Roboteer (40 page)

‘Don’t worry,’ Will said softly as he undid Hugo’s straps. ‘We’ll get you out of here. No one’s going to hurt you any more.’

As Will lifted Hugo out of his chair, the man stared at him with wide, liquid eyes.

‘Why?’ he whimpered.

Will wondered what Hugo meant. Was he asking why Will had betrayed them, or why he’d come back? Will decided on an answer as vague as it was true.

‘Because you’re my shipmate,’ he said. He hefted the boneless scientist over his shoulder and turned to Rachel. ‘Time to get Ira,’ he said.

16.4: IRA

Ira was exercising when the first of the strange sounds reached his cell. He heard muted shouting and banging through the walls from somewhere nearby. The Earthers must be celebrating. Either that or a new prisoner had been brought in.

He stopped and listened anyway. He always did when there was a chance to gain new information – anything that might add to his meagre store of hope. Staying in shape in the cell was easy. Keeping up morale wasn’t. Nevertheless, Ira had fiercely retained his belief in the possibility of escape throughout his incarceration. It mattered not to him that he was surrounded by Earthers, trapped inside a habitat ring closed in by empty space. There was always a way out.

It had been easier to believe that while they were still questioning him, of course. He’d had something to bargain with, then – a way of fishing information out of his captors. Then they’d stopped asking. They’d gone from being fiercely keen to learn his command codes to apparently indifferent overnight. No one had visited him or spoken to him in days. Had it not been for the arrival of rations through his food slot, he could have imagined he’d been forgotten altogether.

The sounds disappeared for a while and then returned, louder than before. They were a strange mixture, some violent noises, some plaintive. He heard something he could have sworn was gunfire, yet no alerts were sounding. Ira’s hopes rose. Maybe a great accident had befallen the station, or his Fleet had come to rescue him. Or perhaps the sun was swelling up, he thought darkly, quashing his insurgent optimism before it caused him to lose focus.

He tested the door. It was still locked. Just in case, he positioned himself carefully to the side of it and readied for attack. He wasn’t a moment too soon, for just then the door shot back. Ira sprang forward.

He managed to rein in his punch at the last instant. It wasn’t an Earther guard he was looking at. It was Will Kuno-Monet. Will’s green prison overalls were covered with blood, and there was a strange, serene smile on his face.

‘Hello, Captain,’ he said dreamily.

‘You!’ Ira exclaimed.

‘We’ve come to get you out,’ said Will.

Ira’s mind raced. The boy didn’t appear to be in his right mind, and the circumstances were not exactly the ones he’d expected in a rescue situation. Was this some kind of trap? Were the Earthers finally enacting some kind of ruse to make him relinquish the
Ariel
’s command codes?

‘How the hell did you get in here?’ he demanded.

‘I killed the guards,’ said Will.

He made it sound like
I made you some tea
.

Ira examined the roboteer’s narrow frame. Something in this picture didn’t add up.

‘Ulanu told me what you said to him,’ said Ira. ‘You told him about the Transcended.’

Will nodded.

‘That’s one betrayal,’ said Ira, his fist still poised and ready to strike. ‘Who’s to say you’re not capable of another?’ He cracked the bones in his neck. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.’

Will sighed. Rachel appeared in the doorway, propping up a broken-looking Hugo.

‘He’s on the level, sir,’ she said. ‘The Transcended have given him some kind of power over the habitat computers.’

The sight of his engineer, alive and unharmed, was better than a blue sky to Ira. He hadn’t dared to hope. But that wasn’t a reason to let his guard down just yet.

‘Did you forget that it was probably the Transcended who landed us in this mess?’ he told her.

Will shook his head. ‘That was John. I’ve been back over my memory logs and found the evidence. He never managed to negotiate the antimatter – all he negotiated was his own escape. The man we saw killed was someone else.’

Ira blinked in disbelief. John was certainly capable of such subterfuge, but Ira had worked with him for years. He was no traitor.

‘I don’t buy it,’ said Ira. ‘He wouldn’t do it.’

‘He might if he thought it was the only way to save the mission,’ Rachel retorted.

Ira stared at her. ‘You believe this?’

She nodded.

‘Look,’ said Will. He pointed to the wall-screen in Ira’s cell. ‘This is from my memory logs.’

Ira watched as a man with John’s face stumbled out of a house on New Angeles in slow motion. As he did, the truth of Will’s words settled into him like a boulder in his gut. It wasn’t John.

He turned back to Rachel. ‘Is this what you saw?’ he demanded.

Rachel nodded hurriedly. ‘Yes! Come on, sir. We can worry about it later. Right now the important thing is to get out of here alive.’

Ira nodded. Regardless of Will’s intentions, this still represented the best chance he’d had to escape. He needed to take it.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Will pointed along the curving corridor. ‘The exit to the prison block is this way.’

Ira grabbed his arm. ‘Not so fast. What about Amy?’

Will’s face drained of all expression. Ira saw something cold in the roboteer’s eyes that made the hair on his arms stand straight up.

‘Amy’s dead,’ he said.

Ira froze. She couldn’t be. Not Amy.

‘They executed her,’ said Will, and walked on without looking back.

Ira felt faint for a moment as that old numbness crept over him again. But just like last time, Ira couldn’t afford to mourn. He drew a lungful of air.

‘Give me Hugo,’ he told Rachel.

Hoisting the human burden across his shoulders, Ira set off after the roboteer. Doors opened before them and closed behind. It was both intoxicating and unsettling to have so much freedom after being trapped in a single room for so long. Ira savoured every sinister moment.

Then they reached a door which drew back to reveal a line of maintenance robots parked in front of them. They were squat, wheeled things with rudimentary tact-fur and pairs of telescopic arms. The lighter ones were armed with habitat carbines. The heavier machines carried two-metre-long bulkhead-repair plates.

‘What’s this?’ said Ira.

‘This is the end of the prison block,’ Will explained. ‘The funny thing is that it’ll be more dangerous from here on. There are no guns in the walls and not half so many doors, so I’ve arranged for an escort. You can put Hugo down if you want – the machines will carry him.’

Hugo waved an arm. ‘It’s okay,’ he warbled. ‘I think I can walk.’

Will smiled at him. ‘Nice to have you back, Doc.’

Ira glanced at both of them. Something in Will had
definitely
changed. He put Hugo down gently, keeping his eyes on the robots. It was very obvious this was Will’s show, and he wasn’t entirely comfortable with that situation.

‘And where is this escort taking us?’ he said.

‘To retrieve the archive,’ Will replied. ‘It’s in one of the holds on the inner level. The Earthers have turned it into a research lab.’

Ira didn’t suppose there was much he could say about that. Apparently Transcended technology was getting him out of jail. Given that, it would be churlish to deny the Transcended an objective or two.

‘Lead on, then,’ he said, with a sweep of his hand.

They walked for what felt like miles, ascending ramp after ramp as the gravity progressively decreased. Ira found the station’s empty passageways disturbing. Every now and then they passed a door on which someone was furiously banging, or through which muffled shouting or wailing could be heard. Other than that, there was no evidence of human life.

Just how had Will managed this? Whenever Will first shut the doors, there must have been some people in the corridors. Where had they all gone?

‘Hey, Will, where is everybody?’ he asked. His voice echoed off the metal walls.

‘Around,’ said Will. ‘I’m taking us on a route that avoids trouble. And I’ve managed to convince some of the Earthers to leave the halls on our behalf – they think there’s an air-management crisis. They’re not all convinced, though. The High Church put a lot of extra security around the archive. The automated systems are under my control, but I haven’t been able to convince the squads posted there to leave. They’ve entrenched their position, so we have no choice but to go through them.’

That didn’t sound good.

‘How many men are we talking?’ Ira asked.

‘About forty.’

Ira shot him a look. ‘And how are we supposed to manage that?’

‘With robots,’ Will replied mildly.

Ira glanced quickly at Rachel, but she didn’t look remotely fazed by the answer. Maybe there was something wrong with her, too.

However, when they rounded the top of the last ramp, Ira saw what Will meant. The high-ceilinged upper level was crowded with autonomous machines of all descriptions, everything from heavy lifters to cleaner bugs.

‘Are you sure you can run all these things at once?’ said Ira.

Will chuckled. ‘No problem.’

Ira and his crew bounced with feather-light steps through the huge, echoing hangar hallway. Will stopped them outside a pair of sealed doors three stories tall.

‘I’d stay back if I were you,’ he said. ‘You won’t be needed for this.’

Ira was about to comment, but Rachel took his arm.

‘Leave him,’ she said softly. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

Ira reluctantly allowed himself to be screened behind the robotic shield Will arranged for them. He watched as the roboteer took his place in front of the doors with his army of machines positioned about him. He gestured with his hands and the massive doors rolled back.

Almost immediately, there was a barrage of gunfire from the other side. Flechettes sprayed off Will’s barrier of bulkhead plating. Protected by his retinue of robots, he stepped forward. Will’s army powered into the room beyond. Lifters wrenched up the barricades the Earthers had created to defend themselves as if they were made of matchsticks. Maintenance robots tore guns from the hands of soldiers while cleaners darted about their legs, tripping them and spraying them with adhesive foam. Erratic gunfire and cries of panic echoed through the chamber. Will walked through it all serenely, tilting his head from time to time as if listening to some inaudible tune.

Will jerked once as a stray flech ripped into his shoulder, but walked on as if he felt nothing at all. Ira stared at him in disbelief. If Will had so much power over these machines, why had he bothered to enter the room and expose himself to danger? He could have fought the battle from anywhere.

Will turned slightly. Ira caught a glimpse of his face and understood. A soft, insane smile curved the roboteer’s lips. Will wanted this. He wanted his enemies to see his face as he smashed them. Ira grimaced. The old Will didn’t have this kind of appetite for vengeance. What had the Earthers done to him, for crying out loud?

Within another few seconds, the fight was over. The Earther positions had been demolished and the soldiers were either unconscious or helpless. The air was heavy with the sound of their plaintive cries. Apparently many of them had broken limbs, perhaps deliberately caused.

Amazingly, the entire operation had been conducted without Will’s force firing a shot. Though as the robots pulled back, it was clear that a soldier or two had been mangled beneath the lifters’ wheels.

‘You can come out now,’ Will called to his friends. ‘It’s safe.’

Ira wasn’t exactly pleased at being treated like a delicate civilian, but he was too astonished by Will’s achievement to care. He stepped up to examine their prize. In the middle of the storage chamber was a bank of screens and sensors. A small cluster of white-robed technicians huddled behind it. Behind them was the immense scaffold in which the archive sat.

‘Your services are no longer required,’ Will told the technicians. ‘You may go.’

The technicians fled in a series of frantic, graceless leaps, their terror outweighing their attention to the meagre gravity. Will’s robots set about dismantling the scaffold and moving the archive into the cargo airlock at the back.

‘We’ve done what can be done here,’ he said. Blood oozed sluggishly from his shoulder, but Will was apparently indifferent to it. ‘The robots will take the archive outside and shuttle-bugs will carry it to whatever ship we decide to take.’

Ira fixed him with a look. ‘I can’t imagine there’s any question about that. We take the
Ariel
.’

An expression disturbingly akin to pity crossed Will’s features. ‘We can’t,’ he said.

Ira’s body tensed for a confrontation. ‘And why the hell not?’

Will stepped over to the technicians’ monitors and pointed to one of the screens. It flared into life.

‘Look,’ he said.

Ira looked. What he saw appalled him. The
Ariel
was in pieces. Great swathes of its exohull cladding had been removed, exposing the workings underneath. Whole field inducers had been stripped away.

Ira’s chest tightened in pain. His ship! That vessel had been his pride and his home. It had been his
life
. He felt the loss of this mere machine savagely, in a way he hadn’t been able to with the news of Amy’s death. Maybe because it was safer to grieve after a piece of metal than his best friend. For a moment, he felt his entire emotional landscape tilt. Tears clouded his vision.

‘I’ve been looking over what the Earthers have got,’ said Will, but Ira barely heard him. His eyes were glued to the dreadful sight of his dead ship. ‘What do you think of this one?’ said Will.

The image on the screen changed. Ira reeled back. He took a deep breath and tried to focus on the new vessel. It was a battle cruiser, a vast, unwieldy monster a couple of dozen kilometres from end to end. Ira could see at a glance that it was a graceless, brutal thing. A piece of shit. Nothing like his
Ariel
.