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

been manned by a full-Corps certified crew, they probably would have had to return to home base for a full inquest after losing even a fraction of their ranking officers. Losing all but ten people, and filling up the ship with misprinted ables, and then just setting their eyes on some largely-hypothetical horizon and continuing to fly with teeth gritted and knuckles white on the control consoles … well, their adventure probably would have ended even more spectacularly than it had begun, with a court-martial on top.
    It all depended on the mission, obviously, as to whether starships reported back to larger settlements more often or less often, even with a full-Corps complement. And the Tramp had run into some exceptional circumstances, it had to be said. Declivitorion was a big place, even though it was right out on the edge of the galaxy. It should have been their ticket to a fresh start, even if it had also posed some unusual challenges. Who could have expected it to have been completely destroyed?
    Actually, she didn’t like to think about that , either.
    Wait , she remembered Decay asking her, not too long ago, are we one of the few AstroCorps crews left, or not?
    Z-Lin recognised the fact that she was loitering, and had been loitering for almost ten minutes now, not wanting to go inside. It occurred to her that it didn’t really matter. The aki’Drednanth were already aware of her. If they could band together to burn the brains of an entire school-fleet of Fergunak, they could certainly tell when someone was standing at their door. They were everywhere on the ship.
    While the investigation into Dunnkirk’s murder went on, they were continuing through soft-space towards their first stop on the long path back from the edge, Mobi. First in a long line of mining settlements that, like the farm worlds of the barmy arm they’d followed out to the edge, were sparsely-populated – not to mention more than a little isolated and quirky.
    The flight would take nine weeks. Nine weeks to find out who killed Dunnkirk and how to deal with it. Of course, Mobi wasn’t that big. If they hadn’t settled this in nine weeks, they could always pass Mobi by and head to the next system in. Then again, Z-Lin thought, if Sally couldn’t solve a murder in nine weeks, she’d probably disembark at Mobi and take up mining.
    There was a problem with the case, Clue brooded, still aware that she was standing outside the heavy freezer door and putting off going in. Basically everyone on board had been with somebody else. They could all vouch for each other. The only one without an alibi, aside from Janya, was the Captain himself.
    Damn it, Skell , she thought to herself, I hope you know what you’re doing. And not just for your own sake.
    In fact … not for your sake at all .
    She adjusted the thermal for what must have been the eighteenth time, and stepped into the farm.
    They hadn’t had a chance, yet, to recommission the chamber that had previously held the Drednanth ‘seed’, Thord’s huge combination ice-sculpture, and knowledge repository. With the space now occupied by seven increasingly-active aki’Drednanth pups, it seemed unlikely they’d get a chance to replace the interior shelves and re-stock them with oxygen blocks any time soon, but the farm was running reasonably close to normal efficiency at this stage so there was no great urgency.
    It was a much larger space than it had seemed with the seed occupying a lot of the floorspace, especially with a pair of massive Bonshooni and a colossal aki’Drednanth squeezed in alongside. The pups had moved back into the main chamber after the successful launch of the seed, but Z-Lin hadn’t been in to see them since their leap to relative speed and the unpleasant series of events that had occurred shortly afterwards. She also hadn’t had a chance to sleep.
    “Hello?” she said, her breath misting thinly in the air. There was a solid layer of crushed ice and gritty snow on the