Old Ironsides Read online

‘You’re gonna be in good hands, boy. I’ll make sure of it, understand?’

  Nathan nodded. ‘I know, dad.’

  Gerry squeezed again, and then embraced his son. ‘I’ll do everything, son, everything I can to bring you back.’

  Nathan fought back his tears, too weak now to hold his father.

  ‘I know dad,’ he replied, exhausted. ‘You need to go.’

  Gerry released him and Nathan watched as his family left. He forced himself to keep the smile on his face, forced himself to keep his eyes open against the crushing fatigue until the very last moment that Amira was out of sight, and then he sagged back onto the bed and closed his eyes.

  *

  ‘You’re sure this will work?’

  Gerry Ironside stood outside the center’s private suite as Doctor Reinheart, a senior pathologist with a shock of white hair and gentle brown eyes, replied.

  ‘This procedure will work, but you must understand that it has only been performed a few times before. It really is ground breaking research and we don’t know the long term consequences of…’

  ‘Will he live?’ Gerry demanded.

  The doctor sighed. ‘He will not,’ he replied. ‘Your son will die here today, Mister Ironside, but whether he will live again depends on how this technology evolves and whether we can find a cure for whatever it is that’s inside of him.’

  ‘That thing, that virus, took the life of Grant Rogers and now my son’s almost gone from us!’ Gerry growled. ‘How long will it take to find a cure?’

  ‘Grant Rogers died from hypothermia,’ Doctor Reinheart said, ‘you know this. Whatever got inside Nathan did not have the chance to infect Grant because he was already deceased. The coroner’s verdict was fully accepted by the courts and the Rogers family. What we’re dealing with here is something completely different.’

  Reinheart gestured for Gerry to follow him across the laboratory to a computer monitor, where he gestured at the screen.

  ‘These things, whatever they are, are the cause of your son’s illness. Until we know what they are, we won’t know how to treat them.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  Reinheart sighed again as he looked at the screen.

  ‘The British were the first to discover these things, in 2014. They sent a balloon twenty miles into the atmosphere and captured microscopic aquatic algae, biological organisms known as extremophiles, living high in Earth’s atmosphere that could only have come from space. Their findings were published in a paper during the Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology conference in San Diego last month. The entities they described varied from a colony of ultra-small bacteria to two unusual individual organisms - part of a diatom frustule and a two hundred micron-sized particle mass interlaced with biofilm and biological filaments.’

  ‘In English, doctor,’ Gerry insisted.

  ‘The findings confirm that life is common in our universe both around and between the stars,’ Reinheart replied. ‘The seeds of life exist all over the universe and travel through space from one planetary system to another. We’re still coming to terms with all of this, still studying the data. I have no idea when it will be that we’ll understand what we’ve got here.’

  Gerry looked at the monitor, which showed images taken through a microscope of tiny organisms now populating his son’s weakened body. Some had segmented necks connected to tear-drop shaped bodies. Others were like small animals, but the majority were spheres that seemed to leak what he had been told by the doctors was a biological substance they had simply named “goo”. But what had frightened Gerry the most was that the spheres, each as wide as a human hair, had all been identified via X-ray analysis as being made from titanium and traces of vanadium. They had also found that it had a “fungus-like knitted mat-like covering”, a combination known to no species on earth.

  Gerry looked at the image for a moment longer and then turned to Doctor Reinheart.

  ‘Can you save my son’s life?’

  ‘I can only hope to cure the disease in the long term,’ the doctor replied. ‘But this illness is resistant to everything we have, and we’re on the cusp of the post-antibiotic era as it is. Your son’s sickness may already have spread and it’s possible that there will be no effective treatment available for some time.’

  ‘You’re saying you’re not giving him anything to fight the sickness?’ Gerry asked in horror.

  ‘I’m saying that there is nothing to fight this sickness,’ Reinhart replied. ‘Bacteria able to resist the drug of last resort, colistin, have been identified in patients and livestock in China. That resistance will spread around the world and is already raising the spectre of untreatable infections. Your son is just one of the first victims, Mister Ironside – if the antibiotic apocalypse should occur, medicine could be plunged back into the dark ages within years. Common infections will kill again, while surgery and cancer therapies reliant on antibiotics will be under threat. The resistance we’re seeing has already spread between a range of bacterial strains and species, including E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, with strains seen in Laos and Malaysia. When the gene responsible, MRC-1, goes global, and I promise you that it will, then there will no longer be an effective medicine against the majority of human ailments.’

  Gerry stared at the alien bacteria on the screen, his mind already filled with the doctor’s apocalyptic vision of a future without medicine.

  ‘How often is this happening?’ he asked.

  ‘Five years ago, discovering antibiotic resistance to most illnesses was a non-event’, the doctor replied. ‘Now we’re seeing a dozen cases a month in every major medical facility in the United States. MRC-1 connects with other genes extremely easily, creating pan-resistance across many forms of infection and exacerbating the problem. I’m sorry, Mister Ironside, but your son is just one of many facing an illness that now literally has neither a cure nor a treatment, and things will only get worse for us all as time goes on. I cannot cure Nathan, not here, not now. It will be up to your life extension service to preserve your son for as long as it takes to produce that cure.’

  Gerry nodded and looked across the center to where a team of private doctors was waiting.

  ‘They’re ready,’ Reinheart said. ‘As soon as Nathan passes away, the cryoprotection process will begin. Nathan’s body fluids will be removed and replaced with a saline solution, a form of anti-freeze that will allow his body to be deep frozen without suffering large-scale tissue damage. This will cool the cells to minus one hundred twenty degrees without ice forming, a process called vitrification. Nathan’s body will then be cooled further to minus one hundred ninety six degrees Celcius and stored indefinitely in liquid nitrogen, at which point the process is complete and Nathan will be in biostasis, perfectly preserved.’

  Gerry nodded, barely hearing the doctor as he looked at his son. A soft beeping noise alerted the doctors and a nurse moved to Gerry’s side and rested a hand gently upon his arm. ‘He’s gone, Mister Ironside.’

  Gerry’s jaw twisted painfully as he forced himself not to cry, and he stared at the floor as Reinheart went on while the cryogenics doctors rushed into his son’s suite.

  ‘But he’s not really gone,’ the doctor said. ‘Real death only occurs once a dying body begins to shut down and its chemicals become so “disorganised” that medical technology cannot restore them. Your son will not reach that stage and will live on in perpetuity until we can figure out how to cure him.’

  Gerry reached out and gripped the doctor’s shoulder.

  ‘For his family, doctor, please don’t make us wait too long. I have money, we can pay for him to remain in stasis for as long as required.’

  Doctor Reinheart smiled.

  ‘We’ll do everything we can, sir,’ he assured Gerry. ‘Hopefully, we’ll have Nathan out of his biostasis capsule and back on his feet in no time.’

  ***

  III

  Phoenix Heights, New Washington,

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p; Sol Date 2417

  ‘He’s coming out, stand by.’

  New Washington Police Detective Kaylin Foxx leaned against a wall that overlooked 15th and Constitution, the sound of traffic humming by overhead as she watched and waited. The sky above was a vivid blue flecked with white clouds that drifted across the heavens.

  Alongside the city’s northern beltway was a series of high-rise projects that had long since been the blight of New Washington, a haven for the criminal low life packed inside. The drug trade, which prospered despite the complexities of living in such a city, had produced a new underbelly that Kaylin and her fellow officers had long fought to eradicate, but those down in the capital seemed to care little for their brethren in New Washington. Phoenix Heights had become the epicentre of the Shiver trade: a new form of bio-implant drug that caused the user to experience two lives of unimaginable ecstasy at once via an exotic and highly dangerous shifting of perceived reality, the user “shivering” between each. The drug took advantage of the fact that the human brain could “lucid dream”, a near-awake state that allowed dreams to be experienced as absolute reality: the phenomenon was natural, but short lived and hard to control. Shiver gave the user that control, leading to an addiction that eventually led to substance abuse, brain overload, an inability to distinguish between reality and dreams, and eventually death by misadventure. The proximal cause was usually suicide, either by the use of the drug or by an individual’s inability to procure more of it, forcing them to face reality on its own terms.

  ‘Got him.’

  Kaylin spotted the local bad actor they were intent on busting off the streets the moment he swaggered out of the high-rise and onto the topwalk. Viggen Polt was a long serving member of the Prime Time gang, so called because of their habit of recruiting young men in the prime of their physical fitness in order to evade law enforcement. His dark skin and black clothing helped him to blend in to his surroundings in the eternal night of New Washington, the flare of the blue sky above brilliant and yet unable to penetrate the city’s deeper, darker depths. Kaylin looked up at that beautiful blue and wished that she could breathe the air down there, but such things were the stuff of dreams and far beyond her…

  ‘He’s on the move.’

  ‘I’m on him,’ Kaylin whispered, her implanted microphone amplifying her voice for the other members of her team to pick up. ‘Keep your distance, let’s not spook him into a chase.’

  Viggen Polt was in supreme physical condition as a result of regular exercise and a series of biomechanical enhancements obtained from the vibrant black-market trade in life enhancing prosthetics. Most were modified from those used by hospitals to replace limbs lost in accidents, where the patient’s own tissues were used to regrow the limbs: instead of replacing the natural limb, the black-market version would be enhanced by molecular titanium reinforcements, a nanofiber mesh woven into the fabric of human skin that gave increased durability and rendered the wearer virtually impervious to pain. Outlawed almost a century before, dealers like Viggen made full use of the enhancements along with a multitude of other modifications in direct contravention of the law and under the veil of “human rights” directives that enshrined the citizen’s right to self-enhancement if born deformed or deficient in any way. Viggo had been born perfectly healthy, but had chosen black market surgery to remove his legs to make legal way for his enhancements.

  ‘He’s heading for the southern quadrant, mark the time,’ Kaylin said into her microphone as she walked casually along a hundred metres behind Viggen and joined the beltway.

  The beltway, or simply The Belt, was a conveyor system that ringed New Washington and carried commuters and pedestrians along at a spritely pace without the need for the flying vehicles humming through the skies above. As the belt carried Kaylin away from the towering blocks of Phoenix heights, so she got her first true sight of that sky.

  The perfect blue vault of the heavens was laced with speckles of distant cloud, and she could see their shadows beneath them on the surface of the ocean far below. The panoramic view above spanned only a fraction of Earth’s surface, in this case the Pacific Ocean as it passed by three hundred kilometres below. Kaylin could see tiny island chains scattered amid the ocean, and across the view stretched immense girders that supported New Washington’s vast ray-shielding that kept warmth in and the radiation and vacuum of space out. As the surface of the Earth drifted by below it also rotated in a dizzying effect as New Washington spun in space, the motion producing the natural gravity felt by the population occupying the outside of the space station’s disc-like ring.

  Built before the scientists who designed such cities had been able to grasp the fundamentals of the Higgs Boson’s control of mass and gravity, New Washington relied instead on good old-fashioned centrifugal motion: the orbiting platform spun at a rate sufficient to generate one-G of acceleration on the inside of its outer ring, The Belt, thus providing natural gravity for those living there. In the centre of the station the docking and loading bays allowed visiting spacecraft to land without worrying about gravity – docking clamps ensured that they could unload passengers and goods safely before departing again. Not dissimilar in appearance to the ancient drawings of science-fiction writers from centuries before, New Washington’s ring-like form was now some ten kilometres across, having been repeatedly expanded to accommodate a population that could no longer afford to live on the surface. The spread of the housing projects at the four points of the station’s wheel, named the Four Corners, had become a stain of poverty on what had once been mankind’s flagship orbital living-space, back then ironically only available to those super-wealthy enough to afford it.

  ‘He’s heading down.’

  Kaylin kept her eyes fixed upon Viggo as he headed for the off-ramp of the Belt and toward the elevators that would carry the user deeper into the city.

  ‘I’m still eyes on,’ Kaylin said as she stepped off the Belt and onto a gantry walkway that spanned a vertiginous drop into the depths of the city, where vehicles hummed through the darkened skies, their small engines capable of resisting the weaker pull of gravity.

  Viggo was heading for the docks near the center of the station and the likely location of whoever was supplying him with drugs from the planet’s surface. Shiver, essentially a genetically altered neurotoxin farmed from an exotic species of puffer fish, was grown in laboratories hidden in the vast wildernesses that made up much of planet Earth before being shipped up to the ghettos of New Washington, New Chicago and other major orbiting platforms. Kaylin used the flow of pedestrians along the gantry to conceal herself as she followed Viggo toward the elevators. As he went right, she went left and entered the next available slot.

  ‘Eyes off,’ she whispered as she walked. ‘He’s on Pad Four. Orion team, you have the watch.’

  As she waited for the elevator doors to close she saw an unmarked patrol vehicle ease out from a parking platform several hundred feet below and begin to cruise slowly up toward the higher levels. Inside were two detectives attached to Kaylin’s Anti-Drug Unit; Lieutenant Jay Allen and Lieutenant Emilio Vasquez. Jay was a career officer who had joined the corps from high school in New Chicago, while Vasquez was a former soldier who had switched to law enforcement for the better pay and the increased chance of picking up hot dates due to his uniform. The pair could not have been more different, and duly were inseparable partners with five long years’ service behind them in the unit.

  As the banks of elevators went up and down, the cruiser moved until its occupants could see through Pad Four’s transparent doors.

  ‘The doors are closed, he’s still inside. We’ve got him,’ Vasquez said, his tones clipped and terse, the military man still very much in evidence.

  Kaylin didn’t reply as the elevator doors closed and the pad began to ascend above the depths of the city. The brightly illuminated Earth that filled the skyline was slowly revealed in all its glory as the elevator rose above the towering spires of city blocks, gigantic pillars fl
ecked with lights from homes and businesses. Generally, the lower one descended into the city the harder life got, largely due to the increased gravity and the fact that most of the smog and the denser air was located on the city’s Belt. Much like the fabled old cities of Earth, the poor lived in the gutters while the wealthy, in as far as New Washington inhabitants could become wealthy, dwelt above. The richest few lived not on the station at all but on Earth itself.

  The elevator cruised ever upward, the traffic increasing as the gravity eased and Kaylin felt herself light on her feet. The load on her heart began to decrease, but her lungs had to work harder as the air pressure dropped. Most folk had a hard time dealing with the constant shift in environment, another reason that the wealthy now avoided the orbiting cities. Kaylin spent most of her time near the Belt to ensure her fitness was at its peak: dudes like Viggo preferred enhancements.

  The elevator cruised past the lofty spires of the upper levels and approached the docking bays, and along with the other passengers Kaylin reached down to her belt and activated the mesh grips on the soles of her boots. Designed to mimic the ability of insects to grip smooth surfaces even when upside down, the mesh on the soles of Kaylin’s boots consisted of a fine layer of microscopic metallic fibres that clung to imperfections deliberately forged into the floors and walkways of the city’s docks and landing bays, allowing the wearers to ‘stick’ to the floor.

  The elevator slowed and the doors opened as Kaylin eased out and looked immediately left.

  ‘He’s on the move, sector four,’ Jay spoke softly to her. Calm, professional, the embodiment of the law enforcement officer.

  ‘I’m on him.’

  Kaylin strode out of the crowds, her hair tied back in a long, dark ponytail that now prevented her from looking like an idiot. Several women around her began tutting as they reached into bags for hair ties, their own hair flowing upward like rippling banners in the near-zero gravity.