Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (23 page)

“Right.
Boonie’s Last Stand
is a hub manufactory,” Bruce said, “but there was no synthetic intelligence on board, and barely even any fully-active hubs. They’re transported off-station almost as soon as they’re built, see. The Artist worked in R&D on board. This is his home.”

“Looks nice,” Zeegon remarked. The crumpled bulk of the station was like an elongated dome, a badly-collapsed ellipse like a half-chewed lozenge. “I like what he’s done with the place.”

“Without a synthetic intelligence on board,” Bruce continued to rhapsodise, ignoring Zeegon utterly, “he had to jump
almost
blind. He travelled to a number of unsuitable locations before he got here, and was then able to cobble together the hub from the components on board.”

Waffa nodded to himself, one of the many things that had been bothering him finally falling into place. A Molran acting alone
might
be able to construct a synthetic intelligence or a hub … but having access to a manufactory station full of parts would definitely make it easier. Even so, it was disturbingly difficult to imagine the Artist running all that machinery alone. Almost as disturbing as imagining him doing it with
help
.

Bruce seemed to read Waffa’s thoughts. “The rest of the
Boonie
’s crew are gone,” it said. “He did this alone.”

“Impressive,” Waffa said noncommittally.

“He hasn’t been back here, obviously,” Bruce went on. “Actually he just arrived, made some adjustments, and left again. The station and its shuttles weren’t space-worthy. The
Boonie
’s crew had sabotaged them after the darkerness got inside them and they freaked out that the Artist was trying to kill them,” the synth paused. “Which he was,” it added, “ha ha. So he had to go back out, flying practically blind, with nothing but an emergency spacesuit and the drive strapped to his back, and find himself a synthetic intelligence and at least some sort of small vessel to sustain him on longer-haul space flights.”

“Can you back up a bit,” Z-Lin said, “to that part about the darkerness getting inside the station crew and them freaking out, please?”

The next voice to come through the communicator, however, was the Artist’s. “Oh,” he said with a light chuckle much like Bruce’s, “don’t worry about that. The first dives were … irregular. It won’t happen again.”

“Irregular,” Z-Lin said.

“We went far deeper than we needed to,” Bruce spoke up when the Artist’s commentary no longer seemed forthcoming, “and brought back far more residue. More darkerness. That’s why we needed the station resources, and peace and quiet, to tweak the system. And why the Artist needed a scooter or a shuttle or
something
more than a spacesuit.”

Clue frowned pensively out of Methuselah’s front screen into the driving rain. “And it’s safe now.”

“Safe as relative speed.”

“That’s not actually very safe,” Decay said.

“Then what are you worried about?” Bruce asked triumphantly.

“
Added
unsafeness,” Decay said through clenched teeth.

“Also,” Zeegon added, without turning his attention from the road as they crawled forward into the shadow of
Boonie’s Last Stand
, “you keep saying ‘we’ about parts you weren’t here for.”

“Sorry,” Bruce sounded abashed. “It’s difficult to keep straight sometimes. The hub was there, not me.”

“I’m not going in there,” Zeegon declared, pulling up in front of the great sodden carcass of the beached space station. “I’ll wait out here and keep Methuselah running.”

“I’d actually get the whole buggy in there if I could,” Sally reported. “I’m looking down on the station and I’m seeing signs of a massive flood front headed your way. It’ll pour off into that chasm so I’ll be fine, but it’s going to hit your location pretty soon.”

“Oh alright I’ll go in there,” Zeegon growled, and gunned the buggy forward with a roar. They rolled into the cathedral-like cargo bay door that appeared to have been repurposed as an entry point.

“I’ve also found what looks like a fairly stable way back across to the lander for you,” Sally said, “as long as there aren’t too many more collapses. I’ll mark it off with some magnetic tape for you and just hope the whole shebang doesn’t get washed away. It should withstand the flood, though. Looks like a good solid rock ridge.”

“Sure it’s not a fake one?” Waffa asked.

“Shut up,” Sally snapped. “I’m going back to the lander. I’m not going to be able to walk the perimeter with this water coming in. Plus, my boots are full of slime and I think there’s a leech in there.”

“The leeches are harmless,” Bruce said helpfully. “A big one would drink somewhat less than an ounce of blood in a day, while a human your size can afford to lose–”

“
Bruce
,” Sally cut in, “I’m not ready to hear how much you know about human blood-loss tolerances.”

“Fair enough,” Bruce said affably. “I’m into the
Boonie
’s systems now, I’ll close the docking bay. Let’s see if it keeps water out now that it’s really quite badly damaged as well as it kept air
in
when it was all in one piece, eh?”

“So reassuring,” Zeegon said.

They parked Methuselah and climbed out.

“Foley, stay here with Ricky,” Clue said to the eejit that had fallen into the sinkhole. “The rest of you, with me. Sally, stay on the comm.”

“Copy that.”

The heavy, slightly-crumpled bay doors began to grind closed. Over the sound of wheezing non-atmosphere-compliant machinery and tortured metal, Waffa could hear the rising roar of water. He tried not to think about the possibility that both Bruce and the Artist had known this was going to happen, from the rain to the collapsed road to the flood, trapping them inside the hulk of
Boonie’s Last Stand
and cut off from the lander. He knew Sally would have told him that assuming your opponent had predicted advantageous accidents was the beginning of the long slide towards utter defeatism.

Sally was like that.

From the vantage point of the hill-like branch she’d clambered onto, Sally could see that
Boonie’s Last Stand
was nestled in a sunken basin composed of massive fallen trunks overgrown with smaller trees and undergrowth. There might also be a continuation of the ridge, she allowed, if the overall geography was more like a crater wall. It was just impossible to say under all the vegetation, and there was no way of knowing how deep the fissures below were.

The level of the area had probably dropped still further when
Boonie’s Last Stand
had materialised on the surface, pushing the whole lot down as creeper-bound logs sagged and rotting wood crumbled.

The whole thing raised some interesting possibilities about the drive. Unlike the relative field, which would tear a ship apart if activated too close to a large body like a planet or moon, this underspace drive seemed to be able to skip you right to – and presumably from – a planet’s surface, essentially without limit. Now he had a synth to direct where he resurfaced, the Artist may be able to get by without a spacesuit or scooter altogether.

It might spell the end of space travel as humanity – indeed, as Molranity and Blaranity and Bonshoonity, aki’Drednanthity and Fergunakility and, worryingly, Damorakindity – knew it.

Slow that wagon down, Sally,
she told herself.
If it’s as simple as all that, why are
we
here? Why didn’t the Artist just grab Bruce and flush us all out into space? Because you
know
Bruce wouldn’t have a problem with that.

There’s more going on here. Something else. And if it’s not about the darkerness getting inside people, I’ll eat my left boob. Because
that
was when he chose to speak up, wasn’t it? When Bruce made that comment about the
Boonie
’s crew.

The basin itself had seemed fairly stable at first glance,
Boonie’s Last Stand
looking as though it had settled in place and wasn’t about to go anywhere. Now, though, the torrential rain had obviously built up somewhere to the local north, and the same collapse that had brought down the tree and destroyed the road had overflowed and was bounding down the great moss-and-fungus-festooned bird’s nest wall behind the
Boonie
.

Fortunately the flood didn’t seem to be bringing much debris with it. If just one of those trees came down, it wouldn’t even need to hit
Boonie’s Last Stand
to utterly cream it. All it would need to do would be to whack another hole in the entirely illusory forest floor, a bit closer to the station. Send it tumbling to the bottom of the chasm Sally was now sitting on the lip of, and which was Mygon-only-knew how deep.

The tree she was in was resting shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the area’s rare outcrops of native rock. If the
Boonie
’s drones had had half a brain between them, they would have built the road and landing pad out this way instead of to the local south, which just seemed to be more rotten lattices of living and dead trees propped up on smaller ridges, eminently collapse-prone.

She could see
Boonie’s Last Stand
, or most of it, through its cloak of overgrowth. She could see where it was truncated. Evidently the underspace drive had a volume limit of some kind, or it had back on those early jumps that the Artist didn’t want anyone to talk too much about. What was left of the hulk, as far as she could see, wasn’t that much bigger than the
Tramp
. Sally noted this with a slight chill, despite the hideous broiling humidity.

Had the rest been clipped off and left behind in whichever part of space
Boonie’s Last Stand
had called home, a mystery to ponder for whatever authorities came out to investigate vanishing manufactory stations? Or had its extremities been chewed off by the darkerness and left somewhere, dissolving in the underspace?

Stow that, too,
she growled to herself in Commander Barducci’s voice.
Stow that melodramatic shooey right-the-Hell
now
.

She watched the floodwaters hit the station and swirl around it before surging off towards the gap left by the falling tree.
Boonie’s Last Stand
didn’t look like it was going to go anywhere and not enough of the water seemed to be falling through the solidly-packed crust to threaten a subsidence, so Sally turned and descended the ridge back the way she had come, following the chatter on the comm. Periodically, she added loops of magnetic tape to branches and fungal outcrops where it looked like Zeegon might have trouble finding the route.

“…the team command on the
Boonie
shut down my research into the underspace drive,” the Artist was saying. “By that stage I was already well into the development, though. You can’t put the creation back in the box. What is it you humans say? ‘You can’t un-have a dream’.”

“Do we?” Z-Lin said, then continued more positively, “we do.”

“So I continued developing, testing, working it all out in theory before going live. Of course, by the time I was ready, things had moved on and a certain amount of … discretion … was required.”

“You did everything in secret,” Waffa surmised.

“Quite under-the-radar, yes,” the Artist agreed. “The nature of the drive, the nature of the underspace – if indeed you can call it ‘nature’ since it is so definitively alien – is such that I was able to conduct quite extensive testing before being obliged to bring my discoveries into the light of day. I believe Bruce is guiding your way with lights,” he added abruptly, “and will be opening doors for you as necessary.”

“I’m on it,” Bruce said.

“The station didn’t even have a synthetic intelligence
in potentia
,” the Artist explained. “It was necessary, of course, given that they were designing and building hubs. That required a synthetic-intelligence-sterile environment. The systems, however, are still susceptible to infiltration. No firewall can keep a synth out, after all – they
are
the firewall. In cases like this, for passing vessels with synths on board, the standard protocol would be that the synth would see the sterile bubble and formally
agree
not to interfere with it. It’s all rather a moot point now, given the damage and the
Boonie
’s new purpose.”

“Some of the lights are in bad shape,” Z-Lin said, probably more for Sally’s benefit than the Artist’s, “and the floor is tilted … but we’re okay.”

“Very good.”

“Whole place could use a lick of paint, though,” Clue added.

Sally slowed, and nodded to herself. That one definitely
was
for her benefit. The Commander had dropped one of the old-fashioned pingback tabs Sally had slipped her while they were preparing for the mission. Whatever her reasons, whatever she was seeing in there, Clue was giving Sally an unequivocal instruction.

“Once the drive came to the attention of my superiors,” the Artist was continuing, “they were quite excited.”

“Now when you say ‘excited’–”

“Yes, they had their concerns, their objections, their narrow-minded criteria for exploration.”

“Am I to assume the words ‘fools, I’ll show them all’ are assembling themselves in your pipes as we speak?” Decay asked.

“I wouldn’t take it quite that far,” the Artist actually seemed rather pleased and coy at this point, not angry or inclined to rant. Sally reminded herself, as she followed the ridge along and ascertained as best she could its rover-supporting capabilities, that there was no value in anticipating any sort of consistent or predictable responses from either assumed-mad Molran or assumed-mad synth. Even if they
were
insane –
especially
if they were – there was no feasible way to gauge what might set them off. Not without more information.

And that was a dangerous game.

“So then you set the drive to take the entire station into the underspace?” Decay asked. There was the sound of a slightly asthmatic manufactory elevator in the background, and Sally found herself grinning. It was a sound that took her back to her earliest days at the University of Gífrheim Minor, worlds away from anything resembling AstroCorps and yet happy inheritor of all their cast-off and outmoded technology. They seemed to be ascending into the bowels of the station.