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

floor, picked up from The Warm where they had taken their passengers on board in the first place. Waffa had used it to seat the seed properly in the otherwise unpadded holding space. Now, it was banked up in a series of little ridges and lumps, and – yes – the pups were concealed behind, and in one case beneath the drifts. As she stepped fully into the room and hauled the door closed behind her, a couple of fluffy white-furred heads poked out to observe her calmly. A third shuffled out on fuzzy rear paws and soft grey knuckles from behind the huge empty shell of Thord’s envirosuit, which a janitorial had dragged back into the farm arc after her departure. “Sorry to interrupt your whatever-it-was you were doing in here.”
    The seven knee-high aki’Drednanth – there were still seven, she confirmed after a quick head count, and then cursed herself for her humanocentric cynicism – emerged from their various hiding places and stood, low-set eyes blinking large and dark on either side of their heavy but still-tuskless jaws. One of them, the one that had emerged from beneath the snowdrift, shook herself off and gave a mewling half-yawn, half-growl from the back of her frosty grey-black throat.
    “So,” Clue said to fill in the silence that followed, “you guys aren’t … fighting over stuff yet? We’re going to get another couple of food dispensers churning out aki’Drednanth chow in a day or two, if you … need more,” she trailed off.
    Given the reality of their situation, the non-Corps nature of their crew and the tension they were all already under, Z-Lin had agreed with Sally and Waffa that full transparency about the investigation was the only reasonable course. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be transparent about, and the result was inevitably going to be supposition, suspicion, finger-pointing and a whole lot of tension. She’d determined that the transparency should apply to the aki’Drednanth even if the tension might be something they managed to avoid. In fact, being aki’Drednanth, they probably got a double dose of transparency. No matter what people said about aki’Drednanth not being able to read minds as such , there was a lot going on behind the words as such that made Z-Lin uneasy.
    For that matter, they might not even be so young and innocent as to ignore the atmosphere among their strange hairless surrogate family. It was easy to look at them and see cuddly little white cubs, but Thord had said it herself. They were ancient, and had been since before they were born. All the more reason to come clean with them now.
    “You girls know Dunnkirk,” she said, “the Bonshoon who was friends with your … with Thord.”
    She already knew they could understand what she was saying. Maybe they’d spent the last twenty or thirty years of their countdown to re-fleshulation learning how to speak AstroCorps standard. They had access to the minds of every Drednanth and aki’Drednanth to ever speak to a human, after all, even if these particular ones had never done so.
    One by one, and from all sides, the aki’Drednanth pups padded and crunched across towards her. Clue fought down the urge to flee. It wasn’t as if that would do any good.
    “Yes.”
    Z-Lin managed not to piss her thermal. The pup that had been behind Thord’s envirosuit had also emerged, and Clue realised she was wearing one of the blue webbing gloves from the suit’s voice synthesiser. It hadn’t been the ghost of Thord speaking. It had been the pup, playing with the glove and speaking through the suit. To be honest, Z-Lin felt ill-at-ease trying to stop her.
    “Okay, but we’re getting that voice remodulated at least,” the Commander said gruffly to herself, then coughed and glanced around at the aki’Drednanth. “Yes? Right, yes. Dunnkirk. I-”
    “Yes no,” the heartbreakingly-familiar voice came once again from the open-fronted but still monolithic envirosuit. “Yes no yes no yes no yes stonk stonk stonk