Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (27 page)

After docking on the recycling station level, careening through the open access passage and shedding his scooter and suit in a furious scrabble in the adjacent corridor, the Artist hurdled the trundling Automated Janitorial Drones holding station in the passageway and sprinted into the ship. He met two eejits in the corridor around by the elevator and killed them both with his bare hands, twisting them and smashing them against the wall. A third eejit, standing
at
the elevator, had the time and wherewithal to hit the general alert before the Artist caught hold of him, dislocated both of his shoulders with his lower hands, pulled back his head with the upper pair and tore out his throat with his teeth.

The alarm didn’t sound, the elevators didn’t shut down, and the alert didn’t set off any of the emergency power-downs or blast-seals between sensitive levels and sectors that a general alert was
supposed
to trigger, because a combination of the game-changer and Bruce’s interference stopped all of that. The alert
did
, however, thanks to a reroute Sally had put in place, send a smaller alarm message to general quarters and the various eejit common rooms using the internal communications system, notifying them of the situation and advising them on steps to take. Whether they had the capacity to understand the notification, let alone take any of the steps Sally’s message advised, well. That was another story but at least a good-faith effort had been made for the official record.

The message also went out to the remaining humans on board, and they at least were in a position to be able to act accordingly.

As an additional bonus, the medical bay and general ship surveillance bumpers would activate during such an alert, to show areas of recent casualty activity. This system had been in place since Mays’s time, long before The Accident, but Doctor Cratch had successfully lobbied to keep Clue from discontinuing it. He’d cited the heightened need for automated medical response, owing to the shortness of staff and his own necessary limitations, and had basically made a good case, and so they’d left the system active. Active, and on a separate circuit to the wider comms system. The upshot was that when the third eejit to die performed his final noble act, the alert began routing surveillance information to the medical bay and allowed Glomulus to see what was happening and piece together with reasonable certainty what had happened previously. The more information that came in, from a variety of creatively-interlinked sources, the more clearly Glomulus saw. Bruce didn’t seem bothered by this so it failed to switch off the bumpers.

And the Artist himself appeared far beyond caring.

Most of the eejits remained where they were, although a few milled out into the corridors and headed for the elevators. Five died – two on the lander bay level, two on the primary bridge level, and one on crew quarters 1 – as the Artist made his way past the exchange and up towards the medical bay. They died simply because they had gone to the elevator and pressed the call panel, and were waiting at the doors when the elevator arrived with its hissing-furious Molran cargo. By the third time this happened, the Artist was so spectacularly enraged by the interrupted ascent that he pulled the fifth eejit bodily into the elevator and dismembered him completely.

He met four more eejits – three, and then one – on his way through the corridors after that, making a total of twelve demolished bodies in his wake by the time he ended up in the medical bay.

He stepped into the pristine white space like a mobile abattoir, blood covering almost every square inch of his feverishly-trembling body and making his shoes squelch on the tiles. He was only momentarily thrown off-balance by the warm tones of Lars Larouchel’s Big Brass Ball playing over the speakers, but one might argue that he was so dramatically off-balance already that the difference it made was negligible. Nevertheless, he stopped trembling and looked around, ears pressed to his wide, flat-topped skull.

“Can I help you?” Nurse Dingus stepped forward and asked the Molran politely. “You look like you need medical attention, and also you’re not a human, are you? We had a Molranoid anatomy specialist printed just after The Accident, I’m told, but he went
urk
.”

‘
Urk
’ wasn’t precisely what Nurse Sassmouth had done. As a matter of fact he had suffered a fatal embolism the first time Decay had agreed to a trial physical, and his final words had been
let’s get you under the scope and see what you can OH MY SHIT OH FUCK
, before he’d collapsed and Decay had politely declined the offer of a reprint. It wasn’t as though Blaren had much in the way of medical needs anyway – not medical needs that the
Tramp
’s medical bay was qualified or outfitted to help with, anyway, beyond the occasional bout of prodigestion and throat murmur.

The Artist grabbed Dingus by the throat and hauled him towards the supply closets.

“Gonazine,” he hissed, “and a molecular bonding stimulator, and if you have both of those I
may
leave you alive.”

“You can help yourself to the gonazine,” Glomulus, who had been watching the Artist’s progress on the casualty monitors, stepped out from his sleeping niche. “We don’t have much need for it since we only have one Blaran on board and he’s not prone to … well, to whatever you things have when a species that sleeps would have nightmares,” he eyed the Artist up and down. The Artist had frozen and was glaring at Doctor Cratch as if offended his precious ears hadn’t warned him of the human’s presence. “Are you troubled by visions? No matter,” he waved a braceleted hand. “Top shelf, on the left. You probably won’t need a stool to stand on, will you? Big tall fellow like you. I’d just appreciate it if you didn’t kill Nurse Dingus there. No telling what I’d get next time, and I just got him trained.”

The Artist snarled and tossed Dingus aside. “Stimulator,” he said, turning towards the closet.

“I’m afraid our stimulator burned out when Wingus
Senior
accidentally bonded himself to an autopsy table,” Cratch said. “The good news was, he was already on an autopsy table so that was a time-saver. The bad news was, like I say, the stimulator burned out. And additionally, just between you and me, Wingus Jr. is a little bit thick,” he smiled. “Everything’s good news and bad news, isn’t it? It’s like I always–”

“Shut up,” the Artist transferred the three heavy bottles to his lower hands, then placed them on the counter while keeping Cratch carefully in his line of sight. “Shame you weren’t still in the brig,” he said, “I might have just left you there. Now I’ll–”

“Wait,” Glomulus raised a long forefinger. “If we’re going to have a showdown, can we wait until the next song?
Can’t Stop Butting Heads
, it’d be so much more appropriate.”

The Artist eyed Cratch cautiously, as if to illustrate that his foaming rage and clear psychosis was merely a decorative scrimshaw on the surface of a tooth belonging to a much more expansive insanity. An insanity space whale, perhaps, Glomulus reflected whimsically. Contro would no doubt approve.

There wasn’t much you could say about the Artist, appearance-wise. He was a Molran, and a more or less normal one – but then, Molren were normal almost by definition. Molren were basically the same as Blaren in looks, with four arms and four-digited hands, broad flat-topped skulls and perpetually-smiling mouths, wing-like webbed ears and elongated eye teeth. Well, in short,
Molranoid
. Molren were even more homogenised, however, with even fewer variations in height, build, and general appearance. Blaren liked to insult Molren by calling them
ghone
, a derogatory Xidh term meaning ‘clone’.

About all that Cratch could tell about the Artist under his liberal coating of eejit blood was that he was old – quite possibly ancient. Despite this, however, he was also extremely
vital
. He was clearly at one of those stages of Molran life where the body revitalised itself and grew new muscle, new fat and in some cases new organs, all the worn-out bits sloughing away and being replaced with improved models, albeit ones that burned steadily hotter and faster as the final phases came upon the individual. These prime periods were how Molranoids managed to live for millennia while humans could barely scrape into a second century with all their hull plates intact.

“I would have left you in the brig,” he said, “and the machine would most likely have kept you fed and watered for as long as you needed. I can’t have you out here, though,” he went on, “because I need a ship. An
empty
ship, at least empty of these unpredictable and unmanageable living elements.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say the ables we have on crew are
manageable
,” Glomulus said. He considered attempting to deflect the Artist’s attention by telling him about the odd underspace-sensitivity Whye had discovered in the
Tramp
’s eejit population, about which he’d been doing the Janus Whye equivalent of excited jabbering almost since the landing party had left. For Janus, excited jabbering meant idly saying
hey, I just noticed this thing, not sure if it’s important, if you think it’s worth a look, I don’t know, it’s all just whatever
…

In the end, he decided against it for the time being. If the Artist
did
end up stealing the ship, killing them all and attempting to form a rapport with the eejits, then he could darn well figure them out as he went along, just like the
former
crew had.

“No,” the Artist agreed moodily. “It’s a shame the able plant seems to have been scrambled, but the automation is good and I don’t need to go far. I’ll be able to get a replacement, and put these poor creatures out of their misery.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you needed to go anywhere,” Glomulus said. “If you can travel to any part of the universe with just a scooter and a spacesuit, why do you even need a ship? And why use this ship as an intermediate point if you can go directly to wherever you’re planning on going – this fabulous place where you can get a new fabrication plant and everything?” The Artist smiled, although Cratch admitted this could simply have been the way his mouth looked. He’d never been good at telling a smiling Molran from a scowling one. “It’s the synthetic intelligence, right?” he asked brightly. “Too difficult to rip it out of the
Tramp
. If it would even let you try,” he paused, and glanced theatrically at the nearest comm speaker. “Bruce has been quiet lately,” he noted.

“Navigation is one concern,” the Artist strolled along the front of the closets, keeping Cratch in front of him in that once-again disconcerting way that suggested he was, if not sane, then at least far more calculatedly
nuts
than it seemed to the untrained eye. “As is the integrated nature of my … friend. Plus, now that you have destroyed my designs and my development station and manufactory, I have need of some of your lab space and automation equipment.”

“I think you’ll find our labs and automation gear disappointing too.”

“Most likely,” the Artist said distantly. “A most unfortunate attempt on the part of your tactical officer to shift the balance of power.”

“Sally is more of a ‘shoot first, questions are for sissies’ person,” Cratch noted philosophically.

“She is a fool.”

“Just as well Decay didn’t get back here and get his hands on you first,” Glomulus noted, his voice quiet. “His wife was killed in The Accident.”

“I didn’t
cause
your precious Accident,” the Artist snapped in sudden annoyance. “Do you think I would do something that risked not only the ship and the ables, but also the synthetic intelligence I needed? No, it was that
thing
Captain Ixia left with your Captain that did it. Did you even know about that? No, I imagine you didn’t,” he said, switching from hot to cold with worrying fluidity. “I imagine they haven’t told you much of anything at all, actually.”

“Sort of like you and Bruce.”

“Sort of like,” the Artist said in mild amusement. “So,” he went on, not waiting for Cratch to fire off a new response, “you survived your so-called Accident … and they let you
out
?”

“Among the things you weren’t expecting to be surprised with today,” Cratch said, waving his hands sheepishly.

“I suppose they needed medical expertise,” the Artist shook his head, “and … well, humans – what can one say? They found themselves alone and in trouble, their numbers suddenly reduced to a pathetic handful. Naturally, being humans, they sought an illusory solidarity with every last member of their species left on board, and illogically assumed they shared common cause and a mutual respect that increases in inverse proportion to the population.”

“Very technical,” Glomulus approved. “I’m not sure that’s what they thought, but it sounds as though it’s based in some very solid human psychology. Or at least mathematics.”

“Only a few of you left, you’ll simply have to trust one another and work together or you will never make it through,” the Artist murmured. “Crimes of the past forgotten and all backs bent to the common oar, yes?”

“You’re
really
thinking of a different group of humans,” Cratch smirked. “Did you hang out with a lot of stem-tweakers or egg-poppers as a younger man?”

“I still can’t believe they let you out,” the Artist marvelled. “Bruce said something about it, but I admit at the time I was more interested in the larger ramifications of your ‘Accident’.”

“I guess there’s a lot of stuff Bruce didn’t tell you,” Glomulus smiled sympathetically. “About the guns. About the eejits. What do you need a molecular bonding stimulator for?” the Artist’s eyes narrowed, and Cratch gave a little shrug. “I’m no threat to them,” he went on. “Not right now, anyway. They have subdermal implants that they can use to set
these
off,” he rattled his bracelets, then twitched the leg of his pants to show the matching metal gleams around his ankles.

The Artist’s ears flicked in surprise, sending a fleck of eejit blood spattering against the closet door. Glomulus kept himself from staring at it by sheer willpower. “Mini-charges?”