Roboteer (34 page)

Monet shook his head. His expression had turned bitter. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he said. ‘I’ve no reason to lie to you. Listen, nothing lasts for ever. Put cavemen in charge of starships and sooner or later we’re going to kill ourselves, with or without help. Either way, mankind’s days are numbered.’

‘Then let us be the ones who number them!’ Gustav spat.

‘Fine,’ said Monet quietly. ‘I don’t care if you believe me or not. Unless you release us, it’s irrelevant. You’ll know I’m telling you the truth when whatever sun you’re sitting near bloats up and fries you. It’s just a shame you won’t have long to regret your mistake.’

Gustav narrowed his eyes. This Earther might be mad but he wasn’t stupid. He knew how to goad his adversaries. Gustav regretted his earlier honesty. Still, if the roboteer became a threat, they could always kill him. He turned to the door and pressed the stud.

‘I’m finished,’ he told Chopra bitterly.

The door swung back and Gustav stepped out into the corridor where Rodriguez and the coordinator stood with expressions of unconvincing innocence on their faces.

‘Well, General?’ said Chopra.

‘Your assessment of the prisoner is accurate,’ Gustav said coldly. ‘His insanity is unfortunate. I will see the captain now.’

Gustav followed Chopra on down the corridor, leaving Monet’s cell behind. The sick, uncertain feeling in his gut came with him.

14.2: JOHN

The captain’s voice came over the bunkroom speakers.

‘Fifteen minutes to Galatean defence perimeter. Weapons officers, report for duty in five.’

John put down the dull pornographic pamphlet he’d been staring at and exhaled slowly. At last! This had been the longest fortnight of his life. It was ironic that he’d spent none of it as himself.

When the Reconsiderist Subsect Starship
Fist of Vengeance
had finished planet leave at New Angeles, the Akbar Inglez who’d shuttled aboard was not the same one who’d left two days before. The real Akbar Inglez was dead. He’d died wearing John’s face as he stumbled out of a resistance house clutching a gun. Now John had Akbar’s face, his pass-codes and his scout mission to Galatea.

John had always prided himself on not feeling guilt. There was little room for that emotion in the life of a spy, but some of the
Ariel
’s crew had been close to him, and the cost of his actions had been hard to bear. He’d counted Ira as almost a friend. And he didn’t like to think about Rachel.

When her face came swimming through his mind, as it did from time to time, he reminded himself that there had been no choice. The Angelenos would never have given him the antimatter. Not that he’d tried particularly hard to get it. From the beginning, he’d steered the negotiation towards a single place-swap with a crewman from an Earther ship. It was the only solution he could think of.

John knew what he had to do from the moment he looked at the star maps with Amy back in the Fecund system. He’d seen New Angeles sitting there just within their range and the plan had come to him fully formed.

The hardest part had been right at the start – convincing Ira that there was any hope of getting fuel there. Fortunately, the compromised roboteer had made that easy for him by kicking up such a fuss. Ira was too absorbed in getting the hell out of alien territory to think through the problems of obtaining antimatter in a star system at full alert.

It was fortunate that things worked out the way they had. Of the entire crew, only he and Hugo appeared to understand the potential threat the aliens posed. The bastards had cut through his finest defensive code as if it wasn’t there, for crying out loud. He hated them for that. He’d decided then that the aliens represented an appalling threat to the human race – one he wasn’t prepared to stand by and tolerate. Unfortunately, there had proved to be no way to purge the
Ariel
of the offending virus, which meant the ship couldn’t be allowed to return home.

Sadly, John knew there was no way he could convince the rest of the crew of that. Had he spoken his mind, Ira would have ordered him not to act and thereby doomed them all. So he’d had been forced to arrange for the ship’s destruction in secret.

Ira had made John’s work infinitely harder by insisting he take the infected roboteer down to the planet. But in the end, John managed to turn even that problem to his advantage. Pointing the finger at Will ensured that even if his plan went off beam, he’d never be suspected. His method also had the added advantage of convincing the Earthers that the trail was cold. Assuming everything went as planned after his swap, the rest of the crew were already dead and the
Ariel
destroyed, along with its sinister alien cargo.

John knew that Ira would never allow himself to be captured. The moment those Earther ships appeared at the rendezvous, he would have either fled or self-destructed. And with the fuel as low as it was, there was nowhere for him to go.

Thus, tidily, the Earthers knew no more about the aliens than they had a month ago. In contrast, the Galateans would be receiving a full report couriered to them at full speed aboard one of the enemy’s own scout ships. John was on his way home faster than he could ever have got there in
Ariel
, creeping around the perimeter of Kingdom space. He’d cut straight through the middle with priority fuelling stops all the way.

If there was one flaw to the entire plan, it had been the forced abandonment of Hugo. John had hoped to hand him over as part of his pay-off to the resistance. They would have gained valuable weapons expertise, while he’d have successfully planted someone with knowledge of the alien threat in a secure location. However, the resistance had shown little interest, so John had been forced to drop him. Still, in the grand scheme of things, Hugo’s role was irrelevant and the universe was certain to be a slightly less annoying place without him.

In its own bitter way, this plan was the masterstroke of John’s career. Unfortunately, there was no one he could tell. The Galatean Fleet would be unlikely to see his whole plan in a positive light. They tended to take a dim view of officers abandoning a ship and colleagues, even under such compelling circumstances.

John sighed as he stood and shuffled over to the wash cubicle. He locked the door behind him and positioned himself in front of the sink. A foreign face stared back at him in the mirror. He missed his features. He hated his new squinty eyes, his broken nose and ludicrous moustache. He hated the man they belonged to. Akbar Inglez was boorish and ignorant. He had no wit, no real grasp of the weapons he ran and precious few social skills. Like most Earthers, he was little more than a peasant. But as Metta had pointed out to him, that made Akbar all the easier to pretend to be.

The gaps in his memory had raised a few raised eyebrows among his new shipmates, of course, but John had explained those away with tales of a drug binge gone horribly wrong. His gruff simulated embarrassment had been enough to make the revolting crew clap him on the back and laugh at his misfortune.

John pulled his overalls down to his waist, tucked a towel around them and held his left arm over the sink. Then, with exquisite care, he pulled out the bone and super-carbon-composite knife from the concealed biopolymer pocket in his flesh. It stung like mad. Red blood and ochre packing plasma dripped from his elbow into the sink. John gritted his teeth as he eased the weapon out.

There was a thudding at the door.

‘Hey, Akbar, hurry up, you fat bastard. I need to go.’

That was Yuri, his bunkmate.

‘In a minute,’ John replied in Akbar’s thick, deep voice.

The knife was out at last. It was a narrow, wicked-looking thing with a serrated edge that had been designed to sit alongside the bones of his arm unnoticed during an X-ray scan. John placed it in the sink, washed as quickly as he could and flushed the toilet.

He flexed his left hand. It still ached, but not so much that it wouldn’t be useful in a fight. With calm efficiency, he pulled his overalls back up and carefully palmed the blade.

‘Come on, Akbar,’ said Yuri. ‘Finish jerking off already.’

John slid the door open, keeping his right hand high at the edge of the door. ‘I am done,’ he announced.

‘At last,’ muttered Yuri. ‘We’re supposed to be on watch by now.’

Yuri barged past him. As he did, John let the blade slip around in his hand and dragged the edge neatly across Yuri’s neck. Yuri’s eyes bulged as he died. In case a slit throat wasn’t enough, the knife’s edge was coated with a nerve agent that had activated within minutes of John exposing it to the air.

John shut the cubicle door behind Yuri. He wiped the blade on his bunk-bag, palmed the weapon once more and stepped out into the narrow companionway, whistling one of Akbar’s favourite tunes.

When he reached the weapons room, his team leader Gary Wu was waiting for him. The other two weapons operators were seated behind him, already strapped into their combat couches with bulky visors over their faces.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Wu demanded.

John’s knife flashed out and plunged into his heart. John sidestepped quickly, getting as little blood as he could on himself, and cut the throats of the other two men while they struggled with their straps.

John felt a certain satisfaction in these executions. He’d been listening to their light-hearted chat about genocide and the things they’d do to Gallie women for two whole weeks and had to laugh along with it. Now they were getting a first-hand taste of what genocide felt like.

With the ship’s weapons staff dead, there were only two other stations on the small scout to worry about – engineering and command. Engineering first, he decided. Command was where he wanted to end up.

The engineering room had three staff, all strapped into their couches and frantically teleoperating robots that someone like Will could have run on his own and half-asleep.

The thought of Will brought with it another twinge of regret. The man had clearly been compromised, John reminded himself. Not really himself at the end. Only a romantic fool like Rachel could miss it. John gritted his teeth.

‘Gunner Inglez! Can I help—’ said the chief of engineering as John’s poisoned blade slipped into his belly. The last, lucky engineer was halfway out of his seat before he died.

‘Captain! Emer—’ he managed to say into his throat-mike before John silenced him.

‘What was that, Engineering?’ came the reply from the captain.

John
tsked
to himself. That had torn it. He picked up the dead man’s mike and spoke in a passable impression of the engineer’s voice.

‘Sorry, Captain, sir. False alarm. My mistake.’

He dropped the mike and stepped to the door. He’d have to move swiftly now. Even as he walked away, he could hear the captain’s voice making fresh demands.

‘Give me a full status report, Engineering. Engineering?’

John ran along the companionway as quickly as the narrow walls and juddering, uneven gravity from the engines would permit. He reached the door to the bridge and typed in the executive override code he’d hacked into the system on his third day aboard.

The ship’s command crew looked up in surprise. The captain was there, surrounded by screens on his real leather couch. His three senior officers were positioned in front of him, walled in by the cumbersome crap the Earthers called ‘technology’.

‘Gunner Inglez,’ said the captain. ‘What in the Prophet’s name is going on? Why aren’t you at your post?’

By the time the captain had finished his question, he had an answer: John had dashed forward and stabbed the first officer in the chest. The three remaining men scrambled madly to get out of their couches. Two of them succeeded. The third died as he tried to rip open his last ankle strap. As he held a forearm up to protect himself, John did little more than rake the surface with the tip of his weapon, but it was enough. The Earther convulsed violently and slumped sideways over the couch, his ankle still trapped.

By that time, the real trouble had started. John ducked and rolled as the captain fired two whining rounds from his executive automatic.

‘Iqbal!’ the captain shouted to his remaining officer. ‘Iqbal, over here! I’ll cover you!’

John had to hand it to them – these top officers responded pretty fast. That didn’t mean they got to live, though. John waited for Iqbal to make his move and dived the other way, against the captain’s expectations.

‘Doors, seal,’ he ordered the computer.

The bridge’s bulkhead doors started sliding shut.

‘Doors, open!’ the captain yelled, but the computer wasn’t responding to him any more.

Just as John had hoped, the surprise of this held the captain’s attention for the critical second it took for John to stand and bury his blade in the captain’s neck. The captain slid forwards, letting the gun fall out of his hand.

John and Iqbal both made a desperate dash towards the weapon. Iqbal was closer, but John wasn’t aiming for the gun. He was aiming for Iqbal’s head. Even as the man grabbed the barrel, John’s foot connected with his head, snapping it back and killing him instantly.

‘Thank you,’ said John calmly, plucking the gun from the dead man’s hands.

He emptied a few rounds into Iqbal, just in case. Then he pushed the captain’s corpse away from the command chair and sat in it. He surveyed the ship’s performance stats and
tsked
to himself again. Not good. The very last thing the wily captain had done was to kick the ship into a fatal-overload condition.

John wrestled the antimatter feed profiles back to a semblance of normality. It wasn’t easy. The simple Earther robots needed constant coaxing. With extreme care, he gently teased the ship out of warp – a task that usually required the attention of three men.

There was a gruesome bump as the gravity failed. Radiation alarms sounded across the bridge.

‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ John shouted.

He pulled everything but the fusion cores offline as fast as he could. Unfortunately, the radiation alarms remained.