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

  III

  XO of the Draka, Attacus Athel, knew that he was considered a born spacefarer by the rest of the crew, and he supposed it was technically a fact. Certainly he felt more comfortable in a starship than he ever had on a planet, but whether that equated to actual expertise and leadership qualities, he couldn’t say. It was just an automatic assumption on the part of his crewmates, which made his job easier but also made him feel like a bit of a fraud.

  It also didn’t prevent him from blurting things out when, for example, Malachi turned up on the bridge sporting a shoulder-parrot. This, at least, was an expected and valued characteristic of a good XO.

  Attacus’s family had lived in the black, with never more than a year or two slumming on an assortment of planets, since before the fall of Earth. When shattered humanity had crept out into the emptiness clutching the Molren’s petticoats, his ancestors had been out here. They’d been crew, denizens, of the so-called Elevator, an ancient and semi-mythical starship named the Destarion. Attacus didn’t know if this was true – he, like most of his breed, was not particularly bound up in superstition and didn’t think the past was more important than the future – but … well, he had a breed. So that much was readily verifiable.

  The Elevator People had been cast out when their legendary home had vanished into folklore before the destruction of Earth, but they had never been content to return to the zeegonai, the proverbial pretty floating stones to which the rest of Earth’s survivors flocked. They’d joined the Molran Fleet, they’d helped expand the Wild Empire to the sixty-systems-strong union it now was, and the ever-dwindling number of pure descendants remaining formed the backbone of AstroCorps.

  Attacus was glad to be on board the Draka, and not just because Sergio Malachi was an exemplary officer. The two had been best friends, all but inseparable, since their time at the Academy. Attacus could just as easily have been sitting in the Captain’s chair at this point while Sergio crossed to the secondary command console. It was the luck of the draw that had put them in this order on this tour. They were both Captains – but there could only be one on a starship, so Attacus was XO.

  He doubted, however, whether he would have embraced his role quite as enthusiastically as Sergio had on this tour.

  “Captain,” he said in a pained voice as Malachi sat down, “why do you have a parrot on your shoulder?”

  “Because it scratched me very awkwardly when I stuffed it down my pants,” Sergio replied. “How’s everyone feeling, Commander Athel?”

  “Charlie’s collecting shipwide medical reports,” Attacus replied, after a quick glance at his console. Reactions to sudden shifts from soft- to normal space could be extreme, especially in humans, but they were usually restricted to nausea, dizziness and – twelve to twenty-four hours later – mild diarrhoea. Attacus, by possible dint of his ancestry, seldom suffered ill effects from bad field collapses. He’d even been in a mild shutterflash incident as a cadet, the cruiser he was on flickering in and out of relative speed as its field fluctuated, without experiencing more than the mild nausea the Molranoid crewmembers did. Most of his fellow humans had required emergency medical attention. “Still too early to say, but there don’t seem to be too many serious reactions and we’ve already registered a full and functional duty complement.”

  “Very good.”

  “I dare say the others will make a full recovery,” Attacus went on.

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  “One or two of the most severe cases may require a yo-ho-ho,” Attacus added, “but at this stage the bottle of rum can probably be left on standby–”

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  “I assume this is Alpha’s new giela that you’ve been so secretive about,” he continued, maintaining his amused tone but shifting to a more immediately relevant line of inquiry. “Or is it purely histrionic in nature?”

  “Commander Athel,” the parrot said in Alpha Drakamod’s creepy-arse warm-and-huggy voice.

  “Zhraak have mercy,” Attacus muttered. “That’s all kinds of disturbing.”

  “What have we got, Commander?” Malachi asked.

  “Single Fergunakil gunship,” Attacus replied, “although according to comms it doesn’t have any guns, so it’s avoiding the designation on a technicality. It’s more of an emergency escape pod at this point. No peripherals, minimal navigation mostly hard-wired into the pilot. Basic life support, cobbled-together cell-powered relative drive that clearly got the vessel into this volume but burned out shortly thereafter.”

  “And a suppressor?” Malachi said. “I’m guessing that’s how we got pulled out of the drab.”

  Attacus hesitated, realising the delicacy of the situation, and the parrot spoke up again.

  “Our own Fergunakil drive control unit dropped us out of relative speed as a result of the interception, Captain,” Drakamod said through her colourful giela. “We had to do so without warning, due to the possibility of losing the signal if we followed correct protocol. The vessel is very small, and almost entirely comms-cold at this stage. I have submitted a full report and outlined the unit’s reasoning. If you wish to address the breach–”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Malachi said, sounding as relieved as Attacus felt. Naturally, it was obvious from the field-collapse readings Attacus and Charlie had assembled that they had crash-dropped out of relative speed because their own Fergies had shut their toruses down. If Attacus had been forced to level that accusation at the sharks, however, he may very well have found himself facing their oh-so-easily-riled antagonism. Drakamod’s ‘confession’ in this situation was a not-inconsiderable courtesy – and pretending it wasn’t happened to be one of the many little acts warship officers had to stage in order to preserve the peace amidst their perilously diverse crew. “I take it our becalmed friend had put out a whisker?”

  “Of sorts, Captain,” Drakamod agreed. “He appears to have assembled a relative beacon from the burned-out remains of his drive, so we received the intercept signal in soft-space in time to drop out in the correct volume. Quite ingenious. It is extremely weak, however, and has a very narrow range – which was why we had to crash-stop. Even given that he had planted himself in the middle of a known shoal-line, it is very fortunate that his signal even reached us as we passed.”

  Attacus couldn’t speak to any of that, except to concur that the Fergunakil they’d been pulled over by had been extremely lucky. He knew that Fergunakil navigators were capable of optimising relative speed jumps and speeds and trajectories by some freak of evolutionary and technological development. They could swim through the great, unimaginably-fast-moving swirl of the galaxy like … well, like fish in an ocean, and find their way from place to place more effectively than even the computer-minds of the Six Species could calculate. It made them invaluable to the Fleet and to AstroCorps, but it also left everybody somewhat uncomfortably at the mercy of the giant sharks.

  The shoal-lines were just another example of this. There were no real lanes in space, let alone the soft-space of relative speed … and yet a route from A to B, logically, tended to fall within a certain scatter-density of paths, and the Fergunakil optimisation of said path created a de facto line along which the sharks were most likely to direct the ships under their control. It was a risk, and generally frowned upon by AstroCorps and the Fleet. After all, if potential enemies could guess within a reasonable volume which part of actual interstellar space a vessel at relative speed might be passing through …

  Of course, it was more complicated than that because relative speed was by definition unreality and there was no real intersection aside from the moment of acceleration into or deceleration out of soft-space. Even so, vessels bypassing real space at superluminal speed left some kind of shadow, and they did pass through practical space-time coordinates in such a way as to allow some kinds of connection to be established. The transitory whisker-signal effect, for example, or the more substantive suppressor-field disruption that could collapse a ship’s re
lative bubble and bring her back into reality just as jarringly as the Draka had been.

  In practical terms, it was just a matter of planting a relative field suppressor along a shoal-line, and interstellar ne’er-do-wells could waylay travellers at will. This was why the Fleet and AstroCorps High Command didn’t like the habit.

  Of course, in truly practical terms what it meant was that an interstellar ne’er-do-well would find him- or herself waylaying a ship full of Fergunak, which was just a terrible idea.

  Malachi didn’t make an issue of the fact that they’d apparently been flying along a shoal-line. It wasn’t worth it, and they were charter-obligated to assist stranded ships whenever possible, no matter how staggering the Fergunak’s own disregard for their fellow fish might be.

  “Resourceful fellow,” was all the Captain said, in a mild tone.

  “I assume you’re synchronising with his interfaces and logs as we speak, Alpha?” Attacus said, keeping his own voice polite. Drakamod was, technically, the Captain of the aquatic crewmembers, who would answer only to their own kind. That she answered to the Captain was another of the necessary fictions that made up their shipboard lives, but she was at the very least Attacus’s equal in rank, and arguably Sergio’s.

  “It is done, Commander Athel,” Drakamod replied. “He is an unimportant member of a free school called the Children of the Bluothesh, and … it seems the school has undergone some sort of difficulty, and this Fergunakil was sent out as a scout – again, of sorts. A messenger? Perhaps as a living distress call, to search for aid,” she seemed uncertain, preoccupied with the unpacking of the dense cybernetic gridnet code. Charlie would not, of course, help her – only Fergunak could safely handle Fergunakil data. “He separated violently from his school and came to this place to wait for a passing vessel. Not a particularly hopeful move, but one of desperation.”

  “Well, here we are,” Sergio said. “Once you have his full data dump, I leave it up to you and your school what to do with him. Do we have an estimate of his own school’s – this Children of the Bluothesh – last known whereabouts?”

  “We have volume coordinates,” Drakamod confirmed. “They appear to be holding position on a little-known transport route from Chalcedony to the central colonies, or at least they were there a week ago and they had every intention of staying there for the immediate future. They’re new to the region, but there’s not much data about their situation. As I said, the school has undergone a misfortune of some kind and information is damaged. They are not acting alone. They may be partnered with landbound, as we are.”

  “Rogue AstroCorps ship?” Sergio asked. “Fleet Separatists? Blaran corsairs? Some dumbler group? You will let me know when my wild guesses are getting close, won’t you?”

  “Would that I could, Captain,” Drakamod said smoothly. “This information is missing from the gridnet.”

  “What about those coordinates to their last known holding position?” Attacus asked.

  “Seventeen hours from here at maximum velocity,” the giela reported. “I am transferring the data to Charlie.”

  “Routing to helm,” Charlie reported promptly.

  “Good,” Malachi said. “Seventeen hours, we’ll all be able to get a decent night’s sleep,” he looked at his Head of Science, a grim-faced Molran by the name of Alani Ka. “Those of us who sleep,” he added with a little grin, then turned back to face the helm. “Get us underway, Midkins.”

  “He means avast, me hearties,” Attacus told the helmsman helpfully.

  “You’re not funny, Commander Athel,” Sergio growled. “And anyway, avast actually means stop.”

  “‘Weigh anchor’?”

  “Better. And also shut up.”

  IV

  The Draka, two-and-a-half segmented miles of field-reinforced black dynacrete with power and transit interconnection spars, looked rather like one of the trains that had crisscrossed Earth in the old days, and in fact still did crisscross some of the smaller Six Species settlements. They weren’t as primitive now, but the general layout was unchanged and the AstroCorps warship followed the same pattern, just scaled up somewhat.

  Each segment was the size of a hive colony, albeit not as densely populated, and heavily plated in the tough hull material. Power generation, command, weapons and comms, life support and habitats, subluminal drive, relative engines, and of course the great aquatic batteries that housed the Fergunak, each segment contained multiple redundancies of all of these warship necessities, but each main function had a ‘primary’ segment which was given over in large part to said function. A warship could still sustain her crew if her primary life support segment was damaged, even achieve superluminal speed – on a limited basis – with damage to her primary relative drive segment. To truly bring her down, you had to do enough damage to enough of the functionalities and their backups.

  The secondary function redundancies in each segment were in turn weighted differently and allocated with a smaller or larger percentage of the remaining shipspace, the values carefully and near-randomly assigned to create a wide range of internal configurations so every warship to cruise out of the shipyards was laid out differently. Only the relative drive, with its bulky twin-torus field generator assembly, was discernible from the outside by necessity, and it was heavily armoured.

  As a result of this design, AstroCorps warships were at once functionally and structurally similar to one another, and different in both small- and large-scale ways, enabling crews to adapt to the layout efficiently but making it difficult for enemies to effectively target and disable them in a combat situation.

  The Captain’s quarters on the Draka were part of a small and deep-buried habitat backup in the command segment that held the primary bridge. Compared to a lot of Captains’ staterooms they’d spent time in, they were relatively poky. Sergio liked them, though.

  He sat back on his old armchair, nursing a glass of port. Attacus sat across the table in a newer ship-issue couch, his own glass empty on the tabletop and his expression preoccupied. Both knew they should be resting before their arrival at the coordinates the Fergunakil … refugee? Deserter? Messenger? … had given them. But there would be time for that. They were still almost thirteen hours out.

  “Are we in that much of a hurry?” Athel asked suddenly, pulling Sergio from his musing with a question so close to his line of thought that he was momentarily confused.

  “To get to the coordinates?” he asked. “Well, if it’s a central trading route to Chalcedony, and the fellows this Bluothesh school are partnered up with really are hostiles, they might hit someone and move on. Certainly if they’re smart that’s what they’ll do. We can’t hope for them to let another shark go, so that would mean–”

  “I don’t mean the coordinates,” Attacus said. “I mean the sharks,” he gave the parrot a narrow look where it sat on a bench near the entrance to Sergio’s quarters, alongside a scatter of the Captain’s other peripheral accessories. It was deactivated, and according to charter and regulations it would remain so until Sergio switched it back on. Fergunakil giela were not permitted to remain connected to their controllers without the full knowledge and consent of the landbound they were interacting with. Of course, they often forgot this regulation. “Are we in such a hurry to get anywhere that we can’t afford to take a few weeks, a few months longer, and keep these murderous fish at arm’s length?”

  “Well, this is certainly a matter of Six Species charter policy and AstroCorps regulations that two mid-level Captains will be able to settle once and for all,” Sergio said in amusement.

  “I know it’s an old argument,” Attacus said. “And I know the charter’s holy trinity,” he raised his hands, palms up mockingly, and intoned, “unity, diversity, respect,” he let his hands fall back into his lap. “Mighty ideals. But it comes back to shaving a few days off each relative speed jump, an edge on the electronic battlefield, and not trusting the fuckers to not turn on us the second we cut them loose.”

  “Whi
ch in turn is AstroCorps High Command’s holy trinity,” Sergio said seriously. “I don’t like it either, but I prefer them on our side – as much or as little as they are on our side – to swimming around out there, getting their own ideas about how to deal with us. Maybe going back to their old masters. I know,” he went on, raising a hand as Attacus opened his mouth to protest, “we don’t know they’re not doing that on the outskirts anyway. But this is the dance we’re trapped in. And if you rise high enough in the Corps, you have to deal with all six of our constituent species. The good, the bad … and the fifty-foot cybernetic ones with all the teeth.”

  “They ate him,” Attacus said.

  “I know,” Sergio replied calmly. “That’s what they do. He’d delivered his information, and he was corrupted by whatever had caused him to separate from his school, whatever had gone wrong with the Children of the Bluothesh to send him here to call for help in the first place. He was broken.”

  “Something missing from him,” Attacus said in a slightly sick-sounding voice. “That’s what they said.”

  “Something like that,” Sergio agreed uncomfortably.

  Attacus grunted. “That’s what they say about all of us, you know.”

  “I know,” Sergio replied. He knew – and Athel knew he knew – better than most. Hadn’t his uncle been helmsman of the Mercury Triumphant, crippled in a magnetic shear at Mayhem fifty years ago? Hadn’t his uncle’s ship been picked apart by a blood-frenzied school of Fergies before the Fleet could blast them out of the irradiated rubblefield that had once been the Lighthouse Moon approach volume? Hadn’t his uncle died screaming bubbles in a Fergunakil gunship as it drew his struggling body into the maw of the enormous monster inside? “They say it about every species they meet, with the possible exception of the Cancer.”

  “And they let the Cancer enslave them,” Attacus brooded.

  “Well,” Sergio drained his glass, still feeling uncomfortable, “they had to kill this one. Too much of a risk to bring him onto the ship, and he wasn’t part of this school. They don’t integrate once they’ve been separated out like that – certainly not with other schools. It’s not how they’re wired. Heh, literally.”