Roboteer
- eBook
- Paperback
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
The starship Ariel is on a mission of the utmost secrecy, upon which the fate of thousands of lives depend. Though the ship is a mile long, its six crew are crammed into a space barely large enough for them to stand. Five are officers, geniuses in their field. The other is Will Kuno-Monet, the man responsible for single-handedly running a ship comprised of the most dangerous and delicate technology that mankind has ever devised. He is the Roboteer. Roboteer is a hard-SF novel set in a future in which the colonization of the stars has turned out to be anything but easy, and civilization on Earth has collapsed under the pressure of relentless mutual terrorism. Small human settlements cling to barely habitable planets. Without support from a home-world they have had to develop ways of life heavily dependent on robotics and genetic engineering. Then out of the ruins of Earth's once great empire, a new force arises - a world-spanning religion bent on the conversion of all mankind to its creed. It sends fleets of starships to reclaim the colonies. But the colonies don't want to be reclaimed. Mankind's first interstellar war begins. It is dirty, dangerous and hideously costly. Will is a man bred to interface with the robots that his home-world Galatea desperately needs to survive. He finds himself sent behind enemy lines to discover the secret of their newest weapon. What he discovers will transform their understanding of both science and civilization forever... but at a cost.
Release date: July 16, 2015
Publisher: Gollancz
Print pages: 433
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Author updates
Roboteer
Alex Lamb
1.1: WILL
Will Kuno-Monet was teaching lifter trucks to hunt when the scramble klaxon sounded. He stopped the ten-ton machines mid-stalk and listened, his body taut. The moment everyone had been expecting for days had finally come. The Earthers were attacking.
He ordered the trucks to their action stations, opened his eyes and yanked back his bunk curtain. His shipmates were already propelling themselves out of their beds and shouting as they hurtled towards the door of the cramped dorm chamber.
‘Move! Move! Move!’
‘Don’t block the hatch!’
Will hurriedly unclipped and followed suit.
Outside, the snakeway was a torrent of figures in silver-green one-piece uniforms. Crew darted like fleeing fish, passing each other on the cramped zero-g bends with millimetres to spare. Will hurled himself into the throng, narrowly missing a couple of engineers.
Ten seconds and two levels later, Will reached the immersion room – a cramped cubic space made of cream-coloured plastic filled with elastic webbing and combat-bags. He clawed his way through the maze of cables to his place at the far end, past the seven other roboteers who were busily sealing themselves in.
Will thrust himself into the bag with trembling hands and let the gel-sac shape itself around his body. He rammed the fat-contact against his neck and tucked his arms inside before the fluid could lock solid. At Will’s mental command, the ultra-high-bandwidth cable started sending. The battle status presented itself to him as fully formed thoughts, each tinted by the crisp, owlish flavour of the Phoenix’s central command SAP.
There were six Earther ships in tight hexagonal formation. Will saw them as bright-red arrows in a schematic representation of local space, zeroing in on the green circle that was their target – the antimatter factory near the star itself. The Earthers appeared to be making a direct bid for it. The Phoenix was instructed to maintain its position.
Strategic analysis showed that the force was far too light to be the predicted primary assault. The Earther ships had small gravity-distortion footprints, suggesting light gunships, probably Jesus Class. No match for the three huge Galatean cruisers guarding the facility. Their approach was almost certainly a feint of some kind. The real attack would come later, when attention was diverted.
Will saw the cruisers as green chevrons whipping across the system to intercept. Galatean ships had a strong speed advantage in-system as their more sophisticated engines performed far better in dirty space. Given the dreadful lag on optical comms, they’d probably engaged the enemy already.
The battle status clear in his mind, Will checked in with his expert – Franz Assimer-Leung, the ship’s tactical assault coordinator. His vision connected to the camera above Franz’s combat-bag, which became Will’s eyes. Franz’s blocky, furrowed face appeared before him.
‘Reporting for duty, sir,’ said Will. The fat-contact relayed the words he thought directly to the speaker bud implanted in Franz’s ear.
Franz busily scanned the contents of his visor, readying his Self-Aware Programs, fingers flying across the console on his lap. ‘Check,’ said Franz. ‘Stay ready, Will. I want you sharp on this one. No wandering off.’
Will couldn’t help bristling slightly. He’d never wandered off during a battle, whatever that was supposed to mean. ‘Yes, sir.’
Franz was clearly busy so Will turned his attention outwards, looking for the battle through the ship’s long-range sensors. At this distance there was nothing to see but X-ray flickering, barely visible so close to the star’s glare. With the filters turned up this high, the rest of the sky was bottomless black.
Will’s mind churned. He could barely stand the anxiety of waiting to see what the Earthers would try. This battle was likely to determine the course of the war.
Memburi had been Earth’s primary fuelling station on the straight-line path between the home system and Galatea – before the Galateans had captured it. If the Earthers didn’t retake it, it would be almost impossible for them to wage war against their former colony, and easy for Galatea to strike back if they tried. On the other hand, if the Earthers did claim it, they’d be well placed to attempt another invasion, and Earth had no shortage of lives to waste in trying.
Will’s train of thought was broken by a sudden nervous laugh. He glanced across at Gordon Inchaya-Brun, the roboteer for ship defence who hung in the bag next to his. Gordon was a large, well-intentioned youth who’d only been with the Fleet for a year. This was his first big battle.
‘They dragged us in here just so we could wait?’ muttered Gordon. His eyes were screwed tight shut.
Will knew Gordon wasn’t talking to anyone in particular but the distraction was welcome. It beat staring into space and doing nothing.
‘I guess so,’ he said.
Gordon’s soft blue eyes opened in surprise at the reply. Like the rest of the Phoenix’s roboteers, he treated Will with a mixture of wariness and awe. There were eight of them in all, one handler for each of the mighty ship’s eight different software subsystems, and Will was definitely the odd one out. He didn’t think like the others.
‘But don’t worry,’ Will added. ‘Space battles don’t last long.’
Gordon gave him an anxious smile. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
Gordon’s fears were well grounded. Today they would live or die with the Phoenix. There was no way off a starship when you were surrounded in every direction by kilometres of the most hideously irradiated machinery humanity had ever devised. You either left the battle with working engines or you fried.
A sudden flare drew Will’s attention back to the view from the sensors. The distant battle was looking unusually bright. It winked at him. Will eyed it uneasily. If the Earther ships were on a suicide run, they might be self-detonating about now. And meanwhile, the next wave of the attack might come from any direction. His heart was in his mouth as they waited.
1.2: IRA
Captain Ira Baron-Lecke of the Galatean starship Ariel watched the battle from a few thousand kilometres beyond the combat zone. It was probably too close, but still a lot further away than he wanted to be. The disrupter cloud made it impossible for them to get any nearer.
He lay back in his crash couch, hands wrapped tight around the control-handles. Through his visor’s standard display, the warring ships resembled flashing points of hard white light on a black background. At full magnification, however, he could make out their true shape. Each ship looked like a dull metallic egg covered with tiny umbrellas. Blue-white light crackled from the spokes, coating the vessels with sheens of spastic luminescence.
Ira did not like what he saw. The Earthers had come in too light – just a ring of six small ships, hemmed in by three immense Galatean cruisers. And they’d stopped short of their objective, as if taunting the Galateans to come out and meet them. They were up to something.
‘Amy, give me an update.’
Though he and Amy, his first officer, occupied opposite bunks in the Ariel’s tiny main cabin, Ira used his subvocal throat-mike instead of speaking out loud. The Ariel was a soft-combat ship. Given the physical conditions it had to operate under, battle orders were never trusted to ordinary speech.
‘No change,’ Amy replied. ‘The Earthers are using juice like it’s going out of style. They haven’t launched any gravity shields, just disrupter buoys. Central Command is convinced it’s a suicide.’
Ira frowned. A disrupter buoy’s single job was to fill the surrounding space with ionic crap that made it impossible for your enemy to use warp. It was an important tool in warfare, but one used sparingly. Disrupters trapped you just as certainly as they trapped your enemy. Yet each one of those little Earther ships had come in carrying enough of them to freeze an armada. He watched the buoys buzzing around their parent ships like swarms of angry bees around a hive. It seemed like a profligate amount of hardware to waste. Furthermore, the battle was getting awfully bright.
‘What are they doing down there? Attacking with g-rays?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Amy.
Ira shook his head. Scout-ship g-rays against battle cruisers. That was like coming at macrodozers with sharpened sticks.
A g-ray was nothing more than a gamma-ray laser, and it was only as good as the amount of power you put behind it. If your adversary could push the same amount of juice through his Casimir-buffers, there was no point firing. You just ended up charging his fusion cells for him. But the Earthers knew that. They couldn’t possibly hope to summon more power than the cruisers, not even if they concentrated all their fire on a single target.
‘They’re insane,’ he muttered.
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Amy. ‘Those g-rays are very hard. The Earthers must have routed main-engine power to their arrays.’
Clearly the Earthers’ tactic was to try to freeze out their opponents’ gravity weapons and force them into an energy battle. It was just one more reason to believe that the Earthers didn’t intend to go home. They hadn’t exactly left themselves an escape route.
Ira still didn’t like it. Even suicide squads launched gravity shields. Instinct told him to pull back, just in case. He keyed open the channel to his assault expert on the bunk below him.
‘John, find any plans yet? I want to know what these bastards think they’re doing.’
There was a pause.
‘Uh, hang on.’
John was deep in his work with Doug, the ship’s roboteer. Together they were gutting the enemy vessels’ computer systems of their secrets with the help of the Ariel’s little fleet of specialised drones.
‘Wait!’ said John. ‘Doug, go back. I think that’s it.’ He muttered to himself, then laughed out loud. ‘Ha! Yes! We’ve got data, Captain, and plenty of it.’
Amy’s voice chimed in. ‘Uh-oh, John – I think you triggered an alarm.’ She flagged a visual pointer in Ira’s display.
The Earthers had fired a volley of pursuit drones directly at the Ariel. Fortunately, they were climbing out through the massive disrupter cloud, which meant they couldn’t use warp. Forced to limp along on fusion torches, they presented no immediate threat. It would take them whole minutes to arrive.
‘I see them,’ said John. ‘Prepping countermeasures.’
While John wrestled with the flow of information coursing between the ships, Ira turned his attention back to the battle with the cruisers. He had to be ready to make his move.
The Earthers had all but completely snared the Galateans’ torpedoes, he noticed, drawing the battle out to a grindingly slow sub-light exchange. Nevertheless, they were still outgunned. It was only a matter of time before they died. As soon as the Earthers ran out of antimatter, their supercharged buffers would drop, and no number of disrupters could save them. However, the seconds kept ticking by and Ira found himself still anxiously waiting. His unease steadily deepened. For a suicide squad, those ships were taking a hell of a long time to die.
The Galateans kept battering away at them, but the Earthers didn’t seem to be flagging. It was the Galatean attacks that appeared to be slowing. They simply weren’t equipped for long battles. Nobody was.
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Amy. ‘I’m not seeing any degradation in the Earthers’ disrupter cloud. It’s just getting bigger.’
She sent him an ion filter of the battle scene. It showed the ragged hole the Earthers had carved in the local flow, like a filthy black smear on the rainbow of space.
‘At this rate, it’ll reach us in two hundred seconds,’ she added.
If that happened, the Ariel would be stuck – and effectively dead. The one thing a soft-combat ship could never afford to do was hit a disrupter cloud. Only heavy, powerful ships could endure a disrupter fight and the Ariel was neither. It survived on speed and stealth.
Ira opened his hotline to Admiral Bryant-Leys aboard the Aslan, the cruiser leading the Galatean assault. ‘Sir, we’ve got problems. That cloud is going to hit any minute now. Requesting permission to get clear.’ He watched the cloud grow during the agonising seconds it took for the admiral’s reply to reach him.
‘Accepted,’ said the admiral. ‘Do what you have to, Ira.’
Ira keyed the channel to his crew. ‘Okay, everybody, we’re pulling back. Rachel, I want full warp.’
‘Rails greased and ready.’
‘Doug,’ he told his roboteer. ‘Brace yourself.’
Ira pressed the ignition stud on his joystick. An invisible hand slammed him into his couch as the gravity engines kicked on. They started moving away, but far too slowly. From cold, the trigger field needed time to build strength. The hammer beats of the engine were slow and intermittent.
‘Ira!’ said Amy. ‘Look out!’
Ira saw what was happening but there was nothing he could do. The Earthers had turned the full might of their disrupters against the Ariel.
As quickly as they came, the brutal tugs of the gravity engines faded and vanished. They were stuck like a bug in amber. Whatever secrets John had unearthed, the Earthers were clearly very keen that the Ariel didn’t leave with them.
‘Rachel!’ Ira snapped. ‘Full power to the fusion torches!’
‘Done.’
Ira turned on the power. Once again he was slammed into his couch, but this time it was merely conventional acceleration. Ira made his way up and out of the cloud at a creeping two-point-five gees. He cursed himself as he watched their progress. The minutes to drone-intercept didn’t look so long and comfortable any more. Drones could accelerate as fast as they liked. They didn’t have human cargo to worry about.
He never should have let himself be caught. He should have moved position without asking the admiral first. Adherence to protocol might have just killed them.
‘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.
‘Amy?’ he said.
She looked up at him, her face unreadable. ‘Doug’s dead.’
Ira blinked in disbelief. Something crumpled deep inside him. ‘How dead? Can we use coma?’
His question sounded weak even as it left his mouth. Amy would have tried that already.
She shook her head. ‘Sorry. It’s too late for that.’
Ira struggled for words. ‘That last turn,’ he said stupidly. It had felt bad, but not that bad. ‘How tight was it?’
‘Fifteen gees,’ she replied quietly.
Ira covered his mouth with his hand. Most roboteers were effectively unmodified when it came to dogfights. They just didn’t have the stamina for it, not even with a muscle-tank to help them. Ira stared down at the corpse floating in the gel-filled box at the bottom of the cabin. Doug might have been a roboteer, but Ira had counted him as a friend. And now Ira had killed him.
‘Hey,’ said John, breaking the airless silence. ‘I hate to be the one to point this out, but this isn’t exactly a good time for grieving. I’ve just been looking at that enemy data and it’s serious stuff. They’re going to come after it for sure, and we haven’t taken any evasives yet. We should get going – otherwise Doug won’t be the only dead person in this cabin.’
Ira exhaled and shut his eyes. Part of him was grateful for the distraction, delivered as it was in John’s usual tactless terms.
‘All right, everybody,’ he said. ‘Get back to your seats. We’ll have to deal with this later. We’re going home.’
2: NEW ROLES
2.1: GUSTAV
While the dignitaries standing around him talked politics, Gustav stared out of the window. It was easy to be distracted by the view. All he had to do was let his concentration wander from the overfed face in front of
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...