Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (2 page)

The planet’s moon, in contrast, looked to be almost entirely ice, more of a comet than a lunar body. It had no doubt been impact-formed from trace quantities of rock and a mass of the ocean world’s water, freezing once it was bunted out of the planet’s protective pocket of atmosphere. Water was still visible on its surface, however, gleaming in the sunlight at the bottoms of the immense crevasses formed by the tidal splintering of its crust.

The cloud-and-wave-wreathed ocean planet, and its titanic glacier of a moon, were absolutely spectacular. Clue wasn’t looking at the planet, though, and neither were the other two humans or the Blaran in the room. Not really.

The AstroCorps orbital approach beacon was invisible to the naked eye, but its signal was strong and clear, and had automatically beamed its handshake onto every interface panel on the bridge.

“We’re back in the universe,” Zeegon summarised with infinite gratitude, filtering the signal to pick up approach vectors. At least, Z-Lin sincerely hoped that was what he was doing. You never really could be sure, with Zeegon. “Now where’s the settlement? Surf, or Ski?”

“The moon’s too unstable to support a settlement,” Decay judged, “unless it’s completely Fergunakil and underneath the ice shelf. It seems more likely to be a mobile settlement on the planet, riding the swell on the far side of the lunar incursion.”

“Radical,” Zeegon enthused quietly. “Do you reckon there’s Fergunak on either one?”

“I’d hold off on the windsurfer prototype you’ve got in blister bay 3 until we find out one way or another,” Z-Lin advised.

“How did you know about the windsurfer?” Zeegon said. “Although incidentally, jetsurfer. But whatever.”

“I didn’t know,” Z-Lin replied, “it was just a guess.”

“
Anyway
, a lunar-mirror cycle would make sense,” the helmsman continued seriously, “and might explain why I’m not getting any big energy spikes. These guys could depend entirely on tidal and hydro power, and use wind-farmed electricity to shoot iceteroids out of the sky in their spare time. That moon’s gotta drop some doozies on them.”

Clue frowned. “No transpersion signatures?”

“No signatures at all,” Zeegon said in mild puzzlement, and glanced back at Decay. “Or am I still reading this stuff wrong, Stretch?”

“You’re not wrong,” Decay reported, three of his four hands busy on his own console while he rubbed idly at one ear-spine with the fourth. “No transpersion signatures. They’re really living off the land. So to speak.”

“Unless they maybe
missed
an iceteroid,” Zeegon added.

“Care to explain?” Clue asked. “Preferably without saying ‘iceteroid’ ever again?”

“The beacon’s the only thing lit up down there,” Zeegon said nervously. “And … well, that’s in orbit. There’s no sign of a settlement.”

“Hold on,” Decay said, “I’m getting a Corps nod from the surface,” he tapped a control. “And a Rosetta nod,” he added. “Looks like they’re ready to talk to just about anyone.”

“Let’s all hear it,” Z-Lin said, “once you get it unscrambled.”

A moment later, Decay had unstrung the underlying alphanumeric ‘Rosetta’ code intended to act as a translation algorithm for any advanced species, and meshed it against the AstroCorps-standard hail they’d also received. A deep and jovial Molranoid-choral voice sounded over the speakers as the Blaran played the transmission.

“All the Gods in the Wall be praised, we’ve been waiting for your arrival for what seems like years, modular. I don’t know where exactly you came from, but thank the Painted Stars and bless your engines that you did.”

This grandiose pronouncement was met by a moment of considering silence.

“Not what I was expecting,” Zeegon allowed.

“Bonshooni,” Decay said with a gentle eye-roll in his voice. “It had to be Bonshooni.”

“Now now,” Clue said mildly. “Put me through, if you please.”

“On in two.”

“This is Commander Z-Lin Clue of the starship designated
AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400
,” Clue said, “although for the purposes of brevity we go by
Astro Tramp 400
. We are a deep-space exploration and transportation vessel with minimal crew and limited technical capabilities. This is a return hail to the settlement…” she consulted the chart and the unfamiliar Bonshoon words, “…
Bayn Balro
? We’re reading you loud and clear and awaiting more … detailed notification of your status.”

“And if we’re the best your Gods could come up with, your Gods are crap,” Decay added, then went on innocently when Clue favoured him with a dirty look, “I ended transmission.”

“
Astro Tramp 400
, this is Acting Consul Harga Choyle of Bayn Balro,” the Bonshoon voice responded, “we are re-transmitting our Corps settlement credentials and an official distress signal in the hopes that you are able to render assistance despite your reduced capacity. Our own starship expertise is nonexistent, but we have several marine biologists and hydro-electric engineers … uploading manifests. We can at the very least keep out of your way during the relocation, since at last count we numbered twenty-seven individuals, eight of them sub-juvenile.”

That answered the question of why a lofty Consul was deigning to man the communications array, Z-Lin realised, but it was hardly reassuring. “Acknowledged, Bayn Balro,” she said, and glanced at Decay.

“It all checks out,” the Blaran said. “Settlement used to be a big mobile complex – a pair of them, actually – and a flotilla of service and research vessels. Eight hundred and ten Bonshooni, one hundred and ninety-four Blaren, eighty-eight humans. Serviceable spaceport, or at least a landing platform, and big-bore power stations for all their … wow.”

“‘Wow’?” Clue said.

“Uh, yeah,” Decay shook his broad, flat-topped head. “The whole thing used to run off this drag-loop system, really big engineering stuff, probably why they have so many engineers on deck. They weren’t motorised, the whole thing was riding the trough behind the tidal surge. And being pulled along by sub-stations on the wave itself,” he whistled through his teeth. “They were being towed, partially, on thousand-mile-long hawsers and drawing power from the wind and waves.”

“I’m hearing a lot of past tense.”

“Yes,” Decay said, “most of the settlement is gone, along with all but minimal generator power. The motion infrastructure has been demolished. They’re drifting.”

“Uh huh,” Z-Lin took a wild guess at where this assessment was heading. “And how long until the wave comes back around and wipes them the rest of the way off the surface of the planet?”

“Oh, that’s not an issue,” Decay said, “it’s not going to arrive for another six weeks. They’re just lucky this planet’s days are longer than its months, or they would have been gone already. Anyway, they will have run out of power and sunk by then. They have no capacity to evacuate or alter course to the nearest body of land even
if
that land wasn’t going to be submerged by about a mile and a half of water the next time the moon swings around.”

“So they’ll sink in … ?”

“Four days, shipboard time,” Decay reported. “Maybe five. Maybe significantly less.”

“Don’t they have any evacuation craft at all?” Zeegon demanded.

“That’s sort of the other issue,” Decay said, “and why they might not last long enough to drown. The manifest does show some small craft, but they’re all way
too
small. The huge school of Fergunak following the settlement would tear them to pieces – the way they seem to be tearing the
settlement
to pieces right now, from the outside in.”

Zeegon drew in a sharp, whistling breath. Sally cursed.

“I take it back,” Z-Lin said fervently. “Their Gods really are crap.”

SALLY

“…were teamed up with a group of marine biologists and habitat designers,” Acting Consul Harga Choyle was saying when Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed looked up from her console to see Waffa stepping onto the bridge. “The usual dynamic, really. They were out there, doing whatever Fergunak do. They had a bunch of different schools across the planet – even a couple on Chote. That’s the moon.”

“I got your alert,” said Waffa, tapping away at his wristwatch, most likely checking workstation readouts he’d fed through there. “Something about a logistics–” Clue raised a hand quickly to wave the Chief of Security and Operations to silence. He nodded, stepped up to Zeegon’s side and stood looking out on the roiling planet far below.

“We didn’t keep track,” Choyle continued on the communicator, “these were aquatic habitats with only small settlements, so the Fergunak had autonomy. We were only ever in contact with this school, the … what were they called?” his voice muffled for a moment as he fumbled with unfamiliar equipment and conferred with another settler, “…the Larger Dark Moving Below. They seemed okay. You know, for Fergies.”

“And then you suffered your … disaster,” Z-Lin said, pushing as tastefully as possible for details but not mincing her words. Any event that reduced a settlement from almost eleven hundred people to twenty-seven was a disaster, simple as that. Sally didn’t envy her the Commander’s console. “When was this?”

“About a week ago, give or take,” Acting Consul Choyle said, “it’s difficult to jibe the local time with the Corps standard calendar, because of the cycles of … anyway, it was about a week ago. Seems like longer. We were hit, and hit hard, and without warning,” Choyle went on, “and I might as well tell you, Commander Clue, we really have very little information on what took place. Most of us left alive are only here because we were on deep maintenance, or otherwise cut off from the settlement. The bulk of the flotilla was gone when we regrouped, along with most of our monitoring gear.”

You could tell you were dealing with a non-human, Sally reflected, because only a non-human could utter the words ‘Commander Clue’ without missing a beat. “Ask him how many Fergies,” she suggested to Z-Lin in a low voice, “and what they’re doing – where they’re focussing their attacks,” Waffa gave her a nod. He had a certain amount of experience with Fergunak.

“There’s about three thousand adults in the Larger Dark Moving Below school, although their numbers may have been augmented by now from other schools,” Choyle replied when Clue passed this on. “They’re gathered in force on the wavewards boundary of the settlement. They come in with groups of between twenty and a hundred, all of them swimming bare so far, and are focussing their attacks on the main residential block. If that goes down, it will drag the rest of us under with it. The block is deserted now – we are trying to sever the connection between that part of the flotilla and the hub where we’re all currently gathered, but … you understand, it is exposed work, on open water. The Fergunak have killed seven of us in various attempts to cut the gantries. The last three humans among us perished on the final attempt,” he concluded, in an odd mixture of apology and praise. He had no doubt recognised their potential rescuers as human from the Commander’s single-chord voice.

“A thought occurs,” Sally said when Acting Consul Choyle fell silent, and Waffa and Z-Lin turned to look at the Chief Tactical Officer. Sally reached out and curled her hands expressively around the
Tramp
’s ordnance control columns.

“No,” Clue shook her head. “We can pick up the settlers from the hub and fly away without murdering anyone, so we’re going to do it that way.”

“Fine,” Sally grumbled good-naturedly. “If the sharks come up into orbit behind us in those torpedoes of theirs, don’t come running to me.”

“I won’t,” Z-Lin replied. “I’ll sit right here and say ‘Sally, murder those torpedoes’. Because you are Chief Tactical Officer.”

“Why are they doing it?” Waffa mused, apparently more to himself than to the bridge at large. When Sally glanced at him questioningly, he clarified. “I mean, is it just a matter of going for the throat because the settlers are weak?”

Sally frowned. The Fergunak were a species of enormous, frighteningly savage, paradoxically-technologically-advanced sharks originating from somewhere in the Core, where they had survived eradication by Damorakind by the simple expedient of siding with them and committing atrocity after atrocity, obscenity after obscenity, for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. They had also scattered out into the galaxy, however, and formed an uneasy alliance with the Molran Fleet at about the same lost-in-the-mists-of-time period as the aki’Drednanth alliance. It was all ancient history and more or less irrelevant, as far as Sally was concerned. The main point was that with the Molren, a large population of Fergunak had escaped the Core and eagerly – some might say pestilentially – settled the oceans of most planets discovered thereafter.

Peace was a tentative thing, while swimming – for the most part – had become an amusing historical footnote.

“Has there been any indication that their ongoing assault is related to the attack your settlement suffered?” Clue asked. “Were they perhaps responsible for it in the first place?”

“The Fergunak have been hit too,” Acting Consul Choyle replied. “They’ve lost most of their tech enhancements, machinery, weapons, or they would have been through here long since. They’re just circling now, picking off maintenance crews, wearing down our ammunition and defences, sending us creepy messages…”

“Why hadn’t they attacked you before now, when they were at full strength?”

“The same reason Fergunak hold back from attacking anyone, I suppose,” Choyle said with a hint of understandable bitterness. “We were fully operational, allied into their gridnet, the charter was still worth the flimsy it was printed on and the Fergies thought
our
friends were stronger than
their
friends.”

“Sally,” Clue said, “start drafting airlift and extraction scenarios using one or two landers.”

“Already on it,” Sally said firmly.