Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  Thord shook her head. “I travelled much, before coming to Ildarheim. The main bulk of the seed was originally on the surface of a comet. It remained there for the time it took for me to gestate, and to be born, and to survive my infancy.”

  Janya nodded. Aki’Drednanth juveniles were, by Six Species standards of child-raising, astonishingly savage. Of their litters, usually only one or two survived the intensive competition for resources. It was a process that had not changed in millions of years – and indeed, why would it? Aki’Drednanth reincarnation tended to negate physiological evolution, even if their minds were advanced beyond human understanding. “Another challenge,” she said, and Thord nodded. “And if you’d failed, your work on the seed would have gone to waste.”

  “This was one test I could not weight in my favour by remaining Drednanth for a longer period,” Thord said. “Sooner or later, the aki’Drednanth must be born, and win her way to the life she has claimed. However, if I had perished as a newborn, all would not have been lost.”

  “The seed would have stayed on that comet,” Janya marvelled, “and you could have taken another shot at it in however-many-thousand years.”

  “Yes.”

  “But only you could complete it,” she said, suddenly understanding – and feeling inexcusably thick for not having done so before. “You started it as Drednanth, you had to finish the job as aki’Drednanth. Other aki’Drednanth poke around at it, and you might be right back to square one.”

  “Isaz understood this,” Thord said, rising ponderously once more.

  “And Rime might not.”

  Thord nodded. “And Rime might not.”

  A few days after this singularly odd exchange, the Tramp arrived in the Burned Heart system. Thord, as per Janya’s instructions, made her way to the landers even as they were decelerating into proximity with the small, desert-dominated planet, and politely declared her intentions of visiting her friend on the surface. As predicted, Z-Lin bent over backwards to provide assistance, and Decay jumped at the chance to pilot the lander to Burned Heart’s tiny polar ice cap. The Blaran barely even waited long enough to report that Burned Heart was alive and well and returning their hails, before trotting off the bridge. By the time Zeegon declared them secured in orbit, the lander was shooting out of the Tramp’s docking blister and dropping into the atmosphere.

  Maladin and Dunnkirk stayed behind, ostensibly to watch over the seed and – Janya strongly suspected – to prevent the possibility of any of the crew from snooping around in the oxygen farm. She couldn’t have said where this conviction came from, but it was insistent. She tried to tell herself that Thord was simply embarrassed to introduce her Bonshooni friends to Rime, but that somehow didn’t ring true.

  Aside from the polar ice caps, and the fact that it was more like a planet-sized baking-hot cattle ranch than a classical sandy desert, Burned Heart was a lot like distant Eshret. It had slightly more in the way of weather, a couple of regions of big geological upheaval, and these in turn fed the moderate climate that enabled the tough, spiky grasses to grow. A couple of decent-sized townships sprawled in the tropics, watered by aqueducts from polar ice processing plants – one of which Rime was apparently occupying, and had been for the past twenty years or so. The people of Burned Heart were very proud of their resident aki’Drednanth, but as far as Janya was aware Z-Lin didn’t even tell them about Thord.

  Burned Heart, like Greentemple before it and Zhraak Burns before that, was something of a technology-vacuum backwater with only the most lightweight communications gear and minimal capacity to house landers from orbit. Also like their other recent stops, however, Burned Heart had not received many visitors lately and the township they’d contacted, Gymerville, had plenty of vacancies. Zeegon ferried down a few crewmembers who were interested in getting off the ship, standing under another sun, and enjoying some cuisine the preparation of which may or may not have violated a number of shipboard atmospheric regulation ordinances, but as Janya had predicted they did not stay long. Gymerville had a strict curfew and some extended ritual blessings for any newcomers who wanted to have their feet on the hard-baked ground at sun-down, and this was part of the reason they’d picked the township in the first place – it had been the first decent-sized settlement to be hit by local dawn when they arrived, giving them a solid eight hours of refreshing blazing sunlight and enabling them to depart after dinner with a minimum of ceremonial bullplop.

  And this – after conducting their minimal business and confirming that Burned Heart had no more been attacked by hostile aliens than Greentemple had been – was exactly what they did. Thord was right behind them and returned to the ship shortly after local sundown, and trundled back immediately to her quarters in the oxygen farm. Presumably Rime had not required her to take part in any Hearter rituals before leaving, but Thord didn’t say a word about her meeting and Janya suspected she never would.

  Rime didn’t follow her, and didn’t contact the Tramp, and within an hour and a half of Thord’s return to the ship they were settling back into soft-space.

  Z-LIN

  Nine weeks out of Burned Heart, two weeks from Declivitorion. They’d been on the metaphorical road from The Warm approximately seventy-five weeks.

  There hadn’t been any major crap-ups in the past two months and change. No outbursts of boredom-induced creativity from their technical-minded crewmembers. No mass-pulpings of eejits in any of the Tramp’s more meat-grindery articles of vital machinery. It had all been by-the-book, professional, stiflingly dull.

  In the past few weeks, as Z-Lin had noted tended to happen after about six weeks in the grey, people had stopped frequenting the parts of the ship that had extensive viewscreens and windows. They walked across rooms and along corridors without raising their eyes. The bridge was still manned, but those on duty were more interested in their consoles and organisers than the view outside.

  You couldn’t look into Ol’ Drabby for that long without realising that nothing was looking back into you.

  Z-Lin usually ate in the mess with the others, if only to keep herself sane. On this occasion, however, she’d set a table in the officers’ dining room. It was a big, fancy, horribly empty space, and she regretted it almost as soon as she’d finished setting it up, but at least it was formal. And at least its windows could be covered over with artful screens, replacing the ghastly grey view with a sequence of attractive space- and planet-scenes. More than a few of them, she’d noted with amusement, were from the beautiful skies of Standing Wave. It was pleasant, without inducing homesickness.

  Her dinner guest, of course, was generally immune to that sort of thing anyway. General Moral Decay (Alcohol) was a known warm and sensitive soul, but tended towards sarcasm in the face of sentiment.

  “Very nice,” the Blaran said, eyeing the food appreciatively. His nostril-slits quivered faintly as he breathed in the scents. “I didn’t realise there was any heartsteer left.”

  “I saved most of my share,” she said, picking up a knife and beginning to carve away at the thick slab of steak. “Not much of a red-meat eater, myself.”

  They’d picked up a few crates of heartsteer meat from the ranchers of Gymerville, on Burned Heart. Z-Lin had been careful to ensure that there was no exclusivity – anyone who wanted a share, got a share. There had been plenty of the delicious, usually-highly-expensive export meat to go around. Not that it had lasted long. Even with the crew eking out their portions as frugally as they could, almost everyone had eaten their freeze-packaged pounds of flesh after the first month.

  “You’re sharing your own ration with me?” Decay grinned. “Commander, I’m touched.”

  “Can’t exactly smokehouse-char the stuff the way they did back in Gymerville,” she shrugged, “but I figured it’d make a nice enough centrepiece of a roast.”

  “All this time, and I had no idea you cooked.”

  “Oh please,” she said sharply. “First of all, Vladislav and Try-Again Tryla from the mess did most of this.
And second, who do you think made your birthday cake when we were en route to Standing Wave?”

  “I thought Janus made it,” Decay said, “because I saw him making it.”

  “Oh right, I made those pies for Contro before that,” she muttered, slicing at the roast, then raised her voice back to full self-righteousness. “But my point remains.”

  “Those were good pies,” Decay admitted.

  “Right?” Z-Lin grunted, angled the knife, gritted her teeth and hacked harder. “Anyway, I thought I might as well pay you back for all the cooking you’ve done for us, over the years.”

  “Hm,” Decay said, and pointed in amusement at the roast she was clearly struggling with. “Want me to carve that?” he waved all four hands mildly. “If it’ll seal the deal, I can mix the nerashka at the same time.”

  “Fine,” she handed over the knife. “So,” she went on, inordinately nervous, “end of the road approaches.”

  “Well, a couple of weeks to Declivitorion and another week or so out to the edge,” Decay hedged, working on the steak with his lower hands and picking up the bowl of thick nerashka sauce with his upper. The sauce was carefully set down in layers – Z-Lin would never admit it now but she hadn’t trusted the eejits to do it right – and was only mixed just before eating in order to release the reactant flavours.

  “I remember a time when a month of relative travel would seem like a hike,” Z-Lin said, “rather than the home straight. And Declivitorion will be the biggest place we’ve been to since our last stopover on Hermes.”

  “Mm,” Decay said noncommittally, and set down the nerashka bowl.

  “Thoughts?”

  The Blaran shrugged his upper shoulders, and rolled his lower uncomfortably. “Are you asking if I think Declivitorion will have been attacked?” he asked, slicing the last few inches of the roast. “Or if Declivitorion – unlike Hermes – will have any of the parts we need?” he looked up at her with a sardonic twitch of his ears.

  “Take your pick.”

  “Well, not to sound cynical, but if Declivitorion was likely to have a new computer cortex for us, and a new fabrication plant and a replacement crew, I think we would have found a reason to pass it by. So I guess I’ll believe it when I see it,” he smiled uncomfortably. “It seems more likely we’ll encounter another amusing detour.”

  “Why does anyone on this ship still insist on prefacing anything they say with ‘not to be cynical, but’?” Z-Lin wondered.

  “Hilariously outmoded tradition?” Decay replied with another shrug. “Let me ask you this – have you and the Captain considered detouring around Declivitorion and just forging straight on to the edge? Declivitorion seems like the most likely place for us to make a final stop, and therefore the most likely place for the Fergies to jump us.”

  “It’s also far too crowded for them to stage a secret assault-and-disposal,” Z-Lin pointed out, “but for the record – yes, I did consider advising that we bypass Declivitorion.”

  “You did,” Decay said, the tiny emphasis on you almost undetectable unless you were sensitive to it by reason of long history.

  “I did. But in the end, reconsidered. Predictable or not, it is our best shot at resupply. So, that’s the way it is?” she summed up, serving herself some vegetables. “We’ve been up against it so long, we’ve become mistrustful of even the chance at improving our lot?”

  “Whether I would go so far as to say we’re only likely to stop at Declivitorion if it’s been attacked and lost its entire AstroCorps infrastructure…” Decay said discerningly, helping himself to heartsteer, “well, that’s a bit more cynicism than even I’m willing to exhibit. But yeah, I guess by this point it’s fair to say that we’ve come to expect the direness of our situation to endure. It’s the norm now, not an exception. Statistics are increasingly on the side of the cynics.”

  Z-Lin conceded with a shrug, and for a time they busied themselves with loading up their plates and glasses. She had provided a bottle of wine from the so-called officers’ cellar in the reception dome, but in accordance with regulation she was only allowing herself one glass. The remainder of the bottle would have no more effect on Decay than a pint and a half of fruit juice.

  “I wonder what Thord and Rime talked about,” she ventured, once they’d started to eat.

  “I think we’ve all been wondering that for the past couple of months,” Decay said. “Aki’Drednanth play deep games,” he looked up. “But as much as I appreciate the exclusive meal, I’m sure you didn’t want to discuss Declivitorion over it. Or gossip about Thord’s meeting with Rime,” his smile widened slightly. “And while I’m endlessly flattered by the idea that you might have finally caught the fever…” he waggled his ears provocatively, “I doubt you’ve invited me here for romantic purposes.”

  Z-Lin rolled her eyes. “You know the only reason you weren’t registered AstroCorps crew on this ship right from the start was because of the Molran regulations about Molran and Blaran segregation,” she said.

  “We didn’t exactly call it segregation,” Decay said forbearingly.

  “Well, fine,” Clue said, knowing the raw pain of Decay’s wife was very close to the surface on this topic. She’d been a junior officer at the party where Decay and Steña had gotten … well, engaged, you could say, but she remembered it more clearly than her uniform insignia from the time. Steña had abandoned her life for this man. And barely three years later, she was gone. “We’re a sensitive and histrionic species. My point is, there are no Molren on board. There is no regulation barring your promotion to Lieutenant at the very least, and your AstroCorps credentials, although old, are still valid.”

  “Old,” Decay chuckled. “A hundred and thirty years. Yes, that’s fairly old, for paperwork.”

  “A hundred and forty,” Z-Lin said. “You were just a kid when you signed up.”

  “Ha,” the Blaran said, a pleasantly choral sound in his double-windpipe. “I remember it well, although the years do slip by. Eighteen months serving on a Blaran-and-Bonshoon-heavy supertug, with a couple of long vacations when we were servicing a Worldship and the entire crew was swapped out for nice clean Molren. And as soon as I was able to transfer to a bigger ship of the line, I was busted down to non-Corps crew so the poor Molren wouldn’t have to acknowledge me. Let alone salute me.”

  “Nobody salutes me,” Clue said. “I don’t think officers get saluted.”

  Decay took a mouthful of steak, and jabbed his fork in the air for emphasis. “They did a hundred and forty years ago, damn it.”

  Z-Lin shook her head. “If you signed back on, you could take officer’s quarters. But since you own about sixty crew cabins already, I don’t suppose that matters to you.”

  “Well now, if I could take an entire level of the officers’ quarters, that would be a step up,” he said wistfully. “Is it true that you still only use the one apartment up there?”

  “By the numbers, that’s me.”

  Decay shook his head. “If I could mash together a few officers’ apartments,” he said, “I could build a bar.”

  “We already have a bar.”

  He glanced pointedly at the bottle of wine. “One where you’re allowed to have more than two drinks.”

  “You take about a gallon of strong grain alcohol to even get tipsy.”

  “I meant big drinks.”

  “If you were an officer, we’d only need a certified medic – or Cratch’s credentials to be unlocked – to make quorum,” she blurted.

  Decay sighed, and took another mouthful of food and chewed it before replying. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said sadly. “It’s bad enough with Contro thinking I’m a general. I’m not going to help you stage a mutiny.”

  “That’s not–”

  Decay raised his upper hands, keeping his utensils in the lower. “I believe you. I don’t care. I’m okay with things the way they are. And seriously, why would you want to promote me, if not for relief-of-command purposes? I know you well enough to say oka
y, maybe it’s because you really believe it’s the best thing for me, but why else? You’re getting everything you need from me now.”

  “We might be one of the few AstroCorps ships and crews left,” she said.

  “You really believe what that crazy old bastard told us? The Artist? He’s the one who killed most of the crew.”

  Z-Lin had her doubts about that, but this didn’t seem like the place to voice them. “There’s something going on with the Fleet, with the Corps. Ever since Seven Widdershins, the Separatists, the God damn Bloody Hands … you can’t tell me you think all is well out here.”

  “You think the Artist killed Aquilar? The Fleet? Fed it all into the underspace, perhaps, as part of his experiments? Is that what you think killed Bayn Balro and The Warm?”

  Doubtful though she was of the provenance of The Accident, Clue had no such uncertainty about the attacks they had seen. The damage to The Warm had been nothing like the sort of thing their old friend the Artist would have inflicted. Even if they hadn’t had his own statements as admittedly dubious evidence to the contrary. “No,” she said, “just … even if everything’s fine, we’re on our own for extended periods and like you say – it’s starting to seem less and less likely that we’re going to get our repair and replacement crew any time soon. We’re a month from the edge, and although I personally am holding out hopes that Declivitorion will be as intact as the entire barmy arm has been, we may not get everything we need there. And then it’s a long hike back in towards the big settlements. Why should there only be two full AstroCorps officers on board when there could be three?”

  “Why not just get Cratch to relieve the Captain of command?”

  “I think that might just be opening a door we don’t want to,” Z-Lin pointed out.

  Decay grunted lightly, chewed another mouthful of steak and washed it down with some wine. “I’ll take the promotion, if you can guarantee it won’t be revoked once we take on a bunch of Molren.”

  “We can’t change AstroCorps regulations–”