Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (15 page)

“I had no idea that was possible,” Janya admitted. “But then, there’s a lot I don’t know about sleeper technology.”

“It is something we have pioneered, in a sense,” Maladin said proudly. “The pod slows down and even stops many processes, but we have found that the freezing process – it is not
freezing
in the literal sense, but the analogy is sound – actually brings our brains into a closer approximation of the aki’Drednanth configuration. We do not remain
conscious
, but we retain contact with Thord. As long as we are in the Dreamscape when the pod is activated.”

“We do much experiment,” Dunnkirk said, with a laugh. Maladin laughed as well.

“Experimental fun with sleeper pods,” Z-Lin said, her face unreadable behind the mask. “Sounds awesome. Let’s get to work then.”

After a brief time finalising their loading plans, the crew headed back into the blessed relative warmth of the tunnels. Thord and the two Bonshooni p’bruz stayed behind to finish packing and preparing, and Z-Lin directed the rest of them to return to the ship.

“Of course, if any of you want to, you can stay out and see what sort of R&R The Warm has available,” she told them as they rattled back towards the docking array, “or help out in any capacity you feel you can. Most of those, I would think, would involve our shipboard resources but you do what you think is best. Plus, you’re not Corps crewmembers so obviously you’re free to disembark and stay here.”

“Can’t imagine why any of you would,” Bendis said genially, “frankly I think your biggest problem is going to be getting out of here without a massive refugee surplus. But I…” he paused, flipped his pad up into his hand, and pecked at it with a finger. “Huh.”

“Problem?” Clue asked.

“No, I guess not. Just got a message,” Lou said, glancing up at her in surprise. “Your Captain’s come aboard and is waiting in my office to have a private word.”

“I told you he’d probably disembark in his own time and contact you,” Z-Lin said with aplomb.

“Well, yeah, but…” Lou looked embarrassed, and tapped briskly at his pad and spun it back into his pocket to disguise his discomfort. “To be honest, I’d sort of assumed … with your drastic crew reductions, I’d assumed a sort of an XO-override situation.”

Clue gave a slight smile. “In the Corps, we call it a–”

“–
Draka
scenario,” she and Bendis finished together, and the Acting Controller grinned. “Yeah,” he went on, “I was wondering if you were just maintaining a convenient fiction to keep things together. Sorry about that.”

“No need,” Z-Lin said, “it’s not as if it affected your conduct. And let’s face it, even
with
the Captain we’re massively undermanned. An act like that wouldn’t achieve much, one way or the other.”

They ascended back into the spar where the
Tramp
was docked.

WAFFA

Waffa once again found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to converse with a Fergunakil
giela
. This time it was fully articulated.

The deceptively small robot was clearing crushed bulkheads and opening out sections of corridor as other robots – automated non-remote-controlled maintenance drones – on the far side of the emergency seals repaired so-called ‘hurricane damage’ caused by venting atmosphere and flying architecture. It was too sensitive a task to fully automate, and too heavy for anything but a machine to perform. A single mistake in the timing and procedures, and the entire sector could depressurise.
Again
. At least as far out as the nearest set of intact seals, which amounted to quite a volume – and volume, most importantly, that currently contained Waffa.

To its credit, the shiny, spindly little machine with the unsettling double-headed erection had not depressurised them, despite the fact that it would pose no risk to the
giela
and would probably be funny for the Fergunakil with which it was connected to watch. Waffa reminded himself that the shark on the far end of the device was most likely dying in a frigid slice of water, in a broken habitat that was slowly turning into a comet.

He even managed to dredge up some sympathy, although under the circumstances he couldn’t have said absolutely-for-certain that it wasn’t just projected self-pity.

The half-mile of spar on the far side of the collapse was devoid of life. The robots were opening it back out and clearing it of broken modulars and residences because there were docks and a power transformer out there. Which meant that more modulars might feasibly be able to dock if more ever showed up, and the current survivors would be able to supply power more evenly and with more oomph to the rest of the inhabited areas of The Warm in the meantime. Maybe even boost the existing system’s stability enough to restore liveability to at least
part
of the Chalice, which would probably be enough to keep the remaining Fergies swimming.

At the end of that half-mile, where the Boco Pano Chrysanthemum that housed his family home had once been, there was nothing at all. And no survivors had logged in from the area. Not even any
comms
had been logged from the area.

“And this is the full list of survivors?” he asked, thumbing through the list on his wristwatch. He’d already realised that the eighteen human names there were completely unfamiliar to him, and the rest were actually able designations.

“So far,” the Fergie said, with a forgivable lack of interest.

“And there are no more big groups of survivors anywhere?” he insisted. “I mean, big areas that still need to be cleared or opened out, that might have survivors in?”

“There are no more areas of any significant size,” the Fergunakil said. “The last peak in
that
bell-curve was the second able nursery we found, and that was the last of those. The rest are all gone. The survivor count has been tailing off since well before that. It reached practical zero for humans a long time ago, and for Fergunak before that since we know exactly how many water volumes there are. There are no hab areas left to open back up, and the rest are frozen, or vacuum, or both. It’s not likely for us even to find Molranoids now.”

“Damn it,” Waffa murmured hollowly. With fingers that were numb without any help from the cold, he entered this information superfluously into his file for the reports he would no doubt be filling in for the next few hours. “Damn it.”

“Yes, little flesh,” the
giela
folded neatly under a buckled stanchion, smoothly whirred erect like an oversized vehicle jack, and stood with arms extended over its head as a heavy-duty lifter rolled in and took the load. It stepped back and angled its gleaming bullet-head to watch as the lifter extended to push the huge arc of metal back into a semblance of its correct alignment. “Damn it all.”

“There’s nothing in the official counts about ‘practical zero’,” Waffa said.

“Why would there be? It is a cold and negative emotion-thing,” the robot clicked forward, positioned itself by a debris-clogged emergency seal, and communed for a moment with the automated network. “But it is truth,” it concluded, beginning to tug free and toss the mangled metal and crete. “You want to stand to one side, little flesh,” it added. “This seal should not drop into place as both areas are pressurised, but it may malfunction. And if it does, you will be crushed and your meat wasted.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Waffa grunted, stepping out of the path of the massive seal-block. “It says here there’s sixty-three Bonshooni survivors. With the twenty-seven from Bayn Balro, that makes an even ninety. Almost as many Bonshooni as Blaren, according to this…” he was aware that he was prattling, listing numbers and comparisons and factoids from around the crumbling edges of what he
knew
, intellectually, was a vast and gaping chasm of truth.

His mother, his friends and neighbours, the entire population of Boco Pano. They were gone. Almost two hundred thousand people had lived in the Boco Pano Chrys, and the entire rambling cluster of extended habitats and mashed-together old modulars had been … had been
erased
.

“I always wanted to taste Bonshoon,” the robot said whimsically. It waited a moment for Waffa to ask a convenient lead-in question, and when he didn’t it went ahead anyway. “Already have tasted human.”

The urge to wait until the
giela
was jacking up the next busted stanchion, and then just reach in and disconnect its main power feed, was savage and sudden and tantalising. But Waffa reminded himself that it would serve less than no purpose. It wouldn’t harm the shark – on the contrary, it would experience a severed connection and maybe a little data-throb, but it would also experience the ineffable Fergie satisfaction of knowing that it had gotten to him. In the meantime, the
giela
would be out of commission until Waffa got over his petulance and plugged the bloody thing back in, and that would only be delaying important repair work that was going to help preserve aquatic and non-aquatic survivors alike.

And his mum, and his friends, and The Warm, would still be dead.

“Real human, or just able?” he asked casually, not looking up from his watch.

It was, as ever, hard to tell from the voice and impossible to tell from the body language of the remote avatar, but the
giela
did pause in its vigorous dislodging work and turn to look at him.

“Able,” it eventually said, with what Waffa opted to interpret as grudging admiration in its synthesised voice.

“Cheap fabricator-printed knock-off of the real deal, mate,” he said in a dismissive tone.

“You know this from experience, little flesh?”

Waffa shrugged carelessly. “Been in space a long time,” he said. “Been in bigger messes than this, too. You’d want to watch out for the Bonshooni we brought with us, though,” he added. “They’re smokers, and even though they’ve been aired out for a bit, I hear that shit gets into the meat.”

The
giela
absorbed this in silence, allowing Waffa to get back to his aimless sifting and scrolling. That was when, like some cosmic reward for his forbearance and grace under fire, he found the travel log archives.

After whisking through them for a minute or two, he left the Fergunakil robot to its task with a muttered couple of words, and headed back the way he had come at an easy low-gee lope. Stopping at the junction of the spar, he contacted Clue.

“Hey, Waff,” Z-Lin came back moments later. “What news?”

“Not much good,” Waffa replied, “and less in detail,” he quickly filled the Commander in on the rescue and repair operations, the ‘practical zero’ threshold that was only being mentioned between the lines on the official data, and the broad strokes of the mysteriously-eradicated Mandelbrot array. “I’ve talked to a few of the survivors, as well as a couple of the Fergies,” he concluded. “About the attack, all I’ve really got are stories but they’re … well, they do have a bit of a cohesive thread that runs from area to area in a believable way. I think there might be something to it.”

“Really? We’ve got nothing here,” Clue said, “aside from the idea that it was some sort of supercharged assault fleet that came out of nowhere and then may or may not have vanished back
into
nowhere when all the outside comms went dead, but nobody can tell because all the outside comms went dead.”

“Yeah. Over this side of the old array, there’s actually a pretty solid rumour that they
boarded
here,” Waffa said, “although that’s about the only thing the stories all agree on. What they did when they boarded, what they looked like, whether they actually
boarded
or just sent in some sort of destroyer drones or charges – it’s all up in the air. Seems to be an unspoken agreement that it was Damorakind, though.”

“That’s what we’re getting, too,” Clue agreed. “So far only the Acting Controller’s gone out on a limb and actually
said
it, and even that smacked a bit of naming the Devil.”

“Yeah,” Waffa repeated. “Nobody’s really talking, same as Bayn Balro, but the general unspoken vibe is that this was a Cancer job,” he paused. “The people in the administration and docking loop who aren’t talking about the attack are also very pointedly not talking about how exactly
we
managed to slip through the coordinated assault net that nobody’s talking about.”

“Right,” Z-Lin said dryly, “well, add that to the insane experimental superdrive
we’re
not talking about, I guess,” she paused. “How about your people, Waff?”

“Gone,” he said, “at least the whole Chrys where they lived has been taken out of the universe. I’ve got some sort of good news, though,” he swiped up the archive. “If I’m reading this right, and the damage to the data isn’t hiding anything too vital like a cancellation or accident, then it looks like my mother took a trip out to Aquilar a few months ago, to visit my sister and her family back there. Chances are, she’s still in transit. Either way, chances are she was probably long gone from here when the shit came down.”

“Good,” Clue said, earnestly. “I’m glad to hear it. Although everyone else you must’ve known from the area … I guess it’s too much to hope that you only had eighteen friends and they’re all still here?”

Waffa gave a little chuckle. “Don’t know a single one of the bastards.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay Waff, well it’s still your call what you do next. If you want to stay here and help out, there’s a pretty good chance any relief or relocation will be going to and from Aquilar anyway, so if you want to hold out for transport, we’ll set you up. We’re not going anywhere near the Big A-Hole anytime soon, though, so if you stick with us…”

“I hear you,”
if the Big A’s even still there
, he thought but didn’t add.

“You don’t need to make up your mind right yet, though,” Clue went on. “We’re going to be here a few days just getting everything sorted out, figuring out who stays and who leaves, and running our engines and printers around the clock to get these guys the juice and medical supplies they need.”