The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction

by Anthology

  “What?”

  “Johann’s alive. Healthy. See? It’s a freezer.”

  “But we all told the berserker he was dead.” She felt stupid with the impact of one shock after another. For the first time she looked down at Karlsen’s face, and long seconds passed before she could tear her eyes away. “It has hostages. It wants his body.”

  “No.” Nogara shook his head. “I see now. But no. I won’t give him to berserkers, alive.” A brutal power of personality still emanated from his broken body. His gun was gone, but his power kept Lucinda from moving. There was no hatred in her now.

  She protested: “But there are seven men out there.”

  “Berserker’s like me.” Nogara bared pain-clenched teeth. “It won’t let prisoners go. Here. The key . . .” He pulled it from inside his tom-open tunic.

  Lucinda’s eyes were drawn once again to the cold serenity of the face in the coffin. Then on impulse she ran to get the key. When she did so Nogara slumped over in relief, unconscious or nearly so.

  The coffin lock was marked in several positions, and she turned it to EMERGENCY REVIVAL. Lights sprang on around the figure inside, and there was a hum of power.

  By now the automated systems of the ship were reacting to the emergency. The serving machines had begun a stretcher-bearer service. Nogara being one of the first victims they carried away. Presumably a robot medic was in action somewhere. From behind Nogara’s throne chair a great voice was shouting.

  “This is ship defense control, requesting human orders I What is nature of emergency?”

  “Do not contact the courier ship!” Lucinda shouted back. “Watch it for an attack. But don’t hit the lifeboat!”

  The glass top of the coffin had become opaque.

  Lucinda ran to the viewport stumbling over the body of Mical and going on without a pause. By putting her face against the port and looking out at an angle she could just see the berserker-courier, pinkly visible in the wavering light of the hypermass, its lifeboat of hostages a small pink dot still in place before it.

  How long would it wait, before it killed the hostages and fled?

  When she turned away from the port, she saw that the coffin’s lid was open and the man inside was sitting up. For just a moment, a moment that was to stay in Lucinda’s mind, his eyes were like a child’s, fixed helplessly on hers. Then power began to grow behind his eyes, a power somehow completely different from his brother’s and perhaps even greater.

  Karlsen looked away from her, taking in the rest of his surroundings, the devastated Great Hall and the coffin. “Felipe,” he whispered, as if in pain, though his half-brother was no longer in sight.

  Lucinda moved toward him and started to pour out her story, from the day in the Flamland prison when she had heard that Karlsen had fallen to the plague.

  Once he interrupted her. “Help me out of this thing, get me space armor.” His arm was hard and strong when she grasped it, but when he stood beside her he was surprisingly short. “Go on, what then?”

  She hurried on with her tale, while serving machines came to arm him. “But why were you frozen?” she ended, suddenly wondering at his health and strength.

  He ignored the question. “Come along to Defense Control. We must save those men out there.”

  He went familiarly to the nerve center of the ship and hurled himself into the combat chair of the Defense Officer, who was probably dead. The panel before Karlsen came alight and he ordered at once: “Get me in contact with that courier.”

  Within a few moments a flat-sounding voice from the courier answered routinely. The face that appeared on the communication screen was badly lighted; someone viewing it without advance warning would not suspect that it was anything but human.

  “This is High Commander Karlsen speaking, from the Nirvana.” He did not call himself governor or lord, but by his title of the great day of the Stone Place. “I’m coming over there. I want to talk to you men on the courier.”

  The shadowed face moved slightly on the screen. “Yes.”

  Karlsen broke off the contact at once. “That’ll keep its hopes up. Now I need a fast launch. You, robots, load my coffin aboard one. I’m on emergency revival drugs now and if I live I may have to refreeze for a while.”

  “You’re not really going there?”

  Up out of the chair again, he paused. “I know berserkers. If chasing me is that thing’s prime function it won’t waste a shot or a second of time on a few hostages while I’m in sight.”

  “You can’t go,” Lucinda heard herself saying. “You mean too much to all men—”

  “I’m not committing suicide, I have a trick or two in mind.” Karlsen’s voice changed suddenly. “You say Felipe’s not dead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Karlsen’s eyes closed while his lips moved briefly, silently. Then he looked at Lucinda and grabbed up paper and a stylus from the Defense Officer’s console. “Give this to Felipe,” he said, writing. “He’ll set you and the captain free if I ask it. You’re not dangerous to his power. Whereas I . . .”

  VI

  From the Defense Officer’s position. Lucinda watched Karlsen’s crystalline launch leave the Nirvana and take a long curve that brought it near the courier at a point some distance from the lifeboat.

  “You on the courier,” Lucinda heard him say. “You can tell it’s really me here on the launch, can’t you? You can DF my transmission? Can you photograph my retinas through the screen?”

  And the launch darted away with a right-angle swerve, dodging and twisting at top acceleration, as the berserker’s weapons blasted the space we’ve it had been. Karlsen had been right. The berserker spent not a moment’s delay or a single shot on the lifeboat, but hurled itself instantly after the launch.

  “Hit that courier!” Lucinda screamed. “Destroy it!” A salvo of missiles left Nirvana, but it was a shot at a receding target, and it missed. Perhaps it missed because the courier was already in the fringes of the distortion surrounding the hypermass.

  Karlsen’s launch had not been hit, but it could not get away. It was a glassy dot vanishing behind a screen of blasts from the berserker’s weapons, a dot being forced into the maelstrom of the hypermass.

  “Chase them!” cried Lucinda, and saw the stars tint blue ahead; but almost instantly the Nirvana’s auto pilot countermanded her order, barking mathematical assurance that to accelerate any further in that direction would be fatal to all aboard.

  The launch was now going certainly into the hypermass, gripped by a gravity that could make any engines useless. And the berserker-ship was going headlong after the launch, caring for nothing but to make sure of Karlsen.

  The two specks tinted red, and redder still, racing before an enormous falling cloud of dust as if flying into a planet’s sunset sky. And then the red shift of the hypermass took them into invisibility, and the universe saw them no more.

  Soon after the robots had brought the men from the lifeboat safe aboard Nirvana, Holt found Lucinda alone in the Great Hall, gazing out the viewport.

  “He gave himself to save you,” she said. “And he’d never even seen you.”

  “I know.” After a pause Holt said: “I’ve just been talking to the Lord Nogara. I don’t know why, but you’re to be freed, and I’m not to be prosecuted for bringing the damned berserker aboard. Though Nogara seems to hate both of us . . .”

  She wasn’t listening, she was still looking out the port.

  “I want you to tell me all about him some day,” Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt’s arm, which dropped away.

  “I see,” Holt said, after a while. He went to look after his men.

 

 

 
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