Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  Then who in hell is in that buried suit? It took Silver a moment, conducting a mental review of Sniffer's holographs, to realize that for all he knew, it could be empty. The armor was hard and solid enough to hold its designed shape independently of the presence of a wearer, dead or alive. The ghastly corpse, so vividly imagined, took on a kind of quantum quasi-existence. Why would anyone go to such lengths to hide an empty suit? With a little effort, Harry could think of several reasons, especially in the case of armor so easily identifiable. The ghastly corpse, whose existence he had never doubted until now, vanished like a ghost at sunrise.

  Vaguely, Harry became aware of a couple of Space Force bystanders staring at him; probably they were worried that the drunken civilian was about to create a scene. But their reactions, or anyone's, counted for nothing. She was alive. She was alive! A constricting shell of frozen grief, already congealed and hard as armor, had been shattered in a moment. It was like a tree on his homeworld shedding a whole winter's worth of ice at once.

  He didn't know whether to openly recognize Becky or not, or what name to call her by if he did. Another woman had just called her Josephine. She'd been living a new life, a different life, for five years now, and Harry was afraid he might precipitate trouble. Fortunately, the base commander's ceremony was still in progress, with people droning little speeches at one other, postponing the need for him to do anything at all.

  One of the enlisted men standing near Harry evidently thought it was the sight of the emperor that had upset him, and edged a little closer. "Don't care for the imperial aristocracy?" the spacer asked in a jesting whisper.

  "Not much, no."

  Silver couldn't just stand there any longer. Somehow or other, not trusting himself to take a last look back at Becky, he got himself away from the reception.

  A couple of hours passed before Harry had any chance to talk with the woman he'd just seen resurrected. He would have preferred to have their first meeting in years someplace where they could hope no one was eavesdropping-maybe inside the Witch. But with all the techs clambering around, their chances of privacy there were pretty low.

  He'd sat in his room for a little while, thinking that she'd come looking for him as soon as she had a chance. But maybe she wouldn't. And maybe something he didn't know about was preventing her from doing so.

  Well, if she was trying to find him, and he wasn't in his room, she'd know, where to look next. In fact, it was just as likely that she'd look first in the other place.

  The lounge was fully open now, with the remnants of the welcoming ceremony still in evidence. Harry settled himself in a kind of booth at one side of the woodland glade, where he and whoever might join him would be able to look out directly, between virtual trunks and branches, at the all-but-empty landing field-they had before them the real thing, visible through statglass. The bar was fully open again and things in general had largely returned to normal. Whatever that might be. Windows were allowed to be windows once more.

  The landing field consisted basically of five or six hectares of flattened, graded rock and gravel with, at the moment, just three lonely ships in sight: Marut's destroyer, still being checked out and tightened up after the successful skirmish; Harry's Witch; and now the emperor's Galaxy. Of the three, Galaxy was parked closest to the hangar doors, and still connected to one of those portals by the evacuation tube. The two patrol boats were presumably somewhere out on reconnaissance.

  Blocking off one end of the vast unused hangar space underground, the maintenance people and their machines had created what was in effect a miniature shipyard. Up on the surface, Captain Marut's second destroyer was no longer recognizable as a ship, having been cannibalized and disassembled until only a few odd piles of parts remained visible.

  Following the course that Harry had predicted for her, Becky soon came looking for him in the bar. The very place where the. welcoming ceremony had been held. No one had yet bothered to take down the flags. Someone's idea of inspiring music was still working away at a muted volume, trying to decide whether it wanted to be a melody or not.

  At the moment, the two of them had the place to themselves; everyone else seemed to be busy with various ideas of important business.

  She'd already changed out of the clothing she'd been wearing as part of the emperor's retinue. She had on a Space Force coverall now. Somehow borrowed, probably; as yet, it bore no designation of unit or rank.

  "This was about the first place I tried," she explained innocently. If she hadn't succeeded here, of course she would have found out where his room was and tried that. "If you weren't in here, I would've tried the library."

  "Didn't know there was one. Real books?"

  "So I've heard."

  "I'll have to check it out. What'll you have?"

  "Scotch on the rocks sounds nice." Becky swirled into a seat with a graceful movement that somehow made her look for a moment as if she were wearing an evening gown.

  Summoning the robot waiter, Harry ordered the Scotch. When it had been set down on the black shiny surface of the table, he offered his companion a silent toast with his own raised glass.

  She choked a little on the stuff.

  Harry said: "I thought the emperor's people didn't believe in using alcohol."

  "They didn't-don't. As of today, I'm officially not one of the emperor's people anymore."

  "I see." She had never been much of a drinker, either, as Harry recalled; but. tossing one down was evidently a good way to signal to the world that her allegiance to Julius was behind her.

  "I just handed in my resignation," Becky offered.

  "Uh-huh."

  "They claim you can never do that, but I did it anyway. That was good," Becky concluded with a sigh, having on her second attempt disposed of half the glass. She tossed her head and ran her fingers through her hair, a gesture that he remembered.

  Harry observed: "When we were all in here earlier, I heard one of the women call you Josephine."

  "Oh, yeah. You have to take a new name when you join, and that's one of the names they like to give people. When I first joined up, there were four other Josephines-at least. Now I'm the… I was the last one."

  "What happened to the others?"

  "Bailed out before I did. Like a lot of other people."

  "No more Josephines. I see. Were all of you his wives?"

  "No. Not all of us. There were grades of wives and concubines. It's a long story."

  "Then I guess it can wait till some other day."

  Becky's hair was longer than Harry remembered it, and curly, as she now sat twisting it in one hand.

  So far, Harry hadn't so much as touched her, not even her hand, and he kept wondering what was going to happen when he did. He'd always wondered how her body that looked so frail sometimes could be so tough.

  "So," he said. "You want to talk about the Emperor Julius?"

  "I don't care. I can take him or leave him alone, as they say." Her fingers went to twisting her hair again.

  "You still have some good feelings about him?"

  "Sure. He's really not so bad-if you have to have an emperor. I just got pretty sick of having one."

  "Are they going to be mad at you for dropping out?"

  "Lots of others have, dropped out I mean. Some more are going to. But what're you doing here, Harry? You could've knocked me over with a virtual photon when I saw you."

  "I get around a lot."

  "I know that. Are you still… ?" She let it die there, assuming he would pick up on the meaning.

  He was about as sure as a man could be about anything that they weren't being overheard. Not right here and now. Commander Normandy didn't seem the one who would routinely spy on people. He said: "I found the stuff, Becky, right where you left it. My Sniffer came up with it yesterday." Then he thought, yesterday, can that be right? It seemed like a long and weary month ago.

  All she said was: "Oh."

  Harry relaxed a little; he'd been afraid she was going to pretend she did
n't know what he was talking about. He added: "I also found your dead body."

  That made Becky blink, but after blinking, she only stared at him blankly. He supposed he'd have to spell it out: "When I found the armored space suit you'd shoved down there"-now understanding flickered across her face, slowly followed by remorse-"I somehow got the idea that you were still inside it."

  "Oh, Harry!"

  "It looked to me like you'd got caught in some kind of a land shift while you were crawling around studying the minerals, or whatever you were doing, and there you'd been stuck for the past five years. Getting more and more impatient, waiting for me to come help you out." He paused. "There wasn't anybody in it, was there?"

  "No. Oh, Harry, I'm sorry! I knew that damn fancy suit had been seen, and I didn't want them tying it to me. I just wanted to put it somewhere where no one was ever going to find it-let alone you. How'd you ever happen to be down there?"

  The music kept on dribbling and babbling in the background. He felt like telling the barkeep to shut it up, but maybe silence in the background would be worse. The ceiling's visual attributes were being muted now, in some kind of random progression of effects, changes so gradual it might not be noticed that they were happening; the high arches looked more like the inside of a Gothic church than a grove of trees.

  Meanwhile, out on the big blank space of the real landing field, visible in sunlight at the moment, one small maintenance robot was moving, making everything else look all the more intensely motionless, so that the scene looked like a painting. He shrugged. "The Sniffer told me there was something else down there, something I was looking for. So far, no one knows that I found anything."

  Becky hesitated just long enough to be. convincing. "Oh, you mean the stuff in the box. I wanted to ditch that, too. That would have been easy, but… ever try to get rid of a suit of space armor, Harry?"

  "Can't say I have."

  "Just making a hole in it-just making a dent, for God's sake-would take a bigger weapon than I've ever carried. Cutting it up into little pieces would take a lifetime, and then you'd still have all the pieces to dispose of somehow."

  "You could have just sent the armor drifting off into space."

  "I thought of that. But they're pretty good now at looking for that kind of thing."

  He sipped his drink. He wasn't going to ask who was pretty good, or who would be combing space in the vicinity for that particular suit, or why. He suspected it would most likely be some kind of Kermandie agents. Maybe later on they would discuss all that.

  Becky was going on:"-so, I got myself a new suit on Gee Eye, and then I came back here and shoved everything I wanted to hide down into a cranny in the rock, where I thought no one was ever going to look. How was I to know that you'd come poking around?" Now she sounded almost offended.

  "That's all right. I didn't know myself until a month or two ago that I was going to be here."

  "Were you really sore about not getting the stuff, Harry? When I never arranged to hand it over?"

  "I managed."

  "I'm sorry. I suppose you missed out on a lot of money. At the time, I just felt scared, and lost, and I wanted to get away from all that. And I guess I thought I was doing you a favor, too, by getting rid of the stuff, because it's dangerous. But you've got it now, and you want it, so that's good. I'm glad. But maybe it won't even be worth anything, after all this time."

  "I don't know if it will or not. I'll have to check it out when I get a chance. By the way, what happened to your ship?"

  "That's another long story. I had to turn it over to the… to Julius and his group when I finally joined. Part of the setup is, you bring them all your property."

  "I bet."

  "So the ship was communal property for about a year, just sitting on what passes for a ramp, at what passes for the emperor's private spaceport. It was never used. Everyone was afraid to go near it without being told to do so-then someone ripped it off. Lifted off one day and was never seen again."

  Harry nodded. Now finally the lounge music had shifted to something that he was able to put up with. Somewhere in the room, a limited robot intelligence had finally apprehended that the imperial welcoming ceremony was over.

  Becky couldn't seem to stop apologizing. She slid a little closer on the padded bench. "When we were partners, it got to be like I just couldn't take it anymore, the way my life was going-not that it was your fault, Harry."

  "I didn't suppose it was."

  "I looked at the stuff, and I looked at everything I had been doing, and I thought I just couldn't live that way any longer. I wanted some peace. So I quit. I'm sorry."

  "I wish you'd stop telling me how sorry you are. There must be something else we can talk about. How's your love life? Rotten, I hope."

  "Sure, Harry."

  "And so, after you ditched everything that tied you to your old life, in an effort to find some peace and quiet, you stayed on Good Intentions, gave away your spaceship, and became Josephine and took up with that lunatic."

  Becky shrugged her narrow shoulders and looked sad. Ever since he'd seen her in the doorway, he'd been fighting down an urge to take her in his arms. Whatever her reaction to that might be, it would be sure to bring on complications neither of them needed at the moment.

  Instead, Silver asked: "What're you going to do now? Assuming we can get all this other business settled." He gestured vaguely toward the ceiling, as if there just might happen to be some berserkers lurking in that direction. In answer to her questioning look, he added: "Impending big shoot-out with the bad machinery."

  "It looks bad this time, doesn't it? Whenever they call for volunteers, watch out. That's what my daddy always used to warn me. I don't know anything about what's going on. Except that I couldn't stay on that damned planet any longer, even if I had to volunteer for a war to get away."

  "You couldn't just walk out on Julius? They kept you confined with lock and key?"

  "No. No, they didn't do that. I could've put my suit on and walked over to the other town. Either of the other towns, but they were both getting tired of taking care of more and more defectors, and I would've still been on Gee Eye. Gods and spirits, Harry, I had no idea you'd be here!"

  "How could you have?" He started to take a drink, then set down the glass untasted. "It looks bad, all right. We're going to lift off in a couple of days and go out and fight a battle."

  Something about his tone of voice made Becky fall silent for a while. Then finally she came up with: "Then maybe at least I won't have to worry about what to do next."

  Now it was Harry who found he was unable to let the past alone. After a while, he said: "So you gave up on me, just to get tied up with this Napoleon? He's a loser, if I ever saw one."

  She was puzzled. "Na-po-lee-who?"

  "Nevermind."

  "That's not his name. His name's-"

  "The Emperor Julius, yeah, I know. I also can tell that he's a loser, whatever name he uses."

  Slowly, Becky nodded. "But he wasn't always. Five years ago, I didn't think he was a loser."

  Maybe you thought I was. He didn't say that aloud. Maybe you were right.

  After a while, Becky said: "Commander Normandy says she's sending most of the people who came on the emperor's ship right back to Gee Eye-they might already be on their way."

  "They will be, as soon as she decides which kind of ship she can best spare to carry them. Probably a couple of launches. But not you, lady. If you don't volunteer to fight, she'll see to it you're drafted into this war and you won't be sent back anywhere. Your record as a damned good pilot is right there in the database for everyone to see, and at the moment, that's just about the only thing that the commander notices about anybody. That and combat experience, which you also have."

  "Are you drafted too, Harry?"

  "Sure. Just haven't got my uniform yet. They said they weren't sure they had a helmet big enough for my head."

  Becky turned to look toward the landing field, which lay before them u
tterly lifeless and awesomely empty in the amber glow of the dwarf that wasn't quite massive enough to be a real sun. Not even the one little robot was moving now. "You said we're going out and fight a battle? When will our ships get here? I didn't see any in the hangars."

  Harry took another drink.

  ELEVEN

  On returning to her office, the commander found waiting for her a small pile of communications that had arrived within the hour, carried to Hyperborea on a crewless interstellar courier that had been delayed many days in flight. There was nothing very odd in this, as such delays, caused by natural events, were fairly common. Most of the messages would not be decoded on base, but simply forwarded to their respective destinations.

  One note, however, was addressed to her, and so had been duly decoded. It was a query from certain authorities in Omicron Sector, dispatched before the final evacuation and fall of all those worlds. What it amounted to was a terse query: Had anybody in the Hyperborean system seen the fugitive Harry Silver? He was wanted in Omicron Sector on several charges, one smuggling, others unspecified.

  Note in hand, Claire sat thinking, fingers drumming on the edge of her holostage display. Almost a standard month had passed since this query was dispatched, and by now, the people who had wanted Harry Silver back in Omicron for legal reasons were very likely dead, or if very lucky, were refugees like Harry. Possibly they would eventually set up some kind of government in exile, or whatever the right term was, but right now, they had bigger things to worry about. She certainly did.

  Commander Normandy put the decoded message away in her private drawer. She'd deal with it later, if she were forced to do so.

  After thinking for a moment, she called up the adjutant. "Sadie, was it you who decoded the query regarding Lieutenant-I mean, Mr. Silver?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Say nothing about it to anyone but me." Marut would be certain to make a considerable fuss.

  "Yes, ma'am." One of Sadie's strong points was that she could be dependably closemouthed.

  Turning in her chair, looking out her office window, Commander Normandy could see that one of the launches was lifting off, taking a load of cultists, some of them unhappy but all still obedient to the emperor their master, on the trip of several hours back to Gee Eye. A number of trips would be necessary to remove all who were going.