Netherspace Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from Andrew Lane and Nigel Foster

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  About the Authors

  Also Available from Titan Books

  NETHERSPACE

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ANDREW LANE AND NIGEL FOSTER

  Originators (May 2018)

  NETHERSPACE

  ANDREW LANE AND NIGEL FOSTER

  TITAN BOOKS

  Netherspace

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785651847

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651854

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2017

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Lane and Nigel Foster. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  To the memory of Craig Hinton. Be proud.

  For Tara and Sacha.

  “IF A LION COULD SPEAK, WE COULD

  NOT UNDERSTAND HIM.”

  Ludwig Wittgenstein,

  Philosophical Investigations (1953)

  “WHAT WE’VE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE

  TO COMMUNICATE.”

  Prison captain in Cool Hand Luke

  (1967), screenplay by Donn Pearce

  and Frank R. Pierson

  THERE ARE FOUR STEPS AWAY FROM OUR LIFE

  THAT WE SHOULD CONSIDER:

  • Different carbon-based chemistry in an Earth-like system, such as another nucleic acid configuration, or different linear chemistry altogether instead of DNA.

  • Different metabolic circumstances around carbon-water-based life, such as sulphur instead of oxygen, different amino acids and proteins, or metals as support at temperatures above 300°C.

  • Different chemistry altogether, perhaps based in silicon and silicones – or perhaps chemistry we haven’t thought of, for instance in Jupiter’s atmosphere or core.

  • Totally different recursive systems altogether, from reproducing tori in stellar atmospheres to complex systems of subatomic particles on the surfaces of neutron stars.

  Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart,

  What Does a Martian Look Like? (2002)

  On 15 April 2019, at 14:12:15 GMT, the ninety-three-kilometre-wide lunar crater Copernicus turned sky blue.

  A minute later it changed to turmeric yellow. Forty seconds later it changed to a morbid purple-red. It was an unmistakable signal, a sign that nobody could miss. Aliens had arrived… and as it eventually turned out, they wanted to trade.

  No one knew what else they wanted. Communication was impossible. They showed no interest in human science, mathematics, arts or religion. Nor was there any rhyme or reason to the trade objects they wanted.

  Forty years after first contact, humanity has spread amongst the stars. There are no more countries, only city states of varying size and power. Aliens are still unknowable.

  Humans are very much the junior partner.

  Half of Earth’s population is content with the situation. The other half wants it changed, some by violence.

  Something has to give.

  1

  It was a bumblebee with a light dusting of pollen and a purposeful air. Bombus terrestris, twenty millimetres long, buzzing through the garden at a brisk thirty miles an hour. No reason for any of the three men and two women – all middle-aged and naked apart from the sepia input tattoos on their forearms – sitting relaxed in the morning sun, to see a threat. Everyone knows bumblebees don’t sting.

  The garden surrounded a two-storey house, mostly wood and glass, on the shore of a lake. Distant hills were already hazy in the heat. A smart-looking jitney bobbed comfortably at the end of a short jetty, another reminder of corporate success. The inevitable armed guards were kept out of sight; nothing threatened the fiction that this was the best of all possible worlds.

  Twenty-seven miles away the woman whose mind guided the bumblebee drone cursed briefly and pressed a virtual button off to one side of her visual field. The implant stopped vibrating. The incoming message could wait. Kara Jones focused again on her targets. One of the men, as hairy as he was overweight, apart from the bald area over his forearm keyboard tattoo, noticed the bumblebee as it flew around the table. Apparently no lover of insects, he picked up a sonic repeller that promised to drive away every buzzing, wriggling, many-legged, stinging thing imaginable, and several that weren’t. This insect didn’t seem to notice. Kara watched as the man apparently considered throwing the repeller at it, changed his mind and returned to the discussion. Everyone knows bumblebees don’t sting.

  The bee buzzed lazily around the group several times then flew off towards the trees and settled on a branch. A moment later it melted into an expensive cinder.

  The three men and two women began to tremble four seconds after the bumblebee cyberdrone had been destroyed. The airborne toxin released by the bee was meant to incapacitate, not to kill.

  Kara sat back, the better to watch all five screens, as her fingers raced over controls injected into the visual centre of her brain, visible as a glowing set of buttons and sliders in her visual field – so much easier to use than a forearm input tattoo when controlling a cyberdrone. Controlling one drone was difficult; five drones needed someone with great skill and experience.

  Vespa mandarinia japonica, the Japanese hornet that had killed fifty people in Japan the previous year. Vespa mandarinia was first seen in England in 2016 and quickly eradicated. That was about to change. Cyberdrone Japanese giant hornets, superbly mechanised, settled on each helpless human, injected large doses of enhanced mandaratoxin and flew away to incinerate themselves. Other cyberdrones carried genuine, and angry, Vespa mandarinia japonicas towards some of the guards, released them and flew off to die like their sisters.

  Kara caught herself regretting the loss of her drones. “Fuck!” she muttered, aware of identifying too closely with the bots. They were only biotech – disposable creations. Some operators went into shock when their drones died, usually the same operators who gave them names and remembered their birthdays. This did not apply to Kara: the army of the English city states, the English Federation Army, had spent a great deal of mone
y eradicating emotion from Kara’s combat persona. Infuriating how every now and then sentiment crept back. She supposed it was a civilian curse, and selected a joss that combined nicotine and amphetamine then inhaled deeply. Back in total control. Time to wrap up the operation.

  One of the guards had been stung and was quivering in shock, slumped against a tree. Three dead, genuine Japanese hornets lay crushed on the ground. All the cyberdrones were now cinders, except for one large wasp – Vespa crabro – and if its compound eyes were a little larger than usual, for the moment there was no one to notice or even care. It alighted on each of the five bodies, its sensors confirming they were dead.

  Kara switched from screen observation to full-meld, a small treat for a successful job. She felt the sun’s heat on her body, saw a multi-faceted world before and behind, above and beneath her in a permanent explosion of image, movement and colour. Human brains cannot handle insect sight without a computer to make sense of it all. But for a few wonderful seconds…

  She sighed, switched back into screen/observation and checked the area one last time. The remaining guards were already running towards their employers. The autopsies would confirm death by insect sting, corroborated by one hospitalised guard and three crushed hornets with no detectable biological or technological modifications.

  Kara keyed in a new command and the wasp together with several back-up drones went somewhere dark to melt. High up in the trees various satellite receivers disguised as twigs – flown in at dusk a week ago by drone starlings – turned to dust. The contract had paid just under one million virtscrip and cost half that amount to set up. Had to be death by accident, had to be all five at once. Being killed in other locations, one by one, would have been far too obvious. But leave a little doubt, she’d been told, make it weird, you know? She’d understood. Nothing so simple as a plane crash – anyway, no more than two of the targets ever travelled together. Instead something so outlandish it could only be genuine bad luck – or an immensely subtle and overly complicated assassination to remind the Big Boys and Girls that something was watching them, something more powerful than they could ever hope to be.

  All in all a nice, professional little earner.

  * * *

  Kara Jones was licensed to operate within all English city states, the lands they controlled and foreign city states bound by treaty. She took care of business quietly and efficiently, and was imaginative and flexible; precisely the type of Official Assassin the Contract Bureau valued. There were any number of unofficial assassins, but mostly they were involved with domestic and personal revenge, the sort of job the Bureau would never accept.

  It might have become a screwed-up world since the aliens had arrived forty years ago but standards were still maintained and anarchy confined to the areas between the city states that could be relatively civilised, basic back-to-nature or psychosis-by-the-sea, or anything in between, and where the one could become the other with disquieting ease. City state authorities everywhere fought against giving these areas a specific name since that would mean recognition. In what was once Europe and North America they were generically known as Out There and individuals would come and go, to or from the Out.

  Kara lit another joss, mild marijuana with a hint of opium, military-wiped her computer of all programs, data and procedures concerned with the hit, and dialled up Control, preferring to use the computer rather than connect direct via her personal implant. “Yes?” she said to the middle-aged, tired-looking man who flashed onto the central screen. “What?”

  “You took your time,” he complained.

  She was glad of the calm the joss brought. “Was working. Your job to know it.”

  He smiled like a man concerned with another, more important problem that Kara would never be told about. “Tomorrow, 08:30 Berlin shuttle from London Thames, arrive 10:00, due Main Reception Earth Central Euro 11:30. Have a good trip.” He clicked off before she could say anything in response.

  Kara dialled up Control again. “What EarthCent branch?” she asked when the tired face reappeared.

  “GalDiv. Don’t ask me why.”

  Kara crushed the joss out on the desktop. “I don’t do aliens,” she said, “you know that,” and took a deep breath of the stale air. She’d run the last two jobs from bland hotel rooms like this – anonymous conveyor-belt hotels with a fast staff turnover – and longed for the outdoors. Seeing the lake and the hills through the eyes of her technologically enhanced wasps had only made the longing worse. Maybe she’d spend a few days at the cottage on the Dart river, safe in Exeter City territory and where her neighbours thought she sold high-tech around the world. She’d sail and go walking through the lawless Dartmoor Out.

  “I told them,” Control said. “They already knew.”

  “You think they want me to kill a free spacer?”

  Earth Central’s Galactic Division controlled eighty per cent of human expansion throughout space and made no secret of wanting to control the rest. The free spacers based Out There, in the Wild, rather than under the controlling aegis of the cities, were branded a threat to civilisation, even if civilisation now included several alien species and any number of weird, human space settlements.

  Control winced at the word “kill”. He’d have preferred to hear “handle” or “expedite”. “Who the hell knows? You can always say no.”

  She scented a sourness in the air: her own sweat and adrenalin tainted with anger. “You going to ask about it?”

  “I know it went okay. I monitored you.” He clicked off again.

  Kara shrugged then typed instructions and watched as her computer – the size and shape of a small cider apple – crumbled into metallic and plastic dust. The screens did the same. Nothing could now connect her with the Bureau and the accidental death of five business people planning a pharmaceutical cartel powerful enough to dominate the industry. She brushed the debris into a plastic bag, went to a window and looked across the neighbouring roofs for a moment before slipping the catch. A moment later a plume of expensive dust polluted the afternoon air and a small, empty plastic bag fluttered away on the wind.

  Kara yawned. She stood, stretched and walked into the bathroom. She stood five foot nine, with the long-muscled, explosive build of a jumper, long or high. With the right clothes she could be whatever was needed: an old woman begging in the street; a society woman with enough sensuality to make gay men and straight women wonder if they were missing out. Her skill was one that could never be taught, only refined: the ability to become part of the scene, whatever it was, the stranger who no one noticed because her body language, clothes and attitude were those of a local. She could also be supremely forgettable, withdrawing into herself, become a grey person of no possible interest to anyone.

  Seven hotel staff had come into contact with Kara and while all would vaguely remember a dark-haired woman in her early thirties, none would be able to describe her face. No fingerprints, pheromones, bacterial profile or DNA were on file with any official or private agency. Her army records had been sealed when she transferred to the Bureau, which guaranteed total anonymity for client and assassin alike. There was no threat of comeback from law enforcement but there could be a problem if the surviving family or friends discovered the truth.

  Kara had long decided that all things bad were mostly the aliens’ fault. They were obviously more advanced, with all manner of marvels to trade… and so had begun human society’s great meltdown: people stopped listening to their national governments. If the aliens ignored kings, queens, presidents, politicians and celebrities, why should humans remain deferent? If the free-roaming aliens – whom many regarded as gods – didn’t care about social or legal status, why should anyone else? Meanwhile most religions had dissolved into paranoid fundamentalism or a vague appreciation of “something nice somewhere out there, maybe”. With the death of government came the dissolution of the nation state as all the various tribes asserted their independence. Only the cities survived.

  The c
ities had been run by their own people, and were often considerably older than the country they belonged to. Within thirty years of first contact the world had become a place of city states. Some, like those in England, Europe and North America, formed trade and defence associations. A few hundred years down the line and perhaps they would become empires, even democratic countries.

  Other city states were isolationist, often aggressively. Global security had to be preserved and so Earth Central – the old United Nations but with teeth – was born and became the world’s policeman. Based in the former UN building in New York, theoretically controlled by the world’s most powerful city states, in practice EarthCent was independent. Like any other organisation its main drive was to survive. The best way to ensure survival was to control Earth.

  Meaning that EarthCent would eventually be overthrown by the very people it claimed to protect.

  The Paris Incident occurred a year after EarthCent was formed. An alien Gliese entered a bar and exchanged a large black box of unknown metal for two hard-boiled eggs and a stale croissant. This somehow – the details were unclear – resulted in the bar owner vanishing and the Arc de Triomphe floating three metres above the ground. It didn’t go anywhere but equally it never came down and EarthCent suddenly acquired a Galactic Division responsible for everything alien. There’d never been another accident like the Arc de Triomphe; humans had learned how to control the various updown-field generators – the name, originally a joke based on the fact that the devices controllably moved things up or down in a gravitational field, had gone viral – even if no one knew how they worked. All updown-field generator technology was deemed GalDiv property. The penalty for illegal possession was death, no trial, no last request. Updown-field generators allowed anyone to go anywhere on Earth and do whatever they wanted. Using the devices, space utility transports – their design inevitably more practical than aesthetic – could simply float up and out of Earth’s gravity field then turn on their alien-provided netherspace drives to slide into the amorphous realm of netherspace. Landing was just as simple.