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

  Fallen – or Traumatic / Hysterical / Fallen, to use his full name – was neither moderately nor severely wounded. He’d taken the full force of his opponent’s gunfire directly in the face, and unlike the Bonshoon Gunton had taken down, the Blaran Fallen had faced had been carrying a pug. Those nasty little bastards used some sort of minor nuclear cascade to burn like fury. Probably why the enemy was now lying so still, with Blue holding the same pug directly against his skull.

  Blue Persephone seemed to be alright – she and Fallen had been friends, but not lovers. Barducci did his best to keep their teams compact and free of intimate connections if at all possible. Her luridly colourful hand was steady as she held the gun on the enemy and kept his shattered arm tightly curled. Blue’s skin, for some obscure Blaran reason, didn’t have bioluminescent infusions but was pigmented bright red from head to toe. When anyone asked her why her name was Blue, she told them, I am blue. You’re just not moving fast enough.

  “Shit,” Barducci muttered, crossing to where Blue was crouching. Skell was there before him, kneeling and checking the crewmember’s body, so Drago remained standing and scanned the room. Their time was extremely limited, he knew, even if all the enemies here had been locked down and none of them were tripping any silent alarms or panic buttons. He pulled out his whisper beacon and tapped it swiftly. They needed to know what was happening back on the modular.

  “He did this thing at parties,” Blue was saying sorrowfully. “Talking through his nose. It sounded like a…” she cut herself off, raised the pug blaster for a fleeting second, adjusted its settings with her upper left hand, then lowered it again and shot the enemy Blaran through the neck. He screamed briefly, there was a smell of burning flesh that mingled stomach-churningly with the scent of fried Fergie, and his body went limp. He’d still live, with some medical attention and rehabilitation. It really was unfair. “Sorry, Captain,” she said, straightening and helping Skell to his feet. The Captain seemed a little bruised but none the worse for wear for his punishing blow to the face and the vicious fighting that had followed it. “Commander,” Blue added. “I’ll check the rest of the dome.”

  Çrom and Drago crossed the room and stood above the glowering seated mass of Nak Dool.

  IX

  Captain Nak Dool was sitting on the floor next to his chair, sporting a twisted neck, dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone courtesy of Commander First Class Gonon Melvix. Horns were an impressive weapon, but they did rather hinge – no pun intended, Drago thought humourlessly – upon sticking your head into your enemy’s body.

  The armoured uniform and great slabs of muscle had done nothing whatsoever to prevent the horrifyingly strong Molran from twisting Dool’s upper body like a bundle of wires.

  “Captain,” Skelliglyph said calmly. “I believe the time has come for us to level with one another. All this dancing around and smirking benefits nobody.”

  “Traitors,” Dool spat.

  “That’s an interesting sentiment, coming from a Noro Metak buccaneer who’s gone way off-script,” Çrom said.

  “Don’t mistake our kuushon with a lack of commitment,” Dool growled. “I may not have been long in the stars, but I am a loyal servant of the Halfmoon throne.”

  “So this really is about the Emperor’s business,” Skell said, eyebrows raised. “What was it you said? An escaped convict?”

  “I thought you said no more dancing around and smirking,” the Noro said.

  “Fair.”

  “W’Tan reports they were able to kill the comms between the Leftovers and the Honey Wings,” Drago reported quietly as his whisper token gave a swift series of pulses and Nak Dool glared at Skell, “but we are completely out of time here.”

  “We’re not the ship you’re after, Dool,” Skell said with a sigh. “You saw our mandate and our AstroCorps credentials. What we were here for, as I’m pretty sure you know, was to meet up with a Fergunakil fast-clipper out of Coriel. He had information for us. You got in a fight with him, evidently, and you won. Now, it’s pretty likely he started shooting at you as soon as you got close because … well, because he was a Fergie and he was charged with contacting a modular with a very specific call sign, not this big messy ship of yours. So he fired on you, and yes, you won. We have no problem with any of that. We don’t even care that you fed him to us,” Skell leaned over. “But if you got his meat, and this rendezvous location and timestamp that allowed you to drop in on us the way you did, that means you got his ship more or less intact. Where is she?”

  Dool rumbled menacingly. “Oong’a fatung, odlakka,” he snarled.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Skell said. “Constable, kill the Bonshoon with the laser holes.”

  “Copy,” Ital said, taking the pug from Blue Persephone.

  “You’re AstroCorps,” Dool growled contemptuously, as Constable turned the blaster back to its maximum setting, “your regulations will not allow a bluff of this–”

  Ital shot the curled Bonshoon in the head.

  “Sorry to say,” Çrom said as the Noro stared, “that Fergie was also operating under an AstroCorps charter. When you killed and fried him up, even before you beached us and refused to deactivate your suppressor, you became an enemy of AstroCorps. And we don’t have time to dick around with a Fairy Mary outfit of mercenaries like you. The clipper. Do you have her?”

  “Yes,” Dool mumbled. “We crippled her and brought her into the Black Honey Wings’s main hold. The shark was dead. Shock damage.”

  “Ship full of water,” Skell said, “they can go fast and decelerate hard, but they do tend to be vulnerable to concussive weapons,” he turned to Drago. “Main hold,” he said.

  “On it,” Drago said, “just waiting on W’Tan to send–”

  “You fools,” Dool growled.

  “Captain?” Skell said politely.

  “You are the ship we were looking for,” Dool growled. “How did you think we found you out here in the dark?”

  “I was rather hoping you’d hit the clipper at her starting point,” Çrom said, “like I said in my clever little assumption-filled summary a few seconds ago, and then used the coordinates on her navigation computer to get to this location,” he sighed. “That’s not what happened?”

  “The shark gave us your location and we’ve been waiting for you, close to this volume, ever since,” Dool said, “…but your credentials confirmed that you were the ones we were hunting.”

  Skell straightened, ran a hand through his hair, and sighed again. “Damn it,” he said, with feeling. “You’re really in the employment of the throne?”

  “We are private contractors,” Dool said. “We are loyal to the throne. And you – dutiful, noble, righteous AstroCorps – you are harbouring an enemy of the throne, and you helped that enemy escape the throne, and when we prove this, prove that you have this person and that you acted with whispered AstroCorps sanction, it will prove once and for all that AstroCorps is an enemy of the throne. And if AstroCorps leaves you in the path of the storm, you will face that storm. Alone. Captain.”

  Drago and Skell locked gazes for a moment, as Captain Nak Dool killed himself and his entire crew.

  The whisper pulsed in Barducci’s hand again.

  “W’Tan says they’re ready,” Drago relayed to Skelliglyph. “She also says she’s looking forward to hearing about why we weren’t told we were rendezvousing with a Fergie clipper out here, because that will be a really exciting and twist-filled story.”

  “Your little buzzer says all that?” Skell asked, sounding impressed.

  “No,” Barducci admitted, “I’m just reading between the lines on that last bit.”

  “Alright,” Çrom said. “Okay,” he hesitated.

  “Captain,” Drago prompted.

  Skell looked up. “What’s kuushon?”

  “Freshness,” Melvix supplied, “inexperience. The quality of being a new arrival or member of something. The Noro Metak are beginners out here, Commander.”

 
“I figured. And ooger fat ‘un?”

  “Oong’a fatung,” Melvix corrected. “You probably don’t want to know.”

  “Aw, come on,” Çrom cajoled. “I love a good insult.”

  Drago stepped out of the room, leaving Skell and Melvix to their dialogue. He had less than five minutes, he calculated, to get off the Nope, Leftovers and down the docking spar to the Black Honey Wings proper, before W’Tan blew the spar to kingdom come. The two docked modulars would then float free, and what happened to the people in the Leftovers would very much depend on how dilapidated the ship was. The A-Mod 400’s ability to hold her own against the remains of the Black Honey Wings, likewise, would depend on Commander W’Tan and the modular’s effectiveness in breaking from dock. She was almost certainly locked to the Black Honey Wings in hostile-boarded configuration, but they had countermeasures for that. Just had to hope Dool’s people hadn’t been outfitted with better gear.

  Once the spar was blown, however, Barducci would be on his own on the main ship, and – with any luck – her crew would have no idea he was there.

  He broke into a run.

  Behind him, the gunfire and screams ended before he was out of the dome.

  INTERLUDE: TIPPY GHEE (I)

  Molren, and Molranoids in general, lived for about five thousand years. Their childhoods, as a result, were long and leisurely … and yet, thanks to enhanced information retrieval and inborn memory baselines and basic sensory cognition, your average ten-year-old Molran was about as smart and knowledgeable as your average human was ever going to get.

  It didn’t mean their childhoods were shorter. On the contrary, they were much longer. A Molran, depending on the subspecies or culture in question, wasn’t really considered an adult until he or she was five or six hundred years old anyway, and the dividing line was far less regimented by law and tradition than it was for humans … or it was more regimented, but the laws and traditions were alien.

  The ‘childhood’ of a typical Molran just wasn’t about learning to walk, run, talk, socialise, and acquire a minimum-level education. Those things were crammed into the first twenty or thirty years of a human’s life because a human only got about two hundred before dropping dead. Condensing the basics made good logical sense.

  A Molran childhood was a building-up of wisdom, a gathering of experiences, a period during which mistakes could be more readily tolerated. It was, largely, something the child decided was over.1 It took as long as it took, and attempting to rush it defeated the purpose.

  The upshot of this is, while Molranoid children didn’t receive a formal education because they didn’t need one, the majority of them did take part in human education programs just for the experience. Just so they could know what a human went through to become even as minimally functional as humans were. Between the age of ten years and First Prime, which could happen anywhere from twenty to a hundred and fifty or so, many Molran youths sort-of attended something not entirely unlike school. Not so much to learn, as to experience the learning curve of humans – and, in particularly condescending cases, to assist in teaching them.

  Many adult humans found this grating, because humanity has a neutron-star chip on its shoulder about being inferior. And also, Molren were annoying.

  There hadn’t been any Molren in Tippy’s home of Colan Gairy Hive on Bad Moon Three, a seething subterranean city-state also known as The Griddle. Oh, there had been a few Blaren who loitered around the school complex … but they’d been Qastrians, opposed to the idea of interference in human development. Their solution to most schoolyard conflicts had been to hand you a pair of rocks and smile encouragingly.

  At Tippy’s school, when they did the old What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up thing, most of the kids had said I want to be a mine angel, because that was what the heroes of The Griddle did. They regulated and ran rescue operations in the vast warren of mines underneath Colan Gairy Hive.

  The rest of the wishes were evenly divided between AstroCorps starship Captain and chocolate taster and, in one special case, no matter how many times they explained to Bori Buddington that this wasn’t the way it worked, aki’Drednanth.

  Taskerion Typhenix Ghee, five years old and born with a flaw in his inner ear that was too intricate to fix surgically – a flaw which had essentially made his nickname better-known than his real name by about three weeks after he’d finally learned to walk – had always answered this question by pointing towards an imaginary horizon, elevating his hand to about thirty degrees, and saying there.

  X

  Drago forced open the elevator maintenance shaft and swan-dived.

  He probably could have taken the elevator itself and lost no more than a few seconds, but there had been a shoot-out in the Captain’s quarters and the whole situation was clearly a cluster-fuck, so the rest of the Black Honey Wings’s crew had to be on high alert by now. This meant that either there would be troops on the way up in the elevator, or the mechanism itself would have some sort of security lockout. If at all possible, he needed to avoid getting himself trapped in machinery-operated places.

  That was a joke all on its own, in a starship adrift in deep space.

  He curled in the shaft as he plummeted towards the exchange field, then – with a teeth-clenching act of will – spread himself out in a belly-flop starfish the moment he emerged onto the exchange level itself. Maximise resistance and slowdown rate, minimise bounce. He’d never dived this way into water before. Well, not from the equivalent of eight storeys up. The impulse to protect yourself from belly-whacking was a weirdly difficult one to get over.

  Maybe it was monkey-stuff, he had time to think as he forcibly spread himself out and completed his plummet into the exchange.

  The exchange level was open, devoid of interior structures aside from the series of elevator rotation points where the lift shafts bored through from one half of the ship to the other. Big, wide, gleaming and pale, with the plane itself … well, it was there in the middle, but you couldn’t see it. It had some impact on light and the air, and there was always a little scattering of dust and grime hovering on it in between its cleaning cycles. But all of those were things you needed time to see. Diving, there was no time – and all you could do was hope that the last guy to use the maintenance shaft hadn’t dropped a tool box or anything for you to smash your head open on as you plunged through.

  He hit the exchange plane face-first, and of course encountered nothing aside from a mostly-imaginary puff of dust across his skin. Down suddenly became up, one micron-thin slice of his body at a time as he dropped through the gravity field, but it happened so fast that he barely had time to register the stomach-loop before he was tumbling upwards through the other side of the exchange level towards the corresponding maintenance shaft on the opposite hemisphere of the modular, flying under his previous falling-momentum.

  He curled and straightened himself swiftly so as to ascend into the tube without braining himself on the sides, but he had lost a lot of momentum already and he was being pulled back now, so a moment later he stopped and dropped back down the shaft and out into the cavernous exchange level. He starfished again.

  Another drop through the plane, and he was basically zero-momentum. Hovering right on the plane like a piece of debris was a pretty unsettling experience, though – the human brain wasn’t designed to deal with its body lying on its stomach and its back at the same time – so he hooked the nearby elevator rotation bulb and pulled himself up arbitrarily into one of the modular halves.

  He climbed the shaft, let himself back out through the access hatch, and sprinted for the docking blister.

  XI

  Drago Barducci was not a small or particularly surreptitious man, although he could move quickly and quietly when he needed to. The current situation called more for speed than stealth, however, so he gave only the most fleeting consideration to the strategic non-optimality of being seen by their enemies. He could avoid, but there would be no hiding. Not if he wanted to get out in time
.

  He was lucky. He kept to corridors that corresponded to little-used ones on their own modular, relying on the similarity of design and lack of customisation, and found his way to a secondary docking area on the blister without encountering any hostiles. There was a certain amount of rearrangement, or at least clutter, throughout the vessel but he managed to cross back into Black Honey Wings proper while avoiding the major traffic areas. The smaller airlock – if you could even call it that, since all its hatches and mechanisms had long since been removed – had a similar no-man’s-land of armoured decking around it but was completely devoid of personnel. Very sloppy.

  He charged out into the less-familiar terrain of the larger starship interior, got into another maintenance passageway off the main thoroughfare, and hurtled down the docking spar hidden from the eyes of running troops. And they were troops, he noted on the couple of fleeting occasions he caught a glimpse through a repair hatch or snuck across an access junction. What sort of mercenary band was this? What sort of Noro bucky swore allegiance to the Halfmoon and became Captain of a starship this specialised, and then used it to run his own personal army of bounty hunters?

  And then came after them?

  Well … okay, that part was understandable enough. Even if the “AstroCorps hanging them out to dry” option was a way more likely outcome than the “AstroCorps admitting to machinations against the throne and declaring war on Aquilar” one, they were something of a catch. And from there, it was easy enough to piece together the rest.

  The throne wanted the traitor they’d sprung from jail. When it became clear that there would be no official manhunt, no on-the-books inquest, that AstroCorps would deny everything and the whole thing would be swept under the rug … well, the throne had to get more creative. So there’d been a private bounty called. With its own little clause for deniability, of course. This was why the Halfmoon let Dool become a Captain of a ship this size, against general Noro Metak cultural exchange regulations. A ship this size, with the accessories with which the Black Honey Wings had been equipped and the heavily-armed, if not particularly well-trained crew she had on board.