Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (36 page)

In the meantime, Thord and Dunnkirk were in the Dreamscape dealing with the reconnected and highly-active Drednanth mass consciousness, and Maladin wanted to be in there helping as much as he could.

Of course, Thord and her Dreamscape were in no direct danger. She was travelling far and wide, metaphysically speaking, communing with vast numbers of her kind and gauging the waters as reaction to her deeds spread and developed. But the Drednanth would never be so crude as to
undo
what she had crafted, nor to try to stop her from following her path to its wilful conclusion. To do so would be tantamount to making war on itself, denying or – worse – destroying a part of its own great mind. An immortal gestalt existence was, by necessity, a peaceful and harmonious one.

That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t also intense – especially for the weak, unaccustomed Bonshooni tourists cowering in Thord’s protective bubble, cringing in the howling winds of thousands upon thousands of millennia of disapproval colder than the void. It was something of a relief when they concluded their business at Shosha Ranch, cruised back out into space, and accelerated back into the seclusion of relative speed.

SALLY

It was a long way from Shosha Ranch to Zhraak Burns, although by no means their longest stint in the grey. The
next
stretch was going to be twelve weeks, and Sally had a deep, dark sense of foreboding about it. Zeegon was
already
racing eejits through the corridors on janitorials.

Still, this leg was a solid eight, after an absolutely minimal-duration and entirely dull stopover at Shosha Ranch Chemical Outpost. Sally thought that maybe the main source of the crew’s unrest
this
time, aside from a recurrence and spike in intensity of the aki’Drednanth dreams that were supposed to have long since faded back to normal background levels, was the region into which they were now heading.

The next leg of the flight was a string of settlements the crew had taken to calling ‘the barmy arm’. The galaxy could be sliced in any number of ways, and the way their flight path sliced it this time just happened to take them out through a series of oddball little settlement-worlds that were the interstellar equivalent of the scenic route. Without any of the interstellar equivalent of scenery which, to be fair, they’d all been rather spoiled for on Standing Wave.

What Sally kept coming back to, as the source of recent tensions on board, was simple. It didn’t
matter
if Zhraak Burns was destroyed when they got there.

Well, okay, it
mattered
, because the Burnèd were innocent people even if they were also more-than-slightly weird. But if Zhraak Burns was still there, then it was just another backwater of no strategic value to friend or foe, spared by the Cancer-or-whatever because of its low technology profile but no help to
them
for exactly the same reason. If it was gone, it was gone and their current theories were either useless, or the Cancer had taken out all the high-tech targets while they were in soft-space and had now moved on to everyone else.

And if it
was
still there, additionally, then it was a Zhraaki enclave anyway. Heck, call it what it was – a cultist commune. Not even Zeegon, a reformed Zhraaki Orthodox, wanted to go there.

The dreams were just an additional stress that nobody needed.

Sally sighed, stepping into her cluttered office and leaning back against the door. She’d just come from a flare-up that she would describe in her security log as “a minor altercation”, but which in her head she was calling “an ugly, murder-hungry son of a whore disguised as a mess hall argument, and not very well-disguised either because it’s getting hungrier.”

She’d learned, as they got to know one another better professionally, that Waffa had an entire second vocabulary for things. A vocabulary that existed almost entirely inside his head, and in the obscure metadata of the
Tramp
’s log system, for all that she read that stuff as little as humanly possible. So when he said something that was ostensibly quite clinical and detached, he was in fact saying something completely different in his head.

Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed realised that she’d started to do the same.

After leaning against the door for long enough to reassure herself that nobody was coming in – a completely pointless act of defiance, because nobody but Clue and the Captain could enter without Sally’s permission, and if either of them
did
the door slid open sideways so Sally would fall right on her arse and then murder might
really
happen – she crossed the cosy-and-claustrophobic-by-design room and grabbed her cup.

It was a good cup, given to her by the Greater Castermaine Police Department when she had ended her assignment with them and returned to the
Tramp
with the Barnalk High Ripper as combination prisoner-in-transit, trophy and God damn neck-albatross. Come to think of it, he was still all of those things, but – and this was where the universe was really having a laugh – he’d somehow added “Chief Medical Officer (non-Corps)” to the list. She often woke up sweating at night wondering what would happen when Glomulus Cratch decided to exercise his prerogative under AstroCorps regulations, allowing him to overrule the officers’ orders in medical situations. Because he already
knew
about the prerogative. Nothing was more certain.

That was going to be an interesting time to be alive.

Of course, his convict status and the fact that every other crewmember had the tried-and-tested ability to detonate his shackles and blow off his hands and feet on a whim might just trump the phoney-baloney “doctor’s orders” protocol. Strangely, though, this did nothing to help Sally sleep at night. It just meant that the image engraved on the insides of her eyelids when she woke up was of Glomulus Cratch sitting on the medical bay floor in the lotus position, bloody stumps held out serenely while he relieved people from duty to the sound of the groovy muzak of the month that he piped incessantly through the medical bay sound system.

So, her cup. That was basically what she had to show for her time with Greater Castermaine PD, but it was good enough. It was a solid pint, with an additional stimulant capsule dispenser built into the heavy handle. Even stockpiling the way Contro did with his toffees, she’d run out of stim several times, but fortunately she’d been able to stock up again on Standing Wave. The cup was shaped like an old-fashioned quantum concussion shell, and it had a swirled Xidh word etched onto its side. Sally didn’t know the Xidh alphabet well, but she was reliably informed the word was
bosskra
, which translated crudely as
the end of the stick with the shit on
. This was based on one of those parallel cultural legacies that Janya found endlessly fascinating, and Sally couldn’t see why the Greater Castermaine PD boys would have bothered to lie to her about what the cup said.

It didn’t matter anyway, because the cup held enough coffee – that was
coffee
, another thing she periodically had to ensure the ship didn’t run out of for the safety of everyone on board, because fuck zolo – to get her through the average day, with room left over to add enough stim to get her through an
abnormal
day, and – after a generous slurp – space to add a shot of 001100101 half-malt to get her through the
other
kinds of days.

Sally poured herself an almost-full cup from the percolator in the corner of her office, added three doses of sugar, then thumbed the handle twice to add stim pellets. She then squeezed the handle steadily to activate the kinetic whisk built into the bottom of the cup, stirring it as she crossed the room. She sat heavily in her deep, comfortable chair and sighed again.

How a conversation between such usually-sedate and open-minded people –
well, Waffa and Zeegon had been the human components
, Sally thought,
so let’s say
usually-laidback
and not go nuts
– could come so close to an out-and-out brawl, she would never know. Okay, the reason it had
almost
happened was that one of the humans had made an uncharitable remark about aki’Drednanth collaborators in the presence of a Bonshoon. And the reason it
hadn’t
happened was that the Bonshoon in question had been Dunnkirk, perhaps the sweetest-natured creature that had ever set foot on the
Tramp
’s troubled decks. And even he had taken a neck in each upper hand and a pair of testicles in each lower hand, and had begun to
squeeze
until retractions, apologies, explanations and assurances had flowed to his complete satisfaction.

No lasting damage done, and all three were the best of friends again. Even better friends than before, in fact. But the tension of whatever had happened to Bayn Balro, The Warm, possibly to the larger Molran Fleet, AstroCorps, Aquilar, and the Six Species in general, could not be overstated. And if it
was
the Cancer, then the master-and-slave arrangement between Damorakind and the aki’Drednanth came under the harsh lights of fearful, xenophobic scrutiny. It was just a fact.

Sally took a long, ruminatory drink. Yes, and the dreams were certainly helping everyone look in Thord’s direction.

Glomulus, who even Janya had to grudgingly acknowledge as the closest thing to an impartial aki’Drednanth specialist they had on board, said that the irregularity might lie in Thord’s warrior-credo-heavy, possibly even reactionary mindset, as signified by the markings on tusk and tongue that they’d each gotten a glimpse or two of over the course of the trip. The others were sceptical about this, since aside from the occasional entirely typical flare-up of aki’Drednanth territorialism and temper, Thord was as serene as the next person. And the next two people were Dunnkirk and Maladin.

“It’s also possibly just a simple matter of Thord being so long between, well,
akis
,” Cratch had theorised. “If you believe that sort of thing. Apparently – this is based on what our Head Of Science has heard – she hasn’t been an aki’Drednanth for a million years. Most of the others have at least dealt with
Molren
before. She might not have even dealt with
them
. Her brainwaves might take some ironing out.”

Sally sighed again, drank again. And they were still a week out from Zhraak Burns, seven tough weeks behind them and a looming eternity of dullness ahead, punctuated by damn hick planets without a decent AstroCorps supplier or coherent cultural philosophy to their names.

Before the dust-up in the mess hall, it had been the murmur in the
Tramp
’s engine. This was one of those things that nobody else had noticed except Contro, who mentioned it in near-random passing about a week
after
it had started happening, and Waffa had only picked it out of Contro’s normal background prattle because he happened to be listening at that moment. It wasn’t an
audible
murmur, or any sort of vibration, or apparently even a
problem
of any kind that anyone understood. It could possibly
become
a problem, but was more likely to just be nothing. Contro’s summary was heavy on the “honestly, you know what I mean!”s, and it required a lot of ramp-downs, brown-outs, test cycles and polarity reversals, and a whole lot of made-up-sounding Contro procedures, in order to clear it up.

All of these things needed to be handled by Waffa and the ables and a liberal coating of eejits, since Contro knew what needed to be done and what the results should be but not how to do any of it. More fortunately, none of the tasks involved shutting off power to the relative drive, so they could work while they flew.

So that prevented some unnecessary bloodshed right there.

It was a minor inconvenience, and even more importantly it was a
distraction
. Everyone liked a good complain about trivial nuisances, so that was okay – but it was still an added tension as well. In the end, the ‘murmur’ was declared dealt with, probably, which apparently had to be good enough for everybody.

“Alright,” she said, once about half her coffee was inside her where it belonged, “maybe if I just sit here in my office for the next week…”

There was a soft chime on her organiser. She squinted down at it.

- - - Internal notification + minor alert + bridge (assumed rodent infestation) - - -

Sally let her squint become an honest-to-goodness glare, and deliberately sat back, put her feet up on the narrow section of free desk-reserved for them, and sipped her coffee.

“I
know
you’re awake,” she told the computer conversationally, “
somehow
. And I also know you’re perfectly aware that the rodent on the bridge is Boonie, so no. I am not going to the bridge to oversee a strip-and-pest-control of the consoles and bulkheads.”

And so another week crawled by, and again they gathered on the bridge, and again they dropped out of the grey and into the velvety darkness of the void.

“Zhraak Burns,” Z-Lin said, as they cruised into the system and approached a pleasant little blue-green world. “Decay?”

“Nodback from the surface,” Decay reported. “No beacon, because … you know.”

“Because they think items of AstroCorp technology are shiny and deceptive trinkets given to us by the Devil to worship debaucheriffically while simultaneously turning our backs on the purity of the Fweig?” Zeegon asked innocently.

“Yes,” Decay said, “because that.”

“Not entirely sure ‘debaucheriffically’ is a word,” Clue added.

“It is to these nutbars.”

“Alright, let’s just get this done,” the Commander sighed. “There ought to be a visitor centre, which is probably where the nod’s coming from.”

“Confirmed,” Decay replied crisply. “They’re sending us a lander allotment, approach vector and we’re exchanging infodumps.”