Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  Through him? ‘For how long?’ Will asked nervously.

  ‘Till we’ve got what we need,’ said John. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll try to make it fast. Get ready for a full-scale data-trawl.’

  Will braced himself. Suddenly the dance didn’t feel quite so cheerful. He began to see the swaying golden spheres for what they really were: deadly moving triggers. This was a very dangerous kind of ball to dance at, he realised. Tread on just one foot and your dance partners were likely to kill you.

  In the next second he experienced a dreadful shuddering sensation, like standing on a bridge over a mighty waterfall. A blur of words and images coursed through his head as the little drone he was piloting became the conduit for John’s download. They were sucking information out of the Earther database as fast as the Ariel could read it.

  Somewhere in the distance, Hugo shouted again. Ira said something stern and decisive.

  ‘We’ve found a map of their soft core,’ John explained, ‘and we think we’ve located the access feed for the alien device. Hugo’s going to try for a quick contact.’

  ‘Can’t we wait?’ Will urged. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up with the trawl going on.’

  ‘We may not get another chance,’ said John. ‘If there are hook mines anywhere in their data store, just reading them will raise the alarm. We have to be ready for a quick exit. Rachel’s already gearing to go.’

  Hugo’s voice came over the line. ‘Don’t worry, Will,’ he said. ‘I’ll be as fast as I can. This is simply an opportunity we can’t afford to pass up.’

  ‘Then get on with it!’ Will snapped.

  He swayed left and darted right. Some of the sentinels nosed closer to him, as if sniffing him over. He wondered if their tiny electronic minds had begun to suspect.

  Then Hugo’s new channel opened up inside him, like a door in his brain. Hugo fired through a simple electronic query – the database equivalent of hello.

  There was a long pause.

  Hello, came the reply.

  Will shivered to himself. This was it. They were talking to aliens …

  Hugo laughed uproariously. ‘First contact!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve made first contact!’

  More like third contact, Will thought. Both the Earthers and the Pioneers had got there first.

  Hugo’s next question was more complex and took the form of an invitation to self-identify. As soon as Hugo sent it, new data started passing back through the door. It was cleverly tagged to build itself into a complex data structure on arrival.

  It assembled in Will’s head in crystalline chunks. However, as it did so, Will realised it wasn’t the reply Hugo had asked for. It was a set of instructions for building a machine. It was the suntap! Will was astonished. That had been easy. The alien hadn’t needed much coaxing to hand over the secret of infinite power.

  ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ Hugo sang. ‘I never expected it so soon! Hold on, I have another question.’

  Will chanced a momentary flick to Hugo’s soft-space to see what the man was planning. Hugo was using the alien’s own self-assembly pattern like a skewer and stuffing a huge chunk of data onto it. As far as Will could tell, it was a potted history of the whole war and Galatea’s role in it. Will realised then that Hugo had spent the last few days planning exactly this exchange. He’d anticipated this moment – or hoped for it, at least.

  Will jumped back into the drone just in time to dive with the swarm. Even with his SAP in place, he couldn’t risk letting go of the little robot for more than a vanishingly brief moment.

  Hugo hurled his question through the data channel. Will felt it flash through him, into the dark, empty aperture that was the link to the alien. He waited on tenterhooks for the reply.

  When it came, it was not what he expected. He’d imagined Hugo might get a potted history of the alien object in return, or at worst another copy of the suntap. Instead, they received more self-assembling data-structures – dozens of them with nothing more than simple diagnostic routines inside. It was as if they were being scanned, or tested for something. Each structure unfolded, then sent a single response packet back into the alien maw.

  With alarm, Will realised that the drone’s own hardware had started to spontaneously unfold some of the alien messages. That could knock him out of the swarm. He reached out with his mind to shunt the structures up the comms-link to the Ariel’s own computers and felt a perceptual jolt.

  It was like a flash of shared memory from another handler, but nothing he could comprehend. For an eye-blink, he saw things like giant icebergs in darkness, with surfaces that crawled and rotted. It was something that shouldn’t have happened. Something he should not have seen.

  Instinctively, Will drew back into the security of his home node. He reached for the fat-contact on his neck to disconnect but his arms were held tight. His physical body had been in the muscle-tank since they reached the alien system, on Ira’s insistence.

  The alien patterns Will had accidentally dragged with him started popping open in the stone-walled room of his private node. Inside Will’s own head. He felt his senses tweak and flutter. Flashes of something vast and tortuously complicated revealed themselves.

  ‘I’m not getting any data!’ Hugo wailed. ‘It’s all going straight into Will’s metaphor space!’

  ‘Will!’ John called urgently. ‘What’re you doing? What’s going on?’

  Will desperately reached out a virtual arm to shut down his link to the drone. Immediately, that part of his interface was snatched away from him, like a toy plucked from the hand of an unruly child. He tried to cry out a warning, but his voice died, too. Like a portcullis slamming down, all contact with his physical body was shut off. At the same time, the alien code kept forcing its way into his consciousness. It rifled his memories like a burglar. It probed every part of him. Will screamed to himself in perfect silence as the components of his identity shut down one by one.

  7: INFILTRATION

  7.1: IRA

  Ira watched as alerts lit up right across his visor.

  ‘What’s happening, people?’ he demanded.

  ‘Will took my data stream!’ Hugo shouted back. ‘He diverted everything into his space and now he’s gone offline. I can’t contact him. How dare he – he’s not qualified to conduct a dialogue of this importance!’

  ‘I’m getting weird reports ship-wide,’ said Rachel. ‘None of my diagnostics appears to be working.’

  ‘Something’s happening,’ said John in a strangled voice. ‘I think the alien feed is hacking us.’ He sounded astonished, as if he’d never expected to be vulnerable that way. ‘I think they’re hacking Will,’ he added nervously. ‘It’s routing everything straight into him.’

  ‘Shut the link down, John!’ Rachel yelled. ‘Shut it down now.’

  ‘Do it!’ said Ira.

  ‘No!’ wailed Hugo. ‘Divert the feed to my console – I can solve this.’

  Ira watched through his displays as John tried to sever the link to the spy-drone. The link cycled security modes nearly as fast as John could block them, but not quite fast enough.

  ‘Got it!’ said John triumphantly.

  The link died. They were free. The data-corruption warnings in Ira’s visor began to subside. He exhaled in relief.

  John roared his triumph. ‘Try to out-hack me would you? No chance, you alien sonofabitch!’

  ‘John, can you reach Will?’ asked Rachel.

  But before John could answer, the warnings started to ramp again, even faster than before.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ John gasped. ‘Where are they coming from?’

  ‘We’re receiving messages direct to our sensors,’ said Amy. ‘The telescopes are flooded with maser pulses.’

  ‘Then stop it!’ Ira barked.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Amy. ‘I’m locked out. It’s coming in on top-level Fleet encryption.’

  ‘H-how is that possible?’ John stammered.

  Ira had never heard him sou
nd so worried. He cycled through the ship’s external sensors. Almost all of them were blinded by the bombardment of data, but finally he found one that showed him what was happening. The Ariel had become the focus of a thousand flickering red beams. Almost every single sentinel in the swarm was firing messages directly at the Ariel. All the comms channels were jammed.

  ‘What is this?’ Ira demanded, shunting the image to John. ‘Some kind of Earther defence?’

  ‘It can’t be,’ said John, his tone nervous as his fingers flew across his keyboard. ‘It’s too sophisticated.’

  The alternative was worse. Somehow, the alien had commandeered Ulanu’s entire defence network to beam messages straight at them. To beam messages straight at Will.

  ‘I can’t lock it out,’ John wailed. ‘If it keeps pushing data at us this fast, the central processors are going to burn out!’

  ‘Arming the manual reset,’ said Ira.

  He reached up to the top of his bunk and ripped open the panel that revealed the ship’s primary comms-fuse. He’d never had to use it before. It was intended as a last-ditch defence against a viral soft assault. Which, he reasoned, was pretty much what they were facing now.

  He flicked open the fuse handle. Alert icons popped up all over his visor.

  ‘Captain, we’ll lose power,’ Rachel warned. ‘Pull that and the whole ship will have to recalibrate.’

  But Ira knew exactly what he was doing.

  ‘Three, two, one …’ he called, and yanked the fuse.

  The lights went out. His visor died. Beyond the cabin walls, a thousand humming machines slowed to silence. They were lost in the total darkness of a cabin sunk below half a kilometre of solid machinery. For a moment, Ira felt the profound weight of his ship bearing down upon him.

  Then red emergency lighting flared into life, drowning the cabin in bloody illumination. The air filled with the mournful clang of plasma-containment alarms. Fortunately, their sound was short-lived. One by one, the ship’s systems leapt back from the brink.

  As soon as Ira’s visor flickered into life, he started checking the ship’s systems.

  ‘How are we doing, people?’ he boomed. ‘I want all our comms battened down. I want our external sensors offline till we work out what the hell happened. I want a full diagnostic on every system we have. And Amy, check on Will.’

  But Amy was already there. She’d scrambled out of her bunk and propelled herself headfirst to the bottom of the cabin in darkness to check the life-sign readouts on Will’s tank. Ira jumped down after her.

  ‘How is he?’ Rachel demanded.

  ‘He’s alive,’ said Amy, ‘but not conscious.’

  Rachel groaned.

  Amy’s hands darted across the tank’s emergency console. ‘Ira, I don’t like his vital signs – they’re all over the place.’ She looked up at him with that same sincere, motherly expression she’d had the day Doug died.

  Ira roared in frustration and slammed his fist repeatedly against the cabin wall. Then he spun and jabbed a finger at Hugo. ‘You and your fucking alien!’

  Hugo recoiled.

  Except it wasn’t Hugo’s fault, Ira knew. It was his. He’d made all the choices that brought them to this place: a crippled ship in enemy territory. And one man down.

  ‘Captain, I—’ Hugo started.

  ‘Shut up!’ Ira roared.

  Hugo fell silent.

  Ira rounded on John. ‘What do you think is the likelihood the Earthers didn’t notice that?’

  John forced his lips into a miserable approximation of a wry smile. ‘Slim,’ he said, his capacity for wisecracks apparently exhausted.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Ira. ‘Rachel, we need those engines up and running as fast as you can, just in case we still have a chance of getting out of here.’

  ‘That could take hours,’ she replied anxiously.

  ‘Make it less!’ he snapped. ‘And Amy, I want sensors back online. But keep it to the minimum, and find some way of hot-coding them so we can turn them off if something like that happens again.’

  Amy nodded.

  ‘And keep Will stable,’ he added. ‘I refuse to have him die on this ship.’ He turned away as her face melted into an expression of pained concern and glared at John again instead. ‘I want our computers clean and stable,’ he ordered. ‘Get rid of whatever that alien bastard shot at us. Purge them all if you have to.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ John replied quietly. ‘That thing went through every node in the ship. And if it buried itself in SAP code, it could be completely distributed by now. It’d look no different from ordinary memory trees. It might be years before we find it. And if Rachel needs robots, there’s no way I can afford a full memory-wipe.’

  ‘I’ll need robots all right,’ she put in.

  ‘Great!’ growled Ira and slammed the wall again, crumpling the padding right back to its metal frame. His ship was infected with alien software and there was nothing he could do about it. ‘Just great.’

  He rubbed his face with his hands. Floating like this, they were sitting ducks. The fact that they weren’t already dead meant the Earthers hadn’t found them yet. But as soon as their enemies regained control of their computers, they were bound to start looking. The Ariel’s time was fast running out.

  ‘You!’ Ira thrust his finger at Hugo again. ‘Help John clean up.’ He glanced around his small domain. ‘I’ll be in my bunk working with Rachel,’ he said. He grabbed the handrail and yanked himself up to his couch.

  7.2: GUSTAV

  Gustav faced a room full of astonishment and black looks.

  ‘You mean, if we don’t agree to shut the project down, the Prophet might kill us?’ said Margaret Banutu, her brow creased in appalled disbelief.

  Having spent the last few months in the company of politicians, Gustav had forgotten that scientists could be equally annoying in their own way. How had these people lived so long and remained so naïve?

  ‘There is an alternative,’ he explained for the third time. ‘Win Rodriguez round. That’s all we have to do. He reports directly to Sanchez. A good word from him and the project could continue indefinitely.’

  ‘That’s all?’ said Pablo Kim incredulously. ‘How are we supposed to do that? He’s High Church. A fanatic!’

  Juliet Zhu held up her hands in dismay. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why is the Prophet so afraid of all this? Doesn’t he see the good it could do?’

  Gustav was readying himself to reply when Assim burst into the room.

  ‘General, sir!’

  Gustav rounded on him furiously. ‘I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed!’

  Assim flushed. ‘Yes, sir, but I thought you’d make an exception for this.’

  ‘For what?’ Gustav snapped.

  ‘Someone’s broken into the Relic feed, sir. And the whole defence network is down.’

  Gustav felt the blood drain from his face. He slapped the compad on his belt – the compad he’d turned off to avoid calls from the disciple. It came alive now with wailing alarms. Gustav strode past Assim, then ran the rest of the way to the command centre. When he arrived, he found his men frantically at work on their consoles. The wall-screens were covered with alerts.

  Rodriguez was already there, waiting. His turned to regard Gustav coldly. ‘Is this what you call “tight security”, General?’

  Gustav ignored him and addressed the soldiers at the desks. ‘Report.’

  ‘We have no sentinel net and no Relic feed, sir,’ the watch officer told him. ‘Half our computers are down and in the process of emergency reboot.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ Gustav demanded.

  The watch officer shook his head. ‘It doesn’t make sense, sir. Transaction records show a huge amount of data being shunted from the Relic feed to a non-existent network address.’

  ‘Did you track that address?’

  ‘Yes, sir. First entry we have for it was just twenty-one minutes ago, when it requested a high-speed di
agnostic of all our systems. Then it started tapping the Relic.’

  Gustav could barely breathe. It could only be the Gallies. His reassurances to Rodriguez sounded pitifully hollow now.

  How? he asked himself. How could they have possibly found this place? And then it hit him: for this to have happened so soon after his own arrival, he must have led them here himself. They had followed his ship. A violent sensation of nausea swept through him.

  ‘Where are they?’ he gasped. ‘Can you see them yet?’

  ‘Where’s who, sir?’ said the watch officer nervously.

  ‘The Gallies, of course!’ Gustav shouted. His hands started trembling. He squeezed them into fists.

  ‘N-no, sir,’ said the officer. ‘The sensor net is dead. It’s still reconfiguring.’

  ‘Find them,’ said Gustav. ‘They’re out there somewhere. I want a full proximity sweep. We have to catch them before they leave the system. We’re going to Code Red.’

  ‘We’re already at Code Red,’ Rodriguez interjected with disdain. ‘That was the first order I gave when I came in here.’

  Gustav glared at him, but Rodriguez just glared back, eyes ablaze with righteous wrath. The man had no authority to issue that command. His decision, however, had been absolutely right.

  ‘Signal the Oort drones,’ said Gustav curtly. ‘Put their sensors on maximum sensitivity. The Gallies must be close if they had a real-time feed running. And now they don’t have a warp trail to hide in. We’ll find them. I want those gunships to release every single suntap drone they’re carrying,’ he added, thinking fast. ‘Spread them in a globular scan pattern, centred here. Kill anything that moves.’

  7.3: IRA

  Through the Ariel’s crippled camera array, Ira watched dismally as the space around his ship filled up with robotic weapons. This close to the star, they’d easily catch him before he left the system. Only the Ariel’s hull cladding was keeping it hidden now, and that wouldn’t stand up to a thorough scan. The only hope they had left was if Rachel could fix the engines before Ulanu decided to fill the area with disrupter buoys. He was surprised it hadn’t happened already.