The failure of ship’s systems was terrifying; the look on Gideon’s face was something else altogether. I was almost too afraid to ask what was wrong. It was bad enough that this was my fault. If I hadn’t dragged Gideon into my problems, his ship would still be fine.
I set my guilt and terror aside. “What happened?”
Gideon did his best to regain his composure. “System intrusion,” he said, quietly. “Like what happened to your headware, only bigger. It’s killed the powerplant. ShipMind, too.”
There was a lot I didn’t understand about spacecraft. But I understood the basics of what Gideon told me. We had no power, and no control.
Gideon swore under his breath. I felt glad, suddenly, he was strapped in.
He called back to me, “There’s a chance the attack has opened the rest of the ship to vacuum. We need to suit up. Toss me one, would you?”
I went to get out of my seat, but the harness held me tight. Feeling foolish, I got out of the harness, looked “down” the cabin to the emergency equipment locker. It was only about four meters. However, I’d never been trained in moving in a weightless environment. As soon as I went to move, I started losing my bearings of what was up and down, and that only upset my middle ears, and soon, flailing in mid-air, I was feeling sick and terrified again.
Fighting to keep the panic under control, I was hyperventilating instead, and feeling terrible about that, knowing it was using up our disappearing air faster than necessary, and that it wasn’t helping me. At length I managed to grab a seat and, as I rotated around, banging legs and elbows into everything, I managed to grab another seat. My rotation was too strong and the seat slipped out of my clammy hand.
Gideon noticed me. “What the hell are you doing, McGee?”
“Trying to get to the supplies locker, believe it or not!”
“For Christ sake!”
“I’ve never really done this before!” The whole cabin spun and turned around me. My guts roiled.
“You’ve never done a SpaceLegs course?”
“When would I have had time for that, I ask you?”
“Don’t coppers do that kind of thing?”
“Are you kidding? I hate space travel!”
He swore again, pushed off from his position by the door and flew gracefully over to me. He stopped me flailing around and explained about the difference between arms and legs out, like a star, and arms and legs tucked in, like a fetus. I believe he used the term “conservation of angular momentum” at least once in a way that suggested he knew what he was talking about. He also explained, not too testily, about climbing around, like a crab, using the features of the environment for hand and foot. “And don’t look at your feet. Just look at whatever’s in front of you.”
“Oh yeah, that helps. Thanks!” I said angrily.
I managed to get to the locker and got two of the suits, each contained in a small white spherical pouch, a few centimeters on a side. Gideon told me to throw one to him, probably thinking I’d take too long, and cause too much damage to the delicate cut-crystal and polished brass fittings and appointments of the cabin in all my clumsy zero-g blundering. He also warned me to anchor myself before throwing the suit. At length, when I was suitably anchored, I tossed him the ball. It bounced wildly off walls, ceiling, floor, seats and fittings, but Gideon managed to snag it. He popped the seal, there was a loud hiss, and the flimsy-looking but steel-tough nanofabric of the suit billowed out. Naturally, Gideon slipped himself into the thing without visible effort in only a matter of seconds. I had more trouble, of course. For one thing, seeing the drifting mass of suit material before me, looking something like a cast-off snakeskin, and not at all like something large enough for me to wear, I wondered where the hell to start. It came with clear, numbered labels, tags and instructions both printed on the garment itself and, it said, transmitted straight to headware on three different emergency channels, including animated diagrams. Without such useful help, I thrashed, tumbled, poked, pulled, grunted, sweated and, swearing mightily, managed to get the thing on, and the clear hood pulled down over my face and secured to the suit collar.
Immediately it felt like I was wearing a sausage skin, and I thought I was going to suffocate. Hovering directly before my field of vision — much like a headware interface display — was a self-powered instruction in numerous languages telling me to PUNCH BUTTON X TO START SUIT.
Button X was an unmistakable square patch of vivid red on the front of the suit, and it came with its own self-powered instructions. I hit it with my gloved hand. Instantly the suit pressurized, began to warm up, and a simple interface appeared on the inside of the hood, offering even more instructions should I need to do just about anything while wearing this thing. A layer of smart biochemicals lining the inside of the suit provided air and processed waste materials.
“Wow,” I said, looking around, surprised at the degree of movement possible with the suit.
“Well done, McGee,” Gideon said, his voice sounding confined and flat. “Now get over here.”
I joined him shortly, sooner than I would have expected. The hands and feet of the suit stuck to surfaces when you wanted them to, so movement was less problematic, but controlling my churning insides, and that dreadful suffocating feeling, was tough work. The suit did what it could, even providing an animated display on the visor with the instruction to only look at the display, rather than at the confounding space around me. This helped focus the mind at least, but I longed to get some headware going again. I felt disabled without it.
“How’s it looking?” I said, struggling to position myself at a decent angle.
“Not good,” said Gideon. “We’re dead in the water.”
“Somebody doesn’t want us going to New Norway,” I said, thinking things over.
“Not just anybody,” Gideon said, looking at me. “There’s something you need to understand, McGee. The version of ShipMind I run on this ship isn’t just state-of-the-art. It’s … well, let’s just say it’s been extensively customized—”
I blinked at the word “customized”, and thought of myself, another notable custom job. I also got the gist of what Gideon was telling me. “This attack shouldn’t have been possible, is what you’re thinking?”
“McGee,” he said, “since we’re sharing secrets today, I might as well tell you, the ShipMind I have running the Good Idea is military-surplus, and customized from there. It’s set up to repel just about any conceivable infowar attack.”
I swallowed my shock. “Military-surplus…” I knew there was a lot of ex-military gear on the market these days, ever since the Silent moved into human space and put a stop to our ability to fight interstellar wars. “So you’re saying this ship of yours has the brains of a warship.”
He snorted. “Yes. For all the bloody good it’s done her.” He was furious, but I could see he was thinking hard about his options. Ships sitting in the Hangar Complex routinely received streams of incoming data in a similar fashion to the way people with headware did: flight control software, various database updates, hypertube weather conditions in nearby space, and so forth, were feeding into ShipMind at any given moment. The ShipMind software, like personal headware, had complex and dynamic firewall software designed to filter and repel intruders. But then, no system is perfectly secure. It had been impressive that the perpetrators — whoever they were — had gotten into my headware. It was even more impressive — and frankly terrifying — that they could also get into the Good Idea’s ShipMind system.
“Who the hell has the power to shut down a military ShipMind, for God’s sake?” I said. And then suddenly, I began to see, for the first time, the true scale of what we were up against. This wasn’t a bunch of routine data criminals; this was information warfare. It went with everything we’d learned so far, including Inspector Tomba getting kicked off the case. Somebody incredibly powerf
ul out there wanted to stop my investigation, and was willing to kill me to do it.
It was starting to get a little warmer inside my suit. “And let me guess. Before we can reinstall ShipMind, we have to restore main power.”
“Got it in one, McGee. The powerplant can be cold-started.” I could hear his teeth grinding. His hands were clenching and unclenching.
“Okay. Okay. You’ve got an emergency toolkit, right?”
“I do.”
“But?”
“What makes you think there’s a but?” said Gideon.
“There’s always a but.”
“There is a but,” he allowed. “All the doors are locked.”
“Damn.”
“I’ll have to cut through the doors first.”
At that point I started seeing why Gideon might be angry. It was bad enough that his ship — his pride and joy — had suffered an infowar attack like this at the worst possible moment; it was even worse that he would have to destroy parts of the antique ship, with all her original equipment fully restored, in order to get us out of trouble.
“What can I do?” I managed to say.
“I’ll let you know.” He pushed himself away from the controls looking strangely comfortable in his suit.
“Right.”
He glided up the cabin to a panel on the wall that looked quite innocuous. It proved to contain regulation-required emergency equipment, including the tools Gideon wanted, a custom fab unit designed to produce pharmaceuticals and first aid stuff, backup ShipMind installer patches, and much else. He grabbed the pouch of tools and the small box containing the installer patches, pushed off the forward bulkhead and flew back down the cabin to the rear door, the one leading to the sleeper car area and, beyond that, the storage compartment and then the powerplant.
Gideon grabbed a small circular gadget from the tool pouch and pressed it against the door. He said it was designed to take air pressure and temperature readings through the bulkheads.
“We still have pressure beyond the door. Thank Christ for that,” he said, glancing my way and grinning a nasty grin. He would enjoy finding whoever it was behind the sabotage of his ship, and giving them a lesson in manners.
Gideon set to work on the rear door applying a metallic gel to the surface in a large vertical rectangle, using a gleaming, sculpted black tool that looked like it would mould itself to the user’s hand. I’d seen tactical response squad guys using it to break through doors and walls; they’d nicknamed it “No-More-Doors”; a tailored nanophage designed to eat through specific materials.
“Now we just float back here a bit,” he said, gently easing me behind him with his arm.
The nanophage set to work instantly, eating away through the door leaving a perfectly shaped rectangular opening. Its job complete, the nanophage substance returned to an inert state; the remaining metallic goo dissipating harmlessly into microscopic particles.
Gideon shook his head, clearly pleased with himself and pulled himself through the opening. I asked what I could do. He said, now looking full of daunting resolve, “Pray that it’s just ShipMind we’ve lost.”
I nodded, still doing my best to keep my terror under control, but feeling like I could dissolve in embarrassing sobs at any moment.
“Consider yourself lucky we don’t use antimatter. If we lost power to the containment for that stuff…” He shook his head. “Only crazy bastards use that crap.”
“Right,” I said, feeling stupid and scared — and wishing I understood the physics of star-drive technologies. I was completely out of my depth. What the hell could I do that would be helpful? It seemed to me that if anybody on the ship could have helped Gideon, it might have been Simon the steward, but he was trapped somewhere in another compartment. In any case I knew that Gideon didn’t need any help. At best I’d be the person holding a work light for him or passing him tools — I could muddle my way through some basic mechanical work of course, but nothing on the magnitude of a starship. I’d leave the grunt work and tinkering to Gideon. He’d rebuilt that elderly powerplant like he’d rebuilt everything else on the ship.
I climbed my slow, tense way back through the cabin to the emergency locker and had a look at all the stuff inside. There was an assortment of regulation-mandated emergency survival tools and equipment, designed for use in a variety of hostile environments. There were also various fab-based devices for the production of food, water, replacement tools, a range of clothing and medications, and communication gadgets of various kinds for various conditions. There were also weapons: a variety of polydiamond-bladed knives and an assortment of guns, most of them big and powerful.
Nothing there looked like anything I could use to help us right this minute. A display to one side of my vision showed that we were still losing air and heat, so much that without the suits we’d be in very poor shape right now. That made me wonder how long the suits would last. There were four spare suits in the locker, should we need them. According to a help file I found in my suit’s visor display system, getting into them required setting up a large sealed chamber made of the same material as the suits. You deployed this chamber around you, pressurized it, and changed from the filthy and incredibly stinky old suit, to the nice new one. Job done, you could depressurize the chamber and dispose of it — or in our case, keep reusing it as needed. After fiddling around, I found another help file in my suit’s display system that indicated the suits’ systems could be recharged using same-brand supply patches, of which I found a packet of twelve. Each suit, with normal operations, could last five nominal days and nights.
If Gideon couldn’t get everything going again, therefore, that meant six recharges each, five days per charge, so we had thirty days. Assuming, I could not help but think, this hypertube of ours didn’t suddenly disappear, taking us with it.
Not helpful. Not helpful. I knew that. But I couldn’t help it. It was on my mind. I was doing my best to remain calm and rational, looking for ways to enhance our survival chances, but there was that nagging, unquiet thought in the back of my mind. What if we disappeared? Where would we go? Nobody knew.
As I drifted about the cabin, contemplating my fate, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Kell Fallow. It occurred to me that I still didn’t know much about him. I couldn’t recall anything about my time in the Cytex factory which featured him. He’d said we’d communicated via “the cloud”, but I didn’t remember anything like that. I did recall some snatches of memory, glimpses of things, like hastily-captured still images, of things in and around the factory, which probably date from the post-fabrication diagnostic and testing period, before they did to you whatever it was that made you forget all that. It was frustrating, even upsetting.
Of course, the way things were shaping up for us so far, all of my concerns might be rendered moot, sooner than I would have liked.
I heard Gideon swearing. For such a professorial sort of guy, with such refined manners, it was impressive to hear Gideon swear. The words were spoken so clearly, with such precise diction and rich vocal tones you had to be impressed. However, out of concern for how posterity will remember Gideon, I won’t record exactly what he was saying as he pulled himself back into the cabin.
He had bad news.
“McGee,” he said, looking spent.
“We’re screwed?”
He rolled his eyes; his brows knitted. He even laughed a little. “We’ve been venting our helium-three.”
Even I knew this was fuel. Gideon tried to explain the details; I felt like my eyes were bleeding. The powerplant worked by fusing helium-three with itself, a process that produced lots of energy but no radioactivity. The resulting plasma was then used somehow to generate power for the ship while the drive cores “post-processed” the balance of the plasma, which produced relativistic thrust. Gideon had explained all this to me any number of times.
I didn’t understand exactly what it all meant, but you didn’t need to be a genius to understand the salient point here.
“How much fuel have we lost?”
“I managed to stop the leak. We’re down to four percent.”
I looked at him. “Four percent?”
“That’s nowhere near enough,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “to restart the powerplant.”
It was my turn to swear.
CHAPTER 10
Days turned into weeks. We got used to recharging and changing suits. The novelty of wearing them all the time quickly wore off. I slowly acclimatized, and got much better at moving around in zero-g. Gideon worried about tissue wastage, and made sure we exercised and ate properly, or at least as well as we could.
We were waiting for the powerplant emergency fab systems to brew up fresh helium-three. It was a slow process, not helped by having to run off its own internal chemical power. Gideon forecast that, with the fabs going full blast, it would take 28 days, give or take a day, to make enough of the isotope to cold-start the powerplant. I pointed out what I’d learned about our suit supplies. He said ship safety regulations required ship masters to stock plenty of emergency gear to cover this kind of scenario. When he knew there would be two of us, the day we set out, he arranged for Simon to load appropriate supplies.
Speaking of whom, I asked, “What about Simon?”
Gideon, sucking on a bulb of tea, shrugged minutely. “He’s in his storage pod.”
“The storage pods run off ship’s power, don’t they?”
“There’s supposed to be a backup self-powered stasis mode that provides the bare minimum to keep him alive.”
Interesting, I thought.
Meanwhile, I found that I kept visualizing the helium-three production process as an insanely fiddly sort of jewelry-making, in which very delicate hands with the tiniest tools in the universe created whole helium atoms, but then, with enormous skill and patience, tweezed one neutron free of the nucleus, leaving the finished atom, its two electrons briskly orbiting, as a minute but potent thing to admire. I told Gideon about this image in my head. He looked at me with a cocked eyebrow. Even through his suit visor I could see that he was amazed at my lack of understanding of not only modern physics but of atomic nanofabrication. In return I dared him to look at a given pattern of blood drops on a wall sometime and provide an informed assessment of what might have happened in order for them to land like that. He said that was different. We disagreed.
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