Gregor spread his hands. “The government of Twin Worlds has no objection to that. But we also have no power to accomplish it.”
“Huvea is not powerless.” And the first spacer went on to propose landing a force of Huvean marines near the Citadel, to find the hostages and bring them out.
Gregor listened with reluctance. “I have no means of stopping you. I will place our communication system, what is left of it, at your disposal. But if you want my opinion, I advise against landing Huvean troops.”
“I am listening. Tell me more.”
“You might send a thousand elite infantry, I suppose; possibly even ten thousand, if the transports in your fleet are carrying that many. But in the current chaotic state of affairs down there, whatever force you send will probably be engulfed by a million or more of Timber’s citizens, many of whom are blaming you for the attack. They will be pleased to confront an enemy with whom they can at least come to grips, one built on a scale that is no more than human. There will be very little I can do about it, given the ruined state of our communications.”
Homasubi decided to delay any landing attempt until he could learn more.
Meanwhile the berserker had obviously become aware of the arrival of the Huvean fleet. Now it was sending one of its auxiliary machines, surprisingly, bearing some signal recognizable by humans as a flag of truce, to the vicinity of First Spacer Homasubi’s flagship (which it seemed to have no trouble in picking out, among several other vessels of the same approximate size and similar configuration), even before the first spacer could organize any marine expedition to the surface of Timber.
The thing came close enough to allow the people aboard the fleet to have a convenient radio conversation with it, but it slowed as it approached. It did not appear to be bristling with weapons.
“If it’s as alien as it seems, how would it know about truce symbols?”
“We have reason to believe it’s taken some of our people prisoners, First Spacer. Possibly as many as a hundred.”
“I see. And they are closely cooperating with its efforts?”
“I have said that they were taken prisoner.”
Suddenly the berserker device, using a strange squawking voice, hailed the Huvean flagship.
The Twin Worlds people were astonished. It had never communicated with them.
“Do we reply, sir?” the first spacer’s communications officer asked him.
“Yes, of course.”
After identifying himself, Homasubi demanded that the intruder do the same.
This time he got an immediate answer, as if there had never been any difficulty about communication.
The berserker still spoke the common tongue in a scratchy mixture of what sounded like recorded syllables. The words had an ugly sound, but their meaning was quite clear. The berserker was identifying itself as an ally of the Huvean state, and said it looked forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The sounds, the animal-like noises that Du Prel made in his pain, were starting to drive Lee crazy. He knew the man couldn’t help it, having had his artificial eye ripped out, but the noise was driving Lee crazy just the same.
How long had it been going on? Hours, days? All means of telling time, except by what went on in their own bodies, had been taken from them. A little longer, and Lee would be ready to go over and strangle Du Prel, just to shut him up.
One after another, several of the victim’s other shipmates had been going to him, not to choke him to death, not yet anyway, but to do what little they could in the way of offering support. Cusanus had held his head in her lap for a time, but presently he writhed away out of her grasp, and the only result was that she had some blood on her coverall.
Meanwhile the machines did nothing to help their victim, nothing to cause further injury. What they seemed to be doing was observing the man’s reactions and those of his fellow prisoners. They waited, silent as so many doorposts and almost as still. Lee assumed they were taking optelectronic notes of every detail of their prisoners’ behavior. Lee would bet that the machines were also taking note of how very little the life-units were able to accomplish in the way of giving help. If one of the victim’s companions snapped and tried to put the fellow out of his misery, they would note that too.
It seemed that Zochler was getting close. He turned to the nearest machine and shouted: “This man needs medical attention!”
No answer. The enemy robots only stood listening, waiting, as impassive as the prison’s walls.
Getting up to pace again, looking restlessly around, Lee wondered, not for the first time, why one wall of their prison had a row of holes pierced in it at approximately eye level.
There were times when it seemed to Lee they had already been locked up for years in this nightmare dungeon. But of course that was crazy. Even in his saner moments, he had to believe that it was many days.
He, like most of the men in the group, had been clean-shaven when disaster struck. But now he could feel that his beard had sprouted into a thick stubble, and he saw the same on other faces.
Even murder and captivity, even what was happening to Du Prel, were not the worst of it. Hanging over them all was the fear that disaster had fallen on the inhabited planets, that would be consistent with everything they had heard and seen, and they had not simply been inducted into some lunatic’s dream.
What might be taking place on Timber now? That thought must be in every mind, but it seemed that no one wanted to talk about it, here where the machine heard everything.
And what had happened to the fleet? Admiral Radigast must certainly have tried to stop the enemy from reaching Prairie. The cadets had been able to hear only the first fragmentary reports on the space battle, and those reports had not given any cause for optimism.
Ting Wu kept muttering that the Huveans must be behind all this, no one argued with him, but no one spoke up in agreement either. Building a machine like this seemed clearly beyond their capability, or that of any ED world.
At first Lee had thought that it would at least be possible to keep an accurate count of his interrogation sessions. But it seemed he had hardly started trying to keep track before he was unsure whether he had been through three of them or four. Everything blurred together.
He had also experienced some two or three (even there he could not be quite certain) intervals of exhausted sleep, flat on the hard floor of his assigned niche. At other times he had gone back there simply to sit, though no machine had ever ordered him to remain in that place.
Another classmate with whom Lee was growing steadily better acquainted was Cadet Carter Hemphill. The two of them had not hit it off very well during their years of study and training. But this was a different world. Gradually, as the others became convinced that Dirigo was not quite up to his job of cadet leader, they began to look to Hemphill, as if out of some instinct.
Hemphill was a pretty taciturn and sober fellow. His gray eyes could take on a cold, inhuman look, startling in his youthful face.
Du Prel had ceased making noises; but if the past was any guide, he would start up again before many minutes had passed.
Hemphill recommended that they never all gather in a group, that they do the planning that must be done in small groups. That they exchange information with each other frequently, but never in groups of more than three.
Hemphill, sitting down beside Lee, remarked that the machine seemed to be holding at least one additional prisoner, several cadets had caught glimpses, through the holes punctured in the opposite wall, of a staring human eye, and then of a shadowy figure moving about in the space beyond the wall.
“The wall behind me, the one that has what look like peepholes in it, well, it seems that’s what they really are. Three people, including me, have at different times caught a glimpse of someone looking through, toward us, from the other side.”
Lee couldn’t come up with any intelligent comment. He nodded.
Hemphill went
on. “All anyone’s been able to see of him, or her, is an eye. Looking out at us, then vanishing again.”
Lee nodded. That was weird, but he welcomed the information. Having something, anything, to think about was a help in dealing with Du Prel’s noises when they started up again. Lee got to his feet, as if for a casual stretch. After taking a random stroll around the room, he walked closer to the perforated wall, getting to a place where he could take a close look at the holes, small spots of darkness. At the moment he could detect no watcher on the other side. The wall was of some composite material. Its thinness, visible at the penetrations, suggested that it was only a crudely improvised partition, not a solid bulkhead. Perhaps the other walls were just as thin. It would be difficult to tell.
Taking his time, Lee completed a rough circle of their dungeon. Eventually he came back to Hemphill. Then he muttered: “If we could somehow shine a light in there” But that wasn’t going to be possible. All the spacesuit helmets, which carried lamps, had been locked away along with the friendly robot.
Feeling sleepy, Lee went back to the niche he was beginning to think of vaguely as his private space, and lay down on the deck. He and the others were presumably free to switch spaces, or make any other mutual accommodation that they liked, but as a rule when people wanted to sleep or use the plumbing, they tended to go back to the spots they had first chosen for themselves.
All the little cells or niches were practically identical. When you put your hand near an unbreakable-looking projection in one wall, cold water ran from it in a steady stream, to gurgle away through a hole in the deck below.
Food was also delivered to the little private niches, by a system of equal simplicity, always in the form of pink-and-green cakes popping out of individual wall chutes at intervals that seemed irregular. The taste of the stuff varied somewhat from one mouthful to the next. In general it was neither good nor bad, at least it was not bad enough to discourage Lee from eating it, when he decided that the new cramping sensation in his gut was probably due to hunger.
The large common room of their dungeon was an odd-shaped space, suggesting that it might originally have served some other purpose, or that it had been installed as an afterthought, just fit in where room happened to be available. All of the niches opened into a common area, high-ceilinged, maybe ten meters wide and three or four times that long. Lee estimated that the glaring lights might be six meters from the hard, metallic deck, and the overhead glare was enough to keep anyone from seeing what forms might occupy the darkness above the lights.
There was just about room enough inside each cell, or niche, for a fairly tall human to stretch out on the floor.
Meanwhile, Lee had the impression that the general dimness of the strange dungeon was beginning to seem a little brighter, he realized that the change was probably only because his eyes had been adapting to the darkness.
But then again, it was possible that the lights were actually being adjusted, for at the same time, the area of excessive brightness began to seem minimally more comfortable, as if those lights had actually dimmed a little.
Gradually, as the hours of their early imprisonment crept by, Lee had allowed himself to be convinced that he was unlikely to be killed in the next few seconds, or even in the next minute. It had come to seem quite possible, even likely, that the odds might favor his survival for another entire hour. Beyond that he could not allow himself to hope, and tried not to think.
Lee talked with his fellow prisoners, one or two at a time, about what the enemy, this unprecedented and unknown enemy, had done to them. They offered each other vague wild guesses on what they thought it was doing, and speculated what it might do next.
They could fairly solidly confirm each other’s impressions of what they had been able to see through the cleared ports of their crippled launch. All of them, as they approached it, had caught glimpses of this vast object into which they had been dragged. The mode of its arrival in-system showed that it was capable of interstellar travel. But so far, none of these space-trained captives had sensed up any of the subtle signs in their environment indicating that such a voyage had begun. The cadets kept trying to reassure each other that they were still in the Twin Worlds system.
There were more shadowy sightings, glimpses of what appeared to be a human eye behind one hole or another in the broad partition. Lee finally caught a glimpse of the eye himself. Next time he found himself sitting beside Hemphill, he murmured: “I doubt that it’s a Huvean.”
“Why?”
Lee sighed. It seemed they were giving up on trying to keep their conversations terse and secret. And why not? “Or, if it is, he or she is only another prisoner like ourselves.”
Hemphill seemed almost to be enjoying this. “You don’t believe our mystery person back there could be the one who’s running this whole show? Actually I don’t either, but I’d like to hear your reasons.”
“Look, if I were running this whole show, I’d want somewhat posher quarters for myself. Instead of living in darkness, depending on a few holes in a partition to give me light, I’d want some electricity.”
Someone else put in: “It would offer a more efficient way to spy on your prisoners.”
“Right. For that purpose, I’d want an elaborate audio-video system. That shouldn’t be too hard to arrange, amid all these cubic kilometers of elaborate machinery, also, I’d spend a little money to give my robots something closer to human voices.”
“Whoever, whatever, is actually in charge, doesn’t seem to agree with your priorities.”
One or two of the bolder cadets tried calling through the partition, to the nameless one who lurked beyond. But only silence answered.
It was hard for people to establish a routine, when the only demands made on them seemed to come at random intervals. It was the same way with their supply of food, and they had been deprived of any artificial way of telling time.
The volume of space devoted to the care and feeding of prisoners, or at least that part of the space actually visible to the captives themselves, was the size of a large house, but still only an insignificant part of the thousands of cubic kilometers making up the great machine’s enormous bulk.
From the brief look they had been able to get at their monstrous captor as they were dragged toward it in the launch, the cadets had got a visual impression of huge size. But without any means of accurately judging the scale, their individual opinions varied widely.
“I’d say it’s as big as a dreadnought.”
“Nowhere near that size.”
“However big it is, it’s big enough.”
The other captives continued their pointless-seeming argument about the size of the thing.
“I tell you, it’s something like fifty motherless kilometers long, five times the length of a battleship. And it’s not skinny.”
Those who had allowed themselves to be convinced were marveling. “It must have field generators, power supplies, as big as those Prairie and Timber have in their ground defenses.”
In the semidarkness obtaining throughout most of the dungeon, it was impossible to see all twenty of the niches from any one position. The look of the place, the zigzag construction of some of its walls, suggested that somewhere around the next corner it might offer a place to hide but of course it never did.
When two or more prisoners began to talk together on any subject, they tended to instinctively keep their voices low, although fully aware that this was doubtless wasted effort. If a machine like this one wanted to listen to anything happening inside it, it doubtless would. There was no sign that anyone or anything was listening, but naturally you had to assume that that was so.
One of the prisoners was saying: “Of course, there could be another dungeon, maybe bigger than this one, somewhere aboard this thing.”
And another put in: “Or there could be fifty more; it’s huge enough.”
“And there could also be a merry-go-round, and a pool table and snack bar; what’s the use of speculati
ng?”
When it came Hemphill’s turn to be taken away for interrogation, he was gone longer than the average, or maybe it only seemed longer, to Lee and some of the others. When he got back, he reported having been questioned repetitiously, and at considerable length about his early life and background, something that most prisoners had not experienced.
Then of course the interrogator had gone on to the usual technical matters. “What will you tell me about your fleet?” it squeaked and quavered at him.
“I will tell you whatever you force me to tell you. Nothing of my own free will.”
“Lies will be punished.”
“Will you recognize the truth when you hear it?”
“I will.”
“Then you must already know the truth. You will not need to hear it from me.”
When finally a machine scooped up the slowly dying Du Prel in its arms and carried him away, still moaning and half delirious, no one could go with him, Cusanus tried, putting her hand on Du Prel’s arm. But the robot just kept walking, as if she were not there, until her arm was knocked free by the edge of doorway as it stalked through with its burden. In another moment, Du Prel was gone, out of sight and out of hearing.
Lee breathed a silent prayer of thanks, and a plea that the noise was never coming back.
Lee had not voiced any estimates or guesses regarding the size of the thing that held them prisoner. But in his intervals of sleep there came strange dreams in which darkness and echoes, unfamiliarity and the queasiness of shaky gravity, made it seem that their prison might be infinite.
He had a dream in which he had to watch it swallowing up the Galaxy.
These visions alternated, in the infrequent intervals when he could sleep, with images of scenery innocent and green, not nightmarish at all.
The world of the executioner was notably different. On awakening in his new environment, he had been given a private tour, while still being kept in isolation, except for the visual contact afforded by the peepholes.
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