Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  As the robots neared the alien vessel – if that’s what it was – the sheer scale of it became clear. It was over two hundred kilometres long. What had looked like delicate fronds from a distance were in fact huge arcing towers of metal large enough to contain entire human cities. The red core hung before them like a world. The whole thing was surrounded by a halo of sparkling dust.

  ‘My God,’ Amy muttered.

  Ira was awed, too, despite himself. They were the first human beings ever to lay eyes on such a thing.

  As they came closer still, Ira made out features that might have been sensors and ports clustered in cryptic patterns on the core’s surface. There were impact craters, too – thousands of them – and great, gaping rents, whether from collisions or warfare, Ira couldn’t tell.

  ‘Hugo,’ he muttered, ‘why don’t you take your drone squad off and explore the surface for weapons?’

  ‘I’ll go with him,’ said Amy. ‘I want to have a closer look at that cratering.’

  Hugo and Amy guided a third of the robotic fleet off across the rusty landscape while Will guided the remainder towards the closest hole in the hull and through it into a huge, dark interior space with twisted cables looping across it. Their robots’ searchlights illuminated countless bits of drifting stuff like dirty snow. It was so thick they could barely see the walls.

  ‘Not much shielding,’ John observed as he examined the hull behind them.

  Will cycled through scan filters till a regular arrangement of tunnel openings appeared out of the grubby haze.

  ‘Will, any idea of the layout of this ship?’ Ira asked.

  ‘No. Sorry, Captain.’

  Ira could hear the frustration in the young man’s voice. He must be tired of people asking him questions about the aliens that he couldn’t answer. But under the circumstances, he was just going to have to deal with it.

  ‘Fine,’ said Ira. ‘Then let’s head towards where the habitat core would be in a human ship. Want to lead the way, Rachel?’

  Rachel chose a tunnel near the centre of the far wall. ‘Let’s try that direction,’ she suggested, pointing with a data marker.

  Will took them gently forwards into a long, curving passageway with rippled sides like the gullet of some prehistoric fish. They stopped shortly after, when they found something resembling a scorpion with a peculiar fanned tail hanging dead and blocking the way in front of them. It had shiny brown body-segments and was missing several of its legs. Fibres trailed out where the limbs had snapped off. Instead of pincers, it had something like armoured hands.

  ‘Is that … one of them?’ Rachel asked in a hushed voice.

  ‘No,’ said Will. ‘That’s a robot.’

  Ira heard no doubt in his voice.

  As they pushed nearer, it became more obvious that the scorpion-thing was artificial. On closer examination, it looked quite primitive. A triangle of lidless cameras passed for eyes. Its body was clad in bald plastic plates and there was no sign of anything like tact-fur. Humans hadn’t built anything that clunky since the Martian Renaissance. Strange, Ira thought. As they passed the ancient robot, the exhaust from their thrusters sent it spiralling gently towards the wall. More limbs snapped off as it brushed past. Time must have rendered the thing as brittle as glass. Soon they exited the tunnel into a place filled with crazy interlacing metal rings that passed for a mesohull. Beneath it were more tunnels.

  Ira found himself fascinated by the similarities and differences between his own ship and this one. Clearly, there were certain features all starships needed, and these Ira could just about recognise. But in other places, the engineering was bewilderingly different.

  Eventually, they found their way to a sealed module that Rachel thought might be a habitat. It was at least fifty metres wide and held in place by great pistons. Its surface was clad in something like Casimir-buffers, except instead of panels, the material was laid in curved sections like strips of muscle, and fed by power cables that coiled like springs. Once, the buffers had been covered with something shiny. Now it was coming off in flakes.

  ‘This is it,’ Rachel exclaimed. ‘We need to get some of those strips back to the ship to experiment on.’

  Will sent a couple of small waldobots down to see if they could prise some off.

  Ira watched the proceedings quietly. He wasn’t sure he liked cannibalising this ancient ship. It felt vaguely sacrilegious.

  ‘Ira, I’ve had a look at the hull,’ said Amy. ‘It appears to confirm Will’s story – everything here is about ten million years old. It looks as if the ship was hit by some kind of massive solar-flare activity. It was literally scoured clean.’ She sent him pictures of the pocked surface and spectrographic scans of the samples she’d taken.

  ‘A flare did all this?’ said Ira. ‘It had to be a pretty big one.’

  ‘I’d say so,’ she replied. ‘That star down there must have sloughed its skin like a snake. Probably took a billion years off its lifespan.’

  ‘I’m going to follow these wiring bundles,’ said John. His marker pointed to cables like the tentacles of a mighty squid curling away around the surface of the module. ‘They might be data links. And if they are, they might lead to an access tube.’

  ‘Great,’ said Ira. He was glad to hear John making a constructive and unironic contribution. Apparently he’d taken their talk to heart.

  He returned his attention to Will and Rachel’s work. A long piece of buffer was slowly peeling away from the ceramic surface underneath like sticky spaghetti. It ripped, leaving one robot holding a trailing end.

  ‘Damn!’ said Will. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rachel told him. ‘We’ll have to reshape it anyway. It’s the raw materials that count.’

  Ira watched the robots painstakingly gather material to bring back to the Ariel until John claimed his attention again.

  ‘Captain, I think I’ve found a way in.’

  Ira flicked over to the view from John’s lead robot. It was of an airlock, if a fairly basic-looking one. The whole ship was a weird mixture of styles, he mused – some high-tech, some clumsy. Who knew, maybe human ships would look the same way to an alien.

  With a little help from Will, John’s robots forced the airlock open. Ira half-expected atmosphere to start screaming out, but nothing happened. The habitat must have long since been violated. They yanked back the door and peered inside. Their searchlights revealed nothing but a blizzard of floating crap. Will took the robots slowly in.

  The module was huge by human standards. Instead of being divided into rooms, it was one great open space filled with ladders of something like silk that tore as they passed through it. And everywhere was the obscuring mass of dirty snow.

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ Ira muttered in annoyance.

  ‘I think it’s what it looks like,’ said Amy. ‘Water ice.’

  ‘What did they do in here, swim?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘It’s entirely possible that this race was amphibious.’

  Then they bumped up against their first corpse. Everyone aboard the Ariel jumped in unison.

  ‘Nice,’ said John smoothly. ‘I love a good surprise.’

  ‘Will,’ said Ira, shaken, ‘get some waldobots over here and let’s take a proper look at this thing.’

  Will stabilised the spinning body so that the rest of them could see it properly. It was a beaked, quadrupedal creature about the size of a large dog, with hands on the ends of each of its four limbs and leathery grey skin covered with short spines. Its eyes were on little turrets. The fingers were webbed and looked highly dextrous.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Amy excitedly. ‘An actual alien. Will, give me a hand, would you? I want to take some samples.’

  Ira and the others spread the remaining robots out. Over the next half-hour, they found dozens of frozen corpses, large and small. Though the aliens’ body plan remained the same, they varied in size from monkey to hippopotamus.

  Ira’s greatest surprise came
when they reached what must have once been the bottom of the habitat. A huge, blunt-faced Fecund with a beak like an industrial shovel was curled up there like a gigantic baby, glued in place by hundreds of strands of silky web. Tiny aliens nestled all around it.

  ‘Hey, everybody,’ John called. ‘Check this out.’

  He drew their attention to a square section of the ribbed grey wall of the module that was covered with what looked like archaic switchboard controls.

  ‘When we followed those links in, I thought I’d find some sort of computer core,’ John explained, ‘but there’s nothing here, just a load of cut-out switches and dials with some lame-ass circuitry behind them. That’s no way to run a starship. What do you suppose they did, twiddle their way from place to place?’

  ‘The soft control over this ship must have been run from somewhere else,’ Rachel suggested.

  ‘I agree,’ said Ira.

  ‘I’ve dated the first corpse we found,’ Amy interjected. ‘It died at the same time as the ship. The solar radiation fried it.’

  ‘Radiation?’ said Rachel. ‘But what about all those buffers? It would have been protected, surely.’

  ‘All I can say is they must have been turned off before the blast hit,’ Amy replied.

  ‘But that’s crazy!’ Rachel insisted. ‘Who turns off the buffers in a live starship?’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t turn them off by choice,’ said Ira. ‘We’ve already seen what the Transcended did to our ship. If they had a hand in this, what was to stop them from powering the ships down through a soft assault?’

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ said Rachel. ‘If the Transcended had that much hands-on power in this place, why didn’t they just shut off everyone’s life support?’

  ‘No idea,’ replied Ira. ‘But I think we’ve found enough to be going on with for the time being. Let’s get these samples out of here and back to the Ariel for proper processing. That might give us some of the answers we’re looking for.’

  He chose not to mention the fact that studying this extraterrestrial morgue was also giving him the creeps.

  They’d started gathering bodies to take back when suddenly Hugo shouted from the bottom bunk. ‘Captain!’

  It was the first they’d heard from him since they’d come inside. The discovery of aliens didn’t appear to have interested him in the least.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ira.

  ‘I’ve found what I think are suntap weapons like the ones the Earthers are using, but on a much larger scale. Amazingly, they’re in excellent condition! With one or two spare parts from the Ariel, I think I could probably get them working.’

  He sounded immensely pleased with himself. Ira was less impressed. Relatively speaking, the whole ship was in excellent condition, given how long it had been floating here.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ he said unenthusiastically.

  His appetite for control of the suntap had been thoroughly quashed by what he’d seen here already, but he knew he’d be a fool to pass up the opportunity to learn more about the technology. In the event that the Earthers managed to track them here, they’d need to mount some kind of defence. They couldn’t flee, and their chances of perpetrating a successful soft assault against the Earthers were at an all-time low. And besides, anything that kept the scientist feeling positive and engaged had to be worth the investment.

  ‘Captain, this is a unique opportunity,’ Hugo urged. ‘We have to try!’

  ‘Will,’ said Ira, ‘if we use a suntap here, are we going to incur the wrath of these Transcended of yours? Having seen the consequences, I’ve no desire to face down one of their solar shock waves.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Captain,’ Will replied. ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s more likely that we’ve been brought here to make use of this technology to win the war.’

  Ira wasn’t convinced. If that were true, the Transcended would have shown them where to find antimatter. He was just going to have to take a chance.

  ‘All right, Hugo,’ he said. ‘Fix up a weapon.’

  Why not? Ira thought. While they were here, they might as well get on with the research that Fleet sent them out here to do. Without it, they were never likely to stand up to Ulanu’s armada. Even knowing that, Ira had the uneasy feeling that he’d just made a deal with the devil.

  9.3: WILL

  A week into their involuntary stay in the Fecund system, Ira called a crew meeting. Will dragged himself reluctantly after the others to the upper chamber. The prospect of discussing their plight did not appeal, particularly given the mood in the cabin recently. The leaden sense of impotence hanging over them grew heavier with every day they spent in this dead place.

  ‘The repairs are going well,’ said Rachel. ‘Will has helped me build a polymer substrate on which we can lay the Fecund composites. We’re lucky – about seventy-five per cent of the material has retained its picopore matrix. It’s not perfect, but it should see us home.’

  She was trying to put a brave face on it. There was still no antimatter. Going home was a fantasy.

  ‘John,’ said Ira.

  John gave them all a winning, action-hero grin. ‘Well, I’m no closer to finding one of those bastards’ computers than I was when we turned up,’ he admitted. ‘The truth is, their IT is crap for the most part. Their wiring is awful and their comms are out of the Dark Ages. If it weren’t for the fact they’ve got robots and wireless ports running through the whole damn ship, I’d think they never built a single processor.’

  Will happened to know that John hadn’t been looking very hard. After they’d discovered the dead aliens on that first day, his curiosity appeared to have fallen off sharply. Now he spent most of his time scouring the Ariel’s systems for signs of the alien code that had hacked his precious defences. As far as Will knew, he’d found nothing.

  ‘I can tell you what I have learned, though,’ said John, ‘which is that there are a whole bunch of habitat cores dotted through that ship instead of just one. They had more crew than they could have possibly used. They were mad for multiple redundancy. As far as I can tell, this ship was designed to have the shit kicked out of it and still keep fighting. Which is weird, because it’s got no exohull to speak of. I’m going to look at the base of those fern-things next – there’s a bunch of complicated tunnels under them that we haven’t explored yet.’

  Ira nodded. ‘Good. Hugo?’

  Hugo steepled his fingers in front of his mouth for a moment and scowled. For a man with the galaxy’s biggest scientific toy-box to play with, he’d been surprisingly testy over the last few days.

  ‘The first prototype suntap is ready for testing,’ he muttered. He met no one’s eyes.

  Ira tried for enthusiasm. ‘That’s great. You want to tell us how it works? After all, that’s what we came here to learn.’

  Hugo glanced sceptically at him. It wasn’t often he was asked to volunteer an explanation these days. It was clear to Will, and no doubt to Hugo, too, that Ira was trying to draw him out.

  Hugo’s interaction with the crew had taken only one form this last week: picking on Will. Every time the physicist faced another frustration in his work, the first thing he did was ask Will for the answer. Except it wasn’t so much asking as demanding, as if it was Will’s fault that Hugo didn’t understand what he was looking at.

  For a few seconds, Hugo said nothing. When no one else spoke, he began. ‘The principle of the thing is simple enough,’ he said. ‘A beam of entangled high-energy electrons is fired into the sun and energy is teleported out through them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Rachel. ‘You can’t draw energy from quantum teleportation.’

  ‘Clearly you can,’ Hugo snapped.

  Will saw Ira shoot him a warning glance. Hugo continued more calmly.

  ‘There is a chamber in the device in which a field is established. The field is a kind of microgravitic agitation pattern that uses a similar principle to warp, but far subtler. The other halves of the electron pairs are held within
it and forced into a state under which … their entanglement cannot collapse.’ He said the words in a rush, as if he really wasn’t happy with the idea, then carried on quickly. ‘Radiation pressure on the electrons in the star forces energy into the trap through the electron bridge, which is collected with ordinary photoreceptors. Simple enough, as I said.’

  Rachel folded her arms and stared at him. ‘I don’t get it. How does this field operate?’

  ‘How do you expect me to answer?’ Hugo demanded suddenly. ‘My research is incomplete and there is no explanation provided in the blueprint.’

  Rachel wasn’t impressed. ‘Then reverse-engineer the components that create the field,’ she suggested.

  ‘I did!’ Hugo shouted.

  Will felt little sympathy for the man. He contemplated saying something.

  Ira beat him to it. ‘And?’

  Hugo turned sullen again. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  The captain eyed him. ‘What do you mean, “there’s nothing there”?’

  Hugo exhaled hard. ‘I mean there’s no system to control the gravitic generators.’

  ‘There must be,’ Rachel insisted. ‘You’re just not looking in the right place.’

  Hugo glared at her with furious, pain-filled eyes and bunched his fists.

  ‘Enough!’ said Ira. ‘Hugo, move on. Do you have anything else to tell us?’

  Hugo blinked and returned his gaze to the chamber floor. ‘Yes. The device has limitations. The electron beam needs time to reach whatever sun it is aimed at, which means it is impractical for deep-space conflicts.’

  Ira’s beaked face broke into an unforced smile. ‘Excellent! That’s our answer. Force out-system engagement on the enemy.’

  ‘Furthermore,’ said Hugo, ‘the gravitic field is highly sensitive both to warp and conventional acceleration due to the ripple effect.’

  Ira pounded his fist into his hand. ‘That’s why those drones chasing us stopped firing the moment they engaged warp. It’s another weakness we can exploit – make them keep moving and they’ll never be able to bring their taps online. Well done, Hugo. If we ever get out of here, your work may have saved us the war.’