Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘I’ll monitor your life signs,’ Rachel offered grudgingly. ‘But if I see any weird data traffic, I’m breaking the link to Ariel, okay?’

  Will nodded. He took a deep breath and dropped himself into the puzzle.

  It was nothing like the first Transcended SAP he’d run. This one was part slide show, part memory log and part dialogue. Will watched through the eyes of a robot as the current in the delivery tube rushed it to the damage site. Water surged around the plastic limbs folded back against its body. Will recognised the slick ribbing on the walls as it flashed past. It was one of the tunnels he’d come in through – they were a kind of hydraulic delivery system for robots! Water had once pumped around this ship like blood.

  Will directed the robot to the access port, where it pushed through the retainer membrane into a scene of chaos and debris. Electricity arced across a steamy chamber filled with the ruins of huge machines.

  How were they going to rebalance the chamber? Will thought in horror. It would take hundreds of units.

  The Fecund engineering philosophy unfolded inside his head. Durability first. They could take as long as they needed to fix this charging bank because the ship had dozens like it. Also, Fecund robots were simple but robust. Even a great nestship like the one he served on only had a few varieties. Their culture had refined robustness to a kind of elegance. They would throw as many robots at the problem as it took.

  Will looked down at the hands of the machine he wore. They were well made but hard and insensitive. Surely, even with an infinite supply of such robots, there would still be delicate, complex tasks they’d never be able to perform.

  The memory stream derailed as if in response to his confusion and Will found himself behind the eyes of another robot, performing a different task. He felt his heart swell with a peculiar kind of pride, tainted with bitter-sweet empathy. He was helping tend the babies. With his massive brown claws, he grappled a huge rectangular tank and dragged it across a birthing factory decorated in soft crèche grey. The tank was full of jelly-like spawn, and his destination was the oven where the eggs would be gently, lovingly overheated. It would ensure the young produced were neuter females like him, born for lives of willing servitude.

  On a ship like this, ninety per cent of the crew were neuter females. Most were deemed disposable and sent to work in the mesohull. The lucky ones like him would be altered for robot work. He envied the disposables their knowledge of their own bodies and their camaraderie of physical contact, though not their brief, painful lives.

  Will recoiled from the knowledge the puzzle pressed upon him. That was why Fecund robots were so simple: because they sent living crew outside the habitat cores to die. They sent their own children to their deaths. What kind of parents would do such a thing to their own offspring?

  The memory track derailed again and Will discovered that he was monitoring the environmental controls for the executive module. He was overcome by fear. Everything must be just right or he would be replaced for sure.

  In the pools below his camera-view, huge clan-parents wallowed. They would never leave the water, and in their lifetime would produce thousands of children, more than enough to run a ship. Thousands. Will reeled. What kind of world could have spawned such a race?

  The puzzle showed him. Another change of context and he was watching soothing pictures of the home world while surgeon sisters made further adaptations to his maimed body. He saw vast seaweed forests and monster tides. It was a world far richer in life than Earth but more capricious in nature. Between the streaks of thick cloud he made out a huge moon hanging overheard like the yellow eye of some angry god.

  The Fecund had evolved hands for moving around kelp forests in powerful currents, Will realised, not for swinging through trees. As he watched, three adolescent Fecund playing in the roiling surf were swept away. Disposable children – a part of life. With a home like this, Will thought, it was amazing the Fecund had ever managed to get off it.

  On the contrary, the puzzle appeared to say, and pulled him through a bewildering series of snippets from what he could only imagine was a Fecund historical documentary. He saw cities built on scaffolds, amazing systems of dams and locks, and Fecund clinging to giant kites. It was clear that once this race had learned to make tools and change their environment, its development had been explosive. He watched simple rockets being assembled in giant silos, and a journey to the giant yellow moon. How tempting a destination it must have been for a developing civilisation.

  The view swapped again, back to the repair scene where it had started. The action was further advanced, and Will was now following a robot scrambling through the damaged ship to a weapons array where energy beams of unbelievable potency were being fired into space. Will’s robot looked out into the void between the vessels and saw armadas of such numbers of nestships that Tang’s force was laughable by comparison.

  They bred like locusts, Will realised. With the natural pressure of their environment no longer acting upon them, the Fecund had practically erupted into space. They fought each other for room and resources on every habitable world they could find and thought little of the loss of life their conflicts incurred.

  Will grudgingly found himself in agreement with the Transcended. These creatures had to go.

  ‘No,’ he thought he heard the puzzle tell him. ‘It is more subtle than that. We do not judge on speed of spread, but on consequences.’

  To finish, the puzzle showed him the chaos aboard the nestship as suddenly the war beams all winked out. Fields of shimmering lustre cast from the frond-like warp inducers faded and died. The sun below them turned an ugly, bloated orange.

  The Fecund had only a minute or two to panic before the shock wave arrived. Will’s robot stared hopelessly at the mutating sun as a tsunami of boiling death enveloped the sky.

  In the numb darkness that followed, a single final image appeared of a metal-clad sphere clutched by pistons in the bowels of the ruined ship. Ten thousand cables trailed from it.

  ‘This is a nest archive,’ the puzzle told him.

  The program ended.

  Will was dumped unceremoniously back into the real world – into a body gasping for breath. His pulse raced.

  ‘—ou alright?’ Rachel was yelling. ‘Talk to me!’ She shook him fiercely.

  ‘Yes!’ Will wheezed. ‘I’m fine.’

  Rachel collapsed against him in relief, then looked up again and fixed him with a glare. ‘What the hell happened in there?’ she demanded. ‘Your vitals went crazy, just like you said they wouldn’t.’

  Will held on to her with trembling hands and pulled himself together. ‘I’m alive, aren’t I?’ he said, trying for whimsy. ‘It was just a bit surprising, that’s all.’ He shot her a weak smile. ‘Thank you. Sorry.’

  His head spun as he struggled to pull meaning from the experience he’d just endured. The Transcended had wanted him to see the dead alien with his own eyes, and then put him in that alien’s shoes. Why? Just so he could view the consequences of being judged self-destructive? Will didn’t believe that.

  There was also the lingering question of how the Transcended had managed to capture the last moments of the Fecund roboteer’s life. Perhaps the entire program had been a fiction, a near-accurate biography created after the fact, for his benefit.

  But on reflection, Will thought not. There had been something too earnest about the puzzle for that. He was left with the unsettling suspicion that the Transcended had come here after everyone was dead and somehow pulled memories from the corpses.

  He froze as the full import of what he’d watched dawned on him. This system wasn’t just a graveyard: it was a memorial. It had been tended, maintained. The Transcended had left it intact on purpose because of its proximity to the lure star. As a lesson for other species, yes, but also as a resource.

  He looked up at Rachel. ‘I know where to go!’

  The route to the nest archive was as clear to him as the walk around his local canteen back home.
That was why the Transcended had wanted him to solve the puzzle here: because there was more to see.

  ‘Go?’ said Rachel. ‘I thought we’d just found the answer.’

  ‘We found the answer to the puzzle,’ he replied with a grin. ‘This is the answer to our prayers.’ He tucked up his legs to launch off, back towards the airlock. Before he could move, Rachel grabbed him again.

  ‘Will,’ she said. ‘I like you. I want to help you. But I can’t do that if I don’t know what’s going on. You still haven’t explained what this is all about. And you’re scaring me.’

  Will took a deep breath and nodded. He needed to slow down again. ‘It’s good news,’ he told her, as calmly as he could. ‘The puzzle ended with a kind of prize – something we can use to get out of here, perhaps an answer to our antimatter problem. And we were supposed to solve the puzzle here because the prize is here, too.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘Come on, I’ll explain on the way.’

  They clambered back out to the robot and followed the tunnels down through the ship in the direction the puzzle had shown him. Meanwhile, Will told Rachel everything he’d learned about the Fecund.

  ‘They sound horrible,’ Rachel said when he’d finished. ‘A species that murdered their own children and trashed every star system they got hold of? I’m not surprised the Transcended destroyed them.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s it, though,’ said Will. ‘The puzzle was trying to tell me that it wasn’t a moral decision. It was deeper than that. It was something about the way they lived.’

  Rachel snorted. ‘Briefly, by the sound of it.’

  The archive was exactly where Will expected it to be, near the base of the bulb, close to the power system that fed the warp-fronds. It was the most important point in the entire ship. Set in the centre of another spherical chamber, the archive resembled a ball of twine some fifteen metres across clutched in the talon of a mighty mechanical bird. Countless cables snaked out of it in all directions and disappeared into sockets in the curving wall. The talon was a bracing device, nothing more than a gravitational stabiliser. The ball was where the action was. It was the hub of the data network for the entire ship.

  ‘Is this it?’ said Rachel.

  Will nodded. ‘This is what John was looking for. The Fecund didn’t use computers as much as we do. They didn’t trust the robustness of software, but they did store data. And this is the database all their roboteers were plugged into. There should be tons of information in it we can use. Stuff that will show us how to get out of here. And how to beat the Earthers.’

  It was exciting just looking at the thing.

  ‘That’s great, Will,’ she said. ‘Really great. Now let’s tell John and get the hell out of here.

  Will’s heart sank a little. ‘We can’t. We need to route power through it and hook it up to a zero-latency diagnostics rig. That’s not possible here. We’ll have to take it back to the Ariel.’

  Rachel’s face fell. ‘How? There’s about ten klicks of ship in the way!’

  Will shook his head. ‘Not true.’ He pointed. ‘We’ve come almost to the other side of the ship. If we keep going that way, there are only three bulkheads between us and the exohull.’

  ‘But it’s still an exohull!’ said Rachel. ‘And this thing must weigh tons. How’re you going to move it? How’re you going to unplug it, even?’ She gestured hopelessly at the mad tangle of wire.

  ‘That’s what robots are for,’ said Will. ‘We can cut a hole in the bulkheads and drag the thing straight out.’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘This sounds like an awfully big job to me.’

  He sighed. ‘I know how it sounds, but I can’t think of a better option. Give me an hour. Let’s at least try.’

  She deflated. ‘One more hour, then.’

  Will grinned at her.

  ‘Do you mind if I tell Ira now?’ she added.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ll start work on the cables.’

  By the end of that first hour, his progress was even better than he’d hoped. His robots needed barely any guidance. With the slightest encouragement from him, they set about their task with almost manic enthusiasm. Burners and cutters attacked the peculiarly fragile exohull, which melted like butter under their tools. Meanwhile, the waldobot made short work of the other decrepit walls standing in their way.

  Will had the strong impression that the nestship had been made ready for this surgery in advance. There were no visible flaws in the bulkheads they tore down, yet when the waldobot hammered at them they broke in clean, straight lines. Was this more evidence of the Transcended’s involvement? It suggested that someone had planned for this moment long before he was even born. There was something unsettling about that.

  Rachel surveyed his progress with gathering surprise. ‘I should learn to stop doubting you, Will Kuno-Monet,’ she said, astonished.

  Will smiled at her, a little nervously. He wasn’t sure exactly how much he had to do with their success. ‘It’s not really me,’ he said. ‘They just drop things into my head.’

  She snorted. ‘They drop puzzles, Will. You’re the one who solves them.’

  A mere four hours later, they were ready to snap the final pistons holding the sphere in place and sail it out into the void. The shuttle waited just outside with grapples extended.

  Rachel regarded the scene with a gleeful grin on her face. ‘We did it!’ she exclaimed. ‘You did it. You’re amazing, Will.’ She hugged him and blew him a kiss from helmet to helmet.

  Ira’s call caught Will in mid-blush. ‘Rachel, Will, cease your activity. Shut down all radiation signatures and wait for further instructions. The Earthers are here.’

  10.2: IRA

  The Earther gunship crept into the system like a visitor to a haunted house. That caution was understandable. Ira could imagine what must be going through the captain’s head – the same things that had gone through his about a week ago. He held his breath as he watched the Earthers edge up to the exact part of the ring where the Ariel was parked. It wasn’t a great surprise. Ira had put the ship in the middle of the thickest concentration of ruins – it was the obvious place to look, and in retrospect he could see that he’d courted this. Part of him preferred the thought of being found and killed to eking out a pitiful existence among the dead for the rest of his life.

  That was why he’d been so reluctant to let Will go, he realised. And of course, true to form, the Earthers had shown up the very moment when two of his crew were out of his sight. Their timing was about right for the luck he’d been having lately.

  The good news was that he’d anticipated the moment and prepared for it. From the moment Amy’s deep-space scans had given him warning, it had taken less than a minute to shut down the Ariel’s radiation profile. Now they were just one more piece of floating junk. The conditions for an ambush were almost perfect.

  The only problem was the plume of heated matter that Will’s little adventure had produced over at the Fecund ship. In the dead cold of the system, it glared like a beacon. But it was small. Hopefully the Earthers would never get that close. The Sargasso region Ira had parked in was still hundreds of thousands of kilometres across. There was plenty of it to get lost in.

  ‘Hugo,’ said Ira, ‘it’s time to power up that new g-ray of yours.’

  ‘I haven’t finished testing it,’ croaked Hugo. ‘Just two more minutes and I can at least run an ad hoc calibration.’

  Ira breathed deeply. ‘Too late for that,’ he said. ‘Turn it on.’

  ‘You realise that at this distance, it’ll still take about ten minutes for the suntap to come online?’

  ‘Then we’d better get started straight away, hadn’t we?’ Ira growled. ‘John, help him. Give him targeting support. I want a clean shot at their habitat core.’

  If he could manage it, Ira wanted the Earther ship intact. Their antimatter could save his mission, and the element of surprise was about the only advantage he was going to get. The
gunship was bigger than the Ariel and a lot better armed.

  He watched with his heart in his mouth as the Earthers fired off drones to explore. Their weapons and defences were all running hot, at full battle status. He wondered what emotion was uppermost in the Earther captain’s mind right now. His guess was either awe or terror, with an outside chance of jubilation at the thought of the bonus he’d collect when he reported all this. Not that Ira intended to let the captain leave.

  The minutes crawled by. Finally, Hugo spoke.

  ‘Suntap online!’ There was no small amount of pride in his voice.

  ‘Fire at will,’ said Ira.

  ‘Not yet, Captain,’ John said quickly. ‘We haven’t got a clean line of sight any more. There’s too much crap in the way.’

  Ira gritted his teeth. If they misjudged the shot at this distance, they could hit the gunship’s juice-containment system, and that would be bad news for everybody.

  ‘Shit!’ said Amy. ‘They’ve found Will.’

  Ira glanced over at the tactical display she sent him and groaned as he saw drones zero in on Will’s plume.

  ‘Reading broadcasts on the Earthers’ primary band,’ said John. ‘They’re not using tight-beam. They can’t be getting line-of-sight, either.’

  ‘What kind of encryption?’ said Ira.

  ‘Nothing I can’t break.’

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ he warned. ‘It doesn’t look like we’ve got much time.’

  The drones closed in on Will and Rachel but didn’t fire. The Earthers must have been curious. The gunship powered across the debris field towards them on its fusion torches and then nosed in close with a few light bursts from its thrusters.

  ‘Broke their level one,’ John announced. ‘Now we can watch, at least.’

  He sent Ira a video feed. It showed a view straight into the hot little hole Will had dug for himself. The Ariel’s shuttle floated nearby in plain sight.