Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Captain, where are you going with all this?’ said Hugo. Will had noticed the scientist’s doughy features slowly creasing with anxiety as the dialogue progressed.

  ‘It’s my guess that if we leave sooner than we planned, we could bring some battle cruisers back here before they get their act together,’ Ira replied. ‘One ship the size of the Phoenix could make mincemeat out of this lot if it caught them by surprise.’

  ‘I could help with that,’ said John. ‘Give me a couple of days and I can halve their production speed and have them blaming each other for it.’

  Hugo’s cheeks reddened. ‘Surely you’re not thinking of leaving before this Ulanu turns up?’

  Ira shook his head. ‘Not if we can help it. We’ll have a much better picture of what’s going on once he gets back. But we can’t wait for ever.’ He surveyed the others. ‘If we sit here for another week and he doesn’t show, I think we can safely assume it’s because he’s bringing crews with him. We should head home and make our report.’

  Hugo made puffing sounds. ‘But Captain, Ulanu is the man who has the secret! If we don’t wait for him, we might never get it.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Ira, ‘but I think—’

  Hugo cut him off. ‘Don’t you see?’ he urged. ‘Even if you return here in time and crushed the armada, we might not have another chance. And that would leave the Earthers with an intolerable technological edge. We simply can’t take that risk.’

  Ira sighed. ‘I think we might have to.’

  ‘Wrong!’ Hugo exclaimed.

  Will winced. That was no way to talk to the captain.

  ‘What’d stop them from doing this all over again?’ Hugo demanded. ‘From causing another Memburi!’

  The silence in the room that followed his outburst had a thick, charged quality. Will looked around at the others and spotted John and Rachel exchanging glances. Amy rested a very subtle hand on Ira’s elbow.

  Ira stared levelly at the scientist. ‘We have to stack that up against the immediate risk to the home world,’ he said slowly. ‘I want that technology as much as you do, but I won’t sacrifice my planet to get it. There’ll be other chances.’

  ‘But you’d be in breach of your mission orders!’ said Hugo. ‘I was told I’d have three weeks to study this thing, and I haven’t even had one yet! What in Gal’s name is the point of this mission if you don’t give me the opportunity to do my work?’

  Ira’s face became stony. ‘We’re talking about something that hasn’t happened yet, Doctor Vartian. And by the way, those are my orders. I’ll interpret them as I see fit. Please remember that you are a guest aboard this ship. It is not your job to determine mission strategy.’ He locked eyes with Hugo and didn’t let his gaze waver.

  Hugo went red in the face, turned and pushed himself quickly out of the meeting room.

  Ira shook his head. ‘One more week, everybody,’ he growled. ‘And John, why don’t you start work on dropping their production.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Ira rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘Okay, everybody, let’s get back to work.’

  Will couldn’t help but smile a little as he slid into to his bunk. Despite the dire situation, it suddenly looked like they might be able to turn the nightmare of Zuni-Dehel around. Guiltily, though, Will realized there was more to his good mood than that. For the first time since coming aboard, he didn’t feel like the outcast in the cabin. For a while, at least, Hugo had volunteered to fill that role. So far as Will was concerned, he was welcome to it.

  5.3: IRA

  Ira kept an eye on Hugo after the meeting. The man’s attitude improved a little, but not enough. He stayed close to the boil and Ira didn’t like the effect that had on the rest of the crew.

  On reflection, he realised that focusing so much of his attention on Will during the flight out had probably been a mistake. He should have paid closer attention to the psych warning on Hugo’s file instead, because the man was behaving exactly as it predicted. In short, he was confusing his own intellectual desires with the needs of the ship.

  Ira suspected that Hugo’s parents had probably been a little too generous with mods for curiosity. It happened a lot, particularly among Galatea’s wealthier families. The more talent you forced into a human brain, the less likely that person was to wind up balanced. For all their sakes, he hoped the man’s scientific thirst was slaked soon. Ira’s alternative was to lay down some old-fashioned discipline – an option that seldom worked well with such a highly strung team. He hoped he wouldn’t have to take that step.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long. Just two days later, Ulanu’s ship arrived.

  Every member of the Ariel’s crew listened in on the encrypted communications that followed. Through a comms window in his visor, Ira found himself looking at a lean man with skin like polished mahogany and eyes that gave new meaning to the word ‘piercing’. He could have been a different species from the squat, sullen Tang in the window next to him.

  ‘Admiral Tang,’ said the brown-skinned ascetic.

  ‘General Ulanu.’ Tang nodded his respects with visible reluctance. Their mutual dislike was obvious.

  ‘I have good news for you,’ said Ulanu. Nothing in his face suggested he was pleased. ‘We have received the order to attack at will.’

  Tang’s tightly held mouth curved up a little at one corner.

  ‘I will be proceeding forthwith to the development facility and will bring you the remaining suntaps within a month,’ said Ulanu.

  ‘And the crews?’ Tang asked hungrily.

  ‘Already on their way from Earth.’

  Tang’s eyes twinkled. ‘That’s excellent. I’ll start preparations immediately.’

  ‘Don’t rush it, Tang,’ said Ulanu tersely. ‘I’d rather we take our time and do it properly.’

  Tang gave him a look of thinly concealed loathing. ‘Of course.’

  ‘One more thing,’ said Ulanu. ‘I’m sure you’ll be excited to know that the Prophet has seen fit to attach one of his personal assistants to our operation. He will be accompanying me directly to the remote facility.’

  Tang’s private smile returned. ‘Congratulations,’ he said darkly. ‘I’m delighted to learn that the Prophet has such interest in your work.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Ulanu drawled. ‘Good luck, Admiral. I shall see you again in a few weeks’ time.’ The general broke the link.

  ‘He’s running a diagnostic check on his engines,’ said John. ‘He’ll be ready to leave in a few minutes.’

  ‘Copy that,’ said Ira.

  He stared at the windows and thought hard. He hadn’t expected Ulanu to leave so soon. John had barely started probing the new ship’s security.

  ‘Captain,’ called Hugo from the lower bunks, ‘we have to follow him!’

  Ira shut his eyes. Just two days ago, Hugo had been exhorting him to stick to his orders. Now he was telling him to disobey them. Ira’s mission plan said nothing about chasing ships away from the target star. He tried to ignore the scientist for a moment.

  ‘John, any way you can stall that ship?’ he said. ‘Give it an engine failure or something?’

  ‘Captain!’ Hugo urged.

  ‘’Fraid not,’ said John. ‘Half a day and I’d have his ship running in circles, but he’s using different codes from Tang’s. It’ll take me a while to break them. Tapping their shared traffic is the best I can do.’

  Ira muttered curses.

  ‘He’s aligning for warp,’ Amy warned.

  ‘Match his heading to the stellar neighbourhood,’ said Ira. ‘I want to know where he’s going.’

  ‘Tried already,’ she told him. ‘Nothing there – he’s hiding his destination.’

  ‘Captain!’ Now Hugo was actually shouting.

  ‘Can it, Vartian,’ Rachel growled.

  Hugo didn’t listen. ‘He’s going to get away!’ he exclaimed.

  Ira ground his teeth and tried to think. Ulanu was leaving without refuell
ing and forcing a course correction on himself – that meant his destination couldn’t be far away. Ira had to weigh that against the risk of discovery if they moved without taking proper precautions.

  The thing was, Ira wanted to go. This Ulanu character had sparked his curiosity, and if they were careful, they’d be able to use the general’s warp bursts to hide their exit. That would be a tricky manoeuvre, though, and deadly dangerous if Ulanu decided to cut his engines for some reason.

  Ira dearly hoped he wasn’t sending himself on a wild goose chase. This little adventure could cost them valuable time.

  ‘Captain! I really must insist—’

  Ira interrupted his passenger in mid-outburst. ‘All right, Hugo,’ he said curtly. ‘That’s enough! Amy, I’m going to use his warp pulses to tail him out so I need a precision trace of his exhaust. Will, work with her. This tail has got to be tight.’

  ‘I’m on it,’ said Will.

  ‘As for you, Hugo,’ Ira growled, ‘I don’t want to hear another word out of you till I tell you otherwise. Do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, Captain,’ Hugo snapped. ‘Only please hurry!’

  Ira smouldered. Hugo’s attitude would have to wait. He didn’t have a second to waste.

  ‘Rachel, give me rails.’

  ‘Rails greasing.’

  ‘Buckle up, everybody,’ he said. ‘We’re heading out.’

  The roar of the drive filled the tiny cabin.

  As Ulanu’s ship started to pulse out of the system, the Ariel was right behind it, slipping along like a shadow.

  6: UPLOADING

  6.1: WILL

  Two days out from Zuni-Dehel, something strange happened. The first Will knew of it was from Amy. He was working with her on the tracking SAP they’d put together. She was scanning star maps while Will tweaked the SAP’s parameters to cope with Ulanu’s primitive but effective signature cloaking.

  ‘It can’t be,’ she said suddenly.

  Will looked up from his work. He was operating out of the Ariel’s astrogation subsystem, a virtual construct more abstract than most of Will’s creations. It was like floating in open space, surrounded by slowly shifting stars.

  He opened a window to Amy’s bunk. ‘What’s the problem? Did we lose him?’

  She looked straight up at the camera, her round face full of surprise. ‘Far from it,’ she said. ‘Look at this.’

  She passed a diagram into Will’s metaphor that showed their flight path away from Zuni-Dehel. The predicted plane of the human galactic shell was shown as a thin pink sheet cutting across space. Their path curved gently outwards, away from the galactic core.

  Will’s brow furrowed. ‘I don’t understand. I thought it was impossible for a starship to come off the shell and still travel faster than light.’

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘And we’re doing about a hundred lights, so we must still be on it.’

  ‘But how?’ said Will. The plot showed them practically flying straight out, with the center of the galaxy behind them.

  Her eyes shone. ‘I think we’re on a Penfield Lobe.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s the holy grail of interstellar travel – a kind of magic crossing place.’

  Will didn’t get it. ‘A crossing to what?’

  Amy laughed. ‘Everywhere else.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘How much do you know about warp?’ she asked.

  ‘The basics. Enough to help Rachel fix the engines.’

  ‘You’re familiar with the First Law, I take it?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Will. ‘A ship can only travel at superluminal velocities across a uniform curvon gradient.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Amy. ‘We can only travel at a tangent to the galactic core because the curvon density behind a ship needs to be the same as that in front. Otherwise, you don’t get a match between the space you’re expanding and the space you’re contracting. Your engine fouls. Thus we can go around the galaxy at speeds right up to the Shige-Mot barrier, but if we wanted to visit the core, it’d take us lifetimes. Then about seventy years ago, a man called Hiro Penfield-Weiss came up with a hypothetical special case of shell topology. The shell isn’t smooth – we’ve always known that. It’s bumpy!’

  She waved her hands enthusiastically to show him and Will couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘All black holes radiate curvons,’ she said. ‘They can’t radiate anything else, so their information debt to the universe is paid in spatial potential. The galactic core may be the biggest source of curvons in our neighbourhood, but there are plenty of others, and they all deform the shell. However, most black holes don’t sit close enough to us to make a big difference. They just make it a pain in the ass to navigate from place to place. But if you position one just right, it makes a kind of pucker, a shape like a droplet that sticks out of the shell. And that’s a Penfield Lobe!’

  She grinned at him through the camera, her blonde pigtails bouncing. She was proud of her explanation, or her discovery, or both.

  Will still didn’t get it. ‘But you said it was a kind of crossing place,’ he reminded her. ‘How does that work?’

  ‘Good question!’ said Amy enthusiastically. ‘At a lobe, the curvon gradient is super-sharp because you’re so close to an emitting source. It makes the shell wafer thin.’ She held up two fingers close together to show him and peered between them. ‘That makes it very easy to pass from one curvon density to another using conventional velocity – from one layer of the onion to another, if you like. So with a little bit of boost from your fusion torches in the right place, you can find yourself on a different shell altogether. You can access star systems that would take centuries to reach otherwise.’

  Will’s skin prickled as he started to understand. If Amy was right, this could be the doorway to whole new regions of the galaxy.

  ‘No wonder the Earthers chose this place to build their fleet,’ he said. Where better to conceal a laboratory than somewhere your enemies can’t even see on their star maps?

  ‘I have to tell the others,’ said Amy.

  With a little help from Will, she assembled a file of her evidence and threw it out into the Ariel’s public data space.

  Rachel and John both reacted with enthusiasm and astonishment, just as Will had expected. Hugo and Ira’s responses were somewhat different.

  ‘How far does that put us from our nearest candidate star?’ the captain wanted to know. ‘This throws off all our estimates for Ulanu’s range and timing. If he has an antimatter factory waiting for him somewhere out here, we could be screwed. We can’t afford to chase him so far that we don’t have the fuel to get back. Unless we intend to convince him to share his supply with us, that is.’

  He had a point. Will had been so impressed by Amy’s findings that he hadn’t thought of that.

  However, it was Hugo’s response that surprised him the most. The scientist read Amy’s file and then started giggling. From where Will lay on his bunk, he could see Hugo staring intently at the ceiling with his hands over his mouth, grinning to himself.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Will.

  Hugo turned abruptly to stare at him. ‘Fine,’ he said airily.

  ‘It’s pretty amazing isn’t it?’ Will remarked cautiously. ‘This Penfield Lobe thing.’

  ‘It’s too amazing,’ Hugo relied, with heavy emphasis. ‘First the suntap and now this? That’s two miracles in the same trip. Doesn’t that strike you as a little unlikely?’

  Now that Hugo mentioned it, it did. Will found himself vaguely unnerved.

  ‘What are you getting at?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Hugo replied coyly.

  Will tried to draw him out, but Hugo refused to say another word on the matter. Will was left with the uncomfortable suspicion that there was another surprise waiting for them just around the corner.

  As it was, he didn’t have to wait long to find himself proved right – less than a day, in fact, when Amy identified t
heir destination star.

  ‘It can’t be!’ she blurted again. Only this time, she sounded far from pleased about it.

  Will didn’t wait for her to explain herself, just pulled up a view of her workspace. In front of him was a spread of windows. The largest showed a low-mass M-dwarf star with its spectrum laid out beneath it.

  ‘Another miracle?’ he asked.

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ said Amy. She sounded troubled. ‘Take a look at that spectrum. See anything strange about it?’

  Will wasn’t used to analysing data from stars but he’d been bred to see patterns, and now that he looked something did jump out at him. Something impossible.

  There were seven very strong absorption lines in the display. The distance between the second and third was twice the distance between the first and second. The distance between the third and fourth was three times that between the first and second. The gaps mapped out the first six prime numbers, in order.

  ‘Primes,’ he muttered.

  ‘Is that what they are?’ said Amy. She sounded afraid. ‘All I saw was that the spacing looked far too regular to be natural. And that they didn’t correspond to any metals I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘John?’ she called across the cabin.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Have you been messing with my spectroscopy code?’

  ‘No,’ said John. ‘Would you like me to?’

  ‘Just check it over, would you, see if there are any bugs in my SAPs.’

  ‘A problem?’ asked Ira.

  ‘I … yes.’ Amy confessed. ‘Take a look at this.’ She dumped the problematic scan into the public space again for the rest of the crew to pore over.

  Hugo took one look at it and burst into laughter. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘Knew what?’ said Ira.

  Hugo cackled for a while before condescending to answer. ‘Don’t you see it? I knew those Earthers were too stupid to come up with this technology on their own. They stole it!’

  ‘We already know that,’ said Rachel. ‘From the Pioneers.’

  ‘Not from the Pioneers,’ said Hugo scornfully. ‘From aliens!’