by Alex Lamb
He ground a fist into his palm. If that was what they stood for, then the High Church couldn’t be allowed to determine the shape of the future any more than the Galateans. He should have leaked the truth while he had the chance.
As he turned to pace again, his eye caught on the holster clipped to his cabin wall. In it was his executive’s automatic, the only lethal weapon inside the ship. It was designed to kill without damaging valuable equipment in the unlikely case of a mutiny.
Though Gustav had been forced to kill many times on Earth, he had never done so on one of his own ships. It was a point of pride. Nevertheless, a question came unbidden to his mind. Would he kill to protect the Relic if it came to that? He discovered it was a question he didn’t want to answer.
4.2: WILL
Will twisted his head slowly by three hundred and sixty degrees, examining the grey-streaked wall of the antimatter-dispersion pipe through which he climbed. Sure enough, there was yet another crack. He groaned.
‘One more,’ he told Rachel.
The flaw would be far too small for human eyes to see – it was just a few molecules wide – but Will wasn’t looking through human eyes. His senses were tethered to a worm-like pipe-cleaner robot nine centimetres long.
He flicked his perspective to the closest repair spider. In an instant, his world went from claustrophobic to vertiginous. Now he was clinging to a rail that ran up through an apparently bottomless network of struts and girders. The pipe hung vertically in front of him, clad in striped superconductor rings from which a tangle of power and monitor cables trailed.
Will accelerated up the rail till he was outside the faulty segment. He extended two arms to seize the pipe and another two to disconnect the power couplings. He yanked each one open with an angry snap. The problem was that the delicate inner lining of the pipes was under constant gravitational shear this close to the exohull. And with the Ariel working its engines flat out, that lining had to be repaired every time the ship docked to refuel.
Any crack left untended long enough to reach critical size would cause the microscopic bullets of antimatter to veer off their magnetically determined path. That meant having the single most destructive substance known to man spraying into your mesohull at near light-speed, which wasn’t exactly desirable. But despite its importance, it was dull, exhausting work, and Will had been at it for six hours straight.
The repairs had begun the moment they’d arrived at St Andrews, their first fuelling star, and were scheduled to finish the moment the tanks were full. The Ariel was leaving immediately, and the pipes would once again be coursing with power. That left Will about one hour to finish everything.
It would have been a lot a lot easier if he wasn’t so tired, but tired was all Will had felt for the whole week since they’d left home. Ira had seen to that. On the first shift-end out from Galatea, Ira had surprised Will by instructing him to sleep in his muscle-tank.
‘We’ll have to build you up a bit,’ Ira told him. ‘I need you in the best cardiovascular shape possible by the time we reach our target.’
Will had never used a muscle-tank before and thought the idea a little strange. However, he was keen to show willing. It had been unnerving, sliding into that box of warm, sticky gel for the first time. Worse still was the sensation of the hundreds of tiny needles pricking his skin. Fortunately, he hadn’t needed to tolerate the sensation for long. The tank knocked him out cold.
By the time he’d woken, Will ached as if he’d been in the gym for all eight hours. On the other hand, the striking increase in his strength from just one night’s exposure had pleased him immensely. The first moment of real worry hit at the end of that next work shift, when Ira instructed him to sleep in the tank again. In fact, to sleep there every rest period till they reached Zuni-Dehel.
Now, with a full week of tank treatment behind him, Will could barely concentrate. His chest felt as if it was on fire the whole time. He was sure that if he did as Ira wished, he’d be completely unfit for duty by the time they reached enemy lines. That said, he wasn’t about to get himself thrown off the most famous ship in the Fleet just because the great Ira Baron had decided to haze him. He’d see the orders through, even if it killed him.
Will ripped the old section of pipe away and shoved a new one into place. The repair spider flinched from the harsh treatment. Will knew he was hurting the robot’s delicate limbs by working so fast but he was too exhausted to care. He rotated his arc-bonding arms to the front and welded in the new section.
As soon as the joint was finished, Will threw himself back into the mind of the pipe cleaner. It started with surprise at his sudden intrusion into its thoughts as Will dragged it up over the still-cooling joints to inspect the mend.
‘Bright!’ the pipe cleaner wailed as its lidless camera eyes passed the heated wall. There were no flaws to be seen. The new section was safe.
‘Done,’ he announced.
He flipped his mind back to the repair-survey node, a virtual space that he’d decorated like the command room of an Old World railway network, complete with beige plastic and fake wood trim. A huge display board filling one wall showed the ship’s convoluted system of dispersion pipes laid out like tracks. Small electric lights indicated the progress of the other cleaners. To his immense relief, they had all now reached their stations and were showing green. There were no more flaws. Maybe Ira would let him rest for the last hour before they set off again. True rest – the thought of it was incredibly seductive.
‘That’s it,’ he told Rachel. ‘They’re all finished.’ He leaned back in his digital approximation of an office chair.
‘Already?’ came Rachel’s reply.
Her avatar appeared on the seat beside him. The avatar was a model of Rachel that Will had assembled for himself. He’d made it out of footage from his memory logs, along with a live-feed of her face from her bunk camera. It looked like her, and most of the time it moved like her, too. Will had spent what few scraps of spare time he’d had compiling heuristics to mimic her physical behaviour. He hadn’t told her yet that he’d built this replica of her in his private world. He wasn’t sure what she’d think, and he didn’t want to lose it. It made him feel less lonely.
One of the consequences of Ira’s enforced regime was that Will hadn’t yet taken part in any of the ship’s social life. With his every minute spent either working or unconscious in the tank, he was missing out on the ship’s banter – the conversation that kept them close. He often heard the others laughing in the background of his sensorium while he struggled to keep the ship’s robotic population in order. Sometimes they sat together and ate meals while he slept or toiled. Will felt even more like an outsider than he had on the Phoenix.
Rachel was the only person he’d really got to talk to so far, and that was only because they’d been working together. Though their conversations were limited to topics like accelerator coils and magnetic sluice-gates, he’d rapidly come to appreciate why Doug had held her in such high regard. She was patient and smart in a no-nonsense kind of way. She’d taken plenty of time to familiarise him with the quirks of the Ariel’s architecture and listened attentively to his every stupid question. He felt more grateful to her than he cared to express.
With the avatar, his time with Rachel became more than just a dialogue through a camera window. It was as if she was actually in the metaphor space with him. And, admittedly, she was also pleasing to look at.
‘I’m impressed,’ she said. Her eyes darted from side to side as she checked the schematics in her visor, breaking the illusion of her presence for a moment.
She couldn’t see Will’s display board any more than she could see him sitting in the chair next to her. It gave her the disturbing appearance of someone partially blind, but Will didn’t care.
‘Have you dry-run them yet?’ she asked.
‘Didn’t need to. I made tight-scans as I was going along.’
Rachel looked uncomfortable at that. ‘I think we’d better, just
to be certain, don’t you?’
Will sighed. ‘Sure.’
He sounded more snappish than he’d intended, but the mere thought of conducting another round of tests was draining. He slouched forwards in his chair and started mustering the presence of mind he’d need to reconfigure the test-suite again.
‘It’s okay,’ said Rachel quietly. ‘I can tell you’re wiped. Why don’t I do it?’
Will glanced up at her avatar. It wasn’t her job, plus she lacked the mods to do the work directly. It would take her three times as long as it would him. Not to mention the fact that she had plenty of her own work to do overseeing the refuelling. On the other hand, it meant rest. Who was he to stop her if she wanted to volunteer?
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
Rachel nodded. ‘Of course. Why don’t you unplug for a while and take a nap.’ She sounded obscurely guilty. ‘I should think you probably need one.’
It wasn’t procedure, but it was appallingly tempting.
‘Ira’s still in conference with the Andrewsian defence minister,’ she reminded him. ‘He won’t be out of the privacy room till it’s time to go.’
She was right. Though the people of St Andrews were very minor allies, they managed to take up a lot of time with diplomatic chatter.
‘Thanks,’ he said at last with a sheepish smile. ‘I really appreciate it.’
He turned his attention back to the real world and gasped with relief as he yanked the fat-contact from his neck. He stretched against his bunk and stared blissfully up at the blue sky of the ceiling. His body relaxed properly for the first time in days. Within seconds, he was asleep.
He was woken after what felt like minutes by a deafening alarm splitting the cabin air. He jerked into motion, reflexively grabbing the slide-bar on the muscle-tank.
‘What’s that?’ he blurted. ‘What happened?’
His sentiments were echoed a split second later by Ira barrelling through the hatch from the privacy chamber like a human torpedo.
‘What the hell is going on?’ he boomed.
The sound of the alarm died.
‘It’s okay!’ Rachel said quickly. ‘Everything’s under control. Will, could I get you back in here for a second, please?’
‘Why is he out?’ Ira demanded. The captain yanked himself over to float beside Rachel’s bunk, his face flushed with anger. ‘What’re you doing? What subsystem are you on?’
Will hastily reconnected his fat-contact. The moment he hit the repair-survey node, he could guess what the problem was from the cluster of flaring red lights on the board. A quick check of his active SAP stable confirmed his suspicion. His last pipe cleaner, made nervous by the cooling welds around it, had failed to return home when its survey was complete. The heat of the pipe was still above its default safety threshold, thus it couldn’t retrace its steps without external instructions from Will. So, like all dim-witted machines, it had sat there quietly and waited for new orders. Thus, when Rachel started injecting a cool test plasma into the pipes, the presence of the cleaner had come up looking like a critical blockage, hence the alarms.
Will grabbed hold of the cleaner’s mind and sent it scurrying back to its service alcove as fast as it could go. Before it got there, Ira’s command icon appeared in the control room, denoting his presence in the system. It took the captain just seconds to spot what was going on.
‘Monet!’ he roared.
The sound was decidedly real, and close by. Will turned back to the real world to see the captain’s beet-coloured face glaring at him over the muscle-tank.
Ira thrust his data visor up over his head. ‘What in fuck’s name were you doing unplugged while one of your repair robots was still active? And why do I find Ms Bock here running your tests for you? Do you know what duty shift means, Mr Monet?’
‘It’s my fault, sir,’ said Rachel. ‘I told him to unplug. And I was the one who injected plasma into the pipe while there was still a robot inside.’
‘Quiet!’ Ira ordered and turned his attention back to Will. ‘What were you thinking? Do you have any idea what would’ve happened if we’d started up the pulse guns with that thing still stuck in there?’
And with sickly clarity, Will did. An antimatter bullet colliding with the cleaner would blow a hole in the hull large enough to drive a macrodozer through. In all probability, they wouldn’t have time to realise their mistake before they died.
‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Monet, this ship only has six people on it,’ the captain snarled. ‘That means everyone has to pull their weight. And if you’re going to make slack-ass mistakes like disconnecting on the job, I might as well leave you here with the fucking Andrewsians. Because I’d rather have Rachel and Hugo cover your job around the clock till the end of the mission than leave my ship in the hands of a second-rate shift-dodger. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Will, his face burning.
‘And I don’t care if someone told you that you could unplug or not,’ he added, with a furious glance in Rachel’s direction. ‘Your duties on this ship are outlined very clearly in your transfer contract. Or do you need a refresher course in Fleet discipline?’
‘No, sir.’
‘From now on, I want to see that noodle on your neck at all times, in-tank or out, unless I explicitly give you permission to take it off.’
Will pressed his lips together hard. Ira might as well chain him to his bunk. What he needed was more rest, not less.
‘Do you get me?’ Ira demanded.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Will stiffly.
‘Then finish those repairs. I want them double-checked, with a full report on my stack before we leave system.’
Ira shoved himself away towards the privacy room. With a grimace of frustration, Will re-immersed himself in the repair node and began running the last batch of tests all over again.
4.3: IRA
Ira dragged himself through the hatch, cursing. He was furious, but mostly with himself. He should have pushed back harder on Bryant about the new roboteer. It was clear Will couldn’t take the pace. He had been deadly serious when he’d suggested leaving Will behind. Having no roboteer on the ship was better than risking a clumsy one. And St Andrews was desperate for technical help. He had half a mind to call the defence minister back and offer him a deal, then and there.
The tiny colony was one of Galatea’s three remaining allies. The only reason the Earthers hadn’t bothered to invade it yet was because the victory spoils wouldn’t cover the invasion cost. Everyone down there was trying to build shelters to hide in for the inevitable day when the crusade arrived. Not that shelters would do them a shred of good.
Ira was about to press the close stud when Amy darted through the hatch after him. The lines on her round face were set hard. She slapped the door stud for him, sealing them in, and fixed him with a stern expression.
‘Ira, what’s going on? This isn’t like you.’
‘What’s not like me?’
Amy snorted. ‘What do you think? The way you’re treating Will! You can’t expect him to undergo a full metabolic enhancement and still be on top of his duties. It’s crazy! You’re pushing him way too hard.’
Ira folded his arms. ‘You think so? Well, those Earthers are going to push him a hell of a lot harder than I am. All I’m trying to do is keep him alive.’
‘How?’ Amy snapped. ‘By pumping his heart so full of drugs that he can barely move? That’s bullshit, Ira, and you know it.’
Ira bristled. He took a lot from Amy. She’d been his friend for years and he valued her advice, but this was the first time he could remember her criticising his leadership decisions to his face. It amazed him that she didn’t understand.
‘If we have to take another turn like the one that killed Doug—’
She cut him off. ‘If! We haven’t even got there yet, Ira. We have no idea what we’re going to find.’
Ira set his jaw. ‘We have to be prepared for that eventuality.’
�
�Do we? In case you hadn’t noticed, this isn’t a pitched battle we’re walking into. It’s a stealth raid. I think this has a lot more to do with your guilt problem than his gravity tolerance.’
‘Call my problem whatever you like. It doesn’t change the fact that we’re about to walk into the very place where that disrupter attack was dreamed up. And if I have to face it again, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that my crew get out of there alive. All of them.’ He shook his head. ‘You seem to think I haven’t been keeping an eye on Will. I have. I have a visor window open showing his bio-vitals twenty-four seven. I know what I’m doing.’
Amy sighed. ‘Do you? Then how come we just faced down a possible pipe blast? If what you say is true, then you’re as much to blame for that little fiasco as he was. Why not talk to him for once. Let him settle in. Make him want to work for you. He’ll be ready a lot sooner if you start treating him like a human being.’
Ira’s chest tightened. The last thing he wanted to do now was get chummy with Will.
‘At least that way we won’t kill ourselves in some stupid blunder before we arrive,’ Amy added. ‘Please, Ira. For all our sakes.’
Ira looked away. ‘Sorry. I can’t. The mission has to come first.’
Amy gasped in frustration. ‘Fine! I didn’t want to have to say this, but in case you’ve forgotten, I also operate as ship’s doctor on this crate. When it comes to the welfare of the crew, what I say goes. So you’ll dial it back and give that lad some downtime, and that’s an order. Do you hear me?’ she demanded, her tone a mocking approximation of Ira’s.
Ira glowered at her and nodded. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
‘You can be damn sure of it,’ she replied and stabbed the stud again.
She pushed herself out, leaving Ira alone in the chamber. He slammed the wall with his hand.
4.4: WILL
With St Andrews safely behind them, Will took refuge in the one task that afforded him any satisfaction in his new life: metaphor tagging.
A quick scan of the Ariel’s software map found him a node he hadn’t worked on yet – a secondary resource-allocation system in the life-support domain. He followed the link and entered a room where the walls were still white and bare, the doorways empty rectangular holes.
