Free Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man by Andrew Hindle

easier to think of the very real possibility that the potential unfriendlies among AstroCorps and the Fleet had all been destroyed at this stage, by an unknown but possibly-Damorakind menace.
    And it made her want to sigh all over again that she had just drawn a line between her civilian-but-non-Corps crew and actual civilians, with rights and identities and an existence outside this modular’s battered old hull.
    All told, they had been flying for eight years. Eight years, two months, five days. It was an easy one to remember, because their launch had been at year’s turn. Although to call it a launch was missing an opportunity to say that time we scrambled onto a modular in the middle of the night and sort of shot our way out of a chrysanthemum while being fired on by three separate governments, and everybody thought it was a year’s turn lightshow .
    They’d been celebrating their fourth year in space back when they had met up with the Dark Glory Ascendant . It was weird to think that that awkward series of incidents was now a halfway mark in their mission.
    It wasn’t unheard-of for long-haul AstroCorps tours to last ten years. Some even stretched to twenty, although those did tend to be far more professional, on-the-books and full-Corps efforts than their odd assortment, and the longer a tour the more Molranoid-heavy the crew tended to become. For a Blaran like Decay, a young fellow with millennia in front of him, a twenty-year tour was nothing.
    Even for a human, with a life expectancy of a mere tenscore, it was doable. A commitment, to be sure, but doable. Heck, from here it would take them the better part of five years to get Janus to his long-overdue appointment on … what had the planet even been called? Admittedly the urgency had gone out of that journey, even for Janus himself, when the rest of his team had been killed and all their samples destroyed … but dropping him off was still officially on their to-do list. It was just constantly a few steps down the priority chain, and that was before they had been skipping-stoned across the galaxy by the Artist. And if you asked Janus about it, he generally seemed pretty fatalistic and relaxed. He was an odd one, and that was coming from the Commander of this ship. Z-Lin had long suspected it was because, deep down, he really wanted to be a ship’s counsellor instead of a horticultural mood analyst.
    Clue had most certainly been on shorter tours than this before. She’d been a space-hound from a very early age, from a long line of space-hounds, and she knew perfectly well that things happened between the stars. Horrible things, usually. And even without the help of a mad Molran inventor and his teleportation drive, you could very easily spend your entire life skipping from place to place and never again run into a single living soul. If you were lucky . They’d been very fortunate, on balance, that their navigation hadn’t been entirely fried when the exchange had turned the interior of the ship into a molecular liquidiser. And again, she could hardly complain about the duration of their journey – she should probably, in fact, be grateful that everyone seemed too preoccupied with their own problems to notice her acceptance. Usually.
    The point was , since their modular was running on something of a blended crew format, there was a lot of leeway in terms of autonomy and course correction. It also happened to make things easier when recruiting people of special skill-sets, and conducting operations that may or may not be in breach of certain official guidelines. Did it make things awkward when the civilians started yammering about not being military personnel and questioning their orders and asking to go home to visit their old mums? Yes. But there were definitely benefits, too.
    The problem with having a full AstroCorps crew, she’d reflected on occasion, was that it rather paradoxically bound the ship to stricter parameters. If, for example, the Tramp had