Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  “Wait, are we one of the few AstroCorps crews left, or not?” Decay eyed Z-Lin, his smile not fading but taking on a wry tilt. “Let’s come back to this conversation when you’re sure.”

  Z-Lin sighed again, seeing that this was not going to get them anywhere. “Alright. Tell me about this bar you’d like to build.”

  If she had to be honest, Z-Lin shared Decay’s – and apparently the rest of the crew’s – pessimism about what they were going to find when they reached Declivitorion.

  For a planet so far out towards the edge of the galaxy, it was old and very well-established. It had been one of the first major planets the Six Species had settled on a permanent basis, on the grounds that it was a good long way from the Core and – given what little they knew of Damorakind’s expansion practices – this gave them plenty of time to see the Cancer coming.

  Declivitorion had, subsequently, become a paradoxically teeming and highly-technological settlement in the middle of nowhere, a hub on the very rim of the wheel. Another benefit of being so far from the main worlds of Six Species commerce, apart from needing to perform commerce with itself, was that people who came all the way out to Declivitorion tended to stay, because – as the crew of the Tramp had discovered – the journey one way was painful enough. The prospect of doing it again in the other direction was simply too much for many people, and so Declivitorion collected the driftwood that washed up on its shores.

  Its relative proximity to the big farming and general supply worlds, furthermore, meant it could mechanise and outfit for starship-servicing all the more comprehensively, and let its population explode. The supercities of Declivitorion housed, at last census, in excess of fourteen billion Molren, Blaren, Bonshooni, humans, and even Fergunak in the planet’s heavily-industrialised seawater canals. There had even been a half-dozen aki’Drednanth, although Thord had claimed they had since taken to their ships and scattered back across the galaxy.

  All in all, it was too good to be true. There was a strong AstroCorps presence and the opportunity to replace almost their entire ship piece-by-piece before the final leg of their journey. Z-Lin couldn’t have said for sure how she felt about getting a new crew after so long. Her gut reaction was almost anti-social – they’d gotten along fine on their own and they didn’t need any help from a bunch of clean-cut strangers, damn it – but she knew this was just survivor’s instinct, curling up inside her and growling at anyone who tried to help. The main problem with getting a proper AstroCorps crew again would be dumping all their eejits on a Declivitorion fabrication centre and getting used to a normal-sized able-backup compliment. Not to mention the month of renovations the ship would require for a team to rebuild her butchered crew quarters.

  The rest of her shipmates might not acclimatise well either. She doubted they’d opt to stay on Declivitorion, but how did you go back to being a lowly non-Corps subordinate with a single berth, after you’d been the chief of an entire sector with a series of rooms the size of a decent manor house? She’d known that game of snatch-the-quarters was trouble as soon as it had begun.

  But one thing she was sure of – Declivitorion was far too much to hope for. Why else would she have resumed sounding Decay out about signing onto the official register, unless she’d been convinced on some level that they weren’t going to get any new Molran crewmembers?

  As low as her expectations had been, however, Z-Lin was completely unprepared for the sight of Declivitorion as they dropped out of relative speed and decelerated into the harsh blue light of the Taras Talga system. Even before the heavily-cityscaped planet came into view, they should have been getting veritable shouts from the array of Chrysanthemums, Mandelbrot arrays, outer-planet settlements and system transport networks. It was all silent.

  But even this was not enough to prepare them.

  Once more, the entire sentient crew as well as their two Bonshooni passengers had gathered on the bridge to witness their exit from soft-space. At first glance, it was as if they were cruising back into orbit around Wynstone, the only difference being that the great dusty orbital Attic was gone. The planet, displayed as a glittering sphere of cities and superhighways in the Tramp’s databases, was seared and charred to a black, ash-choked, magma-veined ruin. There were traces of satellites in orbit, and larger hulks of stations and hubs farther out, but every last one of them was dead in space. Down on the primeval surface of the planet itself, there didn’t seem to be anything left alive above the microbial level. Indeed, only the space junk convinced them that they’d even arrived in the right system.

  They decelerated into proximity with Declivitorion extremely slowly and cautiously, ensuring their engines were fully powered-up and their shields at battle-stations strength. Nobody on the bridge was under any illusion that this would help them against the clearly terrifying might of the attackers responsible for this destruction, but at least it would protect them from the free-floating debris.

  It was Sally who eventually broke the silence.

  “This could pass for a massive series of asteroid impacts,” she said, “if it hadn’t also taken out every other piece of tech in the system. This was definitely the work of hostiles – no way of knowing for sure if we’re talking about the same hostiles, but…” she hesitated.

  “What is it, Sally?” Z-Lin said.

  “Depending on when this happened,” Sally continued, “and taking various planetary and stellar movements into account … plotting this against the hit on Bayn Balro, and the one on The Warm … they’re not just coordinated chronologically, they’re coordinated spatially. The other settlements, the ones that hadn’t been attacked, we’d veered off-true as part of our flight path, heading out here in an arc so we would hit the settlements we did, as waypoints.”

  “What are you saying?” Z-Lin forced herself to look away from the viewscreen, and the angry red-black thunderhead of a world growing steadily in its centre. A world that had been home to fifteen billion people. “The attacks line up?”

  “Close to it,” Sally said quietly, “and as near as I can plot it, assuming this happened any time in the past twelve to eighteen months.”

  “That long ago?” Decay said. “If it happened more than a year ago, then even if they hadn’t heard about it in the barmy arm, Shosha Ranch and Standing Wave would have received word,” he looked back at the window, shoulders slumping, and then said what Z-Lin was thinking. “Maybe they did. They didn’t share any information with us at Sosha Ranch, and the Fleet guys at Standing Wave were even worse.”

  “But why wouldn’t they tell us?” Zeegon demanded, his voice cracking slightly.

  Z-Lin shook her head. “It took us ten months to get here from Standing Wave. Even if this happened a year and a half ago – which would mean it took place at almost exactly the same time as the attacks on The Warm and Bayn Balro – information would only just have started filtering back,” she said heavily. “Especially if ships inbound from here were cut off, or destroyed before they could even get away. The whole system would just have gone dark. This is way more extreme than any of the other attacks. And if word did come back, through the Fleet and through AstroCorps, it would be immediately bumped into a war-footing security level. They wouldn’t talk about it to anyone.”

  “And we haven’t met any Corps guys,” Sally said grimly. “Only Fleet, and Separatists. Who wouldn’t tell us a God damned thing.”

  “And how did they manage to time it that freakily, exactly?” Zeegon asked. “I know, none of us have any idea, but there are only so many options, right? Either they had ships strung out in a line and all agreed to attack at that one moment and now they’ve moved on to whatever the creepy Damorakind version of Phase Two is … or their fleet was able to travel from Bayn Balro to The Warm to Declivitorion in days, maybe hours. A trip which took us the better part of two years. Do we know of any sort of technology that allows for that sort of speed?”

  “Underspace drive,” Decay snarled.

  “No,” Janya, who until the
n had been standing quietly by Waffa’s console, spoke up. “That, at least, is unlikely. The distance between Bayn Balro and The Warm was much less than The Warm to Declivitorion, but even there we saw a slight discrepancy in the timing. Unless they’re coordinating again, to make it look like they’re not quite travelling instantaneously from place to place, it’s still taking them more time than the underspace would take.”

  “Or maybe they’re pausing a bit between each dive,” Sally said, “to recover and charge their weapons or whatever. Maybe decontaminate themselves from the flight, if they’re that familiar with the technology. Shit, for all we know it’s the darkerness itself, again, finding its way to life the way the Artist said it did. Those bits of The Warm that had just been erased, come on. We were all sort of thinking that looked like they’d been swallowed by the underspace, weren’t we?”

  “The damage to The Warm wasn’t consistent with the Boonie,” Janya said. “That was the first thing we checked. Plus, the Artist’s drive could only swallow about two-thirds of the Boonie, which is why we were able to find the rest back where we rescued Rakmanmorion. The damage here, to all the Chrysanthemums – not to mention the planet itself – this is way bigger.”

  “So maybe it’s not the Artist,” Zeegon said, “not anymore. Maybe it’s the underspace itself, or whatever un-lives in there.”

  “As far as we know, the ‘underspace’ showed no interest whatsoever in attacking or absorbing this universe,” Janya disagreed. “Quite the opposite, in fact. Plus, our eejits aren’t getting edgy the way they did the last time, when there was darkerness around. If there’s a new series of underspace events happening, they’re nothing like what we’ve seen before.”

  “And Thord knows what underspace shenanigans smell like,” Janus added, “telepathically speaking. Pretty sure she would have mentioned it by now.”

  “Right,” Janya gave the counsellor a respectful nod. “We have to conclude – for now, anyway – that these attacks are something else entirely. How they’re travelling so fast between–”

  “Contact,” Decay said suddenly. “Incoming ships,” he tapped at his controls. “Oh.”

  “Let me guess,” Z-Lin said coldly, “how many Fergunak are closing in around us from all sides?”

  “Well, to borrow a rather tired cliché,” General Moral Decay (Alcohol) replied, “it looks like all of them.”

  WAFFA

  Everyone started shouting at once.

  “Subluminal drive not responding when I press this,” Zeegon yelled.

  “Comms interrupted,” Decay reported, “video feeds and sensors down, transmitters blocked, nod reception only. Last hit showed at least a thousand gunships, probably as many as five times that. But we’re blind and mute until they ping us.”

  Certainly looks like more than a thousand, Waffa had time to think, staring out of the viewscreen, before his own workstation came alive with its own warnings.

  “Battle stations,” Clue ordered simultaneously, tapping on her console and summarising his own thoughts with a succinct, “we’re not completely blind as long as we can look out of the window.”

  “Damn it,” Waffa shouted as his watch started relating strident information to workstation 19 that he had built into the appliance, “engine fluctuating, some sort of grand-trans collapse, the big cables are going cold. Shields and life-support will hold for now and we’ll be able to stay in orbit, but cruise is gone and the relative toruses are offline. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Helm completely dead,” Zeegon slapped at his console while Boonie chittered in agitation on his shoulder.

  “I’ve just peed a bit,” Janus declared in the tumult.

  “Weapons offline,” Sally reported, “shields are up but they’ve hit us with some sort of pulse, it’s scrambled our synth and caused a force reboot. I can get you some light arms but we might as well vent our recycling tanks at the bastards.”

  “We’ll come back to that bit where you said ‘synth’ just now,” Z-Lin said, cutting through the babble, “but for the moment, what we have here is a Torres-Frye Overwhelm. In basic training, they called it a shark cage. Not a damn thing we can do about it, one modular against more than a hundred gunships and they can basically deafen us with their gridnet chatter. It’s like an electromagnetic pulse with manners. Just stay calm. They can probably afford to hit us a good forty or fifty times if they have as many ships as it looks like they have,” sure enough, in the viewscreen, the piebald-grey-hulled gunships were still gathering and massing between them and the ruined planet below. Presumably the same was happening all around the ship, Waffa thought as he tapped frantically at his watch. Even Contro was looking at his organiser in bemusement shading towards concern. “It will take a minimum of a few minutes to regain our senses and their next wave will hit us before that, so we’re not going anywhere,” bit by bit, as the Commander spoke the rest of the crew grew calm. “The good news is, while they’re caging us, they’re not actually hitting us with ordnance. They want to talk. They want to play. The very fact that they’ve cut off everything except inbound nod-comms is proof of that. They want us sitting and listening. Now if you guys do your jobs right – and you will – we’ll get the reactor back online first and that means with all the other protocols knocked out we’ll be able to feed all that power into the shields for the time being. So when they eventually stop talking our ears off, it’s going to take them a couple more minutes of heavy fire to breach our hull.”

  “A couple of minutes?” Zeegon exclaimed. Maladin, Dunnkirk, Janus and Janya were retreating into a corner and staying out of the way.

  “If it’s a choice between a couple of minutes sucking sweet, sweet air and dying right now, I’ll take the couple of minutes,” Z-Lin said.

  “Okay, but a couple of minutes without guns isn’t going to do us much good,” Zeegon said.

  “Against five thousand Fergie gunships?” Sally gave a humourless laugh, her own hands still busy on her controls. “It’d take us a couple of hours to take them all out even if we had guns, and they didn’t have shields, and they weren’t shooting back.”

  “I’d better toddle on across to the engine room,” Contro said, uncharacteristically serious despite his words. “The maze has collapsed, I need to trace it back up. You know, with – the thingy – it won’t – the red–”

  “Contro, stop explaining what you have to do and go and do it,” Z-Lin ordered. “Each new cage they hit us with will make us that much slower to recover.”

  “Righto!” Contro hurried out the door.

  The Commander tapped on her console a few more times, and sighed aggressively. “Now, Chief Tactical,” she said witheringly, “basically all that stuff I just said, throw it out the nearest airlock if we don’t have a synthetic intelligence on board. If the Tramp’s running on a normal computer right now, then these fuckers have just killed us all. Life support will be gone in fifteen minutes, and the exchange will go in ten. If we’re lucky it’ll go with a roar, and paste us all across the internal bulkheads. Finish the job The Accident started. If we’re unlucky, it’ll go with a whimper and we’ll have time to asphyxiate while we scramble for the life-pods. The insanely-misnamed life-pods,” she added emphatically, “that Ferguank call ‘meat-eggs’,” she took a deep breath. “So please tell me that when you said ‘synth’ earlier, it was not a slip of the tongue.”

  “Pretty sure Bruce is on board,” Sally said guardedly.

  “What?” Waffa heard himself squeak. He literally, actually squeaked. Even while about to be torn to pieces by a couple of thousand cybernetic space-sharks, he cringed with embarrassment.

  “I was wondering about it already, because of a few things,” Sally said, “but then when we lucked out of that corsair situation…”

  “Well, it’s going to luck us out of this one too. Bruce?” Z-Lin raised her voice. “Need-to-know time. Speak up.”

  “Yeah, hi,” the synth drawled.

  “If we’re all alive in an hour’s
time, we’re all going to sit down in a circle together and listen to the absolutely God damn fascinating story of how you’re on board and how you’re not on standby,” Clue said, “but in the meantime, do you have a special circuit board you’d like me to massage sensually?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” Bruce said with an embarrassed chuckle.

  “You’d damn well better be. Right,” Z-Lin turned to Waffa. “As soon as power starts trickling in, coordinate with Sally and Bruce and get it to the shields.”

  “On it,” Waffa and Sally said simultaneously.

  “Getting a nod,” Decay said.

  “Right on time,” Z-Lin said. “I assume it’s audio only,” Decay nodded. “We can see enough to make us shitscared just by looking outside,” the Commander grunted. “Just keep working on getting a video uplink, Decay. In the meantime, let’s hear it.”

  “Copy,” Decay said, all four hands skimming over the panels. “Nobody’s going to be terribly surprised to hear that these guys are calling under the Larger Dark Moving Below school ident.”

  “Not even slightly,” Z-Lin said, although Waffa couldn’t prevent a little crawling jolt of shock. He’d thought the school had been left behind in the ocean under Bayn Balro. Even crunching the numbers and finding they could quite comfortably have been rescued and beaten the Tramp here, it was jarring. The Fergunak were already insane, and a year or more at high relative speeds, completely alone in one of those awful ships, would not warp a Fergunakil mind any more than it was already warped. They didn’t fly in convoy, they didn’t share the grey. They didn’t need to.

  Even knowing, after Standing Wave and the smokeberries, that the Fergunak from Bayn Balro were ahead of them, had not prepared him. Waffa found himself snarling as Decay opened the comms and let the melodious, gentle voice drift across the bridge. The voice of the Larger Dark Moving Below was … it was what dying under the water sounded like. Distant, serene, detached, horrible.