The Berserker Throne

by Fred Saberhagen

  “But no, not at all. I would leave them on a timer, as it were. They would deny you access to the docks for a time, simply to prevent any quick repairs of the remaining ships, and use of them for hot pursuit of me, assuming such were possible. After the set time had elapsed, they would disable themselves or allow themselves to be disabled. A treasury of knowledge, such as the Templars have always sought. And you would have obtained it for them. I’m making you an offer that no real goodlife would make, and you know it.”

  “But at what price?” Commander Blenheim whispered. “At what price? You’ve helped them to kill human beings here, people under my command, Templars. No one but a goodlife would have—”

  There was another outburst of noise, of fighting, somewhere outside the echoing empty room in which they were talking. Again the general turned to the controller at his side. “What was that?”

  “As before,” the machine-voice answered him. “It was necessary to take action against a local instance of aggression by the badlife.”

  “Are you sure? Your communications must be imperfect too.”

  “The probability is more than eighty percent.”

  “Not good enough, for me.” Harivarman waved a hand at the berserker. “Go out and see for yourself, about that fighting. Report back to me directly.”

  “It is not necessary—”

  The general thumbed something on his control device. “This is an order. Go out and see to the matter yourself.”

  There was no more hesitation. The machine moved away, pacing with silent elegance, despite its damaged appearance.

  Now the two humans were alone. Now, thought Commander Blenheim, I could risk everything, attack him with my bare hands. . . .

  Across the table from her, Harivarman, looking almost absentminded, was again picking up the Council’s order for his arrest. “There are some changes I would like to see made in this,” he announced, surprising her when she thought that she was beyond surprise. “Before I’d even want to start negotiating with the Council.” And, looking at her meaningfully, he pulled a writing tool out of his pocket.

  * * *

  It was half an hour later when the base commander left the man who had once been her prisoner. Her head was whirling as she departed, with relief at her own survival thus far, and with fear. And with a new and twisted hope.

  Chapter 15

  The berserker machine that had called to Chen Shizuoka in Prince Harivarman’s voice was now calling to him again, as it advanced along an otherwise deserted street that led obliquely toward the plaza where Chen and Olga were trying to hide:

  “Chen Shizuoka. Come with this machine to safety. Chen Shizuoka, this is Prince Harivarman. Come—” And even as the Prince’s voice boomed forth from the berserker, it kept walking closer to where Chen and Olga were holding their breath, afraid to move.

  Chen was peering out at the approaching monster through small chinks in a decorative screen of masonry. The tall screen separated the small plaza where he was standing from the nearby street down which the murderous thing was walking toward him on its three legs. His carbine, probably useless against this foe, was in his hands, the muzzle pointing up into the air. He was afraid to move a muscle, even the minimal movement necessary to aim the weapon, because aiming it would probably be a waste of time anyway.

  His eyes moved again to his companion. Olga Khazar, standing pressed against the screen beside him, appeared to be on the verge of fainting, leaning on the screen, her hand that held the pistol pale-knuckled with the tightness of her grip.

  The machine coming toward them down the otherwise deserted street was less than fifty meters distant now. It stopped briefly after every one or two of its triangular steps, turning its head from side to side at every pause, as if to sweep the area with its multitude of senses. The thing was almost twice as tall as a man, and pot-bellied as if its central torso might contain some kind of a cargo compartment. Now and then it raised its head even higher on an elongating metal neck, peering over stalled, abandoned vehicles and into upper-story windows.

  Just behind the two people who were holding their breath and trying to hide from the berserker was the flat expanse of the small plaza, much like a hundred other plazas scattered around the City, and behind the plaza in turn there were some three- and four-story civilian buildings. In one of those buildings people were clamoring, oblivious to the approaching terror. It sounded like some stupid argument about what to bring and what to leave, as if there were someplace available for City people to flee. Chen could only hope that maybe the noise and movement behind himself and Olga, together with the screen in front of them, might be enough to mask their presence. The chinks in the decorative screen were very small.

  For whatever reason, the prowling machine did not discover them. At the last intersection before the plaza it turned down a side street, and in another moment it was out of sight.

  As soon as it was gone, Olga gestured, silently, urgently, for Chen to follow her. Then she turned and fled, moving as quietly as possible, crossing the plaza, going in the opposite direction from the machine.

  Chen ran after her.

  After a couple hundred meters she paused, and pulled him into a recess between buildings. Panting with the effort of the run, she whispered: “These weapons we’ve got aren’t doing us any good.”

  “I’ve figured that,” said Chen, nodding. His helmet and Olga’s were both open; they could talk in low voices without breaking radio silence.

  “If we could only get into the base . . .” She broke off, gesturing frustration; the base was where most of the fighting was going on.

  “All right, so we can’t get in there. We tried. Where do we try next?”

  Olga only shook her head. Presently, when they had both caught their breath, she moved on, gesturing to Chen to follow. Chen didn’t ask where they were going; he was anxious to go anywhere. He didn’t want to sit in one place and do nothing.

  Now they began to encounter a few other people, all of them civilians, on the streets. Most of the civilians appeared to be in flight, headed out away from the center of the City toward the relatively remote areas of the Fortress. Those among the refugees who took notice of the two spacesuited Templars at all looked at them more in fear than in reassurance.

  Olga was setting a more moderate pace now, sometimes walking, sometimes moving at a jogging run. Chen, thankful that he had tried to keep to a program of running at home, kept up with her fairly easily. They had traveled more than a kilometer from where they had last seen the berserker before Olga stopped. When she spoke again, it was in something like a normal tone. “Maybe from here we can get a better look at what’s going on.”

  She led Chen into another small plaza, and mounted the broad steps of its elevated central section. It offered them something of a vantage point, almost as if they had climbed a hill. This elevation, like every other on the interior surface, gave a fine view, as from above, of the surrounding territory at a distance of a kilometer or more. They had now made more than that much distance from the base, and from here it appeared to Chen at first that the conflict around the docks and the Templar base had cooled. The smoke in the air there had largely dissipated. But no, the fighting was not over; the sight and sound of it flared up again, and flared yet once more even as they watched.

  “Lookout!”

  Chen turned quickly at Olga’s warning. On a rooftop, several hundred meters back in the direction they had come from, he could again see the berserker that had called to them in Prince Harivarman’s voice. As far as he could tell, the machine was facing almost directly toward him. Whether it could see him or not he did not know. But it called his name again, in an amplified bellow, and simultaneously it dropped from the rooftop out of sight, as if it were hurrying toward him again.

  Olga was already running, fleeing in the opposite direction. Terrified, Chen followed her at the best speed that he could manage.

  They rounded several corners, running hard. When Olga next s
topped for breath, in a twisted alley, she demanded, almost accusingly: “What’s it want you for?”

  He had to gasp twice more before he could get out words. “How the hell should I know?”

  His injured innocence was apparently convincing. Olga led the way again, this time at a mere walking pace, into a street where there were several abandoned flyers. She halted at one of these. “Let’s take this one. We’ll never be able to outrun that bloody thing on foot.”

  “Why didn’t we try this sooner?”

  This, Chen soon decided, must be some kind of service vehicle, for it appeared to need no special key or code to start. Olga took the driver’s seat, and they were off. Under her control the flyer left the ground and swooped away, staying near ground level as it hurtled through streets and alleys. The thing pursuing them would never be able to travel this fast on the ground, thought Chen. But he could not imagine it giving up, and so it was probably still coming after him. If she separated from him . . . he was too scared to suggest that.

  Olga’s thoughts were evidently on other tactics. Driving, she mused aloud: “If we only had some heavier weapons . . . maybe I know where there are some.”

  “Where?”

  “Out on the firing range. We’ve never used ‘em much, since I’ve been on the Fortress, but I think they’re there.”

  There was little traffic in these streets. Fortunately so, for Olga was taking blind corners under manual control at high speed. Chen wondered if the civilians knew something that he and Olga didn’t, if it had already been demonstrated that large moving targets got shot at by either side, or both.

  They rounded a corner swiftly and almost crashed into an oncoming flyer, a vehicle airborne and hurrying recklessly like their own. Chen opened his mouth to yell a warning, but it was already too late for that. Olga had barely avoided the head-on crash, but in the process their flyer had brushed a building. Damage alarms sounded aboard. The vehicle came down heavily, pancaking on the street with an ear-numbing roar, and skidded roughly to a broken halt.

  Seat restraints held. Chen saw objects flying at him, but nothing hit him hard enough to do him damage through the tough spacesuit.

  Olga was unhurt too, and already she was jumping out of the wreck. “Come on!”

  Again, without discussion, she led the way. Moving as if she knew what she was doing, she opened a door in a wall and charged through it, down a ramp leading to some lower, relatively outer level. There might have been a sign to indicate where they were going, but if so it had gone past Chen too fast for him to read it. Through one sublevel passage after another their flight continued.

  At last Olga changed course again, climbing a narrow spiral service stairway to the street. When they had regained the surface level, Chen immediately tried to scan the great map that the interior surface of the Fortress made of itself, to determine their location. But he was too unfamiliar with the Fortress to be able to tell where they were in relation to where they had started. All he felt sure of was that they had been fleeing for a number of kilometers.

  Olga realized what he was doing, and pointed out to him the Templar base and its immediate area, which were now almost overhead, partially obscured behind the miniature solar brightness of the Radiant itself.

  Chen was about to try to insist that it was time for conscious planning of their next move, when their conversation was interrupted. Chen’s suit radio suddenly whispered some kind of gabble in his ear.

  Olga waved him to silence; something was evidently coming in on her radio too. “Wait,” she whispered, waving at Chen again.

  The voice came again. It sounded to Chen like someone was operating a radio without being properly familiar with it.

  Olga cautiously responded, at low power, asking for identification.

  The voice replied, indistinctly. Chen couldn’t make out any of the words, until it asked: “Any more survivors out there?”

  Olga said crisply: “Just tell me where you are, and then get off this channel.”

  “We’re close to what looks like a firing range.” Her head swiveled, looking up at another portion of the self-mapping surface. “Stay put. We’ll join you.”

  * * *

  The firing range, as Chen was able to see for himself an hour later, was like a giant pit dug diagonally into the surface of the inner Fortress, with the targets at the outer, lower end of the pit, a hundred meters or more below the lines of firing positions. These positions were arranged in a series of semicircular terraces, each recessed and shielded to be out of the line of fire from the terraces above it.

  As Chen and Olga came over the lip of the pit, people in uniforms strange to Chen appeared on the next terrace down, emerging from various shelters and hiding places and waving cautious greetings.

  “What are those uniforms?” he asked Olga quietly. They reminded him somewhat of the security people who had chased him through the streets of the capital of Salutai.

  “Dragoons. The people who came on the ship to arrest your Prince.”

  There were more than a dozen dragoons, Chen estimated, looking bedraggled and lacking spacesuits. Chen had seen nothing of the dragoon force until now, though Olga had earlier mentioned their arrival. These were not the proud imperialists she had depicted, but only a haggard, wounded, nerve-shattered remnant of that force.

  There were two Templars among them, both wounded but walking.

  “Where’re your officers?” Olga asked the first dragoon to approach, coming wearily up a stair. The pits and revetments and shelters built around the terraces of the range at least gave the illusion of somewhat greater security than you felt when standing around out in the open, and the meeting quickly moved to a relatively indoor location.

  The young man shrugged. “They were at some kind of a meeting, I guess, when the attack came; I think most of them made it into a shelter, back there near the docks. We were still aboard our ship when it was hit, and we had to get ashore; then we just lit out running.” He spoke in the accents of Salutai, which sounded like home to Chen. “We ran into a couple of your people, and they said there might be heavy weapons out this way. If there were, somebody must have beat us to ‘em.”

  “Looks like you’ve got some kind of communicator set up down there.” Chen pointed. In one of the revetments on the next lower level, the dragoon troops had brought from somewhere a portable screen communicator with scrambler set up or, for all that Chen could tell, what they were using might have been a part of the built-in intercom between the command bunkers and this control center of the firing range.

  “Come on down and join us.”

  “We’ll stay up here on the rim,” said Olga. “It’s easier to keep an eye out from up here.”

  “Okay. Right. Suit yourselves. I’ll report that you’re here. Be back in a minute.” The young man went down to rejoin the others, who were still milling about in a purposeless, disorganized fashion.

  There was a man’s face, rather blurry, on the communicator screen they had down there, and a conversation going on between the face and one or two of the dragoons. Chen stared at it absently, then recalled himself with a start to watch the interior sky again.

  But his eye returned to the man’s face on the communications screen. Something about that face, and the half-audible voice that issued from it, struck Chen as disturbingly familiar. Yes, he certainly ought to recognize that face; did it belong to some Templar officer he had seen on the transport, or near the docks right after landing? But in that case, it wouldn’t be a dragoon uniform that the man was wearing now. Yet the man on the screen was uniformed as a dragoon, certainly—the picture wasn’t that blurry—and wasn’t that a captain’s rank insignia on the collar? If dragoons used the same insignia as the security police . . . But somehow the appearance in dragoon uniform was jarring, it brought the face out of its expected context.

  It took Chen a moment more. But then he had it. That face belonged to Mr. Segovia. Hana’s friend, the man Chen had met just once or twice, a millio
n years ago, back in the university library on Salutai. There was probably some logical reason for Segovia’s presence here, some reason that he, Chen, was too shocked by events to grasp just now.

  But yes, it was certainly odd. How could it have happened that Mr. Segovia was here, and wearing . . . ?

  He was distracted by the problem, and ignored the sound of human feet approaching along a winding catwalk. Then someone spoke to him, in another familiar voice.

  “Hello, Chen.”

  He looked up to see Hana Calderon.

  Chapter 16

  “I’m sorry now that you came back here, Bea.”

  “At this moment,” Bea replied to her husband in controlled tones, “I am too.”

  It hurt Harivarman to hear his wife say that, and for the moment he had no answer to give her. It hurt more than he would have expected since for a long time he had thought that things were totally over between them.

  The two of them were sitting in simple, brightly colored chairs, on opposite sides of a small patio table. Leafy trellises overhead shaded them from much of the direct light of the Radiant, and blurred the bright distant curve of inner surface, so that the fragments of it that were visible might almost be taken for bits of a real sky. The Prince and his wife were in one of the “outdoor” patio rooms of a large and elaborate house, of the type that the old Fortress inhabitants liked to call a villa. It was located about half a kilometer from Sabel’s old laboratory. Someone had been living here quite recently, someone who had evidently abandoned the dwelling on short notice when the berserker attack hit—there were complete household furnishings, clothing in the several closets, food in the kitchen. There was even a jug of wine still on the table in front of Prince Harivarman.

  “So, why did we move here?” Bea asked him. Her voice was so bright and interested, a media interviewer’s or perhaps even a psychologist’s voice, that he wondered if she thought him mad. Bea was sitting with her feet tucked under her in a deep chair. She had answered Lescar’s summons wearing a coverall, a practical garment, as if she fully expected that visiting her husband again was going to involve some physical risk.