One of Nash's lesser concerns over the past month had been to think up a good title for his latest holographic production, the Fifty Fifty documentary.
He had enlisted his friends in this task, and a few of the fragmentary recorded messages that had come in during his absence had a bearing on the subject.
"How about Berserker Fury?" suggested his chief programmer, Nodrog Brag, stroking his neat gray mustache with one finger. No, he hadn't the faintest clue as to where the strange machine had come from, but he remembered seeing it at the party. "Damned unusual to have an efficient butler that's so man-shaped."
"Berserker Fury, hey?" Nash considered the suggestion, running fingers through his reddish hair, talking back to Brag's unresponsive image. "Could be. Could be. But I think not quite specific enough. Doesn't really kick me, you know?"
A couple of other producers, Adnilem and Egroeg, also were on stage, conference calling from Port Diamond—and each had a different title to suggest.
The ground car in which the house sitter and two others had departed was now back in the garage, and from examination of equipment on board it was possible to deduce where it had been driven.
Later, evidence was found that a small spaceship, having interstellar drive, had been kept in the lagoon.
Security came to the conclusion that Nifty Gift was probably no longer within a hundred light-years of Uhao.
Jory Yokosuka, in exchange for the guarantee of certain exclusive interviews, went along with security in hushing up, for a time, the fact of the death machine's presence in Nash's house. The intention was to prevent a local panic.
"Not really my house, of course," Nash muttered.
Whatever else happened, he knew that he would have to submit to a rigorous investigation, try to prove that he hadn't known about the damned thing. His highly placed connections were likely to spare him the worst of any such investigation, but still it must take place.
That even a shadow of suspicion could fall upon his loyalty scared and outraged him.
Examination of the damaged communications system of the house showed that the disguised berserker must have been listening in on all the occupants' messages for more than a standard month. Most likely ever since the goodlife had smuggled it in. Fortunately, it seemed highly unlikely that anything of value to the berserker cause, relating to Nash's military activities, could have been learned and passed along. Almost all the messages consisted of jargon from the world of entertainment, all but unintelligible to the security agent who ran through them the first time.
A twist of spacetime away, out in deep space on the day of the battle, Ensign Bright continued to watch the show. Long minutes went by when he would have much preferred to turn his gaze away, but that was not a realistic option.
He saw a third and fourth, and then a fifth and sixth, attack hurled by the Solarian task forces against the berserker carrier armada, and he had seen them all blunted and broken, against formations of ravening Voids, against the tough inner defenses thrown up by the carriers themselves—and against the less-easily seen, but very formidable, deficiencies of outdated technology.
The fourth attack fell on Death, and Bright on his suit radio was able to hear enough jabber between spacecraft to know that it was being made by planes from Stinger.
And he could see and hear that again the attackers failed to inflict any serious damage, and sustained heavy losses.
The fifth attack was carried out against Death by far-launchers, operating at extreme range, and they were therefore totally ineffective.
One minute later, War and Pestilence were both under attack. Yet again their auxiliary machines managed to defend them successfully.
But here they came again, and Bright's spirits, as tough as those of any other pilot, surged up loyally once more.
He saw two squadrons of hardlaunchers, winking into existence in normal space not far from the nearest carriers, then rapidly closing in.
And this time, when the hardlaunchers came pop pop popping out of flightspace, for once everything going perfectly for the Solarian side, just as in a flawless practice session, the berserker fighters were way out of position. It reminded Bright of the way a good boxer, or a karate fighter, used up three or four good serious punches, assuming they would be blocked, just to get the opponent wide open for the one that really mattered.
On the bridges and in the plotting rooms of each Solarian flagship, in the territory where the admirals held forth, stress and strain continued to mount.
In the sick bay aboard each remaining Solarian carrier, casualties were slowly accumulating, mostly wounded flight crew who had been lucky enough to make it home.
Now each successive wave of attacking Solarians had a slightly easier task in locating the berserker carrier fleet. Those livecrewed fighters and bombers who managed to make it back to their motherships were able to give pretty accurate coordinates of where they had left the enemy; and the enemy fleet was now pretty much immobilized.
During a period of two or three hours following the raid on Fifty Fifty, the berserker task force, compelled to defend itself against one inadequate attack after another, had become virtually stalled. Whatever plans those optelectronic admirals might have had when the battle began had now been seriously disrupted. The huge carrier machines had been unable to maneuver in pursuit of any offensive goal, their engines silently churning space while they concentrated on evasive action, dodging wave after wave of outclassed livecrewed ships.
The fact that the enemy was thus kept off balance meant that still only one Solarian carrier had come under direct attack.
But the cost of keeping the enemy off balance seemed prohibitively high. Solarian fighting strength was being used up at a fearful rate.
Ensign Bright, who had no choice, continued to watch the show, and to listen to those small parts of it that he could hear on his suit radio.
Today he'd seen a lot of his fellow spacers vaporized, along with their ships, but he still wasn't sure that he'd seen even one solid hit against the enemy. He kept telling himself that here were two fresh hardlauncher squadrons, maybe delayed en route somehow, but here they were. And humanity had at least one more chance.
Remaining in normal space afforded the enemy one definite benefit, making it easier for berserker scouts to locate the Solarian carriers. From the beginning the berserker computers had assumed that two or three more such vessels, besides the one they'd already sighted, were probably somewhere in the area.
The berserkers, though so far forced to remain largely on the defensive, were not about to retreat from what they considered an inferior force. Especially not when their own carriers had so far escaped unscathed.
Solarian crew members who had come back alive from the earlier hopeless efforts—and with skill and luck had achieved survivable landings on carrier or atoll—tended to have shattered nerves, and a great many of them were physically wounded. Some had to be carried out of the burning or imploding wreckage of their crash-landed ships.
One or more of the little ships coming home to the atoll exploded on the ramp at Fifty Fifty, and at least a couple of more on the flight deck of a carrier.
At least one came home and then blew up, its damaged drive gone wild, before the still-living crew members could all be extracted from it by the rescue robots.
The best chance of snatching a life from the disaster came when a live rescuer went in. Studies suggested that this was because the robots could not be depended upon to be sufficiently ruthless—there were times, fortunately rare, when it was necessary to handle a victim roughly, even to chop off an arm or leg to save a spacer's life. A robot plunged first into the small inferno, and then backed out, quivering with the optelectronic equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
Chief Warrant Officer Tadao was pulled, still alive, out of one of these rough landings. All the survivors reported seeing and hearing evidence of great carnage among their mates.
Through the optimized senses provided them by their sil
ver helmets, they had caught sanitized but still savage glimpses— usually no more than one quick image—of Solarian spacecraft and human bodies crumpling, burning, vanishing in the white heat of explosions. Often disaster struck so swiftly that it was impossible to trace its progress in real time; that would someday be a job for the debriefers, working with whatever recordings had survived.
Today there was no time for any postmortems. There was only time to make tactical decisions and carry them out; and Naguance, who was now effectively in command (because Bowman was less immediately engaged) decided to keep pressing the enemy.
"Right now I'm throwing into action everything that humanity has in place to throw. If it should turn out not to be enough…" The admiral left the sentence unfinished.
TWENTY-NINE
The sporadic but relentless onslaught of livecrewed Solarian ships against inanimate machines continued over a period of about one standard day.
But the decisive action—the Solarian attacks leading up to the destruction of the first three berserker carriers—had been concentrated within about three hours, starting about six hours after the battle's opening shots.
The earlier attacks, gallant and futile in themselves, had forced the berserker fighters to stay close to the carriers they were trying to protect, and depleted the fighters' energy reserves. The successive waves of Solarian small ships were not detected by the carrier machines' defenses until they were almost within attacking range. The berserker command computers received only scant warning of each successive attack. With each carrier forced into a random pattern of evasive action, it was impossible for them to proceed with any coherent plan.
The hardlaunchers, each crewed by two humans, were designed to multiply the force of their attacks by bursting out of flightspace while hurtling toward their targets. The hard-launcher pilot located the target on instruments while it and his ship were both in normal space, then jinked his ship in a mini-jump toward it, a maneuver that ideally added a special energy to the weapon. The gunner's attention remained concentrated in the search for attacking enemy fighter machines.
A perfect launch, seldom if ever attained in combat conditions, occurred with the missile no more than microseconds away from its last emergence from flightspace.
Sometimes the hardlauncher in its attack doesn't quite come out of flightspace, doesn't emerge all the way into the version of spacetime that most of the human race regards as normal. Just close enough to perfection to launch a missile that will break through. Or comes out completely for an interval measured only in picoseconds. Ten to the minus twelve, or one million millionth. This is the narrow gap of time in which the fields binding missile to ship must be cut loose.
In the battle for Fifty Fifty, the successful attacks on the four berserker carriers were delivered in classic style. It was always extremely dangerous for any ship or machine to enter or exit normal space in close proximity to a large mass, or a nuclear explosion. Such a desperate maneuver only increased the likelihood of fatal damage, and made it unlikely that jumping ship would reach the spot that it was aiming for.
Ideally, before releasing its weapon, the small attacker first closed to a short range, within perilously few kilometers of its target, sometimes well inside the target's defensive force fields. "Diving" into flightspace, then popping back from flightspace to normal space, under such trying conditions was a tricky maneuver, calling for thorough pilot training and razor-sharp execution.
Some gunners were also schooled in effective mind-melding with the communications equipment—which like other optelectronic hardware could perform most efficiently when working in direct connection with the human brain.
Other gunners had been trained to perform as capable backups for everything a pilot had to doand other crew positions as well. Similarly many pilots had received the necessary cross-training to allow them to handle a gunner's job on the defensive armament.
Meanwhile, the defending fighters, those unsurpassed Voids, were throwing deadly obstacles into flightspace right in the path, or on the tail, of the onrushing bombers or under-sluggers. Hails of small missiles, some fragmenting, bits no bigger than rifle bullets.
And the big berserker target, with nerveless mechanical efficiency, was throwing up a screen of antispacecraft fire. Its huge guns, if they could not precisely hit small targets, still generated buffeting field-vortexes, knocking off the Solarians' aim.
Of the several hardlauncher squadrons taking part in the final strike against the enemy, each small Solarian ship that got in range of its target carried and released one to three heavy missiles.
Almost each and every hardlauncher did so. A few of them had accidentally fired their heavy missiles prematurely, because something unforeseen had gone wrong with the latest mind-machine interface. But these hardlauncher pilots flew the remainder of the mission anyway, putting themselves at risk to distract the defenses.
Each missile successfully released from a hardlauncher massed three to eight times as much as a normal adult human body. On impact it released nuclear energies, but as a rule these were almost completely damped by the defensive fields with which any military target was almost certain to be permeated.
In that "almost" lay the attacker's prospects for success.
A gunner, on a hardlauncher, whooping with joy. Gunners on those ships tended to have a better view of the target than the pilot did, once the missile had been released. They could more easily afford to concentrate on it, assuming there were no fighters to be beaten off at the moment.
Even one direct hit with this type of weapon would almost certainly do serious damage to a mothership/carrier-type large berserker; minor to moderate damage to a battlewagon. The truly serious destruction in either case was done by secondary explosions, and runaway surges of nuclear and other energies, released when the vulnerable weapons and power systems of the loading fighter machines were struck by an incoming missile.
In many ways, as Space Force recruits were patiently taught when they showed signs of being overawed, a berserker was like any other machine. No matter how large it was, or how well designed, it could carry, manipulate, and release only finite stores of force and energy. If a machine is concentrating all its energies on one task, such as launching an offensive strike, others must perforce be neglected.
Defensive force fields protecting the huge machines had been partially, marginally lowered or tuned down, owing to the exigencies of reloading and refueling the small machines as rapidly as possible. Or the defensive fields had been deployed against the most recent attack, by undersluggers.
This meant that those fields now had to be redeployed in normal space, a procedure that took no more than a few seconds; but it turned out that those few seconds represented just a little more time than the berserkers now had available.
The accidentally perfect timing, and the fortunate composition of this final, winning strike were as unexpected as all of the earlier futile onslaughts, seemingly randomized, had been.
The combat computers in the Solarian fighting ships, when presenting the ship's livecrew with the image of a confirmed berserker, generally adorned the image with the blazoned insignia of skull and crossbones—a symbol of death and danger almost universally accepted on worlds occupied by Earth-descended humanity.
The members of the little human gathering aboard the berserker flagmachine had scarcely moved since Laval had chained Flower to the curving pipe, but their environment had changed around them. Some of the changes they could not perceive directly. The priority assigned by the machine to their survival, never very high, had been downgraded further. Now the people were surrounded by what appeared to be a vast colonnade of gilded arches, more than tall enough to support the Gothic roof of a great cathedral, marking out a space floored by dark slabs that were glassy hard, and more like rock than metal. Dimly the local portion of the deck reflected the images of people's bodies.
Roy Laval, confident that these badlife would never have a chance to take any supposed s
ecrets away with them, had brought up the idea of berserkers imitating humans, as an advance that would inevitably be made in the near future. This was of course purely a goodlife idea, but he had convinced himself that it was a berserker secret.
He was still arguing with Gavrilov. "Once that is done, the badlife resistance will swiftly crumble. It would be ridiculous for them to oppose us, when we are moving among them, striking them down at will." His eyes glowed as they focused on some inner, private vision.
The voice of the untouchable Templar still drifted past the barrier, hectoring. " 'Us'? You're not a machine, Laval. You're flesh and blood; have you forgotten?"
Stung, the would-be viceroy turned around. "That state of affairs may not persist for long. The Teachers have promised me—" And he fell abruptly silent.
"Promised you what? That you will be recorded, and then provided with a robotic body?"
Laval drew himself up. "It will be so," he said with dignity.
"You delude yourself. Why should they let you in on any real secrets? Why should they do anything at all for you? Because you are alive, you are loathsome scum to them—as you are to us."
Immediately on receiving the report of a Solarian carrier's presence, berserker command assigned new priorities to all its fighting units. The livecrewed, badlife carriers were now judged to be by far the most important target, and the process was begun of changing the arming and loading on the small space-going attack machines.
Looking up, the Solarians could actually see a few of the attacking small ships, popping out of flightspace, very near, with sudden violence. They could see the brighter, even dazzling, flares and streaks of belated antispacecraft fire, lashing out from turrets on the carrier.
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