The pursuit of the wounded berserker resumed. More hours passed, adding up to another day. Tension grew aboard the ship as the trail became stronger, more clearly defined than it had ever been. Whatever was leaving the trail was undoubtedly closer ahead now than ever before. Sizable bits of debris, even fist-sized chunks of this and that, began to show up in the scans still being telemetered in from the outrider robots.
“That’s berserker stuffing.” Domingo said it softly, with obvious enjoyment.
A powerful blast centered somewhere ahead sent a silent but more-than-detectable Shockwave through the white nebula.
Chakuchin made a relieved sound. “It’s blown itself up. That’s it.”
“We’ll see.” Domingo’s intensity did not alter.
Inside the Pearl, whose forward velocity, even here within the buffeting whiteness, could be conveniently expressed as a fraction of the speed of light, the enormously slower Shockwave could be studied on the detectors for some time before it engulfed the ship.
But whatever might be, or might have been, at the center of the shock to cause it still could not be seen.
Domingo ordered acceleration. And more acceleration. Particles of matter, molecule-sized, pinged dangerously against the shielding fields that so far were managing to protect the hull from microcollisions at relativistic speeds. Indicators glowed with warning signals.
The captain ordered: “Give up the trail. Head for the center of that shock.” The location of the center could be determined from the automatic recording of the event.
“Double alert for an ambush. Just in case.”
On the screens of the forward detectors, the image of an object considerably bigger than the Pearltook shape and rapidly solidified. It was angular, irregular and metallic, about at the upper limit of size for effective travel within the nebula.
“Hold your fire!” the captain ordered sharply.
Whatever kind of a machine it was ahead of them, it was not Leviathan. The shape was as jagged as Leviathan’s, but still totally wrong for that, if any of the descriptions and recordings of the monster were correct. Polly heard the captain sigh, a sound that might have come from the lips of a disappointed lover.
The second most obvious characteristic of the object they had just caught up with was the remarkable amount of fresh damage that it had sustained. The ruin looked too genuine and extensive to be any kind of trick. As they approached the wreck ever more closely there was hard radiation, too, wild and irregular in both intensity and kind, but always enough of it to suggest that there might be a small-scale nuclear meltdown in progress somewhere on the enemy.
It appeared that secondary explosions, delayed battle damage—or more likely a deliberate destructor charge, set off in anticipation of capture by the forces of life—had left this particular berserker unit, whatever it was exactly, drifting in a helpless condition.
The humans aboard the Pearlobserved the enemy warily from a thousand kilometers’ distance; then from a hundred; and then again from ten.
Simeon said, with the air of someone trying to establish an assertion as undoubted fact: “Now we’ve got to go back and report.”
Polly, watching on her intercom, saw Niles Domingo’s eyes turn to the big young man, one image glaring at another. The captain squelched Chakuchin’s effort immediately: “We can’t. We’ll lose it if we do. Do you expect that we, or anyone else, will be able to find the way back to it again in this fog?” In another day or so the trail they had followed would have been completely dispersed by random drifting and other natural movements. There were currents in the nebula; it was at least as dynamic as an ocean of water on the surface of a planet.
“All right, then I suppose we finish it off. We have our missiles armed.”
“They’d better be. But don’t use any of them just yet.”
“But what else can we do?” Chakuchin paused, as if realization had just come to him. “Are you expecting to send some of us over to board that thing? It may just be waiting to use its main destructor charge until something living comes close enough to be wiped out in the blast.”
“I think it’s already used whatever destructor charges it had left. And I’ll lead the boarding myself, if that’s what’s bothering you. Can I talk two other people into suiting up with me? If not, I’ll go alone. Polly, what about you?” The captain’s eyes looked out from the little intercom screen and into hers. “We could use your technical expertise.”
“I’ll go,” Polly heard herself agree at once. Then she trembled, thinking of her children. But she could not unsay what she had said. Not to Niles Domingo. She could silently curse the unasked-for fate that bound her to him, but it was her fate still, and she would not have changed it had she had the power.
Iskander, as usual, had not much to say, but he was plainly ready, even eager, to go where his captain led.
Gujar repeated Simeon’s suggestion: “We could just fire away at it …”
But Domingo was silent this time, and this time the suggestion died without argument. The objections to it were too plain. Self-destruction was doubtless what the berserker had wanted to achieve, but something had gone wrong with the destructor charges.
That it had tried to destroy itself when capture by its enemy seemed imminent at least suggested that there was still something aboard that might constitute a valuable secret, perhaps even a clue to where the berserkers attacking the Milkpail colonies had their repair and construction base.
Conceivably there might even be human prisoners still living on that wreck. That there could be seemed doubtful, but berserkers did take prisoners sometimes for the information that could be gained from them, for living bodies and living minds on which to experiment.
Domingo was continuing to study the helpless-looking enemy, switching rapidly from one instrument of observation to another and back again. This was not Leviathan in front of him, but it represented the only immediate chance he had of getting closer to Leviathan. He mused aloud in his newly intense voice: “This is too damned strange. It’s not like any berserker I ever saw or heard of before now. We can’t miss the chance, we’ve got to go over there and see what we can find out from it.”
Simeon suggested: “We’ve still got one courier. Let’s send it off first, at least. Tell people where we are. Get some help out here.”
Iskander shook his head. “I don’t think so. If we launch our last robot courier here, we don’t know that it’s going to be able to find Base Four Twenty-five. Or that it’ll ever be picked up by the Space Force anywhere. I’d say myself that the odds are pretty poor that a courier message from us here is going to get through.” He smiled faintly. “Besides, couriers are expensive.” It was the punch line of a standing joke.
Gujar said: “I agree. We might need the courier worse later on. I’d even say it’s chancy as to whether we’ll be able to find our way out of this ourselves; at least in any comfortable period of time.”
And Domingo again: “Maybe a courier would be able to find its way to the Space Force somewhere. And if it found them, they might not be too busy to come and look at this thing. And if they did decide to come, and they did find their way here and saw it, they might be smart enough to realize its value. Or they might not. No, thanks. We’re going to handle this ourselves. Even if they did agree it was valuable, they might still decide it would be better to fire away.”
There was general agreement among the crew. People out here in the Milkpail depended, often enough, on the Space Force for their very lives. They also tended not to be overly impressed with that organization’s abilities and accomplishments.
Simeon wavered. “Well, if you put it that way …” Wilma was silent.
“I do put it that way. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 8
Inside the cramped ventral bay where the Sirian Pearl carried her only launch—a small craft that also served as her only lifeboat—Niles Domingo, Polly Suslova and Iskander Baza were clambering into the bulbous suits and helmets of
space armor. They were speeding up the procedure by calling checklist items back and forth.
Polly saw Iskander watching her as if he found something very amusing in her way of managing the checklist. She gave him a sharp look in return, and he turned away.
As soon as they had their suits on and tested, the three of them gathered up personal weapons and kits of tools and entered the launch, carefully maneuvering their mechanically enlarged bodies, one after another, through the tight hatchway of the smaller vessel.
The launch was a cylindrical craft, half as long as the Pearlherself but not much bigger in diameter than the height of a tall man. Its hatches were sealed now, and the bay around it evacuated. Then the ventral doors of the bay were opened to space. With Domingo in the pilot’s seat of the launch—his armored helmet had a built-in headlink—the small vehicle separated from the Pearland drove toward the damaged berserker.
Normally the controls of the launch, like those of the larger ship, were operated through a direct linkage to the electrical activity of the human pilot’s brain. The system used on the launch was less sophisticated than that aboard the Pearl, but adequate for the less complicated craft.
One advantage of the launch was its real viewports, through which people inside could look out. In one direction, nearly astern now, hung the Pearl, her gun hatches open, her weapons ready. In almost the opposite direction, suspended against an endless background of distant white billows and luminous pastel columns, the enemy machine was a construction of dark gray planes and angles, torn by blackened holes, lighted from time to time by fitful internal fires—none of which were blue.
The berserker was substantially bigger than the Pearl, and through the viewports it appeared subjectively enormous as the three humans in the launch got their first direct look at it. The enemy loomed even larger as Domingo drove closer. Still, the launch’s radar instruments assured its crew that the machine ahead was by no means of an unusual size for a berserker. It rotated slowly in the eternal sleet of this nebular space, spurting more fumes and debris from ragged, open wounds, emitting an occasional flare of light in one color or another. Polly, looking at the broken, uneven outline the berserker presented, decided that almost its entire outer hull was gone. And yet it had continued functioning, at least well enough to retreat this far after the battle.
The enemy unit appeared to be taking no notice of the Pearl, or of the more closely approaching launch. Possibly it was now completely blind and deaf. Possibly that last explosion, whose shockwave the Pearl‘s instruments had detected at a distance, had originated in a successful destructor charge, and the berserker’s electronic brain, or brains, with their possible secrets, had now been totally destroyed.
Of course it was also possible that the enemy still had additional destructor charges aboard, only waiting to be set off. Or that it still possessed other weapons and was now aware of human presences nearby and was biding its time, calculating how to optimize the last chance it would ever have of carrying out its prime programmed directive.
“Ever get this close to one of them before?” Polly asked the question in a small voice and of no one in particular. Crew stations on the launch were not separated; all three people aboard were riding in the same small compartment. The captain, seated at her elbow, was continuing to ease the launch nearer to the foe at a speed of only a few meters per second.
Wordlessly Domingo shook his head. He seemed to be indicating that he had no time for questions now; Polly bit her lip.
“I was, once,” Iskander murmured. Polly turned her head and looked at him, but he was not looking at her, and he offered no details.
The central thought in Domingo’s mind right now was that this was not Leviathan in front of him. Still, it was one of the enemy, the only one of the enemy that had yet come within his grasp. The sight of the ongoing damage aboard, the nuclear and chemical reactions eating away at it, offered him a definite, savage satisfaction. The feeling was mingled with an urgent worry that the information he had hoped to find here, the knowledge that would somehow give him an advantage, lead him to his true foe, was being destroyed before his eyes in the same fires.
He willed the launch forward more quickly. The safety fields of his chair shielded him and his shipmates from even feeling the acceleration, but they all saw on instruments how sharply the craft responded.
The storm of radiation, which had to be emanating from somewhere within the enemy, grew stronger as they neared the hulk. Still the armored suits ought to be sufficient to shield them from the radiation when they went out as boarders, unless the flux should increase by a considerable factor even above its present level.
They circled the enemy once in the launch, at a distance of no more than half a kilometer. Then Domingo drove his little craft closer again, slowing at the last moment, without warning taking them right inside the damaged hull, as Polly muffled a gasp. The launch entered the enemy’s hull through a great rent that had been torn either by some Space Force weapon or by a secondary explosion. The hole was so big that it seemed to Polly that half of the pastel sunset billows making up the nebular sky outside were still visible after they had entered. But she still found herself holding her breath, with the sensation that gigantic jaws were about to close on her and crush her.
Inside the enemy’s battered hulk, patches of heated, glowing metal were visible in every direction. When the glow of the hot metal was augmented by that from the nebula outside, there was enough light to keep the bowels of the berserker from being really dark. Not satisfied with this erratic illumination, Iskander sent searchlight beams stabbing out from the launch. The lights, playing back and forth at varying angles, revealed more twisted metal along with other objects, shapes and textures, some of which remained unidentifiable. At places inside the berserker, the continually outgassing fumes from internal damage were thick enough to interfere with vision, even with the launch’s searchlights on.
Running one last time through the operator’s checklist of her armored suit—quite unnecessarily, but it gave the mind something to do—Polly knew terror, remembered her children and asked herself why she was doing this. The answer to that question was not hard to find—Domingo had asked her to do it. But that answer, she reflected, was the kind that did you no good when you had found it.
Now that the launch was completely inside the berserker, their communications with the Pearlwere almost entirely cut off. Radios stuttered and rasped with static. Domingo had been expecting this problem. He got around it by maneuvering the launch back to the lip of the wound through which they had entered the enemy’s carcass and pausing to set up a small robotic relay station there. He had to get out of the launch in his armored suit to do so.
Waiting for him inside the launch, Polly and Iskander held their craft in position. They were too busy watching for signs of enemy activity to talk, beyond the minimum of necessary communication, or even to look at each other. But the metal body of the enemy around them, dead or dying, still had not reacted to their presence. Polly could begin to breathe again.
The EVA lock cycled; Domingo came back in. Sitting in the pilot’s seat again, the outer surface of his suit frosting over lightly with the cold it had brought in, he exchanged a few words with the Pearl, confirming for himself that communications had now been solidly reestablished.
Next, driving the launch very slowly, he moved it deeper inside the largely hollow body of the enemy and with a magnetic grapple secured the prow of the small craft to a central projection within the ruin.
Then Domingo once more unfastened himself from his seat and stood up, drifting. The artificial gravity in the launch had not been turned on, conserving that much power against sudden need. He said: “You both know what we’re looking for. Keep in contact with each other at all times.”
“One more thing,” said Baza. “We’re locking up after us. Don’t want any mice getting in while we’re out.” Iskander grinned mirthlessly. “Hatch reentry code will be Baker Epsilon Pearl. Okay?”
The two people with him acknowledged the code. Now the three explorers were ready to begin serious investigation. Domingo disembarked first and looked around before the others came out. Then he beckoned them. Baza, last one out of the small vessel, closed and sealed the hatch. Then the three separated, moving away from the launch in three different directions.
On first touching the metal bones of the berserker, Polly could feel, through the gauntlets covering her hands, how those structural members quivered faintly with the ongoing throb of some machinery. Everything here was not totally dead. But the hulk seemed basically stable, and getting around inside it proved not to be difficult, at least at the start. When necessary the boarders used the small jets on their armored suits to maneuver. But most of the time, in the effective absence of gravity, they were able to scramble readily from one handhold or foothold to another. Each member of the party carried sample cases and nets, means of gathering samples of gas, of debris, of anything that looked like it might represent a clue as to the purpose of this huge construction.
Repeatedly Domingo’s voice came on the suit radios of his two companions, urging them to hurry the investigation, not to waste a moment. It was possible that secrets were being destroyed around them every minute. Polly wondered, but at this late juncture hesitated to ask, how they would be able to recognize a real secret when one appeared.
Already Iskander was jabbing boldly with a long, telescoping staff at some wreckage near the launch. “Someone else ought to look at this,” he said on his suit radio. “This looks to me like biochemistry lab equipment. Maybe your hunch is right, Cap. About there being something here worth finding out.”
Polly, pushing aside incomprehensible alien debris, went to join Baza. The stuff he was digging into looked to her like industrial equipment, pieces from some kind of factory.
Domingo had started his own search some distance away. Over suit radio he informed the others that he had already come upon the remnants of similar equipment.
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