Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  Of all the people on the base, only a few were wearing armor, and getting suited was the first order of business for almost everyone still on the ground.

  Not all the people Harry saw were running to arm themselves, or to reach their battle stations. During the very first moments after this latest alarm had sounded, some seemed reluctant, for some reason, to take the signal at face value. Here and there, they grumbled at the annoyance. Things weren't supposed to develop this way. The damned buzzers and bells again-what was it this time? Another intrusion by a berserker scout? Maybe those crazy Home Guard people from Gee Eye, showing up where they were not supposed to be.

  When Harry reached the place where the little ships were trying to get space-borne, he could see that Claire Normandy's instincts had been correct and help was needed, at least with one or two of them. One relatively inexperienced pilot was having a problem with his helmet-it turned out that he only thought he was, but his ship was just as effectively immobilized. Harry crouched beside him, describing the right procedure, step by step, in a calm voice. In half a minute, the difficulty had been solved.

  Up until an hour ago, Marut had still been arguing that Harry shouldn't be allowed to lift off in his own ship. More than once the captain made the dire prediction that the Witch would head straight out and not come back.

  Almost immediately there were indications that this berserker incursion was rather more serious than the last one. A robot voice, speaking in the helmets of everyone still inside the base or on the field, informed them that the presence of the enemy in force, in-system, was now confirmed. Six to eight unidentified objects, moving in loose formation, had emerged from flightspace about two hours ago, out on the system's fringes. The projected flight paths converged on Hyperborea.

  A couple of minutes later, the number of eight bandits was confirmed.

  Each Solarian reacted in his or her own way to the realization that most of their planning and effort over the past few days had been utterly wasted-whatever the outcome of this defensive battle they were being forced to fight, they wouldn't be making any attack on Summerland.

  Commander Normandy's own battle station was in the computer room. An extra suit of personal armor was kept there for her convenience, and she was getting into it even while she took reports and issued orders, tuning up the big holostage that stood in the room's center, getting a picture of the immediate situation. Just as she was settling into her combat chair, some stray memory or association sent flashing through her mind the idea that she ought to consider ordering Christopher Havot released from his cell.

  As far as she knew, there were no standing orders regarding prisoners in a situation like this, which doubtless came up very rarely. What was to be done in a red alert, with people who for whatever reason happened to be locked in cells, was a matter that the writers of regulations had decided to leave up to the local commander's judgment. And so Commander Normandy needed only a couple of seconds to dismiss Havot from her thoughts. Her attention was going to be totally absorbed in more important matters, and she simply couldn't afford to take the time.

  Plunging into urgent business, Commander Normandy found that one of the first items on her list was seeing to it that all her spacecraft got off the ground.

  Meanwhile, Sadie the adjutant was at least as busy as any of the human defenders of the base, and thinking at least a hundred times as fast in those areas of decision making where a program had been granted competence.

  A certain item had been coded into the long and detailed list of the adjutant's duties: In the event of an attack, or any kind of alert, any human on the base who lacked a formally designated battle station had to be assigned one. If the subject was a patient in the hospital, then that became his or her mandated place. Sadie needed only a few microseconds to discover that the code said nothing specific about people in cells-and a quick check back showed that no one had been in either of the cells during any of the previous alerts.

  Precedent was lacking." Initiative was required.

  Sadie reached a quick decision. Meeting the berserker attack, any berserker attack, was all-important, and Sadie discarded from her computations all factors in the situation that she judged irrelevant to that. And bothering the human commander at a time like this was something to be done only in a grave emergency.

  As long as Havot was in a cell, or subject to any kind of confinement, a major part of his mind was perpetually engaged in scheming to get free. It didn't matter that prison had come to seem his natural state of being. He'd been locked up for so long that real freedom, when he had a chance to taste it, seemed somehow unnatural, which doubtless made it all the more attractive.

  Sadie spoke to him in her measured voice, unhurried and not quite human. She told Christopher Havot that as soon as she had given him his instructions, his cell door would open. His newly assigned battle station was in the computer room. She even told him how to reach it.

  The artificial voice also reminded spacer third class Havot where to go to equip himself with armor. He'd been assigned a suit, a locker, and a shoulder weapon when he arrived as a volunteer recruit, and suddenly these were his once again. All humans must be able to defend themselves against berserker attack.

  Havot, at the moment clothed in the standard coverall and light boots, listened, nodded, and calmly agreed to everything. He accepted almost without surprise the news that he was being turned loose. On some level of his mind, he'd actually been expecting something of the kind to happen.

  The moment after the door slid open, he was out and running. He did not need to delay for even a few seconds to formulate a plan. Instead, he immediately chose, as if by instinct, the corridor he wanted and sprinted down it, running a race in which few athletes could have overtaken him. He went in the direction he had to go to collect his assigned weapon and armor-the same way he would have chosen if he were" making a great effort to get into the miniship he'd begun to get acquainted with in his few days of training. It was near the place where the little ships waited to be launched.

  And now the eight ships of the enemy were in range, at close range, and all the heavy ground defenses of the rock called Hyperborea opened up at once. The effect was dazzling, jarring, almost frightening in itself. And the enemy of course responded.

  Watching the early minutes of the battle unfold upon her holostage, the commander was frightened, not only because berserkers were attacking, but because the ultimate terror was behaving in a way that made it still more terrible.

  Whether it was necessary or not, Commander Normandy felt the need to spell it out for someone: A hundred landers and boarding machines coming down were far more unsettling than a hundred missiles, because it meant that today the berserkers were not going to be content with mere destruction. Just blowing up the base and everyone in it was not their primary goal-instead, there must be things here-machines, documents, objects of some kind-that they were going to great lengths to capture intact.

  Most horribly, the death machines might have as their calculated goal the taking of certain human brains alive.

  Lieutenant Colonel Khodark, who had been listening attentively from his own station at a little distance, said: "One or more of the people who handle the decoding, that's who they want. They've learned something, somehow, about our spying, and they want to figure out how much we know."

  "The prisoners they took."

  "Yes. You know it's almost certain that they picked up some when they ambushed the task force."

  At that moment, when Claire Normandy became convinced of the enemy's objective, she was as frightened as she had ever been in her life.

  But then fear went up another notch when she began to suspect that Shiva might be in command of this assault.

  Havot, still running all-out for freedom, wondered if the artificial intelligence that had released him was now going to be monitoring his behavior. But he decided that the base must be under real attack and that under such conditions, even an A.I. system would be overlo
aded with other work.

  Today they seemed to have a different scent in the corridors. Havot couldn't identify it, but it was something he hadn't noticed while he was in his cell.

  Never mind. He knew what tomorrow's scent was going to be. What really tingled in Havot's nostrils as he ran was the smell of blood, though only in anticipation.

  Of course his real objective wasn't the computer room where the A.I. voice had told him to go, or even the miniship where he'd briefly trained; not now when a vastly more desirable goal might be within his reach. It was as if a part of his mind had been preparing, from the moment of his latest arrest, for just such a contingency as this.

  He'd always had a good sense of direction, and without hesitation, ignoring signs, he now chose the right branchings in the maze of corridors, eventually emerging somewhere on the flight deck, the uppermost level of the underground hangars.

  He opened his assigned locker, scrambled into the armored suit in less than half a minute-he'd gained familiarity with this kind of equipment long before he ever saw Hyperborea-and grabbed up the blunt-nosed carbine that lay in its rack waiting for him, a gift from the Space Force. He needed only a moment to slam the stock against the automatic clamp on the right shoulder of his suit, select the alpha triggering mode and then clip the sighting mechanism on the side of his helmet. Now he could aim and fire almost instantaneously while keeping both hands free.

  If he was being monitored, this was when they would try to stop him.

  But no one tried. Everyone was naturally too busy, with enemies even more frightful than Christopher Havot.

  His real objective was one of the comparatively large ships he'd earlier seen waiting out on the field. He didn't much care which one as long as it had the legs to get him out-system, away from prisons and berserkers both.

  If only they weren't all up and off the ground before he could get himself aboard one. But he wasn't going to let himself think about that possibility.

  In his couple of days of freedom on the base, he'd taken care to make sure of just how many ships, and what kind, were available on the field, and where they were parked. He didn't think there was much in the way of serious transport stored in the hangars.

  When Lieutenant Colonel Khodark received a report that Havot was free, from someone who'd seen the cell door standing open, the colonel wanted to send out an alarm and have the prisoner rearrested. "He's a homicidal maniac!" Khodark shouted to his boss.

  Normandy was listening with only half an ear. "Is that a fact? But he might be fighting on our side."

  "He might, yes. But-"

  The commander nodded toward her holostage, where Khodark's imaged head appeared only in a small compartment at the side. She said: "I've just seen a hundred guaranteed, fusion-powered, steel-bodied, homicidal maniacs hit the ground, and I know what they're going to do. I can't take the time to worry about one who's only flesh and blood."

  No doubt, thought Commander Normandy, her adjutant had done it. Evidently, if Sadie had invested any calculation in the matter at all, she had decided that under berserker attack, Havot was more likely to be helpful than harmful. Well, for all Claire knew, Sadie might be right.

  While that exchange was going on, Harry Silver was still shouting orders at people and machines, struggling to get the pods, the miniships, which were still waiting underground, brought quickly out and properly deployed for fast liftoff. All the neatly organized countdown schedule for getting things smoothly into space had just been badly scrambled.

  Havot had made an instinctive decision as to how best get control of the ship he wanted. If at all possible, he was just going to run boldly up to an open airlock and get aboard. But he didn't want to try to run across the whole field if he could help it. His gut feeling was that one running man would be too conspicuous out there, a prominent target for either side. He had first visualized getting aboard the emperor's ship, probably because he assumed that the opposition inside would be easier to overcome. Not that Havot had any particular urge to kill the emperor. In fact, in his brief contact with the man, he had been somewhat put off by an impression that Julius was altogether too eager to get killed.

  Commander Normandy would have been a good candidate for murder too, as the primary figure of authority. So would the sergeant who'd locked him up, or the spacer caretaker. But the fact that Normandy was also an attractive woman moved her up to the head of the list. As was generally the case with such people, Havot would have much preferred to seduce her first. Experience had confirmed that sometimes the most complete and satisfying success came with the most unlikely candidates. But now it seemed remote that she was ever going to see him or talk to him again.

  So he ran through the echoing underground, past the waiting miniships. The servo-powered joints in the suit's legs more than compensated for the burden of the outfit's extra weight-

  Havot was now running faster than before he put it on. The sensation of massive power that the suit provided engendered feelings of invincibility. He knew it was making him even more reckless than he naturally became in moments of crisis. At an intersection of corridors, he knocked an inoffensive service robot out of his way instead of going around it. There went a human who still lacked a suit, giving him plenty of room-too bad.

  He loved space armor!

  Now Havot began to take notice of the signs. The walls in all the corridors bore a number of them, glowing electrical symbols giving directions through the maze to every part of the base. He supposed that once the enemy had actually breached the walls, assuming they did, the signs might be turned off, or altered to provide misinformation. He shook his head in passing; if things got that bad, such tricks weren't going to help.

  Here and there, a helmeted head turned to look at Havot as he ran, but no one tried to interfere. No reason why they should. Other figures were running, too. People were intent on their own jobs, on getting to where they were supposed to be. He couldn't have remembered if he'd tried how to get to the pod that they'd assigned him to. His mind had blotted out information that he knew he wasn't going to use, and he no longer even remembered what its number was. All his effort was now focused on getting control of a real ship, some capable conveyance that would carry him away from the Hyperborean system, and its prisons and its battles, to some remote world, preferably at the other end of the Solarian domain, where no one had ever heard of Christopher Havot. And he'd noticed, during his brief spell of freedom on the base, that none of the real ships were in the hangar, but all out on the open field, where liftoff could be instantaneous.

  Now he came up from underground, through an airlock and out into the open, almost staggering in his first steps as he left the zone of artificial gravity that was maintained in the hangars. Harry's ship was still out on the field, and Havot blessed the instinct that had made him take time to get himself into armor before doing anything else.

  Still bounding toward his goal, under a steadily turning sky of stars and galaxies, he caught a flashing glimpse of a flying berserker. The thing was not very high, and it hurtled across the dark, star-shot sky almost like a missile, but not really fast enough for that, so that Havot knew it must be coming in to land. The size was hard to judge. All he could see of the object's shape was a span of metal legs, outstretched for landing like those of a falling cat. He thought he'd never seen one of exactly that design before, but he had not the least doubt of what it was.

  It had come into his field of vision and was gone again before he could even think of getting off a shot. As always, the rush of immediate danger made him feel intensely alive.

  Now fire from the attacking machines that were still space-borne was hitting the ground not far away. He wasn't sure what the weapons were, but they were doing damage. Flares, and a rumbling sound that traveled through the rock beneath his boots.

  He needn't have worried about running straight across the field. Around him, other running figures-legitimate pilots and crew members, every one of them far more experienced than Christo
pher Havot, but none with better instincts for this sort of thing-were trying to reach the ships almost as desperately as he was.

  Luck stayed with him on his long run-through the hangar levels and up and out of them, across part of the open field. At last he reached the side of the waiting ship, and after only a moment, located the airlock. The outer door was still standing open; they must be waiting, delaying liftoff, for one more assigned crew member.

  He had a vague idea that this must be Harry Silver's ship-not that the name of the owner mattered. He knew it wasn't the emperor's-Havot's keeper had gossiped to him in his cell about Julius and his ragtag band of followers. He had no idea of how large a crew was likely to be aboard. If there were a dozen armed people inside, trying to take it over could be the last move he'd ever make, but this was the chance he'd chosen, and he'd live with it or die. The worst thing a man could ever do was to hesitate.

  Havot had been afraid that he would get this far and then not have the necessary code to open the airlock on whatever ship he was approaching. But it seemed that luck was with him once again.

  Without hesitation, he bounded up into the lock chamber, which was just about big enough to have held two suited bodies like his own, and slammed his armored hand against the prominent control to start it cycling. Immediately, the outer door banged shut.

  Simultaneously, the inner door was opening. The device worked fast, like the locks on all military ships, relying on a tuning and tweaking of the onboard gravity field to retain most of the atmosphere in the lock chamber even when the outer door was open.

  The moment the gap between the inner door and its surrounding bulkhead widened enough to let him pass, Havot stepped through, weapon ready, trying to take in the unfamiliar cabin with a single glance. Somehow, the space appeared smaller, more cramped, than he had imagined it would be, looking at the outside of the ship.