Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (10 page)

“It’s a start,” Bendis agreed, then cleared his throat. “Right. To cases,” he pulled out a bulky-looking organiser pad of his own, flipped it carelessly in the air – it would have tumbled to the floor with the lazy movement, but he was clearly well-accustomed to the low gravity – and activated it. “Here’s our latest situation reports and biggest needs … shit, damn it,” he muttered, flicking a finger across the pad and then tapping rapidly. “Sorry, this isn’t my pad, it’s just one of the only ones we have with a functioning network, and it’s ancient. Belonged to my brother,” Lou’s voice wobbled for a moment, then firmed. “Should be sending it now.”

“Got it,” Decay confirmed, and Clue looked down at her own pad and nodded.

“As you can see, it’s basic disaster stuff,” Lou said, bouncing the pad on his knuckles again before taking it in his other hand. “As to your own needs, for your ship and crew … well, about a month ago, you’d’ve been parked less than a mile from a state-of-the-art refit and repair Chrys for modulars like yours. Right now, of course, you’re parked less than a mile from fuck-all.”

“What’s your long-term exit strategy for this place?” Z-Lin asked. “Assuming you’ve had time to think about it at all, which you probably haven’t.”

“People seem divided about moving out or starting to rebuild,” Lou admitted. “With a population in the high hundreds or low thousands, we could almost sustain naturally as long as we can seal up the Chalice. And we’d want to get the exchanges running again, at least in some places. We’ve got enough nutrient supplements to keep us all from going gee-lass, but … you know. The humans at least, none of us are sleeping well and we’re all farting like demons, and basically in the long term there’s no substitute for actually having gravity.”

Janus nodded along with the others.
Gee-lass
was settler slang for the assortment of maladies, largely affecting humans, that came from prolonged exposure to zero-gee. It referred first and foremost to muscular feebleness and brittleness of the bones, turning a human – figuratively speaking – to glass. And the lesser complications were pretty unpleasant too. “We can help you out with some medical supplies,” Clue said, “but even with the damage, you guys are probably in a better place than we are in terms of provisions and materials.”

“As to the moving-out lobby…” Lou went on, “I don’t know. There’s talk of using some of the Fergie relative drives to convoy up a field generator for the cruiser, the
Maka Lomgrem
. Item 9 on that list, I think it was,” he gestured with his pad. “Fly it out of here, get it off towards … well, whatever safe and intact world is left. Probably start with Eshret by the books, but damned if I know why we’d bother. In fact,” he said, turning to Contro, “your Chief Engineer might be of use. We’re short on specific engineering know-how and guidance, especially with the synth down.”

“Ahh, yeah,” Clue said awkwardly. “About that.”

“You say ‘specific’…” Decay smiled. “Our Controversial-To-The-End here is a nuclear transpersion physicist. Not an
engineer
as such – just about the closest we have to one, according to AstroCorps protocol.”

“Wow,” Lou looked at Contro in surprise.

Contro waved. “Hello!”

“Wow is right,” Clue said in a dry tone as Bendis waved back dazedly.

“He might be able to help with your power stations,” Janya suggested, “although he’s strictly a theoretical physicist,” she smiled faintly. “Aren’t you, Contro?”

“Theoretically!”

“Right,” Bendis said, “well, we
had
a group of transpersion boffins. All Molren, though,” he added. “Never actually seen a human one,” he shook his head as if to clear it of a mildly-distracting flight of fancy. “Doesn’t really matter,” he went on with a lopsided smile, “since the problem with our reactors is that they’re all
gone
. Unless you can build one from scratch, out of ice and warmium and broken pieces of–”

“I could give it a try–”

“Contro,” Janus spoke up quietly, “not the time.”

“Aw,” Contro said, although in his defence the usual blank optimism of his voice was muted. “It’s alright. I guess I wouldn’t be likely to have much luck making anything out of ice. But anything I
can
do,” he clipped off a cheerfully sloppy salute, “happy to help!”

“Actually, truth be told what we need most right now is either more robots like the Fergunakil
giela
, or big fellows like this,” Lou gestured at the two ables, who straightened slightly. The simple shift in stance made the clones seem to swell and ascend almost to Decay’s height. “Ables – nothing complex, because it gets in the way of their muscle coordination, but just some blokes to help with the rescue and repair operations. Most of them are going on down in digs, or in other collapsed areas. The ability to bench your own body weight is preferable to a degree in transpersion physics right now.”

“We might just be able to help you with that,” Clue murmured, and flicked an inventory item across to Lou’s pad.

His eyes widened as he loaded and read it. “What the…”

“Crew dramatically reduced, plant configuration systems damaged,” Z-Lin explained concisely. “We needed a half-dozen ables to fulfil the function of one. So long story short we have a big, strong, basically expertise-free crew.”

“Holy wow.”

“Yeah,” Z-Lin chuckled. “I’ll start assembling and marching them out for you, and your folks can delegate them to whatever you need. We also have nineteen strapping Bonshoon settlers, and a couple of their kids are about the size of an able,” she cocked her head, scrolling the items on her pad. “If your reactors are gone, how are you keeping the lights on?”

“Since The Warm’s heat exchange generators started to die and the warmium started dropping back towards ambient deep space temperatures,” Lou said, “we’ve been running mostly off some solar batteries, Fergunak turbines that are in danger of freezing up any moment … crap like that.”

“Items 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 on the list,” Decay said politely, looking up from his own device.

“Yeah, knew they were there somewhere,” Bendis muttered.

“We’ll see what we can do to get you some more power,” Z-Lin said, making a note and turning to Contro, who was now bouncing his wristwatch playfully from hand to hand. He grabbed it out of the air and gave her a guileless yet guilty smile. “Can you feed the reactor’s output out into the spar, and charge up any batteries or other stuff they might want to hook up?”

“Sure!” Contro said happily. “I think so!”

“We’ve got a couple of power station grunts who aren’t doing us much good,” Lou said, “they might be able to help. Ables, of course, but–”

“Hold on, Lou,” Decay said quietly. “These counts … the nine hundred survivors found so far includes about a hundred humans, an estimated hundred and fifty Fergunak, and the rest are Molranoids?”

“That’s about right,” Bendis said. “A hundred and ten humans, I think it was last time I checked for sure. Molranoids are generally tougher, see, so we’ve found more survivors in rough spots and we’ve had more
recoveries
from serious injuries than
deaths
from them. I think one of our guys in logistics said that this was a fairly normal disaster distribution. That’s part of the reason they divide ‘em up by species at all, you know – for timing and triage purposes. And our survivors are mostly Molren since they were the most numerous species aside from humans,” the Acting Controller sighed heavily. “Anyway, the longer we go, the fewer
living
humans we’re going to find among the ruins. Statistically.”

“But the human count also counts ables?”

“They’re divided at a sublevel,” Lou said, “but it’s hard to make out because there’s only eighteen of us.”

“
Eighteen
?” Clue exclaimed.

“And the other ninety-odd are ables?” Decay insisted.

Lou nodded unhappily. “The thing is,” he said, “there were a couple of big able living habs that went completely untouched – we’re not sure, but it looks like they were on sleep-shift and that might have had something to do with it, like their … I don’t know, their mental signatures or something were slowed down, harder to find or target. It’s all in the reports we forwarded to you. Anyway, that was about seventy ables right there. They’re tough too,” he added with a little shrug, “so they survive a knocking-around. That’s what they’re designed for. Technically, medically, they’re just very tough humans. We needed to use a few of them for transfusions and transplants, but there was more than enough among the casualties that we didn’t need to do anything too grisly,” he uttered a hollow laugh. “Lucky us, eh?”

“Well, like I say,” Clue said awkwardly, “our medical bay can fabricate organs and things if needed, even if we’re understaffed and the configuration system is shot. Meat’s easy enough.”

“Appreciated. It was weird though.
All
our fabrication plants were hit,
all
our big habitats and gathering places, but those two big dorms of ables were okay,” he grimaced. “Well, ‘okay’ in that there used to be eight plants and about three thousand ables. Statistically, like I say, they did pretty well compared to the rest of us. Better than the Bonshooni, even, from about the same starting population. I’m thinking it
must
’ve been the fact that they were sleeping.”

“Pretty small starting population,” Janya remarked idly, “for ables.”

“It’s a very old and established settlement,” Janus noted. “Not exactly the wild frontier.”

“Right,” Lou said, giving him a nod, “and the general ideology wasn’t in favour of having too many of them around anyway,” he added, sounding apologetic. “There were limits to how many ables we could print off per head of population, and what configurations we could give them, just like on an AstroCorps ship – except in emergency situations, of course,” he added with a second little nod, this time in Z-Lin’s direction. “We’re not about to turn our noses up at their help now, though, are we? Wild frontier’s got nothing on this mess. We’d’ve been printing the big buggers off around the clock since the attack, if we had any printers.”

“We can triple your able complement if you’re really not too fussy about their smarts,” Clue said. “If you’re willing to trade us for any more starship-capable specimens that we could add to our crew, we’d be more than willing to make that transaction permanent when we leave. I’ve calculated that we could swap at least five of our ables for a single qualified one from The Warm, depending on the specifics of the qualifications.”

“Seriously?” Bendis blinked.

“Seriously,” Clue replied, “but make no mistake, these ables of ours have
problems
, alright? They’ll be able to do simple stuff for you, but they’re pretty scrambled. And at the end of the day you still have to feed them, and keep them from going gee-lass, and fill their lungs.”

“Scrambled is fine,” Lou assured them, “as long as they can follow basic instructions. And if your modular can feed them and keep them breathing, we’ve got enough systems to keep them alive too.”

“Let’s say the ones we give you will be able to follow basic instructions,” Z-Lin hedged. “Our mutual regulations probably won’t allow us to offload our
absolute
bottom-shelf boys on you, even if we were inclined to be so irresponsible.”

“It would require a bit of creative request filing and computer trickery,” Janya said, “but if we offload enough eejits – ables, under the shipboard emergency protocols and replaced key positions with ables from The Warm like you were saying, we could probably use the same protocols to print off as many more as they might need here,” she paused, then added carefully, “or at least as many as they’re able to support, which like Lou says, has to be a few more than our ship can, even with all this…” she waved vaguely around at the docking area at which their ship was the only operational vessel.

“I assume your own plants are
gone
, as opposed to
damaged
– much like your reactors,” Clue said. Bendis nodded grimly. “And you don’t have the parts or expertise left to repair
our
damaged shipboard systems?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Decay said without raising his eyes, and Lou shook his head sadly. Janus wondered when the man had last slept.

“Afraid not,” he said. “Like I told you, we
could
have done a great job on your modular, but that was then and this is now. We can’t do anything with your computer, we’ve got no synth, and we can’t help with your fabrication plant. We’ve got plenty of raw materials to stock up your reactor and your oxygen farms and all of that, and make a few other repairs for you, but we can’t do any of the big tech. I doubt even the Fergies can help you with that.”

“Alright,” Clue said, and they finally started to walk along the short concourse towards the emergency-bulkhead-enclosed central transit hub. “Our main tech repairs will have to wait, we’ve come this far without them and we can make do with what we can get from here. We help out as much as we can, upgrade what we can upgrade, and move on to the next settlement up the chain when we can.”

“Mm,” Lou said noncommittally.

“If there
is
another settlement,” Janus spoke up. “You know, I’m just saying.”

“Even if they’ve all been simultaneously hit,” Clue said quite firmly, “which I still find a bit difficult to imagine, Bayn Balro and The Warm each seem to have comparable proportions of surviving people and infrastructure. The larger the world, the better our chances of finding more significant undamaged areas.”

“Actually, that’s true,” Janus admitted. “And also I just realised I should probably have been more up-beat than that, seeing as how I’m ship’s counsellor and everything.”

“Yes,” Clue said, “let’s all of us keep it up-beat.”

There turned out to be a couple of different directions one could head from the
Tramp
, even with the comprehensiveness of the destruction, depending on whereabouts in the array one was headed. They didn’t see any sign of Waffa, or any indication as to which way he had headed. As Bendis had told them, Janus saw that there wasn’t so much damage here as
erasure
, but plenty of makeshift seals and cladding had been flung into place to make this docking spar capable of holding atmosphere against the vacuum outside. It was a mess, more like a slapdash construction site than a rescue and repair operation, and the overall cathedral-like impressiveness of the space was diluted by the panels and wiring and safety strips.