Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Read online

  “‘Wow’?” Clue said.

  “Uh, yeah,” Decay shook his broad, flat-topped head. “The whole thing used to run off this drag-loop system, really big engineering stuff, probably why they have so many engineers on deck. They weren’t motorised, the whole thing was riding the trough behind the tidal surge. And being pulled along by sub-stations on the wave itself,” he whistled through his teeth. “They were being towed, partially, on thousand-mile-long hawsers and drawing power from the wind and waves.”

  “I’m hearing a lot of past tense.”

  “Yes,” Decay said, “most of the settlement is gone, along with all but minimal generator power. The motion infrastructure has been demolished. They’re drifting.”

  “Uh huh,” Z-Lin took a wild guess at where this assessment was heading. “And how long until the wave comes back around and wipes them the rest of the way off the surface of the planet?”

  “Oh, that’s not an issue,” Decay said, “it’s not going to arrive for another six weeks. They’re just lucky this planet’s days are longer than its months, or they would have been gone already. Anyway, they will have run out of power and sunk by then. They have no capacity to evacuate or alter course to the nearest body of land even if that land wasn’t going to be submerged by about a mile and a half of water the next time the moon swings around.”

  “So they’ll sink in … ?”

  “Four days, shipboard time,” Decay reported. “Maybe five. Maybe significantly less.”

  “Don’t they have any evacuation craft at all?” Zeegon demanded.

  “That’s sort of the other issue,” Decay said, “and why they might not last long enough to drown. The manifest does show some small craft, but they’re all way too small. The huge school of Fergunak following the settlement would tear them to pieces – the way they seem to be tearing the settlement to pieces right now, from the outside in.”

  Zeegon drew in a sharp, whistling breath. Sally cursed.

  “I take it back,” Z-Lin said fervently. “Their Gods really are crap.”

  SALLY

  “…were teamed up with a group of marine biologists and habitat designers,” Acting Consul Harga Choyle was saying when Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed looked up from her console to see Waffa stepping onto the bridge. “The usual dynamic, really. They were out there, doing whatever Fergunak do. They had a bunch of different schools across the planet – even a couple on Chote. That’s the moon.”

  “I got your alert,” said Waffa, tapping away at his wristwatch, most likely checking workstation readouts he’d fed through there. “Something about a logistics–” Clue raised a hand quickly to wave the Chief of Security and Operations to silence. He nodded, stepped up to Zeegon’s side and stood looking out on the roiling planet far below.

  “We didn’t keep track,” Choyle continued on the communicator, “these were aquatic habitats with only small settlements, so the Fergunak had autonomy. We were only ever in contact with this school, the … what were they called?” his voice muffled for a moment as he fumbled with unfamiliar equipment and conferred with another settler, “…the Larger Dark Moving Below. They seemed okay. You know, for Fergies.”

  “And then you suffered your … disaster,” Z-Lin said, pushing as tastefully as possible for details but not mincing her words. Any event that reduced a settlement from almost eleven hundred people to twenty-seven was a disaster, simple as that. Sally didn’t envy her the Commander’s console. “When was this?”

  “About a week ago, give or take,” Acting Consul Choyle said, “it’s difficult to jibe the local time with the Corps standard calendar, because of the cycles of … anyway, it was about a week ago. Seems like longer. We were hit, and hit hard, and without warning,” Choyle went on, “and I might as well tell you, Commander Clue, we really have very little information on what took place. Most of us left alive are only here because we were on deep maintenance, or otherwise cut off from the settlement. The bulk of the flotilla was gone when we regrouped, along with most of our monitoring gear.”

  You could tell you were dealing with a non-human, Sally reflected, because only a non-human could utter the words ‘Commander Clue’ without missing a beat. “Ask him how many Fergies,” she suggested to Z-Lin in a low voice, “and what they’re doing – where they’re focussing their attacks,” Waffa gave her a nod. He had a certain amount of experience with Fergunak.

  “There’s about three thousand adults in the Larger Dark Moving Below school, although their numbers may have been augmented by now from other schools,” Choyle replied when Clue passed this on. “They’re gathered in force on the wavewards boundary of the settlement. They come in with groups of between twenty and a hundred, all of them swimming bare so far, and are focussing their attacks on the main residential block. If that goes down, it will drag the rest of us under with it. The block is deserted now – we are trying to sever the connection between that part of the flotilla and the hub where we’re all currently gathered, but … you understand, it is exposed work, on open water. The Fergunak have killed seven of us in various attempts to cut the gantries. The last three humans among us perished on the final attempt,” he concluded, in an odd mixture of apology and praise. He had no doubt recognised their potential rescuers as human from the Commander’s single-chord voice.

  “A thought occurs,” Sally said when Acting Consul Choyle fell silent, and Waffa and Z-Lin turned to look at the Chief Tactical Officer. Sally reached out and curled her hands expressively around the Tramp’s ordnance control columns.

  “No,” Clue shook her head. “We can pick up the settlers from the hub and fly away without murdering anyone, so we’re going to do it that way.”

  “Fine,” Sally grumbled good-naturedly. “If the sharks come up into orbit behind us in those torpedoes of theirs, don’t come running to me.”

  “I won’t,” Z-Lin replied. “I’ll sit right here and say ‘Sally, murder those torpedoes’. Because you are Chief Tactical Officer.”

  “Why are they doing it?” Waffa mused, apparently more to himself than to the bridge at large. When Sally glanced at him questioningly, he clarified. “I mean, is it just a matter of going for the throat because the settlers are weak?”

  Sally frowned. The Fergunak were a species of enormous, frighteningly savage, paradoxically-technologically-advanced sharks originating from somewhere in the Core, where they had survived eradication by Damorakind by the simple expedient of siding with them and committing atrocity after atrocity, obscenity after obscenity, for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. They had also scattered out into the galaxy, however, and formed an uneasy alliance with the Molran Fleet at about the same lost-in-the-mists-of-time period as the aki’Drednanth alliance. It was all ancient history and more or less irrelevant, as far as Sally was concerned. The main point was that with the Molren, a large population of Fergunak had escaped the Core and eagerly – some might say pestilentially – settled the oceans of most planets discovered thereafter.

  Peace was a tentative thing, while swimming – for the most part – had become an amusing historical footnote.

  “Has there been any indication that their ongoing assault is related to the attack your settlement suffered?” Clue asked. “Were they perhaps responsible for it in the first place?”

  “The Fergunak have been hit too,” Acting Consul Choyle replied. “They’ve lost most of their tech enhancements, machinery, weapons, or they would have been through here long since. They’re just circling now, picking off maintenance crews, wearing down our ammunition and defences, sending us creepy messages…”

  “Why hadn’t they attacked you before now, when they were at full strength?”

  “The same reason Fergunak hold back from attacking anyone, I suppose,” Choyle said with a hint of understandable bitterness. “We were fully operational, allied into their gridnet, the charter was still worth the flimsy it was printed on and the Fergies thought our friends were stronger than their friends.”

  “Sally,” Clue
said, “start drafting airlift and extraction scenarios using one or two landers.”

  “Already on it,” Sally said firmly.

  “Decay, take a more detailed look at that crew and equipment manifest. Feed it into Sally’s plans and let’s think about how much of the settlement’s equipment we can salvage.”

  “Are the rest of us going to think about who the Fergunak have decided their stronger-than-us friends are?” Zeegon asked.

  “I don’t think any of us need to think about that,” Clue said, “do we, Mister Pendraegg?”

  “I guess not,” Zeegon muttered. “Fuck.”

  In just over an hour the Tramp had descended from the maximum subluminal cruising velocity she’d dropped into from relative, was locked into a geosynchronous orbit above the remains of Bayn Balro, and Sally was headed for the lander bay with Z-Lin, Zeegon, Waffa and Decay.

  “Have you done anything with lander 3’s controls?” the towering Blaran was asking.

  “No, they’re vanilla,” Zeegon said, “but 3’s still up on blocks with that weird drive thing.”

  “‘Weird drive thing’,” Decay repeated. “Didn’t you fix the weird drive thing?”

  “No, that was the weird heat-shield-deployment thing,” the helmsman replied. “When I fixed that, the weird drive thing started to happen. Seriously though, you’ll be fine with lander 1. It’s just got steering columns as well as a touch interface. You’ll probably find it easier to fly than the standard layout. It’s practically designed to be operated with four hands.”

  “It’s thick, stormy marine atmosphere down there,” Decay said in exasperation “and I’m not a pilot.”

  Zeegon shrugged. “Who is?”

  “Guys,” Waffa said, “it doesn’t matter anyway,” he raised his hand and tapped his watch. “Pretty much all of it will be automated, you’re just there to make sure everyone gets on board safely.”

  “And take out any Fergunak that happen to get in close,” Clue added, most likely for Sally’s benefit. “But since we’ll be landing on the hub roof in turns, it seems unlikely.”

  “How many turns are we going to have to take?” Sally asked, checking her weapons coolly and pretending she hadn’t just heard Z-Lin tell them they’d be landing on the roof.

  “Each lander has seats and straps for twelve people, including the pilot,” Z-Lin replied, consulting her pad, “and with five of us on each one that leaves space for seven passengers on each trip, which means two trips each to get all twenty-seven of them,” she looked up. “Leaving the rover docks empty should give us the space we need to either bring up equipment or personal possessions, or additional people if it looks like an emergency. We could probably get the whole lot in one trip if we squeezed, without overloading the engines.”

  Five red-uniformed eejits, slack-faced and square-shouldered, were waiting for them at the lander bay. Contro was there too, chatting happily with one of the impassive clones.

  “…and that’s when I came up with the jingle ‘zolo premium roast keeps you at your post, but beans on toast is yum the most’!” the nuclear transpersion physicist was saying. The eejit just looked at him vacantly. “I think I’ll send it off to the beans people when we get to a bigger settlement! Or maybe to the zolo people, I don’t know if there are beans people! Hello all!”

  The five eejits Clue had commandeered were part of the Tramp’s fairly extensive stock that were unqualified to actually perform the tasks for which they had been printed due to configuration failure, but were relatively psychologically stable and capable of following simple instructions. Search, load and rescue were at the top end of their capabilities but as long as they were left with simple tasks and not forced into a position where they had to improvise, they ought to be more help than hindrance.

  “Hey there, Chief,” Sally greeted Contro in idle puzzlement before Waffa could take the conversational reins and begin confusing the poor fellow, “what’s up?”

  “Nothing!” Contro replied merrily. “Why? Is something the matter?”

  “Nope,” Sally said, keeping it simple. “We were just wondering what brings you out of main engineering.”

  “Well, it’s right next door! And Sleepy here said we were needed at the landers,” Contro explained, pointing the eejit he’d been telling about his beans on toast jingle. Sleepy didn’t look particularly sleepy – in fact he looked about as awake as eejits generally did, which wasn’t saying much. “I was just talking with him and he said we were meant to come out here.”

  “He was talking about him and his colleagues,” Z-Lin, always ready to err on the side of believing Contro was capable of coherent linear reasoning, explained despite both Sally and Waffa making subtle gestures indicating that she should give up. “The request didn’t refer to you as well.”

  “Oh! Righto! It’s just that when he said ‘we’, I assumed–”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Decay said smoothly, “it’s good that you came anyway, we needed you,” the four humans on the rescue party glanced at the Blaran in surprise, but unanimously kept quiet and waited to see where he was heading with it. “We’ve got twenty-seven Bonshooni coming up,” he went on, drawing Contro aside with a conspiratorial lower left hand on the Chief Engineer’s shoulder, “and the Commander was thinking we’ll need you to rearrange a few of your quarters into a bit of a Bonshoon hotel for them.”

  General Moral Decay (Alcohol), Sally thought admiringly, you diabolical son of a whore. She glanced at Z-Lin, and the Commander returned her look blandly. She evidently had no intention of intervening. Whether or not Contro’s Bonshoon hotel would be a disaster, of course, was another matter.

  “Do you think you can sort that out?” the Blaran asked. “Your rooms are the nicest and these poor fellows have been through a lot. Quite a few of them are kids.”

  Sally might personally not have overdone it quite so much, but of course with Contro you couldn’t really overdo it. “Of course!” Contro beamed. “Very happy to help!”

  “And we’re sure it’s only Bonshooni left?” Sally asked.

  “Well, like Choyle said, the last humans were apparently killed trying to prevent the Fergunak from sinking the settlement entirely,” Z-Lin said, “and there were a couple of hundred Blaren but they all died in the whatever-it-was. The rest are all marine biologists and hydro engineers and stuff, all Bonshooni.”

  “I don’t suppose they have a spare medic who wants to go out and see the galaxy?” Waffa asked. “So we can put our albino psychopath back in the brig … or ideally just drop his skinny carcass in the sea for the sharks?”

  Contro laughed. “Aw, but they might eat him!”

  “I’d be okay with that,” Waffa allowed. “I’d even settle for them just biting him until he was dead.”

  “No medics,” Clue said dryly, “sorry,” she turned to Zeegon. “Where’s your co-pilot?”

  “If you mean Boonie,” Zeegon replied, “I left him on the bridge. I do have a little bit of professional protocol left, you know.”

  “You left your pet weasel on the bridge,” Z-Lin summarised, “because you have a little bit of professional protocol.”

  “If you want me to go and get him–”

  “No, that’s fine,” Clue rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

  Z-Lin, Decay and the eejit Contro had been calling ‘Sleepy’ boarded one lander, and Sally, Waffa, Zeegon and the other two eejits boarded the second. Zeegon took the helm and activated the guidance systems, but insisted on taking care of a few of the procedures manually, just to practice. Once the bay was confirmed clear they sealed it, popped the docking port, and the two landers dropped silently towards the planet below.

  Sally remembered, apropos of nothing, that Sleepy had in fact been one of several batches of eejits they’d had to make after Twistlock. Waffa had told her about it verbally, as well as – probably – putting it in one of his multitude of reports for her to balance on her to-read pile. It had made an interesting anecdote, and you didn’t get many of th
em from the eejit fabrication process.

  Sleepy’s batch, as the name might suggest, had consisted of seven eejits in an attempt to make a new group of surgeons and specialists to recoup their losses and help treat some of the issues they’d had to deal with. It hadn’t been a huge success. Grumpy had been docile enough, Waffa had said, but had also been prone to seizures that eventually culminated in a fatal aneurysm, and Doc had been given his name ironically.

  Sally didn’t recognise the two in their lander, although she suspected Waffa might. All she knew was that they weren’t from Sleepy’s batch. To be fair, although they weren’t technically identical, they had genetic-level homogenised characteristics and they were clones. So unless they had distinctive jobs or memorable mannerisms – or, more usually, spectacular flaws – they were generally as interchangeable as their name tags.

  Before they hit full re-entry, Sally floated her compact frame across to the pilot’s chair.

  “I’m exercising the executive authority reserved for Chief Tactical Officer in a combat or rescue scenario aboard a semi-autonomous spacecraft,” she told Zeegon formally, “to assume control of the lander. You can look it up in the Corps regulations when we get back.”

  “You know I’m not going to,” Zeegon said cheerfully. “As far as I’m concerned, the only person with at least eight weapons strapped about her person has just decided to start back-seat driving. What do you want to do, Sal?”

  “So gracefully efficient,” Sally approved, and used the momentum from clapping Zeegon affectionately on the shoulder to propel herself back towards her seat. “Waffa, tell Decay to take the first pass,” she continued firmly, strapping herself in. “Zeeg, take us down over those gantries the Consul was talking about. The ones connecting the hub to the part of the settlement the Fergies are trying to sink. We’re going to cut that habitat loose, buy us some more time.”