Roboteer (17 page)

His skin prickled. What was this – more alien trickery?

‘Amy, what the hell’s happening?’ he said.

Amy’s answer was a string of obscenities. ‘We’re not compensating for shell curvature,’ she explained furiously.

‘Why not?’ said Ira. ‘Didn’t you give me an algorithm for that when we hit the lobe?’

‘Yes, of course! I don’t know why it’s not—’ Then she let out a wail of despair.

‘What?’ Ira demanded.

‘We swapped shells,’ she said miserably. ‘It must have been your warp-scatter manoeuvres. With the curvon gradient being so steep up here, all those bursts of conventional acceleration jumped us to a different level.’

‘Can we compensate?’ He glanced across at her. Her brow was a mess of worried lines.

‘Hold on.’ She tapped furiously at her keyboard and then reached up to seize her pigtails in anxious hands. ‘We’re on a closed shell!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means we’re deeper into the lobe. We’re not orbiting the galactic core any more – we’re essentially in orbit around the black hole. If we keep going this way, we’ll head straight back to the place where the enemy is waiting for us.’

Ira stifled a moan of frustration. He wondered if Ulanu was bothering to expend energy trying to follow them.

‘So we change course,’ he said.

‘That won’t help,’ said Amy. ‘We have to return to the thinnest part of this shell just to get off it, otherwise we’ll keep going in circles for ever.’

Ira took a deep breath. If straight back into the jaws of their enemy was where they had to go, then so be it.

‘Set a course for that crossover point,’ he ordered. ‘We’ll take whatever Ulanu thinks he can throw at us.’

He pointed his ship back towards trouble.

8.3: GUSTAV

‘Sir!’ said the soldier sitting at the astrogation desk. ‘We’ve analysed the Gallies’ exit vector – they’re trapped in the lobe.’ He smiled smugly. ‘Shall I send ships after them?’

‘No,’ Gustav said, shaking his head reluctantly. It was a hard order to give after the humiliations of the last few hours, particularly after the remarks he’d had to endure from Rodriguez when the Gallies slipped through his fingers.

‘Why not?’ the disciple drawled. ‘Afraid we’ll actually catch them?’

Gustav rounded on him. ‘I’m not chasing them because there’s
no point
. The Gallies will be expecting it. And furthermore because it would be a waste of our resources.’

Rodriguez’s nostrils flared. ‘You call keeping the Prophet’s secrets a waste?’

‘What do you actually know about warp battles, Father?’ Gustav snapped. ‘Chasing people with FTL is like running around in fog. You can’t see a damned thing. You can only catch the person you’re chasing if they happen to brush past you.’ He pointed a furious finger at one of the wall displays. ‘Do you know what that means?’

Rodriguez set his jaw. ‘If you think to belittle me by asking—’

‘It’s a map of their exhaust-radiation profile. They over-burned their engines to get out of here. We know they can’t have fuelled since before Zuni, which means that for a ship that size, they have to be running low. What’s more, their captain just made a stupid mistake that wasted even more of his antimatter and plenty of time. He’s given us the opportunity to put every antimatter factory for light-years around on high alert. By the time he gets off the lobe, he’ll be desperate. He’ll either die in space, or he’ll come to us.’

Gustav turned back to the desk. ‘Comms officer,’ he snapped.

‘Sir!’

‘Instruct Captain Wahid of the
Gaza
to head for Zuni immediately with new orders for Admiral Tang. He is to alert every fuelling star within sixty lights to look out for unscheduled stops, regardless of their apparent security clearance. He is to tell them that …’ Gustav struggled for a suitable excuse. He certainly couldn’t afford to tell the truth. ‘That we have found a Gallie thief-ship involved in a Galatean plot to kill the Prophet. The ship has stolen information critical to the Prophet’s security and may attempt to pass through their system with false clearance information. Tang is instructed to use the operational subset of the Zuni fleet to mark every potential Galatean fuelling star within the same region. The
Gaza
will act as flagship with Wahid in command. Tang is to remain at Zuni to fit the stockpiled suntaps to the remaining ships.’

The last thing Gustav wanted was to give Tang an excuse to play with his fleet. Better to keep him pinned down at Zuni with something to do.

‘Sir,’ said the comms officer, and strode out of the room towards the secure channel booth.

Tang would hate ships being taken away from his precious assault force, but he’d have to cope. The Gallies simply could not be allowed to return home. Whatever they’d done to the Relic, it had killed the Earthers’ feed in such a way that Gustav’s team was at a loss as to how to retrieve it. The alien world had fallen silent for the first time in two years. Gustav’s gut tightened again at the thought.

Analysis of his ship’s slowly rebooting computers had shown Gustav evidence of a message being passed to the intruders that was petabytes in size. With ten minutes’ access, his enemies had achieved something with the Relic that his team had never come close to. That gave the advantage firmly back to the Galateans – an intolerable situation. Who knew what super-weapons they’d been given? He felt sick with envy. And with that feeling came a change of heart.

‘Astrogation!’ he barked.

‘Sir!’

‘Contact the
Saladin
. Tell them to lay in a slow pursuit course after the intruder. They don’t have to catch the Gallies, just follow them.’

Finding where someone had been in warp after the fact was a lot easier than trying to keep up. Remote telescope drones could detect warp flashes for days after a ship had left. And warp always left a radiation trail of some sort, even with stealth technology.

‘Make sure they don’t get away,’ he added. Better safe than sorry.

Surprisingly, Rodriguez didn’t bother taking a swipe at him for issuing that order. Gustav glanced around to see what the disciple had to say for himself, but to his surprise the man had gone. Gustav frowned.
What prompted that?
he wondered. Nevertheless, he was grateful for the peace the disciple’s departure brought. He returned his eyes to the board.

It was only a matter of time now. Then the Gallie ship would be in his grasp, and with luck, so would the secrets of the Relic.

8.4: WILL

Like a body dropped in cold water, Will came awake. He found himself back in the muscle-tank, where he’d been before the whole alien incursion started. Desperate with relief, he commanded the tank to drain its gel and free him. Dragging his limbs out of the confinement of the box was wonderful, though his body ached as if it had been soundly beaten. But he was back, and that was what counted.

He emerged to the sound of shouting. Ira was swearing at the top of his lungs.

‘It’s no good,’ said Rachel. ‘The buffers just can’t be fixed out here. Unless we can get to a safe repair site, we’re all going to die of radiation poisoning before we make it home. We can’t even effect decent temporary repairs without proper working SAPs. But that’s not the worst of it.’

‘Dear God!’ said Ira. ‘What else is there?’

‘We’re also low on fuel.’

‘She’s right,’ said Amy. ‘Our detour around the shell has put Li-Delamir just out of our range.’

‘Shit!’ roared Ira. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

‘As far as I can tell,’ she added. ‘the only system close enough for us to fuel at is Zuni-Dehel.’

‘That’s great,’ John interjected. ‘We just walk right into our enemies’ hands. Hands up who likes torture.’

‘Enough, John,’ Ira barked. ‘If I want your wit, I’ll ask for it.’

Will listened with mounting alarm. What could have happened while he was unconscious? How long had he been out of the loop? And where in hell were they now?

He consulted the ship. Apparently, they were some distance out from Ulanu’s secret system and stalled in space. Amazingly, just hours had passed since their brush with the alien data feed. He also learned that Amy’s estimate was right – there was nowhere safe to refuel that was close enough to reach. In other words, they were trapped, dead and they’d lost Galatea the war. No wonder Ira was tense.

He smiled bitterly to himself. Here was one problem that the brilliant Transcended had failed to anticipate: that he’d be dead before he got the chance to take their stupid test.

But as he thought of the Transcended, something odd happened in his head. A memory surfaced in his mind like a chess piece being deposited on a board. There
was
somewhere they could go. Somewhere they
should
go, in fact. Somewhere very important.

‘I know a place,’ he croaked. His throat was raw, for some reason. It hurt to speak.

All the heads in the cabin whipped around to face him. Their astonishment was clear.

‘Will?’ said Amy incredulously.

‘You’re back!’ Rachel broke into a smile of relief.

Ira just looked worried. ‘What did you say?’ he asked quietly.

‘I have a vector,’ said Will. ‘I know a place where we can fix the buffers. Maybe even get fuel.’

Ira’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where?’

Will passed the coordinates from his interface straight to Ira’s visor. He watched as the captain’s eyes scanned the information.

‘This star isn’t on our shell,’ said Ira flatly. ‘This is uncharted territory.’

Will nodded. ‘I know.’

Hugo spoke up. ‘Then how do you—’

Ira motioned him to silence. His face was grave. ‘Are you positive about this?’ His eyes bored into Will’s.

‘Yes, sir,’ Will croaked. ‘The aliens, they … spoke to me.’

Will watched Hugo’s eyes go round like dinner plates as a pained, jealous look entered them. It occurred to Will then that his experience was going to take no small amount of explanation.

‘And you trust them,’ said Ira sceptically.

Will nodded. ‘I … I think so. I mean, I see no reason for them to send us into the middle of nowhere when we’re just as likely to die here.’

‘How about to take over our brains?’ John remarked dryly.

Will grimaced. ‘I don’t think …’ Then he ran out of words. After all, wasn’t that exactly what had happened to him? ‘I believe they could have done that here if they’d wanted to,’ he said. ‘That’s not what they’re about.’

‘Do we have much choice?’ said Rachel. ‘It’s this or Zuni.’

Ira rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. When he looked up again, his face was full of grim resolve. ‘I expect a full report,’ he said, eyeing Will wearily.

‘Yes, sir.’

The captain turned to his first officer. ‘Amy, take a look at this course and set us up.’

‘Will do.’

‘Then take a look at our roboteer,’ he added. ‘If he’s well enough, Rachel could use a hand.’

‘I’m fine, sir,’ said Will.

Ira regarded him uncertainly. ‘The ship’s doctor will be the judge of that. In the meantime, I want you to start that report.’

Will nodded. ‘Okay, sir.’

As he turned back to his bunk, he couldn’t help but notice the uneasy way the crew looked at him. He didn’t blame them. In their place, he’d be doing the same thing.

9:
UNCHARTED TERRITORY

9.1: WILL

Amy finished checking Will over and stepped back from his bunk.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said, scanning the information in her visor. ‘You appear to be fine. The level of virus in your blood is way down, though I don’t see any evidence of antibodies at work. It’s like the infection just gave up.’

She didn’t sound particularly pleased about it, and Will could understand that. It was one more mystery of the alien assault. And no one was more unsettled about that than he was.

‘How do you
feel
?’ said Amy, peering at him.

‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Physically, at least. A bit bruised, and my throat is raw, but otherwise normal.’

‘And mentally?’

Will was sure she meant the question kindly, but he didn’t like the way it sounded.

‘Just nervous,’ he replied, a little curtly. ‘An alien took over my brain. As far as I know, it’s still in there. How do you think I feel?’

Amy winced. ‘Sorry.’

‘Hey, Will,’ said Ira. ‘You finished that report?’

Will glanced inwards at his home node where he’d been hurriedly writing his transcript while Amy ran her tests. It was a clumsy piece of text, but he doubted Ira was much interested in fine writing at this point.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘What would you like me to do with it?’

‘Just put it in the public space. We’ll all take a look.’

Will would have preferred the captain to read it himself first. Cut down into bullet-point form, his experience with the Transcended made for melodramatic reading. The end of humanity, galactic gardening, billion-year programmes – it was a lot to take in. Reluctantly, he reached into his home node and transferred the file to the
Ariel
’s public domain. Then he lay back on his bunk and waited for the inevitable questions.

John was the first to make his feelings known, which he did by bursting into laughter.

‘Oh my
God
!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will, are you serious? They actually said all this shit?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Will tersely.

‘Well, hey, the nano really hit the fan-o this time! Looks like the whole future of the human race just landed in our lap. Gotta love that sense of destiny.’

It didn’t sound like he believed it for a minute.

‘Cut it out!’ Rachel told him sharply.

Hugo, meanwhile, was making quiet plosive noises as he read. Will could see the man was mesmerised by the text. Then, abruptly, he turned and fixed Will with an urgent if slightly wounded stare.

‘This must have been a very unique experience,’ he said woodenly.

‘It was frightening for the most part,’ Will replied.

‘Did the Transcended say anything about how they manipulate stars?’

Will shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Did they mention anything about particle resonance? Or collapsed-matter states?’

Will shifted uncomfortably. ‘It wasn’t really a technical discussion.’

‘Why not?’ Hugo demanded suddenly. ‘You talked to them – you could have made it one. You could have asked them anything!’

‘I was too busy finding out about the end of mankind,’ Will retorted. He wasn’t in the mood for one of Hugo’s rants right now.

‘If I’d been given the chance—’ said Hugo, his voice trembling.

Ira interrupted. ‘Will,’ he said.

Hugo fell silent.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Will.

‘You’re convinced of the sincerity of this … alien.’

Will took a deep breath. ‘I know it’s a lot to swallow, sir, but I don’t think they’ve got any reason to lie.’

‘Oh, come on!’ John said with a laugh.

‘Quiet!’ Ira snapped. ‘Go on, Will’

Will searched for the words. ‘I mean, they’ve proved they have the power. They made the suntap and the star back there. Who’s to say they can’t do the rest of it?’

‘Did they say anything about how long we have to pass this test?’ asked Ira.

‘Not that I recall, sir.’

Ira grunted. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter a great deal anyway. There’s nothing we can do till we’ve found fuel.’

‘Captain,’ said Rachel, ‘if you don’t need Will, I could use his help trying to set up a temporary buffer configuration.’

‘Fine,’ said Ira.

‘I’m on it,’ said Will, with more than a little relief. Work brought an excuse to escape from the cabin. He gratefully slid his consciousness into the relative sanctuary of the
Ariel
’s metaphor space.

Rachel’s avatar met him in the Cold War Era situation room Will had made for the buffer maintenance node. The big display board showed buffer panels instead of continents. Three of them were shining bright red and several more were yellow, which meant they were already taking rads. They’d all need days in the scrubbing tanks if they ever got home.

‘I guess we could take some of the intact secondaries and rig them over the damage to the primary sphere,’ he suggested. ‘It won’t work for ever, but it might get us to the next system.’

‘Will, forget all that for a minute,’ said Rachel. ‘Are you all right?’

Will glanced at her avatar. Her eyes were full of urgent appeal. He looked away again, into the glaring board. He’d prefer not to talk about it. But of all the people on the ship, Rachel was the only one whose company he wanted right now, and she deserved an answer.

‘Will?’ she asked again.

‘I’m fine,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’m sharing my brain with aliens, but other than that I’m fine, really. The hardest part of it is how everyone’s looking at me. But I can’t say I blame them.’

‘Ignore them,’ she said quickly. ‘Really. John always laughs at anything that scares him, and Hugo’s a genetically overcooked dork.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like, having your senses stripped away like that.’

Will shrugged. ‘I could deal with that. What worried me was being singled out from the whole human race for a job I can’t do. I’m no saviour, Rachel. I’m just a roboteer.’

‘Bullshit,’ she replied. ‘You were
never
just a roboteer. There’s not many people who could have gone through what you faced and come out sane.’

Will doubted that, though her compliment warmed him. He was sure Hugo would have been thrilled by the experience. He’d have come out with a lifetime supply of scientific discoveries, though he might have neglected to listen to the warnings.

‘You’re not alone, you know,’ said Rachel. ‘I want to help if I can.’

Will smiled. ‘Thanks.’

‘Do you think …’ She stopped.

‘What?’

‘Do you think they’ve left you alone now? Your mind, I mean?’

This was the one question Will had no desire to face. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. He buried his virtual head in his hands.

‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever know again.’

The thought nearly made him laugh. It was so vast and frightening that he couldn’t take it seriously. He’d assumed the aliens had finished with him when he woke up back in the tank. Then the location of the uncharted star had appeared in his head. Now he felt certain they hadn’t.

‘Jeez!’ she said. ‘What a mind-fuck.’ She giggled nervously, as if realising just how apropos her words were.

‘There’s nothing you or I can do about it,’ Will told her bluntly. ‘Right now we wouldn’t have anywhere to go if it wasn’t for the Transcended, so why look a gift horse in the mouth while there are buffers to repair?’

She smiled at him with something like admiration. ‘Okay.’

She appeared to think he was being stoic, when he was just desperate for the sanctuary of denial.

‘I wish I was in there with you,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘In your virtual space, I mean. Or anywhere other than this damned cabin.’

A pang of desire struck at the centre of Will’s chest. He stared dumbly at her blind avatar. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

‘Sorry,’ she said at last. ‘Buffers.’

Will turned gratefully away towards the desk. His eyes skittered distractedly across it, looking for the icons that represented his buffer maintenance SAPs. It took him a minute to realised they weren’t there.

‘Where’d my robots go?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I had to take them offline,’ she said. ‘They started malfunctioning during the alien soft assault and I haven’t been able to fix them yet.’

‘Why don’t I take a look?’ he said.

Rachel unlocked the SAP programs and Will tried them on, one at a time. He could detect no difference in them.

‘They feel perfectly fine to me.’

Rachel frowned. ‘How come?’ She ran through her diagnostics. ‘Amazing. I checked them not half an hour before you woke and their awareness cycles were all over the place.’

Will ached inside as he recognised an expression of fading trust on her face.

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about that,’ he told her stiffly. ‘They’re working now, and that’s what matters.’

Without waiting for her to comment further, he hurled himself into the mind of a buffer-jack and started work.

Will worked on repairs for the next two days as the
Ariel
pushed deeper into unknown space. Amy checked his body for infections from time to time and reported him miraculously cured. The others regarded him warily. They all had plenty of questions about his experiences, particularly Hugo. Unfortunately, Will didn’t have any more answers. He found that the tank-time Ira had made him endure on the trip out was fast becoming a habit of his own. It was a refuge from the crew’s attention.

Though he hid from them, Will hated the gulf that appeared to have opened afresh between him and his shipmates. Far from proving himself a part of the team, he felt as if he’d become a liability. In his spare time he ran diagnostic programs on himself in the vain hope of ferreting out more alien memories. He reasoned that if he could determine the origin of the foreign thoughts, he could purge them somehow and pronounce himself cured. But his programs revealed nothing. According to his memory logs, he’d known about the star ahead of them since childhood.

Then, as their fuel supplies dipped miserably into the red, their destination presented itself. It was a K-class star, a little elderly but still on its main sequence. Will found it ironic that, in simple physical terms, although they were just a few light-years from Zuni, the location couldn’t have felt more remote.

Ira dropped warp outside the system and craned his head out of his bunk to speak with Will.

‘Will,’ he said sternly. ‘I need to know. Should we be coming in on stealth?’

Will shook his head. ‘I don’t think there’s any need.’ He wished he knew why. It was hard to advise your captain with only a hunch to go on. ‘I’d come in slow, though,’ he added randomly.

Ira nodded. ‘Slow it is.’

They cruised gently into the system. They’d barely gone further than the Oort cloud before Amy spoke up in a tense voice.

‘Ira, I’m getting readings. Massive ones. And they’re definitely artificial, not planetesimals.’

‘Any signs of an intercept course?’ said Ira.

‘No. They appear to be in stable orbits – maybe habitats of some kind.’

‘Keep your eyes open,’ said the captain. ‘John, I want you ready with torpedoes and countermeasures, just in case.’

Will had an urge to tell them that defences wouldn’t be necessary, but chose not to open his mouth. He had nothing to base his opinions on other than a guess with suspicious origins.

They decelerated in-system and took up an orbit around the star. Ira cut the gravity drive so they could have a proper look around.

‘Give me close-ups of those ships,’ he said.

‘Scanning now,’ Amy reported.

Immersed in the
Ariel
’s astrogation node, Will was treated to the best possible view. It took his breath away.

They were surrounded by ruins. Lying all around them in vast profusion were the remains of a civilisation. They were gothic and immense – vast, dark, twisting shapes covered with rows of curving spikes. It was as if titanic brambles had grown wild in space. The
Ariel
, a full kilometre on a side, could have passed easily through one of the holes punctured in their weirdly textured hulls.

Greater than the sense of scale was the mood of the place. It had about it a tremendous sense of melancholy, as if tragedy had been wrought there on a scale too great for human comprehension. Will felt like a child trespassing through a giants’ graveyard. And yet, beneath the weight of awe and despair, Will found himself touched by a sense of rightness as keen as a child’s excitement.

Yes
, said a voice inside him.
This where you are supposed to be.

‘Amy, give me a system profile,’ Ira said into the hushed cabin.

Amy cleared her throat and spoke almost in a whisper. ‘Four gas giants. Two solid planets, one V-rated, one M. One debris ring. Four hundred and seventeen alien habitats currently detected and counting.’

‘Will,’ said Ira, ‘were these the people who made Ulanu’s planet?’

Will was about to tell them he didn’t know. But then, with a revolted shudder, he realised he did. He’d found another new memory. It was like discovering a pulsing lump of something foreign under the skin of his mind.

‘No,’ he said. Admitting the alien knowledge felt like a guilty confession. ‘These were the last people to find it,’ he explained. ‘They were given suntap technology and then wiped out.’

‘For being destructive?’ asked Rachel.

‘Yes,’ said Will, surprising himself. It was like making up lies and discovering he had utter confidence in them. ‘They controlled dozens of star systems and denuded every one. Left to their own devices, they would have swept through the galaxy. They would have reached Earth.’

The fact alarmed him even as he said it. ‘If they’d lived, the human race would never have evolved,’ he added in a hushed voice.

‘Evolved?’ said Amy. ‘How old are these things?’

‘About ten million years,’ said Will awkwardly.

There were gasps from the others.

‘To the Transcended, the Earther crusade looks no different from these Fecund,’ he told them.