Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (45 page)

“And the stimulator is fried,” Waffa added.

“So now you have to do Janus’s surgery without a stimulator, and without a second nurse,” Sally growled. “And if you try that
idiotic
stunt with your bracelets again, you’ll probably never get full use of your hands and feet back with the next set. If you’re no good to us as a medic, you can go back into the brig.”

“You probably shouldn’t have taken me out of the brig in the first place,” Glomulus said, then raised his long hands defensively. “But don’t worry, I can take care of our beloved tree-hugging friend with the wandering organs. There are methods for the reintegration of limbs and tissues without the use of molecular bonding technology. Back in my student days I wrote and studied … it would be a bit clumsy, but I’m sure I could still do the surgery using unbounded hands. We’d have to move quickly, of course.”

“Do we want to know why you looked into limb replacement as a student?” Z-Lin asked.

“Of course you do,” Glomulus said, indignation putting a slight edge on his drug-glaze. He pushed himself to a sitting position, then lurched to his feet with a groan. Sally stepped forward to help, but he waved her back. “It’s a
fascinating
read, even if I do say so myself.”

“It is, actually,” Janya admitted. “It will still take a couple of months for the new limbs to fully acclimate, but … where’s he going?”

Cratch had stumbled, pretended to trip, and then shambled for the exit. Before any of them could stop him, he’d vanished down the corridor. Waffa heard the
pop-pop
of the Rip’s new bracelets detonating, and the slithery crash of his angular body falling to the floor.

“Son of a bitch,” Sally snarled.

Waffa was kept busy going back and forth for new bracelets for a while. In the end, Z-Lin declared they didn’t have time to dick around. They couldn’t hold him by the arms indefinitely, they couldn’t keep him
sedated
indefinitely, and in the meantime Janus was stable but
still dying slowly
. This, as little as they liked it, gave the advantage to Cratch.

In the end, with Janus’s life slowly trickling away on the operating table, Z-Lin agreed with the Rip that they would remove the medical bay safeguards. He would be
permitted
to leave, but had to agree on the professional need with the officers. The rest of the crew still had their subdermals so any unauthorised appearance could and would be dealt with. And if he didn’t stop arsing around with his bracelets, get his hands into decent working order as best he could without a stimulator, and get to work patching up Janus Whye, he would go back into the brig and the panels would close and the lights would go out. Indefinitely.

Glomulus Cratch declared these terms fair.

Z-LIN (NOW)

Z-Lin stepped out of Waffa’s interlinked expanse of quarters, sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair.

Well
, she thought,
at least now it basically can’t get any more weird and horrible
. It occurred to her that it might be tempting fate to say this, so she turned and stepped aside for the eejit.

Thorkhild – she had to think of him as Thorkhild, otherwise everything began to come unravelled – stepped out through the doorway and stopped alongside her. He was a bit clumsier with his blindness now, not as at-home with the ship and his remaining senses as he had once been, but still approximately five hundred times smoother than the hapless eejit Waffa had blinded, tagged, and thrown into the mulcher to save Thorkhild’s life.

She reflected, not for the first time, at the tidy set of blinkers they’d all put on concerning the eejits. From the arbitrary auto-recycle for sufficiently-botched configurations, to the grades of disposability awarded to the entire group based on their handicaps and their ability to do their jobs … all of it. Yes, these were wetware,
equipment
. And what Waffa had essentially done was throw away a broken tool to spare a less-broken one, because the regulations said he had to throaw away
something
. But it got very difficult to ignore the fact that if you did anything remotely like this to human beings, it would be monstrous beyond comprehension.

This was all a bit moot now, since Thorkhild had arguably left the building. If not as comprehensively as his unfortunate ringer, then in a somehow profounder sense.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked him.

“Please,” Thorkhild said. “Please yes.”

“We know you didn’t do it. Thorkhild, I mean. We know … but the alternative was saying that we haven’t found the killer, or we knew who it was but weren’t doing anything about it, and it all seemed like … it all just, ah,
crap
,” she ran her hand through her hair again. “I’m supposed to be saying Commandery shit right now. What is this?”

“I should not be,” Thorkhild pronounced.

“We have a pack of rogue aki’Drednanth who seem to be behind this, and if we get on the wrong side of the Drednanth in any way, a rock and a hard place doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s like we’ve made a deal with the Devil.”

Thorkhild didn’t say anything about this, and Z-Lin sighed.
What’s happening to us
? She thought.
What sort of evil are we flying with
?

When Z-Lin and Thorkhild reached the lander bay, the landing party was docking. Janya and her assistants, and a pair of other eejits, were busy positioning the bulky mechanism containing Dunnkirk’s mostly-dead body for delivery to the surface.

“This is all very unfortunate,” Bunzo said over the comm, his voice slowly accelerating and rising in volume, “but you’ll note that I let you spoil my party and allowed you to return to your silly little ship. Now I want to know what your game is, and I want to know who you have selected to send down to me, and I want to know if you intend to help me to acquire your aki’Drednanth passengers or if I will have to land your modular and pick them out of the wreckage, and
just to show you I’m not joking, I think I’m going to have to take your crew
-”

“Wait, Bunzo,” Z-Lin said loudly. The party stepped out of the docking bay, looking curiously at the sleeper equipment and the hefty backpack one of the eejits was carrying. Waffa stared at Thorkhild, and then turned narrow eyes on Clue. “We have a proposition for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Please hear me out before getting mad,” Z-Lin said, and put her hand on the sleeper pod. “I know you will have heard that our Bonshoon passenger was killed, but as you can see, he’s
functionally
alive, just installed in a sleeper pod. It was a ridiculously complicated situation, with the aki’Drednanth like you say, and their agenda … and I know, this won’t be satisfactory, but I’ve also just heard that you have some pretty impressive fabrication and medical facilities down there. So maybe he doesn’t need to stay in the pod. I don’t know. Up to you.”

“Oh my God, Clue, have you lost your mind?” Sally breathed.

“Probably,” Z-Lin said, glancing back and forth among their wide-eyed little company. “Maybe I’m just going along with the crowd. Anyway, we have more to offer,” she went on, raising her voice and turning to gesture towards Thorkhild.

“Bunzo already said he wouldn’t accept ables,” Waffa said quickly.

“And that’s the least of our concerns,” Z-Lin added, “
isn’t it
?” she glared at the Chief of Security and Operations. “Our
main
concern is not leaving a
living creature
behind on a planet ruled by a mad computerhuman, to be tortured and mutilated forever as a ghoulish pound-of-flesh tribute in thanks for letting the rest of us go unmolested.”

“Right,” Waffa muttered, “that was the unspoken part of what I was saying, yeah.”

Z-Lin raised her voice again. “No offence, Horatio.”

“None taken,” Bunzo said with a chortle returning to his voice, “but I warn you, I will not abide trickery. Allow me to demonstrate the consequences-”

“Please, there’s no need, and I asked that you hear me out before getting angry,” she said. Bunzo subsided with an audible
hrumph
.

“Anyway, he’s not going to let
any
of us go,” Waffa went on. “And as for giving us that fabricator thing? Pure dickery. He must’ve been running it from his mass-cortex and power plants. We’d never get it to work up here. It would take more energy and computing power than the
Tramp
’s got.”

“Would you let me handle this?” Z-Lin asked coolly.

“I don’t want clone-flesh,” Bunzo said, his voice querulous.

“You’ll want this one,” Z-Lin told him. “It’s actually a partially-refleshulated Bonshoon. An expert in the Drednanth Dreamscape, going by the name of Maladin.”

Sally, Bunzo and at least three other people all said “
What
?” at the same time at this point, and Z-Lin silenced those she could with a glare. Waffa also looked stunned, although Z-Lin knew he’d had his suspicions. He’d been sheltering Thorkhild for some time now, after all.

Bunzo was not good at handling surprises. “This is ridiculous,” he growled. “That is clearly an able, a second-rate
ghone
-meat piece of starship equipment that-”

“This is a
Dreamscape-capable Bonshoon
,” Z-Lin said firmly, “who was separated from his body and found his way
partially
into this brain. His body was then killed when his sleeper pod malfunctioned.”

“Ludicrous!”

“Here’s how it went,” Z-Lin said, although she wasn’t entirely certain of it herself. “Two Bonshooni, partnered up with an aki’Drednanth – the mother of our little pack, as a matter of fact. They helped us to print and configure a set of eej – ables. Enter Thorkhild,” she gestured to the eejit standing beside her. “He has some configuration issues due to our fabricator being damaged, but the important thing is that he was configured with intimate assistance from the ground up, from these two Bonshooni and the aki’Drednanth. There were other ables in the batch, but Thorkhild was an anomaly. He had a rudimentary Dreamscape ability of his own. Nothing like the Bonshooni, let alone the aki’Drednanth, but it was a connection.

“One Bonshoon remained on our ship, while the other – Maladin – accompanied the aki’Drednanth on an onward voyage. When the Bonshoon on our ship was killed, we believe Thorkhild sensed something or was imprinted with some sense of the seriousness of the event. Especially once it was revealed that the
other
Bonshoon’s sleeper pod was sabotaged and he was in mortal danger. Are you following?”

“It’s a fascinating story,” Bunzo rumbled. “An insurmountable pile of hogwash, but fascinating.”

“Okay, I’ll take it. Anyway, Thorkhild found a way of dropping us out of relative speed, so he could attempt to get a warning to Maladin. What happened
instead
was, Maladin fled his own body entirely, going through the Dreamscape of his aki’Drednanth friend, and
into
the mind of this able. It only worked as well as it did because the able’s mind was essentially a blank slate, his brain fabricated especially for imprinting with an arbitrary persona – and remember, this was an able configured with
fundamental help
from the Bonshooni we’re talking about.

“And even then, it didn’t work. What we ended up with was a partial echo of Maladin, an extrusion of his consciousness – and then the rest was killed along with his body, leaving this consciousness like a splinter in Thorkhild’s brain. Completely erasing the
original
Thorkhild, but then there wasn’t much to erase there anyway. He was essentially a doorway.”

“Is this why Mother’s Rebellion want Thorkhild dead?” Sally asked.

“It’s possible,” Z-Lin said. “It’s also possible that we’ll never know what their agenda is. As far as AstroCorps is concerned, this investigation was over months ago, and the sentence carried out,” she gave Waffa another look, then turned her attention back to the middle-distance where she found it most comfortable to address Bunzo. “But if our aki’Drednanth passengers
do
want Thorkhild and what’s left of Maladin dead, what better way than to drop them onto Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World and walk away?”

“I’m going to be sick,” Waffa said softly.

Thorkhild turned his sightless eyes towards the man who had sheltered him, and gave him a lopsided smile. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m dying, and I want an end. I should not be.”

“Even if you don’t believe me,” Z-Lin concluded while Bunzo ruminated, “it has to be worth examining. And like I said, we’re throwing in the other Bonshoon as well. He’s the other Dreamscape-capable Bonshoon I was just telling you about. Consider it a little double-tithe, since apparently last time we cheated.”

“I still don’t know if I’ll let you go at all,” Bunzo eventually said, “but this is extraordinary and I’m very touched. Such a story! Such deviousness! And it all seems to hang together with the ship’s logs and everything.
Most
impressive,” they waited. “Very well,” Bunzo finally proclaimed. “Of course, there will have to be penalties, consequences, mild slappings of wrists for bad children … but send down your wonderful fairy tale Bonshoon and his mysterious able assistant. We’ll call it payment for information provided.”

“You haven’t actually told us anything,” Z-Lin said carefully, “have you? Is this another one of the weird Bunzolabe rules we were never told about?”

“Oh, go and ask your clever Captain about that,” Bunzo said, his amusement momentarily fading at her insulting tone. “He apparently really is still alive and well and smirking up there while you do all his dirty work.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Z-Lin muttered. “Right, let’s dump our pound of flesh and get out of here.”