Roboteer by Alex Lamb

spoke again.
    ‘Rachel, how’s the juice looking?’
    ‘Nice and hot, sir.’
    ‘Buffers engaged?’
    ‘Buffers running at cruise charge,’ she said.
    ‘Deploy the brollies.’
    All over the ship, the gigantic inducers slowly spread their vanes. It took them several minutes to reach full extension.
    ‘Brollies deployed.’
    ‘Grease the rails,’ said the captain.
    Rachel ignited the trigger field – a cloud of exotic heavy particles cooked up with help from the ship’s fusion cores.
    ‘Rails greased.’
    Through the sensors, Will watched lightning course between the inducers, coating the ship with blue-white radiance. The inducer-vanes tilted, creating a long, tapered oval of flickering light that stretched away from the ship in front and behind.
    ‘Ready for warp, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Ira.
    Will braced himself.
    In the next instant he was slammed into his couch as the first matter/antimatter volley collided with the trigger field. Outside the ship, the local curvon flow was coaxed into giving up its spatial potential. The space ahead of the ship shrank suddenly while the space behind expanded and the Ariel leapt forward.
    Two seconds later, the kick came again. And then again, quicker and fiercer. The further they travelled from Galatea’s delicate gravity well, the more juice they could safely use. The thuds of the engine blurred together into a growl that reverberated through the cabin walls. They were on their way.

4: IN FLIGHT
    4.1: GUSTAV
    The captain of Gustav’s personal starship engaged warp two light-seconds out from Earth and set them cruising at a comfortable point-nine gees. With the manoeuvre concluded, Gustav retired gratefully to his cabin. He was on his way back to his private realm at last, away from the poverty and politics of Earth after one of the most tedious weeks of his life. Now, perhaps, he could finally get some peace.
    He locked the cabin door, sat down in one of the inflatable armchairs and pulled out the tablet on which he kept the suntap schematics. For over a year now, Gustav had pondered them in his spare time. Though they remained as opaque as when he’d first examined them, he found that concentrating on the inscrutable design served to calm and focus his mind. He lived in hope that one day, if he stared at its workings for long enough, he’d actually solve the riddle of the alien device.
    For what had to be the five-thousandth time, Gustav turned to the blueprint for the gravitic generator, the most tangled and tortuous component in the entire assembly. He traced energy pathways through the familiar design and waited for peace to come. It didn’t. His mind refused to settle on the details. Instead, he found himself dwelling on the events of the last few days.
    Thinking about the suntap only reminded him that the Prophet had made it impossible for him to delay any longer. He would have to deliver to Tang the stockpile of finished units that he’d so long denied existed. Thus the Kingdom would go to war relying on a weapon they still didn’t understand, and whose behaviour they could not predict. What if all the devices they built stopped working in the middle of the invasion? No one would have the first idea how to fix them.
    Tang had undoubtedly been responsible for that folly. The man didn’t appear to have any interest in the research-and-development process. He just wanted his ships. Gustav dearly wished he could have been given someone cautious and reasonable to work with, but political reality didn’t work that way. The Reconsiderists had few potential admirals, and handing responsibility for the new Fleet to a different subsect would have weakened their position immeasurably. Tang was the best bet at the time. Now Gustav wondered if he’d have been better off recruiting from the damned Medellins.
    No doubt the good admiral would be delighted to learn that his project leader had been saddled with a High Church spy. Gustav muttered curses under his