Their cabins were both too far inboard to boast an actual cleared port. And to call up such a port on holostage was not the way, Havot assured her, to experience the full effect. There was something in the quality of the light, the images brought inboard through clear statglass, that any ordinary holosystem struggled inadequately to reproduce.
At the conclusion of each collective jump, on the fleet’s reemergence into normal space, the people and computers on the flagship’s bridge rapidly counted the ships composing the fleet, after which the human decision makers relaxed momentarily. But with the next breath drawn, people and machines began the calculations for the next jump, a process occupying a few seconds at the minimum.
In the short intervals between jumps, other crew members and their machines scanned space in every direction, testing the enemy’s electronic spoor for freshness and exact position, and restored the desired tightness to their own ships’ formation. Then a last round of intership communications, concluded in milliseconds. Then, at a signal, jump again in unison.
Each time one of the fleet’s vessels reemerged in normal space, its sensors were already looking ahead, probing for signs of recent traffic, trying to catch some clue, some disturbance in the radiation patterns of normal space, indicating what general physical conditions would be encountered in that direction. So far they found no sign that the most recent band of marauders had deviated from the escape route used by their forerunner of three centuries ago.
Until now, the human hunters and their faithful slave machines had been able to see nothing directly of that antique chase. Nor had there seemed any point in wasting time and equipment trying to detect images of the fabled, vanished Eidolon or of the deadly object the old Premier had been hunting; the light that had once borne those images would be hundreds of light-years distant now, even if it had not long ago dispersed into a faintness far beyond the capability of any receiver to capture and restore to intelligibility.
No one in Prinsep’s fleet was looking for the old trail now; the more recent attackers required the hunters’ full attention. Today’s berserkers were certainly leaving a fresh, distinct wake of their own. The suggestion was that to them, sheer speed had now become all-important. As if, against the blind urgency of their mysterious quest, the pursuing Solarian fleet hardly weighed in their calculations at all, any more than had the humans left alive back on Imatra. The killing machines would outrun their hunters if they could, but otherwise seemed determined to ignore them as long as possible.
Commodore Prinsep thought, and several times speculated in the presence of one or more of his subordinates, that these tactics were possibly meant to set his fleet up for an ambush. He tried to estimate the chances of this, looking much grimmer than was his wont. But he still refused to slow the pace of his pursuit.
The Symmetry’s battle computer, and the expert systems Prinsep had grafted to it, did their best to calculate the odds in favor of berserker trickery. Prinsep did not make the calculations public. After all, the decision was up to him.
And then the odds were altered slightly by sheer accident. Two large berserkers, several light-hours ahead of the pursuing fleet, could be observed jump-crashing in their terrible haste, tearing themselves apart on specks and spikes of gravity jutting into spacetime from bits of nearby matter; the remaining members of their pack were compelled to slow down, or face destruction by laws of physics as remorseless as themselves.
Everyone aboard the flagship except the fleet commander himself kept expecting Prinsep to order a slowdown, or some change of tactics. But he did not.
The fleet gained.
Becky Thanarat came back to the cabin she now shared with Havot, and reported (to the amusement and delight of her new lover) that the Humanity Office superintendent and his senior agent, neither of whom had ever seen a real berserker in their lives, were beginning to look a little pale.
Presently the pursuing fleet reduced its speed at the fleet commander’s orders. But only minimally.
Pursued and pursuers went tearing on in the same direction, plunging boldly in among the ever-so-slowly thickening fringes of dark nebula.
Meanwhile Becky was suddenly called on the carpet by her superiors for her apparent failure to pass a decoded message along to them. Ship’s communications had presented evidence, strong if not indisputable, that some radio communication coded for the HO, had been received aboard the Symmetry several days earlier, just as the fleet was reaching the limit of good reception from the Imatran system.
Word reached Havot indirectly that Becky was unable to come up with any acceptable explanation.
Gazin evidently suspected, but could not prove, the truth, and ordered Agent Thanarat thrown in the brig.
Commodore Prinsep, who had to give his approval before any such drastic action could be taken, called in Havot as part of his own effort to get to the bottom of the situation.
“What do you know about this, Havot? We are on the verge of entering combat, and I cannot tolerate these distractions.”
The youth was properly, tremulously outraged. “Superintendent Gazin has declared himself my enemy-why, I don’t know. I supposed he has finally discovered that Agent Thanarat and I are now lovers, and that this is some plot on his part to get at me through her-I know nothing about any supposedly missing message.”
Prinsep sighed and studied the young man who stood before him. Ultimately all decisions here in space, in wartime conditions, were up to the fleet commander.
Then Prinsep said unexpectedly: “Our Carmpan passenger has advised me to rely upon you, Havot. Know any reason why Fourth Adventurer should have said that?”
“No sir, I don’t.” Havot for once could think of nothing clever to say.
“Well, then, I am going to allow the young woman her freedom. For the time being, at least. I suppose I shall have to answer to the Humanity people for it when we get home.” It was obvious that the commodore detested the HO and all the thought-control business that it stood for.
Havot showed a relieved smile. “I don’t think you’ll regret it, Commodore.”
“See to it that I don’t, Mr. Havot. Please see to it that I don’t.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
To the Solarians in the pursuing fleet, Dirac’s berserker, along with the Premier and his people who had vanished in its pursuit, had never been more than dim historical shadows. But now, throughout the fleet, people were once again beginning to speculate on the possibility that Premier Dirac might turn out to be still alive, after all.
The discovery of a living Dirac would certainly have some contemporary political effect. But just what that effect might be was not so easy to say.
Havot mused: “If Dirac or any of his people were still breathing, they’d be old, old folks by this time.”
But as Prinsep several times remarked to colleagues, not absolutely, impossibly too old. He had been studying the history.
Many individuals did live longer than three hundred years; and Dirac had been fairly young, his bride even younger, hardly more than a girl, at the time of their disappearance. Also it seemed only natural that people trapped in a bioresearch station where SA chambers were readily available might very well make use of them.
Provided, of course, that berserkers’ prisoners still had any mastery over their own fate. There was really no reason to expect that any human being taken, anytime, anywhere, by the unliving enemy, would long survive.
Havot once overheard the senior Humanity Office agent, who tended to lean politically to the side of the Premier’s old enemies, envisioning a scenario in which Dirac had become goodlife, or had been goodlife all along, and was now, or had been, helping the berserker raise a goodlife force of millions of Solarians, all slaves and servants of the death machines.
Still, leaving aside political suspicions and accusations, the questions would not go away: Why should the modern berserkers set such overwhelming importance upon their discovery of the route by which their predecessor had withdrawn?
And why should they, ever since making that discovery, have been slavishly following that same route at a near-suicidal speed?
And still, no one had answers.
Were the modern machines consumed with an urge to overtake their own mysterious forerunner? Or did they crave, for some unimaginable reason, to catch up with Dirac’s yacht, which had preceded them on the same trail? Surprisingly, the best and latest computer calculations carried out aboard the flagship showed that such a feat of astrogation lay well within the bounds of possibility-assuming either Dirac’s ship or the berserker he was chasing had gone plowing along on the same course, more or less straight ahead, ever deeper into the Mavronari’s fringes. But why should either human or berserker have done that?
Three centuries of incremental improvements in interstellar drives and control systems, as well as in the techniques of getting through difficult nebulae, assured the modern pursuers that at least they ought to be able to make better time than had their enigmatic predecessor, Premier Dirac.
Some recently constructed berserkers were also known to have incorporated certain improvements over those of Dirac’s time.
And the machines which had carried out the latest attack on Imatra, or some of them at least, had given evidence of belonging to the improved class. So neither pursuit nor combat was likely to be any easier for the modern fleet than it had been for Dirac’s people.
No member of the modern human task force was willing to express a belief that any of the participants in that earlier chase were still out there ahead of this one, gamely plowing on into the dark nebula. The odds were just overwhelmingly against it.
No, when you looked at the situation realistically, that contest must have been settled, long ago, one way or another. It was almost certain that the Premier together with his fleshly friends and enemies were centuries dead, their ships and the missing bioresearch station destroyed in combat or in desperate flight.
And as for the giant berserker that had come to bear his name, if it had not sustained terminal injuries in one fire-fight or another, it might have changed course and broken free somehow of the Mavronari. Or else it had somehow stalled itself, and perhaps its captured prey, inside that endless blackness.
But in any case the modern fleet, under a commander showing an unexpected but seemingly natural combination of boldness and tenacity, appeared to have a good chance of overtaking the contemporary berserker force.
Despite the predicted imminence of battle, morale in all the ships seemed high-or would have, had it not been for the situation involving Havot and the Humanity Office representatives.
The fleet’s captains and the other officers who were taking part in the ongoing planning sessions, kept coming back to the same point: to determine why the modern berserkers were following the cold trail of the old chase, it might be very helpful to learn what that ancient enemy’s goal had been.
Ensign
Dinant
mused:
“I
suppose
today’s
bandits,
independently of any discovery they’ve turned up on Imatra, might retain some history of which target one of their number went after three hundred years ago, and even what tactics it employed then. On the other hand, I can easily believe that our modern death cultivators preserve no record of anything like that, because I don’t see any reason why they should give a damn.”
After a moody silence, Lieutenant Tongres, a pilot, cleared her throat. “Look at it this way. As far as we can tell, the only important thing these old Imatran records reveal is the exact line of retreat taken by Dirac’s berserker. As far as we know that machine did succeed in getting away, and maybe it even worked a successful ambush on the Premier when he came after it. And if a tactic succeeds once, you use it again.”
“Bah! There appears to be no astrogational advantage to this particular pathway-nothing that would make an ambush easier or more effective than if the flight had followed a route a million kilometers to one side or another. For our modern berserkers to head for cover again in the nearest dark nebula would be repeating a tactic. But for them to follow the exact same trail as their predecessor is… something else. Something more than tactics. I don’t know what. A reenactment. But why? why? why?”
The Ensign beat a fist upon a table.
Tongres shook her head. “As I see it, it’s not really that our modern enemies want to follow the exact same trail. The point is, they want to arrive at the exact same place.”
“Oh? And what place might that be?”
“How about a hidden entrance to a clear pathway inside the Mavronari, a quick passage to its interior? A direct route all the way through it and out the other side?”
“The interior, so far as we know, is very little more than a bag of dust. All right, a direct route through would have some value.
But not much.”
“Maybe-maybe they’re carrying important news to berserker headquarters. And the grand berserker headquarters is located on some world inside the Mavronari.”
Dinant was unconvinced. “So now we have a whole fleet of berserkers devoting their time and energy to a mission that a single machine could readily accomplish. Bah. Anyway, aren’t you arguing in a circle? I trust that the important news they’re carrying to their own headquarters is something other than the coordinates of that headquarters’ location.”
The lieutenant bristled, but before she could retort another crew member interrupted:
“How important to these bandits of ours could any news be, extracted from a three-hundred-year-old recording they just happened to dig up on the surface of Imatra?”
“Ah, perhaps you weren’t here for the early showing, the matinee. It doesn’t appear that they ‘just happened’ to dig this information up. The landing machine that did the digging up headed straight for the archive as soon as it touched down, for all the world as if it had been dispatched upon that particular mission. As if they knew somehow that the record they wanted would be there.”
“How would any berserker know that?” Dinant wanted to know.
“A very good question.” Tongres looked thoughtful. “Someone would have to tell them, I suppose.”
This real hint of goodlife activity was met by an interval of silence. Neither Havot nor either of the OH men was present at the moment.
The moment passed.
The third crewmember inquired, “And so the prize our enemies were hoping for, and gleaned from the buried record, was nothing more or less than the direction of the earlier berserker’s flight?”
“What else?” Tongres shrugged. “We’ve all seen the show a hundred times now. Just what else could the big secret possibly have been?”
Dinant was struck with a sudden thought. “Wait. What if…”
“Yes?”
“Suppose, after all, for the sake of argument, that Dirac was goodlife. All right, I know, there’s nothing in his public record to suggest that. But if no other explanation makes sense, we ought at least to consider the possibility. Say he was at least goodlife enough to make a deal with the damned machines, in hopes of furthering his own career. So he arranges somehow to give the machines a whole bioresearch station, containing some millions of protopeople for them to kill, or to-use.”
“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.<
br />
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.
Berserker Kill Page 31