Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (17 page)

It was a fine line to walk, between his honest desire to help people to be nicer as best he knew how, and to rant and preach at them endlessly until they just shut down and ignored everything he said. He’d had maybe fifty crewmembers writing
I will not be a dick to other sentient beings
ten times on a notepad each morning, as far as he could tell, by the time The Accident killed every single one of them except Zeegon and Janya.

It was also hard to tell whether the practice had been having any effect. But this was a good crew. Or, you know, it had been. Still was, in a lot of ways. And now he was the
only
Blaran on board – the only
non-humanoid
on board – and was it his job to get these fluffy-headed primates back to their mothers?

Maybe.

The darkness was still paradoxically, impossibly falling approximately twenty seconds later when tousle-haired, disoriented-looking Zeegon Pendraegg came staggering onto the bridge. It would have been tempting to assume the helmsman had been asleep, but Decay knew it was far more likely that he had just lost track of time while building something pointlessly super-charged with wheels on.

“Stop the ship,” he panted, flinging himself across the room to the helm.

“Well, there’s a problem with that,” Decay replied, all four hands skimming over his controls as they had been since shortly after hailing Zeegon.

“What?”

“According to this, we’re already at all-stop.”

The ship shuddered again, and the blackness clinging to the viewscreen grew deeper. “That’s not possible,” Zeegon said, dropping into his seat and poking at controls. “We’d just hit maximum cruising speed.”

“I know. Top cruising subluminal for all of about two minutes before the alarms started shouting and the automatic systems pulled us into a braking pattern. Must be a record.”

“But it should take, like, an hour to decelerate us,” Zeegon protested. “Emergency all-stop from top speed could be done in fifteen minutes, but every time we do that there’s this God-awful
screeeee
noise and my Burning Knight noddyhead falls over,” he pointed accusingly at the black-plumed knight in flame-carved armour nodding away unmolested on the corner of his console. “Top speed to all-stop in two minutes? That’d turn us into an accordion full of meat paste.”

Decay shrugged his upper shoulders. “And yet, all-stop.”

One by one, Z-Lin, Sally and Janya came hurrying in. Waffa was with them even though he wasn’t bridge crew, because these days they didn’t exactly stand on ceremony and presumably the only alternative was to hang out with Contro or the Rip. By the time they’d all stumbled to their stations and Waffa had seated himself at a vacant engineering console, the
Tramp
had stopped rumbling and the stuff outside the ship – in his mind, Decay had dubbed it ‘darkerness’ – seemed to have gotten as soul-suckingly deep and impenetrable as it was going to.

“Obvious question,” Clue said, and pointed at the screen. “What is
that
?”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to have an answer, Commander,” Janya said a little crossly.

“Of course I am,” Clue replied, deadpan. “You’re the head of science,” she
tsk
ed. “No, I’m not expecting – just – look, anyone has any idea, just blurt it out. No need to even raise your hands.”

Nobody blurted.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say we just flew headlong into a black hole,” Janya said after waiting just long enough to maintain her don’t-go-to status.

“And you
do
know better,” Sally said, “because … ?”

“
Because we’re alive
,” Janya snapped.

“Oh right.”

“I don’t like it,” Zeegon said. “We went from maximum subluminal to a dead stop without flying to pieces – I mean, alright, that specific part I am okay with, but it’s not
possible
– and whatever that is out there, I hate it and want it to die now.”

“Could all this just be more of Bruce’s arsery?” Z-Lin asked. “Assuming
any
of this is Bruce’s doing, could we still be moving but the
readings
say we’re stopped, and the ship shaking and all the rest is just … I know, it’s a reach.”

“Bruce can’t project what we’re seeing onto those screens, though,” Sally pointed. “Those aren’t electronic, they’re good old-fashioned impact-shielded transparent plates of … of … damn it, I don’t remember the name of the alloy–”

“Dexostalic metaflux…” Decay started, then trailed off with a cough when the humans turned to look at him. This had clearly been one of those ‘rhetorical’ things that they didn’t really want answered. It’d be nice if they signposted those a bit more clearly. “In the interests of saving time and syllables, let’s just call it ‘metaflux’,” he concluded. “Not
entirely
without an electronic component, insofar as the shielding is dependent on the drive, and the plates harden as we accelerate, or in the case of an at-rest combat situation they harden as we redirect power from the drive to … but anyway, Sally’s right – you can’t project images onto it.”

“Right,” Sally nodded. “So unless the Artist is out there and he’s poured …
something
… all over the bridge hull panels…”

“Wait,” Janya said. “Does this mean we don’t have shields right now?”

“
Yes
,” Decay said in mild exasperation. “It’s one of the things that make it quite difficult to fake an all-stop.”

“Can we initiate at-rest combat whatever, and get shields that way?”

“In theory,” Decay said. “I’ve been trying since we stopped, but it looks like the combat readiness systems have been broken up into different independent subsystems and it can’t be done from the bridge anymore.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sally raised a hand. “That’d be my fault. Sorry. Sort of trying to stop our new friends from doing anything too drastic with our ship. But if we need something blown up, I think I can still make it fly. I didn’t take the shields into account, but I think with a bit of adjustment we can get them to fire up when we go to battle stations, just like always.”

“That doesn’t get us any closer to figuring
this
out,” Clue said, pointing at the screens again.

“Only one crewmember can tell us that,” Waffa spoke up, “and it’s Bruce.”

The bridge crew sat in front of the oppressive curve of the viewscreen for a few seconds, waiting to see if Bruce was going to speak up.

“Is the Captain going to be stirring himself for this?” Sally asked nonchalantly into the silence.

Clue ignored this. “If we need to fire up the shields–”

“I was winning,” a voice that didn’t seem to belong to any of the crew suddenly spoke up from the speakers.

Z-Lin blinked. “Winning?”

“The game.”

Decay coughed. “I was … playing
Metak
with the computer,” he said, “before this all started to happen.”

“You had precisely
no clue
where my Joker was,” the voice gloated. “You’d been chasing down a decoy for the past ten moves.”

“Bruce?” Clue hazarded.

“Doesn’t sound like the Artist,” Sally noted clinically. “He definitely used a Molran voice, this one sounds human.”

“You’re in the underspace,” Bruce said, “a universe accessed by a special drive the Artist has created.
He
didn’t tag along with
us
– he
came
to us. And now
we
are tagging along with
him
. As for what you can
see
… well, the Artist calls it ‘the darkerness’.”

“God damn
bonsher
,” Decay blurted. Several pairs of eyes turned towards his station. “I just – I – that was what I thought of to call it,” he muttered.

“It’s not soft-space,” Bruce said with a note of triumph in its voice. “Soft-space is just a convenient layer of unreality that you access when you travel at ten thousand times the speed of light.

“But this is
not
unreality, and we are
not
travelling at relative speed,” Bruce intoned, sounding very much like it was enjoying the creepy little spiel. “The layers through which we have just descended, thanks to the Artist’s underspace drive, are the layers separating our reality from
another altogether
.

“Underspace is a variant of the universe where existence itself never kicked off. No matter. No big bang. No cause and effect. No time. No
space
.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever–” Z-Lin spluttered, then continued in a more reasonable tone, “we still exist in spatial dimensions. My response to your words has followed chronologically from you saying them. We’re obviously still
in
some sort of rational space.”

“Only insofar as we have brought some measure of it with us,” Bruce said, “and only for a very fleeting time. We do not
travel
here. There is no distance, no linear chronology or axes of movement. Naturally as we descend and then ascend through the shallows there is a slight lateral adjustment depending on where in
our
universe we want to resurface – hence the regrettable turbulence – but these are minor teething problems. With a little work, the underspace drive will allow us to travel anywhere in this universe, dramatically faster than relative speed. Perhaps even instantaneously. Because ‘where’ is an entirely arbitrary concept unique to
our
reality. It’s a mutual fiction we–”

“What was
that
?” Zeegon pointed.

“What was
what
?” Bruce demanded, sounding peeved at having its big culmination interrupted.

“That … darkerness,” Zeegon said, still pointing, his finger developing a mild shake. “It was on
this
side of the screen.”

“What? No it wasn’t,” Z-Lin frowned, but took a half-step back from the viewscreen anyway.

“No matter,” Bruce said. “We’re surfacing in three … two …
one
.”

The
Tramp
shuddered again, and the disturbing nothingness at the front of the bridge receded. Except, to Decay’s eyes, it didn’t fade out the way it had faded in. When they’d ‘descended’, it had been like they were dropping beneath the surface of something. Now, surfacing, it didn’t feel like they were rising up into real space.

It felt as though the darkerness was turning sideways, tucking itself away into various corners, hiding. Still there, unseen, ready for you to forget about it.

This impression faded quickly, though, the mind unable to hold onto the conviction in the face of the sensory universe. Particularly overwhelming was the massive green-and-grey planet that had just appeared in front of them.

They appeared to be in high stable orbit, bridge-down, with the planet’s sun somewhere behind them illuminating the great cloud-swirled emerald orb. The sudden brilliance of the planet that filled two-thirds of the viewscreen was shocking, particularly in contrast to what had been there moments before.

Clue wasted no time gasping over the impossibility of what had just happened. They had been days – maybe weeks – away from the nearest star system even at relative speed. “Where the
Hell
are we?”

“I could try to use the computer to establish that against known star charts,” Decay said, “if the navigation system wasn’t all
bonsh
ed up.”

“Me again,” Sally confessed.

“Or we can just wait for Bruce to tell us,” Decay went on, “since I’m pretty sure it already knows, and doesn’t actually need the navigational system anyway, apparently.”

“Well how was I supposed to know that?” Sally demanded crossly.

“My friends,” Bruce said, “welcome to Jauren Silva. You are passengers on the first successful, synthetic-intelligence-guided space flight to employ the underspace drive. The Artist was right. He was right!” Bruce’s voice rose to a jarring shriek.

“Um, right about what, exactly?” Waffa asked.

Before Bruce could compose itself and answer this, there was another voice on the communicator. It was not, Decay immediately guessed, the Artist. Not unless the Artist happened to sound exactly like the
Tramp
’s hysterically inept counsellor.

“Hi,” Whye said, “it’s me,” he paused for a moment, then added, “Janus,” after another pause, he continued in a jovial hey-let’s-play tone he had probably learned in a child psychology book from back when
Big Shooey
was still flying. “Um, so hey, does anyone need, you know, counselling?”

Z-Lin sighed. “No.”

“Getting there,” Zeegon added.

“Okay,” there was silence for a moment. “If any of you can feel yourselves being traumatised or getting a disorder or something from these weird blobs of darkness, you’ll let me know, right?”

“Yes,” Sally chimed.

“Okay,” Whye said. Decay was mildly curious just how the accredited horticultural mood analyst was going to help anyone who actually happened to
be
traumatised. So far, they’d managed to hobble along without this question really raising its head in conversation, but now -

“Who are you talking to?” Bruce wanted to know. “Oh, I see. You’ve closed the internal communications system. Very clever.”

Sally cast a directionlessly angry look at the bridge’s sound system. “We–”

“Hold on,” Clue interrupted. “Janus … did you just say ‘these weird blobs of darkness’?”

“Yeah?” Whye sounded ill-at-ease with such a direct question.

“
Why
did you say ‘
these
weird blobs of darkness’?”

“Because there is one, in my office.”

“What,
now
? Still?”

“Yeah,” Whye said. “Should I poke it with a pen or something?”

“What?
No
,” Clue exclaimed. “What’s wrong with you?”

“There may be some residue,” Bruce said breezily. “It will vanish shortly. Can’t exist in a universe with physical law, see.”

“It was
coming in here
,” Zeegon, still sitting bolt upright at the helm, hadn’t taken his eyes off the window panels.

“Illusion,” Bruce said dismissively. “Like an optical illusion, but with every sense – indeed, every
atom
in the body. The absence of anything for which we have a frame of reference, in the underspace, necessitates that your brains try to fill in the missing data with an assortment of things that might
feel
real, but I must hasten to reassure you, they are not.”