The Hydrogen Sonata

“‘Un-promis—’?” Cossont was saying as Berdle talked over her, saying,

“Strong likelihood this is hostile. I’m activating your eSuit and neck-helmet. Please do not be alarmed and remember to put all your weight first on one foot and then the other.”

“‘—ing’?” Cossont finished, as something happened all over her body.

Her underwear consisted of a millimetre-thin body suit which only left her feet, hands and head uncovered. The ship had insisted she wear it, and that they perform a drill before she left to see what would happen if it deployed. Before her eyes, even before she’d put it on, the eSuit had grown an extra set of arms as easily as though it was a big complicated balloon the ship was blowing up, and these had been the last bits to unstick themselves and inflate.

As it had during the practice on the ship, the suit puffed up a little all over, while the thick hems at ankles and wrists unrolled, the suit quickly covering all her hands and fingers in thin gloves and slipping between her feet and shoes in turn as she did as she’d been told and performed a side-to-side stepping motion to allow this to happen; what felt like thin bootees now enveloped her feet.

The thick necklace had unrolled at the same time, extending quickly downward to bond with the collar of the suit while blossoming and closing round her head before shrinking back again to rest lightly on her scalp and most of her face, leaving her eyes, nostrils and lips free under small bulges in the material; the bulges over her eyes were transparent. The first thing she did was tear off the restrictive formal jacket, freeing her lower set of arms. She got tangled in the strap of the shoulder bag, finally setting it securely back in place over her head.

~The problem is located in the primary shaft control node, Berdle told Parinherm. ~It is under continual and dynamic effector load from apparatus it is beyond the abilities of our local assets to counter. I am sending a missile component to the location to attempt some sort of intervention.

~A missile? Are we escalating to—?

~Your pardon. Missile as in, for example, scout missile. Decimetre-scale, field-powered, non- expendable.

One hundred metres away horizontally from the arrested lift and fifty metres higher, within a service space in a suspended ceiling over a dark, unoccupied lecture theatre, a stubby cylinder the size of a fat pen jerked into motion. It lifted and stabbed forward, flourishing an angstrom-fine cutting field that sank into and peeled back the thin metal covering of an air duct.

The missile was one of three Displaced into the spherical Incast facility by the Mistake Not… , along with various other bits and pieces of potentially useful equipment, almost all of which were rapidly redeploying to suit the current situation.

The missile slipped into the duct and accelerated hard, within metres achieving speeds which caused a wave of expansion and compression to travel down the ducting with it, making the duct’s metal creak and its supports groan. Razor-sharp grilles inside the ducting, stationed every few tens of metres to stop animal pests using the ducts as runs, were despatched in field-sliced showers of glittering shards, barely slowing the device at all.

“Fuck,” Cossont breathed, looking from Parinherm to Berdle. “This isn’t good, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” the avatar agreed, then its head flicked — impossibly fast for a real human — towards the lift’s manual control panel, an instant before a gentle beeping noise came from the speaker grille.

Parinherm seemed to be about to speak, but Berdle held up one finger. In a neutral voice, he said, “Yes?”

The missile came to the end of the useful part of the air duct in a last burst of grille components, exiting into a parallel elevator shaft, flying straight across as it twisted and slowed, bouncing off the shaft’s ceramic surface hard enough to leave a crush-indentation then pulsing up the shaft at maximum acceleration, towards the under- surface of an ascending elevator car. It adjusted its course, jolting across the shaft, aiming for near one corner of the car and bursting through it.

It had time to register three humans present in the lift through the shower of debris, then it was bursting out through the roof. It used its already deployed cutting field like an air-screw to provide a tiny amount of extra lift, then as a fender to cushion the next blow on the roof of the shaft as it twisted and turned again and darted down an access tunnel to the next shaft, braking hard at the last moment as it neared the offending control unit. Below, in the shaft it had just left, it could hear screams. These would likely be associated with its incursion into the elevator car two seconds earlier and probably indicated extreme surprise as well as some shrapnel injuries.

“Is that Ms Cossont, Vyr, Lieutenant Commander, Reserve?” a male voice asked from the grille in a conversational tone.

~Getting some air movement, compression, in the shaft out there, Parinherm sent.

~That’s my missile, Berdle sent back at the same time as he said, “It is not,” to the grille. “Why has this lift stopped?”

“Ah. Then I must be addressing one of the two gentlemen who accompanied the lady. My name is Colonel Agansu, of the Home System Regiment, on special secondment, unspecified. I’d like to talk to Ms Cossont.”

“Did you stop this lift?” Berdle said, voice clipped and severe. “Set in motion again immediately.”

Fifty metres over Berdle’s head, the missile floated in mid-air in front of a control unit barely bigger than itself, inspecting the quivering cage of bizarrely spectrumed energies enclosing the unit and the cables leading to and from it.

~Effector-targeted component and ancillaries highly ext-shielded, it reported to the avatar. ~Actions to control/defeat unclear.

Berdle briefly reviewed the poor-quality video the device was sending, and the missile’s available weaponry. It was the least well armed of the three that had been Displaced, reducing the options. ~Close-entrain all 2-mm mini-rounds, the avatar sent. Set for point, centred, kinetic assist.

~Copy, the missile sent, and squirted all its tiny shells at the field-wrapped control unit at once, far too close together to work properly had they been travelling further than a few tens of metres; as they were travelling less than a metre before impact and detonation, this didn’t matter. It used its maniple and cutting fields to kick them forward at the same time, imparting a little extra kinetic energy and throwing itself backwards as a result. Light erupted around the control unit, temporarily blinding the missile as it extended its forward fields to fend off the blast wave and pieces of debris and used its rear field components to help cushion it against the blow as it hit the far side of the shaft it had flown up seconds earlier.

“First I need to talk to—” the voice from the grille was saying.

~Wow! Parinherm sent. ~Sub-gramme AM explosion fifty up! Correction; series of same but smaller.

The air in the lift seemed to pulse gently as the shock wave travelled down the shaft’s structure. Berdle put his hand out and took hold of Cossont’s elbow. She appeared to have noticed the pulse of infra sound and was opening her mouth to speak as the thud from above came. The blast wave slammed down onto the roof of the car, sending the human, avatar and android briefly up into the air as the whole lift was rammed down a notch on its trio of side ratchets; the three dropped to the floor again, steadied themselves.

~Debris approaching you, the missile sent. ~Medium sub-sonic. It sidled back through the dust and smoke choking the debris-littered access tunnel to inspect the control unit. ~Target unharmed.

It’s a ship, Berdle thought. The unit’s being effectorised by a ship, or a unit as strong as one a warship would carry.

~Pause, he told the missile. ~Prepare full personal destruct, immediately under unit.

“Wh—?” Cossont had time to say, before a series of titanic claps shook the elevator car from above. Her helmet had inflated itself and gone to triple layer above the crown of her head. Berdle watched the lift’s ceiling dent in a couple of places.

Fifty metres above, still in a storm of smoke and dust and a faint snowfall of ceramic flakes filtering from the shaft’s summit, the missile positioned itself carefully.

The voice of Colonel Agansu, from the grille, did a little better than Cossont, getting out the whole of “What—?” before matters proceeded.

~That’s a scout missile? Parinherm asked Berdle. ~Really?

~No, that’s a knife missile, Berdle replied. ~And expendable, as it turns out.

The roof/ceiling above would take more, the avatar decided, and the elevator car appeared structurally sound.

Alarms were warbling in the distance, and the local networks, where not under attack, were buzzing with