Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (5 page)

She often indulged in regret for her lost life at Judon Research Outpost, which had ended when she’d come aboard the
Tramp
under what the Captain – or at least the XO, Commander W’Tan – had referred to with typical Molran understatement as ‘exceptional circumstances’. Well, that was one way of saying it. An even better way of saying it was the deceptively simple Xidh word
cholak
, which roughly meant
a fact with an explanation too long and complicated to be worth noting in the official record
. Xidh, the common language of the greater Molranoid species-tree, was elegant like that.

W’Tan hadn’t actually even lasted until The Accident.
She’d
died in the bonefields.

Janya couldn’t have said why she’d originally chosen Judon Research Outpost, a clunky old station at the end of a long arm of straggling nowheres including Castermaine and Whence, each institution more notorious than the last for
not being notorious
. Nothing prestigious or revolutionary or even very interesting had come out of any of those places in centuries, and as for Judon … it was fair to say that nothing prestigious or revolutionary or very interesting had
ever
come out of Judon.

And that had suited Janya quite well. She hadn’t been involved in any particularly secret or ground-breaking studies herself, and didn’t have the usual possessive or protective attitude towards her work that so many other academics had. Something about the solitude, the low-pressure and seemingly-endless tasks, had appealed to her sense of scholarly seclusion. She liked to learn, but she liked it in the same way a sponge liked water – more than, say, a man dying of thirst which was how most modern thought seemed to believe one must like to learn. Hers was the pursuit of understanding, but it was a
lazy
pursuit, really more of a casual stalk than an active hunt. Janya Adeneo gathered knowledge for knowledge’s sake, without the frantic rush of competition and publication and tenure hearings.

And status reports. Oh, how she
loathed
status reports.

And it had worked. Her university professors and advisers had approved the transfer and the practically open-ended timeline for her intentionally-vague assignment. It had essentially been left as an unstated fact that she would subject-drift her way into obscurity and disappear – not so much
off
the face of the academic universe, as
into
it.

Judon Research Outpost had turned out to be a slightly ironic choice on her part, when one considered the other agencies that had selected it for much the same reason. Or, if not ironic, then at least a coincidence you really wanted to
call
ironic, because calling something ironic gave it meaning and significance and took away a lot of the coldness inherent in the universe.

Needless to say, if she’d known about Judon, she would have gone to the monastery on Whence instead.

Life, she often noted, had a way of happening to you whether you wanted it to or not. Tired old proverbs claimed that no man was an island, and the same apparently held true for scholars. And sometimes when you avoided the world, all you were doing was building up pressure. When the volcanic plug of daily routine finally blew, sometimes it took that entire illusory island with it.

And when the ash and pumice cleared, you looked around and oh look, you were back in space.

Once upon a time, the starship they lived in had been named
AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400
. This was, admittedly, more of a classification than a name. Due to certain regrettable events leading up to her hasty launch, the
Tramp
had never been given a proper inauguration.

Owing to some of those same events involving combustion mines and incendiary cannons, and the ensuing years involving far more crashes and scrapes and impacts and dogfights and failed dockings and weapons-malfunctioning-take-us-to-ramming-speeds than they had washings or paint jobs, the last time anyone had looked at the hull the lettering had read
Astro Tra M P 400
, leaving her with her current inglorious but at least soulful name.

Janya remembered the last fully-functioning and full-crewed ship they’d encountered, back before The Accident when they were lost and undermanned but at least not desperate.

The
Dark Glory Ascendant
.

Those
sons of whores
.

It was easy to look back, now that they had barrelled through the maelstroms of desperation and rolled exhaustedly out the far side onto the glassy becalmed waters of utter, shattered indifference, and be philosophical about how that whole situation had played out. Now, the issues that had seemed so important back then were put into the ultimate perspective and one could objectively say that they weren’t all that significant in the big picture. The big picture that was now actually quite small indeed. It was really more of a snapshot. Actually, their old problems were quite laughable if you were a fan of that variety of gallows humour. But at the time … well, even now, it was fair to say that you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone – with the possible exception of Contro – willing to say a kind word about the crew of the
Dark Glory Ascendant
.

Janya was considering scrolling through the latest configuration log for data points, and trying to think of something – anything – she might need to do instead, when the impact report and personal lab notification came through. The object itself was not far behind, delivered in its sealed sample case by mini maglev from the catching station where it had passed through quarantine. Janya sent it through to the lab and made her way there immediately.

After the last incident, eejits were banned from the lab. Even Janya’s special eejit aides were only allowed into the adjoining workspaces and archives, although exceptions could be made.

The problem was that even an eejit who seemed completely stable and high-quality might suddenly decide to drink the bio-samples, or mix two compounds he shouldn’t or, in one particularly memorable case, begin to autopsy himself. There were as many stressors and breaking-points and environmental triggers as there were different ways the brain could misfire. An eejit who had successfully and stably performed a task seven hundred and forty-nine times was
reasonably
likely to successfully and stably perform it the seven hundred and fiftieth time, but there was always a tiny chance that the seven hundred and fiftieth time would be the one that blew a gasket in his beautifully-crafted but fundamentally broken brain.

It was unanimously agreed, therefore, that exceptions really ought only be made in the most highly-controlled and … well,
exceptional
of cases, when there was no other recourse and the benefits outweighed the potential drawbacks. And since the drawbacks were practically impossible to predict or prepare for, the benefits had to be
huge
and so far no benefit had actually
been
sufficient to warrant the lifting of the ban. The ban itself was easy enough because it didn’t need to be enforced. Most of the
Tramp
’s eejits wouldn’t wander into a place unless specifically ordered there, and the rest would have trouble working out how to get to the lab anyway.

Janya moved the object to an examination module, and opened its transport casing. She looked down at the object for a moment, then turned and hit the priority communicator stud on the nearest panel.

“Clue,” Z-Lin’s crisp voice said at the far end. “I
know
you know this bandwidth is reserved for emergency communications and high-command-only information for the oh forget it. What’s up?”

“Assuming this isn’t one of Glomulus Cratch’s jokes,” Janya said, “I’m standing here looking at a very worrying possibility.”

“Is this about the collision warning?” Clue asked. “I have to admit, I haven’t had a chance to check
all
the logs yet…”

“Yes, well,” Janya said, “it’s fair to say this is
tangentially
about the collision warning.”

“I assume we would all know about it if it had been able to penetrate the shields. Or we’d be dead, so either way this conversation wouldn’t be taking place.”

“Correct. No
current
danger to the shields,” since they were cycling up and the
Tramp
’s shields fed off the transpersion drive, they would only be getting stronger as a byproduct of their acceleration. “This couldn’t have done much harm. I can’t guarantee the same for potential future impacts.”

“Of course not,” Z-Lin said. “I wouldn’t expect you to,” she paused. “Are you seeing some sign that there are going to
be
future impacts? Was the incoming object part of some larger body?”

Janya looked down at the ragged, slowly-thawing piece of flesh.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s definitely part of a larger body,” she cleared her throat. “It is in fact a piece of the eejit that was chewed up in that airlock malfunction this morning.”

“I – oh,” Clue seemed at a loss. “Okay then. So it’s just … a frozen body part or two? I mean, not to be insensitive, but we’ve ploughed through corpsicles before. Even at all-stop, they’re not going to be much–”

“Commander,” Janya interrupted, “that’s not what concerns me on this occasion.”

“Okay.”

“According to reports, and according to physics – which I remind you is not my strong suit, but we’re talking quite
simple
physics here – we know that this piece of foot got crushed off by the inner airlock door and was then sucked out of the
outer
airlock door on a sustained blast of the
Tramp
’s internal atmosphere.”

“Right,” Janya could tell that Z-Lin, a not-unskilled astrophysicist herself, was already adding things up in her head.

“Once it was in motion and had sufficient velocity to escape the
Tramp
’s gravity well – and it did – there are only very limited logical reasons for it to come back towards us,” Janya went on patiently.

“Sure,” Clue agreed. “It came out of the airlock at an odd angle, bounced off the inner wall and got some spin on it, something like that. It went off on a tangent and we caught up with it. Wouldn’t be the first time scattering debris acted weirdly around the ship, would it? Remember the bonefields.”

Janya’s lips tightened. She tried not to remember the Captain’s last infamous attempt at a shortcut because, well, in the first place they were
in space
, so nothing other than a perfectly straight line could ever possibly be a short cut, and … she cut herself off short. “Even that … debris … acted in accordance with the laws of physics,” she said, “regardless of the fact that it seemed anomalous and strange to us at the time.”

“There’s always room for us to encounter more such surprises,” Z-Lin said. “We don’t lose pieces of crewmember through malfunctioning airlocks every day.”

“There’s more, Commander.”

“Go on.”

“We were at all-stop when the airlock malfunctioned, the eejit was killed and the body-part ejected,” Janya said clinically. “Waffa had called all-stop already, when it looked like the interface problem was going to run the risk of opening every airlock in the ship simultaneously,” fortunately, that particular eventuality had been ruled out quickly and the issue had turned out to be localised to that one defective airlock. It had, of course, turned out to be considerably more
serious
than just the interface panel, but there had been no way to foresee that. Janya had read the log, and the supporting evidence, quite carefully. Sometimes machinery just broke, especially when you had an eejit – with the best of intentions – mashing his hand on the control panel. “But we weren’t at all-stop when it re-entered sensor-range,” she paused for emphasis.

Clue was there ahead of her. “We didn’t overtake it,” she summarised. “
It
caught up with
us
.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Okay.”

“We were still cycling up,” Janya went on, “but we were already moving considerably faster than an air-propelled chunk of frozen meat would normally be capable of. That’s why the automatic assumption was that we were accelerating
into
something.”

“So either it bounced off something out there, altering its trajectory, or slingshotted around something,” Z-Lin said, not sounding as if she found either of these options particularly convincing, “or … what are you suggesting here? That we’ve lost navigational control and have come around in a circle?”

“It’s possible,” Janya said. Again, it wouldn’t be the first time they had flown into their own wake and gotten all excited about meeting new people. Indeed, once they had gone
four times
around such a loop, thinking they were following some ever-growing caravan or tributary in space, until Z-Lin had pointed out the curve trajectory that had been skipped from the first encounter readings and the magnetic distortion that was fooling their admittedly eejit-manned navigation consoles. After which they had carefully adjusted their course and never spoken of it again. “But unlikely, due to the precautions we take these days.”

“So…”

“So,” Janya summarised, “unless there was some sort of exotic pulsar just a few thousand miles off our hull, right outside that airlock, and we somehow
missed
it…” and by no means was this
impossible
, she reminded herself dryly, “…even with all
reasonable
effects of the debris slingshotting around something – not that there was anything close enough with the mass to
achieve
this, or the time for the debris to perform such a manoeuvre, again, pulsar notwithstanding – the acceleration required to pose an impact risk to an accelerating starship could simply not be reached by such a method.”

“But, since it
was
,” Z-Lin said, “I assume you have at least a wild guess at an explanation.”

“Yes, Commander,” Janya replied.