Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Hemphill looked up sharply, then relaxed. The man approaching one of his own, whom he had stationed nearby.

  “We’ll take these to the High Commander at once.” Hemphill waved the papers. “There’ll be just time to clean out the traitors and reorganize command before we face battle.”

  Yet he delayed for another moment, staring down at Salvador’s corpse. The plotter had been overconfident and inept, but still dangerous. Did some sort of luck operate to protect Karlsen? Karlsen himself did not match Hemphill’s ideal of a war leader, he was not as ruthless as machinery or as cold as metal. Yet the damned machines made great sacrifices to attack him.

  Hemphill shrugged, and hurried on his way.

  “Mitch, I do love you. I know what the doctors say it is, but what do they really know about me?”

  Christina de Dulcin reclined upon a luxurious acceleration couch, in what was nominally the sleeping room of the High Commander’s quarters. Karlsen had never occupied die place, preferring a small cabin.

  Mitchell Spain sat three feet from Chris, afraid to so much as touch her hand, afraid of what he might do, and what she might do. They were alone, and he felt sure they were unwatched. Chris had even demanded assurances against spy devices and Karlsen had sent his pledge. Besides, what kind of ship would have spy devices built into its highest officer’s quarters?

  A situation for bedroom farce, but not when you had to live through it. The man outside taking the strain, had two hundred ships dependent on him now, and many human planets would be lifeless in five years if the coming battle failed.

  “What do you really know about me, Chris?” he asked.

  “I know you mean life itself to me. Oh, Mitch, I have no time now to be coy, and mannered, and every millimeter a lady. I’ve been all those things. And—once—I would have married a man like Karlsen, for political reasons. But all that was before Atsog.”

  Her voice dropped on the last word, and her hand on her robe made a convulsive grasping gesture. He had to lean forward and take it.

  “Chris, Atsog is in the past, now.”

  “Atsog will never be over, completely over, for me. I keep remembering more and more of it. Mitch, the machines made us watch while they skinned General Bradin alive. I saw that. I can’t bother with silly things like politics anymore, life is too short for them. I don’t fear anything anymore, either, except driving you away . . .”

  He felt pity and lust, and half a dozen other maddening things.

  “Karlsen’s a good man,” he said finally.

  She repressed a shudder. “I suppose,” she said, in a controlled voice. “But Mitch, what do you feel for me? Tell the truth—if you don’t love me now, I know you will, in time.” She smiled faintly, and raised a hand. “When my silly hair grows back.”

  “Your silly hair.” His voice almost broke. He reached to touch her face, then pulled his fingers back as if from a flame. “Chris, you’re his girl, and too much depends on him.”

  “I was never his.”

  “Still . . . I can’t lie to you, Chris; maybe I can’t tell you the truth, either, about how I feel. The battle’s coming, everything’s up in the air, paralyzed. No one can plan . . .” He made an awkward, uncertain gesture.

  “Mitch.” Her voice was understanding. “This is terrible for you, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I’ll do nothing to make it worse. Will you call the doctor? As long as I know you’re somewhere near, I think I can rest, now.”

  VIII

  Karlsen studied Salvador’s papers in silence for some minutes, like a man pondering a chess problem. He did not seem greatly surprised.

  “I have a few dependable men standing ready,” Hemphill finally volunteered. “We can quickly—arrest—the leaders of this plot.” The blue eyes searched him. “Commander, was Salvador’s killing truly necessary?”

  “I thought so,” said Hemphill blandly. “He was reaching for his own weapon.”

  Karlsen glanced once more at the papers and reached a decision.

  “Commander Hemphill, I want you to pick four ships, and scout the far edge of the Stone Place nebula. We don’t want to push beyond it, without knowing where the enemy is, and give him a chance to get between us and Sol. Use caution—to get the general location of the bulk of his fleet is enough.”

  “Very well.” Hemphill nodded. The reconnaissance made sense; and if Karlsen wanted to get Hemphill out of the way, and deal with his human opponents by his own methods, well, let him. Those methods often seemed soft-headed to Hemphill, but they seemed to work for Karlsen. If the damned machines for some reason found Karlsen unendurable, then Hemphill would support him, to the point of cheerful murder and beyond.

  What else really mattered in the universe, besides smashing the damned machines?

  Mitch spent hours every day alone with Chris. He kept from her the wild rumors which circulated throughout the fleet. Salvador’s violent end was whispered about, and guards were posted near Karlsen’s quarters. Some said Admiral Kemal was on the verge of open revolt.

  And now the Stone Place was close ahead of the fleet; ebony dust and fragments, like a million shattered planets, blotting out half the sky. No ship could move through the Stone Place; every cubic kilometer of it held enough matter to prevent C-plus travel or normal movement.

  The fleet headed toward one sharply defined edge, around which Hemphill’s scouting squadron had already disappeared.

  She grows a little saner, a little calmer, every day,” said Mitch, entering the High Commander’s monastic cabin.

  Karlsen looked up from his desk. The papers before him looked like lists of names, in Venerian script. “I thank you for that word, Poet Does she speak of me?”

  “No.”

  They eyed each other, the poor and ugly cynic, the anointed and handsome Believer.

  “Poet,” Karlsen asked suddenly, “how do you deal with deadly enemies, when you find them in your power?”

  “We Martians are supposed to be a violent people. Do you expect me to pass sentence on myself?”

  Karlsen appeared not to understand, for a moment. “Oh. No. I was not speaking of—you and I, and Chris. Not of personal affairs. I suppose I was only thinking aloud, asking for a sign.”

  “Then don’t ask me, ask your God. But didn’t he tell you to forgive your enemies?”

  “He did.” Karlsen nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “You know, He wants a lot from us. A real hell of a lot.”

  It was a peculiar sensation, to become suddenly convinced that the man you were watching was a genuine, non-hypocritical Believer. Mitch was not sure he had ever met the like before.

  Nor had he ever seen Karlsen quite like this—passive, waiting, asking for a sign. As if there was in fact some Purpose outside the layers of a man’s own mind, that could inspire him. Mitch thought about it. If . . .

  But that was all mystical nonsense.

  Karlsen’s communicator sounded. Mitch could not make out what the other voice was saying, but he watched the effect on the High Commander. Energy and determination were coming back, there were subtle signs of the return of force, of the tremendous conviction of being right. It was like watching the gentle glow when a fusion power lamp was ignited.

  “Yes,” Karlsen was saying. “Yes, well done.”

  Then he raised the Venerian papers from his desk; it was as if he raised them only by force of will, his fingers only gesturing beneath them.

  “The news is from Hemphill,” he said to Mitch, almost absently. “The berserker fleet is just around the bulge of the Stone Place from us. Hemphill estimates they are two hundred strong, and thinks them unaware of our presence. We attack at once. Man your battle station, Poet; God be with you.” He turned back to his communicator. “Ask Admiral Kemal to my cabin at once. Tell him to bring his staff. In particular—” He glanced at the Venerian papers and read off several names.

  “Good luck to you, sir.” Mitch had delayed to say that. Before he hurried out, he saw Karlsen stuffing the Venerian papers int
o his trash disintegrator.

  Before Mitch reached his own cabin, the battle horns were winding. He had armed and suited himself and was making his way back through the suddenly crowded narrow corridors toward the bridge, when the ship’s speakers boomed suddenly to life, picking up Karlsen’s voice:

  “. . . whatever wrongs we have done you, by word, or deed, or by things left undone. I ask you now to forgive. And in the name of every man who calls me friend or leader, I pledge that any grievance we have against you, is from this moment wiped from memory.”

  Everyone in the crowded passage hesitated in the rush for battle stations. Mitch found himself staring into the eyes of a huge, well-armed Venerian ship’s policeman, probably here on the flagship as some officer’s bodyguard.

  There came an amplified cough and rumble, and then the voice of Admiral Kemal:

  “We—we are brothers, Esteeler and Venerian, and all of us. All of us, together now, the living against the berserker.” Kemal’s voice rose to a shout: “Destruction to the damned machines, and death to their builders! Let every man remember Atsog!”

  “Remember Atsog!” roared Karlsen’s voice.

  In the corridor there was a moment’s hush, like that before a towering wave smites down. Then a great insensate shout. Mitch found himself with tears in his eyes, yelling something.

  “Remember General Bradin,” cried the big Venerian, grabbing Mitch and hugging him, lifting him, armor and all. “Death to his flayers!”

  “Death to die flayers!” The shout ran like a flame through the corridors. No one needed to be told that the same things were happening in all the ships in the fleet. AH at once there was no room for anything less than brotherhood, no time for anything less than glory.

  “Destruction to the damned machines!”

  Near the flagship’s center of gravity was the bridge, only a dais holding a ring of combat chairs, each with its clustered controls and dials.

  “Boarding Coordinator ready,” Mitch reported, strapping himself in.

  The viewing sphere near the bridge’s center showed the human advance, in two leapfrogging lines of over a hundred ships each. Each ship was a green dot in the sphere, positioned as truthfully as the flagship’s computers could manage. The irregular surface of the Stone Place moved beside the battle lines in a series of jerks; the flagship was traveling by C-plus microjumps, so the presentation in the viewing sphere was a succession of still pictures at second-and-a-half intervals. Slowed by the mass of their C-plus cannon, the six fat green symbols of die Venerian heavy weapons ships labored forward, falling behind the rest of die fleet.

  In Mitch’s headphones someone was saying: “In about ten minutes we can expect to reach—” The voice died away. There was a red dot in the sphere already, and then another, and then a dozen, rising like tiny suns around the bulge of dark nebula. For long seconds the men on the bridge were silent while the berserker advance came into view. Hemphill’s scouting party must, after all, have been detected, for the berserker fleet was not cruising, but attacking. There was a battlenet of a hundred or more red dots, and now there were two nets, leapfrogging in and out of space like the human lines. And still the red berserkers rose into view, their formations growing, spreading out to englobe and crush a smaller fleet.

  “I make it three hundred machines,” said a pedantic and somewhat effeminate voice, breaking the silence with cold precision. Once, the mere knowledge that three hundred berserkers existed might have crushed all human hopes. In this place, in this hour, fear itself could frighten no one.

  The voices in Mitch’s headphones began to transact the business of opening a battle. There was nothing yet for him to do but listen and watch.

  The six heavy green marks were falling further behind; without hesitation, Karlsen was hurling his entire fleet straight at the enemy center. The foe’s strength had been underestimated, but it seemed the berserker command had made a similar error, because the red formations too were being forced to regroup, spread themselves wider.

  The distance between fleets was still too great for normal weapons to be effective, but the laboring heavy-weapons ships with their Cplus cannon were now in range, and they could fire through friendly formations almost as easily as not At their volley Mitch thought he felt space jar around him; it was some freak secondary effect that the human brain noticed, really only wasted energy. Each projectile, blasted by explosives to a safe distance from the launching ship, mounted its own C-plus engine, which then accelerated the projectile while it flickered in and out of reality on microtimers.

  Their leaden masses magnified by velocity, the huge slugs skipped through existence like stones across water, passing like phantoms through the fleet of life, emerging fully into normal space only as they approached their target, traveling then like de Broglie wavicles, their matter churning internally with a phase velocity greater than that of light.

  Almost instantly after Mitch felt the slugs’ ghostly passage, one red dot began to expand and thin into a cloud, still tiny in the viewing sphere. Someone gasped. In a few more moments, the flagship’s own weapons, beams and missiles, went into action.

  The enemy center stopped, two million miles ahead, but his flanks came on smoothly as the screw of a vast meat-grinder, threatening englobement of the first line of human ships.

  Karlsen did not hesitate, and a great turning point flickered past in a second. The life-fleet hurtled on, deliberately into, the trap, straight for the hinge of the jaws.

  Space twitched and warped around Mitchell Spain. Every ship in the fleet was firing now, and every enemy answering, and the energies released plucked through his armor like ghostly fingers. Green dots and red vanished from the sphere, but not many of either as yet.

  The voices in Mitch’s helmet slackened, as events raced into a pattern that shifted too fast for human thought to follow. Now for a time the fight would be computer against computer, faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing.

  The viewing sphere on the flagship’s bridge was shifting ranges almost in a flicker. One swelling red dot was only a million miles away, then half of that, then half again. And now the flagship came into normal space for the final lunge of the attack, firing itself like a bullet at the enemy.

  Again the viewer switched to a closer range, and the chosen foe was no longer a red dot, but a great forbidding castle, tilted crazily, black against the stars. Only a hundred miles away, then half of that. The velocity of closure slowed to less than a mile a second. As expected, the enemy was accelerating, trying to get away from what must look to it like a suicide charge. For the last time Mitch checked his chair, his suit, his weapons. Chris, be safe in a cocoon. The berserker swelled in the sphere, gun flashes showing now around his steel-ribbed belly. A small one, this, maybe only ten times the flagship’s bulk. Always a rotten spot to be found, in every one of them, under their skins old wounds, for the life of the galaxy had fought them for fifty thousand years. Try to run, you monstrous obscenity, try in vain.

  Closer, twisting closer. Now!

  Lights all gone, falling in the dark for one endless second—

  Impact. Mitch’s chair shook him, the gentle pads inside his armor battering and bruising him. The expendable ramming prow would be vaporizing, shattering and crumpling, dissipating energy down to a level the battering-ram ship could endure.

  When the crashing stopped, noise still remained, a whining droning symphony of stressed metal and escaping air and gasses, like sobbing breathing. The great machines were locked together now, half the length of the flagship embedded in the berserker.

  A rough ramming, but no one on the bridge was injured. Damage control reported that the expected air leaks were being controlled. Gunnery reported that it could extend no turret inside the wound yet. Drive reported ready for a maximum effort.

  Drive!

  The ship twisted in the wound it had made. This could be victory, here tearing the enemy open, sawing his metal bowels out into space. The
bridge twisted with the structure of the ship, this warship that was more solid metal than anything else. For a moment, Mitch thought he could conic close to comprehending the power of the engines men had built.

  “No use, Commander. We’re wedged in.”

  The enemy endured. The berserker memory would already be searched, the plans made, the counterattack on the flagship coming, without fear or mercy.

  The Ship Commander turned his head to look at Johann Karlsen. It had been foreseen that once a battle had reached this melee stage there would be little a High Commander could do. Even if the flagship were not half-buried in an enemy hull, all space nearby was a complete inferno of confused destruction, through which any meaningful communication would be impossible. If Karlsen was helpless now, neither could the berserker computers still link themselves into a single brain.

  “Fight your ship, sir,” said Karlsen. He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair, staring at the clouded viewing sphere as if trying to make sense of the few flickering lights within it.

  The Ship Commander immediately ordered his marines to board.

  Mitch saw them out the sally ports. Then, sitting still was worse than any action. “Sir, I request permission to join the boarders.”

  Karlsen seemed not to hear. He disqualified himself, for now, from any use of power; especially to set Mitchell Spain in the forefront of the battle, or to hold him bade.

  The Ship Commander considered. He wanted to keep a Boarding Coordinator on the bridge; but experienced men could be desperately short in the fighting. “Go, then. Do what you can to help defend our sally ports.”

  IX

  This berserker defended itself well with soldier-robots. The marines had hardly gotten away from the embedded hull when the counterattack came, cutting most of them off.

  In a narrow zig-zag passage leading out to the port near which fighting was heaviest, an armored figure met Mitch. “Captain Spain? I’m Sergeant Broom, acting Defense Commander here. Bridge says you’re to take over. It’s a little rough. Gunnery can’t get a turret working inside the wound. The dankers have all kinds of room to maneuver, and they keep coming at us.”