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

  But it was clear enough, even to Drago Barducci, that if you were a herbivore you would basically start on the road to civilisation with just and-gathering to your name, and that meant you missed out on not only a whole lot of delicious protein and stuff, but also on a lot of teamwork and communication and abstract thinking and fifty thousand years or so of getting to have sex because you killed something really angry and dangerous. Which, okay, it hadn’t turned the human race into the nicest species in the galaxy, but they were still here, weren’t they?

  Then again, according to Marcila, herbivores were worse. Because the early stages of evolution were all about kill or be killed, and usually eat or be eaten. And herbivores didn’t kill for food. On most planets, with the exception of scary outliers like Gethsemane, plants didn’t do a lot of fighting back. So aside from the obvious challenge of dispatching carnivores who didn’t want to let you eat your salad in peace, there was no corresponding vegetarian option to the development offered by hunting.

  What this meant was that most herbivore species who made it to self-awareness, tool-building, and eventually to whatever the vegan equivalent of the top of the food chain was, were ones who had developed the urge to kill for pleasure. And this tended to make them sub-optimal candidates for interplanetary relations, even when the other candidates included murderous cybernetic sharks, yetis that could kill you by thinking nasty thoughts, and a species of mostly-hairless ape that had had more genocidal wars among its own kind than every other known sentient species in the galaxy had had with other species. Combined.

  The Noro Metak, although they were big and aggressive and more than adequately predatory, had not – as far as researchers were aware – taken the killing-for-sport path to civilisation. They had simply been fortunate enough to evolve on a planet where there were no seriously threatening carnivores, omnivores or scavengers. Nothing capable of taking on the big bovinids, anyway. Any animal that might have had a shot at apex predator had been head-butted until it changed its mind millions of years ago.

  The Noro Metak homeworld, as a result, was an interesting place for biologists. And their culture a topic about which Marcila Martin could rhapsodise for hours.

  Many scientists, Martin included, theorised that the Noros had achieved sentience and higher intelligence simply as a survival mechanism. With no natural predators worth talking about, their population had gone through explosive growth and famine cycles, their planet’s landmasses cycling through mirroring phases of abundance and dustbowl drought, for hundreds of millennia until the Noros learned how to regulate their environment and manage their population. The very planet had played the role of development-contest predator for their species.

  Despite their quick tempers, the Noro Metak were herbivorous through and through, biology and society developing hand in hand. They didn’t even have a conceptual framework for eating flesh, although there were a few species on their homeworld that did it. These were called chashish – little things, pointy teeth – and were largely considered to be a distasteful but necessary part of the biosphere. Like things that enjoyed the close company of faeces.

  And speaking of faeces …

  Sitting down to a first meal with the Noro Metak, back when the crew of the Lonesome Rider had made official first contact, had been a delicate business. Since then, as Skell had previously mentioned, the Noro buccaneers had overcompensated with great enthusiasm. They delighted in seeking out the tastiest and most exotic food and drink, so they could enjoy watching the weird aliens eat it.

  Drago, however, still remembered the taste of bollg, almost-digested plant material dredged all the way back from a stomach so far down the line it might as well have been a colon. The Noro Metak considered it a great act of friendship to share such personally imbued produce. Or so the translators and diplomats and researchers had insisted, although Drago distinctly recalled most of their servings being insultingly small. Honestly, it would have been much less effort to excrete it from the other end. And probably wouldn’t have had that much impact on the flavour and consistency.

  The best thing about that night had been sitting opposite Skell in the Lonesome Rider’s executive dining hall, and getting to watch his face as the Noro ambassador personally served up seconds.

  All of this flashed through Drago’s mind when Captain Dool offered them food, and all of it contributed to Drago’s feeling of relief when Captain Dool told them there was meat.

  This relief lasted right up to the moment they were comfortable in the modular’s dome section, all seated around the slightly-too-big-for-ordinary-sized-humans Molranoid-standard boardroom table, and Bori – a grinning Bonshoon who was rotund even for a member of his species – set the platter of meat in the centre of the table. It was a thick, four-foot-long, sizzling slab of pale flesh, seasoned with ‘ponic herbs and still frying lightly in its own fat, and it smelled quite delicious.

  It was also quite clearly Fergunakil meat.

  Drago looked across the table at Skell, who was smiling pleasantly and exclaiming over how mouth-watering the food smelled and how their hosts really hadn’t needed to go to so much trouble. Their gazes met for a moment, and Barducci felt an unaccustomed chill at the blank death in Çrom Skelliglyph’s eyes.

  Captain Nak Dool knows who we are, Skell might as well have been transmitting on an aki’Drednanth brainwave. Get ready.

  VII

  They ate.

  Everyone picked up on the Captain’s lead and played dumb, even though most of them were quite familiar with Fergie meat and how it looked – not to mention tasted. To be honest, Barducci quite liked it. As far as shark meat went, it was heavier and fattier and usually tastier than most. You just had to chew with caution. The flesh was rubbery, and you never knew when your teeth were going to encounter metal. Fergunak were riddled with nodes, diodes, optic enhancements and other devilry.

  It wasn’t such a big deal once you’d taken that first bite. The Fergunak themselves had no social or cultural taboos as regarded eating their own kind, and famously didn’t care if anyone else ate them either. There were university and Academy courses on Six Species culture that required students to taste Fergunakil meat. There were restaurants out there – shady restaurants, to be sure, on the Blaran side of certain social fences – that were known to serve it. The great sharks, after all, had absolutely no compunctions about eating other sentient species when the opportunity arose, even when they were repeatedly asked not to.

  It was, at least the first time he’d done it, something of a restoration of balance for Barducci. Marcila Martin called it revenge eating. But yes – the first bite was the hardest.

  Skelliglyph had been sitting across the table from him that time, too, come to think of it. It occurred to Drago that a great many of the worst things he’d done, at least gastronomically speaking, he’d done with Çrom Skelliglyph sitting nearby, grinning around a mouthful of the same shit. In fact, most of the worst things he’d done in general had been done with this scruffy-haired sonofawhore in the background.

  Drago wondered if this was maybe something he should be more concerned about.

  “Mmm,” Skell exclaimed, chewing slowly with his eyes closed. “That is delicious. Is it Marganite greatfish? And what’s that seasoning? Don’t tell me, it’s some sort of lemon-pepper. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted such a perfect combination. Delicate, yet piquant.”

  “I prefer it with ham, myself,” Drago muttered, giving Skell a meaningful look.

  “Everyone’s a critic. Please excuse my Chief Tactical Officer, Captain Dool,” Çrom went on. “He probably ate a skuntrigold before starting his shift. He has no appreciation for the finer things in life.”

  “Flying with you, it’s probably just a matter of the finer things in life being unfamiliar and scary to me,” Barducci grunted, and gave the grinning Dool a nod. “This is good. It’s not greatfish though – some sort of gator, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t bother my quartermaster and he doesn’t bother
me,” Dool said expansively, seeming to be entirely at ease and enjoying their apparent ignorance as they enjoyed their meal. He even let Barducci rummage in his pockets and belt, murmuring about needing a little spice, without tensing up at all. Unforgivable laxness. Drago hit his little person-to-person whisper beacon en route, and pressed the firing stud on the thresh-blaster in his belt for good measure. It would have scored a nasty little gash in the floor, but as he had suspected their weapons were dead. Presumably some sort of localised security field shutting off their command protocols, or else a kill-panel at the dock had fried the firing pads. Those were a damn pain to fix, so he hoped it was the former. Of course, that would leave Dool’s crew essentially disarmed as well.

  So, probably the kill-panel.

  Should’ve brought some chemical shooters, he grumbled to himself.

  “What did I tell you?” Skell said as Barducci finally produced the little metal canister and gave it a shake. “He’s always got hoco-nut with him. Never a meal so bad he can’t make it worse with that taste-bud-melting crap.”

  “What is skuntrigold?” Dool wanted to know.

  “Oh,” Skell said around another mouthful of Fergunakil, “your skuntrigold is like a horse – you know horse? Uh, claddatak? Claddadatak?”

  “Ah,” the Noro grinned, and gave a passable impression of a horse’s whinny. “Chaddachak.”

  “Exactly. Well, your skuntrigold is like a long horse with six legs instead of four, and a head like a block of concrete with two eyes on each side,” he poked forked fingers at one side of his head, then the other, to illustrate. “They export them from Radagast, all throughout the Hubris systems. They taste like boiled arse.”

  “Put enough hoco on them,” Drago said mildly, unscrewing the canister and sprinkling a little of the mustard-coloured powder on the side of his plate.

  “Oh yeah,” Skell blathered. “Put enough hoco-nut on it and anything becomes edible,” he leaned over and nudged the Bonshoon sitting too-nonchalantly beside him. “You know,” he said, “I reckon he could eat a–”

  Skelliglyph stabbed the Bonshoon in the eye with his fork.

  VIII

  The trick, when fighting Molranoids, was to incapacitate them as quickly as you could. Taking out their ears was the best approach, because Molranoid flappers were particularly sensitive.

  Unfortunately, this also meant they protected them far more carefully, so your safest option was to go for the eyes and hope they were too distracted by that to get their hands on you by sound alone. Going for the throat was pointless because Molranoids had a couple of them, and going for the genitals was … well, Molranoid goolies were really only out there for the kicking at three points in their five-thousand-year life-spans, so you’d have to be lucky. Basically none of the human weak spots existed on a Molranoid.

  The benefit, if you were absolutely desperate for a bright side, was that you could generally be as rough as you liked and still have a non-lethal engagement. You were very unlikely to kill a Molranoid, no matter how brutally you attacked. Things that would reduce a human to a quivering mound of flesh and bone-shards would barely slow a Molranoid down. Fleet authorities tended to use explosive rounds, pulse grenades and abbronax as crowd control. And all the assorted peripheral extremities and organs could be printed and replaced.

  So it was absolutely no-holds-barred. Of course, if one of them laid so much as a hand on you, it tended to all be over very quickly. And damn it, there were a lot of bat-heads in the room.

  There’d been a bit of reshuffling in their escort in the process of getting to dinner, the result being that hosts and visitors were, aside from Dool himself, evenly matched for numbers, at eight versus seven. The host team, however, consisted of two humans, five Molranoids and a Noro Metak. And unless the crew remaining on the A-Mod 400 managed to do something, there was likely to be a thousand more where they came from, ready to hand. A thousand at least.

  Drago threw his mostly-unscrewed canister of hoco powder in the face of the Blaran closest to him, and threw his plate like a frisbee at another. The powder he’d sprinkled on the rim of the plate turned its edge into a burning brand as the plate struck the second Blaran right across the eyes just as the canister popped open against the eyes and nose of the first in a cloud of yellow dust. Both Blaren hissed and fell back, but neither one was out of the fight yet.

  Blue Persephone, one of the A-Mod 400’s non-Corps security Blaren, had meanwhile lifted one of the Black Honey Wings’s human crewmen into the air and bashed him strategically against the second Bonshoon, knocking the former out cold and making the latter stagger to one side. Molranoids fighting humans had precisely the opposite problem – humans weren’t just easy to put down, they were fantastically easy to kill. Simply hitting one on the head with something could make it die of an undetected brain-swelling three weeks later. Blue Persephone closed with the Bonshoon while the rest of the A-Mod 400’s team tackled the two Blaren Drago had seasoned.

  Their second Blaran crewmember had also leapt back from the table as soon as Çrom had burst into action. His skin a blaze of green phosphorescent dots, he leaned in and hefted the plate of still-sizzling Fergunakil meat – together with its puddle of hot oil – into the upper body of the Blaran whose face had just been blasted with hoco. The unfortunate Blaran went down with a shriek.

  Barducci got a closer look at the guns as he launched himself at the third Blaran, who had been the first to tug a blaster from his belt. Some sort of circuit was stuck to the side, and in the split-second he had to examine it he thought it looked like an add-on to cancel out a security suppression field.

  Maybe our guns won’t need repairing after all, he thought. That was a relief.

  “Gunsides,” he said sharply as he took his best guess and rolled under the invisible beam from the Blaran’s gun. He felt it sunburn his lower back, and then he was up and grabbing at the dampening circuit. It didn’t come off, but it snapped in half under his fingers and the Blaran swore. Drago rose to his feet, attempting to sweep the Blaran’s legs from under him but he stepped back and very nearly clubbed Drago on the side of the head with a lightning-quick swing of the useless gun. Drago dropped and rolled again.

  That was another thing. Damnably, damnably fast, your Molranoid.

  Meanwhile the Bonshoon Skell had stabbed – the erstwhile Bori, server of the food – surged to his feet with the fork still sticking out of his eye socket. He punched Çrom in the face as the Captain was still pushing himself out of his own chair. There was a sickening crunch as Skell’s head snapped back, and he collapsed to the floor like a broken toy. He was up again before Barducci had time to worry about it, though, kicking the chair into the Bonshoon’s lower legs and scrambling away on feet, hands and buttocks.

  This all happened in about the first five seconds of the fight. By the time they reached fifteen seconds, Barducci was satisfied to find, the eight members of the Black Honey Wings’s crew were subdued and the team from the A-Mod 400 were checking the dining room for defensibility. They’d even managed to take a couple of the weapons without disabling them, and had them trained on the still-conscious Molranoids and the menacingly-rumbling Nak Dool. Çrom Skelliglyph could assemble a mean set of crewmembers when he put his mind to it.

  “Who’s bleeding?” Barducci said, when he noticed the dripping red-amber fluid on the Noro’s left horn.

  “Most of us, Commander,” Melvix said. The Molran was his usual utterly unflappable self, and Drago wasn’t particularly surprised when he added, “but it was me who Captain Dool gored.”

  Drago turned to glance at the Molran, who was now crouching over the pair of human hostiles and checking their vitals. His lower left hand was clamped over his side, but even as Barducci watched the Molran eased his slender fingers off the wound and confirmed that it had already sealed off its blood-flow.

  “Think I’ve got some busted ribs,” Ital reported. “And Gunton’s face has suffered extensive improvement.”

  “Fuck
you, Constable,” Robér Gunton said in a wet, snuffly tone. Drago gave the security crewman a cursory glance and deemed the assortment of fractures and facial smearing – an arguably optimal result of being thrown against a wall by a Bonshoon – to be superficial. Gunton had also managed to snare the big fucker’s gun and shoot him with it six or seven times, which was why he was standing more or less unaided while the Bonshoon was curled and groaning on the floor.

  “Good work, Gunton,” Barducci said. “What about–”

  “Fallen’s dead.”

  Drago turned with a sigh. Blue Persephone was crouched beside their second Blaran crewman, her left hands moving deftly over his body while her two right hands held an appropriated gun and the tattoo-twined wrist of the Black Honey Wings Blaran respectively. The enemy Molranoid didn’t seem to be in any danger of moving, with the gun pressed hard against the flat top of his head and his twisted arm so severely broken that fibrous bone was visible through tears in cloth and skin. The enemy crewmember’s bleeding, too, had stopped when his spectacularly unfair Blaran blood vessels had rerouted around the wound – only a clear glaze of almost pure so-called ambrosia, the amber-coloured chemical compound carrying all the Molranoid’s healing necessities, moistened the twisted limb.

  Ambrosia was normally intermingled with the more standard Molranoid blood, giving it its slightly tawny shade. In the case of injury, however, the blood rerouted and the ambrosia stayed to do the job. You could tell a moderate wound, often, from the purity of the ambrosia leaking from it. And you could tell a severe one from the fact that the blood wasn’t successfully blocked off.