Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  A shout was being raised by many voices, not only in the square but all around the city. The outworlders’ ship was in the air.

  XIV

  THE liftoff when it came was very smooth, and took Suomi completely by surprise; he had dozed off at his desk, his head resting on his arms, and on first waking had had the hideous feeling that the ship was already settling down, its flight completed, and that his only chance to act had come and gone.

  Hastily he turned to look at the monitor screen on the bulkhead beside the stateroom’s intercom control and saw with relief that the flight was certainly not over. Imaged in the screen now was Orion’s control room. The high-ranking priest called Lachaise was seated in the central pilot’s chair, bent forward over controls and instruments in an attitude of rigid concentration. Around Lachaise other priests and soldiers sat or stood in nervous postures, clinging to whatever solid supports they could get hold of. Looking past the far side of the control room, Suomi could see down the passageway to the entrance lock, at the far side of which the main exterior hatch was still standing open; moving the ship in such a configuration was perfectly feasible, provided of course that no high speed or high altitude was attained. Another soldier clung just inside the entrance lock, looking out and down through the open outer doors. Presumably he was posted there as insurance should the screens in the control room somehow fail, or (what was much more likely) should the novice pilot have trouble in interpreting their images.

  The flight was evidently going to be a short one. The berserker must be somewhere nearby, and its loyal human servants were going to bring the captured starship to it. Then they would be able to get to work in earnest on the ship. Directing an operation on itself, the berserker could be wired into the onboard computers, assimilate them into its brain, and take over the ship’s various systems as extensions of its own being. And then the drive . . . its conversion to a death machine could be performed at Godsmountain if convenient, or the berserker could fly itself and a loyal coterie to some safe spot in the uninhabited north and there prepare to kill the world.

  Through his stateroom screen Suomi could monitor much of what was showing on the big screens in the control room. He had not dozed long, for it was still bright day outside. He watched, on the screens, the wooded slopes of Godsmountain falling away very gently, then tilting a bit. At the same time Suomi felt Orion tilt in the hands of her inexpert pilot as he started her moving sideways toward the summit. They would not be bothering with the artificial gravity on this low, slow flight in atmosphere.

  The voices of the people in the control room, and those who were communicating with them from outside the ship, were audible in Suomi’s stateroom, coming in over intercom. “Schoenberg,” Lachaise was saying tensely now, “I have a yellow light showing on the life-systems panel. Can you explain it?”

  “Let me see,” said Schoenberg’s voice, wearily, speaking offstage from Suomi’s viewpoint. After a little pause, presumably while a screen was switched to give him a better view, Schoenberg continued: “That’s nothing to worry about. Just a reminder that the main hatch is open and the safety interlocks have been disconnected to let you fly her that way. It’s just a reminder so you don’t forget and go shooting up into space.” Whatever pressure had been brought to bear, Schoenberg was evidently cooperating fairly thoroughly.

  The ship was directly over the city now, drifting balloon-like on silent engines only a few meters above the tallest rooftops. “Go higher, Lachaise!” another man’s voice barked, authoritatively, and Suomi saw the high-ranking priest in white and purple swivel nervously in the pilot’s chair, his pale hands in jerky motion, over-correcting. The ship lurched upward while the men around Lachaise clung to their chairs and stanchions and eyed him apprehensively. The upward acceleration ceased, the ship hung for a heart-stopping moment in free fall, and then with a few more up-and-down oscillations was brought back under more or less steady control.

  “I should have been allowed more time to practice!” the pilot protested feverishly.

  “There is no time,” the authoritative voice snapped back. Suomi recognized it now as that of Andreas, speaking from outside the ship. “Thorun failed and Leros and some agent of the Brotherhood have inflamed the mob. We will load our dear lord and master onto the ship and take him to safety in the north with our prisoners. All will yet be well, Lachaise, if you can only maneuver carefully. Come over the Temple now.”

  Lachaise was now guiding himself by a screen that showed what was directly below the ship. Suomi, in effect looking over Lachaise’s shoulder, saw a strange sight the significance of which he could not grasp at first. Near the largest building in the center of the city—this must be the Temple, for the ship was now hovering almost directly above it—another much lower structure was having its roof peeled back, dismantled, from inside. The workmen doing the job were partly visible, their hands and arms coming and going, removing pieces of roof from the edge of the rapidly enlarging opening. Inside there was the tracery of thin scaffolding on which the workmen evidently stood, and besides that nothing but darkness, unconquerable by the sun that everywhere else fell bright on street and wall. It took Suomi a few moments to realize that the building’s interior looked dark because it was a single vast pit, dug far below the level of the city’s streets.

  “Tell them to hurry with the roof,” Lachaise pleaded.

  “Are you in position yet?” the voice of Andreas countered, the strain in it now quite audible. “I do not think you are quite in the proper position.”

  SUOMI could see now that small but tumultuous groups of white-robed men were running about in the streets around the Temple complex, deploying as if to encircle it. Here and there a drawn sword waved. And uniformed soldiers moved about on the Temple’s walls. Now Suomi saw the bright streak of an arrow flying from street to wall and two more darting in the opposite direction in reply. Perhaps the man in gray, with his grandiose scheme of entering the city disguised as a slave and touching off a rebellion, had been more successful than Suomi had thought possible.

  As for Suomi himself, he had done all he could at the workbench and now it was time to prepare for combat. Feeling unreal, he picked up the small battery-powered unit he had assembled and went quickly across the small room and got into his bunk. Reaching up an arm, he turned his intercom to SPEAK. The voices of the others still came in; and, though they still could not see him, he could join in their conversation now. But he was not ready.

  The bunk was capable of being converted into an acceleration couch, meant to be used in case of failure of artificial gravity somewhere in deep space. To fully convert the bunk now would not be feasible, but Suomi swung the center section of restraining pads over himself as he lay down, and locked it into place. He lay there holding his little recorder ready to play, the gain turned to maximum. He lay rigid with tension and fear, almost unable to breathe, not yet knowing for certain whether he would be brave enough to do what must be done. That it might kill him was not so bad. That it might accomplish nothing except to earn him a leisurely and hideous punishment from a victorious Andreas—that was very possible, and a chance just about too hideous to take.

  Suomi, by turning his head, could still observe his stateroom screen. Lachaise was edging the ship over the great pit now, unmistakably meaning to lower it inside. The removal of the roof out to the eaves had been completed. The fragile scaffolding left inside would part like spiderweb beneath Orion’s armored weight. It was all very well planned and organized. Andreas and the others must have been preparing for a long time to capture a starship. Who had told them how to plan their pit, how big it must be to hold the kind of ship men would be likely to use on a surreptitious hunting expedition? Of course, their lord and beloved master, Death . . . Death knew all the sizes and shapes of human starships, he had fought against them for a thousand years.

  Lachaise in his pilot’s chair was now carrying on a continuous exchange of tense comments with the men waiting and guiding him below,
and with the lookout at the open hatch. The ship began to lower. Down, and down—but-this proved to be a false start, and Lachaise had to straighten her out and bring her up again, dribbling a thin trail of white dust from where the hard hull had brushed delicately against a high Temple cornice and knocked down a barrowful or two of masonry.

  Up they went, and sideways an almost imperceptible distance, and started down again. Lachaise was probably a natural technician and machine operator; at any rate he was learning very fast. This time the slow descent was true.

  His finger on the switch that would turn on the recorder, Suomi balanced over infinite depths of personal change, chasms of sudden death or slow defeat and somewhere a small plateau of triumph. With a part of his mind he wondered if this was the sensation that Schoenberg and other hunters sought, and the men who faced one another in the Tournament, when a lifetime’s awareness of being seemed to pulse through every second of experience.

  He could accept all the possibilities. He could do what must be done. The ship was going down into the hole. Timing, now, tactics. At the bottom they might very well cut off the drive, so that would be too long to wait. Right now, just entering the top of the hole, they were still more outside than in, right now would be too soon.

  He waited through an eternity; the ship must now be a quarter of the way down.

  Halfway down. Eternity was passing.

  Now. With a relief almost unbearable with surcease of mental strain, Suomi touched the switch on the small box he was holding.

  THE voice of Johann Karlsen, biting and unforgettable, heavily amplified, boomed out through Orion’s intercom system, through the radio links from the control room to the outside, through the open main hatch, reverberating at a volume that must have carried into all the nearby city: “THIS IS THE HIGH COMMANDER SPEAKING. LANDING PARTIES READY. UNCOVER THE BERSERKER . . .

  There was more, but it was drowned out by another voice, a voice that could only be the berserker’s own, booming and bellowing from some hidden place: “FULL DRIVE. ANDREAS, IN THE NAME OF GLORIOUS DEATH, FULL DRIVE AT ONCE KILL JOHANN KARLSEN, HE IS PROBABLY ABOARD. I COMMAND YOU, LACHAISE, FULL DRIVE AT ONCE. KILL JOHANN KARLSEN, KIL—”

  And then that voice too was buried, drowned out, obliterated by the explosive violence resulting from the full-power application of a starship’s drive, not only deep within a planet’s gravitational well but almost literally buried within Godsmountain’s mass. Suomi, heavily protected by his padded bunk and bracing himself as well as he was able, was still shaken as if by the jaws of a glacier-beast, flattened against the bulkhead next to his bunk, then forced away from it again, only saved by his straps from being smeared against the stateroom’s opposite bulkhead. The room’s regular lights went out, and simultaneously an emergency light glared into life above the door.

  There followed a sudden cessation of acceleration, a silence and a falling that went on and on. Then the fall ended with another bonejarring crash, loud and violent but still far closer to the humanly endurable on the scale of physical events than was that first detonation drive.

  The ship seemed to bounce, crashed again, teetered and rocked, and came at last to a shuddering rest, her decks tilted at somewhere near forty degrees from the horizontal. Now all was quiet. The screen in Suomi’s stateroom was effectively dead, its surface only flickering here and there with electronic noise.

  Suomi unstrapped himself from his bunk and climbed the crazy slope of the deck to reach the door. He had failed to pick up loose objects before entering combat and breakage in the stateroom had been heavy, though there were no indications of basic structural damage. The strength of the hull had probably saved the ship from that.

  The stateroom door opened forcefully when he unlatched it, and the dead or unconscious body of a soldier slid in, trailing broken-looking legs. Suomi stuck his head out into the passage and looked and listened. All was quiet and nothing moved in the glare of the emergency lights. Here too deck and bulkheads and overhead were still in place.

  He turned back to the fallen sentry and decided that the man was probably dead. Guilt or triumph might come later, he supposed.

  Right now Suomi only considered whether to arm himself with the man’s sword, which was still resting peacefully in its scabbard. In the end Suomi left it there. A sword in his hand was not going to do any good for anybody, least of all himself.

  He thumped on the door of Barbara Hurtado’s stateroom and when a weak voice answered he opened the door and climbed in. Amid a kaleidoscopic jumble of multicolored clothes from a spilled closet she sat in a heap on the floor, wearing an incongruous fluffy robe, her brown hair in wild disarray, leaning against a chair that must be fastened to the deck.

  “I think my collarbone is broken,” she said faintly. “Maybe it isn’t, though. I can move my arm.”

  “I’m the one who did it,” he said. “Sorry. There was no way I could give you any warning.”

  “You?” She raised her eyebrows. “All right. Did you do as much damage to those sons of beasts out there?”

  “More, I hope. That was the idea. Shall we go out and see? Can you walk?”

  “Love to go and see their broken bodies, but I don’t think I can. They’ve got me chained to my bunk, which I guess is why I wasn’t killed. The things they were making me do. Always wondered what soldiers were like and I finally found out.”

  “I’m going out to look around.”

  “Don’t leave me, Carlos.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Things in the control room were very bad, or very good, depending on your point of view. It was closer to the drive than the staterooms were, Suomi supposed. Lachaise, strapped into the central, padded chair, was leaning back with eyes open and arms outflung, showing no wounds but very plainly dead all the same. Intense localized neutron flux at the moment when the drive’s fields collapsed was one possibility in such disasters, Suomi remembered reading somewhere. Lachaise had perished happily, no doubt, in blind obedience to his god, perhaps believing or hoping that he really was killing Johann Karlsen. In the name of glorious death . . . yes.

  Around Lachaise, the priests and soldiers who had been helping and watching him had not been strapped into padded chairs. Neutrons or not, they now looked like so many bad losers in the Tournament. This many lives at least had the berserker harvested today. Some of them still breathed, but none were at all dangerous any more.

  The main hatch was still open, Suomi discovered, looking down at it from the control room, but it was completely choked with broken white masonry and massive splintered timbers; part of the Temple or of somebody’s house perhaps. The ship had come to rest within the city, then. Probably a number of people had been killed outside the ship as well as in it, but Godsmountain had not been leveled, a lot of its people were doubtless still alive, and whoever was left in charge should come digging his way into the ship eventually, probably wanting to take vengeance for the destruction.

  With some difficulty Suomi made his way back to Barbara’s stateroom and managed to lodge himself in a sitting position by her side. “Exit’s blocked. Looks like we wait together.” He described the carnage briefly.

  “Be a good boy, Carlos, get me a pain pill from my medicine chest, and a drink.”

  He jumped up. “Of course. I didn’t think—sorry. Water?”

  “First. Then one of the other kind, if everything in my bar isn’t smashed.”

  THEY were still sitting there together, about half a standard hour later, when after much noise of digging and scraping from the direction of the entrance hatch, Leros and a troop of armed men, swords in hand and in full battle gear, appeared in the stateroom’s open door. Suomi, who had been listening fatalistically to their approach, looked up at Leros and then closed his eyes, unable to watch the sword’s descent.

  Nothing descended on him. He heard nothing but a faint multiple clinking and jangling, and opened his eyes to see Leros and his followers facing him on their knees, genufl
ecting awkwardly on the tilted deck. Among them, looking scarcely less awed than the rest, was the man in gray, armed now with sword instead of hammer.

  “Oh Lord Demigod Johann Karlsen,” said Leros with deep reverence, “you who are no robot, but a living man, and more, forgive us for not recognizing you when you walked among us! And accept our eternal gratitude for again confounding our ancient enemies. You have smashed the death-machine within its secret lair, and most of those who served it also. Be pleased to know that I myself have cut out the heart of the arch-traitor Andreas.”

  It was Barbara who—perhaps—saved him then. “The Lord Karlsen has been injured, stunned,” she said. “Help us.”

  FIVE days later, the demigod Johann Karlsen, he who had been Carlos Suomi, and Athena Poulson, both of them in fine health, sat at a small table in a corner of what had been the Temple courtyard. Shaded from the midday Hunterian sun by the angle of a ruined wall, they were watching the slave-powered rubble clearing operations making steady progress in the middle distance. There the ship still lay, fifty or sixty meters from the Temple complex, surrounded by a jumble of smashed buildings, where it had come to rest after the drive destroyed itself.