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

“Blaran corsairs.”

“Ooh,” Glomulus pressed his clasped hands to his narrow chest dramatically. “Avast and shiver me hull-plates, ye scurvy space-dogs. Are we going aboard, me bold and beautiful mateys?”

“Looks like,” Clue replied dryly. “Try not to crush anyone’s head like a grapefruit between your hands unless you really, really need to.”

“I
never
crush anyone’s head like a grapefruit between my hands unless I really, really need to, Commander,” Glomulus said in an injured tone. She’d already cut off communication, though, so Cratch went back to scouting the ship’s systems and waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was sometimes a good idea to wait for the other shoe to drop, Glomulus remembered Sally saying from time to time. Because when the opposition had both shoes on the ground, you could kick him quite hard in the testicles.

Something like that. It really lost a lot in not coming from the mouth of Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed.

There wasn’t much to see from the medical bay, unfortunately. Even with his feelers out and the medical bumpers periodically flickering in response to whatever toxic code the corsairs had snuck into the
Tramp
’s system, he was without eyes and ears. He felt them dock with the big old double-Worldship hull, or whatever docking extrusion the new MundCorp representatives were offering. He didn’t have eyes in the
Tramp
’s docking blister, so all he could do was wait and see.

Humming to himself quietly but – if he did say so himself – rather jazzily, Glomulus opened all the doors leading into and out of the medical bay. There was technically nothing preventing him from leaving his little domain anymore – the heavy bands on his wrists and ankles would not arm if he broke house arrest – but he still opted not to wander far afield without direct authorisation. There was just too much risk of one of the others deciding he was somewhere he wasn’t meant to be. He wondered if he’d get said authorisation this time, before they were done with MundCorp Research Base.

In the meantime he just opened all the doors, stood in the doorway and listened down the corridor for a short while. Then he returned to the medical bay proper and readied an anaesthetic-administering device he had quietly adapted from the isolation pod they’d inherited from the ragtag collection of smoked-out survivors of Bayn Balro.

Then he sat, quietly in an out-of-the-way corner, and waited.

About half an hour passed. From his vantage point, Glomulus saw a set of corridor guide-lights illuminate along the floor leading into the medical bay.

“Never even knew we
had
those,” he marvelled to himself. Another couple of minutes went by, then he heard the telltale two-toned voice of a Molranoid approaching. A Blaran no doubt, since that was what Clue had said they were looking at here.

“…apparently heading to primary bridge,” the voice said, “we’ll be able to confirm ident against the logs … stand by.”

Never been on board a modular before, sparky?
Glomulus thought.
Why would you board at the docking blister and get an elevator all the way up
here
to get to the
 -

He almost gave the game away by laughing when the corsair wandered confusedly into the medical bay. By sheer iron willpower, though, he managed to keep quiet. He stepped in behind the ludicrously orange-haired Blaran and adroitly administered the series of progressive anaesthetic injections by the simple expedient of hammering the entire set into his back alongside his spinal cord, lumberjack-style. It took a lot to knock out a Molranoid and get past its body’s sequence of safety barriers and drug firebreaks, so the injections were rather aggressive and Cratch was required to step back while the corsair gurgled and thrashed like a giant insect. The drugs were tailored to put down a Bonshoon who had in all likelihood outweighed this lad by a good hundred and fifty pounds, though, so in about ten seconds the Blaran was out cold.

“Wow,” Cratch said, stepping up to the supine Molranoid and chuckling. “You look – and I say this both without hyperbole, and as a man who knows – like a clown.”

Still chuckling, he manhandled the corsair up onto the nearest autopsy table, gave him a quick once-over and divested him of two carbon flechette blasters, an electromagnetic whip and a really, really big knife, then sat down and waited some more.

“Fall back, Scross,” the corsair’s forearm-mounted pad said a few minutes later. The voice on the other end was Blaran, but rather hoarse and shaky. “Fall back. There’s an aki’Drednanth on board and she’s not one of the warm fuzzy ones.”

Really
, Doctor Cratch thought, and leaned over to tap his own internal communicator console again. “Commander?”

“Doctor,” Clue’s voice was calm. “Problem?”

“Not really,” he said. “Got a hostage in the medical bay, if you’re interested.”

“Very good. Rodel and his boys were just disembarking,” Z-Lin went on. “We’ll hold onto your hostage until we’re sure they’re all off, and there aren’t any other surprises on board. I trust that’s–” she cut off, presumably turning back to talk to whoever she was facing off against. ‘Rodel’, Glomulus supposed.

He tapped his communicator again, trying to make the interruption as unobtrusive as he could. “Everything alright there?” he asked.

“Fine,” Z-Lin replied after a moment. “Thord didn’t pull Captain Rodel’s head
all
the way off.”

Another ten or fifteen minutes later they were undocking, and Z-Lin, Waffa, Decay and – unexpectedly, since he had not actually seen any of their three long-haul passengers in person yet – Maladin were standing around the autopsy table. Wingus and Dingus were also on-hand.

“I thought all that stuff was in executive lockdown,” Waffa said, giving the sedative-panel a distrusting look.

“Most of it is,” Glomulus said with aplomb. “This must have been unsealed by whatever messing around these guys were doing with the computer.”

Clue didn’t look as if she necessarily believed that for a second, but nodded as she checked the anaesthetic levels. “Solid job, Doctor Cratch.”

“Mind if I ask what exactly happened out there?” Glomulus asked, jerking a thumb towards the doors.

“Not much to tell,” Z-Lin replied in a voice that said
there’s plenty to tell but I’m not in the mood for God damn story-time right now
. “Bunch of Blaren in crazy toupees took over the base when the MundCorp guys shipped out, they’ve been waiting here and preying on supply ships and anyone else who came along. Slipped some sort of lockout code into our comms, but it didn’t work as planned. They sent this guy to secure the bridge and find out why the lockout hadn’t worked and dig out some information they were apparently interested in. Looks like he got severely lost.”

“Your way with understatement is one of your most admirable features, Commander,” Glomulus inclined his head.

“Well then, in that case I’ll conclude by saying that Gila Rodel didn’t believe we had an aki’Drednanth on board, he’d apparently checked our crew manifest and seen what a mess we were in and decided we were trying the ‘we have an aki’Drednanth’ ploy. Thord then made a personal appearance in the docking blister, and demonstrated her displeasure at being forced to get all dressed up in an envirosuit and come down for a meet-and-greet.”

“Thord was resting,” Maladin said, the Bonshoon’s defensive tone tinged with amusement and smugness.

“Rodel
should
survive,” Waffa added, his own voice giving away nothing but clear satisfaction. “MundCorp had a pretty good medical setup, at least as far as I could judge from the stuff we used to deliver. Unless they took it all with them when they left, it’s just a shame we didn’t get a chance to have a snoop around.”

“Okay,” Glomulus gestured at the table. “What are we going to do with the Great Pagliacci here?”

Z-Lin glanced across the room. “All the actual medical gear is stripped out of that isolation pod from Bayn Balro, right?”

“Right,” Glomulus nodded. “We took everything out and deactivated it after the tragic incident with the dinosaurs.”

She ignored this. “Seal him into it, throw in a couple of those heater-gel packs, make sure his pad’s sending out a signal his boys will be able to pick up, and we’ll space him once we get to a safe distance and are ready to jump,” she turned to leave, then turned back. “You might as well come to the bridge too,” she said to Cratch, “once you and Waffa are done getting him all settled,” she turned, then stopped again. “Oh,” she added, “and all his weapons?”

Glomulus pointed innocently to the little pile of weapons. “That’s it,” he said, “but you can feel free to search for others I might have stashed.”

“We will,” Decay said calmly.

“Most of them were no good for me,” Cratch went on, earnest. “The knife is pretty, but I don’t suppose I’ll be allowed to keep it.”

“You are an infinitely perceptive son of a whore,” Z-Lin acknowledged, and left the room.

Decay picked up the blasters and the whip, pocketed them, and then picked up the long-handled knife. “It’s designed for two-handed use anyway,” he said, giving the blade a twirl. “Two
right
hands.”

“I could figure something out,” Glomulus implored playfully.

Decay gave a brief snort of laughter. “No doubt.”

They lifted ‘Scross’ into the isolation pod and threw in a couple of heating packs to prevent the worst of the chill that the pod was not designed to exclude. It would be enough to keep him alive for ten hours, Glomulus judged, maybe fifteen if he was tough and didn’t mind a bit of frostbite. That was a moot point since the pod only had a cellular air supply system that would last about six hours … but then none of that really mattered either. If his corsair buddies were going to save him, they’d do it within half an hour of his ejection. Or they would leave him to die.

With the nurses’ help, they pushed the pod onto a janitorial and trundled it to the nearest airlock. Not without a certain trepidation – or so Glomulus detected in Waffa’s breathing and heart rate as they worked – they manhandled the pod into the airlock. Doctor Cratch, mindful as always of the subdermal implants that Waffa might decide to activate at any moment once Glomulus’s immediate usefulness had expired, opted not to make a comment about faulty maintenance and the possibility of their being chewed up by the airlock doors.

Glomulus and Waffa went to the bridge.

“Here’s our anti-incursion hero,” Sally announced as they entered. “Well done, doc. You actually
sedated
a person instead of murdering them? You’re really diversifying.”

“Variety is the spice of life,” Glomulus said, giving a little pose-and-hand-jiggle. “Anything is possible, given the right tools. It’s just a mystery how he managed to get so thoroughly lost, when the dreaded space pirates presumably ordered the computer to direct him to the bridge.”

“Yes,” Sally said neutrally, “that is a puzzler.”

Yes
, Glomulus thought, making smiling-but-full eye contact with the Chief Tactical Officer. “Thord already went back to her room?” he went on, and looked around. Maladin had once again accompanied the crew to the bridge, but he was the only relative stranger Cratch could see.

“Yes,” the Bonshoon said. “She was … cross.”

“I see you take understatement lessons from our glorious Commander.”

“How’s that full system check going?” Clue asked from her seat. Glomulus, who wasn’t often honoured with a visit to the bridge, noted with mild interest that she was sitting at one of the backup stations rather than the Captain’s console.
Queen Regent to the last
, he thought.

“Looks clean,” Decay reported.

“All systems report uncontaminated,” Sally confirmed.

“We’re good to go,” Zeegon reported from the helm. In the viewscreens, the great ruddy arc of the system’s sun was dominating the left side and the pockmarked double-blob of MundCorp Research Base was visible on the right like a little red-grey moon. Both were shrinking steadily as, from the
Tramp
’s perspective, they backed away at maximum subluminal velocity.

“Scumbags away,” Waffa said from his station, and hit a control to open the airlock where they’d stashed Scross.

There was a contemplative twenty-second silence on the bridge. It was the sort of silence where things got locked into deep conversational vaults and were never spoken of again.

“Well, this has been weird,” Commander Z-Lin Clue concluded, as they watched the tiny pod gleam bravely in the light of the big red sun, glinting and dwindling fast as they accelerated away. “Hit it, Zeeg.”

They settled back into soft-space. Maladin gave Glomulus a strange, unreadable nod, and strolled off the bridge.

It wasn’t until almost six weeks later – they were on their final approach to Standing Wave – when Thord came to the medical bay for the first time.

Doctor Cratch, known for stealth of movement capable of catching Molranoids off-guard, was surprised by the aki’Drednanth’s absolute silence. She was just there, looming near the doorway, when Glomulus returned from the windowed recovery ward where he had been enjoying his lunch to the accompaniment of some quiet music and an inspirational view of the grey nothingness. Highly attuned to the sounds of anyone stepping across his threshold, he was momentarily shocked to stillness. At the very least, given what he’d seen and heard of the big girl through his dedicated months of snooping, he would have expected her to clunk her huge blocky envirosuit on the doorframe once or twice.

He recovered quickly, sidled forward and tossed his leftovers into the recycling chute. “I wondered how long it would be until you came to see me,” he said.

“I wanted to wait,” Thord said, unusually pensive – in Glomulus’s opinion – for an aki’Drednanth, and certainly one with Thord’s shipboard reputation for being feisty. “Until we were closer to the edge,” she added.

“We’re not exactly close,” Glomulus demurred, “less than halfway, I’d say, all told. But
closer
, certainly. And already a lot of adventures behind us,” Thord didn’t seem inclined to respond to this, and Cratch continued chattering a little helplessly. “Didn’t want too much exposure to my sparkling personality?” he smiled. “Most of the others feel the same way.”