Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  The horrors and destruction visited by berserkers on Omicron Sector, the wiped-out fleets and ruined planets, the menace that had forced thousands of relatively fortunate survivors to flee for their lives, had provided him with an excellent excuse for his visit to this rock-he wondered if the commander had suspected the truth, that he wasn't an entirely random refugee.

  The truth was that he'd come here to Claire Normandy's world with the hope of locating something Becky must have had in her possession-but he thought it extremely unlikely that Commander Normandy knew anything about that.

  One thing he'd never dreamed of discovering when he'd planned a visit to this system was a great, bloody, thriving Space Force installation. Quite likely the presence of the base, with its automated defenses and its dozens of curious, suspicious human witnesses, meant that he wouldn't be able to conduct the search he'd come here hoping to carry out.

  Looking round him again, taking in the view of nebulas and star-clouds as his almost weightless saltation carried him toward his ship, Harry had to admit to himself that Hyperborea might be, after all, a reasonable place to establish a weather station. Could it be that was really all that the commander was up to, she and the four or five dozen people she seemed to have under her command? The Galactic wind, that wraith of particles and forces drifting among the stars, through the near vacuum of normal space, was intense in the vicinity of Hyperborea. As might be expected, the subspace currents, the flows of virtual particles and virtual forces, in the adjoining regions of reality were also particularly fierce.

  Not that any of this was directly apparent to a suited human moving almost weightlessly over the planetoid's airless surface, or looking at the celestial sights. Hyperborea offered some spectacular views of sky in basic black, adorned by several globular star clusters and an assortment of glowing nebulas relatively near at hand. Less prominent, but more impressive if you thought about it, was an impressive backdrop of distant galaxies.

  The strongest source of natural illumination within four or five light-years was the Hyperborean primary, a small, white sun. The primary of the Kermandie system, a somewhat bigger star than this one but almost four light-years distant, made one piercing, blue-white needle point, below the horizon at the moment.

  At the time of Harry's last visit to these parts, about seven standard years ago, the only human settlement in the Hyperborean system had been a civilian community already in place for centuries on Good Intentions. That planet was much larger than Hyperborea, a good distance sunward, only a few million klicks from the brown dwarf, almost near enough to receive from it some decent warmth. Good Intentions and Hyperborea both went around the dwarf and so were never more than a couple of hundred million kilometers apart. That was only a few hours by ordinary spaceship travel, which was almost always subluminal this deep in a solar system's gravitational well. The brown dwarf, in turn, carried its modest family of planets with it in its own orbit round the system's massive white primary star.

  A long way out, antisunward from where the brown dwarf revolved with its brood, several nameless-as far as Harry knew-Jovian-type gas giants showed as tiny disks against the Galactic background; those huge planets were engaged in an unhurried orbital dance whose full turns were measured in Earthly centuries.

  Good Intentions, the almost Earth-sized rock that had long supported the tiny civilian settlement of the same name, came the closest of all these bodies to being hospitable to life. It bore a certain natural resemblance to the Cradle World of Solarian humanity; but unfortunately, the similarity was not really close enough to allow people to live outdoors on Good Intentions without protective suits or respirators-at least not for longer than a couple of days. Good Intentions, most commonly called Gee Eye, was just so tantalizingly, perilously, close to being naturally habitable that members of one cult after another, down through the centuries, had persisted in making the experiment. Some of the less stubbornly committed had lived to tell about it. Terraforming Gee Eye into a friendlier place was considered impractical for a number of reasons, most of them economic.

  Commander Normandy and the few of her people that Harry had directly encountered so far seemed vaguely suspicious of him-he could feel this attitude toward the visiting stranger, but he couldn't tell where it came from. He supposed that whatever version of his record had shown up on their database must look fairly shabby. Probably it cataloged all, or most, of the brushes he'd had with the local laws of several worlds. And there was always the possibility that some error had got in, making matters look even worse than they really were-that had happened to him more than once. But he had to admit that even the absolute truth about his past might not appear worthy of commendation, especially if regarded from a conservative viewpoint.

  At the moment, the Witch of Endor was sitting unattended, all hatches closed and locked. Harry's little ship was in the shape of a somewhat elongated football, about eight meters where her beam was widest, giving a cross section somewhat too great to allow it to pass through the hangar doors used by the couriers and various small vessels that made up the military station's regular traffic. Such Space Force craft tended to be long and narrow, though some of them were more massive than the Witch.

  Harry was just about to lay a gauntleted hand on his ship's lightly wounded side, where a spent fragment from some berserker missile had gouged a path, when there suddenly erupted a cheerful hailing on his suit radio, shattering the past minute or so of blessed silence. Even before looking around, he muttered oaths, too subvocally deep for his microphone to pick up. He would have much preferred to be left alone while he was outside, but evidently that was not to be.

  The source of the hailing, now identifying itself by a waving arm, was an approaching figure whose space suit was marked with a tech's insignia and fitted on the outside with extra receptacles for tools. A couple of maintenance robots, metal things, shaped like neither beast nor human, one hobbling and one flowing along on silvery rollers, came with the human tech. There didn't seem to be any neat way for Silver to decline the other's company. The fewer things he did to work on the suspicions of his uneasy hosts, the better.

  "Hello, Mr. Silver, is it? I am Sergeant Gauhati here." Judging from the tool in the sergeant's armored hands, a thing like a complicated golf club, Harry thought he was probably engaged in testing the force-field generators that must lie buried below the surface of the landing field.

  Harry grumbled something inhospitable.

  Already he felt practically certain that the sergeant's maintenance task was only an excuse. The base commander had sent someone out to keep an eye on him. All right, so he and his dented ship had dropped in on her unexpectedly. So what? What the hell was Normandy worried about, anyway? He was no bloody goodlife spy-there could hardly be anything in his record to suggest that. And everything was peaceful in the vicinity of Hyperborea as far as he could make out. But he could not dispute the judgment of his instincts in the matter; for the Force to plant a base in an out-of-the-way spot like this, something had to be going on here besides an earnest, ongoing contemplation of the interstellar weather.

  Harry's new companion had now caught up with him. Waving his deformed golf club about, the sergeant began to babble about how beautiful this section of the Galaxy looked from this particular vantage point. To Harry, he sounded like a would-be poet who had been too long pent indoors with people who refused to listen to him. Harry soon decided that those people had good judgment.

  Another sight that made a big impression on the sergeant, to hear him tell it, was the striking'effect produced by the clouds of distant external galaxies that were visible in the clear spaces between the vastly nearer and smaller clouds of the Galaxy's own stars and nebulas.

  The other's voice came chirping at him: "Is it not impressive, Mr. Silver? Is it not beautiful?"

  "Yep. Sure enough." The babbler's suit, like most Space Force models, bore a nameplate stretching across the chest: Sergeant Gauhati, sure enough. Harry made a mental note to try to
avoid the sergeant during the remainder of his visit.

  Ah, the romance and the joy of it! "Think of all the people in human history who've wanted to see something like this. And how terribly few have ever had the chance."

  Harry would have preferred to let all those yearning trillions deal with their own problems, choose their own ways to go to hell. He silently congratulated himself on not trying to punch the other out. Privately he felt that he deserved a prize for such forbearance, but he knew he wasn't going to get one. And something more than mere tolerance was advisable if he wanted to allay everyone's suspicions of the mysterious civilian visitor. He said: "Well, it's a living. Or almost."

  His heroic effort at making chitchat was not much appreciated; the sergeant didn't seem to be paying attention. "I love space," the man proclaimed, raising one arm in a grand gesture and sounding perfectly sincere.

  "Yeah?" Harry didn't love space in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that he had spent so much of his life immersed in it, far outside of any friendly planetary atmosphere. "I don't."

  Astonishment, expressed by gesture. Obviously, the sergeant's attitude was something that everyone should share. "You don't? Why?"

  Harry thought about it for a minute. Then he made an abrupt wave at their surroundings. "Because there's nothing there."

  "Nothing?" Only the whole universe, the outraged tone implied.

  "I mean nothing-apart from a few soft, wet spots on a couple of rocks-that's friendly to a human being."

  He might have added that he, personally, found space a fundamentally uncomfortable place to be. But he kept quiet about the annoyances, the itches and chafings and constrictions, that his suit was inflicting on him, because there was nothing wrong with the suit. It .was his own, and as near his exact proper size as made no difference. The fact was that he always felt uncomfortable in space armor, no matter how well it fit, and despite his long experience in wearing it.

  Stoically, Silver now resumed his effort to inspect his ship.

  Some of the crew of the patrol craft had already gone over the Witch once, beginning as soon as they'd boarded it, in search of any dirty tricks that berserkers might have tagged it with during his reported skirmish with them over in Omicron. This was a routine procedure after any combat-but they'd taken a good look at the inside of the ship as well as the outside, so it would seem they thought they had some reason to be cautious about Harry himself.

  Other than his ship, Harry Silver owned very little in the way of material goods. But, as always, he had hopes. This time he thought he might have real prospects-if only these people would let him alone for a little while.

  Now Harry wanted to make sure the local techs hadn't overlooked any serious problems, and also to get a rough estimate of how difficult it might be to get the minor damage repaired; and he hoped he could figure out some way to get someone else to pay for the repairs-but above all, he wondered whether he could depend on the Witch to be spaceworthy in an emergency. Could the repair job, or part of it, be put off until later?

  Lately, emergencies of one kind and another had been coming at him thick and fast, and he had the feeling that the next one lay at no enormous distance in space or time.

  Of course, five years ago when Becky had sent him a message from Good Intentions, when she had possibly deposited here on Hyperborea the thing he'd now come hoping to find, she would have been working alone and in secret haste. And that, as Harry knew only too well, was when the odds went way up on getting yourself killed in some kind of accident.

  For several years, he'd managed to convince himself that it didn't matter whether his one-time partner had robbed him or not; no, Harry Silver wasn't the kind of man who'd spend the valuable days of his life in pursuit of anyone, especially a woman, for no reason other than to take revenge for a financial swindle. But he couldn't escape the fact that the loss of that amount of wealth did matter. It had kept on looming larger and larger, until now he could no longer convince himself that he could be indifferent.

  Again and again he replayed in his mind that last talk he'd had with Becky six, no, seven years ago. The last time he'd actually seen her-on Kermandie, that had been-and how they had made love.

  And then, just about five years ago, that final letter. It had reached him on a World far distant from this one, coming across the void through regular civilian interstellar mail, with the mark of origin certifying that it had been dispatched from Good Intentions. The message had been short, and at first glance, had seemed simple and clear enough-and yet, because of certain things it left unsaid, the more he thought about the text, the more he wondered.

  For one thing, she hadn't told him what she'd done with the stuff. Of course that really wasn't the kind of information that was wise to put down in writing.

  Whether or not he could now manage to get his hands on the box of contraband Becky might have left here on Hyperborea-and whether the stuff inside the box would still be in marketable condition-was going to make a very large difference in Harry Silver's future. He had spent most of his life as a poor man-or at least had spent most of it thinking of himself as poor-and he had hopes of being able to get through the remainder in a state approaching wealth.

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Gauhati had resumed poking around with his deformed golf club. Anything but easily discouraged, he kept on venting bursts of babble, generally leaving between them intervals of silence big enough for his captive audience of one to have interjected a comment if he should happen to feel like it. Now and then Harry did manage to come up with something, just to maintain appearances. In between, he still had plenty of time to think.

  Hell yes, Harry told himself now. I might as well take a chance and send out the Sniffer right away to look for it. If I'm cagey about it, I can do it right under the nose of Sergeant Watchdog here. What's the worst that could happen? But framing the question that way was a mistake, and Silver quickly decided he didn't really want to think about the worst that could happen, which might lead to an arrest for smuggling.

  Meanwhile, what he had now been able to see of his ship was reassuring. The hull wasn't torn open, or even badly dented-it was more a case of the outer finish being marred. Yes, it would be nice if he could recover the piece of fairing that had come loose on its final approach, but the difference in performance would be only marginal at worst. He could drive his ship and survive without it.

  And meanwhile, the sergeant kept on cheerfully rhapsodizing about the glories of the universe. Now he'd spotted something in the sky that reminded him of a string of jewels his mother used to wear. Next time, thought Harry, he'd ask the commander to assign some spy who couldn't talk the job of following him around.

  What the sergeant had spotted was the flicker of another robot courier on its approach. For a weather station, the traffic was indeed pretty heavy, Harry thought.

  Having seen all he really needed to see of his ship's outer surface, Silver opened the main airlock and went in, not taking off his armor or even his helmet when he got into the cabin, because he expected his stay would be quite brief. He didn't even bother to turn the gravity up to standard level. What he did do right away was to get the Sniffer out of its locker.

  Sniffer was of course a robot, designed chiefly to be useful in prospecting for minerals. Standing on its four legs, the robot looked vaguely like a knee-high metal dog, being roughly the size and shape of an average organic canine. It took Harry only a few moments to set in a few commands, telling Sniffer what to search for, and to program the beast with a rough map of the planetoid's surface the way it had looked nearly seven years ago-that was the most recent map he had. Then he was almost ready to turn the machine loose.

  But before doing that, Harry decided, it would be not only polite but conducive to Sniffer's survival to somehow immunize the robot against the local defense system. Weather station or not, this place was on edge and, Harry would bet, well armed. He'd already discovered that the defenses were alert. If local fire control, whether human or auto
mated, spotted some unknown machine crawling around the rocks, it was likely to shoot first and then later try to help Harry figure out what had happened to his robot.

  Opening communications with the world outside his ship, he called: "Yo, Sergeant?"

  "Mr. Silver?"

  Gauhati sounded surprised to be invited into the ship. Harry didn't expect to enjoy the presence of his visitor, but he hoped the invitation would serve as convincing evidence that Harry Silver had nothing to hide.

  He wasn't really worried about the sergeant stealing anything, but you could rarely be absolutely sure.

  Having cycled through the airlock in what seemed a puppy-like eagerness to be sociable, Sarge took off his helmet, revealing pale curly hair and a young face glassy-eyed with the joy of life. He stood in the middle of the cabin, scratching his head as everyone tended to do on taking a helmet off. Harry got the impression that his visitor was making a distinct effort not to appear to notice anything.

  "How about some coffee, Sergeant? Or tea if you like. I'd offer you something stronger, but that would hardly do while you're on duty."

  At first, as if in obedience to some reflex, the sergeant declined. But as soon as he was pressed, he changed his mind and accepted.

  Pouring himself a dose of coffee from the same fount, Harry chatted about the Galactic weather. He refrained from trying to pump the sergeant about his duties, or about the business of the base in general.

  Having made what for him was a considerable effort to gain the goodwill of his shadow, Harry began with his story of wanting to send the robot out to look for his piece of fairing. "But I don't want my robot blasted. Think it'd be safe?"

  Gauhati clearly didn't know offhand. To get an answer, he had to confer on radio with someone inside the base, but the business was handled in a routine manner and didn't take long.