Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (39 page)

“I don’t want to know what that means,” Clue declared.

“You’re right,” Bruce said, “you probably don’t.”

There was a lurch, rather like the crashing dips the
Tramp
had made on her way down, but smoother and somehow
in reverse
, and a weird smog of darkerness began to gather around the scooter. But it wasn’t
forming
there, Zeegon realised immediately – it was
receding
from everywhere else, and leaving Bruce behind in the abyss with its grisly corpse-filled robotic shell.

“Can you ask them if they’ll drop us somewhere specific? Or direct us using the drive?” Clue asked quickly, as they gave another stomach-looping lunge and the blob of darkerness around Bruce deepened into an opaque, shapeless void.

There was no answer from the synthetic intelligence.

“They don’t understand that whole idea,” Contro chimed in. “And I don’t think Bruce can steer us once we’re separated!”

Clue staggered and grabbed Decay’s arm as the ship tilted under their feet. “So where are we going?”

“Ha ha ha! How should I know? Honestly!”

They rose back up, ponderously. Zeegon imagined the
Tramp
’s battered hull shedding darkerness in great cascading globules as she rose. The ascent pulled at him, a feeling like vertigo curling in his abdomen, emptying his lungs like a punch in the gut. It added even more to the earlier feeling of submersion, as if now they were
de
compressing. It was almost as unpleasant as
actual
decompression into vacuum – not that Zeegon had much experience with that beyond a couple of brief and minor mishaps with EVA testing – although he was forced to admit that on the face of it, decompression from deepest underspace appeared to be slightly less agonising and lethal.

The ship stilled. The windows cleared, and a strange spray of stars appeared in the darkness beyond. Strange, but at least of-this-universe, set against darkness that was a mere absence of visible light.

And between the crew and the blister window, the heavy blot of darkerness that had contained the Artist’s scooter, and the ‘
becoming
’ remains of the Artist himself, and his underspace drive, and Bruce, bled out into the air and faded to invisibility, leaving nothing.

There was a long, expectant silence in the docking bay, as the
Tramp
’s engines and life support returned to their ever-present background hum and the crew performed frantic internal bodily stock-takes, trying to figure out whether anything was missing, or anything had been
added
, using nothing more than the feeble apparatus of their nervous systems. It was a task to which the human – and indeed Blaran – collection of senses and impulses was really not equal, but did its very best because the thought of
not checking
was simply terrifying. The stars wheeled slow and stately as the ship turned over, and the familiar-looking stormy green curve of a planet rolled into view below them.

“Now what?” Waffa muttered.

Despite its initial striking similarity, the planet they’d surfaced above was not Jauren Silva. It was, in Decay’s unique assessment, just another random planet with more plants, insects and water than it knew what to do with, and the Blaran had dubbed it Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3558 before even checking the scans.

It was as if the mysterious one-or-many denizens of the darkerness had known
roughly
what sort of planet they might want to get to, Z-Lin reflected, since they had travelled to one before and the Artist and his twisted works had been based on one. And so they had been helpfully trying to send the
Tramp
back
there. But the underspace had just been so monumentally, fundamentally clueless about the fact that there were lots of different planets in the universe, that they’d just deposited the
Tramp
next to one that was close enough.

The crew were wryly amused by this, although they’d been so relieved to be out of the underspace and free of any detectable signs of contamination that they would have laughed at just about anything. Adding to their hysterical good cheer, Z-Lin had checked their location and discovered it to still be within the same
galaxy
from which they’d departed, and actually not all that far from honest-to-goodness chart-marked civilised habitation. It was, they agreed, another classic Captain’s shortcut, with the added twist of not actually involving the Captain at all this time.

Their good cheer was tinged with perhaps a little more hysteria than necessary, of course, due to the Artist’s rambling on the subject of civilised inhabitation being
gone
.

“I guess we’ll find out if he was right,” Clue had said as positively as she’d felt was justified. It was not, she’d been forced to admit, all that inspiring as far as morale-raising catch-cries went – but the crew was aware of her limitations in the proverbs department. And in the meantime, it wasn’t as if they weren’t
used
to flying alone through the trackless wilderness of deep space.

They’d used the
Tramp
’s computer to take the readings and confirm their location against the charts, after Sally had grudgingly deactivated the game changer and helped return all the systems to their normal configurations. Waffa had declared the computer stable, responsive and once again on full synth standby – functional, but non-sentient. And to continue the run of good news, reports also began to come in from around the ship that the eejits seemed to have returned to normal, or the nearest eejit equivalent. Their dopey resting-faces had returned, universally, replacing the creepy wariness that had accompanied the intrusion of the darkerness into the
Tramp
's sphere. The underspace, or the metaphorical gate between
here
and
there
, appeared to be gone.

“It was still trying to keep us alive, wasn’t it?” Waffa said sadly, when he and Z-Lin and Decay were making their way back through the ship towards the bridge. “Bruce, I mean. The Accident … trying to get rid of the Artist and his poxy drive … locking us in. Everything. But it was broken, so it all went wrong.”

“We couldn’t have kept the hub,” Clue said. “Even if we could risk it killing us all the next time it decided we were in danger. It had to stay down there.”

“Yeah,” Waffa sighed. “The gate needed to be closed.”

“The old-timers used to say, when someone invented something that should never be invented, or went somewhere they were never meant to go, the vultures would end up eating their bones,” Decay philosophised. “That was the Infinites making sure the rules weren’t broken,” he paused. “Not more than once, anyway,” he added.

“On the other hand,” Z-Lin said, “once something has been invented, the chances of someone coming back to it and trying to improve it are pretty good. We humans have a saying. ‘You can’t un-have a dream’.”

“Really?” Decay raised a hairless eyebrow.

“Apparently.”

“Sounds like humans,” the Blaran admitted.

The subject of the Captain and his famous shortcuts had reminded the crew, in vague terms, that the chain of command was still arguably extant on board
Astro Tramp 400
, and so Clue was obliged to leave the bridge and go to make her report. She did so, as ever, by assembling a full annotated log of events and resource losses – not least of which had been a dozen eejits whose bodies would need recycling and whose roles would need refilling, with Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 rounding it out to a baker’s dozen although his replacement had already been printed – and then submitting the whole data file directly through the interface panel beside the door to the Captain’s quarters, up in the dome.

The file went through, dropped as ever into the echoless vault of the Captain’s virtual in-tray. It was like slipping a note into a suggestion box, with slightly less chance of actual response or hope of implementation.

As ever, Clue paused outside the smooth, pale door. As ever, she reached up to press on the Captain’s door chime. She paused with her fingers hovering, trembling, over the pad. As ever, she curled her fingers into a fist, closed her eyes, and sighed.

“Damn it,” she murmured.

And then Commander Z-Lin Clue strolled back down through the ship, which was still drifting in high orbit over Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3558 while the crew waited for orders.

After paying a brief visit to main engineering and having a short and unenlightening conversation with the hero of the hour, she crossed to Whye’s office and knocked on the counsellor’s door.

“Hi, uh, Commander,” Janus said with his usual awkward surprise when she stepped inside. He stiffened, visibly steeling himself to lurch out of his seat.

“At ease, Counsellor,” she said wryly. “You’re non-Corps anyway, so you don’t need to get all formal.”

“I was wondering if people were going to start making appointments to come and have – you know, counselling or something…” Janus said, “but it’s totally cool if you come in without a reservation, I’ve got, like, this whole empty schedule. And I’ve been doing more tutorials, the last one was
really
productive, and I think I’ve learned a lot from the recent, you know…”

“I didn’t come for counselling, Janus,” she said, and sat down with a smile, “although I will make an appointment soon, I promise. No, I was actually just coming by to congratulate you for your hard work. With the eejits, talking to them – counselling them even, I heard.”

“Oh,” Whye said bashfully, “that. Yeah.”

“Studying it all the way you did and putting it all together, that was good work. It was…” she thought about it.
Cold-blooded science
was how she might have phrased a similar congratulatory statement to Adeneo. But Janus was more sensitive than that. “Inspired,” she settled on.

“Oh, I don’t know how much use it was with the eejits,” Whye said, “at the end of the day they just had blanker minds, so they picked up impressions more. No amount of talking would have taught us more than that.”

“At least we were able to use them to sort of confirm that we’d managed to seal whatever rift the Artist’s drive had made,” Clue said. “We’re back in real space and there’s no more darkerness in sight – to any of us. And that was the least of what you did. You basically cracked the whole case. You know, coming up with the idea of closing the underspace gate. Saving the universe, if you’ll excuse the hyperbole.”

“It was Contro who actually gave me the idea,” Janus said, “
and
communicated with the underspace once we got down there.”

“Yes, and I just went over to main engineering to congratulate him as well,” Clue said dryly.

“How did that go?”

“He said ‘aw, that’s so nice!’,” Z-Lin replied, in what she felt was a passable impression of the daffy transpersion physicist’s breathless, bright-eyed cheerfulness, “and then he offered me a toffee.”

“‘Boddington’s is bestingtons’,” Janus said with an absolutely straight face, and an impersonation of Controversial-To-The-End that made her own sound amateurish. He may not have been a very qualified counsellor, but Janus Whye was a scarily accomplished mimic.

Clue shuddered. “
Anyway
,” she went on, “I wouldn’t want you to think I was overlooking the fact that it was
you
who came up with the whole plan in the first place, so–”

“No, no, it was Bruce’s idea,” Janus demurred. “It’s okay, I’m fine without acknowledgement.”

“Look,” Clue leaned forward, defaulting to her usual firmness when she wasn’t sure whether a crewmember was joking or actually having a real emotional meltdown, “even if you did both come up with the idea independently and simultaneously, Bruce couldn’t seal the ship without cutting a guy up into fifty pieces, so
you get the credit
. It’s not like I’ve given you an official commendation or a promotion or anything – that sort of stuff is meaningless and I can’t apply it to non-Corps crewmembers anyway…” she waved a hand. “Still,” she said, “it’s the best I could do. Go ahead and tunnel out an extra set of quarters for yourself or something.”

“Doc Cratch couldn’t take the Artist into custody without cutting
him
into fifty pieces,” Janus pointed out.

“I don’t give
him
a whole Hell of a lot of credit either,” Clue said.

“To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a human taking down a Molran before, let alone a mad Molran,” Whye said hesitantly. “Although to be even more fair, taking down one Molran is maybe not such a big deal when you've killed however-many-it-was.”

“Doing it with one’s bare hands is still impressive,” Clue conceded, otherwise not giving the line of discussion any opportunity to flourish into fully-fledged gossip.

“That’s for sure.”

“Brutan Barducci whupped Lareth Ruel Ganon in a shipboard wrestling championship we held once,” Clue reminisced, before adding, “although only by sacrificing his collarbone to get a good grip on Ruel’s ear, and once you get hold of a Molran’s ear their hearts and souls are sure to follow, as they say. Plus, Ruel was, well…”

“Overconfident.”

“I was going to say a damn idiot,” Clue stood back up, and gave Whye a little pat on the shoulder. “Good work, Janus.”

“Toffee?”

“Shut up.”

Zeegon was back at the helm when Clue returned to the primary bridge. Boonie, the lichen-green Jauren Silvan ‘space weasel’, was curled on the helmsman’s armrest and engaged in a battle of wills with the Burning Knight noddyhead perched on the corner of his console. It probably would have been adorable to watch, if it wasn’t a massive violation of AstroCorps quarantine, biohazard and bridge operations regulations.

All things considered, though, at that moment Z-Lin decided she couldn’t care less. The little critter was clean enough. And he seemed surprisingly even-tempered as long as he could stay close to Zeegon, with whom he had apparently panic-bonded in the course of his traumatic reveal on board the lander.

“What’s the Captain say our heading is?” Zeegon asked, just a little bit sarcastically.