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

specifics of the qualifications.”
    “Seriously?” Bendis blinked.
    “Seriously,” Clue replied, “but make no mistake, these ables of ours have problems , alright? They’ll be able to do simple stuff for you, but they’re pretty scrambled. And at the end of the day you still have to feed them, and keep them from going gee-lass, and fill their lungs.”
    “Scrambled is fine,” Lou assured them, “as long as they can follow basic instructions. And if your modular can feed them and keep them breathing, we’ve got enough systems to keep them alive too.”
    “Let’s say the ones we give you will be able to follow basic instructions,” Z-Lin hedged. “Our mutual regulations probably won’t allow us to offload our absolute bottom-shelf boys on you, even if we were inclined to be so irresponsible.”
    “It would require a bit of creative request filing and computer trickery,” Janya said, “but if we offload enough eejits – ables, under the shipboard emergency protocols and replaced key positions with ables from The Warm like you were saying, we could probably use the same protocols to print off as many more as they might need here,” she paused, then added carefully, “or at least as many as they’re able to support, which like Lou says, has to be a few more than our ship can, even with all this…” she waved vaguely around at the docking area at which their ship was the only operational vessel.
    “I assume your own plants are gone , as opposed to damaged – much like your reactors,” Clue said. Bendis nodded grimly. “And you don’t have the parts or expertise left to repair our damaged shipboard systems?”
    “Doesn’t look like it,” Decay said without raising his eyes, and Lou shook his head sadly. Janus wondered when the man had last slept.
    “Afraid not,” he said. “Like I told you, we could have done a great job on your modular, but that was then and this is now. We can’t do anything with your computer, we’ve got no synth, and we can’t help with your fabrication plant. We’ve got plenty of raw materials to stock up your reactor and your oxygen farms and all of that, and make a few other repairs for you, but we can’t do any of the big tech. I doubt even the Fergies can help you with that.”
    “Alright,” Clue said, and they finally started to walk along the short concourse towards the emergency-bulkhead-enclosed central transit hub. “Our main tech repairs will have to wait, we’ve come this far without them and we can make do with what we can get from here. We help out as much as we can, upgrade what we can upgrade, and move on to the next settlement up the chain when we can.”
    “Mm,” Lou said noncommittally.
    “If there is another settlement,” Janus spoke up. “You know, I’m just saying.”
    “Even if they’ve all been simultaneously hit,” Clue said quite firmly, “which I still find a bit difficult to imagine, Bayn Balro and The Warm each seem to have comparable proportions of surviving people and infrastructure. The larger the world, the better our chances of finding more significant undamaged areas.”
    “Actually, that’s true,” Janus admitted. “And also I just realised I should probably have been more up-beat than that, seeing as how I’m ship’s counsellor and everything.”
    “Yes,” Clue said, “let’s all of us keep it up-beat.”
    There turned out to be a couple of different directions one could head from the Tramp , even with the comprehensiveness of the destruction, depending on whereabouts in the array one was headed. They didn’t see any sign of Waffa, or any indication as to which way he had headed. As Bendis had told them, Janus saw that there wasn’t so much damage here as erasure , but plenty of makeshift seals and cladding had been flung into place to make this docking spar capable of holding atmosphere against the vacuum outside. It was a mess, more like a slapdash construction site than a rescue and repair operation, and