I managed a weak smile at him. He was a sweet man. “You said … you said those…” I took a breath, working up to what I wanted to say, worried that saying it would cause a lightning bolt to slam down through the ceiling and blow me to bits. “Those things, they don’t make personal appearances?”
Gideon was quick. “You saw one?” He sat up, perching on the edge of his bed, close to me. “You actually saw one?”
Tears fell from my eyes. I couldn’t speak. My face was screwed up and hot. Looking at Gideon, seeing that he understood, made me cry even harder. I didn’t deserve such a friend. Only real people should have friends like this.
At length, Gideon said, gently, “What … did it say anything?”
It took me some time to get back under control. I wished dearly for psychostats. “It called itself…” I looked around, seeing this perfectly innocuous, bland, pleasant hospital room, with the light scent of nanobiotics and flowers. Few places had ever felt more frightening.
“It’s all right, Zette.”
Nodding, I wiped my nose very elegantly on the sleeve of my pajamas, and quietly said, “It called itself Hydrogen Steel.”
Gideon swore out loud, turned very pale, and swore again, clutching his forehead.
“You’ve heard the name?”
“Only in rumors. Hints. Crazy speculations. The way people in the 19th century would hear these crazy stories about gigantic sea monsters that ate ships whole. Stories you know couldn’t possibly be true.”
“It’s gonna kill me, Smith,” I said in a small voice. I felt eight years old, powerless and weak.
“It will have to kill us both, McGee.”
I thought back to the attack on the Good Idea. “It’s already come close to doing just that.”
He smiled for the first time. “We’re still here.”
Yeah, I thought, but for how much longer? If we keep looking into the Fallow case, we’re gonna get crushed like bugs.
“What do you want to do?” said Gideon.
I felt anxious and fragile all over again. I didn’t see how Gideon, knowing what he knew, and with the fear he felt, could be like this.
“McGee, look,” he said. “How often, back when you were hard-as-diamond Inspector McGee of Winter City, scourge of bad guys everywhere, did you encounter people who scared you shitless? Who threatened all kinds of dire harm if you pursued a certain case?”
“I think there’s a difference between the crazy bastards I used to go after, and, well … this thing.” I gestured at the air around us.
“Bullshit. There’s no difference. How often did you let those bastards stop you pursuing a case?”
“Never, of course.”
Gideon grinned, seeing his point proved without his having to do anything. “You were scared for your life, but you kept going, and you did your job. Right?”
I kept thinking that this situation was fundamentally different. “Yeah, but…”
“You have to keep going. You know you have to keep going.”
“Hydrogen Steel isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill murderer,” I said.
“True, but so what?”
“Christ, Smith, how crazy are you?”
He grinned again, “Just crazy enough.”
I felt a little better, but I knew I’d be dealing with the after-effects of Hydrogen Steel’s “gift” for the rest of my life. Post-traumatic stress disorder would be like a head cold by comparison.
Gideon went back to all-business mode. “Okay, then. So where are we? What do we know?”
I nodded. “Okay. The thing I don’t get is why Hydrogen Steel doesn’t just wipe us out? Why piss about doing all this dainty spy stuff when it could just turn up like an angry god and smite us?”
Gideon looked like he’d been wondering the same thing. “We probably can’t even begin to understand its motives. As far as I can figure out, you and I ought to be dead by now.” He shook his head in confusion. “It makes no sense to play with us like this. Which makes me think there’s more to what’s going on than we currently understand.”
Yes, and any effort to further our understanding of things will probably get us killed, I thought.
We could, at this point, give up on Kell Fallow. I knew that. Probably Gideon knew that. What did it matter if the public record of the murder of Airlie Fallow and her children showed that her husband Kell had done it? Was it worth our lives to keep going?
I looked at Gideon. He was looking at me. He knew what I was thinking. He said, “You have to know the truth, McGee.”
It was what I needed him to tell me. I could not give up. I’d never sleep again if I didn’t keep going.
I took all this in, thinking about it.
“Right…” I said, looking at the floor.
Gideon said nothing for some time. I could tell he was looking at me. His breathing was loud. Somewhere outside, a bird squawked.
Quietly, he asked, “What did … it … say to you?”
I shook my head. It was too soon. I wasn’t ready.
“McGee?”
I shook my head again. “I can’t, okay? I just can’t!”
He nodded. “All right. That’s okay. That’s okay, McGee.”
“I want to tell you … it’s just…” I glanced at him, so he could see how difficult it was for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep it from him, it was that I couldn’t even begin to describe the “visit”.
“All right. We’ll try another way. Okay?” said Gideon. “Did it speak to you? Yes or no? Take your time.”
“Sort of…” I said, wondering as I spoke if I was killing myself. Were there spies in my brain? Could Dr. Panassos’ whirling headware modules see them? What if asking him to look around in there counted as “pursuing my investigation”? I held my head. It felt like a massive burden.
“It warned you off?” Gideon said, quietly. “By showing you what really happened to the Fallows?”
I nodded and felt queasy as the memories returned, all sensory data intact. The stink of hot blood is, I thought, the worst smell in the universe.
“So what you’re saying, McGee, is that Hydrogen Steel made a personal appearance in your hospital room in order to make you stop investigating the case. It showed you what happened to those poor bastards, and, I’m guessing, gave you the impression that similar would happen to you and maybe others?”
I nodded, feeling awful.
Gideon went on, “A firemind wants you to quit the case.” He looked astonished and was starting to think out loud. “Fireminds don’t care about people. Fireminds can’t even relate to people! They live at the speed of light. Their patterns of thought are completely alien to ours. They have their own interests and their own society…”
I was thinking that for someone who’d only glanced at a one-page executive summary, he’d gotten a lot out of it. I was also gratified, in a backhand sort of way, to note that this far into our little chat neither of us was dead. So far, so good, though I thought it was still too soon to relax. How much time had passed between whatever the Fallows had done, or stumbled across, that had earned them the ire of Hydrogen Steel, and the firemind’s decision to put a stop to it? It was something else we didn’t know.
Gideon was still amazed. “What would make a firemind get involved in a human murder investigation?”
“How could we find out without getting killed by said firemind?” I said.
“You believe the threat?”
“You don’t?”
He looked unsure how to put it. “It’s just that it’s so unlikely, McGee.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Okay, I believe you.” He frowned, thinking it over. “It’s just so … improbable.”
“So how do you explain what happened?”
“Well, it’s much more likely that someone infected you with a hallucinotropic nanovirus, perhaps in your coffee. A nanovirus installer particle slips into your bloodstream, travels to your brain, installs itself in relevant areas, and proceeds to play you a very nasty, very believable illusion.”
“Ah,” I said, seeing the weakness in the theory, “But my doctor could scan me and he’d find the thing.”
Gideon didn’t look convinced. “You might very well already have excreted its breakdown products through your sweat glands, through your exhaled breath. Certainly, next time you visit the toilet…”
I swore. “I could at least find out if there’s surveillance bots clamped around my brain cells, though.”
“Unless asking for the scan gets you killed,” Gideon said. When I glared at him, he added, “I’m just considering all the options, McGee! You’re the one who’s telling me your own brain might be bugged.”
I needed to know, one way or another. The uncertainty was killing me.
“If I’m right, Smith, well … you’ve been a top bloke.”
“I’ll pour an espresso over your grave.”
“Only the good stuff.”
“Of course.”
I was stalling. My chair had a “call doctor” control pad. My hand hovered over it. My guts were in knots. I was still trying to get the nerve to hit the button.
“If you don’t call the doctor, I’ll do it for you, just to get it over with!” said Gideon.
“I’ll do it, I’ll do it.” I was terrified to the soles of my feet.
Holding my breath, trying not to grind my teeth, I called the doctor.
CHAPTER 18
Dr. Panassos eventually found time to come by my room, decked out in a new animated shirt, this one showing dogs playing poker. The game looked very tense. He apologized for the delay and explained that the hospital was now critically short-staffed. A great many of the hospital’s doctors had just left to go and work with interstellar aid agencies, who needed all the medical personnel they could get to help with the continuing human catastrophe unfolding in star systems everywhere.
I got him to give me a nanoscopic examination, top to bottom, looking for molecular intruders.
His modules spun a little, and he blinked his way through interface-space. He took the trouble to warm up his hand and then moved it lightly around my head and then elsewhere around my body, always being very polite about what he was doing and where he had to place his hand.
“Ms. McGee,” he said, still staring at his interface, looking alarmed, “I do not know how this could have happened … I’m just looking at the scans we did when you were first admitted…”
I swore under my breath, feeling suddenly chilled. It’s one thing to suspect the worst; quite another to know you were right to worry. “How bad is it?”
“Your … your entire body, and your brain…” He was going over and over his scans, examining every last detail. “You’re not only carrying a bomb, but your tissues have been extensively compromised.”
“A bomb, you say?” I was surprised at the strange, calm tone in my voice. “Whereabouts?”
“It looks like a distributed nanophage weapon. There are small NanoHazard pods the size of your fingernail all through your body in a network, and all of that is linked to an organic transceiver in your brain. If I’m not mistaken it’s got a dead-man switch, too.” He produced a sheet of display paper and showed me image after image, at different wavelengths, resolutions, levels of detail, everything. The molecular wiring connecting the pods looked like tennis balls stuffed into the world’s longest socks.
The upshot was simple: if I made the slightest move that someone didn’t like, or tried to remove the bombs, the nanophage pods would burst. The bots — which were tailored specifically to my DNA — would start to tear down my body, and then use the breakdown materials to build more of themselves. It would start slow, but the agonizing destruction would accelerate to the point where I was nothing but a pool of very tired phage bots. With no further food that they recognized, they’d spontaneously destroy themselves. You’d be left with some very bad smells, some warm water, and some carbon dioxide gas.
And if the doc tried to remove the bomb, the dead-man switch would trigger.
The images were astonishing. I flipped through them, thousands of them, examining the intricacy of it all. This was nothing like the crude bomb that Kell Fallow had carried. This was something altogether more diabolical.
After a long while, I said to Panassos, “How the hell did this get in there without me noticing?”
Panassos told me, his voice barely a whisper, “This looks like spec-ops gear, Ms. McGee. The discomfort you’ve been feeling during your tissue restoration treatment could, I suppose, have hidden quite a bit of covert activity.” He was terrified, and snatching at ideas.
I nodded. “Figures.”
“You’re much calmer about this than I would have expected.”
And certainly much calmer than he was. “What can I say, doc? I’m a cop. When the worst possible thing happens, it’s like the universe is working properly. You get suspicious only when things are too good to be true.”
“All the same, I must reiterate that you did not have these infections when we admitted you. It must have infiltrated your system sometime during your stay, probably without you even being aware of it.” He showed me comparison scans, going out of his way to make it very plain that the hospital was not at fault. It occurred to me that he was thinking about liability insurance issues.
“That would be right.”
“I’m getting the distinct impression,” he said, scratching nervously at his chin, “that you know what’s going on here.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“Well, for those of us who came in late, and who would ordinarily have believed that our hospital was nano-safe, would you mind throwing us a bone?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
He sat on the bed and looked at me, trying to recapture his calm doctorly manner. “Try me.”
“First, I’d suggest you do the same scans on my friend Gideon. If I’ve got all this crap inside me, I’m betting he does, too.”
He muttered something into his interface. “All right. Next?”
“Second, at least one of your nurses is responsible. I’d bet just about anything the coffee and maybe even the food we’ve been getting is chock full of nano installers. I’d recycle all of them, immediately.”
Panassos looked like his world was spinning off its axis. “And?”
“I’ve got a disposable, Simon, working for me down on Narwhal Island.”
“Go on.”
“Contact him for me. I’ll give you his address. Tell him I said to…” What would be safe to say and what wouldn’t? So far I’d learned that my body was probably not carrying surveillance devices — or at least commercial, routine surveillance devices. God knew what was really going on. It wasn’t much of a relief, knowing only that Panassos had ruled out known spyware.
“Right,” I said, taking the doctor’s display paper and stylus, and opened a blank text file. While looking out the window so that the text file was not in my field of vision, I scribbled brief instructions for Simon in binary code which, with a bit of luck, might stump the bugs in my brain:
“CARRY ON. YOU’RE DOING A VERY
GOOD JOB. I’LL HAVE A WORD
WITH YOU LATER.”
I hesitated for a long moment, my fingers on the stylus so tight I would not have been surprised if it had snapped.
“FIND OUT ABOUT AIRLIE FALLOW.”
I waited, glancing around the room.
Panassos took his page back and looked at my note. For a moment he looked like he was going to read it aloud as his floating modules translated the code. I
put a finger over my lips and shooshed him. Looking around the room meaningfully, I cupped my ear.
He nodded, nervously.
“Give me the paper again,” I said. Panassos handed it back to me. He even showed me how to get the online diagnostic help to work, which would explain everything in the scans at a level even I could understand. Pointing at the bomb network, I indicated that I was more than a little anxious about them going off, now that I’d made the first move.
Panassos nodded unhappily. “We really should get the local police in to look at you.”
I grabbed his arm; I was surprised at the new strength in my hand. “No!”
“You’ve got a bomb—”
“Yeah, thanks for the newsflash, Doc. I know! That’s the problem. The coppers will want to try and defuse it, or get it out of me.”
“You don’t trust our police to protect you?”
“For what I’m up against? I don’t think so.”
“We have to at least put you somewhere where you won’t present—”
“Fine. Yeah. Put me in NanoHazard quarantine. But remember my friend Gideon, too.” I imagined he’d be dead thrilled about these developments. It somehow wasn’t quite the mystery-solving crime romp either of us had in mind when we set out. Indeed, now it was much too personal for any of that.
It was also looking like the only way out of this mess would be over Hydrogen Steel’s steaming corpse — if the thing even had a body.
No pressure, though…
I sent Panassos around to see Gideon. I later found out that even Gideon had been infected with nanobombs. I felt lousier than ever.
Meanwhile, the doctor arranged an orderly, another disposable, to come by and wheel me upstairs to the hospital’s NanoHazard quarantine section. On the way we passed several nurses going about their duties. Two were carrying hot drinks for other patients. I shuddered, watching them, convinced they were to blame for my condition. They hardly noticed me. And who would notice them? As agents of Hydrogen Steel’s schemes, they were the perfect choice. The nurses were the only ones who had access to what I ate and drank. Sure, it was possible that someone could tamper with one of the food fabs, but there was no guarantee that the food would get directly to me. No, the most likely explanation was the nurses. Someone had only to compromise their basic programming and they could be easily controlled. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced: it had to be the nurses. It was clever and subtle. I had to give Hydrogen Steel, or whichever of its unknown minions had come up with this plan, credit where it was due. The nurses could hand out food or drink laced with bomb installer particles and, if anything untoward should result from the subsequent chaos, well, the nurses would already have recycled themselves. There’d be nothing to trace back to who, or what had organized the attack.
Hydrogen Steel Page 17
