Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (23 page)

In short, only a colossally out-of-touch prehistoric Drednanth ancient,
walking in
her new brain like a pair of squeaky shoes, could possibly have thought it was a workable theory.

And yet.

And yet, ‘it was Thorkhild, it was Thorkhild, now stop’
, Z-Lin thought, for approximately the seven thousandth time in the past two months.

Execution, imprisonment, rehabilitation, trials … these were all things that happened to
people
, not fabrications or robots or tools. When an able failed in his duty at the end of his forty-year lifespan as an assistant whatever-he’d-been-configured-as, he voluntarily resigned his commission. His brain sent out a “last drinks” signal throughout his body, his vital organs shut down and he died quickly and painlessly. Usually by this time he had already recycled his uniforms and his meagre ‘personal’ – usually profession-related – possessions, cleaned and purged his body, and had sealed himself up in medical micro-film with a couple of nose-holes. If he hadn’t simply strolled to the nearest handy reclamation centre and had himself rendered down, uniform and all. The removal and separate recycling of accessories was a legacy bit of wetware programming, and not really necessary.

Of course, if the eejits of the
Tramp
had all died the second they screwed something up, the crew would have been in big trouble. Fortunately, in at least some sense of the word, the configuration glitches in the plant meant that this retirement signal was short-circuited. This gave eejits license to mess up their jobs, to varying degrees of ship-damage and self-destructiveness, at least until three or four or six co-eejits could be piled onto the task to get it done by law of averages … but it never interfered with the more fundamental imprint. An eejit was harmless.

There were precedents for all kinds of failed able configurations throughout the AstroCorps records. Few quite so comprehensive or widespread as those currently wandering around on board
Astro Tramp 400
, but there were certainly reams of cases. The
Tramp
ster eejits, although some of them were occasionally unpredictable or volatile, and occasionally got into slap-and-flail fights with each other, were ultimately placid. Heck, the Artist had managed to kill twelve of them with his bare hands, and he’d been older than the Zhraak Dome. Okay, he’d been a Molran and more than capable of dismembering a dozen extremely-strong humanoids anyway, but it had probably made things easier for him when his victims had barely fought back.

Ables, or in their case eejits, were technically useful in case of a mutiny, armed civilian insurrection or hostile takeover, but not in any martial sense. They could be used as a resource by the defending officers under Corps protocols hopefully
also
worked into the deepest levels of their configuration, no matter how shitted up the configuration was. But they assisted purely by holding and locking out control stations and nerve centres, and providing basic nonviolent resistance methods that amounted to being meat-shields.
That
was what an eejit could do, at the greatest foreseeable extreme of a starship crew’s violence spectrum.

Most of the bad-config problems on the official AstroCorps record, moreover, were ones that had been easily solved by executive wetware recall and a replacement plant.

Must be nice
, Clue thought.

“Turning left, Thorkhild,” she said.

“Kill all humans.”

She sighed. For the past two weeks, the prisoner had spoken a grand total of four words. The fourth, strategically placed where “kill all humans” couldn’t cover all the complexities of the conversational requirements, was “potty”. He had also become far more catastrophically, well,
blind
. His symptoms were the same – permanent hysterical loss of vision due to a psychological imbalance – only recently he seemed completely unprepared for it. He banged into things, including the minimal and utterly unchanging furnishings in his own brig cell, and even poked himself with food and items of clothing in his attempts to eat and dress respectively.

Also, he drooled a lot and frequently fell over, often parlaying these tumbles into extended snoozes.

Z-Lin wasn’t surprised, and she didn’t intend to
do
anything about it. It had been one of the few things to have happened in the past nine-and-a-half weeks to restore her faith in humanity.

She just wished Waffa could have been more subtle.

“Hold up.”

“Kill all humans.”

“Yeah,” she drew him into the elevator, turned him to face the door, and they descended one level. “Out we go.”

The weeks between the edge and Mobi had been a weird dance between increasingly-desultory investigation and avoiding conducting a trial on an eejit. A weird dance through which everyone got steadily more surly and cynical, and this was in a group whose starting-level had been pretty high already. It had been a linguistic and semantic wrestle, attempting to establish Thorkhild’s guilt or innocence while acknowledging that they were irrelevant to his status as a component, and all the while all too aware of the fact that the pups in the oxygen farm
seemed
to want the whole investigation to go away.

And why was that? Well, that was the absolutely pointless question, wasn’t it?

They’d made a little more headway talking with the seven aki’Drednanth, although it was still unclear as to whether they had been in any sort of communion with their fellows out in the wider Dreamscape while the ship was at all-stop. What Thord, or even the other breath-drawing aki’Drednanth of the Six Species, thought of the Bonshoon’s death was still anyone’s guess. All they’d really been able to establish was that the aki’Drednanth here, on board the ship, had their version of what had happened and what they wanted to happen next. Sadly, it seemed to line up in some superficial ways with the observances made by Janus, Decay, and assorted others throughout the course of the investigation. It was enough, even if it was dramatically unsatisfying.

The irregularities, if you could call them that while still acknowledging that this was the first aki’Drednanth litter you’d ever seen, seemed to increase over time rather than fade. The pups continued to cooperate and persisted in not killing each other. They referred to themselves as The Rebellion, or sometimes Mother’s Rebellion, or occasionally even The Levelled Blade. Janus theorised that this last title was some reference to their having been utilised as a weapon by Thord against the Fergunak at Declivitorion, but it was just as likely to be a failure in the use of Thord’s big rubbery interface-webbing gloves.

Anyway, the pups, whatever they called themselves, had blamed Thorkhild. That meant that essentially they were laying out a track for the investigation to follow, by the obligation AstroCorps had towards the aki’Drednanth and the Molran Fleet. The idea that any aki’Drednanth would ever bother to use this reverence-level authority for anything as parochial as affecting a murder case was laughable and as unprecedented as an able killing somebody, but these were not exactly normal aki’Drednanth and, over the days and weeks, the conclusion seemed purely inescapable. They were weighing in, and in doing so letting the true culprit get away with murder and go on running the ship.

Because it could only have been the Captain. Z-Lin had a very strong suspicion on this score, and she was painfully aware that Sally had her suspicions too. And the longer they spent confirming and reconfirming the impossibility of it being anyone else … well, they were just making it that much clearer to everyone, so who was to say the pups didn’t have the right idea?

And they were all looking at her on this. Not because she was the mouthpiece of the Captain anymore, but because she was the last line of defence between him and the rest of the crew. She was the last sane voice handing out the orders and the crew wanted those orders – they
needed
them – to make sense. Because if the Captain was in charge of their destiny, and the Captain was sneaking around murdering passengers…

It was a fact that, once upon a time, Clue would have believed that the Captain had done what he’d done for a very good reason, and for the safety and betterment of his crew and possibly even the safety and betterment of the entire Six Species. That his actions, once explained, would have made her feel bad about ever having doubted him and would have utterly exonerated him in the unlikely event of the clear-cut case ever finding its way to a Corps tribunal. Maybe that time had not been all that long ago.

But she just didn’t know anymore. She didn’t know how much longer she could pretend, and how much longer the others would
let
her. She wasn’t that great a leader. She was barely Commander material, certainly not XO material, indisputably not Acting Captain material. But she also had to face the fact that they were running, now, on the material they
had
.

They had all stopped asking, sometime after the bonefields, what exactly the Captain wanted from them and what exactly their mission was supposed to be. Yes, it was
technically
a standard tour and on a modular those things tended to have some flex, and yes – the
Tramp
’s tour had been unorthodox from the start and had proven to have rather more flex than anyone had anticipated. Their destinations, detours, orders and mishaps had all followed on one after the other with a sort of relentless logic, a chain of increasingly tiny, slippery stepping stones that had left them all with the sudden realisation that they were knee-deep in a fast-flowing river, that they could see neither bank, and
that wasn’t water seeping into their boots
.

Nobody had really talked about quitting, except in their darkest and most muttering-filled moments. Certainly The Accident had punched the rest of the defiance out of them in this specific sense. If you left a crew of three hundred and fifty, you were just moving on along your career path. If you left a crew of
ten
, give or take the occasional passenger or weasel, you were abandoning a group of friends in the darkness. And that was how they’d held on.

It was hard to ignore the obvious, though. Even Zeegon wasn’t making smarmy remarks anymore. Zeegon was a little bit scared. And Clue didn’t blame him. She was beginning to realise that pretending an eejit had killed Dunnkirk may actually be the best way out for all of them. Because they’d come too far.

“Around this way,” she said, taking the eejit’s elbow and walking him along the curve of corridor. They were past the nearest door leading into Contro’s little chaotic sprawl of quarters, the so-called ‘Contro Tangle’, and Clue breathed a sigh of relief that they hadn’t run into the Chief Engineer. He was probably upstairs in the engine room anyway. If there was one thing that could make this morning worse, she had decided, it would be attempting to explain to Controversial-To-The-End what she was doing. Probably explaining it a half-dozen times, no less.

The suspicions she no doubt shared with Sally were as-yet unfounded and circumstantial, and yes – a not-insignificant part of her hoped they stayed that way. How and why the aki’Drednanth were making the claims they were was something of a mystery. Nobody had done anything so crass as to actually
interfere
with the gloves, which was one of the first things Waffa and Sally – and even Janya – had suggested as the most logical explanation for the pups beginning to communicate in such an anomalous way. No, Mother’s Rebellion were obviously playing their own tune, and it just so happened to perfectly match the drumbeat of the erstwhile killer that they were sheltering.

And that meant that instead of actually solving the case and getting it all taken care of legally and officially, Mother’s Rebellion preferred the crew to either
pretend
an eejit was capable of murder, or actually
believe
one was. Either way, it was disastrous for general wellbeing and tension-levels. Even worse, of course, was the idea that revelation of the
actual
killer might be even
worse
for everybody.

Why had Mother’s Rebellion made the statement they had? Why did
they
care? Clearly, they wanted the investigation to end. Why did they want
that
? It had to be because they were involved somehow. Clue and Sally were agreed on this much.

But they were aki’Drednanth. They would be allowed to do basically
anything
. It was ludicrous, when you actually started looking at the regulations and some old cases. In instances of aki’Drednanth territoriality, it was not unusual for humans and even Molranoids to be accidentally ‘flung’ or ‘impacted’ or occasionally ‘gored’. This generally meant ‘killed in such a way as to make identification of the body difficult’. There had been dozens of deaths over the years. The aki’Drednanth involved were always very regretful, but the general conclusion was “well, shouldn’t have pissed her off.” And where
pups
were involved? Forget about it. Janus himself had almost been ‘impacted’ by Thord. And she’d very nearly decapitated that Blaran corsair Captain they’d fallen afoul of at MundCorp Research.

So why derail a murder investigation due to involvement for which they would probably be completely exonerated by any Six Species authority? Unless it went considerably deeper than that, and darker, and suddenly Clue was quite
glad
they were in the middle of nowhere with no recourse to a Fleet-run legal puppet show.

Oh. And there was another issue, one she was doing her best
not
to think about. And that was, if they put it on the official record that a death had taken place at the hands of an eejit – a
non-sentient primate homunculus
, in the parlance of the greater Molran Fleet – it could very well become the political flashpoint the big Molran grand-daddies of the Six Species needed in order to move beyond lofty snooting and proceed directly to eradicating the program once and for all. And Z-Lin wasn’t even sure that would be a
bad
thing, except insofar as fabricants were about the only thing keeping the
Tramp
flying. In fact, without the eejits they might all have gotten to retire by now, so maybe there wasn’t a down-side. She was still certain only that she didn’t want her name anywhere near
that
historical footnote.