Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  He had it within him to become the starship captain he’d always dreamed of being if he worked hard enough. Assuming he ignored the pressures of his society, was prepared to compromise and never gave up hope. As long as the human race treasured that freedom, and the humanity that went with it, it would thrive. Resort to direct manipulation as Vargas had and it was doomed.

  ‘We were never interested in forcing change upon you,’ the Transcended told him. ‘Nor were we interested in making it easy for you, either. We wanted only to see whether you were capable of meaningful adaptation if given the opportunity. You were. Thus, if you wish to save your people, your task is still the same. Return to the Fecund system. Take the archive with you and resume your work on it.’

  Will felt a stirring of his former emotions – of rage and desire. The immense software vault rippled with the force of his feelings.

  ‘Nothing would make me happier,’ he said.

  ‘During this process, we have come to understand humanity better,’ said the sphere. ‘We appreciate now that you are collective entities, but that your connections to others do not necessarily constitute weakness or lack of independence in your individual selves. We will understand if you wish to take your remaining crewmates with you.’

  ‘I doubt they’d trust me now,’ said Will, muted bitterness seeping back into him. ‘They believe me to be a traitor.’

  The sphere managed to look nonplussed. ‘Then convince them otherwise.’

  ‘How?’ Will replied. ‘I have no evidence.’

  ‘Observe,’ it told him. In the next second, Will was immersed in his own memory logs. They’d been lovingly stored, deep within his tissues.

  The sphere showed him a much-slowed-down image of John stepping out of the house on New Angeles on that fateful day, gun in hand. Will watched John’s eyes sweep across the car where he sat. No light of recognition appeared in his eyes. There was something off about his expression, too, and the set of his shoulders. It wasn’t John.

  Hugo hadn’t betrayed them after all. Nor had the resistance, really. It had been the one man they’d all thought was dead. The realisation sent crackling discharges of disgust across the vast inner space of Will’s consciousness. The powerful emotions this place held at bay were starting to reassert themselves.

  ‘We will leave you now,’ said the Transcended. ‘You may continue with your original plan if you wish, or make use of these new capabilities in some way. You will find that every talent you had before has been restored, greatly multiplied. Your body contains records of every SAP template in the Ariel’s database, and many more that you may find useful. You will also discover that the remaining hardware implanted in your skull may be adapted to provide a communications channel. Through it, you should be able to reach external data systems. Good luck,’ it added, and winked out of existence.

  Will was left floating in the chasm of his own mind.

  Damn right he was going to change his plan. He wasted no time about it. He scanned the vast array of programs stored in his mind till he found the SAPs inhabiting the cells that lived around his interface site. It felt supremely strange to share their thoughts. The cells had no eyes or ears, only a kind of sense-boundary studded with dozens of tiny mouths, each of which could taste with extraordinary specificity.

  He located the invading fabric of the neural probe by the ion gradients that surrounded it. The impact of the clumsy surgery had left an immediately recognisable metallic taste in his head. It only took a few moments of Will’s time to put the cells to work establishing new neural pathways and setting down microscopic circuits of protein filament that would convert the device into a transmitter.

  He set other cells to work, repairing and improving his battered body. In the physical world, he smiled darkly to himself. By the time Vargas next came to visit, Will would be ready.

  16.3: WILL

  As morning rolled around, Will tested his new interface. But as he suspected, Vargas was taking no chances with his prize prisoner. The cell was shielded. No wireless comms could get in or out.

  Will was almost glad. It would be a shame to leave without saying goodbye to Vargas first.

  A few hours later, the door slid back and the priest stepped smugly in. Will felt a butterfly flutter of impending revenge in his stomach and got slowly to his feet. He stood, arms folded, and observed his torturer with a twitching smile.

  At the sight of Will upright, Vargas’s smirk dropped a little. ‘My, you’re looking well today,’ he said sweetly. ‘Had a little change of heart about cooperating, did we?’

  Will couldn’t help but laugh. It came out as a lunatic’s giggle. Vargas frowned and depressed the pain stud on his remote. Nothing happened, except that Will’s grin widened dangerously.

  ‘We’ll have no more of that,’ he purred.

  Vargas stared at him blankly for a second before his wits kicked in. Then he turned and darted frantically for the door.

  Will was faster. He leapt across the room, seized Vargas and slammed him against the floor. Vargas bounced.

  ‘Help!’ the priest shrieked, gesturing wildly to the cameras in the room’s corners.

  Hypodermic darts flashed down and buried themselves in Will’s back. He barely noticed. His augmented cells dissolved the toxins in an instant.

  ‘You are a very bad man,’ said Will, his voice cracking, ‘and so you must be punished.’ With one hand, he seized Vargas’s robe. With the other, he grabbed the priest’s jaw, forcing Vargas to look at him. ‘A very, very bad man,’ Will added, tears stinging his eyes.

  Vargas began to produce a muffled kind of keening. His fingers clawed helplessly at Will’s chest. His eyes bulged.

  Will realised then that he was crushing the man’s jaw. He drew his hand away and looked at it. Vargas made a bleating sound somewhere between coughing and whimpering. The lower half of his face was a crumpled mess.

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled Will. ‘Do you think I’m sorry?’ He lashed out and slapped Vargas across the cheek. Vargas’s head snapped sideways as his face erupted in a spray of blood. ‘Do you?’ he asked again. ‘After what you did to me?’

  He slapped Vargas’s head back and forth, enjoying the simple childlike rhythm of the action for a while. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he was aware of the fact that his augmented arms had accidentally killed the man on his first swipe.

  The appearance of armed guards in the open doorway broke his reverie. However, their presence meant the door was standing open. That gave Will access to the network nodes in the corridor. With John’s full arsenal of code-cracking software at his instinctive disposal, Will ripped their security open like tissue paper. And being a prison block, this part of the habitat ring had weapons mounted beside the security cameras set high on the corridor walls. The guns turned as one. Before the guards could aim, their heads were peppered with high-velocity flechettes.

  Will dropped Vargas’s body then stepped over the guards and out into the hallway. He chastised himself. Three dead in five minutes. Funny to think he’d never killed before today. He mustn’t let his experiences turn him into a monster.

  He sauntered down the corridor while his mind explored the further reaches of the Earthers’ computer system. He killed the alarms that had started to sound and locked down all the doors in the ring, trapping most of the Earthers safely into their rooms. That wouldn’t account for everyone, of course, and many of the doors were fitted with manual override. However, it was going to greatly simplify Will’s problem of getting to his friends.

  He toyed with the idea of sucking all the oxygen out of the work and sleep spaces but decided it would be an uncivilised thing to do. He had no real grudge against most of the station’s inhabitants. He contented himself with listening over the network to their cries of mounting panic as they realised they’d been trapped.

  A quick examination of the prison block schematic revealed the locations of the cells where the rest of the Ariel’s crew were being held. He went in search of them,
Rachel first.

  Will reached her door unopposed and broke the code that held it shut as easily as flicking a switch. It slid back to reveal Rachel slouched against the wall. She looked thin and haggard, but intact. She got up and stared wildly at him has he stepped into the room. Her pale-blue eyes held more fear than relief.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m here to rescue you.’

  She clapped her hands to her cheeks and laughed once. She regarded him warily for a second or two, as if trying to decide whether he was a figment of her imagination. She made no move to approach him.

  ‘Come on,’ he told her. ‘We don’t have much time and we have to get the others out.’

  He turned and stepped back into the corridor. It wasn’t quite the reunion he’d been hoping for, but under the circumstances it would have to do. None of the Ariel’s crew was likely to be at their best today.

  ‘How?’ she said at last.

  Will tried for a smile. ‘The Transcended.’

  She rushed forward and hugged him tight. Will hugged her back, wrapping his arms around her.

  Three rooms away, a squad of four soldiers finally levered their reluctant door open and tumbled out into the corridor. Will turned the guns on them and fired. Rachel jerked away from his embrace as the clamour of shooting filled the air and looked about frantically.

  ‘Where was that?’

  Will stroked her cheek. He’d dreamed of doing that for weeks. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told her softly. She wasn’t that easily calmed. She didn’t understand yet. He sighed. ‘Come on, it’s this way.’

  Rachel hesitated a little when they reached the splattered bodies, but Will held out his hand to guide her past them.

  ‘Did you …’ she started.

  Will nodded and pointed to the swivelling cannons high on the walls. She regarded their smoking muzzles in horror.

  Will shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea how you’ve been treated, but I don’t have a ton of sympathy for these people any more.’

  He turned and led the way. As they moved along the eerily quiet corridors, the only sound to be heard above the peaceful hum of the ventilator fans was occasional muffled thumping on the doors they passed.

  Hugo’s room was closest, and in another two minutes’ walking they’d reached it. Will opened the door. Hugo sat inside, strapped into a torture chair like the one they’d used to kill Amy. His limbs were slack and his face appeared to have aged about ten years. He was wearing some kind of nappy. Will understood all too well the look of bottomless misery on the scientist’s features. From the smell and the beard on Hugo’s face, it looked as if the man had endured the chair for days.

  As Will stepped in, a technician lurking inside the doorway sprang out armed with a scalpel. Will smacked him across the face with a negligent backhand blow as he walked past. The man crumpled and lay still, his limbs at unnatural angles.

  Rachel watched Will’s casual execution with mingled awe and alarm. Then she caught sight of Hugo.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she muttered.

  Hugo regarded his saviours with a disbelief so blank that for a moment Will feared the man’s mind had gone. Will could have cried. The sight of his former shipmate brought so low tore his heart and his dislike for the man evaporated, replaced with a kind of sorrowful kinship. Of all the crew, Hugo was most likely to understand what Will had been through.

  It made sense that he and Hugo were the ones the High Church had chosen to victimise. Will had been selected for his political usefulness, Hugo because he possessed a head full of military secrets. Will was overpoweringly glad they hadn’t found a use for Rachel.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Will said softly as he undid Hugo’s straps. ‘We’ll get you out of here. No one’s going to hurt you any more.’

  As Will lifted Hugo out of his chair, the man stared at him with wide, liquid eyes.

  ‘Why?’ he whimpered.

  Will wondered what Hugo meant. Was he asking why Will had betrayed them, or why he’d come back? Will decided on an answer as vague as it was true.

  ‘Because you’re my shipmate,’ he said. He hefted the boneless scientist over his shoulder and turned to Rachel. ‘Time to get Ira,’ he said.

  16.4: IRA

  Ira was exercising when the first of the strange sounds reached his cell. He heard muted shouting and banging through the walls from somewhere nearby. The Earthers must be celebrating. Either that or a new prisoner had been brought in.

  He stopped and listened anyway. He always did when there was a chance to gain new information – anything that might add to his meagre store of hope. Staying in shape in the cell was easy. Keeping up morale wasn’t. Nevertheless, Ira had fiercely retained his belief in the possibility of escape throughout his incarceration. It mattered not to him that he was surrounded by Earthers, trapped inside a habitat ring closed in by empty space. There was always a way out.

  It had been easier to believe that while they were still questioning him, of course. He’d had something to bargain with, then – a way of fishing information out of his captors. Then they’d stopped asking. They’d gone from being fiercely keen to learn his command codes to apparently indifferent overnight. No one had visited him or spoken to him in days. Had it not been for the arrival of rations through his food slot, he could have imagined he’d been forgotten altogether.

  The sounds disappeared for a while and then returned, louder than before. They were a strange mixture, some violent noises, some plaintive. He heard something he could have sworn was gunfire, yet no alerts were sounding. Ira’s hopes rose. Maybe a great accident had befallen the station, or his Fleet had come to rescue him. Or perhaps the sun was swelling up, he thought darkly, quashing his insurgent optimism before it caused him to lose focus.

  He tested the door. It was still locked. Just in case, he positioned himself carefully to the side of it and readied for attack. He wasn’t a moment too soon, for just then the door shot back. Ira sprang forward.

  He managed to rein in his punch at the last instant. It wasn’t an Earther guard he was looking at. It was Will Kuno-Monet. Will’s green prison overalls were covered with blood, and there was a strange, serene smile on his face.

  ‘Hello, Captain,’ he said dreamily.

  ‘You!’ Ira exclaimed.

  ‘We’ve come to get you out,’ said Will.

  Ira’s mind raced. The boy didn’t appear to be in his right mind, and the circumstances were not exactly the ones he’d expected in a rescue situation. Was this some kind of trap? Were the Earthers finally enacting some kind of ruse to make him relinquish the Ariel’s command codes?

  ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ he demanded.

  ‘I killed the guards,’ said Will.

  He made it sound like I made you some tea.

  Ira examined the roboteer’s narrow frame. Something in this picture didn’t add up.

  ‘Ulanu told me what you said to him,’ said Ira. ‘You told him about the Transcended.’

  Will nodded.

  ‘That’s one betrayal,’ said Ira, his fist still poised and ready to strike. ‘Who’s to say you’re not capable of another?’ He cracked the bones in his neck. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.’

  Will sighed. Rachel appeared in the doorway, propping up a broken-looking Hugo.

  ‘He’s on the level, sir,’ she said. ‘The Transcended have given him some kind of power over the habitat computers.’

  The sight of his engineer, alive and unharmed, was better than a blue sky to Ira. He hadn’t dared to hope. But that wasn’t a reason to let his guard down just yet.

  ‘Did you forget that it was probably the Transcended who landed us in this mess?’ he told her.

  Will shook his head. ‘That was John. I’ve been back over my memory logs and found the evidence. He never managed to negotiate the antimatter – all he negotiated was his own escape. The man we saw killed was someone else.’

  Ira blinked in disbelief. John was certainly capable of such subterfuge, b
ut Ira had worked with him for years. He was no traitor.

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ said Ira. ‘He wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘He might if he thought it was the only way to save the mission,’ Rachel retorted.

  Ira stared at her. ‘You believe this?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Look,’ said Will. He pointed to the wall-screen in Ira’s cell. ‘This is from my memory logs.’

  Ira watched as a man with John’s face stumbled out of a house on New Angeles in slow motion. As he did, the truth of Will’s words settled into him like a boulder in his gut. It wasn’t John.

  He turned back to Rachel. ‘Is this what you saw?’ he demanded.

  Rachel nodded hurriedly. ‘Yes! Come on, sir. We can worry about it later. Right now the important thing is to get out of here alive.’

  Ira nodded. Regardless of Will’s intentions, this still represented the best chance he’d had to escape. He needed to take it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Will pointed along the curving corridor. ‘The exit to the prison block is this way.’

  Ira grabbed his arm. ‘Not so fast. What about Amy?’

  Will’s face drained of all expression. Ira saw something cold in the roboteer’s eyes that made the hair on his arms stand straight up.

  ‘Amy’s dead,’ he said.

  Ira froze. She couldn’t be. Not Amy.

  ‘They executed her,’ said Will, and walked on without looking back.

  Ira felt faint for a moment as that old numbness crept over him again. But just like last time, Ira couldn’t afford to mourn. He drew a lungful of air.

  ‘Give me Hugo,’ he told Rachel.

  Hoisting the human burden across his shoulders, Ira set off after the roboteer. Doors opened before them and closed behind. It was both intoxicating and unsettling to have so much freedom after being trapped in a single room for so long. Ira savoured every sinister moment.