Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 25

  “Other,” Baadan replied, her large four-fingered hands tapping at the tactical and combat arrays. “Standard early-1600s Coriel shipyards design, still clicking out a general Blaran sociocrim marker and Po Chane identity. Definitely Blaran. Most likely the clan leadership under Bluothesh Po Chane.”

  “What’s their heading?” Attacus asked, pausing to look at the main screens before resuming his stride.

  “Tangential,” W’Fale answered, “heading from the Linda Gazmouth towards the Flesh Eater. Not approaching us, although they will come in range of Huey.”

  “Should we fire on it, Acting Captain?” Baadan asked.

  “Hold your fire,” Attacus said calmly, sitting down in Sergio’s seat.

  To her credit, Baadan moved her left hands away from the railgun controls. “Acting Captain, if the ten members of the Po Chane clan leadership are on board that shuttle–”

  “If the shuttle is empty and flying across our railgun’s firing arc by remote control just to gauge our response,” Attacus said, “and we fire on it, we’ll be dooming diplomatic efforts before they even begin. Plus, if there really are only ten Blaren in the clan leadership group, and they’re capable of depopulating a cruiser like the Ivan without taking any kind of losses … well, have you ever heard the expression don’t set fire to the Rogue Colossus of Wynstone–”

  “–until you know he’s going to burn,” Baadan said, just a little wearily.

  “Oh, you’ve heard that one,” Attacus said.

  “You and the Captain use it quite frequently, Acting Captain.”

  “Well then.”

  As they watched, their opportunity passed by. The innocuous little Blaran shuttle vanished behind the pale spire of the Flesh Eater’s nose. Attacus could see how, coming from the mysterious enormity of the Flesh Eater, the shuttle would have seemed harmless to the mercenaries on board the Rotten Ivan. A suitable ship for ferrying envoys across to negotiate terms.

  If it hadn’t been for the frightened revelations of young Second Fwetala Po Chane, Attacus reflected, the crew of the Draka would have most likely made the same assumption. And yet, their damn fool of a Captain had still merrily headed over there despite knowing better, hadn’t he? And now Bluothesh and his nine fellow mass-murderers were on their way back …

  Attacus hit the transport system comm panel and isolated the Captain’s fast-moving pad as it approached the lander bays. “Captain, it looks like Po Chane and the clan leadership have returned to the Flesh Eater,” he reported. “Are you still determined to go through with this?”

  “More so than ever, Acting Captain,” Sergio replied firmly. “At least this way I won’t have to repeat myself.”

  XI

  Sergio, Drakamod still clutching his shoulder firmly, stepped into the lander. The final protests of his XO and Chief Tactical Officer dropped off the comm and fell silent as the door sealed behind him.

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to maintain giela contact at the range we’re going to be reaching?” he asked the parrot idly, crossing to the control module.

  “The range will not be a problem,” Drakamod replied. “I have installed tight-whisper signal boosters at both ends of the interface. I could chew wafers and rustle my feathers from almost a light-hour away, although the lag would be ridiculous. As to whether I remain functional once you are inside the Flesh Eater…”

  “Right.”

  The lander slid out of the Draka’s artificial gravity range, and Sergio nudged them carefully away from the warship. Following the brilliant cone of her prism-arc floodlights and keeping the glare at the lander’s back, he accelerated towards the Flesh Eater. The colourful little giela, weightless, pushed off from his shoulder, spread its wings, and looped lazily through the air.

  “Observe,” Drakamod said. “Flight.”

  “Well played.”

  “We’re receiving a standard approach and docking code,” Drakamod reported a moment later. “Estimated time of arrival, seven minutes.”

  Sergio nodded, having received the same data almost simultaneously on his console. The transmission itself appeared to be harmless enough. Accustomed to dealing with Fergunakil data exchanges, which could turn out to be exotically contaminated at any moment, the ship’s systems could deal with most forms of electronic attack even without Charlie running things. The acknowledgement the Flesh Eater had sent to the lander was as raw-data bland as the comms they’d shared with young Fwetala Po Chane.

  If they were going to spike the warship’s computer system, they probably didn’t need to resort to a hidden comms virus. The very fact that their presence appeared to have sent Charlie into a coma was enough to suggest that the Flesh Eater had more effective measures at her command. Indeed, if she could destroy an AstroCorps warship, or was herself invulnerable to their weapons, there seemed little reason for them to bother with electronic attacks at all.

  Paper-thin …

  “Nothing much to do until then but wait,” Sergio said, tapping in the route and prep commands. He pushed back in his chair and rose out of it a little, enjoying the weightlessness himself.

  “I could tell you a joke,” Drakamod offered after a minute or so of silence.

  “This ought to be good.”

  “Why do AstroCorps crewmembers wear grey?”

  Because the silver uniforms made us look like monkeys wrapped in foil, Sergio thought, smiling slightly as he recalled his curmudgeonly old grandfather regaling the family with tales of the ludicrous military fashions his grandfather had been forced to tolerate. “I don’t know, Alpha,” he said instead, “why do AstroCorps crewmembers wear grey?”

  “So they can pretend to be Fergunak,” Drakamod replied. While Sergio was still wondering whether this was the joke, and whether he should laugh, the alpha went on. “Why do deck-clones and security and ops crew wear red?”

  “I don’t know,” Sergio recited dutifully, “why do deck-clones and security and ops crew wear red?”

  “So we know they’re made of meat,” Drakamod said, this time with the definite tone of someone delivering a punchline.

  “That … probably lost a lot in translation.”

  “Perhaps,” Drakamod acknowledged. “Of course, it’s also possible that you are simply lacking in a sense of humour.”

  “That is possible,” Sergio conceded.

  They drifted almost glacially towards the great white cliff of the Flesh Eater’s hull. The closer they got, the more eerie the monstrous ship’s smoothness became. From a distance, most large ships seemed smooth by the simple expedient of distance blurring away the details of hull plates, access locks, and other features. The Flesh Eater, however, was as featureless as an eggshell, gleaming ethereally in the Draka’s lights, unmarred by crack or scratch or smudge of spaceborne debris.

  Paper-thin.

  “There does not appear to be an opening at the coordinates indicated,” Drakamod commented.

  “No,” Sergio mused, “no there doesn’t,” he floated and looked out of the lander’s front window for a time, feeling the little vessel humming busily through his minimal points of contact with the seat, staring at the vast sweep of hull as it grew and flattened in front of them. Usually, approaching something the size of a Fleet enforcer or even an AstroCorps warship was like flying your lander at alarming speed towards a black metal wall or craggy grey mechanical cliff … in this case, the process seemed slower, dreamy, as though they were drifting into a cloud. “Alpha,” he said, “did you get clear readings on the hull dimensions when we were moving into position?”

  “Yes,” Drakamod replied, and a stylised image flashed onto one of the secondary panels. As per the visual impression Sergio had received, the Flesh Eater was a long, slender double-ended spike, tapering at bow and stern – if they were the bow and stern – into points that were fine enough for a human to cup a hand over, if not sharp enough to pierce skin. From each of these termini the hull expanded gradually to the not-quite-central mass of the engulfed Fergunakil ship,
and presumably whatever other Fergunakil and Blaran vessels and equipment the Po Chane had picked up along the way. The central mass, which was slightly misshapen and mottled with the shadow of the leviathan within. As though the hull was stretched over the Fergunakil vessel, stretched – well, paper-thin.

  But it was the spires, fore and aft, that Sergio was staring at.

  “I’d been wondering,” he said, “why they hadn’t absorbed the Linda or the Ivan. Maybe they’re getting around to it. Maybe they’re going to take them to pieces first, strip them down. But it seems strange … they’re very small ships, and they’d be easy enough to fit anywhere inside, say, the centremost six or seven miles of the Flesh Eater. And I would have assumed they’d be much easier to depopulate, let alone scavenge for parts, if they were inside the larger ship. Why did Bluothesh and his clan leaders go over there in a shuttle?

  “At first I thought it was a matter of available internal space,” he went on, “like she was already full–filled with ship’s systems or pirated wreckage or even water … but I don’t think that’s what it is. Look at that profile.”

  “Not dissimilar to a large-scale reinforced ice structure that has undergone heat and stress weathering, and a certain amount of drive optimisation – maximum size for minimal subluminal debris impact when on the move,” Drakamod agreed. “As I believe your officers were hypothesising … only that is not ice.”

  “No, it’s not,” Sergio agreed. “It’s also very close to the mathematical models they create for relative fields, for Worldships and enforcers and Chrysanthemums, and even some warships. Optimal field stability and scalability.”

  “Yes,” Drakamod sounded surprised. “It is somewhat second nature to my kind, as a technological aesthetic. I had not considered it from the landbound point of view.”

  “Your entire intellectual structure is based in your aquatic form and sense of motion and streamlining,” Sergio agreed. “It’s one of the things that make you more effective soft-space pilots – one of the few things that we can mimic in our own vessels, by making them longer in relation to their torus placements – it optimises the fields we generate.”

  “You also wear grey uniforms.”

  Sergio gave a soft exhalation of amusement, then carried on. “It’s just that forming an ultimately optimised relative field would require us to build hulls to those exact specifications, to within picometres, because we can’t push the field beyond the hull across which it is generated. Torus-based field generation can’t achieve the form due to the power requirements, and our own ship designs – while they approach Fergunakil streamlining – are constrained by practical difficulties. A hull that long and slender, made from dynacrete or any modern material, would just be too fragile, even in vacuum. Let alone on a ship even bigger. A Worldship is ten times the size of the Flesh Eater – if they were designed to be that shape…”

  “And even if you could make a ship that precise shape–”

  “–Why bother when we can make a ship of basically any size we need using our current hull-hugging field bubble technology, without the constraint of perfect adherence to the ideal field?” Sergio concluded in agreement. “Not even the Fergunak make ships the shape of a mathematical bubble, although they’re closer to it than we are most of the time, because they get the job done anyway. It’s all pure theory beyond that.”

  “You believe the Flesh Eater is shaped like this because it is the optimal form to fill her available relative field bubble?” Drakamod asked.

  “No,” Sergio said with a little shiver of excitement, “I don’t think she’s capable of making a relative field at all.”

  XII

  No opening revealed itself before they made contact with the Flesh Eater, and Sergio was just beginning to consider spinning them to a landing configuration and engaging the jets for a touchdown on the snowy surface when computer control was abruptly taken away from him.

  “Are you still with me, Alpha?” he asked in a low voice, as he tapped at the console and found it unresponsive. Sometimes, when lander controls were overtaken by a larger docking and transit system, it also severed giela contact.

  “Always,” Drakamod said with regrettable intimacy. “Lander controls have been re-routed, however.”

  “Not entirely unforeseeable,” Sergio allowed. “Most big ships have their own guidance overrides to avoid visitors falling victim to gravitational shear or parking in the Commodore’s private bay. If they were going to destroy us they would have done so before now anyway – a little bit of autopilot’s not going to hurt us.”

  Still, he had to admit to a twinge of unease as they coasted right up to the featureless wall with only a slight deceleration to show for their imminent impact. There was the usual slightly-nauseating vertigo of a close approach to a large body with its own mild mass-inherited gravitational pull, but in this case it was so faint as to be dismissible as psychosomatic. Then there was the more familiar and distinctly non-psychosomatic sensation of rolling layer-by-layer into another ship’s artificial gravity, although this too was oddly subtle. Sergio found himself sinking comfortably back into his seat, and Drakamod – who had pushed her giela elegantly back towards him and allowed him to snag her out of the air – settled solidly back onto his shoulder.

  At the same time, they flew through the Flesh Eater’s hull at close to three hundred miles an hour.

  It was hard to tell what happened at that precise instant, not only because it passed so quickly but because almost simultaneously the lander encountered atmosphere, began to decelerate more sharply, and the screens and consoles flashed and shouted warnings usually reserved for a dangerously abrupt atmospheric insertion. In this case it was unnecessary, because they weren’t flying too fast and the sensors had been fooled into thinking the lander was crashing.

  Not that flying into a docking bay at three hundred miles an hour wasn’t crashing, in Sergio’s opinion, but it hadn’t been something he could avoid. And as it turned out, the space they’d dived into was a long, pale gallery evidently designed for the landing and take-off of vessels somewhat larger than the Draka’s landers. They roared to a stop and landed with barely a bump on the hard white surface, after decelerating sharply for perhaps fifteen hundred feet. The surface, and indeed the docking gallery itself, seemed as pristine and as pale as the hull through which they had flown. It also seemed quite solid.

  He wasn’t quite prepared to assume from the unorthodox docking that the hull was anything as crude as an illusion. It was clearly as solid as the deck on which they’d touched down, at least insofar as the Draka’s instruments had been able to establish from the outset. It wasn’t a projection – not of any sort the Six Species was aware of, anyway. It was, however, clearly malleable. Its atomic structure had changed to allow them to pass through it, even as it had retained its light-reflecting properties to continue looking solid. Then, presumably, it had reverted to its impenetrable original state.

  This backed up Sergio’s line of thought about the shape of the Flesh Eater’s external structure, a thought he took some comfort in even as he shivered again at the almost unspeakable level of technology they were dealing with.

  “Okay then,” he said, as the lander returned to manual control and powered down one system at a time, starting with the atmospheric insertion alarms. “We’re in one piece, we’re down, and … regular comms appear to be blocked but I am able to send tight-pack signals to show that we’re alive – for now,” he did so, sending a series of discreet pulses to the Draka’s bridge to hopefully allay any concerns their sudden disappearance from viewscreens and comms might have caused. Of course, whether the pulses were arriving at the far end or not would require Attacus to send a response …

  “And whatever the hull is made from, it has still not cut my connection,” Drakamod confirmed before Sergio could ask her a second time whether she was still with him. Sergio grinned, and a moment later the tight-pack array flashed a swift series of response-pulses. The Draka was standing by.


  Consciously avoiding the urge to hesitate on the lander, to check his uniform or take deep breaths or do anything stupid and pointless, Captain Sergio Malachi strode to the door. With another conscious act of will to avoid hesitating in the doorway he stepped out into the Flesh Eater, where his death waited.

  He didn’t know this for a fact, of course. It was just something he tended to keep in mind every time he stepped onto an enemy vessel. He’d found it saved costly attitude adjustments later on.

  XIII

  The hall where the lander had docked was chilly, with a dank and briny feeling in the air that Sergio recognised all too well.

  “They emptied the water out of this place to allow us to land,” he said, crossing to the curved wall of the gallery. The floor wasn’t quite puddled, but it was wet. Slick. “Pretty recently,” he concluded, touching the wall and rubbing his fingertips together. He tried not to think about the mess that would have been made of his lander – and him with it – if they’d gone through the Flesh Eater’s hull and hit water instead of air.

  “Yes,” Drakamod said. “I cannot communicate with the Children of the Bluothesh – our mutual segregation continues – but this part of the ship is quite close to the object we had assumed to be the great grey leviathan. It would not surprise me if the surrounding area was filled with breathable atmosphere.”

  Breathable atmosphere, of course, meant water as far as Drakamod was concerned. And it made sense – the leviathan was constructed to expand in volume and fill with water for habitation. Compacted as the vessel was inside the Flesh Eater, the Fergies could probably still activate the atmospheric generators and fill the foreign hull with water, if encouraged to.

  “Well, I hope they don’t vent this inhospitable nothingness I’m breathing out into space and let the water back in here anytime soon,” he said with a grin.