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

  “I don’t know about that, Captain,” Melvix said, “but the power and security and interior hull composition data reads more like an expanded brig than a series of cabins.”

  “Prisoners?” Çrom sighed. “Are you serious?”

  “Usually,” Blue remarked sotto voce.

  “It could just be a set of rooms they’d converted to hold us in,” Constable suggested. “They were supposed to take us back to Aquilar alive, right?”

  Çrom, eyes locked with Melvix, pointed at Constable. Melvix waved his lower left hand again.

  “If you want to rig this ship to crash or explode, and leave the set of secure quarters unexamined–”

  “Fine,” Çrom growled, “we’ll go,” he swung his finger to point at Melvix. “But you’re looking after them.”

  XVII (Meanwhile, Again)

  “Tell Seg to forward some instructions to Tippy,” Çrom said as they prepared to move out. “I’m guessing he’ll be taking a lander out to clear the road while San Genevieve pilots. Get Barducci’s whereabouts to Tippy.”

  “Barducci’s whereabouts?” Constable frowned, tapping away at the maintenance panel. “Do we have the first clue what those are, Captain?”

  “He’ll be doing something with the transpersion core on the main ship,” Çrom said positively, “at which point he will piss-bolt as far as he can along the lateral power feed and fetch up against the hull right underneath the ‘l’ in ‘Black Honey Wings’. If I had to make an educated guess,” he paused. “Which, you know, I do. Because I’m the Captain.”

  “Copy that,” Ital turned back to her task.

  “And tell Tippy to get those escape pods,” Çrom added. “There’ll be fifteen or twenty of them, he should be able to take them out while they’re all forming up and trying to find a way clear of the combat volume. They’ll be nicely lined up for him. Just tell him to do what he does best, preferably so the wreckage doesn’t hit–”

  “–the hull right underneath the ‘l’ in ‘Black Honey Wings’,” Ital grunted. “Got it.”

  “I don’t mean to sound like the wimpy one,” Gunton said, “but how are we going to get back to the A-Mod 400 safely? Steal a lander?”

  “I think they already flew out,” Blue said.

  “The wimpy one does raise a good point, though,” Çrom noted. Gunton threw up his hands in frustration and turned away. “Now that the crew has abandoned ship and it looks like the rest of us might be getting out of this in one piece after all – our friend Fallen notwithstanding – we need an exit strategy. Space walk? No,” he dismissed his own thought, “Melvix will have all those buggardly prisoners to herd along. Singlehandedly.”

  Melvix sighed. “I–”

  “It’s a figure of speech. I know you have more than one–”

  “No, Captain–”

  Çrom snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Melvix, you’re a genius. Captain. Captain’s dome. There’s an executive escape capsule.”

  “There is?” Blue blurted. “You bourgeois sonofawhore.”

  “Actually,” Melvix said, “I hate to tell you this, Captain, but that is not a standard fixture on modulars, otherwise I would have mentioned it already. Yours was already installed–”

  “Sonofawhore,” Blue whispered accusingly again.

  “Hey,” Çrom protested, “if it was there before I became Captain, it’s not my fault it’s there now. It was whoever-was-Captain-before-me’s fault.”

  “We stole the A-Mod 400 right off the line,” Blue hissed. “Her paint was still wet.”

  “That’s not true,” Çrom insisted. “She was on the assembly line for reasons completely unrelated to her being brand-new or me being a bourgeois sonofawhore who wanted a private escape pod with a steam room in it. And besides, I’ve never used the capsule and I only used the steam room that one time, and if this ship doesn’t have one then it’s a waste of time even discussing this, crewmember. Stand down.”

  Blue rolled her eyes.

  “There’s a problem,” Melvix said, peering in Constable’s direction from near the farm door. He was clearly reading the panel monitors over her shoulder, even though Çrom was a good twenty paces closer and couldn’t make out a thing through the frosty air.

  “Another one? Excellent. Let’s hear it,” Çrom said, and raised a warning finger. “As long as it is not steam-room-related.”

  “The subluminal drive is going to exceed its parameters and shut down before it ever gets the Nope, Leftovers moving at the speed she’s going to need to have an impact on the rest of the ship.”

  “Of course it is,” Çrom groaned. “Because we forgot she’s still attached to half a God damned docking spar. Because we’re all idiots.”

  “Not all of us,” Melvix said mildly.

  “Okay, fine, I just finished drafting our exit strategy,” Çrom said. “We set the modular’s subluminal drive to a slow burn, get into that spar, and blow the docks behind us. The seals will come down and–”

  “Will they?” Blue Persephone asked.

  “Actually, I think it’s more than likely they have all come down already,” Melvix said. “Depending on where W’Tan hit the spar.”

  “All the better. They will have established an atmosphere in there already, just waiting for us.”

  “And how are you planning on accessing said atmosphere, when it is sealed behind emergency doors?” Melvix asked.

  “We can argue about the intricacies of the plan on the way,” Çrom said. “We’ll have plenty of time while we’re watching you looking after all those prisoners. Remember the prisoners? The prisoners you’ll be herding?”

  “Isn’t the whole AstroCorps command structure set up so we don’t argue about the intricacies of the plan?” Gunton asked.

  Çrom clapped him on the back as they headed out of the farm. “Well said, Gunton. You may avoid the label of ‘the wimpy one’ yet.”

  INTERLUDE: TIPPY GHEE (II)

  Tippy wasn’t a prodigy. He wasn’t naturally gifted in any of the subjects or activities normally associated with an up-and-comer in the field of starship piloting. He scraped through with passes, the occasional Exceeds Expectations to balance out the zeroes, and a lot of re-tests. And when he finally learned to fly, he wasn’t instantly and remarkably talented. He didn’t take to it with an unnatural proclivity, earning the respect, nay, borderline superstitious awe, of his trainers, mentors and Academy classmates.

  He didn’t sit down in a simulator and begin performing moves by pure instinct which made his instructor place a call to the specialists at High Command, with the message you’d better get down here and see this.

  He wasn’t a great pilot. He was passable, perhaps in the upper fortieth percentile … but that made him one of millions. There were lots of okay pilots out there.

  Tippy wandered from job to job, vessel to vessel. There were lots of different types of ships in the galaxy, and Tippy flew them all with the blazing mediocrity of a thousand middle-of-the-road suns. He banged a lot of ships around. He crashed two. The official count was three but he was deemed to not have been responsible for the one where the synth took over and tore a wing off because the structural damage hadn’t registered on the log due to a faulty relay.

  But that wasn’t important. A lot of pilots crashed ships. Tippy did something none of them did, and nobody noticed him doing it.

  Tippy flew his ships, mostly adequately, and he was happy the entire time.

  He was good enough to fly. And that was good enough for him.

  Tippy Ghee didn’t have any accolades to his name. No commendations, no medals of honour. He had performed some spectacular stunts in his time, and saved a lot of bacon. But what did it mean, really, to save bacon? Just flying from one place to another, and not blowing your crew up or stranding them ten thousand years from anywhere – that counted as saving their bacon, if you thought about it.

  He’d also accidentally rammed a Chrysanthemum, tried to land a modular, caused a Worldship to perform an emergency
course-change to keep from hitting him the one time he flew a warship, and he’d taken more starships to relative speed while close enough to a planet to peel the drive toruses off like orange rinds than he or any bureaucracy in the Six Species could count. But above all else, he’d flown from point A to point B, quite adequately, and had then turned around and flown from point B to point A without major crap-ups.

  And he’d been happy. Every time.

  Captain Çrom Skelliglyph had once said that the career of Tippy Ghee was like a stream medley by Lars Larouchel. You had to listen to the notes he wasn’t playing, as much as you listened to the ones he was. Only then did you realise that you were in the presence of a very special kind of genius. One you could ask to fly into Hell. You’d wind up with pieces of good intentions lodged in your airlocks and a very pissed-off Devil plastered across your primary bridge viewscreen, but Tippy Ghee would get you there with a smile.

  It never ceased to amaze Skell just how few strings he’d needed to pull to get him.

  XVIII (Meanwhile, Again)

  The ship was quieter now, the freefall tumble of her main body and the launching of the escape pods finally trumping the blatting of the basic hygiene alarms and the wandering janitorials. Plus, they’d already been in this direction a couple of times, more or less, and Çrom decided it wasn’t worth the wasted minutes to change their route in accordance with time-honoured infiltration and avoidance methods. Soon they were back down on the recycling level and working their way around to the sealed cabins.

  “Right,” Çrom said, when they stopped at the first door that Melvix estimated should open on the secure area. It didn’t look any different from this side, but he could see where the wall panels had been replaced and were slightly open at the seams. There would be metaflux plating underneath – a near-certain hunch that he idly confirmed by tugging at a panel near the door frame. Hey, it never hurt to check. They might have been as lazy about this as they had been with everything else on this ugly, ugly ship. “Door’s locked, obviously.”

  “Should be simple enough to find the command clearance,” Blue said, stepping up and leaning over the access panel. “These are cells, and cells are meant to be difficult to open from the outside, but only impossible from the inside.”

  “You’d know, Blue,” Gunton said in a tone of fond reminiscence.

  “I didn’t hear you complaining,” Blue grinned and glanced sidelong at Gunton, the delicate red wings of her ears dipping and then flaring deliberately. She brought three hands up to the panel and worked at furious speed for a few seconds. “Captain,” she said.

  “If you’re thinking they didn’t bother customising this ship since they acquired it, and you want the default executive override codes for standard modulars, just let me know when you want me to enter them,” Çrom said.

  “Captain,” Blue said, her tone chiding. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “With my life, Persephone,” Çrom said extravagantly. “But sooner or later this mission will be over, and you’ll be off into the grey with the Holy Grail of thieves who like to rip off lazy, incompetent AstroCorps crews.”

  “AstroCorps pays me to rip off their lazy and incompetent,” Blue retorted, her fingers still a blur. “It helps thin out their numbers.”

  “Some of my best friends are lazy and incompetent.”

  “Why am I not surprised…” Blue murmured, “…but fine … enter it now,” she leaned back from the panel.

  Çrom stepped up, studied the mechanism for a moment, then tapped it five times. “There you go.”

  “Are you serious?” Blue squinted. “That’s the Holy Grail of thieves who like to rip off lazy, incompetent AstroCorps crews? That’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his–”

  “It’s a default code,” Çrom said. “How complex do you want it to be?” he examined his fingernails. “It is, however, dependent on the AstroCorps Modular Payload database,” he went on, “and is keyed to executive officer DNA from the record, synchronised every time the ship runs into a synth or docks with an official vehicle of the Corps. It won’t do you any good until you make Captain. Which, last time I checked, might be a long wait for you.”

  “You’re hilarious,” Blue grunted, and resumed tapping at the panel.

  “Handsome, too,” Çrom agreed.

  The door opened to reveal twelve – no, fifteen – humans scattered around what looked like a grid of four crew cabins with the interior walls removed. It was a wide-open space with beds in the middle, but nowhere had been out of range of the exploding recyc’ chutes. There had only been four chutes – one for each renovated cabin – but this part of the crew quarters was very close indeed to the recycling plant.

  “You poor, stinking sons of bitches,” Constable said.

  The humans displayed a variety of light chemical burns, and a whole lot of nausea and the other delightful things that happened when you got sprayed with rancid acidic sewage. Even without this coating of misery, they were clearly prisoners.

  “Good Lord, what have these monsters done to you?” Çrom exclaimed in outrage. Melvix picked at the hole Nak Dool had gored in his shirt, the Molran equivalent of choking on laughter. “Come on, my friends. Captain Çrom Skelliglyph of the A-Mod 400. We’re getting you out of here.”

  The prisoners didn’t argue, and none of them seemed too badly injured to need help as they shuffled out. One of them, a tangle-haired woman in the stained remains of an AstroCorps Sciences uniform, stopped at Çrom’s side in the doorway.

  “They made us eat Fergunakil,” she said.

  “Us too,” Çrom said sympathetically.

  “Too much oil,” Blue remarked.

  “To the dock,” Çrom said, “the clock is ticking and the subluminal drive is approaching parameter-breach as we speak. Melvix, this is everyone. Everyone, Melvix.”

  “You’re determined to make these people my responsibility,” Melvix said, “aren’t you?”

  “These people are my responsibility,” Çrom said, squinting nobly into the middle-distance because it seemed the appropriate thing to squint nobly into at that particular moment. He turned, smiled, and patted Melvix on the upper shoulders. “It’s called delegating.”

  Staying on the same level, they herded the retching, stumbling, unspeakably stank-up prisoners through the ship and back to the docking area. Çrom made a brief and low-pressure attempt to question them, and managed to establish that they’d been aboard a small non-Corps private transport from Aquilar to a variety of somewhere-elses. The transport had been too badly damaged to integrate into the Black Honey Wings, and too big to dock internally, but the prisoners were unaware of what had happened to her. Çrom guessed that she, and her official crew, had been left in deep space to die.

  Clearly, Dool and his little army had been trying to figure out whether their prisoners were worth anything to anyone.

  The Corps Sci woman – not technically full-Corps, but Academy trained and evidently graduated from at least some preliminary compulsory units before moving into whatever balloon-head specialty stream she’d chosen – was named Marley Gazzoon. She was the only remotely non-civilian prisoner in the bunch as far as Çrom could make out through the sludge and the hunching, but even she was shocked at the treatment they’d endured. She seemed to have come into space thinking it would be nice. Like living in the sky, only darker.

  Gazzoon did, however, have a good idea for blowing the docks and separating the Nope, Leftovers from the remains of the Chrys spar. It would also, with any luck, deal with the issue of the emergency atmosphere seals.

  “These sections,” she pointed as they passed by, “have been converted into additional security barriers. Shut down boarders from the opposite dock, have a clear space to … to shoot them.”

  “I remember thinking the same thing,” Çrom agreed. “Unfortunately they took all the guns with them when they abandoned ship,” he looked down. “Apart from the guns we took,” he added, “and none of them are big enough to blast thi
s modular off her spar.”

  “But they used hull plating,” Gazzoon pointed, “with its backing layers removed to make it easier to cut and fix in place.”

  “Yes,” Çrom said, then stopped. “Yes.”

  “Captain?” Melvix said.

  “Look at it, Melvix,” Çrom pointed. “Those murder-holes are just sheets of that reversible polymer stuff, same as the brig. With its back-plating off. Super-tough from this side, but they can shoot through from the other side,” he grinned as he saw it dawn on the Molran.

  “Loosen them in their fittings and reverse their molecular directionality, and they’ll push through the surrounding hull until the polymer overheats,” Melvix said. “And when it overheats, it shuts down.”

  “And reversing the fields will glitch the adjacent emergency seals,” Çrom added, “which will allow us to get into the spar. And when the polymer shuts down, best of all,” he concluded, “it’ll do so right down in the guts of the docking mechanism where it will definitely set off the emergency disengagement charges, and close the seals behind us again.”

  “Provided they haven’t taken the initiative of reconfiguring a single one of those systems you just mentioned,” Blue said.

  Çrom grinned. “Only one way to find out.”

  XVIII (Meanwhile)

  Four well-spaced bolts of the howling grey Damorakind fire2 hammered away the dock shielding, the cargo doors, a scattering of equipment and vehicles inside the dock, and – most likely – crippled the Black Honey Wings’s subluminal engines. The shattered starship lost all semblance of drive thrust and began to slowly turn and coast under her existing impetus, so it seemed like a reasonable bet.

  W’Tan was fairly sure she saw the wreckage of the Fergunakil clipper in between the third and fourth blasts, scattering out into space amidst the rest of the cargo and debris. Things were moving fast, however, and the shattered remnants all looked fairly similar as they turned and winked in the minimal light offered by two embattled starships in deep space.