“All right, granted for the sake of argument. Though there’s no evidence he did anything at all to help them. Anyway, what were they supposed to give him in return?”
The ensign paused. “I don’t know. Maybe the plan was that they’d get rid of some of his political enemies. Only the deal went sour, from the goodlife’s point of view, and the berserker ate him alive, along with a few other people on his ships and on the research station.”
“And bolted down about a billion protopeople for dessert. Well, it doesn’t sound convincing to me, but again, for the sake of argument, suppose it’s true. How does any of it explain the behavior of these machines we’re chasing?”
Dinant had no answer.
Tongres sighed.
At last the third member of the conversation spoke again. “But I wonder … the damned berserkers have operated, continue to operate, over a truly enormous stretch of space and time. As far as I know, no one’s ever demonstrated they even have a central headquarters or command center, any more than Solarian humanity does.”
“Interesting thought, though. To consider that the berserkers might have one. Even more interesting to think that we, here, now, might be hurrying as fast as we can along the road that leads to it.”
Over a number of centuries, beginning well before the first berserker raid on Imatra, the interior of the Mavronari had been partially, desultorily explored. The nebula was known to be almost if not entirely lifeless, but also not totally devoid of the possibilities of life. At certain widely scattered locations within the vast sprawl of silent darkness, the light-pressure of isolated suns was sufficient to keep shadowing dust and thin gas at bay, establishing adequate orbital space for modest families of planets.
One or two of these systems of worlds, which according to the flagship’s data banks had never been inhabited (and were all but completely uninhabitable), were known to lie in the general direction of the recurrent berserker flights from Imatra. These isolated systems within the Mavronari had proven to be reachable by narrow, roundabout channels of relatively clear space winding through the occluding interstellar dust. The enemy did not appear to be trying to reach any of these channels. And the fleet commander, with access to prodigious amounts of military information on berserker sightings and activity, could find nothing in his information banks to indicate that the Mavronari had ever been suspected of harboring berserker installations.
Of course other solar systems, known to the berserkers but never discovered by humanity, might well exist inside the sprawling nebula. And worlds unusable by life might still offer space for dock facilities and shipyards, and minerals for production, to the unliving foe.
The Solarians who were now engaged in planning the pursuit felt themselves being forced to the conclusion, for lack of any better, that the enemy were probably indeed on their way to one of those worlds, and had chosen to get there by plowing in the back way, the slow way. But again, why?Certainly any ship or machine, constrained by dust to travel only in normal space, fighting the nebula every meter of the way, would need more than three hundred years to reach any of those bodies from the modern berserkers’ current position.
Prinsep now rechecked the astrogational possibilities. The result was available to anyone in the fleet who expressed an interest: In three hundred years there had not been time for either Dirac’s berserker or Dirac’s yacht to complete the long dark tunneling and emerge at any of those known isolated systems.
“Maybe time enough to tunnel their way to some system we don’t know about? I don’t think so, but I can’t say it’s impossible.”
“Do you suppose that one of the berserkers we’re chasing now could be Dirac’s?”
That question earned the one who asked it a strange look. “Not if Dirac’s berserker stayed on the course it was last seen to be following. If it kept to that course, it’s still in there somewhere, plowing through the dust.”
“Maybe there is some secret passage we don’t know about. Some high-speed lane through the Mavronari that we can’t see from here, a route humans have never discovered.”
One of the captains ran up on her holostage some model images, such profiles of the modern machines as could be compiled from intelligence reports and telescopic sightings.
“None of these correspond with the image of Dirac’s berserker on the old record. You’re suggesting that the thing may have been chasing itself around in a three-hundred-year circle, recruiting a force of helpers as it goes?”
“No, not exactly. Not if you put it that way. I mean that possibly such a machine hangs out in the Mavronari, comes out at intervals to make another hit-and-run attack on Imatra—or some other target—and then ducks back inside.”
The other thought it over. Shook her head. “Historically, there haven’t been many attacks anywhere in the vicinity of the Mavronari. Not a single other attack on Imatra besides the two that we’re concerned about. And why make a raid only every three hundred years? Doesn’t even sound like a berserker.”
“Well, what does it sound like, then?” This was the commodore speaking, cutting through debate with authority. “If anyone here is still clinging to some notion that these objects we’re chasing may not be real berserkers, I advise you to forget that theory right now. We’ve picked up more than enough of their debris, intercepted more than enough of their combat communications, to clinch the fact beyond any doubt … and so did Dirac make sure of his opponent, as the records show, before he started out on his last chase. The things we’re fighting here, and the one he was fighting, are the genuine bad machines. Absolutely!”
Someone else put in: “Remember, berserkers do sometimes randomize their tactics, doing things that seem stupid just for the sake of remaining unpredictable.”
Prinsep shook his head. “Sometimes they do. But three hundred years of deliberate stupidity? Of inefficiency, of downright waste of time and effort and firepower, just to give us something to fret about? If that’s true I give up. No I don’t. Never mind. I’m tired, I’m going to grab some sack time.” His chef’s usual signal, a muted dinner gong, chimed upon the nearby holostage, but for once the commodore waved the menu away without comment.
The fleet managed to gain some ground on the fleeing foe during the next couple of c-plus jumps. But after that, gaining more became bleakly difficult; the commodore considered accepting an increased risk of collisions with stray matter, but decided against it. Even so, the chase was becoming more and more dangerous, almost prohibitively so, as the hunters followed their quarry ever more deeply into the outlying regions of the dark nebula.
Over the next four or five standard days, it seemed that some ground was being lost. The trail left in subspace by their berserker prey grew intermittently colder and more difficult to follow.
The fleet commander gritted his teeth, weighed his chances—some said he spent time alone in his cabin, saying his prayers to whatever form of deity he favored (no one was quite sure what that might be)—and ordered a slight additional acceleration.
And a moment after issuing that command turned, with a put-upon sigh, his attention to the possibilities for lunch.
Meanwhile, Havot and Becky had been reunited. She had supposedly been relieved of all her HO duties, but that punishment—if such it was—was the limit of what her superiors were able to inflict upon her at the moment. She was now living blissfully with Havot in a reprieve of uncertain duration, and of course she was no longer recording what he said and did.
At least, Havot thought, that was what he was supposed to take for granted.
All his life he had been blessed—that was how he regarded the condition—with an incredibly suspicious mind. Which of course was one of the main reasons why he was still alive.
Anyway, spy devices could be very small and hard to spot, and he continued to assume that whatever happened between him and Becky would be overheard, and very likely watched, any place they might go on the ship.
So he was impeccably tender with her, very inno
cent and loving.
* * *
Meanwhile Havot had to grapple with inner demons of some subtlety. As the chase progressed, and it became more and more evident that the commodore was in deadly, inflexible earnest, Havot found the prospect of once more confronting a berserker, or perhaps a whole fleet of them, somewhat disturbing.
In private moments and in dreams he tried to clarify in his inner thoughts his impression, his fading memory, of what exactly had happened between him and the crippled killing machine, back there on the Imatran surface. Had he really—when death seemed certain, the prospect of being able to draw another breath a fantasy—had he really, in that moment, committed himself in some way to serve the berserker cause?
His present situation did not distress him. He was experiencing the usual mixture of enchantment and mesmerizing fear that any perilous enterprise could give him—the sense of being, at least for a short time, fully alive. It was a kick that nothing but serious danger could deliver.
When Havot heard how the berserkers had taken the record from the subterranean archive, he began to think that the action of the berserker machine in sparing him had really not been based on anything he had or had not done. But the trouble with being eternally suspicious was that you could never be quite sure.
There was another question, a related one, that tended to keep the fugitive awake when he lay sleepless, alone, or with his newly released lover, in his bunk: Would the berserkers, when he met them again, be somehow able to recognize him as one of their own? Had the substance of his confrontation with one battered machine somehow been communicated to the others?
Maybe the real question was: Did he, Havot, really want to fight on the berserkers’ side or not?
Given the unexpected ferocity with which Commodore Prinsep was pursuing the berserkers, Havot thought it distinctly possible that he was soon going to find out.
Lying now in the small berth with Becky, his body pressed against hers in the constricted space, Havot looked fondly at his sleeping lover, stroked her blond hair, and smiled to himself.
He allowed himself to whisper, sweetly, inaudibly, one word: “Badlife!”
TWENTY
The first jolting impact of a berserker weapon against the flagship’s force-shielded hull jarred Havot out of the sack, and a moment later Rebecca’s naked body landed directly on top of him.
Yet once more, for perhaps the hundredth time since the task force had left Imatra—Havot had long ago lost count—the flagship had ended a jump with sudden reemergence into normal space.
But this reentry was different. In the next instant after the Symmetryappeared in normal space the first hammer blow from the enemy struck home. A second or two later the ship’s alarms belatedly set up their deadly, muted clamor.
Ruthlessly pushing aside the half-wakened Becky, Havot ignored her confused cries. Even before his mind was fully conscious, his own body was struggling to get into the suit of space armor that for some days had been resting underneath his bunk.
Becky of course had armor too, but hers waited some distance down the corridor in her cabin, so more than Becky’s modesty and reputation were going to be at risk while she ran, half-nude and struggling to pull on clothing, the necessary meters to get at it. Havot could picture others in the corridor perhaps looking at her strangely, even in the midst of their own travail.
Havot accepted her parting kiss without allowing himself to be distracted from the task of getting his own armor on. He did not particularly want her to put hers on, but he could not very well try to stop her or advise her against it.
None of the crew members or passengers aboard the vessels of the task force—with the possible exception of those actually on watch at the time—had been granted any warning at all before their world exploded.
Gambling to overtake the fleeing foe, the fleet commander had accepted a certain risk of ambush. Therefore the berserker counterattack could not be counted as a total surprise, but still its specific timing and its strength were unexpected.
A theory advanced earlier by one of the astrogators, but never supported by solid evidence, held that the enemy had fled in this precise direction because the distribution of various types of matter in the space along this trail offered unequaled possibilities for ambush. Regardless of whether the astrogator’s theory was right or wrong, the practical outcome was almost completely disastrous from the human point of view. The commodore’s continued gamble for speed had finally been lost.
The ten or fifteen lesser vessels of the task force, emerging from flightspace within milliseconds of the flagship, and all within a few hundred kilometers of each other, were also attacked at once. Some of them were instantly destroyed.
The small civilian contingent aboard the Symmetry—Havot, the three HO people, and the Carmpan—had been warned, coached, and rehearsed days ago, soon after the fleet’s departure from Imatra, about their duties once a red alert had sounded. They were to put on armor, get to their acceleration couches as rapidly as possible, and stay in them for the duration of the emergency.
Havot, alone in his cabin, was just completing the process of putting on his suit when he was knocked off his feet by the second direct hit on the flagship. Grimly he struggled erect; his hands were shaking now. The weight and smell and look of the bulky outfit, very much like the one that had saved his life on the Imatran surface, strongly evoked the terrifying chase and then the confrontation by the berserker.
Even as he fastened the last connector on the suit, he ran out into the corridor, keeping an eye open for Becky or either of her senior associates while he headed for his acceleration couch. Not that he expected yet to be able to do anything about them, but perhaps in the heat of battle a window of opportunity would arise. Certainly not here and now. The restricted space of the corridor seemed filled by a jostling crowd of bulky suits and helmets, most of them bright with identification markings of one kind or another.
Bumping his way along toward his assigned battle station, amid the unfamiliar noises and pressures of the confined environment, Havot found his imagination gripped, inflamed, by the idea that he could feel the death machines in space ahead of him, and on all sides, as they came hurtling past the Symmetryat unimaginable velocities. He could sense their lifeless bodies, smell them, just outside the hull—
With an effort he brought his mind back to current reality. Here was the room just off the bridge where all the passengers were to occupy their assigned acceleration couches until the all clear was sounded. Superintendent Gazin and Senior Agent Ariari were in the room already. Their armored suits bore some insignia of the HO office. Havot wondered if that would make them special targets for the berserkers, but decided, to his own private amusement, that this was unlikely.
Meanwhile the ship repeatedly lurched and sounded—hull ringing and groaning like great gongs—under the continued impact of enemy weapons. Blended in now were the space-twitching detonations of her own guns firing back.
Here came Becky, in her suit and apparently unhurt, staggering her way across the unsteady deck to the acceleration couch beside Havot’s. Inside her faceplate he could see her relief to find him still unhurt and already well protected.
The commodore’s amplified voice could be heard, still calm, still in control:
“Stand by to repel boarders. I repeat—”
Boarders! Something that tended to happen frequently in the space adventure stories and surprisingly often in real life as well.
Modern defenses were capable of turning sheer kinetic energy back upon itself. Fighting ships and machines, each muffled in a protective envelope of defensive force, were often more susceptible to the slow approach of a grappling and boarding device than to the screaming velocity of missiles.
Already the ship’s brain, taking over momentarily from the commodore, was reporting in its dispassionate voice that several small enemy attack units had rammed themselves in through the flagship’s force-field protection.
Havot reached out an
armored hand to touch that of Becky in the couch beside his. Beyond her, the other two Humanity Office agents seemed to be lying there inertly.
Then the chief of the Humanity Office, as if sensing that Havot was looking at him, turned his head and glared back, doubtless trying to express his suspicion that Havot would try to take the berserkers’ side now that battle had been joined.
By contrast, Lieutenant Ariari looked too pale and terrified inside his helmet to be worrying about the suspected goodlife or anyone else. He looked in fact like a man about to soil his underwear—if such a thing was possible in a properly fitted suit of space combat armor, with its built-in miniaturized plumbing.
In the small room there was one acceleration couch still unoccupied, this one of drastically different shape. The Carmpan had evidently elected to remain in his cabin. Definitely against the commodore’s orders, but it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to try to enforce obedience in the case of Fourth Adventurer.
And now an arming robot, having evidently concluded its tasks in the control room next door, came rolling into the passengers’ compartment.
No doubt Gazin and Ariari, if anyone had asked them, would have strongly objected to either Havot or the now-disgraced Agent Thanarat being issued weapons. But apparently no one had yet sought their opinion. Certainly the robot from the weapons shop was not about to do so.
Instead it proceeded as it had been programmed, rolling along the short row of acceleration couches, using its metal arms to issue each passenger his or her choice of alphatrigger or blink-triggered shoulder weapon. Gazin and Ariari selected theirs mechanically and the robot moved along. Havot could see even before it reached him that it bore racked on its flanks rows of what he took to be grenades, hanging there like ripe tempting fruit, waiting for any eager Solarian hand to pluck. Havot was no military ordnance expert, but these looked to him like the type called drillbombs. Just the thing to use when you got within arm’s length of a berserker machine—or someone you didn’t like, whether or not he was wearing an armored suit.
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