Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 22

  Malachi looked crisp and well-rested at the command station, although he was holding a small mug of something that probably had an unhealthy amount of stim in it. The parrot was back on his shoulder, and it regarded Attacus with a beady robotic eye as he stepped onto the bridge.

  “Did you hear the good news?” Sergio asked, barely waiting for Attacus to sit down at his own console.

  “About this probably being Blaren, but probably not being a stolen Fleet enforcer?” Attacus asked. “Yes, I heard.”

  AstroCorps was nominally the military and shipping face of a unified Six Species, but the Molran Fleet remained the dominant force between the stars. Their technology outstripped that of humans and Fergunak in many ways, and although they shared a lot of it with their primitive friends there was a deep and abiding secrecy and isolationism to the Molranoid species. This was a source of some acrimony and petulance from those human groups who believed that the Fleet had gained far more from humanity and Earth than the history books recorded, and should therefore be humbly returning the favour by sharing their toys … but the thing you had to keep in the forefront of your mind about the humans who believed in things that weren’t recorded in books was, they didn’t read books.

  For his own part, and despite his own atypical perspective on the ancient cooperation between human and Molran, Attacus generally approved of their allies’ caution. The Molren had seen a lot of terrible things happen, and they were constantly caught off-guard by how fragile and brief non-Molranoids truly were. Not to mention savage – it wasn’t just a matter of opinion that humans would hurt themselves with full and unrestricted access to Molran Fleet technology and weaponry. It was a fact. In the wake of Earth’s destruction, during the disastrous and tragedy-stricken decades as the Wild Empire clawed its way back from the brink of nonexistence, the Molren had tried to help the so-called adys oko – the rushing monkeys – to master their primal natures and walk with fluffy heads held high into a new era of post-scarcity and technology-enabled enlightenment.

  Humans, by and large, had turned out not to be interested in new eras of post-scarcity and technology-enabled enlightenment. They preferred to own things and bite the humans who tried to take the things they owned. And after a couple of hundred years the Molren uttered a vast, frustrated, collective fine. And sat back and let the monkeys bite.

  This was all well and good, and Attacus did tend to concur with the Molran assessment that humans were dangerously unstable and didn’t need any help killing themselves since they died so laughably easily anyway. But he’d flown in a couple of missions against Separatist Worldships and their accompanying Fleet-made enforcers – on one such occasion he’d actually commanded the mission, although he was perfectly aware it had been a political move on the Fleet’s and AstroCorps’ part – and they made even the great AstroCorps warships of the line look like a bit of a joke. It was something of a macrocosm of Molran and human anatomy, in fact, although AstroCorps warships weren’t quite that feeble.

  Still … still.

  It would have been nice to have access to some of their engineering and firepower potential. AstroCorps did have Molren in it, after all. Attacus would have happily served under a Molran Captain – not that he didn’t willingly do so when the draw demanded it anyway – if the AstroCorps warship on which he did the serving had the mass and ordnance of a Fleet enforcer.

  “There’s more,” Malachi said smugly.

  “Oh?” Attacus inquired. “I only heard about the probability of identifying the attendees of the party we’re headed towards. Charlie was kind enough not to beleaguer me with the numbers.”

  “The probability is that the Children of the Bluothesh school is actually a school formerly known as the Dazzling Aqua Sinking To Black,” Sergio said, “who up until about two years ago operated out of a great grey leviathan on the Coriel Hades line.”

  Attacus frowned. The Hades line was an ill-defined spacefaring term referring to the outermost extremity of a star system where the final scraps of debris orbiting the sun ended and interstellar space began. That far out, and particularly notoriously in the Coriel system volume, there were several hardy settlements and an abundance of truly unpleasant Blaran corsair clans. “Who did the numbers say might be the most likely culprits?” he asked, since apparently this chat was what they were getting in the place of an officers’ briefing. “Assuming some clan or other joined forces with the Dazzling Aquas and then lit out for Chalcedony.”

  “The Po Chane,” Sergio grinned.

  “Never heard of them.”

  “No, I hadn’t either. They’ve never really made a splash until now – if you’ll pardon the expression,” Malachi said. Drakamod clicked her beak. “Small group, only a couple of little ships to their name, no big raiding prospects – certainly not in the same league as the well-armed Hades line settlements. But they have a bit of a reputation for eccentricity, for wild boasts and tall tales. Best of all, though,” he leaned forward, still grinning at Attacus, “their Captain, or Patriarch, or Chieftain or whatever, is named Kitander Po Chane. And guess what his nickname is.”

  “Kittypo,” Attacus couldn’t help but say immediately.

  “Guess better,” Sergio said, giving his XO a heavy gaze.

  “The Bluothesh,” Attacus returned grudgingly to Malachi’s script.

  Malachi sat back in his seat. “Just ‘Bluothesh’, actually,” he said, a little surly. “But yes. There are a dozen different ‘Bluothesh’es on the Fleet sociocriminal registry, admittedly, since it’s a nice cool-sounding name implying chaos and madness … but it’s still a good solid coincidence.”

  “So the assumption is that these Po Chane Blaren have taken in a school of outer-Coriel Fergunak and gained their comradeship,” Attacus said, eyeing Alpha Drakamod’s giela. He could ask if their assumption was more along the lines of the Po Chane experiencing a rise in their fortunes and roping the school into their service by some more non-consensual means, but one always had to be aware of the delicacy of the situation. “But then something went bad and the school suffered some kind of disruption to its gridnet presence?”

  “That’s what we believe, Commander Athel,” Drakamod replied smoothly. The parrot’s eyes were entirely too knowing. “The Dazzling Aqua Sinking To Black school numbered almost twenty thousand Fergunak, with ten thousand gunships, two thousand clippers, and a great grey leviathan. They were an effortless match for the Po Chane Blaren, so if that’s who we are approaching … it is difficult to believe that they formed an alliance, I admit, but even more difficult to believe the Dazzling Aqua Sinking To Black were defeated and subjugated from the outset.”

  “What’s our heading, Midkins?” Malachi asked, leaning forward again with an eager look in his eyes.

  “We should be in timber-shivering range in another hour and a half, Cap’n,” Midkins said with a broad smile.

  “You see what you’ve done, Athel,” Sergio muttered, then went on in a louder voice. “And how much of your precious downtime did you waste studying the lingo of yar high seas, Mister Midkins?”

  “Charlie helped, Cap’n.”

  “That’s Captain,” Malachi said. “Same basic number of syllables, it’s not saving any of us any time. And remind me to decompile our beloved computer-mind when we’re done here.”

  “I’ll make a note in the log, Captain,” Charlie said dryly.

  They flew on through soft-space without further discussion, finally emerging into the velvety black and surging forward at maximum cruising subluminal towards their destination. Fetorax W’Fale, at the comms station, reported almost immediately.

  “There’s a pair of ships sending out tight-whisper distress calls in this volume,” W’Fale said, “they look to be traders. No … one trader, one heavy fighter.”

  “I assume there’s a second group out there not sending distress calls,” Malachi said. “The ones who are causing the distress? I’ll be very disappointed if the Po Chane don’t turn out to be here now, after all o
ur wonderful hypothesising.”

  “There’s another ship here,” Charlie said, “but I’m not getting anything from her. What about you, Alpha?”

  “No communications,” the parrot said, “although our schools have become aware of one another. The Children of the Bluothesh occupy what is clearly a starship, but our gridnets are mutually masked. I’m afraid we both consider one another to be corrupted at this stage, so I cannot offer further information.”

  “But the enemy vessel isn’t dampening the traders’ whisper,” Attacus said, feeling suddenly as though things were going very wrong, uncontrollably fast.

  “No,” Malachi said, still looking excited. “They want their victims calling for help. They want something bigger to come to the rescue. The ships out there are bait.”

  “Who needs bait if you can pull ships out of the drab?” Gothal Baadan, Sergio’s Chief Tactical Officer, wondered aloud with a frown curling her naturally-upcurved mouth. Baadan was a Bonshoon, unusual in a higher command position but not explicitly outlawed in AstroCorps crews, the way Blaren were.

  “Who indeed?” Malachi said approvingly. “Maybe their suppressor failed. Either way, they’re not afraid of calling attention to themselves. And in space, that’s either a sign that you’re in a Hell of a ship … or are a damn lunatic.”

  “So they’re not afraid of any ship that might show up along this route?” Attacus asked, musing out loud much as Baadan had been. “Or not afraid of any ships at all?”

  “Either way, they know we’re coming,” Sergio said, reaching up to scratch the parrot sitting on his shoulder. Alpha Drakamod responded by ruffling her giela’s feathers. Both of them had way too much time on their hands, Attacus decided. The Captain lowered his hand and tapped his comms control. “Prepare to crash-jump,” he said curtly. “Alpha, Midkins, lay in a course for the immediate vicinity of our traders in distress. Jump as soon as weapons are primed and shields are at full strength.”

  The big transpersion railgun that the crew had nicknamed Huey – again, for reasons that Attacus had never clearly understood – was the slowest of the warship’s combat systems to cycle up to battle-readiness, and it was prepped in an excellent window of eighteen minutes. As soon as Main Munitions had sent their OK, Midkins hit the console and the Draka flicked back into the grey.

  It was a short jump, and they emerged just minutes later at the site of the confrontation.

  “What,” Head of Science Alani Ka spoke for the entire bridge crew, “the Hell is that?”

  VII

  There was a considering silence on the bridge as the Draka moved into position and relative all-stop, and the different departments gathered their data. In the absence of immediate combat, this busy silence was familiar to Sergio as the usual atmosphere that settled on a warship bridge when she entered a contested volume.

  The Blaran vessel – the immediate and persistent centre of everyone’s attention – was at least as long as a Fleet enforcer and possibly longer, if not quite as massive. It was difficult to get a sense of scale by sight alone, and in the absence of any nearby suns there was almost no ambient light, but the warship’s scanners sent back some raw measurements and the viewscreens added a soft series of enhancements to pick out the shapes before them. Almost nine miles of cold, darkness-shrouded hull extended away at a sharp upward slant from the perspective of the Draka’s bridge. She dwarfed the mere two-and-a-half mile AstroCorps warship, and the Draka in turn dwarfed the two civilian vessels.

  The freighter was about four thousand feet across, almost spherical. The armed cruiser was about half that size, lean and battered and bristling with weapons that were no doubt more than capable of defending her single-ship flock against the standard brigands of the Chalcedony route but were, Sergio judged, at least two generations behind the Draka’s.

  Both the civilian vessels were clad in heavy grey plates of treated stone, the fighter somewhat more sturdily than the freighter, both of them flimsy in comparison to the warship. As was largely unavoidable in space, they were in formation with one another but almost perpendicular to both the Draka and the Blaran ship, tilted almost vertically on the bridge viewscreens. Midkins’s hands flickered over the helm controls, bringing them into the best possible alignment to cover all three ships in the volume.

  As to what the Blaran ship might be clad in … that was difficult to say.

  “Comms?” Sergio said. “Tactical? Alpha, Charlie? Let’s hear it, because I agree with Ka. What the Hell is that thing?”

  “Hull composition unknown,” Chief Tactical Officer Baadan reported after a moment. “It’s not sending back any known markers, and visually it’s … no recognisable features, no visible weapons or access points. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was a natural formation, maybe a comet, except that’s not ice or stone. And we’re getting some sort of signal back from it, but I can’t isolate–”

  “That is some ambient gridnet chatter,” Drakamod said. “I am feeding it through to the Tactical and Science consoles.”

  “So there are sharks in there, somewhere,” Baadan said.

  “Why are we not getting any additional data from the computer-mind?” Ka demanded. “Charlie usually has some information compilation completed by now.”

  “I’m getting comms from the civilian vessel,” Fetorax W’Fale said. “Basic info and a recent log, but no live transmission. The freighter is called Linda Gazmouth, the cruiser is … Rotten Ivan. Molran and Bonshoon crew. They don’t have a lot of information about the Blaran ship, if that’s what she is, except a name. Apparently they got an initial nod from her.”

  “We haven’t gotten a nod,” Baadan said, with a question in her voice. W’Fale shook her head. “What’s the name the civilians were given?”

  “Flesh Eater,” W’Fale said calmly.

  “Flesh Eater?” Ka echoed. “A little more colourful than I was expecting, but if it is a Blaran clan…”

  “The Linda Gazmouth’s log says they were pulled out of relative speed by … some sort of field suppressor, they were able to scramble some sort of emergency response but then their drives and weapons were disabled,” W’Fale tapped at her console. “There’s record in the log of weapons fire being ineffectual against the main ship-body, but then the systems were deactivated. It’s unclear how. I’m sending a standard AstroCorps greeting and our mission identification, Captain,” she continued.

  “I don’t see a suppressor,” Ka said.

  “The Flesh Eater would be big enough to have one inside her,” Baadan pointed at the enormous ship.

  “An internal suppressor?” Ka said sceptically. “The requirements for the spatial interface would cause its accuracy to suffer. Depending on what that hull is made of…”

  “Maybe that’s why they’ve only hooked two ships so far,” Baadan replied.

  “One, technically,” W’Fale said. “The Rotten Ivan is a defence unit, the two vessels were travelling in convoy under a single field. Besides…”

  “Besides, it was the Fergunak who waylaid them,” Drakamod said on Sergio’s shoulder. “The Children of the Bluothesh, as they call themselves now. The gridnet is still trickling. The units that formed the structure are still out there. Over seven hundred of them.”

  “Yes,” W’Fale said. “The Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan reported no effect of their weapons against the main ship-body, but smaller vessels were more susceptible to fire. Fergunakil vessels.”

  “That’s true,” Baadan reported. “Small-unit telemetry is coming back now, it wasn’t automatically compiled … not sure what Charlie’s doing. They’re scattered around the Flesh Eater. Null signals,” the Bonshoon woman hesitated.

  “They are dead,” Drakamod confirmed. “Most of them, I would be willing to bet, before they came under fire from the civilian vessels – but they would certainly be vulnerable to the high-yield fragmentation cannons the Rotten Ivan seems to be sporting. And with their defensive systems offline, even more so.”

  “Tel
emetry reports a selection of gunships and small shuttles,” Baadan said, “each one probably only big enough to contain a single Fergunakil, or they might even have been unmanned.”

  “I think not,” Drakamod replied. “For this manoeuvre, they would need to be fully integrated and gridnet-fine control would be vital. The ships were locked into a linked array. The array formed a high-energy web that achieved the same effect as a–”

  “You’re talking about a stellar trawl,” Ka said, the Molran’s voice scandalised. “It is expressly forbidden by the Six Species charter for Fergunak to create high-range interference webs–”

  “Alas, I think the Dazzling Aqua Sinking To Black school parted ways with the charter when they became the Children of the Bluothesh,” Drakamod said, “if indeed the Coriel Hades line territories could be said to have adhered to the charter in the first place.”

  “Well if it was a trawl, it’s deactivated now,” Baadan reported. “The ship drives are burned out, the components and pilots clearly dead. Some of them do seem to show signs of weapons damage, probably from the Ivan’s rattlers.”

  “Yes, it makes sense that the Rotten Ivan would take a few shots at an intercepting force,” Drakamod said, “if only to knock out the suppressor and get back underway. Although of course a crew more experienced with hostile Fergunakil encounters might opt for more disruptive targeted strikes on the array nodes rather than simply blasting at ships. They wanted to get free of the field and back into soft-space, preferably without making an enemy of the Fergunak in the process.”

  “To be fair, they’d just been trawled out of the drab by a big school of them and an unknown enforcer-sized vessel,” Baadan said. “They were probably safe in assuming the Fergunak were already enemies.”

  “True,” the parrot conceded, “which is why I think it makes a certain sense for some ships to have been hit. This route is not frequented by big predatory schools, so travellers can’t be expected to have protocols in place. Their actions are particularly justified if the civilian vessels found themselves undergoing some sort of mysterious attack that threatened to beach them and negate their capacity to fire at all.”