Then a flight of Voids, materializing out of a background of thin nebular dust, caught up with the six undersluggers from behind. Berserker weapons blazed.
At the second enemy pass, Smith felt the ship vibrate badly. Damage indicators came on in his helmet display, showing which systems had been shot up and how badly.
Turret Gunner Manning was killed, his symbol on intercom freezing into an NFR symbol.
In the pilot's display, Manning's image (when Smith called it up) was frozen. The machinery was quite capable of sensing that Manning's brain had ceased to function.
The pilot could hope that the spacer's helmet had been shot off his head, leaving him still alive. Stranger things had happened in combat. Everything that was possible, and much that seemed impossible had happened to someone at one time or another.
The underslugger carrying Chief Warrant Officer Tadao, his pilot, and his fellow gunner, was hard hit by berserker fire.
The other gunner was killed. Meanwhile, Tadao and the pilot were wounded.
Only with the greatest difficulty did the pilot succeed in getting his damaged spacecraft back to the atoll from which they had lifted off.
Running swiftly through a checklist, the pilot quickly discovered that additional damage had left the underslugger's armament useless—the doors to the missile bay would no longer open to allow the launching of any of the small missiles under his control.
Part of the flight-control system had also been shot away, and only by discovering that another part, a kind of trimmer force field, could do the same job in a pinch—though very slowly and awkwardly—did the pilot manage to maintain any control at all.
Task Force Sixteen, and what was left of Seventeen with its carrier abandoned, remained in sporadic communication with each other by means of message couriers. They had no reason to believe that the enemy intercepted any of these—and as far as any human knew, the berserker enemy still lacked the sophisticated system, invented by the Solarians, of reading information from a moving courier. So far the luck of battle had shielded Sixteen from any onslaught by berserker small ships, whereas the luckless Seventeen had been located not once but twice.
They were within a light-minute of each other, and so were able to use tight-beam radio waves with some practicality. Also, they could observe each other with fair success.
The only immediately apparent results of the fumbling, groping, sporadic attacks launched up till now took the form of disastrous losses among the squadrons of fighters, and especially of undersluggers, that Naguance and the other task force commander had hurled out in their first attempt to hit the enemy.
Hardlaunchers in general were doing better than under-sluggers. Among the former squadrons, only Venture's had been really badly mauled in their first attack, losing sixteen out of twenty ships.
Enemy fighters, and ship-to-ship weapons fired from the big berserker carriers, were wiping the old bombers and their crews out of the sky.
Events so far had demonstrated that even the newest Solarian fighters were not really a match for the crewless Voids. The fact that a live body had to be protected inside each warcraft was not really the cause of the discrepancy; the inertial forces produced by combat maneuvers could be quite satisfactorily damped down within any volume as small as that of the cabin or cockpit. The advantage of having a living brain in the control loop slightly more than compensated for the mere fact that the enemy's lifeless machines were somewhat more maneuverable. Organic neurons were believed to perform some part of their function outside of any version of spacetime that was accessible to mere machines.
The berserker advantage in hardware was not intrinsically impossible to overcome, but was owed rather to superior design and materials. Comparatively few of the attacking Solarians were even able to get close enough to the berserker carriers to launch their heavy weapons before they were blasted out of the sky. And of the heavy weapons actually launched, a majority missed their targets. The few, particularly torpedoes, that might actually have struck their targets had evidently failed to explode.
The only material advantage gained by the Solarians in these early attacksand at the time this seemed very slightwas that the enemy formation of carriers and escort machines was thrown temporarily into confusion, and their progress toward Fifty Fifty temporarily interrupted. Their timetable had been thrown off. Their defensive fighter craft suffered some losses, and their supplies of power and ammunition were depleted.
Radio messages from various ships in both fighter and bomber squadrons arrived tardily at the two carrier flagships, so late as to be practically useless to Solarian command, sometimes long after the ships themselves would have returned—had they survived.
Some of these messages, borne in the living voices of crew members who were dead before their signals reached the carrier, were exultant, claiming substantial hits on big berserkers. For a while these gave some comfort to the admirals—but they had learned to be suspicious of damage claims.
In fact, the undersluggers' attack on the berserker carriers did zero direct damage to the enemy.
And people on the Stinger waited, without result, for even one of the ships in Underslugger Eight to return. On the carrier a live cook had to adjust a robotic chef, a service machine, to keep all of their chicken dinners warm.
At last, after many hours, the robot chef, in the absence of further human orders, saw to it that the plates and utensils were scraped clean, the spoiled food thrown into the recycler.
People on the carrier waited in vain. Berserker fighters, and defensive fire from the big machines, had blasted out of space every unit of Underslugger Squadron Eight.
When Ensign Bright, still drifting in space, in the intervals between attacks, looked out in a certain direction, away from the embattled berserker fleet, the idea struck him, almost like evidence of another physical assault, that light quanta that had been traveling unimpeded for two billion years were now entering his faceplate, dying there indifferently as they delivered their sparks of energy, almost immeasurably tiny, to his eyes and brain.
And for the drifting man, even the battle between death was suddenly remote. Without warning, Bright felt himself momentarily overcome by a perception of ultimate power being displayed before him, of unfathomable purpose, to which the struggles between organic brains and rogue computers were sublimely unimportant.
The moment passed, and he began to breathe again, and feel in terror for his life. At least he wasn't dead yet. The balance of fear and hope swung back again, tipping toward life. His armor was still protecting him beautifully, and if his luck continued to hold, it would continue to do so for several days at least. In survival school he'd been told of people who, wearing standard armor no better than what he had on now, had survived shipless in the void for a standard month or even longer.
Bright waited, breathing and listening, searching the field of the disorganized berserker fleet with his telescope, getting an occasional crash of battle static in his ears.
He was looking out over an extensive graveyard of Solarian small ships. He had lost count of explosions, and he could only keep hoping that all his shipmates and all his colleagues from other carriers weren't dead yet, their bodies and all their obsolescent small ships not yet reduced to little red-hot clouds of gas and dust. The enemy was still essentially unhurt, and he could only pray that he might see at least one more attack.
TWENTY-FOUR
Every now and then the nearest billows of nebular mist shifted in Bright's view—they were clouds of emptiness, distinguishable only by contrast with the almost absolute vacancy in which they were contained. Sometimes the ghostly cloud shapes changed form with amazing speed. On a scale unimaginably smaller, the transient smoke of battle drifted toward dispersion. And now the latter change afforded Bright the chance to see one of the prowling enemy machines quite clearly.
It was the most direct look at the enemy he had been afforded yet. Bright realized with a chill that the berserker could hardly be a hundr
ed kilometers off. Perhaps much less—the small telescope made the dark and elongated shape certainly recognizable as that of a berserker carrier, one of the machines that Underslugger Eight had destroyed itself in an attempt to reach. The size must be enormous, much bigger than any of the Solarian warcraft.
With his scavenged telescope, he thought he might be able to distinguish details as small as a human body—not that there would be any human bodies there.
He had thought that he was being carried slowly away from the battle, from the berserker fleet, but now, to his horror, he observed certain indications that he was drifting closer.
In his enthrallment by the action, the implications of his improved vision had not dawned on him immediately. That he was increasingly able to distinguish undersluggers from hard-launchers from fighters could only mean that he was drifting considerably closer.
Quickly he used the tiny thrusters on his suit in an effort to stop his drift in the direction of the berserker fleet. He measured out brief bursts of energy, not wanting to completely use up his capacity to maneuver.
Then he tried looking through the telescope again. In many cases he could still not make out the actual shapes of individual small ships and machines, but he could follow trails, and try to deduce what they meant.
Large ship-to-ship missiles left trails that were visible under these conditions. And of course the explosions, which at the height of an attack came thick and fast, like rippling fireworks.
At least the monstrous shape that had come very near him was not headed directly in his direction; instead, it held to a smoothly passing course, from left to right. As far as Bright could tell, the enemy was paying him no attention. It was possible that, if those lenses and logic circuits recorded the presence of his suited body at all, they took it for a drifting corpse. If he could see them, certainly they ought to be able to see him too—except that he was much smaller than they were. It was also possible that he had been seen and then ignored. Those automated tools of glass and metal, those information banks, were doubtless busy looking for other things, urgently on guard against yet another Solarian attack.
Bright could distinguish some of the more distant units of the berserker fleet only by the tracks they left behind them, plowing the thin matter of the Gulf in their fitful maneuvers.
The sharp curvature of the tracks showed that they had been taking evasive action. Whatever formation the berserker fleet had been trying to maintain had certainly been scrambled.
Apart from the malignity of the enemy, and his own helplessness, there was something frightening in the sheer perspective and dimensions of the spectacle in front of Bright. It gave him an eerie feeling, it awoke a twinge of sickness deep in his gut, something deeper even than the sight of death, to realize that some of those far-off, blurry footprints in the deep had to be millions of kilometers long, and he was seeing the vast trails as they had been whole minutes earlier. Each track was a string of wide-spaced dots, the long breaks between dots representing the considerable intervals across which the machines making them had carried their flaring energies outside of normal space.
And in comparison with the local nebulae, the trails themselves were nothing, mere insect marks on the side of a mountain…
The machine that had alarmed him was diminishing slowly, getting smaller and smaller with distance, until it disappeared.
One moment it was there, and the next it dropped without warning into flightspace, and Bright even through his armor felt the passage of some kind of wake.
Still Bright had seen no indication that his own squadron's self-sacrificing dash into the jaws of death had so much as scratched any of the enemy machines. Certainly that none of their big ones, the carriers, were seriously damaged. Since escaping from his own wrecked craft, he hadn't seen any explosion worthy of a carrier's destruction, nor had he sighted a new star, of a brightness that would suggest a carrier-sized object slowly melting down to incandescent slag.
The timepiece visible as a dim reflection inside Bright's faceplate informed him that approximately an hour had gone by after the carrier's passing, when yet another small berserker, no bigger than a message courier, going about some unknown search or other task, came puttering very near the place where the shivering human lay willing himself to disappear. The Solarian, suddenly afraid even to breathe, tried unconsciously to diminish himself, to shrink inside his armor.
How near was very near? No way to tell without bouncing a signal off the object, and he was certainly not going to try that. He saw only the track, and not the thing itself. He kept trying to tell himself that the murder machine must be at a safely enormous distance. It might be a thousand kilometers away—much, much farther than the one whose shape he'd earlier identified.
For a time he actually closed his eyes, afraid to look. Dear God, if it comes, let it be quick. But then the immediate peril passed. God was still around, however. No face to be seen, but almost palpable.
Bright still kept trying, uselessly, to determine how much damage had been done to the enemy. Actually, as the disturbances in the thin gas cleared, he couldn't see any evidence that any of the berserkers had been damaged at all.
Slowly the whole scene, including all its components, kept shifting around the castaway. What Bright had earlier assumed to be the Galactic Core now gave hints, as the intervening nearby mist changed its configuration, of turning out to be only a globular cluster, its distance and dimensions shrunken to mere hundreds of light-years instead of many thousands.
Some of the berserker tracks remained clear and sharp in outline, and the idea crossed Bright's mind they might do so for the next million years.
Another frightening phrase came drifting into consciousness: Mere hundreds of light-years.
The universe was dissolving around him, and he was losing the bearings he had thought he had.
Eventually the drifting man came to the conclusion that his suited body, along with the bit of wreckage to which he intermittently clung, was being swept along with the movements of the great enemy machines. He had been helplessly caught up in the trailing wakes of, their force fields, so that he had no choice about maintaining his beautiful observation post.
Gradually, he supposed—he could devoutly hope—he would be left behind by the enemy fleet. His mind rebelled at trying to calculate the odds on rescue, but it ought to be far from impossible.
If only he could communicate what he was seeing to the flagship—but that of course was impossible. At least his present movement ought to be carrying him, though at a hopelessly slow pace, back toward his own fleet, toward the ship from which he'd taken off a few hours ago.
It would have been possible, of course, at any time, to switch on his emergency beacon, in an effort to summon help— but this close to the enemy, there was no chance that anything but a berserker would respond. Again Bright scarcely dared to move his arms or legs, or even breathe. The air seemed to move in his lungs and throat with a loud roaring noise, and surely a machine so close could somehow hear it.
As time passed, Bright kept nervously expecting to see yet another Solarian attack fall upon the fleet before him. Sooner or later, he supposed, there would have to be one. Unless the battle had gone the wrong way, in which case he supposed the enemy would be reorganizing its formations and moving on.
In which case the world as he knew it would pretty well have come to a halt. Things would definitely get a little lonely then… but he wasn't going to fight that hopeless battle in his own mind. Not yet. People got picked up in space all the time— by other people, that is.
Evidently his use of his suit's thrusters had succeeded in stopping, perhaps actually reversing, his drift in the general direction of the enemy fleet.
When the next attack came sweeping in, the sight of the flaming streaks and explosions did not reach him until minutes after they'd taken place. He was watching a silent light show, very faint.
He wondered if there might be a perceptible blast wave propagating throug
h the deep-space mist of dust and particles, occasional atoms of stray hydrogen. Probably, he thought, that was a mad idea. But had such a wave existed, a drifter in space might try to determine the distance of the action, of an explosion for example, by the time lapse between the arrival of the flash and of the shock. Not that there would really be a shock, of course; no, nothing that would be even perceptible, except with the finest instruments; the medium was far too rarefied. For a little time he tried to distract himself with mathematics.
Again Bright saw nothing in the way of convincing evidence that the human side had scored any major hits.
He looked and listened and waited. He tried to think of his family, the wife and child at home worrying about him, and then he tried not to think of them.
And somehow, painfully, another hour passed.
Everyone on the bridge of Admiral Naguance's flagship looked haggard.
Their instruments showed them, with a delay and in the distance, how Lankvil and one or two other craft of Task Force Seventeen were taking a fearful pounding from squadrons of berserker killing machines.
Naguance had already sent what defensive help he could in that direction. Buf most of his own fighters had gone as escort with his undersluggers and hardlaunchers, resources intensely concentrated on hitting at the enemy. And not many of those escort fighters had come back.
Now a courier, escaping from that melee, brought them word that the Lankvil had been heavily hit—again—and her skipper had ordered abandon ship. Bowman had changed his flag to a smaller vessel, or was in the process of doing so. Naguance with his two carriers was more than ever on his own, against a berserker fleet confirmed to have at least four.
Looking directly out over Venture's flight deck, then alternately surveying that impressive expanse on their displays, Naguance and his staff watched as exhausted survivors of one attack or another came straggling back. Sometimes the returning survivors had to delay their landings until the warriors of another wave went out.
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