Roboteer (41 page)

‘Too big,’ he said emptily.

That he should have come to this – Amy lost, no ship and his mission in tatters. If he ever laid eyes on John, he’d rip the bastard apart with his bare hands. You didn’t kill your own shipmates to save yourself. Regardless of what the scheming bastard believed about the mission, he should have known that.

Will touched his shoulder. Ira looked up suddenly.

‘Did you hear me?’ said Will.

Ira shook his head. ‘Sorry, what were you saying?’

‘I said it doesn’t matter how big it is. You just have to be able to pilot it. Rachel and I will do the rest.’

Ira looked back at the ugly cruiser.

‘Captain,’ said Will. ‘We have to make up our minds fast. Word’s already out to the rest of the system that something’s going on here. They haven’t acted so far because they don’t want to fire on their own space station, but they’ll get over that soon enough.’

‘Okay,’ said Ira, screwing shut his eyes. ‘I can fly it.’

With leaden steps, he followed Will out of the storage bay and along the great, echoing tunnel to a bank of docking-pod locks. Ira forced himself back into the moment. There would come a time for avenging the
Ariel
, and Amy. First they had to get away from New Angeles.

‘I’ll need your help plotting a course for Galatea,’ he told Rachel. ‘I have no idea what the warp profile is like on that thing.’

Will turned to face him. ‘Sir. Ira. That’s not where we’re going. I’m taking her back to the Fecund system.’

Ira stared at him. Did Will really imagine he’d changed so much that he could ignore his commanding officer?

‘Sorry, Will,’ he said slowly, ‘but we have to get back to Galatea while there’s still a Fleet there to report to.’

That look of pity appeared on Will’s face again. ‘There’s no point,’ he said.

Ira found his heart hammering. ‘No point? What do you mean,
no point
?’

‘The invasion fleet has already left,’ said Will. ‘Galatea will have been attacked by now. What’s done is done.’

Ira’s chest tightened again. In other words he’d failed to fulfil his mission, and his home world was under the thumb of a horde of genocidal madmen.

‘I don’t care!’ he shouted, surprising even himself. ‘We can rendezvous with the evacuation arks – I know the rallying coordinates.’

Will shook his head. ‘Sorry, sir, but we’ve got to go back.’

‘Have you thought for a moment about what you’re suggesting?’ Ira yelled. ‘That fucking hulk you picked out doesn’t have stealth!’ He jerked a finger back towards the room with the monitors. ‘You’d be leading the rest of the Earther fleet straight to a lifetime supply of alien fucking technology! I’m giving you a direct order, Mr Monet. We’re going home.’

Will looked sadly at the floor. ‘Stay here, if you prefer,’ he said.

‘
What
did you say?’ boomed Ira.

‘I said stay if you want,’ Will repeated quietly. ‘You gave me that option. Or take another ship. All of you.’ His eyes flicked to Rachel and Hugo. ‘I’ll give you SAPs that will make it easy. But I have to go back, and I hope you’ll come with me.’

‘I’ll come,’ Rachel said softly.

Ira stared dumbly at her.

Will turned to Hugo. ‘How about you, Doc?’

Hugo’s lips pursed. He nodded vaguely.

Will smiled at him. ‘No more worries about the alien menace?’

Hugo’s mouth trembled into a bitter smile. ‘I have worries,’ he replied. ‘This change in you means nothing – you still have nothing but their word to go on, and everything I said may yet be true. But since we arrived here, I have had certain …’ His eyes drifted for a moment. He looked like he was about to cry. ‘Experiences …’ he finished raggedly. ‘Given the choice between Truists and aliens, I choose aliens. I would like to see the church … crushed.’ The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. ‘Yes, crushed.’

Ira shook his head in disbelief. ‘This is fucking
crazy
! You’re heading to a dead system with no fuel in it. We’ll be right back where we started!’

Will shook his head. ‘We won’t need fuel.’

The door to the docking pod opened. Will stepped inside, followed by Rachel and Hugo.

‘You’re violating a direct order,’ Ira shouted.

Will nodded. ‘Are you coming?’

They were going to keep him away from his people. Away from reporting. Away from John.

Ira crunched his hands into fists and stormed in beside them. ‘I hope you realise that this little power trip of yours is entirely temporary,’ he told Will, and stabbed the close stud on the door.

17:
BACK IN THE SADDLE

17.1: WILL

As the docking-pod door opened, Ira thrust himself out into the cruiser’s orbital corridor. Will was just behind him.

‘Which way to the bridge?’ said Ira.

Will asked the ship. Pieces of himself were already infiltrating every part of its primitive network.

‘That way,’ he said, pointing right.

Ira grabbed the handrail and dragged himself off at great speed. Will followed. Whispering SAPs informed him that the other ships in the system were taking a lot of interest in the station and had started cycling their encryption. That meant they didn’t have long to escape New Angeles orbit alive. Even so, Will found it impossible to feel hurried. The strange sense of numb serenity that had settled on him after he killed Vargas hadn’t lifted.

The bridge, when they reached it, was like something out of a history interactive. Bulky acceleration couches with consoles on their arms faced a wall filled with monitors as if it was some kind of window.

Ira took the pilot’s seat. Rachel looked around for something that was recognisably an engineering console. Will pointed it out to her.

‘Hugo, do you think you can run astrogation?’ said Ira.

Hugo nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

Will took the captain’s seat. Ira scowled at him as he sat down. Will felt a moment’s annoyance. What else was he supposed to do? It was the best place from which to monitor all the ship’s functions. And in the absence of a proper crew, that was exactly what he’d have to do.

‘All right,’ Ira growled. ‘Let’s get this shitty tub afloat.’

‘Not yet,’ said Will. ‘There are some things I need to do first.’

He shut his eyes and stretched his mind out through the starship’s comms-ports back to the space station. Since leaving the prison block, Will had been gathering robots together from all across the forty-kilometre-long structure. They’d brought with them anything and everything that Will could imagine might be useful in the Fecund system, from welding torches to medical supplies.

Now he directed them towards the loading trucks that ran to the ship’s cargo bays. For the job that lay ahead of him, Will was going to need every pair of hands he could get. He packed machines designed for gravity environments into storage containers. The rest he moved into the ship’s open portals, along with the shuttle-bugs that carried the archive.

‘Captain,’ said Hugo, ‘I think we have a problem. The two ships that were posted in sentinel orbits are moving towards us. I’m receiving data packets from them which I believe are some kind of identification test.’

‘Will, we need to move,’ said Ira.

Will watched train after train of loaded cars trundle into the massive hull.

‘One more minute,’ he said.

‘Message coming in on the public channel,’ Hugo reported.

‘Let’s hear it,’ said Ira.

A voice blared into life through the bridge speakers. ‘KMS
Nanshan
, this is Captain Yuen of the
Third March
. We can see you loading. What’s happening over there,
Nanshan
? Can you tell us why the station blacked out? We haven’t heard anything for over an hour.’

Ira opened his mouth to speak but Will got there first.

‘Good to hear you, Yuen,’ he said, trying to sound relieved. ‘This is Acting Captain …’ He rapidly scanned the station’s database for a real name. ‘Kay Aquino. There’s been an outbreak of a computer virus of some kind, sir. The people are safe for the most part, but comms are down and security’s not responding. We think the outbreak came from the High Church research lab on Level A, so it could be of Galatean origin. We’ve also had some trouble with robots, sir, so we’re moving as much vulnerable hardware out of the way as quickly as we can. We should be done in a matter of minutes.’

Will simultaneously instructed the station’s computers to make it look as if he was telling the truth. He fired a couple of half-hearted infection attempts at the approaching ships from the habitat ring.

‘They won’t buy that for long,’ Ira warned.

‘They won’t have to,’ said Will. He quickly pulled aboard the last of the robots and retracted the loading rails. ‘I’m done. We can go.’

‘About time.’ Ira’s fingers flew across the board. He powered up the engines.

Almost immediately, Captain Yuen’s voice returned. ‘What are you doing, Aquino?’

‘Moving a safe distance from the station, sir,’ said Will. ‘This is the only uninfected ship and we need to get clear.’

‘You do not have permission. You are to hold your position until your status has been validated.’

Will grimaced. ‘Can’t do that, sir. The docking systems stopped responding when we disconnected. They won’t let us back on.’ He turned his mind to the
Nanshan
’s external sensor array just in time to see the
Third March
launch its disrupter swarm. It held them steady in an attack configuration.

‘If you cannot dock automatically, make a manual tether,’ Yuen ordered. ‘Prophet knows you’ve got the machines to do it.’

Meanwhile, the other Kingdom ship had swung around the station and was closing on the
Nanshan
from the opposite side. Both vessels were smaller than the one Will had stolen but they were far from harmless.

‘Sir, I think it’s time to leave,’ Will told Ira.

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said the captain. ‘Hold on tight.’

He ignited the fusion torches and the
Nanshan
pulled away from the station at full conventional thrust – a pitiful three gravities. The Kingdom ships sped after them, matching course and speed. The
Third March
’s disrupters surged forwards and spread around the
Nanshan
like the talons of a mighty claw.

‘This is out of order, Aquino!’ barked the voice on the speakers. ‘Power down your engines or we’ll fire.’

Then let’s beat them to it
, Will thought to himself. He fired a volley of well-aimed g-rays into the disrupter swarm and launched the cruiser’s defensive drones. On a ship this primitive, there wasn’t enough processing power for him to do anything particularly clever with them.

‘
Third March
, please ignore that last assault!’ Will cried down the public channel. ‘We were wrong about the virus, sir. We are infected. Repeat, we
are
infected. The weapons array is not under our control! In the name of the Prophet, please retract all weapons immediately! We will attempt to move the ship to a safe distance until the virus can be combated.’

‘Negative,
Nanshan
,’ said Captain Yuen. ‘Power down engines and prepare to be boarded.’

Will shut the channel. ‘Any chance of some evasives here?’ he asked Ira.

‘We’re running them already!’ Ira snapped.

Great. The cruiser was so cumbersome that Will hadn’t noticed.

This problem was going to need a different solution. Will threw a handful of SAPs at the
Third March
’s security. The cruiser wasn’t equipped with all the fancy tools the
Ariel
had enjoyed, but it did have the advantage of a full suite of Earther security codes in its command cores.

‘Second ship just launched disrupters,’ said Hugo.

It only took them seconds to close on the
Nanshan
. Will tried to fend them off with more g-ray fire, but keeping the enemy buoys from surrounding his ship wasn’t easy. Running three weapons banks and several dozen tiny spacecraft simultaneously had his skills at full stretch, even with his new abilities.

‘How long till warp?’ he grunted as his mind flickered from problem to problem.

‘We’re trying!’ Rachel replied. ‘This engineering set-up was built for a crew of five. I don’t have the software for it.’

While still struggling to outmanoeuvre the disrupter swarm with his drones, Will ducked into the vault of his new mind. He threw Rachel every engineering program his body had access to. They started popping up all over her console.

‘Hurry!’ he urged.

It was no use. The disrupters closed and fired. Every time Will targeted one, another started up, increasing the distance before they could warp out.

Finally, one of Will’s security SAPs came back. It had matched the attackers’ encryption cycle. Will cackled and cracked the
Third March
’s main computer open like a walnut.

‘Take that!’ he yelled, firing an order for assault-system shutdown straight into their primary processors.

Half the disrupter swarm fell away. Before Will could repeat the trick, however, the second ship swapped cycles.

‘Four more cruisers moving in from the outer system,’ Hugo warned.

Will gritted his teeth. There had to be a better way to fight this battle. He reached back into the
Third March
and started pushing SAP code into the compromised computers. He didn’t have time to make the new software particularly strong or sophisticated, but he only needed control of the enemy ship for a minute or two.

With ponderous deliberation, the
Third March
retrained its weapons on the second Kingdom vessel and started firing everything it had. Will smiled as he listened over the public channel to the shouts of panic and confusion that ensued. The rest of the disrupter swarm fell back, drawn into the conflict Will had created.

He turned his attention to the four new approaching ships. He tried a couple of long-range viral attacks but their encryption was already up and running. This problem was going to be a lot trickier.

‘I’ve done it!’ Rachel gasped. ‘Ready for warp!’

Will quickly sucked his drones back through the exohull.

‘Munitions retracted,’ he told Ira.

‘Firing engines in three, two, one …’ called the captain. Then he hurled on the power.

The cruiser surged forwards but the four Earther vessels veered madly to match course. The sound of the
Nanshan
’s engines rose from a pounding to a whine as Ira took them up and out into the safety of interstellar space.

‘Get ready for the nastiest warp-scatter manoeuvres you’ve ever experienced,’ said Ira as they neared the system perimeter.

As soon as he was clear for FTL, Ira broke off warp and fired the thrusters at full tilt. The enormous ship dragged around on its axis. Ira warped again, stopped, applied thrust and warped, over and over. The effects of jerking and turning in such a big ship were far less aggressive than aboard the
Ariel
but no less sickening.

Fifteen minutes later, the
Nanshan
’s warp trail was a sprawling mess. It would take their pursuers hours to find them.

‘We’re clear,’ said Ira.

Will passed him a course that would take them straight to the heart of the Fecund system and then flopped back into his couch.

They were free. New Angeles lay behind him. He could hardly believe it. The weeks of torture and isolation were finally, undisputedly over. Without quite knowing why, Will folded his knees up to meet his chest, buried his face in his hands and began to sob.

17.2: GUSTAV

Gustav stood with his hands clasped tightly behind his back and looked out from the balcony of his new office in the trench town of Perseverance. Golden light streamed down in dusty shafts through the curved glass canopy overhead, illuminating the tiny twisting paths and glittering fishponds in the park far below. Across from him were stacked layers of Galatean homes with their curious outdoor walls made from nothing but white sheets. They reminded him of washing days in the Sophia of his childhood.

Perseverance might have been still and beautiful, but it was also chilling in its emptiness. The town was virtually dead. There were no voices, no people visible below except the occasional Kingdom marine cradling an assault cannon. In the short weeks that he’d been there, he’d already learned to hate that quiet.

Apparently only half the population was missing, yet Gustav had never been anywhere that felt so desolate. There was nothing to hear but the distant rush of the air fans and his aide, Regis Chu, standing behind him, reciting the depressing details of the day’s status report.

‘Our troops have been all the way up the northern transit line to the settlement at Hope Canyon,’ said Chu. ‘The pattern appears to be the same – no children left, no environmental maintenance personnel. Only adults, and all of those appear to have volunteered to stay behind. I had Colonel Hassan sweep the town for hardware. Unfortunately we, er … lost four men to a chemical explosion of some kind and a fifth to a suspicious airlock failure.’

Gustav shook his head. ‘Did Hassan retaliate?’

In his experience, marines always retaliated, usually before they knew who was responsible for attacking them.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Regis. ‘Three locals were killed and one of our men was accidentally wounded in a friendly-fire incident. An atmosphere supply pipe was ruptured. I have a repair crew looking at it now.’

Gustav rubbed his eyes and groaned. Tang had known exactly what he was doing when he’d stuck Gustav with the job of Planetary Consolidator. It was spite in its most transparent form. Gustav was trapped on this denuded, hostile world for the weeks or months it would take for the new Protectorate Authority to arrive from Earth while the rest of the Kingdom celebrated. His task was not helped by the fact that the force of Kingdom marines he commanded appeared to be spectacularly inept.

‘My God, Regis,’ he said. ‘I thought these troops were supposed to be our finest. I expected them to be clumsy, but they’ve exceeded even my wildest expectations.’

‘There may be a reason for that, sir,’ said Regis. ‘Doctor Wei at our med-centre has been running blood tests and he’s found that the soldiers coming in have some very unusual hormone levels. His current theory is that the Galateans have poisoned the local food supplies, maybe even the air, with some kind of agent for which they’ve already taken an antidote.’