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drugs and human beings did not mix.
    And it looked like these guys had been planning on shipping out huge quantities – had probably been exporting them for some time, in fact – and evacuating with the lot when things went bad. The majority of boxes and containers on this level, clearly arranged for transport and vacuum- or freeze-packed, were filled with berries.
    One of the packs, the source of the smell although the remaining Bonshooni also accounted for a lot of the dizzying sweetness, had fallen from its stack and the plump blue-black berries had scattered across the floor. A big Bonshoon bootprint was tramped across the berries in a wide splash of dark juice.
    “Damn it,” Waffa said, shaking his head. “Marine biologists my arse.”
    There wasn’t much, aside from smokeberries and smokeberry root and stem stock. Even if the majority of the former settlers had been engineers and scientists, they’d been supplementing their research with a little mind-expansion and a most-likely lucrative little side business. A settlement this small, this far from major centres … there weren’t many hard-and-fast laws limiting Bonshoon commerce, and out here it was frontier law at best.
    Still, he looked through what there was. There were computer terminals outdated even by the Tramp ’s standards, probably not even synthetic intelligence compatible. Sally might have been interested in them for security purposes – she was always happy to find a way around the risks of computer-compromising attacks, and their recent adventures had only made her even more paranoid – but it was all hideously bulky. There were a few recreational systems, equally unwieldy, and some racks of clothing and safety equipment that all seemed ancient, and Bonshoon-sized to boot. The comparatively waiflike Decay wouldn’t be able to use any of it. The human possessions Waffa had been hoping to find had apparently been discarded when the last of the humans had died. They’d be able to feed the settlers’ identity information into the wider records networks when they hit a bigger system, but this was the sort of settlement that attracted people without next of kin …
    He blinked. Stacked haphazardly against one curved wall of the chamber was a collection of sleek grey mannequin parts in varying states of disarray. Most were completely disassembled and dead, but one, torso and half a head, was propped up in a ghoulish sitting position and had some interface lights glowing on its chest.
    Waffa recognised the devices. They were giela . Interactive Fergunak machines designed to be an extension – the whole, writ small – of the massive marine creatures up in the open air. The small, usually-humanoid robots were linked to Fergunakil controllers, directly into the cybernetic cortexes of the sharks and allowing them to see, hear, speak and interact with a dry-land environment from a distance, generally from the comfort of their oceanic homes through powerful transmitting arrays.
    These ones had been systematically taken apart. A wise precaution, since Fergunak were known to use the remote drones for brutally destructive purposes when things turned hostile. Waffa noted with faint hilarity that even the robot’s genitals had been smashed. Fergunakil giela invariably had large, offensively-detailed genitalia decorating their groins. Usually male and female in some sort of tasteless combination – sometimes coexisting, sometimes in mutated-looking combination or conflict, sometimes engaged in self-copulation or mutilation. The Fergunak found this amusing, because they knew that humanoid, Molranoid and to a different degree aki’Drednanth found sexual organs and gender to be a personal and often taboo subject, and didn’t like to be confronted by it.
    Waffa often wondered why they even bothered trying to be friends with the fucking monsters. If the Molren and aki’Drednanth weren’t so set on harmony and understanding, and if the Fergunak themselves