Hemphill was nodding. “We might be able to do ourselves some good.” It was conceivable that though the ship was wrecked, its artificial gravity might still be on, and power functioning. Air would be abundantly available, and water and food, when breathing had ceased to be an immediate concern.
“It might even have a lifeboat.” If they could cram their six bodies into a boat built for a scout’s normal crew of three, that would offer a possibility of their all getting clean away. Of course, if there should not be room enough … but they would ford that stream when they reached it.
Crossing the great plain, it was necessary to avoid long stretches where sheer, featureless flat metal offered no purchase, nothing to grip or kick against for guidance or propulsion. The six people made the best speed they could, while remaining more or less together. If a strong jolt of acceleration should hit them suddenly, it would probably wipe them out against some nearby obstacle, or, at best, wrench the hull away from them and leave them drifting in interplanetary space.
As they progressed, a few more shot-up Twin Worlds scout-ships became visible, their wrecked bodies jammed into angles and crevices across the enemy’s monstrous hull.
It struck Lee as amazing that every one of the party had managed to regain the berserker’s outer surface. Here they clung on by one means or another against occasional jolts of mild acceleration. Searching the sky for help and meaning, Lee and Hemphill and their companions could see the familiar glow of Timber, not really more than a pinpoint yet, but still too big to be anything not belonging to the Twin Worlds system. Its natural color was still distorted by the drifting reek of battle clouds, and the persistence of defensive forcefields.
The six made the best speed that they could manage, following first a low ridge and then an irregular chain of impact craters across the pockmarked plain. The nearest downed scout-ship sat on the smooth metal surface at an odd angle, but did not appear to be tremendously damaged.
If they could get in, and systems were functioning, there was every reason to hope for protection against g-force, there was very likely to be water, food, and, above all, air, along with a functional system to recharge their suits.
But appearances had been deceiving. The closer they came to their chosen wreck, the worse it looked, especially when they were able to view it from a slightly different angle.
The party straggled to a halt. No one had any comment. “Which way do we go, chief?”
It wasn’t a hard choice, and Hemphill pointed toward the nearest of the other downed scouts that were in sight. Now only a few minutes of life remained in any of their suits, a few minutes that might easily be canceled any second, if their captor should hit them with another hard jolt of acceleration.
As they approached their second choice, they could see what was holding this little ship in placethe heat and force of impact had, at a couple of places, welded the lower surface of the scout-ship’s hull to that of their great antagonist.
Unfortunately, the hatch ordinarily used by the crew was on the side of the ship partially held against the stranger’s hull, with no room for a human body to squeeze in between, and probably no way to open the hatch if it could be reached.
Moving around the compact vessel with some difficulty, it was hard to find anything to hold on toto try the cargo hatch, they discovered that the hatch was entirely gone, along with a good part of the surrounding hull. A hole had been ripped in the small ship’s side, offering ample room for entrance into the cargo bay.
As the first cadet went through the airlock, a cry of joy went up, blessed air! One and two at a time, they entered.
The control room and most of the controls were intact, though the drive was ruined.
The young woman, Cusanus, gave thanks to all the gods, when, after hurling herself into the pilot’s chair, she discovered that though the artificial gravity had been turned off, it was still operational. In another moment, the scoutship’s deck had become a horizontal reference and people were standing on it, while the plain of surface visible through the cleared ports had taken on the aspect of a sloping mountainside. When the great crush came again, they might survive.
A plentiful supply of water remained in the onboard tanks. The automated galley had been damaged beyond repair, but preserved rations, water, and air, were all to be had in abundance.
People gratefully opened their helmets, gulping in plentiful recycled air. The next order of business for most of the cadets was to begin recharging their suits from handy outlets, against the possibility that some new problem would force them out again onto the airless surface.
The only indication of what might have happened to the ship’s crew was the fact that the lifeboat was missing.
The holostages remained dark, but some of the communication gear was working. Lee got to work at once, trying to contact other ships.
Looking out across the square kilometers of their enemy’s scarred flank, they saw by the apparent motion of the stars along the horizon evidence of some relatively gentle force that was now pushing the berserker sideways.
This was not the powerful push of the berserker’s own main drive, but the nudging of several scoutships that had managed to get right up against its hull. The acceleration produced in the huge mass by this means was comparatively weak, variable, and intermittent, but it was definitely there. The enemy tried to correct against this force.
One cadet, recognizing the cause of the perturbation, yelled: “Our people are still fighting!”
“But with scoutships?” Kang Shin wondered.
“You fight with what you’ve got.” Hemphill told him. “If you count the defensive patrols, we’ve got more scouts by far than any other type of vessel. Using the scouts makes sense when you think about it.”
“I’m thinking. But it would seem to mean the admiral’s flat-out desperate.”
“Up against this tough bastard, I don’t doubt that he is.”
“And if you were driving your ship on a ramming mission, you’d look for a vulnerable spot to hit, rather than just slamming into this outer hull, judging from what we’ve seen, it’s just a sheer slab of armor.”
In fact, it seemed obvious that most of the rammers would be trying to hit the same place, or one of a small number of similar places, huge wounds where the berserker’s outer layers of armor had already been blasted and torn and burned away.
Even as the cadets watched, another scout came ramming in, sending jolts of new vibration through their great opponent’s battered frame. On approach the little ship was very difficult to see, against the background of the Galactic night. Closing with the enemy at bullet-speed and faster, perhaps taking evasive action, its live crew, if any, there would be no more than one volunteer pilot, would have gone scrambling for the lifeboat with only seconds to go before impact, relying on the autopilots to eject the boat on some survivable trajectory in the fraction of a second just before impact.
The autopilots had not been designed to carry out such an extremely specialized task, and Lee could imagine that programming them for a mission like this would be far from a sure thing.
They would try to resist, reject, even engage in self-destruction, unless the command was properly repeated and reinforced. Some of them might crash their lifeboats on ejection, while others missed the target altogether.
The cadet who had been posted as lookout in one of the cleared ports of the wrecked scout raised a cry.
He had caught sight of someone or something moving across the scarred plain of the enemy’s surface, following their own path from the direction of the great damage.
Feretti had taken the weapon’s officer’s chair, and was making an effort to get some of the scout’s surviving armament to focus on the movement. It was a tough job, looking out at the real world through cleared ports, without a holostage to bring in trustworthy, carefully detailed images.
Then Lee, who was standing lookout, let out a yelp of joy. “Don’t shoot! It’s Random, and he’s dragging someone wi
th him. He must be trying to save Dirigo!”
Making radio contact with the robot was not difficult. Random, slowed down by the necessity of dragging along a live captive, while not doing the unwilling client any substantial harm, made slow but steady progress toward the wrecked scoutship that had become a sanctuary, and followed directions to enter through the cargo bay.
The cadets were startled by their first close look at the helpless human the robot had in tow. One of them demanded: “Who’s this? Where’s Dirigo?”
Random outlined the facts, describing the scene in the theater and the other that followed shortly, deep in the enemy’s guts and near the central processor. His optelectronic memory was vivid and precise, and could be played back later on a holostage. Though Random had not witnessed the shooting, he could confirm that Dirigo was dead, and his prisoner a suspect.
The prisoner himself only glowered at his fellow humans, and was disinclined to speak. Based on Random’s calmly factual description of this man’s behavior, they agreed it would be unwise to set him free in their current circumstances.
The robot also gave its informed opinion that the enemy’s central processor was dead.
A scoutship had no compartment that could be readily adapted to serve as a brig, and the six cadets, twice the usual complement of crew, were crowded enough without setting aside one of the few rooms as a prison.
Hemphill decided to use the tiny cargo hold to confine their captive. Huang Gun, fastened into a suit newly recharged with electrical power, its radio selectively disabled, was held pinned at the bottom of the cargo bay, in a forcefield normally used to secure cargo. He was unable to move a limb, but could turn his head inside his helmet to draw water and liquid food from the suit’s small reservoirs. He was able to talk with the people he’d been trying to kill, but he had very little to say.
Huang Gun was able to see out of his place of confinement, looking up through his helmet’s faceplate, and through the great gash that had been ripped in the side of the cargo bay in the crash.
The musing executioner could not see Timber from where he lay. But a tormenting vision formed all too clearly in his mind: how, on that great ball of rock and soil and gas, badlife by the billions still swarmed and bred. He was morally certain that they were still being born, even on the very threshold of annihilation. They were still fighting, with their fierce determination and their inferior weapons, against what remained of the master’s independent landing parties.
But he still had faith in the master. The master would find a way to reach the executioner, his faithful servant, and kill him, and kill them all.
Lee and Hemphill came to the cargo bay and tried to talk to him, but the prisoner resisted interrogation, and they had the robot’s dependable word that this man had attempted suicide, in an effort to aid the enemy.
He refused even to identify himself, except to say: “Goodlife.”
Hemphill frowned at him. “You’re what?”
Huang Gun would not repeat it.
“Goodlife. All right. What in all the hells does that mean?”
Random, who had joined the men, verified the syllables, but offered no interpretation.
Hemphill gave the prisoner a hard look. “Goodlife, hey? Actually you don’t look good at all. Well, old man, you may be eager to die, but that’s just tough, it isn’t going to happen. Somehow we’re going to get you off this hulk alive, and eventually down to Timber. People down there are going to want to spend a long time talking to you.”
And Lee added: “If you think your life’s a burden now, just wait till we get you home.”
Most of the six were looking out through the scout’s cleared ports, while the monster that they rode expended its last fuel in a final kamikaze charge. Observing from their safe nest of generated gravity, they could see bits of metal, fragments of some other scout-ship, or of the enemy, whisked away, or wedged into a crevice and slowly deformed by the mounting g-force.
Then acceleration abruptly ceased. No human knew it yet, but the last elements of the berserker’s drive had failed.
Minutes later, the cadets succeeded in making radio contact with a functioning scout, at a range of only a few thousand kilometers.
An answer to their plea came quickly, half smothered in a torrent of noise. “Say again, where are you?” Captain Ella Berlu and her crew were nearly exhausted, after days of practically continuous duty, but they were up for one more effort.
“We’re six cadets, seven people in all, holed up in a crashed scout, on the hull of this damned thing that captured us when it caught our launch. It’s almost dead!”
There was a pause. “You’re right on the berserker’s hull?”
“On the what? Say again?”
“The berserker.” There was a pause. “Everyone’s calling it that.”
Ella and her crew had only a hazy idea of who they were supposed to be rescuing. But such details hardly mattered. The people somehow stranded on the monster were human, and the idea was to get them out.
The cadets’ suits had so far served them marvelously well, exceeding their original stress and endurance standards in this cold inferno. But Hemphill and Lee could see already that their suits, however tough and reliable they had seemed in time of peace, were primitive models, not up to the real requirements of space warfare. “To begin with, stronger and longer lasting power supplies.”
“Yeah, and certainly some kind of armor, something, so those things’ grippers won’t be able to just…” He raised both hands, and made slow tearing motions.
While crouched in the cabin of the derelict scoutship, waiting for the promised help to arrive, the two had a discussion about it. They came to quick agreement that they were not armed or armored with anything like the effectiveness of the berserker’s own small combat machines.
“Looks like we might possibly make it.”
“We’ll make it.” It sounded like Cadet Hemphill intended to enforce that conclusion by sheer willpower, if necessary. He added: “The next time we fight one of these damned machines, we must have armored suits. Surely that can be done. And better weapons. And a much better power supply, to provide weapons with some punch.”
“We’ll need stronger weapons not only in our hands, but on our ships.”
“More shields, more speed, more of everything.”
“We’re not doing too badly.”
“Yes, we’ve survived, and yes, we can be proud of that. But the fact is, we’ve also been lucky. Lucky that the damned thing was damaged before it arrived in the Twin Worlds system. We thought we were perfecting superb weapons, we just didn’t know.
“We’re not able to do much of anything against this enemy. Not yet.” Hemphill raised his hands and looked at them, flexing the fingers and watching them as if contemplating the puny weakness of a human body.
Another inadequacy of the suits was that they were not self-sufficient over extended periods of time; miniaturized hydrogen power lamps had not yet become feasible. The servo power of the limbs was limited by, among other things, how much energy was stored.
Ella Berlu was easily able to land her scoutship, its outer hull all scorched and battered from some earlier skirmish but still functioning, quite close to the downed vessel, and pick up everyone who was still alive.
When Hannah Rymer came out of the little ship to inventory the eager assembly of prospective passengers, and try to figure out where room could be found for them in her own vessel, she paused, staring in confusion at the motionless figure clamped into the ruined cargo bay.
“What’s this? Who’s this?”
“A prisoner.” Hemphill’s exhausted voice was terse. “Captain, I’ll explain as we get moving. We’d better go.”
“I’m assuming the prisoner comes too.”
“You bet your life he does. It’s very important that he be kept alive. I’ll stay behind myself if necessary.”
Somehow they got everyone crammed into the functioning scoutship. To save space, the robo
t Random was left behind, assigned the task of monitoring conditions on the hulk, of watching carefully for any sign of renewed berserker activity, and transmitting reports. Some of the people who had shared a berserker dungeon with the robot felt that leaving Random behind was somehow wrong. But of course Random did not mind in the least.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Gregor was getting ready to return to his planet and his capital; but before departing the Mukunda, he was having one more face-to-face meeting with the first spacer.
Before its main brain died, the death machine’s drive system had done its best to fine-tune its own orbital path, to make sure it had the advancing planet Timber squarely in its sights.
“If the berserker hits the planet as a cluster of fragments, rather than a single solid mass, that should reduce the destruction by an order of magnitude. The impacts will still cause heavy damage. But with any luck at all many of the pieces will miss Timber entirely, and more of them should break up and burn up when they slam into the atmosphere.”
“You mean if we don’t break it up, we’re talking more billions dead, if we do, maybe only additional millions.”
“If we don’t break it up, or steer it off its chosen path. Right now that seems our best bet. And I think it’s working.”
“There’s no way that a planet can dodge. We’ve got to do something to stop the damned thing.”
The enemy seemed almost inert, almost helpless to defend itself. But, if the berserker was given time in which to work unmolested, it might, for all that any human being could tell, be able to repair its weapons of mass destruction and unleash them once more when it got close to Timber.
And how could any human being be sure those weapons were not working?
Was the appearance it gave of death, of defeated inertia, only a trick?
First Spacer Homasubi had decided he would dispatch his own expedition, made up of daring volunteers from among the crew of his own flagship. They were going to perform a deliberate boarding of the great berserker, to investigate the feasibility of blowing it up. The idea of using the thing’s own drive to steer it away from Timber had also been suggested, but there was some reason to believe its drive was no longer working, and just finding it and learning to use it might take years.
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