Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  What a plum the Shiva assassination mission must have seemed when they were talking it over back on Port Diamond. How the officers would have jockeyed and politicked, when possible, for such an assignment. But now what had been a chance for glorious achievement, leading to promotion, widespread publicity, perhaps even political grandeur, was turning into a fiasco. Now, to Marut, any risk must seem worthwhile in the effort to retrieve his fortunes.

  The base on Hyperborea had never possessed any offensive capability-that had never been its purpose. It was not home to any substantial number of fighting ships, and lacked the facilities to support them. Commander Normandy also had at her disposal a few armed launches, narrow little craft, used as shuttles around the planetoid and on errands to and from other ships hanging in low orbit. These launches had room in them for little more than their two crew members, but Marut's reconstituted task force could have them too, if he could figure out some way to use them. And that was the extent of the direct help Commander Normandy could provide.

  Hyperborea did also house and deploy a good flotilla of the most advanced superluminal couriers, the majority of them at any given moment berthed deep within the rock.

  Those couriers had been coming and going at a high rate over the last standard month, and in fact, the landing field was empty of them now, though a supply ready for launching as required was ready underground. Information kept on coming in, a bit here and a bit there from the data-snatching buoys and probes, regarding the monster berserker commander code-named Shiva by its victims.

  There was only one other inhabited solar system physically close enough to make it possible that help might be obtained from it before the deadline. As a matter of form, an appeal for help was sent by fast courier to the authorities-there was really only one authority-on the planet Kermandie, four light-years distant. The expected rejection arrived by return courier in less than twenty-four hours-as everyone who knew anything about that paranoid dictatorship had assumed it would. But now the fact that the appeal had been made was on the record. It would be there the next time the question of interstellar sanctions against Kermandie came up in council.

  True to his word, Harry had gone back to his ship and turned over the codes to the human techs, still glum with failure, who met him there. When a test had satisfied the technicians that they could now move the ship and use it, they left it to go on about more immediately urgent business-right now, work on Marut's one salvageable vessel had priority. Once more, Silver found himself alone.

  Again he checked for messages, and this time, to his silent elation, found that a coded transmission had come in from Sniffer. The search robot, while remaining somewhere out in the field, had transmitted several pictures, which the man now decoded and examined in the privacy of his ship's cabin-under the present conditions, there seemed no chance of his getting away from the base to see the site for himself. The defenses were ignoring the robot dog, which had already become familiar to them, but both humans and machines would be sure to take note of a man in civilian armor, especially if there was anything out of the ordinary in his behavior.

  Sniffer's pictures came up, one at a time, in three-dimensional form on the smaller of the control cabin's two holostages. The total absence of any sunlight in the images reinforced an impression that they had been made somewhere underground. The robot's lights illuminated a cramped, irregular space among big black rocks, and they showed two objects of great interest to Harry. One of these he thought he could recognize as the very thing he'd come here on the chance of finding: a small box made of some hard, durable substance, of rectangular shape, neutral gray in coloring, and presumably of sturdy construction. It was just about big enough to contain an average-sized loaf of bread.

  But it was the sight of the second object that brought on sudden sickness in the pit of Harry's stomach. Wedged tightly between rocks, only a couple of meters from the small box, was an inert suit of space armor, custom-made and individualized, bearing painted and engraved markings that allowed Silver to recognize it at once as Becky Sharp's. The suit was jammed in a position that looked extremely uncomfortable, the head slightly downward between two huge slabs of stone.

  Inside the armor there would presumably be a human body, frozen flesh and bone now every bit as inert as the useless protection in which they were encased. No doubt both the suit and its wearer had been exactly where they were for a long time; taking into consideration everything he knew about what Becky had been doing and what she might have done, Harry Silver decided that five years would be just about right. The statglass faceplate of the helmet was turned away from Sniffer's probing cameras, so there was no chance of his getting a look inside the helmet-not that after five years, he would have wanted to see in.

  Looking at the images, Silver went through a bad few minutes. In fact, they were much worse than he would have expected had he tried to imagine something like this happening to Becky. He shifted the recorded images to the bigger of his cabin's two holostages, but that didn't help at all. During this time, he remained dimly aware of the noises being made by the crew of Space Force techs and their machines, clumping around outside the hull, getting ready to perform modifications on the Witch. But fortunately, the people outside couldn't see him or hear him.

  He was still sitting there, staring at the stage, when Commander Normandy called and asked him to come in for another face-to-face meeting.

  "Be right there."

  But then, for a little while, he didn't move a muscle. He just went on sitting.

  Fortunately, he'd had several minutes quite alone before her call came in.

  By the time Harry was once more sitting down in a room with the commander and the captain, he had himself more or less in hand. It was probably a conference room near her office, with a dozen chairs, only five of them occupied when Harry sat down around a businesslike table.

  The main reason the commander wanted to talk to Harry Silver at this time was his supposed expertise on the world called Summerland, where now a berserker base existed and there was reason to expect that a mechanical monster code-named Shiva was going to show up at some precise time in only a few days.

  Marut had brought one of his aides with him. Together, they had a dozen questions for Harry, all of them about Summerland and the other bodies that shared its solar system. The standard astrogational charts and models gave the basic facts, of course, but left out a lot of details that the planners wanted to fill in. Some of their questions he could answer, and some not; he promised to try the database on his ship, though he doubted it held much more than the basics. Summerland had not been a major concern of his for some time.

  In, Harry's present mental state, it took a while before Marut's basic idea really sank in: The captain, using whatever makeshift squadron he was able to assemble, was actually planning a landing, some kind of a commando assault, on the distant planetoid that had become a berserker base.

  The captain's physical wounds were obviously bothering him yet, but Harry was beginning to wonder whether the psychic damage might not have been worse. Marut still had his arm sling draped around his neck, and used it about half the time, but he kept picking at the bandages as if he were ready to tear them off, working on some subconscious theory that the injury would go with them.

  When Harry tuned in again on the conversation going on around him, he heard the commander asking Marut: "Do you suppose the machines that jumped you knew where you were going? What your mission was?"

  "I don't see how they could have known that, ma'am. Unless there's been some goodlife spy at work." Then he turned deliberately to Harry. "What do you think of that idea, Mr. Silver?"

  "How the hell should I know?"-and he found himself coming halfway up out of his chair. Deliberately, he made himself settle back. "Sorry, Commander. Are you suggesting goodlife spies at CINCSEC? It seems unlikely." They were all looking at him, wondering what had, suddenly set him off. Well, they'd just have to wonder.

  But if Marut jabbed at him v
erbally just once more, any time during the next few minutes, he was going to get up and smash the little bastard's face in, never mind if the man had only one good arm to defend himself with. But happily, the captain seemed ready to move on to other matters.

  The damage done in the ambush to the people and machines of the original task force, the enormity of the setback, was looming larger and larger. No more than a couple dozen of its people, out of an original complement of hundreds, had survived that berserker attack-and twelve of the survivors were still occupying an equal number of the station's medirobots, down in the crowded little hospital.

  Where else could the captain turn to get some help?

  The commander herself warned Marut not to expect much in the way of assistance from Gee Eye: "That's not a major spaceport down there, nor is it a favorite retirement destination. I think you'll be lucky if you can find a dozen people qualified out of their ten thousand. And how many of the dozen are going to volunteer… ?"

  "And how many of those who volunteer will we be willing to accept after we get a look at 'em? But we have to try."

  Claire Normandy agreed that it would be better if some-one other than herself did the talking. Captain Marut volunteered to make the appeal-but then bowed aside in favor of one of his junior officers, who was admitted to have a more diplomatic manner.

  The commander gave him some advice. "Tell them only that you need a few people-a very few-for a special mission. That some kind of space combat experience is required. And we might as well tell them at the start that it's dangerous-that'll be obvious anyway, and maybe we'll get a little credit for honesty."

  The only real neighbors of the handful of people on the military station were the ten thousand or so living on Good Intentions. As Captain Marut was given the story by Lieutenant Colonel Khodark, the commander's second-in-command, "neighbors" was too strong a word. The Gee Eyes were the only other population within reasonable radio communication range, and that was all. Theirs was an old, old colony. According to the official histories, it had been founded for scientific purposes, even before Earth-descended humanity had been caught up in the berserker war.

  There was of course also an unofficial history, in the form of legend or folktale, stating that the colony had begun life as a smugglers' base. Folktales were silent on the subject of how the place had got its name.

  Over the last century or two, the people of Gee Eye had never been close to the mainstream-if indeed such a thing existed-of Galactic Solarian society. Traffic in and out of their modest spaceport was always low. The history of the place testified that it had an attraction for cranks and visionaries.

  "What keeps it going?" Captain Marut asked.

  "Not tourism, though our people go there sometimes just for a change, to get off the base for a little while. The population is largely folk from other worlds who want to get away from it all, I suppose. There are a couple of small Galactic Council facilities," Khodark replied.

  "Do they all live in one town down there, or what?" The captain looked as if he felt vaguely uneasy, trying to imagine a mere ten thousand people spread out over the whole land surface of a planet almost the size of Earth.

  "My understanding is that there are now three towns," Khodark explained. "Near enough to each other to be served by one spaceport. Plus a few outlying habitations, none of them at any great distance from the port."

  Silver had actually visited Good Intentions at one point in his career, which was more than Commander Normandy had done-he had been in a surprising number of places. He could remember only one town there, but no doubt things changed over the years, even on Good Intentions.

  Naturally, Marut wanted every fighting ship that he could get, and now he had his heart set on the few making up the small, separate defensive fleet of the planet Good Intentions, what the people on Gee Eye called their Home Guard.

  Not that there was any prospect of his actually getting those. Harry Silver could have told the captain, and the commander did tell him, that the leaders of Good Intentions were not about to send their small flotilla off on a dangerous gamble in some remote and unknown place. And there seemed to be no way they could be compelled to change their minds.

  "Trouble is, we'd have to fight a battle with them to get any of their ships away from them."

  No one on the base was sure of how many private ships might ordinarily be based on Good Intentions, what type they were, or indeed, whether such craft existed. Records kept by the early warning array, which tracked all traffic in and out of the system, indicated that there could not be very many and that none had any fighting ability worth mentioning. But whatever the number, all of them seemed to have been driven elsewhere by their owners as soon they got wind that some kind of berserker emergency was shaping up. Certainly no parked hulls were visible in the latest long-range scans of that planet's lone spaceport, where normally two or three showed up.

  Staring out through the broad statglass window of the commander's office, Harry thought about how soon he might be able to get down there to Gee Eye. More and more, he was nagged by the urge to see if he could learn anything about Becky's last days. If he actually took part in this upcoming battle, or wild-goose chase, or whatever it turned out to be, and lived through it, and if he still had a ship to use when it was over, he'd give it a try.

  Once or twice, as this latest planning session continued, Silver had to be called back from some apparent daydream-the people and things in front of him tended from time to time to disappear, and there were moments when all he could see was a painfully positioned suit of armor, caught between masses of rock that Zeus himself couldn't have pried apart. And the only words he was able to hear clearly at this moment were purely in his mind, spoken in a voice that had never uttered a single word inside this room, and never would.

  "Are we boring you, Mr. Silver?"

  Harry looked at the man who'd said that, one of Marut's junior officers, who in response, blinked, sat up straighter in his seat, and closed his mouth. Commander Normandy said something calm and neutral, bringing the discussion back to business. Over the last day, she'd been getting in a lot of practice at doing that.

  Now several of the Space Force people were looking at Harry in a different way, not challengingly, but oddly. Probably, he thought, they were beginning to wonder if he was on some kind of drug. Let them wonder.

  What did the station's database have to say about the facilities and assets available on Gee Eye? Nothing that suggested a lot of help was likely to be forthcoming from there. According to the database, there were a few schools, a monastery, founded and then deserted by some now-vanished cult. A hospital or two, one of them some kind of facility run by the Council government.

  Meeting over, Harry went his own way again. Once he got back out to the Witch, he needed only to transmit a few simple orders to get his prospecting robot back onboard and tucked away into its locker. He supposed he could unlimber the Sniffer again, any time he wanted to, and send it back to that same hole in the rocks to pick up the little box, the special contraband that Becky had… well, that she must have had in her possession when she sent Harry that last message. That letter had been mailed on Good Intentions, and he had assumed it was about the last thing Becky did before boarding some kind of ship, likely her own, and heading out for parts unknown-intending one quick stop on Hyperborea before she left the system.

  But somehow he could no longer get excited about the contraband, which only yesterday had played such a big part in his future-what had looked like his future yesterday, today had only a tenuous existence. Right now he could no longer get very excited or worried about anything that might be going to happen to him tomorrow or the next day. There seemed to be only one thought that could still stir his interest: the idea of hitting someone, or something, very hard.

  Damn her! Damn her anyway, for getting herself killed like that!

  And there was one other vaguely interesting thing: Certain indirect clues, mostly having to do with the numbers
and types of people he encountered in the mess hall and the corridors, were causing Harry to suspect the presence on-base of some big, powerful, highly secret computers. No one ever talked in his presence about any such installation, but the people he saw, or many of them, had something of the look of computer operators.

  When he had mentioned his thoughts on the subject to the captain, Marut had dismissed them with the short comment that it was none of their business. They had no need to know.

  "Maybe you don't, Captain. I wonder if I do."

  SIX

  A few hours later, Harry was sitting in the cabin of the ship that he still thought of as his own, pondering imponderables and reading a list that the cabin's smaller holostage held up for him. The list bore a high security classification, but the commander had given it to him anyway. Compiled by Captain Marut, it gave the order of battle for the revised mission plan. Shorn of official form and jargon, the gist of it was something like this:

  • Item: One destroyer, whose only official name seemed to be a string of esoteric symbols-her crew had given their ship a kind of nickname that they used when they talked shop among themselves, but Harry wasn't sure he could pronounce the word, and he wasn't going to try. "The destroyer" would do. Marut's one surviving ship still showed extensive scars from the berserker ambush, but her captain was firm in claiming that she had been restored to full mechanical effectiveness. Six out of the original crew were in the base hospital. Nine spacers, a full third of her current shorthanded crew, were replacements, some of them survivors from the crew of the scrapped destroyer. There were still several positions open, and they were going to have to be filled somehow before going into combat.

  • Item: Two patrol craft, known prosaically as Number One and Number Two, borrowed from the base. These were smaller than destroyers, and less heavily armed and shielded. But they at least had the advantage of being operated by their regular crews, some of Commander Normandy's people. Adequately trained, though some of them had never been tested in a real fight.