Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (49 page)

“So answer the question,” the second spoonbiter said. “Did you not understand the question?”

“Should we keep on asking the question in the same way until you improve?” the first spoonbiter said.

“My world was intact,” Rakmanmorion said, “but the attack came just as I was slipping away. The cold came, my life support was gone.”

“Yes, we know space is cold and you fell asleep, that’s no good to us at all. Did you see them? Ships, movements, weapons? Ships? Movements? Weapons?
Ships
-”

“I took pictures,” Rakmanmorion said, “before I lost power completely. I am not-”

“Stop talking and let us look at the pictures that your computer has. By the way your planet was completely destroyed and there are no life signs on the surface. We only found you in orbit because our property is tagged. They probably missed you because you were all switched off.”

“Does this make me fortunate?”

“I hardly care,” the second spoonbiter leaned in, after looking at something in its claws that was probably showing it the pictures Rakmanmorion had taken. “That’s a Damorakind ship. That’s definitely a Damorakind ship. How many were there, what sort of movements? How many?
How many
?”

“There was one,” Rakmanmorion said wearily. Rising from the fugue was more than a matter of nutrients. It required rest and reflection. You had to
decide
to return to the world of the living. “There was only one. Please stop asking me questions, spoonbiters. There was
only one ship
.”

MOS (THEN)

It really was intolerable.

Mos Karturi caught back up with the modular as she fled the Bunzolabe, seemingly locked in some sort of outward trajectory and completely out of control. Even with his advantages, he was lucky to get back on board while the ship was spinning slowly end-over-end on the edges of the boundary grid, and before it jumped back into soft-space. Just as he’d been lucky to get
out
of the blessed thing, back when they’d headed recklessly into the contaminated region of space in the first place.

His whole situation was untenable, he’d decided. He couldn’t just keep jumping blind. Not with these crazy humans in charge of the ship. He’d have to alter his current arrangement. He’d wanted to take one of the landers, but the
Captain
seemed to have been prepping one and the crew were using another. It would have been too conspicuous.

Mos settled back in the out-of-the-way corner he’d picked out for himself, and began to piece together what had happened and what was going on. He was good at that.

He had to admit he sympathised with Bunzo’s opinion of Godfire, although it was interesting to hear about the strange foretelling he seemed to have had about his own doom. Was such a thing even possible? No wonder he’d blown up one of the ship’s guns as an object lesson! Mos had heard stories about the ghastly transcribed human and his prophetic abilities, but he’d taken them for tall tales. And in the past two or three hundred years even those rumours seemed to have dropped away into the general background mythology.

Encouraged to fall silent, perhaps. Prevent too many hopefuls from thronging to the Bunzolabe, looking for answers. It was an intriguing line of thought, but not really what he was interested in at the moment. Not his area.

But death by Godfire, yes. Mos could believe that. Godfire was one of those things that couldn’t do anything
else
but kill.

It was one of those things he wished he’d never helped steal.

So, now it seemed as though his intrepid subjects had need of a hub. Well, he could get them a hub. He had everything he needed to
make
a hub. A better hub than the one he was using now, anyway. A cleaner one. He lived in a hub manufactory, after all. And although he’d repurposed a lot of it and the completed hubs had usually been shipped out straight away, well – he still had the
capacity
. The one he’d brought with him had been enough to hide him from a crummy old modular computer, had been enough to get him out of the Bunzolabe with his most important equipment uncorrupted, but …

Bunzo has the right idea. Control the software, control the hardware, control the
wetware
. A hub might come in handy. A
proper
hub
.

Are you sure you’re not just talking to yourself, and I don’t really exist?

“Shut up,” he hissed.

Are you sure
I’m
not just talking to myself, and
you
don’t exist?

He needed to be careful. Not too many trips, not too close. And they certainly couldn’t be
told
about the extent of his wanderings. Not until they were ready. Maybe not even then.

Why tell them anything at all? Do you need more bodies?

If he skipped back and forth too much, things would escalate before he wanted them to. He would be noticed. Or the drive would begin to destabilise. Begin to get hungry.

So, they need a hub?

He really couldn’t believe these people. Careening from disaster to disaster. Maybe
he
was the problem. Maybe he
was
going insane.

He’d been told to expect them on Barlowe’s Rock. But when they had arrived, they’d had no idea. They were … well, it was like they remembered nothing. Admittedly it must have been traumatic for them. Most certainly, of that he had no doubt. What they had witnessed? Traumatic. But the way that Captain of theirs had acted!

Intolerable.

Trauma, maybe. Yes.

But they’d been talking about the bonefields. He hadn’t talked to the
crew
, but he’d listened. They were loudmouths. The bonefields? That was crazy. Aquilar was nowhere near the bonefields. Not unless they had moved. Not that it was
impossible
for them to have moved, or to have
seemed
to move. He had only the roughest idea of where the bonefields were supposed to be – it wasn’t really his area of interest – but he
did
know they hadn’t moved in over three thousand years. Although their movement
was
a difficult thing to be certain of. The floating bones saw to that. And it was said that nobody could go there twice. Unlike the Bunzolabe, which nobody in their right minds
would
go to twice.

Alright, no, it wasn’t
impossible
for them to have gone to the bonefields. Not if you believed the stories.

Stories again?

“Stories are important,” Mos whispered. “It’s the grain of truth, my friends. The grain of truth. If it hadn’t been for the story of Çrom Skelliglyph, I might never have created you.”

And if it hadn’t been for the grain of truth,
I
might never have created
you.

He didn’t know
that
much about them yet. He’d been watching, following, but he’d been … distracted. After the disaster with the exchange, things had gone from bad to worse. He’d been lucky, again, to survive
that
little example of Skelliglyph’s lunacy. And in the year and a half since? Well. The idiots had blundered into the
Bunzolabe
almost before he’d noticed. That’s how pathologically incapable of maintaining coherent behavioural patterns they were.

So no, he wasn’t that familiar with his subjects. He knew who was
left
, but not who was doing what, or indeed what
any
of them were planning to do
next
. Oh, the computer was stubborn. Or he’d forgotten. It was hard to say. Sometimes he thought he had figured things out before. Sometimes it was like he had just arrived. Maybe another reason to get a hub synced up. A synth might help keep him grounded.

Keeping his distance, moving
out
of the ship, would make it easier for him to travel if he needed do. Without bringing anything on board ahead of schedule. Without alerting them. Without hurting them. But for that, he’d need a greater measure of control. He’d need more knowledge.

This was
not
how I envisoned spending my Final Prime
, he mourned, and this time he was almost certain the thought was his own.

If he hadn’t been told by Domino Hainey, from AstroCorps High Command on Aquilar itself, the only man to
ever
believe in him, the only human he’d ever really trusted … if he hadn’t been told by Domino that these were the people he needed, he would never have believed it. Now, he was left with no choice.

He’d talked only to Skelliglyph, as Domino had instructed. Such as the conversation had been. It had taken place outside a tiny, oddball dive bar in a tucked-away corner of Mithras spaceport on Barlowe’s Rock. He might not even have bothered to talk to Skelliglyph at all, except for what was to be Domino’s final message, and Karturi’s own complete failure to find anything but scattered remnants of the Molran Fleet. That had been back when he’d harboured delusions of getting wider Fleet support for his life’s work. More support than that offered by some rogue human AstroCorps officer.

And it hadn’t been until later that he’d found out about Aquilar. As close as the Rock was to Aquilar, relatively speaking, not even news of the greatest magnitude travelled that way. It had come late enough, in any case, to cast doubt-shadows across his mind.

Late, late, conveniently late. Too late?

But now the Cancer was spreading, and end times were coming to the Six Species. And yes, Domino had sent those instructions as his epitaph, and yes, Mos was obligated to see them through.

“Sorry,” Skelliglyph had said to him jovially, “but The Cap’s fairly … picky about who he lets in here.”

“Domino Hainey told me to meet with you.”

“I haven’t talked to Tumbles Hainey in years.”

Mos had been stunned at the time, totally unprepared for this response. The sheer
gall
of it. “You were with him on Aquilar barely two months ago. Please trust that I come by this information in the most-”

“Nope, haven’t been to the A-Hole either,” Skelliglyph’s amusement had faded. “Haven’t been back there since we launched in ’55.”

Mos recovered from his shock, again, at this blatant falsehood. “He told me personally that you had just been there, and that you’d be coming here looking for me. That you’d need me. The Fergunak fast-clippers out of-”

“Look, you old fossil,” Skelliglyph had said, still forcedly jovial, “haven’t you got a Worldship to crash onto somebody’s home town somewhere?”

Mos still seethed when he thought about that conversation. Oh, since they ‘launched’. Indeed! Domino had told him about
that
, too. In the process of warning him about the way this crew did business, oh yes, the ‘launch’ had certainly featured in
that
correspondence.

But Mos had heard the stories about Skelliglyph. Of course he had. Even the less ludicrous ones were interesting.

It still made him coldly angry, though.
He
was an old fossil?
Him
? And this was Çrom Skelliglyph talking?

Better kill them all
.

If it hadn’t been Domino. If it hadn’t been
him
to pass on the word about this ship…

Mos had to trust him, though. There was nothing left for him to do. Certainly
now
, he had no alternative. These were the ones who – God help them all – were going to finish this, one way or another. These were the ones who were going to push the Hacticos back into the Core and rub them out.

It may not have been a patented prophecy from Horatio Bunzo, but it had been Domino’s last order. And that had to count for something.

A part of him that was
mostly
still Mos, though, had decided that if he
ever
found out these monkeys had had anything to do with Aquilar, he was going to feed them to the abyss. If needs be, he could commandeer the ship and complete the mission himself. A larger ship might leave him safer, anyway.

Safer from what?

He just didn’t know what these people were up to now. They had a dangerous man in their brig – even Mos knew about the Barnalk High Ripper – but didn’t seem in any hurry to deliver him to the authorities. Of course, he knew better than they did that there were precious few authorities left.

Unless
…

Unless they
did
already know on some level, as he suspected they had to, and that was the reason they weren’t delivering Cratch to face justice.

Mos wasn’t all that interested in Glomulus Cratch, though. He was interested in the Ripper’s final victim, and only survivor.

Yes, he’d been lucky that Domino had put him in their path. He’d had some encounters with other ships, although none of them had approached the Fleet’s size or resources, and none of them had been quite right. A modular, with a synth-in-potentia of this computer’s unique status and level, was just what he needed.

Maybe he wouldn’t
have
to destroy them. Maybe he’d bring them into his discovery. Help them the way he had so rashly promised Domino he would.

Doesn’t that amount to the same thing?

“Shut up,” Mos insisted. “If they’re going to win this, they’re going to need what I have.”

He’d have to make it seem as though he’d just stumbled onto them. If their madness, their memory-loss, was so complete … he’d have to hide the truth from them, until he knew more. Figured out once and for all whether they were the people Domino had thought they were.

Or I could get rid of the unstable elements, and keep the ship. Fulfil the mission on my own.

Are you convincing yourself of something?