Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (12 page)

Now, moving in the virtually-nonexistent gravity of The Warm, Thord loped and bounded across the warmium ground with slow scooping pushes of her squat legs and her enormous arms, the rounded fawn blocks of her suit swinging and shifting as she stretched and coiled. The legs ended in huge boots that looked more like hooves, while the hands, like a Blaran’s, each sported three fingers and a thumb – although like a human she only had one pair. They were long, thick, and bestial, even if the gauntlets concealed the claws and the thick fur. Aki’Drednanth tended to eschew fine object manipulation, but were more than capable of operating machinery, limb augmentations and
giela
-like remote devices that enabled it for them.

Decay had seen a few different variations on the aki’Drednanth envirosuit, the heavy sealed machinery that kept the creatures chilled to their natural and accustomed state of deep freeze. He’d even seen one aki’Drednanth, the legendary Hibernos Rex of the Molran Fleet Council of Captains, wearing the ancient Damorakind-crafted envirosuit that she adopted in ceremonial situations. When the Molren donned their full dress uniforms, Hibernos Rex habitually swapped her Fleet-standard suit for the gleaming obsidian spines and glowing blue highlights of her ancestral slave-garb. An aki’Drednanth in
that
getup was truly terrifying.

Thord was wearing the more usual boxy arrangement of articulated refrigeration units, scratched and dented on the outside and decorated with stickers, prints, and even the occasional riveted-on plaque. The helmet, a huge blocky thing that looked like the shovel on an excavator, was featureless except for a voice synthesiser bumper under the shelf of her chin, and a set of signal lights on each side roughly corresponding to the positions of her eyes. The bumper would be connected either to sensors in the gauntlets that Thord could use to ‘type’ – fine object manipulation aside, many aki’Drednanth had formidable muscular control and could quite easily make tiny shifts in the joints of each finger sufficient to recreate a standard alphabet and to write very nearly as fast as a person could talk – or to the larynx pit where sub-vocal exhalations could be detected and converted. The aki’Drednanth did not have the palate for standard speech, although they did have a decidedly untamed language of their own. In either case, the bumper translated the signals and emitted them as speech.

The lights, a group of three short horizontal blue-green bars on either side of the helmet, shifted in colour and switched on and off in accordance with a nuanced emotional spectrum that a wise person figured out fairly quickly when dealing day-to-day with an aki’Drednanth.

These simple devices were how the aki’Drednanth communicated with any
non
-aki’Drednanth. Among her own kind, Thord’s primary means of communication would be telepathy – silent, highly complex, and blindingly fast, utterly belying the bestial nature of the species. It was Fergunakil technology, of course. Decay didn’t know whether the Damorakind had wanted or needed their aki’Drednanth slaves to speak, but the accessories were of Fergunakil design.

Thord half-glided, half-pounced across the ground and dropped delicately to stand in front of them on feet and knuckles. She didn’t seem to have any magnetics in her suit, depending entirely on her mass and an exquisitely-honed awareness of her momentum and power to keep herself from pushing too hard and too high.

“I am Thord,” she said, her bumper’s voice a mellow bass-androgynous rumble with a hint of Molranoid harmonic. “You are the new Controller, and the crew of the modular that has just recently arrived.”

Decay didn’t know
every
aki’Drednanth by name. Even a tiny population like the five hundred or so that made up the ‘Fourth’ species – the Fergunak and humanity had joined later, making the aki’Drednanth the Fourth as well as the first non-Molranoid species – was constantly shifting and changing. The great creatures lived and died like any other, legends and theories of their immortality notwithstanding. In purely organic terms they were longer-lived than human or Fergunakil but short-lived in comparison to Molran, Blaran or Bonshoon. Some of them even departed to their ancestral homegrounds of the Great Ice where the bulk of their population dwelled. Sometimes they returned, and sometimes they were replaced with newcomers from the Core. And this was even before you considered the added complication of aki’Drednanth rebirth, which could mean that even when an aki’Drednanth died, she was still able to be an arguably active member of society through the Dreamscape, and that it was entirely possible you hadn’t seen the last of her in the flesh, either.

Even so, he was reasonably sure he knew the pseudonyms of
most
of the aki’Drednanth at large among the Six Species, as of his last wide-ranging data-sift little over a year ago. Well enough to tell a well-travelled and integrated ancient like Hibernos Rex from a new arrival or relative recluse, at least. And he was pretty sure he’d never heard of Thord. This didn’t actually
mean
anything in and of itself, of course.

As if on cue, she raised a massive gauntlet to the battered helm of her envirosuit. With a
clunk
and a soft whisking sound of micromotors, the helmet lifted away in segments and folded back against her shoulders and chest.

GLOMULUS

As luck would have it, Contro and Janus had meandered off to one side and away from most of the group, almost forming a third point in a triangle already consisting of crew and The Warmies. This put Contro in a good position to see the aki’Drednanth – Contro, and more importantly, his watch.

It had been a stroke of luck, again, that Contro had been diddling around with his wristwatch and it had therefore ended up on the
outside
of his thermal. Sometimes in the pocket of his cardigan, and frequently on the ground, but usually in his hands. Glomulus had resigned himself to not seeing anything much of interest, and listening in on what was happening using the little organiser device he had discreetly hacked into some time ago. Now, he was being treated to a veritable video tour.

Of course, the wristwatch being in Contro’s hands instead of around his wrist meant that the daffy physicist was usually bouncing or flipping or tossing it back and forth, fumbling it and – at one disturbing point – putting it into his mouth. Janus had fortunately been close at hand and had rescued the device, which Contro had “mistaken for a toffee”.

The organiser had some pretty sophisticated stabilisation and extrapolation software, however, and even bouncing around and flipping end over end had little effect on what Cratch could see on his little monitor in the medical bay. The wristwatch device shot images at high speed and then rotated and angled and composited them into a clear, if slightly laggy point-of-view continuity at the receiving station. It was almost as good as being there, with the added benefit of not having to wear the universe’s lamest superhero costume.

“And here’s me without a bowl of snacks,” Glomulus mourned light-heartedly to the sterile, empty chamber.

Thord’s head was huge and heavy and covered with a long, thick, white pelt. Her cranium was much smaller than the lower part with its massive shaggy chin and muscular jaws. Huge vertical tusks like a row of thick eighteen-inch bananas curled up from her leathery black lower lip. It was just as well her eyes weren’t front-and-centre like they were on the heads of most apex predators. If they had been, Thord would have looked out at the world through a yellow picket fence.

Her eyes and ears, indeed, were small – almost an afterthought – vestigial sense organs long since superseded by the aki’Drednanth’s powerful telepathy. They were tucked away down behind her jaws at the base of her skull, barely visible above the heavy collar. What need did a creature have for sight, smell and hearing, when she could step across the mental landscape and smite the minds of higher and lower animals alike, with pinpoint accuracy and elegance?

How had such a creature ever become a slave?

Well. The answer to that varied, depending on who you asked. The common consensus seemed to be that the aki’Drednanth submitted to Damorakind for the same reason they still conducted part of their aki’Drednanth-to-aki’Drednanth communication in bestial howls – there was something interesting and enjoyable in it for them, something satisfying. This wasn’t an insulting assumption or implication that they
liked
to be slaves, however. A life of subjugation meant little when you considered, one, that aki’Drednanth existed mostly in worlds inside their own minds where not even Damorakind could go; two, that aki’Drednanth were functionally immortal and one lifetime among technically endless was ultimately a flick of an ear; three, that they were reportedly quite prized and well-treated in Damorakind society, used as status symbols and ceremonial guards; and four, that any one of them could just up and leave whenever she liked.

“Commander Z-Lin Clue,” Glomulus was faintly aware of the Commander introducing the party all over again. “This is Janus Whye, our counsellor; Controversial-To-The-End, Chief Engineer; this is Janya Adeneo, Head Of Science; and General Moral Decay (Alcohol), comms officer. The eej –
ables
are with Louzhan, I don’t know their names…”

It was also an issue of practicality, Cratch reflected. By bending to the Cancer rather than fighting back against it, the aki’Drednanth guaranteed that Damorakind felt no driving hostility or need to dominate or destroy them, or threaten their precious home range – the way they did, for example, against the rest of the Six Species. The aki’Drednanth did not need to exterminate the whole crawling Core, or waste effort and resources getting into an arms race when Damorakind inevitably adapted and struck back in an attempt to preserve their existence. They coexisted at what was, for them, a negligible price.

Some said this was naïve. Sooner or later, Damorakind
would
get around to eradicating the aki’Drednanth, once they could be sure of doing so without catastrophic reprisals. And living in ostensible servitude while your masters got around to the business of genocide was tantamount to signing your own death warrant.

“…just a little bit overwhelmed, none of us have seen one of your kind in a very long time…”

You were supposed to be able to tell, from the setting of the jaw and the shape of the enormous curving tusks, whether an aki’Drednanth was
really
male or female. The creatures themselves considered it an irritatingly irrelevant detail into which other species put far too much stock, and generally made a conscious effort to keep the information undisclosed. Out of linguistic convenience they used the female pronoun – not universally, but generally – for much the same reason people used it for starships. And because the female was often the larger and more powerful in the animal kingdom. Glomulus couldn’t really see from the dodgy vantage point of Contro’s wristwatch, though.

The pale, skeletally-thin doctor was aware of the fact that many aki’Drednanth removed their helmets simply to show that there was an
organism
inside the suit. It was not unheard-of for people – usually Fergunak using specially-designed
giela
and for unfathomable reasons of their own – to articulate a similarly-sized and gyroscopically-powered suit and pass it off as an unknown aki’Drednanth. Sometimes humans did it too, although why
they
did it was slightly less of a mystery. Neither Molran, Blaran nor Bonshoon would ever question an aki’Drednanth and would do what she asked almost without exception, and Glomulus knew this could be extremely lucrative if you could get away with it. Of course, even given their hereditary respect Molranoids were rarely fooled. And the penalties for impersonation were harsh. Not from the aki’Drednanth themselves, who found the whole practice rather amusing, but from the Molren. Molren just had
no
sense of humour when it came to aki’Drednanth.

“Decay.”

Still, Cratch thought, it was somehow crass, upsetting, to see Thord present herself this way, even though this was an exposure her kind clearly didn’t mind. It was undignified, as if they’d called her a liar before even introducing themselves.

He noticed that one of her tusks was artfully etched with a spiralling pattern of symbols and figures, while the rest were still smooth and unmarked. These decorations had an assortment of meanings and Glomulus wasn’t certain of them all, although teeth were a passion of his and the aki’Drednanth arguably had the most amazing teeth in the galaxy. Some aki’Drednanth had markings on all of their tusks, some on none -

“
Decay
.”

Glomulus blinked, and at the same time Contro dropped his watch, or more likely missed a catch and tossed it down by accident since it fell a bit faster than the gravity would account for. The screen was momentarily obscured by the pebbled warmium ground. Decay, Cratch realised as Contro picked the watch back up and bounced it in the air, had clearly been caught woolgathering – probably on the very same topics Glomulus himself had been.

“Aha,” Glomulus gloated theatrically, “but I am all the way over here on the ship, my dancing four-armed friend. I’m
allowed
to woolgather. You – alert and at attention at all times.”

“Commander?” the Blaran’s voice said in clearly-attempted briskness, as though he’d been caught ruminating rather than rhapsodising. Glomulus saw Thord raise her hand once again and the helmet folded back into place.

“Lou was just saying, he sent you the docking history as part of the lost vessels manifest,” Clue said, “regarding the Molran cruiser Thord arrived here on.”

“It was some weeks before the attack,” Thord said. The lowermost bar of her eye-lamp flickered swiftly – or that was what it looked like to Glomulus, but Contro had chosen this moment to flip the watch over and play with something on the screen, which meant that mostly what Glomulus got to see was Contro smiling in amiable confusion, the tip of Contro’s index finger as he pecked and prodded at the watch, Contro’s gaping nostrils … anyway, Cratch thought back to his brief time with the aki’Drednanth named Fridge –
way
back – the lower-bar flicker most likely denoted subdued amusement. “We were expecting a connecting flight,” she continued, “which has not materialised.”