“Yeah, I’ve heard about Mike. Haven’t had the chance to meet him.”
“What’s the Premier’s plan?” Kensing badly wanted to know, and he felt it rarely hurt to ask.
“That’s no secret,” the box assured him. “We’re going after the bad machine.”
That was what Kensing had been hoping to hear. Something inside him, somewhere around his heart, gave a lurch at the possibility—no matter how faint—of catching up with the ongoing disaster that had carried Annie off. Of finding out at first hand what had happened. Of coming to grips in violence with the monstrous inanimate thingsthat had done this to her and to him.
And here right in front of Kensing was the person of all people who might make the possibility real. Frank Marcus, who at one time or another had retired, it seemed, from just about every armed force in the Solarian Galaxy except the Templars; Colonel Marcus, who as it turned out was now piloting Dirac’s yacht.
Kensing said bluntly, “Colonel, if anyone’s going after that berserker, I’m going along.”
“Yeah?” The talking boxes sounded interested but not entirely convinced.
“Dr. Zador and I were going to be married in a month. More to the point, I’m an engineer who’s trained and working in defensive systems. I’ve been doing the preliminaries for the projected colonial vessels.”
“Combat experience?”
“No.”
“That may not matter too much. Most of our crew doesn’t have any either. If you’re a qualified defense systems engineer, maybe the chief’ll want to fit you in.”
Moments later Brabant, having evidently received some invisible communication from the Premier, was ushering Kensing into the inner office.
Setting foot in the inner rooms of the Premier’s suite for the first time in several years, Kensing again noted that certain remodeling and redecoration had taken place since his last visit. As if the ship were becoming less a ship and more a place of business.
In the center of the innermost room was a large desk, a real desk constructed basically of wood, though its upper surface was inhabited by a number of electronic displays. The desk held several stacks of real paper also, and behind them sat a real man. The Premier was not physically large. He had changed, in subtle ways that Kensing would have been hard put to define, in the two years since the two of them had last come face to face.
Dirac’s hair was steely gray; thick and naturally curled, it lay trimmed close round his large skull. Sunken gray eyes peered out from under heavy brows, like outlaws preparing to sally from a cave. Skin and muscles were firm and youthful in appearance, belying the impression of age suggested by the gray hair. His hands toyed with a fine-bladed knife, which Kensing recognized as an antique letter opener. Dirac’s voice, an eloquent actor’s bass, was milder than it sounded on public holostage.
As Kensing entered the cabin, the Premier was in conversation with the image of a rather handsome and much younger man, who appeared on the largest of the room’s three holostages, the one beside the desk. The younger man, who wore pilot’s insignia on his collar, was saying; “—my deepest sympathy, sir.”
“Thank you, Nick.” The presumably bereaved husband gave, as he often did, the impression of being firmly in control though inwardly stressed. He looked up and nodded at Kensing, whose escort, withdrawing, had already closed the door behind him.
Kensing began: “Premier Dirac, I don’t know if you—”
“Yes, of course I remember you, Kensing. Friend of my son’s, he called you Sandy. Mike always thought highly of you. So you’re delegated to explain this mess to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fill me in on the details later. And you’re in on the colonizing project—and you’re also Dr. Zador’s fiancé. Very sorry about her. A terrible business we’ve got here.”
“Yes, sir. My sympathy to you. Mine and everyone’s on Imatra.”
Dirac acknowledged the condolence with a brusque nod. “Mike’s not with me this time,” he remarked.
“Someone told me he’s off on a long trip, sir.”
“Yes. Very long.” The Premier indicated the ‘stage. “I don’t suppose you’ve met Nick here, have you? Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect and pilot. Works for me.”
“We haven’t met yet, sir.”
Dirac proceeded with a swift introduction. Was there just the faintest momentary twinkle of some private amusement in the old man’s eye?
The formality concluded, the Premier once more faced the imaged head and shoulders of Nicholas Hawksmoor. “Proceed.”
Nick reported quietly: “There was nothing I could do, sir. I was … almost … in time to get myself aboard the courier before that last explosion. But not quite in time. I couldn’t be of any help to anyone aboard.”
“Had you any direct evidence that my wife was among the passengers?”
“I couldn’t even confirm that. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, Nick.”
“No, sir. Thank you for understanding that, sir.” A brief hesitation. “There’s another matter I suppose I should mention.”
“What’s that?”
“Shortly after the alert was sounded, I was given a direct order by Acting Supervisor Zador on the biostation. She commanded me to take my ship out and ram the enemy.”
This statement was made so casually that Kensing, who thought he was paying close attention, wondered if he had heard right, or if he had earlier missed something. He understood that as soon as the alert was called, Annie as acting supervisor would have automatically become local defense commander. A wildly inappropriate function for her, but …
Dirac nodded, accepting the information about the ramming order with surprising placidity. “So what happened next?”
“Well, sir, Dr. Zador wasn’t—isn’t—a combat officer, but she must have thought she’d come up with a good plan to at least distract the berserker. Obviously it wouldn’t have worked. I couldn’t have got the Wrenwithin a thousand kilometers of a monster like that before it vaporized me without breaking stride.
“So when the acting supervisor gave me that order, rather than argue and distract her further from her own real job—at which I am sure she’s more than competent—I just acknowledged the command and then ignored it. The only really useful thing I could do with my ship at that point was to stay close to the courier and try to look out for those on board.
“If the berserker had sent one of its own small spacegoers after the courier, or a boarding machine, I would probably have tried ramming that.Or tried to get the machine to come after me instead. But of course, as the scene actually played out …” Nick looked distressed.
Dirac said gently: “It’s all right.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But—”
“Yes, sir?”
The shadowed eyes, with a danger in them that Kensing had never seen there before, looked up from under the steel brows. “From what you tell me, we don’t really knowthat the Lady Genevieve ever actually boarded that courier at all. Do we?”
Nick’s holostage image appeared to ruminate. “No, I don’t suppose we do.”
Dirac nodded slowly. He glanced at Kensing. “In fact, what I’ve heard of the recorded radio traffic indicates that Dr. Zador had some concern about the courier leaving prematurely. She feared the pilot might pull out before everyone who wanted to get aboard had done so.”
“That’s correct.”
Premier Dirac now turned his full attention back to the visitor who was physically present in his cabin. “Kensing, have you people on Imatra any further information on that point?”
“I don’t know anything about it, Premier. I’ll certainly check up on it as quickly as I can.”
“Do that, please. I want any information bearing on the question of the Lady Genevieve’s presence on that courier.”
“I’ll get it for you, whatever we have.”
“Good.” Dirac knitted steely brows. “So far no one has shown me any firm evidence
one way or the other. So I have to believe there’s a good chance she was still on the station when it was so strangely—kidnapped.”
Kensing didn’t say anything.
Dirac was not ready to leave the point. “We do know that somepeople were still aboard the station, right? Supervisor Zador, for one. And didn’t she say something to the courier pilot to the effect that others were intending to stay?”
Nicholas Hawksmoor put in: “At least one other, sir. The bioengineer Daniel Hoveler apparently remained with Dr. Zador. That seems to be the only definite evidence we have on the presence or absence of any particular individuals.”
Dirac nodded, displaying a certain grim satisfaction. “So at this moment, as we speak, there are still living people on the station.” He met the others’ eyes, one after the other, as if challenging anyone to dispute the point.
Kensing was more than ready to hope that Annie still had a chance at life; it was almost but not quite unheard of for a berserker’s prisoners to be rescued. But Nick was willing to dispute his employer’s assumption. “We don’t knowthat, sir.”
Dirac gave the speaker his steely glare. “We don’t knowthe people aboard the station have been killed. Correct?”
There was a brief pause in which Nick seemed to yield. “Yes, sir. Correct.”
The Premier smiled faintly. “To be on the safe side, then, we must assume that there are living people. And my wife may well be among them.”
“That’s correct, sir. For all we know, she may.”
“That’s all for now.” And Dirac’s hands moved over the surface of the table in front of him, dismissing Hawksmoor, whose image vanished abruptly, calling up other images on his private stage.
He said: “Kensing, I’m going to order the search for survivors of the courier abandoned. Any functioning space suit in the vicinity would be putting out an automated distress signal, and nothing like that is being received.”
Kensing didn’t know what to say, but it seemed he wasn’t required to say anything at this point.
Dirac continued: “But I am going to keep a number of my pilots busy, Nick among them, combing through all the space debris that resulted from the combat, the berserker stuff along with ours. We may be able to glean a lot of information from that.”
“Yes, sir, I expect so.” The room was replete with wall displays, in addition to those on Dirac’s desk. From where Kensing stood, he could read most of the wall information fairly well. Obviously surface and satellite telescopes were still locked onto the retreating enemy and its prize. He was tormented by the idea that somewhere inside that distorted little dot, Annie might be still alive.
Dirac followed his gaze. “Look at that. As far as anyone in-system here can tell by telescope, the bioresearch station has suffered no serious physical damage. My ships will soon be refitted—I don’t see why it should take more than a few hours—and as soon as they’re ready, we’re going after it.”
“I’m coming with you, sir.”
“Naturally, I expected you’d say that. With your experience in defense systems you’ll be useful. Welcome aboard. See Varvara when you go out; she’ll sign you up officially.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The Premier nodded. “She’s not dead, I tell you.” Obviously he meant his own young bride. Looking quietly into some holostage presentation of nearby space, he added: “I am sure that I would know if she were dead. Meanwhile, I want to gather every possible bit of information about the attacker.”
Berserker debris, Kensing knew, was often valuable to military intelligence because it allowed types of enemy equipment to be distinguished. He nodded. They were going to need every gram of advantage they could get.
Leaving the conference, Kensing once more encountered Colonel Marcus and the bodyguard Brabant. They were talking in the corridor with a woman Kensing had not met before, who introduced herself to him as Varvara Engadin. Engadin was somewhere near the Premier’s age, probably around fifty, but still slender and impressively beautiful, and her name was familiar. She had been the Premier’s intimate companion—as well as his political adviser, according to the stories—when Kensing had first met the family. At that time Mike’s mother was already several years dead.
“Ms. Engadin, I’m supposed to see you about signing on the crew.”
“Sandy.” She put both hands out to him in sympathy. “I’ve been hearing about your loss.”
Conversation focused briefly on the tragedy. Though everyone spoke in polite and diplomatic terms, plainly all agreed that Dirac was determined not to accept the overwhelming probability that his bride was dead, and he fully intended to get her back. To have his way, to impose his will, as usual, even when his adversary was a berserker.
Kensing, his own feelings torn, commented that everyone really knew the odds were pretty heavily against that. This psychic pretense was not at all the Premier’s usual mode of behavior.
“Know him pretty well?” the colonel asked. He had a way of swiveling a lens on his front box to make it plain who he was speaking to.
“I’m a friend of his son’s—a close friend for a time, but I haven’t seen Mike for a couple of years. And I’ve stayed with them in one of the official mansions. How about you?”
“Don’t really know them. Been working for the Premier only a couple of months now. I was just in the process of turning down a chief pilot’s job when this came up. Now it looks like I’m in for the duration.” Marcus did not seem at all displeased by the prospect of going to war again. Somehow the metal boxes and the voice coming out of them impressed Kensing as capable of expressing shades of feeling. Somehow the colonel’s boxes could give the impression of swaggering as they rolled.
“What do you think has happened to his wife? Really?” Kensing felt compelled to dig for expert opinion regarding the fate of those aboard the station.
“He could be right. She might not have boarded that courier at all.”
“And what do you think …” He couldn’t make himself state the question plainly.
“Hell, I don’t know. There’s always a fighting chance. But no use anyone getting his hopes too high.”
His official enrollment completed, pacing down a corridor toward his newly assigned quarters with Marcus rolling at his side, Kensing listened to more of the colonel’s opinions. Frank Marcus commented that two bizarre points about the recent raid set it apart from almost any other military action that he was able to remember.
“First point: regardless of what this berserker did out here, in the vicinity of this planetoid, it made no effort to get at the inner planets of the system. Didn’t even send scouts sunward to look them over, or to raid the space traffic going on that way. There’s quite a bit of space traffic, almost all of it unarmed ships.”
“The inner worlds are heavily defended,” Kensing offered.
Marcus dismissed that with the wave of a metallic arm, a tentacle-like appendage of inhuman but obviously practical shape. “In my experience, when a berserker as big and mean as this one—hell, any berserker—sees it has at least a fighting chance to take out a couple of billion people, it’s not likely to pass up the opportunity.”
“So why did it take the biolab? Not destroy it, but actually grab it and carry it away?”
“I don’t know yet. But I do know something that strikes me as even more peculiar. Our tricky berserker didn’t even make a serious attempt to depopulate thisplanetoid. And it was right here. And the defenses on Planetoid Imatra are—were—a hell of a lot lighter than those on the sunward planets. It took out the defenses that were shooting at it, and that was that.”
Kensing, whose job had long required of him serious—up to now purely theoretical—study of berserkers’ tactics, had already been trying to make sense of it. “So, that means what? A monster machine that doesn’t want to kill people? Indicating that in some crazy way it’s not really a berserker?”
“I wouldn’t want to tell that to the guys who were manning the ground defense
s, or to the people who tried to fight it in space. No, it’s ready enough to kill. But it had some bigger goal than simply attacking this system. It wouldn’t deviate from its plan, even for the chance to take out a couple of billion human lives. Of life units, as the berserkers say. Wouldn’t even delay to polish off a million or so near at hand.”
“All right. Was that your second point?”
“No. Actually the second peculiarity I had in mind was that even now, days after the attack, the damned raider is still in sight. Either it can’t go superluminal while it’s towing something as big as that lab, or it doesn’t want to risk the attempt. And if it hasn’t tried to go c-plus by now, it’s not going to. Because now it’s close enough to the Mavronari to start getting into the thick dust.”
Kensing paused in the corridor to take another look for himself, calling up the picture on one of the yacht’s numerous displays. True, the berserker was currently observable only with some difficulty, but there it was. Still fleeing in slowship mode, though with a steady buildup of velocity in normal space, so that the tiny wavering images of the raider and its captive prey, as seen from the vicinity of the Imatran planetoid, were measurably redshifting.
Not greatly, though. “A long way to go to light speed.”
“Right. It hasn’t been humping its tail hard enough to get near that. C-plus wouldn’t be a practical procedure, as I say, for an object moving in that direction—into the dust.” In fact, as Kensing discovered when he queried the terminal, the very latest indications were that the berserker’s acceleration appeared to be easing off somewhat, and computer projections were that the burdened machine might actually have to diminish its velocity in the next few hours or days as it penetrated ever more deeply the outlying fringes of the nebula.
Within the next few hours, a war council composed largely of key members of the Premier’s staff went into session aboard the Eidolon.Kensing, as the official representative of Imatra, was in attendance. Kensing’s Imatran compatriots continued to maintain a wary distance.
Kensing had remained aboard the yacht, sending down to his apartment on the surface for extra clothing and some personal gear. It now seemed unlikely that he would leave the Eidolonfor any reason before the squadron’s departure, the projected time of which was only hours away.
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