Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  John had always prided himself on not feeling guilt. There was little room for that emotion in the life of a spy, but some of the Ariel’s crew had been close to him, and the cost of his actions had been hard to bear. He’d counted Ira as almost a friend. And he didn’t like to think about Rachel.

  When her face came swimming through his mind, as it did from time to time, he reminded himself that there had been no choice. The Angelenos would never have given him the antimatter. Not that he’d tried particularly hard to get it. From the beginning, he’d steered the negotiation towards a single place-swap with a crewman from an Earther ship. It was the only solution he could think of.

  John knew what he had to do from the moment he looked at the star maps with Amy back in the Fecund system. He’d seen New Angeles sitting there just within their range and the plan had come to him fully formed.

  The hardest part had been right at the start – convincing Ira that there was any hope of getting fuel there. Fortunately, the compromised roboteer had made that easy for him by kicking up such a fuss. Ira was too absorbed in getting the hell out of alien territory to think through the problems of obtaining antimatter in a star system at full alert.

  It was fortunate that things worked out the way they had. Of the entire crew, only he and Hugo appeared to understand the potential threat the aliens posed. The bastards had cut through his finest defensive code as if it wasn’t there, for crying out loud. He hated them for that. He’d decided then that the aliens represented an appalling threat to the human race – one he wasn’t prepared to stand by and tolerate. Unfortunately, there had proved to be no way to purge the Ariel of the offending virus, which meant the ship couldn’t be allowed to return home.

  Sadly, John knew there was no way he could convince the rest of the crew of that. Had he spoken his mind, Ira would have ordered him not to act and thereby doomed them all. So he’d had been forced to arrange for the ship’s destruction in secret.

  Ira had made John’s work infinitely harder by insisting he take the infected roboteer down to the planet. But in the end, John managed to turn even that problem to his advantage. Pointing the finger at Will ensured that even if his plan went off beam, he’d never be suspected. His method also had the added advantage of convincing the Earthers that the trail was cold. Assuming everything went as planned after his swap, the rest of the crew were already dead and the Ariel destroyed, along with its sinister alien cargo.

  John knew that Ira would never allow himself to be captured. The moment those Earther ships appeared at the rendezvous, he would have either fled or self-destructed. And with the fuel as low as it was, there was nowhere for him to go.

  Thus, tidily, the Earthers knew no more about the aliens than they had a month ago. In contrast, the Galateans would be receiving a full report couriered to them at full speed aboard one of the enemy’s own scout ships. John was on his way home faster than he could ever have got there in Ariel, creeping around the perimeter of Kingdom space. He’d cut straight through the middle with priority fuelling stops all the way.

  If there was one flaw to the entire plan, it had been the forced abandonment of Hugo. John had hoped to hand him over as part of his pay-off to the resistance. They would have gained valuable weapons expertise, while he’d have successfully planted someone with knowledge of the alien threat in a secure location. However, the resistance had shown little interest, so John had been forced to drop him. Still, in the grand scheme of things, Hugo’s role was irrelevant and the universe was certain to be a slightly less annoying place without him.

  In its own bitter way, this plan was the masterstroke of John’s career. Unfortunately, there was no one he could tell. The Galatean Fleet would be unlikely to see his whole plan in a positive light. They tended to take a dim view of officers abandoning a ship and colleagues, even under such compelling circumstances.

  John sighed as he stood and shuffled over to the wash cubicle. He locked the door behind him and positioned himself in front of the sink. A foreign face stared back at him in the mirror. He missed his features. He hated his new squinty eyes, his broken nose and ludicrous moustache. He hated the man they belonged to. Akbar Inglez was boorish and ignorant. He had no wit, no real grasp of the weapons he ran and precious few social skills. Like most Earthers, he was little more than a peasant. But as Metta had pointed out to him, that made Akbar all the easier to pretend to be.

  The gaps in his memory had raised a few raised eyebrows among his new shipmates, of course, but John had explained those away with tales of a drug binge gone horribly wrong. His gruff simulated embarrassment had been enough to make the revolting crew clap him on the back and laugh at his misfortune.

  John pulled his overalls down to his waist, tucked a towel around them and held his left arm over the sink. Then, with exquisite care, he pulled out the bone and super-carbon-composite knife from the concealed biopolymer pocket in his flesh. It stung like mad. Red blood and ochre packing plasma dripped from his elbow into the sink. John gritted his teeth as he eased the weapon out.

  There was a thudding at the door.

  ‘Hey, Akbar, hurry up, you fat bastard. I need to go.’

  That was Yuri, his bunkmate.

  ‘In a minute,’ John replied in Akbar’s thick, deep voice.

  The knife was out at last. It was a narrow, wicked-looking thing with a serrated edge that had been designed to sit alongside the bones of his arm unnoticed during an X-ray scan. John placed it in the sink, washed as quickly as he could and flushed the toilet.

  He flexed his left hand. It still ached, but not so much that it wouldn’t be useful in a fight. With calm efficiency, he pulled his overalls back up and carefully palmed the blade.

  ‘Come on, Akbar,’ said Yuri. ‘Finish jerking off already.’

  John slid the door open, keeping his right hand high at the edge of the door. ‘I am done,’ he announced.

  ‘At last,’ muttered Yuri. ‘We’re supposed to be on watch by now.’

  Yuri barged past him. As he did, John let the blade slip around in his hand and dragged the edge neatly across Yuri’s neck. Yuri’s eyes bulged as he died. In case a slit throat wasn’t enough, the knife’s edge was coated with a nerve agent that had activated within minutes of John exposing it to the air.

  John shut the cubicle door behind Yuri. He wiped the blade on his bunk-bag, palmed the weapon once more and stepped out into the narrow companionway, whistling one of Akbar’s favourite tunes.

  When he reached the weapons room, his team leader Gary Wu was waiting for him. The other two weapons operators were seated behind him, already strapped into their combat couches with bulky visors over their faces.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Wu demanded.

  John’s knife flashed out and plunged into his heart. John sidestepped quickly, getting as little blood as he could on himself, and cut the throats of the other two men while they struggled with their straps.

  John felt a certain satisfaction in these executions. He’d been listening to their light-hearted chat about genocide and the things they’d do to Gallie women for two whole weeks and had to laugh along with it. Now they were getting a first-hand taste of what genocide felt like.

  With the ship’s weapons staff dead, there were only two other stations on the small scout to worry about – engineering and command. Engineering first, he decided. Command was where he wanted to end up.

  The engineering room had three staff, all strapped into their couches and frantically teleoperating robots that someone like Will could have run on his own and half-asleep.

  The thought of Will brought with it another twinge of regret. The man had clearly been compromised, John reminded himself. Not really himself at the end. Only a romantic fool like Rachel could miss it. John gritted his teeth.

  ‘Gunner Inglez! Can I help—’ said the chief of engineering as John’s poisoned blade slipped into his belly. The last, lucky engineer was halfway out of his seat before he died.

  ‘Captain! Em
er—’ he managed to say into his throat-mike before John silenced him.

  ‘What was that, Engineering?’ came the reply from the captain.

  John tsked to himself. That had torn it. He picked up the dead man’s mike and spoke in a passable impression of the engineer’s voice.

  ‘Sorry, Captain, sir. False alarm. My mistake.’

  He dropped the mike and stepped to the door. He’d have to move swiftly now. Even as he walked away, he could hear the captain’s voice making fresh demands.

  ‘Give me a full status report, Engineering. Engineering?’

  John ran along the companionway as quickly as the narrow walls and juddering, uneven gravity from the engines would permit. He reached the door to the bridge and typed in the executive override code he’d hacked into the system on his third day aboard.

  The ship’s command crew looked up in surprise. The captain was there, surrounded by screens on his real leather couch. His three senior officers were positioned in front of him, walled in by the cumbersome crap the Earthers called ‘technology’.

  ‘Gunner Inglez,’ said the captain. ‘What in the Prophet’s name is going on? Why aren’t you at your post?’

  By the time the captain had finished his question, he had an answer: John had dashed forward and stabbed the first officer in the chest. The three remaining men scrambled madly to get out of their couches. Two of them succeeded. The third died as he tried to rip open his last ankle strap. As he held a forearm up to protect himself, John did little more than rake the surface with the tip of his weapon, but it was enough. The Earther convulsed violently and slumped sideways over the couch, his ankle still trapped.

  By that time, the real trouble had started. John ducked and rolled as the captain fired two whining rounds from his executive automatic.

  ‘Iqbal!’ the captain shouted to his remaining officer. ‘Iqbal, over here! I’ll cover you!’

  John had to hand it to them – these top officers responded pretty fast. That didn’t mean they got to live, though. John waited for Iqbal to make his move and dived the other way, against the captain’s expectations.

  ‘Doors, seal,’ he ordered the computer.

  The bridge’s bulkhead doors started sliding shut.

  ‘Doors, open!’ the captain yelled, but the computer wasn’t responding to him any more.

  Just as John had hoped, the surprise of this held the captain’s attention for the critical second it took for John to stand and bury his blade in the captain’s neck. The captain slid forwards, letting the gun fall out of his hand.

  John and Iqbal both made a desperate dash towards the weapon. Iqbal was closer, but John wasn’t aiming for the gun. He was aiming for Iqbal’s head. Even as the man grabbed the barrel, John’s foot connected with his head, snapping it back and killing him instantly.

  ‘Thank you,’ said John calmly, plucking the gun from the dead man’s hands.

  He emptied a few rounds into Iqbal, just in case. Then he pushed the captain’s corpse away from the command chair and sat in it. He surveyed the ship’s performance stats and tsked to himself again. Not good. The very last thing the wily captain had done was to kick the ship into a fatal-overload condition.

  John wrestled the antimatter feed profiles back to a semblance of normality. It wasn’t easy. The simple Earther robots needed constant coaxing. With extreme care, he gently teased the ship out of warp – a task that usually required the attention of three men.

  There was a gruesome bump as the gravity failed. Radiation alarms sounded across the bridge.

  ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ John shouted.

  He pulled everything but the fusion cores offline as fast as he could. Unfortunately, the radiation alarms remained.

  He quickly opened a tight-beam channel to Galatean defence. Then, with a wince, he ripped the message chip from the patch of false scalp on the back of his head and slapped it against the wireless port on the captain’s chair. It contained a summary of his status and a highly compressed set of strategic recommendations. As soon as they received it, Fleet would hopefully come and rescue him.

  Unfortunately, this far away from the primary defensive line, it’d be hours before his message arrived. Hopefully the bridge wouldn’t flood with gamma rays before then.

  He looked left, towards the captain’s floating corpse. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what shall we talk about?’

  14.3: JOHN

  As soon as the Fleet medics finished his anti-rad treatment, John was taken to see Admiral Bryant-Leys aboard Evacuation Ark One. The admiral strode across his huge office to meet John with arms open wide. His huge, rugged face was crinkled in delight.

  ‘Lieutenant Forrester. John!’ He took John’s hand in both of his and shook it fiercely.

  John winced. ‘Careful, sir. The bones still ache a bit.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bryant, his massive eyebrows shooting up. ‘Sorry about that. Why don’t you come over here and sit down. Take a load off.’ The admiral put his arm gently around John’s shoulders and gestured to the chairs by the viewing wall.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said John.

  He hobbled over to the chair and sprawled gratefully into it. He’d made it home, and a few ugly days in a scrubbing tank was all it had cost him. He smiled to himself. No more vile ruins. No more horrible alien software creeping through his ship, keeping him up at night.

  No more crewmates, his subconscious bitterly reminded him. His smile faded. Still, his guilt would fade in time. Guilt always did.

  He looked to the admiral. Bryant was very obviously examining John’s new face. John couldn’t wait to get rid of Akbar’s features. So far, all he’d been able to do was shave off the dreadful moustache.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Bryant. ‘If I hadn’t been told, I would never have known it was you.’

  ‘Cosmetic surgery is one of the few areas where the Angelenos are ahead of us, sir,’ said John, as airily as he could. He didn’t want to talk about it. The doctors had expressed some doubt as to whether they could undo all the Angeleno cleverness. His face might never be quite the same again.

  ‘I must say, sir, I’m very glad to see the arks in action,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘I was afraid my message wouldn’t arrive in time.’

  ‘We started priming them the day after you left,’ said Bryant. ‘When we spotted the Earthers making scouting runs, we began ferrying people from the surface. We were just waiting on some word from Ira before making the launch. You brought us that. On behalf of the Fleet, I want to thank you.’

  John twisted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Just doing my duty, sir.’

  ‘But it must have been the mission of a lifetime,’ the admiral insisted. ‘Alien worlds, shell distortions, fighting with the resistance.’

  ‘You could say that, sir.’

  Bryant read the pain on John’s face. ‘I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.’ He looked down. ‘They were a fine crew.’

  John nodded, keeping his expression carefully neutral.

  ‘Captain Baron was a brilliant man, and a good friend,’ said the admiral.

  ‘Yes,’ said John softly. ‘Yes, he was.’

  Bryant was quiet for a second and then looked up again. ‘I apologise for raking over old coals, but I’m afraid I’ve brought you here to go through the whole thing with you again. Just to get the facts straight, you understand.’

  ‘As you wish, sir.’

  ‘I’ve read your report, of course,’ Bryant added. ‘It’s the details I want to clarify.’

  John nodded, suppressing both frustration and fear. What was there to clarify? He had brought back a full set of logs from the Ariel. What more did the admiral need?

  ‘Where would you like me to start, sir?’

  Bryant leaned back in his chair. ‘At the beginning, please.’

  So John talked. He said everything he could remember till he got to the alien software attack, which he chose not to dwell on too heavily. Even now, he hated how it had made him feel. It h
ad scared him in a way he’d never experienced before. He hurried on to a description of the Fecund system, which held the admiral rapt. The next bit he glossed over was the betrayal on New Angeles, but this time, Bryant was not to be rushed.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said the admiral, leaning forward. ‘You were set up by your roboteer, Will Kuno-Monet.’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Bryant with a shake of his head. ‘He looked like such an excellent officer to me. A little wild, of course, but then our best ones always are – yourself included. He saved my life, you know.’

  John nodded. ‘Yes, sir. But I should say that it wasn’t really Will who betrayed us – it was the thing inside his head. It took him over. Twisted his mind. At first, it appeared to be helping us. Then it led us to that alien graveyard. And when we insisted on leaving, it became dangerous. Consequently, it’s my recommendation, sir, that once we win this war, all knowledge of the suntap be destroyed and the alien systems made off limits. These so-called Transcended can’t be trusted. Their extinction strategy regarding the suntap illustrates that pretty clearly, I think.’

  Bryant smiled at him kindly. ‘Winning may be a little way off, Lieutenant. Right now, I think we’d settle for a draw. But back to New Angeles for a moment.’

  John gritted his teeth.

  ‘You say the resistance saved your life,’ Bryant ventured.

  John nodded. ‘Yes, sir. We owe the Angelenos a debt of gratitude. When the Earther forces ambushed our rendezvous site and the shooting started, I was lucky enough to dive back into the house. The others died.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Bryant. ‘So how do you know Will was responsible?’

  ‘He was the only one with the means, sir,’ said John, a little more curtly than he’d intended. ‘I foolishly gave him an interface device to patch into the local network after his operation. It was a gesture of trust, but a badly chosen one. I hold myself responsible.’ He looked down and tried for a suitably penitent expression.