Nor had the scout’s final fate been visible to any of the other surviving humans. The small handful still alive were at the moment totally absorbed in the problems of keeping themselves in that state, and getting aboard the station.
With the scoutship’s disappearance, the enemy fire stopped.
A great many-perhaps all-of the small enemy machines that had come out to counterattack had been destroyed. Any that might have survived had ceased to oppose the boarding, had withdrawn out of the range of the yacht’s still-formidable guns.
For a moment there was silence. Bright stars, dark nebula, looked on imperturbably from all directions.
Hastily checking the yacht’s various systems for damage, Nick found the drive still functional. In a moment the temptation to cut and run away had risen again. Hawksmoor considered abandoning the Boss and all who had left the yacht with him, seizing the opportunity to get away cleanly with Jenny. Still arguing against any such rash decision was Nick’s basic programming of obedience to Dirac and the equally fundamental commands that he serve and protect humanity-both still were very strong.
But again, he thought his final decision not to desert rested on the fact that the station still offered the only hope of reestablishing Jenny in the fleshly body she so fanatically demanded.
Despite considerable losses suffered by the human side, the boarding action now appeared to be succeeding in its main objective. Two small Solarian craft were attaching themselves to hatches over there, reestablishing a foothold on the station. But Nick observed that the victory gave every indication of turning out to be Pyrrhic. Only these two craft had survived this sharp clash.
Nick was presently able to reestablish radio contact with Dirac.
One of the Premier’s first questions was “Where’s the scoutship? How did Marcus come out?”
“He went down somewhere, it looked like, on the far side of the big berserker. I wouldn’t count on him, sir, for any more help.”
“Damn it. Any more bandits in sight?”
“Negative, sir. They went out of my sight along with the colonel.”
“All right. Stand by, Nick. We’re docked here now, and we’re going in.”
“The best of luck, sir.” And at that moment, Nick was sure he meant it.
Frank Marcus was down, but not yet dead.
On finding his scoutship surrounded and harassed by a number of the foe, he had continued to fight aggressively. Triumphantly he had radioed word back-a signal that never got through-that he thought he had succeeded in breaking the back of the opposition by small machines. The number actively engaged against him had diminished to almost nothing. He had won for his shipmates the chance to land on the station virtually unopposed.
But now the scout with Frank inside was down, smashed down by grapples of overwhelming force upon the enemy’s black, scarred hull. Still, Frank was not dead. The colonel came out of his wrecked ship fighting, having survived where no being entirely of flesh could have done so, his mobile boxes making him almost as agile and armored as a berserker.
It was time, and past time, for a retreat. But there was no way to retreat, and just staying where he was, until the berserker got around to looking for him, was pointless. He doubted very much that anyone was coming to his rescue.
That left him with the option of going forward. At least he wasn’t finished fighting yet.
He hadn’t gone far before he saw the chance, the possibility, of being able to do some more damage before the finish came.
Ahead of him, as he clawed his way forward across the berserker’s outer hull with his eight metallic limbs, Marcus now perceived a weakness, a place where his huge opponent’s outer armor had been blown or ripped away in some fight thousands of years in the past.
It was just moments later, when he was in the act of actually entering the berserker, pushing ahead with his own boarding operation, that Frank suddenly understood, was perfectly convinced, that time and luck had run out at last. This was one daring effort that he was not going to survive. The realization did not interfere with his smooth flow of effort; if he had tried he couldn’t have thought of any better way to die.
Naturally he had not come out of his little ship unarmed. Once inside the great berserker, near anything it thought important, he could still distract the enemy, make it pay a price. Show it that wiping out life from the universe was never going to be an easy job. Force the damned thing to divert part of its computing capacity and its material resources to finish him off. And maybe in the process he could give his fellow Solarians a chance to rob it of its prize, the bioresearch station it so badly wanted. Maybe Dirac and the rest would even be able to finish it off altogether.
Marcus indeed managed to get inside the hull. Then he had not far to go, in his one-man lunge for some outlying flange of the enemy’s vitals, before he encountered heavy opposition.
Only Hawksmoor, alertly guarding his post aboard the Eidolon, received any of the last radio message Colonel Marcus sent. Only part of the message came through, and that in somewhat garbled form. And the last words that Nicholas, listening closely on the yacht, was able to hear from Frank were “Oh my God. Oh. My.
God.”
The two surviving small Solarian vessels had by now attached themselves to modest beachheads on the large hull of the biostation-itself small by comparison with the looming bulk of the berserker only a few hundred meters beyond it.
Dirac and those who were still alive and functioning with him-Kensing among them-were preparing, under the umbrella of Nick’s potential firepower, to enter simultaneously two of the station’s airlocks.
The boarders had to confront the possibility that the hatches might be booby-trapped or barricaded. Actually the station’s outer skin appeared scorched or dented here and there, as if by near-miss explosions. But as far as could be ascertained from outside, the airlocks were intact. All indications were that the mating outer doors had functioned perfectly.
Now the Premier and his companions, wearing armor and carrying the best shoulder weapons available, climbed out of their acceleration couches and made their way one at a time through the small airlocks of their own craft and into the station’s larger chambers, where there was room for several to stand together.
Kensing moved among them, as eager and terrified as the rest-but his yearning to find Annie quenched his terror.
On entering the station’s lock, they immediately discovered that the artificial gravity was still functioning at the normal level.
Indications were that the internal atmosphere was normal also.
But no one moved to open his or her helmet.
“Go ahead. We’re going in.”
Someone standing beside Kensing worked the manual controls set into a bulkhead. And now the station’s inner door was cycling.
Kensing waited, weapon leveled, mind almost blank, his will holding the alphatrigger trembling on the edge of fire.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The planetoid Imatra was ringed by the orbits of a score of artificial satellites, and several of these metal moons bristled with sophisticated astronomical equipment. Similar devices were revolving close to the larger members of the local planetary system. Now all of these instruments in orbit, as well as many on the ground, had been pressed into service, all focused in one direction. They provided anxious observers with some bizarre views, coming in from approximately ten light-days away.
The images received were at best spotty with distance, and incomplete as a result of interference from the Mavronari’s outer fringe. Nor were the pictures nearly as detailed as the viewers could have wished. But under diligent interpretation they did indicate that the Premier and his pursing force had indeed-ten days earlier-managed to catch up with the fleeing enemy.
The additional fact that the encounter had been violent was suddenly revealed by the ominous spectra of weapon flashes.
There were also the resulting briefly glowing clouds. Some kind of fierce though small-scale engagement w
as, or had been ten days ago, in progress.
Several of the worried observers in the Imatran system speculated that these flares and flashes limned an enemy attempt to ambush the pursuing yacht and its escorting ships. How successful the attempt had been, there was no way to be sure from this distance.
None of these observers from a distance detected anything, beyond the mere fact that Solarian ships had met the enemy, that could be construed as real encouragement to supporters of the Solarian cause. And some of the once-glowing clouds that were the aftermath of battle persisted, expanding enough to block any possible view of later events-assuming the chase had gone on to an even greater distance, beyond the site of the battle scene currently unfolding.
One of the few things that those who watched from Imatra were able to say with certainty was that there had been no detectable attempt at communication with their system by any of the Premier’s ships, and no sign that any of those vessels had turned back.
More days passed with no new developments, no news. None of Dirac’s ships came back in triumph, and if any had tried to turn back from a defeat, they had evidently been destroyed in the attempt. And if any had launched a robot communications courier, that too had been destroyed or had somehow gone astray. The people in the Imatran system lacked any means of confirming or elaborating on what they thought their telescopes had shown them.
Whether the Premier’s whole squadron, including his yacht, had been wiped out or not was impossible to determine. One could only try to estimate the probabilities. There was not much to go on, really; just those final signals suggesting a space fight, if you knew where to look for them, and even those tenuous traces were fading day by day, hour by hour. Already it was impossible to record anything meaningful beyond the fact of those little glowing clouds, which one could assume to be the flame and smoke of distant battle. An ambiguous signal at best. And soon there would be nothing at all worth putting into memory.
“Well, we do have fairly good records of this whole unfortunate business. But the point is, are we sure we really want to be diligent about preserving them?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that as soon as all the directly interested worlds understand that not only Lady Genevieve is missing, but now Premier Dirac himself-”
“How can we be blamed for that? In all honesty, how can we be blamed in either case?”
“Well, I foresee we are probably going to be blamed by some people-unjustly, of course, but there it is-at least for the Lady Genevieve’s being lost.”
“Well, if we are to be blamed, let us at least not be accused of destroying records. That would only make it seem that we are covering up something, something truly… truly…”
And of course Sandro Kensing was gone too. But he had volunteered. The more the local authorities of the Imatran system contemplated their new situation, the more they concentrated on the problem of how best to protect themselves against possible damage from future investigations. Or even mere accusations or rumors.
The more they thought the matter over (now meeting, as they were, face-to-face, taking full advantage of the fine conference facilities on Imatra), the more it seemed to them that they were going to have to endure some kind of trouble along that line.
Assuredly the Premier Dirac Sardou, the most powerful Solarian within a space of many light-years, was not going to be allowed to vanish unnoticed from Galactic politics and society.
Not that all the leading members of that society would be displeased by his absence. Inevitably, certain people were going to gain certain advantages if Dirac could reasonably be presumed, could legally be declared, dead. Others would just as surely lose thereby. Still others would benefit if the period of uncertainty could be prolonged. Any formal declaration of the Premier’s demise would have to wait for at least seven standard years, but even now interested people were surely planning for that contingency.
A standard month after the Premier’s departure with his squadron, the local authorities, despite their differences of opinion on other aspects of the situation, including the wording of the pending formal announcement, had no difficulty in agreeing that Dirac and his people and his ships were really hopelessly lost, and any attempt to speed a new force to their rescue would be foolish.
The Imatran leaders also carefully inspected the records of the actual attack, as well as those documenting the berserker’s departure and the beginning of the Premier’s pursuit. The local authorities discovered in these records nothing to cast doubt upon their own basic innocence regarding the recent tragic events.
Therefore copies of the relevant recordings, in optical and other wavelengths, were freely produced for anyone who might be presumed to be strongly interested, and some copies were dispatched to other systems. Then the original records were routinely filed away.
The inner door of the airlock slid open in front of the Premier and his handful of surviving volunteers, admitting them to the interior of the bioresearch station. They found themselves confronted by a normally lighted corridor, which appeared to contain nothing in the least out of the ordinary. Just down this corridor, a few meters to their right, the other boarding party was making an equally uneventful entrance.
Dirac addressed the station’s optelectronic brain, ordering it to hold the inner doors of both airlocks open.
“Order acknowledged.” The voice of the station’s brain sounded slightly inhuman, which was perfectly normal for a Solarian-built robot device.
The doors obediently stayed open. So far. Jamming or welding them in that position would slow down a quick retreat, if such a maneuver became necessary.
The small party, reunited now and remaining together as they had planned, advanced a few meters down the corridor. And then a few meters more.
Dirac, undaunted by the disastrous losses suffered by his rescue mission thus far, was implacably determined to continue his search for his wife. There he stood now-where Kensing could get a good view of him-in the corridor just outside the main laboratory room, a middle-sized man in heavy but flexible armor, blinker (as opposed to alphatrigger) carbine carried in the crook of his right arm. Kensing got the impression that the Premier was perfectly well satisfied with the success of the rescue expedition up till now, heavy casualties and all.
A few meters ahead of the entering party, in perfect conformance with the computer model of the station they had all studied, the corridor branched. As far as it was possible to see along the curves, both branches stretched on, well lighted, filled with usable air at breathable pressure (or so Kensing’s suit gauge continued to report), and utterly lifeless.
Standing beside the older man, Kensing could feel his own nerves still ringing with the violence of that last clash in space.
Well, here I am, was what his mind kept telling itself, without being able to get much beyond that basic proposition. Well, here I am, still alive. Even Annie, it seemed, had been all but forgotten for the moment.
In a small voice scrambled and decoded again on the suit radios, someone murmured: “Would help if we could get Nick over here.”
The Premier shook his head inside his helmet. His unmistakable radio voice responded: “Negative. At the moment I need Nick right where he is. Now we’re going to look into the lab.”
Kensing eased forward, holding his breath, his weapon cradled in his arms. The other people advanced behind him and beside him, brain waves close-coupled to the triggers of their carbines and projectors, ready and expecting from moment to moment to be plunged into yet another firefight.
No human’s unaided reflexes, of course, could begin to compete against the speed and accuracy of machinery. Not even when the glance of an eye and an act of will, spark of a mind set on a hair trigger, were all it took to aim and fire. But technology made the contest less uneven. Shoulder arms and helmets were melded with the operator/wearer’s human alpha waves in such wise that, if great care were not exercised, the whole armored suit could come perilously close to acting i
n berserker fashion.
Weapons cradled in its arms or fastened to the helmet would blast at any visual silhouette that met certain programmed specifications, or simply at sudden noise or light or movement.
The suits of armor in which the human fighters now stalked the biostation were also equipped with coded IFF, a hopefully accurate system of distinguishing friend from foe.
“Where are they?” Kensing couldn’t be certain if the voice in his helmet was referring to the berserker’s commensal machines or to its human victims.
Had Dirac and his party been facing a human enemy, the apparent withdrawal of the foe might easily have persuaded them that their enemy was frightened. But nothing could frighten a berserker. Whatever killing machines might have occupied this very corridor a day ago, an hour ago, five minutes ago, must be still lurking somewhere in these multitudinous compartments and spaces, awaiting the right moment, the savage signal, to spring out, as swiftly efficient as factory machinery, and kill.
Having failed to provoke any enemy response, Dirac ordered another cautious, methodical advance. His plan called for the territory that had been examined, apparently regained for human control, to be gradually extended. One corridor, one deck, after another.
Kensing had now warily eased his way just inside the doorway of the main laboratory room. Here were a thousand pieces of complex equipment of various sizes, shapes, and purposes, everything now standing still and silent. Annie had so often told him things about this chamber that even without studying the VR
model in the yacht’s ten-cube he would have had no trouble feeling almost at home inside it. This was where she worked. Her duty station, he felt sure, during the alert. So here was where berserker machines, assuming they had come aboard, had most likely caught up with her.
Keeping a tight grip on his nerve, Kensing eased his way in farther from the doorway. His weapon ready, he stood looking about.
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