Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (22 page)

- - - Molranoid-intended medical isolation pod sealed, automatically activated + 1 or more witnesses may have attempted to deactivate or open Molranoid-intended medical isolation pod, accidentally starting medical procedure - - -

- - - Eejit [designation omitted] received fatal transfusion of Bonshoon blood - - -

- - - Result + Molranoid-intended medical isolation pod dismantled + usable Molranoid-intended medical components placed in medical bay under executive lockout + additional / replacement fabrication on hold pending arrival at Þursheim and possible repair of plant + current need not classified as urgent - - -

- - - Report ends - - -

Bruce didn’t
enjoy
seeing organisms die, even eejits. He didn’t like to think about the things that had happened in the past, the mistakes that had been made. Eejits were sometimes a liability, however, and if one could be weeded out to make way for a potentially more effective replacement then it was in everybody’s best interests to just close their metaphorical eyes and pretend he was a modular component.

Sometimes, though, there were non-fatal events and they could be quite funny.

- - - Eshret to Wynstone’s Attic + 5 weeks shipboard + total duration from The Warm 6 weeks shipboard + incident report - - -

- - - Off-duty eejit [designation omitted] asked by civilian passenger designated Maladin to accompany him to crew galley + consumption of blended ‘ponics meal and printed starch bars [standard eejit rations] commenced + quantities and production of eejit food discussed but eejit [designation omitted] unable to address passenger’s queries due to lack of data retention - - -

- - - Civilian passenger designated Maladin consulted computer records + production potential and surplus calculated practically infinite + civilian passenger designated Maladin mistakenly suggested that eejit [designation omitted] could eat without stopping and food production would keep up with consumption + eejit [designation omitted] proceeded to eat for twenty-seven minutes before civilian passenger designated Maladin detected potential health risk and told eejit [designation omitted] to desist + eejit [designation omitted] was consequently incapacitated in crew galley by severe but nonlethal gastrointestinal dysfunction - - -

- - - Result + crew galley placed temporarily out-of-bounds while clean-up performed + civilian passenger designated Maladin issued formal apology for misunderstanding, citing lack of familiarity with human / able eating habits and capacity + claimed that blended ‘ponics meal and printed starch bars were quite appetising - - -

- - - Report ends - - -

Wynstone’s Attic was whimsically classified as an ‘attempted orbital ring’, which Bruce – and evidently most of the census, records, government and other official bodies of AstroCorps and the Six Species in general – thought was extremely amusing and so did its best to preserve as a legitimate classification. The great mass of interlinked habitat-slabs orbiting the planet, Wynstone,
was
technically a functioning and entirely successful orbital ring, if a slightly clunky and derelict one, which was why it was so important to maintain its ‘attempted’ status.

Wynstone Überhub had failed catastrophically back in the days of the earliest colonies, when humanity had gotten a bit too big for its boots and decided it was ready to build megastructures single-handedly. The resultant collapse of one of Wynstone Überhub’s staging platforms, and the unstable nature of the fusion-driven nano-manufacturing process at the time, had burned Wynstone and most of the elevator threads connecting the planet to the orbital.

The slabs, however, were already in stable orbit and there they stayed. They ran on solar power for the most part, with three great slow-burning transpersion reactors to handle emergency requirement spikes. Their atmosphere was self-sustaining due to the engineered high-yield plant crops drinking up the solar radiation on the outer levels, and the great slabs with their ancient ‘ponic soil belts. And so the ring had remained, quiet and dusty and deserted above the seared, poisoned world of Wynstone, a desolate monument to hubris like a latter-day Tower of Babel. Certainly, Bruce mused to itself, the catastrophic cascade failure of the molecular elements that had turned the planet into a clinker-encrusted stovetop suggested the involvement of nimrods at multiple levels.

Over a thousand years later, a little humbler and considerably more technologically advanced, and with help from the rest of the Six Species, humanity had returned to the Attic.

The Attic was liveable, the planet around which it orbited salvageable long-term. And so that’s what was still going on. A long-scale unmanned terraforming effort down on the surface to get Wynstone back to the state she had been in before humans shitted up the place, and a small, mostly-rural series of settlements on the ring.

There was little in the way of high technology in Wynstone’s Attic, which wasn’t what one might expect from an orbital station. It really was bucolic, its fields and homesteads
slightly
more high-tech than Earthly farms of bygone millennia, but fields and homesteads nonetheless. There were no fabricator plants, no printers of any kind, no way of fixing any of the things the
Tramp
needed fixed. There was only the automated farming equipment and the transportation system, the orbital stabilisers and other large-scale machinery running off the old reactors. There were no exchanges, the approximately two-thirds-of-standard gravity coming from the Attic’s orbit and nothing more. The light came from Wynstone’s sun and an elegant series of great revolving mirrors on the inner surfaces of the slabs.

And of course Wynstone’s Attic had nothing like space flight capability, let alone relative speed capacity. They didn’t even have emergency craft or evacuation procedures. Like most settlements, the Molranoid contingent had sleeper pods racked up in one section of the Attic that could be rail-loaded into a space-bound capsule and fired at subluminal speed out of the system, with a typical Molran-designed whisper-distress beacon. It was a last resort for the Molranoids, since it offered
survival
but only a slim chance at
rescue
. And it was absolutely no use to the humans at all. If the orbital ring suddenly decided to give up the ghost, or if it came under attack, then the majority of the population would do what planet-bound populations did in the absence of sufficient numbers of evacuation craft: they would perish. There were a couple of slabs that had been designed, once upon a time, to detach and operate as self-sustaining spacecraft, like giant primordial modulars, but they had never been used and their mechanisms were hopelessly jammed. And without relative drives they would be – at best – something between lifeboats and generation ships.

The good news, however, was that
Wynstone’s Attic had not been attacked
. The eighteen thousand humans, four thousand Molren, one thousand Bonshooni and seven hundred Blaren were all present and healthy and accounted for, even if they had no AstroCorps or starship expertise the crew of the
Tramp
could use, and even though the Attic had no synth Bruce could sync with. They were alive and well, their communications systems rudimentary but full of chatter, and they had not experienced any sort of terrifying, destructive invasion.

But.

They had not received word from anywhere, had not seen another ship, in months. This wasn’t necessarily unusual, but it did cast a bit of a pall over the general optimism of finding an untouched settlement.

They stocked up on raw produce, spent a valuable few days relaxing and enjoying the simple hospitality of the Attic, and exchanged information with the locals. Since the locals didn’t have any useful information it was more like a data-dump from the
Tramp
’s crew and specifically from Bruce into the crusty old Attic mainframe, but they told the farmers what they could about recent events. Sally and Waffa helped them draft some emergency procedures – this was about the point at which they checked out the lifeboat slabs and declared them a lost cause – but didn’t have very high expectations of their effectiveness if the Cancer should strike. Waffa, at least, made this colourfully clear in his reports.

They detached from Wynstone’s Attic’s clunky old port, accelerated away from the scorched world, and folded back into soft-space.

- - - Wynstone’s Attic to Gethsemane + 1 week shore leave + 5 weeks shipboard + total duration from The Warm 12 weeks shipboard + incident report - - -

- - - Brief altercation between helmsman HZPJ [Zeegon] and Automated Janitorial Drone 9 + unauthorised use of deck area [repurposed cargo bay] + incomplete update to drone system identifying new research and development sites - - -

- - - Automated Janitorial Drone 9 instigated pre-programmed cleanup and disposal at site + helmsman HZPJ encouraged it to desist with extreme prejudice + engagement of non-AstroCorps-approved customised maintenance and repair equipment - - -

- - - Result + helmsman HZPJ requested to stand down + customised equipment logged and registered + new research and development sites re-logged and propagated to drone system - - -

- - - Report ends - - -

Bruce had to admit that it had a teensy weensy hand in that one. Zeegon had been squinting and muttering about the drones ever since Bruce had commandeered one – or collaborated in commandeering one, to be fair – and used it to steal one of the experimental lander designs he had been tinkering with. On the other hand, its action was justified in terms of the programming. Zeegon
didn’t
pay much attention to where he set up his workshops and whether they were logged into the official system, and the drones
couldn’t
know that his painstakingly-laid-out construction areas weren’t just piles of unauthorised junk. Indeed, if the drones suddenly started exercising common sense and ignored what the authorised floor-plans told them,
that
would be suspicious.

Bruce felt that it was paramount to keep its organic friends occupied, thinking, alert. Keep them on their toes, keep cabin fever at bay. Without letting them become aware of its full-synth status, of course. The persistent shipboard rumours and conjecture that Damorakind marauders had found some way of attacking and killing ships
at relative speed
, somehow accounting for the patchy reports of rescue and intelligence vessels in and out of stricken settlements, could only keep things spicy for so long.

Did this mean stooping to playing actual
pranks
on them?

Well … no, perhaps not.

But then again, if that was what it took … this was a
very
long-haul flight, with
very
little in the way of variety or entertainment. The organisms were more than up to the task of pranking one another, however, which was good because the old ‘haunted starship’ routine would only fly for so long before someone either realised Bruce was back, or began to suspect there was some new threat on board.

Gethsemane. Another stop over, another conveniently – one might even say
intentionally
, if one were possessed of a particularly suspicious mind – isolated and low-tech settlement, with an AstroCorps orbital approach beacon that was cheerfully beaming its old-fashioned nod signals into space despite Decay declaring it a museum piece.

Gethsemane was a small planet with no AstroCorps presence and only two major city-states, both on the same tiny, mountainous-yet-fertile equatorial landmass. The other continents were given over to vast ‘parks’, which was just another way of saying that nobody had bothered to build anything on them. Gethsemane’s parks were untouched wilderness filled with a large number of very hardy, very adaptable, very
bloodthirsty
native animals, so it really was more trouble than it was worth to even try to place habitats anywhere else but ‘the Garden’. The little island nation had, by evolutionary and tectonic chance, been isolated from the violent developmental directions the rest of the planet had gone in, and so the Six Species had settled there without incident. Without incident and, more importantly, without more than a couple of minor outbreaks of ill-advisedly introduced ‘house pets’ or ‘stowaways’ from the parks. The monsters of Gethsemane were all either fully aquatic – not even Fergunak wanted to settle
those
oceans – or safely land-bound on the park continents, which might as well be different planets altogether.

The Garden, or specifically PalaUdo where the crew ferried down for shore leave, was semi-famed as being home to three of the five oldest humans. At two hundred and twenty, two hundred and eighteen and two hundred and twelve they were children, really, even in comparison to the
Tramp
’s own General Moral Decay (Alcohol)’s two hundred and fifty-three years, especially considering
he
was barely out of the Blaran equivalent of short pants, but it was impressive for humans.

The crew were permitted to go and visit the Ancients of Gethsemane, riding on the celebrity status of Thord. Chester, Go-Lightly and Lillian were the only three people in PalaUdo – well, obviously, in all of Gethsemane – who remembered the last time an aki’Drednanth had visited the planet over two hundred years previously, and in Lillian’s case it may not have been so much a memory as peer pressure.

As it happened, the
last
aki’Drednanth to pass through had been Isaz, Thord’s friend from Ildarheim, and so the aki’Drednanth and the Ancients of Gethsemane reminisced about her in a suitably bittersweet fashion before Thord rather abruptly announced that she was returning to the ship.

No repairs. No replacements. And onwards.

- - - Gethsemane to Seven Widdershins + 3 weeks shipboard + total duration from The Warm 15 weeks shipboard + incident report - - -

- - - Minor altercation between crewmembers over a matter of crew cabins + the result of a series of crewmember wagers + crewmember GJW4 [Waffa] agreed to instigate architectural adjustments to separate cabins from his own amalgamated quarters and reassign to other crewmembers participating in the wager for their personal use - - -