Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Some days, I’m even Elaine Stainless to myself. But not today.

  I open the line to Wee Jen as soon as we’re out of the faraday house, and ask her to bring UberStahlStuck GmbH out of the mothballs: a squeaky-clean daughter company that we keep on ice for working with transnationals and the pickier nation-states. One such client is EDF, the former French national energy company that bought up a great deal of the UK’s privatised grid back in the day. Brexit and its continental blowback wiped out EDF in Europe, and left it holding the baby in the former UK – the baby being, in this case, a mismatched bundle of undermaintained infrastructures scattered around the country. Among them is the old Woodhead rail tunnel.

  We leave the DNZ on a little solar trolley that rides the old rails south-east, just in case anyone’s paying attention. We alight at Middlewood, from where the ghost of an older line leads us north and then east, through fields and overgrown ghost-suburbs, toward the western foothills of the Pennines.

  The tunnel mouth at the Woodhead end is all but obscured by a well-fortified compound: monofil fencing, razortape concertina, roboturrets, the full Monty.

  The tunnel is very valuable still, despite the high-voltage cables running through it not having carried a current in years; both of the Roses like to keep things local, and won’t share or trade energy with t’other Rose as a matter of principle – which, if nothing else, means there’s always plenty of easy pick-up work for a crew like ours on both sides of the Pennines. But the Cold War of the Roses amplifies the Woodhead Tunnel’s other offer: an inviolable infrastructural beachhead in both federations, and the ability to send personnel and materials from one side to the other. The North’s answer to the Eurotunnel, as the old joke used to go... though people stopped telling that one after Kentish separatists brought down the roof on a few thousand indentured refugees from Greece.

  UberStahl’s credentials get us into the killing zone between the compound’s outer and inner fences. Three bored-looking techs and a security goon with meth-head eyes emerge from the gateway module, buttoning up EDF coveralls over thick wool jumpers, breath steaming in the floodlit chill.

  “Contractors, eh?” The three-stripe tech is a Scouser; she makes theatre out of consulting her wristpad, while the six of us Surgicals do our best not to look like we’re having our bluff called. “Nothing in me schedule, luv. I’m guessing it’s some sort of emergency, eh? Call from HQ on the White Rose side, is it? Something gone wrong near the Woodhead end again?”

  “Something like that,” I allow, as non-committally as possible. If she wants to do the work of fabricating the story, I might as well let her; it’s a risk, but a calculated one. “Priorité cinqe, though – so it’s all need-to-know, y’know?”

  “Yeah, right. Ours is not to reason why, eh?” She laughs. “But it’s the curse of this particular brigade to be a bit light on the old per diems, like. Don’t suppose HR sent out that overtime we’re owed, did they?”

  Crunch time. I activate a pay-the-bearer draft on the UberStahl company seal, fill it out to the tune of what I imagine Three-Stripe’s monthly take-home must be, and nearfield it to her. “This should explain HR’s position thoroughly,” I say.

  The EDF peeps have a little head-to-head in the drizzle. The huddle breaks; the heavy heads back toward the gate module, followed by one of the lesser techs.

  “Alright, luv,” says Three Stripe. “Our Adil back there, he’s just found a problem with the cam network in the tunnels, see. Take him a good few hours to fix it, he reckons. Mebbe right through ‘til morning. But so long as you don’t mind working without the guaranteed security that EDF’s surveillance systems normally provide to visiting contractors, maybe we could just let you get on with your, ah, job.” Glances at the Kid, looks back at me. “Priorité cinqe, oui?”

  “Vraiment,” I say, trying not to sound too relieved. Someone has to keep up the pretense, right? “We’ll get out of your way, then.”

  “Looks like you’d better,” she agrees. Listens for a moment, distracted. “Yeah, them cams are definitely down. We’ll keep ‘em that way until morning.” She grins; it takes ten years off an already young face. “Now fuck off before we all get in trouble, alright?”

  The tunnel mouth is blocked with thick steel plate, tarnished and pitted by the Pennine weather. Let into its centre, there is a door large enough for a freight wagon, where two dozen meters of rails and sleepers protrude from the tunnel mouth like a rolled-out tongue.

  “Mines of Moria,” mutters Swampy. Something’s got him spooked. I’ll need to get him straightened out once we’re inside.

  “How does that one go?” pipes up the Kid – revived, however briefly, by the prospect of a story he doesn’t know, or doesn’t remember.

  “Don’t ask,” I say, raising the company seal to the authentication plate. A muffled thunk, a buzz, a scrape of metal on metal.

  Speak, friend, and enter.

  The door opens.

  Beneath and between the echoing booms of gunfire, I can hear someone chanting shit, shit, shit, shit.

  I realise that it’s me. My throat hurts. The air smells of cordite and rain, and there’s vomit on the toe of my right boot. I’m holding my fletcher.

  I look up again. Ten yards ahead of the tunnel mouth where I’m crouching, ‘Arry’s hunkered down behind the bulk of an old freight bogey, ducking out every few seconds to send a couple of rounds into the thicket sheltering our assailants, who plainly don’t have the firepower to do much more than they already have, and just as plainly aren’t going to retreat.

  “Hold, twist or fold?” shouts ‘Arry.

  We don’t have the time to hold them, and there’s too few of us to try for a tactical twist that might scare them into a rout. I glance over at Nirmayi; she nods once, closes her eyes. I look over at Swampy, his life pooling red in the mud beneath him.

  “Fold,” I call back. They started it, I tell myself, playground sing-song in my head.

  ‘Arry crouches low, rummages in his pouches, brings out something that fits in his fist, twists it, lobs it at the thicket. There’s a bright flash, a loud crack, followed immediately by utter silence.

  For a few moments, all is motionless but for the drizzle and falling leaves sparkling in the sunlight, and my kick-drum heart thumping hard in the cavern of my chest.

  Swampy had done such a good job of keeping his shit together in the tunnel that I let him out ahead while the rest of us finished our strip-downs in the faraday room at the end of the tunnel. It all looked clear on the cams, so I figured it’d be fine; never much bandit trouble on the SoYo side, if only because no one’s got owt worth stealing.

  He doesn’t need long in the faradays anyway; his ‘plants weren’t networked by design. See, Swampy was a johnny for an academic activist group known as the Prussian Forestry Commission during the Brexit years; he smuggled proprietary data and paywalled papers both ways across the border with Europe, stashed on an encrypted SSD drilled into the bone of his brainpan. The Border Force caught him by accident as he returned from a conference in Amsterdam, turned him over to GCHQ’s wetware specialists. The SSD was locked up tighter than an offshore bank, but they’d used generic parts and shareware to build the crude visual user interface he needed to shunt stuff in and out of it; this left open a high-bandwidth pipe directly into the visual cortex of Swampy’s brain, down which the dataspooks poured, in Swampy’s own words, “every wonderful horrible thing that ever was”.

  His will never cracked, and nor did the crypto, but his mind’s been a shattered mirror ever since. They never made a charge stick, but the media coverage ensured he’d never work in the academy again. So now he rolls with me – with us. He’s plain useless a lot of the time, and an outright liability in a firefight... but he’s got copies of everything he ever smuggled and a whole lot more still stashed upstairs, and he’s saved the company’s bacon more than once before.

  And now he’s bleeding out on a damp April morning.

  I slowly become awa
re of sound again: behind me, the Kid’s ragged sobbing; Wee Jenny, squawking from my wrist-pad, asking what’s happened; ahead of me, ‘Arry Satchels reciting every bad word he knows, as he crawls towards the heap of tie-dye and military surplus that used to be Swampy.

  I hadn’t counted on a scavenger crew camping the tunnel mouth like the respawn point in a poorly designed strategy game. I wonder, with a horrible detached clarity, whether there was some clue I missed in what Three Stripe had said: whether she’d tried to warn us, or knowingly sent us into an ambush. I watch Nirmayi stripping the scavengers while ‘Arry shovels out a shallow grave. Their corpses are gaunt, with the pinched, rat-like features of poverty and malnutrition. Even their weapons are junk, for fuck’s sake; the round that hit Swampy came out of an old .22 so rusty it’s a wonder it didn’t blow up in its owner’s face.

  But it didn’t, so we killed him.

  I killed him. At this point, I figure my karma hasn’t got far left to run.

  I help Nirmayai rig stretchers from bundles of carbon rebar, cable ties and the ragged tents from the scavvers’ camp. Her face stoic, her cheeks wet, she gently zips Swampy’s body to a stretcher, while the Kid tries to argue that it’s no problem, he’s fine to walk all the way to Rust City.

  Funny how they’re corpses if you didn’t know them, but bodies if you did.

  I walk over to the Kid and give his shoulder a gentle shove; he goes down like a crane in a gale.

  “You can barely stand, let alone walk,” I snap. “Lay down, Kid.”

  “Okay, boss,” he whispers. Those whipped-puppy eyes, sure – but at the same time, the supplication to the role. The comfort of knowing his place in the tale, of thinking I know mine.

  I walk away a bit, face east and look out over God’s Own CountryTM: the White Rose Federation stretches away from my feet to the North Sea coast, or whatever’s left of it.

  I try to think about the route ahead, make plans, but it all feels inevitable now. The threads are all tugging in one direction.

  We reach the checkpoint at Penistone, and there’s a long line: rural fringers heading in to the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire to trade whatever they can breed, grow, make or find out in the foothills. With typical SoYo reticence, no one passes more than pleasantries with the barely-disguised mercenary crew carrying a corpse and a soon-to-be-corpse on jerry-built stretchers, and it’s all I can do not to scream at them that yes, one’s dead and one’s dying and it’s all my fucking fault and can’t you just for a change lay the sacred institution of queuing aside and let us through... but mercwerc is technically illegal in SoYo, so we pretend along that there’s nothing to see here, just some humble farmsteaders carrying two sick friends and the sort of tools that’re no use for digging ditches, si’thee? And finally we’re in front of the border guard himself, White Rose regalia stitched badly onto a military greatcoat twice as old as I am, whose job frees him from the burden of polite fictions. He glances at the UberStahl seal, shrugs.

  “Don’t mean nowt round here, duck. Them of you with arphids should present ‘em; them of you without will have to go through certification.”

  I am forced to fall back on older credentials. I look at my feet, exposing my neck. A beep from the border guard’s scanner.

  “Ah, reyt,” he says. “Elaine Halfway. You’ve citizenship, system says.”

  “Aye,” I reply. I’ve not heard that surname in a long time. “Can I vouch for the unchipped?”

  “You can, that. Means you tek responsibility for ‘em, though?”

  I look back at Swampy; at the Kid, panting like a dog with sunstroke.

  “Aye,” I say. “I do, that.”

  I thumb the forms; the guard waves us through.

  Twenty minutes being prodded and observed in customs; by the time we’re out, Wee Jenny’s booked us space in a livestock truck for the ride down the line to Sheffield, and I’ve made a voice-call I’d planned never to make. We ride the rails in silence; at New Victoria station, I bundle Nirmayi and the Kid into a pedal-taxi.

  “Aren’t you coming?” she asks.

  “Best if I don’t. He’s all checked in, it’s all arranged. I’ll come find you both tomorrow morning. Tim’ll fix him up, I promise.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be fine. Home town, remember? Now go.”

  She goes, grudgingly. The crew disperse to find lodgings of their own. I find a cheap room just off the Wicker, lay down, stare up at the map of stains on the ceiling, looking for a route out. I consider leaving, rehearse it in my mind: see myself boarding the early milk train for Hull, maybe taking sail for the New Hanseatic.

  Instead, I go outside, bundled against the wind from the east. I wander the streets of my past, waiting for one more dawn.

  Next day, morning; what was once Royal Hallamshire Hospital. More memories, but I’m too tired to manage them. The crew’s all here. Doctor Tim’s telling the Kid the score re: his renals.

  “You’ll never get full function, I’m afraid. 70% optimal for your demographic, maybe; if you were a drinker, you’re not any more.” Firm but gentle: Tim learned his bedside from doctors who fled the collapse of the NHS. “We dropped in a generic firmware, but we can’t do anything about the MAC, so keep them off your uplink bus permanently. The licensee can flash a new firmware remotely, and a new license might not leave you time to cross the mountains and let your boss beg a favour.”

  The Kid slurs fulsome thanks to Tim, loved-up on morphine and the prospect of more life to come. “Uh’m glad that you an’ Elaine are friends, Tim. So glad.”

  “We’re not friends,” Tim replies. Here it comes. “We were colleagues, once.”

  “The Surgicals!” The Kid beams, a bright light against the black hole yawning open inside my chest. He’s always loved the story. Loves any story; they’re all the same to him. “You skated together, right? In the Brexit years?”

  Tim just looks up. Straight at me. A look he gave me once before. We’re so close to the end, now. I’m so close. Almost as close as I was to Tim.

  “No, we never skated together; that’s just a story your boss made up. Her brand narrative, if you like: the Sheffield Surgicals, former medical student roller-derby stars turned techno-ronin adventurers after the balkanisation of the health sector!

  “But most of the originals quit, of course, or died. No one remembers the old days apart from her, do they? Because none of you were there.”

  He’s still looking straight at me. And I’m looking back, and I don’t know what my face is saying. I want him to stop there. But I want him to finish it, too.

  And he does. Looks around at all the others, then back at me. “So none of you know it’s all lies,” he says.

  The Kid’s face folds up in pantomime sorrow. “Every story needs a little bit of fiction,” he starts.

  Tim snaps, and something inside me snaps at the same time. The last thread holding the mask on, maybe. “Sheffield Surgicals was never a fucking roller derby team, OK? It was a private medical research start-up. The NHS folded half way through our training, so most of us took private sector work – frontline care, palliative, subscription A&E. There was little research work going, and what there was, was dodgy. But ambition doesn’t care much for dodginess, does it?”

  “Some of it’s true,” I hear myself saying. “I did play roller derby.”

  “No, hang on a minute,” says the Kid. “She quit her course when the NHS folded–”

  “–and then spent three years project-managing a manufactory interface implant that left its volunteer test subjects with permanent psychotic dysmorphia. Rest of their lives, locked in their own heads, utterly convinced that their body is actually a SMT pick-and-place machine or fuck knows what else. She had the grace to confess at the inquest, at least. I’ll give her that.

  “But don’t fall for the rest of it. Elaine Stainless doesn’t exist. The Sheffield Surgicals have never been anything but a way for a defrocked medical researcher to pretend she never sc
rewed up. It may look like a business to you, but it’s really a sop to her guilt.”

  It’s all true. I don’t need to hear it again. I walk out of the ward as Tim tells the rest of it, out into the street.

  The endorsement the company put on my public profile was the best reference a med-tech student could dream of, and ensured I’d never work in legitimate medicine again for as long as I lived; that was the end of Elaine Halfway. Elaine Stainless took her place a little later, after my old derby team folded, leaving me lumbered with the continuity accounts of one failed business, and control over the registered domains and brand identity of another. I put two and two together, and convinced everyone they saw a four.

  And this is the end of Elaine Stainless, it seems. I thought I was helping those I’d harmed before, somehow – that I was making amends. I still think that now, if I’m honest. It’s not like there’s anything else I can do. Your backstory always gets you in the end.

  I can’t let it end there, though. Not like this. This isn’t just my story, after all.

  One by one, my crew come out in silence and join me on the wall outside the hospital – all but the Kid, of course.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell them.

  Beside me, Nirmayi shrugs. “We all knew anyway.” She takes my hand in hers.

  “Even the Kid?” I ask.

  “Well, no, but he’s over the moon right now. He just got to be part of the denouement of a twenty year story! Keeps asking Tim to find him an agent.”

  I smile. The expression feels like it doesn’t belong on my face, like a poorly fitted dust-mask.

  “Maybe we should all find one,” I say.

  Or maybe, just for once, I should wait for someone to find me first.

  Between Nine and Eleven

  Adam Roberts