Roboteer (2 page)

‘Those drones are closing, Ira,’ said Amy.

‘I can see that.’

The drones slid effortlessly into targeting range and opened fire with their g-rays. Fierce crackling filled the tiny cabin as the buffers struggled to compensate.

Ira flinched in surprise. ‘Shit!’

‘I told you those rays were hard,’ said Amy.

Ira yanked the joystick. The ship went into a gut-wrenching turn.

‘Rachel, damage report.’

‘Thirty per cent of our secondary buffers just blew,’ his engineer replied.

Ira winced. Drones with that kind of power were unheard of. Another hit like that could finish them. Only one primary buffer had to fail for their fragile habitat core to be scoured with radiation.

‘I want all the power we can spare going through those buffers,’ he ordered.

‘It already is,’ said Rachel.

How could a single drone put more power into a laser than his ship’s engines?

He keyed his roboteer. ‘Doug?’

‘Repairs in progress, Captain. We’ll be good as new in no time.’

Even though synthesised direct at Ira’s implant, Doug’s voice still sounded strangled. Doug didn’t do well in heavy gees. He was the only one on board not bred for the rigours of spaceflight.

‘John, I want countermeasures,’ said Ira.

‘Launching now.’

‘John, I need to know what I’m looking at. I want tactical profiles on these things. I want weapons specs.’

‘Ira!’ Amy squawked.

Ira banked hard and hurled on the power as another drone lined up to fire. It felt like a freight train had landed on his chest. Stars skittered across his vision. Someone whimpered on a lower bunk.

‘Amy, how long till we’re out of this cloud?’ Ira gasped, relying on the throat-mike to turn his wheezing into words.

‘Eighteen more seconds. I see another drone charging—’

Ira flipped the ship again and almost blacked out as the anvil of gravity crashed into him.

‘Ten, nine, eight—’ breathed Amy.

‘Rachel?’ said Ira.

‘Ready.’

Ira kept the ship turning as he brought the gravity engines back online. This time, he meant to hit the edge of the cloud running.

‘Three, two, one,’ said Amy. ‘We’re clear!’

Ira engaged warp. For an awful second, the thrust from the fusion torches combined with the pull of the gravity engines. It felt like his organs were fighting to escape through his back. Then the torch died and they were away.

The drones shrank to dots behind them.

1.3: WILL

Captain Beaumont-Klein’s voice rang in Will’s ears.

‘Brace for warp.’ For the last ten minutes, Will had ached for the waiting to end. Now he wished it could have lasted a little longer. His combat-bag jolted as the
Phoenix
’s engines kicked in. As the growl of the drive filled the ship, a burst of fresh orders from Central Command unfolded in his head like a spiritual revelation.

Something had gone wrong. The ships guarding the antimatter factory were in deep trouble. Pictures of the battle scene flashed up to fill his field of vision. The disrupter cloud was the biggest he’d ever seen, its ragged ends stretching for tens of thousands of kilometres, like a dark scarf blown in a slow-motion wind. Will experienced a cold rush of fear.

All three cruisers were in danger. The
Baloo
wasn’t responding, the
Walrus
was losing power and the
Aslan
was under heavy fire. And they were all deep inside that cloud. It was a catastrophe, and it had somehow been wrought by those six little ships.

The
Phoenix
closed rapidly on the battle, cutting in-system to get as near as it could without hitting the cloud. Then it turned and ploughed straight in, fusion torches at full burn. Will’s combat-bag threw him sideways. Captain Klein was taking them in to rescue the trapped cruisers.

As soon as it was within targeting range, the
Phoenix
came under assault. G-rays raked the mighty ship’s buffers. The vessel automatically fired off its gravity shields. Will called up a distortion map and watched the tiny drones race away. Each shield was visible as a hard little pucker in the loose weave of space. It was a shield’s job to draw fire towards itself and away from the ship it guarded, but their fields softened and shrank almost as soon as they were launched. The enemy buoys had manoeuvred to turn their fire-cones upon them.

‘Will?’ said Franz.

‘Here, sir.’

‘We’re taking out those disrupters. Here’s your template.’

A SAP model immediately downloaded. It looked like a cartoon schematic of some fabulously complex clockwork machine. Shining recall trees hung off the core-cycle, laden with the SAP’s memories, each one a brightly coloured block bristling with spiky semantic tags.

‘It should compensate for the enemy evasives,’ Franz told him. ‘Now go!’

Will pressed the model to his mind like a mask. He could feel the SAP’s cunning, its eagerness to hunt. With a sweep of one virtual arm, he created sixty-four copies of the program, injected their client modules into the
Phoenix
’s waiting torpedoes and fired. Then he tethered his perceptions to the lead torpedo and flew out with it into the dark.

This was the job he’d been bred to do: to manage, train and guide SAPs from the inside. In physical terms, his mind was just talking to the ship’s server substrate. The servers talked to the comms array, and the array ferried orders to the torpedoes via bursts of laser light. But to Will, the effect was seamless.

He stared through unblinking electronic eyes and raced across the aching void of space. As the torpedo, he hungered to join with the disrupters hanging ahead of him in an embrace of spectacular death.

The disrupters hovered like a shoal of fat fish and then scattered as Will plunged into their midst. Will twisted and snagged the closest. They exploded together in a blast of fusion flame.

Will swapped his viewpoint to another torpedo. The disrupters boosted desperately away from him, trying to manoeuvre out of range without losing their hold on the pinned cruisers. Will ripped after them, his kamikaze brethren beside him. He picked his target and dived on it. The disrupter couldn’t move fast enough. G-ray blasts from the ships below tried to spear him as he closed for the kill, but it was no use. Will was the shark and the disrupter the sluggish whale. Impact was ecstasy.

His perspective jumped again, to a new pursuit. Forests of g-ray blasts erupted on all sides. He slalomed between them, his digital senses far faster than the old-fashioned targeting programs on the enemy ships.

Suddenly, a ball of white-hot flame ignited next to him. One of his kind was hit. Will cursed. It was bad news to lose a torpedo so soon.

On impulse, he pulled back to re-examine the attack pattern. As expected, he still had enough torpedoes to kill every disrupter, and each of his torpedoes was more than a match for the Earther defences. So why did he suddenly feel worried?

Then he saw it. It was subtle – something only Will’s specialist eye for a pattern would recognise. The fight no longer had an ordinary shoal-and-shark dynamic. Franz hadn’t compensated for the increased power of the g-ray defences. Even glancing hits were reducing Will’s numbers. The enemy beams would thin out his torpedoes too soon. That meant there would still be enough disrupters left to shower their poison onto the trapped starships. They wouldn’t be able to free the
Aslan
– or themselves.

Will needed a way to make fewer torpedoes go further. He stared desperately out at the staccato blasts of radiation that were ruining his assault and cursed. Then an idea struck him. If those g-rays were a risk to him, surely they were to the disrupters as well. Was there some way he could turn that fact to his advantage? The answer was
yes
, but the SAPs would need to be sheepdogs, not sharks.

He spurred his lead torpedo on alone and ducked back to his home node where the SAP model hung before him. A blizzard of flashing colour-coded markers picked out the active thought-chunks of each weapon he had left.

Will chased along the stony tunnels of his mind to his private chambers. He grabbed a handful of memory-chunks for playground games and flicked back to the running model. Without pausing for a seizure check, he slammed his chunks onto a fresh branch of the model’s primary tree and started hooking up instinct keys as fast as he could. With luck, this old game of his would bind to Franz’s carefully structured pursuit tactics and give them exactly what they needed.

An angry shout filled his sensorium, almost breaking his concentration. ‘Will! What in Gal’s name are you doing?’ It was Franz.

Under battle conditions, SAP design was Franz’s job. Will wasn’t supposed to touch them.

‘Leave my SAP alone and get back out there!’ Franz roared.

Will didn’t listen. He couldn’t stop now or the torpedoes would hit the new memories and stall. He frantically hooked up the last few links.

‘Stop!’ yelled the expert. ‘Do you want to get us all killed?’

Will heard Franz open a channel to the captain.

‘Sir, we have an emergency. My roboteer’s gone rogue!’

Will connected the last strand and leapt back into the head of the lead torpedo. It was coursing through a barrage of enemy fire, hungrily chasing a fleeing disrupter. Will triggered the new memories.

It wasn’t a clean patch, but it worked. He felt an abrupt surge of incongruous joy as the missile changed its mind about its intentions in mid-swerve. Rather than heading straight for the buoy, it veered at the last moment, forcing the disrupter to bank hard towards another of its kind. The buoys crashed, erupting in a blast of white-hot ions.

Will’s heart soared, despite the furious bellowing from the captain he could hear in the back of his head.

‘Monet! What the hell is going on?’

Will watched with glee as his torpedoes shepherded the disrupters into each other, and into their own ships’ g-ray fire. Like most Earther machines, the buoys were gratifyingly stupid, designed to follow basic instructions from an unmodified human operator. They had no idea how to respond to being played with. Captain Klein fell silent as he witnessed the sudden rash of disrupter deaths.

However, while Will had started thinning the disrupter cloud nicely, his sensors showed him that the
Phoenix
was taking a beating. Secondary buffers were at sixty per cent and falling, and Gordon was having trouble fending off the enemy’s barrage of fire. Will took a copy of the new template branch and passed it to him. With luck, the same thought patterns used in reverse would help to lead enemy drones away from the
Phoenix
.

By the time Will was back behind the eyes of his lead missile, the
Aslan
’s engines were powering up again. The
Baloo
and
Walrus
looked dead, but under the circumstances saving one ship out of three wasn’t bad.

The Earthers made a last desperate attempt to ensnare the flagship again, but their buoys were spread in a hopeless sprawl. Five seconds later, the
Aslan
had warped out. Will heard cheers somewhere in the background. The
Phoenix
’s engines started to charge.

Will sent his remaining torpedoes on death dives towards the enemy ships just before the expected order came.

‘Ready for warp!’

In the next second, the battle was a flaring dot in the distance behind them.

Will allowed himself a moment to exhale. He could hear the other roboteers laughing and whooping all around him. With pride and relief still coursing through him, he linked to Franz. Franz’s face was beet-red and wide-eyed.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Will, ‘but I saw a problem with your pattern and had to improvise.’

For a moment, Franz just stared. ‘You disobeyed a direct order.’ His voice was cold.

Will’s spirits fell. ‘Yes, sir.’

Then the captain’s voice came online. ‘Mr Kuno-Monet.’

Will winced at the tone.

‘You’re damned lucky we got out of that alive,’ said Klein. ‘You jeopardised the entire ship, and the
Aslan
, too.’

‘Captain, I—’ Will started.

‘What were you thinking – hot-patching in the middle of a firefight? And with private files, too. The whole volley could have seized.’

‘I’m sorry, Captain,’ said Will. ‘There was a flaw in the attack pattern—’

‘The pattern was fine,’ snapped Franz.

Of course, Franz hadn’t even checked. He was too confident of his own genius, and of Will’s inferiority, to bother.

‘The only thing flawed in that attack—’

Will cut the expert off before he could embarrass himself further. ‘Sir, you failed to compensate for the g-ray barrage intensity. Had I left your pattern active, torpedo attrition would have run seventeen per cent higher than your prediction. We’d all be dead.’

Franz stared speechless into his cabin camera.

‘I will of course prepare a combat simulation for you to explain my actions,’ Will added.

The captain sighed. ‘Franz, prepare a report,’ he said tiredly. ‘And Will, I want to see a full memory log.’

‘Captain—’ said Franz.

‘Enough!’ barked Klein. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about it till we’re back in port.’ The communication channel closed.

Will was dumped back into his home node, where the combat SAP was still winking. He ripped the fat-contact off his neck and sagged back in exhaustion.

1.4: IRA

Ira skipped clear of the Memburi system into the blissfully clean space between the stars. He locked in the autopilot, flicked up his visor and breathed a sigh of relief.

He looked down into the
Ariel
’s cramped main cabin. ‘Everyone okay?’

Amy was already at the bottom bunk with Rachel beside her. That wasn’t good. Crew only left their bunks under heavy warp in an emergency. Something bad must have happened. For a moment, Ira’s heart went into free fall despite the shuddering tug of warp gravity.