainly, of that he had no doubt. What they had witnessed? Traumatic. But the way that Captain of theirs had acted!
Intolerable.
Trauma, maybe. Yes.
But they’d been talking about the bonefields. He hadn’t talked to the crew, but he’d listened. They were loudmouths. The bonefields? That was crazy. Aquilar was nowhere near the bonefields. Not unless they had moved. Not that it was impossible for them to have moved, or to have seemed to move. He had only the roughest idea of where the bonefields were supposed to be – it wasn’t really his area of interest – but he did know they hadn’t moved in over three thousand years. Although their movement was a difficult thing to be certain of. The floating bones saw to that. And it was said that nobody could go there twice. Unlike the Bunzolabe, which nobody in their right minds would go to twice.
Alright, no, it wasn’t impossible for them to have gone to the bonefields. Not if you believed the stories.
Stories again?
“Stories are important,” Mos whispered. “It’s the grain of truth, my friends. The grain of truth. If it hadn’t been for the story of Çrom Skelliglyph, I might never have created you.”
And if it hadn’t been for the grain of truth, I might never have created you.
He didn’t know that much about them yet. He’d been watching, following, but he’d been … distracted. After the disaster with the exchange, things had gone from bad to worse. He’d been lucky, again, to survive that little example of Skelliglyph’s lunacy. And in the year and a half since? Well. The idiots had blundered into the Bunzolabe almost before he’d noticed. That’s how pathologically incapable of maintaining coherent behavioural patterns they were.
So no, he wasn’t that familiar with his subjects. He knew who was left, but not who was doing what, or indeed what any of them were planning to do next. Oh, the computer was stubborn.
Or he’d forgotten. It was hard to say. Sometimes he thought he had figured things out before. Sometimes it was like he had just arrived. Maybe another reason to get a hub synced up. A synth might help keep him grounded.
Keeping his distance, moving out of the ship, would make it easier for him to travel if he needed do. Without bringing anything on board ahead of schedule. Without alerting them. Without hurting them. But for that, he’d need a greater measure of control. He’d need more knowledge.
This was not how I envisoned spending my Final Prime, he mourned, and this time he was almost certain the thought was his own.
If he hadn’t been told by Domino Hainey, from AstroCorps High Command on Aquilar itself, the only man to ever believe in him, the only human he’d ever really trusted … if he hadn’t been told by Domino that these were the people he needed, he would never have believed it. Now, he was left with no choice.
He’d talked only to Skelliglyph, as Domino had instructed. Such as the conversation had been. It had taken place outside a tiny, oddball dive bar in a tucked-away corner of Mithras spaceport on Barlowe’s Rock. He might not even have bothered to talk to Skelliglyph at all, except for what was to be Domino’s final message, and Karturi’s own complete failure to find anything but scattered remnants of the Molran Fleet. That had been back when he’d harboured delusions of getting wider Fleet support for his life’s work. More support than that offered by some rogue human AstroCorps officer.
And it hadn’t been until later that he’d found out about Aquilar. As close as the Rock was to Aquilar, relatively speaking, not even news of the greatest magnitude travelled that way. It had come late enough, in any case, to cast doubt-shadows across his mind.
Late, late, conveniently late. Too late?
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 37
