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

  She assumed that Barducci had gotten what they needed from the clipper and had moved on out of the hold before her assault, but timing was critical and she had to focus on her own part of the fight. There were upwards of three hundred and fifty people on board her ship that she needed to keep alive. She still intended to lodge an official executive lower-levels reprimand for the record, though. As XO, she should have been informed of a fast-clipper rendezvous. And not just because it might have made her responses to later events more effective and relevant – there were any number of security and procedural considerations involved in AstroCorps interactions with agents of the Fergunak.

  Of course, Skelliglyph knew this perfectly well, which was probably why he hadn’t told her.

  W’Tan turned her attention towards the apparently-runaway modular. She’d broken dock in a shower of habitat debris and other clutter, and was listing – slowly, but with gathering momentum – towards the main body of the Black Honey Wings. The docking spar, or at least the far end of the Black Honey Wings’s hull that the A-Mod 400 had already severed in her initial attack after undocking, was spinning slowly away from the combat volume.

  “Any contacts, Mister Segunda?”

  “Only some maintenance-channel pings for Tippy, Acting Captain,” Stana Pae Segunda replied. “Providence already passed them on to the lander. Apparently the Nope, Leftovers launched escape pods a short while back. Tippy’s going to take care of them.”

  “Any sign that the Black Honey Wings is preparing to launch escape pods of her own?” W’Tan asked.

  “No, Acting Captain,” Krader reported. “It seems likely that the modular section housed a lot of the less military crew, who were under orders to evacuate,” or just not under any orders to the contrary, W’Tan thought. “The crew on the main body are more likely to know how this ends.”

  “Let’s hit the pod bays on our next sweep anyway,” she decided, and the A-Mod 400 swept around the crippled bulk of the enemy starship, “and remove it from their list of available alternatives.”

  “Bays will be in range of the big guns if we sweep back towards the end of the spar, Acting Captain,” Ruel reported from the secondary bridge. “But that will take us into the path of that modular.”

  “Hit them with guided torpedoes,” W’Tan said.

  “Copy, Acting Captain,” Krader said. “Six ought to do it, but I’ll make it ten just in case they still have some interference to run.”

  “Very good, Acting Chief Tactical Officer. Then take us out of range of the collision,” she said, tapping at her console. “It is likely to detonate both halves of the ship, provided our infiltration teams have released the correct safeguards.”

  “This new heading is…” San Genevieve frowned. “You want us between the collision-point and that loose piece of spar? We’ll still be in potential debris range. Acting Captain.”

  “I am aware of that, helmsman,” W’Tan said. “Launch a spread of impact charges when we are in position, and prepare for numerous small contacts and hull damage. The charges will only break up the larger pieces. Mister Krader, please also be on alert for any large debris that gets through the spread.”

  “Copy, Acting Captain,” Krader said. “Torpedoes away, doesn’t look like they have much in the way of – wait, yes, they’ve launched a spread of their own but they seem to be wildly off-target.”

  “Of course they are, Mister Krader,” W’Tan said. “Their ship is in freefall and the impact charges won’t know whether they’re supposed to stop the torpedoes or the modular. With any luck, they won’t stop either.”

  “Taking us around the ship and out of the primary impact zone, Acting Captain,” San Genevieve announced.

  Gratifyingly, even though clearly none of them had any idea why she wasn’t moving them farther out or at least getting the bulk of the Black Honey Wings’s docking spar between the explosion and their ship, the crew didn’t ask any more stupid questions. There were no further hostilities from the dying starship, and when the Nope, Leftovers shouldered through the desperate spread of impact charges a minute or so later they shredded the front curve of her hull but otherwise did nothing to slow her down. By then, although the A-Mod 400’s crew couldn’t see the detonations, the torpedo hits were clearly visible reflected off the assortment of junk floating around the Black Honey Wings. If the enemy crewmembers had been intending to take the pods to temporary safety or a lingering death from exposure, the option was now off the table.

  Another minute or so after that, the Nope, Leftovers smashed into the main body of the starship.

  XVIII

  Drago was knocked off his feet when the docking bay exploded, even though he was several passages away and one level up from where he had entered the cargo hold when the A-Mod 400 began pelting the bay with mini-whorls. He scrambled upright, swore as the burned skin on the palm of his hand split, and ran on. There was smoke in this corridor and it was only a matter of time before fire-containment measures made his life even more difficult.

  He found his way by back-corridors to the Black Honey Wings’s main engineering block, not only before more decompression barriers came down but also running into just two people in the process. He pulled a piece of plain sheathing off the wall and used it to absorb the wild blast of heat from the weapon in one of the humans’ hands, then dropped the buckled composite plate and launched himself between the two crewmen. He would have liked to leave one of them conscious, if only so he could ask where everybody was, but the second blast from the heat-baton went directly into the face of the second guy just as Drago was cracking the head of the first against the wall.

  Shrugging to himself and slipping the heat-baton into his belt – with due consideration to the fact that he now had two decidedly phallic objects stuck around his waist, and that there was no way he was going to avoid a certain level of smarmy commentary – he ducked inside the engineering complex.

  Main engineering also seemed to be empty, aside from a pair of ables who attempted to apprehend him according to the security protocols built into their configurations. Their configurations also rendered them unable to do much more than punch him or attempt to grapple him to the floor, however, so it was easy enough to put them down even considering their genetically-flawless strength and agility. In this case he didn’t bother trying to leave them awake, since an able would not reveal the crew’s actions or whereabouts even under torture. He couldn’t, any more than Barducci could have recited the complete Arguments of Dicates and Fluence word for word.

  There was more shooting while he made his way through the chambers towards the transpersion core, and now the ship was really starting to rock. He couldn’t tell from here whether the Black Honey Wings had lost subluminal drive power, but he strongly suspected it was the case. That was why the A-Mod 400 had targeted the hold, after all.

  That meant they would be moving on to higher-energy-release targets, and getting ready to do serious damage. Which meant he only had a few dwindling minutes, if that, to unlock and disengage the safeguards that would allow the runaway power surges and overloads to reach critical levels.

  Fortunately, he didn’t need to get inside the core to do that. Entering a transpersion reactor was a dicey business at the best of times, and when the energy output was fluctuating – as it did in a damaged system – your chances of getting lost increased dramatically. His old Academy buddy Selby had vanished into a transpersion core maze. During an exercise. Drago himself had done better than most humans in his classes when it came to transpersion physics, but it was mostly a mystery to him. He had, however, learned a few dirty tricks.

  The safeguard controls were located on a more stable and accessible locked console on the outside of the deceptively-small core chamber, and the lock was pretty easy to break when you had some command experience and a heat-baton.

  The closest hits of all came as he was bolting back out of main engineering and away from the central regions of the vessel. It took real willpower to run in
to the part of the ship that seemed to be taking the worst beating, apparently in defiance of all self-preservation and common sense. He followed the lateral power feed in the hopes that it would take him by the shortest route to the nearest section of outer deck. The blasts hammered almost directly over his head, possibly taking out the level above, but mercifully seemed to be receding as the A-Mod 400 – presumably – peeled along the larger ship’s hull en route to another part of the battlefield. He heard and felt other impacts elsewhere, and thought they might have been torpedo hits against the life pod bays. In the unlikely event that the rest of the crew had been trying to evacuate, the torpedoes would have put a stop to it.

  The hits overhead, however, were Godfire. He suspected, aside from the months he had spent actually working inside the mini-whorl gunnery, that this was the closest he’d ever gotten to live Godfire. And it was different, when it initiated from the stockpile and surged out through the guns. It was tamer. Here, as the A-Mod 400 swept by overhead and peppered the Black Honey Wings opportunistically with blasts, it howled. One shot, just as he was sprinting out along the corridor, actually pierced the deck above and impacted right behind him.

  His ears rang with it even as the corridor opened briefly to vacuum and he was flung into the air before the emergency seal came down almost right on top of him. It was an unearthly, musical chord, the sound of the grey fire ripping a long channel right out of the universe and feeding it into unreality. It wasn’t like tortured metal or burning air or tearing flesh. It was worse, more fundamentally wrong, than all of those things.

  Reality sang as it became nothingness.

  He didn’t think he’d ever really felt it, despite what a lot of people said, when he was inside a starship that was crossing over from normal space into soft-space. Some people said they felt a turning-over sensation, or a feeling like the molecules of their bodies being frozen for a split-second in almost-synchronised sequence. He’d always assumed it was psychological. And it may well be – but when that Godfire howled into the deck behind him, he felt that sweep of coldness even before the more profound rush of heat-loss that came from the hull breach. He felt every particle in his body shiver. And he would feel it, from that moment on, every time the A-Mod 400 went superluminal.

  He stumbled and rolled into a series of side rooms just as the hammers of the emergency seals began coming down all along the corridor. The wall of the room he ended up in buckled and he charged off again, following the path of the lateral power feed in the now-sealed corridor. He flailed from room to room, more crashes and alarms and emergency seals going on all around him. Three more times he entered rooms with crewmembers – humans and ables – in them, but they were all already dead due to power surges and an assortment of ugly mechanical failures. On one such occasion there was also a Bonshoon, alive, hideously burned and struggling with a collapsed set of conduits on the far side of the room amidst the charred corpses of humans. She raised her eyes, bright blue in her blackened face, and stared at Barducci as he barrelled through. She made no attempt to apprehend him.

  Finally he fetched up against a cross-passage at the exterior of the ship, a closed seal to his right where the corridor he had been in would have opened into a T-junction. Something a few rooms behind him began to go critical. He could feel the heat baking against his back. He thought it might have been the conduits the Bonshoon woman had been wrestling with, and had evidently failed to repair. The corridor stretched left and right, dotted with windows opening on debris-strewn blackness. He’d lost his heat-baton, but by some miracle he still had the Fergunak core dangling from the side of his belt.

  He sighed. End of the road.

  Directly to his left, in a sudden and absurd manner, the battered nose of an armoured lander appeared in the middle of the corridor and a flared ruff of emergency hull-sealant plates leapt comically out around the gap, blocking off the vacuum tightly before any decompression could take place. Seals nevertheless came down on either side, trapping Drago inside the fifty-foot corridor-segment with the lightly-hissing lander.

  If he’d been standing any closer to it, he would have been impaled by shredded hull plating. He laughed.

  “God damn it, Tippy,” he said, as the lander door ground open.

  “Yell at me on the way out of here,” Tippy shouted. “We’ve got about thirty seconds before we get a modular in the face,” he paused, and eyed the Commander. “Is that a Fergie computer core in your pants, or are you just happy–”

  “Shut up.”

  XIX

  “How badly might this have gone for us if those guys hadn’t been the worst bounty hunters in the central colonies?” Skell mused.

  Drago looked into his drink. They were sitting on opposite sides of a small lounge setting inside what was apparently an executive escape pod built into the Captain’s quarters. Drago hadn’t known there was such a thing, but he had to admit it was nice. A smoked-glass-partitioned section within the pod fixture was apparently a steam room, but Çrom – to Drago’s mingled relief and regret – had not asked him if he wished to partake. The drink was more than enough for him anyway, for the moment. It was a Black Morkhus, and it was a big one. The sort of size that usually meant you wouldn’t be going back on duty for a couple of shifts.

  Not that that was going to be a problem, since Doctor Mays had given him his rest-heal-no-stress-go-home-toot-toot-olé marching orders barely an hour ago. At least he’d had time to send his report.

  “Do you think it’s reasonable to assume the Halfmoon has better bounty hunters at his disposal, and that they’re after us?” he replied to the Captain’s philosophical question. “Wouldn’t they have been here, if the throne had been able to secure their services?”

  “Well, we haven’t really been in the black for long enough for word to get out,” Skell replied. “Give us time to collect more worthy foes. Dool was clearly rash. Let the others bide their time. Meanwhile, I call this a pretty successful shakedown for the ship and crew.”

  “Shakedown.”

  “Yeah.”

  Drago sipped his Morhkus appreciatively. “Sure,” he said. “Good test of our maintenance guys and their ability to replace busted hull plating.”

  “It was for an excellent cause.”

  “It could have gone really badly for us if Dool and his buddies hadn’t been incompetent,” Drago agreed. “And it probably does pay to prepare for the possibility that there might be longer games being played behind us.”

  “As long as they’re behind us,” Skell said, as Drago had known he would.

  “Am I ever likely to find out what was on that Fergie computer core that was so important?”

  “Of course,” Çrom said in a wounded tone. He had a glass of his own in his hand – that awful Corps-issue half-malt he seemed to like. “It was orders.”

  “We take orders from the sharks now?”

  “The sort that can’t come through official AstroCorps command channels, yes.”

  “And am I ever likely to find out what those orders are?”

  “Now what could I possibly have done to make you so cynical, Brutan?” Çrom objected. Drago just looked at him flatly. “Of course you will. If you don’t want to wait until the officers’ briefing – which was mostly delayed because of your spectacular collection of owwies and boo-boos in the first place, I might add – I can tell you now. We’re headed to The Warm.”

  “The Warm,” Drago drew a blank for a moment, then frowned. “Wait, the giant alien cock-popsicle full of weird conspiracy loons and researchers and hippies?”

  “There’s also a large Fergunakil population there,” Skell said, “where apparently we will get another set of orders. And before you complain about how convoluted it all is, we’re also meeting up with a Fleet contact and probably also taking on some more crew.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Maybe. Sure as heck isn’t anyone I know, though. Mostly below-deck types. This stopover will also more or less obligate me to fulfil a p
romise I made before we left Aquilar,” he added, “which I’m not particularly happy about,” Drago looked at him quizzically. “Let’s just say someone did me a favour while I was recruiting on the Big A, and I wasn’t expecting to be put in a position where I would be required to repay that debt.”

  “And you’re sore because you feel obscurely cheated by a universe where you can’t foresee the direction and velocity of every subatomic particle from now until the end of time,” Drago summarised.

  “Don’t you?” Skell replied. “Ah well, I guess we’ll see when we get there. Always need some extra hands, and we didn’t exactly cruise out of Pestoria Geo with a bursting crew compliment. Can’t crew a ship entirely with ables, you know.”

  “It’s never been adequately explained to me why not,” Drago remarked.

  Çrom sipped his drink. “I think the prevailing opinion is that if we start using ables to do too much of the challenging stuff, the entire human race will just collapse onto the nearest planet and begin throwing poop and masturbating furiously,” he said, “although the numbers on that may have been skewed by too many Molren being asked. Still, you have to admit that if we all just sat back and let the clones go out and swashbuckle their way around the galaxy, it’d be embarrassing. And the Molren would never let us hear the – hey, isn’t that against doctor’s orders?”

  Barducci had pulled out his organiser. “I’m just taking another look at the new manifest,” he said, “those strays you brought aboard.”

  “Oh, right,” Skell grinned. “Nice enough bunch, once they’d had a wash.”

  “Mm,” Drago swiped through the list. “And they weren’t the original owners of the Nope, Leftovers?”

  “No,” Skell replied. “The ship seemed to have been commissioned and put together mostly-legitimately. While Dool’s crew did take the prisoners under pretty dubious circumstances, it was more opportunistic-acquisition and proactive-salvage than outright piracy. The Nope, Leftovers had been part of the Black Honey Wings long before the prisoners were brought aboard. There won’t be any lasting legal repercussions about us crashing them into each other.”