Gregor turned the device off and pushed it away, meanwhile indulging in several of Radigast’s favorite phrases. Then he said: “I’m damned if I’m going to argue with this piece of hardware. Admiral, can you get me down there somehow? If I can meet the president face to face … is he actually sending these messages as we receive them?”
“You mean their crazy content is due to some monstrous technological screw-up?” Radigast for once looked uncertain. “Think that’s wise? Suppose he still refuses to see you?”
“I think it’s beyond wise or unwise, simply necessary. At least down there I’ll have a chance of finding out. This business with Belgola, must be settled somehow, one way or another.”
“From the content of his last messages, I’d say it’s been settled already.”
“No. Not until we know for certain whether he’s gone mad. It’s still conceivable that this is some kind of system error.” Gregor was shaking his head gloomily. “I hate to ask you to put any of your crew in special danger.”
The admiral had to laugh at that. It made an ugly little sound, that laugh. “Running a courier down to Timber? The way things are going, one set of motherless risks looks no more special than another. However you slice it, my people don’t have much in the way of life expectancy, let me do the worrying about them.” He stopped to think for a moment. “Are you taking the girl with you?”
Again Gregor had come close to forgetting about Luon. “Should I?”
“Are you asking me?”
“You’re right, it’s my decision. I suppose I’d better take her, yes. I’m sure she’ll want to go.” On giving the matter a moment’s thought, he realized that when he told Luon where he was going, he would probably have to tie her up or drug her to make her stay behind on the ship; and if she went with him, the admiral and the fleet would at least be relieved of one responsibility.
Luon’s eyes lit up and she came to life when she heard what sort of trip her grandfather was planning. “Are you going to the Citadel, Gramp? That’s where I have to go.”
He nodded. “I suppose it is the most logical place for me to start my search. And certainly for you to start yours.”
Meanwhile the admiral kept calling for more information on the ship captures and boarding in space. In every case (except perhaps one where the human ship exploded, from unknown causes, taking out the enemy with it), a small berserker craft used force-field grapples to attach itself to a small ship, and then proved itself able to overpower the humans and their vessel.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The small, unarmed starship hurtling toward the Twin Worlds system had been under way for only a few standard days, and by any measurement taken in normal space-time would still be more than twenty light-years from its destination. But it was, of course, traveling in flightspace, and those on board estimated their time of arrival at only a few hours in the future.
Fewer than a dozen human passengers, all but one of them Earth-descended, rode the ship. In the onboard compartments currently occupied by the ED, statglass viewports remained tuned to opacity against the eye-watering, nerve-grating irrelevance of flight-space outside.
In only one compartment were the ports cleared, not because its occupant enjoyed the view of what was passing, but because she was indifferent to it. The single Carmpan passenger, whose ancestors had never breathed the air of Earth, had senses that could bridge the unimaginable void of twenty light-years. She could experience intensely, though at a distance, the horror of space battle, the massacre on Prairie and the fighting on Timber, the magnification of every human emotion brought about by war.
The Carmpan had assumed for the purposes of this mission the name of Ninety-first Diplomat, and for the comfort of everyone concerned she had been assigned a small private cabin, in which she spent most of her time. Her cabin’s lighting, adjusted for her comfort, would have been somewhat unfriendly to Earth-descended eyes. The components of the atmosphere and the strength of artificial gravity had also been slightly tweaked.
Ninety-first Diplomat was in her tidy quarters, busy writing at a low table. Being a historian, as well as something of a diplomat, she was hard at work in the former capacity. Work was a means of distracting herself from the horror that she could sense ahead of her in space and time, the great atrocity hurtling toward her at many times the velocity of light.
Her sturdy Carmpan body, more rectangular than cylindrical, clad and decorated with various small harnesses and pouches, was resting easily in its normal stance, with the long dimension horizontal. The highest part of her anatomy, the curved ridge of her back, was no more than a meter from the deck.
The appendage by which Ninety-first Diplomat controlled her writing instrument was not really a hand, or at least could not have been recognized as such by any Earth-descended anatomist. A close observer, had there been one, would have marked long thoughtful moments when the writing instrument was being held by nothing physical at all.
The words that flowed from the instrument onto a kind of parchment were born in spurts, with pauses of silent, painful effort in between.
Standard years would pass before they were eventually translated into the most common Earth-descended tongue:
“The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar….
The Carmpan was dimly aware, around a bulge of time that did not entirely obscure her vision, of that future translator’s thoughts and problems. But under current circumstances such relatively small concerns were of but passing interest.
Vaguely, when she chose to focus her attention on them, the Carmpan was also aware of her ED shipmates. Most of them were currently gathered in another, notably larger, compartment of this peaceful starship, just a few meters distant beyond steel bulkheads and cushioned doors. They were just as comfortable in their environment as the Carmpan was in hers, being immersed in light and gravity best suited to their eyes and bones. Half a dozen Earth-descended humans, each representing a different branch of the colonial efforts of old Earth, were raising their voices, trying to outtalk each other in brisk debate.
Unhappy beings! the Carmpan lady thought. All of them were still blissfully unaware of the slaughter of their fellow Earth-descended humans, even now in progress at their destination. Still, all were fearful of finding trouble when they reached the system called Twin Worlds. To try to avoid that trouble was the purpose of this voyage. They would not be greatly surprised, though certainly horrified, if on arrival they discovered that their efforts were too little and too late, and war had broken out between Twin Worlds and Huvea.
Not one of them dreamed that the horror actually awaiting them could be worse than that.
In their hearts all of the Earth-descended truly believed that they had mentally prepared themselves for war; but in truth they were not nearly ready for what they were actually going to find.
The Carmpan sighed, it was a very Earth-voiced sound, and pushed her writing implement away. A moment later, the cabin door chimed softly, signaling that someone outside asked admittance.
The senior member of the ED diplomatic gathering had come down the short corridor, to tap gently on a certain door, the one bearing the Carmpan insignia, along with the small, clearly printed warning about a different environment inside.
The Lady Constance, the elder stateswoman from Earth itself, was courteously received. On entering the cabin, squinting in the odd light, Lady Constance averted her gaze uncomfortably from the cleared port, looking off into one corner of the room. She was privately ashamed of the secret revulsion she always felt when in the actual physical presence of her respected colleague. It was unpleasant to look at flightspace outside the port, and in her case tended to bring on spacesickness, but the lady found it even more unsettling to look directly at the Carmpan.
It was hard to locate the Carmpan face, and it was probably better to assume that it did not exist, or that the person to whom you spoke perpetually had her back turned, that being her own idea of politeness.
Formal and routine greetings were exchanged. In response to the gestures of Earth-descended hands, small tentacles waved in pairs above a roughly rectangular torso, supported on at least eight, the number sometimes varied, small legs. “Slow and squarish,” were the words most often used to describe the body. People from other branches of humanity generally had great difficulty in distinguishing Carmpan female from male.
Ninety-first Diplomat had already decided that there would be no point in giving her shipmates advance warning of the staggering shock that waited for them at Twin Worlds. She was having enough difficulty in trying to come to terms with that event herself.
More importantly, this disaster required her to make the necessary preparations for a Prophecy of Probability. Sheer decency, as her branch of galactic humanity saw that virtue, would soon require her to make one, whatever the personal cost might be.
“Are you joining us for dinner?” her visitor asked, in innocent ignorance of any greater events impending. One meal shared daily among the branches of Galactic humanity had come to be the custom on this journey. Joint gatherings, in which the light and air were modulated to compromise settings, were mildly uncomfortable for everyone involved. But no one had proposed they be abandoned.
“Thank you. I will be pleased to do so.” After a moment’s thought, the Carmpan added: “You will be interested to know that a Prophecy of Probability lies in the near future.”
The visitor was no longer squinting, as the ship’s interior environmental controls had already automatically adjusted the light at one end of the room for the comfort of her eyes.
“This is exciting news,” the woman from Earth cautiously observed.
“I supposed it would be.”
“Perhaps I should consider it disturbing news as well. May I ask why we are to be honored with a Prophecy?”
“May I decline to answer?”
“Of course, if that seems best to you.”
The visitor, who knew more than most other Earth-descended humans did about the Carmpan, was much impressed. But she would not pursue the matter, knowing it would almost certainly be futile to do so.
The truth was that Ninety-first Diplomat judged it distinctly possible that, should the captain of the peaceful starship hear such a warning and believe it, he was fully capable of abandoning his mission, turning his ship around, and heading for safety at one of the many neutral ports available. Ninety-first Diplomat would have been personally relieved to avoid danger by such means, but she could not permit it to happen. Rather she was compelled to go on.
“Until dinner, then,”
“Until dinner.” Ninety-first Diplomat had her special place reserved at table, her special food provided. For an hour or so, the difference in ship’s atmosphere and gravity would matter little.
When the door had closed behind her visitor, and the lighting and ventilation had readjusted themselves for her maximum comfort, she once more applied herself to the task of writing.
The subject of her writing was, thank all the gods, not with her in the ship.
“…it used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown games-men had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy’s territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.
“When it began to attack the Earth-descended humans, they called it a berserker.”
It was as if the word itself had served as some kind of occult key. The tendrils of Ninety-first Diplomat’s far-reaching, remote perception had entered the domain of a mind that was not organic. The jarring impact of an intelligence so permeated with death came upon the Carmpan like a seizure:
Dimly she was able to perceive what the quantum computer, optelectronic berserker brain was “thinking” as it pondered the worlds it had just discovered, and the intelligent life units that called themselves the Earth-descended.
At times in their long, long past, this machine and others of its kind had encountered other life units that were basically similar to these. Most of them had resisted destruction, some more capably than these, but in the end their resistance had made no difference, all the different variations had proven susceptible to being satisfactorily healed of the disease of life.
In recent hours the killing machine had thoroughly examined one or more captured robots, of the type constructed on the scale and in the likeness of the local life units, and had disassembled one into its component parts, down to the microscopic scale. But it had found nothing of great interest in the design or the materials.
But the presence of such a unit stirred interest in the berserker’s planning circuits. Endlessly, tirelessly, as they had uncounted times before, when a similar situation had arisen in other solar systems, these subsidiary modules raised the possibility of imitating the imitation.
The plan, well within the capabilities of the onboard workshops, would be using the captured robot as template and model to craft a berserker machine so closely resembling the native life units that they would have difficulty distinguishing it from one of their own kind.
But the suggestion was rejected by the central planning circuits, as it had been uncounted times during the machine’s earlier history. Deep in the berserker’s fundamental programming were commands, biases solidly built in, that prevented it from attempting the direct imitation of any kind of life. Even the voices that it generated to speak to the living enemy must be, by a branch of the same prohibition, clearly distinguishable from the natural models.
Why this prohibition should have been so firmly established in the time of the shadowy Builders was a question only briefly touched on by the central processor, touched on and almost instantly put aside. The dictates of programming at that level were never to be questioned. Things must be this way because they must.
Meanwhile, the physical task currently at hand, that of expunging the last traces of the life-infection from the world called Prairie, had settled into a phase of pure routine. An easy computation predicted that the work should be entirely accomplished within another standard day. The process no longer required any quick decisions, or computations that were other than routine. Central planning was free to devote its full capacity to other matters.
Thousands of years ago, the berserker had learned that intelligent planet-dwelling life units, when faced with serious threats from space, tended to burrow down into bedrock, creating deep shelters for themselves. On no planet had the berserker ever encountered any shelter that had proven deep enough, well fortified enough, to save its occupants.
Certainly the caves in which this system’s life units had tried to hide themselves were flawed and inadequate, as were their heavy defensive weapons. Such deficiencies in design spoke of a drastic lack of recent experience in war. The absence of previous damage on the planet confirmed the fact.
Well before its arrival in this solar system, over a period of time equal to several Earthly months, the berserker had been studying stray communication signals from the swarming billions of units that constituted this infection.
The inhabitants of this odd system of twin life-infected worlds had been slow to recognize the true nature of their attacker, and many of them had evidently not done so yet. Yet they had been as ready as they could be, to the best of their limited abilities, to repel some kind of an attack.
The existence of a single battle fleet in local space argued strongly that the life units dwelling on these two in-system planets had not been about to engage in war against each other. It was rarely possible to be absolutely certain in such matters, but the probability of such an intramural conflict here ha
d to be considered low.
One of the first things it had learned about this system, in its routine process of intercepting local messages and interrogating its first batch of local prisoners, was the fact that the dominant life units here were poised on the brink of war with life units dwelling in another solar system.
Ninety-first Diplomat was struggling to regain her mental and physical balance. The overwhelming ambiance of death, though still light-years away in space, had stunned her mind, so that her body rolled and slid away from her writing table and across the compact cabin’s deck.
Subtle sensors conveyed to those outside the cabin the fact that not all was well within. Summoned by a horrified Lady Constance, several more of their ED colleagues had entered the cabin. All were concerned, and some of them were on the point of dragging Ninety-first Diplomat to the onboard medirobot.
With the last lingering echoes of the contact still reverberating in her brain, she roused herself in time to keep them from doing that.
Thousands of standard years ago, at a time and in a calendar that could hardly be connected with any Earth-descended record keeping, in a part of the galaxy that could never be clearly seen from Earth, the berserker’s builders had taught it something of the science and art called history, as practiced by the intelligent forms of organic life.
Three of its current harvest of ten living prisoners had grown talkative in their fear, giving the impression of cooperating fully in their private interrogations. The three were being considered as possible volunteer goodlife, but the central processor would not make that decision for some time. Meanwhile the possibly useful three were still being confined with the other members of their group, and treated no differently.
What the berserker had heard from its prisoners, and deduced from their behavior, confirmed what it had already learned from messages intercepted in space: The life units of this system were poised on the very brink of war with those of another solar system that they called Huvean, it was even possible that hostilities had already begun.
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