How a conversation between such usually-sedate and open-minded people – well, Waffa and Zeegon had been the human components, Sally thought, so let’s say usually-laidback and not go nuts – could come so close to an out-and-out brawl, she would never know. Okay, the reason it had almost happened was that one of the humans had made an uncharitable remark about aki’Drednanth collaborators in the presence of a Bonshoon. And the reason it hadn’t happened was that the Bonshoon in question had been Dunnkirk, perhaps the sweetest-natured creature that had ever set foot on the Tramp’s troubled decks. And even he had taken a neck in each upper hand and a pair of testicles in each lower hand, and had begun to squeeze until retractions, apologies, explanations and assurances had flowed to his complete satisfaction.
No lasting damage done, and all three were the best of friends again. Even better friends than before, in fact. But the tension of whatever had happened to Bayn Balro, The Warm, possibly to the larger Molran Fleet, AstroCorps, Aquilar, and the Six Species in general, could not be overstated. And if it was the Cancer, then the master-and-slave arrangement between Damorakind and the aki’Drednanth came under the harsh lights of fearful, xenophobic scrutiny. It was just a fact.
Sally took a long, ruminatory drink. Yes, and the dreams were certainly helping everyone look in Thord’s direction.
Glomulus, who even Janya had to grudgingly acknowledge as the closest thing to an impartial aki’Drednanth specialist they had on board, said that the irregularity might lie in Thord’s warrior-credo-heavy, possibly even reactionary mindset, as signified by the markings on tusk and tongue that they’d each gotten a glimpse or two of over the course of the trip. The others were sceptical about this, since aside from the occasional entirely typical flare-up of aki’Drednanth territorialism and temper, Thord was as serene as the next person. And the next two people were Dunnkirk and Maladin.
“It’s also possibly just a simple matter of Thord being so long between, well, akis,” Cratch had theorised. “If you believe that sort of thing. Apparently – this is based on what our Head Of Science has heard – she hasn’t been an aki’Drednanth for a million years. Most of the others have at least dealt with Molren before. She might not have even dealt with them. Her brainwaves might take some ironing out.”
Sally sighed again, drank again. And they were still a week out from Zhraak Burns, seven tough weeks behind them and a looming eternity of dullness ahead, punctuated by damn hick planets without a decent AstroCorps supplier or coherent cultural philosophy to their names.
Before the dust-up in the mess hall, it had been the murmur in the Tramp’s engine. This was one of those things that nobody else had noticed except Contro, who mentioned it in near-random passing about a week after it had started happening, and Waffa had only picked it out of Contro’s normal background prattle because he happened to be listening at that moment. It wasn’t an audible murmur, or any sort of vibration, or apparently even a problem of any kind that anyone understood. It could possibly become a problem, but was more likely to just be nothing. Contro’s summary was heavy on the “honestly, you know what I mean!”s, and it required a lot of ramp-downs, brown-outs, test cycles and polarity reversals, and a whole lot of made-up-sounding Contro procedures, in order to clear it up.
All of these things needed to be handled by Waffa and the ables and a liberal coating of eejits, since Contro knew what needed to be done and what the results should be but not how to do any of it. More fortunately, none of the tasks involved shutting off power to the relative drive, so they could work while they flew.
So that prevented some unnecessary bloodshed right there.
It was a minor inconvenience, and even more importantly it was a distraction. Everyone liked a good complain about trivial nuisances, so that was okay – but it was still an added tension as well. In the end, the ‘murmur’ was declared dealt with, probably, which apparently had to be good enough for everybody.
“Alright,” she said, once about half her coffee was inside her where it belonged, “maybe if I just sit here in my office for the next week…”
There was a soft chime on her organiser. She squinted down at it.
- - - Internal notification + minor alert + bridge (assumed rodent infestation) - - -
Sally let her squint become an honest-to-goodness glare, and deliberately sat back, put her feet up on the narrow section of free desk-reserved for them, and sipped her coffee.
“I know you’re awake,” she told the computer conversationally, “somehow. And I also know you’re perfectly aware that the rodent on the bridge is Boonie, so no. I am not going to the bridge to oversee a strip-and-pest-control of the consoles and bulkheads.”
And so another week crawled by, and again they gathered on the bridge, and again they dropped out of the grey and into the velvety darkness of the void.
“Zhraak Burns,” Z-Lin said, as they cruised into the system and approached a pleasant little blue-green world. “Decay?”
“Nodback from the surface,” Decay reported. “No beacon, because … you know.”
“Because they think items of AstroCorp technology are shiny and deceptive trinkets given to us by the Devil to worship debaucheriffically while simultaneously turning our backs on the purity of the Fweig?” Zeegon asked innocently.
“Yes,” Decay said, “because that.”
“Not entirely sure ‘debaucheriffically’ is a word,” Clue added.
“It is to these nutbars.”
“Alright, let’s just get this done,” the Commander sighed. “There ought to be a visitor centre, which is probably where the nod’s coming from.”
“Confirmed,” Decay replied crisply. “They’re sending us a lander allotment, approach vector and we’re exchanging infodumps.”
“Not to contribute to the already-plentiful cynicism on the bridge,” Sally asked, “but is there anything in the uplink that would warrant you calling this an exchange?”
“No,” Decay replied in the same smoothly professional tone, “nothing’s happened here in eleven years. And in case you were wondering, that was an AstroCorps intervention on an asteroid, the destruction of which the Burnèd are attributing to – let me double-check that – yes, to Zhraak. They’re less forthcoming on the subject of how they even knew the asteroid was coming, since that was actually the work of the astronomical unit in the visitor centre. Using spooky telescopes.”
Clue sighed.
“On the other hand,” Janus spoke up, “it’s an agrarian population of – what – ninety million?”
“A hundred and fifteen million,” Decay said. “They’ve been busy.”
“Nothing else to do,” Waffa grinned.
“A hundred and fifteen million,” Janus said, “and they haven’t been attacked, while way smaller populations like Bayn Balro and The Warm were.”
This led to a thoughtful, if slightly dissatisfied silence as they slipped into orbit.
Zhraak Burns was, as Janus had said, a pleasant and rural settlement, widely dispersed across the fertile plains of the planet’s expansive single supercontinent. It seemed like a relatively young world, but it was so geologically stable that it could in fact have been that way for a billion years. Indeed, what little actual research took place on the planet seemed to confirm this was the case. Zhraak Burns was a planet in its early adulthood, physically preserved in a state of supercontinental youth by its tectonic serenity.
It was somehow strangely appropriate that such a geologically peaceful planet should become home to an extremist sect of a singularly purification-by-violence-inclined cultural group. Although admittedly the Burnèd followed an interpretation of the Pinian Gospels According to Zhraak that focussed on purely theoretical and ideological violence rather than actual human sacrifice and murderous killing sprees, so it wasn’t that poetic. Sally was a bit dubious on the whole concept of ‘ideological violence’, but as long as nobody was actively trying to blow her backside off she was fine with ‘most any philosophy.
“Ho
w long are we stopping over?” Decay asked.
“Shouldn’t need to be here very long at all,” Z-Lin said. “I guess we can agree on a shore leave break but I doubt that’s going to be very long. Get the ground under our feet, get some sun, get some proper cooking … other than that, there’s not a whole lot to do. Shosha Ranch didn’t have anything for these guys, and since we’re heading outbound to more farm planets there’s nothing really these guys need to send with us. Maybe on the way back we’ll fill our holds with corn or something. But for now, it’s nothing but a chance to get off this damned ship for a minute.”
“I’ll take it,” Waffa said fervently.
Everyone on the Tramp who wasn’t an eejit, an able or an aki’Drednanth ended up piling into two landers and heading down to the planet where, by agreement, they spent three surprisingly peaceful days. Zhraak Burns was a warm and pleasant place, even though it was the beginning of winter at the visitor centre. This just meant it rained occasionally, which was an unaccustomed treat in itself for the perennially starship-bound crew. The visitor centre was a sprawling complex of parks and entertainment complexes with simple but solid modern conveniences, and even confirmed bookworms like Janya and Janus got out for the odd stroll. Maladin and Dunnkirk in particular seemed to love the little patch of forest in the middle of the compound. There were about a thousand full-time inhabitants of the centre and a rotating cycle of one or two hundred actual Burnèd drop-ins, but any native who actually deigned to set foot inside the cesspit of offworlder techno-corruption was by necessity open-minded and friendly. And the place was so big it was easy enough to go without seeing another soul for the entire shore leave if that was what you wanted.
None of them, despite the crystal-clear, freshwater and completely-uninhabited lake, went swimming.
GLOMULUS
Glomulus Cratch sat in the medical bay.
“Nurse Dingus,” he said, “let’s have something from the Years of Thunder and Gold anthology.”
Dingus, who had been steadily improving in a pure muscle-memory rote fashion, scowled mightily and prodded at the esoteric three-button controls of the sound system. This hard-won proficiency had come at the expense of some of his medical procedural knowledge, but since the exercising of his medical procedural knowledge had frequently made him a danger at the operating table, it was really no big loss. Bless him.
Besides, now Glomulus had a new nurse.
“Three of the ables were allowed to go down for shore leave.”
Glomulus glanced sidelong at Nurse Dingus, still studiously examining his audio panel, and then glanced at Nurse Bethel. Nurse Bethel was standing with his beefy arms folded and the usual blank, cud-chewing look of the resting eejit on his face, although he had also managed to acquire ‘caring bedside’, ‘breaking grim news’ and, unfortunately, ‘petulant knob-end’ from his configuration process. Nurse Bethel was one of the twenty Midwich Eejits made with wacky-wacky assistance. Even less fortunately, he’d really only had opportunity to share the latter facial expression with his colleagues so far.
Although Doctor Cratch supposed it was poor form, somehow, to describe a lack of opportunity to show ‘breaking grim news’ face as ‘unfortunate’.
“They went down to repair a heating unit,” he said. “Any shore leave they get will be incidental to their work.”
“I could go down and give some booster jabs, then do some climbing.”
“Should I ask why you want to climb?” Glomulus inquired.
“I like to challenge myself.”
“Good for you. Why don’t you challenge yourself by doing an equipment inventory?”
“I did one,” Bethel sulked. “Days ago.”
“Better do another one,” Glomulus said cheerfully. “A lot can happen in a few days.”
“Nobody’s here. Why are we even on duty?”
Glomulus wondered whether whiny toolness was part of Nurse Bethel’s eejitism. He was a high-level eejit and a very good nurse, granted, and aside from the face and the occasional nervous tic he seemed to only have a habit of looking at things cross-eyed when he was agitated, which was unfortunate because it was very difficult not to chuckle when he was angry, which just made him angrier. More fortunately, he was also extremely grating, which made him at once less amusing and more fun to laugh at.
He’d never worked with an able nurse. They were supposed to be more or less like Academy-trained AstroCorps Medical Assistants, First Grade. But Nurse Bethel was pretty close. Everyone was very pleased to have a medical specialist in the bay who wasn’t wanted for crimes against the Six Species.
Glomulus held up his nano scalpel. It was a new acquisition from Standing Wave, and – like all his scalpels – it was security locked so that he could only activate it for emergency surgery purposes when the system had registered a medical crisis. “Do you see this?” he asked in a friendly tone. “It’s a scalpel. Very sophisticated, took hours to fabricate in a machine far more advanced than any of ours, on a world we’ve never been to, and it found its way from that world to the medical supply depot where we picked it up, and from there onto our ship, across thousands of light years and you know what? It doesn’t get shore leave. You,” he pointed at Nurse Bethel and spread his hands, “you are also a very sophisticated piece of medical equipment, and to my lasting regret you do not get shore leave because not even a broken configuration will give you the human attribute of slowly losing your mind out of boredom. You can only emulate it, very irritatingly, for your captive audience. Nothing went into your brain that would allow you to have personality outside the AstroCorps nurse parameters, any more than this scalpel has urges, so you don’t need shore leave to go and satisfy those urges.”
“So why do I want to go climbing?”
“Two possibilities come to mind,” Glomulus said. “One, your configuration also contained a faulty psychological cross-reference to some physical therapist or planetside rescue operative able’s configuration, so you got a bit of bad wiring. Or two, the psychic snowman who built your brain was thinking randomly about how darn neat it might be to climb something one day. And then you popped out.”
“So aren’t they parameters outside my nurse configuration, and don’t they need to be satisfied?”
“Not really,” Glomulus said. “If you can’t do your job without taking time off to climb a wall occasionally, we can probably work around that. But you don’t get shore leave for it. Me, I’d have no problem letting you go down to any old planet and climb to your heart’s content, if you even can climb without killing yourself. The desire, you see, isn’t necessarily linked to aptitude, either existing or learnable. But if you got shore leave, we’d have to give all the other eejits shore leave. And some of them like to put their heads under water for fun. Until they pass out. And there’s three hundred and thirteen of them, and we can’t watch them all,” he looked up at the sound of the soft maximum-cruise chime. “And also, we left Zhraak Burns about an hour ago and unless I’m mistaken we’re about to go back to relative speed.”
“But–”
“You have twelve weeks to petition Commander Clue for permission to take shore leave,” Doctor Cratch smiled. “It’s good to have a hobby. Good luck!” he gave Nurse Bethel a bracing double thumbs-up.
“That’s stupid,” Bethel said shrilly. “It’s unfair and it ignores basic facts about fabrication and configuration of organic tissue, and I think you just don’t have any understanding of the subject so you’re resorting to flippancy.”
“Not so much ‘resorting’ as ‘defaulting’,” Glomulus amended serenely, “but your point is valid. Nurse Dingus,” he went on, “are you ready?”
Dingus dutifully pressed the final button, and the mellow tones of the Portobello Crooner began to waft across the clinically white chamber.
“And screw your dumb music too!” Bethel snapped.
“Now now,” Doctor Cratch said idly, “let’s not go saying things we can’t take back.”
“I’m the
most technically Corps-qualified medic on board,” Nurse Bethel said, stepping up alongside the console Glomulus was standing by and moving in so close to Glomulus’s face that his wonky eyes appeared to be staring at the doctor’s nose, “and you’re a convicted felon. I know ables can’t hold the position but if you were in the brig where you belonged, I would de facto hold the position while it actually went to the Head Of Science.”
Glomulus stepped back and made it very clear for the official audio-visual record that he was nowhere near the man and in no way forcing a confrontation. The record, he reflected, was very important. “Janya Adeneo would be so thrilled to hear you suggest that.”
“It doesn’t matter. My point is, there’s nothing to do so you might as well not be here and then maybe I would get the consideration I deserve.”
“I’m not sure ables are authorised to be this grumpy and insubordinate,” Glomulus said lightly.
“It doesn’t count as insubordination if my superior should by rights be relieved of duty and placed under arrest,” Bethel said, “idiot.”
Finally, the glaring cross-eyed eejit in front of him gave one of his involuntary nervous tics and stepped back, raising a hand to angrily swipe at the side of his face and his hair, as Doctor Cratch had noticed he almost always did when he twitched.
“Wait – don’t eat that!” Glomulus exclaimed in sudden alarm, hurrying forward and raising his own hand helplessly. Nurse Bethel looked confused, and opened his mouth querulously. “Was that an abbronax capsule? What was that even doing out?” by the time he said even, Glomulus had his index finger and thumb fleetingly on either side of Bethel’s throat as if taking his pulse. As he said out, he was pinching the eejit’s windpipe swiftly and with incredible augmented strength, crushing it closed. Nurse Bethel stiffened, and Glomulus swept on around to the eejit’s back, pounding briskly. This was a bit jarring and painful for his grafted-on hands, but he was used to the discomfort by now. “You’re choking, but look – this is good news,” he said with swift efficiency, “because it means the capsule hasn’t opened yet. Spit it out, cough it up. Come on, old son, you can do it.”
Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 28
