Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  Gideon was peering at the unfolded envelopes, but stopping here and there to stare into interface-space. “Somebody must have gotten careless,” he said. “Spy networks are not for the faint of heart.”

  “You’re sure this is a spy network?”

  “You think it’s not?” He held up one of the envelopes with its incriminating brown text revealed for all to see.

  He had a point. We were looking at a number of people, scattered around human space, who were piecing something together, and who needed some means of reliable, private communication.

  Gideon went on. “All of these letter senders, all of them, are on your list of the sixty-three victims. Along with their families.”

  I was looking at that list as well, and comparing it with the list of names revealed on the envelopes.

  The envelope list included all the known dead.

  All but two people. I showed these two names to Gideon. He checked his own copies of what we knew.

  “How did they esc…?”

  The Otaru node spoke. His low, modulated tones after our intense whispering back and forth sounded deafening. “Europa orbit in fifteen minutes, Inspector.”

  CHAPTER 27

  On arrival, we obtained clearance to land from Galileo Space Control and took our original, small Otaru ship down to the spaceport.

  This gave me just less than an hour to catch up on a few things. I snagged my latest mail and newsfeeds from the Home System Mail Hub — there was a huge buildup that would take me a while to digest, including the results of some infosphere searches that had been following me around human space for some time now waiting for me to download them.

  One thing I checked right away: the hypertube situation was approaching criticality. The rate of disappearance was accelerating ever faster. It was now estimated that there would be no tubes left in a matter of weeks.

  All of which explained much of the other news I saw.

  Human space, since the Eclipse Incident and the start of the Silent Occupation, was a volume of space more or less centered on the Home System, and with a radius of approximately 50 light-years in every direction; this was considerably smaller than it had been years ago, during the population boom. In this more confined volume of space, tens of billions of people struggled to get through their lives. Conflict in the form of localized brushfire wars on most worlds and in many habitats was a constant. We were used to that kind of thing going on. Humans weren’t capable of living together without a fight starting over some damn thing, or indeed over nothing much.

  As I scanned the newsfeeds with growing horror, I saw that the hypertube crisis had finally become real for the vast majority of people. For a long time it had been a strange, unfathomable thing going on that wasn’t much of a problem right now. At worst it caused travel delays, stock shortages, and so on.

  Now, however, out of what felt like nowhere, the imminent collapse of our entire interstellar way of life was causing End-of-the-World chaos and pandemonium like nothing seen since the Silent Occupation began. Perhaps even since the Kestrel Event.

  Billions of people were on the move, trying to link up with family members scattered across different star systems. Try as they might, commercial transport companies could not add enough capacity to take the strain, even though most of the larger companies had been planning for exactly this crisis for some time. Nobody forecast that the panic would be this bad. There weren’t enough ships; the ships that were available were running flat-out, and carrying too many people, and spending too long stuck between the vanishing hypertubes, looking for tubes that would take them further to their destinations. I remembered the problems Gideon and I had had, what felt like years ago now, just trying to get from one tube to another. Now it was like that, but to the tenth power. Passengers squeezed into transports started rioting if the ship didn’t find a new tube fast enough.

  I felt profoundly guilty. Here we were flying around in ships powered by the fireminds’ secret displacement drive. No hypertube worries for us! I had asked our Otaru node why the fireminds would not let humanity have the displacement drive. “Humanity is not ready for what they would find with it,” he said.

  “Um, isn’t that a little…”

  “Presumptuous?” Gideon cut in.

  The node bowed minutely. “It is not for me to comment.”

  Gideon, though, tried another gambit. “You said before, when I asked to see the powerplant, that there was … how did you put it?”

  “There is nothing to see, Mr. Smith,” the node said.

  “Yes, that’s it. Yes. What did you mean by that, exactly?”

  “Otaru ships, Mr. Smith, are powered by the vacuum energy.”

  Gideon nodded. “I see. And the vacuum energy, that’s what fireminds themselves live on, isn’t it?”

  “You are correct.”

  “So how do you convert the vacuum energy into … you know, making the ship go?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Do you actually know, or is this one of the things Otaru didn’t tell you?”

  “I do not know. The ship knows.”

  “Ah,” Gideon said, thinking about it. “The ship knows.”

  “This is so, Mr. Smith. This is the Otaru Way.”

  He nodded. “So what is it out there…” he gestured outside the ship to indicate the rest of the galaxy, “that we mere humans aren’t ready to face?”

  The node did not look bothered by the switch in conversation topics. He said, quietly, “Everything, Mr. Smith.”

  We landed just as the last few transports were leaving. The spaceport terminal was operating primarily minimal, disposable staff. I didn’t see any genuine people — as if I could tell anymore who was and wasn’t genuinely human! That aside, all I could see were functionaries going about their programmed duties carrying things, organizing things, and, oddly, cleaning things, which surprised me. The terminal complex was on the small side, but it looked like someone had spent a very great deal of money building and fitting it out.

  “Are those real crystal chandeliers up there?” I asked Gideon as we walked around, staring at everything. Gideon, I saw, was visibly disgusted with the decor.

  “It’s like somebody saw a picture depicting the glory days of the Roman Empire, liked all the columns and statuary and staircases, but also, for the hell of it, thought they’d add in as much gold as they could get away with. I mean, look at this…” He pointed at solid gold hovs parked neatly on their floatfields nearby. I squinted in the reflected light off their gleaming aeroshells.

  After the sometimes too minimalist interior design Otaru used in his ships, it was almost refreshing to see what people with no taste could do with nearly unlimited funds. Almost.

  “I think this is actual lawn, too, McGee,” said Gideon.

  “Lawn?”

  “You could play tennis on it!”

  Our headware, meanwhile, was under heavy attack from advertising systems, bombarding us with information about all the amazing but extremely discreet storage services available. There were hundreds of these services, apparently. You could store anything here. No names required. Modest fees. No government red tape. Indeed, the Independent Republic of Europa, which established this industry here, did very well by taking a small cut of all the transaction fees.

  You could also buy anything here, the adbots informed us. Anything at all, and you didn’t necessarily need money. There were convenient terms for all kinds of interesting barter arrangements.

  “I feel like I need about a thousand showers,” Gideon said.

  Listening to the same adbots, I was inclined to agree.

  Gideon — no doubt due to all that reading he did back in the firm — turned out to know a few things about the place. Galileo City, prior to the start of the Silent Occupation, had been a network of independe
nt research stations representing several sovereign governments and metastates in human space. In the political and economic chaos that followed the Silent’s arrival, which included the collapse of the Home System Community, the research stations declared independence and, more importantly, neutrality.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, gawking at gigantic statues of faux-Roman generals on horseback. The immense blocks of translucent marble changed as you watched, as if carved by unseen sculptors. The statues’ heroic pose would last a few minutes, and then swarms of invisible nanobots would go about their work, rebuilding the original, raw blocks of marble, ready for the next cycle. It was hard to pay attention to Gideon, the spectacle was both so astonishing, and so cheesy.

  Gideon, doing his best to spare his refined senses from such gaucherie, pressed on with his explanation. “The original idea here was to cut themselves away from the constant struggle to beg and scrape funding from their host nations, to free themselves from all that embarrassing and degrading hustling — to say nothing of not wanting to be seen in any way as being part of the political maneuvering that had led to the Eclipse Incident in the first place.”

  “I remember,” I said. It had been only nineteen years ago.

  Gideon went on, enjoying as always giving a lecture. I had to admire his determination to explain all this while surrounded by so much gaudy, neo-Roman crap. “Within five years commercial operations were going very well indeed.”

  “I think I’m seeing where all this came from.”

  “That’s right. But here’s the fun part: the scientists here, the ones who started out just wanting more money for their research, found themselves getting squeezed out. Profits from the commercial side of things were getting channeled towards growing the commercial operation. The poor bastards found they were back to having to apply for grants from the Galileo City government, which grudgingly provided funds, providing research did not in any way compromise tourist operations.”

  I nodded. “I bet the lawyers loved it.”

  Gideon nodded. “Irony, McGee, is the fifth fundamental force in the universe.”

  Gideon and I were looking for help finding the Heritage Credit Europa bank. Disposables in fantastically expensive suits helped us find our way to a modest office complex in the downtown commercial district. The whole city was built carefully inside the kilometers-thick icy crust, and kept cool through the use of superconducting heat-exchangers, which kept the city’s inevitable heat energy output from melting the ice around and under the town. The colossal ice ceiling kept harmful radiation at bay. However, the air was still quite chilly and we had to dress warmly, much like when we visited Narwhal Island. Many buildings, for example, were built from engineered ice designed to be many times stronger than more traditional building materials. The eerie pale bluish light permeating Galileo City’s office buildings and grand public plazas and retail galleries was beguiling. The buildings sported vibrant colors and startling designs, reminding me of the textile art projects my mother was always attempting but rarely finishing.

  My mother who never existed, of course.

  I wondered if I would ever get used to that.

  We took a hov-taxi to the Heritage Credit Europa building. The hov was specially modified for the icy conditions: where regular hovs used hot microfusion thrusters for propulsion, these used cooled compressed inert gas-jets. The acceleration was gentler, and the ride much quieter.

  The fare, even for half a kilometer of travel, was horrendous. Gideon didn’t offer a tip.

  More smartly dressed disposables, all of them cheerfully oblivious to the interstellar havoc going on across the reaches of human space, welcomed us to Heritage Credit Europa and discreetly inquired if we were new customers or existing clients.

  “Actually,” I said, seeing the look on Gideon’s face at the prospect of dealing with disposable functionaries, “neither. We’re investigating the affairs of one of your clients. We’ve got her account details, and we just need to have a quick look at what she’s storing here.” I transmitted a copy of Airlie’s security deposit form to the functionary.

  “I’m sorry,” the functionary said, smiling politely but managing to convey a certain frostiness that had nothing to do with the environment, “but without the client’s authorization, and a valid search warrant, we cannot reveal to you the contents of the account.”

  Gideon sighed heavily.

  “I thought you’d say that,” I said.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” the functionary said. “It’s bank policy. We have to protect our client’s privacy, as I’m sure you understand.”

  “But we have her documentation,” I said.

  “Which the client could use, once we verified her identity, to conduct account operations.”

  Gideon sent me a brief text message, which popped up in my headware interface: “Time for a little magic from the mystic East, McGee…”

  I turned back to the functionary. “So what’s involved in setting up an account in a place like this?”

  The impeccably dressed functionary blathered on in a supercilious and annoying way while Gideon’s custom headware got to work with its secrets of the mystic East routine.

  It was taking a lot longer than usual.

  There turned out to be a lot involved in establishing an account here.

  And the fees were crippling. How did Airlie pay all that each month?

  I remembered the memory pods full of cash.

  Which made me think, Where the hell did Airlie get all that cash? I could see that it was her escape money if things suddenly went all pear-shaped, but where did she get it?

  Gideon sent another message: “Victory! Give the man a tip.”

  The functionary looked at me, and something in his expression altered. He said, flashing a pretty good simulation of a smile, “Mrs. Fallow! Delighted to see you again. How can we assist you today?”

  It was a weird thing, being mistaken for a woman whose murder you had witnessed not that long ago. It took me a few moments to get comfortable with the charade. Gideon, meanwhile, had stepped in and explained what we needed.

  “This way, please,” he said, leading us to some elevators.

  “You’ll have to teach me how to do that one day, Smith.”

  “You wouldn’t like the other stuff you have to learn first.”

  The bank’s vaults were buried deep in the rocky seafloor. The functionary explained that the ocean at this point was 112 kilometers deep. The pressure at that depth was inconceivable. The water approached boiling point. The whole moon was subjected to tidal influences due to its orbit around Jupiter, and these affected Europa’s solid interior, flexing it enough to generate heat.

  To get there we would be riding something worryingly like the Stalk train we attempted to take from Amundsen Station down to New Norway. The difference this time was that the distance was a tiny fraction of that trip’s, and that the train we were taking was a small habitable module wrapped in countless layers of woven polydiamond mesh 22 meters thick, and attached to a space elevator-grade polydiamond tether.

  The 112 kilometers would take two hours, give or take, depending on currents.

  I didn’t like it. The cabin was barely big enough for the two of us. I could feel Gideon’s body heat and smell his breath and lived-in clothes. We were rushing about everywhere getting into all this trouble but neither of us had had any decent sleep outside of our hospital stays, let alone anything much to eat.

  There were fixed displays on the interior walls giving us an infra-red glimpse of the scenery on the way down. There wasn’t a lot to see. Scientists had located some very peculiar plant life, and some small creatures, something analogous to prawns, and a range of smaller things that the prawns fed on, some colossally strong form of plankton or krill. It didn’t strike me as terribly exciting.

 
The inevitable question arose, once I got over my fear that I would suffocate inside this monstrous spherical tomb, “Do you think it knows we’re doing this?”

  “The firemind?” Gideon asked, quietly. He looked entirely at ease in these cramped confines. The thought of unthinkable tonnes of hot water pressure outside did not appear to bother him.

  “Yes, of course!”

  “It can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “You think?”

  “It tallies with what Otaru told us about Hydrogen Steel’s limitations.”

  “It’s just, we’re rather vulnerable in this thing.”

  “You’ve got your bodyguards.” He was flipping his doubloon; in the lighter-than-normal g the coin kept pinging off the low ceiling. It was annoying.

  “I’ve just got a very bad feeling about this. Like we’re leaving ourselves exposed.”

  “If it could get us, it would get us. It’s shown us that before, right?”

  I agreed, and privately hated myself for being afraid. I was Detective Inspector Zette McGee, Homicide, and I didn’t take crap from anybody, after all. I chewed on nuts and bolts and spat rivets. Nobody gave me static, nobody. Criminals feared me, knowing I was just as likely to beat the shit out of them if I didn’t like what they were telling me. I had a reputation, way back then, before I found out I was an android.

  Was it easier to behave like that, as inhumanely as that, because I was an android?

  The question gnawed at me.

  To take my mind off this crap, I got into my headware and called up the information about Otaru’s murder. I had the spare time and I needed distraction very badly.

  If I could just stop thinking about one of Hydrogen Steel’s killers manifesting inside this small cabin.

  CHAPTER 28

  Otaru was a firemind with a history of interfering in human activities, which made him one of the unusual ones. The vast majority of fireminds, once they were able to move about on their own, spent a short while taking in the limited sights of human space and then took off into the darkness of unexplored space. The galaxy beckoned, and they went. It was the same with Otaru. Many years ago he had been involved in some murky business nobody knows much about, other than that it had something to do with the destruction of the Kestrel Orbital habitat. After that, he swept off to explore, never to be seen again.