Roboteer (18 page)

‘The Fecund,’ Ira echoed. ‘Is that the name of these people?’

‘I think so.’ Like the rest of his explanation, the name had just popped into his head.

‘What else do you know about this place?’ asked Hugo suspiciously.

‘Nothing!’ Will replied quickly. Then, less defensively, ‘I … I don’t know.’

John chuckled to himself on his bunk.

‘Ira,’ said Amy, ‘I’ve just completed a thermal scan and I can’t find a single live energy signature in the whole system. There are plenty of blast sites that might have been caused by containment failure, but there’s no actual antimatter.’

Of course there wasn’t, Will realised with sudden chilling certainty. There was never going to be. This place had run out of antimatter while humans were still living in the trees. The pit of his stomach fell away. It appeared he’d brought them here to die.

Why?
he asked himself. Why had the Transcended let him think they might find fuel here when it couldn’t possibly be true? Why had they been brought here at all, if not for that? Simply to be made to understand humanity’s fate, and then stand by while it was extinguished?

Will started to consider the things he’d been told in a different light. What if it was all lies, the test and everything? He couldn’t be sure he knew what the thing in his head wanted, he realised, or what it intended to do with them.

‘Unfortunate,’ Ira rumbled. ‘Well, people, I’m sure you’re aware of the position that leaves us in. If we can’t find juice here, we’d better hope that M-type planet is comfy, because there’s no going home now. We just wasted what fuel we had left getting here.’

Will cringed at the bitterness in Ira’s tone.

John burst into sudden hoots of laughter.

‘What’s so funny, John?’ Rachel demanded.

‘This ride!’ he replied. ‘The aliens fucked us over. Now
there’s
a surprise! This has got to be the shittiest mission in the history of spaceflight. We should get a prize or something.’

‘Quiet!’ Ira snapped. ‘I haven’t finished.’

John’s laughter dulled to suppressed sniggers.

‘Amy,’ Ira growled, ‘check the whole system again. Make sure there’s nothing we can use. Make triple sure. Rachel, look for buffer materials. Just because we can’t find juice is no reason not to make repairs. There should be plenty of ship parts around here to cannibalise. Assuming they’re not too old, and assuming we can tell what the fuck we’re looking at. John, find what passes for a computer in this place, if there’s anything left after all this time, and trawl it. That could save us a lot of search time. And Hugo, keep your eyes open for weapons. Since we’re here, we might as well find out what these aliens could do. If we ever get home, it might win us the war. I want you all to report back to me the moment you find anything,’ the captain told them. ‘Do you understand me?’

There was a chorus of ayes. Ira fell silent.

Will waited for half an anxious, miserable minute before he opened his mouth. ‘Sir, what should I do?’

‘I don’t know, Will,’ Ira replied wearily. He sounded more disappointed than angry. ‘Help Rachel. And if any way out of this fucking mess pops into your head, let me know.’

9.2: IRA

While the crew prepped for a robotic survey of the ruins, Ira stared out at the grim panorama of tumbling wreckage, his mind churning. He’d read about what happened on stranded starships. Admittedly the conditions had never been quite this extreme, but a single common factor stood out among all those that survived: morale. If there was one good thing about their situation, it was that Ira suddenly had time on his hands, which meant a chance to address the interpersonal issues he’d let slide since they’d hit Zuni.

‘John,’ he said, propelling himself out of his bunk, ‘meeting room, right now.’

A smirking John slid into the chamber behind him. Ira sealed the hatch.

‘What’s up, Captain?’

‘You,’ said Ira. ‘With respect, John, your cracks are showing.’

John’s face stiffened.

‘Ever since we got hacked you’ve been ratcheting up the laughs. You’re not sounding balanced any more.’

John shrugged. ‘Should I? They hacked my ship. What do you expect?’ He shot Ira a meaningful glance.

They both knew what John’s psych report said –
high-functioning sociopath with a strong loyalty complex offsetting severe interpersonal limitations. Level-three obsessive behaviour around security and control themes that is beneficial when suitably motivated.
Ira knew because he’d been briefed. John knew because he’d hacked the senior-officers’ database years ago. There was an understanding between them that nobody kept secrets from John for long.

‘I need you to put a lid on it,’ said Ira. ‘I know you can do it.’

John was an excellent officer – a man who literally laughed in the face of death and functioned coolly under the most incredible pressure. The fact that those talents came with certain behavioural consequences was something both he and the Fleet had been happy to overlook. After all, it didn’t make him that odd. About thirty per cent of Galateans had a personality disorder of some sort by pre-diaspora standards. John was simply a starker case than most.

‘Of course,’ said John. ‘You can count on me. You know that – Galatea comes first. I’ll find another way to manage it, no matter how fucked up this trip gets. But while we’re in here …’

Ira waited for him to finish.

John’s face twitched. He smoothed his hair. ‘We have a
slight
security problem, wouldn’t you say? That’s what I
thought
you wanted to talk about.’

‘Agreed,’ said Ira. ‘But I don’t see a way to fix it right now.’

‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to limit it. It doesn’t mean there aren’t steps we can take.’

‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘Having a hacked ship I can fix,’ said John. ‘Lying next to a hacked person—’

‘I know this isn’t easy,’ said Ira.

‘How am I supposed to clear out the soft core when his fucking head is plugged into it all the time? It’s like trying to clear the rat shit out of a ship full of rats without killing the fucking rats.’

Ira sighed. ‘Remember, John, he’s still your crewmate. It’s your job to protect him as well as everyone else.’

‘Sure. But that fucking alien is using him for cover, which makes him a human shield,’ said John. ‘And the Galatean Fleet has a policy on human shields.’

Ira was about to reply, but a ping from Amy sounded first. He touched the comm. ‘What is it?’

‘The robots are away,’ said Amy. ‘I think you’re going to want to see this.’

‘We’ll pick this up later,’ he told John as he slid back through the hatch. ‘And thank you for listening. I mean it.’

With reluctance, Ira swung back into his bunk and pushed his visor on. His sense of claustrophobia returned as his field of vision filled with the view from the lead robot. The vast thicket of alien tatters lay straight ahead and a sense of wrongness at stepping into this awful graveyard gripped him like a palpable force. There was no room in his heart for excitement or curiosity. While he rifled through the ruins of another civilisation’s dead, the Earthers were mobilising to invade his home world and turn it into a copy of the lifeless disaster that lay before him.

‘Gah!’ Amy exclaimed. ‘I can’t find anything that looks like an actual ship in this mess! There’s nothing with a proper exohull, or even brollies.’

‘There,’ said Will, and dropped a marker into the display field. ‘That’s one.’

Ira zoomed in for a better view. It looked like the bud of some exotic flower floating in space. Delicate ferns of lacy, branching material arced forwards from a rounded base to surround a rust-red bulb. He could see no feature that made it look remotely like a ship. Ira’s concern that his roboteer was no longer completely human increased another notch.

As the robots neared the alien vessel – if that’s what it was – the sheer scale of it became clear. It was over two hundred kilometres long. What had looked like delicate fronds from a distance were in fact huge arcing towers of metal large enough to contain entire human cities. The red core hung before them like a world. The whole thing was surrounded by a halo of sparkling dust.

‘My God,’ Amy muttered.

Ira was awed, too, despite himself. They were the first human beings ever to lay eyes on such a thing.

As they came closer still, Ira made out features that might have been sensors and ports clustered in cryptic patterns on the core’s surface. There were impact craters, too – thousands of them – and great, gaping rents, whether from collisions or warfare, Ira couldn’t tell.

‘Hugo,’ he muttered, ‘why don’t you take your drone squad off and explore the surface for weapons?’

‘I’ll go with him,’ said Amy. ‘I want to have a closer look at that cratering.’

Hugo and Amy guided a third of the robotic fleet off across the rusty landscape while Will guided the remainder towards the closest hole in the hull and through it into a huge, dark interior space with twisted cables looping across it. Their robots’ searchlights illuminated countless bits of drifting stuff like dirty snow. It was so thick they could barely see the walls.

‘Not much shielding,’ John observed as he examined the hull behind them.

Will cycled through scan filters till a regular arrangement of tunnel openings appeared out of the grubby haze.

‘Will, any idea of the layout of this ship?’ Ira asked.

‘No. Sorry, Captain.’

Ira could hear the frustration in the young man’s voice. He must be tired of people asking him questions about the aliens that he couldn’t answer. But under the circumstances, he was just going to have to deal with it.

‘Fine,’ said Ira. ‘Then let’s head towards where the habitat core would be in a human ship. Want to lead the way, Rachel?’

Rachel chose a tunnel near the centre of the far wall. ‘Let’s try that direction,’ she suggested, pointing with a data marker.

Will took them gently forwards into a long, curving passageway with rippled sides like the gullet of some prehistoric fish. They stopped shortly after, when they found something resembling a scorpion with a peculiar fanned tail hanging dead and blocking the way in front of them. It had shiny brown body-segments and was missing several of its legs. Fibres trailed out where the limbs had snapped off. Instead of pincers, it had something like armoured hands.

‘Is that … one of them?’ Rachel asked in a hushed voice.

‘No,’ said Will. ‘That’s a robot.’

Ira heard no doubt in his voice.

As they pushed nearer, it became more obvious that the scorpion-thing was artificial. On closer examination, it looked quite primitive. A triangle of lidless cameras passed for eyes. Its body was clad in bald plastic plates and there was no sign of anything like tact-fur. Humans hadn’t built anything that clunky since the Martian Renaissance. Strange, Ira thought. As they passed the ancient robot, the exhaust from their thrusters sent it spiralling gently towards the wall. More limbs snapped off as it brushed past. Time must have rendered the thing as brittle as glass. Soon they exited the tunnel into a place filled with crazy interlacing metal rings that passed for a mesohull. Beneath it were more tunnels.

Ira found himself fascinated by the similarities and differences between his own ship and this one. Clearly, there were certain features all starships needed, and these Ira could just about recognise. But in other places, the engineering was bewilderingly different.

Eventually, they found their way to a sealed module that Rachel thought might be a habitat. It was at least fifty metres wide and held in place by great pistons. Its surface was clad in something like Casimir-buffers, except instead of panels, the material was laid in curved sections like strips of muscle, and fed by power cables that coiled like springs. Once, the buffers had been covered with something shiny. Now it was coming off in flakes.

‘This is it,’ Rachel exclaimed. ‘We need to get some of those strips back to the ship to experiment on.’

Will sent a couple of small waldobots down to see if they could prise some off.

Ira watched the proceedings quietly. He wasn’t sure he liked cannibalising this ancient ship. It felt vaguely sacrilegious.

‘Ira, I’ve had a look at the hull,’ said Amy. ‘It appears to confirm Will’s story – everything here is about ten million years old. It looks as if the ship was hit by some kind of massive solar-flare activity. It was literally scoured clean.’ She sent him pictures of the pocked surface and spectrographic scans of the samples she’d taken.

‘A
flare
did all this?’ said Ira. ‘It had to be a pretty big one.’

‘I’d say so,’ she replied. ‘That star down there must have sloughed its skin like a snake. Probably took a billion years off its lifespan.’

‘I’m going to follow these wiring bundles,’ said John. His marker pointed to cables like the tentacles of a mighty squid curling away around the surface of the module. ‘They might be data links. And if they are, they might lead to an access tube.’

‘Great,’ said Ira. He was glad to hear John making a constructive and unironic contribution. Apparently he’d taken their talk to heart.

He returned his attention to Will and Rachel’s work. A long piece of buffer was slowly peeling away from the ceramic surface underneath like sticky spaghetti. It ripped, leaving one robot holding a trailing end.

‘Damn!’ said Will. ‘Sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rachel told him. ‘We’ll have to reshape it anyway. It’s the raw materials that count.’

Ira watched the robots painstakingly gather material to bring back to the
Ariel
until John claimed his attention again.

‘Captain, I think I’ve found a way in.’

Ira flicked over to the view from John’s lead robot. It was of an airlock, if a fairly basic-looking one. The whole ship was a weird mixture of styles, he mused – some high-tech, some clumsy. Who knew, maybe human ships would look the same way to an alien.

With a little help from Will, John’s robots forced the airlock open. Ira half-expected atmosphere to start screaming out, but nothing happened. The habitat must have long since been violated. They yanked back the door and peered inside. Their searchlights revealed nothing but a blizzard of floating crap. Will took the robots slowly in.