“–Cratch?” Waffa suggested.
“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” Zeegon conceded, “but the correct answer was ‘zombie’, and you still owe us each a cabin.”
“No deal. Bendis and his staff have been muttering it behind their hands for weeks already.”
“But you’re the first Trampster to say it.”
“Are we Trampsters now?” Sally asked in amusement.
“Just something Decay and I were trying on for size,” Zeegon shrugged, turning back to his console. He plucked up a cheezy chunk and tossed it over his shoulder without looking back. Boonie extended elegantly from Waffa’s shoulder on his back legs, almost horizontally, and caught the little ball of artificially-flavoured carbo-starch in forepaws and teeth. “Hey,” he went on, “so do you know anything about a planet called Eshret?”
“I know about a lot of stuff,” Waffa replied. “It might jog my memory if you toss us one of those cheezies.”
“They’re just print-outs.”
“Didn’t ask,” Waffa caught the cheezy chunk almost as deftly as Boonie had, and munched for a moment before saying, “yeah, Eshret, it’s a sandboondie a week or so from here, pretty much the same way we’ve been headed so far. Clue said something about you guys charting a course?”
“Out to the edge,” Sally said.
“The edge?” Waffa blinked. “That’s going to take years.”
“Probably a couple,” Sally agreed, “yep.”
“Bloody Hell.”
“All us non-Corps peons will get our chance to disembark,” Sally said, “and there’ll be plenty of stops along the way. But this is a classic AstroCorps mission. We’ve picked up a passenger of the wacky-wacky persuasion.”
“No kidding.”
“She’ll be moving into one of the oxygen farms with a big piece of luggage,” Sally said. “I mean seriously big. So we’re going to have to decommission an entire farm arc.”
“Are we taking bets about Contro getting his tongue stuck on anything? I want a chance at double-or-nothing on that lost cabin,” Waffa snapped his fingers a couple of times, fumbled the next cheezy chunk that Zeegon tossed to him, and grunted as Boonie uncoiled and snagged it before he could bend down. “One more, tiger.”
“Way ahead of you on the Contro-getting-his-tongue-stuck pool,” Zeegon said. “I’ve got my hopes pinned on ‘algae block’, if you want to double-down you’ll have to take something less likely, like ‘sleeper pod lid’ or ‘wacky-wacky-Drednanth butt’.”
“I’ll go with ‘coolant conduit lining’,” Waffa said, “I can already see maintenance jobs in my future.”
“Deal. So when you say ‘sandboondie’,” Zeegon went on, flinging another cheezy chunk, “I assume you mean it’s a desert planet.”
“Eshret? Yeah,” Waffa nodded, catching and eating. “There’s nothing there, though,” he said through his mouthful, “at least there wasn’t in … wow, ‘56, when I was last here. An unmanned research post, a secondary beacon, maybe a water reclaimer. All I really remember was the little lab thing, my sister did a school project about it. Funny, the crap that sticks in your head. Anyway, it’s habitable, but you’d want to be…” he paused, and gave a short laugh.
“Desperate?” Sally guessed.
“Yeah. So, what, have we got some hitchhikers?” Waffa asked. “Aside from the aki’Drednanth who wants to live in our algae tubes?”
“Bunch of Molren,” Zeegon said, “it’s still in negotiation with the Cap and Clue and this Bendis dude, but they seem to want to go out there and start over.”
“Hope they like worms,” Waffa grunted. Sally gave him a puzzled look. “That’s all they’d have to eat,” he said, holding up his forefinger and thumb about a half-inch apart. “The research thing. It’s a bunch of fabbed mealworms, testing microbial something-or-other in an extreme-arid environment.”
“So they’d have microbes as well,” Zeegon said.
“Oh yeah, they’d have microbes up the wazoo,” Waffa said. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”
“These are your classic Molran über-logical survivalist dillweeds,” Zeegon proclaimed. “If there’s room for a microbe up their wazoos alongside the giant sticks, I’m going to predict they’d go for the gusto.”
“Well, can’t argue with the idea,” Waffa said. “I think Eshret was the designated evac point way back in the day, when people were worried The Warm might wake up and try to eat anyone living on it. And it’s such a flyspeck, chances are the Cancer won’t even know it’s there. Nobody stays quiet like a Molran, right?”
“So they say,” Sally agreed.
“Right,” Waffa climbed to his feet and looked at his watch. “I’ve got some reports to send. Then I guess we need to start printing. If we can palm off the dross on Bendis and his gang, we might just stand a chance of running off a few improvements in the eejits we keep. And lowering our headcount is going to be very handy if we’re going to be down an oxy farm block. I’ll head down to the plant,” he concluded, striding back towards the door. “If you need me, I’ll be xeroxing shooeyheads.”
ZEEGON
They ended up spending another four shipboard days at The Warm.
About half of this time was spent arranging the exchange of eejits for ables and getting the new Trampster ables settled, as well as wrangling their own eejit population and attempting to sort them according to their stability and usefulness both to The Warm and to the Tramp herself. Z-Lin spent a lot of time with Acting Controller Bendis and other emergent representatives of the surviving population of The Warm, negotiating their outbound route and potential passenger complement. And Zeegon, Waffa, Sally, Janus and Decay spent most of their time performing the renovations that would be required to house at least one of those passengers. They could not use the less-critical but more fresh-luxury-food-oriented ‘ponics arcs for the task, since both Thord and her ‘luggage’ required the deep cold of the oxy farm. This was at once a shame, because everyone loved oxygen, and a relief, because oxygen could go screw itself if you didn’t have fresh peppers.
Zeegon mostly found the work to be enjoyable. He preferred smaller vehicles when it came to tinkering, but had to admit that the opportunity to remodel something the size of a modular didn’t come along every day and it was an interesting experience. He didn’t kid himself that it was much of a feather in his cap, of course – and he was beginning to wonder about the relevance of updating his résumé for new skills and practices anyway – but it was a distraction.
They gutted an entire two-hundred-and-fifty-foot arc, emptying and dismantling and then storing the shelving and reticulation systems. The dense blocks of ultra-oxygenated algal stock that grew in the deep-chilled ring-chambers provided the Tramp with fresh air and a largely-unnecessary additional water supplement, and they kept as many of these activated along the walls of Thord’s new quarters as they could. The rest went into storage. They ended up with a broad hangar of icy metal that they were able to furnish roughly using leftover gear from The Warm. Aki’Drednanth didn’t need much in the way of amenities, just a coating of crushed ice to pack into a surface to keep the whole area from being too hard and slippery, and to pack around the bottom of the seed to keep it from sliding around in the unlikely event of collisions or any disruption to the exchange.
Of course, Zeegon felt obliged to point out, if they collided with something severely enough to bounce the ship’s interior around, a bit of crushed ice was unlikely to protect the seed – and the crew would be pulped well before the seed took heavy damage. And this went double for problems with the exchange. They’d already lived through one catastrophic ‘exchange event’ – well, ten of them had lived – and none of them had any desire to try their luck at another. But it was better than nothing for the small turbulence.
The second half of their four-day ‘shore leave’ was spent not at dock, but in a parking flight pattern above Thord’s bubble, actually figuring out the cargo loading problem – and not just the loading
, but the unloading that would logically have to be done at their final destination. They had to get the aki’Drednanth’s enormous iceblock up into the specially-cleared, specially-sealed, specially-prepared sector of one of the Tramp’s two big oxygen farm rings. Intact. And it wasn’t as if they could just open an airlock and manhandle the long prism of ice through the corridors and up the elevator shaft and into place – extensive remodelling of the dome and inter-level bulkheads had to be completed before they could hoist the seed into the frigid hangar. The farm rings were directly below the modular’s dome-levels but behind the relative field toruses that provided her with superluminal speed, and those absolutely could not be knocked open to make a door.
In the end they constructed something like an extended cargo airlock in the dome next to Janya’s labs and a second cargo door in the dome floor that opened onto the farm on the level below. It wasn’t quite big enough to admit the seed full-length, but the doors were offset to allow the crew to angle it into its new home – and then, hopefully, angle it back out and send it drifting off into intergalactic space at the conclusion of their mission. It was a big job and not exactly up to AstroCorps code, but they had plenty of help and the regulations had a surprising amount of stretch in them where aki’Drednanth were concerned. Finally, they got the seed installed.
They also ran the fabricator more or less non-stop, which over the course of four days gave them twenty-five more eejits to play with. This was a little south of average, Waffa told Zeegon with his usual meticulousness, since a significant number of the fabrication runs had ‘finished’ their configuration process far too early and the resultant eejits simply could not be left alive, essentially wasting those hours they had spent in production. That was just the luck of the draw, Waffa said. An able took five hundred minutes to configure from beginning to end, and twenty to print, but their plant couldn’t do that anymore. It still printed in twenty minutes, but it configured for between ninety-two and two hundred and fifty-six minutes, and they had no control over how long the plant decided to take. Or what sort of jaw-dropping moronity would step out of the plant and attempt to eat his uniform as soon as you passed it to him.
Waffa could go on like this at considerable length if you let him, which was why Zeegon tended to distract him with new engineering challenges or minor tool-related incidents that then required the Chief of Security and Operations to stalk off and write a report.
Some of the new eejits were actually top-shelf and worth swapping out existing Tramp crew-eejits for, the others were prime candidates to be placed on The Warm’s workforce. Both the Warm-bound newly-printed and the eejits displaced by the new print-jobs were bundled out onto The Warm with mittens tied to their wrists, metaphorically speaking. Zeegon got the feeling that Z-Lin would have been happy getting rid of even more, but protocols not designed to cope with a damaged fabrication plant were tying their hands somewhat. At least their arrangement with The Warm, swapping eejits for ables, was allowing them to reduce headcount in a way permitted by the protocols.
All told, they wound up with three hundred and ninety-eight souls on board, counting their three long-haul passengers and the forty Molran survivalists bound for Eshret but not counting Boonie the weasel. Three hundred and forty-five eejits – or fabricants, technically, since forty-two of them were full ables and only three hundred and three of them were eejits – was still massively over the AstroCorps regulation saturation point, and yet still left them close to critically low on actual crewmembers. Their crew count was as close to modular-standard as it had been, in fact, since the original crew complement had been obliterated, only now they were mostly ables and eejits instead of a mixture of humans, Molren and Blaren.
It was a paradox. They were close to normal for a legal-sentient crew, but borderline-critically undermanned in terms of expertise for a crew composed mostly of fabricated assistants and untrained non-Corps extras. At the same time, they were approaching overmanned in terms of their oxygen consumption, now that a small but high-yield section of one of their farms had been repurposed. The oxygen farm was an ecosystem as delicate as any other, and even the loss of a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot stretch of shelving caused significant disruption to the entire farm ring, meaning that they were losing productivity in more than just the renovated arc.
Still, they were nowhere near critical levels there, and Janus Whye – horticultural mood analyst and the closest thing they had to an expert on oxy farm algae – assured them that the biosphere would settle down and regain yield over time. Their assortment of new Bonshooni friends, arguably experts on high-output ‘ponics of a different kind, concurred with the counsellor. Although, as Whye pointed out to Zeegon, it wasn’t their problem since none of them were staying aboard.
After running their engines hot for The Warm’s power cell refill needs, and the mass-printings of eejit muscle and more literal medical flesh, they were also able to take on some replacement parts and a lot of The Warm’s supply of carbon blocks, which were used as raw material for various sorts of fabrication. The Warm had no need of the materials for now, and they had warehouses of surplus even before you took the frozen levels of the Chalice into account.
Thord, Dunnkirk and Maladin came aboard without ceremony. The one interesting scene, as far as Zeegon was concerned, came shortly after he, Sally and Z-Lin met their passengers at the docking blister. Zeegon had never met an aki’Drednanth before, and had missed out on a formal introduction to Thord in the past few days of bustling activity although he had seen her fleetingly from a distance. When he’d pleaded his case to the Commander – the operative word being pleaded – she had grudgingly agreed to let him join the delegation.
The Bonshooni grunted and visibly struggled a little as they crossed over to the Tramp‘s gravity, but they’d taken care of themselves and a month of minimal gravity had in no way degraded their powerful Molranoid muscles and bones. Thord, on the other hand, barely even seemed to notice. The effortless gliding motions he’d seen her employing on The Warm settled into the heavy tread of a thousand-plus-pound animal, of course, and her additional two or three hundred pounds of refrigerated envirosuit came down to earth with a long, settling series of hisses and clanks, but she approached the minimalist welcoming committee without apparent effort and gave them a smooth nod.
“I will speak to your Captain,” she said without preamble.
Zeegon wasn’t specifically ordered to return to his post, although Clue did give him a long, narrow look as he innocently ushered the passengers towards the elevator. The Commander tapped something into her pad and went along without comment, and Sally followed behind. Zeegon assumed she was as curious as he was to see how this would play out.
The elevator was a decent size, but it was still somehow a little uncomfortable with an aki’Drednanth and two Bonshooni sharing the space with three humans. A single aki’Drednanth, Zeegon was noticing even after such a brief exposure, tended to fill an available space in much the same way as a gas did, only it was an armour-plated gas. They ascended into the dome given over to the Captain’s chambers and the expansive area for observation and the reception of visiting dignitaries, a broad echoing space that Zeegon had only visited a handful of times since The Accident.
For a moment, he reminisced quietly to himself about the little party they’d thrown for the crew of the Dark Glory Ascendant. He hadn’t been invited to the reception up here, of course – he’d been a mere EV Rover Assistant First Grade at the time, not helmsman – but there had been a series of little bashes held in each crew department, and the EV engineering group had put together a good one.
Not that the crew of the Dark Glory Ascendant had appreciated it, the colossal pricks.
They crossed the sad, gloomy chamber to the Captain’s door. Clue once again stopped and gave Zeegon a veiled glare. She seemed to be singling him out, he noticed, even though Sally was standing there and looking on blandly. Z-Lin glanced down at her organiser, back up at Zeegon, then stepped over to the
door and tapped briskly at the respectably old-school door chime.
Zeegon knew Z-Lin Clue quite well, so he was pretty sure he was the only one who noticed the momentary hesitation, and the willpower she had exerted to actually complete the motion. Sally would have spotted it, probably, but she was standing back and off to one side as if to cover the area in case of sneak attack. Thord may have noticed too, if aki’Drednanth were as sensitive as people said they were … but if she did notice, the massive quasi-immortal in the refrigerated suit said nothing.
Clue cleared her throat. “The Captain might not even–”
The door opened.
It opened on gaping darkness, and even though Zeegon restrained himself from craning and peering, he knew it would do no good anyway. The Captain’s chambers were expansive, taking up an arc that filled about a third of the entire dome level, and if the entryway wasn’t illuminated then you weren’t going to see diddly-squat.
Thord, Maladin and Dunnkirk stepped into the darkness – the aki’Drednanth almost scraped either side of the doorway with her envirosuit on the way through, but was well-accustomed to moving about in a world a few sizes too small for her – and vanished. The door closed.
An awkward three minutes and twenty-seven seconds followed.
“You might want to consider returning to your posts,” Z-Lin said, without much hope in her voice that Zeegon could detect. “This might take a while.”
“We’re not flying anywhere just yet,” Zeegon said, maintaining his innocent performance, “and I finished the last package for the Molren ahead of schedule just so I could try my hand at this diplomacy thing,” he’d been helping a couple of the Eshret-bound Molren to pre-check and pack up a series of lightweight vehicles they’d found in a gutted old warehouse on The Warm, which they believed would make serviceable dune buggies.
Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 13
