Netherspace

by Andrew Lane

  “Think it through, Marc.” She sat down on the bed. “Please.”

  “You woke me up and I’m trying to forget how those Cancri stank when I killed them. And now I got to speculate on something I don’t understand.” He yawned mightily. “Okay. Far as I see it, pre-cognition and creativity, spontaneity can’t get on. Pre-cog’s all about a nice, tidy, ordained universe. Creativity is about a mess, things changing all the time. There’s also intuition… pre-cogs wouldn’t like that.” He was silent a moment. “Oh. Fuck. Was that it…” He told Kara about Tatia’s sense of being watched in the warehouse, and how she felt her intuition had been increasing. And yes, they only had her word for it, but he believed her. Not believed that she thought it had happened, but that it really had.

  “Are we adding two and two and getting an absurd number?” Kara wanted to know.

  Marc shrugged. “It’s an infinite universe, so anything can happen. I mean, what are we saying – pre-cogs of all species in an alliance against the rest of us, forging ahead to secure a future that only they can see? That’s kind of simplistic. And then there’s this potential master race who make all the technical goodies. I mean, maybe we, maybe GalDiv is just looking for reasons why humans aren’t top dog in the galaxy. Like, how embarrassing that we rely on a sack of wet leather like the Gliese. They should be seven foot tall, beautiful and glowing. Maybe there isn’t a pattern, a plan. Just thousands, millions of different species all bumping into each other so tech and science get spread around and no one remembers who first thought of it.” He stopped and shrugged again. “But what do I know? I’m just an artist turned soldier.”

  Silence, broken by the sound of a door slamming followed by hurried footsteps. “If it’s serious someone will scream,” Kara said in answer to Marc’s questioning look. “But then there’s the matter of aliens collecting human stuff for thousands of years. The two dissected bodies… why? What was whoever did it looking for?”

  More footsteps outside, but less hurried.

  “This is about Tse, isn’t it?” Marc asked.

  “He knows a fuck of a sight more than he’s saying. Look, okay, don’t let’s stray into a world best left to philosophers and theoretical physicists. But you watch Tse. You watch him hard. And if you ever think he’s a danger to the rest of us, you do whatever’s necessary to stop him.” She stood up and stretched. “That’s an order, by the way. Not a request. My responsibility whatever happens.”

  “But this is more than rescuing a bunch of idiot Pilgrims,” Tse had said. “What happens here, what’s been started, is so much bigger than that.”

  “This stays between us,” Kara said, closing the door behind her.

  16

  The canteen was empty when Marc and Kara arrived for breakfast, except for Tse. “You look worried,” he said.

  “Lots of questions and fewer answers do that,” Kara replied levelly. “Marc’s just hungry.”

  Tse smiled. “We got porridge re-con with recycled water and maple-type syrup. Last night I dreamed of fresh milk.”

  They ate quickly, soon joined by Tatia.

  There was no guarantee that the Cancri would be at the same place, other than a hunch and a conviction. But they were, half a mile from the SUT. Several hundred of them, more mob than welcoming committee, milling around as if excited. Or angry. Or simply confused. Cancri, who knows?

  The four humans got out of the truck and waited.

  The Cancri mob parted and one of their vehicles with the odd-sized wheels appeared, towing a flat-bed on skids – why no wheels? – on which were two large metal drums.

  They were, as Tatia quickly informed the others, exactly the same as the drums that had fed the Pilgrims, drums in which food and water almost miraculously appeared fresh from Earth.

  Kara glanced at Tse who shrugged. Nothing in his precog universe gave a hint of “why”. The drums apparently did not affect the RIL-FIJ-DOQ’s return home.

  The flat-bed was left in the no-being’s land between human and alien.

  Marc went to look and reported fruit, vegetables, what seemed to be a barbecued side of beef, still warm, and water. Was it a peace offering, a bribe, or something else?

  It was Tatia who first noticed the descending shape in the sky, quickly identified as a human-built SUT. It landed a hundred metres away.

  “It looks like the LUX-WEM-YIB,” Tatia said in a quiet voice.

  “So sorry, here’s your transport back, bon voyage,” Marc said.

  Kara’s AI disagreed.

  < Not the LUX-WEM-YIB. How could it be? GalDiv salvaged it.

  > Then what…

  < Hold on… meet the POC-TAD-GOL, colony SUT, went missing two years ago.

  Kara almost gasped as the insight hit her. She knew exactly what the Cancri wanted. “Tatia, take the truck and fetch some of the Pilgrims who want to stay.”

  It took her half an hour. As Tatia explained, all the stay-behinds had wanted to come and her once iron-clad authority seemed to be slipping. She brought back seven of them, who took one look at the Cancri and walked smiling towards them, which was exactly what Kara had wanted. A moment later the airlock of the POC-TAD-GOL opened and five more Cancri appeared.

  Kara dispatched Perry to search the SUT, and sent Mariana to check which Pilgrims wanted to stay and which wanted to go. While the two of them rushed off on their separate business, she stood watching the scene but not seeing it. Instead, her mind was filled with little bursting bubbles of revelation. Nothing psychic – just facts and suppositions that had been floating around in her subconscious until they had started to link up.

  “There were only two things the Cancri could have wanted from us,” she said to Marc eventually. “Either for us to leave or to stay. Because of everything else, I figured it was stay. They wanted humans here… and now they’ve got them.”

  “All that killing, the hostages?” He sounded incredulous. “Just so humans would stay? One hell of an invite, even for an alien.”

  Kara shook her head, wishing he’d get out of soldier mode and into imaginative artist. “Don’t judge ’em like us. Perhaps death isn’t the same for them. We’ll never really know, but I think there’s a group of Cancri got carried away and took the Pilgrims, maybe wanted to find out about our creativity, although that’s giving them human motivations… and another group found out and caught up to them after the Pilgrims escaped, and brought those two grubless ones to us for Marc to kill. Which could be their way of saying sorry, or their way of saying hello because truth is, no one knows anything about aliens. So ask me again in twenty years, should we live so long. Maybe I’ll have answers.”

  * * *

  The humans who’d elected to stay would have no navigator, medic or mechanic. But there were instructional vids so it was possible the POC-TAD-GOL would go Up again. However, as Kara said, they could well be stuck on this planet for the rest of their lives. And there was no guarantee that the “good” Cancri, if they existed, would stay in control.

  And that was that. Kara gave the stay-behinds the truck. Goodbyes were said. Tears shed, two last-minute changes of heart to stay, three of the same to go. Mariana had elected to stay and would undoubtedly become queen of the new colony, as long as it lasted.

  “How long do you think they will last?” Marc asked.

  Kara had no idea and said so. “Don’t be surprised if they move to another colony planet. Assuming they find one. And get the SUT mobile.”

  “You never said why the Cancri want humans here.”

  Kara sighed. “Because I have no idea.”

  * * *

  “Have you ever danced with an alien?” one of the stay-behinds asked Kara as the RIL-FIJ-DOQ prepared to leave.

  No, but I once killed one in my arms. “Not recently,” she said with a smile.

  The man looked at a couple of crates that Henk and Tate had unloaded from the RIL-FIJ-DOQ. “Are you leaving something for us? We have everything we need.”

  “I’m leaving something,” she
said, “but not for you. For us.”

  Things started to go sour just as Kara and the rest were going through their pre-Up checks in the RIL-FIJ-DOQ, which had been sprayed with Gliese protective foam by the Cancri – for whom nothing seemed too much trouble, now that they had their live humans. It seemed that while Cancri and humans couldn’t communicate, both were competent – or lucky – at guessing what the other wanted. No, change that: what the other needed.

  Five alien SUTs appeared in the sky above them and started to descend. They sported items that looked suspiciously like heavy armaments – barrels for laser and projectile weapons and missiles on pylons. The humans watched on the SUT vid screens.

  Marc looked across at a suddenly fidgeting Tse. “Any ideas?”

  Tse shrugged weakly. “The probability landscape’s confused.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Cancri who don’t want us to leave?”

  Marc wanted to smack him.

  On the screens the approaching SUTs took up position around and above the RIL-FIJ-DOQ. The things that could be heavy weapons swivelled on gimbals to point directly at them.

  “And now here we have a probability path that prevents us from leaving the planet,” Kara observed. She saw Marc’s fists clenching, and the way he gazed murderously at Tse, and she put a soothing tone into her voice. “It’s not a conspiracy, Marc. Tse didn’t betray us.” She looked over at him. “Did you? Tell him. Tell Marc what it’s like for you.”

  “Explain the concept of blue to a man who has been blind from birth?” Tse laughed: a short, humourless huff of breath. “We don’t communicate. We just… see what’s best for everyone in the long term. What reduces suffering and pain and death. What makes people most content.”

  “That long term being, what, thousands of years?” Henk chipped in from his position. “What gives you the right?”

  Tse shrugged. “The fact that we can. And yes, thousands, maybe millions of years. There is no horizon on the future – just an increasing fuzziness – but some landmarks stand out, even that far away: the ones we want to aim for, and the ones we want to avoid.”

  Marc started moving from his seat. “I don’t think the hand weapons we have will reach those SUTs,” he snapped, “and I don’t fancy hanging out of the airlock and firing one, but I’ve got to do something.”

  “Can I suggest a more… creative solution?” Kara asked. Before anyone could answer her fingers drifted over the sepia tattoos on her left forearm, as she simultaneously interfaced with her AI.

  > Ready with Plan A?

  < Oh, it’s a plan now, is it? Not just a vague set of desperate measures and a hope that they might lead to a satisfying conclusion?

  > Stop whining and do it!

  She leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes and accessed the controlling software that sat in the back of her mind, reminding herself how it worked. Mental muscle memory. She’d never managed something this big before. It was going to be… interesting, to say the least.

  < I can handle this myself, you know? her AI pointed out huffily. Kara reminded herself it was just software programmed to inject some kind of personality into the transactions. Wasn’t it?

  > A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, she sub-vocalised. She sent a set of mental commands, one of which adjusted the screens to show the ground outside the SUT.

  The crates that she’d ordered to be left behind on the surface opened up, hatches in their tops and sides sliding back. For a moment nothing happened, but then what looked like smoke began to drift out. For a few seconds it moved aimlessly, but then it began to head with purpose upwards, towards the Cancri SUTs.

  In her mind Kara could choose from several thousand different points of view, as her drone insect army marshalled itself into five thin streams that started to head for the five approaching SUTs, but she restricted herself to a few outriders. Five different fields of vision. Five different Cancri battlewagons into whose open weapons-ports she poured her troops.

  One SUT spun around, almost like a grazing herbivore bothered by flies. Two others tried to disperse the insect drones by firing their weapons. And then the small explosive suicide packages that, in another life, guaranteed no drone left behind, exploded in a sudden burst of energy, taking the weapons out of service permanently and sending the SUTs tumbling backwards, trailing smoke. The remaining two SUTs – or, at least, their staff – seemed perplexed at the sudden turn of events. This lasted until Kara deliberately set the insect-borne charges to explode in the weapons-ports and also on the nosecones of the missiles that studded the outside of the crafts. The two SUTs burst apart, raining wreckage and alien bodies down on the ground below. Kara’s fields of view went black. She felt the loss of so many drones as a sudden void within her mind, a place of desolation where there had, moments before, been a chiaroscuro of sensory impressions.

  “They didn’t see that coming,” Marc said approvingly.

  “Get us out of here,” Kara snapped at Henk. “Quickly.” The anger was a cover for the grief that she felt – irrational, but still real. She had sent a message, but there had been a cost.

  The updown-field generator eased into life and the RILFIJ-DOQ lifted off.

  “We don’t have a call-out fee,” Henk said unnecessarily.

  “We should be okay,” Tse reassured him. “The probability landscape’s clear.”

  No one believed him.

  * * *

  Perry Flach killed himself five minutes after their first dive into netherspace.

  That was how Kara saw it, as did Marc. Tse said nothing. Perry had planned it well, helped by so many sensors being down because of the still-maimed SUT AI. He’d hidden himself in the airlock and then, when netherspace lay all around them, bypassed the safety system and opened the outer door, the traditional way Henk had described of sacrificing oneself to a netherspace snark. The surveillance cameras showed Perry standing naked, his body bathed in the shifting, absurd and sometimes obscene colours from outside. He smiled up at the camera and waved goodbye then turned towards his future, his death. Walked to the edge of the lock and paused, holding his arms wide. Some of those watching on a monitor swore that a tendril of light coiled itself around Perry and took him away. Others said no, he’d dived into netherspace as if it were the sea. A moment later the monitor feed was cut by Tate.

  Afterwards no one spoke much about it. It felt like talking behind Perry’s back. Besides, what was there to say? He’d long had a fascination for netherspace, as the note Tatia later discovered made plain. He’d seen it as going somewhere he was meant to be. He’d also left a clear and concisely written will. However you defined it, Perry Flach wasn’t insane. There was also a suspicion that his career-honed senses knew that a snark was about to attack, and his death had benefited his companions.

  Three days after Perry’s one-way trip outside the netherspace drive went phffffft! and the RIL-FIJ-DOQ reappeared in realspace.

  17

  They sat in the canteen: Kara, Marc, Tse, Tatia and the staff. The rescued Pilgrims were in their own shipping container, unaware that one of them would soon be a reluctant hero. The atmosphere was heavy with tension.

  “Sabotage, obviously,” Marc said.

  Tate nodded. “The odds of an SUT having its Gliese sideslip-field generator breaking down on two consecutive trips is… well, not exactly vanishingly small, but it’s rare. Very rare.”

  Grimly, Henk nodded his agreement. “Look, I found something underneath the platen that we placed on the sphere. Looks like dust or grit; enough to push the platen away from the sphere’s surface. Less than a millimetre, but the moment that happened the entire drive would have blown. Exactly what happened when our revered former mission manager deliberately pulled the platen off.”

  All eyes inexorably turned towards Tse, who bore the scrutiny patiently for a few moments before saying, “It wasn’t me. Even if you don’t believe that, you’ve all been watching me since we got back on board. You know I couldn’
t have done it.” As the hard looks went on, he added: “Look, be rational. If I were going to sabotage the drive I’d just follow Leeman-Smith’s example and pull the platen off completely. I wouldn’t bother introducing anything underneath it. I’m not even sure how I could, without disturbing the contact between the platen and the surface of the sphere.”

  “But did you know it would happen?” Tatia asked. “And why did you say we’d be safe on this trip?”

  Tse shrugged, and looked away. “There’s no clear path to any future that I can see.”

  Henk made a coughing noise to attract attention. “Actually,” he said, “when I checked the other platens, I found that they all had a kind of dust stuck to their undersurfaces. My guess is that the heat of the netherspace drive, or maybe some radiation it gives off, caused the dust to expand, pushing the platen away. Maybe one of the Cancri factions sabotaged all the platens.”

  “We’ve no proof there are any factions. Good Cancri, bad Cancri, disturbed but well-meaning Cancri,” Kara said fiercely. “You’re applying human motivation and behaviour to them. And it could be an accident, simple as that.”

  “But there are factions,” Tse said, surprising everyone. “Two of them. Pre-cogs and their followers, and the rest.” He looked around at the stunned faces and smiled slightly. “Some of you – Kara? Marc? – must be near the truth by now, surely? It isn’t just about the Gliese or the Cancri. Most races have their pre-cog and non pre-cog factions. It seems to be an evolutionary process. Of course, creativity and intuition and spontaneity can’t exist in the pre-cog world. They get in the way.”

  “Why humans?” Nikki asked, her expression stunned. “Why so intrigued by us?”

  “Because,” Tse said with the same infuriating calm, “in this part of the galaxy humans are a young race. The creativity hasn’t been bred out. The older races are usually dominated by pre-cogs. Everything is orderly. Art is refined down to its most basic components. Science also suffers. But it’s all very safe. Except many have a sense of loss, perhaps. Are aware that their civilisations aren’t progressing. And then, a very long time ago, they found Earth. At least the Gliese did. I think that initially they kept Earth secret. Even today only a handful of races know where those artefacts originate. They’ve been bringing them to that planet for thousands of years. It’s a communal museum, an art gallery with only one exhibitor – us. The Gliese only made official contact when human technology would have forced them into the open.” He smiled again. “It’s all very simple, really.”