Netherspace

by Andrew Lane

  “Fresh foam,” Nikki said, biting her lip. “Safe as you can be. The mission manager doesn’t think so. The mission manager suggested a jump to normal space to get away from whatever it is.”

  “The mission manager’s in command,” Leeman-Smith said.

  “What’s the problem?” Kara demanded.

  “We’re mid-transit,” Nikki explained. “If we pull the navigation platen off the drive before transit is completed, we lose the drive. Do not ask why. It just happens. That means we’ll be stranded who-knows-where in realspace with no way of moving.”

  “Until the Gliese repair the drive,” Leeman-Smith said loudly, attempting to regain control. “And we return to Earth… to repair the foam,” he added quickly. “Then resume the mission.”

  But everyone knew that Leeman-Smith didn’t intend to be on it.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. “That’s what happens. A drive breaks, the Gliese arrive.” His voice rose in pitch. “I’ve even got a couple of bottles of whisky in my pod. Medicinal but hey, why not? We’ll have a party, okay? Just let me do my job.” Then he whimpered as the RIL-FIJ-DOQ suddenly lurched from side to side, as if shaken by a very large hand. Or perhaps a tentacle. His face twitched.

  “Except we need to use netherspace to reach Earth,” Tate said reasonably. “And who knows? Whatever’s out there could be waiting for us. Best we wait for it to go away.”

  “The Gliese will help,” Leeman-Smith said desperately. “It’s what happens.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Marc asked Nikki. “This situation?”

  “Three times,” Nikki said. “The mission manager hasn’t.”

  “My SUT,” Leeman-Smith insisted. “My responsibility.”

  Another scraping sound from outside. Whether it was a fluctuating force field or something more physical, like an inquisitive monster, was beside the point. It sounded wrong.

  “It goes away after a while,” Henk said. “The pixies aren’t very smart.”

  Leeman-Smith shuddered. “It’s destroying my SUT!”

  Kara eased forward very slowly. In a few minutes she’d be in range.

  “No,” Nikki said, “it’s just playing.”

  Kara caught Henk’s eye and nodded encouragingly, hoping he’d understand.

  He did. “Of course,” Henk joined in, “there is a way to make it piss off.” Anything to keep Leeman-Smith occupied until Kara was close enough to disable him.

  The three staff became very still, eyes fixed on Leeman-Smith. Kara saw Marc glance at her for instructions and shook her head. This was her play.

  “How?” Leeman-Smith all but begged. “Please!”

  “Someone goes to say hello,” Nikki said.

  Leeman-Smith stared at her.

  “We blow the foam plug over the airlock,” Nikki explained, making it sound like an everyday manoeuvre. “And whoever’s in the lock – no spacesuit necessary – says hi. Then whatever it is goes away. They hate being ignored, you see.”

  Kara didn’t need the simulity to understand that Nikki, Tate and Henk had seen this happen before. She knew where: out near Aldebaran, where a deep-space skipper had sacrificed himself for his staff. She inched a little closer.

  “But… but… you go mad in netherspace,” Leeman-Smith protested. “And why doesn’t GalDiv do something about… about… about these creatures!”

  “If they exist,” Henk said. “Could be all an illusion. Except I know it’s not. All explorer staff know it’s not. And there’s fuck-all GalDiv can do about them. But netherspace itself’s okay, as long as you obey the five-minute rule. Never done it myself, but they say it’s like swimming in warm champagne.”

  Leeman-Smith still hadn’t got it. “You mean it’s over so quickly?” An obvious thought struck him. “We could use the call-out fee.” Then realised his mistake. “No, of course, we need the fee for the Gliese. Okay, as mission manager I’ll have to choose.”

  Kara was close enough to decide her attack. Knuckle strike just beneath his nose, to produce pain agonising enough to disable him instantly. Kick to the back of his nearest leg, causing him to fall sideways and towards her. Strike to his solar plexus, leaving the man paralysed long enough to tie him up. Too bad he was wrongly positioned for a fatal throat strike.

  “We don’t know,” Henk explained, “because hardly anyone ever comes back.”

  Leeman-Smith stared at Henk in horror. “You mean that…”

  “It’s a sacrifice,” Nikki told him. “Traditionally they say, ‘I might be gone for a while.’ Don’t know why. But it sounds good.”

  Leeman-Smith drew himself up. “I have the good of the RIL-FIJ-DOQ, the staff and our passengers to consider. I’ll decide who goes.” For a moment no one spoke, struck by the absurdity of the statement, that Leeman-Smith still believed he’d be obeyed.

  Which was when Marc apparently decided to get involved. It wasn’t altogether his fault; his knowledge from the simulity conditioning insisted that Leeman-Smith meant for Kara to go into netherspace, even if he had no way of enforcing it, and Marc was programmed to protect her. “I don’t think so,” Marc said loudly. “If it’s orders you want, how about the ones Greenaway gave you?”

  “How did you…?” Leeman-Smith half-turned to meet this new threat – and saw Kara poised to strike. “Fuck you!” he screamed and jumped between Nikki and Tate, too fast for anyone to stop him for terror and panic gave him extra speed. He reached the metal sphere and twisted the platen to one side.

  A deep, discordant chime sounded inside the sphere.

  Reality jumped a track. The glowing, flickering colours extinguished themselves.

  Leeman-Smith turned to face them, breathing heavily. “I gave an order. You refused it.”

  Kara thought about slapping him simply for the pleasure. “You panicked.”

  “My first duty is the safety of this SUT and the mission.” The fear and panic had seamlessly integrated into a default mode of self-righteous arrogance.

  It wasn’t worth arguing with him. “What now?” Kara asked Tate.

  Tate sighed heavily. “We wait for the Gliese to show up, exchange the call-out fee for a new drive and go on our merry way.”

  “No,” Leeman-Smith said. “My SUT could have been damaged. We return to Earth.”

  Everyone looked at Kara.

  “We continue,” she said.

  “Bitch!” Leeman-Smith spat. “RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s mine!”

  A brief flurry of movement next to Kara, the flat sound of flesh meeting flesh, and Leeman-Smith fell to his knees, both hands clutching his nose. Blood began to seep between his fingers.

  “It’s ‘Bitch Ma’am’ to you,” Marc said, standing over him.

  Kara sighed. “Ask permission next time, will you?” Presumably simulity training had conditioned Marc to protect her authority. Or he’d done a little more than just ride with an Out biker gang. “Where’s the call-out fee?”

  “In the stasis shipping container. We won’t wake it until the Gliese show,” Henk explained. “In case of second thoughts. In case we get too fond of it.”

  Was that how her sister had been taken by the Gliese? As an it?

  “Nonetheless we should check that it’s okay.”

  Henk nodded, walked along the length of the engineering container, away from the control room. Kara and the others followed – all except for Leeman-Smith, who stayed behind, staring blankly at the now defunct drive, crimsoned hands covering his nose.

  The shipping container they walked into was filled with grey ceramic crates, stacked up on either side of a central aisle. Mission-critical equipment for when they arrived at the Cancri homeworld – including weapons, communications equipment and modular transport units equipped with updown-field generators. Kara hadn’t paid them much thought. Time for that when they were getting close to their goal.

  Henk glanced at each of the barcodes on the crates in turn, presumably using his cortical implant and the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s records to identify their contents. Eve
ntually he located a crate no different from the rest, which was the middle one of a pile of three. A panel on its side flipped down when pulled. There was a small control panel in the centre. Henk bent forward to read the display, then turned to face them, his face sombre. “I need to run some checks,” he said heavily, “but I think the fee is dead.”

  < That may be the least of your worries, said a voice in Kara’s mind. It sounded apologetic. < Leeman-Smith just shut down the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s so-called higher functions. Thinks he can blackmail us, probably. I never saw that one coming.

  10

  ONE DAY EARLIER

  It had taken far longer to prepare for their escape than Tatia had expected. It was one thing to blithely say, “We’ll take over the Cancri SUT,” another to figure out precisely how to do it. One of the Pilgrims with military training said it was the difference between strategy and tactics. There’d be only the one chance. Fail, and what little freedom the humans enjoyed would be gone. Or the space vehicle would be moved further away. Or everyone would be killed. With aliens, who knew?

  It was the grey-haired SUT staff member, Perry Flach – who turned out to be the LUX-WEM-YIB’s mechanic – who’d helped Tatia develop a tactical plan. Given that he was slated to be part of the assault on the Cancri vehicle, Perry had reason to help. He wasn’t frightened of dying, not after twenty years transporting emigrants and cargo throughout deep space. A month after his first trip Perry had understood the long-term chances of survival were not good. Most staff eventually died in deep realspace, vanished into netherspace or ended their days drooling in a comfy chair at the “GalDiv Home For Distressed Space Staff”, as he dismissively called it, that was maintained in Seattle City. And yet he hadn’t stopped going Up. The money was generous but the attractions of space and all the emigrant worlds were far, far better. And then there was netherspace, which became an obsession. On a few occasions he’d even been close to going outside while moving through netherspace, but had always been stopped at the last minute by the thought of his kids on Earth, even if he rarely saw them. He supposed, he told Tatia, that it had been the same for oil-rig workers and the military in the past, but the knowledge that people had been missing their families all through history hadn’t made it any easier.

  Now, captive on some stinking Cancri world, Perry knew he’d never see netherspace, never be one with it unless they managed to escape… and if that miracle happened he’d go outside for sure and sacrifice himself to the unknowable that, he haltingly admitted to Tatia, sang colours to him in his dreams. And his kids would, he hoped, remember him with affection, if not love, even if they were little more than strangers.

  “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted,” Perry had told Tatia, another military cliché that never stopped being true. He also added, for good measure, “Measure twice, cut once,” a carpenter’s maxim. “We gotta know as much about the Cancri as possible. Figure who’ll be in the attack party – we can’t go in a mob, too confusing. We need to see if the hounds’ve got any routines.” That was the shorthand way they’d begun to refer to the composite Cancri – hounds and grubs. “Who if any of them are in charge. Need to watch the grubs sunning themselves on the roof. It’ll take a while, Tatia. Meanwhile you have to keep everyone involved. Keep them busy and their morale high. That’s what leaders do.”

  The grubs bathing in the blue sun had to be the brains and the hounds the transport. An obvious symbiosis but not of equals. Of the two, the hounds seemed to be the most skittish, never allowing the humans within grabbing distance. The grubs were different – and indifferent when lying on a nearby roof, not caring if a human got within two or three metres, only using their jade-green pincers to move higher up if a human got within a metre or so. They definitely had no eyes, ears or a nose. Only a mouth from which occasionally dribbled a bluey-green liquid. Presumably the mouth was used for both feeding and excreting, although no one ever saw them eat or drink. Possibly, they derived energy direct from the sun. People who got near them felt uneasy, without being able to figure out why or precisely how. It could be fear, disgust or a hind-brain caution when confronting something unknown. A reasonable assumption would be that grubs were telepathic, and the feelings were a defence mechanism. The leading question was what could they do to a human mind if actually touched?

  The grubs smelled of rotting seaweed. The hounds of nothing much but they did have eyes – several small button ones in a circle high up on the front of their muzzles – and an equally small mouth. No obvious teeth or nose but a spongy area in the back of the head that someone thought could be an ear. Their bodies were slim and muscular, front legs ending in sharp hooves, rear ones in thick pads. The arms were bony with two elbows and three-fingered hands. The hounds were hairless with no obvious pattern to their striped skins, each one different, much like a human face. Sometimes the ones without a grub made sounds to each other, a series of squeaks and whistles as from a frantic rat. Had to be communication but on a very basic level. Or maybe exchanging the equivalent of a human dictionary. Perhaps the sounds were their equivalent of a human’s tics and twitches while the real communication was going on via chemical secretions borne on the wind. It was impossible to know.

  The Cancri stayed in another dome-shaped building three hundred metres away. Get too close and one appeared waving a weapon. They didn’t object when humans went near any of the rusty, randomly wheeled transports. At least, it was assumed to be rust. Could just as easily be mould. Or an intelligent bacteria. It was easier to agree on rust. No one ever saw a Cancri drive one of the transports, so there was no way of knowing how they worked. Close reconnaissance suggested that the cabs had six irregular buttons and five levers on a central pedestal, along with three sling-like front seats that would fit the hounds and two rows of indented rear seats for ten grubs. The transports were presumably used when the grubs needed to go further or faster than the hounds could manage. New hounds, Tatia theorised, would be available at the destination. There were probably spare ones all over the planet – “Like bloody dog pounds,” someone said – waiting to be picked up by a grub.

  Tatia had a picture in her mind of the hounds leaning out of the windows on the transports with their ears flapping back in the breeze and their tongues lolling, although they had neither ears nor tongues that anyone could see. She suppressed her laughs. Hysteria could be contagious, and that was all it was – just nervous hysteria. Plus, of course, there was the risk of portraying the hounds as, well, just hounds. It was like the old novels and movies about aliens, before first contact. Reptilian aliens were cold and logical; cat-like aliens were aggressive predators; insectoid aliens were vicious. In fact, aliens were exactly what it said on the tin: aliens, with intellects and capabilities that no one could guess at.

  Perhaps they should have chosen other names. Riders and steeds? That was just as bad. Maybe just alpha Cancri and beta Cancri – alphas and betas for short.

  Which made her think – why assume there were only two parts to a composite Cancri? Maybe there was a gamma Cancri, a delta Cancri and onwards, which could be used to construct different types of composite Cancri for different purposes. How would anyone know? Did it matter? In the end, speculation was essentially pointless. Measuring twice was fine, but measuring ten, a hundred times only a delaying tactic. At some stage you had to make the cut.

  There were always two armed Cancri at the entrance to the SUT, except at night when the airlock door was closed. As the harsh blue sun sank towards a distant horizon the hounds would trot over to the building with the grubs on its roof and wait patiently as their masters squirmed downwards, finally to fall with a soft thump onto their backs. Sometimes a grub missed and had to be lifted up by two hounds and placed on a third, when its pincered legs would slip into two tiny mouth-like openings on the hound’s back. It made some watching humans feel ill and others think of body lice, almost feeling sorry for the carrier. It also seemed a little primitive. Surely a space-faring species would have found a simpler,
more efficient way of melding grub to hound?

  But aliens, who knows?

  That had become the motto of the hostages: “Aliens, who knows?” Fatalistic, yet with a certain element of hope. With aliens even a miracle can happen.

  All the Cancri vanished into a domed building some three hundred metres away before the night fell. The door closed and the humans were left to their own devices. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere on this alien planet they could go, except to get away from where they were, and if they did that eventually either the hounds would hunt them down with their lolling gait or the wheeled vehicles would be brought into service. Also, since the temperature dropped to below freezing once the sun was down, there was the very real likelihood that anyone who wandered off would die of exposure. For all these reasons the hostages became essentially self-managing, staying inside their dome, where the temperature was controlled. The walls were made of some sort of ceramic that could go from below freezing to boiling in a second. The technical-minded amongst the captives became frustrated trying to work out how. The best guess was that the Cancri had managed to find or acquire a way to store and channel entropy, but for Tatia it was a pointless discussion. It just worked. Did it matter that according to human physics it was impossible? Wasn’t all human science now alien?

  Yet another source of wonder and frustration: every day the containers were stocked with water and food fresh from Earth. One moment empty, the next full. Anyone stupid enough to be in one of the containers at the time got buried or near drowned. The delivery system had to be based on netherspace, but with a disturbing level of control and accuracy. Here was netherspace tech that worked on a planet. The only time a netherspace drive had been used on Earth, by a family who traded it for a box of honey mangoes and thought to outsmart GalDiv, the subsequent explosion took out half of Karachi. But here there were no explosions and the food and water kept on coming. If this was typical Cancri technology, was there any point in trying to escape? They’d retrieve you in the blink of an eye. Except the grubs didn’t have eyes. In a drop of greeny-blue drool, then. But was it actually Cancri technology? There was the rumour – believed implicitly by Juan and on which Tatia was pinning her hopes, all their hopes – that the Gliese owned and allocated netherspace tech. So maybe it was a mistake to assume the Cancri were technological gods. Maybe they weren’t as smart as everyone assumed. Maybe they were just clients using Gliese technology that they didn’t understand. Maybe. It was a hell of a word on which to build an escape.