Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (8 page)

It wasn’t unheard-of for long-haul AstroCorps tours to last ten years. Some even stretched to twenty, although those did tend to be far more professional, on-the-books and full-Corps efforts than their odd assortment, and the longer a tour the more Molranoid-heavy the crew tended to become. For a Blaran like Decay, a young fellow with millennia in front of him, a twenty-year tour was nothing.

Even for a human, with a life expectancy of a mere tenscore, it was doable. A commitment, to be sure, but doable. Heck, from here it would take them the better part of five years to get Janus to his long-overdue appointment on … what had the planet even been called? Admittedly the urgency had gone out of that journey, even for Janus himself, when the rest of his team had been killed and all their samples destroyed … but dropping him off was still
officially
on their to-do list. It was just constantly a few steps down the priority chain, and that was
before
they had been skipping-stoned across the galaxy by the Artist. And if you asked Janus about it, he generally seemed pretty fatalistic and relaxed. He was an odd one, and that was coming from the Commander of
this
ship. Z-Lin had long suspected it was because, deep down, he really
wanted
to be a ship’s counsellor instead of a horticultural mood analyst.

Clue had most certainly been on shorter tours than this before. She’d been a space-hound from a very early age, from a long line of space-hounds, and she knew perfectly well that things happened between the stars. Horrible things, usually. And even without the help of a mad Molran inventor and his teleportation drive, you could very easily spend your entire life skipping from place to place and never again run into a single living soul. If you were
lucky
. They’d been very fortunate, on balance, that their navigation hadn’t been entirely fried when the exchange had turned the interior of the ship into a molecular liquidiser. And again, she could hardly complain about the duration of their journey – she should probably, in fact, be grateful that everyone seemed too preoccupied with their own problems to notice her acceptance. Usually.

The point
was
, since their modular was running on something of a blended crew format, there was a lot of leeway in terms of autonomy and course correction. It also happened to make things easier when recruiting people of special skill-sets, and conducting operations that may or may not be in breach of certain official guidelines. Did it make things awkward when the civilians started yammering about not being military personnel and questioning their orders and asking to go home to visit their old mums? Yes. But there were definitely benefits, too.

The problem with having a full AstroCorps crew, she’d reflected on occasion, was that it rather paradoxically bound the ship to stricter parameters. If, for example, the
Tramp
had been manned by a full-Corps certified crew, they probably would have
had
to return to home base for a full inquest after losing even a fraction of their ranking officers. Losing all but ten people, and filling up the ship with misprinted ables, and then just setting their eyes on some largely-hypothetical horizon and continuing to fly with teeth gritted and knuckles white on the control consoles … well, their adventure probably would have ended even more spectacularly than it had begun, with a court-martial on top.

It all depended on the mission, obviously, as to whether starships reported back to larger settlements more often or less often, even
with
a full-Corps complement. And the
Tramp
had run into some exceptional circumstances, it had to be said. Declivitorion was a
big
place, even though it was right out on the edge of the galaxy. It should have been their ticket to a fresh start, even if it had also posed some unusual challenges. Who could have expected it to have been completely destroyed?

Actually, she didn’t like to think about
that
, either.

Wait
, she remembered Decay asking her, not too long ago,
are we one of the few AstroCorps crews left, or not?

Z-Lin recognised the fact that she was loitering, and had been loitering for almost ten minutes now, not wanting to go inside. It occurred to her that it didn’t really matter. The aki’Drednanth were already aware of her. If they could band together to burn the brains of an entire school-fleet of Fergunak, they could certainly tell when someone was standing at their door. They were everywhere on the ship.

While the investigation into Dunnkirk’s murder went on, they were continuing through soft-space towards their first stop on the long path back from the edge, Mobi. First in a long line of mining settlements that, like the farm worlds of the barmy arm they’d followed out to the edge, were sparsely-populated – not to mention more than a little isolated and quirky.

The flight would take nine weeks. Nine weeks to find out who killed Dunnkirk and how to deal with it. Of course, Mobi wasn’t
that
big. If they hadn’t settled this in nine weeks, they could always pass Mobi by and head to the next system in. Then again, Z-Lin thought, if Sally couldn’t solve a murder in nine weeks, she’d probably disembark at Mobi and take up mining.

There was a problem with the case, Clue brooded, still aware that she was standing outside the heavy freezer door and putting off going in. Basically everyone on board had been with somebody else. They could all vouch for each other. The only one without an alibi, aside from Janya, was the Captain himself.

Damn it, Skell
, she thought to herself,
I hope you know what you’re doing. And not just for your own sake.

In fact … not for your sake at all
.

She adjusted the thermal for what must have been the eighteenth time, and stepped into the farm.

They hadn’t had a chance, yet, to recommission the chamber that had previously held the Drednanth ‘seed’, Thord’s huge combination ice-sculpture, and knowledge repository. With the space now occupied by seven increasingly-active aki’Drednanth pups, it seemed unlikely they’d get a chance to replace the interior shelves and re-stock them with oxygen blocks any time soon, but the farm was running reasonably close to normal efficiency at this stage so there was no great urgency.

It was a much larger space than it had seemed with the seed occupying a lot of the floorspace, especially with a pair of massive Bonshooni and a colossal aki’Drednanth squeezed in alongside. The pups had moved back into the main chamber after the successful launch of the seed, but Z-Lin hadn’t been in to see them since their leap to relative speed and the unpleasant series of events that had occurred shortly afterwards. She also hadn’t had a chance to sleep.

“Hello?” she said, her breath misting thinly in the air. There was a solid layer of crushed ice and gritty snow on the floor, picked up from The Warm where they had taken their passengers on board in the first place. Waffa had used it to seat the seed properly in the otherwise unpadded holding space. Now, it was banked up in a series of little ridges and lumps, and – yes – the pups were concealed behind, and in one case
beneath
the drifts. As she stepped fully into the room and hauled the door closed behind her, a couple of fluffy white-furred heads poked out to observe her calmly. A third shuffled out on fuzzy rear paws and soft grey knuckles from behind the huge empty shell of Thord’s envirosuit, which a janitorial had dragged back into the farm arc after her departure. “Sorry to interrupt your whatever-it-was you were doing in here.”

The seven knee-high aki’Drednanth – there were still seven, she confirmed after a quick head count, and then cursed herself for her humanocentric cynicism – emerged from their various hiding places and stood, low-set eyes blinking large and dark on either side of their heavy but still-tuskless jaws. One of them, the one that had emerged from beneath the snowdrift, shook herself off and gave a mewling half-yawn, half-growl from the back of her frosty grey-black throat.

“So,” Clue said to fill in the silence that followed, “you guys aren’t … fighting over stuff yet? We’re going to get another couple of food dispensers churning out aki’Drednanth chow in a day or two, if you … need more,” she trailed off.

Given the reality of their situation, the non-Corps nature of their crew and the tension they were all already under, Z-Lin had agreed with Sally and Waffa that full transparency about the investigation was the only reasonable course. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be transparent about, and the result was inevitably going to be supposition, suspicion, finger-pointing and a whole lot of tension. She’d determined that the transparency should apply to the aki’Drednanth even if the tension might be something they managed to avoid. In fact, being aki’Drednanth, they probably got a double dose of transparency. No matter what people said about aki’Drednanth not being able to read minds
as such
, there was a lot going on behind the words
as such
that made Z-Lin uneasy.

For that matter, they might not even be so young and innocent as to ignore the atmosphere among their strange hairless surrogate family. It was easy to look at them and see cuddly little white cubs, but Thord had said it herself. They were ancient, and had been since before they were born. All the more reason to come clean with them now.

“You girls know Dunnkirk,” she said, “the Bonshoon who was friends with your … with Thord.”

She already knew they could understand what she was saying. Maybe they’d spent the last twenty or thirty years of their countdown to re-fleshulation learning how to speak AstroCorps standard. They had access to the minds of every Drednanth and aki’Drednanth to ever speak to a human, after all, even if these particular ones had never done so.

One by one, and from all sides, the aki’Drednanth pups padded and crunched across towards her. Clue fought down the urge to flee. It wasn’t as if that would do any good.

“Yes.”

Z-Lin managed not to piss her thermal. The pup that had been behind Thord’s envirosuit had also emerged, and Clue realised she was wearing one of the blue webbing gloves from the suit’s voice synthesiser. It hadn’t been the ghost of Thord speaking. It had been the pup, playing with the glove and speaking through the suit. To be honest, Z-Lin felt ill-at-ease trying to stop her.

“Okay, but we’re getting that voice remodulated at least,” the Commander said gruffly to herself, then coughed and glanced around at the aki’Drednanth. “Yes? Right, yes. Dunnkirk. I-”

“Yes no,” the heartbreakingly-familiar voice came once again from the open-fronted but still monolithic envirosuit. “Yes no yes no
yes no yes
stonk stonk stonk
shit shit
.”

Right
, Clue thought,
not talking. Fiddling with the gear
. The pups, old and wise and full of knowledge as they might be, still lacked the fine motor control that could only be ingrained with growth. “Okay,” she said mildly, “there’s no need to be nasty.”

Glomulus Cratch being in Whye’s office at the time of the murder had been at once positive and negative. It had provided him with an alibi, as he had been prompt to point out himself, but there were really only so many explanations for a corpse in the medical bay, and the order Clue had receiver to get Cratch
out of there
was depriving them of the easiest one. It was also keeping half of the crew, possibly more, from lynching their only real medic. On the
other
hand – and this was where you started needing as many hands as Decay – it was putting the murderer-hat on somebody else. Somebody who
probably
wasn’t already a murderer. Not one as infamous as Cratch, anyway. Somebody whose
turning out
to be a murderer might finish the job of tearing the
Tramp
apart.

Which left her in the delightful command position of being required to conduct an investigation, but also find a way of hiding the perpetrator’s guilt for the greater good. It had occurred to her almost immediately, in fact, that this was most likely the
reason
Cratch had been put in Janus’s office. But that just raised even more uncomfortable questions, and she still couldn’t figure out if it made him more or less likely to be the killer.

These things were always good news and bad news, as the Rip himself liked to say.

The aki’Drednanth with the glove had fallen silent, paw held out and leathery grey fingers extended, looking down at the glove as if unsure how it had made the sounds and what she ought to do about them. She had needle-like puppy-claws, Z-Lin noticed, but they seemed to be able to extend and retract. Now the pup was doing that, fascinated. Learning how to do it again, perhaps, after half a million years as pure consciousness.

There was another uncomfortable pause, into which Clue’s organiser pad chimed softly. She pulled it out of the pocket of her thermal, and glanced at it.

On Janya’s suggestion, Waffa and Sally and Decay had checked Dunnkirk’s frozen body, cursorily and non-invasively. According to the report she’d just received, the Bonshoon’s teeth were intact. That
could
just mean that Cratch hadn’t managed to get back to the medical bay and collect his trophy yet, and wasn’t planning on it until after the dust had settled … but it was somewhat indicative. The Barnalk High Ripper, while known for his calculating nature and frightening ability to bide his time, was not exactly restrained when the time for the kill arrived. It seemed unlikely this was any sort of booby-trap or elaborately-planned remote killing. Plus, Cratch could
never
have suspected he’d be invited to Whye’s office.

Could he?

Aside from the most unsatisfying dismissal of the Rip from their suspect pool, they had also quickly discounted Wingus and Dingus, the enduring fixtures of the medical bay nursing team.

Despite Sally’s gloomy pronouncements about eejit uprisings and emergent behaviour, it didn’t look like any of them had deviated from their absolute configuration baselines sufficiently to do murder. So far, with the investigation underway less than three hours, it seemed like they’d eliminated all but a pair of suspects, each more impossible than the last. Next steps…