The banal argument among the goodlife continued, with the machine still silent. Then the Teacher's voice, booming and squeaking from hidden speakers, started to say something. But it broke off again, before a single word had been completed.
Utter silence held, while seconds ticked by.
And then people were looking up, and someone cried out that the hardlaunchers were on their way.
"Helldivers!" Gavrilov screamed, and dove for cover where there was none to be found.
Gift, in his private cage, was unable to see the missiles coming, but he could see how the whole group standing at a little distance from his cell snapped their heads back, looking almost straight overhead.
In a reflex action he grabbed up the helmet of his prison suit. Then he looked up again.
The berserker did not waste time or energy in commenting on the tactical situation. It had abruptly fallen silent shortly before the newest attack, before any of the people on the deck had any means of knowing what was about to happen.
Gaping skyward, badlife and goodlife alike were transfixed by the sight, somewhere above the transparent roof, of the three hurtling, swelling small dots that could be nothing but Solarian missiles. Unstoppable, inside the last of the carrier's defenses. This time Gift could see, he could feel in his gut, that they were not going to miss.
Incoming missiles that were slow enough to be seen in flight by human eyes had been deliberately slowed down by their internal mechanism. High velocity, bullet speeds and more, did not give maximum efficiency in the penetration of force-field defenses. Such a weight of kinetic energy only made the repelling force fields more effective.
Gift could see plainly how the first incoming round to reach its' target hit squarely on the flight deck's forward elevator. Not with the speed of a bullet; more like a runaway ground truck. The blast picked up the whole platform, sailing it like a chip right against what passed for a control island on this carrier, pinning a fold of the transparent wall of the life compound beneath it.
Gift in his armor was thrown across his little cell, and slammed into a bulkhead. He picked himself up, as quickly as he could in the slow and clumsy suit. Reflexively, he reached for his helmet, then changed his mind and threw the pot aside.
Laval, who had been in the act of mounting to his favorite observation post, was hurled to the deck. A moment later he bounced up, looking around him wildly.
The first blast had torn the roof right off Gift's cell, and for the second time in a few hours he thought that he was dead.
The transparent roof above, which he had judged to be some thirty meters overhead, had broken like a cheap window. Shards were falling, swirling, in the makeshift gravity. One struck him on the shoulder of his suit.
There came another dazzling blast, hurling people off their feet and causing minor damage. That was only another near miss, Gift told himself, in the threatened privacy of his own skull.
But there was no doubt, no thinking at all required, about the next one. The only question was whether anyone at all had survived; somehow they all did.
And when that roar had faded, the Templar bellowed, before yet another explosion cut him off:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where—
Another bomb penetrated the glassy deck, and for a measurable fraction of a second longer it was possible to think that not much was going to happen. Then the detonation came. Knocking a large structure, what Gift thought must be some kind of launching cradle, into a massive superstructure that towered over the flight deck at one side, forming one solid supporting wall for the flimsy-looking cover that had been improvised to shelter life units.
Drifting Ensign Bright was now watching the most spectacular show that he had ever seen, or ever hoped to see. And now, with all the attacking spacers in this wave still alive, he was able for the first time to pick up a great deal of their talk on his suit radio. Pilots abandoning their usual controlled voices, exchanging directions, and yelling their triumph, in the clear.
Solarian scout ships brought back word to their admirals that the enemy carrier machines indeed were burning, parts of them melting down like furious fission piles. Clouds of gas and fine debris were dribbling and bursting into space.
About half of these smart bombs, even those launched in the last, successful Solarian strikes, missed their targets, were deflected, or failed to detonate.
But enough of them, and more than enough, hit home to get the job done.
Some people returning from the day's earlier missions had reported hits, but never in such glowing, detailed terms. When these latest reports reached the Solarian carriers, and were confirmed by unemotional machines, triumphant rejoicing reigned among the admirals and their staffs.
But in the next minute, even as the holostage still held before them the evidence of triumph, they were once more grimly cautious and alert. The battle wasn't over yet.
Naguance said: "The enemy is going to attack our carriers too, as soon as he—it—they—can find us. We don't know how many attack machines they may have already put in space."
Someone in the company of one of the Solarian admirals was wondering aloud about those eleven enemy battleships whose presence in the region could be deduced from broken codes. Only one of those murderous machines, the Hate, had been accounted for so far—fortunately it was too distant from either Solarian task force to be able to bring its heavy weapons to bear on any of humanity's large ships; and those weapons were too ponderous to work well against the darting small-ship onslaughts.
But no one on the human side knew where the other ten berserker dreadnoughts might have got to. Since the raid on Point Diamond, humanity in the Gulf had nothing that could stand up toe-to-toe and match them in open battle. Even one of those huge berserkers, getting in range of Fifty Fifty, could raise holy hell with all the installations on the ground.
People at every level of command kept fretting about these matters, though most people did so silently. It would be hell to see those monsters come bursting out of a nebula within missile range. Or C-plus cannon. Intelligence had given its opinion that the remaining battleships would be safely out of the way for another day or two, and intelligence had been proven right so far. But still…
One of the berserker carriers, because of the need to make defensive maneuvers in the first hour of fighting, had become considerably separated from the other three, making fighter-machine coverage of them all a problem.
And the movement of what Solarians were calling the Main Body toward Fifty Fifty had been temporarily stopped, with the big units of the berserker fleet kept busy making defensive maneuvers.
Of course, thought someone on the flagship Venture, finely coordinated attacks were the goal of every military planner. If you had to take on a fleet much larger than your own, that kind of operation offered the only reasonable chance of success. But there was no possibility of the Solarian commander's waiting until his crews and machines should get themselves into some ideal state of readiness.
Back on Uhao, a suspicion that Nash was goodlife had briefly worried both Traskeluk and Jory. In Jory's case the doubt was promptly dismissed. She had met her boss only briefly, and could not say that she liked him, but she had been through a battle with him, and would have a hard time believing such an accusation.
And any remaining doubt the journalist might have felt was completely laid to rest the moment Nash walked in the door and discovered the damage. The dumbfounded look on his face was utterly convincing.
Commander R, when at last she was interviewed by security officials (even they had had a hard time getting to her in this busy time), told her questioners that she had noticed nothing strange about Traskeluk's behavior, or Gift's, during her last brief meetings with them at Hypo HQ. "After all they had been through, one would expect the dear boys to be still a little upset, no?"
Traskeluk and Jory were now both somewhat receptive to the idea that Gift h
ad possibly joined some goodlife cell, maybe had belonged to one for a long time, instead of being, as Trask put it, just a damned yellow-bellied coward. But Jory was not so sure about the coward part. And neither she nor Trask could really be sure about the goodlife.
Of course the authorities were now at least formally suspicious of everyone who had recently been in the house where the berserker had been hidden.
Traskeluk, as a war hero, was the least likely subject of further investigation. Gift shared pretty much the same status. But there seemed a good chance that the missing man had been the victim of foul play. A full-scale search was now launched for Nifty, whether he proved to be victim or perpetrator.
The idea that a goodlife agent might have infiltrated Hypo as deeply as either of those two men was a frightening one indeed. It implied that there might be another agent in some position that was even more sensitive.
An alternate theory was that the heroic Gift had been kidnapped or done away with by some goodlife cult or cell.
Traskeluk, belatedly accepting the ride to the hospital, thought things over as he watched the scenery go by.
The record indicated Gift had really been here in Nash's house. It suggested that Nifty had been willingly or unwillingly involved with goodlife… it was looking less and less likely that he, Trask, would ever be in a position to carry out his vow of vengeance.
Which, Traskeluk decided, trying to find a comfortable position for his burned back, was just as well.
Maybe tomorrow or the next day he would send his father and grandfather that letter after all. But it would be a different letter from the one he had first planned.
If Gift ever turned up, he would very likely be court-martialed, some day, on Traskeluk's evidence. And maybe he, Cedric Traskeluk, would stand in the dock too, for not telling the truth about the spy-ship incident. Well, if that time ever came, Traskeluk meant to tell the truth as well as he was able. If Gift never did show up, that was another matter.
Nifty had made his own choice, dug his own grave; let him lie in it.
Jory in the next seat had been watching him. "Trask."
"What?"
"You know, you're a hell of a fighter."
"Thanks. So are you."
"Thanks—a hell of a fighter, but it's my opinion that as an implacable avenger, you wouldn't have been all that effective."
Traskeluk nodded slowly. He didn't pretend not to know what she was talking about. "I'm not going to break my neck chasing the son of a bitch any further. If I ever run into him…"
"What'll you do?"
Traskeluk thought about it. When they reached the hospital, Jory was still waiting for her answer.
THIRTY
Solarian planners assigned berserker computers ranks comparable to those in the human forces, just as they would have done with human opponents. According to the number of units each seemed to command, and their relative importance.
There was one berserker computer involved of even higher "rank" than the one aboard the War, but that superior admiral had remained too far away: Perhaps a thousand light-years distant from the carrier battle, aboard the largest unit in the force of battleships that it was holding in reserve.
The plan called for a heavy attack on Fifty Fifty, in the expectation that this would lure the Solarian fleet, or whatever remained of it after the Port Diamond raid, out into battle. Then the berserkers would shift the weight of their onslaught against the human fleet, and crush that force decisively.
Fifty Fifty would then fall like ripe fruit—not that the communications exchanged between enemy units used any symbol so vivid with life. Once a berserker base had been firmly established on the newly sterilized atoll, another strong raid on Uhao, and the badlife would soon find that planet and system indefensible.
The way to the homeworlds would then lie open to the berserker hordes, and mere planetary defenses would soon fail without a fleet to support them. Before massive human reinforcements could be brought into place from other sectors, all of those worlds, including Earth itself, could be thoroughly cleansed of their great pollution, the disease of infected matter that called itself life.
But as the battle actually progressed, the battleships, with their crushing field generators, their well-nigh irresistible C-plus cannon, had been laying back too far from the carrier strike force to have any effect whatsoever on the outcome of the fight. Communication proved even more difficult than was to be expected over such distances, and the battle was effectively over before the dreadnoughts could be brought into action. To have held this force so far back now appeared as a major strategic blunder.
One of the premier's cabinet members asked: "Did you say 'human opponents'? In a war?"
"I know." She nodded her noble head of silver hair. "We strain our imaginations trying to envision even ourselves, let alone any other branch of Galactic humanity, fighting a full-scale war against other intelligent life forms. But we constantly have evidence before us that violent human conflict is possible, even common. And we know that such war can happen on the largest possible scale; the Builders engaged in at least one, of which the berserkers are our legacy. And the pre-Expansion history of Earth is full of dark passages; in fact there are long stretches in which the story seems more darkness than light."
"Yet here we are," said the secretary of war, after a thoughtful pause.
It would seem that a computer of the rank of the berserker admiral, given complete information, could produce a foolproof battle plan. But of course no military commander in history had ever been granted complete information, in the sense that a chess player surveying the board could have it. Certainly, the computers in question were getting only sporadic and misleading robot courier reports on the progress of the battle.
The controlling computer of the fourth berserker carrier, code-named Pestilence, found itself cruising at some distance from the first three, after all four had spent some minutes taking evasive action, which perhaps involved microjumping in and out of normal space. Pestilence did not succumb to the Solarian hardlauncher attacks until several hours after the first three, and managed to get off its own attack wave before it was hit. These were the machines that fatally damaged the Lankvil.
That Solarian ship was hit hard by the first berserker wave, but survived the assault. Heroic efforts by damage-control people and their robots made great strides in overcoming the damage inflicted.
After today's first pummeling by berserkers, Lankvil might well have been able to make it back to Port Diamond, either in tow or under its own power, there to undergo a second resurrection. But before it could leave the theater of operations, the wounded carrier was hit again, and heavily, in a second attack by berserker undersluggers. Soon after that, Lankvil had to be abandoned.
A great effort was made to evacuate all of the wounded from the dying carrier, transferring men and women to smaller, destroyer-class vessels. The effort had only partial success. In the confusion, no one passed the word to abandon ship to the medics working in the operating room.
One or two injured people struggled above decks on their own, and were eventually saved.
Hours later Lankvil, hopelessly battered by enemy bombs and torpedoes, gutted by fire and more exotic reactions, blew up in a maelstrom of fragments and radiation, almost two days after the last berserker carrier. One Solarian warship of the destroyer class had also been totally blasted in the same attack.
The majority of the crews of both these vessels abandoned ship successfully, were picked up by other smaller Solarian craft, and survived the battle. Many hundreds more, on those two ships and others, were wounded, and the loss in fighting machines and other material was considerable. But here in the homeworlds sector, that loss could be made up in a year or so with new production. But berserkers trying to replace losses in this sector were at the end of a long, long supply line. There were reasons why they could not simply fill the Galaxy with berserker factories.
A volunteer salvage party had reboarded th
e carrier, a day after the official order to abandon, and were still trying to save the ship when the finally fatal attack hit home. Some died, and some survived in spectacular and unlikely ways.
One factor greatly contributing to the Solarian victory was that each of the four berserker carriers was caught loaded with numbers of small attack machines—in two cases whole squadrons—crammed together on deck below deck, all in the very process of being serviced, rearmed, and repowered for offensive missions when Solarian missiles set off secondary explosions and chain reactions among them. The energies that both sides crammed into their small craft were devastating, however and whenever they broke loose. The string of firecrackers effect, with nuclear and other exotic reactions taking the place of simple quick oxidation.
Berserker command, after the Main Force was targeted by land-based bombers and torpedo ships, had decided that a second strike on Fifty Fifty was necessary. Preparations for that strike were under way when scout machines sent word that they had discovered the Solarian carrier force, or part of it.
The defenders of the atoll remained dug in and waiting for another blow that never came.
The impact of Solarian missiles had shaken the berserker carrier, taken the damping defensive fields beyond the limit of their resistance, and bringing them down in invisible rubble that melted instantly back into the fabric of spacetime from whence it had been drawn. Nifty Gift, fighting to clear his mind after the dazing impacts, felt he had attained important insight. He decided that life, like death, had a long history of predation too. There had been living killers long before there were berserkers. The damned machines were still far behind; maybe by a billion years or so, when it came to a determination to destroy.
Berserker Fury Page 35