Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘I’m going to repair it,’ he said.

  Ira nodded knowingly to himself. ‘Do I need to remind you that the Earthers will be here very soon? That we have about three days?’

  ‘I know that,’ said Will.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ira. ‘So are you going to tell me how you intend to repair a ten-million-year-old starship ten times the size of this one by then?’

  Will cleared his throat. ‘With robots.’ It sounded ludicrous even to his own ears.

  Ira shut his eyes for a second. ‘I see. And where are you going to find fuel for it?’

  ‘We’ll make it,’ said Will. ‘The ship has machines.’

  ‘Of course it does.’

  Will flushed with anger. He’d had it with being treated like a flake.

  ‘This is what we’re supposed to do,’ he insisted. ‘The alternative is death by star-burst. We’ll make it work.’

  Ira gazed at him impassively for a little while and then turned back to face his console. Without saying another word, he steered the ship towards the ruin Will had selected.

  Will’s anxiety grew as they got closer, but so did his excitement. It was much like the first ship they’d examined, only far less battered and, if anything, slightly larger.

  It took a long time to find some way to park the Nanshan, but eventually Will spotted a fissure near the rounded stern of the alien ship. He sent out waldobots to anchor the cruiser in place and extended a loading rail towards the breach. Along the rail went score upon score of robots. They spread across the surface like ants, exploring the opening, and then poured inside.

  Will started receiving images from the interior and directed them straight to the monitor wall for the others to see. To his initial dismay, the inky, icebound mess that appeared was much like the interior of the other nestship. He noted with relief, though, that there wasn’t quite so much free-floating snow. Maybe the fluid-transport systems hadn’t ruptured as badly on this vessel.

  ‘This ship was designed to take an incredible pounding and still work,’ Will reminded the others, as much for his own benefit as theirs. ‘It has massive redundancy built into it. Plus the only damage it’s sustained has been from space exposure. This one arrived after the star-burst – you can tell by the exohull’s composition spectrum.’ He glanced at them. ‘And we don’t have to fix up the whole thing, just the basics.’

  Except, of course, it was also supposed to be manned by a massive number of crew. Will didn’t simply need to repair it. He also needed to control it. Robots would have to take the place of the Fecund slave caste. And he was going to have to rig a whole new network of comms-nodes to talk to them. At the moment, he had about eight thousand autonomous units on board. He’d require ten times that number, maybe more.

  The nestship had originally been equipped with a huge supply of disposable multi-purpose robots. They’d be worthless scrap by now, but there were automated factories on board to build the things. Getting those back up and running would have to be Will’s first priority.

  He stared into the monitors, contemplating his options, till he noticed that the others were staring at him. For a moment, he wondered why. Then he realised they were waiting for him to say something.

  ‘Well?’ Ira drawled. ‘In case you forgot, this is your plan, Will. Does this ship fit your needs?’

  Will nodded.

  ‘Then we’d better get working, hadn’t we?’ said the captain. ‘Hugo?’

  The scientist blinked. His face was drained of emotion, as usual these days. He’d barely spoken since they’d freed him.

  ‘I want you to see what you can do with the weapons and defence,’ said Ira.

  ‘I’ll give you a team of robots to work with,’ Will put in.

  Hugo nodded.

  ‘However,’ Ira added, ‘your first priority will be to rig up a few more of those suntap cannons like you did last time. That way we’ll at least stand a chance when the Earthers turn up.’

  Ira glanced at Will as if expecting a challenge, but Will wasn’t about to debate the idea.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a good idea to me.’

  Will would have to quintuple his workforce before he started on anything he’d need Hugo for anyway.

  The scientist nodded again. ‘It should be easier this time, now that I know what I’m doing.’

  Ira turned his attention to Rachel. ‘I want you to start looking at the engines,’ he told her. ‘That wreck may be older than the human race, but if we can run, we might last long enough to do something with it.’

  Will winced. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I need her help with the robot factories first. We have to make sure we can keep the ship in one piece before we try moving it.’

  Ira cocked an eyebrow. ‘My, that’s reassuring. In that case, Rachel, go ahead, you’re with him. And Will, if you don’t mind’ – the captain gave Will an exaggerated zero-gee bow – ‘I’m going to work on a defensive strategy. Forgive me for being sceptical, but I suspect we’re going to be attacked before you finish work.’

  ‘Fine,’ Will replied, trying not to let too much relief creep into his voice. Usurping Ira’s authority was still deeply uncomfortable for him. It’d be easier for him to do what he needed to with the captain somewhere else.

  Ira clapped his hands together. ‘Right, everybody, let’s get to work. Hugo, over here. Let’s start with a review of the defences we already have.’

  Ira led Hugo off to look at the Nanshan’s weapons desk.

  Rachel floated up beside Will. ‘Can we talk privately for a moment?’ she said quietly.

  Will nodded. She gestured for him to follow her out into the companionway.

  ‘I want to clear the air before we start work,’ she said once they were alone. ‘I think we both know you’ve been avoiding me.’ She winced and looked off to the left. ‘I just wanted to say that if you feel what happened between us was a mistake, I can deal with that. You only have to say.’

  Will shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that.’

  Her face relaxed immediately, though a look of anxious curiosity remained. ‘So what is it?’ she said.

  Will tried to find the words. ‘I didn’t really tell you about what it was like for me in that prison back at New Angeles.’ He gritted his teeth. It was still impossibly difficult to talk about. ‘Let’s just say it was worse than that chair they found Hugo in. It was …’ Unwelcome tears sprang into his eyes again. He wanted to say something about what they’d done to him but the words steadfastly refused to come.

  Rachel looked at his expression in horror. ‘Oh, Will,’ she said, and hugged him hard. ‘I’m so sorry. If you want me to back off, just say the word. I mean it.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. He stroked her hair and kissed it, very gently.

  She smiled at him, her eyes full of earnest, desperate positivity. ‘I have faith in you and what you’re doing. What we’re doing. The Transcended gave you the tools. Now it’s just a matter of us working out how to use them properly.’

  Will agreed, and was grateful for her tactful change of topic. But what had he really got? A head full of SAP interface and a body populated with half-sentient cells. Remarkable tools in their own right, but what use was robotic blood when you were repairing a starship?

  And then he saw it. He’d always thought those transport tubes that ran through the ship were like arteries. Who was to say they should be pumping water just because that was what the Fecund had used them for? Maybe the vessel would be shielded enough for a dilute solution of his own augmented cells to flow through those pipes and survive. In a very eerie way, the ship would become an extension of him. He already knew from the puzzle dream he’d had right here in the Fecund system that the radiation levels in the outer hulls of nestships were lower than aboard Earth vessels. Otherwise the slave workers wouldn’t have lasted a minute, even with the help of suits.

  Will knew it was a stretch. It was one thing to replace a few microscopic wires and quite another to patch hundreds
of kilometres of tunnel lining in a frozen, radioactive starship. But he had a funny feeling it would work. The answer felt right, as if the Transcended had laid the ship out before him like another puzzle. The solutions to his problems would be built into it if he was smart enough to find them.

  He stared intently into Rachel’s eyes. ‘You’ve just given me a crazy idea.’ He took her hand. ‘Come on, we’re going to the sick-bay.’ He pulled her down the passage, explaining on the way. As he spoke, her eyes grew wider and wider. ‘If I can get enough of the network repaired to start pumping fluid around, then the blood will be able to detect the smaller ruptures from temperature and pressure variations.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said when he was finished. ‘That is a crazy idea.’

  But she still followed him.

  The Nanshan’s sick-bay was little more than a cubicle. They crowded inside and Rachel started looking through the cupboards.

  Will flexed his arm. ‘I want you to transfuse about a pint,’ he said.

  Meanwhile he started setting up the rest of his experiment. When they left the space station, the medical robots he’d taken had brought with them several tons of supplies. Those included forty-five litres of artificial plasma, which Will moved to a tank in a shielded area outside the habitat core. He’d use that as food. Then he descended into his new mind and told his blood what to do.

  Rachel brought out a hypodermic gun and carefully decanted Will’s blood. It took a little careful replumbing of the habitat core to pump the stuff out into the tank Will had prepared, but they managed it. Ten minutes later, Will was watching his cells diffuse into the tank through the eyes of the attendant robots.

  ‘If we can create the conditions the cells need to multiply, the number we have to work with should increase exponentially till we run out of protein,’ he told her.

  Rachel smiled at him. ‘Are you kidding? The one thing Fecund ships don’t lack is protein.’

  She was right. The ship was full of corpses. In fact, the whole star system was full of corpses. Protein galore. He broke into a grin.

  18: TROUBLE ARRIVES

  18.1: WILL

  Ira was wrong. A full four days passed before trouble hit.

  On the first day, Will and Rachel hurled themselves at the task of refitting one of the robot factories. It turned out to be a simple matter of extruding and replacing those components that time and harsh conditions had destroyed. There weren’t that many. By the time they got it running, his other machines had carried out coarse-grain repairs on dozens of kilometres of fluid-transport conduits. Will saved hours by not checking for tiny fractures his cells could repair for him.

  On day two, Will set his new robots to work repairing the second factory, a task for which they were perfectly designed. Meanwhile, he and Rachel synthesised twenty gallons of smart-blood solution. It took them hours to get the conditions right for cell multiplication, and even longer to make the cells do anything useful. It became clear that the smart cells in themselves were not enough. Will was going to have to create a dedicated communication system for them, too. In the end, he solved his problem by losing another sample of blood, this one carrying new orders.

  By the end of the day, he had a transmitter in the tank that had become the hub of an extraordinary network of nerves. The fact that the same kind of nerves would have to run through many kilometres of tubing was a thought that disturbed him deeply. However, he had two factories working.

  On day three, Will collected hundreds of Fecund bodies and experimented with using his new blood to break down and utilise their tissues. The experiment was a success. His new cells, he learned, conveniently contained a suite of programs for exactly this kind of work.

  Will also rigged heaters fed by the Nanshan’s fusion cores to melt the thousands of tons of ice already in the tunnels. By the end of the day, he had over a thousand litres of smart plasma and a hundred and eighty kilometres of transport tunnels repaired.

  By the close of the fourth day, the ship was starting to look promising. And by that time, Will was no longer surprised at his own success. As each of his gambles paid off, it grew increasingly obvious that it wasn’t a coincidence. As he’d suspected, the ship had been made ready for someone to resurrect a long time ago. Will could feel the hand of the Transcended in everything he did. They were present in every robot that fulfilled a repair task perfectly without his supervision, and every engineering problem that turned out to have a tidy, clever solution. At times, he felt like a dog being given treats in return for performing tricks. He also found himself wondering how many other solutions to species’ problems lay floating out there in the dark.

  When fate finally caught up with them, Will was deep in the bowels of the alien vessel with Rachel, overseeing the repair of some fluid heaters. Their discussion was interrupted by a call from Ira, still on self-imposed watch at the Nanshan’s sensor console.

  ‘Will, Rachel – it’s happened.’

  Will stopped talking mid-sentence.

  ‘The far-field scans just picked up the entry flashes from six ships,’ Ira went on. ‘That means they’ll be here in minutes.’ There was a strong note of I told you so in his voice.

  Will and Rachel exchanged nervous glances. Will felt the pit drop out of his stomach. Despite their successes, they were nowhere near ready.

  ‘They still have to find us,’ Will ventured optimistically.

  Ira laughed. ‘That’ll take them about thirty seconds. This crate isn’t the Ariel. There’s no way to lock down its infrared profile. If you want to live, I recommend getting to your battle-stations right now. I’m going to fire on them as soon as they’re in range.’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Hugo. Hugo was out on the far reaches of the nestship’s exohull, tinkering with the vessel’s defences. ‘I’m heading for the primary habitat core. The shield should be ready to activate, but I’ll need Will’s help.’

  The shield had occupied all of Hugo’s attention since Will had given him the archive files on it on their first day of repairs. If it worked the way Hugo hoped, it would buy them enough time to finish fixing the ship. If it didn’t, they stood a good chance of vaporising all the nestship’s outer defences at a single stroke.

  ‘I warn you, though,’ said Hugo, ‘I haven’t run any tests yet.’

  ‘There’s no time like the present,’ Ira retorted.

  ‘I’ll see you there,’ said Will.

  He broadcast instructions to his robots to report to their action stations. He hadn’t finished clearing tunnels but it was too late to worry about that now. It was time to put the ship’s arteries to work.

  ‘Ready?’ said Rachel.

  Will nodded.

  Together they clipped their suits to the heavy-duty waldobot they’d been using for transport and sped off towards the nestship’s core.

  18.2: IRA

  Ira strapped himself down in front of his improvised weapons array and cracked his knuckles. It was years since he’d run an assault position. He hoped he hadn’t lost his touch.

  On the screen before him were the marker icons for the six incoming ships. Four of them were clearly the light cruisers that had chased them from New Angeles. The other two looked unpleasantly like troop transporters.

  Only Earth bothered to train zero-gee troops. Everyone else in the war had used robots. But then, only Earth had a steady supply of suicidal young men angry or vicious enough to sign up for such dangerous work. Earther space troops had a reputation for erratic, senseless violence that made their tactics very difficult to predict. Everything they touched turned into a bloodbath. On no account could Ira afford to let those ships get close. Unfortunately, all of them were heading directly for the Nanshan.

  Ira shook his head. Just as he’d suspected, it hadn’t taken the Earthers long to locate their target. They were being drawn to the Nanshan like flies to the dead.

  Ira wished that Will had given in to his request to move the stolen ship to another part of the debris field. Will
had refused on the grounds that they were still using it to power and coordinate the repairs. Thus, the two ships were still bound together by a hundred different kinds of struts and cables.

  The good news was that, thanks to Hugo, Ira had three working suntap g-rays positioned in the debris field nearby. He’d powered and primed them the moment he saw the first flash. With luck, it was just a matter of waiting for the perfect shot.

  After an initial surge of speed, the Earthers crept towards their target. Ira could understand their reticence. The enemy crews were certain to be experiencing awe and fear as they neared the ruins. Ira was counting on that to keep them distracted. Little by little, ships drifted into perfect positions. Ira waited with his heart in his mouth for a targeting lock. The computer chimed as his best-placed weapon zeroed in.

  He fired. The suntap cannon channelled a torrent of radiation at the lead cruiser. It died instantly. A split-second later, the other ships were scattering into the cover of the ruins.

  Ira cursed them as he struggled for another targeting lock. These guys were quick off the mark. He grazed a second ship before it could put a tumbling alien habitat between itself and his death ray.

  He scowled into his monitor. That hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped. He didn’t dare fire again till he got a clean shot, otherwise the Earthers would be able to pinpoint his closest g-ray and take it out. Time to roll out the conventional defences.

  He fired the Nanshan’s drones. With luck, a heavy enough assault would drive the Earthers into exposing themselves. However, the answering release of munitions that came from the Earther ships was startling. There were hundreds of them – far more than vessels that size would normally carry. With a grim, sinking feeling, Ira realised why the Earthers had taken an extra day to arrive. It wasn’t that they couldn’t follow his manoeuvres. They’d been preparing.

  The enemy drones converged on his own. All of them mutually annihilated with alarming speed. Ira keyed in the new tactical program codes Will had given him as fast as he could. They slowed the attrition rate, but even so it was guaranteed to be a losing battle. He was barely going to touch the Earthers, let alone drive them out.