Sliding Void by Stephen Hunt Page A

hologram schematics, the walls reassuringly solid rather than a skeleton interspersed with the star-spattered void, the bank of consoles comfortingly mechanical. At the centre of the atrium, rising up towards Calder as the lift descended, stood one nod toward modernity – a gigantic table that could have seated a company of marines, but instead was attended by a single man in the ubiquitous green crew overalls. He was pacing its length with the intensity of a field marshal, the hologram landscape across the tabletop not one of military formations, but the hills and valleys of drive cores and reactor piles, portions rising like volcanoes to demand his attention. Circling the table as if they were engaged in a race, a small army of robots rolled, stepped and hovered in holding patterns, waiting for the man to jab a finger at them, his mouth shouting commands that Calder couldn’t hear inside the whining lift. With orders tossed at them in this seemingly derisory manner, the robot that had been singled out would peel away and head off to do his bidding. Calder’s diminutive escort waddled out of the lift first, the open door flooding the lift with sounds of the organised chaos outside. He stepped out after them. It smelled like an oil driller’s cabin – either that or a cop’s garage. Burning grease. Ionisation in the air, robot exertions, machine frictions. The ever-present whiff of great energies being released in distant chambers.
    Up until now it had been superfluous giving Zack Paopao the title of drive chief, as he’d had no human crew to boss around. With Calder’s arrival, that was about to change. The twin R4 units halted outside the roller-derby circling the chief’s last stand, observing it with the cool detachment of race referees. Calder walked across to stand just beyond the looping train of robots. Some were little more than crab-sized steel shells with antenna flickering as they jolted along on hidden wheels, other robots taller than the R4s, tractor-tracked cabinets beeping and hooting between themselves, spindly beanpoles with binocular-shaped heads trotting around on whipping nests of metal tentacles.
    Chief Paopao was either ignoring Calder or oblivious to his existence. He stood five and half feet tall, his round Chinese face sporting a trim goatee beard below and a dark bushy mane of hair above running to silver. It was hard to peg a person’s true age with life extension treatments, but Paopao looked old – maybe late fifties or early sixties. In alliance space, the chief could have been celebrating his half-millennium birthday and Calder would have been none the wiser. Life extensions were prohibitively expensive, the genetic wizardry of resetting human telomere DNA a treatment that could only be initiated so many times – and a closely guarded secret of a network of laboratories; one practised in exchange for disgustingly large amounts of money. But there was something about the chief that spoke of age, of weariness, of tiredness – or was it just the stink of a man who had been defeated by life once too often? Was it the hunched way he leaned over the control table? The harried flicks of his fingers across the control surface, pinpointing nascent problems he had fixed a hundred times before. Or the wiry compactness of his body – as though every inch of fat and waste had been sucked away by a life weighted too long with labours? Brooding between sim episodes, the stench of failure was an odour Calder worried might be clinging to his body. When the chief turned around and finally deigned to acknowledge the newcomer’s presence, the look Calder received was curiously familiar. Where had he seen that before? Ah yes, the glance his father had shot Calder when the military council had arrived bringing news of his older brother Brander’s death on the battlefield and the unexpected tidings that Calder Durk was now heir to the whole kingdom. A mixture of fear and fascination.
    ‘Ah, well,’