Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (43 page)

“On it,” Waffa and Sally said simultaneously.

“Getting a nod,” Decay said.

“Right on time,” Z-Lin said. “I assume it’s audio only,” Decay nodded. “We can see enough to make us shitscared just by looking outside,” the Commander grunted. “Just keep working on getting a video uplink, Decay. In the meantime, let’s hear it.”

“Copy,” Decay said, all four hands skimming over the panels. “Nobody’s going to be terribly surprised to hear that these guys are calling under the Larger Dark Moving Below school ident.”

“Not even slightly,” Z-Lin said, although Waffa couldn’t prevent a little crawling jolt of shock. He’d thought the school had been left behind in the ocean under Bayn Balro. Even crunching the numbers and finding they could quite comfortably have been rescued and beaten the
Tramp
here, it was jarring. The Fergunak were already insane, and a year or more at high relative speeds,
completely alone in one of those awful ships
, would not warp a Fergunakil mind any more than it was already warped. They didn’t fly in convoy, they didn’t share the grey. They didn’t need to.

Even knowing, after Standing Wave and the smokeberries, that the Fergunak from Bayn Balro were ahead of them, had not prepared him. Waffa found himself snarling as Decay opened the comms and let the melodious, gentle voice drift across the bridge. The voice of the Larger Dark Moving Below was … it was what dying under the water sounded like. Distant, serene, detached, horrible.

“It was already dead.”

There was silence on the bridge. Z-Lin Clue leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. “Identify yourself.”

“I am the alpha, the voice of the Larger Dark Moving Below,” the voice said. “We do not offer a name for the mouths of flesh.”

“Okay, I’m going to call you Mister Goggles,” Clue said, “unless you give me some more dignified alternative. Mister Goggles was my pet
ghone
fish when I was a kid. I made him in a fun fair make-your-own-designer-fish fabricator. Great big googly eyes. I maxed out the eyes,” she sounded fondly reminiscent, and Waffa felt a deep chill when he looked at her and saw the frigid blankness on her face as she stared at the viewscreen. “Do you want to know what happened to Mister Goggles after he’d lived for six months? That’s an excellent lifespan for a
ghone
fish, you know.”

“I wanted you to know, little flesh,” the alpha of Larger Dark Moving Below – and now Waffa couldn’t think of it as anything but Mister Goggles – said calmly. “It was dead when we got here. We had nothing to do with it. You can check the damage profiles. Not that we care.”

“Oh, we know it wasn’t you, Mister Goggles,” Z-Lin replied. “Not your style. But don’t you want to hear what happened to my
ghone
fish?”

“I imagine, little flesh, that you ate it,” Mister Goggles said silkily. “Or else it died, and rotted, and you threw it into your recycling chute.”

“Oh no. His eyes broke, for a start,” Z-Lin tapped at her console again, not looking away from the viewscreen. “He was blind, for the last week. Then the neighbour’s cat got him. It was really very sad. You see, the cat jumped up on the table, then perched on the side of the tank. And then, well, Mister Goggles – the
old
Mister Goggles – he was blind, and he wasn’t very bright. He heard the sound and he thought it was feeding time, so he came swimming up to the surface, and
blip
,” she smiled slowly. “Poor old Mister Goggles. I was very sad. I was sad for
hours
.”

“I see.”

“But you know what my mother told me?” she went on blithely. “She told me that Mister Goggles had been a fish, and fish are stupid, and that his last seconds had been happy because all he was thinking about was his dinner. And when the cat got him, he was too stupid to even feel it.”

“A sad tale,” Mister Goggles commiserated after a pause. “Do you want to hear the tale of Mister Bendis?”

Waffa’s heart froze.

“Mister Bendis had his eyes, and Mister Bendis was very clever indeed,” Mister Goggles said. “Do you know what he was thinking, in his last seconds? I do not know, little flesh, but he was not happy. We have been waiting here for you.”

“Is that so,” Z-Lin said faintly.
Damn it, Clue
, Waffa thought in agony,
you didn’t really think you could go one-on-one with a Fergunakil, did you?

“We heard you were flying two Bonshooni fatmeats out to the edge.”

“Did Mister Bendis tell you that?”

“There is no point in keeping us talking,” Mister Goggles said. “Your weapons are dead, your ship is dead, and you are surrounded. Soon your air will stop.”

“You’re the one talking,” Z-Lin pointed out.

“Most of our kind were dead when rescue came to the Chalice,” the Fergunakil went on. “Poor Mister Goggles, indeed. The leviathan – our vessel, you see, our Chrysanthemum – carried ships, in the many tens of thousands, then to our ocean. We took once more to the dark skies. We returned to The Warm, and we had our way with the flesh that lived there. How afraid they were! When Mister Bendis told us you were headed to the edge, we thought this the likely spot. The Larger Dark Moving Below came here, and the other schools scattered.”

“Did Bendis tell you what we were doing out here?” Clue asked.

“He said you were playing delivery games with a pair of insane Bonshooni veil-climbers,” Mister Goggles said. “A long way to fly, to deliver your meaty friends.”

“A very long way.”

“And very little meat. You delivered more for us, from Bayn Balro to The Warm,” Mister Goggles remarked. “You should have left the sweetmeats behind. We may not have come after you. Instead you left them to scream on The Warm. But for you, it was an offering that came too late.”

“Is that right, Mister Goggles?” Clue said quietly.

“We are what we are, little flesh,” the Fergunakil said. “And the blood of your entire species is in the water.”

“So hang on. That’s what he told you?” Z-Lin said. “That we were bringing some Bonshooni out here to throw against the wall? And that’s all? And then you ate him and everybody else?”

The door to the bridge opened.

“Many words of defiance, much spitting and swearing,” Mister Goggles said melodiously. “He died well, with bravery almost to the end. Good old Mister Bendis.”

“You’re not wrong,” Clue murmured, and turned to look at Thord as the vast armoured aki’Drednanth stepped sideways onto the bridge and unfolded easily in her envirosuit, “if that’s all he told you.”

“His bravery was of course only
almost
to the end,” Mister Goggles went on obliviously. “His final moments, in the last icy water that we could bring to the Chalice with the power from the leviathan, those moments were for the choking, the struggling, the bleeding and the screams. He said nothing more of importance, as we took him limb by limb.”

“Good old Mister Bendis,” Clue said, and turned towards the comm station. “Decay?”

“Not sure for how long, but I can get our picture back,” the Blaran said, the skirled bioluminescing veins in his hands forming a glowing blur as his fingers flickered over the console. Z-Lin gave him a brief nod.

The screens at each station lit up, showing the vast shoal of dead grey tubes hanging in space all around the
Tramp
, weapons bristling. At the same time, their transmitters put an image of their bridge onto whatever passed for screens integrated into the Fergunak systems.

Thord straightened and set herself slowly on feet and fists, the massive smooth blocks of her suit gleaming in the emergency lights.

Mister Goggles barely hesitated. “It is a lie,” it said lazily. “Data trick. We shall hit you again with the cage, your tricks will not continue.”

“Not seeing the cat won’t make it go away, Mister Goggles,” Z-Lin said calmly. “It won’t bring dinnertime back.”

“One aki’Drednanth is not enough to take us all,” the Fergunakil still sounded serene, but Waffa reminded himself it was a voice synthesiser. “It is sad, but we have taken the mind-eaters before and we shall take you. You will live on, in your cold dream, unlike these others. It is no great tragedy.”

“What makes you think,” Thord said, “that I am alone?”

“We will fire now, little flesh,” Mister Goggles said, and now Waffa was almost certain he heard tension in the voice, and he didn’t
care
if it was his imagination.

The bridge lit up as the gunships opened fire. Beyond a faint thrumming under his buttocks through the seat, Waffa felt nothing.

A couple of minutes of heavy fire
, he thought,
thanks to the re-routed power and our computer not being a computer. Surprise, little fishies
.

“Too late,” Thord’s own smooth, synthesised voice, unlike that of the Larger Dark Moving Below alpha, carried infinite regret.

The Fergunak must have tried to keep firing their weapons at that stage, may have even tried to turn tail and flee, only to find that whatever part of their nervous systems were jacked into their relevant gunship components had already seized up. One by one, their guns ceased.

And Thord’s light panel went completely dark.

“Oh fuck,” Decay said quite distinctly.

“I hate you,” Mister Goggles’s final transmission was still disconcertingly jovial and melodious.

Thord turned, the soft aquamarine glow of her mood bars returned, and she stepped back towards the still-open door. She turned sidelong and prepared to hitch in her envirosuit once more.

“Um,” Zeegon ventured, pointing at the viewscreens and the gunships still hanging in space above the Hellscape of fallen Declivitorion.

“They are dead,” Thord said.

The helmsman blinked. “So they’re just … just like that?”

“Were you expecting the ships to explode?” the aki’Drednanth asked, with a gentle flicker of her lower bar.

“Frankly, yes,” Zeegon replied in an offended tone.

“Wow,” Clue said, leaning back in her seat. “To be honest, I was just hoping you’d be able to wipe out enough of them to disrupt the cage and let us get power back to the relative drive,” she turned and looked at the Bonshooni, near Janus and Janya, with new respect. “So Maladin and Dunnkirk were able to … boost your power or something?”

“No,” Thord murmured, “not them.”

CONTRO

By the time he’d wrestled the reactor core back into behaving itself, and everything was humming away the way it was supposed to, everyone was already running off and doing other things. They didn’t even seem to be worried about the sharks all around them anymore. Honestly, some people! He hadn’t imagined the Fergunak, had he? A lot of people had been shouting at once, and then the reactor had gone haywire. Maybe he’d made up the bit about all the ships around them. He’d have to ask someone later.

Still, he’d gotten the power flowing again, and nary a murmur to be heard. That was the important thing. Apart from the sharks. He strode out of core, dusted off his hands, unbuckled the core belt, and draped it cheerfully around the shoulders of an eejit slumped in a chair in the engine room. Another eejit was standing at a console, pointing at the readouts as if trying to read them. Contro looked over his shoulder and saw that Waffa had left him a message. Giving the eejit a clap on the back – the eejit turned and looked at him in puzzlement, which made Contro laugh – he headed out.

So he’d fixed the engine. But then – typical! – nobody was worrying about all the things they’d been shouting about before. Everything always moved too fast for Contro, and usually when he jolly well wasn’t paying attention! Still, you had to laugh.

Contro laughed again as he hurried to join the others at the oxygen farm. Just as well he already had his cardigan on! He tripped over an eejit lying in the corridor near the elevator, laughed again, ascended to the farm level and trotted around to Thord’s door. Waffa had left him a thermal. Good old Waffa! Contro struggled into the garment, tugged his cardigan on over the top, and stepped into the freezing cold.

Thord was visible over the heads of the crew, who were crowded around her and looking at something on the floor. The aki’Drednanth was out of her envirosuit, shaggy and naked apart from a pale blue netting glove wrapped around each hand, sheathing her thick fingers like cobweb. Contro supposed it was the text-to-speech communicator.

Waffa and Decay looked up when Contro arrived, and stepped aside to let him see. He stepped through to the front of the group, and looked down at the seven squirming, mewling, fluffy white creatures clambering on Thord’s great clawed feet.

Well, Contro didn’t need to have ever seen one before to know an aki’Drednanth puppy when he saw one.

“I was explaining that they were born not long after we left MundCorp Research Base,” Thord said. When she moved her fingers in tiny sequential waves, her voice came eerily from the empty envirosuit in the corner next to the end of the big ice slab. “I was … on edge, and this has been why I overreacted to some things. I apologise for the deception.”

“This is why you were so insistent nobody come in here,” Janya said. “It was nothing to do with the seed at all,” Thord shook her head. “You could have just told us, you know,” Janya went on, then shook her own head. “I suppose it wasn’t our concern.”

“My species is private about these matters,” Thord said, “particularly whelping. It does not normally occur on board a starship, in the company of non-aki’Drednanth.”

Decay was grinning down at the seven pups. They were like knee-high versions of their mother, except fuzzy instead of shaggy, and their big fluffy lower jaws currently had no tusks, only soft grey-black lips and big, wide dark eyes down on either side of the neck. Their arms and legs looked comparatively long and gangly, their fingers grey and stubby like little paws. One of them, having climbed on top of two of her sisters, half-yawned and half-yowled, showing a frosty grey tongue and grey, toothless gums. Thord picked the mountaineer up and deposited her none too gently behind her.