Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  Will’s unease returned instantly. ‘Because I want to help fight the Earthers, of course,’ he replied, blushing as he said it.

  It wasn’t quite the whole truth. Will had also joined up because he hated his life. He’d been bred for the terraforming effort. That meant working on an endless supply of ecological alerts. It meant leisure hours spent in roboteer-only dormitories and whole days playing over memory logs from people whose minds he didn’t fit. It had been safe, controlled and oppressive beyond words.

  His childhood dream was to be a starship captain. But as he’d repeatedly been told, that wasn’t a job for a roboteer. Even if he had the necessary empathy and leadership skills, his special talents were too urgently required at home.

  But Will had never given up the dream. In his spare time, he focused his talents on creating smarter, more creative SAPs. If he couldn’t become a captain the ordinary way, he reasoned, maybe he could create a good enough artificial crew for a ship that would only need a roboteer to pilot it.

  Before his ambitious dream had borne fruit, the war began and the employment laws changed. Aged just twenty at the time, Will had signed up straight away, much to his parents’ distress. Five years later, roboteers were still no closer to becoming captains, but at least he was out of terraforming.

  Bob shook his head. ‘You’re the most high-functioning roboteer I’ve ever met, Will. But you’re also the most stubborn. From all three ships you’ve worked on, the reports on your performance have been exactly the same: excellent work, doesn’t obey orders.’

  ‘I obey orders,’ Will retorted. ‘Just not bad ones.’

  ‘See?’ said Bob. ‘There you go again! Don’t you see how unreliable this attitude makes you look? You got through this one by the skin of your teeth. You should have told Franz what you were doing, at the very least. Ideally, you should have flashed a message to the captain, too. It would have saved a lot of panic. If your action hadn’t proven necessary, your career would be over.’

  ‘But it was necessary,’ said Will.

  Bob nodded. ‘I know. And the truth is, you did great. You were put in a very difficult position and you made the right call.’ He shrugged. ‘As it is, Expert Leung is going to face a personal inquiry and in all likelihood be reposted to Oort defence.’

  Will was surprised by the news. He’d never intended to hurt Franz, no matter how much he disliked the man.

  ‘You, however,’ said Bob, ‘aren’t going to face any kind of disciplinary action. The Fleet isn’t in the habit of punishing good decisions. However, we do still have a problem.’ He steepled his hands again and looked at Will over the top of them. ‘We can’t leave you on the Phoenix. So we’ll have to repost you, too.’

  Will’s insides tightened.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob added quickly. ‘It’s a promotion … of sorts. I’m transferring you to the Ariel.’

  Will blinked. ‘The Ariel?’

  Bob nodded solemnly.

  Will couldn’t believe his luck. The Ariel was famous. It was a Mosquito-Class starship – one of the Fleet’s best soft-combat vessels, and certainly its fastest. The crew were all high-flyers and the captain had a reputation for brilliance. Everyone had heard of Captain Baron. The Fleet common rooms abounded with legends of his exploits. It was a dream job.

  ‘They need a new roboteer,’ Bob explained, ‘and quite frankly, you’re the only qualified man we have available. But from your psych profile, you could be an excellent fit. With such a small crew, they need someone who can take spontaneous action. Someone who isn’t afraid to think up solutions to unfamiliar problems.’

  Will had never dared hope that he might achieve such a posting. It was about as high up in the Fleet as a roboteer could expect to get.

  ‘But I warn you,’ said Bob, ‘this is not like the jobs you’ve had before. You’ll be the only roboteer on board. That means you’ll be responsible for handling every SAP they have. And there’s no room for insubordination on that ship. If you break the rules again, it’ll be in a very high-stakes game. You’ll be out of the Fleet for good, if there’s still such a thing around when you get back. Furthermore, your micromachines will have to be updated.’

  Will barely cared. There was always a risk when they tampered with the machines that laid down the nerve tracks to a roboteer’s neural interface. But what difference did one more operation make compared to the risk of being fried alive by a g-ray?

  Bob peered at him. ‘So, what do you think? Has the Fleet handled your case fairly?’

  Will nodded quickly. ‘Yes, sir! I mean Bob. Thank you. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Then don’t say anything.’ Bob pressed his hands against his knees. ‘Well, you’ve got plenty to do,’ he said sombrely, ‘so I won’t keep you.’

  He ushered a stunned Will back toward the lift. ‘The building will give you access to the confidential information you’ll need, including memory logs. It’ll also tell you when and where to report. You’ve only got twenty-four hours of leave now, I’m afraid, then you’ll have to go directly to the surgery for overnight servicing. The Ariel is heading straight out on a new mission.’

  Will’s head reeled.

  Bob gently guided him into through the doorway and waved farewell. ‘Good luck. You’ll need it.’

  The last thing Will saw before the lift door shut was the commander’s earnest, oddly worried face silhouetted by the gold light reflected from the wall of the trench.

  3: DEPARTURE

  3.1: IRA

  Half an hour before his scheduled departure, Ira took the lift up to the exit lounge. The lounge lay near the Fleet station’s hub, so with every level he climbed, Ira lost gravity. The short journey always unsettled him for some reason and today the feeling was the worst it had ever been. But then, the lounge was where he was due to meet his crew, and his new roboteer.

  Ira stood with his arms folded, staring straight ahead into the beige impact padding of the lift chamber. Rachel stood beside him. Though he didn’t meet her eye, he knew the look she’d be giving him. It was the look that told him he needed to get his act together.

  ‘It really wasn’t your fault,’ she said for the fiftieth time.

  ‘I know,’ he replied quickly. ‘Really, I’m fine.’

  They both knew that wasn’t true. The three days since they’d hit port had been hard. Ira had barely stopped working the entire time. First had come the debriefing. That had turned into a strategy meeting. By the time they were done with strategy, he’d barely had time to grab a little sleep before attending Doug’s memorial ceremony to give the eulogy.

  Telling the life story of a man he’d killed himself was one of the hardest things Ira had ever done, and he’d felt like someone was moving a knife around in his gut the whole time. He kept looking up into the hollow eyes of Doug’s parents and flinching.

  ‘My crew is my family,’ he’d told the assembled mourners. How true it was. Yet he found himself unable to meet their eyes.

  In the past when Ira had been in pain like this, he’d always turned to the same easy solution: get back out there. Usually he couldn’t wait for the next mission to start. The Ariel was his own little world – somewhere to be busy, where he had no choice but to focus on the moment.

  This time it was different. To his surprise and dismay, Ira had discovered that he was reluctant to go back into space. The reason was simple: two more fragile lives had just been pushed into his care.

  One of them would be the Fleet weapons specialist, Hugo Bessler-Vartian. Ira had met Hugo a couple of times before. He was brilliant, if more than a little conceited. Ira wouldn’t have picked him for the job, but he was the best in his field and, more importantly, he’d volunteered.

  There was a warning marker in Hugo’s file – apparently Hugo’s emotional-stability index wasn’t all that high. But Ira wasn’t particularly worried about him. Dealing with fragile personalities was part of his job. Every crewmember on a Mosquito-Class starship had to be at the cutting edg
e of their chosen field. There was no room for extra staff, or for underperformance. Those kinds of intellects invariably came with quirks – often severe ones, which meant that traditional military discipline simply didn’t work aboard soft-combat ships. Ira had spent years functioning as both military leader and group therapist. Personality problems he could deal with.

  Ira’s biggest concern was always stamina, and on that count Hugo wasn’t a problem. He’d received surgical gravity tolerance enhancements before the war. They weren’t as effective as genetic mods, but Ira knew first hand that the man had spent plenty of time in space. He was solid enough, even though he wasn’t from a Fleet family.

  It was the other new person who worried him more – the one who’d just been added to his permanent crew. Ira only had a single requirement in mind for Doug’s replacement when he called Bob at the Handler Farm: high gravity tolerance.

  ‘There aren’t any left,’ Bob told him. ‘You have to understand, most of these people were bred for civil engineering, not spaceflight. Only six roboteers ever received high-gee mods, and they all have places aboard other soft-combat ships.’

  ‘Then get me one of them,’ Ira demanded. ‘This mission has an aleph one rating, goddamn it!’

  ‘I can’t. They’re all out of port.’

  ‘Then get me one with surgical augs.’

  ‘There aren’t any,’ said Bob gently.

  ‘Listen. I’m headed deep into the shit this time. It doesn’t get any deeper. And if I don’t find someone who can take high-gee, they’ll be dead before I come home.’

  ‘Ira, please, try to understand. The division is badly short-staffed. The losses of Baloo and Walrus hit us hard. There’s only one qualified candidate we can offer you, but I promise, he’s excellent. He practically pulled Phoenix and Aslan out of the fire single-handed. He’s gifted.’

  ‘Can he take a ten-gee turn?’

  Bob stammered his answer. ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Then why the hell should I care how gifted he is?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but he’s all there is. Take it up with Bryant if you have to, but I promise you, he’ll say the same.’

  And Bryant had. So it didn’t matter what Ira thought of this Will Kuno-Monet. He was stuck with him, at least for the time being. Since then, Ira hadn’t even looked over the new man’s profile. He was afraid to.

  Rachel touched him lightly on the arm. It was an unusually gentle gesture from her – a measure of her concern. ‘I’m sure he’ll be fine,’ she said.

  She could guess what he was thinking, but then he hadn’t exactly hidden it well. He gave her a brief smile intended to look reassuring. She didn’t buy it. Her pale-blue eyes winced in concern.

  Thankfully, the lift doors opened at that moment. Ira bounced out and headed down the bland space-station corridor. ‘Might as well get it over with,’ he muttered to himself.

  Rachel followed.

  The lounge door snapped open at his brisk advance. He marched into the grey-panelled room and clapped eyes on the young man sitting there alone, perched on the edge of one of the chairs. He was tall and thin, at least six foot, with a fresh face and a mop of mouse-brown hair that looked as if it had never seen a comb.

  He was clearly lost in a recall trance. His eyes were screwed tight shut and he was swaying from side to side, making a soft keening sound. Ira was lost for words. So this was the material he was supposed to work with? The boy looked barely out of Fleet School. His bones were thin enough to be snapped on the first tight turn. Ira could feel the grim responsibility for the boy’s life settling onto him already, and they hadn’t even left port yet. He stared imploringly at Rachel.

  ‘Give him a chance,’ she told him. ‘He might be tougher than he looks.’ She stepped forward to rouse the roboteer.

  Ira didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t as if he had a choice.

  3.2: WILL

  As he swapped madly between tasks, Will took a second to glance out through the Ariel’s sensors. Set against the dark, roiling mass of disrupter cloud, the hard white lights of drone torches crawled menacingly towards him. The Ariel had just minutes to get out before the Earther munitions caught up with them.

  ‘We have another C-buffer breakdown in panel one-one-eight!’ Rachel shouted.

  Will leapt into the head of the closest repair truck. Gears screamed as it accelerated away down the curving track towards the damage site, its hard little mind alight with worry. He’d only just sent it on its way when John started madly flashing messages at him.

  ‘Is that countermeasure template loaded? I need that SAP online now!’

  Will hurriedly loaded the pattern, running a desperate virtual eye over the massive memory trees as he did so. The SAP was a twisted thing, a typical John creation, full of sly trickery and outright brilliance. He copied it and hurled it out into the void. There was no time to give it a proper check.

  Without warning, there came a lurch and rib-crushing pressure. The soft enclosure of Will’s muscle-tank became a fist, squeezing him to death. He whimpered as every inch of him cried out in pain. Finally, the pressure released, but even as he gasped for breath, Amy blurted orders in his ear.

  ‘Habitat core gravity compensation is slipping. We need three shifters up there now.’

  Will leapt into the mind of the lead shifter idling in its bay. It unlocked with an eager snap, but Will got no further with its orders as the terrible pressure came again.

  Pain drove out thought. The sympathetically linked shifter crashed against the back of its bay as it shared his suffering, hydraulic arms flailing. Will could feel his bones grinding against each other and snapping as his skull distorted like an eggshell in a vice.

  ‘We need gravity compensation now!’ urged Amy.

  ‘Prepare engine double-checks for immediate warp engagement,’ said Rachel.

  Will could do nothing about their requests – it was enough of a challenge to keep from blacking out. Just when he believed the pressure couldn’t get any worse, it did.

  This time it was beyond his ability to endure. He was an ant trapped between the thumb and forefinger of a callous god. He felt himself dying. He tried to cry out, but he couldn’t breathe, let alone scream.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  His eyes flicked open. He found himself sitting in the lounge again, sweating. His body was wound as tight as the field on a fusion bottle. He looked up to see who’d touched him and met a woman’s eyes. She was dark and pretty, with a heart-shaped face and eyebrows that met in the middle. Will knew her immediately even though it was the first time they’d ever met. It was Rachel. She looked just as Doug had remembered her. Lovely Rachel, who sang in her bunk and had the loudest laugh on the ship. She was smiling at him, though her eyes held something of a nervous appeal.

  Will already knew about Rachel’s work on starships and admired it. He’d been looking forward to talking to her. Now he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  ‘Uh, hello,’ he managed. ‘Ma’am,’ he added quickly, as Rachel outranked him by several grades. He stood and found himself towering over her. She couldn’t have been taller than five foot. She was ‘born to fly’, as they said in the Fleet, though she managed to make the Fleet-family body style look curvaceous rather than stocky. Will flattened down his hair and gave her an awkward Fleet salute. He did his best to stand straight and be smaller at the same time.

  Then he caught sight of the man standing behind her. It was Captain Baron. The captain was about the same height as Rachel but looked as broad as he did tall, with a skull shaped like a bullet and a hugely muscled torso too big for his green one-piece uniform.

  For a moment, Will was thrilled. Then he noticed how the captain was eyeing him with a dark, unhappy expression. Will shifted uneasily. In most of the inherited memories Will had of the captain, he’d been smiling. Will’s spirits faltered. He’d managed to make himself look like a handler freak already, in his very first meeting with his new commanding
officer. He cursed himself. He shouldn’t have arrived so early, and he ought to have resisted the urge to play Doug’s last sequence one more time.

  He’d spent all his spare time since the reassignment going through Doug’s memories. It was never easy to feel strong emotions through memory logs, but Will had played the battle sequence nine times. More than any other clip, he thought it gave him an insight into what his new shipmates must be feeling. Anything that might help him know them had to be worth trying, he reasoned, even if it meant experiencing the death of his predecessor. But it was starting to look like he’d taken that theory too far.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Uh, yes,’ said Will. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  He winced. Rachel was looking at him like a stranger, which of course he was to her. Yet Will could remember working with her for years, or parts of those years, at any rate. He’d listened to her rant about her father, the admiral. He’d watched her cry. He’d lost to her at poker dozens of times, and won occasionally by sneaking a look at her cards through the cabin cameras behind her.

  But he knew from hard experience that if he started treating her like the old friend he felt she was, it would only distress her. That was part of the burden of being a roboteer. He had to pretend not to know too much, at least for a while, anyway.

  ‘I was just accessing a log,’ he babbled. ‘That’s why I might have looked a little strange.’

  She smiled wryly. ‘I guessed. I’m Rachel Allesandro-Bock, engineering officer.’ She held out a broad, well-muscled hand for him to shake. He shook it as firmly as he dared.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘And may I introduce Captain Baron-Lecke?’

  Will turned his gaze back to the captain. Baron looked him up and down, and then pushed his face into an unconvincing expression of warmth.

  ‘Hi, Will,’ he said. ‘Please, call me Ira.’ He took Will’s hand and folded his gigantic digits around it in an embrace of almost pointed delicacy.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,’ said Will. ‘An honour. I’ve read all your reports. Well, not actually read them as such. Just memorised them. But I’m sure you could have guessed that.’ He realised he was running off at the mouth and stopped abruptly. He tried for a winning smile.