by Alex Lamb
The room’s only defining feature was a huge portrait of a woman Will had never met at one end. She had a narrow, closed-mouthed smile and hair pulled back tightly in a bun. There was no furniture, just a few notebooks and brightly coloured polyhedra scattered across the floor. Will shook his head. Doug might have had a gleaming service record, but he wasn’t a very imaginative man.
With a wild sweep of his arm, Will began his work. The notebooks and shapes jumped up into the air and landed in orderly rows. He stabbed a virtual finger at the wall.
‘Casino!’ he ordered.
The surface turned to red velvet and shaped itself like the bulkhead of an Old World cruise liner. Roulette wheels and craps tables extruded from the floor.
‘And you can go,’ he told the woman in the painting. He clicked his fingers and the painting vanished in a satisfying burst of flame. He strode about, pointing at the books and shapes, telling them what to become. ‘Card deck! Chip pile! Croupier!’
Associating strong visual metaphors with software systems gave a roboteer rapid, intuitive navigation of a ship’s systems. Will preferred to use vivid historical settings. They made for powerful moods, which cut jump times. He’d long since learned that the more like a real place a metaphor was, the more efficiently his mind could handle it. So he bothered with the little details like chairs and windows.
His own personal software was modelled on his childhood home in the trench town of Endurance. He knew it intimately. But the Ariel was a different matter. Many of the metaphor tags there were still based on Doug’s experiences. It wasn’t strictly necessary for Will to retag every single subsystem, but it was one of the tasks Ira had given him to do, and so he was doing it. And besides, ripping out all evidence of Doug from the ship had become a kind of therapy. Doug, who’d stared bravely into the jaws of death. Doug, who’d got along with Ira just fine.
‘Hey!’ Rachel’s avatar appeared beside him as she opened a channel to talk. ‘You busy?’
Was he ever anything but? Will managed to resist the urge to reply with a bitter quip.
‘No more than usual,’ he replied quietly.
‘I want to apologise,’ she said. ‘It clearly wasn’t your fault that alarm went off. It was mine. I should have checked the SAP stable before I started.’
Will shook his head. ‘No, it was my fault. I pushed that cleaner too hard. That’s why it stalled. I was mistreating my robots, and there’s no excuse for that.’
‘Not as badly as Ira’s mistreating you,’ she retorted. ‘That’s the other thing I want to say. I think you’re doing great and that he’s being a shit.’
Will raised his eyebrows. ‘I hope you’re subvocalising.’
She grinned and shook her head. ‘No. I took my privacy hour early so I could talk with you.’ Her face grew serious again. ‘Ira’s always a bit tough on new recruits, but this time he’s taking it too far. He never treated any of us the way he’s treating you. The rest of us can see what he’s doing and it’s starting to get embarrassing.’
Will was touched and surprised that Rachel had decided to take the time out to talk to him, but she was only confirming what he already knew: Ira had it in for him. In all Doug’s memories of the captain, he’d treated his crew more like a family than a military team. Discipline on the Ariel was incredibly elastic, but the ship worked because Ira inspired an almost fanatical loyalty in his crew, despite their profound personal differences. The model father-to-the-crew couldn’t have been further from the Ira Will had seen so far. Which led him to a single painful conclusion: there was nothing he could do that would make the captain happy.
‘I don’t think it’s anything personal,’ said Rachel. ‘My guess is he’s still messed up over Doug. But that’s no excuse – he’s supposed to be a professional.’
Perhaps it was about Doug, but Will had his doubts. Ira might have just taken a look at his career record and decided he didn’t want Will on his ship.
‘It’s great, the way you’re handling it,’ she said. ‘I wish I had that kind of restraint. If I were in your shoes I think I’d have popped him one back there when he made his little speech.’
Will found himself smiling. Punching Ira would probably have broken his hand. The man gave the impression of being made out of something a lot harder than flesh.
‘When Amy followed him, I think that’s what she had in mind, too,’ Rachel added. ‘My guess is they had a row, because they were both a bit red-faced, after.’
Will sat down on one of the casino chairs. ‘I had no idea she did that,’ he said quietly. He was surprised how much it meant to him.
He knew Amy through Doug, of course, but had barely talked to her, so he could hardly expect her to know him. For days now, Will had wanted to tell her that he liked the way she whistled in her bunk, even though Hugo appeared to find it annoying, and that her impersonation of Admiral Bryant was hilarious. However, there’d never been the time.
‘Is she in trouble over it?’
Rachel laughed. ‘Far from it. Ira may be the captain, but don’t be fooled – Amy has a lot of clout on this ship. She’s a force to be reckoned with. I don’t think Ira would dare discipline her even if he wanted to. Those two are about as close as you can get to being married without actually sleeping together.’ She shrugged quickly. ‘Anyway, you’re working, and I didn’t mean to interrupt you. But if you ever want to talk more or need any kind of help, just let me know. And if necessary, I’ll talk to Amy on your behalf. Who knows – one of these days I might even get the emergency VR rig out of storage. Then you could show me around that private world of yours.’ A self-conscious smile played across her mouth. ‘It must get lonely always being on your own.’
A warm, almost painful feeling spread through Will’s chest. He’d never had a visitor in his metaphor spaces except other roboteers. No one had shown an interest before.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That would be great. I’d like that.’
She glanced away from the camera awkwardly. ‘Well, see you in the cabin.’
‘Yes.’
Her avatar winked out.
Will sat on the chair in the casino for some time after that, doing nothing and feeling better than he had in weeks.
5: SPYING
5.1: IRA
One week on from their second fuelling stop, the Ariel reached its insertion point – the place where its flight path crossed the time-compensated sensor boundary of their target star. From now on, the Ariel would have to be invisible.
Ira turned off the warp engines, silencing their rumble. Now they were floating weightless and undetected, just outside the realm of their enemies.
Through his visor, Ira could see Zuni-Dehel ahead of them, little more than a bright point of light. His enemies were still invisibly minute at this distance. No telescope ever built would have been able to see them. However, that didn’t mean the Ariel was safe. Far from it. Simply flying this close would eventually give them away.
The problem for soft-combat ships like the Ariel was that ordinary warp bursts sent out flashes of hard radiation that could be seen for millions of kilometres. Entering an enemy star system undetected, therefore, required concealing the ship’s approach by turning off normal warp engines long before it arrived at its destination. That way, by the time the tell-tale winking of the warp bursts reached your foe, you were already gone. Thus your choice of insertion point was determined by how long you intended to hang around. Ira was giving them three weeks.
‘Rachel, prepare for stealth drive.’
‘Sir.’
‘Amy, I want a full-resolution scan of our destination.’
‘Telescope drones are already away.’
Ira had felt a change in the mood of his crew over the last few days. Everyone was a little curt and impatient and there was less chatter between the bunks. The cabin air felt charged with some unexpressed emotion. Ira knew the mood well. It was the mood of people going into battle.
Only Hugo appeared to be unaffec
ted. If anything, he was excited. Ira would have been troubled by that attitude in a member of his permanent crew, but in a passenger he chalked it up to a lack of front-line experience.
He’d watched Hugo over the last few weeks and felt he had the measure of the man. Hugo was pompous, abrasive and had the kind of arrogance of which only those bred for mental superiority were capable. People like Hugo invariably considered themselves supermen and leading them required a patient, delicate hand. But on balance, Ira had met a lot worse.
Far more importantly, with respect to the mission, Will had started to adapt. Though it rankled for Ira to admit it to himself, his old friend Amy had been right. The handler’s performance had come on leaps and bounds since he started getting extra rest. He’d opened up to the crew, too. Ira just hoped they hadn’t bought his cooperation at the price of his life.
On a whim, Ira leaned out from his bunk. ‘Will,’ he called.
The handler’s head appeared in the gap between his muscle-tank and the lower bunk. ‘Sir?’
How earnest he looked. How keen to please. ‘You stay near that tank over the next few days, okay?’ said Ira. ‘I don’t want you getting caught out if we need to do some fancy flying.’
Will nodded and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, sir. I promise.’
‘Good,’ said Ira gruffly, and ducked his head away before Will could catch the vulnerability he knew must be showing in his eyes. Ira still hadn’t been able to bring himself to engage Will in conversation. Perhaps in a week or two.
‘Scan complete,’ said Amy. ‘Drones retrieved.’
Ira buried himself in the output, looking over what little of their destination they could see. Two gas giants were clearly visible along with what looked like a broad asteroid belt just inside the orbit of the inner one. There were no solid planets in evidence, which made the belt the most likely site of enemy activity. So that was where they’d head.
‘Will, how’s our albedo looking?’ he asked.
‘Nice and low, sir. I have hull crawlers on it now. By the time they’re done, we’ll be black as space.’
‘Good.’
Ira watched the last preparations through his visor. Then, when everything was ready, he gave the order. ‘Strap down, everybody. We’re going in.’
He waited for Will to be fully sealed into his muscle-tank before proceeding.
‘Rachel, ready the torches.’
‘Torches ready, sir.’
‘Then here we go.’
Ira braced himself as the ship ramped its conventional acceleration to four gees. He couldn’t resist glancing at the window in the bottom-left corner of his visor that showed Will’s vital signs. They looked fine. Excellent, in fact. Ira smiled to himself. He’d done some good, at least.
For the next hour and a half, Ira did nothing but increase the Ariel’s conventional velocity. A careful pilot could drop out of warp with the same reference frame he went in with, and Ira wanted to arrive travelling fast with respect to the target star. He needed enough speed to slip past his enemies unnoticed, but not so much that it became hard to dump the surveillance drones as they passed. Eventually, the time came for the next step.
‘Grease the rails,’ he ordered.
He watched the engine-profile graphs jump as Rachel turned up the heat. Somewhere over his head, lead nuclei in the accelerators were being smashed together at a fantastic rate, and their exotic by-products pumped out to form the secondary field.
‘Rails greased,’ said Rachel.
Ira opened a window to view the ship’s exterior. The brollies were now at full extent and humming with power. This time, though, the space around them glowed a dull, shimmering red. The Ariel was using its tau-chargers.
The tau-charger was one of Galatea’s most impressive wartime innovations. While they made their way into the Zuni-Dehel system, energy released by warp would emerge as pseudo-stable particle pairs instead of g-rays. Their arrival should only be visible much later, as a slow, continuous stream of antimatter annihilation.
The bad news was that the chargers were a huge drain on the engines. The gravity profile they created was also flat and unstable. Ira used them sparingly.
‘Ready for warp,’ he told the crew and pressed the firing stud.
The first bump was softer than usual, almost syrupy. With uncharacteristic sluggishness, the engines climbed from a whumping sound to a gentle hum. As the space around them filled with flickering light, Ira swapped to a tactical model of the surrounding space. The small reddish sun hanging before them slid closer.
Gruelling hours passed during which there was nothing his people could do but man the sensor arrays and hope. Without doubt, the area would be primed with Oort drones. If one spotted them, chances were it would intercept at full warp. They wouldn’t see it until it hit. And unfortunately, even in a small system like Zuni it took the better part of a day to make a stealth insertion.
As the tau-charged engines carried them ever closer, their emissions became more obvious. The field generators had to struggle to compensate for the grime of hot ions that filled in-system space.
They finally reached their closest safe distance.
‘Preparing to drop warp,’ said Ira. ‘Dropping warp in six, five, four, three, two, one …’
He snapped off the gravity drive. Everyone exhaled as the Ariel became just one more small dark body in a whole star system of small dark bodies. Ira grinned to himself. They were in. That was always the second hardest part of every mission. The only thing trickier was leaving, and that was days away.
He turned back to the external sensors and received his first uninterrupted view of the system interior. They’d emerged just as intended, above the ecliptic, a little beyond the orbit of the Zuni’s inner gas giant. The asteroid belt hung somewhere ahead of him.
‘All right, Amy, let’s have a look around.’
‘Aye aye, Captain.’
A window in his visor showed him the output from Amy’s telescope array. Little by little, a full-resolution target diagram emerged. Ira’s skin crawled as dark patches resolved from fuzz to unmistakable definition. There were gasps from other bunks.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Rachel.
Floating at the edge of the belt was an armada, a fat crescent of ships, small Jesus Class vessels like the six that had attacked Memburi. Only here there were nearly three hundred, more than twice as many as the entire Galatean Fleet.
In his most pessimistic estimates, Ira had thought he might find fifty. His people’s hopes of raising an adequate defence suddenly looked thin indeed.
At the leading end of the crescent hung a small industrial complex consisting of a factory asteroid, two habitat rings, an antimatter plant and the filigree frameworks of at least four construction bays. Inside them, yet more starships were being assembled. It was a veritable hive of industry.
Ira’s guts churned. The ships could only be intended for one target. They were looking at Galatea’s death sentence.
‘So many,’ mumbled Amy.
For a while, the crew were quiet, absorbing the reality of what lay before them. Then, at last, Will spoke.
‘They must be almost ready to attack.’
His voice was little more than a whisper, as if what they said aboard the Ariel might be heard outside as they slipped invisibly by.
‘They’re more than ready,’ said John darkly. ‘The question is: why haven’t they attacked yet?’
Ira could feel the mood aboard his ship changing. People were growing afraid. He didn’t want that.
‘I have a better question,’ he said, injecting as much vigour into his voice as he could muster. ‘How did they manage to build all this without us noticing? I thought we broke crusade security.’
‘We did,’ said John. ‘This fleet must be running out of a different subsect. A separate group with its own codes.’
‘That still doesn’t explain how they managed this,’ Ira insisted. ‘There must have been traffic to and from this place – arms s
hipments, crews, habitat parts. How come we didn’t spot it?’
‘I’m not so sure there would have been traffic,’ said Rachel. ‘Look at the size of that factory. It seems big next to the ships, but it’s tiny compared to the Fleet yards back home. It would take ages to build a fleet that size with a factory that small. It must have been running at full tilt for several years. They’ve been planning this for a long time – almost since the start of the war. My guess is that any traffic’s been slow and intermittent. Not so heavy that it’d register to our intelligence SAPs.’
‘Then whoever runs this joint is a damn sight more cunning than most Earthers,’ John remarked. ‘And more patient, too. It’s almost impressive.’
‘If Rachel’s right, it may be good news for us,’ said Amy. ‘Those ships might still be empty. I can’t imagine that crews have been living aboard such small ships for months or years, just waiting. They’d have to be billeted somewhere else.’
She was right, Ira realised with relief. ‘Good point,’ he said. ‘That might buy the home world a little time.’
Hugo spoke up. ‘But if this fleet has been here for months, they must have had the new energy technology even longer.’ He sounded appalled by the idea. ‘Why didn’t they use it sooner? It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, with that kind of firepower, why haven’t they slaughtered us already? They needn’t have lost Memburi in the first place.’
Ira wasn’t impressed by Hugo’s choice of words. The man seemed personally insulted by the Earthers’ strategy, as if they’d done it to spite him.
‘Maybe they knew we’d come looking,’ Ira suggested. ‘They wanted to be sure of overwhelming force before they let us know it existed.’
‘But where are the spin-off technologies?’ Hugo demanded. ‘Where are their trial runs? We spend the entire war convinced we’re technologically in the lead. Then, at the last minute, they bring out a fully mature stand-alone technology that we can’t even guess the theory for! Furthermore, we discover that they’ve probably had this edge for years and never bothered to use it. I don’t buy it. It stinks.’