Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 19

  Drago nodded. As if legal repercussions were something that bothered Çrom Skelliglyph. Ever.

  Most of the newcomers were civilians, although there were a couple of non-Corps military and varying shades of Corps Sci grey in there. Many of them had actually considered themselves more passengers than prisoners, using the Black Honey Wings as a transport and seemingly not aware that Nak Dool had changed the terms of their agreement. They’d happily signed off on the Noro’s secret op in return for getting where they were going quietly. They didn’t appear too fussed about how long it took, or even that it might never have happened at all under Captain Dool.

  These sorts of things weren’t uncommon.

  “So we’re a taxi service,” he concluded.

  “Yeah,” Çrom grunted. “Comes with the territory when you’re running a modular. Cargo, personnel, occasional muscle-flexing on dumbler borders…”

  “Illustrious.”

  Skell grinned. “Next time steal something bigger.”

  Drago gave a dutiful chuckle. “You know how easily we could’ve taken the Black Honey Wings?” he pointed out, still reading the manifest.

  “Brute. I wouldn’t be seen dead on a ship that ugly.”

  There had been some debate as to whether or not the prisoners should share the fate of the rest of the Black Honey Wings crew, but they really did seem to have no idea of Dool’s mission. Easy enough to establish with a bit of gentle cross-examination and a look at some of the logs Segunda and the team had managed to chip out of the Black Honey Wings’s computer before the ship was finally destroyed. There wasn’t much, but what there was would have been difficult to fake and way beyond the expertise – not to mention the procedural intricacy – of Dool’s clowns.

  In the end, although Drago still wanted to have a chat with a few of them, he was quite satisfied that there were no double-blind infiltrator bounty hunters among them. He was reasonably sure that these poor schlubs were nothing more than what they seemed – schlubs.

  “Military, military, medical – nice, xenosurgeon – medical … what the Hell is a horticultural mood analyst?”

  “Damned if I know,” Skell replied. “The lead analyst – there are three of them – is a fellow named … Marsden? Mandon?” he pulled out his own pad, consulted the list, tapped it. “This guy. Mandon Muir. He said they were on their way to Gordon’s Crater.”

  “We’re not travelling anywhere near Gordon’s Crater,” Barducci said. “Unless our new Fergunakil overlords tell us to.”

  “Now now. Anyway, since their alternative was to wait in that barely-airtight spar segment wondering if AstroCorps Rep and Rec was going to get to them before the Fergies – or if neither of the above would come at all – I guess they’re not too fussed about the fact that they’re unlikely to get to Gordon’s Crater anytime soon. It’s not like Dool was getting them anywhere either, and he had them sleeping in a room with a dozen close friends.”

  “I also suspect they don’t know where they are or where Gordon’s Crater is,” Drago smiled forbearingly. “I didn’t get more than a look at them all when we came aboard, but I’m pretty sure from this report that they’re dosing with something. I know the signs. I just haven’t figured out what their poison is yet.”

  “No contraband in their luggage?” Skell raised his eyebrows. “Nothing of a ‘happy horticulture’ nature?”

  Drago shook his head. “What luggage?”

  “Right. Darn shame,” Çrom chuckled, then lowered the pad. “On a scale of one to Numb,” he asked seriously, “how much bad shit are you leaving between the lines here in order to spare me the dreadful burden of guilt?”

  Drago realised Çrom must be reading his report. “Well, we got out of it with one more Gunton this time around,” he said, and regretted the attempt at dark humour when he heard how bleak his voice had gone. “Six,” he limited himself to concluding in reply to the Captain’s question, before the part of him that still wondered if the second Noro bucky had been pregnant – he hadn’t mentioned that on the official record – compelled him to add, “maybe seven.”

  “Not bad for our first major engagement,” Skell said enthusiastically, seeming to forget the ‘Gunton’ quip as soon as it had been said. “Not counting our launch, I mean.”

  “You don’t need to sound so happy about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Çrom said, seeming genuinely contrite. He looked down at his pad. “I’m sorry, Brute.”

  “I’m not going to be around to protect you from this mission forever, Skell.”

  “Are you kidding? Brute, you’ll bury us all,” Çrom thumped the arm of his couch. “Lord knows I’m not going to do my own shovelling,” he grew sober again. “Seriously, Drago. I won’t say this is as bad as it’s going to get. You remember what happened last time I said things couldn’t get any worse.”

  “Things got worse.”

  Çrom pointed at him with his drink-hand, sloshing the nasty whiskey a little. “Correct. But I will say, when things do get as bad as they’re going to get, when we’re there on the big razor blade of the universe, dancing while the toes fly, it’s going to be you and me. To the end, Brute.”

  “Yeah,” Drago drumbled.

  Skell leaned forward and pointed at him again, quite intently. “Yeah.”

  “How about you? How’d you go?”

  “Oh, you know. I got off surprisingly easily.”

  Drago smiled sadly. “Only had to shoot four people?”

  Skell raised his glass.

  Malachi’s Gambit

  I

  Once, in the year of the Six Species 1751, there was a war that occurred between just four starships.

  Lost in the dark, the four ships faced one another and did bloody battle, spilling their valiant life blood into the icy black. And because it was a war, there were no victors.

  Only survivors.

  The trading freighter Linda Gazmouth, and the mercenary protection cruiser Rotten Ivan, were travelling from their home base in the Aquilar system to the independent dominion of Chalcedony. There, they would pick up refined materials from the mining systems to return to the shipyards of the Aquilaran Empire.

  It was a stable and comfortable and above all lucrative arrangement that they’d been conducting for almost five decades, ever since the Linda Gazmouth had changed hands in the chaotic wake of the Mayhem incident and the Rotten Ivan had joined her in the frontier territory of Aquilar’s outer settlements, looking to pick up a sheen of legitimacy. Perhaps even redemption for her crew’s unspoken past. It might have been a tall order but stranger things had happened.

  The Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan were slightly shady, it was true, but they were ultimately legally-recognised traders. In the mid-Eighteenth Century YM,3 a trade and transport chitty to the Aquilar system was a beacon of civilisation in a wild and lawless galaxy. The sanction of the Emperor was a figurative certificate of noble standing, even if none of the crewmembers of either ship would ever be precisely welcomed in high Aquilaran society. Their work was honest, even if some of their routes delved deep into the writ’s fine print and their self-defence methods danced between pragmatism and utter brutality. The Empire was willing to turn a lot of blind eyes in the interests of getting materials out of Chalcedony.

  They were tough, experienced, and quite cold-blooded, and they really didn’t stand a chance.

  The third ship was the Flesh Eater, Captained by Kitander ‘Bluothesh’4 Po Chane. Po Chane and his crew were Blaren, a particularly ruthless clan of the criminal Molranoid subspecies, highly dangerous and – owing to the fact that the Flesh Eater and her crew were new in the volume where they encountered the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan – practically unknown. In deep space, where almost everything was dangerous,5 there were few things as threatening as an enemy you knew nothing about. The mercenary crew of the Rotten Ivan were accustomed to dealing with the raiders and corsairs and opportunists on the road from Aquilar to Chalcedony and back, but Po Chane was something
new. And his ship, the Flesh Eater, was … extraordinary.

  Under normal circumstances the encounter would have been a simple assault. A crew of dangerous Blaran pirates hitting an unsuspecting and outgunned trading convoy and taking their cargo, killing their crew and appropriating their vessels, or at least stripping down what was left of them for spare parts. It happened a lot, in the secret silence between the stars. It usually went unpunished. It frequently went unnoticed. This time was uglier, of course – it always was, when the Fergunak got involved. But it still wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

  It wasn’t called an assault, however. And this was because the fourth ship involved was the AstroCorps warship Draka.

  II

  Captain Sergio Malachi sat back, swivelled in his armchair and slung his feet up on the padded arm. The armchair was one of the few pieces of personal property he’d brought with him on their current tour. It was old and squashy and smelled faintly of the caffeine-tweaked karanka leaf that he’d smoked as an Academy student. The sweet, musty smell of the civilian-legal but mildly-Corps-contraband karanka would, he knew after almost twenty years of star-hopping, never leave the chair’s padding.

  He opened the bottle of non-alcoholic cider and settled back to watch the parrot.

  The glossy, colourful thing clicked industriously across the table, sweeping the surface behind it with iridescent tail feathers. It reached out, picked up the wafer of choolong, and munched it with a scatter of crumbs. Balancing on one gleaming claw and holding the wafer in the other, it worked its beak and rough grey tongue in a grinding motion. Beady eyes gleamed.

  Sergio sipped his drink and raised the bottle in salute. The parrot raised the remains of its wafer in a mirroring gesture.

  “It’s very good,” Sergio congratulated his friend.

  “Isn’t it?” the parrot said in a rich, modulated voice. Sergio smiled against the neck of his bottle.

  Of course, to call Alpha Drakamod his friend was probably stretching things. Sergio had swum with the monstrous fish, without any primary defensive measures in place, and was still alive. That might be as much due to the extreme nature of the secondary defensive measures, however – secondary defensive measures such as the ship’s crew being ready to vent Drakamod into space as soon as she took her first bite – as it was a sign of any sort of affection Drakamod felt for the human. In fact, that was certainly the case. Fergunak did not feel affection, not in any way analogous to human emotion. Still, it was something. Their relationship, however you wanted to characterise it, was a rare thing between humans and Fergunak.

  Technically, Sergio was aware, Fergunakil females occupied a different hierarchy in their schools, and while they were critically important they were unable to become alphas. The Draka’s little school of Fergunak, however, was slightly unusual – and Drakamod was their alpha. It was, she said, not unheard-of, especially among the tiny, insular schools that developed on board AstroCorps warships. There were only five hundred Fergunak on board the Draka, scarcely a school at all by the standards of the wider species, but the sociocultural drive to form a cohesive unit, delineated by starship of residence, was strong.

  Sergio took another drink while the parrot, actually a sophisticated remote-controlled sensor-and-interface device decorated with a mass of synthetic feathers, clicked back across the table and swept the new crumbs onto the floor with its tail.

  “What happens to the food you manage to actually get in your mouth?” he asked.

  “It slowly rots in the giela’s internal cavity,” Drakamod replied simply, “unless you periodically empty it out.”

  “Ah.”

  “If you would like me to install a miniature recycling system and vent the processed waste at random intervals onto the back of your uniform–”

  “No, that’s fine,” he admired the bird-that-wasn’t-really-a-bird for a few more moments, marvelling at the fine motor control and the exquisitely lifelike plumage. He could hardly believe that the intricate little machine – a giela, as the standard interface unit between Fergunakil and air-breathers was usually termed, the whole, writ small – had been built by the cartilaginous hands of a fifty-foot cybernetically-enhanced shark. Of course, she in turn had used a variety of machine interfaces to complete the work, and most likely the specialised manipulators of a more standard AstroCorps giela which stood about chest-high to a human … but it was still quite an achievement. In fact, it was even more impressive to think that she’d built the remote-controlled machine using another remote-controlled machine than that she’d done so using her own hands. “Can you fly?” he couldn’t help asking.

  The parrot gave a raucous and gooseflesh-stimulatingly realistic squawk of amusement. “As well teach a bird to swim, little flesh.”

  Sergio chuckled. “Good point, elegantly made.”

  The warship Captain drank his cider, and the warship alpha chewed on her wafer, in companionable silence for a while. It occurred to Sergio that the truth was even stranger than the outward appearance – the parrot was not eating the choolong, but instead a giant shark at the other end of the ship was remote-controlling the little machine to look like it was, for reasons of her own that probably had little to do with entertaining the human. Drakamod herself was probably cruising silently around the exercise gyre, or maybe eating from the variety of nasty flesh-analogues the resequencer could churn out. Five hundred Fergies took a lot of feeding.

  The things we do to ease the monotony of a long relative speed jag, he reflected, watching the giela finish demolishing the wafer and resume pacing the table. Click-click-click-click … swish … click-click-click …

  “I believe, however, that I can hold a set of playing cards in one claw,” Drakamod said presently.

  “Oho,” Sergio grinned. “Are you suggesting we go in for another round of Heshtan Highwalk? I don’t know that poker’s your game, Alpha.”

  The parrot hunched its wings in a little shrug. “I’m feeling lucky.”

  “Luck doesn’t really come into it,” Sergio squinted. “Did you design some sort of sensor into that thing?”

  “No,” the giela said placidly, then added, “you can examine it if you like,” when the Captain continued to look suspicious.

  “I’d actually be curious to see whether the ability to see my cards gave you an edge in this game,” Sergio commented, “given how very severely I whupped you last time.”

  “Why don’t we make it interesting?” Drakamod suggested, giving a very good impression of flaring temper and a ruffle of her giela’s colourful feathers. “If I beat you, you will have your leg removed and you will allow me to eat it.”

  Sergio knew better than to react indignantly to this. It was pretty low-key aggression, for a Fergunakil. “I never quite got full mobility back in the last two fingers of my left hand,” he demurred, flexing the digits, “after that emergency seal malfunction. Resequencer body-parts just don’t work as well as the real thing. And besides,” he added, “too much of that sort of thing and you start to feel like you’re being replaced by a deck-clone, in instalments.”

  “I would be happy to build you a synthetic leg,” Drakamod offered. “Or perhaps you could fashion one from a piece of hardened plant-matter. It would fit your new ‘Captain of high space’ idiom, I think.”

  “You haven’t told me what I’d get if you lose,” Sergio remarked.

  “I would perform that navigational system overhaul you’ve been wanting,” the giela said.

  Sergio suppressed a smile, and looked sternly at the parrot over the lip of his bottle. “You would perform that overhaul anyway,” he said, “because it’s your job. Yes?”

  “Of course, Captain,” the parrot said crisply. “However, even in AstroCorps there is a difference between doing one’s duty and performing an exceptional service as a favour.”

  “I must say I’m disappointed–” Sergio began sardonically, when a nauseating feeling of reversal swept over him. It was like every molecule in his body had decide
d to turn around at once, somehow leaving him facing the same way on the armchair. Moreover, since not every molecule in his body had a stomach, they seemed to transfer their cumulative nausea into the molecules that made up his stomach, such that he struggled to hold his half-bottle of cider down.

  They’d come out of soft-space ahead of schedule and unprepped.

  “My regrets, Captain – we seem to have encountered an interception signal,” Drakamod said without needing to be asked, as Sergio swung his legs back around and prepared to stand – just as soon as the bottom of his gullet stopped roiling. “Single Fergunakil vessel, non-Corps, we’re receiving a greeting protocol … old, but valid.”

  “Collating data,” Charlie reported unobtrusively over the comm system.

  “Let’s go,” Sergio said, leaning forward and extending a hand to the parrot. Knowing as he did that the claws, let alone the beak, would have been designed with the capability to shear off his fingers without effort, it took some willpower to allow the machine to take hold of him.

  “I am mobilising the school,” the parrot reported.

  Sergio stood, the giela clinging firmly but not painfully to the edge of his hand, and transferred the surprisingly light device onto his grey-clad shoulder. The glossy little machine clung there, rustled its feathers slightly again, and compensated with impressive balance as Sergio rounded the armchair and strode for the door.

  It continued to hold steadily in place as he stepped onto the transport pad and let it whisk him along the deck and up onto the bridge, where he emerged beside his command station.

  “Captain on the oh for fuck’s sake, is that a parrot?”