The Berserker Throne

by Fred Saberhagen

  Then Harivarman was the first to break radio silence. He spoke again, in words that were obviously not directed at Lescar beside him: “You are a little earlier than I feared you might be, Prime Minister. Waiting for your arrival was becoming something of a strain.”

  “Ah.” The voice that answered was well known in all the Eight Worlds and beyond, instantly recognizable. “Thank you. I naturally got here as fast as I could when the courier ship reached my little squadron. Fortunately we were on maneuvers in what turned out to be an ideal place to get the news. Everyone must be ready to respond instantly when there’s word of a berserker attack. Everyone, of course, but goodlife.” The figure in the doorway made a small mocking bow.

  “Or even goodlife, sometimes.”

  “Ah. Can it be then that you have grasped something of the truth?” The figure in the doorway of the temporary shelter shifted its position, standing now in such a way that its face became partially visible through the helmet faceplate. The prime minister’s physical trademarks—Lescar had seen him before, at a distance—were a wild shock of hair that for many decades had been just touched with distinguished gray, a nobly chiseled profile, a tall spare frame. He was naturally elegant, as the Prince was not.

  “I think I have by now grasped something of the truth,” the Prince replied. “Are you ready, then, for me to know it all?”

  The flyer was still drifting lightly in the corridor, with the two powerful machines that were its escort maintaining themselves at a little distance from it, one on each side.

  If Roquelaure was in the least perturbed by the arrival of his enemy with an escort of berserkers, he was doing a marvelous job of concealing the fact. “Yes, I should say that the time has now arrived for you to know the whole truth . . . I’ve just been looking over your diggings here, General. Fascinating. And I rather expected you’d be along. With metallic companions.”

  “Ah? And still you came unaccompanied to meet me?”

  “Yes.” The figure in the doorway still seemed perfectly at ease. “You see, a lot of people—most of the Imperial Guard included—might have a hard time dealing with certain aspects of the truth that I wanted to discuss with you.”

  “I can well believe that.”

  “So, I left my soldiers back with my two ships. Where we landed, a couple of kilometers from here. They have things to do there to keep them busy. And they admire my almost foolhardy courage in coming here without their protection. Actually what I really wanted was this little talk with you alone. Lescar is there with you, of course—how are you, Lescar?—but he doesn’t count.”

  The Prince said: “Speaking of little talks, I’ve just been having one with Captain Lergov.”

  “My dear man. I thought you said you were concerned with truth.”

  “I believe I heard some of it from him, this time. The Templars are going to hear it too.”

  The prospect of revelations by Lergov seemed to have no more effect on the prime minister than did the presence of berserkers. Roquelaure only shook his head inside his helmet. “Ah, truth. A chancy business, trying to deal with that.”

  * * *

  In another large airless chamber half a kilometer away, Chen Shizuoka was watching Colonel Phocion patch another communications connection into another utility box. The journey to this point from the interior had seemed a long one to Chen, though in fact it had taken only minutes.

  The self-propelled gun, here with them in near-weightlessness, was clinging to a wall nearby.

  Phocion had stopped frequently en route, at each stop using his old base commander’s key, gaining secret access to the various communications networks of the Fortress. He kept looking as they progressed for traces of berserkers or other people in areas nearby.

  This time his caution was rewarded.

  Beatrix moved closer, watching with the men as a picture appeared. The colonel had managed to get a remote video pickup working in an area ahead of them, where preliminary readings had indicated there was activity.

  “It’s Harry,” she breathed, as the picture steadied. “Harry, and . . . ahh.”

  * * *

  Harivarman ordered the controller to send its companion machine scouting, to check whether Roquelaure had really come here unguarded and alone.

  “Affirmative,” the controller replied, after the other machine had been gone for a couple of minutes, searching the nearest other rooms and corridors.

  The Prince said: “You appear to take your status as my captive quite calmly, Roquelaure. Are you so sure I won’t give the word to my machines and have you pulled to pieces?”

  “I’m not sure what word you will give them. Are you sure of the result?”

  “Yes, I think so. I’ve had some time to get used to it, watching berserkers operate at close range, having their power at my command. Have you ever tried to imagine, Roquelaure, what it would mean to a man to have the berserkers’ control code in his hands?”

  “Oh, I have tried to imagine that, yes. I too enjoy power, you know. Though perhaps my imagination is not as fertile as yours, Prince. Anyone would be able to make certain deductions about you, though. Anyone who saw you come here escorted by berserkers. And I suppose that you have been holding the surviving inhabitants of the Fortress hostage until you are somehow provided with a getaway ship.”

  “It would seem that I can now count a prime minister among my hostages.”

  “It might seem so to you. But in reality, it is not so at all.” The prime minister turned his head calmly to one side, looking directly at the controller. “Your berserkers are not going to harm me. Because, you see, I am not here at all. It is a mere phantom that discourses with you. The real, historical meeting between us is coming a little later, in an hour or so. I am going to catch you without your escort then and kill you, earning the cheers of billions of people by eliminating the despised arch-goodlife. Meanwhile my men will be defeating the berserkers and driving them off, saving the precious population.”

  “I see. I hadn’t realized all that . . . but did I understand the first part correctly? At the moment, you are not here?”

  “That is correct.”

  Prince Harivarman shook his head. “My eyes and instruments assure me that the image of a somewhat overly handsome assassin before me is not a creation of holography. So explain that claim to me, if you will.”

  “Tut. You could be sued for that, calling me an assassin. You seem to be projecting all your own little flaws upon me . . . I mean that my presence here, tolerated by the machines escorting you, is going to be invisible to history—because only I will survive to tell humanity about this talk that we are having. This moment of history is going to be exactly what I say it is. No more and no less.”

  “Oh indeed?” Harivarman sounded as confident as ever, but suddenly very curious. “And how do you plan to accomplish that? What bluff is this?”

  “No bluff at all, my dear Prince.” Roquelaure gestured offhandedly at the controller. “How long would you say our friend here, and its auxiliary machines, have been on the Fortress?”

  “I have seen evidence that they have been here for several centuries. They were even filmed with dust—”

  “No. Not at all. There you are wrong. Dust can be arranged. Several months is much more like it.”

  Harivarman smiled slightly. He raised his control device near the window at his side. “You have carried off some amazing bluffs in your career. But not this time. Can you see this? What would you say this is?”

  “Tell me. I want to hear you tell me.”

  “Very well. Suppose I tell you that I have here the control code for the berserkers?”

  “I would say that you are making a false claim—as you have often done. You are not only goodlife, and an assassin, but a fraud!”

  “I can demonstrate the fact.”

  “Oh indeed? Can you? I look forward to witnessing the attempt.”

  Harivarman thumbed his device. At the same time he spoke in a changed, commanding voice.
“Controller, seize that man. Do not kill him, but bring him here, closer to my vehicle, away from his own.”

  It was a direct order, if Lescar had ever heard one.

  The controller ignored it. The tall metal shape, still incongruously trailing cable-ends, was clinging to a wall approximately equidistant from Harivarman and the prime minister. And it did not move a centimeter.

  The Prince triggered his device again and again. “Seize him! I order you!”

  The controller turned another one of its lenses toward the Prince’s vehicle. But it did nothing else.

  Roquelaure had begun to laugh when the Prince’s first order was ignored. He was still laughing. It was a very confident and a very ugly sound.

  The Prince slowly lowered his hand, the radio device still in it. He sat there, his helmet shadowing his face from Lescar’s gaze. When his voice came into Lescar’s headphones again it sounded more numb, more utterly defeated, than Lescar had ever heard it sound before. “But . . . it worked. I found them . . . I opened the controller unit . . .”

  Lescar bent over his seat, hands raised to his own faceplate. But that did not shut out their enemy’s laughter, or their enemy’s voice. Those came through inexorably.

  When he could stop laughing, the prime minister said: “Do I need to explain to you what the real controlling code is? Even berserkers can be—well, no, unlike humans they cannot be corrupted. Unlike people, they remain forever true to their basic drive. But they are honestly, openly, ready to be bought.”

  “You’ve bought them, then . . . there’s only one kind of coin they’ll accept.”

  “Of course. They have an apt term for it themselves: life-units. For a rather large number of human life-units, scheduled for future delivery, I have actually concluded the bargain that the bad side of your own nature was finally able to wrestle your better nature into making. After I’m Emperor, they can have Torbas . . . it can be arranged. It’ll never be anything but a poor and unprofitable world anyway.”

  “There are a hundred million people living on Torbas.”

  “Pah. Closer to two hundred million. But there is no audience here, don’t bother posing. History is going to be blind to your words and actions from now on, General. Two hundred million life-units. Useful coins. Oh, it occurs to me. Are you recording my voice perhaps, my image? Will it disappoint you too cruelly if I tell you that it will not matter?”

  “I know,” the Prince said, slowly, after a long pause. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “No, I’m not recording. But will you tell me something? One thing more. For my own final—knowledge.”

  “Well, possibly. What would you like to know?”

  “Colonel Phocion. Did he—?”

  “Did he know that it was berserkers he was letting aboard his Fortress? Gods of all space, no. There must have been rather a lot of them—I came past their lander back there; it’s rather larger than I had expected. Well, guarding against human treachery of some kind, I suppose. The way the wicked world is, one can hardly blame them for that.”

  “But Phocion . . .”

  “Look, Harivarman. The man knew he was being corrupted, but he thought it was only some simple smuggling operation, accommodating certain simple civilian needs—all he had to do was create a blind spot or two in the outer defenses for a time—no trick at all for someone with his knowledge of the system.”

  “Why do you do it, Roquelaure? You already have wealth, power, everything—”

  “I do it because it pleases me to do it. And why should I not use the world and what’s in it to please myself? If the universe has any higher purpose than that, I’ve yet to observe it . . . and the Imperial Throne will be mine now, and that will please me, more than most people are capable of imagining. But you can imagine it. That’s why I wanted to tell you. The Imperial Throne, my friend. I will have it, I’ve made up my mind to that. I’ll take it with the berserkers’ help if that’s the only way that I can manage it.”

  The Prince’s lips moved. The words were hard to make out. He said: “Well. I had hopes . . .”

  “Of being the next choice for Emperor yourself. Mounting from the berserkers’ backs. Announcing the discovery of the control code”—a chuckle—“after of course some judicious use of berserker muscle to punish your local enemies.” Roquelaure had to pause, to laugh again. He was really enjoying this. “It must really have been quite a strain, for you, to turn goodlife . . . but no, Prince. No. The berserker throne is mine, not yours.”

  And a giant’s hand seemed to come slamming against the back of Lescar’s seat. The Prince, who could still act quickly enough to take him by surprise, had gunned his flyer into maximum acceleration. The corridor ahead came leaping at Lescar; the shelter with Roquelaure in its doorway, that had been to one side, had already been whisked from sight.

  But the try was too slow by far to avoid the controller’s weapons. Lescar, saved by his heavy armor, felt and saw the hurtling vehicle torn and blasted open around him. His armored body hurtled free. A huge bone of the Fortress, an exposed major structural element, came flying at him. The impact was a glancing one and Lescar came through it essentially unhurt.

  At first the Prince was a suited figure tumbling beside him. Then the Prince was grabbing his arm, helping him get his bearings, pulling him on. Somewhere. And once more there came the flare of heavy weaponry around them . . .

  * * *

  Beatrix, when she saw on the screen her husband’s vehicle shoot forward, tried to rush out from her position of relative safety, to do what she could to help him, to be with him at least. She heard the blast of the berserker’s shot echoing down the corridor just outside. The scene she was watching remotely could be no more, she thought, than half a kilometer away.

  She had almost reached the door when figures in heavy armor, Templar armor, sprang in from the corridor to hold her back. A tall man gripped her with both hands, then savagely made a gesture that would be understood by any veteran of space warfare, fiercely commanding her to radio silence.

  Then the astonishment of the Lady Beatrix was compounded. Looking into the faceplate of the man who held her back, she recognized the craggy features of the Superior General of the Order of the Templars.

  Chapter 20

  When the heavily armored figures of Harivarman and Lescar went scrambling away from the wreckage of their flyer, they were out of the direct line of sight of the controller, and it forbore to fire after them again.

  Nor did the controller attempt to pursue the man who had claimed to be able to control it, whose orders it had in fact been following for days. As far as Beatrix could tell, watching the small screen, the berserker was intent now on nothing but observing the prime minister.

  Prime Minister Roquelaure, launching himself out of the plastic workshop’s doorway with an expert push and drift, moved through the low gravity toward his own small fighter ship. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the controller following him slowly, and he said to it: “I see that you understand. It does not matter that he should get away for the moment. If he does not take his own life somehow now, I’ll soon take it for him.”

  The radio whisper of the berserker’s reply, relayed by pickups in the room where it was speaking, came thinly to the ears of the people watching in the chamber half a kilometer away. “You are right in that it does not matter. I will kill him soon.”

  The man who was alone now with the controller paused. It was taking him long unhurried seconds to drift the last few meters to his fighter. “No. No. I see that after all you do not understand. You can kill any number of life-units you wish to in the Fortress, as long as you save a few to testify to my heroic rescue of them—all as we discussed. But in the case of the badlife Harivarman, it will be better if you are not the one to kill him. I want to claim his death for myself; that will make me something of a hero. If later it appears that he was killed by a berserker, that could cast doubt on my story. It could even tend to make him a martyr in the eyes of many badlife units.
Do you know what a martyr is? We don’t want that.”

  * * *

  In the gloomy chamber five hundred meters away, Beatrix met the eyes of the SG; slowly, with a last warning gesture, he let her go. More gestures had already been exchanged between him and Beatrix’s companions. Working in almost complete silence, though for the most part in darkness, Phocion was tapping into the communications nexus again, this time in a more elaborate way, making multiple connections for some purpose that Beatrix could not immediately comprehend. People in Templar armor, with more electronic equipment in hand, were helping him.

  Other armored Templars were, with an agonizing effort for speed and silence at the same time, unlimbering Colonel Phocion’s heavy gun and turning it out into the adjoining corridor.

  * * *

  “We?” the controller asked.

  “You and I. I was speaking of our common interest.” The tiny figure of the prime minister on the small screen had now finally reached the open hatchway of his fighter. Roquelaure was pausing there, casually, seemingly nerveless, with one hand on the door before he got into the ship.

  The controller had come drifting—just as casually—after him, and was now no more than three or four meters away. The other berserker machine still had not returned; it had evidently found other business of some kind to occupy it.

  How many more berserkers were there, Beatrix wondered, still prowling in the interior of the Fortress, surrounding the beleaguered base? A few of them had been destroyed. There might be forty left. Even if the controller were fired upon, destroyed, it was very unlikely that they would all simply go dead. No. Berserkers did not work that way. . . .

  The tiny berserker on the screen was asking the prime minister: “How far do you consider that our common interest now extends?”

  “To a considerable distance . . . don’t tell me that you’re having second thoughts about our agreement. If you don’t go on with it now, all that you’ve done so far would make no sense from your point of view. So far you have helped me, but I have not helped you. You have derived no substantial benefit.”