Roboteer Read Online Free

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 him to the three-storey pane of bulletproof glass several metres beyond it. And from where he stood, in the primary antechamber of the Prophet’s palace at Bogotá, the vista was compelling, if not exactly pleasant.
    The antechamber looked out past the palace’s bone-coloured tiers over the manicured miles of gardens to the slums beyond. In the distance, where once proud forest had stood, prote-farms now sprawled, a chequerboard of dirty brown and sickly yellow squares. The sky was an angry sulphurous grey. It wasn’t that the scenery differed particularly from the rest of what Earth had to offer, but from the palace you could see that much more of it. It appalled Gustav that, even on the Prophet’s very doorstep, the world still showed so few signs of recovering from the Terror Century.
    While the dignitaries droned on, Gustav quietly adjusted his position to look into the antechamber itself, a view far preferable to the desolation outside. The antechamber, one of many, was a snow-white New Gothic fantasy. Vast columns like frozen waterfalls of milk met at a vaulted ceiling far overhead, and the floor was bright and smooth like a sheet of ice. It reflected the courtiers standing around in small groups, making impressionistic butterflies with their brightly coloured robes. Their muted conversations echoed off the glacial walls.
    More importantly, Gustav now had a view of the enormous doors he’d shortly have to walk through. They led to the throne room of His Honesty the Prophet – the spiritual ruler of all Earth.
    ‘So what do you think, General?’ one of the dignitaries asked him.
    Gustav had enjoyed no peace since he arrived. Everyone wanted to be seen to talk with him before he received his holy commendation.
    The man who’d spoken had small, fat hands sticking out from the voluminous folds of his bright-orange robe. He waved them when he talked, like little pink balloons.
    Gustav tried for a polite smile. ‘I’m sorry, what was that again?’
    ‘I said, what do you think? Is the education of females permissible under dogma?’
    A skeletal man draped in moss-green fabric pointed a bony digit at the