Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (13 page)

“Pretty sure those are just stories, boss,” Waffa said nervously, and Z-Lin nodded. “But in communication with them, and in cahoots? Yeah, could be. Could be someone on the crew, someone who talked to Thord or some other aki’Drednanth or Drednanth, and was convinced to be their hands on board the
Tramp
.”

“And we’re back at Cratch being the one with the aki’Drednanth fascination,” Sally pointed out. “He even made Thord some homebrew. He might have managed to get in mind-contact with the pups. He could do that from the medical bay. But he was never anywhere near the pods, I’d bet my coffee cup on it. Other than him, and probably the Captain, every single one of us have been in there to visit. Hate to say it, but needing to get to the pods to sabotage them has ruled out our two chief suspects and thrown all the rest of us back into the spotlight.”

“The
Captain
?” Waffa squeaked, then berated himself for squeaking.

“It’s still a possibility,” Z-Lin said, “since both the Captain and the good doctor have a knack for finding their way around the ship undetected. The Captain more so than Doctor Cratch, on account of not being under house arrest … but the farm has basically no surveillance. No bumpers, no medical scanners. Why would it? The only living thing in there, usually, is algae.”

“I’m surprised to hear you admit it could be the Captain,” Sally said.

Clue shrugged. “Even Cratch has an alibi for the murder we know about,” she said, “and as for the sabotage … there’s a few windows there, and the Captain could use them even more effectively than the rest of us. I don’t want to think about any of us being responsible, but…”

“My suspicion is that we’re looking at the result of at least two overlapping agendas here,” Sally said. “One,” she held up a thumb, “Thord
did
admit responsibility for Dunnkirk’s pod, according to Maladin. Two,” she added a forefinger, “after they decided to leave Dunnkirk here, somebody
here
decided they didn’t want him around, and killed him. Three,” she added her middle finger, then curled it back, “or
possibly
three, anyway … when Dunnkirk’s pod was wrecked, somebody sabotaged
Maladin’s
pod with lethal intent. And the way I see it, any two of those facts could be connected. Or all three might be.”

“And whether Mal’s pod was sabotaged before or after Dunnkirk’s – or if it was even sabotaged at all – changes the landscape significantly,” Z-Lin said, “and we don’t have access to that data. Just this debris that doesn’t correspond to our best guesses and faulty data.”

“Correct.”

“If I’ve followed you,” Waffa said, “all three events being connected would mean that Thord was behind it all, and was trying to bump off
both
of her Bonshooni friends.”

“Which doesn’t make sense,” Clue said. “She’s an aki’Drednanth. Or she
was
, if you like, and is now a Drednanth. If she’d wanted them dead she would have just killed them. With her hands if not with her mind.”

“I agree,” Sally said. “All three being connected does seem unlikely. And she’d still need a human – or Blaran – accomplice to do Dunnkirk at the time he was, well, done. We were already at relative speed. Had been for some hours, cut off from the Dred-”

“Wait, back up a bit,” Z-Lin said, and turned to Waffa. “You said Mal’s pod would space him within twenty four hours?”

“We’re already too late,” Waffa said heavily, “if that’s what you’re about to ask. We’ve already been inbound from the edge for, what, at least eighteen hours now. Twenty-four hours was a conservative maximum, anyway, not a hard-and-fast schedule. By the time we turned and went back and found them…” he sighed, and prodded at the dark crumbly matter on the table with his pad. “No, if this mushed-up core is really evidence of deliberate sabotage, he’d be dead by the time we got there. If it’s not, then he’ll be fine either way. And even if we stopped here and tried to contact them somehow, even if the pups could help with that, what would they do? Mal’s asleep, Thord’s a frozen corpse – in this sphere, anyway. They couldn’t do any repairs on the pod.”

“Damn it,” Z-Lin snapped.

“That’s my-” Waffa started to reply with a hint of a smile, when the ship dropped out of relative speed and began to decelerate into emergency all-stop with a shuddering
screeeee
from the engines that was audible ship-wide.

SALLY (THEN)

In what was to be the first course of her final year at the University of Gífrheim Minor, Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed had presented her embryonic high-functioning computer system interrupt device, the Sally-Forth Engine. It had been the size of a small mobile home or a large escape capsule – indeed, she’d constructed the casing out of the latter – and it had disrupted high-level automated computer networks to such a point that the communications interfaces would begin spouting off the most profane and blasphemous phrases in their lexicons. Even synthetic intelligences, to a certain degree, fell prey to the interference and started calling people bad names about seventeen questions into a simple response test.

Sally had thought it was fantastically funny, as well as being a mild little up-yours blow to the computer-dependent hegemony, perchance to usher in a revolution of simplicity and autonomy and return humanity to their tough, self-reliant roots. She’d been young.

Most of her professors at the university had disagreed with her assessment. One of them, admittedly the head of faculty for Synthetic Intelligence Enhancement and Relations, had called it borderline treasonous against the Six Species, and hinted heavily that the mindset behind the project was sympathetic to the Damorakind cause. The Cancer in the Core, Professor Gedwyn said, did not use synthetic intelligence in their insidiously-growing civilisation, opting instead to enslave and cybernetically mangle the Fergunak as living computer systems. Their very hatred of any outside intelligence drove them to reject the assistance of benevolent machines, and weaken their race by oppression of others. Was
that
what Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed wanted for the Six Species?

Nobody really paid much attention to Professor Gedwyn, since she made these sorts of pronouncements regularly and at little provocation. Moreover, as Sally thought but none of the faculty seemed to want to say out loud, nobody gave a single shit what Damorakind did to the Fergunak.

Far more importantly, the synth – or the university cortex
instance
of the synth; these one-that-were-many types of intelligence were messy as far as Sally was concerned, and you could never be sure whether you were talking to an individual or the whole collective, or whether the one you were talking to
now
remembered a conversation you’d had with another one
earlier
– had been amused by the engine, rather than threatened. Obviously it had requested that the concept not be disseminated to the general public, since the general public was home to known nests of computers-are-taking-over-the-galaxy crazies, and it was keen to ensure that the general interfering principles of the device were not adopted or expanded on in any commercial or research capacity.

However, as the synth itself said, the engine was amusing and harmless, ultimately easily detoured-around by a proper synthetic intelligence. And in time it might even be adapted into a good diagnostic tool for this very reason. There were certainly cases of corrupted and imperfectly-synchronised synth instances that could feasibly represent a security or even safety risk, and the ability to confound such imperfect smart computer systems could arguably be quite beneficial.

Nobody liked to talk about
those
, but Sally wasn’t sure what was scarier. The possibility that the synth was prone to failures that might make certain instances of it dangerous to organics, or the possibility that it was
immune
to such flaws and therefore any dangerously haywire semi-synths out there were acting that way because the synth had consciously
decided
they should.

No, actually, Sally
was
sure what was scarier. It was that second one.

Of course, it had never actually
come
to that. Insane or evil synthetic intelligences were the thing of campfire stories. Variations between synth instances were basically no more extreme than individual personalities, and always within the parameters of sanity and stability. Failures in computer systems that interfered with their ability to achieve active synth when in the presence of a hub invariably meant that they just
didn’t activate
, and just went on being slightly-glitchy computers instead of awakening into murderous synthetic intelligences bent on galactic domination.

So far.

And her device, the clunky silver-and-transistor-heavy electromagnetic blunt instrument that was the Sally-Forth Engine, was never going to be an effective muzzle to
actual
synthetic intelligence. A real mind, mechanical or organic, could intuit its way around the blocks and redirects. It didn’t get lost in the maze, it just
rose above
the maze and ignored it. Sally was good, but she was in no sense a genius of synaptic programming. There were people, of the aforementioned computers-are-taking-over-the-galaxy crazy ilk, who were far better than she was at this, and who were already trying and failing to destroy the synth across the Six Species. They didn’t need her help to do that. Sally could severely confuse a computer, and mess up a decent network. Actually confounding a synthetic intelligence was beyond her.

So she’d obediently mothballed the engine, accepted her “quit in good order and we’ll pretend to want you to come back as long as you never do” reward for a youthful rebellion, and left the university to pursue a career in law enforcement. And occasionally just
enforcement
, since to some people ‘law’ was just something that happened to everybody else, and Sally didn’t
like
those sorts of people. Generally speaking.

The Sally-Forth Engine
did
earn her some black marks that she could never satisfactorily trace back to a vindictive synthetic intelligence, and these had severely inconvenienced her in a lot of other small ways. She’d eventually been hounded off the police force due to ‘politics’, which she knew meant ‘people who need votes from idiots to make a living are uncomfortable letting a possible computers-are-taking-over-the-galaxy crazy wear a badge’. She’d wound up in a non-Corps munitions and debugging position on a couple of different modulars, culminating in a posting on the
A-Mod 400
, but had at least been able to keep her police certification. Certification afforded her unique opportunities to join landing parties and get her eyes eaten by psychotic aliens, or her duodenum perforated by panicked settlers with ad-libbed weapons. Being on board an AstroCorps ship, on the other hand, had burdened her with endless courses and meetings and programs and simulations, to keep her allegedly troublesome personality up to code.

And, precisely
because
it had earned her those marks and all that inconvenience, Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed had bloody-mindedly decided to make it worth all that arse-chapping by darn well keeping the engine and continuing to tinker.

And now they were about to meet Horatio Bunzo.

It wasn’t a synth –
he
wasn’t – but it stood to reason that low-tech was the way to go, in approaching him. Sally had been looking for stories, cases, reports on other attempts to infiltrate the Bunzolabe and the tricks that might have been tried, that might have failed. There was nothing solid. Of the few cases that existed in the security and tactical archives, most were high-level military classified, most of the
rest
were sensationalised beyond recognition, and all of them were at least three hundred years old.

She couldn’t believe, even now, even after all they had been through, that they were launching into something so randomly deadly and sealed-doc. Were they even
remotely
that kind of ship, that kind of crew? It was an honest question. As far as Sally was aware, maybe this was what they
were
now. It would have been nice if they’d been consulted about it, but…

She sent another half-hearted ping to the Commander. They were no doubt going to have a conference at the twenty-four hour mark, where Z-Lin was no doubt going to explain that the Captain had gotten a fabulous hunch and there was a brilliant reason they were plunging into such an obscurely-yet-legendarily dangerous place. That reason just eluded Sally for the time being, as did the no-doubt-equally-brilliant reason they’d had to find out about their intended destination from
Zeegon
. If the mad buggy enthusiast hadn’t accidentally identified the classified nature of their latest upcoming coordinates, possibly by pressing random buttons on his damn console … well. Clue might not even have
told
them until they were parked outside the Bunzolabe.

But yes, minimising the technology Bunzo could access on board when they entered his sphere of influence, and the technology they took with them to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. That was the best they could do. She assumed they
would
be putting their boots on the Godforsaken planet. She hadn’t been told anything yet, not even two days out, but it seemed a shame to come all this way and not
land
.

They didn’t have the capacity to fly the ship entirely on manual. Not even with a full crew of modular mastercraft prodigies would they be able to bypass the computer completely. It just wouldn’t be safe. And Bunzo was systemic, and lived in the machine as a natural environment, so he
would
find his way in. What he would be able to do once he got in, though – they could limit
that
.