Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (15 page)

Z-Lin sighed.

“So was whatever-it-was that we’re going in here to look for smaller or larger than a modular?” Sally asked, before anyone else could join in the burgeoning sarcasm-fest.

“It
was
a modular,” the Commander replied, consulting her pad.

“That’s not inspiring,” Sally said. “But who were they?”

“The
Denbrough
is the latest ship to have gone missing,” Clue related, “she was an AstroCorps Rep and Rec modular, last seen leaving Zero-Dark-Magi Chrysanthemum almost four years ago.”

“Four
years
?” Waffa exclaimed. “How much of them do they think is going to be left?”

“That’s sort of what we’re meant to be finding out,” Z-Lin noted, and then returned to her organiser. “The
Denbrough
’s mission was on the official record as a Repair and Recovery tour to ascertain the whereabouts of the warship
Yojimbo
, the
next-to-last
ship to vanish in the Bunzolabe three years before
that
.”

Sally felt that now, they were getting closer to the hub of the matter. “And
Yojimbo
was carrying…?”

“Nine thousand human, Molran and Blaran crewmembers,” Z-Lin said, giving Sally a look of affronted humanity so convincing the Chief Tactical Officer almost believed it.

Clue, you sly young slip of a girl
, Sally thought admiringly.
You’ve been practicing
. “Alright,” she said, “nine thousand poor innocent warship crewmembers, and presumably another three hundred and fifty-odd aboard the
Denbrough
. Keeping in mind that we haven’t got a hope in Hell of rescuing nine thousand people in a modular … if there’s some non-personnel-related reason we’re going after these lost ships – a reason, say, to do with ordnance or experimental equipment or sensitive data – it would be not just tactically sound to share it now, it would also be the sensible course, on an interpersonal level.”

Clue shrugged, and swiped at her pad. “I’m sending you all the known manifests of both the
Denbrough
and
Yojimbo
,” she said. “The warship, naturally, has significant firepower but – like her crew – it would prove difficult to get all of it on board. If there is anything extra-special, experimental, or classified on board that we are supposed to be looking for, it is above both my access level and, as far as I am aware, the Captain’s. This data is all we have to go on. The main piece of information I
believe
we are looking for is whether these lost ships are still in orbit or elsewhere in the system, or if they have been destroyed, or if they have been taken down to the surface – either of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World, or one of its assorted satellites.”

“A warship couldn’t land on a planet any more than a modular could,” Waffa said, examining his pad. “It’d collapse.”

“That’s right,” Z-Lin nodded. “If they’ve been taken down, we can assume they’re either destroyed, or they’ve been landed in some sort of controlled manner and subsequently disassembled.”

“If they’re still in space, the order I’m expecting we’ll be given is to hook up to the warship, and link up the
Denbrough
if we possibly can, and convoy all three ships out of there at relative speed,” Sally said, “in a shared field. Is that about the shape of it?”

“I’d think more than twice about ordering us to link our ship up to anything that’s been floating in the Bunzolabe for the better part of a decade,” Clue said. “And even if
Yojimbo
’s big guns weren’t already under hostile control, we’d be waving goodbye to the statistically-safest mission profile the second we hitched ourselves to a warship.”

“So we really are just looking around,” Sally said.

“That’s the plan.”

“If we do go down to the surface, we should take as few people as possible,” Sally advised. “I’ll put together some-”

Clue held up a hand. “We’ll want you on the ship,” she said, “whether we go down there or not. You’ll need to keep an eye on the systems here, make real-time adjustments to this interference engine of yours, keep the
Tramp
from shooting us on her own or whatever she might end up doing. Heck, even just letting Cratch out of the brig would be enough to put us into a shambles,” Janya nodded as the Commander said this. “You’re more use to us up here.”

Sally nodded too. Much as she hated to admit it, it made sense. “I would personally advise putting the brig on full power-down emergency lock,” she said. “That will effectively turn his cell into a sealed box no matter what the computer says. He’ll have enough air for a week, and if we’re longer than that…”

“Probably a good idea,” Z-Lin agreed. “The name of the game is locking up all moving parts on board the
Tramp
that might be turned against us.”

“If you sedated him, you wouldn’t need to worry about feeding him,” Janya said. “You could filter-feed him indefinitely. That way, Bunzo – or whatever agency is responsible for the hostile computer incursions – would have to not only hack into the brig controls and open everything up, he’d also have to tweak the medical array and send a janitorial to mess with the brig controls manually to revive him.”

“If we shot him in the head before we even come out of soft-space,” Zeegon added just a little acerbically, “it’d be even
harder
for the psychotic clown-God to turn him loose on us.”

Things degenerated into a multi-player exchange of quips and snipes and sarcastic retorts at this point, but Sally recognised it as a more or less harmless means of relieving the tension that was growing among the crew. They
were
going to do this, and now they were just arguing in order to make themselves more tetchy at each other than they were scared of Zeegon’s ‘psychotic clown-God’. Sally knew it, and – she saw from the carefully blank look the Commander gave her when she glanced up the table – Z-Lin knew it too.

Giving Clue a look of her own, letting the Commander know that whatever happened next was entirely the officers’ doing, Sally excused herself. Lots of arrangements to make, final tweaks to the Sally-Forth Engine to complete, emergency procedures to finalise.

Before she returned to her office, though, she printed Glomulus his next meal and took it in for him.

The Barnalk High Ripper was sitting on the end of his bed when she came down the broad aisle between the cells, studying his single sheet of senso-flimsy with an intentness that belied the fact that there couldn’t possibly be anything of interest on the thing. He looked up with a wide, gleaming smile when she arrived. His teeth, just a little bit too long to be anything but disturbing, were acceptably white but they always
looked
yellower than they were, in the frame of his pale face and his long, light-straw-blonde hair.

“Chief Tactical Officer Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed,” he said, rising to his feet and putting the flimsy on the little desk. “Please pass on my regards to The General for allowing me a view for these past few hours. And tell him that I have taken his advice about
cerebral dysphasic credulosis
very much to heart.”

“Tell him yourself,” Sally said curtly, tapped the controls, and then pushed the bowl of mushy rations halfway through the metaflux observation plate, so Cratch could step forward and pull it the rest of the way into his cell.

“I understand we’re going to be coming out of soft-space in twenty-four hours,” he said politely, picking up the bowl and giving the food a long, blatantly fraudulent sniff of delectation. “Anywhere exciting?”

“No,” Sally said. She reached a decision. “In fact, it’s so dull you’ll probably sleep through it.”

JANYA (NOW)

Janya was sitting in her lab, coincidentally thinking about Thord, when the ship came out of relative speed and slammed to a halt at the limit of the AstroCorps-defined safety parameters. Aside from a mild judder and a faint noise from the bowels of the ship, the manoeuvre didn’t disturb anything much in the dome. It was mostly down at the bridge levels that an emergency all-stop was
really
felt.

Nevertheless, Janya was on her feet as soon as the shake ran through the floor under her seat, and strode out of the lab to look up at the dome. It was set to the standard beige expanse that she usually left it on when they were at relative speed, since the grey nothingness of soft-space was the sort of view that got to you after a while. A few quick taps of the wall controls turned the dome panels transparent and slid the shields back.

By this stage they were already swiftly approaching all-stop, and from the black, starless gulf they had clearly come out of soft-space in the middle of deepest, darkest nothing, so the dome’s screens were more than up to the task of deflecting any particles they might have the extraordinary statistical luck of running into. Janya stood looking up at the rich void of space – a sight she hadn’t been expecting to see for at least another couple of months – until her pad pinged.

Before she could raise the organiser, she stopped with a grimace. A pain, mild but insistent, had awakened and pulsed behind her left eye, near her temple. She raised her hand, rubbed. The pulse faded, throbbed, faded again … but didn’t vanish.

She finished lifting the pad towards her face, frowning, and opened the communicator. “Commander,” she responded to the ping.

“Crisis,” Clue said brusquely, “probably.”

“What happened?” Janya asked. She assumed, if the mysterious hostiles that had destroyed Declivitorion had managed to find them in soft-space – as it seemed to be generally accepted that they could – then she and the Commander would not be having this conversation. “Another hull breach?”

“Looks like it,” Z-Lin confirmed, although even as she spoke Janya was looking at the same report as it skimmed across her organiser screen. She couldn’t decipher it as quickly as the Commander, though. “As for the cause, you’d better tell us,” Clue continued. “You’re closest to it.”

This was true, Janya saw. The breach seemed to have been next to the ‘seed airlock’, the renovated section of the dome through which Thord and Maladin had passed on their way from the farm below, out into space. It was all heavily reinforced and had held for the better part of two years, so she had a hard time believing any of its seals had chosen this moment to give up the ghost. “I didn’t hear any sort of decompression,” she said with a frown, but headed in that direction. “The last time, when Sticky cut through that alcove in the eejit crèche, the hull rang like a bell.”

“Waffa says probably a microbreach,” Clue said.

“Okay. Oh, Commander?” Janya continued. “This might be my imagination, but…” she hesitated, unsure of how to phrase her question.

“Headache?” Clue saved her the trouble.

“Everybody?”

“You, me, Sally and Waffa,” Clue replied grimly, “so I’m guessing yes, and I’m guessing it’s no coincidence. At least this time it hasn’t seemed to have killed any eejits, but we might be looking at a prelude. Waffa’s on his way up to meet you with a couple of the ables, but the rest of us are headed to the farm right now to see if the pups are warming up to let us have it, or if this is just their way of inviting us down there.”

“If it is, we’d better think about giving them pads instead,” Janya remarked, rubbing at her temple again lightly. “Oh, and that reminds me – I assume we looked at the pads we’d given to our passengers?”

There was no shortage of organiser pads on board. Even with the ability to store the data and repurpose any of the several hundred crew pads that were in storage after The Accident, there was a good supply of baseline models for passengers and new crew, not to mention the more basic designs that were part of the able-or-eejit uniform. They’d given one to each of the Bonshooni after picking them up at The Warm, and offered one to Thord. The aki’Drednanth had politely declined. Her envirosuit’s communication system could interface with the crew’s organisers and the ship’s comms.

“Yeah,” Clue replied, “but there was nothing. Dunnkirk had forgotten his on the bridge after we left the edge. He was almost as absent-minded as Contro when it came to the pad, and he only ever used it for comms anyway. Turns out there was no data stored on it at all, aside from a couple of little notes – mostly just reminders about who each of us were, and he hadn’t accessed
them
since a few weeks out of The Warm.”

“Maladin’s pad?”

“In with his belongings,” Clue reported. “A bit more heavily-used, but nothing of value.”

She hadn’t heard a sound, as it happened, because not only had it been a tiny hull breach, it had also been inside the seed airlock. There were several layers of plating and bulkheads surrounding the chamber – Waffa wasn’t the galaxy’s greatest engineer, but he worked safe – not to mention an arc of the dome’s segmented floorplan, with rooms and corridors further muffling the soft-space decompression. And, she soon learned, as the report had indicated it had been a tiny breach.

The chamber had been fitted with a door on the corridor-side, another of the heavy emergency blast doors from The Warm, like the access doors down in the farm ring. An eejit was already present at the door, but he was not standing. He was sitting, hands clasped on either side of his head, staring into space. Janya slowed as she approached.

“Thorkhild?” she said. It was an educated guess. This was Thorkhild’s general maintenance area, and the directionless stare of this particular eejit seemed slightly more like blindness than the standard eejit glaze. Thorkhild, with his serene repair-work and occasional odd pronouncements, was one of the more memorable Midwich Eejits Thord and her Bonshooni friends had helped to configure. “Are you alright?”

Thorkhild looked up, eyes staring off to Janya’s left. As she often did when she saw Thorkhild’s sightless gaze, she was struck by an insistent memory of the fallen star cultists with their stone eyes. “Uh,” he said. “Uh…”