Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (45 page)

“You’re suggesting keeping them on board as well as keeping them all alive,” Decay said. “What if they want to get off?”

“I guess it depends whether or not we’re past the priority zero point,” she sighed. “But you’re right, it doesn’t really matter. If she wants to get off, she’ll get off. They all will. All they need to do is turn our brains to porridge one by one until we
let
them off.”

“They’re all aki’Drednanth who have lived before, if you choose to believe that,” Decay said, “and I tend to think we don’t have much choice but to believe it,” Clue nodded. “If you try to raise them this way and they let you, they’ll be aware that they’re not being raised right. They won’t thank you for disregarding that facet of their existence.”

“Maybe I’ll pull one out from under the tusks of her sisters and let her tell me that herself,” Z-Lin snapped.

The debate was satisfyingly circular, pleasingly irresolvable, and in that manner they reached the edge.

The thing about the edge of the galaxy was that it didn’t just happen. There was no little sign on a moon,
last fuel for 1,500,000 light years
. There was no point at which you could stand, starry skies behind you and a black gulf in front. There was not, despite what many Bonshooni who had never been out here believed, a shimmering aurora veiling the emptiness. If there
was
a veil, it was as invisible as the dark matter that apparently teemed there.

For the past few stops, since about Greentemple, they had been working their way out along a thinner and thinner arm – the erstwhile barmy arm that had started at Zhraak Burns – and the stars in the sky had grown more sparse. A solar system, of course, was a solar system basically anywhere in the galaxy. It was a lot of empty darkness, a star in the middle, a scattering of sand grains across the black that only revealed themselves as planets if you knew exactly where you were going and got very, very close. When you were in it, you couldn’t see much else. The surrounding stars were thicker or thinner depending on how close you were to the core. Sometimes, if you were in the right place, you could see the galactic disc.

You couldn’t see it from here, not without the observatory’s instruments. There was no system. The closest star was some twenty light years behind them, and it was uninhabited. This was just … end of the line. It was as far as they could go before the engines started sucking fumes, choking on exotic energy. Any ship to fly out much farther than this couldn’t do it on conventional transpersion, and not inside a conventional relative field. It was old school, and
slow
, and it was perched on top of a power station and battery mass approximately the size of a Worldship. Or it was even slower still.

There
were
stars out there, in the intergalactic void. Rogue stars, miniature galaxies, all sorts of exciting weirdness that people had been able to study and see through an assortment of technological means. Oh, there were plenty of them. But the thing about the intergalactic void was, it was so big even the occasional star system just got swallowed up in the emptiness. It wasn’t enough to make the engines of a starship work, it wasn’t enough to act as a feasible stepping stone bridge. It had been tried, and nobody was really sure what had happened to the ships that had tried it.

No. This was it.

They pulled up, and they parked, and they got ready to offload Thord, Dunnkirk, Maladin and the Drednanth seed.

And that was when they found that one of the sleeper pods was smashed.

“Wow, it’s dark out there,” Zeegon said, stepping into the conference room. He was the last person to enter, having brought the ship to all-stop and coordinated with the ‘tamping down’ of the engine core until the time came for them to limp and cough their way back into stellar space.

Everyone but Glomulus and Waffa were in the conference room, the former in his medical bay and the latter putting the final finishing touches on the modest little rig that was going to reinforce the seed, house the now-single sleeper pod, its power supply and the minimal anti-impact countermeasures. A little cow-catcher of metaflux hull plating – in this case collected from the wreck of the
Boonie
rather than their own stores – was more than ample for the task of protecting seed, pod and power supply from the dangers of intergalactic space. Of course, if they ran into anything larger than a speck of dust out there in the emptiness, they would be very unlucky indeed. A cow seemed … statistically improbable.

Thord was once again sitting at one end of the table with the Bonshooni on either side of her. Maladin looked confused and angry, Dunnkirk looked distraught. Both expressions seemed understandable enough, in Decay’s opinion, if a little jarring on the two normally-affable fellows.

“Are we thinking maybe it was … uh, one of the kids?” Z-Lin said delicately as Zeegon sat down. “I know they’re adults and all, on the inside, but they have their instincts, they’re good and active, maybe one of them was teething or…”

“It was not the offspring,” Thord said.

“I’m looking into the logs,” Sally said, “and … Bruce is proving a bit unwilling to commit.”

Bruce was another subject they had talked about in the days since Declivitorion. It naturally refused to tell them how it was sustaining full synthetic intelligence, although it did not display any signs of instability or any hint that it might become a danger. Its airlock-chomping days, it swore with all the sober earnestness of a recovering addict, were over.

The prevailing theory was that it had somehow activated when they’d come into close proximity with
Boonie’s Last Stand
, even though the hub manufactory had been completely clean and all the sensitive synth material had been removed by AstroCorps Rep and Rec. Maybe it had found components in space, and assembled itself a hub while running on automatic pilot.

Decay didn’t really believe that, he was pretty sure nobody else did either, and Bruce wouldn’t tell them where its hub was. Which he supposed was fair enough.

“Okay, so to trot out the usual suspects,” Z-Lin said, “we’re pretty sure Cratch had nothing to do with this since he hasn’t set foot in the oxy farm. It might have been an attempted eejit clean-up job, but since those two almost died of hypothermia right at the beginning, they’ve generally been keeping out too.”

“Janitorial being an evil ornery son of a whore?” Zeegon suggested.

The Commander shook her head. “Janitorials don’t go into the farms either, unless specifically programmed to – and even then, they don’t hang around. We’d still be looking for the
programmer
.”

“Can it be
repaired
?” Maladin said, reaching across Thord’s lap and taking hold of Dunnkirk’s upper left hand.

“Yes, we are not with care who did this thing,” Dunnkirk said earnestly. “We willn’t ask question. But can it will be fixed?”

Z-Lin shook her head, shoulders slumped. “Components we don’t have replacements for,” she said, “smashed beyond repair.”

“Whoever did this waited until we were well out of range of any sort of help,” Sally said. “Not that anything short of a Fleet ship would have sleeper components, and they might not have helped us anyway. But they made sure we were out past the big tech worlds. There might have been something on Declivitorion, but…”

“So,” Decay said, “do we backtrack and look for help? Try this again when we get a replacement sleeper?”

“Oh God please, no,” Zeegon whispered quite audibly, then looked ashamed. “Hey, what about the isolation pod from Bayn Balro? Not the pod itself, since we had to space that … but the gear. Sedatives, medical stuff. Could that be altered into something close? We might even be able to backtrack to Declivitorion, see if the Fergie ships have any smokeberries in their holds, right? That stuff is basically what they use to put people under in a sleeper pod.”

Z-Lin was shaking her head again. “Nothing like it,” she said, “the equipment is completely different, and even if we had smokeberries … no. The pod is a write-off. It’s one pod now, or we go back and start looking for Molren who have started to make it pretty clear they don’t want to be found.”

Janus raised a hand hesitantly. “What about the Dreamscape?” he asked. “I mean, like, is it at all possible that one of you could go out without a pod, like Thord is, and recombobulate in the Dreamscape, the way an aki’Drednanth returns? Exist as consciousness?”

Maladin seemed to snap out of a reflective pause. Now he and Dunnkirk both looked stricken, and exchanged a look before Maladin answered. “A Bonshoon cannot make that journey,” he said, standing up. Thord did the same. “I can enter the Dreamscape while in the sleeper pod. If Dunnkirk comes in a suit, or any other device, sooner or later it will succumb and he will lose consciousness and slip from the Dreamscape, into death.”

“Not return,” Dunnkirk said, tears glinting in his eyes.

“It sounds like you’ve made a decision,” Decay said.

“We discussed it just now,” Maladin said. “No point in dragging this out.”

“It is time,” Thord agreed.

With a suddenness that surprised Decay, and without further debate, they were assembling at the big modified door to the oxygen farm.

“Right,” Waffa said, “okay. Here’s how we do this. We’ve got the pod prepped, all the bits and pieces are attached. We’re going to vent the atmosphere from the seed room, and the second stage chamber, the, uh, ‘seed airlock’, up in the dome above. Then after we’re equalised, we open the internal door, and the
outer
door, uncouple the seed, and the catchers on the dome will reach in, hook to the end of the seed, and…” he coasted his thermal-gloved hands sideways and up. “On flimsy, and according to Bruce, you should just glide on out, with a good kick of momentum to see you on your way,” he paused. “Um, you’ll probably be …
returned
, by then,” he said to Thord. “We’ll get one of the boys,” he glanced at the two Bonshooni. “Which of you … ?”

“I am staying,” Dunnkirk said sadly.

“Okey doke,” Waffa said uncomfortably. “So, uh, right, we’ll get Mal hooked in and all systems go, before we vent out the atmos. That’s when you hunker down on that ice block however you’re planning on it, get yourself locked down.
Then
we vent. It’ll take about ten minutes, in order to minimise the, you know, stuff flying around in there, causing damage. You’ll probably lose consciousness before the doors open. And … well, even for you, the cold … it’ll be better to be unconscious by the time…”

“Yes,” Thord said, laying a hand on Waffa’s shoulder briefly. “Thank you, Galvan.”

Decay spared Waffa a glance.
‘Galvan’? Oh, so you
told
her?

“Ready when you are, then,” Waffa said, red-facedly ignoring the Blaran. “Well, we can get you hooked up and ready to go, Mal. Whenever.”

“Where are the pups?” Janus asked.

“They have been moved to the next arc,” Thord said, and gestured at the door. “They will be fine there until you can restore atmosphere to this room.”

“Have you … said goodbye?” Janus asked.

Thord turned her helmet towards him with a light flicker of amusement. “I will not be leaving them.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I will be leaving you, however,” Thord said. “Farewell, Janus. I will remember you. You are a good man. Look after these people.”

“Okay then.”

“I think we have everything we need for looking after the kids,” Z-Lin said, busying herself with her pad as Decay had noticed she often did when she was confronting an uncomfortably emotional scene. “I don’t know how well we’re going to handle it when they start to kill each other … I mean, we’re only human.”

“You will see them through,” Thord said, giving the Commander a pat on the arm. “They will do as they must.”

“Ignoring the fact that all seven of them have lived a bunch of times before and they know that when they die they’ll just go back on the waiting list?” Clue shook her head. “Where’s the sense? We’re in a situation, resources-wise, that would allow all seven…” she waved a hand, shook her head again, gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Human.”

“They may surprise you.”

“That would be a welcome change,” Clue said.

“Life is a privilege,” Thord went on heavily, “not a right. Returning to the Drednanth is the penalty for failing, even at the last, to achieve your potential. What is it you humans say? You have to pay to play.”

“No human on this ship has ever said that,” Clue said calmly, looking back down at her pad. “If they had, I’d’ve given them a wedgie.”

Sleeper technology was strange, Decay reflected as Maladin and Thord continued around the crew, saying their farewells. The original intention, if you believed the mythology, had been for the vast majority of the Molran species to sleep peacefully in the holds of their Worldships. After demolishing the rocky worlds of their long-lost home system to build the Fleet and venturing out into what became increasingly obvious was a big, very unfriendly galaxy, the Molran species had diverged. And a lot of them were still asleep.

Not just the Blaren and Bonshooni had branched from the trunk, but the sleepers themselves. Because the Fleet had been out there for a long time. The waking Molren had become the quintessential Fleet species, while the sleepers had been a sort of vast, iceberg-like store of genetic and cultural memory. According to long-agreed protocols, selected groups of the sleeper mass had been awakened and integrated into Fleet society at periodic intervals, to reinvigorate aging societies and stir the stagnating gene pool.

Most of the sleepers wanted to remain frozen until they found a way out of the galaxy, out of harm’s way, to a new system they could settle permanently – out of space itself, maybe. It depended on who you asked and what level of wacky their beliefs reached. It was possible, theoretically – a few exploratory Worldships were known to have left the galaxy using their subluminal drives, and although they’d been out of useful contact for millennia it was entirely likely that their crews would be able to sleep through the intervening aeons and awaken at their destinations. Unless they were just stuck in the veil and their pingbacks were all forged, of course. There was always that.