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

“Ready,” she said.
    “If there’s berries in there–”
    “There aren’t any berries,” she said, surly. “I tossed all my berries.”
    Right , Waffa thought, if by ‘tossed’ you mean ‘ate’ … “Send up the last three little ones next,” he said, “then the rest of you can help our crewmen to load up and secure your buddy in the isolation pod.”
    The Bonshooni were cooperative – the idea of a starship arriving completely at random and being their only ticket off a shark-infested ocean planet with a miles-tall tidal wave on the way had a lot to do with that – and soon the eejits and two beefy settlers, one male and the other female, were manhandling the battered old isolation pod up out of the hatch and across the roof. The juveniles, one a pudgy six-footer on the verge of the Molranoid equivalent of teenagerhood, a second about the same age and the third a squirming infant no more than a month old, were loaded up along with the uncle of the latter. The parents, it seemed, had perished in the attack … although with Bonshooni, you never could really tell. They had strange family systems and as many different labels for interrelationships as they had interrelationships. The ‘uncle’ might have been a friend, a lover, a sibling, or even the biological father of the infant – there was no way to be sure and if the Bonshooni didn’t think it was important then it wasn’t the business of the Tramp ’s crew to figure it out.
    “Load an extra guy into my seat,” Waffa instructed the eejits, turning and heading back towards the hatch. “I’ll wait for the other lander and help them. I want to check out the hub, see if I can find any information,” he made his way down the service ladder, and eyed one of the dwindling collection of survivors as they were milling and hefting their belongings in huge, beefy arms. “That’s okay with you guys, right?”
    “Of course,” the Acting Consul, a male as huge and round and ruddy as his voice had been, nodded earnestly. He was helping the others, having grandly declared that he would be the last Bonshoon off the hub. “None of us are very good with the sensors and records and stuff – we were up against it just trying to get the beacon reconnected and our transmitters going – but if you want to try, go ahead. We – I also have a backup of our records and logs here on a data block,” he raised one of his own bags, most of which seemed bureaucratic in nature.
    “I’ll check it out, see what we can salvage,” Waffa said, swinging out over the ladder and descending into the structure. “You’ll want to come in and close that hatch again, they’ll be taking off.”
    “Oh, right.”
    The upper level of the hub had most likely been their communications centre, or at least a backup one. The consoles from which Acting Consul Harga Choyle had transmitted Bayn Balro’s distress call, and the beacon setup and allied junk, was stacked in one corner and the rest of the space had been repurposed into an evacuation staging area for the twenty-seven Bonshooni and their belongings. Actually quite efficient, Waffa admitted grudgingly, for smokers. He crossed to the stairs and descended into the next level.
    The thick, sweet smell of smokeberries, like vanilla-scented cigar smoke, filled his nostrils and made him feel giddy. He knew there was no harm in the smell, though. A bowl of smokeberries would give a Molranoid an enduring euphoria, two would give it an assortment of visions or insights of dubious scientific merit, and three would put it as close to sleep as a Molranoid ever got. The drug in smokeberries was a natural extraction, genetically enhanced, of the medication that laced a Molranoid’s blood when in suspended animation.
    A half-bowl of berries was more than enough to kill even the most heroically-proportioned, Able-Darko-esque human. One berry alone, crushed into a dish of ordinary food, could give a human a permanent psychotic break. Molranoid