Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (36 page)

There was a long, horrified silence.

“Back into a human?” Zeegon asked. “Into
Janus
?”

“No no, of course not, no,” Bunzo exclaimed, “goodness me, no. Can you only imagine it? No, of course, studies are ongoing. We wouldn’t expect a perfect retranscription. Probably only a test copy at first, maybe even a fragment, and more augmentation will be needed before the whole parade can fit into one little old brain again. A network of several brains would need to be arranged, first. And always with the option to restore to the electronic sphere.”

“Dude, that’s pretty messed up,” Zeegon said, still staring at the burgers.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Bunzo said, his voice high and fragile. “It takes a special compatibility with the mechanical. An affinity. So unfortunate that your friend Ital didn’t make it as far as the Bunzolabe. She had great affinity. Great
enthusiasm
.”

“What are you, fifteen?” Zeegon asked scornfully, but unable to keep an edge from his voice.

“I don’t mean to be unpleasant,” Bunzo said, “but after so many years, you come to see that there is nothing truly new, nothing truly beyond the emotional range of human beings, regardless of the body that houses them.”

“We’re leaving,” Z-Lin said.

“I’m just saying, Ital would have understood,” Bunzo said, “and would not have judged. Indeed, how
could
she judge?”

The wide panel that had borne the BUNZO BURGER sign shifted to a more conventional panorama-display screen. The scene, the sounds of which began to pipe from the foyer’s sound-bubbles, included Ital Constable. The scene was an obscenity.

“Zeegon,” Clue snapped, stepping in front of him where he stood, white-knuckled. It was more shock than anything else, at that moment. After Bunzo’s slow build-up, his cheerful and cordial personality, the sudden shift was jarring no matter how little Zeegon had allowed his guard to drop. “
Zeegon
. You know it’s fake. How easy is it to make scenes like this? A layman could do it on an organiser two thousand years ago, you think Bunzo couldn’t do it today?” Zeegon shook his head, and half-turned away. Clue stepped in front of him again, challenging. “You having doubts, Pendraegg?” she lowered her voice. “I’m going to tell Sally you had doubts. She’ll punch you so hard in the dick, you’ll piss pelvis.
You dare
.”

Zeegon shook his head again, this time to clear the red, steaming thoughts from within, and looked Z-Lin in the eye. “You’re right,” he said, “this is lame. If you’ve just had your thousandth birthday and all you’ve learned in that time is to needle someone with fake pictures of his dead girlfriend … what the Hell were we so scared of you for?”

“Hey, let’s not go
too
far with it,” Z-Lin said. “Let’s all keep the starship graveyard full of dismembered mummified corpses in the fronts of our minds, alright?”

“I’m just showing you what you wanted all along,” Bunzo said, all injured innocence. “You wanted to see something twisted? Well, I dislike rudeness and I dislike being misrepresented. So there, feast your eyes. In fact, I don’t think I want you here anymore.”

“I already said we were leaving,” Z-Lin started.

“You want to ask him to bring the lander over for us?” Zeegon asked.

“Forget it,” Clue growled. “I was a damn idiot to abandon the lander in the first place. Let’s go and try a manual takeoff. We can worry about-”

Decay glanced over the top of Zeegon’s head. “Commander?”

Zeegon and Clue turned. The smooth, pale-tinted robots had reappeared, shockingly fast and silent. And now there were about a dozen of them looming in the entrance of each shop along the spaceport foyer.

“Ah, shit,” Z-Lin muttered. “Gentlemen, arm yourselves.”

Zeegon and Z-Lin pulled out a heavy pistol each. The guns, dense composite projectile weapons from Sally’s private collection, were apparently nicknamed ‘Boddington Mules’. Zeegon had been amused by this, imagining they fired toffees at high speed, but their brief training session with the pistols had disabused him of the notion that they were playful in any way. You had to remember to reload them with a new composite-mass core every hundred shots or so, but there were very few pure analogue weapons more effective against machinery. Janus had had one as well. It, unlike his organiser, had not shown up after his disappearance.

Decay, meanwhile, unslung a slightly more massive disc-fed shredder rifle and hefted it in his upper hands, while the lower slipped out a replacement disc from another bag he was carrying on his hip. The shredder was Molran-designed, usually used for crowd-control. Molren died a lot harder than humans, and were proportionately more difficult to put on the cool-down seat. Nevertheless, the discs in this bag were full of flanged ceramic rounds far more lethal than the usual Fleet carbon beads.

It was heavy, requiring a Molranoid’s strength; and it ran out of ammunition fast, requiring a Molranoid’s second set of hands to make it an effective on-the-move weapon. But unless they were
really
mobbed, Decay would probably be able to cover them while they made their getaway.

They formed a loose back-to-back triangle and began to shuffle out of the spaceport.

DECAY (NOW)

The months following Alr’Wady, in terms of communication and information, were dominated by the rumours and details of the Fleet assault on sovereign Chalcedony worlds. They were all supposed to be united, the Six Species indeed, the Fleet just another subculture. More widely dispersed perhaps, and arguably older and more powerful than the settled planets, and definitely more cagey, but all on the same team. It didn’t take much to set off old suspicions and hostilities, however, uncover old prejudices and grievances.

This was particularly true, Decay had found, among the increasingly human-heavy populations along the Chalcedony border. Humans were temperamental and quick to hate, and they cherished their ignorance like a childhood toy of intense sentimental value. He was no great friend of the Fleet himself, of course, and he had to admit that the settlements in this region seemed to have a pretty darn solid justification for their antipathy.

Even so, there were undercurrents. Rumours beneath the rumours. As comms officer, General Moral Decay (Alcohol) had access to all the chatter, and responsibility for piecing it together into some sort of coherent probability-supported narrative. And the narrative he was seeing here was that there was something brewing. Something that might go all the way to Aquilar, might involve all of AstroCorps and the entire Molran Fleet, and might be the start of a counter-strike against the Cancer. A big one.

Worldships did not attack places. They had warships for that – and according to the reports from the Alr’Wadi, the assault
had
involved way more than a single Worldship’s contingent of warships – but the Fleet
in general
simply did not do planetary incursions. Planetary incursions were too
conspicuous
.

Then again, aki’Drednanth siblings didn’t get along, either. It was a time for new and interesting things.

Ruby Susan was a tiny place, a brilliant red fountaining pulsar surrounded by an oddball little community of mobile, self-contained habitats belonging to a collection of extended families. Like deep-sea animals thronging around a volcanic vent, the Susannim swept around the neutron star in counter-orbit to its swiftly-revolving beacon. They collected its strange floods of radiation and energy in charged webs, loaded it into battery tankers and fired them deeper into Chalcedony space at relative speed and by remote control. Their partners at the far end sent back empty tankers, information and luxury items.

Ruby Susan had heard rumours of the Alr’Wady attack, and also of full deep-Chalcedony worlds being similarly afflicted. Worlds that were not as welcoming as the border communities, and had nothing to do with AstroCorps or the Fleet if they could possibly avoid it. The Susannim had heard reports of worlds stripped bare of their infrastructure.

And that wasn’t all.

From Ruby Susan the
Tramp
was meant to be taking a four-and-a-half-week stretch to New Chalcedon. New Chalcedon was effectively the capital planet of the region, since only the worlds of the Chalcedony border were open to outsiders. Chalcedon itself was closed to the impure. New Chalcedon was the biggest open world in the region, and a major centre of commerce as a result. Here, although their contact with AstroCorps Repair and Recovery, let alone re-crew possibilities would have been limited, they might at least have finally managed to get hold of some replacement components. And a week or so of shore leave in an approximation of actual civilisation might have been on the cards.

“Don’t bother,” was the advice of the Susannim family they matched orbits with and exchanged nods and notes, “it’s gone.”

“Gone?” Decay queried.

“New Chal was destroyed, almost two years ago now,” the Susannim contact, Pyetir, said matter-of-factly. “Wasn’t bat-heads though, wasn’t the Fleet. Word went up and downstream fast, but it hasn’t hit the big outsider systems yet.”

“We hadn’t heard this from the downstream settlements.”

“Most of them don’t much care about New Chal. Bit of a numpty place, you know. Chances are they didn’t talk about it at all.”

“That’s true,” Decay conceded, “we hadn’t discussed our planned stopover at the outsider capital, since standing AstroCorps intercultural guidelines suggest it might be considered inflammatory,” he was visited by a fleeting yet extremely vivid memory of Sally crouching and punching a shirtless human male extremely hard in the gonads, and took a moment to relish it. “If it wasn’t us bat-heads who destroyed New Chal, who was it?” he asked. “Any data?”

“Data, Hell no. Plenty of scuttlebutt, though. Some sort of alien attack. They’re saying Damorakind,” Pyetir paused. “Say, you weren’t insulted by that bat-head thing, were you? I mean, I’ve got friends who’re Molren – well, Blaren – and they’re totally okay with me saying ‘bat-head’, and they call me ‘monkey’ and it’s all good.”

“Relax,” Decay said wryly, “we’re an AstroCorps modular. No feelings here.”

Pyetir laughed awkwardly. “Right.”

“You can tell your sister and / or wife I appreciate her attempts make a diplomat out of you, though.”

This time the Susannim’s laugh was more genuine. “That’s the spirit,” he grew sober again. “We heard Declivitorion also bought it.”

“You can treat that as confirmed,” Decay said, “we came out to the edge past Declivitorion, it had been wiped off the map. Looked like the same sort of alien attack we’d seen elsewhere, but on a much larger scale. If your guys are suggesting Damorakind for the New Chal attack, they’re not alone,” he tapped at his console. “I’m uploading our logs of other attacks and aftermaths,” he said. “For comparison.”

“Obliged,” Pyetir said. “If you’re still headed to the New Chal coordinates, you’ll probably get a look-see of your own. Be prepared for some blockades, though. And not fuzzy border settlement types, either. Last I heard, the big boys were in that volume, flexing their muscles. They might not want you to get close, you know.”

“Wouldn’t want us seeing them bleed?” Decay guessed.

“That’s about it. Your uploads would probably make the difference for them, but we’ll give you some batteries as well. They always want cells, and we don’t usually deliver that direction. Just ask them to think of the Ruby next time they’re fluffing their budgets.”

“Copy that.”

They couldn’t stay at Ruby Susan long. The Susannim habs were shielded like space-bound tanks, as well as being swaddled in their spiderwebs of collector mesh. Even though she could match their crazy dance around the winking red eye of the pulsar and dock with the ramshackle old machinery, the
Tramp
’s hull was not up to the task of protecting her crew from Ruby Susan’s radiation for very long. They took on some batteries, exchanged and calibrated some last data points, and then they were on their way.

As predicted at Ruby Susan, when they arrived at the New Chalcedon system it was into a cordon of long-established Chalcedony warships. These were pretty small beans compared to AstroCorps warships, and if a
Fleet
warship had decided to fly through them and dump her recycling plant contents on the dead planet she wouldn’t have had a problem, but they were more than up to the task of stopping a modular. And systematically dismantling her. They didn’t have Godfire, but they had a nasty line in transpersion weaponry and a lot of businesslike launching and acceleration turrets that no doubt boasted various heavy ordnance.

They even had a huge hemispherical relative suppression generator. Not enough to stop unauthorised relative speed flight out of any part of the system, but it was parked squarely over the major commercial lanes and it trapped the
Tramp
almost as soon as she dropped into cruising subluminal.

Fortunately, although they were from deep Chalcedony space, the blockade personnel were calm and professional. New Chalcedony was not off-limits, they said. It was just dead, so there was little benefit in going there and they had fended off a lot of disaster fetishists and thrill-seekers. When Decay uploaded their own attack reports and data, not to mention when they delivered the batteries from Ruby Susan, the Chalcedonians became downright amiable. The
Tramp
was permitted through to take her own readings of the disaster site, as well as taking a copy of all the gathered information not deemed too sensitive. When it came to the attack, there wasn’t much classified. What
might have been there
, once, wasn’t as important as the fact that it was all gone now.

New Chalcedon looked much like Declivitorion. It was a little smaller, but it had also had a pair of moons with some settlements on, and those had been destroyed to a similar volcanic degree. It was almost like looking down at a primordial world – or worse, one that had been slashed open by an outlawed mining practice.