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

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