Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  So, it was indeed true that some alien civilization had destroyed our home planet. It did not seem like much of a revelation. These days, the constant noisy babble of the interstellar infosphere being what it was, the “aliens did it” meme had become the leading candidate for explanations of what had happened to Earth.

  I still didn’t know which alien civilization was responsible, or, for that matter, why they had done it. What had we done to them, other than broadcasting hundreds of years of bad media and everything else out into space? Of course, much more recently we learned that we were not alone in the galaxy; there was, at least, the Silent. And if there was one powerful alien race out there, it was likely there were others who had yet to reveal themselves. Why an alien race would launch an attack against Earth and then disappear again, never to return, made no sense. One school of thought suggested the Silent had destroyed the Earth years ago and had been quietly watching us ever since, lurking off-stage, waiting for a good moment to return and teach us a lesson about galactic diplomacy. I didn’t think this theory made any sense, but what did I know?

  Still the most baffling question of all remained: why had all human governments since we lost Earth done everything in their power to keep the entire matter under wraps?

  “McGee…?”

  “You all right there, Smith? You look a fright.”

  “There appears to be something rather wrong with my head. My headware’s on the blink.” He was sitting there in the pod next to me, and he was feeling his head, as if noticing bumps and shapes that had not been there before. He looked the same to me, but also somehow different. He looked older, as if he’d just had a dreadful scare. There was something in his eyes that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t the distant stare people get when they’re working their interfaces; it was something else. Something worrying.

  ShipMind reported that we had attained a stable orbit around Europa. I hardly heard it.

  “What are your diagnostics saying?”

  “Diagnostics are offline. The whole thing’s crashing all the time. I’m getting rather a lot of advisories referring to Otaru, for one thing…”

  “You do know the last node transferred his Otaru kernel to you, right?”

  “And there’s this other thing — I beg your pardon?” He glanced at me, startled.

  “You and the Otaru node were working on the displacement drive thing. Those combat viroids infected his onboard systems and were killing him. So he transferred his…”

  “He transferred his Otaru kernel … to me?”

  “To you, Smith. I imagine your existing headware isn’t all that compatible with such things. To say nothing of the other thing…”

  Gideon was skimming through his interface-space, looking at everything. “There is something else in here.”

  “Something else?”

  He nodded, looking grave. “So it would seem.”

  “Any ideas what it is?”

  “All I know is that I can see every star in the galaxy — and know everything about them, the worlds in each system, you name it. Every star I look at I know by several different names, many of which are words, or, rather disturbingly, things like words, I don’t in the least recognize…”

  “Things like words?” I said, very worried indeed.

  “Some sort of designators.”

  I swore. Focusing again. “You said before that you knew where Hydrogen Steel went.”

  “I said that?”

  “Right after it killed the Otaru Copy, it fled. You piped up and said you knew where it went.”

  Gideon looked thoughtful and distant for a moment, then, looking surprised, said, “Oh. I see. It’s there.”

  “Smith? Where’s there?”

  He said, “It hasn’t gone far. It’s parked in orbit around Ganymede.”

  CHAPTER 32

  I thought for a moment. “Ganymede?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Nothing I can see from here.”

  I was thinking about Hydrogen Steel’s godlike weaponry. Even if its primary ship was heavily damaged, the firemind lurking inside it was probably still perfectly intact and fine. “Do you suppose it’s just organizing some repairs?”

  “Either that or it’s planning to destroy the moon and everybody on it,” said Gideon.

  “Why would it do that?”

  “How badly does it want to keep the information from getting out? How many people is it willing to kill? We talked about this.”

  I swore quietly. “Can we get this pod around to Ganymede?”

  “I seriously doubt it. Onboard fuel reserves … let’s see. We’re down to slushy fumes.”

  Nodding, I got into my headware comms gear and tried to get the pod to send mayday messages. It could be that the same emergency response guys who went to fix up Europa might still be down there. Messages sent, I reluctantly settled back with Gideon to wait for a response. Gideon said that it might take quite some time, if things were bad across the Home System. “All the spare emergency response ships might be busy with higher-priority stuff.” He was still clutching at his head and rubbing his eyes.

  “So you can literally see everything going on in the galaxy now?” I said, trying to fill time.

  “Not everything, but a lot of it. There appears to be surprisingly little starship activity in the rest of the galaxy. On the other hand, I can just make out this pod of ours orbiting Europa.”

  “God, really?”

  “I’m just wondering why there are so few ships out there. No, wait, I tell a lie.” He squinted and knit his brows together. “I can see some ships, here and there.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Most of them are other firemind ships.”

  “How many?”

  “In the whole galaxy? Less than a hundred.”

  “How many in human space?”

  “Three, counting Hydrogen Steel.”

  “So there are two other fireminds out there?”

  “There are two others using ships to get around. There could be other fireminds out riding the vacuum.”

  I thought about what I’d learned from the Otaru Copy. It had said that Hydrogen Steel and its allies had opposed Otaru. Hydrogen Steel was simply the “leader” of their cabal. I told Gideon, and asked him where the other ships were.

  “There’s one at Barnard’s Star.” Six lightyears from the Home System.

  “What’s it doing? Can you tell?”

  Gideon concentrated, eyes closed. “It’s loitering with intent, I think you’d say.”

  “What’s it waiting for?”

  “God knows,” said Gideon.

  “What about the other one you mentioned?”

  “That’s Chromium Lux. It’s out at Aldebaran.”

  Damn. “Right where we have to go next…” We still had to see what Javier Mondragon had sitting in his maildrop account on the Heart of Darkness hab.

  I thought for a minute. Huge events were taking place, and here we were stuck in a lifeboat.

  None of it would be happening, probably, if people like Airlie Fallow had just left well enough alone. How terrifying must it have been putting together their spy network, sending notes with secret urine messages across human space, worrying that with every new person brought into the fold you were increasing the risk of someone blowing the network? It was like a handful of ants conspiring against a town full of humans.

  I was starting to think that Airlie and Javier might have the rest of the puzzle about Earth’s fate sitting out there somewhere. I was assuming that he, with the help of his friends at Heart of Darkness, had helped her organize her new identity, and all that cash. All she needed to do was go out one day and not come home.

  But how do yo
u do that when you’ve got kids? I didn’t get that part. I decided to talk to Gideon about it, but he was slumped back in his seat, eyes squeezed shut, and I could see his eyes working hard under his lids. He looked like he might even be starting to sweat. “Smith?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t even notice me talking to him. I poked his arm, and called his name, and got no response.

  “Hey, Smith!” I was shaking his shoulder, yelling at him.

  Two things suddenly happened.

  The first was Gideon waking up. He looked a mess, like he’d been out all night drinking. “Did we do it?”

  I had been all set to say, “Did we do what?” when I registered the news from ShipMind that we had arrived in orbit around Ganymede. Gideon would have received the same advisory, and he looked astonished, in a deeply exhausted way. He disappeared into interface-space to check the nav display. I did the same.

  And there it was. We were in a stable orbit two hundred k’s above Ganymede. Gideon actually said, “Wow…”

  I said, “There is no way in hell that this is true.”

  “I think it is true, McGee.”

  “It just cannot be true. ShipMind’s on the blink.”

  “It is true, and I’ll tell you how I know.”

  I went to say something skeptical, but I saw the look on his haggard face, and in those foreign eyes. That look stopped me dead.

  He allowed himself a modest smile. “I think I’ve got a star-drive in my head, McGee.” He had the grace to look a little wryly amused at this development.

  I stared, and stared some more. “The … thing … the thing Otaru gave you?”

  He winced, as from a sudden storm of pain blasting through his head. “That’s right. It’s been setting itself up. It showed me how it works.”

  “That’s not possible!”

  “It’s alien tech. God knows what it can do.”

  “I thought it was just a thing for, you know, studying the galaxy…”

  “Yes, so you can decide where you want to go.”

  Meanwhile, Ganymede Space Control had contacted us, asking for our vessel details. The people down there were apparently unaccustomed to ships — especially tiny escape pod ships — simply appearing in orbit. I told them who we were, and that we needed rescuing. “Stand by, please. There may be some delay,” they said.

  “You believe me now, McGee?”

  It was inconceivable. “No. Not entirely. I mean… We were just orbiting Europa.” As if this explained everything.

  “We can go anywhere. Anywhere. Hypertubes be damned.”

  I had more important things on my mind. “Is Hydrogen Steel still here?”

  Gideon nodded. “Yes, it’s out in a synchronous orbit parked over Winter City.”

  “Winter City?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Just switching to ShipMind, and sneaking into Ganymede Control’s sensor feeds…”

  “Secrets of the mystic East again, right?”

  “There’s much to admire about the mystic East, McGee.”

  “Well?”

  He looked like he was having a hard time of it. Then, whispering, he said, “McGee…”

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  He piped the sensor feed to me, and I saw it for myself. “Oh God…”

  Hydrogen Steel was transmitting data into Winter City’s infostructure. Loads of it.

  I recognized it from the information Otaru gave me. It was the replicating infoma. The bastard was infecting Ganymede with infoma!

  “Why the hell is it doing that?”

  Gideon was still studying the data from Ganymede Control. “It’s lost its mind. It’s lost its bloody mind!”

  “What? You’re saying it’s crazy?”

  “It sustained colossal damage in the attack. Its cognitive sections were almost completely destroyed.”

  Confused, I said, “But fireminds don’t need hardware. It can just pop out and float off somewhere.”

  “The Otaru Copy, he was dying of the infoma. He must have infected Hydrogen Steel before it could escape!”

  So Hydrogen Steel was now infected. It made sense. And as its broken mind unraveled…

  “How do we stop it?” Ganymede was the provisional capital of human space. Even with the hypertubes nearly gone, it still supported extensive intrasystem trade and communications. Every message transmitted to an incoming or outgoing ship; every data-based service and device in the city and indeed throughout the Home System; finance and commerce; mail and media; it was all under immediate threat. In human space we knew about robust defenses against data system intrusions and threats. At all times of the day, every day, a typical person’s headware received thousands of unwanted system attacks. It was routine. You treated it the way you treated threats from other sources: you took precautions and you knew the dangers.

  Nobody in human space, however, had any protection against replicating infoma. It was a disease of information, borne by information, and hostile to it and the hardware that supported it. It attacked modern civilization itself. And here was Hydrogen Steel, possibly knowing it was dying, deranged from something like brain damage, finding a way, with its last breath, so to speak, of keeping the Truth about Earth from getting out. If the people looking for that knowledge couldn’t for some reason be killed, why not destroy the communication infrastructure that enabled the knowledge’s transmission?

  So why was it not attacking us? We were in a very different orbit, but it had to know we were here.

  I was thinking hard and fast. Maybe it didn’t know we were here. There was no way to be certain of how much damage the Otaru Copy had inflicted. It had certainly looked like total catastrophe. Could his attack have knocked out the firemind’s sensors — or was the thing just out of its mind, beyond reason, and thinking entirely in terms of Plan B: preventing the spread of the information — and to hell with its prime directives!

  Gideon contacted Ganymede Control to warn them about the threat. They replied that they were having difficulty with many of their systems, and would have to get back to us.

  He then checked our own onboard ShipMind — and quietly swore. “It’s got us.”

  I connected the dots. If the pod’s ShipMind was affected, it was only a matter of time before we lost critical systems, which meant life-support, artificial-g, comms, and the limited nav we could manage with thrusters.

  And that was the good news. The bad news was that the infoma could get into our headware and even into our nervous systems. I was already worried enough about Gideon’s exposure to the combat viroids that killed the last Otaru node. When he transferred the kernel over, some of those viroids might have attached themselves. We didn’t know. With the tools we had we couldn’t investigate. Gideon’s drastically altered brain might be a time-bomb.

  We contacted Ganymede Control again and asked for permission to transfer our orbit to one that would get us to the Winter City Geosynch Stalk station.

  They never responded. Soon there was nothing there but static.

  We swore a lot for a few minutes, then got down to business.

  ShipMind was infected but we could still give it manual nav commands. Transferring from Low Ganymede Orbit up to synchronous orbit would take a lot of thruster fuel, and several long, hard burns. ShipMind had already told us that we did not have enough fuel to complete the sequence of burns we needed.

  And there was worse news: ShipMind also reported that Hydrogen Steel had just disappeared.

  “Where did it go?” I said, stupidly.

  Gideon cleared his throat politely. “Er, McGee?”

  I looked at him for several seconds before I remembered about Gideon’s recent warranty-busting brain upgrade. “Oh,” I said, “right.”

  “It’s heading for Proxima. The
other firemind, the one located at Barnard’s, looks like it plans to meet it there.”

  I thought this over for a moment, then realized: “A new ship! The bastard’s going to swap ships with the other firemind!”

  Gideon weighed this up. “Sounds likely. Plus it can infect more human settlements and outposts.”

  “What’s its ETA? Can you tell?”

  “It’s using the displacement drive. It could get there in a matter of minutes.”

  I swore. It looked so obvious. Hydrogen Steel transfers across to the other firemind’s ship. That firemind takes on the infected ship and drags it around human space, infecting our entire infosphere with the infoma, leaving insane Hydrogen Steel, in a fancy new fully-powered ship to come after us. I explained this to Gideon.

  “We need a proper ship,” he said, thinking hard, and fiddling with his doubloon.

  I checked ShipMind. It was running more slowly, but so far critical systems were still functional.

  “Give me a minute, McGee,” said Gideon. “I’ve got something of a crazy idea.”

  “Do you plan to tell me what you’re up to?”

  He explained his idea.

  After I finished coughing and laughing, I said, “You’re right. That is a crazy idea.”

  “If you have a better idea I’m all ears, McGee.”

  “How about we use that thing in your head to get us somewhere that hasn’t been infected yet?”

  “McGee, getting us from Europa orbit to Ganymede orbit just about fried my brain. I’m as yet unwilling to try it out on longer jumps.” Even saying this he appeared to still feel some residual pain, and he absently touched the side of his head.

  I let him carry on with his original plan.

  Minutes passed. ShipMind was starting to fail. I looked around the cramped pod cabin to find an emergency supplies locker. Spacecraft operating regulations stipulated that all ships had to carry, among the usual survival gear, backup installers for all key ship’s systems.