Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  At length, we emerged into a vast, darkened room.

  Theo hit the lights.

  Gideon swore, carefully enunciating the words and speaking in a low voice.

  Theo had enough gear to fully equip a small army. It was more a question of what Theo didn’t have access to. There was every kind of firearm and weapon imaginable, and that was just for starters. In the back I saw the dark and gleaming curves of gun-hovs, personnel carriers, assault tanks, and more.

  Theo turned and apologized to us. “This is just what I have at these premises. There’s more at my main shop down on the surface. This is just a small sampling,” he explained, looking like a little boy with a dirty secret.

  Gideon took a few steps into the middle of it all, glancing about in a way that suggested to me he knew what he was looking for. After a moment, he called Theo over and started talking and pointing. Gideon looked up at me after a bit and asked, “You’re rated on paramilitary gear, aren’t you?”

  This surprised me, but only a little. “I did a month of Square One counter-terror training,” I said, thinking back to the time in my copper career when I dabbled with the idea of going in that direction. I did the month of initial training, designed to give you a taste of what that line of work involved, and on the whole I didn’t care for it. It was important work, but it wasn’t for me. I was more drawn to homicide work, where you have to think your way into the mind of a killer, and try to understand what makes people do things. It was something I could do, to some extent at least.

  Theo, meanwhile, was looking at me with fresh appreciation on hearing that I might know my way around assault weapons.

  “I’ll just wait for you upstairs, Smith.”

  “I’ll be along shortly, McGee,” Gideon said with a grin.

  More than two hours later, Gideon found me outside at a café, sipping some iced water with a twist of lemon, and resting my aching feet. My guts still didn’t feel wonderful, and standing for prolonged periods only made me woozy. My mind was full of that message from Simon. He mentioned there were at least ten of the non-humanoid black destroyers. It didn’t seem like a huge leap to assume these were much the same thing that I’d seen in the vision I got from Hydrogen Steel, the thing that killed Kell Fallow’s family, and made him watch.

  That led me to brood about my own encounter with Hydrogen Steel. And brooding about that only filled me with stark terror. The Cube filled my consciousness, bursting out of the confines of memory and starting to occupy all of my thinking space. And the more it did that, the more I began to have doubts about going down to Narwhal Island. I didn’t think it would matter how much weaponry and gear Theo sold Gideon. You didn’t go after gods with guns and bombs. Still, if I was mad enough to go down there and sniff around in whatever wreckage was left, maybe I ought to at least go with whatever I could get, just in case.

  We still had no idea how to kill those shadow creatures though, but I had a strong feeling that Hydrogen Steel could peel off further copies of those things if it wanted. It was, after all, a thing made of pure data.

  “How are you doing?” said Gideon, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Better now, thanks.”

  “Theo wanted me to give him your phone address.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you were working a case at the moment.”

  “What’d you end up buying?”

  “Probably way too much.”

  “Probably,” I said, looking at him, “not nearly enough.”

  “You think?”

  “I think we’re bloody nuts to go down there, regardless.”

  “But we’re still going?”

  “We’re still going. I just don’t know…” I frowned, thinking about it.

  “What if we can’t kill those things?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much that.”

  “I leased a gun-hov, in case we need a fast getaway.”

  I swore, thinking about the ridiculous expense. “Hope our estates get a refund if we get killed.”

  “We won’t get killed, McGee.”

  I stared at him. “Have you not been paying attention, Smith? Five hundred people are dead!”

  He caught himself before saying something unwise, and said instead, in a more moderate tone, “If you’re that worried, don’t go.”

  “I have to go.”

  “What for? You know what happened to the Fallows. Case closed.”

  “I disagree. What I’ve seen and what I know are not the same thing.”

  “You said that … thing, it showed you what happened!”

  “It presented me with a story.” I kept thinking about all my fake memories.

  “Does it matter?” Gideon said, but he said it as if there was more at stake than just the case. It made me look at him differently.

  “It matters to me.” I felt like I owed it to Kell Fallow to find out what was going on.

  “What do you think you’ll find down there? There’s nothing left.”

  “There’s always something left.”

  “Look, McGee,” he said, “just so you know, I’m on your side. I’m just making sure you know what you’re doing.”

  “What I’m doing is: (a) honoring the request of a dead friend—”

  “Kell Fallow wasn’t exactly a friend…”

  “He knew me enough to come to me when he needed help. And (b) trying to find out what kind of secret could possibly justify massacring five hundred people. Let’s say we accept the story I was given. Let’s say that’s true. It doesn’t explain why they were killed. And the more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to Airlie Fallow. The killer made sure she was dead before moving onto the kids.” I paused there, trying not to think of those kids. After a difficult moment, I continued, “What did Airlie know?”

  For that matter, I thought to myself, why did Hydrogen Steel let Kell live in the first place? The situation was clearly a setup to make it look like Kell had gone mental and killed his family. As usual with Hydrogen Steel, the idea was to divert attention away from its own activities, so making Kell look responsible made sense. I had seen this sort of frame job in Winter City. The whole murder suicide thing might have looked a little too suspicious for Hydrogen Steel’s liking. It had probably decided that it was better to let Kell live, knowing that he would probably run rather than try and clear his name.

  Gideon thought for a moment. “You could do a search for information about Airlie.”

  He was right. When I’d thought about this before, I didn’t have headware access; now I could. I launched a search through human space for documents, messages, mail, calls, official forms for every damn thing. All kinds of stuff could be out there. Swarms of sniffers would query every public infosphere node in human space and make freedom-of-information applications to access the files of the private ones. The process could take weeks, but results from local space nodes should start to come back within a few hours.

  I put my shoes on and got up.

  “Where’s all the gear?” I asked as we ran to catch a taxi.

  “Theo’s freighting it downwell to New Oslo by shuttle. Should be waiting for us when we get there.”

  “What about permits? The government down there might not be too crazy about us running around with heavy weapons like that.”

  Gideon flagged down a taxi. “It’s taken care of. Ask no questions.”

  I muttered under my breath, but went along. “There must be a lot more to trade diplomacy than meets the eye,” I said, looking at him once we were in the stinking taxi-hov and zooming off to the Stalk terminal.

  “It has its moments, McGee.”

  We had to wait more than an hour at the Orbital Express terminal for the next train. The departure lounge was chock-full of people waiting to go downwell, or family an
d friends of people coming up. All the dreadful wobbly seats were taken. Gideon offered to get me an autoperch from a nanovend machine, since he knew I still wasn’t one-hundred percent after being so ill earlier. He came back with a cheap autoperch, which unfolded and assembled itself, after a fashion, into a very flimsy-looking disposable chair. The thing held my weight perfectly well, but never conveyed a sense of comfort or rest. Gideon stood nearby, strong and tall, starting to appreciate what his new body could do, even if he did disapprove of the Procedure by which he was given it.

  PortMind announced through our headware that Orbital Express Train 101 was about to arrive. The voice advised us to move in an orderly manner along the yellow lines clearly marked on the concourse floor. In reality, everybody simply massed in a thick crowd as close to where the doors would be as they could.

  The woven polydiamond tether and associated electromagnetic strings were just barely visible behind the curved, clear, vactight ceramocomp wall surrounding the great cylindrical well in the center of the terminal complex. It disappeared up through the ceiling to the higher levels and, ultimately, far overhead to the Counterweight Rock, poised tens of thousands of kilometers above us. The cable was thin and difficult to spot in the harsh terminal lights, except for a narrow, strangely compelling gleam if you looked from just the right angle. Sometimes you’d see people standing with their faces pressed against the cold ceramocomp windows, staring down, through the many levels of the terminal complex, trying to see down as far as they could.

  Eventually the train itself rose through the well, car after car, and it came slowly to a halt. Then the whole train started its fifteen-minute safety processing cycle as the vehicle prepared for atmosphere and heat after the long climb through cold vacuum. The train was formed of several tall, torus-shaped cars wrapped around the cable. In due course, the transparent wall extruded passenger transfer tubes up to the train’s hatches, which slid out to one side. Attractive disposable ride attendants in uniforms appeared at the hatch to wave the passengers off. When they said they hoped you would travel with Orbital Express again, the sincerity on their faces was quite realistic.

  The PortMind voice announced that Orbital Express Train 101 would begin boarding in twenty minutes.

  The vast majority of passengers I saw coming off looked unhappy, tired, grumpy, couldn’t stand up straight, and you could plainly see them grimacing at the attendants. “How long is this trip again?” I asked Gideon. I did know how long, but I knew Gideon was itching to tell me just how much better it would have been if we’d spent some money and done things his way.

  “Two days,” he said.

  “And how much more would it have cost to fly down?”

  “Lots more,” he said, enunciating clearly as ever.

  I swore and started preparing myself, thinking that the only thing worse than the next two days would be what we’d find down on the planet. For one thing, this was the only space elevator on all of New Norway. It was based in the planetary capital, New Oslo, which was a very long way from Esseka, from where we’d have to get a flight to Narwhal Island — assuming we could get a flight out there now. New Oslo was on the far side of the planet from Esseka. It would be connecting flight hell. The OE ticketing kiosk told us it had arranged all the connections for us, and we only had to present ourselves to particular gates in particular terminals by particular times for it all to work out, but neither Gideon nor I were optimistic.

  On the other hand, I was not quite sure how we would gain access to the island. It was one huge crime scene now, with access only provided to Esseka cops and forensics people. I’d asked Gideon about this. He said it would be all right, and I wondered if he was going to draw again upon his mysterious “secrets of the mystic East”. It wasn’t the way I liked to conduct myself, and overall I was pessimistic that we’d be allowed onto the island, even given our interest in the case and my previous career as a copper.

  When the time came, we boarded, squeezed and apologized our way around all the other boarding passengers, many of whom were already getting cranky, and found our seats. We squabbled over who got the window view — neither of us wanted it — and, at length, did our best to fold ourselves into the unpleasant, rather lumpy, seats. Gideon, much taller than I was, found he was just about eating his knees. I was more concerned with the repeated kicking I was getting through the back of my seat from some nasty kid behind me.

  The seating was arranged radially, in rows of ten broken up into three sections of two, six and two again, which allowed for two circular aisles. I knew it cost more to get the outside seats, if for no other reason than that you didn’t have to climb over several people every time you wanted to visit the toilet. Which in turn assumed you could find a toilet that: (a) worked, and (b) wasn’t jammed with couples doing their clichéd and cramped best to join the 25,000-Mile-High Club.

  Perky ride attendants did their little show informing the couldn’t-care-less passengers what to do in the event of various alarming but unlikely emergencies. We learned, for example, that each car of the train could, in a real crisis, split up into three segments and become escape pods programmed to put themselves into a stable orbit around the planet. Gideon nudged me. “That’s assuming the system works,” he said.

  I smiled. Orbital Express was a no-thrills firm, but at least their ads emphasized that they spent money on system safety. There was a nasty bunch of regulatory authorities, both planetary and interstellar, who would have OE’s ass in a sling over the slightest fault. It wasn’t pleasant traveling with these guys, but at least it would be safe.

  I did my best to settle back in my lumpy seat. The kicking from behind me was already pissing me off, but I didn’t want to make an enemy so early in the trip.

  The train started moving down. The window view showed more than a dozen busy levels of terminal complex sliding past.

  There was an unpleasant assortment of odors, too, now that I was getting used to being on the train. There was some kind of harsh cleaning agent, moist sweat, and something else I couldn’t identify.

  Gideon and I exchanged looks. His shaggy eyebrows arched meaningfully, and he was nervously fiddling with his gold doubloon, making it flip back and forth across the knuckles of his right hand.

  We settled in for a long, long trip.

  CHAPTER 21

  With no news from the island to follow, and nothing but endless bloody spam in my mail, I decided to take a nap for a while.

  Gideon, still playing with his doubloon, said he was going to try listening to some Miles Davis. He was trying to tell if he still had a soul or not. He reasoned that the soul is what makes us respond to beauty and emotion. If he was okay, the music would move him the way it always had. If he sat there and felt nothing, as he feared would happen, he’d know he really was a soulless machine. It was a big moment for him. He was pale and fidgety, and kept flashing nervous smiles as he sat and listened, the music from his headware filling his body.

  After several minutes, Gideon woke me. “McGee!”

  “Smith, whatever it is, it can bloody wait. I’m trying to get some z’s here, all right?”

  “I can’t feel anything, McGee! There’s nothing there. Nothing at all!”

  “Smith, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just tired and wound up. It’s been a bastard of a time lately for both of us.”

  “But there’s nothing there! Nothing! Not the slightest thing. It’s like I’m listening to advertising jingles or dance music. It’s… God, McGee. This … I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

  “You’re fine. Just settle down and relax. All right? You’re fine.”

  He looked at me, just for a moment, in a way I didn’t like. “What?” I said, calling him on it.

  “Pardon?”

  “That look, just now.”

  “You seem to have me confused with someone who knows what you’re
talking about, McGee,” said Gideon.

  “You looked at me and just for a moment there, Smith, it crossed your mind that I wouldn’t understand what you’re talking about because I never had a soul in the first place, so I wouldn’t know what it’s like to suddenly not have one. There. That’s what you were saying in that look.”

  He stared at me. “I beg your pardon. My name is Gideon Smith. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “That’s what you bloody well thought!”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Christ, Smith.”

  “I don’t know what I’ve done here.”

  “You’re so freaked out about this machine bullshit—”

  “Excuse me, but let’s be fair. I am legitimately concerned about the disposition of my soul. It’s a serious matter.”

  I swore. “Your bloody soul is just fine. If you’re horrified at the idea of being just like your android buddy Zette, then everything’s just fine.”

  “I don’t—”

  I put my hand up. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  “But—”

  “Sleeping now,” I said testily. Already I could feel my brain powering down into the snooze.

  Gideon swore quietly under his breath, as always enunciating terribly clearly.

  The first sign of trouble was my headware waking me up, warning me that a massive infowar assault was attempting to crash through its security.

  I was instantly awake and alert. My headware was getting my body to dump adrenaline into my system as quickly as possible.

  At first it looked like everybody was asleep, including Gideon.

  Then I noticed that Gideon was only barely breathing.

  Across the aisle, people were not breathing. Many were bleeding from their noses.