Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  One of the packs, the source of the smell although the remaining Bonshooni also accounted for a lot of the dizzying sweetness, had fallen from its stack and the plump blue-black berries had scattered across the floor. A big Bonshoon bootprint was tramped across the berries in a wide splash of dark juice.

  “Damn it,” Waffa said, shaking his head. “Marine biologists my arse.”

  There wasn’t much, aside from smokeberries and smokeberry root and stem stock. Even if the majority of the former settlers had been engineers and scientists, they’d been supplementing their research with a little mind-expansion and a most-likely lucrative little side business. A settlement this small, this far from major centres … there weren’t many hard-and-fast laws limiting Bonshoon commerce, and out here it was frontier law at best.

  Still, he looked through what there was. There were computer terminals outdated even by the Tramp’s standards, probably not even synthetic intelligence compatible. Sally might have been interested in them for security purposes – she was always happy to find a way around the risks of computer-compromising attacks, and their recent adventures had only made her even more paranoid – but it was all hideously bulky. There were a few recreational systems, equally unwieldy, and some racks of clothing and safety equipment that all seemed ancient, and Bonshoon-sized to boot. The comparatively waiflike Decay wouldn’t be able to use any of it. The human possessions Waffa had been hoping to find had apparently been discarded when the last of the humans had died. They’d be able to feed the settlers’ identity information into the wider records networks when they hit a bigger system, but this was the sort of settlement that attracted people without next of kin …

  He blinked. Stacked haphazardly against one curved wall of the chamber was a collection of sleek grey mannequin parts in varying states of disarray. Most were completely disassembled and dead, but one, torso and half a head, was propped up in a ghoulish sitting position and had some interface lights glowing on its chest.

  Waffa recognised the devices. They were giela. Interactive Fergunak machines designed to be an extension – the whole, writ small – of the massive marine creatures up in the open air. The small, usually-humanoid robots were linked to Fergunakil controllers, directly into the cybernetic cortexes of the sharks and allowing them to see, hear, speak and interact with a dry-land environment from a distance, generally from the comfort of their oceanic homes through powerful transmitting arrays.

  These ones had been systematically taken apart. A wise precaution, since Fergunak were known to use the remote drones for brutally destructive purposes when things turned hostile. Waffa noted with faint hilarity that even the robot’s genitals had been smashed. Fergunakil giela invariably had large, offensively-detailed genitalia decorating their groins. Usually male and female in some sort of tasteless combination – sometimes coexisting, sometimes in mutated-looking combination or conflict, sometimes engaged in self-copulation or mutilation. The Fergunak found this amusing, because they knew that humanoid, Molranoid and to a different degree aki’Drednanth found sexual organs and gender to be a personal and often taboo subject, and didn’t like to be confronted by it.

  Waffa often wondered why they even bothered trying to be friends with the fucking monsters. If the Molren and aki’Drednanth weren’t so set on harmony and understanding, and if the Fergunak themselves weren’t so damnably helpful sometimes …

  The Fergunak are sharks, a legendary Commodore of the Molran Fleet had once famously said. You cannot hate a thing for its nature. You can only be aware of it.

  “Flesh.”

  The word, melodious and compelling, had come from the lit-up giela sitting on the floor. Waffa blinked, coming out of his reverie and squinting warily at the battered robot. Presumably, since there was no full-scale Fergunakil transmitter on the hub unless it was below sea-level, and the final semi-intact giela’s fine and rough ambulation alike had been completely demolished, the Fergies were only using this one as a communicator – to speak, and most likely to see and hear. The transmitter equipment upstairs would not be sufficient to provide a full uplink for the giela functions even if the robot still had the potential to perform them, but it was obviously enough to allow a piggyback signal for audio-visual.

  “Flesh.”

  Waffa forced himself not to clear his throat, or give any other sign of nervousness. “Are you talking to me, tiger?”

  “Of course you,” the giela said softly. “If I were talking to the chair, I would say ‘chair’.”

  “Mm,” Waffa grunted, and – again, against every screaming instinct in his body – turned away from the slumped machine and went back to desultorily searching through the equipment.

  “We did not do this,” the giela said. “Damorakind did not do this. The smoker Bonshoon fools did this. If it were Damorakind, would they leave us here? They would kill us all, or take us safely back into their ships. Return us to slavery. Hear me, little flesh. Why would we be here if this were anything but their doing?”

  Don’t engage with it, Waffa said steadily to himself. Don’t let it get inside your head. Fergunak will say anything, if … damn it. “What did the Bonshooni do,” he said, turning away from a dusty console, “detonate a bunch of smokeberry fertiliser?”

  “We only wanted the residence,” the giela spoke casually, not seeming to listen. “Did you know, it still had many … people … inside. Human people, and Molran people, and the sweets of both. Did they tell you that the block was empty and that we were only trying to pull down the hub with the smokers in?” it paused, then went on. “Yes, they told you this. No, the smokers put all of the other kinds into the residence, and left them to bleed. We feed well, now that you have cut it free and sent it below.”

  Waffa stepped away from the pile of broken robots and the ghastly half-active one. He raised his arm and spoke into his watch. “Did we get confirmation that there was nobody in that residential block?” he asked under his breath, ensuring that they were on a closed comm circuit and that he was out of range of the giela’s damaged auditory systems. “Are we sure the Bonshooni didn’t … I don’t know … put the humans and Blaren in there, and use them as decoys or something?”

  “The block was empty,” Decay replied from near-orbit, “we’ve got monitoring feeds. And all the losses are accounted for legitimately, even if there is a big fat blank on the part that should explain what actually caused this mess. The smokers didn’t feed anyone to the sharks, they didn’t lace the residential block, and anyone who went out there and fell afoul of the Fergunak did it of their own free will and the Fergies were the ones who killed them,” the Blaran paused. “Don’t let their talk get into your head, Waff.”

  “Right,” Waffa muttered. “Damn it, thanks mate, right,” he lowered his hand, and went back across to the giela. He deliberately leaned down and began to rummage through the pieces of the fully-dismembered ones. Yes, as he’d suspected – the manipulator appendages of a couple of the robots were caked with dried blood. This had been the first wave of the Fergunakil attack after whatever had happened to weaken the settlement and sever ties between the land-bound and aquatic species. Link up to the giela and use them to sabotage equipment and murder key personnel. Or just whoever happened to be closest at hand, in order to create panic. I hope they broke these damned things quickly, he thought.

  “Leave the sweetmeats,” the sleek little robot said next, its voice almost lascivious. “Leave them behind, or we will fire our ordnance and blow your modular out of orbit. We see you, flesh. We watch you. Not all of our machinery is dead.”

  The sweetmeats, Waffa thought. It means the Bonshoon kids. “If you had missiles you would have used them by now.”

  “No, because we want the flesh. But if you deny us, you can die in space.”

  “Yeah,” the Chief of Security and Operations said, suddenly quite calm, “and it’ll take – what – six minutes for a torpedo to reach orbit, from the surface?”

  “Six minutes to regret, flesh,” th
e Fergunakil said at the far end of the giela link. “Six minutes is a long time.”

  “It really is. Sal,” Waffa went on casually, raising his watch again and opening a full-free channel, “I assume that since we left the bridge undermanned you will have set some control measures in place.”

  “Yeah,” Sally replied from the roof, “even if the Captain doesn’t take the seat, we can do plenty remotely. Or Janya or the Rip could. Heck, Contro and a pair of eejits could run through the protocols, as long as the eejits stopped Contro from pressing any buttons.”

  “You cannot shield against a Fergunakil torpedo,” the giela said placidly. “Not in a parking orbit and not even if you were at combat stations. Not in a modular.”

  “Just out of interest, how much Godfire could Pater and Fuck-ton rain down on this location in six minutes?” Waffa asked.

  “About a thousand rounds,” Sally said way too promptly. “I set that up to be basically a single command. But why use six minutes and a thousand rounds, when this planet’s so tectonically fucked that thirty seconds and fifty rounds a few miles from here would basically turn this whole place into a supervolcano? The concussion wave alone would kill everything bigger than a brine shrimp in this entire hemisphere. Not to mention, the gravitational disruption would probably finish off that moon of theirs, and the schools swimming under the ice up there. Most likely send the whole lot bola-ing off into the sun.”

  “Yeah,” Waffa said, “that’s what I thought.”

  “You are fle – human AstroCorps,” the giela said, still eerily placid. Waffa reminded himself that the Fergunak didn’t have the emotional response model of humanoids or Molranoids, or even aki’Drednanth. You could go mad trying to read feeling into their tones, especially when it was all modulated through a giela anyway. “You will not do this.”

  “I’m not Corps,” Waffa said. “And if you say anything else to piss me off, we might just shoot the crap out of your planet on our way out of the system anyway.”

  “We’d be within regs to do it even if they’re polite to you,” Z-Lin unexpectedly spoke up on the channel, “as a starship dealing with an emergency situation, any Fergunak in violation of the Six Species charter are to be considered legally Damorakind and therefore hostile, and dealt with accordingly. And by the way,” she added, “I am Corps.”

  The giela remained silent.

  “There’s nothing else down here worth picking up,” Waffa said, cutting down to internal communications again but no longer lowering his voice so the Fergunakil couldn’t hear. “I don’t think I’ll bother going any further downstairs. If there was anything useful salvaged by the survivors, they would have brought it up to the staging area. It looks like the smoke was their main priority.”

  “We’re on our way inbound,” Clue went on. “Let’s get this finished.”

  “We will see you again, flesh,” the giela said as Waffa headed back towards the stairs.

  “Not giving us much incentive to leave you alive there, Bubbles,” Waffa said, and ascended back to the top of the dome.

  “I’m just saying, they’re a commodity,” Zeegon was saying on the comm when Waffa helped the next round of evacuees onto the lander and climbed up to where Decay was sitting in the pilot’s seat. The remaining Bonshooni were all able-bodied and capable of settling themselves into the seats, and so Z-Lin was standing behind the pilot’s chair and continuing a debate with the helmsman that had clearly been going on since shortly after Zeegon had heard there were smokeberries in Bayn Balro. “They’ll be valuable for trade if things have gotten as bad as it’s starting to look.”

  “We are an AstroCorps starship,” Z-Lin said steadily, “not a drug runner. And if things are as bad as they look, then the Tramp is the only commodity we need. A functioning relative-capable starship is currency that’s only going to appreciate in value.”

  “‘Functioning’?” Waffa murmured.

  “Quiet you,” Clue gave him a narrow glance before turning back to the communicator. “Anyone at our end who brings smokeberries on board will be reduced to single quarters,” she announced, “inside the Contro Tangle with the evacuees.”

  “We’re non-Corps civilian crew,” Zeegon said, and Waffa recognised this as a new incarnation of an even older argument, that Clue and Pendraegg been having on and off since The Accident. “You can’t bust down our quarters.”

  “I can’t officially reprimand, demote or court-martial you,” Z-Lin said for what Waffa judged must have been the fiftieth time, “but ‘non-Corps civilian crew’ are only entitled to single ‘non-Corps civilian’ quarters, not the crew quarters you have now and certainly not the huge crazy expanses of linked-up rooms you all have. And I can’t force you back into single rooms since it’s seven against one, for all practical purposes … but when we reach that point, we have basically decided to forget about civilisation and the rule of law, and none of this matters anymore. But you did sign up to be part of the crew, and that meant being part of the chain of command, and now you’re helmsman because of that.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Don’t make me remind you,” Clue severed the comm connection with an aggravated sigh, and turned back to Waffa. “Am I crazy to not want a hold full of smokeberries?”

  “Yes,” one of the Bonshooni strapped in nearby said.

  “Wasn’t asking you.”

  “You’re not crazy, boss,” Waffa said, strapping down the bag he’d been carrying. “What about the Fergies? I don’t know what their capacity is, since they’d only be lying about everything if we asked them, but they do seem to have lost most of their tech. Otherwise they would have taken us all out by now.”

  “I think we can leave without worrying about them shooting us in the butt,” Z-Lin said. “I won’t be leaving any kids behind for them to eat as a thank-you for not using their imaginary missiles on us,” she turned her gaze on the evacuees. “A fully-grown wannabe smoke-smuggler, not to belabour the point, would make a much rounder meal.”

  “We get it,” the nearby Bonshoon said querulously.

  “Even one of them would be like a piece of toffee to a Fergunakil,” Decay said without looking up from the lander controls.

  “But what I’m asking is,” Waffa continued, “much as I don’t want to … look, they’re pretty much stuck here just as much as the Bonshooni were. They were way bigger dicks about it but they’re still marooned.”

  “I know,” Z-Lin said with another sigh. “We have to leave the sharks down here. We don’t have the capacity to carry even a fraction of them, even if we wanted to.”

  “And we don’t want to,” Decay put in.

  “Damn right,” the evacuee agreed.

  “Still not asking you,” Clue said, then turned back to Waffa. “They seem fine out there in the water, they’re not about to be wiped out by this planet’s tides since they’ve already survived this long, and with the infrastructure they have it’ll only be a matter of time before some of their own come and get them. Even as busted as it seems to be, they’ve got comm capability and you know how resourceful those bastards are. We can even point the way for their buddies once we get to our next port of call.”

  “Yeah,” Waffa said, “that was sort of what I was thinking,” he hesitated. “Also, that once they do get rescued they’re going to hold a grudge.”

  “Well, that’s possible,” Clue allowed, “but it’s a risk we’re going to have to take. We’re just a modular, there’s no way we can transport three thousand Larger Dark Moving Below Fergies, let alone any of the other schools. So a goodwill notification of distress is all they really deserve. They are in violation of the Six Species charter, as well as AstroCorps regulations. It would be a security breach to bring any of them with us, and Sally would have my hide. I can be court-martialled even if you guys can’t.”

  “We’d never testify against you,” Waffa said.

  “Not even if I filled our holds with psychotic cyborg sharks?”

  “Well…” Waffa he
dged. “Since you’d probably make me do all the installation work, maybe I would be a bit disgruntled.”

  Z-Lin chuckled. “Come up with us on this round,” she said. “We’re good to go with the rest of this, we’ll get the last stragglers on Zeegon’s next trip, and you can head to main engineering and start setting up for the next leg of our journey. Get the engines prepped, and so on,” she gave him an invisible Clue-wink. “Help the Chief Engineer get us ready to go.”

  “Oh yeah?” Waffa said, taking his seat and strapping in while Sleepy finished loading the last Bonshoon they could fit aboard. “Where are we dropping these guys?”

  “End of the line,” she replied solemnly. He looked up at Clue questioningly, and she handed him a command flimsy. “This is you, Waff. We’re two weeks out from The Warm, and that’s where the Cap’s directing us,” she saw his thunderstruck expression. “I was surprised too. Never realised we’d ended up in this neck of the woods. Better late than never, huh?”

  “The … The Warm?” Waffa said, his face numb.

  “That’s right,” Z-Lin clapped him on the shoulder and headed for her own seat. “We got you home.”

  JANYA

  It was another two weeks at relative to The Warm.

  Janya had never been there, but Waffa had talked about it enough times to leave her fascinated. Although xenoarchaeology wasn’t really her area, and although it proved unrewarding nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, it certainly wasn’t a dull discipline. Besides, it was a long and uneventful trip and nineteen smoke-withdrawn Bonshooni and their increasingly strident and demanding kids quickly lost their distraction value. Especially after the adrenaline of their getaway from Bayn Balro and its schools of hostile but fortunately-planetbound Fergunak had worn off. So she’d read up on it a bit, because that was what she did.

  The little scientist sat back in the clean silence of the dome laboratory and reviewed what she knew.