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

  “The ships might have been the only thing they could hit,” Baadan agreed.

  “Yes,” Drakamod said. “It doesn’t really matter, however, because the Fergunakil ships were burning out before that, the deaths of all individuals making up the trawl practically inevitable.”

  Baadan frowned. “You mean–”

  “Usually, a trawl can be properly managed with minimal burn-outs,” Drakamod explained. “The component vessels returned to normal use. In this case the setup was careless, without consideration of the components as anything but disposable. Unless the Flesh Eater mobilises more of the Fergunak from her interior, it’s unlikely her crew will be stopping any more travellers with this method … but then, as the Captain said, perhaps they never had any intention of doing so.”

  “And that brings us to the ‘mysterious attack’ that the civilians suffered. Did the Fergunak fire on them or was it the Flesh Eater herself?” Baadan asked. “Or was it some other form of interference that caused their disablement? Something built into the trawl field?”

  Sergio was listening to all this with half an ear. He was looking at his XO. Attacus was staring at the almost-invisible monster, his face pale and waxy as though he’d seen a ghost.

  “Light her up,” Athel said quietly.

  “Commander,” Baadan said crisply, and tapped at her controls.

  Not even the big prism-arc floodlights could fully illuminate the immense ship, but they revealed details that had until then been hidden in the interstellar darkness.

  Although perhaps details was the wrong word, Sergio thought a little numbly. The Flesh Eater was a long, pale needle, smooth and featureless as an eggshell, stretching and swelling back from the slender point nearest the Draka, then – unseen beyond the reach of the prism-arcs, but picked out on the enhanced viewscreens – tapering back to another point at her farthest extent. Her centremost point was perhaps a mile and a half in diameter, slightly rounded and slightly asymmetrical, grey mottling the creamy surface … like something dark lodged inside a dead white artery.

  Sergio frowned at the unexpectedly colourful simile. It had entered his mind unbidden, and was now lingering very insistently.

  Aside from this dark and ungainly bulge in her centre, the Flesh Eater was completely seamless and without flaw, a straight and slender ivory splinter close to nine miles long.

  “The Children of the Bluothesh are inside,” Drakamod’s giela murmured in Sergio’s ear. “Those who remain alive. Their ships. Their waters. Everything.”

  “Mm,” Sergio said, looking at the lopsided bulge in the Flesh Eater’s hull. It was about the right size to be a great grey leviathan, he supposed – the mobile mass-habitats were usually between one and two miles in diameter when folded for transit, and could open out and be painstakingly filled with water to form miniature moons up to fifty times that size. Only a madman would actually try to attack one, of course … but then, they were dealing with someone who had been dubbed ‘Bluothesh’. He turned to look again at Attacus.

  “A lot of unknown properties,” Ka reported from her console, tapping away at the controls and readouts with all four hands. “Alien. This is clearly a dumbler or relic that the Blaren have taken over – if indeed they have taken over, rather than the opposite. It’s entirely possible that the Blaren, and the Fergunak, were attacked and assimilated by this vessel, which then read their computer and gridnet data to arrive here–”

  “Possible, but it doesn’t explain the Bluothesh connection,” Baadan insisted.

  “Athel,” Sergio said quietly, cutting across the bridge chatter. Attacus grunted slightly, turning his head towards his old friend without actually interrupting his wide, childlike stare at the gleaming shard on the viewscreens. “The Flesh Eater. Is she what I think she is?”

  Finally, Attacus roused himself.

  “If you’re thinking she’s the Elevator, Captain, the lost starship Destarion, defender of Earth … I’m afraid the answer is no,” he said.

  Sergio slumped, but it wasn’t out of disappointment as Attacus seemed to think. He was actually surprised at the depth of the relief he felt. He knew little more than a few ghost stories about the Elevator, and a few vague anecdotes Athel had shared concerning his family history … but what he knew, even if only a fraction of it was based in anything close to reality, was enough to convince him that only a madman would go looking for something like the Destarion … but then, again, ‘Bluothesh’ …

  The point was, some lost things were meant to remain lost. The thought of the Elevator in the hands of Blaran corsairs, much less Fergunak, was enough to bring a prickle of actual cold sweat to Sergio’s forehead.

  “You’re sure?” he asked, willing his voice not to shake.

  Attacus looked pained. “Well…”

  “No no, please don’t say ‘well’,” Sergio said. “Say ‘yes’.”

  “Captain,” Attacus said seriously, “it would be foolish to ignore the coincidences at work here. The Destarion was supposed to be closer to Worldship size than enforcer, but she was nicknamed ‘the Godfang’ for a reason – her hull, and her general shape, might easily have been comparable to this. Moreover, it was said her small arms were called Flesh-Eaters.”

  “That is a small arm?” Sergio pointed.

  “Um,” Attacus said.

  “She’s nine miles long!”

  “Admittedly not small, any more than an enforcer is a small defensive fixture…”

  “So the Flesh Eater might be … what? One of the Elevator’s autonomous weapons?” Sergio asked. “A fighter – an enforcer to the Destarion’s Worldship, in your analogy?”

  “I was actually thinking more along the lines of an elaborate deception,” Attacus replied, “relying heavily on Elevator lore – such as it is.”

  “I tend to agree,” Ka said, “since the Destarion retains a solid hold on the superstitions of many non-Molran cultures … but the fact remains, the Flesh Eater is a nine-mile structure and is apparently functional. If it is merely a disguise, a sheathing placed over a ship or collection of ships…”

  She’d spotted the great grey leviathan frame under the surface too, Sergio noted to himself. “It’s a serious bit of engineering,” he concluded.

  Ka inclined her smooth-topped head. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Of course, even if they don’t have an enforcer under there, they could slap together a couple of abandoned or bombed-to-Hell hubstations,” Baadan suggested. “Throw in the Fergunakil great grey like Alpha Drakamod was saying … they could convoy up something that size, make it look like a single vessel.”

  “Drakamod said they assimilated a bunch of the school’s hardware,” Midkins spoke up from the helm. “Is it possible that hull’s just a bunch of extruded ice? The great grey could manage production if they took on raw gases, and there are drive profiles that could turn an ice formation into a long spike like that–”

  “Possible,” Ka replied, “but whatever that hull is, as Baadan confirmed, it is not ice.”

  “Which brings us back to dumbler tech,” Sergio said, “or worse.”

  “So where did the shit-dancers get it?” Baadan asked.

  “I have a more relevant question,” Athel suddenly seemed to jolt out of his contemplation of the Flesh Eater.

  “Commander?” Sergio acknowledged.

  “What’s happened to Charlie?”

  VIII

  The machine-mind was gone.

  “The entire cortex is on practical standby,” Chief of Security and Operations Gondolus Tate reported after a few seconds of failure to elicit a response from Charlie. Attacus, in the meantime, had continued to send command prompts through his console but he knew it was futile. “It’s online, the system is operational and we have full technical functionality, but it’s non-mind only. We’ve been downgraded to freighter response-model processing power.”

  “It appears to have happened just after our crash-jump into this volume,” Alani Ka said, “but it was hidden in the da
ta inflow. Of course, without Charlie there to filter the data and report a shutdown … it seems as though we may have emerged into some sort of disabling field.”

  “Related to whatever’s knocked out the Linda and the Ivan?” Malachi asked.

  “No, Captain,” Ka said, just as Baadan said “yes, Captain.”

  “Want to try that again?” Malachi suggested calmly.

  “Possibly related, Captain,” Ka acknowledged. “But the requisite output to render a computer-mind dormant is very different to any drive-suppression or weapons-nullifying field. And we still know nothing about the civilian ships anyway. All we do know is that they are apparently immobilised and their weapons are down. Whether it was done by a field or by actual hostile action–”

  “Alright, first up let’s check our own subluminals,” Attacus was relieved to hear Sergio move briskly into the usual command processes for hostile encounters. His old friend was a consummate professional, despite his penchant for theatrics. He wasn’t about to be defeated by this. “And Tate, run a diagnostic on the relative drive. Baadan, let our friends in the Flesh Eater know that Huey’s awake,” he pointed at Ka without looking across at her. “You said ‘dormant’ just now, Head of Science,” he went on as Baadan and Tate bustled into action. “Do you think we might feasibly get Charlie back if we move away or knock out whatever’s bumped it from the cortex?”

  “I couldn’t possibly guess, Captain,” Ka said, her usual Molran calm slightly ruffled but only insofar as her ears were standing somewhat more stiff-and-open than usual. “My choice of words was entirely arbitrary. The computer-mind may simply be on standby as on a smaller non-mind vessel, as Commander Tate said … or it may have been wiped more comprehensively. There doesn’t seem to be any way to tell from the existing cortex data and functionality–”

  “Ready to fire railgun across her nose, Captain,” Baadan said.

  “Subluminals and relative drive read functional, Captain,” Tate reported.

  “Commander Athel?” Sergio said.

  Attacus blinked, caught once again in the depths of rumination. “Captain?”

  “Your recommendations, Commander,” Malachi said crisply. “If this is some kind of … small arm … from the Elevator, we wouldn’t want to exacerbate things. And until we get more local information from the Linda, the Ivan, or the Children of the Bluothesh–”

  “I would recommend not firing the railgun, Captain,” Attacus surprised himself a little by saying.

  Sergio nodded. “I concur, as a matter of fact. But as long as Huey’s primed and the ventral exhausts are open, I imagine whoever’s on board the Flesh Eater will be aware that we have a transpersion railgun that could give most Fleet-level hulls a good ringing.”

  “The question, of course, is how the Flesh Eater’s hull compares to a Fleet one,” Ka said.

  “Why, Alani,” Sergio grinned. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that you suspect her of being tougher than hulls created by the hard-working and ingenious Molran.”

  “Just as well you do know better, Captain,” Ka replied smoothly. “I simply think it’s imprudent to assume our weapons would have a detrimental effect on a hull the composition of which–”

  “At ease, Head of Science,” Malachi said in a dry tone. “I wasn’t casting aspersions on your species, loyalty or logical faculties–”

  “We’re being hailed,” Fetorax W’Fale said. “Highly atypical profile, it looks like they’ve cobbled together a return signal from our initial comm and the protocols the civilian ships used, fed through…”

  “Yes,” Drakamod said, “Fergunakil network compression. Perhaps it is the only method they have for breaching the technology gap, or perhaps they are aware that we have lost our computer-mind and will therefore be at a disadvantage with encryption,” the colourful giela clicked its beak. “The Children of the Bluothesh, if they are even still alive inside that ship, are greatly changed. They are not meant to be there. This is not Fergunakil communication as we know it, Captain, but a ghoulish parody using their systems.”

  “Can you clean it up into something close to our usual ship-to-ship?” Sergio asked.

  “Of course.”

  The Captain grinned and reached up to scratch the giela again. This was about the moment when the main viewscreen resolved into the image of an entirely Molran-looking figure in a pocket-encrusted coverall the shade of sky-blue that Molranoids, for whatever reason, referred to as ‘vaulting blue’. If he was a Blaran, Attacus reflected bemusedly, he was altered extremely subtly – if at all.

  “Humans,” the man said with a visibly-relieved slump of all four shoulders. “Thank Karl for – is that a parrot on your shoulder?”

  IX

  The Captain’s ‘rugged AstroCorps frontier officer’ act was like a Barskburger Kitchen Sink feast, Attacus reflected as he watched Malachi talk to the Blaran. It didn’t actually have the word cheese in its name, but it really did contain quite a lot of cheese.

  “I’m Captain Malachi of the AstroCorps warship Draka,” Sergio was saying coolly, “and I’m here in response to reports of an illegally relocated Fergunak school, charter violating behavioural and gridnet alterations and outlawed combat formations. We also received close-beamed calls for assistance from the civilian vessels–”

  “I’m going to save us all some time, Captain Malachi,” the Blaran said in a voice tight with urgency. “We bounced those distress calls off the freighter and the merc ship for you. And we sent out the clipper with the call for help. The fish told us he’d be able to park himself on a shoal-line and get the attention of passing ships. We bumped him out of the formation while we were setting up the suppressor. A half-dozen clippers and gunships burned out during the ramp-up, so he wasn’t missed,” the Blaran paused. “We did commandeer the school and bring down the pair of sourcat haulers, though,” he added.

  Sourcat, one of the many Blaran nicknames for Molren. They’d already established that the Linda and the Ivan had a mixed Molran and Bonshoon crew, which wasn’t particularly unusual. And of course, Attacus reflected, a Blaran crew would identify a mixed crew of non-Blaran Molranoids most directly with the species with which they shared the most antagonism. Blaren didn’t have much of a problem with Bonshooni one way or the other – most people didn’t. But Blaren and Molren had a history so long, it was mythology.

  Why was this fellow so happy to see humans, though?

  Maybe they’re trying to complete their collection, Attacus thought, but a deep, creeping part of him knew that wasn’t it. A deep, creeping part of him hadn’t relinquished the unpleasant sensation that things were going wrong, and their progress had just reached terminal velocity.

  “Kindly identify yourself,” Malachi said, maintaining his chin-jutting act.

  “Second Fwetala Po Chane,” the Blaran said, “formerly of the Scourge of Hades.”

  “Currently of the Flesh Eater,” Sergio said. “Has something happened to Captain Bluothesh, perhaps?”

  Fwetala did not look surprised that Malachi knew this. “The Captain is … with the rest of the clan leadership,” he said, in a tone that clearly indicated that he didn’t want to answer any follow-up questions.

  Blaran clan hierarchies were, Attacus knew from long and bitter experience, as convoluted as some of the physical augmentations they distinguished themselves with. Each family, crew, clan, culture was practically unique so there was little point in figuring out the assorted ranks and titles. What applied to one was almost perversely unlikely to apply to the next, and you were just as likely to give offence as to predict a pattern. Blaren were by their very natures opposed to structure, stagnation, and being categorised.

  There were a few traits that a lot of groupings shared, although even these were by no means universal. It was a simple matter of practicality that if you existed in a mobile artificial environment like a starship, you needed some sort of command structure in order to keep things working. This was deeply ingrained even in the Blaren, from their
millennia with the Fleet, and as with Blaren and Molren alike it translated to larger and more sedentary planetbound groups as well. These command structures tended towards units of strong, clever Blaren who led, and others who – provisionally – opted to follow. Sometimes, as appeared to be the case with the Po Chane, a certain family or subclass emerged as the ruling or even the only party in the group.

  Blaren weren’t always augmented, but such a large proportion of them were that it was practically a characteristic of the species. In a lot of the smaller corsair clans, augmentations were often standardised and ritualised, a young Blaran gaining his tribe’s colours or decorations or enhancements upon reaching a certain level. Some clans abstained en masse from augmenting themselves, until such time as their group achieved something noteworthy, at which point they would all adopt a physical alteration to commemorate said noteworthiness.

  You couldn’t make any assumptions about the fact that ‘Second Fwetala Po Chane’ appeared un-augmented, or that his ‘clan leadership’ had excluded him from whatever Captain Kitander was up to. You couldn’t even make any assumptions about his claims that the Blaren had been the ones to call for help, either. He might have been in the middle of staging a power-grab, or enacting a long-game trap for the warship crew. Blaren were complex creatures, and the truly criminal Blaren were the worst of the lot.

  “And where is your clan leadership, Second Po Chane?” Sergio, never one to shy away from the unwanted questions, asked calmly.

  “On board the Linda Gazmouth,” Fwetala said, “subduing the crew and securing the cargo.”

  “I assume, by ‘subduing’, you mean–”

  “They’re all already dead, Captain Malachi,” Fwetala said, and Attacus was at least fairly sure the Blaran looked uneasy. He also – although Attacus had never been a great judge of relative ages in the long-lived Molranoid species – looked rather young. Attacus would have hazarded a guess that the fellow was in, or perhaps even still approaching, his First Prime. Maybe he was still too young to accept a Po Chane augmentation and join the clan leadership. “As is the crew of the Rotten Ivan.”