Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (9 page)

“Yes, Commander,” Sally said crisply. “I assume the Captain will be staying aboard anyway?”

“Most likely,” Clue replied, ignoring the bare edge of sarcasm in the question since it had been delivered according to official emergency protocols, “or he will disembark at another level of the blister, but you’ll probably be pinged about it on the security log. Try not to fly off without us. Zeeg, if you wouldn’t mind staying behind this time…”

“That’s fine,” Zeegon replied, “I’ll keep the engine running until you come back and confirm if there’s a Zaz Burger still open on this thing. Then I’m out of here.”

“Fair enough,” she turned towards Decay’s station, and noticed the Blaran was looking mildly perturbed. “Problem?”

“Looks like the hub we just linked up to isn’t syncing with our computer,” Decay replied. “It’s still in standby, not firing up into full synthetic intelligence the way it should when it hooks up to an active synth.”

“The hub’s ports might be intact, but its synth broken,” Clue said.
More good news for Waffa
, she thought with an inner grimace. Their Chief of Security and Operations had been despondent about losing ‘Bruce’ after the synthetic intelligence went back into non-sentient standby, and had been looking forward to hooking up to a modular hub and seeing the hopefully-not-at-all-insane synth return to its senses.

Still, it seemed like he had bigger problems to worry about right now. They’d all have to prioritise their concerns for the foreseeable future.

“I’ve hooked up as much as I can from here,” Decay went on, stepping away from his console. “With permission, Commander?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” Z-Lin said, and opened a general comms channel. “Janya, Janus, Contro, primary bridge blister bay if you want to disembark. We’ll gather at the lockers and suit up for cold weather. Magboots for anyone who doesn’t want to be a balloon. This means you, Contro. And let’s have a bit of a stick-together policy until we can be sure which parts of the settlement aren’t going to break off and float away into space, okay?” she remembered Waffa, and added, “Waffa, are you still on the comm?”

“Yes Commander,” he replied promptly, “don’t worry, I’m in full thermals and mags and I even threw on a suitpack in case I get spaced. But I’ve contacted one of the Controller’s deputies and they’re advising me of the safe areas. I think I can figure out the rest by memory.”

“Copy that,” Clue said. “Glomulus, I’d appreciate it if you restricted yourself to the medical bay, as ever. You’ll be released on your own recognisance and under surveillance later, but until then I regret that you can consider your security measures active and your …
mobility
… dependent on your good behaviour in the immediate future,” she waited for a scathingly witty or disconcertingly cheerful rejoinder, but all she got was a meek acknowledgement ping.
Always a first time
, she thought, and resumed transmission. “And if our passengers from Bayn Balro can collect their possessions … we’re going to establish whether this is a safe place to drop you off or if we need to take you somewhere else,” she glanced at Decay, who nodded and returned to his own console.

“Keep in mind that we may be picking up more evacuees rather than dropping off,” the Blaran added, “so if you disembark or we lose track of you, you might end up losing your comfy private cabin.”

Z-Lin gave him a silent thumbs-up and resumed. “So please don’t go wandering off the ship until we know what’s happening here. We have also been advised to don thermal gear, so your own clothing may not be sufficient,” Bonshooni would be capable of surviving in conditions too cold for a human to bear, but even they had their limits. “Acting Consul Choyle, I’m depending on you to keep track of your people. That is all. Clue out.”

JANUS

Under normal circumstances, when a fully-functional modular docked with a fully-functional Chrysanthemum or other kind of large station, the airlocks and computer systems wouldn’t be the only things that connected. The gravity exchanges on each habitat would also merge, and depending on the setup in the station that could mean one of several different things. For the docking area of a big Mandelbrot array like The Warm, it would mean the spar and general station exchange would impose gravity in one structurally-designated and fixed direction, while the modular’s exchange created ‘downward’ gravity in each hemisphere of the ship towards the central plane.

The upshot of the two exchanges meeting was that crew could only comfortably disembark from one hemisphere of the modular. One
could
board from the other side, switching the starship’s established ‘down’ for the general station’s one, but even if a disembarking crewmember managed the required cartwheel the results tended to be disorientating. The inner gyroscope of most humanoids and Molranoids was an easily confused mechanism that had not really evolved with exchange technology in mind. The gravity on planets was nice and dependable and constant – constant enough, indeed, to make honest-to-goodness
laws
about – and didn’t run around swapping ‘up’ for ‘down’ all the time. In a worst case scenario, exchange sickness could lay a crewmember up for a couple of days while his or her inner ear and fluids recovered from the gravity lag.

Frankly, even stepping in the normal and approved way from a ship to a station made Janus Whye feel a bit dizzy and weird, and that didn’t even make any sense because it was like walking from one room to another. He was okay taking a lander from ship to planet, or from ship to station, but actually walking from one exchange region to another – nope. His brain made him want to throw up into his own mouth a little bit, even if it didn’t push so hard as to actually make him sick. It was the same thing climbing stairs or a ladder and then flipping over across a starship’s exchange plane. He was fine doing exactly the same thing in the elevator, even though that was a way more violent mechanical motion. It was
buffered
.

Still, with The Warm’s Mandelbrot array apparently exchangeless, none of this was a problem. It was just a matter of switching from gravity to near-zero-gravity using the magboots, which could of course also be disorienting – and most certainly
was
, for Janus – but at least it tended not to matter what side you came in from. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ were a matter of consensus. And at least there was a certain biological justification for his lack of equilibrium. Stepping from gravity to near-zero-gravity just wasn’t right.

Acting Controller Bendis was waiting for them on The Warm’s side of the docking port. Although it was clearly becoming a bit of a misnomer to call it ‘The Warm’ – minimal heating left it breathtakingly cold outside the ship. The thermal suits left heads bare, and the chill immediately misted their breath, turned human noses red, and made Decay fold and curl his ears tightly up against his skull.

It was actually slightly disorienting to see a human being that looked like neither one of the seven crewmembers Janus saw almost every day, nor the basic almost-but-not-quite-identical able template that made up the eejits who accounted for every other humanoid he’d seen for the past far-too-long. This was counteracted a little by the fact that Bendis was flanked by a pair of hulking, impassive ables in emergency services uniforms.

Janus didn’t need to be a counsellor to see that these guys weren’t eejits. Their expressions were alert and wary, their postures combat-ready and their uniforms scuffed and worn with heavy use.

Acting Controller Bendis was a slightly-shorter-than-average fellow in his early middle-age, paunchy and earnest in a similar uniform-patterned thermal suit to the one the Commander was wearing – AstroCorps, but a settlement variant rather than starship crew one. He was absurdly jolly-looking with his cold-pinched red cheeks and red nose, and balding in a way that suggested he was just too busy and practical to give much of a shit about getting himself a full head of hair. Of course, standing between two ables was an excellent way of ensuring that all of these features were very, very noticeable. When his sharp eyes picked out that Z-Lin’s thermal was styled after the AstroCorps uniform and bore her markings of rank, he gave her a crisp and respectful nod.

“Commander … Clue,” he said, with that miniscule hint of are-you-serious hesitation that habitually followed hearing the combination of name and title spoken aloud, even by oneself. “Welcome to The Warm.”

Clue nodded back. “Thank you, Controller Bendis.”

“Now
that
formality is dealt with, it’s Louzhan. Louzhan Bendis. Everyone calls me Lou,” the Acting Controller stepped forward and extended his gloved hand. “Please feel free to do likewise.”

“Lou,” Z-Lin nodded, and they shook. “Z-Lin,” she turned to introduce the others. “Janya Adeneo, our Head Of Science; General Moral Decay (Alcohol), comms officer; Janus Whye, ship’s counsellor; Controversial-To-The-End, Chief Engineer. Our Chief of Security and Operations has also disembarked,” she added, looking around, “but he tells me he’s made himself known to your people. He’s a former local, I relieved him to go and look for family.”

Lou nodded grimly. “Pleasure to meet you all,” he said, then raised bushy eyebrows. “Is your Captain … ?”

“The Captain is conferring on matters of high security and awaiting my report,” Clue said smoothly, “and will not be disembarking with us at this stage, although he may opt to do so at a more convenient time – in which case he will probably contact your people independently.”

“And the rest of your landing party are … civilians?” he asked politely, glancing at the collection of people behind her in their plainclothes thermals. Contro had eventually been compelled to don magboots, but was happily lifting the magnetised pads in the heels up off the floor and bouncing on his toes while Janya and Janus took turns trying to calm him down.

“Yes,” Clue replied. There was an extended pause after this as Lou waited for further clarification. Instead, the Commander changed the subject. “Our computer didn’t come off standby when we docked,” she said. “Your synth is dead?”

“The synth is dead,” Bendis nodded. “Computer systems and automation is running – barely – but the synth is dead, the able fabrication plants are dead, any comm not routed through a Fergie gunship is dead. The Mandelbrot’s dead and the Chalice is dead. And The Warm’s ambient mineral temperature has dropped from minus ten to minus twenty in the past forty-eight hours,” he concluded, his voice turning raw. “Whatever hit us, they didn’t just kill our settlement. They killed this entire God damned place.”

“Did
anyone
see what happened?” Clue asked, speaking with professional detachment in spite of the degree to which Bendis’s words had evidently shaken her.

Janus was pretty shaken himself.
The Warm itself
 … killing something that big, that old, and that
alien
took a special kind of violence. And even if you couldn’t put a human – or Molran, or even Fergunak – face to it, it was somehow as much atrocity as vandalism.

“The settlers we picked up were all off the grid when it happened,” Z-Lin was continuing, “so they basically know as much as we do. But there were only a thousand-odd people in Bayn Balro, not counting the Fergunak schools, and we didn’t get anything from
them
, for obvious reasons. Your people … I know your losses have been catastrophic, but if any of the nine hundred confirmed survivors saw anything…”

Lou was shaking his head. “Even after almost a month, it’s looking like anyone who got even a fleeting glimpse of our attackers ended up dead,” Lou replied. “Or, I don’t know,
deleted
. We’ve only been able to collect scattered reports that are entirely without electronic verification, on account of the computer system and security monitors and beacons all getting fried, and the synth being gone. They’re more like rumours, gossip. And most of it contradicts itself.”

“Bayn Balro still had a functioning beacon,” Decay stepped up, “although they didn’t have any other orbital or space-based surveillance, and no synth. I can take another look at the data we lifted from it, and see if it happens to have any readings that might corroborate what you’ve collected. I have to prepare you, though – my initial scans suggest that the beacon didn’t see anything.”

“Appreciate it,” Lou nodded.

“But you said
attackers
,” Z-Lin pressed. “So there must be something close to a majority consensus on what did this.”

“Yes, the largest number of witnesses – and keep in mind we’re still around about low double-figures here, and ‘witness’ in this case means that they might have seen a shadow, or a weapons-beam, or heard a noise, or gotten some sort of alert from the surface before the surface was scoured clear and they had to climb back to safety, or just heard something from some other survivor that sounded sort of like what they thought they might have seen, and so have just sort of
edited
what their own account might otherwise have said…” Lou took a slightly ragged breath, “…keeping all that in mind, the prevailing theory is that we’re looking at some sort of starship fleet, using energy weapons in a pretty exotic spectrum. Although to be honest, you might as well say
t’was a mess large o’ dragons possessèd o’ fiery, fiery breath
,” he quoted with unexpected elegance, then grunted. “A lot of the phrasing we use is just a convenient way of talking about it. We don’t actually
know
a damned thing.”

“It’s a start,” Decay said. Janus felt obliged to murmur faintly in support of this stance. Contro, unusually for him, seemed shaken to wide-eyed silence and had stopped trying to bounce in the near-zero gravity. Janya was her usual silent self, watching the Acting Controller with an intent expression on her scar-striped face. She’d probably had her book-senses tickled by the Sloane quote, Janus reflected in vague amusement.