Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  Then they reached a door which drew back to reveal a line of maintenance robots parked in front of them. They were squat, wheeled things with rudimentary tact-fur and pairs of telescopic arms. The lighter ones were armed with habitat carbines. The heavier machines carried two-metre-long bulkhead-repair plates.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Ira.

  ‘This is the end of the prison block,’ Will explained. ‘The funny thing is that it’ll be more dangerous from here on. There are no guns in the walls and not half so many doors, so I’ve arranged for an escort. You can put Hugo down if you want – the machines will carry him.’

  Hugo waved an arm. ‘It’s okay,’ he warbled. ‘I think I can walk.’

  Will smiled at him. ‘Nice to have you back, Doc.’

  Ira glanced at both of them. Something in Will had definitely changed. He put Hugo down gently, keeping his eyes on the robots. It was very obvious this was Will’s show, and he wasn’t entirely comfortable with that situation.

  ‘And where is this escort taking us?’ he said.

  ‘To retrieve the archive,’ Will replied. ‘It’s in one of the holds on the inner level. The Earthers have turned it into a research lab.’

  Ira didn’t suppose there was much he could say about that. Apparently Transcended technology was getting him out of jail. Given that, it would be churlish to deny the Transcended an objective or two.

  ‘Lead on, then,’ he said, with a sweep of his hand.

  They walked for what felt like miles, ascending ramp after ramp as the gravity progressively decreased. Ira found the station’s empty passageways disturbing. Every now and then they passed a door on which someone was furiously banging, or through which muffled shouting or wailing could be heard. Other than that, there was no evidence of human life.

  Just how had Will managed this? Whenever Will first shut the doors, there must have been some people in the corridors. Where had they all gone?

  ‘Hey, Will, where is everybody?’ he asked. His voice echoed off the metal walls.

  ‘Around,’ said Will. ‘I’m taking us on a route that avoids trouble. And I’ve managed to convince some of the Earthers to leave the halls on our behalf – they think there’s an air-management crisis. They’re not all convinced, though. The High Church put a lot of extra security around the archive. The automated systems are under my control, but I haven’t been able to convince the squads posted there to leave. They’ve entrenched their position, so we have no choice but to go through them.’

  That didn’t sound good.

  ‘How many men are we talking?’ Ira asked.

  ‘About forty.’

  Ira shot him a look. ‘And how are we supposed to manage that?’

  ‘With robots,’ Will replied mildly.

  Ira glanced quickly at Rachel, but she didn’t look remotely fazed by the answer. Maybe there was something wrong with her, too.

  However, when they rounded the top of the last ramp, Ira saw what Will meant. The high-ceilinged upper level was crowded with autonomous machines of all descriptions, everything from heavy lifters to cleaner bugs.

  ‘Are you sure you can run all these things at once?’ said Ira.

  Will chuckled. ‘No problem.’

  Ira and his crew bounced with feather-light steps through the huge, echoing hangar hallway. Will stopped them outside a pair of sealed doors three stories tall.

  ‘I’d stay back if I were you,’ he said. ‘You won’t be needed for this.’

  Ira was about to comment, but Rachel took his arm.

  ‘Leave him,’ she said softly. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

  Ira reluctantly allowed himself to be screened behind the robotic shield Will arranged for them. He watched as the roboteer took his place in front of the doors with his army of machines positioned about him. He gestured with his hands and the massive doors rolled back.

  Almost immediately, there was a barrage of gunfire from the other side. Flechettes sprayed off Will’s barrier of bulkhead plating. Protected by his retinue of robots, he stepped forward. Will’s army powered into the room beyond. Lifters wrenched up the barricades the Earthers had created to defend themselves as if they were made of matchsticks. Maintenance robots tore guns from the hands of soldiers while cleaners darted about their legs, tripping them and spraying them with adhesive foam. Erratic gunfire and cries of panic echoed through the chamber. Will walked through it all serenely, tilting his head from time to time as if listening to some inaudible tune.

  Will jerked once as a stray flech ripped into his shoulder, but walked on as if he felt nothing at all. Ira stared at him in disbelief. If Will had so much power over these machines, why had he bothered to enter the room and expose himself to danger? He could have fought the battle from anywhere.

  Will turned slightly. Ira caught a glimpse of his face and understood. A soft, insane smile curved the roboteer’s lips. Will wanted this. He wanted his enemies to see his face as he smashed them. Ira grimaced. The old Will didn’t have this kind of appetite for vengeance. What had the Earthers done to him, for crying out loud?

  Within another few seconds, the fight was over. The Earther positions had been demolished and the soldiers were either unconscious or helpless. The air was heavy with the sound of their plaintive cries. Apparently many of them had broken limbs, perhaps deliberately caused.

  Amazingly, the entire operation had been conducted without Will’s force firing a shot. Though as the robots pulled back, it was clear that a soldier or two had been mangled beneath the lifters’ wheels.

  ‘You can come out now,’ Will called to his friends. ‘It’s safe.’

  Ira wasn’t exactly pleased at being treated like a delicate civilian, but he was too astonished by Will’s achievement to care. He stepped up to examine their prize. In the middle of the storage chamber was a bank of screens and sensors. A small cluster of white-robed technicians huddled behind it. Behind them was the immense scaffold in which the archive sat.

  ‘Your services are no longer required,’ Will told the technicians. ‘You may go.’

  The technicians fled in a series of frantic, graceless leaps, their terror outweighing their attention to the meagre gravity. Will’s robots set about dismantling the scaffold and moving the archive into the cargo airlock at the back.

  ‘We’ve done what can be done here,’ he said. Blood oozed sluggishly from his shoulder, but Will was apparently indifferent to it. ‘The robots will take the archive outside and shuttle-bugs will carry it to whatever ship we decide to take.’

  Ira fixed him with a look. ‘I can’t imagine there’s any question about that. We take the Ariel.’

  An expression disturbingly akin to pity crossed Will’s features. ‘We can’t,’ he said.

  Ira’s body tensed for a confrontation. ‘And why the hell not?’

  Will stepped over to the technicians’ monitors and pointed to one of the screens. It flared into life.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  Ira looked. What he saw appalled him. The Ariel was in pieces. Great swathes of its exohull cladding had been removed, exposing the workings underneath. Whole field inducers had been stripped away.

  Ira’s chest tightened in pain. His ship! That vessel had been his pride and his home. It had been his life. He felt the loss of this mere machine savagely, in a way he hadn’t been able to with the news of Amy’s death. Maybe because it was safer to grieve after a piece of metal than his best friend. For a moment, he felt his entire emotional landscape tilt. Tears clouded his vision.

  ‘I’ve been looking over what the Earthers have got,’ said Will, but Ira barely heard him. His eyes were glued to the dreadful sight of his dead ship. ‘What do you think of this one?’ said Will.

  The image on the screen changed. Ira reeled back. He took a deep breath and tried to focus on the new vessel. It was a battle cruiser, a vast, unwieldy monster a couple of dozen kilometres from end to end. Ira could see at a glance that it was a graceless, brutal thing. A piece of shit. Nothing li
ke his Ariel.

  ‘Too big,’ he said emptily.

  That he should have come to this – Amy lost, no ship and his mission in tatters. If he ever laid eyes on John, he’d rip the bastard apart with his bare hands. You didn’t kill your own shipmates to save yourself. Regardless of what the scheming bastard believed about the mission, he should have known that.

  Will touched his shoulder. Ira looked up suddenly.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ said Will.

  Ira shook his head. ‘Sorry, what were you saying?’

  ‘I said it doesn’t matter how big it is. You just have to be able to pilot it. Rachel and I will do the rest.’

  Ira looked back at the ugly cruiser.

  ‘Captain,’ said Will. ‘We have to make up our minds fast. Word’s already out to the rest of the system that something’s going on here. They haven’t acted so far because they don’t want to fire on their own space station, but they’ll get over that soon enough.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ira, screwing shut his eyes. ‘I can fly it.’

  With leaden steps, he followed Will out of the storage bay and along the great, echoing tunnel to a bank of docking-pod locks. Ira forced himself back into the moment. There would come a time for avenging the Ariel, and Amy. First they had to get away from New Angeles.

  ‘I’ll need your help plotting a course for Galatea,’ he told Rachel. ‘I have no idea what the warp profile is like on that thing.’

  Will turned to face him. ‘Sir. Ira. That’s not where we’re going. I’m taking her back to the Fecund system.’

  Ira stared at him. Did Will really imagine he’d changed so much that he could ignore his commanding officer?

  ‘Sorry, Will,’ he said slowly, ‘but we have to get back to Galatea while there’s still a Fleet there to report to.’

  That look of pity appeared on Will’s face again. ‘There’s no point,’ he said.

  Ira found his heart hammering. ‘No point? What do you mean, no point?’

  ‘The invasion fleet has already left,’ said Will. ‘Galatea will have been attacked by now. What’s done is done.’

  Ira’s chest tightened again. In other words he’d failed to fulfil his mission, and his home world was under the thumb of a horde of genocidal madmen.

  ‘I don’t care!’ he shouted, surprising even himself. ‘We can rendezvous with the evacuation arks – I know the rallying coordinates.’

  Will shook his head. ‘Sorry, sir, but we’ve got to go back.’

  ‘Have you thought for a moment about what you’re suggesting?’ Ira yelled. ‘That fucking hulk you picked out doesn’t have stealth!’ He jerked a finger back towards the room with the monitors. ‘You’d be leading the rest of the Earther fleet straight to a lifetime supply of alien fucking technology! I’m giving you a direct order, Mr Monet. We’re going home.’

  Will looked sadly at the floor. ‘Stay here, if you prefer,’ he said.

  ‘What did you say?’ boomed Ira.

  ‘I said stay if you want,’ Will repeated quietly. ‘You gave me that option. Or take another ship. All of you.’ His eyes flicked to Rachel and Hugo. ‘I’ll give you SAPs that will make it easy. But I have to go back, and I hope you’ll come with me.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Rachel said softly.

  Ira stared dumbly at her.

  Will turned to Hugo. ‘How about you, Doc?’

  Hugo’s lips pursed. He nodded vaguely.

  Will smiled at him. ‘No more worries about the alien menace?’

  Hugo’s mouth trembled into a bitter smile. ‘I have worries,’ he replied. ‘This change in you means nothing – you still have nothing but their word to go on, and everything I said may yet be true. But since we arrived here, I have had certain …’ His eyes drifted for a moment. He looked like he was about to cry. ‘Experiences …’ he finished raggedly. ‘Given the choice between Truists and aliens, I choose aliens. I would like to see the church … crushed.’ The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. ‘Yes, crushed.’

  Ira shook his head in disbelief. ‘This is fucking crazy! You’re heading to a dead system with no fuel in it. We’ll be right back where we started!’

  Will shook his head. ‘We won’t need fuel.’

  The door to the docking pod opened. Will stepped inside, followed by Rachel and Hugo.

  ‘You’re violating a direct order,’ Ira shouted.

  Will nodded. ‘Are you coming?’

  They were going to keep him away from his people. Away from reporting. Away from John.

  Ira crunched his hands into fists and stormed in beside them. ‘I hope you realise that this little power trip of yours is entirely temporary,’ he told Will, and stabbed the close stud on the door.

  17: BACK IN THE SADDLE

  17.1: WILL

  As the docking-pod door opened, Ira thrust himself out into the cruiser’s orbital corridor. Will was just behind him.

  ‘Which way to the bridge?’ said Ira.

  Will asked the ship. Pieces of himself were already infiltrating every part of its primitive network.

  ‘That way,’ he said, pointing right.

  Ira grabbed the handrail and dragged himself off at great speed. Will followed. Whispering SAPs informed him that the other ships in the system were taking a lot of interest in the station and had started cycling their encryption. That meant they didn’t have long to escape New Angeles orbit alive. Even so, Will found it impossible to feel hurried. The strange sense of numb serenity that had settled on him after he killed Vargas hadn’t lifted.

  The bridge, when they reached it, was like something out of a history interactive. Bulky acceleration couches with consoles on their arms faced a wall filled with monitors as if it was some kind of window.

  Ira took the pilot’s seat. Rachel looked around for something that was recognisably an engineering console. Will pointed it out to her.

  ‘Hugo, do you think you can run astrogation?’ said Ira.

  Hugo nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

  Will took the captain’s seat. Ira scowled at him as he sat down. Will felt a moment’s annoyance. What else was he supposed to do? It was the best place from which to monitor all the ship’s functions. And in the absence of a proper crew, that was exactly what he’d have to do.

  ‘All right,’ Ira growled. ‘Let’s get this shitty tub afloat.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Will. ‘There are some things I need to do first.’

  He shut his eyes and stretched his mind out through the starship’s comms-ports back to the space station. Since leaving the prison block, Will had been gathering robots together from all across the forty-kilometre-long structure. They’d brought with them anything and everything that Will could imagine might be useful in the Fecund system, from welding torches to medical supplies.

  Now he directed them towards the loading trucks that ran to the ship’s cargo bays. For the job that lay ahead of him, Will was going to need every pair of hands he could get. He packed machines designed for gravity environments into storage containers. The rest he moved into the ship’s open portals, along with the shuttle-bugs that carried the archive.

  ‘Captain,’ said Hugo, ‘I think we have a problem. The two ships that were posted in sentinel orbits are moving towards us. I’m receiving data packets from them which I believe are some kind of identification test.’

  ‘Will, we need to move,’ said Ira.

  Will watched train after train of loaded cars trundle into the massive hull.

  ‘One more minute,’ he said.

  ‘Message coming in on the public channel,’ Hugo reported.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ said Ira.

  A voice blared into life through the bridge speakers. ‘KMS Nanshan, this is Captain Yuen of the Third March. We can see you loading. What’s happening over there, Nanshan? Can you tell us why the station blacked out? We haven’t heard anything for over an hour.’

  Ira opened his mouth to speak but Will got there first.

  ‘Good to hear you, Yuen,’
he said, trying to sound relieved. ‘This is Acting Captain …’ He rapidly scanned the station’s database for a real name. ‘Kay Aquino. There’s been an outbreak of a computer virus of some kind, sir. The people are safe for the most part, but comms are down and security’s not responding. We think the outbreak came from the High Church research lab on Level A, so it could be of Galatean origin. We’ve also had some trouble with robots, sir, so we’re moving as much vulnerable hardware out of the way as quickly as we can. We should be done in a matter of minutes.’

  Will simultaneously instructed the station’s computers to make it look as if he was telling the truth. He fired a couple of half-hearted infection attempts at the approaching ships from the habitat ring.

  ‘They won’t buy that for long,’ Ira warned.

  ‘They won’t have to,’ said Will. He quickly pulled aboard the last of the robots and retracted the loading rails. ‘I’m done. We can go.’

  ‘About time.’ Ira’s fingers flew across the board. He powered up the engines.

  Almost immediately, Captain Yuen’s voice returned. ‘What are you doing, Aquino?’

  ‘Moving a safe distance from the station, sir,’ said Will. ‘This is the only uninfected ship and we need to get clear.’

  ‘You do not have permission. You are to hold your position until your status has been validated.’

  Will grimaced. ‘Can’t do that, sir. The docking systems stopped responding when we disconnected. They won’t let us back on.’ He turned his mind to the Nanshan’s external sensor array just in time to see the Third March launch its disrupter swarm. It held them steady in an attack configuration.

  ‘If you cannot dock automatically, make a manual tether,’ Yuen ordered. ‘Prophet knows you’ve got the machines to do it.’

  Meanwhile, the other Kingdom ship had swung around the station and was closing on the Nanshan from the opposite side. Both vessels were smaller than the one Will had stolen but they were far from harmless.

  ‘Sir, I think it’s time to leave,’ Will told Ira.