Dot Robot

by Jason Bradbury

  The finished instrument was fit for a Jedi Master. It was heavier than it looked and its stripped rubber grip stuck to the meat of his palm. There were eight fully operational buttons drilled in two lines along its body, and, as its enthusiastic inventor wielded it like a rapier, his every twist and thrust was picked up as pixel-perfect inputs by the test software on his monitor.

  The converted movie prop may have had a touch of the Hollywood about it, but there was nothing make-believe about its intended use. Jackson’s mind drifted to the mountains of Ukraine, where he saw the ruined village and its destitute inhabitants. He had been constantly on edge since Brooke’s rescue and every time he thought he saw a blacked-out Range Rover, or a potential kidnapper in every passer-by, it made him more determined to find Lear and finish this.

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘Now? Whatcha mean now?’ said Jackson from the cafe, trying to keep the ketchup from running down the sleeve of his triple-decker bacon sandwich hand.

  ‘It’s hard to speak,’ said Brooke in a whisper. ‘But I’m at the launch facility and we’re minutes away from countdown.’

  ‘Would it have killed you to give me half an hour’s warning?’ said Jackson, stuffing the whole sandwich into his mouth in one go and looking for somewhere to wipe his hand before settling for the tablecloth.

  ‘The investors were beginning to get cold feet and Dad decided to go straight ahead with the launch. I’ve sent the login details to your email,’ she hissed. ‘Just get your bed-wallowin’ behind back home.’

  So much for a relaxing Saturday breakfast, thought Jackson, as he limped breathlessly into the block of flats after running all the way. He looked up to see the lift doors taped shut and a big OUT OF ORDER sign hanging above them. Of all the times for them to fail, it had to happen now. Jackson already felt nauseous after eating too quickly, then running too fast. Now he faced eighteen flights of stairs. He put the first four floors behind him with little trouble, but by the fifth he could taste bacon again, mixed with mucus. About halfway up, stopping to catch his breath, he decided that perhaps he would try harder for Spinks in the next cross-country. Even the smokers would have made it up the stairwell quicker than he could right now.

  The two men in the launch room, blissfully ignorant of Brooke’s alternative plan for their very expensive robots, were the facility’s launch director who squinted at her through remarkably dense spectacles whenever he spoke, and Nathaniel Goulman, a shy but brilliant PhD student who had hung around after graduating from Professor English’s class and had become an indispensable part of his many projects. He worked mainly with J.P. on the university campus in Massachusetts and his considerable skills in the discipline of computer science came a close second to those of the great man himself. It also helped that Goulman was an obsessive body builder. In light of recent events, J.P. found it reassuring that the systems analyst for this test flight could benchpress 315 pounds.

  The operations room was built inside a bombproof bunker. For its three inhabitants, who were working in close proximity to a launch vehicle filled with over one million litres of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, its one-metre thick concrete walls and blast-resistant steel doors were reassuring. The room itself was packed with computers and flat screens; and, after J.P. had insisted on adding his own gear, there was barely room to walk between workstations.

  Brooke looked up at her father on a large monitor above her terminal.

  ‘Have you fixed it yet?’ J.P.’s face loomed large. Brooke had already managed to delay lift-off for a few minutes by stringing a line about possible loss of pressure in one of the cryogenics tanks. A system for pumping frigid gases around the launch vehicle’s main stage was required to keep its liquid fuels cold enough to prevent them exploding as they sat there. The system was functioning perfectly, but Brooke knew it was just the thing to buy her some time. Now that time was just about used up. The launch window, a combination of weather conditions and the precise prediction of where certain lethal chunks of orbital debris would be, was about to close. She would have to give the thumbs-up for the automated start sequence in the next sixty seconds, or not at all. But where on earth was Jackson?

  Brooke wiped the sweat from her top lip and stared at the launch vehicle, which sat quivering in a heat haze on her screen. Its largest component was its fuel tank. The fat white tube towered thirty metres above the ground, two shorter solid booster rockets strapped to its sides like an afterthought. Sunk partly in a deep trench was the main engine, designed to drink an explosive cocktail of liquids from the fuel tank, then spew them out in a fiery stream that would push the whole assembly into low Earth orbit. Then the bright white phoenix would die, leaving nothing but a tiny capsule in the silence of space from which J.P.’s robot brood would hatch.

  ‘Go for auto-sequence start … T minus thirty seconds …’ said the director from the terminal across from Brooke. The young engineer was sure of one thing: if her British friend didn’t arrive soon, it would be impossible to patch him into the complex communications system without someone noticing. And the only chance of getting Lear would be lost.

  Jackson’s chest was still heaving and his nose was wet. Even his teeth and gums hurt. All the same, he had made it. The computer hummed happily under his desk, but his online email was being painfully slow. After what seemed like enough time to run up and down the stairs all over again, but was really only ten seconds, a list of new messages appeared, including one from Brooke. Jackson clicked on the web link in Brooke’s mail and a page not unlike Tin Lizzie’s appeared. It looked like a mash-up of the Hummer’s web interface and the screen from a flight simulator. Jackson could see the familiar USERNAME and PASSWORD fields, but in place of the car’s speedometer and gear-shift graphics there were several simple, line-drawn gauges. Labelled THRUST and BATTERY, they had a cluster of indicators with eye-catching titles – GRENADE, CLAW, MAGNET and SHUNT – overlaid on the black background of the video feed. There was also a faint emerald-green circle in the top left, which Jackson assumed was some form of navigational display, given the ‘20 km’ that was written beneath it.

  He entered the necessary details and waited.

  ‘T minus twelve seconds and counting …’ announced the launch director, reading from a screen full of digits.

  ‘Good luck, guys,’ said Brooke’s father. She could see him standing in the desert with a bunch of small men in grey suits, hiding behind binoculars and telescopes.

  ‘12 … 11 …’

  Where are you, Farley?

  ‘10, 9, 8, 7, 6 … Main engine’s start.’

  A bright white LED flashed up at Brooke’s workstation. Jackson. She sighed in relief.

  ‘Problem?’ asked Mr Goulman.

  ‘Negative. Got it covered,’ Brooke said, quickly clicking to accept the incoming comms request.

  ‘3, 2, 1 … Booster ignition and lift-off!’

  All the video feeds from the launch pad greyed out as a wave of smoke and steam engulfed the structure. The building that housed Brooke and her two colleagues was a good fifty metres away, but as the spacecraft was propelled skywards, the pressure wave from its powerful engines hit their building and every display, rack and mounting rattled.

  ‘Nice of you to join us,’ Brooke said quietly into her microphone.

  ‘I thought showing up late for a gig was considered rock ’n’ roll!’

  The twelve deck chairs were, literally, in the middle of nowhere. Each one had its own cooler beside it, containing a bottle of champagne and several bottles of water. And each chair was occupied by a man in a suit.

  ‘If you look to your monitors now, you should see the main fuel stage falling away,’ said Professor English, wiping sweat from his face with a handkerchief. He cut a romantic figure against the flat sandy landscape with its mountainous backdrop. With his leather flying jacket, white silk scarf and quiff of jet-black pomaded hair, he looked more like a Second World War flying ace than a distinguished academic.

  As each
man stared into the small LCD screen in their hand, J.P. continued. ‘It will follow the same path as the solid booster rockets and fall to the west of Mojave, with assistance from drogue and main parachutes. A beacon will guide our recovery crew to its location. In a few minutes’ time the remaining capsule will establish itself in orbit, after which our flight director will hand over the mission to the engineer in charge of the deployment stage – my daughter, Brooke English.’

  When they heard Brooke’s name, the men bowed and applauded enthusiastically.

  ‘He certainly knows how to put on a show,’ murmured Jackson. ‘I’m assuming you haven’t told your dad what we intend to do with his precious cargo?’

  ‘I think it’s best if we don’t dwell on that.’ Brooke tried to bury her guilty thoughts. Since her return, her father had made a real effort. He’d cancelled a couple of meetings up in Boston, and the three of them had even sat round the kitchen table and eaten as a family. They hadn’t done that since Christmas.

  To distract herself, Brooke thought about the problem of her two colleagues in the room. She wouldn’t get much past them, with them sitting so near, and they surely wouldn’t let her hijack the mission. She had a diversionary tactic, but would it work? She had exactly forty minutes to find out. Just under half the duration of the orbit that J.P. was now explaining to his guests. The precise amount of time it would take the capsule, currently 300 kilometres above them, to reach Eastern Europe.

  CHAPTER 30

  ‘I need to speak to you urgently, J.P.!’ The desperation in Mr Goulman’s voice was apparent, even over the static of the two-way radio.

  ‘What is it? Why are you speaking to me on the radio?’ said Professor English.

  ‘The launch director and I are standing outside the operations room.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow!’

  ‘It’s your daughter, J.P… . she’s locked us out!’

  Inside the cramped operations room, Brooke was grinning at how easy it had been to get her two coworkers to leave the bunker. Setting the fire alarm off was easy, and she’d never seen anyone move so quickly as she screamed out, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Then she just got up, closed the reinforced door behind them and sat back down.

  But it was time to be serious now.

  ‘How’s that joystick of yours coming along?’ she asked Jackson.

  ‘It’s not exactly a joystick …’ replied Jackson, holding the modified lightsabre in his hand. It had been easier than he expected. After pairing it up with his computer, he’d simply assigned a few commands from Brooke’s web page to the buttons. ‘I wouldn’t have minded a practice.’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything you need to know on the way in. But for now, just sit back and cross your fingers. Initiating Descent Phase.’

  Two fireballs streaked a path through Earth’s upper atmosphere before the re-entry computer gave the command to shed the charred carbon plating that made up the first-stage heat-shields. Then what their originator, Professor English, described as two ‘large black air-bags’ ballooned out around each machine, at once slowing their descent, and acting like big beach balls on touchdown.

  Jackson’s machine, the one Brooke had referred to as Tug, bounced clean over a farmhouse, before taking the top two layers off a stone wall and burying itself in the side of a metal grain silo. The final act of the computer that had controlled every stage of Tug’s descent was to vent the gas inside the tough polyethylene-plastic ball that surrounded the robot. As the wedge-shaped robot sparked into life, Jackson flexed his fingers nervously round the metal shaft of his wireless stick, ready to take over.

  *

  Kostya had been walking these hills since he was a child. His pace had slowed in the last few years, but he was limber enough to make it to his favourite spot before the sun sank behind the mountains.

  The first thing the old man noticed was a noise from Olena’s farm. It was a tinny crunch like a car being crushed and it didn’t belong out here, a hundred kilometres from the nearest breaker’s yard. It wasn’t easy to see from on top of the hills – it wasn’t easy to see anything at his age – but he would swear that the tin grain-tower was leaning over. Had it always been like that, or was he just getting old and forgetful? Still, it was a strange thing, an enormous grain-tower as crooked as a wizard’s hat.

  The next sound to reach the elderly herdsman was like a boar charging towards him through the trees. He’d seen a few in his time. He’d shot one once and sold what he couldn’t eat. The noise grew louder, rumbling and crashing through the trees until something broke clear of the thicket – something big and black that was rolling towards him.

  Kostya felt once more like the scared thirteen-year-old boy who had faced the German Army in Odessa all those years before. He would have liked to run and hide from the huge black cannonball, but his old bones wouldn’t allow it, so instead he just stood in the tall grass as it rolled to a stop a few metres from him. Nothing was stranger than what happened next, and nothing more was necessary to convince the old Red Army soldier that the Nazis were back. Kostya instinctively ducked at the suppressed cracks that sounded just like shots from a Sturmgewehr rifle. Then the matt-black ball, which stood taller than the old man stooped, opened up – and a smaller ball rolled out. The dull metallic sphere propelled itself along the ground by spikes that stuck out and retracted from points all over its skin, so that it made a kind of fluttering sound. The Nazi contraption completed its metamorphosis by sprouting three stubby rotor blades and taking to the air. The whining sound it made put the startled old man in mind of the noise the shells made when he had last stood at the mercy of the German war machine. What could he do but watch as the strange sphere disappeared into the valley? He couldn’t run and raise the alarm. Even if he still had a rifle, his arthritic hands couldn’t hold it steady. He wasn’t sure, but he thought his old eyes were showing him a second machine. This one, triangular-shaped, joined up with the floating metal ball and headed across the field below.

  So be it. If this was the start of another invasion or perhaps the beginnings of lunacy – it was only to be expected at his ripe age – there was something the old herder could do. He could carry on with his walk, find his perfect spot, sit down and enjoy the view. And not even the might or madness of the German Army would stop him.

  The two unlikely war machines landed several seconds apart from each other and Brooke had them rendezvous above a crossroads.

  ‘I’ve brought us down a few clicks from the compound,’ she said, taking the lead of a low-level push northwards. ‘How are you finding the controls?’

  ‘Tickety-boo,’ said Jackson, rolling his vehicle erratically about its axes and leaving a Tug-sized hole in a wooden fence before tucking the robot in behind Punk.

  ‘Both units are powered electrically, but Tug has an additional fuel cell which feeds a pulse jet. It can deliver a maximum of two shunts before all the fuel in the cell is exhausted.’

  ‘Shunts?’ asked Jackson.

  Brooke realized that Jackson hadn’t yet seen the robot he was controlling. He knew little more about it than the scant facts she had emailed for him to build the control mechanism.

  ‘You’re flying a space tug, the muscle in my father’s vision for a roughneck gang of space miners. The idea is that ten or twenty tugs could attach themselves to valuable pieces of floating rock, then use powerful jet engines to shunt the rock into position so other members of the gang can extract cobalt, platinum, titanium and other valuable metals for haulin’ back to Earth.’

  ‘I’m guessing that’s what the CLAW and MAGNET are for?’ He’d mapped these functions on to his control device, at Brooke’s request.

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘And the GRENADE?’ Jackson expected he’d like this explanation.

  ‘Thermite. It was used by Special Forces soldiers in the Second World War against tanks. Dad wanted a crowd-pleaser for his investors. It’s a mixture of powdered aluminium and iron oxide that burns at a very high tem
perature – over 2,500 degrees centigrade. That’s hot enough to turn anything metal into liquid. It would be no good in space, a bit like Punk’s rotors, but perfect for our test site.’

  ‘So what’s your robot packing?’

  ‘Punk is the boffin of the group. He’s designed to gather information, film, photograph and perform tests on rock formations so the other bots know where to dig. You should see what he’s giving me back now, almost 360 degrees of vision, thanks to twelve cameras all over his cute little body. Punk has a few tricks up his sleeve too, but I’m not intending to use them. It’s important we keep a lid on things, Jackson – this mission is all about getting Punk into a position where he can gather the evidence we need to persuade Lear to give up the twins and hopefully close him down for good. I’m in enough trouble as it is … the last thing I need is an international incident to lay at Pops’ door.’

  As the machines arrived on the ridge above the compound where they had last been as part of MeX, Brooke and Jackson grew quiet. The shape of the valley, with its sheer bottleneck at one end, looked familiar, but everything else about the place had changed. Where the compound had been there was nothing but hard-baked mud. It was smooth, flat and clean – freakishly clean. From the base of the largest cliff to where the fence once stood, there wasn’t even a tyre track or a single piece of discarded trash. In place of the buildings were just four dusted rectangles, like the footprints of a huge alien spaceship that had touched down and sucked up everything in sight. The clean-up didn’t make it any less of a disaster area. For Jackson, there was something in this arid scene that foretold what would come if Lear’s plans were left unchecked.

  ‘There’s nothin’ left to photograph,’ said Brooke despondently. As the two combed the valley floor with the mining bots, it became clear how clinical the clean-up operation had been. The base of the biggest mountains had undergone the most amazing transformation. The cavernous gash housing the water-pipe exchange had completely vanished, and in its place was smooth rock.