He turned and ran for the outside, working on a half-formed plan of distracting the thing, drawing away from Jory so she could call for help. He leapt for an open window, his flying body tearing and splintering its way through one of the antique insect-repelling screens.
He could hear the thing coming after him, crabbing on three limbs, then hobbling erect on its damaged leg. Surely it must be moving almost as fast as it could have moved before being shot. Trask threw a look back over his shoulder and saw the smile, then dashed on faster than ever, instinctively dodging around bushes and rolling under lawn furniture, trying to get away from it.
There beyond the rear of the house was the swimming pool, complete with a roaring, gushing water slide, and his mind seized on the possibility that getting there would offer him some kind of chance. The robot, especially in its damaged condition, might not cope at all well with deep water.
Feet skidding on short mutant poolside turf, Trask dodged halfway around the kidney-shaped pool, then dove into deep water when he saw that he was still not going to be able to outrun the disabled killer. The smiling thing kept coming, and it was gaining ground.
The poolside area, with its high surrounding wall, formed a pretty effective trap for Solarian humans.
And even while it chased him, it was calling up reserves.
Trask surfaced in the middle of the pool, treading deep water, looking to see what was going to happen next. Burymore stood beside the water slide and smiled at him; it wasn't going to plunge in and try to swim.
Here came three automated serving machines, short flat-topped legless things on rollers, too innately stupid to know or care whether they were being commanded to hurt humans or not. But they were all under control of the berserker, in a system that must work great when you were giving a huge party. The servers, moving briskly and silently, took up their positions at poolside, spreading out along the water's edge on the side away from Burymore. What they would endeavor to do to Trask when he came out he didn't know—maybe try their armless best to push him back and drown him. At the very least it seemed certain they could delay him until the hobbling killer could make way around the edge of the pool and catch up with him again.
And there were other possibilities—as if it had read Trask's mind, the butler abruptly sent one of the servers rolling smoothly forward, splashing deliberately into the pool. If the idea was to short out the machine internally and electrocute the swimming man, it failed miserably. If Burymore's hope had been to get at Trask from under water, that succeeded no better. Looking down, the man could see it sitting inertly on the blue bottom.
The servers' anthropomorphic leader, its butler's livery now somewhat torn and in disarray, stood smiling at him from beside the water slide, and thought things over. The two remaining servers would be adequate to keep him in the pool.
Now Burymore, while evidently trying to decide on a next move, produced a small round metal tray from somewhere, and stood once more with tray in hand, balancing it at a perfect level.
Optelectronic insanity, thought Trask, treading water. When sophisticated software breaks down, the results are likely to be bizarre.
Some twenty-five meters to Traskeluk's right, and Burymore's left, one of the side doors of the house opened, and Jory came tottering out. His heart rose at the sight; at least she wasn't dead or crippled. The butler tried hurling his tray at her, from clear across the pool, but the metal disk sailed in an airfoil curve and only smashed a window.
The woman, battered and still somewhat dazed, her hair in disarray, was leaning against a table on the terrace, and hardly bothered to dodge the missile.
In a loud voice she called out: "Trask, the phones are all dead! I can't get a message out!"
"Get out yourself." Traskeluk was very much aware of the maximum effective range of the weapon he had built into his artificial limb. And also aware of the fact that he had only one shot, plus a few seconds each of the weapon's other capabilities. He dared not squander his only chance.
Jory ignored his order. "Trask, there's a dead woman in the house. Her body's jammed into a cooler. That's how I knew."
He nodded his head in answer, saving breath while he continued to tread water. All right. He knew that he had to actually come to grips with the robot to be effective—but he had no way to communicate that necessity to Jory.
Was time on the robot's side, or on the side of the living? For all Trask knew, days might pass before another human showed up at the front door.
Jory's head had turned. Something eastward along the side of the house had caught her attention. Trask followed her gaze. There, under a little canopy to keep off rain, was a woodpile, of real wood for the real fireplaces inside. And there…
She pushed her bruised body away from the table. She was hobbling her way over to the woodpile, going to get the ax, whose handle Trask could barely see, sticking up on the far side of the pile.
And the robot had now seen what human eyes had seen, and was scuttling quickly to cut her off from the weapon.
Now or never, thought Traskeluk, and splashed to the pool's edge at the right spot to intercept Burymore. The butler was having to come the long way around.
Jory, keeping an eye on action around the pool, naturally thought that what he was doing would be suicidal, and screamed warnings to him to get back.
Now the fight had really started, and pulling himself up out of the pool was easy. This was the encounter Trask had been spoiling for, and he was going to stay and see it through. He had no breath for singing left, but he could hear the words of an old battle song come roaring through his mind.
One of the serving machines darted forward at him, fast as it could dart, and Traskeluk faked one way and dodged another. The robot on its party-serving wheels shot past him and went splashing into the pool to join its colleague.
The remaining simple server was hovering in the background, and he couldn't wait to see what tactic it might try. Instead, he went right for the butler in a football tackle, and caught the hard repulsive body squarely. Its bad leg failed and man and machine went down together, both of its arms pounding on his back like logs.
The remaining serving machine rolled closer, spraying something hot. Not quite boiling liquid, or soup or coffee, scorched and spattered at the back of its live opponent, heat steaming through his clothes to strike at skin already burnt by the spent pistol. That seemed to be the best, or the worst, that a simple server had. In a minute, thought Trask, as he tried to get his own hidden weapon into position, in a minute, if I live that long, it will be spitting knives at me, and trying to generate poison gas.
Then he heard a scream, an unpracticed battle cry in a high feminine voice, and from the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Jory, assailing the server with her ax.
Meanwhile Trask was still being clubbed with baseball bats, or so it felt. He tried to roll back poolward, thinking that if he could get Burymore into the water the berserker might drown him, but once it was on the bottom it would not be getting out. Burymore must have been calculating the same thing, for its resistless mechanical power rolled Trask the other way instead.
Traskeluk's mind was racing even as his body struggled. The machine was physically stronger than he, in every part but the left arm, and maybe even there. But not as strong as, for example, one of their boarding machines, like maybe the one he'd rifled down in space. Some functions of the device were only moderately powered, as they would have been in an ordinary robot butler.
That gave him the idea that he might be able to break one of Burymore's arms if he could get the proper grip. A hold that would let him use the super power in his left fingers and forearm. But while he was breaking one arm, what might it be doing to him with the other? It would not feel pain.
And now, of all the goddamned luck, his left arm was pinned down, under the weight of both their bodies; and the robot, with the one hand it had free, was knotting up the collar of his shirt. And that was how it was going to strangle him—
he fought its left arm with his fleshly right, but he might as well have tried to lift the nearby house and throw it at his foe… the world was turning red and fading on him…
The ax must have hit squarely on Burymore's back, for Trask, his senses failing, could feel the jar of impact through the robot's body. He heard a little sobbing breath that was not quite his own and must have come from Jory.
Her blow with the ax against the metal torso had not quite carried crippling force, but maybe it had made a hole—anyway, it was more than Burymore wanted to experience again. The robot twisted half away from Traskeluk, and shot out one hand to seize the woman by an ankle. Jory let out a scream and fell.
And the berserker chose this moment to begin babbling sweet words, in a leisurely voice, through speakers that had never been inconvenienced by the need to draw breath. Philosophical-sounding arguments culled from overheard human conversations. Words, no doubt, that had proven effective in arguments with certain other humans.
Jory, in desperation, somehow broke free, leaving one shoe and patches of ankle skin in the robot's grasp.
Between great panting breaths she yelled to Trask, "Another pistol—in the house—I'll get it!"
And even as she yelled, she scrambled and staggered to her feet and ran.
Burymore, scuttling like a giant crab, pursued her back into the house.
Trask, lungs gulping air in a desperate effort to make up a deficit, grabbed up the ax and came after the killer.
The berserker still had a few more serving machines that it could call into action and hurl at its badlife enemies. Trask met them, fortunately one at a time, on his way to the house, and beat them off with the ax.
Then he dashed into the house, through the French windows where Jory had gone in—and paused to see what she and the robot were doing.
In front of Traskeluk as he looked about him lay available a whole range of tools or other objects related to Nash's success as a fabricator of dreams and fiction—awards, recorders, trophies, cartridges, a broken chair used in a famous fight scene, images of actors frozen in crystal cubes. Nothing in all of this a damned bit of use just now.
The man, took two steps forward—
—and the robot shot out, in a blindsiding ambush, to grapple with him again. The ax went flying, somewhere out of reach.
When Jory appeared again, a frantic figure in the background, Trask could see that her clothes, like his own and Burymore's, were torn in several places. So were the humans' skins.
The fight swirled into a large room laid out as a theater.
The entry of moving bodies made the lights spring on, and a curtain roll across the windows, screening away the outside world.
An elegant male voice came booming into life; the house had sensed that people had entered the theater.
"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I have something special for you this Thursday evening." And the holostage lit up, with the illusion of curtains of fine shimmering fabric.
And now, down on the wood floor at the foot of the stage, the butler had Traskeluk once again in a death grip, though the butler was by now down to one usable arm; one of Burymore's arms was never going to kill anyone anymore, because the ax, antique-styled and double-bitted, was back in Jory's hands, and the arm had been left dangling by a savage blow.
The heavy blade came crashing back. Now a good part of Burymore's smiling, deader-than-a-corpse face had been wiped from the front of its steel skull. But the mouth still smiled, one lens-eye still beamed at the butler's current victim.
The butler's good arm released Trask momentarily, lashed out with machine-tool speed and precision, parrying the wooden ax handle as that weapon swung again. And now the ax lay broken, and Jory staggered back.
The expression on the remaining portion of Burymore's face had not altered in the slightest.
Jory's head was reeling, her arms and legs unsteady, and she tottered around the theater, under the loud voices and the music from the stage, trying to get in position to use the ax again. The handle, broken short, made a great handicap. She tried once more to bury its keen edge in the robot's back, but the heavy blade only scraped ineffectively off steel and slid away, tearing expensive black fabric.
Now she was afraid of hitting the struggling man if she swung again.
But she could see that Trask was getting killed, and in desperation she tried, and came very close to hitting her partner, and did the robot only minor damage. But yet once more the robot's grip was jarred a trifle loose.
Traskeluk could hear only the roaring of the blood in his own head. The sound of his own breath had stopped while the world once more turned red before him. Jory was somewhere nearby, groaning. It was the point of the butler's shoulder, or the butler's knee, that now crushed Trask's throat and was cutting off his breath. Both of his arms were now pinned behind his own back. Both wrists caught in the crashing grip of the butler's remaining hand.
It was eerie that stress produced no sound at all within the robot body.
Burymore meanwhile was groping with his half-dangling, erratically jerking hand, trying to find some other weapon with which to finish its male badlife opponent off more quickly. The robot had not forgotten Jory, either.
She wouldn't let it. She dragged at Burymore, then beat on the side of the butler's head with the heavy end of the now broken-handled ax, imperiling its remaining eye, so that the machine had to shift again to get rid of the distraction.
Traskeluk's left arm came free at last. His eyes and mind sought out his built-in icon and the practiced sequence of mental images.
Cedric still had no certainty of where the butler's brain was housed, but he could wait no longer to find out. This game wasn't going to last till the next hand.
Looking at the icon in the upper-left corner of his visual field… hooking it with his gaze, of with a blink, and dragging it into place. Thinking the proper thought…
The fingers of his left hand abruptly twitched and jerked with monstrous power. Each fingertip became a lance of heat and radiation. The thin steel casing of the butler's belly and chest caved in under the assault; the unbreathing optelectronic vitals were coming into Traskeluk's grasp.
He used his icon for the last time.
Burymore convulsed with deadly violence. It seemed that the ghost of a mad dog leaped at Trask…
Old Space Force training with the icon had taken over. Traskeluk used the various powers of his arm in sequence, as best he could. Miniature accumulators exhausted themselves in detonating surges. Tiny sparks and molten droplets splashed and flew, raising puffs of smoke from what was left of the man's clothing, and the machine's…
With the blast of a small destructor charge, meant to wipe out whatever secrets its brain still held, the berserker died. The artificial hand and wrist that were now buried in the enemy's torso took the brunt of the explosion's force…
The man's body was flung back, by the front plate of the butler's chest, striking him with stunning force. Trask's left forearm was a jagged stump, composite surrogates of metal bone and bloodless flesh.
Jory had slumped down, crying and gasping but totally alive, in front of the first semicircle of comfortable seats.
The butler was right up on stage. It lay there smiling at its conqueror, as if offering hearty, sportsmanlike congratulations
… but its body was ripped open, and not even Burymore's eye-lenses were moving now.
Lights and action. Towering above the fallen robot came an image of Morrison Duke, the most famous of the heroic stars in Nash's dramas, striding broad-shouldered and costumed, glaring at some invisible offstage opponent, and muttering threatening words.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Gavrilov, crouching stoop-shouldered in the small ship's single pilot's chair, had been closely watching the controls for the past two hours. And for most of that time Gift, standing a couple of strides away, had been curiously watching him. Flower, meanwhile, had consciously lost herself in some kind of computer game, at the othe
r end of the compartment.
While Gift was watching the yacht had slowed, popped into normal space, minijumped again, then gone through the process once or twice more. And all with no kind of solar system anywhere in shouting distance. Some kind of rendezvous, then
Gift even looked out several times through a cleared port, during one of their long intervals in normal space. Hopeless. Like getting a glimpse of ocean, and trying to tell from that where you were on a planet's surface.
A rendezvous, all right, because the signals indicated that a docking was coming up.
Gift didn't get this at all, but by now he had just about given up asking questions.
There came a muffled thud, and the faint sounds of machinery.
Nifty looked forward to meeting whoever was about to come aboard; they could be as crazy as Gavrilov if they wanted to, just so they were a little more willing to pass out information. He was going to demand to be told…
And then the airlock opened, and he knew that for the rest of his life he was never going to demand anything again.
Because he had just seen that his life was over. Because the new pilot had come aboard. A figure stepping out of the worst of Nifty's nightmares came walking out of the airlock, focusing on him with its lenses, taking little notice of the other two people who had frozen in their positions. It was the size of a man and very roughly, the same shape. Two metal arms, ending in five-digit metal grippers. Two metal legs supported a body that had never known either blood or breath.
There was a long moment in which Gift would have used his deathdream—if he'd still had one. Involuntarily his gaze turned away from the shape in the hatchway, turned upward and inward, looking for the deathdream icon, which was no longer there.
Flower was startled at first, when the berserker entered, then joyfully excited. She came quickly to Gift's side where he stood quivering against a bulkhead, and clung to his arm, murmuring. He understood she was trying to reassure him, though his terror would not let him understand a word of what she said.
Berserker Fury Page 30