The man’s voice went sliding, babbling, into incoherence. He meant to say: “Damn you, robot, you cannot refuse! You are now assigned to me. Grab hold!”
Whether those were his actual words or not, whether the robot could understand him, it moved, but only to drop the hose and slide on past Huang Gun. Then it turned to face the man.
Random had assumed a solid stance, blocking the man’s forward path completely, each hand gripping one of the ancient railings used by breathing engineers. “Sir, I must refuse to obey your order, for reasons”
“Then get out of my way!” The executioner would not be stopped. Death had commanded, and he was going to drag the massive firehose forward, even if he had to do it by himself. Could he do it? He would have to. He told himself that he could feel the strength of a maniac swelling in his muscles.
But Random did not move.
The master’s voice was loud in the executioner’s helmet, shouting a string of commands at both man and rebellious robot, but there was nothing, nothing at all, that the master could do right here and now to enforce its orders.
Meanwhile the thing called Random talked on calmly, in its damned implacable badlife voice. Its tones were still full of pleasant modulations, making them hearable beneath the shouting. “No sir. The intensity of radiation increases rapidly in the direction you indicate. Ten meters from where we stand, I compute that an exposure of thirty seconds would certainly be fatal. For you to proceed any farther would be suicidal. Therefore I cannot permit”
“You do not understand, motherless, brainless robot!” Huang Gun heard himself erupting in a volley of gutter language, words he had not realized he still remembered. He had never had this kind of trouble with a robot before. Of course he had never before attempted to use one in such serious business.
His master had fallen silent, trusting him to plead the case of Death.
In desperation he tried to take thought, to come up with a convincing story. He forced himself to speak distinctly; but still the words poured out in a wild babble. “If, if the central processor aboard this vessel is irretrievably ruined … then many … many human lives will be lost. Yes, many! Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. People are depending on this ship to”
Random cut in rudely, but still as calm as if discussing the prospects for tomorrow’s weather. “What you say, sir, is manifestly untrue, contradicted by the observed facts.” The robotic voice was perfectly obstinate, maddeningly cheerful. “Sir, I compute that you are in need of medical attention, and possibly subject to criminal investigation. In the circumstances I must detain you, and respectfully insist that you accompany me in search of help.”
“No! Nooo!”
Radio noise generated by the master welled up in their fragment of the intercom, drowning out both their voices. The executioner dropped the nozzle of the heavy hose and snatched the gun from his belt. He aimed, but for one crucial second was kept from firing, by the fact that without this robot’s help he might never be able to do the job.
The grip that closed on his wrist an instant later was not hard enough to bruise his skin, but far too strong for him to break. It seemed to know where every nerve and tendon lay. In a few seconds Huang Gun no longer held the pistol.
He screamed. His agony seemed all the greater because his body felt no pain. Mere human flesh and bone, weak and subject to decay and failure, might conceivably have lugged a firehose, but could hardly fight a robot. That was an observed fact. The gun had disappeared into Random’s carrying pouch, and both the executioner’s wrists were being held, patiently maneuvered behind his back, clamped together in the untiring grasp of one of Random’s hands.
Random began to drag him implacably away from the master’s dying heart, back in the direction of the stars. The return journey would be a slow trek, no ride provided this time. They were going toward the places where decadent and evil life held rule.
When Huang Gun continued struggling, violently kicking, wrenching his body from side to side, almost throwing his captor off balance, the metal fingers of Random’s free hand came forcing their way into his suit’s built-in backpack. Moments later, Huang Gun’s oxygen was being cut off only partially, just enough to reduce his movement to a feeble parody of struggle. His rescuer bore him away, choking and writhing with the pangs of rebirth into continued life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Grabbing a convenient flange of metal with one hand, Hemphill brought his drifting body to a halt, meanwhile holding up his free arm as a signal. Behind him, five spacesuited people strung out in single file caught hold of whatever projections of enemy hardware they could reach, stopping their forward motion. The six of them were near finishing their great climb, even in weightlessness it had certainly seemed like a climb, emerging from a vast interior darkness, into the faint wash of starlight that found its way in through the broad, jagged hole in the enemy’s outer hull. Still the fugitives were essentially in shadow, with the Twin Worlds’ sun on the far side of the gigantic vessel.
For the past twenty minutes or so, the fugitives had been climbing lightly, precariously, toward this providential escape hatch, working their way up and out, into the ghostly radiance of a hundred billion Galactic suns. For the last part of the ascent, with plenty of light and sufficient handholds, they had been moving with dreamlike ease up one jagged lip of the enormous hole. Now they found themselves some fifty meters above the flat plain of the enemy’s flank, on a sharp, jagged pinnacle that was part of the raw edge of the gaping wound.
At several points in their flight so far, the fugitives had felt the monster start majestically to move away from them, the beginning of a slow and steady acceleration, as of some pre-programmed course correction, pervading the whole huge frame. Fortunately the g-force, so far, had been no stronger than Timber’s or Prairie’s normal surface gravity, and the six people trying to crawl out of the enemy’s belly had been able to deal with it. When one direction suddenly became down, it gave them the sensation of climbing a narrow trail along the rim of a mechanical canyon tens of kilometers deep. The canyon’s innermost recesses were swallowed in darkness, like the pit of hell.
Then something in the drive or astrogation system had evidently called for a correction, and a change in the direction of acceleration briefly established “down” in the direction the people had been moving. For a long few moments they had to cling fiercely to whatever tiny handholds they could find, like flies traversing some titanic ceiling, while below them the possibility of a long fall stretched out to infinity.
Hemphill had called a halt to give himself and the others a chance to look around. From the vantage point they had now reached, at the very rim of the gaping hole, he had a broad view of the enemy’s outer surface, with perhaps a hundred square kilometers of it visible. It made a ghostly, unreal landscape under starlight, vast expanses of smooth metal studded with projections and divided by dark canyons. Here and there long ridges reared like ancient castle walls.
Having scrambled and groped through kilometers of darkness to get to where they were, the six had already begun to get a feel, an inner picture of their enemy’s true, enormous size. They had gained an appreciation of this thing that had incidentally captured them, while in the process of fighting off an attacking fleet and killing an entire planet, the very world that half of them called home.
A vast expanse of sky had come into view, and Hemphill and his companions took an additional few moments to study it, assuring themselves of their current position within the solar system. The familiar constellations testified that they had not been carried halfway across the Galaxy during their long term as helpless prisoners.
Other sights, less reassuring, were also visible. The long axis of the enemy’s massive body pointed in the general direction of a bright dot of light, one that could hardly be anything but a fairly nearby planet, and no other planet but Timber, even if the color did not seem precisely right.
There was of course no use trying to see or speculate where the Twi
n Worlds battle fleet might be at the moment. Even the biggest ships, unless actually radiating brightness, would be impossible to spot, without the help of instruments, at any distance beyond a few kilometers.
Hemphill could see, at a considerable angular distance from Timber, faintly radiant clouds, encompassing a sizable volume of space, that impressed him as looking the way the residue of some serious battle ought to look. Depending on their distance within the system, the clouds could easily be millions of kilometers long. They were not conspicuous against the starry background, but to space-trained eyes looking for something out of the ordinary, they stood out unmistakably.
Lee, clinging to a jagged spine of displaced metal close beside him, was looking in the same direction. “What is that?”
“Probably just what it looks like. Particles and gas. It means there’s been more fighting while we were locked away.”
After a few moments of disorientation, Hemphill got his bearings and took a more serious look at the planet Prairie, on which he had been born.
Another suited figure, just getting its bearings, raised a pointing arm. “There’s Timber.” The inner world of the pair, at least, was unmistakable, and at no great distance on the scale of solar systems.
“Yes, we’ve established that. Then that’s Prairie over there, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. Doesn’t look right.”
“Then what is it?”
People tried to make sure of their position. The familiar stars of their home system’s sky were clear enough, but even so, there was a general sense of disorientation.
“You’re right, that’s got to be Prairie. But you’re right too, it shouldn’t look that way.”
People were squinting, tuning faceplates to try to filter out the dull, hazy glare of the Galactic background as they gazed at Timber. “They must have their full planet shields up. That would be natural.”
“No.” Hemphill was whispering. He had let go of, forgotten, whatever he had been carrying. The object just went drifting away, so someone else had to grab it. “No, that’s not just the shields. We’ve seen Timber with the shields up before, and it didn’t look like that.”
“Then what?”
“Something else has happened to Prairie. And I think that Timber’s shields are gone.”
For a moment, with no means of getting anywhere in sight, and in their exhausted state, vague hints of great additional disaster seemed to carry more than their ordinary force.
Hemphill closed his eyes for a long moment. He was not going to be beaten. For some time now, not being beaten had been the foundation of his life.
He opened his eyes, and looked at what was near at hand, in the territory where he might be able to do something that made a difference. “All right, so something else has happened on the planets. Maybe it’s dust in the atmosphere. None of that changes our problem, which is, how do we get off this hulk? How can we attract the attention of one of our own ships? Our people have to be out there somewhere.”
The first spacer was silently affirming to himself his conviction that the berserker was not yet dead. Though it had finally been outfought, pitted against a collective stubbornness the equal of its own, battered by waves of attackers almost into immobility, the death machine was still deadly dangerous.
The berserker was moving away from a combined fleet of heavier warships, but its object was not a retreat out of the system. If the berserker, its enormous mass closing on Timber with a velocity of kilometers per second, could strike the planet squarely, then tidal waves, ground quakes, and the blotting out of sunlight might kill billions more.
Only the remaining Twin Worlds scoutships could catch it now and try to stop it.
The next period of acceleration started gradually, uncertainly, a function of drive units and control systems no longer able to operate with full precision. The movements caused were only tentative, deprived of all central control, like reflexes in a dying body.
But the system still remembered where its last target lay, and did its best to guide the hurtling mass in that direction.
When new acceleration caused the tail of the monster vessel to acquire the direction down, the six human beings on its surface began a scramble to find shelter.
In a moment all six were clawing their way back into the enormous cave from which they had just escaped. Only a couple of minutes ago, while still just within the thickness of the ruptured outer armor, they had crawled past a long, thick tube that looked identical to a large housing they had examined earlier, a unit that seemed to offer the chance of artificial gravity inside, possibly a vein or artery in the enemy’s materials-handling transport system. The great machine must have many components that needed protection against the stress of powerful acceleration.
The outer surface of the tube, thank all the gods, was not heavily protected. What ancient builder could have imagined that armor would be needed here? A few moments’ frantic work with hand tools ripped a hole in the side of it, a gap big enough for a human to climb through.
Each fugitive on moving inside the tube entered a domain where artificial gravity neutralized all outside forces, restoring the blessed sense of weightlessness. Outside the tunnel’s wall, the g-force was steadily increasing, and the last cadet had to be hauled in by three classmates against a pull that was rapidly becoming more than standard normal.
Drifting inside the broad tube, again with no sense of up or down, Hemphill allowed himself a few deep breaths, despite the fact that his virtual power gauge was beginning occasionally to flicker red.
He remembered to keep his voice calm. “We may be all right for a while.”
Lee sent a brief flicker of his helmet lamp down the long tunnel, in the direction that went curving deep into the enemy’s body. Nothing was moving down there, nothing especially horrible appeared. “Yeah. As long as no cargo comes flying through this thing to wipe us out.”
The interior of the long, smooth tube was a couple of meters in diameter; one of the cadets speculated that large missiles might be fed through it from some interior factory or magazine to a battery of launchers just inside the outer hull. Fortunately, there was no traffic of weapons currently in progress; maybe the launchers had been destroyed, or the connected magazine had been emptied.
“Maybe it’s used up all its assets,” Zochler offered hopefully.
“We can hope,” Feretti grunted.
Safe for the moment in their shelter, the fugitives’ next need was for a means of knowing when the acceleration had cut off again, and they could resume their search for something to give them long-term hope. The entrance they had cut in the tube’s side provided a window for observation, but acceleration in itself was invisible. They needed to devise some means of testing.
Down on the surface of the planet Timber, the half dozen enemy landers that survived were all seriously damaged, worn down to a fraction of their original strength by waves of Twin Worlds fighting machines. In the course of their raid so far they had killed many thousands of units of intelligent badlife. Following a long-established protocol, the most powerful computer in the group had assumed the role of local battle director. Only a hundred meters of ruin and wreckage, and a semicircle of badlife armored vehicles, separated them from the Citadel’s outer wall.
From every direction came a steady overland flow of reinforcements for the human side, in the form of machinery and humans, some of them summoned from the far side of the planet.
The orders transmitted to the landers from their master in deep space had been changed; their mission had altered from reconnaissance, probing attacks, to maximum destruction.
It was the last order that the central processor ever gave.
The central processor had transmitted its prediction of its own impending destruction to all of its auxiliary machines with which it could still make contact. It would be the programmed duty of each unit, operating independently, to fight and kill whatever life they were able to reach, with the usual priority assig
ned to the intelligent, resisting badlife. Whether the onrushing mass of the berserker in the sky was going to hit the planet or not was still to be determined.
At four million kilometers an hour, the berserker was closing steadily on its remaining major target, the planet advancing at a much slower pace toward the calculated place and moment of impact, which lay only a few hours in the future.
Its refueling process had been interrupted, and the berserker had not been able to take on as much new hydrogen as it had planned. But the onboard reserves of energy, in the form of fuel and otherwise, would be enough to see this fight to a conclusion, one way or another.
A hell of blue flame and disorganization was eating its way into and through the central processor. Among the last concepts it managed to retain was: The species of badlife that infests this system, whatever may have been its recent history, does not, after all, seem entirely ignorant of war. It seems well suited to carry out a stubborn resistance.
Besides, it was necessary to maintain a steady push of acceleration to counter the force of the small ships that were trying to throw the berserker off course.
The six cadets had once again survived. By pushing small objects (mostly scraps of enemy-provided food, dug out of inner coverall pockets) carefully out through the window of their shelter, and noting whether the fragments flew away or drifted near, the cadets were able to tell when the acceleration had ceased. Only a few minutes had passed since they took shelter. The inexorable depletion of their suits’ power had progressed more slowly while they remained almost inert, but it still progressed.
The latest fragments of imitation food were drifting tentatively just outside the window. Hemphill drew one more deep breath. “Come on, people. We’ve got to move again.”
Several Twin Worlds scoutships, crashed or landed on the enormous hull, were visible. Estimating distance was difficult in this environment, but Hemphill thought the nearest was between one and two kilometers away.
“Boss, if we can get ourselves to one of those…” Zochler sounded hopeful.
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