Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  DEDICATION

  For Jill, my strongest supporter from day one.

  ROBOTEER

  ALEX LAMB

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  1: Battle at Memburi

  2: New Roles

  3: Departure

  4: In Flight

  5: Spying

  6: Uploading

  7: Infiltration

  8: Cat and Mouse

  9: Uncharted Territory

  10: Hands On

  11: Sickness

  12: A Change of Plans

  13: Betrayal

  14: Face to Face

  15: Losing Power

  16: Murder

  17: Back in the Saddle

  18: Trouble Arrives

  19: Justice

  20: Ultimatum

  21: Carefully Ever After

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to Louis Lamb, Sarah Pinborough,

  my agent John Jarrold, and the awesome team at Gollancz,

  without whom none of this would have been possible.

  1: BATTLE AT MEMBURI

  1.1: WILL

  Will Kuno-Monet was teaching lifter trucks to hunt when the scramble klaxon sounded. He stopped the ten-ton machines mid-stalk and listened, his body taut. The moment everyone had been expecting for days had finally come. The Earthers were attacking.

  He ordered the trucks to their action stations, opened his eyes and yanked back his bunk curtain. His shipmates were already propelling themselves out of their beds and shouting as they hurtled towards the door of the cramped dorm chamber.

  ‘Move! Move! Move!’

  ‘Don’t block the hatch!’

  Will hurriedly unclipped and followed suit.

  Outside, the snakeway was a torrent of figures in silver-green one-piece uniforms. Crew darted like fleeing fish, passing each other on the cramped zero-g bends with millimetres to spare. Will hurled himself into the throng, narrowly missing a couple of engineers.

  Ten seconds and two levels later, Will reached the immersion room – a cramped cubic space made of cream-coloured plastic filled with elastic webbing and combat-bags. He clawed his way through the maze of cables to his place at the far end, past the seven other roboteers who were busily sealing themselves in.

  Will thrust himself into the bag with trembling hands and let the gel-sac shape itself around his body. He rammed the fat-contact against his neck and tucked his arms inside before the fluid could lock solid. At Will’s mental command, the ultra-high-bandwidth cable started sending. The battle status presented itself to him as fully formed thoughts, each tinted by the crisp, owlish flavour of the Phoenix’s central command SAP.

  There were six Earther ships in tight hexagonal formation. Will saw them as bright-red arrows in a schematic representation of local space, zeroing in on the green circle that was their target – the antimatter factory near the star itself. The Earthers appeared to be making a direct bid for it. The Phoenix was instructed to maintain its position.

  Strategic analysis showed that the force was far too light to be the predicted primary assault. The Earther ships had small gravity-distortion footprints, suggesting light gunships, probably Jesus Class. No match for the three huge Galatean cruisers guarding the facility. Their approach was almost certainly a feint of some kind. The real attack would come later, when attention was diverted.

  Will saw the cruisers as green chevrons whipping across the system to intercept. Galatean ships had a strong speed advantage in-system as their more sophisticated engines performed far better in dirty space. Given the dreadful lag on optical comms, they’d probably engaged the enemy already.

  The battle status clear in his mind, Will checked in with his expert – Franz Assimer-Leung, the ship’s tactical assault coordinator. His vision connected to the camera above Franz’s combat-bag, which became Will’s eyes. Franz’s blocky, furrowed face appeared before him.

  ‘Reporting for duty, sir,’ said Will. The fat-contact relayed the words he thought directly to the speaker bud implanted in Franz’s ear.

  Franz busily scanned the contents of his visor, readying his Self-Aware Programs, fingers flying across the console on his lap. ‘Check,’ said Franz. ‘Stay ready, Will. I want you sharp on this one. No wandering off.’

  Will couldn’t help bristling slightly. He’d never wandered off during a battle, whatever that was supposed to mean. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Franz was clearly busy so Will turned his attention outwards, looking for the battle through the ship’s long-range sensors. At this distance there was nothing to see but X-ray flickering, barely visible so close to the star’s glare. With the filters turned up this high, the rest of the sky was bottomless black.

  Will’s mind churned. He could barely stand the anxiety of waiting to see what the Earthers would try. This battle was likely to determine the course of the war.

  Memburi had been Earth’s primary fuelling station on the straight-line path between the home system and Galatea – before the Galateans had captured it. If the Earthers didn’t retake it, it would be almost impossible for them to wage war against their former colony, and easy for Galatea to strike back if they tried. On the other hand, if the Earthers did claim it, they’d be well placed to attempt another invasion, and Earth had no shortage of lives to waste in trying.

  Will’s train of thought was broken by a sudden nervous laugh. He glanced across at Gordon Inchaya-Brun, the roboteer for ship defence who hung in the bag next to his. Gordon was a large, well-intentioned youth who’d only been with the Fleet for a year. This was his first big battle.

  ‘They dragged us in here just so we could wait?’ muttered Gordon. His eyes were screwed tight shut.

  Will knew Gordon wasn’t talking to anyone in particular but the distraction was welcome. It beat staring into space and doing nothing.

  ‘I guess so,’ he said.

  Gordon’s soft blue eyes opened in surprise at the reply. Like the rest of the Phoenix’s roboteers, he treated Will with a mixture of wariness and awe. There were eight of them in all, one handler for each of the mighty ship’s eight different software subsystems, and Will was definitely the odd one out. He didn’t think like the others.

  ‘But don’t worry,’ Will added. ‘Space battles don’t last long.’

  Gordon gave him an anxious smile. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’

  Gordon’s fears were well grounded. Today they would live or die with the Phoenix. There was no way off a starship when you were surrounded in every direction by kilometres of the most hideously irradiated machinery humanity had ever devised. You either left the battle with working engines or you fried.

  A sudden flare drew Will’s attention back to the view from the sensors. The distant battle was looking unusually bright. It winked at him. Will eyed it uneasily. If the Earther ships were on a suicide run, they might be self-detonating about now. And meanwhile, the next wave of the attack might come from any direction. His heart was in his mouth as they waited.

  1.2: IRA

  Captain Ira Baron-Lecke of the Galatean starship Ariel watched the battle from a few thousand kilometres beyond the combat zone. It was probably too close, but still a lot further away than he wanted to be. The disrupter cloud made it impossible for them to get any nearer.

  He lay back in his crash couch, hands wrapped tight around the control-handles. Through his visor’s standard display, the warring ships resembled flashing points of hard white light on a black background. At full magnification, however, he could make out their true shape. Each ship looked like a dull metallic egg covered with tiny umbrellas. Blue-white light crac
kled from the spokes, coating the vessels with sheens of spastic luminescence.

  Ira did not like what he saw. The Earthers had come in too light – just a ring of six small ships, hemmed in by three immense Galatean cruisers. And they’d stopped short of their objective, as if taunting the Galateans to come out and meet them. They were up to something.

  ‘Amy, give me an update.’

  Though he and Amy, his first officer, occupied opposite bunks in the Ariel’s tiny main cabin, Ira used his subvocal throat-mike instead of speaking out loud. The Ariel was a soft-combat ship. Given the physical conditions it had to operate under, battle orders were never trusted to ordinary speech.

  ‘No change,’ Amy replied. ‘The Earthers are using juice like it’s going out of style. They haven’t launched any gravity shields, just disrupter buoys. Central Command is convinced it’s a suicide.’

  Ira frowned. A disrupter buoy’s single job was to fill the surrounding space with ionic crap that made it impossible for your enemy to use warp. It was an important tool in warfare, but one used sparingly. Disrupters trapped you just as certainly as they trapped your enemy. Yet each one of those little Earther ships had come in carrying enough of them to freeze an armada. He watched the buoys buzzing around their parent ships like swarms of angry bees around a hive. It seemed like a profligate amount of hardware to waste. Furthermore, the battle was getting awfully bright.

  ‘What are they doing down there? Attacking with g-rays?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Amy.

  Ira shook his head. Scout-ship g-rays against battle cruisers. That was like coming at macrodozers with sharpened sticks.

  A g-ray was nothing more than a gamma-ray laser, and it was only as good as the amount of power you put behind it. If your adversary could push the same amount of juice through his Casimir-buffers, there was no point firing. You just ended up charging his fusion cells for him. But the Earthers knew that. They couldn’t possibly hope to summon more power than the cruisers, not even if they concentrated all their fire on a single target.

  ‘They’re insane,’ he muttered.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Amy. ‘Those g-rays are very hard. The Earthers must have routed main-engine power to their arrays.’

  Clearly the Earthers’ tactic was to try to freeze out their opponents’ gravity weapons and force them into an energy battle. It was just one more reason to believe that the Earthers didn’t intend to go home. They hadn’t exactly left themselves an escape route.

  Ira still didn’t like it. Even suicide squads launched gravity shields. Instinct told him to pull back, just in case. He keyed open the channel to his assault expert on the bunk below him.

  ‘John, find any plans yet? I want to know what these bastards think they’re doing.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Uh, hang on.’

  John was deep in his work with Doug, the ship’s roboteer. Together they were gutting the enemy vessels’ computer systems of their secrets with the help of the Ariel’s little fleet of specialised drones.

  ‘Wait!’ said John. ‘Doug, go back. I think that’s it.’ He muttered to himself, then laughed out loud. ‘Ha! Yes! We’ve got data, Captain, and plenty of it.’

  Amy’s voice chimed in. ‘Uh-oh, John – I think you triggered an alarm.’ She flagged a visual pointer in Ira’s display.

  The Earthers had fired a volley of pursuit drones directly at the Ariel. Fortunately, they were climbing out through the massive disrupter cloud, which meant they couldn’t use warp. Forced to limp along on fusion torches, they presented no immediate threat. It would take them whole minutes to arrive.

  ‘I see them,’ said John. ‘Prepping countermeasures.’

  While John wrestled with the flow of information coursing between the ships, Ira turned his attention back to the battle with the cruisers. He had to be ready to make his move.

  The Earthers had all but completely snared the Galateans’ torpedoes, he noticed, drawing the battle out to a grindingly slow sub-light exchange. Nevertheless, they were still outgunned. It was only a matter of time before they died. As soon as the Earthers ran out of antimatter, their supercharged buffers would drop, and no number of disrupters could save them. However, the seconds kept ticking by and Ira found himself still anxiously waiting. His unease steadily deepened. For a suicide squad, those ships were taking a hell of a long time to die.

  The Galateans kept battering away at them, but the Earthers didn’t seem to be flagging. It was the Galatean attacks that appeared to be slowing. They simply weren’t equipped for long battles. Nobody was.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ said Amy. ‘I’m not seeing any degradation in the Earthers’ disrupter cloud. It’s just getting bigger.’

  She sent him an ion filter of the battle scene. It showed the ragged hole the Earthers had carved in the local flow, like a filthy black smear on the rainbow of space.

  ‘At this rate, it’ll reach us in two hundred seconds,’ she added.

  If that happened, the Ariel would be stuck – and effectively dead. The one thing a soft-combat ship could never afford to do was hit a disrupter cloud. Only heavy, powerful ships could endure a disrupter fight and the Ariel was neither. It survived on speed and stealth.

  Ira opened his hotline to Admiral Bryant-Leys aboard the Aslan, the cruiser leading the Galatean assault. ‘Sir, we’ve got problems. That cloud is going to hit any minute now. Requesting permission to get clear.’ He watched the cloud grow during the agonising seconds it took for the admiral’s reply to reach him.

  ‘Accepted,’ said the admiral. ‘Do what you have to, Ira.’

  Ira keyed the channel to his crew. ‘Okay, everybody, we’re pulling back. Rachel, I want full warp.’

  ‘Rails greased and ready.’

  ‘Doug,’ he told his roboteer. ‘Brace yourself.’

  Ira pressed the ignition stud on his joystick. An invisible hand slammed him into his couch as the gravity engines kicked on. They started moving away, but far too slowly. From cold, the trigger field needed time to build strength. The hammer beats of the engine were slow and intermittent.

  ‘Ira!’ said Amy. ‘Look out!’

  Ira saw what was happening but there was nothing he could do. The Earthers had turned the full might of their disrupters against the Ariel.

  As quickly as they came, the brutal tugs of the gravity engines faded and vanished. They were stuck like a bug in amber. Whatever secrets John had unearthed, the Earthers were clearly very keen that the Ariel didn’t leave with them.

  ‘Rachel!’ Ira snapped. ‘Full power to the fusion torches!’

  ‘Done.’

  Ira turned on the power. Once again he was slammed into his couch, but this time it was merely conventional acceleration. Ira made his way up and out of the cloud at a creeping two-point-five gees. He cursed himself as he watched their progress. The minutes to drone-intercept didn’t look so long and comfortable any more. Drones could accelerate as fast as they liked. They didn’t have human cargo to worry about.

  He never should have let himself be caught. He should have moved position without asking the admiral first. Adherence to protocol might have just killed them.

  ‘Those drones are closing, Ira,’ said Amy.

  ‘I can see that.’

  The drones slid effortlessly into targeting range and opened fire with their g-rays. Fierce crackling filled the tiny cabin as the buffers struggled to compensate.

  Ira flinched in surprise. ‘Shit!’

  ‘I told you those rays were hard,’ said Amy.

  Ira yanked the joystick. The ship went into a gut-wrenching turn.

  ‘Rachel, damage report.’

  ‘Thirty per cent of our secondary buffers just blew,’ his engineer replied.

  Ira winced. Drones with that kind of power were unheard of. Another hit like that could finish them. Only one primary buffer had to fail for their fragile habitat core to be scoured with radiation.

  ‘I want all the power we can spare
going through those buffers,’ he ordered.

  ‘It already is,’ said Rachel.

  How could a single drone put more power into a laser than his ship’s engines?

  He keyed his roboteer. ‘Doug?’

  ‘Repairs in progress, Captain. We’ll be good as new in no time.’

  Even though synthesised direct at Ira’s implant, Doug’s voice still sounded strangled. Doug didn’t do well in heavy gees. He was the only one on board not bred for the rigours of spaceflight.

  ‘John, I want countermeasures,’ said Ira.

  ‘Launching now.’

  ‘John, I need to know what I’m looking at. I want tactical profiles on these things. I want weapons specs.’

  ‘Ira!’ Amy squawked.

  Ira banked hard and hurled on the power as another drone lined up to fire. It felt like a freight train had landed on his chest. Stars skittered across his vision. Someone whimpered on a lower bunk.

  ‘Amy, how long till we’re out of this cloud?’ Ira gasped, relying on the throat-mike to turn his wheezing into words.

  ‘Eighteen more seconds. I see another drone charging—’

  Ira flipped the ship again and almost blacked out as the anvil of gravity crashed into him.

  ‘Ten, nine, eight—’ breathed Amy.

  ‘Rachel?’ said Ira.

  ‘Ready.’

  Ira kept the ship turning as he brought the gravity engines back online. This time, he meant to hit the edge of the cloud running.

  ‘Three, two, one,’ said Amy. ‘We’re clear!’

  Ira engaged warp. For an awful second, the thrust from the fusion torches combined with the pull of the gravity engines. It felt like his organs were fighting to escape through his back. Then the torch died and they were away.

  The drones shrank to dots behind them.

  1.3: WILL

  Captain Beaumont-Klein’s voice rang in Will’s ears.

  ‘Brace for warp.’ For the last ten minutes, Will had ached for the waiting to end. Now he wished it could have lasted a little longer. His combat-bag jolted as the Phoenix’s engines kicked in. As the growl of the drive filled the ship, a burst of fresh orders from Central Command unfolded in his head like a spiritual revelation.