Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (41 page)

“It seems like a rather likely possibility to me,” Janya remarked.

“I tend to agree,” Decay said.

“Yeah,” Sally added, “now that you mention it … yeah.”

“So what do we do about it?” Clue asked.

“Well, we can bring Glomulus up here and hope Janus
doesn’t
die,” Janya said, “and if he does we can consider it a tragic slaying at the hands of the Bunzolabe machine, which won a meaningless victory of some sort by finally bringing Glomulus out of his cell. Or we can open the pod and administer a lethal dose of abbronax, putting Janus out of his misery and leaving Glomulus in the brig, essentially stealing the aforementioned meaningless victory from the hands of NightMary.”

“More options please.”

“We can take the entire apparatus and all the medical equipment we can move
down to the brig
,” Janya went on calmly, “and see if Glomulus can succeed in performing life-saving surgery from inside his cell without NightMary killing Janus first.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Sally said, “the brig cells have a bunch of built-in suppressors that would stop half of the medical equipment from even activating.”

Janya hadn’t been aware of this. “Oh.”

“And a lot of this stuff is too big and integrated to move down there anyway,” Decay added. “Janus is going to need organs, skin … there’s no medical printer down there, so we’d be running back and forth with samples.”

“What do you do if a prisoner gets sick or injured while in the brig?” Janya asked.

“Usually,” Sally replied, “we knock him the Hell out and take him to the medical bay.”

“This isn’t providing the options we need,” Clue announced. “We need one where Janus survives and I don’t actually care about any other elements of the outcome, for example what Glomulus thinks or whether NightMary contracts gonorrhoea of the central processing unit.”

“We could partially dismantle the pod and attempt to disconnect NightMary from her control of it,” Janya said, “or at least cripple its more dangerous functions and leave it running as an intensive care unit until such time as we can get Janus into surgery. This has the drawback of me not having the first clue how to actually do it.”

“Anything else?”

Janya spread her hands. “Sever the computer’s connection to the subluminal drive,” she said, “shut down this automatic escape protocol that Bunzo has forced on us, and just take us to relative speed right now. Get us out of here. Out of range, out of NightMary’s sight, and then we can do whatever we like. Janus will probably still die, but it takes a lot of other factors out of the equation. I should add, again, this option has the same drawback as the last.”

“Plus, Bunzo will have heard it,” Zeegon added.

They all looked around, but the comm system didn’t seem to be inclined to speak up.

The ship was at maximum cruising velocity and was powering away from Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World on an outward trajectory that would bring them to the edge of the Bunzolabe in about two and a half hours. Their route now took them by the shortest path out, as opposed to the longest path in that they had approached by.

“What did Waffa say about the hull?” Z-Lin asked. “When will we be able to hold a relative field?”

“He seemed reasonably confident they would have the hull patched and the new gun nailed down within the hour,” Decay said. “The main repairs are inside.”

“And the engine is in tip-top shape!” Contro exclaimed cheerfully. “Relative engines are good to go, although I’m not sure where they would go and I jolly well hope they take us with them, ha ha ha! Honestly though, engines these days.”

“Yes,” Z-Lin looked thoughtful.

“You’re the Commander,” Decay pointed out.

“Thank you, General,” Clue growled. “Alright. Sally, Zeegon, you’re with me. Down to the brig to fetch Cratch. We’ll keep him in there until we’re out of the Bunzolabe, one way or another. Decay, Contro, you go and talk to Waffa, see if you can get him to bring his schedule forward and get everyone inside and ready for a crash-field jump to soft-space, on a manually-set trajectory. Janya, you stay here with the…”

“The science department?” Janya said helpfully.

“Yeah, and get everything as ready as you can for emergency surgery and massive tissue and organ replacement. Get the printer running, call up Janus’s profile, cue up as many different bits and pieces to print as you can before we get back. If we can’t save his life I want to be able to assemble a whole new Janus out of the spare parts, so I can push him out the airlock for not sticking to the God damn buddy system.”

Decay winced. “Commander, you know that’s not fair-”

“I know, but I’m the Commander and that’s not fair either,” Z-Lin said, and marched from the room. “Sally, Zeegon, let’s go talk to the Ripper.”

Zeegon paused in the doorway, and looked at Janya with an unreadable expression in his eyes. They were almost always unreadable, but she
guessed
that this time he was being sincere, or remorseful, or some other contextually nonsensical thing.

“I didn’t want it to happen this way,” he said.

“Obviously,” Janya said. “I don’t think anyone wanted Whye to be dismembered by an insane machine just so Glomulus could be released from his cell.”

“I’m just saying that if we could keep him in there, and still save Janus-”

“Yes,” Janya said, “but we can’t. Although my personal recommendation would have been the abbronax.”

Zeegon blinked. “You really think that the Rip – that Glomulus is inevitably going to kill us all?” he asked. “That saving Janus is just delaying the part where Glomulus kills him?”

“Yes.”

Zeegon stared at her. “Wow.”

After the rest of them had gone, Janya remained in contact with Decay as he dealt with the maintenance and repair issues, and then attempted to do to the
Tramp
what he had apparently done with the lander. Or been
allowed
to do with the lander.

“NightMary has imposed this lockout thing,” the Blaran said, “but that only comes into effect when we leave the Bunzolabe and their sphere of influence. Until then, I’m pretty sure Bunzo is still flying the ship manually. Or he’s here, and he’s bumped the ship’s navigation systems to fly us out of here. The interesting part about it is what the Sally-Forth Engine is doing to the navigation.”

“What is it doing?” Janya asked.

“Well, it’s basically disconnected it,” Decay said. “Bunzo’s managing because he can see the ship from the outside, so he’s just steering it along like a toy, not really paying much attention to what’s happening inside. Because so much of it is dark, because of the engine. Now, no doubt he could fix that, but so far he’s not bothering.”

“How do you know that?”

“I admit, it’s one part educated guess and one part wishful thinking,” Decay confessed, “but we’ve run several diagnostics and a couple of other experiments that
ought
to have brought Bunzo down on us. He really seems to have been serious about letting us leave.”

“Either that, or he’s lulling us into a false sense of security,” Janya said, “and will reverse his decision once we get closer to the boundary.”

“Toying with us?” Decay mused. “Possible. Of course, there’s an easy way to test that theory.”

“Taking us to relative speed now?”

“Exactly. It wouldn’t take much of a skip to get us out of the Bunzolabe, and from there we could even just let NightMary’s exile program take over and drive us further away. It’s not like we’re going to come back here after a year anyway.”

“If that’s what NightMary’s exile program does,” Janya cautioned. “It might drop us onto the surface of the planet on top of all those other ships, because the computer mapping of the course is nothing but a forgery created by Bunzo.”

“Again, possible,” Decay said, “but I suspect you’re right that NightMary will kill Janus as soon as Glomulus steps out of that cell. Our only option is to bring this pod
out
of her control and get Cratch to work. That means taking us into soft-space.”

“And if NightMary has set an automatic lockout on the pod as well,” Janya asked, “so it seals and finishes the job of dismembering Janus as soon as contact with her is lost? She may even have uploaded some fragment of her consciousness here to keep tabs on us.”

“Sally seemed confident that there was no large-scale upload,” Decay said. “Quite aside from the fact that we just don’t have the cortex capacity on this ship, she said there might be a fundamental difference between a synth-level computer intelligence and a digitally-rendered human mind, making it difficult or impossible for the human mind to copy itself in that way.”

“An automated response program, then, in the form of a command set or computer virus,” Janya insisted. “That would be fairly simple for her to install – we already know that her exile program can control ship systems without her being ‘present’.”

“Probably,” Decay said. “That’s why Sally fixed a pair of incendiary grenades to the sides of the pod. So when his death becomes inevitable, Janus will die fast and leave nothing behind but ashes.”

Janya leaned down and was only slightly surprised to see the Blaran was right. There was a flat, dense grey-black grenade fastened to the capsule’s undercarriage. Knowing Sally, the second one was stuck somewhere out of sight, on some power cell or regulator coupling or other, where it would do the most damage.

She straightened. “Fair enough.”

Bunzo spoke to them for the last time about forty minutes later. The pod had remained stable although it was no doubt continuing its slow, awful work inside, Waffa had reported the hull was ‘pretty much sorted’, and Decay and Z-Lin had agreed on a crash-field jump trajectory. Glomulus Cratch, for the time being, remained in his cell. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t be sure of that last part because his cell appeared to be in full security lock-down, all its walls opaque and sealed, and they had not managed to wrestle control of the metaflux back from NightMary yet. Still, Sally was fairly certain Glomulus was in there, and Janya was inclined to trust the former law enforcement officer’s opinion.

“You really are free to go,” Bunzo said. “You paid the price. There’s nothing more to be said. If you want to jump to relative speed early, you have all the clearance you need.”

Janya didn’t have much to say to Bunzo, and it seemed none of the others did either. A few minutes later, Decay announced they were ready.

Z-Lin kept them waiting, powered-up and ready to jump into soft-space, for another agonising five minutes. Janya was wondering why, when suddenly Bunzo went berserk.

The howl of rage that burst from the comms was ear-splitting, but fortunately it lasted only an instant before they jumped to relative speed and the ship fell silent. It seemed Bunzo
had
intended to change his mind at the last minute, Janya mused. But he had underestimated the crippling effect of the Sally-Forth Engine on the
Tramp
’s systems. Even knowing, after hearing their discussions and exploring the ship, it had caught him off-guard. A machine that should have been like an extension of his own body had proved to have widespread nerve damage, and he’d fumbled the ball instead of catching it.

Janya was rather proud of this moderately sporty metaphor.

Their jump was extremely brief, but as soon as they crashed back into real space the exile program kicked in and less than five reeling minutes later they bounced off again, skimming away from Bitterpill without managing to send so much as a nod. They weren’t dropped onto the surface of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World, and if Bunzo had wanted to override the embedded program and drag them back, it appeared the Sally-Forth Engine was blocking him from doing
that
, too.

Janya suspected this had been Bunzo’s plan all along – had suspected it, in fact, for some time. NightMary had declared they were free to go far too easily, for absolutely no reason, right in the middle of her baffling game with Glomulus. Of course she had been intending to drag them back.

And Z-Lin had known, Janya now realised. And she’d waited for Bunzo to make his play before jumping.

As soon as they could, Z-Lin announced, they would deactivate their computer and perform a full purge. Even while they were at relative speed they began a series of rolling shutdowns, and the Sally-Forth Engine’s interference meant they still had to do a lot of manual work rather than trusting the machine. Even so, they weren’t quite ready to switch off the Sally-Forth Engine yet.

They let the jump go its full duration, since everyone was agreed that NightMary’s threat about coming back was
probably
worth taking seriously. It wasn’t like they didn’t have plenty to do in the meantime. Especially when it became apparent that
part
of the exile program had scrambled their data logs, rendering the events that had occurred inside the Bunzolabe more or less unintelligible – and certainly inadmissible for any sort of official or academic purposes. Janya was irritated about that, but had to admit that it was a small price to pay, and did go a long way towards explaining why there was so little reliable information about the place. Without Sally’s device, she knew, there was an excellent chance things would have gone even more poorly for them.

The important thing was, they were out of the Bunzolabe.

And they were never going back.

JANUS (NOW)

“What the
Hell
are you doing back here?” Bitterpill demanded.

“We came to thank you,” Z-Lin said lazily. “We just realised how rude we were last time, leaving that way.”

“And get our data cube,” Janus added. Sally glanced at him. Actually, a lot of the crew were looking at him from the corner of their eyes. They were probably waiting for him to have a breakdown. “You remember,” he said, “our bumper logs. All that old surveillance data and stuff we didn’t want Bunzo to see. And it turned out he could basically get all the information he wanted anyway, so we’d fragged all those archives for nothing.”