Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Fifteen and a half minutes left.

  The damage inside was quite as extensive as the condition of the hull had indicated. Their suit lights augmenting the sharp beams that Meitner’s distant sun threw into the airless interior, the boarding party spread out, keeping in touch by means of their suit radios. This had undoubtedly been a passenger ship. Much of the interior was meant as living quarters, divided into single and double cabins, with accommodations for a couple of dozen people. What furnishings remained suggested luxury. So far, everything said by the lifeboat’s occupant was being proved true, but Liao as yet had no clear evidence regarding that occupant’s humanity, nor even a firm idea of what evidence he was looking for. He could only hope the evidence was here, and that he would recognize it at first sight.

  The interior of the ship was totally airless now, having been effectively opened to the stars by the repeated use of some kind of penetration weapon. The ruin was much cleaner than any similarly damaged structure on a planet’s surface could be. Loose debris had been carried out of the ship with escaping air, or separated from her when her drive took her outside of normal space and time, between the stars.

  “Look here, Captain.” The lieutenant in charge of the marine squad was beckoning to him.

  Near the center of the slender ship the lieutenant had found a place where a wound bigger than any of the others had pierced in, creating, in effect, an enormous skylight over what had been one of the largest compartments on board. Probably it had been a lounge or refectory for the passengers and crew. Since the ship was damaged, this ruined room had evidently provided the most convenient observation platform for whom-ever or whatever had been in control. A small, wide-angle telescope, and a tubular electronic spectroscope, battery-powered and made for use in vacuum, had been roughly but effectively clamped to the jagged upper edge of what had been one of the lounge’s interior walls, and now formed a parapet against infinity.

  The lieutenant was swiveling the instruments on their mountings. “Captain, these look like emergency equipment from a lifeboat. Would a berserker machine have needed to use these, or would it have gear of its own?”

  The captain stood beside him. “When a berserker puts a prize crew on a ship, it uses man-sized, almost android machines for the job. It’s just more convenient for the machines that way, I suppose—more efficient. So they could quite easily use instruments designed for humans.” He swung his legs to put his magnetic boots against the lounge’s soft floor, so that they held him lightly to the steel deck beneath, and stared at the instruments, trying to force more meaning from them.

  Men kept on searching the ship, probing everywhere, coming and going to report results (or rather, the lack of them) to Liao at his impromptu command post in what had been the lounge. Two marines had broken open a jammed door and found a small airless room containing a dead man who wore a space suit. Cause of death was not immediately apparent, but the uniform collar visible through the helmet’s faceplate indicated that the man had been a member of Wilhelmina’s crew. And in an area of considerable damage near the lounge another suitless body was discovered wedged among twisted structural members. This corpse had probably been frozen near absolute zero for several days and exposed to vacuum for an equal length of time. Its death had also been violent. After all this it was hard to be sure, but Liao thought that the body had once been that of a young girl who had been wearing a fancy party dress when she met her end.

  Liao could imagine a full scenario now, or rather two of them. Both began with the shipload of students, eighteen or twenty of them, perhaps, enjoying their interstellar trip. Surely such a cruise had been a momentous event in their lives. Maybe they had been partying as they either entered or were about to leave the solar system containing the planet Esteel. And then, according to Scenario One, out of the deep night of space came the desperate plea for help from the damaged and harried courier, hotly pursued by berserkers that were not expected to be in this part of the galaxy at all.

  The students would have had to remain on board the Wilhelmina, there being no place for them to get off, when she was commandeered to carry the space inverter on to Meitner’s planet. Then urgent flight, and two days from Meitner’s a berserker almost caught up, tracking and finding and shooting holes in Wilhelmina, somewhere in the great labyrinth of space and dust and stars and time, in which the little worlds of men were strange and isolated phenomena. And then the two heroic survivors, Henri and Winifred, finding a way to push on somehow.

  Scenario Two diverged from that version early on; it was simpler and, at first glance, more credible. Instead of the Wilhelmina being hailed by a courier and pressed into military service, she was simply jumped by berserkers somewhere, her crew and passengers efficiently wiped out, her battered body driven on here ahead of the main berserker fleet in a ploy to forestall the installation of the space inverter and demolish the colony before any help could reach it. Scenario One was the more heroic and romantic, Two the more prosaic and businesslike. The trouble was that the real world was not committed to behaving in either style but went on its way indifferently.

  A man was just now back from inspecting Wilhelmina’s control room. “Almost a total loss in there, sir, except for the drive controls and their directional settings. Artificial gravity’s gone, astrogator’s position is wiped out, and the autopilot, too. Drive itself seems all right, as far as I can tell without trying it.”

  “Don’t bother. Thank you, mister.”

  Another man came to report, drifting upside down before the captain in the lack of gravity. “Starboard forward lifeboat’s been launched, captain. Others are all still in place, no signs of having been lived in. Eight-passenger models.”

  “Thank you,” Liao said courteously. These facts told him nothing new. Twelve minutes left now, before he must select a target and give the command to fire. In his magnetic boots he stood before the telescope and spectroscope as their user had done, and looked out at the stars.

  The slow rotation of the Wilhelmina brought the dreadnought into view, and Liao flicked his suit radio to the intership channel. “Bridge, this is captain. Someone tell me just how big that space inverter is. Could two untrained people manhandle it and its packing into one of those little eight-passenger lifeboats?”

  “This is the armaments officer, sir,” an answer came back promptly. “I used to work in ground installations, and I’ve handled those things. I could put my arms around the biggest space inverter ever made, and it wouldn’t mass more than fifty kilograms. It’s not the size makes ‘em rare and hard to come by, it’s the complexity. Makes a regular drive unit or artificial gravity generator look like nothing.”

  “All right. Thank you. Astrogation, are you there?”

  “Listening in, sir.”

  “Good. Barbara, the regular astrogator’s gear on this ship seems to have been wiped out. What we have then is two history students or whatever, with unknown astronomical competence, working their way here from someplace two days off, in a series of c-plus jumps. We’ve found their instruments, apparently all they used—simple telescope and spectroscope. You’ve been thinking it over. Now, how about it? Possible?”

  There was a pause. “Possible, yes. I can’t say more than that on what you’ve given me.”

  “I’m not convinced it’s possible. With umpteen thousand stars to look at, their patterns changing every time you jump, how could you hope to find the one you wanted to work toward?” Ten minutes. Inspiration struck. “Listen! Why couldn’t they have shoved off in the lifeboat, two days ago, and used its autopilot?”

  Barbara’s voice was careful, as always. “To answer your last question first, chief, the lifeboat autopilots on civilian ships are usually not adjustable to give you a choice of goals; they just bring you out in the nearest place where you are likely to be found. No good for either people or berserkers intent on coming to Meitner’s system. And if Wilhelmina’s drive is working, it could take them between the stars faster than a lifeboat could.r />
  “To answer your first question, the lifeboats carry aids for the amateur astrogator, such as spectral records of thousands of key stars, kept on microfilm. Also often provided is an electronic scanning spectroscope of the type you seem to have found there. The star records are indexed by basic spectral type—you know, types O, B, A, F, Q, K, and so on. Type O stars, for example, are quite rare in this neck of the woods, so if you just scanned for them, you would cut down tremendously on the number of stars to be looked at closely for identification. There are large drawbacks to such a system of astrogation, but on the other hand, with a little luck, one might go a long way using it. If the two students are real people, though, I’ll bet at least one of them knows some astronomy.”

  “Thank you,” Liao said carefully, once again. He glanced around him. The marines were still busy, flashing their lights on everything and poking into every crevice. Eight minutes. He thought he could keep the time in his head now, not needing a chronometer.

  People had lived in this lounge, or rec room, or whatever it had been, and enjoyed themselves. The wall to which the astrogation instruments were now fastened had earlier been decorated, or burdened, with numerous graffiti of the kinds students seemed always to generate. Many of the messages, Liao saw now, were in English, an ancient and honorable language still fairly widely taught. From his own schooldays he remembered enough to be able to read it fairly well, helping himself out with an occasional guess.

  CAPTAIN AHAB CHASES ALEWIVES, said one message proceeding boldly across the wall at an easy reading height. The first and third words of that were certainly English, but the meaning of the whole eluded him. Captain Liao chases shadows, he thought, and hunches. What else is left?

  Here was another:

  OSS AND HIS NOBLE CLASSMATES WISH THE WHOLE WORLD

  And then nothingness, the remainder of the message having gone when Oss and his noble classmates went and the upper half of this wall went with them.

  “Here, Captain! Look!” A marine was beckoning wildly.

  The writing he was pointing to was low down on the wall and inconspicuous, made with a thinner writing instrument than most of the other graffiti had been. It said simply: Henri & Winifred

  Liao looked at it, first with a jumping hope in his heart, and then with a sagging sensation that had rapidly become all too familiar. He rubbed at the writing with his suited thumb; nothing much came off He said: “Can anyone tell me in seven minutes whether this was put here after the air went out of the ship? If so, it would seem to prove that Henri and Winifred were still around then. Otherwise, it proves nothing.” If the berserker had been here, it could easily have seen those names and retained them in its effortless, lifeless memory, and used them when it had to construct a scenario.

  “Where are Henri and Winifred now, that is the question,” Liao said to the lieutenant, who came drifting near, evidently wondering, as they all must be, what to do next. “Maybe that was Winifred back there in the party dress.”

  The marine answered: “Sir, that might have been Henri, for all that I could tell.” He went on directing his men, and waiting for the captain to tell him what else was to be done.

  A little distance to one side of the names, an English message in the same script and apparently made with the same writing instrument went down the wall like this:

  Oh

  Kiss

  Be

  Me

  A

  Right

  Fine

  Now

  Girl

  Sweetie

  Liao was willing to bet that that particular message wasn’t written by anyone wearing a space helmet. But no, he wouldn’t make such a bet, not really. If he tried, he could easily enough picture the two young people, rubbing faceplates and laughing, momentarily able to forget the dead wedged in the twisted girders a few meters away. Something about that message nagged at his memory, though. Could it be the first line of an English poem he had forgotten?

  The slow turn of the torn ship was bringing the dreadnought into view again. “Bridge, this is captain. Tell me anything that’s new.”

  “Sir, here’s a little more that came in clear from the lifeboat. I quote: ‘This is Winifred talking now, stop. We’re going on being human even if you don’t believe us, stop.’ some more repetitious stuff, Captain, and then this: ‘While Henri was navigating I would come out from the lifeboat with him and he started trying to teach me about the stars, stop. We wrote our names there on the wall under the telescope, stop. If you care to look you’ll find them, stop. Of course that doesn’t prove anything does it, stop. If I had lenses for eyes I could have read those names there and remembered them . . .’ It cuts off again there, chief, buried in noise.”

  “Second, confirm my reading of how much time we have left to decide.”

  “Three minutes forty seconds, sir. That’s cutting it thin.”

  “Thanks.” Liao fell silent, looking off across the universe. It offered him no help.

  “Sir! Sir! I may have something here.” It was the marine who had found the names; he was still closely examining the wall.

  Looking at the wall where the man had aimed his helmet light, near the deck below the mounted instruments, Liao beheld a set of small, grayish, indented scratches, about half a meter apart.

  “Sir, some machine coming here repeatedly to use the scopes might well have made these markings on the wall, whereas a man or woman in a spacesuit would not have left such marks, in my opinion, sir.”

  “I see.” Looking at the marks, which might have been made by anything—maybe furniture banged into the wall during that final party—Liao felt an irrational anger at the marine. But of course the man was only trying to help. He had a duty to put forward any possibly useful idea that came into his head. “I’m not sure these were made by a berserker, spaceman, but it’s something to think about. How much time have we left, Second?

  “Just under three minutes, sir. Standing by, ready to fire at target of your choice, sir. Pleading messages still coming in intermittently from both ships, nothing new in them.”

  “All right.” The only reasonable hope of winning was to guess and take the fifty-fifty chance. If he let both ships go on, the bad one was certain to ram into the colony and destroy it before the other could deliver the key to the defenses and it could be installed. If he destroyed both ships, the odds were ten to one or worse that the berserker fleet would be here shortly and accomplish the same ruin upon a colony deprived of any chance of protecting itself.

  Liao adjusted his throat muscles so that his voice, when it came out, would be firm and certain, and then he flipped a coin in his mind. Well, not really. There were the indented scratches on the bulkhead, perhaps not so meaningless after all, and there was the story of the two students’ struggle to get here, perhaps a little too fantastic. “Hit the lifeboat,” he said then, decisively. “Give it another two minutes, but if no new evidence turns up, let go at it with the main turret. Under no circumstances delay enough to let it reach the planet.”

  “Understand, sir,” said Miller’s voice. “Fire at the lifeboat two minutes from your order.”

  He would repeat the order to fire, emphatically, when the time was up, so that there could be no possible confusion as to where responsibility lay. “Lieutenant, let’s get the men back to the launch. Continue to keep your eyes open on the way, for anything . . .”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The last one to leave the ruined lounge-observatory, Liao looked at the place once more before following the marines back through the ship. Oh, be a fine girl, Winifred, when the slug from the c-plus cannon comes. But if I have guessed wrong and it is coming for you, at least you’ll never see it. Just no more for you. No more Henri and no more lessons about the stars.

  The stars . . .

  Oh, be a fine girl . . .

  O, B, A, F, G, K . . .

  “Second officer!”

  “Sir!”

  “Cancel my previous order! Let the life
boat land. Hit the Etruria! Unload on that bloody damned berserker with everything we’ve got, right now!”

  “Yessir!”

  Long before Liao got back to the launch, the c-plus cannon volleyed. Their firing was invisible, and inaudible here in airlessness, but still he and the others felt the energies released pass twistily through all their bones. Now the huge leaden slugs would begin slapping in and out of normal space, homing on their tiny target, far outracing light in their trajectories toward Meitner’s planet. The slugs would be traveling now like de Broglie wavicles, one aspect matter with its mass magnified awesomely by Einsteinian velocity, one aspect waves of not much more than mathematics, The molecules of lead churned internally with phase velocities greater than that of light.

  Liao was back on the dreadnought’s bridge before laggard light brought the faint flash of destruction back.

  “Direct hit, Captain.” There was no need to amplify on that.

  “Good shot, Arms.”

  And then, only a little later, a message got through the planet’s ionospheric noise to tell them that the two people with the space inverter were safely down.

  Within a few hours the berserker fleet appeared in-system, found an armed and ready colony, with Hamilcar Barca hanging by for heavy hit-and-run support. They skirmished briefly, and then decided to decline battle and depart. A few hours after that, the human fleet arrived and decided to pause for some refitting. And then Captain Liao had a chance to get down into the domed colony and talk to two people who wanted very much to meet him.

  “So,” he was explaining, soon after the first round of mutual congratulations had been completed, “when I at last recognized the mnemonic on the wall for what it was, I knew that not only had Henri and Winny been there, but that he had in fact been teaching her something about astronomical spectroscopy at that very place beside the instruments—therefore, after the ship was damaged.”

  Henri was shaking his youthful head, with the air of one still marveling at it all. “Yes, now I can remember putting the mnemonic thing down, showing her how to remember the order of spectral types. I guess we use mnemonics all the time without thinking about it much. Every good boy does fine, for the musical notes. Bad boys race our young girls—that one’s in electronics.”