Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man by Andrew Hindle Read Free Book Online

between the land-bound and aquatic species. Link up to the giela and use them to sabotage equipment and murder key personnel. Or just whoever happened to be closest at hand, in order to create panic. I hope they broke these damned things quickly , he thought.
    “Leave the sweetmeats,” the sleek little robot said next, its voice almost lascivious. “Leave them behind, or we will fire our ordnance and blow your modular out of orbit. We see you, flesh. We watch you. Not all of our machinery is dead.”
    The sweetmeats , Waffa thought. It means the Bonshoon kids . “If you had missiles you would have used them by now.”
    “No, because we want the flesh. But if you deny us, you can die in space.”
    “Yeah,” the Chief of Security and Operations said, suddenly quite calm, “and it’ll take – what – six minutes for a torpedo to reach orbit, from the surface?”
    “Six minutes to regret, flesh,” the Fergunakil said at the far end of the giela link. “Six minutes is a long time.”
    “It really is. Sal,” Waffa went on casually, raising his watch again and opening a full-free channel, “I assume that since we left the bridge undermanned you will have set some control measures in place.”
    “Yeah,” Sally replied from the roof, “even if the Captain doesn’t take the seat, we can do plenty remotely. Or Janya or the Rip could. Heck, Contro and a pair of eejits could run through the protocols, as long as the eejits stopped Contro from pressing any buttons.”
    “You cannot shield against a Fergunakil torpedo,” the giela said placidly. “Not in a parking orbit and not even if you were at combat stations. Not in a modular.”
    “Just out of interest, how much Godfire could Pater and Fuck-ton rain down on this location in six minutes?” Waffa asked.
    “About a thousand rounds,” Sally said way too promptly. “I set that up to be basically a single command. But why use six minutes and a thousand rounds, when this planet’s so tectonically fucked that thirty seconds and fifty rounds a few miles from here would basically turn this whole place into a supervolcano? The concussion wave alone would kill everything bigger than a brine shrimp in this entire hemisphere. Not to mention, the gravitational disruption would probably finish off that moon of theirs, and the schools swimming under the ice up there. Most likely send the whole lot bola-ing off into the sun.”
    “Yeah,” Waffa said, “that’s what I thought.”
    “You are fle – human AstroCorps,” the giela said, still eerily placid. Waffa reminded himself that the Fergunak didn’t have the emotional response model of humanoids or Molranoids, or even aki’Drednanth. You could go mad trying to read feeling into their tones, especially when it was all modulated through a giela anyway. “You will not do this.”
    “I’m not Corps,” Waffa said. “And if you say anything else to piss me off, we might just shoot the crap out of your planet on our way out of the system anyway.”
    “We’d be within regs to do it even if they’re polite to you,” Z-Lin unexpectedly spoke up on the channel, “as a starship dealing with an emergency situation, any Fergunak in violation of the Six Species charter are to be considered legally Damorakind and therefore hostile, and dealt with accordingly. And by the way,” she added, “I am Corps.”
    The giela remained silent.
    “There’s nothing else down here worth picking up,” Waffa said, cutting down to internal communications again but no longer lowering his voice so the Fergunakil couldn’t hear. “I don’t think I’ll bother going any further downstairs. If there was anything useful salvaged by the survivors, they would have brought it up to the staging area. It looks like the smoke was their main priority.”
    “We’re on our way inbound,” Clue went on. “Let’s get this finished.”
    “We will see you again, flesh,” the giela said as Waffa headed back towards the stairs.
    “Not giving