Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (34 page)

“I’m not sure, to be honest!” Contro laughed. “He was an odd one!”

“Artsy types usually are,” Tiny Clarence said. “They don’t quite live in the same reality as the rest of us, do they?”

“Ha ha ha! True, that!”

Contro didn’t manage to convince any of his guests to return to the medical bay, despite his best diplomatic efforts. Gosh, but old people could be stubborn! Fortunately, their problems didn’t get any more serious and everyone was still in one piece by the time they got to Ursos.

Ursos and Arctos were a pair of planets orbiting on opposite sides of their system’s sun, so usually incoming ships picked one to stop at, and in this case it was Ursos, although Arctos was probably very nice as well. And they were big planets. In fact, they were huge. Contro learned a lot about them from the miners in the final few days before the
Tramp
arrived in the system.

“They’re so big, by rights they ought to have collapsed into some other state or condensed into gas giants or some damn fool thing,” Pepe ‘Gasket’ Waskell told him one night when he was sitting up with Zeegon and a couple of the other passengers. They’d been trying to play this game the Alr’Wadi had brought aboard, called
Acorns and Bollocks
, but for some reason they’d stopped explaining the rules after a while and had stopped playing entirely shortly after
that
, and were now just chatting. Contro didn’t understand why, because he’d been having a wonderful time. “The boffins had to rethink the whole planetary structural theory shebang when they found ‘em, they’re that huge.”

Gravity was so high on Ursos and Arctos that only Molranoids could live on the surface without habitats fitted with special exchange variants to level out the drag. And while exchange technology was all good and well to provide normal gravity in
zero
gravity, it acted a bit queerly in
high
gravity. According to the miners, there had been ‘combination-reset events’, which was a fancy way of saying people had been squashed into bony pizzas. Not even Fergunak could manage in aquatic habitats, and nor did they want to. The enormous planets had natural structures extending through their mantles, a sort of naturally-occurring reinforcing lattice that somehow prevented the planets from collapsing under their own weight. The strut structures were of a rare, well-nigh unique megadense material, that was constantly fusing and extruding from the heavy elements deeper in the mantles. The miners of Ursos and Arctos dug it out and exported it for its multitude of uses.

“My buddy Wildy always wanted to come here,” Zeegon said. “He was sure Ursos and Arctos were hollow, and down near their cores they were livable worlds. The whole process of the veins being fused together and extruded and dug out, see, eventually the planets would run out of material down there to fuse together, and that would leave them hollow.”

“That sort of like how a sun runs out of shit to fuse together, and ends up hollow?” Gasket squinted at the helmsman.

“Hey, I never said Wildy was a planetary physicist.”

“And wouldn’t a hollow planet have less mass than Ursos an’ Arctos,” one of the others, a retired engineer on the wrong side of two hundred, added, “thus makin’ their high gravity a big freaky mystery?”

“Yeah, but down by the
core
-”

“Where it’s
ten thousand degrees
?” Gasket demanded.

“Hey,” Zeegon protested again. “I never said I believed it.”

“This Wildy buddy of yours sounds like a grade-A shooeyhead,” the former engineer said. “Why didn’t he come out here with a shovel and a bedroll?”

“He died along with most of the rest of our crew,” Zeegon replied.

There was a considering silence at this.

“Ahh, shit,” the former engineer said, “I’m sorry, son. Pity he couldn’t be here,” he gave Zeegon a nudge. “I woulda gotten a kick out of watching him trying to find the elevator.”

They pulled into orbit around the great thunderhead-black planet Ursos, and found it more or less intact. As far as Contro could tell, anyway. Nobody went running around like a headless chicken shouting about the planet being attacked by aliens or the Fleet or anything else. Not that chickens without heads shouted about that. Or about anything, really, which just went to show that probably nothing was wrong. Or that there were no chickens on the planet. Which was a shame, because chickens were neat.

Anyway, they said goodbye to the Alr’Wadi miners and Contro guessed they passed on all the news they’d gathered about the Worldship that had attacked the mining colony. Hopefully without too much alteration and exaggeration leading to Hargo’s whispers, he thought. The authorities at Ursos had already heard about the attack on Alr’Wadi, of course, and were already starting on a full-scale repair and restoration mission. Finding big enough ships able to carry the equipment back and forth had been a problem, but at least the orbital stations were well set-up to give the refugees the care and attention they needed.

Before they left, just a couple of days later, Contro was delighted to see Tiny Clarence once again, and this time he was back on his feet. Well, back on
somebody’s
feet, and that was the important thing.

From Ursos it was four more weeks to Margan’s Leap, and they had a nice heavy load of Ursos ore in their cargo holds. No passengers this time, except for a pair of logistics and emergencies officers from some department or other, who were overseeing the ore delivery and trading information about the Alr’Wady attack ‘upstream’. Contro never got to meet them, though – they stayed in the officers’ quarters and didn’t mix with the crew even though they were in transit an entire month. Z-Lin said it was because they were zealous full-Chalcedony officials, but Contro suspected it was just because they were boring ol’ fuddy duddies.

Margan’s Leap was a very nice place and they all took a few days of shore leave. Well, except for Doctor Cratch of course. And probably not the Captain, although he might have snuck down at some point on one of the landers. Anyway, it was a jolly nice place and you’d hardly believe it was a mining planet at all. It was actually mostly the asteroid belts and outer moons of the system that were mining-heavy, but Contro discovered that the planet itself had some refineries and stuff and that was where they delivered their ore from Ursos.

Margan’s Leap – or specifically Gates-Of-Pearl, the island they landed on – was like a beach resort. None of them actually went into the water as far as Contro was aware, but the beaches
were
very nice. It was good to lie on the sand and get a bit of a sunburn, even though it wasn’t really his thing. Personally, he was worried about Fergunak even though the Gates-Of-Pearl locals insisted there were none in the water here. It was actually the
clams
you had to worry about, but that was another story altogether.

The Marganites had also heard about the attack on Alr’Wady, although they were surprised and pleased to learn that there hadn’t actually been any casualties, because the news
they’d
heard had been that a lot of people had been killed. Hargo’s whispers again, Contro suspected. Even so, they were pretty darn cross about the whole thing and there were mutters of war between the Fleet and Chalcedony, talk of full separatism that was usually restricted to the fringe crazies. Chalcedony had a lot of rocks and stuff, but full secession from the Six Species was what Decay referred to as ‘a dumb monkey move’. Contro didn’t know about
that
, but he did remember Waffa complaining earlier about how none of the Chalcedony settlements would be able to help them get any sort of crew or replacement equipment. They didn’t seem the most hospitable bunch, if you thought about it that way. But then again, aw, Contro was sure they meant well.

Gates-Of-Pearl was a Mygonite enclave, which Decay suggested Contro should find familiar and pleasant. To be honest, though, Contro didn’t understand very much about these particular Mygonites, although he was sure they were very nice people really. Well, except for the ones who made Sally do a duel and the one she actually
duelled
with, that was a bit rude … but yes, mostly they were probably very nice. It was also confusing because they were
Marganite Mygonites
, which sort of sounded like you were saying the same thing twice, and that always left Contro struggling to keep up.

It all started with the pearl party, which the crew was invited to attend. The people of Gates-Of-Pearl weren’t
miners
so much as
hunters
, and their methods were very traditional and old-fashioned and quaint – but low-tech was apparently the best way to go about hunting the clams, because dropping a grenade on them or shooting them with a laser would ruin them, or something. Anyway, it was tradition. The clams that lived in the oceans around Gates-Of-Pearl, although not in the tourist lagoons, or so the locals said but still none of the
Tramp
sters really wanted to put that to the test, were big and aggressive and carnivorous. They ate a lot of the other big fish and crustaceans in the oceans of Margan’s Leap, as well as the occasional boat or submarine, if you didn’t play the right sort of whale-whistle all the time to keep them away. Oh yes, the whales of Margan’s Leap were the things that ate the clams, so you wanted to watch out for them too although usually you could see them coming because they pushed islands out of the way, or so Decay said. Not as big as space whales, surely to goodness, but pretty big. The clams, though, often contained huge pearls: Margan’s pearls, valued throughout the galaxy.

To be perfectly honest, Contro didn’t really understand the whole issue even though Janya tried to explain it to him. It was something about the traditional hunting methods, and the class of people who made a living from hunting the clams. It was very dangerous and they weren’t paid terribly well. But that made sense to Contro. Like most kinds of mining, really, the people who did the actual digging and stuff got a bit of a lousy deal, then every time the goods changed hands from then on, they got a little bit more polished and expensive and everyone got a little bit richer. It was like money – or credits, or goodwill, or whatever other currency was going – had just appeared out of nowhere, and kept on appearing, for no reason! When the lumps of actual
stuff
got smaller! It was like magic. But it was also sort of logical, he had to say.

Anyway, that wasn’t
really
the problem, although Janya explained that it was actually a terrible thing and the baitmen, the poor fellows who went down and sometimes got their arms or legs bitten off by the clams, were basically a slave-class. AstroCorps and the assorted Six Species government groups couldn’t do much to stem the flow of the pearls, because they were so valuable and Chalcedony was semi-autonomous or something, which Contro understood as meaning that if they wanted to feed themselves to giant clams and be generally beastly to one another, they darn well could and nobody else could say boo.

But then he didn’t actually understand the allure of the pearls, either. Honestly, the one the local baitmen had dug out looked like a giant snotty brain. And really, who liked a giant snotty brain?

So the locals had killed one of the giant man-eating clams, and found a pearl inside it, and so they’d had a pearl party. Contro was led to believe that this was basically what the baitmen got instead of being paid a fortune for the pearl itself, but it was a very fun party and there was lots of food and drink, so he didn’t see what they were complaining about. And it was mostly
other
people complaining anyway, he couldn’t help but notice. The baitmen, with their twitchy looks and mismatched fabricator arms and legs, didn’t say much at all. Everyone even got a little slice of the giant clam meat, and although Contro thought it was like trying to eat the inner sole of a sweaty shoe he chewed on his and made the best of it.

That
was when Waffa, a little the worse for drink, had said something about them going to Bunzo’s, and them being the only crew to get out of the Bunzolabe alive and then to turn around and decide to go back in again. And he’d probably been saying it in an attempt to impress one of the lady baitmen, or maybe you called them baitwomen, Contro didn’t know, anyway she was a very nice young lady and you could hardly see the joins even though she was scarcely wearing
anything
, and then one of the other locals who
wasn’t
a baitman had said Waffa was a big flabby liar, and Waffa had said he’d rather be a big flabby liar than a cunt, and then there’d been the duel.

Only it had been Sally, as Chief Tactical Officer, and as the only true Mygonite on the crew apart from Contro himself, who officially had to do the duel and defend Waffa’s honour and prove Waffa wasn’t a big flabby liar by having a fight. Which Contro didn’t understand but it was all jolly exciting.

Sally punched the angry local twice, once in the testicles and once on the back of the head as he doubled over. The second punch served to smash his face into the dance floor that had been cleared specially for the occasion. Some medics took the no-longer-angry-or-even-moving-anymore local away, a couple of baitmen tossed a couple of buckets of seawater onto the dance floor, and the party continued. At some point along the way Waffa disappeared with the lady baitman, and Z-Lin was worried that some other locals might be planning some sort of revenge and she voiced concern that the lady baitman was a honey trap, but Sally told her to unclench for once in her life.

So all in all it was a happy ending for everyone except the fellow Sally had punched. Which was normally how it went when Sally punched someone.

After hearing Z-Lin mention honey traps, Contro asked Zeegon how he might spot a honey trap and avoid falling into one because it sounded awfully sticky, although if he did fall into one he wondered if they were good to eat, and Zeegon laughed until he threw up. Contro did like it when he was funny but he sometimes wished he knew why.

From Margan’s Leap it was another four weeks to Ruby Susan.