Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (30 page)

Waffa shook his head. “The remains went into the toruses, and across the plane, and we did what we could to clean them even before we met the Mundy guys. You know how much grease – condensed fat – there is in an average human? Enough to make seven blocks of soap. Decay told me. He likes those little facts,” he laughed shortly. “In his defence, he did also point out there was enough to make five in a Molran.”

“There is more in Bonshoon, I think so,” Dunnkirk said, then grew serious. “The grease stayed?”

“Janus says it’s just psychological,” Waffa shrugged.

“Oh, you get counselling for this.”

“Nah. He tries to slip a bit into conversation sometimes.”

“He is good counsellor.”

“You think so?” Waffa shrugged again. “He’s a nice bloke, but … wait, what – you? You’ve had counselling from Janus?”

“I try to slip into conversation,” Dunnkirk said, turning from the plant to Waffa and giving him a little wink.

“What do
you
need counselling for?”

“We are flying to the edge of space, to ride the Drednanth seed into the walls and perhaps beyond,” Dunnkirk said, eyes bright. “It is very for excitings, but also I am afeared.”

“Fair enough,” he was about to change the subject when the configuration conveniently ended, effectively doing it for him. “Okay,” he said, looking at his watch as the product aperture and the uniform port opened in a tasteful little waft of steam that smelled inoffensively of a hot shower room. “That was ninety-five minutes, almost the bare minimum, so let’s not get our hopes–”

The eejit, glossy from the innards of the machine and buck naked in the non-confrontational way animals and anatomically-correct mannequins tended to be, stepped out of the wreath of steam and stood, the slack waiting-face of the eejit on his face. He turned, saw Waffa and Dunnkirk rising to their feet in the alcove, and straightened to a semblance of attention.

“Howi howi,” he said.

Waffa almost fell back into his chair. The eejit’s voice was a little thick and confused, and he had that classic bovine non-expression … but he was nevertheless, unmistakably, delivering the intended AstroCorps-regulation phrase for a fresh-printed and successfully-configured able.

Able
.

“Uh, howi, right,” Waffa said, and hurried forward to hand the eejit his still-warm uniform. “Hey. Uh … hey.”

“Is he alright?” Dunnkirk asked in concern.

“He seems fine,” Waffa said. “I’ve actually never heard one say ‘howi’ before. It’s what they’re supposed to say, when they’re printed and configured right. When they’re
ables
.”

“Is this then able?”

“Well, no,” Waffa went on, consulting the interface and looking at the sequence of cognitive tests and indicators that accompanied the configuration. This guy was definitely suffering a configuration problem – if you could configure an able in ninety-five minutes, why did it normally take five hundred on a working machine? – but it was unusually mild. This was a
very
decent-quality eejit. “No, but he’s a good print.”

“Ready to get to work,” the eejit said, quickly donning his uniform. “Ready to get to work.”

“That is good,” Dunnkirk said. “I am glad. I’m glad it worked, the … as we … the thing I tried.”

“What thing?”

“The…” the Bonshoon raised a hand to his ear, waggled his fingers obscurely, and then used the same hand to point and wiggle his fingers at the fabrication plant. “I … we tried this, this communion. Thord wants to
kashraa
… minimal …
minimise
… the printer mans. The eejits, the number of them,” Dunnkirk explained, sounding oddly shy.

“You
made
him configure better?” Waffa practically squeaked. “How the
Hell
did you do that?”

“I just, with Thord,” Dunnkirk said helplessly. “I just, just feel the mind. Feel the layers. Help them lay down right, one on top of the next. It is difficult.”

“Awaiting assignment and designation,” the eejit said. “Awaiting assignment and designation.”

Waffa shook himself and turned back to the interface. “Right. Uh, right, okay. We’ll call him Shaw,” he tapped on the console and assigned Shaw a basic identity and shipboard role. “First name, Tubby.”

Dunnkirk blinked. “Tubby?”

Waffa turned to the eejit. “What’s your name, chief?”

“Tubby Shaw, Tubby Shaw.”

“
Classic
,” Waffa grinned, then noticed Dunnkirk’s puzzlement. “Never mind. Can you do that mojo with the other nineteen boys we’ve got to print?”

“Yes, I think. We may need to stop, Thord will need to rest, she is…” Dunnkirk made another obscure gesture with his lower hands. “She will tire from the work.”

“No worries, we can rest, we can do them in shifts, just let me know when you guys need a break,” Waffa began to prepare the next print, and Tubby Shaw headed with convincing purposefulness towards his first shift. “If we’re going to get good eejits out of this, we can take our time.”

CONTRO

They reached MundCorp Research Base early one morning, although obviously it wasn’t
morning
morning, it was just the part of the day on board ship that everyone agreed was morning for some reason and when the night shift turned into the day shift. Contro wasn’t sure when they’d agreed this. He hadn’t been involved, that was for sure. Although he probably would have done it the same way, so he couldn’t very well complain. In fact you never really
could
tell which morning was the real thing, because most of the crew members were from different planets and they all had different mornings, didn’t they? So it was just as well they all used a made-up one on the ship, really. But it was confusing, too, because as far as Contro could tell it was always night outside. Honestly, that was space for you. In fact it wasn’t even
night
, it was soft-space so it was sort of grey and funny, like a very dense foggy morning.

Actually, when you thought about it, in soft-space it was morning all the time! So it didn’t really mean much to say it was morning when they got to MundCorp Research Base, and that just proved it.

Still, Controversial-To-The-End had gotten up, put on his trousers and shirt and socks and shoes and a good cardigan, not necessarily in that order, and made himself a cup of tea to have with his breakfast. While he ate his ‘ponic-grown cereal and protein-bar – the bar was printed, but he thought they were pretty yum – he read a few pages of a book he’d been trying to get through since … well, since before they’d met the Artist and gone hopping all over the galaxy, actually! He was a bit of a duffer when it came to books. Never could quite be sure if he’d read it before and just forgotten, or not read it at all, or read something else and was remembering
that
, or even why he was reading it. The words were in the book, and that was fine. Why did they need to be in his head too? If he needed them, he knew where they were. They weren’t going anywhere. It wasn’t as if they were going to vanish and he would be the only person with the words in his memory. Actually, the book would be in a bit of a pickle if that happened, because Contro was pretty sure he’d never seen this character ‘Mack’ before. If the book vanished and he was left as the only person who knew the story, all he remembered clearly was the tea-stain on page thirty-two. And he was pretty sure that wasn’t important to the plot.

So why read it? It was basically doubling the information, and – he would be the first to admit – not doubling it very well! If it was meant to be for his own entertainment, it really needed to hold its plot together a bit more carefully.

And now he wanted a pickle.

He liked his cardigans. People thought it was odd, and he supposed it was in a way because thermals were warmer, but it was just a necessity in his line of work. And cardigans added a warm
feeling
, as well as actual warmth. Today, though, Contro remembered that he wasn’t going into the transpersion chamber, so he wouldn’t actually need the cardigan, most likely. Being in a starship at relative speed didn’t have the same feeling that being immersed in the soft-space in the heart of the ship’s engine did. You were protected by the hull and the atmosphere and the heating wossnames. It was
different
. Standing in that chamber with the core belt heavy on your hips, the chamber walls oscillating minutely at exactly ten thousand times light speed, and your own body oscillating to the precisely identical field harmonic from the belt so you could interact with the interior, and so the reactor could do all those things that it could never get away with doing in the hard-space universe … well, that got chilly!

It would be fair to say Contro didn’t actually
remember
that they were getting to MundCorp Research Base,
per se
, so much as finish his breakfast and the confusing half-page about Mack and his disagreement with the smugglers or what have you, and headed towards the engine room at a cheerful stroll. Then Waffa had pinged him on his organiser pad, asking him why he wasn’t answering his watch, and to remind him that Zeegon had sounded the one-hour-to-subluminal about fifty minutes ago and he could come to the bridge if he wanted. So yes, it was more like he had heard Zeegon’s announcement just as he was getting up, but had then forgotten the whole jolly thing, and had gotten dressed and had breakfast and headed to work just like always! Honestly, what a dope!

He did that sometimes. But he was sure, if anyone were to ask him about Mack and the travelling acrobat troupe, he’d be able to answer any question put to him.

Most of the gang had gathered on the bridge, as they seemed to habitually do these days whenever they were coming out of superluminal flight and entering ‘the universe’, as some of them called it. There was a bit of a sense of “righto, let’s see if everything’s tickety-boo here or if something’s a bit iffy” about it, like each new stop was a new crack at having the entire universe be back as it was. Funny, really.

Glomulus was in the medical bay as always, of course, and Janya was probably reading or some such, and Thord and the Bonshooni were hanging out in the farm ring. And the Captain, obviously, was off doing Captainy stuff in the Captain’s chambers. But the rest of the team – Z-Lin, Decay, Sally, Waffa, Zeegon and Janus – were all on deck. Everyone tensed up as the counter ran down and Zeegon dropped them back out of the formless grey and into the blackness of space. It was as if everyone was expecting a big sign with
BOO
written on it to appear in the window when they dropped out of soft-space. That was funny too.

There was no sign with
BOO
. There was just a big old red sun, a band of asteroids passing between it and the
Tramp
, and – even closer, slowly slipping in to fill the viewscreen and take a big pickle-shaped bite out of the bulging sun – MundCorp Research Base.

“Pickles again,” Contro chuckled. “They seem to be chasing me today!”

The others looked at him, but nobody said anything. They were probably all worried about whether the base was all in one piece.

It certainly seemed to be in one piece. The base really was just two Molran Worldships with their noses cut off and then pushed together end-to-end. The result was actually more like a giant peanut than a pickle – a great craggy bulbous shape hanging in space, with a slightly narrower point in the middle between the two bulges, and the massive rings that combined power stations, relative toruses, subluminal cruise engines and technician residences at either end of the peanut. It really did look quite amusing, and the only things that gave it away as an artificial structure were the lights in the terminus bands and the fact that no asteroid would ever accidentally get carved into such an odd shape. Probably.

Actual commissioned and active Worldships were smoother, since they went around with their hulls activated and received regular repairs. MundCorp Research Base was sheathed in rock and soil and crete and ice, and was pocked and cratered with debris from the meteor field that also acted as a ready-to-hand source of raw materials. The meteor field was also Fleet property, but held by a different division in mining and infrastructure, a consortium comprising political and commercial elements of …

Sally coughed. Contro looked up, and realised he was sitting at her console, reading a data feed about MundCorp Research Base. Honestly, now he couldn’t remember anything except the stuff about the meteor field he’d just been looking at. The part of the book he’d read at breakfast – gone! Had Mack been facing off against a Fleet mining consortium? That sounded about right.

“Thanks,” Sally said, as Contro chuckled and jumped to his feet. She pointed him towards the next station along. “Was just snooping on Decay’s panels, you can take that seat.”

“Now I’ll never know if Mack found out how the miners were smuggling bits of meteor into the circus,” Contro complained mildly.

“Uh, okay then.”

“No beacon here, but we’ve got a nodback,” Decay announced.

“They don’t have a beacon,” Waffa said. “At least they didn’t back in the day. Too secretive even for that. They’ll send out a tug, most likely.”

“Getting a full transmission,” Decay added.

“What the heck, put it up on the monitors,” Z-Lin said. A moment later, she let out a short, sharp laugh of shock. Contro had never heard such a sound from her. Usually
he
was the one laughing. He came back from the other station, which hadn’t lit up with the rest, and craned across Sally’s shoulder to see what was so funny. Z-Lin hardly
ever
laughed.

But then, Contro conceded, he’d never seen a Molran with a ropy mop of bright purple hair before, either.

“Hi,” the Molran said, his close-harmonic dual-windpipe voice sounding easy and casual. “Reading you loud and clear, modular.”