Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  CHAPTER 35

  Mind quietly reeling, I sat for a moment, feeling, if anything, worse than before.

  EVA? Outside the ship?

  “I can’t do that,” I said to myself in a reasonable tone. “I’ve had no training for anything like that. I barely knew how to get around inside a ship in zero-g, let alone clamber about outside.

  Once again I thought about Gideon. I would be very vulnerable outside. Anything could happen. It would be a marvelous opportunity for a “tragic accident”.

  Swearing, I got up. I would just have to make sure there were no tragic accidents.

  I went to suit up.

  The suit patiently explained how to put it on and power it up. Despite this help, I was still making a mess of it. I was also getting headware advisories letting me know that onboard stores of key materials used in biostatic and psychostatic management processes were running dangerously low and I should either eat as many as possible of a long list of foods, or swallow several headware supplement capsules.

  “I haven’t got bloody time for this!” I muttered in the course of trying to figure out why the damn suit wasn’t starting up. The instructions were only slightly unclear. I suspected they had originally been written in another language and then translated into English. The diagrams helped, but not enough. Inside the suit, meanwhile, I was getting extremely hot and sweaty, and there was a pervasive smell of some kind of artificial chemicals I couldn’t identify.

  The fourth time I tried the startup sequence, the suit came to life, pressurized and cooled. A discreet suit interface placed itself in one corner of my visor.

  This hideous ship’s main airlock was also done out in lurid neo-psychedelic colors. The light had been changed to an ultraviolet lamp. The white parts of my suit were so vibrantly bright that the visor automatically darkened when I looked at them. I swear, some of the things on the airlock walls looked like large yellow spiders scuttling around me.

  I couldn’t get outside fast enough.

  The suit interface provided detailed instructions for conducting oneself in an emergency EVA situation. Important controls or features inside the airlock were highlighted in my visor so I’d know what to do. The hard part, however, was always going to be stepping outside. One thing that helped was that my tether cable “knew” where it had to latch, and there was only one type of socket out on the hull. I was still tethered to a latch in the airlock, which allowed me to lean out into the harsh light and allow another length of tether cable to find its way into one of the outside latches. In the sudden glare my visor adjusted itself and turned black.

  All this had taken time I knew I didn’t have. My ShipMind display showed things were bad. The AIADs were relentlessly pounding at its defenses. Without Gideon and the Otaru kernel all would have been lost by now.

  “Right!” I said, gritting my teeth, all set to climb out onto the hull.

  The instructions I was getting from the suit recommended various effective ways to leave an airlock and gain one’s footing on an outer hull. The instructions, when I tried these methods, all appeared to have been written for people who already knew what to do, and who were much more physically coordinated than I was.

  I did finally get out there. I was clumsy, inelegant, panicky and slow, but I did get out there.

  The view, once I got my feet under me and stood “up”, was brilliant. We were in another star system. The local star was a blazing white-blue ball of palpable heat.

  Focus, McGee. Focus.

  Right. I had a visor map of the hull’s surface, so I knew where to find the AIADs.

  It would only be a matter of time before Hydrogen Steel arrived. I wondered how well firemind long-range sensors worked. They could travel faster-than-light; could they also perceive faster-than-light? I was assuming they could.

  My tether latch-point moved along the hull with me, riding a series of cross-hatched grooves in the hull-surface. It felt eerily like walking a dog.

  I found my first AIAD, down near the engine vents. It was much bigger than I expected, perhaps half the size of a hov, and it had camouflaged itself to look exactly like it was just a knobbly, evil part of the hull. It radiated weblike threads that sank into the hull structure. I swore, wondering how I was going to get this thing to shift. It looked like it had not only made itself look like part of the ship, but that it had become part of it, too.

  Walking up to it, ready for whatever the hell it might do, I saw that it had serial numbers, part information, manufacturer logos and i/o ports.

  When I was within two meters of the thing, it challenged me to verify my identity, and advised me that it was authorized to use deadly force. A small domelike protrusion on its side rotated around to face me, giving me a good view of a 12mm gun muzzle.

  I swore, whispering — and suddenly felt the need for a toilet.

  Again, the AIAD asked me to verify my identity.

  The only idea I had would take time to implement, time I almost certainly didn’t have. Plus, there were still two other of these bloody machines barnacled onto the ship.

  I backed away slowly. When I tried zigzagging about, I saw the gun muzzle track me effortlessly.

  There’s nothing like having a large gun pointing at you to really clarify your thinking.

  Back at the airlock, I clumsily lurched inside, crawling like a very large, drunk spider. I phoned Gideon.

  Surprisingly, he answered, but didn’t sound right. “…McGee?”

  “I need your secrets of the mystic East thingy.”

  “…Hydrogen Steel is coming. Only minutes…” As before it was like his voice was coming from a long way away, and that he was dreaming.

  “I know that. Can you transfer that thing into my headware?”

  There was an infuriating pause. “…I can give you a copy of the Otaru kernel. The mystic East thing is cellware.”

  I muttered under my breath. The Otaru kernel said it wasn’t quite up to dealing with the AIADs.

  Then I stopped and thought. If I had a copy of the Otaru kernel, there would be two copies in play instead of just the one!

  “Do it, Smith!”

  “…It hurts, McGee.” He sounded, chillingly, like a little boy lost in a dark forest.

  “Do it!” I was still tethered to a latch in the airlock.

  It took him a few long, frustrating moments, but suddenly I “saw” a blinding white light explode before me. It was beautiful.

  Then, like a delayed shockwave, the pain hit. It felt like something much too large, made of cold black iron, was forcing its way out of my head, and didn’t care what damage it caused on the way.

  I went away for a little while.

  I was in the woodcut illustration of the Japanese garden again. Water trickled; gentle cherry-blossom breezes wafted through my hair; a wise but sick old man was sitting on a rock, eyes closed, concentrating.

  “I don’t have time for this! Hydrogen Steel is coming!”

  The old man’s voice whispered inside my mind, “Tell the machine you are systems tech five-eight-five-g, and that it must stand down immediately.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier, when I could have used it?”

  “There was but one of us. Now there are two. We are stronger. We can help.”

  I woke into staggering agony. Despite that, I struggled out of the airlock, trying not to whimper at the pain, and scrambled down the length of the ship to the AIAD. It challenged me again. Clutching at my helmet, barely able to breathe from tension and pain, I managed to tell the thing that I was systems tech 585G. “And stand down immediately, you bloody bastard!”

  The gun turret rotated away. The machine itself rotated a half-turn, showing me a large maintenance access panel, which irised open. It was a little shocking. For some reason I hadn’t really expected what Otar
u told me to work. Pessimism, I think. Nothing works quite the way it’s meant to, I’ve found.

  Inside the compartment was a fixed display surface offering an array of options.

  The one I liked most was SHUT DOWN AIAD NETWORK. As I touched it, things started happening. For one thing, the web of thread things that had penetrated the ship’s hull, and which were helping in the AIAD’s attempts to subvert our ship’s infostructure, suddenly retracted. Then the AIAD itself moved. Standing back, I saw that it was removing itself from the hull and changing back to a dull nonreflective black color. Within moments it was a machine attached to the ship’s surface only by way of three explosive bolts.

  It was going too well.

  So well, in fact, that I had failed to notice certain things that were now becoming apparent.

  My first clue was that suddenly the light here was bad. My visor was busy adapting to the changing light and glare levels, and the suit was working to keep the interior temperature steady in the plunging darkness.

  “Bloody hell…” I muttered, as I turned.

  At first, it looked like the starry sky was gone.

  Or, worse, that something had replaced the sky.

  I felt a wave of chills that had little to do with the suit environmental systems.

  Realizing what was happening, I tried to contact Gideon, but I couldn’t raise him. Comms were jammed.

  That left one thing. I turned to the AIAD, and scanned its options, and started working the controls, looking through the available commands. “Where’s the bloody help files?” This was an age when even the thing you use to clean your teeth each day has a hundred pages of help file crap, but not this AIAD unit. It occurred to me this was probably because genuine systems techs for the company that made these things had the help files in their headware. In this moment of unbreathing near-panic as I worked the controls, I also spared a thought to wonder about the people who would work for a company that made things like this, and wondered what they told their children they did for a living. “Yes, Billy, I make particularly evil war machines. My job is to make them extra evil by teasing them with pointy sticks and not letting them have food.”

  The light around me was changing. And, horribly, I could feel a cold breeze on my skin.

  I was thumping the AIADs skin and screaming, “Where’s the bloody command for TARGET ENEMY BLOODY SHIP?”

  There was a hand on my shoulder.

  I jumped, startled, hard enough for the nano-grippers on my ActiveTraction boot soles to lose their grip on the hull. I started to float away, flailing and twisting, screaming blue murder.

  As I twisted and panicked on the end of my tether, I saw things.

  I saw that Hydrogen Steel’s new ship was bloody gigantic. It looked like you could park a moon in there. My bladder could no longer cope, and who could blame it?

  I also saw Gideon on the hull of our ship, pulling me back “down”.

  Gideon?

  Then I saw a growing number of Hydrogen Steel node Cubes gathering on the hull of our ship. As I watched, the numbers looked like they were doubling, like technological bacteria. Soon they would cover the entire hull. It was already hard to make out the shape and garish colors of the ship. And even up here, adrift, I could feel that icy breeze against my skin, blowing me “back”.

  Gideon was holding me and making sure my boots bonded once more with the hull. He touched his helmet to mine. “Can you hear me in there, McGee?” he said, his voice muffled but clear enough.

  “Smith!”

  “My apologies for making you jump. I should have realized.”

  “You’re back? You went away for a while there…”

  “I am and I am not. The Otaru kernel constructed an emulation of my personality and is using that to drive my physical body and interface with you. The ‘real’ Gideon is attempting to get the star-drive going.”

  I swore, barely comprehending what he had said. “Right. Fine. Okay. Help me get this bloody bastard to go and attack Hydrogen Steel!”

  “It might be too late.” He gestured behind him. The army of Cubes was spreading. They would engulf us, I thought, in less than a minute. Already my four spectral Otaru samurai stood, poised with their katanas, ready to defend me. The Cubes distorted their eerie light.

  I did not think, even on the worst stormy nights in the most wretched underground hovels of Winter City, I had ever been so miserably, shiveringly cold. My suit systems were going full blast heating the air, but I could not feel it. All I could feel was the debilitating, crippling cold wind sleeting through me. My teeth chattered, my breath burned my sinuses and lungs, my joints ached.

  Gideon touched his helmet to mine and, with difficulty, held it there. He was freezing to death, too. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.

  “Your idea or the kernel’s?”

  “Does it matter, McGee?”

  I thought it did, since I had reason to think that Gideon might not after all be acting in my best interest. The Cubes, meanwhile, were closing in, hundreds of them. Only my samurai were keeping them at bay now.

  “I need you to … trust me,” he said, struggling to speak clearly.

  That, despite everything, got my attention. “Trust you?”

  “Yes … I’ve … Got … An … Idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “We have to … we have to … leave this … ship, McGee.”

  Suddenly, the samurai sprang into action. Their gleaming swords sliced silently in the vacuum and shattered many Cubes. Which itself was surprising: I had not known you could destroy such multidimensional phenomena — but then I remembered that the samurai were not real physical swordsmen. They cut and hacked and drove the Cubes back. Profound energies flashed and burned around us, but there were always more Cubes, doubling, doubling, relentlessly doubling. A group surrounded them, despite their dazzling best efforts, doubling faster than they could kill them. We watched, horrified, as the Cubes overwhelmed my samurai defenders. One by one, their glorious light flickered and died.

  Gideon was holding my arm. Touching his helmet to mine again, he shouted, hoarsely, “There’s no more time, McGee!”

  “What’s your idea?”

  Gideon waggled his eyebrows. “We’re going to hijack Hydrogen Steel’s ship.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Dying now of a strange species of exposure, about to be engulfed by the nodes of my enemy, with only a moment or two left, I said to Gideon, “No.”

  “No?” he managed. “McGee—”

  The eerie unlight from the crowding nodes blotted out everything. “We can’t!”

  Gideon hesitated for a moment. Then he reached out to grab me. “McGee. This is what—”

  I struggled to pull away. “No!”

  The Cubes were all around us. I could see our reflections, and reflections of our reflections, deep into their terrifying crystalline structures.

  Gideon let me go. The contact between our helmets was lost; I could no longer hear his voice. He stood with his arms out, looking furious.

  I took a painful step back, shaking my head, feeling tears freeze on my skin.

  A look of growing horror swept his face. He understood.

  He took one step towards me. I backed away, and tripped on a sensor dome. My other boot held, but I lost my balance.

  Gideon took one more step, and he was pointing at the AIAD. He looked like he was screaming.

  Why’s he pointing at—?

  The AIAD’s close-in antipersonnel defense system consisted of an automatic gun firing solid 12mm rounds. I don’t know how many hit me. At first I wasn’t even aware of anything except a staggering series of extremely heavy pounding sensations that knocked me off my feet. Even as I dangled at the end of my tether, the shots kept coming. I had no time to register pain, only a split-sec
ond of confusion. I was only faintly aware of the harsh sound and giddy-sick sensation of my suit depressurizing. I was dead before my body could fully decompress.

  There were a few moments in which I felt suddenly very calm. The tattered remains of my flesh and suit tumbled nearby in a starlit cloud of reddish mist. I could look around. One thing I saw in this fleeting moment of lucidity was Gideon, standing there on the ship’s garish hull as the Cubes closed around him. Suddenly, he sprang up, rising quickly, without his tether. The AIAD was firing at him, and I think a few rounds hit him.

  Where the hell was he going? The only thing up there was Hydrogen Steel’s ship.

  I had time to think: The mad bastard is going to hijack Hydrogen Steel anyway…

  Things went cold and dark. It felt something like falling asleep.

  The old, sick man sitting on the rock in the woodcut illustration was trying to tell me something but I could not hear him properly. He was reaching out to me. His hand was fragile; I could see the dark veins beneath his papery skin. I took his hand in mine—

  And heard his weak voice in my head as my consciousness filled with images from “outside”. He showed me Gideon, wounded but still operational, crouching on Hydrogen Steel’s endless surface, working on his suit. I could hear him. He was furious and upset, weeping, his nose running. I didn’t understand what he was talking about, though. The old man explained to me that Gideon was powering up the star-drive in his head.

  “You’re doing what?” I said, unable to help myself.

  Gideon did not respond. Even as he sobbed his guts out, he went through the final steps to activating the drive.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I said to the Otaru spirit.

  “Mr. Smith plans to avenge your death, Inspector McGee.”

  “My death…? What do you—?” I started to realize exactly what had happened to me. The confusion cleared. I remembered the shredded bits of my suit and body on the end of the tether.

  “You are now part of me,” Otaru said. “We exist, barely, in the vacuum energy, the merest, faintest wisp of what I once was.”