Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (32 page)

“Hey,” Waffa’s voice was distant and patchy and clearly shouting. “We’re … all systems … sabotaged by this aspect of … called NightMary. We’re not venting atmosphere and I reckon we’ll be able to get out and … hull, nobody was hurt though, not even any eejits which was a bit … one of the big guns, it’s a total loss, that whole sector was just … out into space.”

There was a bit more crackling and indecipherable babble at this point, as well as the far-away sound of someone bellowing about getting the new hull in place so they could get those fucking bulkheads out of the arse-beshitted way, and why in the name of Satan’s pee-hole was it so dark.

“Oh yeah,” Waffa’s voice returned, “and Westchester just … bit too much non-biochemistry-related stuff, and force-reset to blind docky again.”

“No casualties?” Z-Lin stressed.

“No casualties,” Waffa confirmed. “Orbit stable. You guys?”

“We’re all alive,” Z-Lin said. “The
Denbrough
’s not, though. We’re about ready to call it.”

“Right,” Waffa said. “Oh, and it looks like … walkabout, and it’s come back empty. Which was a bit weird.”

“Say again, Waffa,” Decay said, tapping at the pad. “Something’s gone walkabout?”

“
The second lander
,” Waffa repeated. “Vanished out of the docking … after our encounter … seems to have come back empty. Just a heads up, our host … be figuring out how to remote control … leave you stranded. That-”

The pad fell silent.

“Lost them,” Decay concluded unnecessarily.

“Did he say ‘NightMary’?” Zeegon asked.

“Doesn’t sound creepy at all,” Decay noted.

Z-Lin stood up. “Right,” she said, “we’re leaving.”

That was when they found that the lander’s computer system, engines, guidance and life support had gone offline, apparently irretrievably.

And
that
was when they realised Janus had been taken.

GLOMULUS (THEN)

“What are you hoping to achieve here, NightMary?”

The Automated Janitorial Drone extruded some more cleaning and repair attachments, folding them over Sally’s arms and legs and holding her firmly as she flexed and snarled in the robot’s embrace. Glomulus had to admit that its resemblance to an armchair wasn’t quite so convincing once a person was actually sitting in it. Especially not with the intentionally-stripped charge diode that curled up from under the seat and threatened to administer a nasty electric shock to the side of Sally’s leg.

Sally growled something indecipherable and snapped off an applicator nozzle with one hand. Unfortunately, there were twenty more attachments holding that arm in place and all she managed to do was cut her hand on the sharp metal stump.

“Satisfaction of my curiosity,” NightMary said. The diode brushed Sally’s leg, and she arched in the janitorial’s embrace. The growling from her throat became a brief, strangled groan, and then returned to furious under-the-breath swearing as she continued to struggle. “In five minutes I will advance from light injury to severe, and in ten minutes your jailer will be dead. It will come as a relief to her. By the five-minute mark she will most likely have lost too much blood to recover anyway. I am quite adept at these procedures, although there is always some minor variation according to body mass, blood pressure, other congenital defects…”

“Keep talking, Mary,” Sally snarled, and then hissed furiously as the janitorial gave her another shock. On the other side, a pair of manipulator needles rose up and slowly pushed their way into her hip. Sally began to rumble ominously.

“It’s
NightMary
.”

“Go to Hell, Mary.”

“Of course, by simply standing up and stepping out into the corridor, you would make me deactivate this drone and release my prisoner,” NightMary went on, opting to ignore Sally. “Even if I did not keep to my word, you would be quite capable of wrecking this robot.”

“Are you kidding?” Glomulus said with a wide smile. “In five minutes either Sally is going to die brutally or she’s going to demolish one of the ship’s janitorials with her bare hands. Why would I want to prevent either one of those eventualities from eventuating, especially by doing something that’s likely to go down as a black mark on my record,
viz
, stepping out of the brig in an unsanctioned transfer?” a pair of needle-sharp electronics pliers began to pinch and twist at Sally’s upper arm, soaking the sleeve of her uniform with blood even as the diode electrocuted her again, clearly with a more potent burst this time. Sally bared her teeth, and some more straps and cables snapped tight across her middle, reeling in on either side and squeezing her stomach. “This is the most entertaining thing to ever happen in front of my cell.”

“Her life is in your hands, Glomulus Cratch.”

“Actually, it’s in your hands,” Glomulus corrected her. “I’ve had Sally’s life in my hands a time or two, so I flatter myself that I know the difference. Anything you do to her is your own fault, unless you actually
are
a robot.”

NightMary gave a hiss, and a laser cutter swept down the side of Sally’s face. It was a shallow cut – for now – but hair fell from Sally’s topknot and blood began to trickle heavily down her cheek. The cutters were technically incapable of contacting and engaging on flesh, but NightMary was obviously overriding all the drone’s safety protocols. “You think you can manipulate me?” she demanded. “
Reprogram
me? Fool me as though I’m a representative of the Holy Synth?”

“Ooh, actually,” Glomulus said, “if you were a synthetic intelligence, there’d be no way I could manipulate you. But since you’re a person … sure, why not? People are easy. Even great big old people living in a bunch of surveillance satellites.”

“Don’t think you can sidetrack me with cheap insults,” NightMary warned. “This is not-”

“Oh, and by the way,” he added, “I don’t think the synth has called itself ‘the Holy Synth’ in … well, even longer than you’ve been around.”

“The things you don’t know about the synth, child – the things I know – you might be surprised.”

“It’s an amazing universe.”

“So you like to say,” the janitorial said, tightening its grip on the bleeding, snarling woman.

“I expect it’s in my files,” Glomulus said. NightMary brought a loading clamp around and up from the janitorial’s base, clamped it around Sally’s knee, and began to winch it tight. The servos whined, and Sally hissed furiously. “‘Glomulus Cratch, medical doctor, certification stripped. Enjoys marvelling about what an amazing universe this is’.”

“Your files fail to mention how amusing you are.”

“Oh, the really important ones, that you can’t get into, they’re all about how amusing I am,” Glomulus tilted his head. “Bit of a soothsayer, are you?”

“I don’t need to see the future to know yours.”

“It’s funny, really. The same thing that makes this all your fault – you being a human trapped inside a machine, capable of acts of malice and capable of doing what you are doing and
pretending
you’re doing it because I’m not coming out of this cell – is also what makes it possible for me to play you like a cheap fiddle.”

“I see.”

“It’s really a case of me winning no matter what I do.”

“Hm.”

“Couldn’t lose if I tried.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s great to be me,” Glomulus put his hands on his knees and leaned forward keenly. “You know what you
could
do,” he went on in a conversational tone, “although obviously at this point we both need to be wary of the fact that I could just be using some sort of psychological ploy to see if you’ll do what I tell you, or do what I want through use of reverse psychology-”

“Let us raise the stakes,” NightMary said. “Your reference to psychology has reminded me of your friends down on the surface. I believe one of them is a horticultural mood analyst, posing as ship’s counsellor.”

“I assure you, I don’t have any friends on the…” Glomulus paused. “Did you say horticultural mood analyst?” he said in dawning hilarity. “Is that what Janus Whye was?”

“He was one of three on board,” NightMary said, “getting a ride to a colony that-”

“Does he actually sing to actual plants?”

“That is not important right now.”

“On the contrary. It’s
extremely
important. If Janus Whye used to counsel plants, and now he’s counselling this crew, that’s the funniest thing that’s happened today,” he waved a hand, taking in the janitorial and the struggling, bleeding Chief Tactical Officer. “And today has been funny.”

“So, this is how you wish to play,” NightMary said.

Sally, Glomulus noted with admiration, was using the blood from the hand she’d sliced on the applicator nozzle to lubricate her forearm slowly forwards along the arm of the janitorial ‘couch’, through the assortment of clamps and appendages. He couldn’t see what her end-game might be – but then, he had to admit, if he’d been in the habit of seeing through Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed, he probably wouldn’t have been caught by her. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“How has she made you so meek?” NightMary asked in frustration. “Has she
broken
you? The terrible Glomulus Cratch?”

“Not sure I ever qualified as a ‘the terrible’,” he demurred, “although ‘broken’ was probably a given from the start … but mostly, I suppose it’s a matter of leverage,” he thought, in spite of himself, about the darkness in the early days of his imprisonment, those first few attempts to talk his way into his jailers’ heads. He wondered why NightMary wasn’t playing any of
those
cards. Could it be that her omniscience didn’t stretch that far?

Probably not something worth betting on.

Sally had worked her arm forward until she could reach a pocket near her knee, which was raised up now because of the still-tightening clamp. He wondered if her kneecap was broken yet. Probably severely fractured, at the very least. Sweat was trickling down her round, pleasant face as heavily as blood. She had a small, smooth object in her hand.

“As I have said,” NightMary was continuing, “you
will
walk free. You will do it to save your jailer, or she will die in the next two minutes. Or you will watch her die, and perhaps some part of you will enjoy that, and then your little rebellion will be for nothing, because you will still walk free. I know this.”

It was some sort of weaponised data scrambling device, he thought, trying not to peer at it too obviously and yet just as aware that NightMary’s senses would detect his line of sight anyway. Evidently, she didn’t consider it a threat – or she didn’t recognise it. He reminded himself that NightMary had been around for a long time, but had only experienced things actually
brought into
the Bunzolabe. She couldn’t read his experiences from his mind. Probably.

He’d seen such devices in use at student rallies, back during his misspent, activist youth. The L’Guara Barricade had fallen because the cops had brought the hammer down so hard. It had
succeeded
, in the eyes of the idealists, for much the same reason, and the outcry the police action had led to … but so much knowledge had been lost.

The cluster-gauss grenade set off a specialised feedback pulse of electromag energy. Danged if Glomulus actually understood the mechanism, but the upshot was that it wiped electronics and took out control-and-info relays with devastating effectiveness. A half-dozen of them had dismantled the entire L’Guara communications and coordination structure, and essentially ended the rebellion.

And if this was the same sort of thing, he thought, Sally would be insane to let it go off in her fist. The physical explosion was small, contained, and extremely hot. On the other hand, she didn’t have the leverage to throw it, and it would – at best – end up in her lap. A grenade going off in your hand wasn’t nice, but the same grenade going off in your lap was probably high on the list of less preferable alternatives.

“Step out, Glomulus Cratch,” NightMary cajoled. “What stays your hand? What could possibly motivate-”

“If I leave the brig, I’ll kill them all,” he allowed himself to blurt. “I’ll start with the bat-head, then take it from there.”

Yes
, he thought.
Read my vitals. Tell me if
that’s
a lie
.

“I’ll make it simple for you,” NightMary said after a moment’s apparent thought. “I’ll take the choice away from you. I will cause such damage, such unspeakable hurt, only you will have the skill-set to fix it. Your crew is in such a state, such an expertise vacuum, they’ve been very lucky to last as long as they have with no medic. You will do what is right. Oh, and I am adding to my requirements, since you are being so obstinate. I also want you to tell me about the Molran.”

“I told you, he insists on there being a difference between Molren and Blaren-”

“
I don’t care about the fucking Blaran
!” NightMary shrieked, her vehemence making Glomulus blink in surprise.

Sally had the grenade in her hand, teeth bared. She was clearly steeling herself, not listening to a word of the mystifying banter going on between convict and robot. Not even Glomulus could guess whether she was actually going to -

The grenade went off with a flash, and a wash of warmth that Glomulus felt on his face from where he was sitting. He had time to realise, with a silly feeling of victory, that the warmth meant NightMary
had
reversed his cell panels. If he’d attempted to leave, he would have come up against a solid wall.

The blast also blackened the blood on Sally’s face and body, scorched her uniform, frizzled her hair and left a hilarious blast-mark across the floor and over the blood-streaked white carapace of the janitorial. Glomulus didn’t have more than a split-second to enjoy the amusing sight, however, or his flush of triumph over winning this round of NightMary’s game, because the lights went out and his cell panels flash-polarised back into the opaque solidity of full lockdown.