Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (12 page)

“That’s insane.”

“They do it back on the Big A all the time. Even Wingus and Dingus could handle it. It’s just a few buttons, the printers and the traction unit do all the work. The molecular bonding stimulator to make sure the grafts take, no tissue rejection, but most of it happens automatically. Limbs are way easier than organs.”

“The first thing he’ll do in that situation is call your bluff,” Janya reiterated patiently. “He’ll push you, he’ll break every rule you give him, he’ll step out of his house arrest zone until you can’t handle grafting his extremities back on anymore. You’ll lift the arrest just to stop him from detonating himself. By then he will have a good idea of how the bracelets work. His next experiment-”

“Forget it,” Zeegon growled, “I’ll just tell the Commander you still say no.”

“It would be more helpful if you’d listened to my explanation,” Janya said, “because if you had, you would have noticed that right at the start I said it wasn’t my place to decide this or to affect the outcome-”

“Yeah, well you’re
affecting it
,” Zeegon said. “And we’re going into a danger-marked volume of space with no medic.”

“Regardless of whether Glomulus Cratch is in the brig or in the medical bay,” Janya said, “we will still be entering the Bunzolabe without a medic on board. But I’m sure the Commander will appreciate the insinuation that
I’m
the one giving yes-or-no permission one way or another.”

“If Cratch had been out of the brig when we went into the bonefields, Ital might not have been-” this time Zeegon cut himself off.

“Do you talk to him?” Janya asked, attempting to change tack. This was a different sort of cliff-wall. The sort with shards of glass in it.

“Who, the Rip?”

“Yes. When you deliver food, or it’s your turn to do a surveillance sweep. Do you talk with him?”

“This isn’t
his idea
, if that’s what you mean,” Zeegon said stiffly.

“Of course not. If
he
suggested an idea like this,
everybody
would reject it out of hand. You just need to be aware that defending him, finding solutions for him, getting him a milder sentence and more freedoms and benefits – none of this will make him your friend. It won’t mean he’ll spare you, when the time comes. He’s not like the lion who recognises the mouse who pulled a thorn from his paw. He’s more like an
actual
lion.”

Zeegon left, and Janya could tell he was disappointed even though she was at a loss as to why. He’d had an insane request that she had no power to grant, and she had told him her opinion of the request and explained why it was insane. That was an entirely productive conversation, as far as she was concerned.

People were strange.

She returned to her armchair after seeing Zeegon to the door. She sat back down, picked up her pad, and continued to read.

WAFFA (NOW)

The start of the next day’s shift found Waffa in the examination room where they’d put the remaining pieces of Dunnkirk’s wrecked sleeper pod, aside from the freezer elements that had been used to stow the body. The Chief of Security and Operations was chewing moodily on a caffeine-laced fruit-n-fibre bar.
Your complete breakfast
, he reflected,
in a single preoccupied print-order
.

The room was actually a surgical recovery ward, but there were so few
Tramp
sters left it hadn’t been used in a while. It was a secure and sterile environment, and it was a bit more accessible than the labs up in the dome, so they were using it as a makeshift forensic lab. Or whatever you called a lab for a sabotaged piece of machinery.

The Rip had obligingly agreed to restrict himself to the medical bay proper, well away from the security-sealed equipment and the stored body of Dunnkirk alike. They’d decided not to throw him back in the brig, but that was always an option.

He walked around the pod. For the most part, aside from the freezer components carefully removed from the back and the two panels on the side that had been opened, it was more or less intact, if a bit battered from long travel and slightly mismatched from its customisation. If you closed the panels, it all looked fine.
Inside
the panels, of course, the true extent of the damage became clear. Their saboteur – the general consensus seemed to have been that Thord was the guilty party, if only because of the amazing lack of fuss Maladin and Dunnkirk had made – had pulled out the innards of the pod and smashed them on the floor of the oxygen farm. Another point against Thord, really, since the job would have required tremendous strength or some heavy equipment.

Waffa sat down on a nearby chair, and sighed. They’d gathered up all the shattered pieces they could find and now these were lying on the examination table next to the pod itself. There were still some puddles around the scattering of components, since they’d been unable to separate a lot of it from the ice of the farm floor, so had just swept it all up and let melting do the separation for them.

He finished his breakfast, dusted his hands off and scooted his chair over to the examination table, and prodded at the bits. He couldn’t have put the whole thing back together again in a million years. Even if it was just a matter of gluing and soldering it all into place – and if it
was
just a matter of gluing and soldering, they could have fixed it before Thord and Maladin rode the seed into extragalactic space – a lot of the machinery was Fleet solid-state stuff, crumbly as black chalk and apt to give humans a nasty rash if it got into their skin. There was no fixing it. Not with the gear they had on board. But he could at least
catalogue
it.

That was the sort of thing that made Waffa’s world slowly correct itself. It was something he’d found, increasingly, that he needed on this extended tour aboard
Astro Tramp 400
. When the universe seemed to be running on the fumes of burned logic, there was some comfort to be had in putting one tiny corner of it in order.

He pulled out his pad and called up the sleeper pod schematic.

It was a pretty rough thing, since the full details of sleeper pod construction tended to be guarded by the Fleet, but he didn’t need to know
everything
. Just enough to see that the pod had been gutted in just the right areas, evidently by somebody who knew what they were doing. Thord, millions of years old and connected to a mass-mind even older and ridiculously experienced in all facets of ancient and modern technology, would probably have no difficulty. He had no idea whether the Drednanth Dreamscape provided tutorials or if it would have just presented itself as part of Thord’s knowledge, but one way or another she would have had the information. The schematic was just to show roughly where each component belonged. That way, he could see if there was still anything lying in the oxy farm.

Waffa didn’t expect to find anything. He’d never really examined evidence in pursuit of a murder case before, so he had no idea what to look for. All he knew was that every little facet of the two Bonshooni and their aki’Drednanth matron, and their wacky plan to take a swim to the next galaxy over, needed to be treated as potentially relevant. So he was rather surprised when he
did
find something.

He blinked at the jumbled pieces for a moment, then looked at the schematic. He tapped and flicked through a few angles, then used the edge of his pad to separate out some of the crumbs and fragments, as carefully as an addict scraping hop-dust. He couldn’t be bothered to go down the hall into the medical bay proper and micro-film his hands. Who had time for that crap? He peered at the debris again, then pinged Clue and Sally.

“Look at this,” he said a few minutes later once they’d arrived. He nudged at one little pile of components – what looked like a bronze cigar tube, beaten severely in the middle so it was bent crooked with a split in the metal, with a crumbly mass of black chalky substrate inside. “Shell casing and rod. Pretty sure it’s the biometric regulator core. Obviously pulled out of Dunnkirk’s pod and smashed. Without it, the pod would’ve stopped functioning after about twenty-four hours even if all the rest of its bits and bobs had been working.”

“And that?” Sally pointed at the second separated-out pile of black shards.

“Second rod,” Z-Lin said quietly.

“Right,” Waffa agreed. “Banged up and dropped with all this, so it looked like the rod from this core-” he pointed at the first pile, “-but this core still has
most
of the rod inside, except for these bits that came out when it split. Look,” he nudged at the pieces in the second pile with the corner of his pad again, rearranging them into a flattened cylinder. “It’s a whole rod.”

“Taken out of the
other
pod’s regulator core?” Sally guessed.

“Well the schematics don’t say anything about a spare,” Waffa said, “so the extra bits have to come from somewhere. And there’s no second
casing
.”

“So someone took it out of Mal’s pod,” Z-Lin said, “smashed it and dropped it with the pieces from this one, and replaced the shell casing without a core,” she clenched her hands, voice growing colder than the farm ring. “So nobody would notice it among the debris, and it would pass by unnoticed while we were all looking at the
visible
damage.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Waffa said. “None of us know diddly about sleeper pods. But if Mal’s pod was strapped to that ice block with a dud regulator…”

“We’re looking at a double murder,” Sally growled.

Z-Lin held up a hand, crisply forestalling any cursing or shouting. “Are we
sure
these regulators weren’t just unneeded components?” she asked. “They customised the pods to enable themselves to enter the Dreamscape while sleeping – maybe they had a different regulator setup that you’re not seeing on that schematic, because the schematic is of a standard pod. They might have had a workaround.”

“That’s true,” Waffa said. “Most of the bits here are pretty similar but you can tell just from the way the pod’s configured that it’s not
exactly
like the schematic we have on file,” he raised his pad a little helplessly. “But the main differences are in the neuro-whatsit inhibitor pan, the big old thing that keeps the sleeper’s brain from petrifying. Keeps ‘em awake enough to tune into the Dreamscape. And the freezer array that we already took off this pod, to preserve Dunster’s body.
These
parts-” he gestured at the scatter of broken components, and the bashed-open panel from behind which they’d come, “-look to be pretty standard,” he shrugged. “Janya had better take a look too, but I doubt she’ll tell us any different.”

“Wouldn’t it let off an alarm if the pod was missing a core and it was going to go tits-up in twenty-four hours?” Sally protested.

“Only if they
added
an alarm,” Waffa said. “I mean, the basic pod functionality is, if it stops working, it wakes the sleeper up and lets him out.”

“Shit,” Sally growled, “in this case, it’d just space him.”

“I’m thinking
Dunnkirk’s
pod was maybe totalled to hide the
tiny
sabotage done to
Maladin’s
pod,” Waffa said, then deferred to Sally with a gesture of his organiser. “But I’m not a cop.”

“Don’t know if it holds up,” Sally said, scowling. “I thought all three of them had implied pretty heavily that
Thord
smashed Dunnkirk’s pod, to keep him here for whatever reason. In fact, forget
implied
– Maladin
told me
as much, when we were heading to the farm for the launch. He didn’t explain why – he suggested that it was best Dunnkirk stay behind, to provide a connection with us, and the pups. Whatever. That’s why they were all hunky-dory with the pod being all wrecked up in the first place. Only Thord could have gotten away with that.”

“Then maybe whoever did this fine sabotage did it so it would slip by after the big one, like Clue – like the Commander said,” Waffa replied, striving for professionalism and, he felt, mostly succeeding. “We checked the other pod after we found Dunster’s was busted. I mean, we checked it as much as we could, but we were sort of depending on the Bonshooni and Thord to know their equipment. It
seemed
fine.”

“And we didn’t look inside all these casings and stuff,” Sally said.

“Right,” Waffa nodded.

“And we can’t be sure if Mal’s pod was even tampered with – not
sure
sure – until we go back out into subluminal space and get back in touch with Thord,” Clue said. “That’s in the off-chance we can get her pups to pass along any such information. I mean, we could just find ourselves turning up at the next planet with an aki’Drednanth presence, and the first we’ll know about how they feel towards us will be when they turn our brains to pudding.”

“And that’s just the beginning of
that
problem,” Sally said forebodingly, and Z-Lin nodded.

Waffa looked back and forth between the Commander and the Chief Tactical Officer. “What am I missing?” he asked. “Not a cop, and not spoon-fed the royal officer jelly.”

“Whoever did Mal’s pod –
if
they did Mal’s pod – knew a bunch about sleepers,” Z-Lin explained. “I don’t know if that makes our job harder or easier. Because it lets basically every human on board off the hook. Decay too, for that matter. He’s never worked with sleeper pods. Wouldn’t know one end from the other.”

“Which leaves us seven immortals of completely unknown skill-sets,” Sally concluded, and Clue nodded again.

“Wait – the
pups
?” Waffa said. “
Really
?”

“I don’t know
what
I’d rather believe at this point,” Z-Lin said. “The alternative is that someone on board has hidden this expertise from us, right up to the point when they performed this bizarre murderous act of vandalism for some unknown reason,” she shook her head. “Or that one of us got, I don’t know, possessed by one of the pups, and did it? I don’t want to lend any unnecessary credence to fear-mongering and rumours, but there are stories about aki’Drednanth – and
Drednanth
– getting into people’s heads and using them like puppets.”