Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  There had to be at least a dozen men commanding the enemy machines, and all of them more familiar with the equipment than he was. It didn’t help that half of the fight was happening behind debris, where he could only see the action through slow relayed images. There was nothing to do but issue his fleet broad commands and hope.

  His drones were rapidly overwhelmed. With a snort of disgust, Ira realised he had no choice but to pile on the power. He started firing again with his closest suntap-ray, taking every free shot he could. Two enemy ships received glancing hits and Ira had the satisfaction of watching their inducers flare and die.

  This time, though, the Earthers retaliated and their sporadic shield of covering fire quickly became focused. Ira’s best-placed suntap died in a flash of radiation. He roared his displeasure and slammed his fist on the arm of the couch.

  The Earthers followed up their attack with another sudden burst of fire, this time aimed directly at the Nanshan. Ira scrambled madly to defend the ship as the buffers around him crackled under the onslaught. Clouds of countermeasures sprayed out from the Nanshan’s hull. But as his hands flew madly over the keyboard, three dark shapes slunk out across the debris field towards him.

  Troop shuttles. They were headed for the Nanshan and using the floating wrecks as shields. Ira watched the little ships close on him with horrified fascination. They were flying insanely fast for such dangerous territory, but Earthers had always been good at risking lives. He tried desperately to block their advance using the Nanshan’s own underpowered g-rays but was hard pressed enough just keeping his buffers alive. The shuttles disappeared behind the curve of the nestship’s hull, hugging close to protect their final approach.

  Ira bellowed obscenities at them. There was no way he could get a lock on them now. They’d converge on his location in a matter of seconds, and in no time at all the nestship would be crawling with Earthers. There was only one thing to do: tell the others and hope they could pull some kind of alien rabbit out of the hat before it was too late.

  He hit the intercom button but nothing happened. A warning message popped up across his monitors – comms systems down. The Earthers’ tidy firing pattern had knocked out his primary and secondary antenna arrays.

  ‘Fuck!’ yelled Ira.

  There was only one way to raise the alarm now. He’d have to chance it that the Earthers wouldn’t use g-rays with their troop shuttles in the line of fire and go in person. He grabbed his suit, threw himself down the corridor and piled into the docking pod as fast as he could. He watched the action on the monitor screen as the pod sealed and proceeded with painful slowness up to the exohull. The shuttles were slithering over the side of the nestship’s hull like vipers towards the Nanshan’s helpless bulk.

  ‘Come on!’ Ira boomed, bashing the docking pod wall with the flat of his hand. ‘Can’t you go any faster, you fucking machine?’

  The pod reached space at last and trundled unhurriedly along the docking proboscis. Ira immediately hit his suit intercom and started broadcasting.

  ‘Ariel crew, listen up. Earther arrival in the nestship interior is imminent. I repeat, imminent.’

  The first shuttle swept into view around the curve of the hull below him. A tactical laser lanced out from its nose, severing the rail ahead of him, and Ira’s pod ground to a juddering halt.

  ‘It’s just not my day,’ he muttered as he slammed on his helmet and yanked the lever on the pod’s emergency door release. He gripped the handle hard as air flooded out of the chamber. Then he held his breath and hurled himself into the half-kilometre gulf that still lay between him and the great rent in the nestship’s side.

  Ira turned lazily end over end as he soared across the void, struggling to stabilise himself with the suit’s feeble thrusters. As he did so, he caught sight of a line of Earther soldiers in dogfight harnesses being spat out of the nearest shuttle’s hull like peas from a child’s mouth, and they were accelerating towards him.

  Ira contemplated firing the small vacuum automatic clipped to the suit’s leg, but the distance was too great. Truthfully, he wasn’t equipped for zero-gee combat. They’d catch up with him in no time. He used what was left of the juice in his thrusters to propel him towards the jagged edge of the hole below.

  Despite being wafer-thin in starship terms, the exohull was still several metres thick and not easy to grab hold of. There was a dreadful moment when Ira bounced at the lip of the rent and started to drift clear. He was almost out of reach before his hand lashed out to seize a nearby spar of tortured iron. He hung there, clinging to the ship with nothing but a single slippery hand. The laser sighting dots of Earther space-combat rifles wobbled briefly across his legs.

  With a grunt of effort, Ira pulled his body back towards the wall of the ship. He half-flew, half-climbed hand over hand into the nestship and along the inner wall away from the hole. The chamber he found himself in was a huge, mottled polygonal space like a bubble in some titanic metallic foam. It looked very different in reality from its image on a monitor wall. The scale was humbling, and without robots’ light-enhancement filters to illuminate the space it was oppressively gloomy.

  Ira glanced around for ways to escape. There were openings to access tunnels on the other side of the chamber but they were dozens of metres away across open space. The rail that Will’s machines had constructed ran across to them but following it would leave him totally exposed. So he pulled himself hand over hand along the strangely pocked and bubbled exohull interior towards the one piece of cover available – Hugo’s project.

  Dominating the chamber and anchored to its coreward wall was one of the things the physicist called a ‘quagitator’. It was a huge particle gun of some kind with helical accelerator channels and a broad crown of glassy spikes. It looked like a squashed helter-skelter topped by a head of violently stiff hair. Hugo had surrounded it from end to end within a turret of scaffolding and diagnostic sensors. It squatted menacingly in the dark.

  Ira leapt for the scaffolding and started pulling himself down towards the accelerator’s base. In the next second, the Earthers arrived. The searchlights on their dogfight harnesses flicked on, filling the chamber with crazily swooping circles of light. Laser sights flickered against the struts ahead of Ira’s hands. He grabbed the closest pole and headed inwards, ducking into the crevice between the quagitator’s huge ceramic-clad coils. The machine was still warm from Hugo’s tests and hummed beneath Ira’s gloved hand.

  Who knew how many rads he was taking just floating here? However, the good news was that no one in their right mind was going to shoot at him while he was close to such a machine. Starship equipment had a nasty habit of being full of antimatter or plasma or piped X-rays. Even the stupidest Earther knew that.

  Ira unclipped his automatic and took pot shots at the Earthers as they zipped past. He missed, and the soldiers started to clamber into the scaffolding above and below him. It was only a matter of time before they surrounded him.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Still, at least I made it this far.’

  ‘Sir, what’s going on?’ said Rachel’s voice.

  Ira blinked. He must have left his broadcast channel open when the pod died. Rachel and Will had been listening in ever since.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘I’m stuck on a fucking quagitator. The one just inside the rent.’ He instantly regretted his frankness. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he added. ‘I’m fine. Get to the habitat core and start up the defences.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir—’ said Rachel.

  ‘That’s an order!’ Ira shouted.

  The last thing he needed was for the rest of his crew to blow their final chance to act because of him. He snapped the intercom off and started dragging himself down the quagitator’s curving track. Who knew – maybe he’d make it to the bottom before they killed him.

  18.3: WILL

  Will and Rachel floated in the mesohull pathway that led to the habitat core and faced each other as they listened to Ira’s l
ast shouted command.

  ‘Do you want to carry on while I go back for him?’ said Will.

  ‘No,’ replied Rachel with a smile.

  ‘All right then,’ said Will.

  He turned the waldobot around, and with it the small army of machines cluttering the passage in both directions. They started racing up towards the chamber where Ira was trapped. As Will rose, he reached his mind out across the slender communication lines he’d rigged through the nestship’s labyrinthine mass and called for help.

  ‘Any idea how to get him out of there?’ said Rachel.

  Will nodded. ‘I’m going to take on the soldiers. You’ll be covering his escape.’

  More robots poured out of side-tunnels as they ascended, drawn by his call to battle. Will nudged a second waldobot up close.

  ‘You ride that one,’ he told Rachel. ‘It’s got manual controls. Take it to the foot of the accelerator. Grab him if you need to – I’ve set the hands so they won’t crush him.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Will replied.

  Rachel gave him a look. ‘That’s what Ira said.’

  Together they burst up through the opening into the outer chamber. Rachel’s robot veered to the right. Will’s headed straight up, surrounded by a shielding swarm of machines. He identified his targets through fifty pairs of artificial eyes and set about neutralising them with mechanical efficiency. At the same time, he launched a soft attack and started dismembering the Earthers’ tactical network.

  The soldiers’ responses were the expected combination of random, disordered gunfire and incoherent orders. Will’s robots seized the Earthers and immobilised them, stripping them of their weapons. But as he closed in on a knot of men taking shelter in the scaffolding, a rush of urgent commands came over the Earthers’ main channel.

  ‘Primary target acquired!’ someone shouted.

  ‘Commence Phase Two! Go! Go! Go!’

  One of the Earthers shouldered a broad-mouthed cannon and took aim. There was a cough of icy vapour and a projectile of some kind ripped towards Will. He veered aside and drew up a shield of heavy-duty metal-movers. The device exploded against them. At the same time, Will’s world burst open. A blinding, shrieking racket filled his head. It was an EM bomb.

  Will instinctively clapped his hands to his helmet as the barrage of electromagnetic radiation scoured his skull. His less robust robots died immediately. They went limp and tumbled inertly off towards the walls. The few shielded for exohull work simply froze, their command stacks abruptly emptied.

  In the moments of ringing shock that followed, the Earthers threw themselves at Will. He struggled weakly as they clustered around his body. Even in his addled state, he managed to thrust four of them aside through the sheer strength of his augmented limbs, but they jetted straight back into the fray.

  Somewhere in the struggle, the soldiers clamped a kind of cage over Will’s head. They seized his arms and trapped them by his sides with a suit-lock. Will squirmed and thrashed to no avail and his legs kicked harmlessly against vacuum.

  Will cursed his own stupidity. He’d never suspected they’d use a weapon that damaged themselves along with him. But clearly this was a planned attack. They knew about him and his skills in advance and they wanted him alive. He groaned to himself as understanding dawned. Of course they knew about him. He’d left them all the evidence of his abilities they could ever need when he fled the station at New Angeles. He hadn’t deleted the records of his escape. That meant the Earthers had video footage, data-transport records and over a dozen eyewitnesses.

  Even so, the trap was still a cut above the normal Earther tactics. The soldiers had even come equipped for weightless combat. That was a rare thing in modern warfare, but simple analysis would have shown the archive had been stored in a weightless environment. Someone had paid attention to the details. Will suspected Enrique Chopra’s hand in this affair.

  The soldiers dragged Will to the inner wall of the chamber. As they pulled him along by the cage locked around his helmet, he noticed that the Earthers weren’t remotely fazed by the comms blackout their weapon had created. They were signing to each other with their hands. That meant they had to be Spatials, Earth’s crack zero-gee assault troops – the same butchers who carried out the Ganymede Massacre in the first year of the war. No doubt Chopra had seduced them out of planet leave on New Angeles with promises of bonus pay.

  Will made a tentative attempt to contact his surviving robots. He wasn’t surprised when nothing happened. The cage was a signal blocker. It had probably been manufactured specially for him.

  While the troops swapped gestures, Will’s strength slowly began to return, and with it his determination to act. He could only think of one plan, and it was insane. He was surrounded by armed men and held in the grip of a solid steel band, but he didn’t care. Will would rather die a dozen times than return to the hands of the High Church.

  He shut his eyes and focused on his smart cells. His blood raced and his muscles tingled as he braced his arms against the suit-lock and strained. The metal band dug hard into his flesh. More significantly, it dug into the life-sustaining sleeves that surrounded them. Will pressed slowly but firmly – there was no point ripping his suit open unless he absolutely had to. He channelled his power, rearranging the body chemistry of his limbs. He let everything but the battle between him and the suit-lock’s embrace melt away.

  Nothing happened immediately, but eventually the lock gave sluggishly before snapping open. Will’s arms flew up as they became free. Without pausing, he turned the motion into an attack, seizing the rifle of the closest soldier with one hand and grabbing the man’s suit with the other.

  Will hurled the soldier across the chamber, using the momentum it gave him to fly sideways. The soldiers’ weapons whipped around to fire. They sprayed low-recoil suit-rippers into the space where Will had been a second before, their qualms about killing him apparently vanished. Will returned fire with deadly accuracy.

  As the Earthers scattered for cover, Will reached up and tore the signal blocker from his head. Only three of his robots had survived the EM blast, but they were the biggest of his waldobots. They were all he needed.

  He set permanent-kill programs into each of them before the Earthers got the chance to fire another EM weapon. Then he watched, smiling, as they ground, ripped and pounded the screaming soldiers into pulp. By the time his sideways vector brought him to the far wall of the chamber, the fight was over. He observed the fleshy remains with a certain crazy satisfaction and blinked himself back to sanity.

  He looked around. Ira and Rachel were gone, and so were many of the Spatials. That wasn’t good. Will asked the nestship network where they were, but there was no reply. All his local nodes for a dozen chambers in every direction had been fried when the bomb went off. Will had no idea where his friends were now or how to help them.

  There was only one way he could find them now, and that was by getting his fluid transport system running at last. The mobile transmitters and sensors it carried would mean the Earthers could fire off as many EM bombs as they liked and Will would still be able to track his shipmates. He hailed the closest waldobot and set off as fast as he could for the habitat core, where Hugo no doubt waited.

  18.4: IRA

  While Will dealt with the Earthers, Ira and Rachel fled through the weirdly cellular interior of the nestship’s mesohull. As they flew, Ira ranted.

  ‘What the hell do you think you were doing, trying to rescue me?’ he demanded. ‘Didn’t I give you a direct order? Does my authority count for nothing around here any—’

  His tirade was interrupted by a hateful squeal as the waldobot they were clinging to twitched once and died. Then its headlamps went out.

  ‘Rachel?’ he said, but their intercoms were also dead.

  Ira flicked through channels, trying them all. He looked up just in time to see Rachel’s frantic gesturing. By the light of their feebl
e suit-guides, he saw that their waldobot was hurtling towards one of the chamber walls. He and Rachel leapt free of the machine just before it ploughed straight into the unyielding alien ceramic.

  Rachel grabbed his suit and dragged him close enough for their helmets to touch.

  ‘Was that what I think it was?’ Her voice buzzed through his faceplate.

  ‘It was an EM weapon,’ Ira replied.

  Rachel’s expression darkened. ‘Then Will’s in trouble. We should go back.’

  Ira sighed and nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  He had no intention of abandoning one of his crew. He just wished that circumstances hadn’t conspired to make him look quite so hypocritical.

  Rachel squeezed his arm and pointed back the way they’d come. ‘Wait! Look!’

  Through the doorway to the chamber behind them, Ira saw the beam of a searchlight illuminate the drifting ice particles. He scanned the space they were in – it was too large to manoeuvre in quickly, and they only had a dead waldobot for cover.

  ‘This way,’ he said, pointing deeper into the ship. Rachel nodded.

  Ira led the way, flying desperately from doorway to doorway and squinting in an effort to make out the irregular shapes in the gloom. Two chambers on, he found a small space criss-crossed by plasma supply pipes and took cover behind a cluster of larger conduits near the corner. Rachel squeezed in alongside him. Seconds later, six Earthers poured into the room and fanned out, making complex hand gestures as they moved.

  Rachel pressed her helmet to Ira’s. ‘We can take them,’ she said. ‘Six to two isn’t bad.’

  Ira grinned. He’d been thinking the same thing. The close space would give their lighter suits an advantage and the Earthers were bound to think twice about firing with so many pipes around. The odds were good. The enemy might be trained zero-gee warriors with thrusters, but he and Rachel were Galatean Fleet, bred for space.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The three on the left are yours. The ones on the right are mine. We move on my mark.’ Ira waited for the closest Earthers to drift near. ‘Go!’