Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (29 page)

The remaining legs of the flight grew generally longer than the early ones, and it was seven weeks to the Fleet research station that was their next stop. About a week into the flight, Waffa woke up from an extremely powerful but elusive and formless dream. There had been pain and confusion and loneliness, he’d been trapped and fearful and separated from his own kind, encased by cold walls without knowing why. It had been thoroughly disorienting.

He knew, intellectually, that it was just another echo of Thord’s mind as she dealt with her solitude and the separation from the larger Dreamscape that occurred when an aki’Drednanth was in soft-space. But the association he
reflexively
drew – and which was very hard to discard – was with the eejits who had died because of the stupid pranks Waffa had been involved in. The only vivid image that stayed in his mind after the dream ended was of the
Tramp
’s confining walls, and it was impossible to avoid placing Sticky, Bumfluff and Jocko into that image, cutting their way industriously out to decompression and death. He woke up with tears wetting his face.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

It was, he concluded, probably a bit of a combination – Thord’s unintended brain-shouting, and Waffa’s enduring remorse over the screw-up. Sticky, Bumfluff and Jocko hadn’t exactly been top-shelf eejits, although Bumfluff had known how to handle a cutting torch provided you pointed him in the right direction with it. Which was probably, now Waffa came to think about it, one of the main reasons the three of them were dead now.

Since before their detour to
Boonie’s Last Stand
, Waffa had been half-heartedly collating the reports on their lost eejits and their current resources-to-requirements ratios. They’d shifted considerably into the positive as the farm settled down and recovered productivity after their renovation, and after they’d dropped off those Molran survivalists at Eshret.

Now, since they’d lost some more eejits and fabricator plant repairs in Þursheim were off the menu, he had submitted his reports and received official approval. Their crew complement could increase comfortably and they would all be able to keep breathing.

It was time to start printing eejits again.

Waffa was humming tunelessly to himself and tapping up some random pre-reports on his watch – it was always good to get a few templates ready to just fill in the blanks and shoot off, since there was a bunch of essentially-identical tasks in the pipeline – as he stepped onto the elevator. He was so engrossed that he didn’t even notice quiet, looming Dunnkirk standing in one corner.

“Helloes,” the rotund Bonshoon said with a cheerful wave of his left hands. Waffa jumped.

“Jesus, I almost shat,” he blurted, then shook his head sheepishly. “Sorry mate. I was miles away.”

“Miles – oh, is figure of speech,” Dunnkirk nodded with a gleaming grin. His AstroCorps standard language skills were improving rapidly, proportional to his ability to categorise almost everything he
didn’t
immediately understand as a ‘figure of speech’. Which, to be fair, it usually was.

“Yeah. Sorry. Just … how can a big bloke like you be so quiet and invisible, eh?”

Dunnkirk spread his meaty arms, displaying the flowing waist-length shirt he was wearing. “I am have
okshani
that is same colour as elevator walls,” he said.

“That’d do it,” Waffa agreed.

“I am give
okshani
on the Prufrock,” Dunnkirk said, then corrected himself, “I
was given
. It was a gift from a Bonshoon who wanted the…” here he made an obscure but evidently-sardonic little gesture with his lower right hand, “…the blessing of the aki’Drednanth.”

“Hah,” Waffa said. They descended through the exchange, flipped smoothly, and ascended towards the plant level. “Where are you heading, tiger?”

“I was thinking … did you have a dream, Waffa?” Dunnkirk said, suddenly hesitant. They reached the plant and the Bonshoon disembarked with Waffa.

“Yeah,” Waffa frowned, pausing in the corridor. “I thought they were supposed to have stopped, or settle down, but this one was as mad as they were when we were just out of Seven Widdershins.”

“I am a little
barash
– envy –
envious
– that you sleep and have a dream,” Dunnkirk told him. “It is must be strange and wondrous.”

“You can have it,” Waffa grunted. “Why are they still happening?”

“It may to do with the seed,” Dunnkirk said seriously, “I think this is so. Thord is … distracted, she is agitated. There are things.”

“‘
Things
’?” Waffa said.

“Things that bother,” Dunnkirk said, visibly uncomfortable. “Everybody has very difficult and is tense.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Waffa said, resuming his stroll. “Whole lot of uncertainty floating around,” he glanced at the Bonshoon and smiled a little as he saw Dunnkirk assiduously file this statement under ‘figure of speech’. “So, you coming with me to watch the plant print out some eejits?”

Dunnkirk blinked his wide greenish-yellow eyes in astonishment. “I – yes – I – may I?” he stammered.

Waffa shrugged. “No rule against it, as long as you don’t push any buttons.”

“No, of course no. I was hoping I could join. I am curious. I like to see.”

“Well, we have here an order to print twenty new boys,” Waffa said, tapping his watch. “So that’ll take – at between ninety-two and two hundred and fifty-six minutes per dude – anywhere between thirty-one and eighty-five hours. If things go pear-shaped – uh, if things go wrong, then we may need to abort a few prints and start over, so that’ll add to the time. But here’s to hoping.”

They followed the corridor around to the chamber containing the gleaming cluster of huge round machines that made up the mysterious fabrication plant. Waffa immediately busied himself with the minimal programming he needed to perform on the interface before the fabrication process initiated. Most of it was handled internally, the machine interpreting the simple commands and forming a body and mind out of them. Most of the rest was encoded into the print orders.

Once the commands were completed and the great pale bulk – presumably – began its work, Waffa tapped his watch to start the clock and gestured towards the little lounge setting built into a nearby alcove. He’d long since dragged one of the more comfortable armchairs out to rest close by the product aperture of the plant, since he was usually the only person here and liked to be sitting close at-hand when the eejit emerged, but he didn’t suppose there was any harm in sitting a bit further from the action, in the name of companionship.

“And this is it?” Dunnkirk said, looking in surprise at the interface panels and then sitting down on a couch opposite Waffa.

“That’s it,” Waffa said, and put his feet up on the little table in between them. “Just a few options to select, and then print. The whole thing is just magic-level tech as far as I’m concerned, which is why none of us have any idea how to fix it. We tried opening it up once, but were very lucky to get the panels back in place without breaking the whole plant completely. Between you and me,” he went on, “I usually have so much crap to do – reports and engineering stuff – that printing eejits is the closest thing I get to a break. But since we have a few ables now, I actually
have
a bit of spare time. I could still be performing other official duties while I sit here, but right now it’s pretty quiet.”

“I understand,” Dunnkirk said with a solemn wink.

Waffa grinned. “It
should
actually be possible for a technician to set the plant to print and configure, then just leave. The able would come out after five hundred and twenty minutes, find his uniform printed there–” he pointed at an alcove not far from the main product aperture, near his usual armchair, “–put it on and just mosey on to wherever he was meant to work. But with these boys, it’s better to have someone standing by. Or in this case, sitting.”

“It makes sense,” Dunnkirk nodded gravely. “And does the, is it body comes from this,” he pointed at one part of the machine, “and then the mind, the configure, comes, is done here?” he pointed to the closer module, with the ports in its sides.

“Buggered if I know for sure,” Waffa admitted, “but yeah, that big one there, that’s where most of the actual machine-noise comes from and that’s where you feed the carbon and other stuff in, so I’d guess that’s where the meat gets printed up,” he lifted his feet off the table. “Get you a drink?” he pointed towards a dispenser at the back of the alcove.

Dunnkirk, lost in apparent contemplation of the plant – Waffa worked with Contro and he knew the facial expression of a body not in current possession of its entire conscious mind, whether it was human or Bonshoon – blinked and turned to the Chief of Security and Operations. “Is zolo?”

“Of course,” Waffa replied. “What else would an AstroCorps drinks dispenser have?”

They sat for a while, sipping their drinks in silence. Dunnkirk once again seemed distracted, perhaps even honest-to-goodness lost in thought.

It was, however, the Bonshoon who eventually spoke up to break the monotony. “So,” he said, “we are headed to MundCorp.”

“Yep,” Waffa said. “MundCorp Research Base. Home of Big Gravity. And with you three on board, we might actually be allowed to dock and use the guest facilities,” the Bonshoon looked at him in confusion, and Waffa grinned. “I spent time as a trainee shipping eggers and equipment from The Warm to Mundy,” he explained. “That is, two years, two six-month-long straight jags
out
and two six-month-long straight jags
back
. None of these fancy-schmancy detours to exchange gossip with Wynstoners and drink Widdershins hooch and rescue giant ticks in distress. Six months in soft-space each way. I think my mum was hoping it would convince me that AstroCorps ships weren’t for me, but in the end all it did was convince me that milk runs on the
Dublin Reception
weren’t for me.”

“Ah,” Dunnkirk said, “and the scientists at MundCorp were not the most welcoming?”

Waffa gave a short laugh. “You could say that. MundCorp is top-secret and Fleet proprietary, which means Molren make up almost the entire population, or staff, or whatever you’d call them. I think there’s three, maybe four humans who have ever been on board. The base itself is supposedly a relic of some sort, like The Warm, but the entire thing is encased in a couple of old Worldship hulls. One of them is the
Mundus
herself, the original MundCorp ship … the other one, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either,” Dunnkirk offered, as Waffa took a drink. The Bonshoon was slightly distant again – it seemed to come and go.

“It’s also apparently the
relic
that’s the source of exchange technology,” Waffa went on, “since MundCorp is the Fleet research group responsible for its use in all the Fleet ships and throughout AstroCorps. Big Gravity, like the joke. But I don’t buy that. The Worldships and the rest of the Fleet had gravity exchange tech long before they came out here and built the base. I always took it to just be mutterings, you know, from people who have a chip on their shoulder about Molren or whatever.”

“A chip?”

“Figure of speech,” Waffa said with a slight smile. “Anyway, it’s top secret. We never got to even dock with them, the two times I was out here. They’d send out an R&R tug, load our cargo onto it while we pissed it up, then they’d fly it back to Mundy and we’d go home.”

“Pissed … ?” Dunnkirk’s frown cleared. “You mean the drinking.”

“Oh yeah,” Waffa said fondly. “Usually the stuff we’d delivered on the
previous
milk-run, you know?”

“I think yes,” Dunnkirk said, then went on more hesitantly. “I also think, it – Maladin said that is maybe an exchange problem, that you had your big ‘The Accident’ and…” he trailed off with a helpless little wave of his upper hands, and went back to looking pensively at the plant. “He said he thinks.”

“It
was
the exchange,” Waffa said, keeping his tone neutral. “What made Maladin think so?”

“It was – at The Warm, the humans were all killed very easy, they died hard, fast,” Dunnkirk said, earnest and apologetic in equal measure. “The ables, they were tougher. No offence. I mean, I say wrong, many survived.”

“No offence taken, mate,” Waffa said quietly. “So I guess Maladin started wondering why the ables all died on the
Tramp
, and it was a few
humans
who survived – humans and one Blaran,” Dunnkirk spread his lower hands, and Waffa smiled. “And the only kind of technical failure that might qualify is the sort that would screw up the exchange.”

“He says he thinks.”

“It’s true,” Waffa shrugged. “It wasn’t a collision or a hull breach or a life-support glitch. The exchange … did what it did … and yeah. As well as killing almost everyone on board, it also killed all the ables. Even if some of them might have survived the primary effects, there’s something in the configuration, or their guidance filaments. The same reason the computers got messed up and the plant is now broken, also basically broke the brains of the … I think it was seven or eight ables whose bodies we actually found. And the plant’s made eejits ever since.”

“Do you think you ask the MundCorps to check your exchange?”

“It occurred to me,” Waffa said, taking another contemplative sip of his zolo, “and if they let us dock I think we should ask.”

“I will to ask Thord to put in a good word.”

“Thanks. MundCorp
did
check our exchange, though,” Waffa went on, “and there’s no problem, at least not anymore. Actually, the exchange is pretty much the only system that was thoroughly messed up in The Accident that has since received an official once-over from the builders. It wasn’t at the MundCorp base, it was just a Mundy flier, but they checked her over and cleaned her end to end, and gave her the stamp,” he shrugged. “Said she was clean. She still doesn’t
feel
clean, though. Cross the exchange plane outside the elevator, and you can feel the grease.”

“The … grease?” Dunnkirk frowned again, as far as a Molranoid could with their up-curled mouths. “Is also figure of speech?”