Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (31 page)

This was also where they were all now sitting, under the night sky between the lander and the wreck. The
Denbrough
’s docking blister, slightly lopsided with the lower couple of deck-access ports subsumed into the wrecks beneath, loomed above Z-Lin where she sat, arms wrapped around knees, thinking unproductive thoughts.

How Bunzo had managed to get all of these ships down in one piece, short of some massive space elevator and freight system of which there was absolutely no evidence, was a mystery.

“It might have been relative skipping,” Decay said as he strolled up, seeming to read the Commander’s mind. “I’ve read about it in some journals, you know. About the synth. Coming
out
of relative speed close to a large body is technically safe, or so they say, as long as the ship and the body don’t intersect. It’s
entering
soft-space close to a planet that can cause damage. It’s just that due to the generally high risk of accidents, the regulations tend to err on the side of caution and just tell pilots not to do it.”

“Probably wise,” Clue allowed.

“The main danger in leaving soft-space too close to a planet, aside from the possibility of planet and ship occupying the same space, is other vehicles.”

“And Bunzo would be able to control the traffic,” Clue said.

“Right. It’s also practically impossible to skip out of relative speed close enough to a moving target, like a planet, to just let your ship drop lightly onto the surface,” the Blaran said. “You’d need to exactly match speed and trajectory, not only orbit but also rotation, and then make the jump.”

“And to do this little damage to the ships,” Z-Lin said, “it couldn’t even be a matter of inches. Even a light fall onto a planet surface, for something like a modular, would make her collapse like a house of cards.”

“It would be a matter of
microns
,” Decay agreed. “So little space, and at such precisely-matched velocities, that they might as well already be touching. Then it would just be a matter of letting the weight settle, and he could even tweak the internal emergency measures and the exchange and things, to further minimise the damage. There are articles about synthetic intelligence being capable of that sort of mass-synchronous calculation,” he looked up at the wreck of the
Denbrough
. “Judging from the way Bunzo’s command sequence got us right to the planetary mass-margin, he might have been able to drop us right here on the surface if he’d wanted to.”

“That’s encouraging,” Z-Lin said. “Any more news from the ship?”

They’d lost contact with the
Tramp
almost two hours earlier, but had maintained optimism and gone about their mission, finding their way inside the half-deflated modular and picking their way through to search for anything resembling survivors.

What they’d found, after about twenty minutes, hadn’t
exactly
resembled survivors. In fact, what it
had
resembled was the reason they were all once again outside, getting some fresh, balmy night air while they thought about what to do next. And hoping that whatever they
did
think of to do next turned out to be exciting enough to make them forget what was inside the
Denbrough
.

“Nothing,” Decay answered glumly. “I think it’s going to be impossible to regain the connection from this end, even without an intelligent machine actively interfering.”

“Do you think he is?” Z-Lin asked.

“No way of knowing, really. Have I mentioned that I’m not really a comms officer?” he sat down next to her on the smooth, weatherbeaten cruiser hull, and nudged her with a lower elbow. “I’m trained as a data analyst and archivist. I was just promoted to comms when everybody else died.”

“Yeah, I think you did mention that,” Z-Lin smiled wearily. “You also have about a century of experience over the rest of us,” she paused. “That landing trick Bunzo might have pulled,” she went on hesitantly, “with the internal buffers and the exchange. Do you think that might have been what … did that to the crew?”

“No,” Decay said, with his usual lack of sugarcoating. “The internal systems are designed to
preserve
life and limb. A failure would have reduced all but a handful of the organics to their component molecules and dispersed them – well, as we know.”

“Right.”

“I’m not going to say it’s
impossible
,” he added. “With sufficient motivation and control over the mechanisms, you could get the gravity exchange to do just about anything. I just … no, I doubt it. That was done manually.”

“Robots?”

“Robots, probably other ship systems…” he glanced upwards. “I’m going to have another crack at the comms.”

After a while Z-Lin stood up, stretched, and strolled across to the deepening rift where the
Denbrough
curved away, the ship they’d camped on vanished between two even older hulks, and the craggy hull of
Yojimbo
was visible in the gloom. She held up her organiser pad, thumbed its illumination to full, and peered down at what little she could see of the warship’s … secondary armament prow, she hazarded.

Zeegon joined her. “Think we could get down there?” he asked. Clue shrugged. “You know, I had the perfect rig for this on one of the PIVs,” he went on wistfully, “a sort of gyroscopic crash-cage that we could rig up to a tow-line. Even without the vehicle frame, we could just lower ourselves down there, or just tumble it off the edge and bounce to the bottom. Then get out, see what there is to see, and tow ourselves back up. As it is…” he squinted at the drop-off. “That plating’s pretty smooth. Even if you got down there without breaking a leg, you’d have to get back up.”

“Not sure going down there is a great idea,” Z-Lin said quietly.

“You think there’d just be more of that?” Zeegon gestured towards the
Denbrough
’s docking blister. “Just a few years more mummified?”

“Possibly,” Z-Lin replied, “but I was looking more at that flash-release flue,” she noticed Zeegon looking as carefully blank as she knew
she
often did when their helmsman started on about buggies. “That big barrel-shaped part there,” she said, raising the pad higher and attempting to illuminate the flue. “It’s partially crushed under the next ship over.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s a very specific sort of fixture,” she said, “that only a very specific sort of warship has. They’re designed for the rapid and total deployment of a mini-whorl stockpile. And not just the little ones we have for our guns – the big bomb-style ones. Empty a cargo-hold of those on a planet, you’d probably turn it into a three-hour black hole.”

“Holy crap.”

“They’re not designed for shooting wars or flying wars,” Clue said. “They’re planet killers. If
Yojimbo
came in here with that sort of artillery, I’m not sure I
want
to see what Bunzo did to them.”

“And, what? They’re unstable?”

“Oh, they’re perfectly stable,” Z-Lin said. “I’m not super-confident about the containment and release mechanism, it looks a bit crushed, but the main thing I’m worried about is going anywhere near that part of the ship, which The Bun might take as some sign of interest on our part.”

“Yeah,” Zeegon said fervently. Then he pointed. “Did I see something move down there?”

“Don’t even start.”

“Seriously,” he pointed again, and Z-Lin raised her pad. There was nothing down there, and she gave Zeegon a narrow look. “
Seriously
,” he said, stepping back from the slope. “It was the robots, right? On the
Denbrough
, I mean. They did all that … that chopping-up and laying-end-to-end stuff.”

“Probably.”

Zeegon nodded queasily. “When you got that nod from the
Denbrough
, was there any sign that there was anything else active down here? Or was it just their beacon or whatever?”

“No sign of life,” Clue said, “organic or otherwise. But that doesn’t mean Bunzo can’t switch everything back on whenever he wants. We didn’t get in deep enough to really check how the reactor core looked, or any of the bridge systems. A ship in this sort of condition, there could be all sorts of containment breaches and damage to the reactor that we wouldn’t want to get close to, even without worrying about rogue robots.”

They headed back towards the lander.

“And there was no nod or anything from
Yojimbo
?” Zeegon asked.

“Nothing,” Z-Lin shook her head. “There was some fragmented data in the
Denbrough
’s uplink that suggested they had been able to get a nod from
Yojimbo
when
they
arrived here, much like we’re getting from the
Denbrough
now. It’s probably a crew and armament manifest, which we basically already knew, as well as Corps ID tags for the warheads, all that technical crap.”

“Something our glorious AstroCorps commanders might be interested in getting?”

“Not really. Presumably they already knew what was on board the ship when they lost it.”

“And no use to us?”

“None whatsoever. We could use the IDs to access the warheads without any sort of automated security response, if we had any official command codes to feed them once we had access. Only we don’t,” she waved in a general dispirited circle at their hilly-looking surroundings. “And it’s not like we’d ever get any of these ships to fly. They’re beached whales. They’d break up if we turned on their subluminal drives, and that’d probably set off a half-dozen others. I don’t know if even a fully-functional starship could escape a planet’s gravity-well without coming to pieces.”

“The
gravity
-well, maybe,” Zeegon agreed, “but not the atmosphere.”

Clue nodded. “And not even Bunzo could drop a ship
off
a planet and into soft-space. Decay’s right about that. Laws of physics, nothing to do with engine and field timing. The whole thing would just rip itself to pieces, even if it wasn’t already half-crushed.”

“And Bitterpill warned us not to take anything off the surface.”

“Right. Considering the survival profile we have, let’s not go spoiling it all by doing anything stupid,” she sat back down. “Even with activation commands, all we could do is set them off.”

“The mini-whorls?” Zeegon said in surprise. “The planet killers?”

Clue nodded. “And we’d be right here getting killed along with it. With the warship dead, you’d need to be
sitting
on the things.”

“Might still be worth thinking about, if we’re in real trouble,” Zeegon said, then shook his head. “Dang, I’ve been hanging out with Sally too long.”

“Not worth thinking about,” Z-Lin explained. “With the data we have, we can do precisely nothing to anything down here. We’d need commands keyed to those specific IDs, and that would have to come from AstroCorps authority beyond the ship. High Command,” she gave a short laugh. “Or a synth instance with a Corps background.”

Decay emerged from the lander, and returned to sit beside the three humans. Z-Lin glanced at him questioningly, and he shook his head.

“So what else can we do here?” Zeegon asked, looking from Z-Lin to Decay to Janus and back to Z-Lin. “Mission accomplished, right? We came to find out what happened to the
Denbrough
and
Yojimbo
. And…” he gestured at the wreck.

“Okay,” Z-Lin said. “The ship was supposed to stay in orbit on the night-side of the planet, so in a few more hours she’s going to be gone from overhead even if we don’t get back in contact.”

“If they’re still up there,” Zeegon said.

“The ship’s still up there,” Decay assured him.

“How do you know?”

“Well, because I can
see
it,” Decay replied, and patted the pair of electronic lenses hanging around his neck.

“Those could be hacked,” Janus pointed out.

“The digital equivalent to a drawing on the lens,” Zeegon nodded, “yeah.”

“Okay,” Decay said patiently, “except you can also
see a little light moving up there
that perfectly corresponds with the Tramp’s location. So unless The Bun destroyed our ship, then moved something about the same size and shape and albedo as our ship into the orbit it used to occupy…” he spread his upper hands.

“Did I tell you my joke about albedo?” Janus asked.

“Please don’t,” Z-Lin requested.

“I thought I had high albedo-”

“Please don’t?”

“-but it turned out-”

“I’ll have you
actually
court-martialled.”

“-I just had a raging photon.”

Decay guffawed.

Zeegon lay back and laced his hands behind his head. It was a deceptively-relaxed movement that Z-Lin recognised as a coping mechanism. As if by
acting
as though this was a pleasant shore leave on a balmy resort planet, it would somehow
become
one. “It’s pretty nice here,” the helmsman said, “at least until the marauding killer robots and runaway fun-park machinery comes for us. So what’s the plan?”

“We’ll still have the lander,” Z-Lin said, “but the sun will come up and we’ll have the planet’s bulk to get around if we decide to take off and return to the
Tramp
. Not to mention those parking arrays and whatever else is up there between us and the sun.”

“Why not head back to the
Tramp
now?”

“Not until we know what’s happening up there,” she said. “For all we know, we might fly into their sights and get blown out of the sky.”

Decay’s pad chimed quietly from his pocket. All eyes turned to the Blaran as he consulted the little computer.

“We’re back in contact with the ship,” he confirmed after a few seconds. “Apparently the auto-repair system used some sort of shonky work-around with the EVA suits and … here we go. Audio only, and probably temporary – this is primeval stuff. It might actually be getting to us because it’s too low-tech for Bunzo to grasp.”

“Well it’s still coming out of the pad,” Z-Lin warned. “He’ll be able to get that.”

Decay nodded and held up the pad in his upper left hand, so they could all hear.