More than a year had passed since he'd killed anyone, any one at all, and a certain need had been building up, and now suddenly he recognized the craving for what it was.
Displays assured him that the cabin he had entered was fully pressurized, but the two human figures in front of him were completely buttoned up in armor, even to their wired crew helmets. Both were intent on their jobs, their backs to the man who had just entered-no doubt they were assuming that he was someone else.
Between them stood on its short, thick pedestal an empty chair, a prominently unoccupied position. Havot quickly assumed that this would be the pilot's. A third control helmet rested there on its stalk of flexible cable, awaiting its user.
An instant later, one of the armored figures turned to confront the newcomer. The other was still facing away from Havot, evidently continuing to assume that the person who'd just entered was the one they had been waiting for.
Without a moment's hesitation, Havot shot down the first human figure that got in his way. The suited body, back turned to Havot, was lifted by the jolt, knocked spinning in midair to crash against a bulkhead amid big shards of shredded armor. What a hit-this gun was meant to kill berserkers, after all.
He'd taken great care not to miss. He didn't want to shoot a hole right through the inner hull, doing some kind of damage that would keep him on the ground-and it was almost a sure bet that his weapon as he held it now had not been turned to any particular reflective coating.
The second spacer he shot was standing up and had spun around at the sound of the first concentrated blast. This shot, at point-blank range, opened up the armor frontally and knocked the suited figure heels over head, sending it crashing into a bulkhead and falling to lie in an inert heap.
As easily as that, the ship was his. And, as far as Havot could tell, all ready to be launched. How the battle was ultimately going to come out was too remote and abstract a question for him to worry about-fighting a battle would be fun, but getting clean away in a nice ship would be infinitely more fun.
Havot hurled himself into the central chair. Somehow, that seemed to him the most likely place from which to get the ship hurtling up into space.
Now. Close the airlock-there was a manual control for that, he'd seen it worked on other ships-and get going. Later, if he got away from Hyperborea alive, there would be time enough to worry about astrogation. All these ships had good autopilots. Right now, he had to somehow, anyhow, get up into space and get going.
He thought of dragging the bodies out of the ship, but that would take too much time. Once he was well under way, he'd find a means of dumping them out into space.
Briefly, the idea crossed his mind that he ought to look into the next compartment to see if there was anyone in there. But every instinct urged him not to delay for that, not even a few seconds.
Now he was loosening the helm of his suit, lifting it off. Then he reached out to the pilot's headgear and plucked it from its stalk.
When Havot put on the activated helmet, the world around him changed abruptly. He'd more or less expected that-but not such a violent and extensive transformation as he got.
He observed the strange symbol representing the cannon, amid a bewildering array of other symbols, but paid it little attention. This display was far more complicated than the one he'd started to train on, and included a lot of things Havot didn't understand. For a moment, he came near wondering whether he ought to consider giving up.
He was certain that there ought to be an autopilot system here, somewhere, but he wasn't going to take the time right now to figure that out.
Abruptly, a host of new connections was completed, through inductance, between the synapses of his brain and the waiting, receptive hardware in the helmet. Hardware was a very misleading word for devices of almost organic subtlety. He nearly cried out as the world swirled crazily around him. Somehow, this experience was vastly, disconcertingly, different from what had happened in rehearsal. Of course, that had been only a very elementary kind of primary-school interface. Everything in this display was shudderingly faster and more complicated. Still, he thought the outline of what he had to do was plain enough. Going this way would have to mean going up…
His gauntleted fingers were crushing the chair arms, and his body stiffened. There seemed to be nothing to prevent him from actually launching into space. And in fact, now here he went-he was actually getting the ship off the ground.
This was it. This was going to work.
Somehow the helmet and its associated hardware had conjured up for him the realistic image of a knife, the long blade saw-toothed and stained with the good red stuff. The picture was distracting, coming and going amid the myriad other icons the pilot was supposed to watch, and he kept wanting to get the smooth wooden handle of the weapon in his grip.
Never mind that now. Concentrate. Concentrate! The drive was already on, working, and he was space-borne. Or almost. All he had to do was put it into gear, so to speak.
Like this?
Suddenly, the ship lurched under him. Artificial gravity kept him from feeling the movement, but through the helmet he could see its violence. His mind trailing raw and gory visions that only he could see, like clouds of smoke or mists of blood, Havot managed to achieve liftoff. Not that he had a clue to where he was going. Abruptly it seemed to him that what was turning not only the knife blade red, but the whole world, was his own blood, welling out of all the orifices on his head. He screamed in horror, in terror. Only seconds after liftoff, the drive stuttered, and the ship, wildly out of control, was carrying him helplessly he knew not where.
SIXTEEN
One of the top priorities in base defense was always to get every ship capable of movement up off the field and out into space as rapidly as possible. Whether or not a vessel could fight effectively, it made a harder target, and presented the enemy with greater problems, in space than it did sitting on the ground.
Today the distant early warning array, englobing the whole solar system, had functioned almost perfectly, even if its human masters, worn by their preparations for a different kind of battle, had been just slightly laggard in reacting. By the time any berserker was near enough to strike, the machines of close-in defense were ready, the whole planetoid already shivering with the long-stored energies now being mobilized.
Several of the smallest craft intended for use in the raid on Summerland, the imitation berserkers, were already up in low orbit when the alarm sounded. Some of the defenders nursed hopes that their presence would confuse and delay the oncoming attackers, but if that had happened, the effect lasted for no more than a couple of seconds.
Captain Marut, at the first sound of the alarm, cursed in anger and ran for his ship. His immediate reaction was one of instant rage: How dare the damned machines nullify all his ingenious plans?
But even as his anger flared, he realized that no one with much military experience ought to be surprised at such a turn of events. It crossed his mind to consider how much of the whole war was nothing but sheer madness, let humans and their enemies make plans as precisely as they liked.
Marut's destroyer, with himself and all the essential members of his reconstituted crew onboard, had already lifted off. They were clear of the field even before Normandy had got herself established in her proper battle station in the computer room.
And, to the surprise of many, the emperor's ship was next off the ground, her crew evidently moving with the speed of fanatics. Commander Normandy, only a couple of minutes after reaching her battle station in the computer room, was pleasantly startled to observe the departure of the Galaxy, accelerating strongly upward from the field.
Actually, in terms of minutes and seconds elapsed, the emperor and his crew hadn't been all that fast. The only reason they were second off was that something must be delaying the Witch of Endor. Communications with the Witch were also out at the moment, a situation not surprising in the flare of electronic battle noise.
Now most of the remai
ning smaller craft were lifting off. Sadie the adjutant, in her unshakable machine voice, was calling out a litany of names and numbers.
For some reason, the Witch needed a couple of additional minutes to get going, and once the commander was on the verge of making a concentrated effort to call the pilot to see what was going on. But the delay, whatever its cause, turned out not to be critical, for there she went at last, apparently still unscathed, though her movement seemed a bit erratic. Evidently the enemy this time had some objective more important than smashing up Solarian spacecraft.
Relieved that at least one possible catastrophe, the loss of ships on the ground, had been avoided, Claire Normandy turned her attention to other problems.
One or two of the smaller craft were still stuck on the ground. Watching the difficulties attending a simple scramble, the commander thought the enemy might have unwittingly done her people and Marut's a favor by preempting the planned Solarian attack. Suddenly it seemed to her that Harry Silver had been right about that; there would have been no way to escape disaster.
Now and then Commander Normandy glanced at the huge computers mounted immediately before her, just beyond the conference-sized holostage on which a model of the battle was struggling to take shape. Then she turned her head to look at some of the operators who were still engaged with the computers in their decoding work. They were ignoring the battle outside to the best of their ability, and they would have to continue to do so as long as possible. Until the fighting engulfed this very room.
For the hundredth time, the commander wished that there could be some way to divert the fantastic computer power before her from its usual task, to the immediate needs of base defense. But there was none-none that could be implemented now.
Around her, the solid rock that encased the computer room was shaking, jarring with the impact of berserker missiles nearby, rumbling with the thunderous response of her own automated defenses. Nothing had yet touched or seriously disturbed her precious computers-they, along with several meters' thickness of the surrounding rock, were held nearly motionless by powerful protective fields.
Distracted by other matters, she didn't notice, until Sadie called her attention to the fact, that the Witch was back on the ground, if not exactly on the landing field, less than a minute after having lifted off.
Harry Silver was still struggling with the problems that a group of inexperienced pilots were bound to have in getting their launches and little shuttles up and off the ground. The major difficulty involved the unfamiliar control helmets.
It needed only one person in a panic to screw things up, and here there seemed to be at least two or three.
"Never mind that!" Harry spouted profane obscenity in exotic languages. "Get up! Get these ships off the ground!"
Harry swore at the incompetent ones, at those who were suddenly paralyzed with terror, and finally had to drag out of a miniship's cockpit one would-be pilot who was thus immobilized. He shoved the man aside so that he went staggering and bouncing in the low gravity. Years ago, experience had taught Harry that it was futile to try to punch out somebody who was wearing a helmet and full body armor, even for a puncher who was similarly equipped.
Among the group having problems was Karl Enomoto, who'd been assigned to a two-seater launch. Looking and sounding strained, though far from panicked, Enomoto announced that he'd had to abort his liftoff due to a malfunctioning drive. "I just couldn't get the bloody thing to work."
"With all the bloody tinkering that's been going on," Harry growled back, "I'm not surprised."
Then, at last, people and machines were once more flowing up into space, and Silver was suddenly free to run for his own ship. He hadn't been timing the delay, but now he realized that it had probably cost him no more than a couple of minutes; there was still a chance that he could reach the Witch before Becky and whoever else had got aboard gave up on him and lifted off.
Enomoto stuck with him as he ran. Well, having one more aboard wouldn't do any harm, and Harry didn't know where else to tell the man to go.
As Silver ran, he tried to call ahead to his ship on his suit radio to tell them he'd be there in a few more seconds, but getting any signal through the flaring battle noise and the berserker jamming was hopeless at the moment.
Scrambling as fast as he could move, Silver had run only a short distance when he reached a position from which he ought to have been able to observe the Witch directly. He saw what he had half-feared to see, that she was gone, and felt no great surprise, only a pang of mingled relief and disappointment. He'd simply been held up too long, and Becky and whoever else had scrambled aboard had taken her up.
What might be happening to Silver's woman and his ship out there in the space battle was his next concern. He had to assume they were both going to be all right. But Harry's confidence was shaken when at last he did catch sight of his ship. The Witch was at extreme low altitude and maneuvering in a peculiar way.
Just standing here and watching wasn't going to accomplish anything. What was he going to do now?
The hectares of landing field that stretched in front of him were now totally devoid of anything that could get off the ground. Marut's one functional destroyer was no longer to be seen, and neither was the emperor's ship. That, of course, was as it should be.
There were already missile craters on the landing surface-only the powerful damping field of the defenses had prevented the whole thing from being blown away-and Harry realized that had his ship been a minute later in lifting off, she might well have been blown to rubble.
The ominous pencil shapes of several enemy missiles just lay there unexploded in the rock, near the spot where the Witch had been, each another demonstration of the feats of local space-warping achieved by the defense.
It came as no surprise, but was still an ugly shock, to see berserker landers on their way down. Harry caught sight of one about to land, spreading long legs like a giraffe.
Behind and above it hurtled half a dozen others of various types, including rough likenesses of the human form.
Several times Harry was on the brink of taking a shot at the enemy. But he refrained as the chance of doing serious damage to such moving targets with only a shoulder weapon seemed wastefully small.
Running around out on the open field would make no sense, so Harry used the airlock in a nearby kiosk, and the stairs inside, to get down into hangar space. It was an unlikely chance, but possibly another ship of some kind was still available in some corner of the hangar, or behind one of the revetments on the field. He was a pilot, and in time of crisis, every instinct screamed that he wanted to be up off the ground in something.
Harry reversed the direction of his run, moving the few necessary steps to get back to the place where he'd been struggling to get the launches space-borne. Karl was sticking with him. One miniship, the one that had been giving Enomoto trouble with its drive, still had not been launched.
Harry bumped open the hatch again and wedged his armored body into the front seat. Enomoto, evidently determined not to be left behind, climbed into the rear. "Need a gunner? I'm good at that."
"Hang on, then. I'm gonna try."
Harry slammed the control helmet on his head, feeling the gentle, carefully padded physical contact-and drew a deep breath, like a man who had suddenly come fully alive. The next thing to deal with was getting launched.
Harry's regular space armor had a pilot's helmet built in, so he only needed to connect an umbilical cord. Now he could see what had held up Enomoto-there was some tangle in the thoughtware, and it took Harry only a couple of seconds to think it clear. In the next moment, they were off the ground.
The ship that Harry was now driving into space possessed only light armament. Of course it was a lot smaller than the Witch, no more than ten to twelve meters long, and narrow, little more than three meters wide. The launch carried two to four short-range missiles and a beam, projector of modest energy. There was not much hope that any of this would work against la
rge enemy machines, but it might be possible to do something really effective against the swarming landers.
Some cosmetic alterations had been made in the launch to try to make it pass as a berserker, if only briefly. Should the enemy be confused, even momentarily, so much the better-but Harry wasn't going to count on it.
Immediately the helmet gave him, in the form of visible icons, a complete inventory of the weapons systems aboard, as well as the available power and the current status of as many systems as he wanted to try to deal with.
Right now, he only wanted a minimum-let the automated systems manage the rest.
Harry had been relieved to discover that the thoughtware on the launch was indeed of an advanced type, much like that aboard his own ship, for use only by skilled pilots.
As he activated the controls, the world around him underwent a marvelous transformation in his perception. Stylized, vivid, very complex and colorful. Simulated audio came through, as well as video, giving him a shadowy awareness of the presence of Enomoto in the rear seat. Experience rendered as clear as crystal a display that would have overwhelmed and bewildered a neophyte.
The little world of rock that had fallen away so rapidly below him now appeared as a mass of stylized, grayish lumps. The two suns that he might normally have seen, bright white and dull brown, had been rendered invisible, being only distractions to the business at hand.
An act of will shifted the scale of the presentation in discrete jumps or, at the operator's choice, in a smooth flow of changing sizes. He perceived the berserker ships or landers, by his own preference, as slugs or insects, furnace-red outlines surrounding masses that were the empty color of the night between the stars. The few odd Solaria ships that he could see were distinct small shapes in bright pastels, a somewhat different hue for each, nothing like red among them.
Shiva in Steel Page 20