Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (25 page)

Hearing a Molran –
most likely
a Molran, she reminded herself, since they still had no solid verification one way or another – shifting so rapidly in moods was more than a little disturbing. Hearing that choral two-tone voice swinging from anger to amusement to dreamy contemplation … there was something profoundly abnormal about it.

“Naturally some velvet ropes will need to be set up around the residue,” he said impatiently.

“Why haven’t they faded?” Clue asked. “I thought the blobs were supposed to dissolve into nothingness in the bombardment of the laws of reality or whatever.”

“In some cases they
are
dissolving,” the Artist said, regaining his equilibrium and shifting from tour guide back to teacher, “just very slowly. Some of them are residue from early test dives that stabbed into extremely deep underspace – in terms we can understand, which of course don’t really apply, you might say they are very
dense
darkerness – and so are taking a longer time to recede. Others are actually in a state of constant flux, building up and receding around an experimental generator.”

“Like a permanently open door?” Zeegon asked sickly. “An open door to that awful God damn place which phased through our ship’s hull and got inside the
Boonie
’s
crew
? A door to
that
?”

“Zeegon,” Clue said gently, and Sally relaxed a little. The last thing they wanted was to provoke the Artist by criticising his work. That was evidently what his superiors on
Boonie’s Last Stand
R&D had done, and he seemed infinitely indifferent to whatever horrible thing had happened to them. And indeed to every other soul on board.

The Artist seemed not to have noticed Zeegon’s exclamation. “I’m working on a way to stabilise the field,” he said happily, “so a traveller might simply step into one of these stable nodes, and then emerge from a corresponding … ‘
blob
’ … anywhere in the universe. Or put on a miniaturised version of the diver and step into a departure node, like this one here – or this one – and then emerge wherever he or she might wish. With the diver, you would essentially be a small underspace vessel and would bring a temporary node with you when you surface. This will change
everything
.”

“No,” Decay’s voice suddenly said, dull and flat and filled with purpose. “No, no. We’re going back to the lander.
I’m
going back to the lander. This field trip is over.”

“Okay, hold on,” Zeegon said – quite bravely, in Sally’s opinion given that there was a mad Molran on the line and a lethally furious Blaran right there in the room with him, “so it’s eerie as Hell and might – okay,
probably
has adverse effects. But would one more jump be so bad? In the
Tramp
, I mean, sure, we can go back, right,” he was evidently making eye contact with Decay at this point and scrambling to avoid a confrontation with the towering, sharp-fanged alien. “Jump us to Aquilar, and let Bruce and the Artist go on their way.”

“Leaving a madman and a mad synth on the loose with a teleporter that brings blobs of
this crap
into our universe, and possibly capable of infecting every synth everywhere with the same nutosity, and makes people insane when they use it?” Decay snapped.

“Aquilar is gone,” the Artist, once again not seeming to care that Decay was insulting him, spoke in the same cheerfully wistful voice he had been employing when describing his underspace-node daydream. Bruce, interestingly, didn’t speak up either.

“Maybe with the proper study,” Clue also seemed to be doing her best to put a brave face on a horrible situation, “the drive can be stabilised, the effects lessened, synths made to work with it … all of that. Some way to stop the darkerness from getting in. Some sort of protective field, like we have built into the relative engines. Shed the residue so it doesn’t come out. Contain it in these nodes and make it safe. Damn it, I don’t know.”

“Did he say ‘Aquilar is gone’?” Waffa asked.

Decay, through a clearly vast expenditure of Blaran willpower, brought his fury under control. “Okay,” he said into the worried silence that had descended when the team realised the Artist had said actually something super-creepy. “I never thought I’d say this, but the research and development that this station did, that’s what this drive still needs. All those things you just mentioned, Commander. The Fleet – not AstroCorps, the
Molran
Fleet – is the only place that could do it. Skip to them. We’ll be sitting comfortably in a Worldship as those smug bastards underspace us to the gates of space within a month,” he snorted, anger once again fizzing to the surface. “That’s what you think’s going to happen here, right? Everything hunky-dory and happily-ever-after?”

“The Fleet is gone,” the Artist said.

“Why do you keep
saying
that?” Decay demanded, nervousness clearly audible under the exasperation.

“Because it’s true,” the Artist’s laugh was eerily childlike. “Do you think they weren’t the
first
people I went looking for? The
first
group I thought might listen to me when my superiors on the
Boonie
wouldn’t? Even deaf and blind in the darkerness, I could have found them. I
would
have found them, if they still existed.
They are gone
, little Blaran. The Six Species are no more. The aki’Drednanth set them to sleep and the Fergunak took them to the Cancer. And the Cancer devoured them, right down to the last child.”

“Holy shit,” Zeegon said clearly.

“That’s not true,” Decay said with a wobble in his voice. “Not the aki’Drednanth. They wouldn’t,” he paused, obviously looking around at his crewmates for agreement, and just as obviously seeing only discomfort and doubt. “Why would they do it now? It would defeat the whole purpose of defecting to the Fleet in the first place.”

This time the Artist’s laugh was heartier. Too hearty. “Oh look,” he said, his voice bright with savage pleasure. Maybe he hadn’t ignored Decay’s insults quite so stoically after all, Sally noted. “A Blaran shit-dancer who has more blind, adoring faith in the aki’Drednanth than a Molran does.”

“We’re on the move,” Clue reported. There were sounds of brisk footsteps on the
Boonie
’s deck. Sally wondered if the Artist wanted them to leave – and if not, whether Bruce would stop them.

“You know the aki’Drednanth left the majority of their kind – and more, so much more – behind in the Core,” the Artist said, apparently not caring where the team went. Sally heard the elevator again. “Left them to the mercy of the Damorakind. You
know
this.”

“Descending,” Clue said.

“I still don’t get this,” Zeegon said, sounding breathless. Obviously they were leaving Testing Core 3 behind them at speed. “Showing off and convincing us of his greatness and all, sure, but why invite us down here if he wasn’t going to come down and join us?”

“Divide and conquer,” Sally said simply over the comm. She was following the tyre tracks Methuselah had left on the road now, where the downpour and a series of smaller washouts hadn’t eradicated them already. She calculated they would still manage to drive it. “He’s going to try to take the
Tramp
.”

“How long have you known this?” Clue exploded.

“I’ve suspected it since roughly the moment we established it was just him and Bruce up there,” Sally said, “and I’ve been certain ever since we arrived in orbit and he muscled us down here. He knows AstroCorps landing protocol would place most of our mid-level command on the surface, leaving the Captain on board with useful but essentially harmless crew,”
well
, she amended to herself, ostensibly
harmless, anyway
.

“Too convoluted,” Zeegon said discerningly. “Why would he bring us down here and show us his secret lair, when he could get the
Tramp
way more easily by just spacing us all?”

A few reasons spring to mind
, Sally thought.
He needs a
few
of us to run the ship, but the people left on board will be enough. Maybe he couldn’t get all the airlocks to fail that way, that’s why Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 got himself killed in the first place.

Or, you know, he’s just insane
.

“Don’t worry,” she assured everyone instead, “he’s not going anywhere in the
Tramp
. If he tries, she’ll blow.”

This time, the silence on the comm was even more thunderstruck and Clue’s explosion all the more concentrated as a result. “
What?
”

“The game changer was a diversion,” Sally said. “Bruce can waste time trying to pick its way back into irritating nonessential systems, and even if it succeeds we haven’t really lost anything.”

“But I know
now
,” Bruce pointed out complacently. “I can still hear you through the station sound system, remember?”

“I remember,” Sally replied. “That’s why we wouldn’t have really lost anything.”

“But then why would you tell me now?”

“There’s not much point having the ship rigged to blow in the event of you trying to take it,” Sally replied, “if you
don’t
know about it. Bit of an extreme measure, isn’t it? The idea is to
not
have the ship blown up. And also
not
leave us stranded here with a short-haul lander that, at best, we could rig up with an underspace drive and insanity-swim our way to it-doesn’t-matter-where-because-we’d-be-crazy-when-we-arrived.”

“
Stop saying we’re crazy!
” Bruce howled.

“I stand corrected,” Sally said drily. “But the point is, it doesn’t matter. You won’t find the loop–” she cut herself off as if realising she’d said too much.

“So, it’s a runaway loop protocol of some sort,” Bruce gloated. “That ought to narrow it down. A bit hackneyed, o’course.”

“Or that might be another misdirecting tactic,” Sally remarked.

“Nice try.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sally paused in her hike, unslung the backpack from her shoulders, and set it on the wet, spongy ground in front of her. “If he’s going to try to take the ship, he’s going to have to go through Janya, the Captain … and the Rip.”

“Don’t forget the shrink,” Zeegon added.

“A counsellor, a librarian, a hermit, and a man in the brig,” the Artist snorted. “I hardly think that’s going to pose much of a threat.”

“And you’re comfortable leaving us in your lab and future historical museum on – what was it again, General?” Clue said.

“Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3557,” Decay – naturally enough the only one of the five of them not sounding out of breath – supplied promptly.

“You’re okay leaving us here on Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3557 with your precious lab,” Clue said, “while you take our ship and do who-knows-what to our friends, and leave us here indefinitely?”

“Bruce will take care of you and see to it that you do no damage to my work,” the Artist said complacently. “And since the lander will not sustain you indefinitely, you would be best served by settling in the
Boonie
’s crew habitats anyway, if you want to survive. In case you hadn’t noticed, Jauren Silva is not a world with the most pleasant of environments.”

“I might even see my way to restoring partial exchange function to the manufactory,” Bruce said, “and providing a more human-level of gravitational pull.”

“We’re at the buggy,” Z-Lin said.

“We will locate the loop,” the Artist said, “and your ship will be long gone by the time you return to the lander.”

“Then you won’t mind this next bit,” Sally said with a grunt. “Are you guys out?”

“Yes,” Clue reported over the roar of Methuselah’s engines. “The waters have receded a lot but it’s going to be a tricky one.”

“Give me a challenge next time,” Zeegon said happily.

“Alright,” Sally said, “I marked the ridge for you, you’ll want to head up and then around, and reconnect with the road. I haven’t made it back to the lander yet, so feel free to pick me up on the way through. I think I’ve had my exercise for the day.”

“Copy that,” Z-Lin replied.

“I am already aboard and Bruce is making preparations to leave,” the Artist chuckled. “I’m not sure what you’re hoping to achieve.”

“Then let me put an end to the suspense for you,” Sally said, and hit the controls on the side of the game changer.

“Oh. My gun ports are opening,” Bruce reported idly.

“No!”
the Artist shrieked.
“Stop them!”

“Can’t,” Bruce replied, “I seem to be locked out.”

In high orbit, the
Tramp
revolved ponderously. The massive twin mini-whorl guns, Pater and Fuck-ton, poked their blunt snouts into vacuum and opened fire with a primal howl of reality parting from unreality that only became audible as the pulses hit atmosphere. The Artist’s shrieks were drowned out as two, four, six, eight blasts of concentrated grey Godfire rained down from the sky, sucking vents in the clouds and smashing right at their intersection point into the sagging green-encrusted hull of
Boonie’s Last Stand
.

With a thunderous
crump
that Sally felt through her feet on the road halfway back to the lander, the manufactory was utterly obliterated, its component particles corkscrewed into the nothingness on the far side of relative speed. It left behind a gaping hole in the jungle into which several waterfalls began merrily cascading … and away from which a rover buggy sped, with three humans, three eejits and one Blaran inside it clinging for dear life.

Methuselah was spry for an old fart, but they’d barely made the ridge when the
Tramp
ate a not-inconsiderable hole in Jauren Silva just a few hundred feet behind them.

“God
damn it
, were they mini-whorls?” Zeegon screamed over the rumble of disintegrating canopy and the near-decompressed ringing in his ears. “Did Sally just shoot our arses off with
mini-whorls
?”