Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (11 page)

“We’ll select three hundred ables that will be most useful for you and least useful for us,” Z-Lin went on, “and get them signed onto your work details. In the meantime, anything else we can do…”

“You know, all this – with the plant and your ables and our needs, all of it – it actually meshes quite nicely,” the Acting Controller said, leading them across the chilly, echoing space towards a gaping hole that had once been a freight scrollwalk but was now a steeply-sloping ramp with an elevator platform riveted to a rail. Janus thought he seemed preoccupied by something, and had been since Z-Lin had mentioned moving on to a larger Six Species world. He wondered if the Acting Controller was worried about evacuation, or maybe thinking about how many of his people could fit on a little starship like the
Tramp
. A lot, Janus thought – especially if their swollen population of eejits was replaced by humans and Molranoids.

“Meshes, does it?” Z-Lin inquired politely.

“Mm,” Bendis said again. “You guys drop headcount quantity in favour of quality, freeing up shipboard resources that you’re probably going to be forced to drop.”

Z-Lin frowned as they jumped down onto the elevator platform, and Janus was reassured that she seemed to be as wary as he was, and had detected Lou’s veiled implication. There was a good five-foot gap between concourse and platform, but the low gravity made it easy. “What do you mean?” she asked as she landed and brought her heels back into contact with the metal, and Janus followed behind.
Here comes the part where they try to commandeer the ship
, he thought, steeling himself,
and Sally blows the docking spar off at the roots
.

“Well, all this stuff,” Lou hit a push-button on the hastily-assembled old-style control panel and started them descending. He held up his brother’s old organiser pad, flipped it over the back of his hand one more time, and waggled it. “I mean, these are
our
priorities,” he said, as they bumped and rattled down off the spar hub deck and into what was left of the bowels of The Warm, “but it turns out we have a priority zero for you.”

Decay looked up sharply from his own organiser. “You have an aki’Drednanth on board?” he asked. “She wasn’t on the manifest.”

“Late arrival,” Bendis replied. They continued descending through the increasingly-cold and clammy depths of the settlement. “And you know they tend to stay off the official lists. I’m not actually sure how many people are left who even know she’s here.”

“But she was here for the attack,” Decay said, “and survived? She hasn’t identified the attackers? What did she have to say?”

Bendis chuckled and raised his hands. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “One question at a time. And oh yeah, I don’t have answers to basically any of them. She hasn’t given an official statement or anything but a quiet all-clear from her habitat out on the metal. I’m
told
she’s been part of a couple of deep-freeze rescue ops but I was never involved, I just coordinated my deputies and then got the reports. She was down below when the attack came and that’s
most likely
why she survived, but then … well … aki’Drednanth, you never know. I mean, she could have used her abilities to escape somehow, or evade attention. Don’t ask me, I just work here,” the long-suffering Acting Controller was beginning to look harried under the Blaran’s piercing gaze, and the harsh engineering lamps that illuminated the sloped elevator shaft were particularly unforgiving on his tired eyes and ruddy bald pate. “I don’t know where myth ends and fact begins with the big buggers, alright? I’ve never
seen
an aki’Drednanth, and that includes Thord. I only know she’s here, and that makes her – and her needs – your priority zero by the AstroCorps book.”

“Thord?” Janus asked before Decay could descend any further into stammering fanatical jabber. “That’s her name?”

“That’s her name,” Lou replied, “or – you know – that’s her human-friendly pseudonym,” he spared Decay a wry grin. “That at least I can tell you.”

DECAY

Decay considered himself a hard-boiled next-generation Blaran freed of historical obligation, superstition and baggage. Unlike Steña who – poor thing – had had first-gen Blaranity thrust upon her, he was born to it and inured against all that Ancient Debt
bonsh
the Molren went on about.

Nevertheless, he was fluttering with excitement inside.

They were about to stand before an aki’Drednanth
.

Louzhan Bendis led them to another makeshift transit system built on the bones of a clearly superior one that now lacked the power infrastructure to run properly, and they traversed some more tunnels. The platform they disembarked at was scooped into the soft, silvery native mineral of The Warm – warmium, Lou kept calling it – and Decay couldn’t help but feel an
additional
flutter, this time of uneasiness and sorrow. It was cold here, so much so that even he was glad of the thermal garb, and if what they’d been told was true the temperature was only going to drop.

“It’s still only about fifteen below here,” Bendis confirmed, when Decay crossed to the wall beside the ascending stairs and pressed his gloved upper left hand to the metallic surface. “The whole thing’s cooling from topside in. Up in the bubble we’re headed for, last readings put it at minus twenty-three.”

“Thord won’t even be wearing her envirosuit,” Decay said.

“Are you bioluminescing a bit there?” Janya murmured in amusement.

“Hope you brought your autograph book,” Clue added.

“Shut up.”

“I guess you run a pretty casual ship,” Bendis chuckled.

“We’ve been through the wringer,” the Commander shrugged. “And what can you expect from civilians?”

As if to illustrate this, Contro crossed past the access arch and toe-bounced over to a door set in the warmium. He opened it to reveal a dead, dusty maintenance and monitoring console. “Hello! What’s this?” he asked cheerfully.

“Nothing of any use to us anymore. This way,” the Acting Controller said, ushering them towards the stairs. They had once been automated but were now as dead as everything else, slightly oversized and awkward for the humans to climb but relatively easy for Decay. Of course, the effective absence of gravity aside from the practical illusion provided by their boots made it as easy for them as it was for him.

We’re going to see an aki’Drednanth
, he thought, but no longer felt the urge to share with the group,
not just out of her envirosuit, but
in zero gee.

“Come on, Contro,” he said, giving the transpersion physicist a clap on the shoulder and noting in passing amusement that the smiling human was actually wearing a cardigan over the top of his thermal. “And don’t
lick
anything.”

“Thanks for reminding me!” Contro exclaimed, and rummaged in the pocket of his baggy top. He dropped his watch, managed to catch it before it could drift away, put it in his pocket, pulled out a paper-wrapped tube, dropped
that
, caught it as it bounced off the wall, and held it aloft triumphantly. “Aha! Anyone want a toffee? Eat up before they freeze, I always say! Well, not always, but it’s certainly a point! Ha ha ha!”

“Contro–” Clue started patiently.

“Shit, I’ll take one,” Bendis said. “Haven’t had toffee in a bloody year. Cheers, mate.”

Clue grinned and shook her head, and they climbed back up towards the surface, Contro’s cheerful voice echoing off the mineral shaft walls as he prattled about the innumerable merits of Boddington’s and the huge supply he had with him but that he hoped he would be able to replenish before too much longer but imagine if it was actually the last stockpile of Boddington’s Toffees in human civilisation, and wouldn’t that be funny but not really very funny in that sense at least, and how many should he responsibly save for alien archaeologists to discover and replicate do you think, and wasn’t it a shame the printers just couldn’t get it right, and have you ever tasted printer toffee, it was actually jolly decent but sometimes ‘jolly decent’ just wasn’t quite enough was it, and then on back around to the subject of Boddington’s re: its innumerable merits.

Bendis, surely due to extremely short exposure and the fact that he’d thought there were only eighteen humans left in the galaxy up until a couple of hours before, seemed rather charmed by this monologue.

They reached the top of the stair and the surrounding warmium gave way to equally-cold habitat-standard metaflux plating once more. It was a small room, barely large enough for the five humans, two ables and the Blaran to stand on the landing together, with a door set into one wall and a metal cabinet bolted to another.

“There’s air in the bubble, of course,” the Acting Controller said, “but I’m told Thord has vented out a lot of the heat and re-routed that power to where it’s needed, so it’s brass monkeys out there,” he opened the cabinet and started passing out floppy black
niqi
s, headgear that would seal against their thermals and keep their faces warm, while allowing them to see out through filter-fitted eyeholes. They weren’t standard issue on starships – generally speaking, if you needed a
niqi
as well as a thermal, you put on a spacesuit and called it good. “You’ll want these.”

Decay pulled the material down over his flattened ears and smoothed it over the top of his head with quiet gratitude. Honestly, he didn’t often envy humans their fur and their tiny, feeble little ears, but the cold sometimes had a psychological impact that no amount of blood chemistry and muscular insulation could counteract.

Bendis checked that they were all rugged up, consulted and tapped at his organiser a moment longer in some sort of communication with his deputies, then leaned in and pushed the door open. Decay noted, again, the calmly-automatic way the human braced one foot against the adjacent wall under the cabinet in order to provide leverage. They’d been living essentially weightlessly for the past three weeks, and a reinstatement of gravity would no doubt come as a tremendous shock to them all.

He’d probably drop that giant pad of his in the first ten seconds, at least
, Decay thought in uncharitable amusement, and followed Z-Lin out into the open.

And ‘into the open’ was what it felt like. At first it was difficult to see the bubble, since it was made of very fine regenerative film extruded from the low ring-wall surrounding the habitat. It had probably been ruptured in several places during the attack and had grown back in a matter of minutes, as it was designed to do around micrometeorites and other impacts. Even if the bubble had depressurised for an hour, the collection of low shacks could have maintained an atmosphere while the bubble stretched and swelled back into place like a net of cobwebs puffing up into the air. There were several structures and openings that probably led down into tunnels like the one they’d just exited – if not airlocked, then at least barred by airtight doors and able to be blocked off by emergency seals.

For that matter, the average aki’Drednanth envirosuit could maintain EVA viability for the time it would take for the habitat to repair itself.

It was an efficient and sustainable design, hybrid Six Species bio-nano-technology, but useful only for a limited range of situations and environments, and particularly
species
. They couldn’t have made more than a few surface bubbles this way, or the whole lot would have eventually come floating apart in a stiff solar wind. And heating the film and interior was an added expense and an added destabilising element due to the temperature shear, which was probably another reason Thord had done away with it.

The bubble was designed to be held aloft in near-zero gravity by the pressure of the atmosphere inside it alone, so it was by necessity extremely light and thin. The ground was untreated, pebbly-surfaced warmium bedrock interrupted only by the secondary structures and the ring-wall, although the latter was not visible from their current vantage. And yes, Decay could tell even through the thermal and the
niqi
, it was
cold
. The Warm itself might have been minus-twenty-something, but with most of the heating power leached out of this area the air was chilled nearer to the ambient temperature of The Warm’s practically nonexistent atmosphere. It must have been sixty or seventy degrees below zero, Decay thought. Quite close to ideal, for an aki’Drednanth.

They stepped out into the bubble, boots creaking and grinding on the frozen ground, and looked around at the desolate space. There was a strangely stifling light from a collection of emergency lamps, and the local sun was peeping over the Chalice. Chilly blue light pierced the field of ice meteorites in sharp rays.

Decay, much to his private pleasure, saw her first.

She emerged from one end of a nearby long, tent-like structure of canvas and light hull plates. Thord
was
wearing her massive beige envirosuit, rather unexpectedly and unnecessarily, but Decay allowed that she no doubt had her reasons. In fact, when he stopped to think about it, it actually made sense. The bubble could fail at any moment, there could be more space-borne debris or another attack from almost any source, and she would need the suit’s air. If the bubble
did
burst, the eight of
them
would be lucky to get back into the stairwell before asphyxiating.

Thord was – there was simply no other more appropriate way of saying it –
vast
. The average aki’Drednanth, while only a foot or so taller than a Blaran – eight feet, sometimes as much as nine – were essentially cubical in volume. They were nine feet
in every direction
. And her refrigeration gear added another effortless foot to this, and added to her overall cubishness. Normally aki’Drednanth were powerful but pacific, their movements smooth as muscle effortlessly cancelled out the immense weight of their gear, but at the same time slow and deliberate. This was more to do with the care and affection they showed for their little Molranoid and humanoid cousins, however, than the popular misapprehension that aki’Drednanth were lumbering semi-sentient Ogres.