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

  Later, after over four hundred years of highly interesting and educational organic life – and just a few short decades before a Six Species starship named Thunder Child was to have her fateful first encounter with the Biograbe at Keeley Towers – Frost On Four Legs returned to the Dreamscape, leaving her flesh to expire and decompose behind her.

  It had been an accident, really. There was a fire in an egg vault near her opulent refrigerated home, caused by an uncontrolled illness that could in rare cases put the plasma-venting digestive systems of the Biograbe infants into full meltdown. Overcrowding coupled with a failure in the safety systems led to the worst disaster in living memory. Biograbe living memory, in any case.

  Only one in a thousand Biograbe reached maturity at the best of times, their enormous sacs of young making the aki’Drednanth fight for flesh-rights look tame in comparison. Frost On Four Legs, thanks to her Biograbe-designed freezer-suit, was able to save over a hundred Biograbe juveniles before the ceiling collapsed and her suit and body alike began to burn.

  She withdrew into the Dreamscape, feeling the conduit between her and her body shrink and close, one channel at a time, leaving a momentary numb throb in her dream form’s head … and then she remembered, for the first time since her earliest fumbling conversations with the Myconet, that the head of her dream-self was only a symbol anyway. With the closing of the conduit, the pain vanished. The ache of her jaws, the dry fire that had haunted her joints for the past ten years or more, and of course the colossal, obscene pain that had come from the fire. All gone.

  She folded her many legs and settled on the ground beside the Myconet. The mushroom had hardened a little but not grown in the centuries since her extrusion into Frost On Four Legs’s Dreamscape. As promised, she remained a representative only, not taking up more space than necessary in Frost On Four Legs’s part of the Great Ice.

  “So,” the Myconet said as if resuming a conversation they’d left off mere hours before, “that was a life lived.”

  “Yes,” Frost On Four Legs said, stroking her plasma-scarred feeding palps meditatively with a hooked foreleg. The scarring, like the body itself, was pure Dreamscape illusion – but elder Biograbe bore the slightly-bubbled texture of burns on the shell around their mouths, trophies of long lifetimes spent warring with their own fiery innards, and so Frost On Four Legs emulated this in the dream, for the sake of her own self-identity. “Yes, it was,” she paused for a while, but the Myconet appeared to have no follow-up remarks. “How long will I be Drednanth?” she asked, although she already knew the answer her old friend would give.

  The Myconet didn’t disappoint her. “You will be Drednanth always,” she said. “As for when you will next acquire flesh … this I cannot say.”

  “You experienced the flesh,” Frost On Four Legs said, “even though your own body perished in the nest. You rode along with me, and shared my experiences without any of the pesky upkeep and administration work,” she tapped the mushroom with a claw. “Didn’t you?” the Myconet did not reply, but her tendrils moved in a smug fashion. “And how many of your extrusions ride along with other dreams?” Frost On Four Legs went on. “How many look out through the eyes of other aki’Drednanth? You old monster, with your lofty claims that hardly anyone can extrude into two bodies at once – how many bodies do you have?”

  “Many,” the Myconet said, “if that is the definition you choose.”

  A few short and uneventful decades later, the Myconet summoned Frost On Four Legs to her Dreamscape with the invitation to reassume the flesh – or die.

  XIV

  Before even considering its sensational wording, the very fact of the invitation itself was more than unusual – it was unprecedented. The Myconet, usually the very definition of fatalistic calm, let her preposterously small and immature friends flit around in their childish fashion, never really instructing them or calling upon them. If she had any need to talk to any member of the Drednanth, she had but to wait for the opportunity to arise. After half a billion years, the Myconet was not in any specific hurry to do anything.

  Frost On Four Legs didn’t use the doorway-growth anymore. It still stood, at least part of it, next to the Myconet’s mushroom in Frost On Four Legs’s dream, but she traversed by the simpler route these days, moving from one part of the Dreamscape to another. And the Myconet’s dream, or the part of it that she reserved for meetings with other Drednanth, was always accessible. No invitation or announcement necessary.

  When the mushroom told Frost On Four Legs to attend, this was new. It was strange, anomalous, and the phrasing – reassume the flesh, or die – nothing short of unnerving. The strain in the ancient’s curmudgeonly old voice even more so. Frost On Four Legs could imagine nothing in the galaxy that could so discountenance the Myconet. Naturally, she skittered immediately onto the soft pastel plain and looked up at the towering fungal mass.

  “You must come,” the Myconet said. “You must follow.”

  With a rasping twist, a pale weave of new growth burst out of the lightly-furred ground and coiled into a doorway. Without hesitating Frost On Four Legs folded herself through it in the Biograbe manner, poking and grasping first with her legs and then pulling her hard-shelled body into the dream of a Drednanth she had not met before. It must have been her overwrought imagination, but she felt as though the orange-and-yellow sky was darkening a little behind her as she moved away from the Myconet’s dream.

  The Dreamscape into which Frost On Four Legs stepped was unfamiliar, all columns and strange slow-sweeping blades of ice or blue stone, somewhere between machines and giant-leafed plants. There was a sound, here. A rumbling that Frost On Four Legs could tell was not right. Something in this dream was breaking, buckling under pressure. And beyond that … yes, something in the great whole of the Drednanth was going dark. Something was happening. Something new.

  Something terrible.

  She seized upon the only familiar things she could – the figure of the Drednanth whose mind she had stepped into, and the chest-high mushroom standing beside her.

  The mushroom wasn’t much larger than the one that stood in the heart of Frost On Four Legs’s dream, but it was older. Gnarled and dark and glossy, like petrified wood long-smoothed by the touch of a million hands. Their fully-realised Drednanth host was big, taking the form of a pale-blue grub with a soft segmented body spattered with black markings, and a single compound eye as large as Frost On Four Legs’s whole body dominating the foresection.

  “This is Jaath,” the Myconet said. Her voice was the same, although still with that unnatural urgency.

  Jaath hunched her huge body, a gleaming collection of legs and mandibles moving beneath her eye. “I cannot take another,” she said. “Silver Bane crowds me.”

  “Where is Silver Bane?” the Myconet asked.

  “I have no idea,” Jaath said sharply. “She’s in here somewhere. I cannot take a second. Not even for you.”

  “She is Frost On Four Legs,” the Myconet said.

  “I know who she is,” Jaath said, giving Frost On Four Legs a not-unfriendly look that radiated more from the atmospheric communion of her dream than the character of her huge faceted eyeball. “She was in the litter with Isaz and Shiverteeth Comet-rider.”

  “Then you know that she was oona’aki’Drednanth when she returned, less than fifty years ago. She lived but one life of flesh before that. She will take up negligible space.”

  “Take her to TakaKran.”

  “TakaKran is gone. The Damorakind were destroyed, and TakaKran returned. Our options dwindle, Jaath.”

  “Yes,” Jaath said tightly. “I know. Take her to Thord. She and Isaz conspired together to escape this.”

  “Thord has closed her doors,” the Myconet said, “and I will not be the one to tear them asunder. Too many of my fellow ancients are already trying that route. We do not fight in the Dreamscape.”

  “You still believe that,” Jaath said sadly. “Even now. Even now that we fight.”

&nbs
p; “Yes.”

  Jaath looked at Frost On Four Legs, her great pale-blue body and huge shiny eye somehow helpless. She turned back to the Myconet. “Your extrusions, in my dream and the dream of Frost On Four Legs, will be all that remain of you,” she said. “You know I cannot take more of your mind. It is too big.”

  “My mind is already gone,” the Myconet said simply. Jaath recoiled, and the little mushroom twisted its tendrils. “The doors close, the lights fade, the tale ends. Already there is little of me remaining but the afterword you see here, the footnote that resides with Frost On Four Legs.”

  “What is happening?” Frost On Four Legs asked.

  “I don’t know,” the Myconet said. Frost On Four Legs tried to remember, and realised she had never heard the Myconet say I don’t know. Never in such a stark, unqualified manner.

  “Am I to take it from your chosen form that you know something of the Biograbe?” Jaath asked, giving a final shudder and evidently opting not to question the Myconet further. “The Myconet said you lived among them.”

  “For almost three hundred years,” Frost On Four Legs said.

  “Very well,” Jaath allowed, “you may be needed. Can you fight?” Frost On Four Legs hesitated. “If it makes you feel better, it may not occur in the Dreamscape as such, although the struggle may overflow here, despite the fond fantasies of the Myconet. The struggle will be in the flesh – but it will start long before your bodies are born. In fact, you may struggle and die in my dream before we even find a chance to gestate new flesh. I am the only aki’Drednanth here.”

  “Others will come,” the Myconet said.

  Jaath collected herself ponderously. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” Frost On Four Legs said. “I don’t even know what you’re both talking about.”

  “Soon the communion between us will collapse,” Jaath said. “It will be as though we are entering the grey, even though you have no flesh form to do so, it will feel the same. You must withdraw yourself into this dream, not into your own. If you remain in your Dreamscape, you will be cast into the Gnang and you will never return.”

  “You will die,” the Myconet said.

  There was a shudder and things went dark momentarily. When the watery light of Jaath’s Dreamscape returned, Frost On Four Legs noticed that cracks had appeared on the closest trunk-columns surrounding them. In the root of her mind, she felt her Dreamscape receding. It did feel somewhat similar to entering the grey, as though her current extension into Jaath’s mind – Jaath’s flesh brain, Frost On Four Legs was increasingly certain – was a body in the physical sphere.

  She didn’t hesitate. As her centre ebbed away into the dark, she pulled herself forward with a great surge, feeding everything that she was into the Biograbe representation standing in front of Jaath, feeding her entire Dreamscape into the realm of towers and sweeping leaves.

  The world shuddered and went dark again. When the light returned, there were more cracks on the trunks … and the neat black sweep of a Dreamscape door had appeared beside the Myconet. Frost On Four Legs’s dream lay beyond it, nested within Jaath’s lattice.

  “Frost On Four Legs has proven resourceful and creative when it comes to the finer points of Drednanth conflict,” the Myconet said.

  “Will you never let me live that down?” Frost On Four Legs said dryly. “Roar forgave me.”

  “Roar may be the only one of us who is safe right now,” Jaath said bluntly, “seeing as how she’s already stuck head-first in a black hole. But if you can fight, and if you can think, then perhaps you are worth the effort.”

  “Why,” Frost On Four Legs asked without holding out much hope for an answer, “have I poured myself into the aki’Drednanth brain-ice of a Drednanth I have never met? What is happening?”

  “Change,” Jaath replied.

  “The Drednanth, if it is lucky, is about to be reborn,” the Myconet added. “You, as one of our most recent oona’aki’Drednanth, have paradoxically become the Drednanth with the most experience in the field.”

  “In the field of being a newborn pup with no experience at all,” Frost On Four Legs said.

  “I did say it was a paradox,” the Myconet replied. “I will help you where I can, but you will find I am greatly limited.”

  “Help me with what?” Frost On Four Legs asked.

  “I have told you many times that the universe is large,” the Myconet said, “and old, and strange. But I have perhaps failed to impress upon you just how large, how old, how strange,” the mushroom twisted gently. “It is time you found out.”

  Black Honey Wings

  I

  Commander W’Tan was sitting in the Captain’s chair when Barducci arrived on the bridge. This was standard protocol for the XO in an off-shift contact event situation, particularly if said XO happened to be a Molranoid XO to a human Captain.

  It still gave Drago an uncomfortable feeling to see the cold-blooded, dead-eyed Molran sitting in the big seat.

  “I understand we’ve been grounded,” he said, striding across to his tactical console. “Have they contacted us yet?”

  “Preliminary nods only,” W’Tan said, her attention on the main viewscreens rather than the Chief Tactical Officer. “Aside from the suppressor, which might qualify as a form of contact. Where is the Captain?”

  “Washing his hair,” Drago replied vaguely, checking his console’s readouts and finally raising his eyes to give the unknown ship a proper look. “That tousled-up Academy-washout bed-head thing doesn’t happen by accident, you know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Washing hair is this thing humans can do,” Barducci explained, “when they’d rather be doing anything else than talking to strangers in ugly, ugly starships. And it is an ugly, ugly starship, by the way.”

  W’Tan seemed disinclined to argue that point. Black Honey Wings was a truly unlovely piece of hardware.

  The vessel might have been a Chrysanthemum hub, stripped right down to her engines and a single pair of docking stations, one of which had a modular attached to it. The body of the ship, therefore, was long and spindly and encrusted with sealed-off segmentations, and then bent in the middle at almost ninety degrees. The whole thing sort of looked like a skeletal arm, cocked at the elbow, holding a discus. A very lumpy old discus, possibly with a skin disease of some kind.

  Barducci might have assumed they were addressing the modular and that it had just happened to have docked at a blasted-out Chrys stem, but there hadn’t been a Chrysanthemum, whole or otherwise, here when they had stopped. Additionally, the modular had clearly been attached to the Black Honey Wings for a long time. Her docking area was overgrown with access chutes, exchange and torus augmentations, and a couple of extra habitats. The dividing line between dock and modular was thoroughly blurred.

  And then there was the massive umbrella arrangement at the other end, extruding behind the thick torus of the Black Honey Wings’s main relative drive. A madman’s sculpture of shoulder blade and some ribs, perhaps, expanding on the ‘arm’ simile.

  “I am of course familiar with human hair issues,” Commander W’Tan said. “For example, I am aware that some of you have more issues – not to mention more hair – than others.”

  “Score one for the Commander,” Arlin San Genevieve, currently at the helm while Tippy was off-shift, opined with a grin back over his shoulder.

  “You better watch that lip of yours if you don’t want to be detailing PIVs for the rest of the tour, S.G.,” Barducci grumbled, running his hand with theatrical sensitivity over his inexorably-rising forehead and thinning crown.

  “Sorry, Brute.”

  “So what is this,” Drago said, “aside from five quads of ugly in a two-quad bag?”

  “Assuming you are talking about the starship that is detaining us,” W’Tan said, “she appears to be a Chrysanthemum-class amalgam with single modular affixed, dual relative drive capability and armaments in the low-warship ranges. No AstroCorps registry and certainly not built to
AstroCorps specs. The starship’s name appears to be–”

  “Black Honey Wings, yeah,” Barducci said, “I got all that. I think I caught a live performance from them last time I was out at Standing Wave.”

  “Are you sure that was all you caught?” San Genevieve asked.

  “Now that you mention it, I did also pick up this nasty oozing little growth that itches like a sonofawhore,” Drago said. “Fortunately, it knows how to pilot a God damn ship,” he turned back to the XO, who was about as impressed as ever with the sparkling human bridge repartee, not to mention being interrupted in the middle of her technical rundown. “I was wondering more about that structure on the far end. Is it really a relative field suppressor with its dress off, or does it just look like one?”

  “Since something in this vicinity is dampening our relative drive,” W’Tan said, “and we are the only two starships out here, it seems likely.”

  Drago whistled. “And they just dropped in on us?”

  W’Tan nodded. “We came out of relative speed at these coordinates according to the Captain’s orders,” she said, “for these … ‘calibration and contact operations’,” her scepticism regarding their spuriously-justified stopover was quite palpable, but this wasn’t exactly a new reaction from the Molran either. “The strangers in the Black Honey Wings exited relative speed shortly afterwards, unfolded this framework from under their primary field torus, and shut down our relative drive. At which point I contacted the Captain, and got you instead.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “My natural assumption at this point is that either the Black Honey Wings discovered our intended exit coordinates back at the last Mandelbrot we stopped at,” W’Tan concluded, “or they are the people we have come out here to contact. Which is why the Captain’s decision to wash his hair is at once inconvenient and characteristic of the man.”

  “Copy that, Commander,” Barducci said, at least putting a semblance of professionalism in his tone. “Comms, anything yet?”