Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  “It got you thinking,” I said, clutching the bowl tightly in my hands, wondering if I was going to need it. I could still smell the last batch of vomit in it, even though Gideon had cleaned it.

  “The only thing was you didn’t look or behave like any android I’d heard of,” he said, and for the first time I heard a false note in his voice. “You’re a person, in every sense — and that makes no sense.”

  “My documentation says I’m a Cytex Systems Claudia 3.0…” I said miserably.

  Gideon leaned back and looked at me, thinking very hard. “McGee, I beg to differ.” He flashed a warm smile.

  My breathing was better now, but I still felt terrible. “I’m some kind of custom job, I think.”

  Gideon looked at me differently now, his smile growing. “You might be a custom job, but whoever designed you does phenomenal work.” He looked embarrassed, which was an odd thing to see on him. “McGee. Listen, I—” He stopped abruptly. “Bloody hell. My phone.” He stared off into space, blinked a couple of times, then said, “Gideon Smith, hello? Ah, Inspector Tomba. Good to hear from you…”

  “Put him through your Paper so I can hear, too,” I whispered.

  Gideon glanced at me, nodded and got up. “Is there anything new at your end?” he said to Tomba. “Oh, is that right?”

  Annoyed, I glared at him. “What? What’s wrong?”

  Gideon got a folded sheet of Paper from his back pocket and gave it to me. I opened it and powered it up. “One moment, Inspector. I’m just piping your call through to Paper so McGee can hear you,” said Gideon. He blinked twice quickly, then once more, and suddenly Tomba’s voice was coming from the Paper’s phone interface.

  “…hear me, Ms. McGee?”

  I did my best to conceal my crying from Tomba, but I don’t think I convinced anybody. “I’m here, Inspector. What have you got?”

  “The bad news is that we found the homebrew android facility—”

  “And everybody’s gone, leaving no evidence, right?” I said.

  “That’s right. We’ve also been studying the remains of your headware. It looks nothing like your run-of-the-mill cracker job. It’s why you never noticed it, even with up-to-date counter-intrusion measures—”

  I glanced up at Gideon, who looked a little concerned. “So a high-end professional job?”

  “It matches with everything else, Ms. McGee,” said Tomba.

  I thought about the resources someone would need to tap into my headware for God knows how long, to say nothing of the gear they’d need to set up a bootleg disposable android factory. It wouldn’t be cheap, and it meant the perpetrators would have sent their spyware into my headware as part of the constant high-bandwidth feed of data I — along with everyone else — received every day. It also meant the intruder had to be something quite apart from everything the commercial counter-intrusion systems recognized and could tackle.

  I was starting to feel dreadful all over again, though colder and more frightened than before. “You said that was the bad news, Inspector. Is there some good news?”

  “Yes, actually. We tracked this Kell Fallow back to Narwhal Island, a remote colony on New Norway. He shows up on the planetary census figures, along with his wife Airlie Fallow.”

  This was good news. “Narwhal Island?” I said. The name sounded faintly familiar.

  Gideon sat and worked on something with his headware.

  “So where do we go from here, Inspector?” I said, feeling more like myself again, despite the chill of dread in my guts.

  “There’s not much more I can do, Ms. McGee.”

  “What?” I didn’t like the sound of this.

  “My superiors are transferring me to another precinct. They’re short-staffed, and…”

  I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not pursuing this? There’s clear evidence of heavy shit going on and you’re just dropping it?” I shouted at the Paper. “For God’s sake, Tomba, you have to keep on this!”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. McGee. My hands are tied. Your case is being reassigned.” He did actually sound sorry, too, to give the guy some credit.

  “But you can’t just…”

  “Ms. McGee,” he said, “speaking as a fellow cop, I think you would be well advised to leave Serendipity immediately.”

  “Tomba? What…?”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. McGee. Good luck.” He killed the link. The phone interface went quiet, displaying the phone company logo, and hundreds of ads for things I didn’t want. I swore under my breath.

  Smith took his Paper back, and checked that it had kept a copy of the call. “We’ve got one lead, McGee,” he said, putting the best face on things.

  I was still shocked, and deeply suspicious. Reassigned, indeed. Superiors transferring him to another precinct, my fat ass. I smelled the nasty whiff of a cover-up, and I’d encountered enough of those in Winter City to know what I was talking about. What were they covering up, though? Usually it was just catastrophically bad management, and higher-ups trying desperately to hang onto their jobs. I wasn’t getting that feeling this time. What Gideon and I had seen so far looked like something else; something worse…

  “What do you want to do, McGee?”

  I seethed. “We gotta get out of here, Smith.”

  “I’ve just been preflighting my ship, if that helps.”

  I looked at him. “God, you’re efficient.”

  “It looks like you’re in very serious trouble,” he said. “I can help.” He got up.

  “You don’t care at all about what I told you, do you?”

  Now Gideon started to look uncomfortable. “It will take some getting used to,” he said. “But I can worry about that later. Right now, we have to move.”

  “I’m not exactly dressed for travel, Smith,” I said. I was currently wearing a set of Gideon’s enormous white flannel pajamas, with elegant blue pin-stripes. My hands were lost in the arms; I didn’t know where my legs might be.

  “You’ll do. Now come on, quick sticks!”

  “Quick sticks?”

  “Something my Granddad used to say.”

  Gideon shut down his home, and made sure it was secure. We were gone.

  Gideon’s ship, with the unfortunate name of Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, was docked in the Level Five Hangar Complex, where attentive Serendipity bots and disposables tended to it — and the thousands of other personal space-going vessels — with mindless devotion. The air in the cavernous space reeked of different kinds of oil, industrial solvents, a number of organic gases and the sharp stink of thruster fuels.

  The Good Idea, as he called her for convenience, was a small ship, a WolfCraft 75 Cruiser, technically a “ketch”, in that she had only two main Tokatech engine cores in the powerplant section, both extensively restored. Knowing Gideon it was easy to imagine that he’d won her in a card game, or that she was somehow stolen and rejiggered to keep the original owners from finding her again, but, alas, Gideon had bought her from a shipbroker, and was in the kind of debt that one would normally associate with small nation states. I didn’t see the point of having such a ship if it meant that kind of debt (the sale of antique funny-looking cars notwithstanding), but that’s how it was. Gideon had a passion for vehicles of all kinds. This ship had not been new when he acquired her, either. She came with more than a hundred years of history. He’d tried to tell me all about it a few times, but I had always tuned out around the point where he got to the role she played in some minor interplanetary war in the Unity Europa thirty-something years ago, when she’d been used as a courier vessel for some spies or mercenaries or something. He said two people had been killed aboard her at different times, too, and he could talk about that until your eyes bled.

  ShipMind, which spoke with a male French accent, welcomed us, and reported that all systems were nomina
l, a complete maintenance audit had been performed only two days ago, various minor and major pieces of equipment had been swapped out and replaced, and the cost had been billed to Gideon’s Serendipity accounts. She was fully fuelled, the matter circulation system for the fab units had been refreshed in the past week, and the sleeper compartments had just been freshly made up, per Gideon’s orders. In short, she was ready to go. I could see Gideon was deeply pleased to have all this at his disposal. It was almost indecent, the smile he wore, the way he seemed to straighten up a little and puff his chest out. He’d deny any such posturing, of course, but it was funny to see.

  A male disposable steward in a formal navy and gold uniform like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan appeared before us, and told us that he would be seeing to our various needs during our flight, and we could call him “Simon”, if that would help, and did we have any baggage that needed stowing?

  I glanced at Gideon. “You’ve got a steward?”

  He had the grace to look awkward, now that he realized that his new steward was, technically, one of “my people”. “Ah, well. I thought it would make things easier.” He blushed and turned to Simon. “We have no baggage, Simon. I think we can make our own way aboard.”

  “Very well, Captain Smith.”

  “‘Captain Smith’?” I gave Gideon a dire look.

  He looked suavely embarrassed. “Humor me, McGee.”

  We went aboard. Inside the ship, the small passenger areas had been refitted to resemble, or at least evoke, a cut-down version of the legendary Orient-Express luxury train. And, like a train, the Good Idea was laid out linearly, with the passenger areas almost claustrophobically confining. Gideon explained that this lack of space was part of the ship itself, not the decor, and reflected the high cost of providing atmosphere, heat and artificial-gravity.

  First Gideon showed me through the airlock and into the galley and then the main cabin, which was a surprisingly small compartment. There were six expensive leather chairs set up in three rows of pairs on either side of a narrow aisle, with huge square windows currently showing the interior of an ancient train station. The ceiling was white with discreet lighting and elegant Art Deco marquetry was inlaid in the mahogany wood paneling. To compliment the room, small tables stood by the windows each adorned with a reproduction of a small antique lamp. It was — I had to admit — beautiful. The atmosphere of refined rail travel was almost vivid enough to taste.

  Then he showed me through to the next section, the “Wagons-Lit” car.

  I flashed a look at him. “Explanation for us peasants, Smith?” He coughed and explained that this was the “sleeping car” area. It featured an extremely narrow passage with three sleeper compartments on the left, and large rectangular windows — each set up with a sheet of display paper behind it to show simulated video of traveling through European countryside — on the right. Rich, reddish mahogany wood paneling was everywhere, and there was the strong smell of expensive leather.

  Behind the sleeping compartments was the door leading through to a storage compartment, and behind that was the powerplant compartment, the last of the passenger-accessible areas.

  For a small vessel it somehow managed to convey the illusion of grandeur and elegance, though I had to force myself not to laugh at Gideon’s pretentiousness in adopting such a look for his ship.

  I found a comfy leather chair in the opulent lounge area of the ship, while Gideon paced up and down the cabin, anxious to be away. Then, after only a few more moments, Serendipity Control gave us our clearance, and we were gone, headed for Narwhal Island on New Norway — just as soon as we could find a compatible hypertube.

  Finding the right hypertube presented difficulties. We were stuck out there for hours, the ship’s sensor packages peering at every spacetime deformation that came along, hoping to find a tube entry point. These would show up as ring-shaped flaws of a certain size in the fabric of local spacetime. The entry point led into what used to be called a wormhole, only hypertubes were, as far as I had ever managed to understand, very twisty and knotty. They had what scientists called “a complex topology.” You needed a ship fitted out with powerful electromagnetic tube grapples to wrestle those twists and knots into something resembling a straight line, headed in the direction you wanted to go. There had been plenty of popular novels and such written about terrible hypertube accidents, the combined effect of which led people like me, who didn’t much care for space travel, to greatly prefer keeping both feet on the solid, reliable ground.

  Gideon kept apologizing to me. About every three minutes he would come through my section of the passenger lounge area and apologize for the ship’s autopilot not having found a suitable tube yet. After about the ninth time he passed through with a fresh apology, I told him, “For God’s sake, just stop it. All right? We’ll go when we go, and that’s that.”

  “I wouldn’t be so damn jumpy about it if it weren’t for that look on your face, McGee!”

  “What look?”

  “That pale, tense look. The way you’re wringing your hands all the time.”

  Unknotting my hands, I did my best to conceal my sudden embarrassment. “It’s that thing with the Humanitas, the way they’re saying tubes are disappearing. You can’t help but worry. What if you were in one when it disappeared?”

  “We’ll be going any minute now.”

  “If I’m looking jumpy and nervous it’s because of you going on like that!”

  Simon entered the mahogany-lined cabin. “Would Madame care for a beverage or something light to eat?”

  “A glass of ice water would be lovely, thank you.” Good God, it called me Madame!

  Simon left the way he came. I watched the back of his hairless head. A complete life form, freshly minted earlier today.

  Gideon suddenly looked distracted; he stared off into space for a moment, consulting his headware interface, then smiled. “We got one!”

  “Oh well done!” I said, “Call the media!”

  He ignored that. “We’re entering the tube…” He was staring at his interface, studying nav displays only he could see. “Tube transit time should be twelve minutes, plus or minus three minutes thirty seconds.”

  I could hear the powerplant working harder, shunting great quantities of energy to the tube grapples. “So, how many tubes do you think we’ll need?”

  “Just this one, two at the most, depending.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding, thinking this was a crazy way to undertake interstellar travel.

  While Gideon paced, concentrating on his displays, I looked out the windows. They, like the ones back in the sleeper car, were standard glass with high-res display surfaces behind them, equipped to show expensively-rendered views of early-twentieth century rural Europe, as if seen from the windows of the actual Orient-Express train. They had the virtue of keeping track of your eye-movements and head-position, so that as you moved around the view changed, creating a near-perfect illusion of field-depth. If you didn’t peer too closely, the effect was startlingly realistic. Gideon explained, when I remarked on this, that he could also arrange for the ship’s audio system to supply realistic simulated audio feeds of what a steam train hurtling along steel rails in those days might have sounded like. I held up a hand and said no, the view was enough simulation for my taste. I tried not to dwell on the notion of a fake person looking at a fake view.

  A few minutes later the window displays abruptly blanked.

  “Oh,” I said, blinking.

  Gideon muttered something. “Just a minute,” he said, blinking through his interface panes. “Just a glitch.”

  The attractive, holographically simulated gas lamps switched off.

  “Um…”

  “We’re under attack,” Gideon said, blinking furiously now, working his guts out to rescue the situation.

  The powerplant started s
pinning down; we could hear it clearly.

  Gideon jammed himself into a seat opposite me. “Buckle in, McGee. Now!” His seat harness wrapped itself quickly around his body, securing him at eight separate points. Lacking headware interfaces, I had to wait for Gideon to realize this, which he did after a moment. Soon my harness was snaking around me, pulling itself tighter than I would have chosen — or believed possible. Every part of my body was held motionless, even my head.

  “What now?”

  “We’re shutting down,” said Gideon through gritted teeth. He was swearing at the interface as he struggled to gain control.

  There was a sudden, sickening feeling of sudden falling. My guts leapt to my throat. I swore, trying not to panic, glad Gideon had taken the trouble of securing us. Ship-generated g had just failed, along with the inertial dampers. Gideon’s face looked puffy; his hair was adrift. I felt my own hair suddenly much looser and my own skin felt different.

  “Shit!” Gideon said, and suddenly thumped the table between us. It was something I’d never heard him say before.

  “Smith?”

  “I’m locked out of ShipMind.” He was livid, struggling to regain a semblance of calm.

  Before I could answer, I noticed the sudden silence as the air ventilation system stopped. Already it felt a little chilly. “Locked out?”

  “Systems completely compromised.”

  “Like my headware.”

  “Only worse this time.”

  I understood what he meant and tried not to panic. I realized what this meant.. We could drift through its multidimensional knots indefinitely. Reflexively, I went to trigger my psychostats to deal with it, to keep me under control in the crisis, as they always had done.

  Except I was offline, just like the ship.

  CHAPTER 9

  Gideon looked furious, his face cold, grey and grim as death.

  “Bastards!” he whispered, trying his best through his headware to get ShipMind to answer.