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

weren’t so damnably helpful sometimes …
    The Fergunak are sharks , a legendary Commodore of the Molran Fleet had once famously said. You cannot hate a thing for its nature. You can only be aware of it .
    “Flesh.”
    The word, melodious and compelling, had come from the lit-up giela sitting on the floor. Waffa blinked, coming out of his reverie and squinting warily at the battered robot. Presumably, since there was no full-scale Fergunakil transmitter on the hub unless it was below sea-level, and the final semi-intact giela ’s fine and rough ambulation alike had been completely demolished, the Fergies were only using this one as a communicator – to speak, and most likely to see and hear. The transmitter equipment upstairs would not be sufficient to provide a full uplink for the giela functions even if the robot still had the potential to perform them, but it was obviously enough to allow a piggyback signal for audio-visual.
    “Flesh.”
    Waffa forced himself not to clear his throat, or give any other sign of nervousness. “Are you talking to me, tiger?”
    “Of course you,” the giela said softly. “If I were talking to the chair, I would say ‘chair’.”
    “Mm,” Waffa grunted, and – again, against every screaming instinct in his body – turned away from the slumped machine and went back to desultorily searching through the equipment.
    “We did not do this,” the giela said. “Damorakind did not do this. The smoker Bonshoon fools did this. If it were Damorakind, would they leave us here? They would kill us all, or take us safely back into their ships. Return us to slavery. Hear me, little flesh. Why would we be here if this were anything but their doing?”
    Don’t engage with it , Waffa said steadily to himself. Don’t let it get inside your head. Fergunak will say anything, if … damn it . “What did the Bonshooni do,” he said, turning away from a dusty console, “detonate a bunch of smokeberry fertiliser?”
    “We only wanted the residence,” the giela spoke casually, not seeming to listen. “Did you know, it still had many … people … inside. Human people, and Molran people, and the sweets of both. Did they tell you that the block was empty and that we were only trying to pull down the hub with the smokers in?” it paused, then went on. “Yes, they told you this. No, the smokers put all of the other kinds into the residence, and left them to bleed. We feed well, now that you have cut it free and sent it below.”
    Waffa stepped away from the pile of broken robots and the ghastly half-active one. He raised his arm and spoke into his watch. “Did we get confirmation that there was nobody in that residential block?” he asked under his breath, ensuring that they were on a closed comm circuit and that he was out of range of the giela ’s damaged auditory systems. “Are we sure the Bonshooni didn’t … I don’t know … put the humans and Blaren in there, and use them as decoys or something?”
    “The block was empty,” Decay replied from near-orbit, “we’ve got monitoring feeds. And all the losses are accounted for legitimately, even if there is a big fat blank on the part that should explain what actually caused this mess. The smokers didn’t feed anyone to the sharks, they didn’t lace the residential block, and anyone who went out there and fell afoul of the Fergunak did it of their own free will and the Fergies were the ones who killed them,” the Blaran paused. “Don’t let their talk get into your head, Waff.”
    “Right,” Waffa muttered. “Damn it, thanks mate, right,” he lowered his hand, and went back across to the giela . He deliberately leaned down and began to rummage through the pieces of the fully-dismembered ones. Yes, as he’d suspected – the manipulator appendages of a couple of the robots were caked with dried blood. This had been the first wave of the Fergunakil attack after whatever had happened to weaken the settlement and sever ties