Knives could wait. Right now Havot would bide his time, watching for the proper opportunity with the calm he was usually able to enjoy on desperate occasions-more than one enemy had described his serene composure as inhuman.
He was pleased when, after a further exchange of heavy-weapons fire, an actual berserker boarding was confirmed by a ship’s announcement. At least three devices were thought to have penetrated the inner hull.
Someone was whimpering on intercom-Havot supposed it might be Ariari. Most of the regular crew, at least most who were still alive, seemed to be carrying on with their duties, almost calmly, to judge by their voices tersely exchanging jargon.
And then a different report. A terrified human voice, breathing raggedly as if the speaker would soon be dead, came on intercom to say one of the things was moving down a corridor in the direction of the control room.
Smoothly, unthinkingly as if he were letting his body take over, Havot hit the release on his couch. He stood up, the powered joints of his heavy suit bringing him easily to his feet, carbine in the crook of his arm swinging into firing position. The backpack holding the compact hydrogen power lamp-enough kick there to stop a runaway ground train-slipped neatly into its proper position on his back as he got up.
Regulations sternly forbade passengers to leave their couches for any reason during combat, and naturally such a rule had force enough to keep Becky and the two HO men, sticklers all for law and order, in their chairs a little longer.
But after only a moment Becky slid out of her couch too, determined to be with her lover.
First Gazin and then Ariari did the same, as if they were somehow compelled to follow anything that looked like leadership.
Havot gestured savagely for them to keep back. Hoping they were going to stay out of his way, nursing his carbine into just the position where he wanted it, Havot moved as quietly as his armored bulk would let him to a position from which he ought to be able to ambush anything or anyone appearing in the doorway.
Subvocalizing a command to his suit’s small built-in brain, he turned up the sensitivity on his helmet’s airmikes. Now he could hear the berserker coming, slowly. Something was out there in the hallway now, moving closer, walking, humping, sliding upon damaged, subtly grating parts. Lurching forward, then waiting, pausing as if to watch and listen. From where it was, it ought to be able to see right past Havot’s ambush, into the control room itself.
Havot had no doubt that this machine approaching now was going to kill him if he did not kill it. Any half-baked bargain that he might or might not have made back on the Imatra surface had long ago gone up in smoke, in wisps of unreality. If the berserkers were truly hoping to enlist him for goodlife, they were going to have to come right out and say so, offer him a better and more clear-cut deal than they had done before.
Out in the corridor, the killer machine once more centimetered forward, this time stopping no more than four meters from where Havot crouched, close enough for him to glimpse one flange of its forward surface, to see how badly it was damaged, spots slagged and glowing at a temperature that at this distance would have scorched unprotected human skin-and then, with all the speed it could still muster, the machine rushed the apparently unguarded control-room door.
Havot’s alphatrigger beam, striking from one side, swifter than any conscious human thought, sliced out to destroy. At point-blank range a blade of light and force skinned berserker armor back like fruit peel, evoking an internal blast and spray, dropping the monster in its tracks, no more than halfway through the doorway.
The other passengers were thrown into panic, and two of them at least were firing their shoulder weapons now, slicing already demolished berserker hardware into smaller bits. Beams glanced back harmlessly from armored suits, from treated bulkheads and the deck.
Now Havot saw his chance. Dodging back into the midst of the sliding and bumping confusion of armored bodies, the billowing smoke and fumes from the demolished foe, he picked out Becky’s suited form, stepped close, and slapped one of his three drillbomb grenades hard against her armored back.
The suited figure convulsed, its faceplate glowed like a searchlight for an instant; the grenade’s force, focused into a molten, armor-piercing jet, evoking secondary interior explosions, was certain death to any human being in the suit.
Turning, wondering if he had the time to try for one of the HO
men, Havot was stunned to see Becky’s anxious countenance gazing out at him from the helmet of another suit.
And there was Gazin, also still alive. Havot realized that he had wasted a chance, killed the wrong person, wiped out no one more dangerous than a bureaucratic coward. Only Ariari was in that suit down on the deck, well cooked by now inside his armor bubbling with fumes and heat. Here, curse her, was Becky Thanarat still alive and on her feet, tearfully glad to see that Havot himself had survived uninjured this almost hand-to-gripper fight with a berserker.
Terse exchanges of conversation assured Havot that the other two were blaming the man’s death on the berserker. And now things had calmed down a little; it would be necessary to wait before he tried to use another grenade on Becky.
Aroused by fear and the proximity of death, Havot was now gripped by an almost physical yearning for a knife. Almost certainly there would be a good selection of edged weapons from which to choose, available among Prinsep’s elaborate table cutlery.
Checking the charge on his shoulder weapon, Havot left the room and started down the corridor. Someone called after him on scrambler radio, and he tersely put them off, saying he was only scouting.
Down one deck, he went prowling through the deserted galley, excited by a profusion of knives arrayed in high racks, left lying carelessly on wooden cutting boards among the meat and fruit.
Choosing hastily, he picked the biggest weapon that would fit into one of his suit pouches and stowed it there for later use.
Of course the knife was not going to be of much use as long as Agent Thanarat continued to wear armor, and she wasn’t likely to take her armor off until the combat concluded-if she was still living then. Havot considered other ways, such as possibly pushing Agent Thanarat into some berserker’s grasp. And even her death would not completely set Havot’s mind at ease. He still suspected that some of the incriminating message might be around, perhaps still waiting to be decoded. He’d have to search Becky’s dead body, if at all possible, and then her quarters.
The latest estimate from what still survived of Damage Control was that two or three or four small berserker boarding machines had actually entered the flagship. It was now thought that all but one of these had been destroyed, but only after bitter fighting that had left much of the vessel’s interior in a shambles.
No one knew at the moment where the single surviving berserker boarder was.
Meanwhile, heavy-weapons fire was still being exchanged with large berserker units. By now the Symmetry’s drive had been somewhat weakened, and the outer and inner hulls both damaged.
Havot, after picking up his knife, made his way back to the control room. On the way the only humans he saw were dead, and he encountered no more berserkers. When he arrived he discovered that Fourth Adventurer had finally emerged from his cabin to join the other passengers, wearing his own Carmpan version of space armor.
Havot, in what he imagined was something like proper military style, reported to Prinsep that he had disposed of one berserker-said nothing about the objectionable human-and that he was present and available for duty.
Prinsep, his hands totally full with other matters, only looked at him and nodded.
That was all right. Havot again went out and down the corridor a little distance, to look for at least one more metal killer. This was fun, more fun than he had expected.
Meanwhile Prinsep, still in the fleet commander’s chair, his human staff badly decimated around him, was attempting on intercom to raise crew members in other parts of the ship. The results were discouraging. It sounded like only a f
ew wounded survived anywhere in the ship.
Then something made him look up, to discover where the last berserker boarder was. Much more nimble than its predecessor, it had just come popping out of God knew where to appear at the very entrance of the control room. One of its grippers, blurring sideways at machine-speed, knocked Havot’s armored body smashing into a bulkhead before the man could get his carbine into firing position. In the next eyeblink the berserker had selected a target and fired its own weapon, killing Becky Thanarat, who had her carbine almost raised.
The next shot, fully capable of piercing Solarian body armor, was snapped off a fraction of a second later at Prinsep, a conspicuous target in his central chair. It missed the commodore only by centimeters, and no doubt would have killed him had not Fourth Adventurer, unequipped with formal weapons, propelled his suited body at that moment right into the berserker’s legs.
Gripper arms beat at the Carmpan like the blades of a propeller, snagged and tore his suit, mangled his flesh.
Havot was not dead. Firing while still flat on his back, slashing away coolly with his alphatrigger weapon, he cut the berserker’s legs from under it, and a moment later detonated something vital deep inside its torso.
A stunned, ear-ringing silence fell.
Slowly, his back against the bulkhead, weapon ready, Havot centimetered his way back to his feet. His armor had saved him.
He had been momentarily stunned, but was not really hurt.
Dead people were lying everywhere. Becky was among them, Havot saw; at the moment he hardly cared. He picked his way around and over fallen bodies, smashed machinery, back into the control room, where Prinsep still presided, though one support of his acceleration couch, that nearest his left ear, had been neatly shot away. He and the surviving human pilot, and even the surviving HO superintendent were now all looking at Havot with something like awe.
Minutes passed, while outside the flagship’s battered, straining metal, heavy weapons thundered, the tides of battle still ebbed and flowed.
The embattled commodore, still presiding over his half-ruined control room from his chair near the flagship’s center of mass, grimly continued to receive damage reports, news of disaster from almost every deck.
Commodore Prinsep, the once-bright armor encasing his pudgy body now battle-stained and scorched, the outer surface splashed with Carmpan as well as Solarian blood, seemed to be gradually slumping lower in the webs of his acceleration chair.
At the moment his face bore an expression of wistful calm that might almost have been despair. Yet minute after minute he continued to make decisions, to answer questions softly, logically, purposefully. Something in his very attitude of inertness, his immobility, inspired confidence.
More minutes passed, and casualty reports kept coming in, while inside the fleet’s few surviving hulls, machines and people fought desperately to control battle damage, to determine the positions of surviving friends and foes, to recharge weapons and maintain shields at the highest strength attainable.
Communication among the ships in the task force had now become intermittent at best. Contact was cut off altogether for many seconds at a stretch, with nearby space a howling hell of every kind of radiation. But the coders and transmitters had been designed to cope with hell, and there were moments when cohesive packets of information did come through. Some of the human vessels were being vaporized while others were claiming kills against the enemy.
The flagship’s brain, delivering with unshakable calm its best evaluation of the fight, concluded that the enemy must have sent half or more of his force dropping back to spring this ambush.
Although to some of those who lived through it, the battle seemed to go on forever, actually, by the usual standards of combat between forces of this size, it was mercifully short. In a very brief time, no more than a quarter of a standard hour, several berserkers had been destroyed. On the debit side, every vessel in the ambushed fleet was badly shot up, and half of them were gone.
Now there were suggestions that berserker reinforcements were arriving.
In any case the signals from other friendly vessels were fading, one by one, and they did not come back. Their images disappeared from the tactical stage.
Prinsep expressed a hope that some at least of the other Solarian ships were getting away; with all the noise in space, it was impossible to distinguish intact departures from obliteration.
Havot, almost at ease, one arm round a stanchion in case the artificial gravity should stutter again, was cheerful, in his element at last.
“What do we do now, chief?” he inquired. Again, Prinsep only looked at him.
No matter. Havot looked back serenely.
To extricate his vessel from the ambush, the fleet commander closed his eyes and ordered his surviving organic and optelectronic pilots to jump his ship ahead.
Before normal space dropped away, several of the survivors aboard the flagship caught a last glimpse of several ravening berserkers, barely detectable by the humans’ instruments as they came darting with abandon after their escaping prey, only to encounter pulverizing collisions with almost insubstantial dust, vaporizing themselves or being sufficiently disabled to be thrown permanently out of the fight.
Somehow or other the Symmetry, though limping and with a number of its compartments hissing air, survived its desperate bid to break free, carrying to relative safety Havot and a handful of other survivors, half of them wounded, along with a number of dead.
With a last effort, straining the damaged drive very nearly to its limit, the computers guiding the damaged ship sought out the most open channel and maneuvered the scarred hull into it.
Not only did the flagship survive, but it temporarily retained enough speed, power, and mobility to break away from the several surviving ambushers.
The dead Carmpan, and a number of Solarian dead, still lay in the corners of the control room and the adjoining chamber.
The human pilot, Lieutenant Tongres, said: “I took what I could get, Commodore-and now astrogation’s got us back on the same old trail again.”
The commodore for once looked haggard, but his voice was still steady. “Any more bandits ahead?”
“Don’t see any yet. But I can’t see much of anything for all the dust, so there might well be. I don’t believe that was their whole force we just engaged.”
“Thank all the gods of space we avoided a few of them at least.”
Someone in a remote area of the ship was still on intercom, with repeated desperate pleas for help.
And so Ivan Prinsep bestirred himself-heaved himself out of his acceleration couch for the first time since the battle had started-and went to check on the wounded elsewhere in his ship.
The organic pilot was busy. A couple of other people lay in their couches free of serious physical injury but totally exhausted.
Havot, so far virtually unscratched, almost jauntily volunteered to come with the commodore as bodyguard, in case any enemy boarding devices were still lurking in the corners.
Prinsep nodded his acceptance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The flagship’s surviving human pilot, Lieutenant Tongres, was discussing the situation with Ensign Dinant, the only other person still functional in the control room, even as they worked on the flagship’s damaged instrumentation.
Soon a startling fact was confirmed: beginning approximately at the present location of the flagship, an open channel cut through the enclosing nebular material, offering relatively smooth passage. This crude tunnel of comparatively clear space led on in the general direction the enemy had originally been following.
The lieutenant marveled. “Look at it. Almost like it was dredged clear somehow.”
“Almost.” Dinant’s admission was reluctant; the actual accomplishment of such a feat on the scale now visible would have been far beyond any known technology, and similar natural features were not unheard of. “Wouldn’t be surprised if Dirac’s berserker once came right down this chan
nel, with the old man himself driving his yacht right after it.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Tongres went on intercom.
“Commodore, you there? We’re really hurting. Drive, shields, everything.”
Around the still-breathing pair of officers the control room’s surviving holostages were sizzling, erupting like white holes in strange and improbable virtual images. The display system, like all the flagship’s systems now, was obviously damaged. Power was being conserved wherever possible.
Presently Prinsep’s voice came back, redundantly transmitted on audio intercom and scrambled suit radio: “Do what you can.
I’ll be back with you in a minute. We’re going to have a problem with the wounded. We don’t seem to have an intact medirobot left aboard.”
Prinsep, escorted by a serene Havot, soon reappeared in the control room. They had not tried to move the seriously wounded yet.
Turning to the commodore, the pilot asked: “I think she’s got about one more jump left in her legs, sir. Do we try it, or do we just hang here?”
With a sigh the commodore let himself down in his blasted chair. “We try it. We look around first, and catch our breath, and see if anything else is left of our task force. And if after that we find ourselves still alone, we jump again. Because there’s nothing here.”
Havot had seated himself nearby-there were a number of empty couches now available-and was attending with interest.
Ensign Dinant asked: “Which way do we aim? And how far?”
“We aim dead ahead, straight down that channel you’re showing me.” Prinsep’s helmet nodded awkwardly to indicate direction. “Let the autopilot decide the range. Because we know what we have behind us here-berserkers-and we can see what we have on all sides. There’s nothing for us in the deep dust.”
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