Damorak: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man by Andrew Hindle

Author:Andrew Hindle [Hindle, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: space opera, scifi, science fiction
ISBN: 9781534818613
Google: lVRYvgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1534818618
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2016-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE: THE BLACK STEEL CLAWS OF THE GODS

- - - Ripper - - -

- - - Communicator - - -

- - - Exterminator - - -

ELAN (THEN)

Elan strongly suspected the Captain of being responsible for the nickname. Barducci and Skelliglyph had both insisted it was entirely coincidental that ‘Conch’ was a slightly-warped contraction of ‘Controversial’, and the nickname was in no way a sly dig at Elan’s second-class Mygonite designation.

“The Conch was Captain Basil Hartigan’s ship,” Barducci had done his best to explain while simultaneously maintaining an innocent expression, “the one he flew around the galaxy in, in Loës Artikon’s Tales of the Always Night. She was always the one who talked to the dumblers and made sure Hartigan didn’t get eaten. It seems completely appropriate to me.”

Elan knew the Tales, of course – knew them rather better than most, by dint of his education. The Conch, in fact, had earned a reputation for diplomacy and wit because she was not just any old starship, nor was she run by a synthetic intelligence. She had, in the oldest and unabridged copies of the text, been a digital transcription of a human mind – the mind of none other than Hartigan’s late wife, Nella. These days, of course, everybody knew what a terrible idea human transcription was, and it was outlawed by the Six Species charter besides … but it was widely accepted in academic circles that such romanticised accounts had been an inspiration for the real-life attempt at transcription that had resulted in the Bunzolabe.

Elan wasn’t sure how flattering the nickname was, when he really started to think about it.

Skelliglyph, for his part, insisted that the nickname had even older roots, from which Artikon had taken the name in the first place.

“It means that you’re the one who’s doing the talking,” Skell had told him. “Or at least we are, because we’ve got you. It’s from an old Earth story about emergent rule of law from barbarism. A conch was a kind of trumpet, or maybe a seashell. Doesn’t matter. Conch, come on, it’s a good nickname.”

It didn’t really matter, Elan supposed, whether it was a good nickname or not, or that there was quite a big difference between a trumpet and a seashell – or between a seashell and a starship with a digital ghost in her computer, for that matter. The nickname seemed to be something the Captain was going to insist on, and the more Elan protested against it the more traction it was going to get with everyone else. This would only lead to unpleasantness and nobody wanted that in close quarters on a long-haul flight. There would be enough to contend with, without him making a fuss over something that was ultimately unimportant. It wasn’t as if he really minded about his Mygonite designation. He wasn’t one of those eternally-offended activists who referred to it as a ‘slave name’. Some people needed to read up on what slavery actually involved, before shouting and waving their hands about having to use a government-assigned name to receive social services.

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