Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Spread out,’ Tang told his captains. ‘Destroy those remaining stations and the inner system belongs to us!’

  His ships crawled forward through the miasma of their own disrupter cloud, lancing the Gallie stations as they went. Despite their power, the improvised battle stations were no match for a sustained attack from Tang’s fleet. One by one, they winked out. The tide had started to turn.

  ‘The Galateans can’t hide for ever,’ Tang announced jubilantly. ‘Otherwise we’ll have their world surrounded before they can do anything about it.’

  He was right. The Gallies flashed back into the fray, darting along the sluggish Kingdom lines just outside disrupter range to launch vast sprays of torpedoes. Tang’s suntaps seared the space around them, but the Gallies were moving too fast for them to score many hits.

  ‘Cowards!’ yelled Tang. But he was laughing now, confident of his victory.

  ‘Sir!’ wailed Lee. ‘The enemy munitions are doing something strange to our disrupter field.’

  Tang’s face fell once more. ‘Show me.’

  A bright field diagram overlaid the battle on the main screen. Somehow, the Galatean weapons were shepherding the disrupter drones together. The result was that, as the fleet’s formation thinned, a cloud remained around each Kingdom ship but the space between them was rapidly becoming clear.

  ‘Redirect the disrupters,’ Tang ordered.

  ‘We can’t, sir!’ said Lee. ‘Not without reprogramming them. The Gallies have tricked their SAPs somehow.’

  ‘Then pilot them by hand, for God’s sake!’

  All at once, the Galateans flashed back into their carefully prepared patches of clean vacuum and started firing with all weapons. Battle was truly joined.

  ‘Admiral, sir!’ called one of the comms officers. ‘Communications down to ships eleven, nineteen, twenty-six—’

  ‘Soft attack!’ Tang yelled. ‘Cycle the security codes!’

  Fleet coordination evaporated under the onslaught and the battle dissolved into chaos, with ship fighting against ship. As Gustav watched, the flagship was separated from its escort and forced to take on the enemy ships one by one.

  The Galateans fought like demons. They used every trick in the book, and plenty Gustav had never seen before. He had to hand it to them – they were impressive adversaries, even though their cunning was bought through butchering the natural order of humanity.

  Then the Fourth Wave arrived. Tang issued a flurry of desperate commands.

  ‘Cover them! Inform all ships on open channels!’

  The order came too late, of course. The Galateans concentrated their fire on the vulnerable new ships, and a third of them were reduced to slag before their suntaps could engage. By now, though, it hardly mattered. Tang already had the advantage.

  Gustav wondered what the sky looked like from the surface of Galatea tonight. Probably too dangerous to view with the naked eye, he reflected. Anyone with a brain in their head would be watching the display from a lead-lined bunker.

  Slowly, Tang’s hold on the star system became a vicelike grip. He ground down the Gallies through pure attrition, hurling dozens of ships and hundreds of lives at the enemy.

  This was how Earth really won, Gustav knew. Never through technical superiority, rather with the most reliable force in the history of warfare: sheer weight of numbers.

  In the end, the enemy simply ran out of tricks. Their star system was flooded with enemy vessels. Their home world was effectively surrounded. Each ship they had left was mobbed by a dozen Kingdom gunships.

  After two gruelling hours of ship-to-ship fighting, Lee proudly relayed an incoming message to Tang.

  ‘Sir! I have the Galatean admiral on the line! He says he wants to surrender.’

  ‘About time!’ Tang shouted.

  His good humour had been battered flat somewhere in the madness of battle. Now he was just plain furious. More than half of his precious fleet had been destroyed by a handful of Galatean cruisers. It was by far the longest battle in the history of spaceflight, and without doubt the most expensive in the history of the human race.

  ‘Instruct him to hand over his command codes and prepare to have his strategic facilities boarded,’ Tang snapped, then slumped back into his couch and glowered.

  ‘Congratulations, Admiral,’ said Gustav smoothly.

  Tang rounded on him. ‘This was your fault!’ he seethed. ‘It was your delaying that caused this mess!’

  Wrong, Gustav thought to himself. It was your impatience. But he didn’t want to think about it any more. The whole process had left a sick taste in his mouth.

  The final comic touch to the affair came half an hour later when the Kingdom’s capture team processed the strategic information passed to them by the Galateans. Commander Lee had the unfortunate job of passing the news to Tang.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, in the tremulous voice that Gustav had learned preceded disaster.

  Tang eyed him coldly. ‘What?’

  ‘We have secured the planet, sir, but only about half the population is there.’

  Tang shut his eyes for a moment. ‘Where are the rest of them?’

  Lee cleared his throat. ‘They’ve already been evacuated, sir. That includes the children, the elderly and everyone with expertise in maintaining the planet’s terraforming systems.’

  Gustav realised the import of that immediately. He shut his eyes and chuckled mirthlessly to himself.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Tang demanded.

  Gustav gave him a pitying glance. Tang had clearly not done sufficient research on the planet he’d been so keen to conquer.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Gustav said. ‘Without trained engineers, this planet’s ecosphere will go into violent collapse in just a few years. You’ve captured nothing.’

  Such extraordinary expense just to secure a dying world wasn’t likely to impress many in the Holy Court. For the battle that was supposed to end the war and refill the Kingdom’s coffers, it was a surprisingly poor result. Tang’s face became a mask of pain.

  ‘Evacuated to where?’ he snapped.

  ‘They don’t know, sir,’ said Lee. ‘Apparently, their flight vectors were never disclosed to the rest of the Galatean Fleet.’

  Tang pummelled the arms of his chair like a petulant child. ‘Scan space! Organise searches!’ he ordered through gritted teeth. ‘They can’t have gone far. We will find them, and then we will make the cowards pay!’

  16: MURDER

  16.1: WILL

  Vargas came to Will’s chamber every day. At first, he asked questions. How had Will communicated with the Relic? Where had his people found the artefact? Will refused to answer, despite the pain. Vargas quickly grew bored with his intransigence and concentrated on breaking Will’s spirit instead.

  His technique was simple but insidious. He gave Will orders. Obedience resulted in pleasure, disobedience in pain. Sometimes Vargas instructed Will to do things he’d do anyway, like sitting or breathing. Whenever possible, Will disobeyed. But then Vargas would create little challenges, like instructing Will not to harm or humiliate himself in certain specific, degrading ways.

  Inevitably, Will’s body started to crave the bliss Vargas meted out, and to fear the suffering. The sensations were so total that it was impossible not to. An awful voice gathered strength inside him, telling him over and over that it would be easier to simply submit rather than live like this. It echoed in his head at night, asking him if he honestly expected to see the light of day till he accepted his fate. It reminded him that his actions were irrelevant now anyway – that it was only a matter of time before the end of history. He might as well spare himself the torment.

  Nevertheless, Will discovered that he had it within him to resist. The turning point came one day when Will was lying on the floor of his cell. Vargas was jolting him repeatedly and ordering him to get up. As Will gasped like a beached fish, he realised something important. Vargas could inflict limitless quantities of pain upon him, but he couldn’t a
ctually make Will change.

  Will suddenly had a vision of his self as something totally separate from the world. It was a remote, indestructible thing like a hard black sphere, distanced from the flashing, glaring lights of sensation that impinged upon his physical person. The sphere could only be damaged if Will allowed it.

  The only thing that still linked that sphere to the outside world was the insidious voice. In order to defeat the voice – and Vargas – Will had to protect the sphere. He had to maintain the separation between his mind and his senses.

  From that day onwards, Will took to behaving as if the priest wasn’t there. He pretended he couldn’t hear the man’s threats or enticements. He told himself he was in his private node, deaf to the world. After a while, it became easy to do – enjoyable, even. The fantasy of a private node helped a lot. Will found himself constructing a version of his old metaphor space out of pure imagination and residing there day after day, even when the priest didn’t visit. It was a preferable reality to the soft grey walls of his prison.

  Vargas didn’t react well to Will’s new strategy. With each passing day that Will refused to bend to his will, Vargas became more impatient. He changed tactics and embarked upon a programme of systematic humiliation.

  Soldiers were brought in to brutalise Will. He was subjected to every kind of physical torment Vargas could devise and made to enjoy it. Will only retreated further into his mind, like a man sinking happily into a pool of viscous quicksand.

  Had Will been inclined to focus on the world, he might have enjoyed watching the priest’s persona of pious calm crumble into wrath. However, he was far away. Until the day Vargas changed his tack again.

  He stepped into the cell one morning carrying his white priest’s hat in one hand.

  ‘Wake up, Monet,’ he said curtly.

  Will stared through him.

  ‘Because your education has been coming along so slowly of late, I’ve decided to try a new method with you.’

  Vargas clicked his fingers and the wall of the cell behind him sprang into life. It revealed three cells much like Will’s own. Each one contained a familiar figure: Amy was sitting up against a wall, Rachel sleeping and Ira doing press-ups. It was the first evidence Will had been given since their capture that they were still alive.

  The sight of their faces did what Vargas’s voice could no longer do. It dragged Will towards awareness and tears sprang unbidden to his eyes.

  ‘I have written down their names and placed them in this hat,’ said Vargas. ‘You will pick one of the names and that person will die. If you fail to pick a name, I will kill them all.’

  Vargas held out the hat. ‘Choose,’ he snapped.

  Slowly, the nature of the choice permeated Will’s torture-softened brain. This isn’t good, he thought to himself. It wasn’t something he could ignore. He knew Vargas well enough by now to recognise that the man was in deadly earnest.

  Will’s eyes drifted up to the hat. He stared at it.

  ‘Wait too long and your opportunity is lost,’ said Vargas coldly. ‘You have one minute.’ The priest checked the watch on his sleeve.

  Will held his breath as he tried to think. He’ll kill them all anyway, he told himself. What difference would a few days make? But he couldn’t bring himself to believe that while he was looking at his crewmates’ faces. A lot could happen in a few days. Ira might find some way to get them out.

  Death is better than living like this, the voice inside him said. But Will saw no evidence to suggest the others had been abused in the way he had. He’d be able to see it in their faces if they’d been treated like him.

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ said Vargas. ‘Are you going to save two of your friends or not?’

  Reluctantly, Will staggered to his feet. He looked inside the hat. The pieces of paper were folded over so that it was impossible to read them before he picked. In a way, he was glad of that. He knew that playing along could be a terrible mistake. Taking part in Vargas’s games had never been a good idea before. However, this time the lives of two of his crewmates were on the line. Will could tell that Vargas didn’t want him to choose. If he refused to play along, two useless deaths would be on his conscience.

  Will screwed up his courage. ‘Fuck you, Vargas,’ he croaked.

  He met the priest’s gaze squarely and, without looking or flinching, drew out a slip.

  The moment the paper was in his hand, an icy shadow passed across his heart. What if it was Rachel? It had been days since Will had thought or cared about anyone, but still he found himself praying it wouldn’t be her.

  He slowly opened the slip: Amy McKlusky-Ritter.

  Will gasped in spontaneous relief and hated himself for it immediately. This was Amy, for God’s sake – happy, loveable Amy. The person who’d stood up for him when he joined the crew. The person who’d hand-nursed him through the worst of the Transcended virus. And now she was going to die. How could he be relieved about that? Yet he was. Guilt clutched at his heart. Vargas had won anyway.

  Vargas saw the expression on Will’s face and smiled. ‘Excellent,’ he said. He plucked the slip from Will’s limp fingers and read the name. ‘Prisoner three to the execution room,’ he said to the walls.

  Will slumped back into the corner, curled his arms tightly around his legs and shut his eyes.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Vargas cheerfully. ‘You’re going to watch this.’

  Vargas gestured and two large guards stepped into the cell. One grabbed Will’s hair and yanked his head up. Another applied a nerve-tickler to his face to force his eyelids open.

  Will struggled but it was hopeless. The guards were far stronger than him.

  ‘Fuck you! Fuck you all!’ he screamed.

  ‘Now enjoy,’ Vargas said with glee.

  The priest pressed the button and Will’s body melted under a wash of pleasure. He had no choice but to writhe in delight has he watched four burly guards enter Amy’s cell. She glanced up when they arrived, in hope at first. Then her face went stony with concern as they led her away. The cameras tracked her motion through the station’s bland corridors.

  ‘Is there any point is asking where you’re taking me?’ she asked her guards, but received no reply. ‘I thought not.’

  They led her to a huge, high-ceilinged room with wall-screens depicting the flags of every Earther subsect. In the centre of the floor was a kind of throne made from moulded black plastic with straps attached to its arms and base.

  Amy hesitated at the threshold as she saw the chair. Her jail-worn features slid for a moment into an expression of fear and sorrow as she realised what was about to happen.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said quietly.

  Then her face settled back into a mask of stoic calm. A gurgle escaped Will’s lips as ecstasy and misery mingled repulsively in his mind and body.

  The guards shoved Amy forward and bound her into the chair. She took the opportunity to spit in their faces. The guards glared at her but didn’t bother to retaliate. They simply finished their work and walked away. The screen swapped to a frontal view of Amy on her throne, with the flags waving behind it.

  ‘This will be used in our public-information bulletin tonight,’ Vargas explained enthusiastically.

  ‘Amy McKlusky-Ritter,’ said a bold, masculine voice, ‘the Holy Court of the High Church of Truism finds you guilty of the crimes of heresy, murder, espionage, withholding evidence and betrayal of the human race. The sentence is death by neural lash.’

  ‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Amy replied.

  There were a few seconds of waiting, charged with dreadful anticipation, then Amy’s face contorted in agony and surprise. Vargas increased Will’s pleasure by another notch. He grunted in bliss as Amy spasmed.

  Her face relaxed. She drew air raggedly and choked out a single sob before the lash came again. She arched in palsied torment. Vargas ramped Will’s reaction every time her body jerked. Her screams echoed round the room. Meanwhile Will watched and endured. His body began to
shiver uncontrollably.

  At last, after thirty neural lashes, Amy slumped forwards in the chair, dead. Vargas gave Will one long, last surge of pleasure.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ the priest mused. ‘Most people never live past twenty. But then I suppose she was a moddie.’

  Will whimpered with incoherent loathing.

  ‘You’ve had a busy day,’ Vargas told him gently, patting him on the top of his sweating head. ‘Why don’t you relax a while? And then maybe tomorrow we can have a nice conversation about where that alien archive came from.’

  The priest hummed to himself as he and his thugs sauntered out of the cell, leaving Will to collapse against the foam floor and shake.

  In the hours that followed the execution, Will didn’t move. He lay still as a corpse, his mind lurching between feelings of intolerable guilt and blinding hatred. Food was delivered through the slot in the wall but Will paid it no attention.

  Eventually, artificial night came to his little world, but Will didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. He could only lie there, the memory of Amy’s last moments still burned into his mind’s eye along with the revolting knowledge of his own delight while she died.

  Vargas had won and Will knew it. He couldn’t take another day like this one. If they tried the same trick again with just two names in the hat, Will knew he’d break. He’d tell Vargas everything rather than squirm and moan like that while Rachel died. Which meant he only had hours left before it was all over.

  As the last shreds of his precious freedom drifted restlessly, meaninglessly by, Will found himself hallucinating, as he often had in recent days. Disconnected fragments of his past came back to haunt him. He saw himself aboard the Ariel, talking to Amy. She was smiling at him, telling him about the Penfield Lobe. Then he was in the Fecund starship, crawling through the icy tunnels towards mysteries millions of years old. The hope he’d felt then seemed so ludicrous now. Will blinked and saw himself back in the security of his personal node, building a solution to an alien SAP puzzle – one that would save the human race …