As she left, his voice rose up behind her: "Innocent or guilty, I'm ready to fight berserkers, Commander. Is there a note, a comment, from Commodore Prinsep in that file? He'll tell you how well I perform."
Marut expressed his wish that at least one ship from Good Intentions would drop in at the base. "At best, we could commandeer the ship."
"I doubt they'll send a warship, they'll have them all out on patrol."
"Well, at least we might be able to send that homicidal maniac back where he belongs."
"Technically, they tell me, Havot's not a homicidal maniac."
"I've also heard that he's technically not a sadist. Tell that to his victims, they're just as badly off. I wonder how many of them there are, by the way."
"I don't know and I don't care-he's not going to add any of my people to the score. Yes, getting rid of Mr. Havot would be nice. But it's far more important to make sure that the other volunteers are going Jo work out well enough for us to use them."
So far, the performance of the other early volunteers in training was encouraging.
Finding himself almost immediately back in confinement after a brief taste of freedom was a far more serious blow to Havot's psyche than his attitude to the commander and the sergeant had revealed. He'd not been at all surprised, of course-the only surprise was that he'd been free as long as he had-but his reincarceration had hit him harder than he'd expected.
For a long time, in the hospital on Gee Eye, and for years before that, he had rather enjoyed it when people gave him that wary look. But in the past few months, it had started, more and more, to annoy him. Then, beginning when he'd been put aboard the ship to Hyperborea, all that had changed. It was obvious, from the attitude of the other draftees toward him, that none of them knew the first thing about his background. Nor had any member of the crew of the ship that brought him here seemed aware of his-special credentials. How glorious!
His renewed condition of freedom had been, of course, too good to last. Being locked up again had come as no surprise-yet still it had been a hard blow.
He wondered how many of his new potential comrades and shipmates had been told about his record, and exactly how much they had been told.
"Chow time."
Havot looked up, blinking mildly, at the sound of the cheerful voice. It was the sergeant, the same man who'd so capably taken him into custody, carrying a tray, accompanied by a wide-eyed spacer of low rank who, the sergeant said, was going to be Havot's caretaker from now on.
Both spacers seemed reasonably well-informed on the status and history of their prisoner. At least they knew what kind of hospital he'd been in, and why he'd been put there.
Dully, Havot studied the contents of the tray when the young man shoved it in through the slot in the wall. Well, no worse than he'd expected.
The sergeant had to hurry on about some other business, but before doing so, he gave his assistant what was obviously a final caution, so low-voiced that Havot could not make out a word.
In spite of everything, Havot coujd not resist a little boasting. "Did you know, Sergeant, that in the hospital, they… assigned me a certain roommate?"
"Oh?" Two heads turned in a wary response-naturally, neither of them could see what he was getting at. The sergeant said: "I don't quite see…"
"Forgive me, I'm not making myself clear." Havot gave his head a civilized little shake. Moving forward, he leaned on the statglass wall, putting his lips close to it as if in an effort to achieve a kind of intimacy. "Two of us who, in the view of the staff, presented special problems were assigned to the same room. Not by chance, I assure you. No, they really hoped that one of us at least would eliminate the other, thereby reducing the special problems by half." Havot stopped.
"And?"
The young man in the little cell raised an eyebrow. "Here I am." His voice was gentler than ever.
THIRTEEN
Today was the seventh day since the arrival of Harry Silver on the base. And it was also the day on which the new task force had to lift off if it was going to intercept Shiva at the scheduled time on Summerland.
On the morning of Harry's arrival, Commander Normandy had issued an order canceling several scheduled weekend passes. Four days ago, she had gone further. All time off was virtually eliminated, except for the minimum deemed necessary for rest and food. All of her people not actually on duty in the computer room, or working at other essential tasks, had been set to refitting pods, used couriers, and even lifeboats, as imitation berserkers, under the direction of Captain Marut and his lieutenant, or otherwise assisting at the practice maneuvers. Hour by hour, tension had grown, until now it was almost palpable.
Three days ago, the captain had urged her to order everyone on the base to set aside regular duties to help with the preparations for the sortie.
Commander Normandy had calmly and immediately assured him that that was not possible.
Marut was taken aback. "Commander, I don't know what the regular duties of most of your people are, but-"
"That's right, Captain, you don't. So you'll have to take my word for it that I must keep a minimum number of people-not less than twelve, probably fifteen-on a job that must have priority."
The captain blinked. "Priority even over the attack on Shiva?" He seemed unable to conceive of such a possibility.
Claire Normandy nodded. "Exactly."
"I don't understand. What could such a mission be?"
"Captain, I will not discuss it."
Marut couldn't understand, but he was going to have to live with it. The commander sat looking at him in steady silence. "Commander, I intend filing a written protest."
The base commander was neither surprised nor moved by hearing that; probably she had expected it. "That is your right, Captain. It doesn't change anything."
Harry had long ago ceased to pay much attention to the irregular traffic in robot couriers, coming to the base and leaving it again. He estimated the number at ten or twelve arrivals every standard day on average, and an equal number of departures. No one around him ever talked about what these busy vehicles might be carrying, but certain things were fairly obvious. Some of their cargo could of course be physical supplies-though that would be a damned inefficient way of shipping material. And if all the incoming couriers were laden with orders from headquarters, Normandy would surely be cracking up under the strain of trying to keep up with them, and she didn't give any sign of doing that.
No. The conclusion seemed inescapable that the burden of this substantial commerce was mainly immaterial. Vast amounts of information were being sent, from a variety of sources at interstellar distances, here to Hyperborea. On this base, some kind of information-processing took place, and when that had been accomplished, the results were shipped out to distant destinations. Beyond that, Harry wasn't trying to speculate. He had plenty of other things to worry about.
The hours of the last few day's had rushed by in a blur, most of them filled with planning, with frantic work to make an assortment of hardware look and act like something else, and with rehearsals. The latter were carried out mostly in the actual ships that would be used in the attack, but with control helmets connected in simulator mode. The ships stood motionless on the landing field, or hung in low orbit, while standard tactical computers worked the simulation. Only once did Harry get to take part in a real exercise in space. It was a hurried affair, lasting no more than half an hour, in which all the available armed launches, together with an odd assortment of even smaller craft, meant to be imitation berserkers, maneuvered to the far side of Hyperborea. There, in real time, scratching and banging their armor on real rocks, they practiced the landing operation that Marut hoped to be able to employ successfully at Summerland-there was no serious attempt to simulate enemy ground defenses, though everything would depend on the Solarians' ability to deceive them when the time came to do the real operation.
Harry's estimate of the chances of success plummeted, if possible, to an even lower level.
/> In endless debates, which seemed to Harry maddening exercises in futility, the leaders hashed over the possibilities. Harry was present during at least half of their discussions.
Whatever the layout of the berserker station on Summerland proved to be like, whatever its size, the basic unfriendliness of its design to human intruders could be taken for granted-forget about airlocks, or supplies of air and water. Any corridors or catwalks there would be of a size and shape to facilitate the movement of the enemy's service machines, most of them smaller than armored people. Possibly there would be no artificial gravity. Even worse, and more likely, there would be a field of simulated gravity that cut in only when necessary to protect relatively fragile machines from heavy acceleration. And the level of gravity maintained when that system was turned on would probably be vastly different from Earth-surface normal. Mere space suits did not come equipped with protective fields, and their occupants might well be mangled without their armor ever being pierced.
The possibility was raised of the enemy base containing a prison cell or two, possibly occupied by captive life-forms. There was no reason to believe that the majority of berserker installations were so equipped. A great many dramatic stories, and innumerable rumors, detailed the fate of berserkers' prisoners, but only a few of them were true. In real life, cases of a death machine holding prisoners were extremely rare, and when a berserker did take them, it had clear and specific reasons for doing so.
Marut was decisive. "We've got too much to do as it is. If there are any prisoners held on Summerland, we'll just have to ignore them-until our primary mission is taken care of."
The new plan of assault, as worked out by Normandy, Marut, and their aides, in consultation with Harry Silver, called for a landing to be made by units disguised as berserker machines-but still, if possible, without even being noticed-on the planetoid called Summerland.
Every time Harry had the chance, whenever his new colleagues were willing to listen to his comments on the developing plan, he let them have the plain truth as he saw it. And he was far from optimistic about the possibilities of success.
At one point, after listening to what seemed an hour of optimistic projections, Silver threw a holostage remote control crashing across the room and swore. "How the hell are we supposed to approach and land without being detected?" There would be some kind of early warning system, probably much like the one protecting Hyperborea. And if the attackers got through that, every square centimeter of the planetoid's surface would be monitored at least by sensors.
Marut looked at him as if he had just heard confirmation that the new lieutenant's sanity was suspect. "That's the whole purpose of our program of deception, Silver."
Once a foothold had been established on Summerland, assuming that could be done, the human attackers would work their way to a good point from which to strike at the enemy base's unliving heart.
The success of the plan worked out by Marut and his assistants depended heavily on how well the individual pilots assigned to miniships could each operate a swarm of them. These devices were in large part originally berserker metal, designed and put together in the base workshop to look like berserker utility machines. There were in all as many as a dozen of the little pods. Certain individual human pilots were going to have to control as many as three, or even four.
They had earnestly considered assigning Silver to that job, but in the end had decided that his proven skill as a combat pilot was too desperately needed. He would be in the pilot's seat on the Witch of Endor. Becky Sharp's somewhat lesser but still formidable talent would be put to work on the pods. People controlling those miniships would have to approximate routine berserker movements up until the last possible moment-and then maneuver and fight as they never had before. Not that they, would be carrying much of anything to fight with.
The more Harry thought about the plan, the less chance of success he was willing to allow it. The more ingenious new details Marut thought up, the crazier it sounded.
But Harry didn't want to withdraw from the planning sessions. If he had to go through with this, he wanted some idea of what was going on.
Marut's original plan had called for Havot, then considered a choice recruit, along with Marut himself and one or two others, the whole party shielded and armed with converted berserker hardware, to drop in their miniships from the scout or courier as it approached the berserker base from behind the far side of the rocky planetoid.
Havot being no longer available, someone else would have to take his part.
Once the landing party was on the berserker base, especially after it got inside, making its way from one point to another would almost certainly involve cutting or blasting a route through solid decks and bulkheads, not to mention fighting off its commensal machines-keeping in mind that the place must still appear as a functional berserker base, at least for half a minute or so in the interval between their own arrival in the system and that of Shiva with its presumed escort.
At that point, the intruders, or some of them, would be required to slip out of their Trojan hardware and move and fight in their own suits of space armor.
Relentlessly, the advancing numbers on the chronometer were bearing the combat crews toward the moment when they must board the inadequate ships of the new task force and lift off for Summerland. Somewhere, at some astronomical distance in space, though at no enormous gap in time, the thing called Shiva was in flight, no doubt escorted by sufficient units of mobile and aggressive power to sterilize and pulverize a planet.
Now, on the seventh day of Harry Silver's presence on the base, only a few hours remained before the scheduled liftoff for the attack on Summerland and Shiva. And Harry Silver was growing more and more thoroughly convinced, with every passing hour, that Marut's new plan of attack was completely harebrained. Trouble was, he didn't yet see a damned thing that he could do about it.
Still the only person who could stop the attack was Normandy. She could do it simply by pulling rank and refusing the newly reconstituted task force permission to lift off from her base. But she wasn't going to do that. Harry could understand her motives for allowing the plan to go forward, but he was increasingly sure that she was wrong.
The installation of the c-plus cannon aboard the Witch had been completed, and Harry's ship was certified as combat ready. Even the missing fairing had been replaced by a new piece, made in the machine shop. The thought crossed his mind that if he failed in combat, Marut didn't want him to have the faintest shadow of an excuse.
It might have been funny, if it wasn't tragic. To Harry, the whole plan was looking more and more suicidal. Maybe he'd felt a bit self-destructive when he signed up for it, but he sure as hell didn't now.
So far, he'd not aired his complaints in the presence of the lower-ranking Space Force people and the other volunteers. But they had eyes and ears and brains just as he did, and he could hear some of them grumbling too.
Julius had been given the brevet Space Force rank of captain-modest for an emperor, but he was going to be in command of his own ship, crewed by his own followers, and that was the only point that he had really insisted on. The captain/emperor was quite prepared, or said he was, to take the Galaxy into combat shorthanded if necessary. Even if he was the only live human on board. It was quite possible to do that, with even the largest carrier or battleship, but the vessel would have only a fraction of its potential effectiveness in combat.
When some of his followers objected, pleading with him to protect his glorious life at all costs, Julius haughtily accused them of wanting him to act the part of a coward.
At least one of them was then suitably penitent. Graciously, the emperor forgave him.
And he told his listeners that he had retreated far enough-his calm, thought Normandy, was that of the potential suicide. She had known one or two of that type rather well.
Some of the people who had remained loyal to Julius until now decided that they were going no farther. Then they resumed some relationship wi
th Becky, though her reasons for defecting were a little different from the others'.
Everything besides the looming battle had now become for Julius a mere distraction.
Harry got the impression that the man really didn't want to risk sabotaging the whole effort against Shiva through his own ineptitude, or that of his faithful followers. And Harry thought that what he really did want was perhaps not all that hard to figure out. The Emperor Julius wouldn't be the first failed leader in human history whose goal in entering battle was simply to achieve for himself a sufficiently glorious and dramatic end.
Of course, if the Solarians won the coming fight, and the emperor survived, that wouldn't be too bad either. One tested way to acquire dedicated followers was to launch a crusade.
FOURTEEN
Shortly after being locked up, the prisoner had put in a formal request to be allowed to communicate with a civilian lawyer down on Good Intentions. His appeal had not been denied so much as ignored. All his objections and questions would have to wait until Commander Normandy had time to consider them, and of course no one knew when that might be.
It seemed to Christopher Havot that his best chance to make a break for freedom would come when the sergeant and his helpers showed up-as they surely would sooner or later-to take him to the landing field, or to the hangar, and load him aboard ship to be transported back to Good Intentions. How good his chance of getting loose might be would absolutely depend on how the sergeant and his helpers went about their job, and Havot was worried that the same sergeant would be in charge. Of course a real chance to get away, clean out of the Hyperborean system, would be too much to expect. That would mean somehow getting aboard an interstellar ship and riding it somewhere else-realistically, far too much to hope for. Much more likely would be a lesser opportunity, which could still be highly satisfying. An unrestricted few minutes, or even no more than a few seconds-that could be time enough to pay back some of the people who ran the system that kept him from enjoying life to the full. Christopher Havot could leave his mark again.
Shiva in Steel Page 17