Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  Something had gone wrong. The ships guarding the antimatter factory were in deep trouble. Pictures of the battle scene flashed up to fill his field of vision. The disrupter cloud was the biggest he’d ever seen, its ragged ends stretching for tens of thousands of kilometres, like a dark scarf blown in a slow-motion wind. Will experienced a cold rush of fear.

  All three cruisers were in danger. The Baloo wasn’t responding, the Walrus was losing power and the Aslan was under heavy fire. And they were all deep inside that cloud. It was a catastrophe, and it had somehow been wrought by those six little ships.

  The Phoenix closed rapidly on the battle, cutting in-system to get as near as it could without hitting the cloud. Then it turned and ploughed straight in, fusion torches at full burn. Will’s combat-bag threw him sideways. Captain Klein was taking them in to rescue the trapped cruisers.

  As soon as it was within targeting range, the Phoenix came under assault. G-rays raked the mighty ship’s buffers. The vessel automatically fired off its gravity shields. Will called up a distortion map and watched the tiny drones race away. Each shield was visible as a hard little pucker in the loose weave of space. It was a shield’s job to draw fire towards itself and away from the ship it guarded, but their fields softened and shrank almost as soon as they were launched. The enemy buoys had manoeuvred to turn their fire-cones upon them.

  ‘Will?’ said Franz.

  ‘Here, sir.’

  ‘We’re taking out those disrupters. Here’s your template.’

  A SAP model immediately downloaded. It looked like a cartoon schematic of some fabulously complex clockwork machine. Shining recall trees hung off the core-cycle, laden with the SAP’s memories, each one a brightly coloured block bristling with spiky semantic tags.

  ‘It should compensate for the enemy evasives,’ Franz told him. ‘Now go!’

  Will pressed the model to his mind like a mask. He could feel the SAP’s cunning, its eagerness to hunt. With a sweep of one virtual arm, he created sixty-four copies of the program, injected their client modules into the Phoenix’s waiting torpedoes and fired. Then he tethered his perceptions to the lead torpedo and flew out with it into the dark.

  This was the job he’d been bred to do: to manage, train and guide SAPs from the inside. In physical terms, his mind was just talking to the ship’s server substrate. The servers talked to the comms array, and the array ferried orders to the torpedoes via bursts of laser light. But to Will, the effect was seamless.

  He stared through unblinking electronic eyes and raced across the aching void of space. As the torpedo, he hungered to join with the disrupters hanging ahead of him in an embrace of spectacular death.

  The disrupters hovered like a shoal of fat fish and then scattered as Will plunged into their midst. Will twisted and snagged the closest. They exploded together in a blast of fusion flame.

  Will swapped his viewpoint to another torpedo. The disrupters boosted desperately away from him, trying to manoeuvre out of range without losing their hold on the pinned cruisers. Will ripped after them, his kamikaze brethren beside him. He picked his target and dived on it. The disrupter couldn’t move fast enough. G-ray blasts from the ships below tried to spear him as he closed for the kill, but it was no use. Will was the shark and the disrupter the sluggish whale. Impact was ecstasy.

  His perspective jumped again, to a new pursuit. Forests of g-ray blasts erupted on all sides. He slalomed between them, his digital senses far faster than the old-fashioned targeting programs on the enemy ships.

  Suddenly, a ball of white-hot flame ignited next to him. One of his kind was hit. Will cursed. It was bad news to lose a torpedo so soon.

  On impulse, he pulled back to re-examine the attack pattern. As expected, he still had enough torpedoes to kill every disrupter, and each of his torpedoes was more than a match for the Earther defences. So why did he suddenly feel worried?

  Then he saw it. It was subtle – something only Will’s specialist eye for a pattern would recognise. The fight no longer had an ordinary shoal-and-shark dynamic. Franz hadn’t compensated for the increased power of the g-ray defences. Even glancing hits were reducing Will’s numbers. The enemy beams would thin out his torpedoes too soon. That meant there would still be enough disrupters left to shower their poison onto the trapped starships. They wouldn’t be able to free the Aslan – or themselves.

  Will needed a way to make fewer torpedoes go further. He stared desperately out at the staccato blasts of radiation that were ruining his assault and cursed. Then an idea struck him. If those g-rays were a risk to him, surely they were to the disrupters as well. Was there some way he could turn that fact to his advantage? The answer was yes, but the SAPs would need to be sheepdogs, not sharks.

  He spurred his lead torpedo on alone and ducked back to his home node where the SAP model hung before him. A blizzard of flashing colour-coded markers picked out the active thought-chunks of each weapon he had left.

  Will chased along the stony tunnels of his mind to his private chambers. He grabbed a handful of memory-chunks for playground games and flicked back to the running model. Without pausing for a seizure check, he slammed his chunks onto a fresh branch of the model’s primary tree and started hooking up instinct keys as fast as he could. With luck, this old game of his would bind to Franz’s carefully structured pursuit tactics and give them exactly what they needed.

  An angry shout filled his sensorium, almost breaking his concentration. ‘Will! What in Gal’s name are you doing?’ It was Franz.

  Under battle conditions, SAP design was Franz’s job. Will wasn’t supposed to touch them.

  ‘Leave my SAP alone and get back out there!’ Franz roared.

  Will didn’t listen. He couldn’t stop now or the torpedoes would hit the new memories and stall. He frantically hooked up the last few links.

  ‘Stop!’ yelled the expert. ‘Do you want to get us all killed?’

  Will heard Franz open a channel to the captain.

  ‘Sir, we have an emergency. My roboteer’s gone rogue!’

  Will connected the last strand and leapt back into the head of the lead torpedo. It was coursing through a barrage of enemy fire, hungrily chasing a fleeing disrupter. Will triggered the new memories.

  It wasn’t a clean patch, but it worked. He felt an abrupt surge of incongruous joy as the missile changed its mind about its intentions in mid-swerve. Rather than heading straight for the buoy, it veered at the last moment, forcing the disrupter to bank hard towards another of its kind. The buoys crashed, erupting in a blast of white-hot ions.

  Will’s heart soared, despite the furious bellowing from the captain he could hear in the back of his head.

  ‘Monet! What the hell is going on?’

  Will watched with glee as his torpedoes shepherded the disrupters into each other, and into their own ships’ g-ray fire. Like most Earther machines, the buoys were gratifyingly stupid, designed to follow basic instructions from an unmodified human operator. They had no idea how to respond to being played with. Captain Klein fell silent as he witnessed the sudden rash of disrupter deaths.

  However, while Will had started thinning the disrupter cloud nicely, his sensors showed him that the Phoenix was taking a beating. Secondary buffers were at sixty per cent and falling, and Gordon was having trouble fending off the enemy’s barrage of fire. Will took a copy of the new template branch and passed it to him. With luck, the same thought patterns used in reverse would help to lead enemy drones away from the Phoenix.

  By the time Will was back behind the eyes of his lead missile, the Aslan’s engines were powering up again. The Baloo and Walrus looked dead, but under the circumstances saving one ship out of three wasn’t bad.

  The Earthers made a last desperate attempt to ensnare the flagship again, but their buoys were spread in a hopeless sprawl. Five seconds later, the Aslan had warped out. Will heard cheers somewhere in the background. The Phoenix’s engines started to charge.

  Will sent his remaining torpedo
es on death dives towards the enemy ships just before the expected order came.

  ‘Ready for warp!’

  In the next second, the battle was a flaring dot in the distance behind them.

  Will allowed himself a moment to exhale. He could hear the other roboteers laughing and whooping all around him. With pride and relief still coursing through him, he linked to Franz. Franz’s face was beet-red and wide-eyed.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Will, ‘but I saw a problem with your pattern and had to improvise.’

  For a moment, Franz just stared. ‘You disobeyed a direct order.’ His voice was cold.

  Will’s spirits fell. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Then the captain’s voice came online. ‘Mr Kuno-Monet.’

  Will winced at the tone.

  ‘You’re damned lucky we got out of that alive,’ said Klein. ‘You jeopardised the entire ship, and the Aslan, too.’

  ‘Captain, I—’ Will started.

  ‘What were you thinking – hot-patching in the middle of a firefight? And with private files, too. The whole volley could have seized.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Captain,’ said Will. ‘There was a flaw in the attack pattern—’

  ‘The pattern was fine,’ snapped Franz.

  Of course, Franz hadn’t even checked. He was too confident of his own genius, and of Will’s inferiority, to bother.

  ‘The only thing flawed in that attack—’

  Will cut the expert off before he could embarrass himself further. ‘Sir, you failed to compensate for the g-ray barrage intensity. Had I left your pattern active, torpedo attrition would have run seventeen per cent higher than your prediction. We’d all be dead.’

  Franz stared speechless into his cabin camera.

  ‘I will of course prepare a combat simulation for you to explain my actions,’ Will added.

  The captain sighed. ‘Franz, prepare a report,’ he said tiredly. ‘And Will, I want to see a full memory log.’

  ‘Captain—’ said Franz.

  ‘Enough!’ barked Klein. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about it till we’re back in port.’ The communication channel closed.

  Will was dumped back into his home node, where the combat SAP was still winking. He ripped the fat-contact off his neck and sagged back in exhaustion.

  1.4: IRA

  Ira skipped clear of the Memburi system into the blissfully clean space between the stars. He locked in the autopilot, flicked up his visor and breathed a sigh of relief.

  He looked down into the Ariel’s cramped main cabin. ‘Everyone okay?’

  Amy was already at the bottom bunk with Rachel beside her. That wasn’t good. Crew only left their bunks under heavy warp in an emergency. Something bad must have happened. For a moment, Ira’s heart went into free fall despite the shuddering tug of warp gravity.

  ‘Amy?’ he said.

  She looked up at him, her face unreadable. ‘Doug’s dead.’

  Ira blinked in disbelief. Something crumpled deep inside him. ‘How dead? Can we use coma?’

  His question sounded weak even as it left his mouth. Amy would have tried that already.

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry. It’s too late for that.’

  Ira struggled for words. ‘That last turn,’ he said stupidly. It had felt bad, but not that bad. ‘How tight was it?’

  ‘Fifteen gees,’ she replied quietly.

  Ira covered his mouth with his hand. Most roboteers were effectively unmodified when it came to dogfights. They just didn’t have the stamina for it, not even with a muscle-tank to help them. Ira stared down at the corpse floating in the gel-filled box at the bottom of the cabin. Doug might have been a roboteer, but Ira had counted him as a friend. And now Ira had killed him.

  ‘Hey,’ said John, breaking the airless silence. ‘I hate to be the one to point this out, but this isn’t exactly a good time for grieving. I’ve just been looking at that enemy data and it’s serious stuff. They’re going to come after it for sure, and we haven’t taken any evasives yet. We should get going – otherwise Doug won’t be the only dead person in this cabin.’

  Ira exhaled and shut his eyes. Part of him was grateful for the distraction, delivered as it was in John’s usual tactless terms.

  ‘All right, everybody,’ he said. ‘Get back to your seats. We’ll have to deal with this later. We’re going home.’

  2: NEW ROLES

  2.1: GUSTAV

  While the dignitaries standing around him talked politics, Gustav stared out of the window. It was easy to be distracted by the view. All he had to do was let his concentration wander from the overfed face in front of him to the three-storey pane of bulletproof glass several metres beyond it. And from where he stood, in the primary antechamber of the Prophet’s palace at Bogotá, the vista was compelling, if not exactly pleasant.

  The antechamber looked out past the palace’s bone-coloured tiers over the manicured miles of gardens to the slums beyond. In the distance, where once proud forest had stood, prote-farms now sprawled, a chequerboard of dirty brown and sickly yellow squares. The sky was an angry sulphurous grey. It wasn’t that the scenery differed particularly from the rest of what Earth had to offer, but from the palace you could see that much more of it. It appalled Gustav that, even on the Prophet’s very doorstep, the world still showed so few signs of recovering from the Terror Century.

  While the dignitaries droned on, Gustav quietly adjusted his position to look into the antechamber itself, a view far preferable to the desolation outside. The antechamber, one of many, was a snow-white New Gothic fantasy. Vast columns like frozen waterfalls of milk met at a vaulted ceiling far overhead, and the floor was bright and smooth like a sheet of ice. It reflected the courtiers standing around in small groups, making impressionistic butterflies with their brightly coloured robes. Their muted conversations echoed off the glacial walls.

  More importantly, Gustav now had a view of the enormous doors he’d shortly have to walk through. They led to the throne room of His Honesty the Prophet – the spiritual ruler of all Earth.

  ‘So what do you think, General?’ one of the dignitaries asked him.

  Gustav had enjoyed no peace since he arrived. Everyone wanted to be seen to talk with him before he received his holy commendation.

  The man who’d spoken had small, fat hands sticking out from the voluminous folds of his bright-orange robe. He waved them when he talked, like little pink balloons.

  Gustav tried for a polite smile. ‘I’m sorry, what was that again?’

  ‘I said, what do you think? Is the education of females permissible under dogma?’

  A skeletal man draped in moss-green fabric pointed a bony digit at the speaker. ‘But that’s not the question,’ he said. ‘We’re only talking about the Following here, not the Leading classes. I have no issue with the girls of Leading families receiving an education. That harms no one.’

  Gustav remembered. The Prophet had recently passed a dictate expressly forbidding the female children of Following families from receiving education. A few of the Kingdom’s many subsect leaders had launched a doomed attempt to appeal the decision.

  ‘I’m a scientist, I’m afraid, gentlemen,’ Gustav said mildly. ‘I try not to get involved in political matters.’ Or not the immediate ones, at least, he thought. Gustav had dedicated his life to building a better future. He had long since given up on the present.

  ‘But General …’ said a voice from the back of the group. This new voice belonged to a man dressed in the white gown of a High Church disciple. He was handsome in a slightly soft, florid kind of way. Only his eyes and the point of his nose were hard. He wore his dark hair oiled back. ‘Even the most reserved among us have a moral instinct, wouldn’t you say? And as a scientist, education must be a topic dear to your heart.’ His smile was filled with small, even teeth. ‘You have women on your team, don’t you? I’d be interested to hear your gut reaction on the subject.’

  Gustav regarded the disciple warily. The man had hovered at th
e back of almost every group Gustav had met that morning, yet this was the first time he’d actually opened his mouth. In doing so, he’d managed to justify practically every suspicion Gustav had entertained about him.

  The fact that Gustav employed female scientists was supposed to be a secret, simply because everything about Gustav’s work was secret. This conversation would have to be brought to an end, and quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry, but my training encourages me to avoid gut reactions,’ Gustav said with a hard smile. ‘In my experience, they’re a poor substitute for data.’

  The disciple refused to be dissuaded. ‘Really,’ he said airily. ‘We in the High Church see things differently. We consider the moral instinct to be a vital guide in decision-making. A kind of spiritual compass, if you like.’ He looked around at the others, as if confident of their agreement.

  ‘Then let me ask you a question,’ said Gustav. ‘Which do you think poses a greater security risk to the Kingdom – cycle-game or FROF-b command encryption? I assure you that is a topic of urgent interest in Military Intelligence circles at the moment.’ Gustav waved his hand generously. ‘I don’t need an informed response, just a gut reaction.’ He crooked an eyebrow and waited.

  The disciple frowned. His cheeks turned a ruddy colour. Some of the dignitaries chuckled. Before the disciple could muster a suitable reply, a voice boomed down from the antechamber’s lofty heights.

  ‘General Gustav Ulanu. You may approach the Prophet.’

  All across the great chamber, conversation died to silence.

  Gustav inhaled. It was time. He bowed to the dignitaries. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

  He turned and walked with measured steps across the immense floor to the white portal that was swinging open to admit him.

  How ironic it was. Most people would have given their lives to win a commendation from the Prophet, yet Gustav felt nothing but foreboding. Admiral Konrad Tang was the man who should have been there instead of him. Tang was the man who’d commanded the Memburi attack force. He was the one who’d successfully secured the system in the name of Earth two weeks previously. He was the public face of their project in all matters. So why would the Prophet choose to bestow such a visible honour on Gustav? Particularly given that Gustav had been purposefully dragging his heels for the last six months. A caution would be more in order than a commendation.