Netherspace

by Andrew Lane

  He’d already asked Kara about weapons training, suspecting she’d say it was unnecessary, the simulity would take care of it. Marc was left feeling even less useful than normal. As useless as an artist with intent but no inspiration. Or a soldier without a gun – and that was another thing: he wasn’t even allowed to become proficient at killing in his own way. Someone else’s experience and knowledge would take over and turn him into a mean fighting machine.

  He began making half-hearted notes about the intended artwork. For some reason salamanders had come to mind and he wished they’d go away. He wanted to blend various aspects of the entire mission team including Leeman-Smith – was that the salamander reference? Surely not – a blend or gestalt greater than the sum of the human components…

  He realised that he’d forgotten about someone who could prove vital to the mission’s success: whoever had volunteered to be the well-paid call-out fee if the sideslip-field generator went phhht! and the Gliese breakdown service arrived. That aspect of the mission had been glossed over, but whoever the person was they deserved to be celebrated.

  Seized by the idea, he interfaced with the SUT’s AI, hoping to find some record of who the person was, but there was nothing. No name, no history, no details. All Marc could find was a barcode reference matching a crate somewhere in the SUT. In that crate was a functioning life-suspension unit, and in that unit was a human being who could save their lives.

  Marc’s mind started to spin, making up stories to explain who the person was, and why they had ended up frozen. Was it a man or a woman? A child, maybe? Were they providing for a family, or were they alone in the world? Were they terminally ill, or did they want to make a contribution to the wide and diffuse thing that was human society?

  He had to know, but he couldn’t. There were no facts, no details to get traction on.

  Apart from the barcode.

  Marc tried to convince himself that he was being stupid, then gave in and used the SUT’s AI to identify where the call-out fee was located. By now this person had taken on some kind of heroically idealised proportions in his mind. He knew he was being stupid, fixating on something that many would think was unimportant, but another part of him thought, Well, isn’t that the point? Doesn’t this person deserve to have their name known?

  The crate was in a storage container near the control unit and the sideslip-field generator. Marc found his way to it, and used his implant and the SUT’s records to identify which of the grey ceramic crates stacked on either side of an aisle was the one containing his hero. There were no distinguishing features apart from the barcode. No nameplate, no small frosted pane of glass through which the person’s face could be seen. Nothing to tell him who they were, or what they had done to deserve their fate. After a few minutes staring at it Marc turned away, frustrated. Another good idea ending up in nothing.

  As the days dragged by, Marc found himself spending time with Tate Breckmann. The mechanic was entertaining, with insightful ideas about art. Good-looking, but not enough to be a distraction. Marc’s work had always existed somewhere on the axis that led from art to engineering, even if biological. Tate was a useful sounding board for the more structural problems that were biting at Marc’s mind. A bottle of brandy would have made the conversations even more interesting but Tate didn’t drink.

  “So what happened to your exploration SUT?” Marc asked the mechanic once.

  “Repair yard,” Tate said briefly. “Damaged on our last trip Up.”

  “Your manager’s on vacation?” Pushing it, but Marc had become very curious.

  Tate looked at him with mixed pity and anger. “He died out near Aldebaran and we couldn’t bring him home.”

  And that was that. Marc was smart enough to know there was a mystery, for once sensible enough not to go any further.

  During another one of their conversations the SUT dropped out of netherspace again. Tate shrugged apologetically. “Sorry – I need to go reset the sideslip-field generator, ready for when Nikki’s figures come through.”

  “Don’t worry.” A thought occurred to Marc. “Can I come watch?”

  Tate nodded. “Why not? Just don’t interrupt.”

  Marc had already discovered that the interconnected structure of the RIL-FIJ-DOQ meant that there were several ways to get from any one shipping container to another. Tate took them from the canteen to the sideslip-field generator unit the long way round that avoided the central command unit where Leeman-Smith spent most of his time.

  The engineering shipping container was silent and dominated by the suspended metal sphere of the Gliese sideslip-field generator, the podium above which it floated and the hub attached to the ceiling. Tate immediately started accessing the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s AI via his cortical implant and either typing instructions into the keys tattooed onto his left forearm or touching some of the more task-specific icons on his right forearm. Not for the first time Marc wondered how long it would be before humans and AIs melded together into a new life form. Or had they already done so without anyone realising?

  He moved closer to the sphere, noticing that his blurred reflection shifted and altered in the tarnished metal. He moved to his left and found the beetle-like platen attached to the surface, determining the time spent and direction of their last movement through netherspace. This one was about the size of a golf ball, cut in half. Close up, he could see that there was a structure to it: little channels and veins with no obvious order or purpose. A single hemispherical bead sat directly in the centre, glittering like an insect’s eye.

  “Don’t touch,” Tate warned, without looking at him.

  “What happens if I do? Just out of interest?”

  Tate shook his head. “You mess with the drive. Do not touch.” A few minutes later he made a “Ha!” noise.

  “Got the figures?” Marc asked.

  “Got the figures,” Tate confirmed. “Stand back, otherwise you’ll get hurt.” The fingers of his left hand danced over the patterns on his right forearm, and suddenly the metal hub in the ceiling opened up and unfolded into a series of segmented arms, each one tipped with three thin claws. One of the arms extended towards the platen and picked it with infinite gentleness from the surface of the sideslip-field generator with a slight click. A second arm reached around the sphere, towards the platform above which it hovered. The platform opened up like a flower, revealing rows and rows of platens. They were all different sizes, and it seemed to Marc that the patterns made by the channels and veins on their surfaces were also different. Why not? As the SUT’s AI had told him, there was no pattern in netherspace. Silly to expect any type of pattern in the method used to move through it. Meaning what – that movement within netherspace was a matter of probability, or luck? No wonder so many SUTs went missing.

  The device in the ceiling suddenly rotated, bringing the arm swishing round and past Marc’s face. He felt the breeze of its passage on his skin. An inch closer and he’d have lost his nose.

  “I told you to stand back,” Tate said.

  The hub in the ceiling halted, and the second arm reached out to take a new platen from one of the rows. Its metal claws appeared to slide into grooves on its side for purchase. In a strange, silent ballet the arm brought the platen up towards the sphere while the hub began to turn again, halting only so that the first arm could reach down and around the sphere to put away the original platen. The metallic blossom of the platform closed up while the hub span for a third time. When it stopped again the second arm moved the platen near to the globe while the first arm folded itself away neatly. Everything paused, waiting.

  Tate walked around the sphere, looked at the platen, then looked at the place on the sphere where the segmented metal arm was proposing to place it. He nodded approvingly.

  “I’ve no idea whether this is right or not,” he confided in a low voice, “but the drive seems to expect me to approve what it’s doing.” He laughed briefly. “Like an expensive restaurant, sniffing the cork from a bottle of vintage wine, tr
ying not to embarrass myself in front of the sommelier.”

  He stepped back and typed something into the tattoo on his left arm. The segmented metal arm moved the platen closer and closer to the surface of the sphere. In his mind Marc imagined a controlling intelligence screwing up its eyes in concentration, and moistening its lips with the tip of its tongue. The platen moved closer to its target, ever slower and with microscopic accuracy. Marc found himself holding his breath. The platen touched the surface of the sphere with a bell-like noise that vibrated through Marc’s body.

  The claws released and the metal arm withdrew into the ceiling hub, which folded itself closed. Everything was back to the way it had been, except that there was now a different platen in a different location.

  Tate touched his arm. “Mechanic to mission manager,” he said in a loud voice. “Ready for next transition to netherspace.”

  Marc didn’t hear Leeman-Smith’s response, which was directed toward Tate’s implant. He did hear the mission manager’s voice on the tannoy warning everyone there was about to be another transition to netherspace and then the standard countdown. It seemed that Leeman-Smith’s main job was to make announcements.

  Tate reached toward the platen and pulled the glittering metal bead from its centre. He held the bead a millimetre away from the curved depression that it had fitted into. Just as Leeman-Smith’s countdown got to “One” he simply put the bead back in place.

  Rainbow lights swelled up in the grooves and channels covering the sphere’s surface, casting shadows across the container. A rustling sound, like sheets of paper falling through the air and rubbing against one another, swelled with them. The sideslip-field generator had come to life again – if the word “life” wasn’t too anthropomorphic. Looking at it, Marc wasn’t sure. It certainly seemed to have woken up from a state of dreaming quiescence.

  And as the light and the noise swelled to their maximum value, the universe shifted slightly sideways again. In Marc’s head, where he had left his cortical implant showing a virtual image of the view outside the SUT, the picture vanished. Blocked.

  Colours began to flicker across the drive. They reminded Marc of Nikki’s eyes during sex. “What happens,” he asked, intrigued, “if you put that bead thing in on five rather than on zero?”

  “We get to our next arrival point in realspace five seconds earlier,” Tate said, smiling. “In some ways this is a very precise operation, but in some ways a bit slapdash. You get used to it.”

  “So what happens if you put two platens on at the same time?”

  Tate nodded, as if he was placing a tick on some internal checklist. “Yeah, someone usually asks that. I had a feeling it was going to be you.” He took a deep breath. “Right – there are two answers to that question. The first answer is, you can’t. The system is set up so you can only take one platen out at a time. To take a second platen out you have to put the first platen back. Why the check? That brings me to the second answer. A while ago someone like you decided to try anyway. They smuggled a platen onto an SUT, one that they’d taken from their previous SUT without anyone knowing. When it came time to slip into netherspace, they slapped the new platen on at the same time as the drive was trying to place its own platen. The later inquiry decided that they must have had a drink or drugs problem. Still, nobody else has been that stupid since – not even when stoned out of their minds.”

  “So what happened?” Marc asked, aghast.

  “Best that the inquiry team could figure is that the SUT tried to slip into netherspace in two opposite directions at once. It just pulled itself apart. Half the SUT went one way, half went the other way, and everything inside just got left behind, floating in realspace.” He paused for a moment. “I’d like to think that the idiot who tried the experiment lived long enough to regret his actions, but despite the rumours hard vacuum kills you instantaneously. Shock of the sudden cold and the extra shock of your lungs turning inside out while your blood boils.”

  Marc made a rueful face. “Ouch. One last question: if we can’t communicate with aliens, how come our computers can talk to this?” He pointed at the netherspace drive.

  “You’ll have to ask the Gliese,” Tate said. “They just can – but only via an AI. And before you ask, we learned how the drive works when a group of humans were taken on board a Gliese SUT and allowed to watch. Luckily two of them were engineers. Even so it took five years before we’d really got the hang of it.” He smiled at Marc. “Fancy another coffee?”

  “We’ll get Tse to make it. He’s got a gift.” He caught the faint rueful smile on Tate’s face.

  * * *

  Nikki had propositioned Kara a day after she’d had sex with Marc. In space you took what you could whenever you could. It was like the old immigrant liners on the England to Australia run: once into the Mediterranean, repressions were loosened along with the corsets. Another time, another SUT, and Kara would have said yes. But she was still angry at being cherry-picked by Henk, satisfying though he’d been; unable to forget his eyes glowing with the same colours as the sideslip-field generator; and distrusted people who’d spent ten years exploring and mapping the galaxy – and who’d lost their leader out near Aldebaran, but were sketchy with the details. Kara suspected that Nikki, Henk and Tate had been contaminated by something in netherspace, crazy as it sounded. She couldn’t see any obvious threat to her team or the mission, but no matter how friendly, no matter that the staff had supported her against Leeman-Smith, she couldn’t trust them. She’d told Nikki that the team was now celibate until mission’s end. It made better operational sense: sex could affect judgement in a firefight. All said with a direct honesty that, given Kara’s own history, suggested an acting career could be a serious option.

  Now, sitting in the canteen and discussing London Restaurants We have Known And Despised with Marc and Tse, the whole pointlessness of their existence in deep space swept over Kara like a shroud. Pointless mission, pointless hostages and pointless mission manager. Really, what did they think they were doing out there? It took a moment or so for Kara to understand she’d been hit by a wave of depression, something she hadn’t experienced since her sister went Up and never came home.

  Depression suddenly became the least of her worries.

  Kara thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She reflexively turned her head to look and saw that the other two were doing the same.

  She froze.

  As did Marc and Tse.

  There was something in the room with them. Except they couldn’t see it, not directly. It was more a movement, a presence barely glimpsed from the corner of the eye, never to be seen full on. But it was there. As was a smell of ozone and an itching all over their bodies.

  Their simulity training taking over, Kara and Marc automatically formed a protective triangle with Tse.

  Marc shook his head. “I can’t fucking see—”

  “Be quiet,” Kara said forcefully. “Concentrate.”

  She wished there was a weapon, even a knife, even though she knew it probably wouldn’t help. It would just give her something to do with her hands.

  “It’s not inside,” Tse said. And then, in sudden understanding: “Oh, now it begins.”

  A faint scratching sound came from behind the plastic veneer that covered the metal wall of the shipping container. As if a mouse were trapped between the plastic and the metal. No, too loud, too determined, more like a rat.

  Larger than a rat. Much larger. A long screech like nails slowly scraping across a roughened blackboard. Or a talon across bare metal.

  The canteen was in one of the shipping containers on the outside of the cluster that made up the RIL-FIJ-DOQ. That meant beyond the plastic veneer, beyond the metal, there was a metre or more of alien protective foam. And beyond that – netherspace.

  “Hic sunt dracones,” Kara muttered.

  “I thought snarks,” Marc whispered back.

  Kara tapped her forearm, hoping her AI would have some ideas.

&
nbsp; < You’re on your own, kid, it said inside her head. < Beyond my pay grade.

  Nothing to do for the moment but wait. Then “Fuck!” as the emergency klaxon drowned out everything else. This one was real, not a virtual sound transmitted into their brains via their implants. Presumably a failsafe in case the SUT’s AI went down.

  “Control room, now!” Kara shouted.

  They sped through the steel corridors, the klaxon shrieking in their ears. Reached the control room to see through the linking corridor into the engineering shipping container – the one containing the sideslip-field generator. A flushed Leeman-Smith was there with Nikki and Tate, all three in front of the metal sphere housing the netherspace drive. The lights from the crevices and sigils on the sphere cast shifting illumination across the container, turning Leeman-Smith’s face from demon to clown and back again.

  Henk was standing over a control panel. He pressed a button and the klaxon stopped. The whispering, rustling sound of the operational sideslip-field generator rushed in to fill the soundspace that was left.

  “Situation report,” Kara snapped.

  “What?” Leeman-Smith noticed them for the first time. “Just shut up, okay? The situation is under control.” He wore a one-piece sleeping suit in a light, furry fabric with the initials MM embroidered on both sleeves above the elbow. Here was a man determined to be mission manager even in his dreams.

  “We’re being attacked,” Tate said, in a normal tone. “Or checked out. Maybe played with.” He shrugged. “Choose your nightmare.”

  “By?” Kara snapped.

  “By whatever. Some kind of radiation, quantum fields, acidic compounds, the netherspace equivalent of pixies – whatever it is that exists out there.”

  “You don’t sound worried,” Kara observed, then jumped as another screech signified that something was still interested in them.