Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Exohull stability at eighty per cent,’ Rachel reported. ‘Now sixty-five.’

  ‘Firing suntaps,’ said Hugo. ‘Power in twenty-three minutes and forty seconds.’

  The bombardment slowed and died in a final rumble of thunder. It took a full minute for the glare around them to fade. As it did so, the crew of the Ariel Two got their first proper look at Ceres.

  Military engineering had transformed the asteroid into a dandelion head of orbital towers and construction frames. It was as if the tiny world had been taken over by enormous metal trees bearing huge surreal fruit. The fruit were starships. Will could see at least twenty under simultaneous construction.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Rachel.

  Galatea had nothing like this place. There’d have been no point – they didn’t have the crews to man ships produced in such quantities. It put in perspective why the Earthers had been so hard to beat.

  Ira sent the shipyard a hail on the truce channel. An astonished face appeared: a jowly military commander in a black dress jacket pulled over a canary yellow casual one-piece. Will could see decorations hanging in the cabin in the background – flags in the colours of all subsects.

  ‘Unidentified ship!’ the commander shouted. ‘Who the hell are you and what in the Prophet’s name is going on?’ Outrage and panic were fighting for control of the man’s face.

  ‘This is the Galatean Starship Ariel Two,’ said Ira smoothly. ‘This facility has been selected for destruction to make a demonstration for your government. We are giving you advance warning to evacuate your staff and withdraw your defensive fleet before firing commences. We would like to minimize loss of life, so we implore you to take this recommendation seriously.’

  The commander blinked at him in disbelief. ‘Is this a joke? Galatea has already fallen. Everyone knows this. The war is over.’

  ‘We liberated it,’ said Ira. ‘You have fifteen minutes to get your people out. Escape shuttles will not be targeted. That is all.’ He killed the link and rubbed his eyes. ‘Anyone want to take bets?’ he said darkly.

  Mere seconds later, the Ceres defensive fleet undocked and started to manoeuvre. At the same time, drones started pouring out of the surface of the asteroid in long streams.

  ‘I guess they didn’t need the fifteen minutes,’ said Ira.

  He backed the Ariel Two away. The drones kept coming and coming until there were so many it was ridiculous. There were thousands of them.

  ‘Holy shit, again,’ said Rachel.

  ‘I told you the defences were formidable,’ said Ulanu.

  The Ariel Two wasn’t moving nearly fast enough to avoid such a large drone swarm. Fresh impacts flared against the exohull.

  ‘Will, thin that crowd, would you?’ said Ira.

  While the Fecund shield had done an excellent job at fending off g-rays, it clearly did less well against persistent physical bombardment on this scale. Will started picking off missiles with targeted g-ray bursts but found himself struggling almost immediately. With so many targets to keep track of, a lot of them were getting past him.

  ‘Shield stability is back down to seventy per cent and falling,’ said Rachel.

  Suddenly, showing up unannounced in the home system was starting to look like a bad idea. Will needed more mental bandwidth for targeting. He pressed his thoughts deeper into the nestship’s network, imploring his smart-cells to help him compensate. Something shifted inside his mind. His head swam for a moment, then abruptly the swarm of incoming missiles leapt into sharper focus, their flight vectors forming an easily comprehensible weave. Time slowed to a crawl.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ he muttered.

  He let the hidden patterns in the drone flight paths guide him. Two hundred simultaneous lances of hard light seared out from the Ariel Two, yielding two hundred direct hits. Will raked through the incoming munitions, toppling them like dominos. He realised with surprise that the drone wave was almost spent already. But the Ceres fleet had yet to act. He watched the starships position themselves to release another volley.

  ‘Make your point,’ said Gustav quietly. ‘Quickly. The Ceres crew will never evacuate now. They would rather see you dead. Do it decisively and spare lives elsewhere.’

  Will stared down at the factories below. Ira had been right. This did feel different from the battle for Galatea. This time he was the intruder – the one purposefully contemplating murder. Yet when he reached inside himself for a moral compass, all he found was a vision of Amy’s screaming face. He just wanted the church finished and the war over. If this was the cost, so be it.

  Will fired a tenth-of-a-second boser-blast into the heart of Ceres. The icy mantle of the asteroid erupted in a plume of steam. Shock waves rippled out across the dusty surface causing the orbital towers to sway and snap and the entire delicate structure began to come apart. Gouts of vapour jetted out from the tiny world along fissures miles on a side. They watched in silence as the Ceres facility crumbled in slow motion like a collapsing bridge.

  From somewhere in the cabin where his human body sat, Will heard exhalations of surprise at the scale of the destruction. This, Will realised with horror, was a boser’s true purpose, not skewering ships. A boser was a world-killer.

  The shock of the moment gave way to chaos as the Ceres fleet started to pull desperately away from the Ariel Two and their mangled world. They launched a fresh wave of drones, but in a barely organized surge. Whatever they’d expected, it had not been the immediate obliteration of the site they were charged to protect.

  Will reached out with his mind again and let the totality of the new assault sink into his extended consciousness. Then, with a twitch of mental muscle, he fired on them. Missiles died like firecrackers.

  The Earther ships fell back, desperately throwing out gravity shields as they went. Gravity shields wouldn’t do them much good, Will thought. He hadn’t launched a single drone since he’d arrived.

  ‘Will, Ira,’ said Hugo, ‘I’m seeing eight more battleships approaching. Big ones.’

  ‘On what bearing?’ said Ira.

  ‘Out-system. They’re coming from behind us. Origin unclear. Sending you coordinates.’

  ‘My, how convenient,’ Ira growled. ‘An attack fleet appears whole minutes before we have suntaps online.’

  Will opened his human eyes and saw the captain looking daggers at Ulanu.

  ‘Did you anticipate such a rapid response, General? I thought we had about half an hour before the nearest fleet clued in.’

  ‘I’m as surprised as you are,’ said Ulanu, his tone flat. ‘We appear to have been unlucky.’ It was impossible to tell whether he meant it or not.

  ‘Liar,’ said Hugo. ‘He set us up. I knew he would. I’m going to kill him.’

  ‘Not while we’ve still got ships to fight, you’re not,’ said Ira. ‘Leave that chair and I’ll break your legs.’

  Ira hailed the incoming fleet. ‘This is Captain Ira Baron of the liberated world of Galatea. We are here to make a point, not engage in wholesale warfare. Power down your weapons and none of you will be harmed.’

  They didn’t have to wait long for a response. A man with a narrow, hawk-like face and dramatic eyebrows flashed up in a video window, his face a mask of fury. Will recognised him from the propaganda broadcasts he’d been forced to watch. The man was Admiral Kazak, the so-called ‘Colony Crusher’.

  ‘What point is that, Galatean terrorists? In case you hadn’t noticed, the war is finished. You lost. The punishment for the murders we just watched you carry out is death. We have beaten you once. We will beat you again. Prepare to receive the wrath of the Kingdom of Man.’

  Unlike the gunships at Galatea, these were old-fashioned warbirds – huge ships crammed with autonomous munitions of every kind. As soon as they came close enough to engage, they fired all of them in a full-frontal assault.

  Will reeled at the scale of the violence and the lack of strategy behind it. The Earthers, he decided, must be really upset. He lurched back in
to his extended senses and the new swarm before him slowed as if dropped into treacle. He started picking off drones again with flickering beams like a pianist’s fingertips dancing over their hulls. It pushed his concentration to the limit, but Will didn’t care. What worried him more was that even while he was keeping the lengths of his shots minimal, their antimatter reserves were still dropping. Even if their shield stayed stable, they wouldn’t be able to keep up this game for ever. Will checked the suntap countdown. Engagement was still nine minutes away – an eternity in battle time.

  ‘More company,’ said Hugo acidly.

  Will pulled up the link to look. Another ten ships bore down on them behind the eight. And then behind them, another sixteen. It was as if there had been an entire fleet just waiting for them. The bottom fell out of Will’s stomach. The Ariel Two, it appeared, had made them badly overconfident.

  ‘How?’ said Rachel. ‘Where are they coming from?’

  The new ships arrived in waves, throwing weapons at the Ariel Two with a complete disregard for the caution that normally came with space warfare. In the wake of Ceres, they must have realised that nothing short of a total onslaught would yield results. Will redoubled his efforts, but with attack now coming from so many sides at once, protecting the exohull was impossible. His mind was simply stretched too thin. The augmented concentration started to hurt.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Hugo, his voice cracking now. ‘Far scans indicate a hundred ships and counting.’

  ‘Ulanu!’ Ira shouted. ‘Tell me what is going on, because even in my wildest dreams of fuck-up, I did not imagine this.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ulanu snapped back. ‘I gave you my best assessment.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Ira roared. ‘Lie to me one more time and I will snap every bone in your body.’

  ‘And you’ll get the same answer,’ Ulanu said icily. ‘Dispense with the threats, Captain. You are far less frightening than most of the people I’ve had to work with.’

  ‘It’s the celebration,’ said Rachel suddenly. ‘I just looked up the profiles on those ships – none of them is supposed to be here. The whole fleet must have been recalled to participate. They probably maxed out the docking capacity at Fleet HQ and parked the rest at Jupiter L-Four. Which means we flew straight past them.’

  ‘Great!’ said Ira. ‘So we walked into a fucking parade.’

  While the others talked, Will scrambled to vaporise the endless tide of munitions. His head ached. Breathing had started to become a struggle.

  ‘Exohull stability now at twenty-five per cent,’ said Hugo.

  The limits of the Ariel Two’s capabilities, which had appeared so distant just days ago, now looked immediate and frightening.

  ‘Fuck this,’ said Ira. ‘Sorry, Will, but we’re getting out of here. Ending the war will have to wait.’ He hit the reverse thrusters and started trying to back the ship out of the line of fire. ‘We’ll use what’s left of Ceres to shield us till we have enough power to get out of here.’

  Will could tell in an instant that Ira didn’t have enough control over the ship to make that happen. They were surrounded already and the wrong moves would make the drone assault worse. It would take precision flying – non-human precision flying. Will plucked piloting control away from Ira’s desk and did it himself. He routed power from backup systems, shutting down everything non-essential.

  ‘My console is dead,’ Ira shouted. ‘Monet! What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Will!’ said Rachel. ‘Your data load has gone crazy. Your vitals are spiking.’

  Will knew she was right. He still needed more bandwidth – a lot more. He gripped his couch with white-knuckled hands, ordering his smart-cells and the entire ship to compensate. Blood pounded in his ears. His cheeks and fingers tingled as a barrage of weird neurochemical options thundered through his mind. He green-lit every one. Then, at last, his hold on the ship’s systems started to swell and stretch. Entire tracts of his neural web throughout the ship appeared to blend directly into his subconscious. He had no idea how his body was doing it, but that was something he could figure out if they lived.

  ‘We’re sliding towards their disrupter cloud,’ Hugo warned.

  Will grabbed Hugo’s sensor schematics and made them into extra eyes. He started patching all the remaining ship’s systems straight into his interface. As he did so, he was distantly aware of the fact that the other people in the cabin were simply staring at him now. There was nothing left for them to do. He’d taken it all over. He’d explain later, he decided, if they made it.

  Will moved as the starship, firing thirty-seven thrusters at once with microsecond-accurate bursts. Simultaneously, he bombarded the enemy with hundreds of g-rays, tiny facets of his personality managing each one. Other parts of him tracked individually every buoy and missile in the blizzard of weapons. He even started to feel the ebb and flow of the suffering quantum shield. He adjusted power to the quagitators, anticipating load before it arrived, balancing what capacity it had left. And one by one, he punched out each starship that swung in to join the fray.

  The action became a blur. With a start, Will realised that the entire conflict could be seen as an abstract, higher-dimensional pattern. From that perspective, the untidiness of the attack appalled him. He used its asymmetries against it, nudging the ship this way and that to pit the drones of each craft against each other, just as he’d done back at Memburi. It felt so simple now that it barely deserved comment.

  Just as Will’s antimatter reserves slid dangerously into the red, the downpour of warheads dwindled and stopped. The remaining ships pulled back – all seventeen of them. Around the Ariel Two hung a dense soup of shrapnel and superheated ions.

  Will stared at the last Earther vessels in surprise through a thousand lidless electronic eyes, waiting for them to do something. Part of him longed for the battle to restart. He hadn’t got to finish tidying up their attack.

  He threw a message out on the truce channel. ‘Are you done?’ he boomed. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

  No reply came. It belatedly occurred to Will that they’d agreed to make Ira the face of their negotiations. Will didn’t even know what image of himself his message had projected. Right now it was probably something a little odd. Never mind.

  The Earther ships slid back out of targeting range and shifted to form a stationary globe formation with the Ariel Two at the centre. Will scowled at them. What were they up to?

  ‘Monet,’ said Ulanu, ‘I recognize that pattern. The fleet is aligning for a suicide dive.’

  With the exohull still radiating frantically, Will knew they wouldn’t be able to take a coordinated blast of that magnitude. And amazingly, he still had ninety seconds before suntap engagement. They weren’t seconds he could afford. He needed thrust now – and far more than the conventional engines could give him.

  Without really thinking about it, Will routed power to the boser, using the super-accelerated iron as reaction mass, and hit all the reverse fusion-torches at the same time. The ship snapped backwards at a crazy angle, out of the field of red-hot debris. Will then threw them sideways, tumbling the huge ship end-over-end. Finally he piled on conventional power until he hit clear space and rammed them into warp. The ship arced around the back of the startled Earther formation and left them in the dust.

  Enough messing about, Will thought to himself. It was time to take their point to the Prophet while they still could.

  As Will raced towards Earth, antimatter depletion warnings clanged in the cabin. Non-essential ship functions started shutting down. The quagitators died, leaving the hull a mass of liquefied iron alloy barely held in check by its magnetic brackets.

  ‘Will, what are we doing?’ shouted Ira. ‘We need charge!’

  Will dumped them out of warp a light-second from Earth and fired the suntaps. Any closer and he’d cause mayhem. He’d probably given Earth’s partygoers a nasty sunburn as it was.

  They now had six minutes of total vulnerability. The s
implest conventional weapons could punch a hole in them. Will was gambling that with a two-hundred-and-forty-kilometer-long alien starship hanging over Bogotá, they wouldn’t even try.

  He opened his human eyes and found everyone staring at him, their eyes wild. And by the state of disarray in the habitat core, it was clear that some of his manoeuvres had shaken things loose.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  Rachel glanced nervously at Will’s hands. He looked down. They’d grown into the couch like bits of melted wax. In fact, all along his forearms, threads of organic matter trailed out, plugging him into every data port within reach. Weird bundles of semi-organic fibre had punched through the floor and hooked themselves up to his legs.

  He tried to shrug, but apparently his spine was plugged in, too.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sorry, that looks weird, doesn’t it? I needed bandwidth. Nothing to worry about. I think it’s all retractable. Hopefully.’

  He glanced across at Ulanu. The general peered at him with an expression both pained and astonished.

  ‘General,’ he said.

  Ulanu kept staring.

  ‘Gustav. You’re up.’

  ‘You still trust him after all that?’ said Ira. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Will. ‘He’s what we’ve got.’

  Ulanu ignored the captain and nodded gravely at Will, as if coming to some kind of final peace. He started typing commands into his comms console.

  ‘Open a channel to the following secure address,’ he said.

  Will reached out to touch the Earth’s pervasivenet and made the connection. The ringtone and wait-image they received on the bridge’s monitor screens seemed incongruously mundane, given the circumstances.

  Eventually, a worried-looking man with a lined face and dark skin appeared. Will could make out a grand white chamber in the background where men in brightly coloured robes were locked in fierce debate.

  ‘Khan here,’ the man snapped. ‘This had better be good.’ Then he caught sight of the face on the screen. ‘Gus!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where are you?’