Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (6 page)

“I think we can leave without worrying about them shooting us in the butt,” Z-Lin said. “I won’t be leaving any kids behind for them to eat as a thank-you for not using their imaginary missiles on us,” she turned her gaze on the evacuees. “A fully-grown wannabe smoke-smuggler, not to belabour the point, would make a much rounder meal.”

“We
get
it,” the nearby Bonshoon said querulously.

“Even one of them would be like a piece of toffee to a Fergunakil,” Decay said without looking up from the lander controls.

“But what I’m asking is,” Waffa continued, “much as I don’t want to … look, they’re pretty much stuck here just as much as the Bonshooni were. They were way bigger dicks about it but they’re still marooned.”

“I know,” Z-Lin said with another sigh. “We have to leave the sharks down here. We don’t have the capacity to carry even a fraction of them, even if we wanted to.”

“And we don’t want to,” Decay put in.

“Damn right,” the evacuee agreed.

“Still not asking you,” Clue said, then turned back to Waffa. “They seem fine out there in the water, they’re not about to be wiped out by this planet’s tides since they’ve already survived this long, and with the infrastructure they have it’ll only be a matter of time before some of their own come and get them. Even as busted as it seems to be, they’ve got comm capability and you
know
how resourceful those bastards are. We can even point the way for their buddies once we get to our next port of call.”

“Yeah,” Waffa said, “that was sort of what I was thinking,” he hesitated. “Also, that once they do get rescued they’re going to hold a grudge.”

“Well, that’s possible,” Clue allowed, “but it’s a risk we’re going to have to take. We’re just a modular, there’s no way we can transport three thousand Larger Dark Moving Below Fergies, let alone any of the other schools. So a goodwill notification of distress is all they really deserve. They
are
in violation of the Six Species charter, as well as AstroCorps regulations. It would be a security breach to bring any of them with us, and Sally would have my hide.
I
can be court-martialled even if you guys can’t.”

“We’d never testify against you,” Waffa said.

“Not even if I filled our holds with psychotic cyborg sharks?”

“Well…” Waffa hedged. “Since you’d probably make me do all the installation work, maybe I would be a bit disgruntled.”

Z-Lin chuckled. “Come up with us on this round,” she said. “We’re good to go with the rest of this, we’ll get the last stragglers on Zeegon’s next trip, and you can head to main engineering and start setting up for the next leg of our journey. Get the engines prepped, and so on,” she gave him an invisible Clue-wink. “Help the Chief Engineer get us ready to go.”

“Oh yeah?” Waffa said, taking his seat and strapping in while Sleepy finished loading the last Bonshoon they could fit aboard. “Where are we dropping these guys?”

“End of the line,” she replied solemnly. He looked up at Clue questioningly, and she handed him a command flimsy. “This is you, Waff. We’re two weeks out from The Warm, and that’s where the Cap’s directing us,” she saw his thunderstruck expression. “I was surprised too. Never realised we’d ended up in this neck of the woods. Better late than never, huh?”

“The … The Warm?” Waffa said, his face numb.

“That’s right,” Z-Lin clapped him on the shoulder and headed for her own seat. “We got you home.”

JANYA

It was another two weeks at relative to The Warm.

Janya had never been there, but Waffa had talked about it enough times to leave her fascinated. Although xenoarchaeology wasn’t really her area, and although it proved unrewarding nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, it certainly wasn’t a dull discipline. Besides, it was a long and uneventful trip and nineteen smoke-withdrawn Bonshooni and their increasingly strident and demanding kids quickly lost their distraction value. Especially after the adrenaline of their getaway from Bayn Balro and its schools of hostile but fortunately-planetbound Fergunak had worn off. So she’d read up on it a bit, because that was what she did.

The little scientist sat back in the clean silence of the dome laboratory and reviewed what she knew.

The Warm was a so-called Mandelbrot array. The technical classification was ‘Mandelbrot class superhub array’, but the huge conglomerations were each generally unique and so tended to just go by the world-names people gave them. It was a little complicated, but it all came down to modular starships like their own
Astro Tramp 400
.

The modulars were so named for their ability – indeed, their design – to link up to hubstations. A fully-loaded hub could carry up to thirty modulars, and was called a ‘Chrysanthemum class hubstation’. Chrysanthemums were run by a single hub, a synthetic intelligence computer mind synced with all of the computers on all of the modulars. And the hubstations were mobile, if unwieldy – the guiding synthetic intelligence linked up the relative drives and engines of all the component modulars and coordinated them into a single-vehicle convoy.

Chrysanthemums in turn could link up into Mandelbrot class superhub arrays, also run by a synth but using the parallel hubs of each component Chrysanthemum. They were major self-sufficient space-based settlements, AstroCorps’s answer to the Worldships of the Molran Fleet but not as self-contained. They were too massive and complicated to move at more than a steady lumber in the low subluminal registers, lacking the titanic and technologically-inaccessible relative drives of the Worldships, and so tended to exist either in orbit or in free-drifting space. They were only relative-capable if they divided up into their component Chrysanthemums, flew to a new location, and then reassembled. And this generally never happened.

The Warm was an atypical Mandelbrot array. It was bigger, more permanent, and one of the oldest settlements in the Six Species. It wasn’t a centre, not a major population by any stretch, but it was old. And it had a population in the region of two million, mostly humans. Technically, it wasn’t a Mandelbrot array at all, except insofar as it was a collection of Chrysanthemum class hubstations unified by a synthetic intelligence. It was also clustered and mortared together with long-established and completely flight-incapable habitats and the ancient, cannibalised remains of starships, hulks of the Molran Fleet craft that had brought the first settlers here, fleeing from the Cancer back before the foundation of Aquilar.

The settlement’s foundation was The Warm proper, a strange relic that had an ambient temperature of about minus ten degrees – not
warm
, as such, but considerably warmer than space. It was alien, which was a rather arbitrary term that could either mean
anything not human
, or
anything that isn’t human, Molran, Blaran, Bonshoon, Fergunakil, aki’Drednanth or Damorakind
. The Warm was the latter.

There
were
other species out there, for various definitions of sentience, technological and cultural advancement, enlightenment. None had yet signed on officially as the seventh species in the accords. Which was probably just as well, Janya always reflected – it would require rebranding on a massive scale, and probably a reset of the Molran
Yeka Mogak
calendar. The Warm had been built and left behind by some as-yet unknown civilisation.

There were a few things like The Warm scattered around, needles in the impossibly vast haystack of space. Alien, unidentified, old and incredibly diverse. Due to their utter random alienness, in fact, it wasn’t possible to say whether they were all from the same originating culture or from a bunch of different ones. Some technologies had unifying threads, others not so much. Some relics could be dated, and spanned hundreds if not thousands of millions of years, and others – like The Warm – so far managed to evade classification based on age altogether.

Janya called up one of the few publications in the
Tramp
’s database about The Warm.

About eleven hundred miles long and three hundred miles thick, it was a solid geometric cylinder formed of some sort of metallic compound heated to a uniform minus ten degrees – considerably warmer than ambient space and thus clearly artificial even if its unnatural shape was not a giveaway. It had no atmosphere, no spin, and only the minimal gravity afforded to it by its mass, but it formed a solid foundation for the hubstations and other habitats encrusting its surface.

And its heat, if you could call it that, was capable of generating power. Not as much as the reactors throughout the settlement and its numerous integrated modular starships, of course, but apparently fuelless and endless and without byproduct.

Mostly, though, The Warm was a research community – researching The Warm.

Lazy centuries of study had revealed -

A Bonshoon, a weathered-looking female responsible for at least one of the juveniles in the young-but-mobile category – Janya didn’t even try to figure out what relationships the settlers had between each other anymore – came into the lab.

“Hello,” the massive Molranoid said nervously when Janya looked up from her reading.

“Hello,” Adeneo replied neutrally.

“My name’s Oya,” the Bonshoon went on. There was a lengthy pause. Janya had already been introduced to all the settlers so there didn’t seem to be much point in repeating her name just to observe a pointless conversational ritual. “How are you?” the Bonshoon eventually asked.

“A bit distracted,” Janya answered, moderating the pointedness of her tone in the vague awareness that it would somehow be considered rude even though
Oya
was the one who’d barged in uninvited. “I was reading up on our destination.”

“The Warm?” the settler hurried forward and dropped into a seat next to Janya. Since she’d set all the furniture in the lab to her own tiny proportions, the seven-foot-six Bonshoon almost fell. She ended up sprawled in the low seat with her legs splayed awkwardly. “Fearfully sinful place, The Warm.”

“‘Sinful’?”

“Lots of humans – that’s not the sinful part, of course, it’s just that humans and Blaren and such don’t have the same belief structure as Bonshooni, and that’s fine,” Oya said, “it’s just that technically we define that, you know, the classification, it’s–”

“Sin,” Janya said in amusement. “That’s really quite quaint.”

To her credit, Oya didn’t get offended at this. “The Bonshooni believe that where there is a gate in space, there must be an enclosing wall,” she said, folding both thick pairs of arms and leaning back in her seat. The lab furniture was solidly designed with multi-species tolerances and so the chair didn’t even creak, although Janya couldn’t help but wonder if this was going to be the final straw.

“I know,” she said. “Something about the galaxy having a veil cast over it and the rest of the universe being painted onto that veil.”

“Nonsense, of course, if taken literally,” the Bonshoon said. “It’s simply a technological myth explaining the intergalactic gulf and the conundrum of relative travel in void regions.”

“Bonshoon purists believe that anyone who reaches the outskirts of the galaxy simply lodges in the wall and is enfolded in the veil,” Janya said, “don’t they? Anyone who
returns
has falsified computer and sensory information, even their memories altered to convince them that they didn’t see anything out there and just came back because they ran out of resources. Any of the missions to actually go out and
not
return are apparently just stuck out there. Or, since the only rational way to travel out there is through soft-space, they are presumed out of contact due to being at relative speed, however they are making it work. Whether they are going to rematerialise in another galaxy and then take thousands – or millions – of years to communicate with us, or whether they’re just gone for good, lost in a general relative field collapse, is impossible to verify. The communications we actually still manage bounce back from some of the slow-drifting Fleet explorers are said to just be data ghosts, a forged signal intended to give the illusion of a wider universe that vessels are receding into.”

“Again, literally such a concept is ludicrous,” Oya said.

“I don’t know,” Janya said. “Philosophically, reality is bounded entirely by what external stimuli tell us. If those stimuli were being generated, even
forged
, by some outside element, how would any of us know for sure?”

“Are you a believer?” the evacuee asked, intrigued.

“I believe in what I see,” Janya shrugged, “and I accept that I don’t see even remotely
close
to everything. And if our recent experiences have illustrated nothing else, it’s just how malleable reality can be. It’s a moot point, though,” she went on, “since all we can do as organisms is perform actions based on the information provided by our senses.”

“Well said,” Oya agreed. “This entire conversation might be in your mind, or mine, but lacking any concrete evidence common sense suggests we carry on as if it is really happening between two organisms.”

“And that we carry on as if the rest of the universe actually exists, perhaps,” Janya said, “regardless of how sinful the idea might be?”

“Well, quite,” the settler said a little uncomfortably. “I’d just heard that the Bonshooni on The Warm had turned entirely from any sort of veil interpretations in favour of human beliefs. Mygonism, things like that,” she gave an exaggerated shudder. “Zhraak stuff.”

“The prevailing academic opinion seems to be that Zhraak was actually some sort of Molran bio-weapon intended to kill Damorakind,” Janya said idly, “that went haywire and killed a whole lot of people and in doing so accidentally became a figure first of folklore, and then religious superstition.”

The Bonshoon paled under her mariner’s suntan. “Are you serious?”