Drednanth: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Read Online Free Page A

didn’t refer to you as well.”
    “Oh! Righto! It’s just that when he said ‘we’, I assumed–”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Decay said smoothly, “it’s good that you came anyway, we needed you,” the four humans on the rescue party glanced at the Blaran in surprise, but unanimously kept quiet and waited to see where he was heading with it. “We’ve got twenty-seven Bonshooni coming up,” he went on, drawing Contro aside with a conspiratorial lower left hand on the Chief Engineer’s shoulder, “and the Commander was thinking we’ll need you to rearrange a few of your quarters into a bit of a Bonshoon hotel for them.”
    General Moral Decay (Alcohol) , Sally thought admiringly, you diabolical son of a whore . She glanced at Z-Lin, and the Commander returned her look blandly. She evidently had no intention of intervening. Whether or not Contro’s Bonshoon hotel would be a disaster, of course, was another matter.
    “Do you think you can sort that out?” the Blaran asked. “Your rooms are the nicest and these poor fellows have been through a lot. Quite a few of them are kids.”
    Sally might personally not have overdone it quite so much, but of course with Contro you couldn’t really overdo it. “Of course!” Contro beamed. “Very happy to help!”
    “And we’re sure it’s only Bonshooni left?” Sally asked.
    “Well, like Choyle said, the last humans were apparently killed trying to prevent the Fergunak from sinking the settlement entirely,” Z-Lin said, “and there were a couple of hundred Blaren but they all died in the whatever-it-was. The rest are all marine biologists and hydro engineers and stuff, all Bonshooni.”
    “I don’t suppose they have a spare medic who wants to go out and see the galaxy?” Waffa asked. “So we can put our albino psychopath back in the brig … or ideally just drop his skinny carcass in the sea for the sharks?”
    Contro laughed. “Aw, but they might eat him!”
    “I’d be okay with that,” Waffa allowed. “I’d even settle for them just biting him until he was dead.”
    “No medics,” Clue said dryly, “sorry,” she turned to Zeegon. “Where’s your co-pilot?”
    “If you mean Boonie,” Zeegon replied, “I left him on the bridge. I do have a little bit of professional protocol left, you know.”
    “You left your pet weasel on the bridge,” Z-Lin summarised, “because you have a little bit of professional protocol.”
    “If you want me to go and get him–”
    “No, that’s fine,” Clue rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”
    Z-Lin, Decay and the eejit Contro had been calling ‘Sleepy’ boarded one lander, and Sally, Waffa, Zeegon and the other two eejits boarded the second. Zeegon took the helm and activated the guidance systems, but insisted on taking care of a few of the procedures manually, just to practice. Once the bay was confirmed clear they sealed it, popped the docking port, and the two landers dropped silently towards the planet below.
    Sally remembered, apropos of nothing, that Sleepy had in fact been one of several batches of eejits they’d had to make after Twistlock. Waffa had told her about it verbally, as well as – probably – putting it in one of his multitude of reports for her to balance on her to-read pile. It had made an interesting anecdote, and you didn’t get many of them from the eejit fabrication process.
    Sleepy’s batch, as the name might suggest, had consisted of seven eejits in an attempt to make a new group of surgeons and specialists to recoup their losses and help treat some of the issues they’d had to deal with. It hadn’t been a huge success. Grumpy had been docile enough, Waffa had said, but had also been prone to seizures that eventually culminated in a fatal aneurysm, and Doc had been given his name ironically.
    Sally didn’t recognise the two in their lander, although she suspected Waffa might. All she knew was that they weren’t from Sleepy’s batch. To be fair, although they weren’t