Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (25 page)

Both the Sunset Mandelbrot and
Red Mobi
orbited the angrily-glowing, lumpy remains of Mobi at a neighbourly closeness, a string of skeletal and totally non-flight-capable modulars even stretched out between them like a three-mile-long bridge most of the time. The rest of the array’s habitat-modulars were equally stripped-down but perfectly hospitable, with sealed decks and working exchanges but nothing much in the way of high technology. The only ships capable of flight were the huge armoured lorries that plunged into the seething magma chasms between the great stone orange segments of Mobi’s crust, disgorged armoured miners and then rose back up with cargoes of the assorted minerals the unfortunate planet’s mantle was rich in. The lorries weren’t relative-capable, and nor were any of the ships that made up Sunset. Nor, for that matter, had
Red Mobi
been in almost two hundred years. The only way out of the Mobi system was by catching a ride with the haulage convoys that came from deeper in Chalcedony space once every decade or so. Or an even more unusual passer-by like the
Tramp
. In this case, as it happened, there were no would-be passengers looking for a ride away from the shattered planet.

There were about ten thousand people in Sunset, and about five thousand on
Red Mobi
. They were all staunch citizens of Chalcedony, but this was an affirmed border world and they did lots of business with outsiders, so it was a nice enough place to stop for a short time.

They were also Bonshooni, so everyone was very careful not to mention the dead Bonshoon they had in their med ward.

There was nothing much they needed from Mobi, besides a little relaxation in Sunset … but there wasn’t much you could do on a Mandelbrot array, ultimately, that you couldn’t do on a modular. There were some bigger and more intricate game and entertainment systems, but a lot of the wine and song – and
all
of the women – were Bonshoon-specific, which was a bit of a challenge for the relatively delicate human constitution.

There was also no recourse to replacement components or crew, a state of affairs they were all pretty accustomed to by now. Waffa had been printing more eejits, and had been since they’d re-entered relative speed after Tubby Shaw’s little adventure with the electronic solderer. All told, he had added a new batch of one hundred and eight eejits to their stockpile, for a total of three hundred and seventy not including the Midwich Eejits or the ables from The Warm, and he still intended to print more. It was slow going. As Waffa liked to explain, it was about one hundred and eighty minutes per eejit taking into account the body-print twenty minutes, lost time for failed sub-ninety-two configs, and the time he spent either sleeping – with nobody backing him up, although Decay stood in from time to time – or investigating Dunnkirk’s murder. He had a complex minute-averaging algorithm thing, most likely painstakingly arrived at while waiting for eejits to print. He could have printed out well over five hundred in the nine weeks from the edge to Mobi, but they simply didn’t need that many hands.

It wasn’t that they were still holding out hopes of getting a proper plant, certainly not from Mobi … it was just that they had some
ables
now, more than the standard modular allotment of them in fact. And if you could get by with fewer than six hundred eejits on board, the better it was for the oxy farms. They hadn’t ended up printing any more eejits with help from Maladin, Dunnkirk and Thord since the twenty Midwich Eejits either, for various reasons. And nobody had even suggested trying their luck with configurations guided by Mother’s Rebellion.

Sunset was a pleasant enough place, even on those occasions when companies of miners finished their shifts and came aboard to unwind. This generally happened once every other month, and lasted a week or so. Sunset was just experiencing the tail end of such a week when the
Tramp
arrived.

Despite their reputation Bonshooni weren’t really stupid, not in comparison to humans. They were just relaxed and happy. Taking their attitudes, and their love of food and drink and luxuries into account, Bonshoon settlements made for enjoyable shore leaves, if done in careful moderation and with a lot of probably-unnecessary reminders about drugs.

Clue, much to her own annoyance and self-condemnation, didn’t speak to Waffa again until after they were separating from Sunset and heading on out of the system. Or, more accurately and even more to her annoyance and self-condemnation, that was when
he
next spoke to
her
.

“Totally not up to code,” he told her, apropos of nothing, when she was passing through main engineering. “I mean about Dunster’s papers,” he explained, “his cultural demographic stuff, you know, about bodily remains and all that. That side of his docket was pretty skimpy already, ‘course, since his bodily remains were meant to live forever in a sleeper pod drifting outside the galaxy on a big ol’ block of ice.
That
was his cultural demographic.”

“Yeah,” Z-Lin had known this. It was part of the reason she’d been looking for some way to delegate the job. This didn’t stop her from feeling crappy about delegating it the way she had. “And the second choice was basically ‘leave it all to Maladin’, right?”

“Right,” Waffa nodded. “Anyway, point is, we couldn’t do any sort of service or official handover or anything back there on Mobi, even though they were all Bonshooni. We might as
well
have just mulched him if we were going to drop him off at Sunset. They drop their dead straight into the chasms … aside from the couple of tiny trace particles of cobalt they extract from the body, which they feed into their transpersion reactor’s main gamma laser and use as some sort of still-with-us-in-spirit bullplop.”

“Not exactly Dunnkirk, then.”

“Nope. And these guys all think the Vahoon are a thing. Dunster once told me he’d rather piss blood in a tank full of Fergies than have a conversation with a Vahoo-ha-head.”

Z-Lin laughed, although she had a hard time imagining gentle, kind-spoken Dunnkirk saying something so crude about another person’s beliefs. It was said, according to an exclusively Bonshoon myth that was not particularly widespread even among the Bonshooni, that there was a
fourth
Molranoid subspecies. The Vahoon were supposed to have divided primarily from the Bonshoon, but could also spring forth from Molren and Blaren if the candidates were sufficiently pure and if they performed any one of a hundred different rituals depending on the specific lunatic fringe you happened to be listening to at the time. The Vahoon ranged from ‘genetically and culturally and technologically perfect Molranoids’ all the way up to ‘magic God damn pixies that pissed rainbows and crapped gumdrops’, according to the overwhelmingly sceptical majority. They were also supposed to have the ability to step through the veil and enter the real universe, which is what they invariably did whenever they achieved Vahoonity, which conveniently explained why no bastard had ever seen one.

“I guess that answers the ‘why did Decay stay on board’ question,” she remarked.

“Yeah. They were pretty normal around us, but then, well,” Waffa gave her a hesitant grin in a minor peace offering. “We poor monkeys can’t become Vahoon. So they don’t like to talk with us about it.”

“Our sour grapes would tend to spoil things for them.”

“Right. Anyway, I could use our next few legs – next one was Private Dancer, right?”

“Yep. Another little slice of nothing.”

“Yeah. If we can get a longer-term flight-plan, I should be able to figure out the best place to see Dunster off.”

“I’m on it,” Clue assured him, and had been so set on reconciliation that she’d formulated a command request right then and there, and even as they were accelerating towards maximum cruising velocity she headed directly to the Captain’s dome. It wasn’t really necessary, but hopelessly watching his door in person while the request fell into the vault seemed like the right thing to do.

It wasn’t
entirely
fair to say that the Captain’s echoless vault swallowed
every
attempt at communication. Reports went in and were logged. Recommendations went in and were accepted, rejected or amended. Orders came out. Much as the crew might have
liked
her to be Acting Captain, Clue
was
still just XO. And the Captain, for all his unorthodoxy and downright dodginess,
was
still Captain. That was the way AstroCorps worked, particularly on modular operations.

A request for clarification or longer-term mission parameters was usually ignored, yes – and an amend-or-justify memo from ‘the senior officers’ was almost guaranteed to vanish without a trace. But there were some signs of life. Heck, when Thord and her Bonshoon friends had come aboard, Thord had declared that she would see him … and his door had opened to her. Z-Lin wasn’t sure if that had happened since the
Dark Glory Ascendant
.

Those poor snooty sons of whores.

Their orders so far had not been all that specific. An inbound trajectory back towards the centre of Six Species space was the general gist of it, and this was something that didn’t require much guidance. Every direction was inbound, when you were parked on the edge. This route back along the edge of Chalcedony space served the dual purpose of filling their holds with mining cargo to shift upstream for benefits, which in turn obliged them to go to larger settlements, and also allowing them to check the region out for any sign of ongoing attacks. Mobi had not provided them with cargo or gossip, but there was a long road ahead.

As to where they were
ultimately
heading, they had a few spots on their itinerary that were of strategic value but -

She looked down at her pad as it chimed softly. A course, featuring recommended stops and mid- to long-term destination and orders, had scrolled onto her screen. As usual, these coordinates were accompanied by little notes about the system, along with officers’-eyes-only logistical recommendations. The sort of thing, generally, that Zeegon complained about having to claw out of the computer substrates with his teeth and fingernails.

“You read my mind,” she muttered.

From Mobi, as they’d already known, their next stop was Private Dancer. A three-week hike. Zeegon’s birthday was in less than two weeks, Clue reflected.
Maybe we can push the party back and try to get to Private Dancer on the hammer
, she thought.
We can probably tweak this set and push the engines a bit and get there a few days late. It’d be a good spot for a shore leave celebration
.

She shook her head. The previous week, a little subdued after all the arguments and the fruitless investigations and the relentless tension, they had celebrated Janya’s birthday. They all remembered the
last
time they’d celebrated Adeneo’s birthday, back on Standing Wave. That had been when they’d found the smokeberries, and realised the Larger Dark Moving Below Fergunak were stalking them.

Good times.

“Right,” she murmured to herself, and rolled down the list. “Mobi,” she read quietly, “Private Dancer, Alr’Wady, Ursos, Margan’s Leap, Ruby Susan, New Chalcedon, Fat Tuesday, Gola, Bun-”

She frowned. She read the instruction. She read it again. She stared.

Then she opened a command-level communication channel with the Captain’s chamber.

“I can’t do this,” she said. There was no response.
The Captain’s God damn echoless vault
, Z-Lin thought in frustration. She signed off, stepped over to the door and tapped briskly at the respectably old-school door chime, then raised her pad again when there was no response. She keyed in a quick official objection to the order, on record under the amend-or-justify memo set.

- - - The crew will MUTINY. - - -

There was, if possible, even less response to this than there had been to her comm, and her press on the door chime. Bruce, however, did send back a subdued little acknowledgement ping.

- - - That’s exactly what
I
told him. - - -

“The fact that you’re finding out these things before the rest of us is not
actually
reassuring, Bruce,” she raised her voice slightly and addressed the silent, dimly-lit dome. The synth didn’t respond, although she would have liked to think its silence became somewhat sheepish.

She was on the verge of giving the Captain’s door a good punching when there was a mild, choral little cough from behind her.

Clue stifled a sigh. Decay was one of the few Molranoids she knew who had adopted the cough affectation so flawlessly. It was very rare for a Blaran to have any sort of tracheal issue or build-up or virus that would require him to cough, so when he did it was invariably as conversational shorthand for ‘I’m standing here witnessing events and don’t have any particular comment, but do want to broadcast my presence so as to minimise recriminations after the fact’.

Much like humans did, in short.

“Problem?” he asked, when she turned towards him.

“Our flight plan,” she replied, raising her pad and giving it a shake.

Decay nodded. “Are we being sent somewhere murderously dangerous again?”

“Yeah,” Z-Lin said heavily. “Everybody, conference room as soon as we’re back in soft-space,” she headed past him towards the elevator, and added over her shoulder, “bring ten feet of rope.”

GLOMULUS (THEN)

It was with mild, muzzy surprise that Glomulus woke up. He couldn’t remember going to sleep, and he was sprawled rather uncomfortably on his front across the bed. Sure sign that he had been drugged. He remembered Sally’s little throw-away remark about him sleeping through wherever they were going next. Having already pieced together from the various clues his other jailers had dropped that they were going to the Bunzolabe, he had to admit he saw both sense and madness in sedating him. Either way, he supposed he was glad to be awake.