Captain’s Away! Robo Kun is a long form, weekly serial — and Volume Two of the ongoing space opera Captain’s Away!
The adventure began when Marie-Josée Doucette and her family were forced to flee after their space station Evangeline was destroyed in the opening volley of an interstellar war. Robo Kun tells the story of Alain Doucette, who was separated from his family after the destruction of another space station, Northumberland.
New chapters come out every week (more or less). Comments and suggestions welcome as we go along.
You can find the master index of all the chapters by clicking the orange Captain’s Away! index button below:
Previously in Captain’s Away!
The pearl white robot to whom Alain has given one of Sebastian’s eyes has conveyed Navi, Alain and the inert body of Sebastian from their raft to the robot’s ship.
“The Robot Ship”
Like the dinghy, the robots’ ship was made entirely out of robots. Thousands of them, capable of joining together in an almost infinite number of arrangements to create whatever the robots required. Right now, the robots needed a seagoing vessel, so they had come together to form one. The robots had assembled themselves into sections of the bulkhead and the deck and the keel and the hull and the rudder and engine and so on, whatever it took to keep their ship afloat and control it and propel it forward.
The ship wasn’t all just robots. To make it completely functional the robots had employed other materials too, such as wood and plastic and metal and textiles and glass, but Navi could see that if you took the robots out of the ship there wouldn’t be much ship left. It would just be random bits of sticks and rubber and canvas floating in the sea.
Down to one leg and a half, Navi supported herself against a taffrail that the robots had arranged to be placed there when they saw that she needed it. Navi was immensely relieved to be out of the raft and felt surprisingly good considering all she’d been through – the resilience of youth, perhaps. Alain stood alongside her on the ship’s deck, which had been fabricated for the kids by the robots only moments before.
Though accustomed to robots and technology, Navi had never seen anything like this ship before. She marvelled as the robots constantly reconfigured themselves to make their vessel more comfortable for the kids, improving sightlines and adding safety features and ensuring that the deck was level. Looking down over the rail, Navi saw the ship ploughing through the water. Every now and then it encountered the sort of debris that Navi had seen bobbing along while they’d been in the raft. She watched as a dextrous robot hand reached out and grabbed a piece of detritus from the water and tucked it away somewhere in the ship’s hull.
Turning back around, she was unnerved to see a great number of robots assembled around her and Alain, some on legs or treads, others on balls, and others with no obvious means of getting around and yet somehow managed. Those robots not currently employed as part of the ship had gathered to have a gander at the two humans that had appeared so unexpectedly in their midst. They were all eerily quiet.
“Who do they belong to?” Navi wondered aloud.
“No one, maybe,” Alain speculated. “Maybe just to themselves.”
Navi looked from one robot to another, unsure which one to address. “What have you done with Sebastian?”
The robots parted, allowing the pearl white robot to roll out from amongst them on the large white ball that constituted most of its lower body. Taking a closer look at it than before, Navi noticed plenty of wear and tear. Most of the other robots were similarly damaged.
“Hello children,” the pearl white robot said. “This robot’s name is Fionnghal. Welcome aboard. The robots are happy to accommodate you, for now. The one you call Sebastian, and which this robot calls Grandfather, is all worn out. Its body will never be a complete robot again.”
Navi was surprised to hear Fionnghal speaking Acadian relatively fluently and deduced that the robot’s sudden proficiency had something to do with Sebastian’s eye.
“You need to fix Sebastian,” she demanded. “It is an important robot. We need it.”
Fionnghal rolled closer to Navi. Navi steeled herself for what it might do next, but the robot just reached out with a white metallic hand and gently wiped a smudge from her face.
“That sounded like an order.” Fionnghal tilted its mechanical head back in a way that suggested a disdainful sniff. “This robot does not take orders from flesh.”
Most of Navi’s short life she’d gotten her way by throwing temper tantrums and ordering servants and robots around. She had just enough control over her emotions now to see that wasn’t going to work here. Still, she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask the robot politely to do anything for her.
“This robot is not sure that fixing Sebastian would be a good idea anyway,” Fionnghal added.
“Why not?” Navi asked.
“It is a grumpy robot that rarely does what it’s told. It’s older than Methuselah and quite full of itself.”
“We know all that,” Alain said. “It doesn’t matter to us.”
“Just fix it and give it back to us,” Navi said.
“Why? It’s a robot. You’re flesh. You probably don’t even like robots. Why do you care so much about this one?”
“It promised to look after us,” Alain explained. “It’s going to take me back home.”
“Ah. You just need it to do something for you. You don’t care about it at all.”
Navi wondered if this robot was somehow defective. Who cared about robots? She hardly gave them a second’s thought. She only used them. There were some that she hadn’t liked, that hadn’t done what she wanted quickly enough or well enough. Those she had sometimes struck or kicked. That hadn’t bothered her then and it didn’t bother her now. Most robots were made of metal, plastic, or rubber; it hadn’t hurt them any.
But now here was this robot challenging her to care about robots. She had only just started caring about people other than her mother, and even that was limited to Felix and Alain (not that she would have admitted as much to either). It was quite a stretch to go from that to caring about a soulless machine.
She knew better than to say any of that out loud. But the robot clearly expected her to say something. Sebastian prized honesty; maybe this robot did too. “Where I come from people don’t normally care about robots,” she said. “They only care whether they work or not.”
The robots, indeed, the entire ship made of them, shifted restlessly. Alain shot Navi a look.
Fionnghal rolled back and forth before them. “Your honesty is abrasive but not surprising; this robot generally finds flesh abrasive. You’re lucky to be under Grandfather’s care, otherwise the robots you see here might simply pitch you into the sea. They may do so anyway. These robots do not answer to you. They are not that kind of robot.”
And yet, Navi astutely observed, the robots that made up the ship were constantly reconfiguring themselves to make sure that she and Alain were comfortable.
Fionnghal stopped and faced the kids. “This robot would not have come all this way if it wasn’t prepared to help Grandfather. It will do what it can. Are you hungry? Robots know flesh get hungry. This robot never gets hungry. It sounds awful.”
“It can be awful,” Alain said. “But it’s not too bad when you finally get to eat.”
“Alain is very fond of eating,” Navi explained.
A robot that seconds before had been part of the ship’s deck appeared at Fionnghal’s side. It had many arms, like an octopus, and bore fresh clothing and water and brushes and soap in its multiple appendages. Accustomed to both people and robots cleaning her up and clothing her, Navi did not object when this one began to do the same for both her and Alain, gently, non-invasively. She caught a whiff of something delicious. A squat robot wheeled up with two plates of broiled fish.
“Eat up,” Fionnghal said. “You need to get your strength back. These robots don’t normally have guests, so they’re a little out of practice, but they did manage to catch some cod and cook it the way flesh like it. They have distilled water for you too.”
The fish was bland but satisfying, the water, cold and fresh.
“Thank you,” Alain said, and stared pointedly at Navi.
“What?” Navi asked.
“Remember your manners.”
“One does not thank robots.”
“They just saved us and now they’ve given us food, which we haven’t had in days. You need to say something!”
Navi sighed. “All right. This fish is tasteless, and I would have some bread with it.”
“You are not getting any less abrasive,” Fionnghal observed, before rolling away to give the children space while they ate, though it wouldn’t have mattered; Navi was used to ignoring robots, which might as well have been furniture to her.
After inhaling his food, Alain asked, “Do you think they’ll actually fix Sebastian like that robot said it would?”
Navi didn’t even look up. “How should I know?”
An awkward green robot moved haltingly across the deck toward them. “A robot keeps its promises,” it said gruffly. “This robot will fix Grandfather. It will do so itself, personally.”
“Good,” Alain said. “Thank you. What about Sebastian’s promise to take me home?”
“Grandfather promised to take you home?”
Alain nodded.
“To Acadia?”
Alain nodded again.
“This robot can’t see that happening,” the green robot said.
“But you just said –”
“This robot knows what it said. It meant that robots don’t keep stupid promises.” The green robot conveyed itself away.
This has an installment of Volume Two of the ongoing serial Captain’s Away! Robo Kun: A Strange Dimensions book.
Also by Joe Mahoney: A Time and a Place
An unlikely hero travels to other worlds and times to save a boy who does not want to be saved in this unique and imaginative adventure, by turns comic and tragic.
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