Netherspace

by Andrew Lane

  The mission manager smiled thinly. “We make it sound easy, but that’s because we’re professionals. It’s actually a very precise, highly technical operation.”

  “It’s not,” Tate murmured. “A trained monkey could do it – and it wouldn’t need much training.”

  “Only feeding,” Kara murmured.

  Let’s see, Marc thought. A mechanic, a navigator, a medic – all useful on voyage and on planet. A mission manager isn’t. So Leeman-Smith’s superfluous, and knows it. He’s defensive.

  “We have calculations to run,” Leeman-Smith said tightly. “I suggest the three of you find your cabins and sort yourselves out. You can watch take-off on-screen. Mission briefing in the canteen in two hours.” He looked at Greenaway. “I’ll see you out.” The two men left the control room.

  His first space flight. Marc was surprised he didn’t feel excited. Instead there was an overwhelming trepidation. He glanced across at Kara and suspected she was feeling the same way. Then at Tse sitting next to him, who smiled.

  “We’re okay for the next twenty-four hours,” the pre-cog said quietly. “Then it gets bad.”

  Marc’s stomach seemed to lurch. “How bad?”

  “Someone dies. But I’m pretty sure it’s not you. Or Kara.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  Tse smiled. “Pre-cog’s not a science, Marc. It’s more like art.”

  “I’m an artist,” he protested. “That gives me no comfort whatsoever.”

  7

  Marc was looking for the toilets – or the restrooms, or the head, or whatever the hell they were called on this thing – without any success. Wandering around for a few minutes he discovered the inside of the SUT smelt like a breaker’s yard and too much bare metal was depressing.

  He was about to ask out loud for help from the AI – but it probably wouldn’t hear; and if it did would only ignore him, or give him the wrong directions – when he heard voices from around a corner.

  “You got the sealed orders?” That was Greenaway. Judging by the faint sounds of distant hammering, drilling and pumping he was standing in the SUT’s open airlock.

  “Right here.” That was Leeman-Smith. “Why not download them into the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s AI memory?”

  “Computers aren’t secure. Not any more.”

  Leeman-Smith sounded doubtful. “But surely…”

  Marc could imagine the affronted frown on the man’s face.

  “The result of an alien trade,” Greenaway said wearily. “Some sort of program that breaks any computer security system. Seems to be a type of meta-mathematics allied with quantum computing. We think. Doesn’t even require any knowledge of the operating system, the computer language, anything. It operates at a symbolic level above all that. We think we’ve got the only copies. But we can’t be sure. Free spacers and anyone else in the Out could also have it.”

  There was a pause, during which Marc imagined Greenaway pointing at whatever portion of Greenaway’s anatomy was holding the sealed envelope.

  “Only if the mission is directly threatened, okay? Open them for any other reason and you will be on the shelf – and I mean that literally. I actually do have a shelf, with people on it.”

  “Nothing will go wrong,” Leeman-Smith said huffily.

  There was a pause. Marc could imagine the two men looking at each other, one passive-aggressively defiant and the other with a world-weary menace.

  “This is unnecessary,” Leeman-Smith finally said.

  “Is it? Say the SUT breaks down, in real or netherspace, what do you do?”

  “Open the orders. I can’t see why…”

  Greenaway ignored him. “And follow them. A Chinese philosopher said an unread book is just a block of paper. You open the orders and follow them.”

  Leeman-Smith changed the subject. Awkwardly. “I’ve never heard of this computer hack trade,” he said. “Surely something like that would have made headlines?”

  “We suppressed it. Stupid to trumpet a possible intelligence advantage.”

  “Unless everyone else has the same advantage.” A nonsensical comment meant to establish understanding. Marc despised the self-satisfaction in Leeman-Smith’s voice.

  “When do you open those orders?” Greenaway asked again.

  Resentment at being treated like a child. “If anything seriously threatens the mission,” Leeman-Smith said heavily. “Like the RIL-FIJ-DOQ breaking down.”

  “I’ll want to see survivors.”

  “Don’t worry,” Leeman-Smith said, “I’ve no intention of dying young.” Which nicely summed up his solipsistic attitude to life, Marc decided.

  “Not many do,” Greenaway drawled. “Never could figure out why. Say goodbye to the others for me.” He paused. “No, say au revoir.”

  Marc heard the sound of Greenaway leaving the SUT. He imagined Leeman-Smith standing there, staring after him, having expected a hearty handshake or even a manly punch to the shoulder, but denied his heroic due.

  Why hadn’t the mission manager – such a banal term but it summed up human travel in space neatly – seen the significance of the conversation? An alien computer program that could break any known security system was hot news indeed. So hot it wouldn’t be told to a mission manager, unless he wasn’t expected to survive.

  The airlock door clanged shut, sealing them in. Like the sound of a prison cell door slamming; Marc hadn’t heard that since his teenage years but he’d never forgotten it. The sudden flash of memory meant that he almost missed the sound of Leeman-Smith’s footsteps. Time to leave.

  Back in the lounge Marc mentioned his need for a piss to the navigator, Nikki. She offered to take the newcomers to their cabins and led Marc, Kara and Tse along a different corridor to where a set of identical doors, spaced equally apart, screamed dormitory. Name cards had been fixed to each door. Kara seemed amused to discover she’d been promoted to major. Marc wondered why he was only a captain.

  “I’m not calling you ‘sir’,” he grumbled.

  “‘Captain’ is pretty damn good for a newly drafted civilian,” Kara pointed out. “And the correct title is ma’am. But you can call me boss.”

  All the cabins were identical, five metres long by two wide and three high. A hard-mattressed bed, a shower/ toilet, vid screen and a bulky plastic-looking cylinder fixed to one metal wall. A crisp pile of combat uniforms in a dull grey colour sat on each bed, topped with a folded green bath towel that had been washed too many times for Marc’s comfort, and a small washbag. New combat boots and a pair of flip-flops were set neatly on the floor. One for operations and one for relaxation. Even a newly drafted civilian knew which was which, he thought snarkily.

  “So we get to shower,” he said, looking at the drive. “I was worried about flannel-washes for the foreseeable future.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Kara told him. “Everything’s recycled.”

  “Everything?”

  “Today’s coffee, yesterday’s pee. Today’s pee, tomorrow’s shower. And so it goes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And you never know who you got.” Kara smiled evilly at the expression on his face. “Washing your hair with Leeman-Smith.”

  Marc shook his head and moved the pile of combat clothing to one side, next to the towel. Its position offended him, geometrically set right in the middle of the bunk. He looked at it for a second then twisted it slightly so that it wasn’t parallel with the line of the bunk. That made him feel better. He’d made an artistic statement.

  A shadow seemed to pass, making the clothing look brighter. He frowned at it. The lighting in the cabin hadn’t fluctuated, as far as he could tell, and nobody near him had moved. It was the clothes themselves.

  “Automatically adjusting, context-sensitive self-illumination,” Kara said, seamlessly switching from piss-take to military mode. “The combat gear always matches ambient light to minimise contrast between itself and the surroundings. Short of having a picture of what’s behind you in front of you it’s the
best form of all-round camouflage, and we haven’t had anything like that in trade yet, so far as I know.”

  “We could always invent it ourselves,” Marc pointed out. He moved the pile of clothing away from the towel. It immediately faded into a darker grey, matching more closely his bedding. When he straightened, he saw that Kara was looking at him pityingly.

  “What’s the point spending billions of virtscrip to research and develop something we might be given by aliens next week?”

  He looked around. No one else within earshot. “Something you should know. Boss.” He told her about the conversation he’d overheard in the airlock. Kara listened intently, her face impassive.

  “We knew there was a possible AI problem,” she said. “Sealed orders are new. First time I ever heard of ’em. And I was joking about calling me boss.”

  “So was I. Strange Greenaway telling that prick so much about the computer threat.”

  “Because it’s so secret and Leeman-Smith’s only a lowly mission manager?”

  Marc waited for the sting.

  There wasn’t one. “Well, I’d say Leeman-Smith isn’t expected to make it home,” Kara said casually. “That your take? Good. And good job.”

  He wasn’t used to praise from someone he liked and respected. Someone he’d been twinned with. Marc nodded then looked around. “Nowhere to hang my clothes,” he grumbled.

  “In the Corby,” she said.

  Marc looked blank.

  She pointed to the cylinder. “There.” She showed him how to open it. “Standard military laundry. Just hang your clothes inside.”

  “Laundry?”

  “Originally alien tech, of course. Removes all dirt, sweat, blood, oil, shit and dead skin,” she said in a tone of voice used for instructing recruits. “Takes an hour max. Leave them there until you need to change. Got it?”

  “Why Corby?”

  Kara shrugged. “Maybe they’re made there.” She smiled slightly. “Or maybe we exchanged the town of Corby for the technology. Maybe it’s not even there any more.”

  He stared darkly at the machine. “It removes all the dirt, sweat, blood, oil, shit and dead skin,” he repeated. “Then what? Turns them into tomorrow’s shepherd’s pie?”

  Kara laughed. “If you’d ever tasted military survival rations,” she said, “you wouldn’t make that joke.”

  “I gotta take a pee.” He gestured at the shower/toilet.

  “And top up the water tanks,” she said, straight-faced.

  For the next couple of minutes he thought of nothing else. A certain satisfaction at being a vital part of the SUT’s life-support system would be nice. Instead he remembered that urine was once said to halt baldness – and Leeman-Smith had a full head of gleaming hair. The connection did not make Marc feel better. Finding that Kara was still in the cabin made him feel worse, especially when she motioned him – not even a “please” or “by your leave”! – into the corridor. He noticed that Nikki and Tse were chatting in a cabin next to Kara’s. Tse would have had to explain to the navigator where the pre-cog believed – or intuited – the Cancri homeworld was.

  “I’m going to change into uniform,” Kara said loudly, so Tse could hear. “See you both in ten.” Saw the oh-so-obvious question form on Marc’s lips. “Minutes. You should change, too. Need any help or can you tie your own boots?”

  “We don’t have self-tying boots? I have to do everything for myself around here?”

  She shook her head pityingly.

  “I better go,” Nikki said, getting up off Tse’s bunk. “Have to plot the direction and impetus for our initial drop into netherspace. I can correct any errors as we go along, but it’s a point of pride amongst navigators to minimise the number of drops we have to make.”

  “They have league tables,” Tse explained, looking at Marc. “Nikki used to be in division two, but she got promoted.”

  Back in his cabin Marc changed into uniform and liked the results. When he was a teenager he had read somewhere that any man who’d never been a soldier or sailor regretted it. Very jingoistic. He couldn’t remember the exact wording of the quote but he never forgot his reaction: angry contempt, even though he was riding with centurion bikers Out There who based themselves on the Roman army and its controlled use of extreme violence. For Marc, soldiers and sailors represented authority and uniforms were the death of individuality, and thus the death of art.

  Yet now he liked the subtle camouflage clothing. The material was soft but tough-wearing and impossible to crease. It felt good, designed for fighting not the parade ground. A hidden hood and hidden gloves, built into the collar and cuffs, meant that his skin tone wouldn’t stand out against the shifting light level of the clothing. There were black underpants, vest and socks that felt like wool but had to be synth. Wool was only produced in the Out. The synth boots were also self-camouflaging, and surprisingly comfortable. Admiring himself in the full-length shower mirror – especially the captain’s pips on his shoulders, and the commando-style green beret – he realised the uniform had been tailored for him. Had to be. No standard issue would have fitted so well.

  Despite the uniform, and the excitement trembling in his gut as take-off drew near, Marc was disappointed on some deep level. Kara probably felt at home with a bare-bones cabin, but for Marc it had a thrown-together feel. Much like the SUT itself – and all the others he’d seen.

  It was true that romance had long vanished from space travel… possibly because no one knew how movement in netherspace worked. Treating it as just another type of commute made the ignorance of humans less embarrassing.

  Even so…

  SUTs are disposable. Like Leeman-Smith.

  He froze as the insight hit, staring at, without seeing, his reflection in the mirror.

  They’re disposable because so many don’t survive.

  Marc remembered what Kara had said: “The rumour is that something in netherspace scratches away at the skin of any SUT, trying to get in.” He’d seen what could be teeth or claw marks in the foam protection of other SUTs at Tegel, although they couldn’t realistically be either. Evolution wouldn’t have produced those familiar design solutions in such an alien environment.

  His own comment to Greenaway, only two days ago: “One in every forty spacecraft vanishes. Lost or broken.” Greenaway hadn’t disagreed.

  What if it was ten in every forty that vanished, maybe more? What if another ten showed up with their staff and passengers driven mad? But with Gliese popping up everywhere with sideslip-field generators to trade, space travel couldn’t be stopped. What was the acceptable loss rate for space travel?

  He remembered the long past voice of a friendly spacer: “Show me… Sorry, kid. That’s Gamma Three, not Epsilon Seven. I recognise those things that look like trees. You must have got it wrong.” Those vidcards were all Marc had of his parents back then. And maybe they were just a convenient fiction designed to cover up an unpalatable truth.

  GalDiv controlled space travel, and controlled even the facts about it, apparently, but why? The free spacers were bothersome, but were they important? Not really. In fact, in all Marc’s time in the Out he’d never met any, nor seen one of their vehicles. Everyone knew the free spacers operated from the Out but no one seemed to know where exactly. Similarly, no one knew how many GalDiv-authorised SUTs there were. Tegel wasn’t the only space access point. Every city state had one. Yet the public knew dick-all about space except what GalDiv told it.

  Oh? What about GalDiv spacers themselves?

  What about them? Humanity’s spreading through the galaxy. Okay, so there’s someone you went to space school with, whatever, and they stop showing up for class reunions: do you think they’ve been eaten by netherspace? Or do you believe it when someone says “Oh, they went off to Alpha Centauri…”

  There was too much space activity for anyone to document except GalDiv. And GalDiv had good reasons not to tell the truth.

  A voice inside Marc’s head told him to get the hell out, that t
he mission was too dangerous and he would not be controlled by anyone. Another voice said it was too late.

  He still didn’t recognise himself in the mirror.

  “You can leave but they’ll kill you,” Kara had said.

  But that’s not the reason I’m going to stay. Well, not the only reason. A moment of honesty that made the face in the mirror smile. I’m staying because I said I would, even though I may have been conned. I’m staying because I want to see this through. And because like it or loathe it, I’m now linked to Kara and where she goes so do I. Still it wasn’t all bad. There was the hardened alien foam that was going to be sprayed, or painted, or spread skilfully with a butter knife across the SUT’s exterior to protect them from netherspace. Suddenly that foam, that alien foam, was very important to him.

  Marc thought fleetingly how well the green beret set off his eyes, and went to find his comrades.

  Kara and Tse were waiting for him in the corridor, both in uniform; Tse also had a captain’s pips. Even though the camouflage worked only by matching the contrast, not the background, Marc was struck by the way they suddenly seemed almost… unnoticeable.

  “I feel like I’m being played,” he said ruefully, needing an outlet for the shock of his secret epiphany. Or perhaps a cover for it. “This uniform fits too damn well.”

  “You look very impressive,” Tse told him.

  “Always ‘me, me’ with you,” Kara said. “Listen. Chances are we’ll have to control a bunch of scared, demoralised civilians. You do not establish authority looking like a sack of shit, you establish authority by looking like you know what you’re doing. That you can take care of yourself and therefore you can take care of them. A simple psychological trick but surprisingly effective.”

  Another form of camouflage, Marc thought.

  “Also,” Kara went on, “we represent GalDiv, otherwise known as the human race. Not a bad idea to look smart, even if aliens can’t tell best from worst. Finally, combat’s a damn sight easier in well-fitting gear and comfortable footwear. You have to expect GalDiv knows everything about you. Even your boot size or whether your balls hang left or right. They got my bra size spot on. Left me five packs of my favourite joss. You don’t, I know, but you’ll be puffing away pretty damn soon, I swear. We belong to GalDiv for the duration, Marc. Get used to it.”