Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Read online

  - - - What about a dark flounder right down each of those gun ports? You can flick them their way using the catchers on the far side of the ship, they won’t see a thing. - - -

  - - - Yeah, good idea. - - - Drago tapped furiously. - - - While I’m performing miracles of unguided freeform marksmanship, how about I put a toffee in an airlock and then decompress it so it shoots right up Dool’s pee-hole? - - -

  Skell glanced across at Drago’s console, eyebrows raised, before going back to his own tapping. - - - If you think that’ll help… - - -

  “Your word does have meaning here, Captain,” Dool was careful to point out, “but trust is also earned.”

  “The whole point of the AstroCorps institution is inherent trust,” Skell said, patting his chest. “Trust in the AstroCorps uniform, built up over centuries.”

  - - - How are the subluminal engines? - - - Çrom’s next question appeared on Drago’s console a moment later. Drago felt his stomach turn over.

  - - - What can I tell you that will stop you from giving the order I think you’re about to give? - - -

  “None of that trust applies automatically to anyone who just says they are AstroCorps,” the Noro was insisting. “And if AstroCorps do not react well to being intimidated, they react even worse to being stolen from.”

  Skell grinned. - - - Just tell me when the flounders are thirty seconds out. - - -

  “I appreciate that viewpoint, Captain, I do – but I cannot, as an officer of AstroCorps, show any sign of weakness or capitulation under duress from an external armed force. If you had arrived here and simply made peaceful contact with us, I would not be in this particular bind. And naturally once you remove your suppression, we will all be the best of friends again. But I cannot oblige you in these circumstances. You understand the precedent it would set, if all of these symbols meant nothing and a starship had free rein to prey upon any vessel smaller than it.”

  “We are not here to undermine the very fabric of interstellar commerce!” Dool exclaimed. “We are attempting to establish the credentials of a suspected criminal, and releasing our suppressor is a tactical risk we cannot take given how likely it is that a starship thief would simply take the opportunity to flee into soft-space!”

  Skell and Dool repartee’d on around the point, the Noro once again growing increasingly frustrated and shouty even as his self-control slipped and his vocabulary grew paradoxically larger, shedding the ‘simple short-tempered buccaneer’ act in favour of ‘shrewd, short-tempered tactician’. Barducci, in the meantime, sweated and adjusted the emergency catchers to throw completely dark explosive charges, rather than to catch incoming debris. Without any of the guidance or correction systems that would make the flounders clearly visible to the Black Honey Wings’s defences, and actively blind the Black Honey Wings’s own catchers … it was like building four robotic trebuchets, then firing them all perfectly the first time and getting a set of one-foot-across rocks into a set of gaps that couldn’t be more than three or four feet across between each mini-whorl gun and its port. Simultaneously. From a distance of almost a mile.

  The computer helped considerably, of course, but the Black Honey Wings wasn’t big enough to have a synthetic intelligence on board and so the A-Mod 400’s computer was unable to synchronise up to full synth capacity. Therefore it still needed to be told a lot of things. All in all, though, that might have been for the best. A pair of synth nodes chattering to each other would probably have brought this whole thing to an end by now, despite the synth’s lofty non-interference ideals.

  Finally he was ready, and the catchers whipped gently and undetectably along the hull, flinging the tiny dark-grey warheads across the intervening space. He waited, and then flicked across the note he’d previously keyed up.

  - - - Thirty seconds. Whether they actually hit anything, I want on the official record, is not something I want to bet our lives on. - - -

  Skell sighed dramatically. “Very well, Captain Dool. You’ve convinced me. If you will swear on your honour to uphold the dignity and respect of AstroCorps, I believe we can bend this once and send your our official mission tags and idents, while pretending we are just sitting here of our own free will.”

  “Very good, Captain Skelliglyph! You do your people much credit.”

  “Stand by,” Çrom gave Segunda a nod.

  “Comms deactivated, Captain,” Segunda reported.

  “Very good, Mister Segunda,” Skell turned towards Drago. “Chief Tactical Officer Barducci,” he went on in the same pleasant tone, “ramming speed.”

  IV

  “Captain,” W’Tan spoke up levelly from the auxiliary command console while Barducci relayed the orders to fire up the subluminal engines and swiped the heading data across to San Genevieve.

  “Commander?” Skelliglyph said in a theatrically indulgent tone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well we’re not ramming the ship, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Çrom said, as the A-Mod 400 surged forward. “We’d splatter ourselves all over the main Chrys hull, and obviously a modular ramming another modular is a no-win so we can’t go for that section either.”

  “The Black Honey Wings is hailing us again,” Segunda said, only his sheer, towering Molranity keeping the panic from his voice. “And their mini-whorl guns are ready to … oh. Stand by.”

  Three of the four flounders went into the gun ports and exploded flatly, crippling the guns but doing no major structural damage. The fourth missed its mark but detonated on the hull nearby, skewing the Godfire cannon’s trajectory. The gun fired three rounds of deadly grey fire as the modular swept in, each one grazing the hull but not actually impacting. Then they were past the point at which either the damaged gun or the bulky starship could adjust to continue firing.

  “Not bad, Brutan,” Skell complimented him. “Maybe I should have asked you to fire that toffee.”

  The A-Mod 400 tore through the skeletal suppressor array like … well, similes weren’t really necessary. She tore through like an armoured modular flying into a relatively fragile series of composite support struts and field dampening emitter cables. That is to say, very easily indeed. If the Black Honey Wings’s suppressor had been built in the normal way it would have been massive, a heavily-armoured dome capable of suppressing relative fields across half a solar system. A chief tool of AstroCorps and many official planetary authorities, the relative suppressor was a central and therefore usually-heavily-defended part of any police operation. Take it out, and you moved the battlefield out of subluminal crawl and into soft-space.

  This suppressor, however, had been built in an oh-so-sneaky fold-out, fold-in manner, without any shielding, almost certainly because it was not an officially-sanctioned piece of equipment.

  The elements of stealth and surprise came at the expense of durability. The Black Honey Wings’s countermeasures and conventional guns would have been quite capable of taking out any ordnance fired in that direction short of Godfire, so technically the array was satisfactorily protected. The sensors around the rim of the suppressor dome would probably have even detected a salvo of lights-out flounder warheads. But none of these defences were any use against an impactor the size of a modular.

  The larger ship nevertheless hammered at the A-Mod 400 furiously for the few seconds she was accelerating, the weaponry scorching her hull plates and even making a few holes in non-key areas of the upper decks. Barducci left it to his team to assign ables and drones to those damaged areas. They knew what to do. This wasn’t, as he’d told Captain Dool, their first rodeo.

  At least this time they were ramming something fragile.

  All he cared about in the immediate aftermath were the casualty reports as the ship took fire, and they seemed clear. No major damage, no injuries. They crashed out through the far side of the wrecked suppressor in a spray of shards and cables, one of their catcher arms getting exposed by a lucky shot and then torn out by an even luckier snag as they ripped merrily into the hug
e, delicate umbrella. Still, impact countermeasures were easily replaced and the arms were multiply-redundant.

  They decelerated on the far side of the Black Honey Wings and Drago was already firing, fully-lit flounders and concussion mines this time, as well as bringing their own pair of big guns, Pater and Mater, out and ready. He noted with approval that Dool had ordered the four ports on this side of his ship open as well, probably while the A-Mod 400 was demolishing his suppressor. However – and also very much to the Noro’s credit – he was not firing them. The A-Mod 400 had not arced up her relative engines, and was clearly not preparing to flee. And she would still lose a face-to-face battle with the larger ship.

  Well, Drago thought, as he surgically crippled the second bank of mini-whorl guns, call it a seventy-thirty chance, in their favour. The bent stretch of the Black Honey Wings’s main hull, not to mention the modular grafted to the far end, still had numerous mini-whorl batteries capable of firing on them, and no way for him to even try to take them out until they opened.

  Still, the A-Mod 400 wasn’t preparing to vanish into the grey, and so Dool’s evidently keen tactical mind had recognised that there was more going on here than he’d originally assumed. He was not about to wantonly destroy the little modular, and so Drago returned the courtesy by only doing minor superficial damage to the open ports. Immediate danger neutralised, and nothing that couldn’t be repaired … although the array was totalled.

  He also fired a final round of charges back at the pulse mine he’d dropped on their way through the centre of the suppressor. The charges set off the pulse with a bright flash. Although there was no external sign, the mine would have taken out the main relative torus on the Chrys stem, since the fat ring just happened to surround the fixture from which the suppressor had unfolded. So unless they had a beefed-up engine in the modular at the other end of the starship, there was no way the secondary relative field could cover the entire vessel. The Black Honey Wings was dependent on the main drive for that.

  Also quite easily-repaired, but for the moment their positions had neatly reversed – A-Mod 400 parked and ready, Black Honey Wings becalmed.

  “Right,” Skelliglyph said pleasantly, “where were we?”

  “Minor hull damage, one of the catchers got ripped out, Pater and Mater are online and the relative drive is operational,” Drago reported. “Enemy vessel has not activated any more mini-whorl guns and her primary relative drive is offline. Suppressor has been neutralised and the four open gun ports on this side, along with three on the far side, have been crippled. No other structural damage.”

  “The Black Honey Wings is hailing us,” Segunda reminded everyone.

  “Mister Segunda, please transmit our official AstroCorps mandate, mission tags and ident,” Skell ordered. “I did give the man a promise.”

  V

  “You destroyed my ever-fucking ship!”

  Captain Nak Dool of the Black Honey Wings was … well, as far as Drago could tell, given his lack of familiarity with Noro Metak body language, he was about as calm as he’d been since they’d made contact. The simmering brink of explosive rage seemed to be the calmest Dool got. He’d acknowledged their credentials with an official nod transmission that had somehow managed to sound huffy, and a little while later they’d received a docking clearance for the blister opposite the add-on-encrusted modular at the far end of the damaged starship.

  Barducci had had his doubts about docking and meeting with the crew that had briefly been their captors, and even more briefly been their enemies, but the Captain was serenely confident. They’d established their mandate, proven their mettle, and the immediate danger was over. Most importantly, the Noro Metak respected strength. The stupider and more demonstrative, the better. And their ramming stunt had been nothing if not stupid and demonstrative.

  On the other hand, Barducci had to concede, they had wrecked up Dool’s ship pretty damn good.

  “Come, Captain,” Skelliglyph said expansively. Skell, Barducci, Constable, Melvix and a small group of security officers had boarded the Black Honey Wings, leaving W’Tan and the rest of the senior officers aboard the A-Mod 400. “We barely scratched her.”

  Dool, who seemed far more enormous in real life and smelled distinctly of livestock, folded arms as thick as Drago’s thighs. “My relative suppressor is totalled!”

  “Your what?” Skell said with exaggerated puzzlement. “I didn’t see anything like that. If I had, I would have been obligated to report it to AstroCorps and this whole sorry mess would just tie us all up in red tape.”

  Dool glowered. Nobody could glower like a Noro with a full rack of horns. “You fired stealth torpedoes at us while we were communicating,” he rumbled, “then you used trickery to mask the commencement of your ramming approach, and you set off a pulse mine in the middle of our relative engine!”

  The Captain, surrounded as he was on all sides by Molranoids, not to mention Dool and Barducci, somehow managed to look like he wasn’t the smallest creature in the room aside from Ital Constable.

  “I went off-script,” Çrom Skelliglyph said. “I trust this isn’t a problem.”

  Nak Dool stood, arms folded, his blocky armoured shape flanked by two luridly-tattooed Blaren and three enormous Bonshooni, glaring at the mildly-smiling human. The two crews had met in the broad open space around the docking doors, and Barducci had to grant it was a well-set-up area. Plenty of room, no cover … a boarding party would be pretty exposed coming through here, and the walls opposite were blast-armoured and clearly installed with small panels of one-way metaflux shielding in strategic places. Latter-day arrow slots, he thought approvingly. In fact, the whole ship seemed set up more like a corsair rig than anything else. Maybe this was one cultural exchange buccaneer who was taking his designation seriously.

  Dool laughed.

  “You are an odlakka with teeth, Captain!” he roared, and turned slightly side-on. “Come into the Leftovers,” he continued, extending a huge hand in invitation. “It is a little more like a home, and there we can talk.”

  Nope, Leftovers was the name of the modular section of Dool’s starship. Dool had no idea what the name might have meant, and had not bothered to rename her after acquiring the Black Honey Wings in undisclosed but doubtless questionable circumstances. The two parties crossed the docking area, Dool’s team relaxing and half of them splitting off altogether to return to their duties. Barducci was pleased to note that the A-Mod 400 group remained vigilant.

  “Anyway, those weren’t stealth torpedoes,” Skell was continuing modestly as he stepped through the heavy blast door into a similarly-battle-ready corridor beyond. “They were just ablation disc warheads, what we call flounders. With all their guidance systems and running power switched off, they’re difficult to pick out even as space junk. And my supremely talented Chief Tactical Officer threw them at you using a silent propulsion method.”

  Dool glanced back and slightly up at Barducci, a feat Drago noted the Noro could only achieve by turning his entire upper body. The vast musculature of his shoulders and back, not to mention the plated uniform, didn’t allow much mobility in the neck. Barducci had long since stopped feeling bad about making these sorts of strategic notations about people. “Hm,” Dool grunted. “You are an enormous cunt.”

  “On multiple levels, Captain Dool,” Barducci agreed blandly.

  Dool swung back to address Skelliglyph, who was strolling along the murder-hole-lined passageway alongside him. “You are an officially licensed and authorised AstroCorps vessel,” the Noro continued loudly. “Why did you not send this proof in your first transmission?”

  “Because, as you know perfectly well, you trapped us in a suppressor field and began making demands,” Skell said calmly. “I was not lying, Captain Dool – about any of it. AstroCorps as a matter of policy does not provide data under coercion or intimidation.”

  “Why haven’t you given your ship a name?” Dool demanded. “It would prevent such misunderstandings.”

&
nbsp; Barducci smiled faintly. Oh yes, they had a set of mission tags, and an official mandate. Their unconventional departure from Aquilar had been necessity, but it hadn’t been theft in any but the most officially-unavoidable way. It was, as Skell had pointed out, a matter of deniability.

  Their mission was demonstrable for most levels of bureaucracy and government. But if push came to shove, AstroCorps high command was also able to say they’d busted an enemy of the throne out of prison and fled Pestoria Geo Chrysanthemum in a stolen modular, under heavy fire. That was just the way it went.

  “Our modest little modular was clean off the shelf when we set out,” the Captain said. “A starship, in my experience, lives into a name more often than up to it.”

  And what does that even mean? Barducci wondered silently.

  They crossed another, slightly less-spacious docking area, and entered the Nope, Leftovers.

  VI

  “Are you hungry? Bori, bring the food. We have meat, for you hungry omnivores.”

  The A-Mod 400’s Head of Science, Marcila Martin, had a lot to say about evolution. Particularly the point at which, in her words, “it got interesting”. And this, according to Marcila, was the point members of any given species started saying “I like your clothes” to each other.

  It wasn’t that Martin was a fashion-obsessed airhead. She was just more of a cultural anthropologist than biologist. She also played a mean game of exchange tag for a human who had blown a hundred and forty-seven candles off her last birthday cake.

  Anyway, her point about evolution was that it was rare for herbivorous species to make it out of the arms race of prehistory and drag their nasty baggage into the bold new dawn of sentience. Drago didn’t really follow all the ins and outs of it, because Marcila could really wax lyrical when she’d had an extra stim pellet in her zolo, but it was something about hunting. Well, Drago understood that much. Humans, and the Molranoid species, had been through their hunting-and-gathering phases. As for the Fergunak … as pure carnivores and aquatic, Marcila said, they were even rarer than herbivorous sentients because the sea was basically nightmare soup on any planet in the galaxy, no matter what liquid the sea happened to be made of. The Fergunak had been dragged into the higher intelligence registers by the Damorakind, and the aki’Drednanth … well, nobody really knew about them. They’d reached enlightenment millions of years ago and were apparently now perfectly content to reincarnate themselves in the womb, as giant shaggy ice monsters. It took all sorts, really.