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

Sally saw several areas along the fence where the mesh was sagging, perhaps missing altogether.
    But if they got through the fence, she thought, there was still the reinforced hull of the hub and it looked as though they hadn’t had any luck breaching that yet. Even the portholes were too tough for anything less than a cutting torch, and so far it seemed as though the sharks hadn’t gone that far. It would have taken time, and time would have allowed the settlers to deploy countermeasures.
    If a cutting torch won’t work, a couple of thousand atmospheres of pressure probably will , Sally thought with an inner snarl.
    They cruised over the flattened top of the dome and moved on towards the second structure, leaving Decay to land on the hub.
    The residential block was square, dark grey, three storeys high and far larger than the hub, and it was already foundering, its outer edge noticeably lower in the water than the inner. This was clearly due to the windows on the sea-level floor having been broken to admit the dark surf. Soon, Sally judged, the block would sink enough to allow the Fergunak to break the second-floor windows. When that happened, even if safety bulkheads had sealed off the interior of the sea-level floor and the stairwells connecting it to the second, the block would sink and – yes – the segmented connecting gantry that appeared to be a combination of walkway and light rail system would drag the hub beneath the waves.
    A third body, a large nodule-encrusted cylinder, was also still floating nearby. Decay had already identified it as a lifeboat station. Worse than useless, since each boat could hold one adult and one juvenile Bonshoon and could have been swallowed whole by an adult Fergunakil. There had been some discussion of the rations in the boats, as well as the energy packs and support systems, but the Tramp didn’t need emergency supplies urgently enough to risk an attempt at salvaging pods from the cylinder.
    With a slight reprogramming of the autopilot, Zeegon swung into a little circuit of the troubled water between the hub fence and the residential block.
    “There,” Sally, looking out through the lander’s forward screens, pointed. Zeegon glanced up from finalising his work on the controls, and paled.
    “Holy crap ,” he gasped. “Is that just one of them?”
    A sleek shape, a tapered diamond with wing-like fins on either side, moved like a cloud shadow under the connecting gantry and grew , rising towards the surface until the great jagged sails of its dorsal fin and tail broke the water like a pair of small grey-black yachts chasing each other through the waves.
    “Thirty-five tons of fun,” Waffa said grimly, joining them. “Haven’t seen a Fergie before?”
    Zeegon shook his head. “Not in water. Just their ships, you know. I thought it was a bit of waterlogged debris or a patch of kelp or something. Look, there’s another one.”
    A second vast shadow skimmed beneath them, merged with the one on the surface, and reappeared on the other side. As the lander looped around, the second Fergunakil broached the surface and glided into a synchronised loop with the first, keeping pace unnervingly with the lander’s flight pattern. A third shark appeared, and a fourth.
    “I can see the damaged part where they tried to cut the connection before,” Sally said, pointing. “It looks like the sharks have dragged up some chains from somewhere to hold it together, but a couple of good shots from the incendiaries will melt it off.”
    Keeping it well above a hundred feet, Zeegon looped them back over the gantry and opened the main bay doors. Sally settled the big-bore incendiary cannon straps across her back and chest, descended towards the lander’s empty rover bay, and then paused. She turned, pulled an evil-looking little pug blaster from her pocket, and slapped it into Waffa’s hand. He blinked at it. He had to know that it probably wouldn’t even annoy a Fergie, except that Fergunak