Brother Assassin

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Operations, I’m onto something.”

  The scream came again and again. The slave-unit’s hearing was keen and directionally accurate. Derron changed course slightly and began to run, leaping the unit over the softest-looking spots of ground, striving for both speed and silence.

  After he had run for half a minute he slid as silently as possible to a halt. A stone’s throw ahead of him, he saw a boy of about twelve up in a treetop, clinging tightly to the thin upper trunk with both arms and legs, but still in danger of being shaken down. Every time his yelling ceased for a moment, another sharp tremor would run up the trunk and set him off again. Although the lower part of its trunk was quite thick, the tree was being shaken like a sapling by something concealed in the bushes around its base. There was no animal in this forest with that kind of strength; it would be the berserker machine there in the underbrush, using the boy as bait, hoping that his cries would bring the adults of his group.

  Derron stepped slowly forward. But before he could tell on which side of the tree the berserker was hidden, and take aim, it had spotted his slave-unit. Out of the bushes a pinkish laser beam came stabbing, to gouge out a fireworks display from the armor covering the slave’s midsection. Leveling the laser beam before it like a lance, heaving bushes and saplings out of its way, the berserker charged.

  Derron caught a glimpse of something metallic and low, four-legged, wide and fast-moving as a ground-car. He snapped open his jaw and pressed down, inside his helmet, on the trigger of his own laser weapon. From the center of the slave’s forehead a pale, thin shaft of light crackled out, aimed automatically at the spot where Derron’s eyes were focused.

  The slave-unit’s beam smote the charging machine at a point somewhere amid the knobs of metal that made it seem to have a face, then glanced off to explode a small tree into a cloud of flame and steam. The shot might have done damage, for the enemy broke off its rush in midstride and dived for cover behind a hillock, a grass-tufted hump of earth less than five feet high.

  Two officers in Operations, both of whom were evidently monitoring the video signal from the slave, began to speak simultaneously, giving Derron orders and advice. But even if they had gone about it more sensibly, he had no time to do anything now except go his own way. Somewhat surprised at his own aggressiveness, he found himself running the slave-unit in a crouch around the tiny hill.

  He wanted the fight to be over quickly, one way or the other. He charged at top speed, yelling wordlessly inside his helmet as he fired his laser. The berserker burst into his view, crouched like a metal lion, squat and immensely powerful. If there had been a spare moment in which to hesitate, Derron might have flinched away, for in spite of all his training the illusion was very strong that he was actually about to hurl his own tender flesh upon the waiting monster.

  As it was, he had no time to flinch. With all the inertia of its metal mass the slave ran at full speed into the crouching berserker. The trees in the swamp quivered.

  A few seconds’ experience was enough to convince Derron that the decision to use anthropomorphic fighting machines in this operation had been a great blunder. Wrestling was a tactic not likely to succeed against a machine of equal or superior power, one not limited in the speed of its reactions by the slowness of protoplasmic nerves. For all the slave-unit’s fusion-powered strength, which Operations had envisioned as rending the enemy limb from limb, Derron could do no more than hang on desperately, gripping the berserker in a kind of a half nelson while it bucked and twisted like a wild load-beast to throw him off.

  Once the fight started it seemed to Derron that every authority in Operations was looking over his shoulder, and that most of them had something to say about it. Voices in Derron’s ears shouted orders and abuse at him and at one another. Some of them were probably trying to get the others off his back, but he had no time to hear them anyway. The green forest was spinning round him faster than his eyes and brain could sort it out. In a dizzily detached fraction of a second he could notice how his feet flew uselessly on the ends of his metal legs, breaking down small trees as the monster whirled him. He tried to turn his head to bring the Cyclops eye of his laser to bear, but now one of the berserker’s fore-limbs was gripping the slave’s neck, holding the slave’s head immobile. He kept trying desperately to get a more solid grip for his own steel arms around the berserker’s thick neck, but then his grip was broken, and he flew.

  Before the slave could even bounce, the berserker was on top of it, far faster and more violent than any maddened bull. Derron fired his laser wildly.

  The dizziness of the spinning, and now the panicky sensation of being painlessly trampled and battered, raised in him a giddy urge to laughter. In a moment more the fight would be lost, and he would be able to give up.

  The berserker tossed him once again. And then it was running away, fleeing from Derron’s wildly slashing sword of light. As lightly as a deer the squat machine leaped away among the trees and vanished from Derron’s sight.

  Dizzily he tried to sit up on the peculiar sandy slope where he had been flung. In doing so he at once discovered why the berserker had chosen to retreat; some important part had been broken in the slave, so that its legs now trailed as limp and useless as those of a man with a broken spine. But since the slave’s laser still worked and its powerful arms could still do damage, the berserker’s computer brain had decided to break off the fight. The berserker saw no reason to trade zaps with a crippled but still dangerous antagonist, not when it could be busy at its basic program of killing people.

  The Operations voices had their final say.

  “Odegard, why in the—“

  “In the Holy One’s name, Odegard, what do you think—“

  “Odegard, why didn’t you … ? Oh, do what you can!”

  With a click they were all gone from his helmet, leaving their disgust behind. He had the dazed impression that they were all hurrying away in a jealous group, to descend like a cloud of scavenger birds upon some other victim. If his experience since taking the field was anywhere near typical, the foul-up of the whole operation must be approaching the monumental stage, that stage where avoidance of blame would begin to take precedence in a good many minds.

  Anyway, he was still in the field, now with half a unit to work with. His disgust was mainly with himself. Gone now was the wish to get things settled quickly, one way or the other. Even his dread of responsibility was gone, at least for the moment. Right now all he wanted was another chance at the enemy.

  Holding the slave propped with its arms in a sitting position, he looked about him. He was halfway down the conical side of a soggy sandpit that was ten or fifteen meters across at the top. Nothing grew inside the pit; outside, the nearby trees were nearly all in bad shape. Those that had escaped being broken in the wrestling match were blackened and smoking from his wildly aimed laser.

  What had happened to the boy?

  Working his arms like a swimmer, Derron churned his way uphill through the sand to a spot from which he could see over the rim of the pit. He could recognize, a short distance away, the tall tree in which the youngster had been clinging for his life; but he was not in sight now, living or dead.

  In a sudden little sand slide the crippled slave slid once more down the tricky slope toward the watery mess that filled the bottom of the funnel.

  Funnel?

  Derron at last recognized the place where the slave-unit had been thrown. It was the trap of a poison-digger, a species of large carnivore exterminated on Sirgol in early historical times. Looking down now at the bottom of the pit, Derron met the gaze of two grayish eyes, set in a large lump of head that floated half above the surface of the water.

  Matt was standing just behind the boy Dart, while both of them peered very cautiously through the bushes toward the poison-digger’s trap. The rest of The People were a few hundred yards away, resting in the concealment of some undergrowth while they scratched up a few roots and grubs to eat.

  Matt could
just catch glimpses, above the rim of the funnel, of what seemed to be a head. It was certainly not the poison-digger’s head, but a shape as bald and smoothly curved as a drop of water.

  “I think it is a stone-lion,” Matt whispered very softly.

  “Ah, no,” whispered Dart. “This is the big man I told you about, the stone-man. Ah, what a fight he and the stone-lion had! But I didn’t wait to see the end of it; I jumped from the tree and ran while I could.”

  Matt hesitated, and then decided to risk a closer look. Motioning with his head for Dart to follow, he bent down and crept forward. From behind another bush they could see down into the pit, and Matt was just in time to observe something that made him gasp silently in amazement. Poison-Digger, who could master any creature once it had fallen into his pit, reared up from his slime and struck. And the stone-man simply slapped Digger’s nose with casual force, like someone swatting a child. And with a howl like the cry of a punished child, the Bad One splashed down under his water again!

  The man of shiny stone muttered to himself. His words were filled with power and feeling, but spoken in a tongue unknown to Matt. He slapped at his legs, which lay twisted as if they were dead, and then with big arms he started trying to dig his way up out of the pit. Stone-Man made the sand fly, and Matt thought he might eventually get himself out, but it looked like a very hard struggle.

  “Now do you believe me?” Dart was whispering fiercely. “He did fight the stone-lion. I saw him!”

  “Yes, yes, I can believe it.” Still crouching and keeping out of sight of the pit, Matt led the young one away, back toward the others of the band. He supposed that a fight between two such beings might have accounted for all the burnt and broken trees that had puzzled him earlier, and for all the noise that The People had heard. Now, while leading Dart away from the pit, Matt looked hopefully among the bushes for a huge shiny corpse. A dead stone-lion was one sight Matt wanted very much to see—it might help blot out another picture that would not leave his mind, the picture of what a stone-lion had done to his two young wives.

  Huddling under bushes with the rest of the band, Matt talked things over with the more intelligent adults. “I want to approach this stone-man,” he said. “And try to help him.”

  “Why?”

  Finding the words to explain why was not easy. For one thing, Matt was eager to join forces, if he could, with any power that was able to fight against a stone-lion. But there was more to it than that, for this particular stone-man did not look capable of much more fighting.

  The others listened to Matt, but kept muttering doubtfully. Finally the oldest woman of The People took from her lizard-skin pouch (in which she also carried the seed of fire) the finger bones of her predecessor in office. Three times she shook the bones, and threw them on the muddy ground, and studied the pattern in which they fell. But she could not see the stone-man in the bones and she could offer no advice.

  The more he thought about it, the more determined Matt became. “I’m going to try to help the stone-man. If he does turn out to be hostile, he can’t chase us on his dead legs.”

  The slave-unit’s ears picked up the approach of the whole band of The People, though they were being very quiet.

  “I’m getting some company,” Derron subvocalized. He got no immediate reply from any of the too many chiefs who had been overseeing him before; and that suited him just as well for the moment.

  The People drew near, and the bolder among them peered cautiously from behind bush and tree trunk at the slave-unit. When they saw its head was raised, looking at them, they stepped one at a time out of concealment, showing weaponless hands. Derron imitated the gesture as well as he could; he needed one hand to support the slave in a sitting position.

  The People seemed slowly to gain confidence from the slave’s peaceful gestures, its quiescence, and probably most of all from its obviously crippled condition. Soon the whole band had come out into the open and stood whispering among themselves as they peered curiously down into the pit.

  “Anybody listening?” Derron subvocalized “I’ve got a crowd of people here. Get me a linguist!”

  Since the start of Time Operations, a desperate effort had been made to learn as many as possible of the languages and dialects of Sirgol’s past. Disguised microphones and video pickups had been carried on spy devices to many places and times in the past where there were people to be studied. The program of study had been pushed as hard as possible, but the magnitude of the job was overwhelming. In the modern world there were just two people who had managed to learn something of the speech of these Neolithic semi-nomads, and those two were very busy people today.

  “Odegard!” When response did come, it took the form of a blast in his helmet that made Derron wince. The voice did not identify itself, but sounded like that of Colonel Borss. “Don’t let those people get away from you! Even if your unit’s crippled, it can offer them some protection.”

  “Understand.” Derron sighed, subsubvocally. “How about getting me a linguist?”

  “We’re trying to get you one. You’re in a vital area there… . Stand guard over those people until we can get another unit to the spot!”

  “Understood.” Things were tough in the berserker-ridden Neolithic today. But he might, after all, be better off sealed up in his master-unit than out in the foul-up and confusion that must be engulfing the Section.

  “Anyone that size is bound to eat a lot of food,” one of the older men was complaining to Matt.

  “With his dead legs,” Matt answered, “I don’t suppose he’ll live long enough to eat very much.” Matt was trying to talk some of the braver men into giving him a hand in pulling the stone-man up out of the trap. Stone-Man seemed to be waiting with some confidence of getting help.

  The man debating against Matt cheerfully switched arguments. “If he’s not going to live long, there’s no use trying to help him. Anyway, he’s not one of The People.”

  “No, he’s not. But still …” Matt continued to search for new words, new ways of thought. He would help the stone-man alone if he had to. By arguing he was trying to make his feelings clear to himself as well as to the others. He saw this strange being who had tried to help Dart as a part of some larger order, one to which The People also belonged, as if there could be a band, a tribe-of-all-men, some group set in opposition to all the wild beasts and demons, that killed and afflicted men by day and night.

  “Suppose there was a band of stone-people around here,” suggested another man. A few of The People looked over their shoulders apprehensively. “They would be dangerous enemies to have, but strong friends.”

  The suggestion did not strike root; the idea either of friendship or of enmity with other bands did not have much importance in The People’s life.

  But Dart piped up, “This one wants to be our friend.”

  The oldest woman scoffed. “So would anyone who was crippled and needed help.”

  A female linguist’s voice joined the muted hive that was buzzing anew in Derron’s helmet. She provided him with a rather halting translation of part of the debate among The People, though she was ordered away after only a couple of minutes to work with another operator. From Operations voices in the background, Derron overheard that so far two berserkers had been destroyed, but ten slave-units had been lost. And the appearance of the slave-units tended to terrify and scatter the people they were supposed to be protecting.

  “Tell them to try pretending they’re crippled,” Derron advised the Section. “All right, I’ll do without a linguist if I have to. That may be better than getting a word or two wrong somewhere. But how about dropping me some of those self-defense weapons to hand out to these people? It’ll be too late for that when the berserker comes back.” The machine he had fought must have gotten sidetracked following some old trail or pursuing some other band, but he had to assume that it would be back. “And drop me grenades, not arrows. There’s only one man in this band who has a bow.” Inside the slave’s big torso
was a chamber into which small items could be sent from the future as required.

  “The self-defense weapons are being prepared,” someone assured him. “It’s dangerous to hand ‘em out until they’re absolutely needed, though. Suppose they decide to use ‘em on the slave? Or blow each other up by mistake?”

  “I think it’ll be more dangerous to wait too long. You can at least drop them now.”

  “They’re being prepared.”

  The way things were going today, Derron didn’t know whether he could believe that or not.

  The People seemed still to be discussing the slave-unit, while he kept it sitting in what he hoped was a patient and trustworthy attitude. According to the brief translation Derron had heard, the tall young man with the bow slung over his shoulder was the one arguing in favor of helping the “stone-man.”

  At last this man with the bow, who seemed to be the nearest thing to a chief that these people had, succeeded in talking one of the other men into helping him. Together they approached one of the saplings that had been splintered in the fight and twisted it loose from its stump, hacking through the tough strings of bark with a hand ax. Then the two bold men brought the sapling right up to the edge of the poison-digger’s trap. Gripping it by the branches, they pushed the splintered end down to where the slave could grasp it. Derron caught hold with both hands.

  The two men pulled, then grunted with surprise at the weight they felt. The boy who had been up in the tree came to help.

  “Odegard, this is Colonel Borss,” said a helmet-voice in urgent tones. “We can see now what the berserkers’ target is: the first written language on the planet originates very near your present location. The deaths so far haven’t weakened its probability too much, but one more killing could be the one to push it under the real-time threshold. There’s a peduncle effect, of course, and we can’t pinpoint the inventor, but the people in your band are certainly among the ancestors of his tribe.”