Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Feeling a little tired, are we?’ said Vargas, tilting his head as Will slumped sideways. ‘Very good.’

  15.3: WILL

  Will awoke, lying on the floor of his cell. Groggy disorder clotted his thoughts. Shot again, he thought bitterly to himself. If there was one thing his experiences had made him deeply weary of, it was being knocked unconscious. Apparently everyone wanted a turn. His head ached abominably. He sat up slowly and called on his sensorium to dull the pain.

  Nothing happened. His sensorium wasn’t there.

  Will emitted a garbled cry of fear and reached frantically for the back of his neck. He found a patch of artificial skin there, over a dent – a dent where his interface had been.

  His grogginess immediately forgotten, Will leapt to his feet, his hands pressed desperately to the wound. He tried again and again to access his interface, but nothing happened. There were no extra senses. There was no personal node. His mind stubbornly refused to remove its focus from the tiny cell.

  It was gone, the thing that had defined him since birth. With it had gone his access to all the mental spaces he’d created, as well as every mind he’d shared. He was no longer a roboteer. They might as well have cut off his arms.

  Will cried out in anguish. He clutched madly at his neck and ran back and forth across the cell, unable to accept it. Then, slowly, the truth of his fate sank into him, like a cold, grey hand closing slowly around his heart.

  He slid down the wall, staring at nothing. How could he tolerate this cell with no way to leave it? Never in his entire life had he been restricted to a real space this way. He would go mad! He was struck by a sudden, terrifying vision of the life that was left to him – a long, dark-walled tunnel, closed in on every side. Imprisonment, torture and death. He began to giggle. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  The door opened with a hiss and Father Vargas stepped daintily in. ‘And how are we feeling today?’ he asked sweetly.

  Will screamed in fury and launched himself across the room at the man’s face.

  He didn’t reach it. He’d barely taken a step before the pain stopped him. It was no ordinary pain, either. It had a terrible purity unlike anything Will had ever known – a brightness that burned away all other thought. It filled him and defined him. Will felt his mind come apart.

  The next thing he knew, he was lying face down in the middle of the cell, his head spinning. The pain was gone, but the memory of it still rang in his head like an echo of rending metal. With a sudden start, Will drew breath. So powerful was the aftermath of that sensation that he couldn’t bring himself to move. He lay there motionless, waiting for the sense of monstrous violation to fade.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Vargas step forward with a small plastic object in his hand.

  ‘That’s right,’ the priest crooned. ‘Lie down and relax.’

  Vargas pressed his fat thumb to the object and Will’s world split apart again, but this time from pleasure. It suffused every corner of him, drowning him in ecstasy. He gasped, speechless at the beauty of it. Drool spilled from the corner of his mouth. Then, all at once, the sensation faded. Its wake brought a feeling of terrible emptiness, a craving for the sensation’s return that made him shake. Fresh tears rolled down Will’s cheeks.

  ‘While we were taking out your interface, we took the liberty of installing something else,’ said Vargas. ‘The implants already inside your brain made the process straightforward, and I felt sure you’d forgive us for it eventually. It’s a thing the Angelenos invented. Some of them actually had it installed voluntarily.’ He sighed. ‘One of their many twisted sexual practices, I’m afraid. But don’t worry, we intend to use it for far finer purposes – to help you discover your love for the church.’

  Will tried to absorb the import of the priest’s words, but it was too appalling for his mind to encompass.

  ‘We will make the process as painless for you as possible, of course,’ said Vargas. ‘That little taste I gave you was just a warning of sorts. In self-defence, you understand. We will start you on a regimen of pleasure, I think, to teach you to value the stimulus. Then, as you grow to understand its importance, we will begin to give you simple tasks to perform in return for it. I feel sure we will be getting along famously in no time.’

  He stepped back to the door. ‘I’ll let you rest for a while. You look like you need it.’

  As the door slid shut, Vargas pressed the remote again and the pleasure returned. It was muted this time, but no less compelling. It washed Will’s body in bright sunlight, bleaching the surfaces of his mind. He curled up on the floor, alone, mutilated and controlled, and couldn’t help but enjoy it.

  15.4: GUSTAV

  After the most bitter journey of his life, Gustav arrived on the bridge of Tang’s flagship, the Sukarno, at the insertion point outside the Galatean system. Gustav pulled himself in and, with a sensation of powerful loathing boiling inside him, delivered a zero-gee salute.

  Tang floated at the centre of the busy, crowded room and regarded Gustav with a grin that threatened to split his little round head apart.

  ‘General, so glad you could make it,’ he said. ‘We didn’t want to start without you.’

  Gustav had flown to Memburi as slowly as his orders would permit, only to find that Tang had already left. More orders were waiting, instructing him to come to the Galatean front with all haste. Just two short weeks had passed since he’d left New Angeles.

  He was unpleasantly surprised at the speed with which events had unfolded. They revealed quite clearly that Tang must have been planning the attack behind his back while he searched for the Ariel. Gustav had been forced to spend the next leg of his journey contemplating that fact.

  Tang gestured to a couch situated just to the left of his own. ‘I have reserved a place for you,’ he said.

  Gustav settled himself over the indicated seat. Its arms were blank. There were no controls on them.

  ‘Why, thank you,’ said Gustav frostily. ‘And in what way would you like me to help you, now that you’ve brought me out here?’

  ‘Oh, by doing what you’ve always done,’ said Tang with gleeful emphasis. ‘Support, advise. Offer a few words of wisdom on the suntap if it becomes necessary.’

  In other words, nothing.

  It was clear that Tang and Rodriguez had agreed this long before New Angeles. Rodriguez would get the Relic, and the Ariel if it was found, without Gustav there to comment or complain. In return, Tang got his battle and a humbled spectator to watch it.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Gustav. ‘I have some new intelligence on its operation that my team was able to draw from the Galateans, if you’d like to hear it.’

  Tang’s smile hardened a little and he regarded Gustav warily. ‘Go on, then. We don’t have long – the scouts will be back in a matter of minutes with incursion clearance.’

  ‘Well,’ said Gustav, ‘there’s fresh reason to believe that the devices have a fatal flaw of the kind I originally suspected. If used heavily enough, they could induce a reaction in the target star, causing it to undergo a kind of small nova. If that happens, you’ll lose the fleet and the objective. Thus, I recommend strongly against using them.’

  Tang’s face darkened into a murderous scowl. ‘Is that right?’ he snapped. ‘Well, forgive me if I don’t take your advice on this particular occasion, General. This fleet relies on weapons powered by suntap, as you well know, and I have no intention of sounding the general retreat at this point on the basis of your suspicions. So, if you have nothing more useful to say, I suggest that you keep your ideas to yourself for the duration of the battle.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gustav acidly.

  ‘Now, if you’ll forgive me,’ said Tang, ‘I have an invasion to prepare for.’ With that, the admiral pulled himself across the bridge to talk to his captains.

  In fact, it was several hours before the scouts returned. Gustav had nothing to do but hang around and watch the activity. Tang flitted from one gaggle of officers t
o the next, discussing tactics and issuing orders like a squat, graceless hummingbird. The crews for his remaining ships were fresh in from Earth and needed plenty of guidance. They had hearts full of zeal and heads full of nothing. Gustav regretted ever delivering Tang his suntaps.

  Eventually Tang returned to his couch, his self-righteous enthusiasm back at peak levels. He talked strategy at Gustav while he strapped himself in.

  ‘The Gallies know we’re coming, so we can expect a concerted defence. However, at Memburi I intentionally primed them to expect a single, rapid assault. This time, I’ll be attacking in a series of four waves. It’s my hope that the Galateans will be drawn into attacking the first wave and be surprised when the second arrives from a different vector.’

  Gustav was no fleet strategist, but still he doubted the Galateans would fall for it. No matter how well Tang thought he’d primed the enemy, he’d be facing down a force of tactical geniuses. Making any assumption that bold about what they’d do had to be a bad idea.

  In Gustav’s limited experience, heavy-duty space battles always turned into a chess game. Thanks to warp, you had to anticipate where your opponent would mass his forces before you could see what he was trying to do. And the Galateans were excellent chess-players.

  ‘To your places, please, gentlemen,’ Tang called to his officers.

  The wall-screens around the bridge flicked on, revealing an extraordinary view of the ranks of starships hanging there, bathed in the cold, white glow of the vessels’ running lights.

  ‘Ready the First Wave,’ said Tang.

  The tactical coordinators worked furiously at their consoles for several minutes. With a fleet this size, coordination was far from straightforward.

  ‘First Wave ready, sir,’ came the call.

  Tang’s voice swelled with pride. ‘First Wave engage!’

  Gustav looked across at the admiral’s face and saw a man flushed with the anticipation of victory. Tang gazed into the wall-screen with something like rapture on his face. Gustav turned and watched the bank of sixty massive spiked spheres that constituted the First Wave power up. Lightning coursed crazily across their surfaces and became oval shells of light. The ovals stretched in unison and in a flash the ships were gone, flickering into the distance like fireworks. The bridge jolted from their combined gravity surge.

  ‘Ready the Second Wave,’ said Tang.

  From the tense murmuring into head-mikes and the urgent tapping of control boards, Gustav guessed this would be the wave they went in with.

  Tang looked barely able to survive the five minutes of waiting before his own illustrious charge into battle. He fidgeted and tapped and gripped his small hands together tightly. His eyes strayed back to the chronometer in the corner of the main display every few seconds.

  ‘On my mark!’ bellowed Tang. ‘Second Wave, engage!’

  Their field generators crackled. The screen was filled with jagged skeins of light and then the first hammer blow of the gravity drive struck home. Tang had decided to bring them in at full warp. Two-and-a-half gees of effective acceleration pressed Gustav into his couch.

  The screen swapped to a diagrammatic display, showing their approach to the target system. The Second Wave would curve around the side of the star in line with the galactic shell and cross the outer defence sphere from above the plane of the ecliptic. No one talked during the long, gruelling minutes of flight.

  ‘I hope it’s not over before we get there,’ Gustav remarked wryly.

  Tang shot him a warning glance.

  ‘Dropping warp in ten, nine, eight …’ called the pilot.

  ‘Comms officers at the ready,’ said Tang.

  The Sukarno arrived. At first, the screen showed nothing but stars and the glare of Galatea’s butter-yellow sun dead ahead. Then, little by little, the display began to fill with multicoloured markers indicating ships and facilities.

  Gustav winced. Unwilling to expose his flagship to too much danger, Tang had placed his Second Wave quite a distance from the star. It’d take them a long time to get their weapons up from here. Tang was counting on the Galateans being too busy to notice. Gustav hoped he knew what he was doing.

  The murmurs of the communications officers quickly built to frenzied shouting. Apparently, things were going wrong already. Gustav bit his lip.

  ‘Lieutenant Lee,’ said Tang urgently. ‘Give me an update. What’s going on?’

  ‘We don’t understand it, sir,’ said Lee. ‘The Gallies appear to have built themselves some suntap stations.’

  ‘What?’ roared Tang.

  Gustav’s heart sank. How had they managed that, he wondered, when the Ariel was sitting back at New Angeles? Could there have been two spy ships? He shook his head in disbelief.

  Tang glared at him. Gustav replied with a shrug. However the Galateans had managed it, it was out of his hands now.

  ‘We count four installations,’ said Lee. ‘Big ones, positioned in the inner system. We think they’re converted munitions factories. The First Wave ran pretty much straight into them. They were fired on before they could get their own taps online. We’re getting damage reports in now.’

  Lee was silent for a moment.

  ‘Thirty ships destroyed, sir,’ he announced in a quavering voice. ‘Seventeen more are engaged in disrupter clouds and have sustained damage.’

  Amazing. Out of sixty ships, only thirteen were still intact. If the news hadn’t been so horrific, Gustav would have laughed.

  ‘Incoming vessels,’ one of the officers warned. ‘Sir, we’re under attack!’

  No sooner were the words out of the man’s mouth than eight huge Galatean cruisers flashed into existence around the Second Wave. They hit hard and fast with swarms of torpedoes and disrupters. In a matter of seconds, Tang’s cumbersome fleet was paralysed, while the Galateans stayed way back and bombarded them with fresh munitions.

  Tang screamed orders at his people as his ships vainly attempted to scatter until their main weapons could be used. Meanwhile the Galateans shot at them like the proverbial fish in a barrel. Gustav watched it all unfold with something between amusement and horror. What a way to die.

  ‘No! No! No!’ Tang roared. ‘Broaden the spread! Use the drones! Draw their fire!’

  ‘Suntaps online in ten, nine, eight …’ shouted Lee.

  ‘Now we’ll show you!’ Tang snarled.

  But the Galateans had timed it well. Two seconds before the suntaps came online the enemy cruisers warped away, leaving antimatter mines in their wake.

  ‘Mother of God!’ Tang gasped, just before the blast wave hit.

  The display screens blacked out, along with all the lights on the bridge. The starship shook. Tang yelled furious curses in his native dialect until the lights came back on.

  ‘Status reports coming in,’ warbled Lee.

  Tang’s Second Wave, battered and spread across tens of thousands of kilometers of space, had lost a dozen ships already, and there was now nothing within firing range to attack.

  ‘Head in-system!’ Tang shrieked, crashing his fist repeatedly against the arm of his couch. ‘Make for those stations! We’ll give those stinking Gallie nenglak filth some pain!’

  The suntaps shut down and the Sukarno charged forwards again towards the Galatean home world and the beleaguered First Wave. Their gravity engines shuddered and groaned under the pressure of forcing their way into the system’s ion-cluttered depths.

  ‘I want defensive drones in place the instant we drop warp,’ ordered Tang.

  ‘Dropping warp in six, five, four …’

  The engines died and the Sukarno fired its defences.

  Almost immediately, a bank of suntap-powered g-rays raked across the fleet, knocking out minor systems and evaporating half the unprotected drones in blasts of vicious radiation.

  It looked like the Gallies hadn’t had time to build large g-ray arrays since learning about the suntap, so they’d made up for it with numbers. Each converted factory was studded with hundreds of
small laser installations firing in synchrony. The result was something like a gamma-ray cheese-grater, with Tang’s fleet as the cheese.

  Tang waved his arms and roared commands, his face red, spittle flying from his mouth. Gustav had no idea the man was capable of such animation.

  ‘Focus your fire!’ Tang screeched. ‘No, you fool, further out, make them split their array!’

  The Gallie battle cruisers returned in a blaze of light and fired swarms of torpedoes into the Kingdom ranks.

  ‘Suntaps in five, four, three …’ said Lee.

  ‘Brace for impact!’ warned Tang.

  But this time, the Galatean cruisers warped out without dropping bombs. They were too close to their own installations to try that trick again. And now Tang had his precious suntaps at last.

  ‘Annihilate them!’ he spat.

  Dozens of g-ray beams lanced out, focused on the closest station. It turned cherry-red and folded in on itself before exploding with a blast that rocked the bridge.

  The attack came not a moment too soon – the Third Wave dropped out of warp just light-seconds away.

  Tang cackled with mad delight. ‘Prepare for attack! I want full disrupters!’

  Sure enough, the Galateans appeared again to harry the Kingdom fleet before they could bring their suntaps online. The difference this time was that there were three times as many of them. They poured torrents of fire on the newly appeared vessels. Almost immediately, the Third Wave began to break apart under the onslaught.

  But by now, Tang had established his bridge-head.

  ‘Freeze those ships!’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want a single one of them getting out of here alive.’

  A massive swarm of fully charged disrupter drones swept up from the Kingdom fleet towards the Galateans, covered by a barrage of fire from Tang’s lines. The Galateans were forced further and further back, and this time they were sustaining damage. Three of the huge cruisers crumpled and died under the momentous expenditure of solar power. A fourth exploded in a blast of radiation as Kingdom g-rays smashed open its antimatter trap. By the time the remaining Gallies warped away, Tang’s standing fleet had increased to almost a hundred and fifty ships.