Netherspace

by Andrew Lane

  There was general nodding across the group. Mariana, resentful that the authority she’d tried to assert had been so casually undercut, led the way outside.

  A lemon-yellow sky stretched above a dusty lavender plain. The alien SUT that had brought them there was still parked a few hundred yards away from the domes. Looking at it, Tatia noticed how the ubiquitous foam that covered it had been… what? Dissolved? Worn down? Eaten away? Whatever: the curving shape of the underlying construction was visible through the remnants of the foam – different from the building-block construction of human SUTs.

  Ground vehicles of alien design were parked nearby. They were a rusty red in colour and multi-wheeled, but the wheels were a mixture of sizes. There was no clear pattern as to whether the bigger wheels were at the front, in the middle, at the rear, spaced equally or spaced randomly. Tatia now knew it was no use trying to impose human logic on alien actions or designs. They were what they were, explicable only to alien minds.

  Some Cancri were watching the humans, while others went about their unknowable business. Most of them were the usual combination of two life forms – the small, soft, white maggots and the striped greyhound-like beasts of burden that carried them and manipulated things for them with the thin arms that emerged just above their front set of legs. Tatia noticed, however, that some of the beasts of burden were trotting around without the maggoty riders on their backs. Their gait was ungainly, and she saw that their backbones – or whatever they had in place of backbones – were curved to form a saddle shape that matched perfectly the size of their riders. Two of them were standing side by side with their mouth parts moving. Were they talking? She looked around for riders without their steeds; it took a while to find them. It was only when she turned around at the dome behind her that she saw some of the pale grubs clinging to the surface. Were they taking in the sun?

  One of them was about ten feet away from Tatia, at head height. She stared at it, appalled and fascinated in equal measure. She could have held it like a baby, but the stumpy limbs it used to cling on to the greyhound-like beasts of burden were tipped with serrated claws coloured a translucent green, like jade. The grub’s mouths were made up of several grippers of different sizes and designs. It didn’t seem to have eyes, but as she watched, revolted, the grub twisted so that its mouth end was pointed straight at her. It was looking at her; she was sure.

  “I am not scared of you,” she whispered. “I hate you.”

  Its “head” twisted away again, disinterestedly, and it started crawling up the side of the dome. The tiny jade claws made small grooves in the supposedly adamantine surface.

  She looked back towards the alien SUT. There were also two representatives of a species she had never seen before. They were standing separately, several hundred metres apart. Their multiple limbs were long and thin and curved: they looked like small weeping willow trees, and it was difficult to make out any central body, any head, anything apart from the profusion of drooping limbs, which were striped in dusky pink and grey. The only thing that distinguished them from vegetation was the fact that they moved, fast but decisively, across the ground for a while, then stopped.

  A commotion from the front of the group of Pilgrims pulled her interest away. Cancri guards waving weapons were isolating three scared adults and two screaming children from the rest of the group. They herded them towards a space between the buildings and the SUT.

  A Cancri pointed its weapon at one of the children. He turned around, frantically scanning the crowd for a familiar face. He spotted Tatia, and his mouth and eyes went wide.

  It was Pablo.

  His head exploded.

  Tatia screamed, had to be held back. Not so lucky, a man shouted obscenities as he ran blindly, pointlessly towards a Cancri guard, swinging his arms.

  A second later, two bodies lay in the lavender dust.

  * * *

  “That’s really us,” Tse said, a note of disbelief in her voice. “We’re in there. Here.”

  On the right-hand side of the screen the ground began to recede. Marc, always in some sense a spectator in his own head, glanced around. A trained assassin, a borderline psychopath, a pre-cog and a navigator who was hiding who knew what personality defects, all moving to sit as close to the screen as possible, like kids peering through an open window at a parade. On the left-hand side of the screen they could see that some of the jigsaw of images that were being transmitted from cameras all around the space access point were pointed at empty tarmac while others were tracking the SUT as it rose into a translucently blue sky. At least, Marc assumed it was their SUT. There must be several launching every hour.

  On the right again they could see the space access point, visible from the air. Then the city, patched with green and studded with silver lakes. The SUT had vanished from the left-hand pictures, so Marc switched to full-screen: their point of view. The city was now a sprawling tumour of grey artificiality eating into the green flesh of the Out surrounding Berlin city state. As they climbed higher Marc saw the Baltic coast and then northern Europe receding beneath them until a net curtain of cloud faded the planet below. The cloud thickened until they were staring into a dirty grey nothingness. They were higher than any ramjet flight now; gradually blue and green and black crept in around the edges of the grey cloud: the colours of the Earth, and of deep space behind its circular horizon. Kara and Nikki were noisily identifying cities and seas. Marc should have been looking on this with the eye of an artist, seeing the multiple shades of colour and the chiaroscuro of light and shadow, but instead he felt disappointed. It was like looking at a map, except there were no labels. He realised that he hadn’t really seen anything with the eyes of an artist since he’d exchanged memories, maybe personalities, with Kara. Nothing apart from the position of his towel. Now his interest seemed to be more military.

  Was Kara imagining a new artwork? Somehow he doubted it.

  To his right Tse sat in a rigid silence as if this was the first time he’d realised the Earth was round. Or maybe experiencing the realisation this might be the last time he saw it. If so, a similar thought was floating somewhere inside Marc’s own mind. He glanced at Kara. She was looking at him speculatively, as if not sure what manner of man he was. Well, one who knew more about Kara than any other human being, for whatever comfort that was.

  “Worth fighting for,” she said.

  Marc was about to add “and dying for?” when Leeman-Smith’s voice filled the room again, announcing, “Netherspace in eight minutes.” The vid screen went blank.

  “Hey, who turned that off?” Marc exclaimed, furious, shaking the remote control.

  “No,” Kara quietened him, “remember what Greenaway said about netherspace? If you look for more than five minutes you go insane.”

  Marc felt an increasing anger, aware that it covered a pit of unease that only deepened the more he discovered about space flight and hyperspace and the odds of getting where they wanted to go unscathed. He’d always known space flight was like launching a ship into rough seas and hoping for the best, but the metaphor, for him, had meant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tea clippers: all sails and masts and spars and jolly heave-ho Jack Tars. Now he was beginning to realise they were more like Vikings in open longboats sailing the North Atlantic. Or islanders from a small, insignificant atoll sending canoes across the Pacific Ocean. This wasn’t exploration but an act of faith… or desperation.

  “How many other teams has Greenaway put together in case we screw up?” he asked, almost wearily. “How many SUTs are sitting on the tarmac right now, waiting for permission to launch?” A thought snagged his mind. “Are we even the first? Maybe there were five previous missions that never made it out of netherspace.”

  “It is what it is,” Kara said. “Not a thing you can do to change it.”

  The old Marc would have thrown a fit. New Marc nodded his acceptance. “What are our chances, boss? I mean, of just getting to this fucking planet, wherever it is?”

 
She looked at him levelly. “Your point being?”

  “This.” The gesture took in the entire SUT. “All of them. Us. Disposable, right? Cheapest solution so that there’s minimal waste when something goes wrong. Because something out there really does not like us.” He paused and took a deep breath, trying to suppress a sudden panic. “I’m not scared, Kara, but—”

  “You should be,” she interrupted. “I know I am.”

  “What?”

  “Space, specifically netherspace, doesn’t like us. I told you, remember?”

  “I thought you were joking.”

  “At least we’ve been foamed,” she said with heavy humour.

  Tse gave a discreet cough. “Actually there isn’t enough to do every one, and sometimes the spreaders leave voids or gaps by accident, or trap some air bubbles that expand in vacuum and push the foam apart. And often the foam gets totally worn away. We should be okay, though.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I’ve been working with Greenaway for some time,” Tse said. Not for but with. “You pick up things and—”

  “Prepare for entry into netherspace,” Leeman-Smith said over the intercom. For the second time he began counting down the time from ten to one. Tse stopped speaking, and shook his head.

  The universe blinked.

  * * *

  “That’s it?” Marc said, disappointed.

  “Welcome to netherspace,” Kara said. “Population – eight more than it was a few seconds ago.”

  “No fanfare,” Marc said. “No flashing colours or stars elongating into straight lines. I feel kind of cheated.”

  “Me too.” Kara glanced from Marc to Tse and back. “I don’t think it’ll get more exciting for a while.” She checked her watch, a little surprised to see it was working normally. So much for Einstein. Or if time has slowed, I wouldn’t know. But people who go to the stars age like everyone else. Or is Nikki several hundred years old? If so, she looks good for her age! Seriously good. So does that medic, Henk. Damn Marc! Not easy to stay operational with his libido slowly stirring inside my head. Or my libido, come to that. It must be the prospect of space. Kara took a deep breath. “Our esteemed mission manager’s briefing us soon. Now listen, people. First rule of military operations is to eat and sleep whenever you can. As of this moment we’re officially in shit-storm territory. So grab food and go rest; best you do both, okay?”

  Although neither Marc nor Tse were hungry, Kara made them stuff their pockets with hi-pro bars and synthchoc before shooing them off to their cabins.

  “What about you?” Marc asked.

  “I need a word with Leeman-Smith,” Kara told him.

  She headed towards the central pod of the SUT, surrounded by the various other shipping containers and thus furthest from netherspace and anything that might be out there, trying to get in. That was where Leeman-Smith would be.

  Not so much for operational reasons but because the man was a pathological coward.

  Kara had known that within minutes of their first meeting. When it came to judging individuals whose actions could harm her people, Kara Jones was rarely wrong. And now she needed a quiet talk with the man whose grandfather was responsible for first contact. She needed to explain who was top of the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s food chain, before the conference at which Leeman-Smith would undoubtedly try to exert control. And while the staff were unlikely to follow him – Nikki had made her loyalty obvious and she’s so attractive – mind on the job, Sergeant, I mean Major, mind on the job – it was best Leeman-Smith never even tried. Bad luck to begin a mission with blood already on the floor.

  The rectangular units were connected in strange ways; Kara had to double back on herself several times before finding the way into the command container where she discovered that Leeman-Smith wasn’t alone.

  Influenced by all the visions of the future she’d experienced in old television series, Kara would have expected Leeman-Smith in a bigger and better chair than anyone else, and everyone staring forwards at a large screen showing what was going on outside – though it would be blank, now they were in netherspace. In fact, the command unit was just like a small open-plan office. Several desks were spaced around it, and the only thing that distinguished Leeman-Smith’s area from anyone else’s was that his desk faced one way and theirs faced towards him, like a teacher in front of a class. There was even a potted plant on his desk. Tate and Nikki were there with the mission manager, the three of them concentrating on information projected onto their retinas by their own internal implants and typing instructions onto the keyboard tattoos on their forearms. It looked to Kara like some bizarrely synchronised puppet show. Every now and then one of them would ask a question of the others, but apart from that they were locked inside their individual worlds.

  As far as Kara could figure it, the staff were calibrating the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s sensors, which were providing data from netherspace. But judging by the occasional barbed comment from both Nikki and Tate, this was something of a waste of time. First, the sensors were designed and built in realspace – whatever that was – so wouldn’t work properly in netherspace. Second, no one had any idea what they were looking for, other than it was probably large and unfriendly. And third, there was fuck-all they could do about it anyway, so best to relax and let the foam do its job. Leeman-Smith, however, was adamant: the sensors had to be working perfectly and linked to an emergency program within the SUT’s AI.

  Kara stayed for a few minutes, watching, until the novelty wore off. Then she left the command module and moved towards the back of the SUT, down a linking corridor that she thought led to the unit with the Gliese sideslip-field generator.

  As she reached the halfway point in the short corridor something moved in the corner of her vision, a flickering shadow, a flutter of light and darkness. It startled her. Kara turned, hands raised in instinctive readiness to defend against an attack, but the corridor was empty.

  Kara waited a few moments, listening for movement, but there was only the beating of her own heart and the low susurration of the air recycling system. Maybe a moth had wandered on board to be whisked away with the rest of them into netherspace. Maybe a spider had taken up residence and was busy building webs that would never catch a fly. Where did that thought come from? Rational, Major, rational.

  Early missions, from what she had heard, had spent hours using radiation and chemical sprays to eradicate insects and vermin from their SUTs before take-off so as to avoid contaminating alien worlds with new life forms, but the practice had quickly faded away. Most life forms humans had brought along for the ride died quickly with nothing to eat – and precious little native life on alien worlds was edible by any visitors from Earth, large or small. Unfortunately this extreme housekeeping had also wiped out most of the staff’s gut microbes. Each human carries within them approximately two kilograms of live, friendly bacteria. They keep the gut working properly, and are important to the immune system. Eradicate them and a bad case of the runs or chronic constipation is the mildest reaction. The worst includes death.

  With sick staff confined to their bunks, the eradication process was quietly dropped. Nobody complained, and no alien worlds were overrun with rats or cockroaches. Or, at least, nobody ever reported that they had been. Most colonists had a robust approach to their new planetary homes, best summed up as “you belong to us now”. Except where the native dominant life forms were possibly as or even more intelligent than humans, in which case they went elsewhere. The galaxy was a big, big place with room enough for every colonising species.

  Rational, Major, rational. Kara shook her head and turned towards the engineering unit. She wasn’t quite sure why she wanted to go there. But it seemed like a good idea.

  Something twitched at the extreme edge of her vision.

  She turned quickly, scanning the air, but there was nothing.

  A subtle change in her blood pressure, perhaps, causing the lens in her eyeball to deform slightly and making her think she had seen something
move. A light globe that was on the edge of failing. A hallucination. God forbid it was an incipient failure in her AI chip. Whatever it was, she was going to ignore it until it showed itself more fully.

  She wasn’t worried. At first, perhaps, but not anymore. Intrigued was more like it. Even amused – who on earth could be stalking me? Mmmmm, I hope they’re attractive because I’m—

  Rational, Major, rational. Not the time to begin feeling horny. Is this what Nikki meant by “feeling loose”? Nikki. Love her mouth. Rules and regs are for Earth, for realspace.

  Maybe later. Can’t do anything that affects Tse and Marc, my team, my people.

  * * *

  Marc and Tse had gone to their cabins still feeling cheated after the non-event of entering netherspace. Marc would have liked to talk more but Tse obviously needed to be alone with his thoughts, leaving Marc alone with his.

  The cabin was bare in the extreme. Not spartan, as he’d originally seen it, but bare-bones boring. And he had a sudden, intense curiosity to know what it was like outside. All the colours a man could imagine and several he couldn’t. Look at it for more than five minutes and a man goes mad. So how about three minutes? One? Thirty seconds?

  He wished he had an avatar who could look at netherspace for him. Except that was crazy; an avatar was only a front-end, a user-interface for the AI that somehow “lived” in the chip seated just behind his right ear. It had no ability to look at the external world in wonder and report back in metaphor what it had seen.

  Screw it! Marc knew that lightness of being that suddenly arrives for no good reason and stays long enough to illuminate the rest of the day. There’s probably a chemical reason for it, he thought. So often a mundane, boring reason for the beautiful things in life.

  He didn’t like space, let alone not-realspace. He despised computers, despite the implant. Well, can’t live without the fucker, can I?