Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (14 page)

“Naturally we wish to know your intentions and desire an open channel of communication and discussion, in order to minimise – or ideally eliminate – such events from occurring in the future,” she took a deep breath. “Normal procedure when encountering a presumably hostile agency is to establish its local coordinates through communication triangulation, and then give it a blast with the guns. I say this because you already have unprecedented control of our systems, so can not only prevent triangulation, but can also communicate through the synthetic intelligence without even offering a pingback location. We ask only that you do so, enabling a dialogue with no risk to yourself.

“We understand that the death was due to your desire that we not leave the ship. We have no intention of doing so, and wish only to prevent further bloodshed.”

She didn’t have long to wait.

Right,
she thought as the receiver chimed.
Bruce won’t talk to me, but the
Artist
will. Lucky old me.

“Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed,” the voice from the speaker said without preamble. “Militant Mygonite warrior woman extraordinaire. They put you on tactical? I can see the logic, although why they didn’t put an able in the position instead…”

Sally frowned as the voice purred on. Did he not know about the eejits? Was he fishing to see how much she would reveal of what he already knew, so he could accuse her of lying later in the conversation? Classic leverage ploy. Or had his buddy Bruce not told him about their little printing problem?

Maybe the synth can’t tell the eejits are eejits,
Sally thought with a little chill.
Mygon knows, we must all look about the same from Bruce’s level. You can’t tell if someone’s eyes aren’t quite lining up if all you can see is the top of their head
.

The voice. Undeniably a Molran’s voice, she concluded. Soft and given a light two-tone chord from the semi-discrete windpipes, and capable of instantly putting her on edge even more than she already had been. Even Decay, himself a Blaran, couldn’t avoid this quirk of Molranoid physiology.

“If you are an exploration and transport vessel,” the voice asked suddenly, “why do you have guns?”

“Because the universe is a murderous airless bitch,” Sally replied, “and everything in it behaves accordingly. Better to have guns and not need them, than to not have them and die with your eyes boiling out of their sockets.”

“Hardly an enlightened viewpoint,” the Artist noted reprovingly.

“Enlightenment and deadliness are not mutually exclusive,” Sally said. “Snakes and scorpions and spiders make that pretty clear – for their own specialised definitions of enlightenment.”

“Ah,” the Artist said, his tone becoming warm and appreciative.
Great
, she thought,
an armchair-philosopher-brand psycho
. “But these animals fight with other weapons, never using their venom on their own.”

“I don’t use guns on people either,” Sally replied, “but you’d better believe I won’t die, as long as I can
sting
and die.”

“Very human.”

“Not much alternative,” Sally said. “Now let me ask you a question. If you’re an artist, why did you mince a man and spray his mangled extremities into space?” she leaned forward in her chair. “Maybe you’re an artist the way a man who takes a dump on a canvas, and then uses a homeless person’s face to smear it around, and then says it’s a ‘statement’, is an artist.”

“You–”

Sally grinned savagely. “Maybe you’re an artist the way the Rip is a surgeon.”

There was a long pause from the speakers, then the Artist spoke again. “You are trying to keep me talking.”

“Long as I can.”

“Even though you know triangulation is futile.”

“The more words you say, the better the odds of one of them telling me something about you.”

The Artist chuckled. “It is a different kind of triangulation, perhaps.”

“I suppose.”

There was a soft
click
, and a brief hiss from the communications array before the channel went quiet. The connection was severed. The Artist was gone.

Frowning, Sally sat for a few moments and stared at the wall-mounted consoles and screens. Then she pressed an interface pad and confirmed that she had the entire conversation on record. Nice, ostensibly-safe, personal-drive record.

Then she stood, walked out of the communications centre, returned to the elevator, and descended towards the medical bay.

People thought commanding a starship was all glamour and excitement, battles and first contact events with disturbingly sexy aliens with flawless turquoise abs. The truth was, the good days – the
really
good days – were boring. Battles were horrible and terrifying. People voided their bowels when they were frightened or excited or confronted with the prospect of explosive decompression. And afterwards, you had to fly to a safe area and make repairs before you could go off-duty.

And once you’d done that a half-dozen times in a room full of people who had shat themselves, oh boy, did the shine ever start to come off.

Glamour? Forget it. And the sexy aliens with the turquoise abs most likely had toxic bacteria on their kinky long forked blue-black tongues, or reproduced using egg sacs that nature decreed had to incubate
somewhere
.

Space was crap and Z-Lin Clue wanted to get off.

Sometimes she thought the Molren were onto something with their wacky apocalyptic techno-mythology, the
etta
as they called it in Xidh.
Etta
, an odyssey where both start and finish were complete unknowns, just an aeon of flying through the universe in a sorrowful attempt to find the exit.

She sighed.

If Glomulus Cratch hadn’t been on board, Z-Lin would have had no recourse but to accept the descriptor ‘skinny’. As it was, she was free to revel in ‘slender’, ‘lean’, ‘slim’ and sometimes even ‘lithe’. In a weird way, then, she supposed she should have been grateful the Rip had survived The Accident.

Z-Lin was, with the dubious exception of the Captain and the even more dubious exception of helmsman Zeegon Pendraegg, the only Academy-trained crewmember on board, in
any
weight category. And she was ninety percent sure she was the only graduate. She was pretty sure the Captain had performed some sort of nightmarish blood-soaked sacrificial ritual to Karl the Bloody-Handed in order to secure his position – or at least to secure the captaincy he’d apparently held before being busted down to Captain of
AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400
.

The whole question of Academy training and rank, not to mention official protocols and considerations, all seemed a bit pointless when you stopped to think you were the only full AstroCorps crewmember on board. You
learned
about the possibility of establishing a chain of command in a total-loss situation, but it was hard to look at the pure theory at the time and realise just how
silly
it was.

The uniforms were perhaps the best example of this.

The very concept of a ‘uniform’, linguistically, became a bit of a joke when you were the only one wearing it. The overwhelming majority of the
Tramp
’s crew, of course, wore the able red – a standard non-command AstroCorps uniform that was nevertheless quite clearly an identifying wrapper on a
part
rather than clothing on a person. The fabricator printed out a half-dozen of them for each able and that was all they ever wore throughout their forty-odd years sucking air.

Then there were the others. Sally, Waffa, Decay, Zeegon and Contro all wore the basic non-Corps crew uniform, approved and regulated but ultimately not
official
in any way. Janus and Janya wore regulation academic attire, and Glomulus wore his hospital whites over the top of whatever garish fashion monstrosity he’d selected from his very limited wardrobe.

This, of course, was only when they were on shift. Which – depending on the situation – could actually turn out to be for cruel and unusual lengths of time.

It was a system set in place entirely for the consistent and tidy identification and professionalism of a crew far more numerous and far more diverse than their current batch. And almost infinitely more professional. Frankly, as far as Z-Lin was concerned, if they just showed up for their shifts and didn’t attempt mutiny, sabotage or musical theatre, the dress code could go stuff itself.

Z-Lin Clue was from an AstroCorps family. Her lineage stretched right back to the
Destarion
. She had the Elevator in her blood. And the added sarcasm value of her orders coming from ‘Commander Clue’ really couldn’t be overstated.

Clue was standing at the fabrication plant, looking up at the huge, silent machine.

Since all eejits and ables looked the same, and the configuration process was more like layering down a personality and training than just programming a drone, there was always a risk of the wrong one putting on the uniform and pins, going to the wrong area, doing the wrong job, slipping category and getting everybody killed. So they were carefully tagged and computer monitored, and redirected with very gentle electrical impulses when it looked like they were going to the wrong place and picking up the wrong set of tools.

The computer again,
Z-Lin thought. She wondered what they were going to do if Waffa’s precious ‘Bruce’ decided to mix the eejits around, switch off the impulse filaments or repurpose them to send the eejits meandering all over the ship, causing random mayhem in their attempts to do jobs they scarcely understood even when they were standing in the right room and in front of the right panel. She wondered if it had already thought of this trick. Wondered if it had already
done
it.

She wondered if it was controlling the eejit fabrication in the first place, and making the plant fill the ship with gits.

Or minions.

Z-Lin also wondered, not for the first time, whatever had happened to the real Able Darko. Apparently there was a profile that the human original had, distinguishing him. And all ables were computer-identified, just as distinctly and infallibly as human fingerprints, navels, irises, genes. Plus they had the filaments. It was no more possible for one able to pass himself off as another than identical twins to swap identities.

But there were conspiracy theories. Had Darko gone out into the vast able pool, invisible in plain sight, and made his way around the universe? Z-Lin had thought those stories were fun, once upon a time.

Giving another sigh, she turned away from the looming plant and made her way down, and then back up, to the medical bay.

“Alright. Talk to me,” she said, stepping into Cratch’s sterile domain. Glomulus, Janya, Sally, Waffa and Contro were already there, and looked up with palpable relief when she entered.

“Ha ha! Well okay! Hello, aw, what do you want to talk about? I don’t suppose there’s any point in talking about the weather–”

“Someone
else
talk to me,” Z-Lin interrupted the chattering Contro, closing her eyes.

“We have a Molran going by the handle of ‘the Artist’,” Janya said, “infiltrating and spying on the
Tramp
’s interior and crew by way of jacking into our computer somehow. This has brought the synthetic intelligence off standby and made it behave … oddly. The Artist has apparently instructed it to keep us inside the ship, and it decided – independently or due to his influence – that this meant killing Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 with an airlock.”

“But not me,” Waffa put in. “By complete coincidence, I might add,” he shifted his feet. “It’s also difficult to ascertain how much of the accident was intentional and how much really was down to a series of errors in the hardware and blunders by the eejit.”

“Fair enough. It has also allowed him to piggyback along on our relative field when we go superluminal,” Janya concluded.

“
We think
,” Waffa added. “We don’t actually know how long he’s been out there.”

“We don’t even know
if
he’s out there,” Z-Lin declared.

“Um,” Cratch pointed at the foot of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19, lying on the examination table in its puddle of juice.

“And exactly how much do we know that didn’t come directly from the machine?” Clue said. “Can any of us
see
DNA?” she waved towards the blob of flesh and shoe-bits. “What part of
that
mess looks like a Molran’s dental work?” she turned to Sally. “You’re the closest we have to a synthetic intelligence expert,” she said, “and I do actually mean that as a compliment. What do you think?”

“She’s right,” Sally said morosely. “It
all
came from the computer. The scans, the readouts, all of it. Rip –
Cratch
most likely swabbed manually for samples–” Glomulus, looking faintly amused, nodded, “–but it was the scanners that told him it was Molran saliva and Molran DNA and Molran tooth-imprints. Even the debris trajectories from the initial airlock malfunction were mechanically plotted. Nobody was
watching
those bits fly off into space, unless the Cap was stargazing at the time. The synth – Bruce – could have caught that piece the second it squeezed out of the outer airlock, fed it over to the catchers and
then
sounded the impact alert. And let us think the foot was coming flying back from some crazy impossible angle.”

“But you
talked
to this guy,” Waffa said plaintively. “You were just saying–”

“I talked to a voice out of a speaker,” Sally said, turning to address Z-Lin and simultaneously sending a transcript of the conversation to her organiser pad with a flick of her fingers across her own wristwatch communicator. “Bruce could easily have synthesised that.”

“But you’ve activated your game changer,” Waffa pointed at the large square backpack Sally was carrying, “right? So it couldn’t have been faking the communication.”

Sally grimaced. “External comms are much more robust and operate off a different system. Bruce could have been in that system all along, routing this eloquent-sociopath shooey through the external array. It’s the person-to-person comms, and the surveillance, that the game changer isolates,” she tapped her watch, and shook her head. “And even then, it could be bypassing a lot of my measures by using the externals.”