Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (27 page)

“So, are you going to take steps?” he asked. “About the Godfire, and the … priest? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“No.”

“No you’re not going to take steps,” Glomulus said, “or no you don’t mind my asking?”

“Neither, Glomulus Cratch,” NightMary said.

The central bar slid back into the wall. Bounced back two and a half seconds later. The janitorial gave an exasperated
tsk
. The bar slid back again, and stayed open. After a few seconds, Glomulus unfolded his arms and poked a long finger towards the transparent metaflux.

Before reaching it, though, he paused. The polarity only worked one way or another. It couldn’t make the plate molecules vanish completely. If he poked his finger in and the polarity was reversed, he wouldn’t be able to withdraw it. He’d
have
to exit, or risk losing a finger if and when the plate returned to its sealed state. Which might turn out to be the moment NightMary got annoyed at his reluctance.

Instead, he stepped to one side and picked up the flaky, papery remains of the bowl from his table. He couldn’t remember eating before going under, and he usually disposed of the remains before they could encrust his desk, so he took this as further evidence that his food had contained a first-level sedative before he’d collapsed to the bed and had a second-level administered through the inlets. The drug had also robbed him of his memory of eating the food, which was probably a blessing.

He broke off a strip from the rim of the bowl, returned to the slot in the lower part of the wall below where the cross-bar used to be, and poked it gingerly into the wide, clear upper panel. It slid through unimpeded, and when he released it the flake of prison-utensil fell at a familiar, unnatural diagonal shunt before landing on the floor half-in and half-out of the lower panel. As he’d suspected.

NightMary had opened his cell.

Glomulus looked at the flat profile of the janitorial’s head. “Are you
sure
you’re not going to take steps?”

The janitorial – NightMary – laughed again. “Is that what you think this is?”

He stepped carefully back from the wall, sidled backwards to his bed without taking his eyes off the robot, and sat down. “I
think
I’m fine here,” he said, “unless you’re planning on forcing me to leave this cell?”

“No,” NightMary said again. The janitorial began to reverse along the aisle. “They sealed you in,” it went on. He was more or less forced to concede at this point that
it
was in fact a
she
, although the fact that she was actually a personality-facet of a
he
made it that much more complicated. No doubt Feathers Muldoon or that funny, nervous fellow Whye would have a lot of fun figuring it all out. What was the role of a gendered personality in a consciousness transcribed into the mechanical? What was the difference between a transcribed consciousness from a female organism and a female
aspect
of a male one? Especially since it had been electronic some four or five times as long as it had ever been human?

“Well,” he said in reply, “it
is
a brig.”

“With the power-down emergency lock,” NightMary said, “the walls were all opaqued until I got into the system.”

“I do appreciate the view, NightMary,” Glomulus said, “but-”

“I understand you have a sworn intent of your own, Glomulus Cratch,” it interrupted him. “I read it in your journal, even if I couldn’t piece it together from your files. You have a job to finish, do you not?”

He turned his head at a slight flicker in his peripheral vision, and saw that the flimsy on his desk had begun to scroll of its own accord. “Oh, that,” he said with slight embarrassment. “Well, I’m sure I’ll get around to it. Anyway, it’s not so much
sworn
, as-”

“Your jailers have put this ship in an orbit that leaves it permanently on the night-side of the planet,” it interrupted again, “until they decide otherwise. You won’t be leaving my domain any time soon, so I can wait for you. But the ship that is their goal, down on the surface?” the robot had rolled all the way to the end of the row of cells now. It turned smoothly to vanish around the corner, out of Glomulus’s line of sight from where he sat on the bed, even with the full stretch of his cell’s observation panel rendered transparent.

“I didn’t even know they were
looking
for a ship,” he called after it.

The next thing NightMary said came through the cell’s speaker system. He very,
very
nearly jumped. “Night falls on that ship in three hours and twenty-seven minutes.”

Glomulus sat on his bed, and waited. He let the last of the anaesthetic fade from his system. He didn’t get up and use any more pieces of his bowl to check whether his cell was still standing open.

He was rather proud of himself for that.

SALLY (THEN)

It wasn’t until the landing party had departed for the surface, and the wide stretch of abandoned ships carefully arranged around the outskirts of a luxurious spaceport, that NightMary finally got in touch with the bridge.

There hadn’t been any trace of ships in orbit. Not
outsider
ships, anyway. As Bunzo himself had said, there hadn’t been any AstroCorps vessels docked at the parking arrays and they didn’t find any more of them drifting in orbit. There was also no wreckage, which was at once reassuring and worrying. When they
did
find evidence of starships in the broad hinterland around the spaceport, and further discovered that the starship graveyard might be
several ships deep
as well as several hundred square miles in extent, the ‘reassuring’ and ‘worrying’ neatly switched places.

“How many missions did they say had been lost in here?” Sally said with a frown.

“They
were
just the ones anyone heard about,” Janya said. “There seem to be ships of all kinds down there – and ages.”

The voice came unannounced, without any sort of incoming transmission or opportunity to accept or reject a direct hail. It was a voice from within the ship, only patently not from the ship’s crew. Sally might almost have said the voice sounded like their old XO, high-and-mighty Commander Choya Alapitarius W’Tan, except
this
throaty female voice was human rather than the soft-choral product of a Molran’s windpipes. And it wasn’t saying things like ‘the following is at least a fourth reminder’ and ‘for the benefit of the hard of hearing’ and ‘file all reports using the template or – I cannot stress this enough – they will be discarded by the system and make additional work for more competent crewmembers’. Which was usually a bit of a giveaway for W’Tan.

“Why have you come?”

Sally and Janya were on the bridge, Waffa and Contro in main engineering. There were contingents of eejits with basic security configurations in place at both locations and everyone was under instructions to maintain a strict buddy system at all times. Nobody quite knew what to be ready for, so they were trying to be ready for anything. Sally had a screen on her tactical console showing a live feed of the Rip’s cell, and she glanced at it out of the corner of her eye at least once every twenty seconds. He was still apparently fast asleep, his cell walls solid and polarised and – aside from the visual feed through the bumper’s filament-thin sensor – powered-down.

She hadn’t been over to check on him personally since they’d put him under back at the boundary buoy, and that was nagging at her. They’d been on high alert as they picked their way through night-side near-planet space to their current geosynchronous orbital location, but all had remained quiet. Bunzo had vanished from their comms with a final jovial “goodnight,” but no other interference had taken place. The dark side of the planet was quiet and thronging with smaller machines, similar to the satellites they’d first encountered but not as large or autonomous.

She’d have to go to the brig and check on him soon. Of course, her
brain
was telling her this was pointless, because the brig was in shut-down and she would just be looking at blank walls, but at least she’d be able to see
those
with her own eyes. If she didn’t go and
look
, she was going to drive herself to distraction.

Sally glanced at Janya after the human-version-of-Commander-W’Tan voice spoke.
Here comes round two
, she thought, and saw the odd, deceptively frail academic was clearly thinking the same thing.

“This is Chief Tactical-”

“-Officer Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed of the of the starship designated
AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400
,” the voice said, “although you identify for simplicity’s sake as
Astro Tramp 400
. Yes, I know who you are. If I didn’t, I probably would have asked that.”

“Just observing protocol,” Sally said mildly. “We’re here looking for survivors or information about another AstroCorps ship-”

“
Denbrough
,” the voice said, “which was searching for
Yojimbo
. I know that too. If I’d wanted to know what your mission was, I probably would have asked
that
.”

“Well, you asked why we’ve come,” Sally said. “We’ve come because it would have been very difficult to complete our mission if we hadn’t.”

“Hm,” the voice disapproved.

“I don’t mean to be glib,” Sally gave it her best diplomatic effort. “Tense situations have that effect on me sometimes.”

“Why didn’t you refuse your mission?” the voice asked. “Based on the survivability statistics surrounding incursions on the Bunzolabe, you would have been well within your rights to refuse orders on the grounds of likelihood of ship loss with all hands. At the very least it would have forced a command review of the orders and crew complement. And the margins are even wider for non-Corps crew, which you are. Unless you have some agenda that has left your tiny, tiny crew unwilling or unable to submit itself to higher AstroCorps authority and the
scrutiny
that involves.”

“Would you mind introducing yourself?” Sally asked. “We’d be interested in knowing who we are addressing,” she paused. “Are you Mary?” she hazarded.

“I am NightMary,” the voice said, just a little coldly. “Only Horatio calls me Mary.”

“That’s where we heard the name,” Sally nodded. “Sorry, but he didn’t tell us not to call you-”

“I maintain security for the night-side of the planet,” NightMary continued. “Did he tell you that? Did he tell you that I would not approve of your armaments? Did he tell you what happens to disturbers of the peace who come into Sleepytown?”

“No,” Sally said calmly, “he didn’t tell us any of that.”

“You should never have come here this way,” NightMary said, and now her voice sounded a little sad. “It’s still not too late. Leave the landing party on the surface and go. I won’t stop you.”

“Sorry,” Sally said, “but we can’t leave half our crew down there with no hope of escape. They’re depending on us. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t see a relative suppressor in orbit.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, The Bun gave us a set of commands for a quick relative skip from the boundary to near-orbit,” Sally said, “and tracing that backwards would get us almost back to our point of origin. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways for you to stop us so I’m not about to try it – but like I say, we don’t have any intention of leaving the lander down there.”

“It doesn’t matter what your intentions might be,” NightMary said, “there is only one way for you to escape this place alive. And I don’t need to suppress your relative drive with a big, clunky old field. I can make it suppress itself.”

There was a pause that Sally decided, after about eight seconds, was an awkward pause.

“Yeah,” she said, “we have this device cutting off access to-”

“
It doesn’t matter
,” NightMary snapped. “There is no returning to that foolish robot Bitterpill, not with the codes Horatio gave you. They will already have been altered as you were entering them, and if you attempt to reverse course they will drop you straight into the sun.”

“Just one of the many reasons we really weren’t considering it,” Sally said soothingly. “But we don’t want to leave our friends,” she paused. “Did you say there was only one way for us to escape the Bunzolabe alive?” she went on. “Assuming for a moment that you
want
us to leave, that would be very valuable information and we’d greatly appreciate it if you told us. It’s the sort of sharing situation we call win-win.”

NightMary didn’t respond for a long time. “You have come to a very dangerous place,” she said, just as Sally had decided she was not going to reply at all, “dangerously uninformed.”

“Sounds like us,” Janya said almost inaudibly.

“Did you make that amazing starship lasagne down there?” Sally attempted to change the subject, sparing Adeneo a not-entirely-disapproving glance.

The spaceport itself seemed to have mostly been set aside for small landers, Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World’s own deluxe ferry service, and big tourist cruisers capable of making planetfall and turning into hotels in their own right. Of course, nobody came to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World back in its heyday and stayed aboard their own ships, but Sally supposed you had to disembark somehow. The spaceport was like an enormous reception area, and as far as they could tell from orbit, it was in bright and gleaming working order after six hundred and eighty-one years of seclusion. The great mounded plain of starships arrayed around it told a different story, but the spaceport’s lights all seemed to be on and its navigation and other systems seemed to be running smoothly.

It was also utterly deserted. Of
organic
life, anyway.

They’d debated landing at the spaceport and walking to the wide, slumped disc of the
Denbrough
, but the hulks were tight-packed and formed what amounted to hilly terrain over which the team would have to climb, both out and back unless they split their party and half of them stayed on the lander. Z-Lin made it very clear that they would be staying together, and as close as possible at all times to the lander and escape, as undependable as anything electronically-controlled might be inside the Bunzolabe. Leaving the lander parked in a haunted spaceport and going clambering over fifty half-collapsed starship hulls to their destination, while an unknown multitude of robotic entities rallied and the starships themselves came back to life under Bunzo’s command … it all hardly bore thinking about, and Sally agreed with the Commander entirely.