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

  Attacus grunted. “They can go it alone if they need to. The clippers–”

  “I know,” Sergio sighed. “The single-pilot gunships and torpedo ships are usually crewed by outcasts, or they form little schools of their own, or there’s a whole process of agreements about how they separate and how soon they have to return … it’s complicated.”

  “Mm,” Attacus agreed darkly. “Complicated. Why we couldn’t have spared a relative-capable torpedo ship for him, or one of our comms clippers. Why he couldn’t have gone from here back to Aquilar to share his data on whatever had happened to his school. Complicated. What’s not complicated is what would have happened to us if we’d dared to declare him damaged or a security hazard, and shot him. Or eaten him the way they did.”

  “They did offer to share him,” Sergio remarked.

  Attacus’s mouth twisted. “I don’t understand your sense of humour sometimes, Serge.”

  “It’s not really a joke,” Sergio said sympathetically. “Yes, they kill and eat their own, for reasons that seem chilling to sensitive apex omnivores like us. And if we kill them, their fellow Fergunak can sometimes spend generations meticulously exacting vengeance. I heard a story once about a school of Fergunak whose ship was hit by corsairs–”

  “I know the stories, Serge,” Athel snapped. “I was in the same Academy courses. I was at the same bars,” he shook his head, grimacing again. “It’s just that, sometimes … it gets to me. That’s all. Sometimes I realise they’re … they’re just…”

  “Sharks,” Sergio murmured.

  “Yeah.”

  “And we’re just monkeys,” Sergio remarked.

  “Right.”

  “And Molranoids are just…” Sergio paused in theatrical uncertainty.

  “…whatever they are,” Athel said, unsmiling.

  They sat in silence for a while. Sergio offered Attacus another drink. Attacus refused. After a time, it became clear that they were either going to go to bed here in the Captain’s rooms or separately, and Attacus stood, opting for the latter.

  “Sleep well, Sergio,” he said, as they stopped in the doorway and clasped arms. “I think tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

  “I have a feeling you’re right,” Sergio said, and sighed. “Attacus, I don’t want–”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Attacus grunted again. “When the ports open, I’ll do my duty. Side by side with the fish if that’s what it takes,” he looked back into Sergio’s quarters, as if regretting what was no longer on the cards that night. His gaze settled unambiguously on the bench where the Captain’s accoutrements lay. “I just don’t want you to forget what’s on the other end of that hilarious fucking parrot, Sergio.”

  “I promise,” Sergio said fervently, then smiled. “You know, to be quite honest, I think being told by a Fergie that there’s something missing from you is a mark of good character.”

  “Yeah,” Attacus said, smiling grudgingly. Attacus Athel didn’t smile easily. He never had.

  Sergio kept his own expression cheerful and confident as Athel headed out into the corridor for his own quarters in the officers’ hab.

  Something missing from him. That’s what they said about him.

  Something like that.

  His smile faded. Because that wasn’t what they’d said about the Fergie in the lone gunship, was it? They hadn’t said there was something missing from him.

  They’d said that something had been taken from him.

  V

  Just as he knew about the confidence his lineage inspired in the general crew, Attacus also knew he was valued on a more abstract, even superstitious level. He was considered something of a good luck charm aboard ship, like faded spaceborne nobility. And it was far more to do with his pedigree than the very effective professional partnership between himself and Captain Malachi, although that too played a part. They were a good team, and their missions, their crews, always benefited from the rapport they shared. And word of that sort of success got around, and gained a superstitious impetus of its own. They were rising stars, as often because of their strange informality as in spite of it.

  He didn’t feel particularly beneficial tonight, much less a good luck charm. The old feeling of fraudulence was back with a vengeance. He felt, as he returned to his quarters and got ready for bed, like a hundred years of tension in a ten-year tour.

  Attacus Athel was descended in a direct line, with a couple of minor twists around the time of the Zhraaki reformation, from Attacus Hate. And although a half-dozen fortunate marriages and name-changes and cultural shifts had separated him from the less-than-pleasant family name, he’d inherited the first name thanks to a mother and father who were way too keen on reading dusty old history-blocks. Still, it could have been worse. His younger sister had been named for Mathel Hate, and going through life with a name like Mathel Athel was – to hear her tell it – the sort of thing that really made you wish you still lived aboard a starship capable of destroying half of the observable universe with a single flick of her dread All-Eaters.

  He changed out of his uniform in the dark, the only illumination coming from the tiny fleck of purple crystal on the amulet around his neck. The size of a grain of sand, the chip was only visible when the lights were out, but it seemed to shine more brightly the darker it was. Just an illusion of relative light levels, of course, but it was a nice symbolic feature for a family heirloom.

  The crystal was a substance called Bharriom, the God stone, and it was impossible to synthesise or create in a resequencer. So far, moreover, it didn’t seem to be naturally-occurring on any of the planets the Six Species had settled. It had apparently existed in rare and tiny quantities on whichever world the Molran Fleet had started out from, because it was how they’d powered their original Worldships. Indeed, the fact that they hadn’t found any more of the stuff on their legendary outward journey from the Core, until reaching Earth on the last metaphorical fumes in their engines, was why the Six Species now relied on power generation technology designed and perfected in the centuries following the First Feast.

  This minute grain had been a gift to Attacus’s family back when they really had been the Hates. Or so he’d been told. It carried no measurable energy charge anymore, even if the Fleet had retained the knowledge of how to extract and use it. A piece this small probably couldn’t power terribly much in any case. Its sole value was sentimental, perhaps with a little ‘historical’ thrown in to the right collector. Relics of the Elevator People were highly sought-after by the sort of people who did their work in badly-ventilated basements.

  It was said to be the last scrap of the heart of the Bosskra, the used-up parts of the crystal formation painstakingly cut away like necrotised flesh. When the Fleet had begun to experiment with Bridnak cellular power, and the displaced Elevator People had helped, the Fleet Council of Captains had given the final piece of the heart to Attacus Hate in recognition of his aid. There might have been more to the story – the Bosskra’s fate was as inextricably linked to that of Big Shooey and the Darkmas as the three Worldships had purportedly been physically connected – but the embellishments grew and diminished from telling to telling, according to the teller and the audience and the situation and how much alcohol was in the room.

  Bharriom was said to shine white in the presence of Gods, and even manifest as some kind of conscious entity in special situations. So far, the fleck Attacus wore around his neck had never manifested before him in any situation, and had unaccountably failed to shine in any colour but purple. Attacus liked to joke with Sergio that it was a sign he needed to keep better company.

  He sighed, climbed into bed and tried not to think about how many hours were left until their arrival. Once you started the if I fall asleep now I’ll still get enough rest game, it was all over. Sometimes he envied Molranoids for the way they didn’t need to sleep. And their strength. And their resilience. And their intelligence. And their five-thousand-year lifespans. And the extra pair of hands they had. />
  Come to think of it, he envied Molranoids quite frequently.

  But the sharks … he snarled to himself and rolled over, trying to let go of his spinning thoughts so he could drift off. Humans needed sleep while Molren and their Blaran and Bonshoon cousins didn’t – it hardly seemed fair that they couldn’t at least go to sleep when they chose. The sharks … well, they slept too, but they swam around while doing it, and thanks to their cybernetic enhancements there wasn’t much difference between their waking and sleeping states. They also slept for shorter periods, due to compresses electronic processing time or something. He didn’t understand. He, like many AstroCorps officers and many, many humans, didn’t think too much about the Fergunak because they gave him the screaming creeps.

  But the sharks … the sharks … the sharks …

  What did the Draka’s sharks’ reaction to their marooned fellow Fergie mean? Sergio wasn’t wrong – had the landbound crew decided to blow the drifting vessel out of existence as soon as they’d picked its databanks clean, the resulting vendetta would have unified both the Draka’s school and the stricken school over on the transport route, and resulted in the likely destruction of the warship. Or, at the very least, the hounding of all her crewmembers to the ends of space and time. If it had come to that choice, indeed, Attacus was fairly sure the Captain would have chosen to help the lone Fergunakil – and what sort of trouble might that have caused, in the interests of sparing the Draka’s crew from the wrath of the Fergunak? They knew nothing of the corruption the castaway had suffered. But instead, and to Attacus’s probably-transitory relief, the sharks themselves had decided to eliminate the messenger.

  And now they were thundering towards a whole school of similarly tainted Fergunak, and whatever it was that had tainted them.

  Attacus wasn’t worried, as such. The Draka was an AstroCorps warship, more than a match for most of the outsider cultures of Six Species space, even most of the more troublesome Fleet Separatist groups and Blaran clans. And they had a highly skilled, well-equipped and ferocious five-hundred-strong school of their own Fergunak with them. They were unlikely to be attacked, much less face any real threat to their continued existence.

  But what if their Fergies decided to take out the entire school towards which they were now heading? And what if they were outnumbered? And even if they weren’t … getting caught in the crossfire of a Fergie school-off was no laughing matter. The way they held grudges, the disproportionate way they reacted … it was terrifying and had no real parallel among landbound species. Even the aki’Drednanth, who could be savage when provoked, were placid in comparison to the burning hate of the Fergunak. The Draka’s air-breathing crew might catch a face-full just for being there.

  It had been fifty years since Mayhem, since Lighthouse Moon had torn itself from orbit and turned the Vors Vorias system into a nightmare of hurtling planetoids. Alpha Drakamod had been there, Attacus knew, although obviously she hadn’t been part of the school that had turned on the Captain’s uncle. She’d been little more than a pup, a mere twenty years old or so. Now she was seventy-odd, in a species with an average life expectancy of about eighty. And that brought up a whole new set of concerns.

  What would happen to the Draka’s little school of monsters when venerable, slightly-eccentric Alpha Drakamod died? And what if it happened in the course of the coming encounter?

  This was always a concern, so it didn’t really pay to dwell upon it. There were a few contenders for school alpha in the event of Drakamod’s death, both male and female. And they, like almost all of the Fergunak who were accepted into AstroCorps schools, were fairly well-balanced and weren’t crazed devourers of sentient flesh – except, like all Fergunak, when they were. Still, the replacement of Alpha Drakamod wouldn’t itself be a disaster … but it was a considerable disruption to Fergunakil systems.

  The usual course these things took was that a starship’s entire Fergunakil contingent would settle on a temporary arrangement until the immediate conflict or mission was completed. In the Draka’s case, that meant the Fergies would all just agree to get on with business and carry out their last known orders, until such time as their current engagement was done. Why they couldn’t continue this way indefinitely … well, it was a shame, but then Attacus had to admit that the landbound crew didn’t operate that way without leadership either, and the Fergunak were dependent on their alpha by way of their genes and their software. After the conclusion of the mission, the ship would return to a safe location, go into a period of shutdown, and permit the school to pick a new alpha in its usual ferocious way. If the result was a school too heavily compromised to run the required systems – and this usually wasn’t the case, as there were as many redundancies among the Fergies as there were among the rest of the ship’s functions – they would need to be replaced with a whole new school.

  The supplanted school would either find its way to a smaller ship, or would retire to a convenient planet- or vessel-based ocean, or it would be systematically torn apart and devoured by the Fergunakil authorities.

  Attacus could only hope that they’d get through whatever awaited them at the transport route without losing Alpha Drakamod, which left him with a decidedly strange conflict of emotion. Maybe at the end of this tour he could convince Sergio to go back to a smaller command. No more sharks.

  He’d barely dropped off, or so it seemed, when Charlie’s voice nudged him gently but firmly back to consciousness.

  VI

  The Draka’s computer-mind, for reasons nobody had ever adequately explained to Attacus, was named Charlie. Together with Captain Malachi and Alpha Drakamod, it formed a sort of command triumvirate on the warship. One that was mirrored in all warships – in all vessels of sufficient size, in fact, to support both a Fergunakil school and a sentient computing cortex – throughout AstroCorps.

  Every instance of the computer-mind was subtly different, although they formed a sort of complex whole that Attacus didn’t think non-gestalt minds had the faculties to comprehend. Charlie was an intelligent and self-aware entity with its own set of legal rights and definitions according to the charter, but it would synchronise with other instances and share its data – so thoroughly, in fact, that there was no actual distinction between the synchronised instances. It would, however, retain its individual character upon separation, albeit with a new set of knowledge picked up from the merge.

  Attacus suspected the computer-mind did it for the benefit of the organics crawling about inside its machinery, but he had to admit that for all he knew the emergent personality was an artefact of the cortex hardware. He knew, for example, that the ‘dumb’ but learned-response computers on board smaller ships could synchronise with the computer-minds of larger ships, and for a time display the same sentience and personality of those ships. Then, when they went their separate ways, the smaller ship’s computer would for a while continue expressing the mannerisms of the computer-mind in an eerie echo.

  It was even worse when a small ship was in the company of two or more larger ones, and all the computer-minds synced up and the non-sentient computer wound up with an amalgamation. That had happened on the last cargo transporter Attacus had Captained. For almost six months afterwards, their computer had cleared its synthesised throat politely almost every time it spoke, and said “howi” in the place of its usual greetings or acknowledgements.

  “We’re about an hour from return to normal space,” Charlie reported to Attacus as he blearily washed up and pulled a fresh uniform on, “and another hour at high subluminal cruise to the allocated volume. The Captain wants to pull us up at a safe distance and see what’s out there.”

  “Makes sense,” Attacus said. “Did the Fergunakil data give up any more clues while I was asleep?”

  “Nothing much,” Charlie replied. “Enough that we can be fairly sure that we’re looking at a Blaran crew, probably something smaller than a Separatist Worldship but still big – Fleet enforcer big, but not actually a Fleet enforcer.”
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br />   Attacus relaxed a little. “I appreciate the stimulant value of your introducing the ‘Fleet enforcer’ possibility in the misleading way you just did, Charlie.”

  “I don’t mean to lull you into a false sense of security,” Charlie said seriously. “Just because we’re probably not flying into a confrontation with a Fleet enforcer, doesn’t mean it’s not a dangerous situation. A lot of ships the size of the one the Fergunak are talking about here are already registered or at least known to some degree or other. And they’re all pretty dangerous. So unless this is some entirely-unknown new construction…”

  “Which is dangerous all on its own,” Attacus said thoughtfully. “And we don’t know anything about this crew? Aside from the fact that they’ve had some sort of corrupting influence on a school of Fergunak?”

  “Well,” Charlie hedged, “they’re currently unidentified, yes – not known, that is, with any first-hand certainty. I won’t beleaguer you with the numbers, but there’s a reasonable probability that they’re a known Blaran clan who have just come into some new real estate, and now they’re squatting on a juicy Chalcedony-Aquilar trading route waiting to come into some more. As for what happened to the Fergunak … we know that the one who broke off to get this distress call out was considered damaged goods according to AstroCorps Fergunakil standards. And he was sent for help because something had happened to the school of Fergunak now calling themselves the Children of the Bluothesh. What this means we can expect from this school when we arrive, or if the school is even still around, I couldn’t guess.”

  “I suppose we’ll see, then,” Attacus said. He’d noted the now in now calling themselves the Children of the Bluothesh, but didn’t ask any more. There would be a command briefing anyway and Charlie would get sarcastic about repeating itself. He finished getting ready, and headed without undue hurry for the bridge.