Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  Harry Silver had understood for a long time that the shapes and colors of the world, as he perceived it through his helmet, were produced as much by his own brain as by the external hardware. Thus his pilot's world was inevitably going to be marked by events in his own mind below the conscious level.

  He guided the launch, controlled its speed, by another effortless act of will. The helmet and its hardware had become transparent to his purpose.

  Here, logic and meaning flowed out of complexity, as from a page of printed letters.

  The pilot's helmet left Harry's eyes uncovered, his head free to turn, to see and hear things in the tiny cabin around him at the same time as the helmet's augmented vision and hearing-bypassing eye and ear to connect directly with nerves and brain-brought him a clear and marvelous perception of the world outside.

  And now the helmet, and the subtle devices to which it was connected, provided him with vastly augmented senses with which to look for, among other things, his own ship.

  As Harry lifted off, swearing under his breath, he felt a trifle cramped, engulfed in the vague physical discomfort he usually experienced in space. But all systems were working, the artificial gravity cushioning him and his shipmate against all the gees of acceleration that he poured on. He'd really wanted to do whatever fighting was necessary in his own ship, and not the least of his reasons was the c-plus cannon the techs had just finished putting in it.

  In a matter of a few seconds, piling on acceleration cushioned by onboard artificial gravity, he got his miniship up to an altitude of almost a hundred kilometers, enough to obtain a minimal amount of maneuvering room.

  Now the launch was well up in space, and still, against all Harry's expectations, nothing was attacking it. Either the enemy's attention was focused elsewhere, or the attempt at berserker disguise was more successful than he'd dared to hope.

  And now suddenly, unexpectedly, Harry caught sight of the Witch again, at a distance of a few score kilometers. He needed no augmented senses to see that she was in trouble, jerking and reeling drunkenly in flight. In another moment, she had vanished around the curve of the planetoid's near horizon.

  "What the hell is going on?" demanded an anguished Harry Silver of the world.

  A moment later, he was distracted by an urgent communication from someone on the ground.

  "Armed Launch Four, who is in command aboard?"

  "I am, get off my back."

  "Lieutenant Silver?" It was the commander's voice. "That is not your assigned ship!"

  "It is now, dammit!"

  Enomoto, in the rear seat, was wisely staying silent, concentrating on his armament, which so far, he'd had no need to use.

  At least one of the space-borne berserkers took a passing interest in the launch. So much for any hope of being successfully disguised.

  Whereupon Harry, and his frightened and marveling shipmate, spent the next minute or two engaged in furious combat in the near vicinity of the planetoid. The onboard computer of the launch engaged in a few seconds of thrust-and-parry with its counterpart aboard the nearest death machine as Harry's lethargic human synapses, in their relatively glacial slowness, added a human-Solarian flavor to the output, tinting and toning everything, like pedals on an organ.

  That clash, that small footnote to the battle, was over before either human occupant of the launch had consciously realized that it had started.

  It was the kind of thing, Harry knew, that was likely to bring on nightmares later. If only he was allowed to live long enough to enjoy another nightmare-

  In the shielded compartment just behind the control cabin, banks of hydrogen power lamps, all currently tuned for maximum output, flared fiercely with the flames of fusion.

  The image was momentarily converted into that of lancing weaponry. First a beam, then a missile, rapidly followed by the beam again.

  "Get the bastard!"

  "-got him!" The gunner Enomoto, combat veteran that he was, yipped and howled with elation.

  Harry wasn't at all sure of the claimed kill. But at least they had inflicted some damage, and had themselves survived.

  Then, at last, on the bare-bones display that was the best this wretched excuse for a combat ship could provide, Harry again picked out the familiar code symbol of his own ship, returning from around the curve of the horizon, looping back, reappearing in the same place that it had disappeared, and still maneuvering drunkenly.

  Thank all the gods the Witch hadn't been vaporized or wrecked! But Becky, in the pilot's seat, wouldn't be mistreating her this way. Something had gone seriously wrong.

  Harry was raging now, swearing a blue streak against the fate that seemed to have sent Becky into some deep trouble and left him with a poor substitute for his own ship.

  And he couldn't keep from fretting about the new c-plus cannon that the commander had taken such pains to have installed on his ship. Harry hoped to hell someone was getting some good use out of that. Maybe, he thought, someone aboard the Witch had tried to use the weapon and it had backfired somehow, which the c-plus was prone to do. That could explain his ship's bizarre behavior.

  He couldn't figure out what might be troubling his woman and his spacecraft, but at the moment, all his energy was concentrated on simply keeping himself alive.

  And his groaning, yelping shipmate, too. Both of them, along with the poor excuse for a ship that they were stuck with, were buffeted around severely; either they would make it or they wouldn't. What worried Harry, while he waited to find out, was that the enemy seemed to be putting out a swarm of landers.

  Down on the ground, Commander Normandy, who ten minutes earlier had been almost in despair, was finding some grounds for hope. In general, there were certain indications, clearly visible to her in her combat control center, that the enemy was finding the ground defenses uncomfortably, perhaps unexpectedly, strong-great missile launchers and beam projectors that pounded the stuffing out of most of Shiva's tough escort machines.

  A haze of dust and small parts swirled and drifted in low gravity.

  Space in the near vicinity of the planetoid, out to about five hundred kilometers, was now almost totally clear of berserkers; some of them must have pulled back a little, out of close range of the ground defense-but it looked more and more like most of them had gone right down on the ground.

  There was still one, though. When Silver looked for it, his helmet showed it clearly, up above. Right there, streaking past in a low orbit. Confusing the ground defenses, dodging everything they threw at it, changing its orbit rapidly in a tactic known as quantum jumping, after the supposedly analogous behavior of certain subatomic particles. Harry certainly wasn't going after anything that size, not with this peashooter he was driving now. He'd leave that to the emperor, if Julius wanted to die a glorious death.

  But this battle was going to be won or lost right down on the surface of Hyperborea. The more Silver saw of the enemy landing machines, especially the ominous number of them-there had to be something over a hundred-the worse he felt about the Solarian chances. For once, the berserkers weren't content to strive for the pure annihilation of humanity and all its works. All those landers had to mean that the enemy was making a great effort to capture the base, or some important part of it, intact. And Harry had a horrible feeling that they knew exactly which part was so important to them that they were willing to make almost any sacrifice to get at it. They hadn't seen that part yet, anymore than Harry had, but like him, they had learned about the computers. From prisoners, or through sheer deduction, they knew something about the true work of this base, enough to convince them of the necessity of finding out the rest.

  Silver threw the launch into the defense against the landers as best he could, though it was practically impossible to coordinate the puny efforts of the launch with those of anyone else. He aimed at the Crawling, darting enemy machines, sending his agile craft screaming over the enemy units that were scrambling on the ground as he strafed them.

  Other Solarian ship
s space-borne in the vicinity were trying to join in as well. Marut's destroyer was nowhere to be seen. Harry couldn't spot the Galaxy either, and was fleetingly curious as to what might have happened to the emperor. There remained the two patrol craft and a handful of even smaller units like the one that he was in. He thought he caught a glimpse of one of them in his helmet display, but he couldn't be sure.

  It was at this point that Harry picked up part of a communication from Marut, intended for the base, the gist of which seemed to be that things were just about all up with the captain and his crew.

  Even in the heat and confusion of battle, sending the launch darting and lunging this way and that, Silver took care not to stray too many klicks away from the planetoid, out of the zone of protection theoretically offered by the heaviest close-range ground defenses, which were mostly beam projectors. He was taking a calculated risk in doing this-it was quite possible that in the roaring fog of battle, friendly fire would kill him. But the odds were against that-and any sizable berserker entering this zone in an attempt to close in on him would have to contend with the most powerful Solarian weapons.

  From time to time, he communicated tersely with his shields-and-armaments specialist, Enomoto. And he grouchily demanded that the other tone down his screams of elation when they hit the foe.

  There were a few fleeting moments when communication with the base could be established solidly enough for information to be exchanged, and then only in bits and pieces.

  Claire Normandy was trying to order all ships' attention to the danger of berserker landers, rallying her fleet to help defend the base.

  One of the things she wanted to know was why the Witch wasn't performing up to expectations. Harry had to try again to explain that he wasn't in the Witch. And when the commander finally understood that, she naturally wanted to know why.

  "Because she was off the ground before I could get to her. Can't tell you any more than that."

  Silver would be double-damned if he could give any better answer yet, but he was going to find out.

  The enemy did not yet seem much concerned with anything as trivial as an armed launch. The larger berserker machines, the few of them still space-borne, simply tried to kick it out of their way so they could get on with what they really wanted. Their main objective had nothing directly to do with Harry Silver, or with his craft.

  The good news-there were long minutes when it seemed the only good news-was that the ground defenses were taking a heavy toll on the enemy machines in space-here came a drifting fog of small parts from another one, glowing as pieces pinged off the launch's small defensive fields-but still, it was plain that all too many of the little landers were getting through, making contact with Hyperborea's black rock, where some were digging themselves in, others making as much speed as they could toward the almost featureless walls of the base.

  No sooner had Harry concluded that the berserkers were once more totally ignoring him than that situation changed drastically for the worse. Now the launch was caught up in a duel, trading shots with a superior foe that appeared to have singled out the small Solarian for destruction. In the process, Harry and Enomoto lived ten or fifteen seconds of electric intensity.

  Silver's shipmate kept busy firing missiles and trying to work the beam projector. The launch's modest arsenal of missiles was soon used up, and the projector was too small to be effective, except against enemy machines already damaged, their shielding weakened.

  Eventually, their latest foe, a thing that Harry would have described as a kind of berserker gunboat, was taken off their back. Harry wasn't sure if the cause was some heavy ground-based Solarian weapon or whether the berserker had simply moved on to some other objective.

  Shrieking noise, and an explosion of light inside his helmet, told Silver that the miniship he was driving had been seriously hit. His shipmate was screaming, though hopefully not injured much. But Harry's helmet and his instincts alike assured him that the launch had been badly damaged.

  He might have managed to stay space-borne for a long time yet, but instead decided to crash-land his crippled vehicle. To hell with this fluttering around in space in this little gnat of a ship. Nothing that anyone could do with a midget like this was going to decide the battle. His own ship, his real ship, was down, and his woman was in her, and he was going there to do whatever he could.

  "Hold on, Enomoto, we're going in."

  His helpless shipmate screamed something incomprehensible in reply.

  "Shut up. Hold on." Harry gritted his teeth, and against the looming impact, actually closed his eyes, which of course did him no good inside the helmet. The launch went plowing in, scraping its hull right through a small squad of enemy landers deployed along one edge of the landing field. Only one leaped clear, on metal legs.

  Moments later, the armed launch, causing what seemed a great disturbance for its size, went scraping and screeching and thudding to a halt, artificial gravity still holding on, saving the occupants from almost all the stress, until it had lost half its speed. Finally, the craft went off one edge of the landing field and up against a substantial rock, one of the big black buttresses like those in Sniffer's pictures.

  Chunks of rock and metal flew, force fields bent and glowed. The launch's onboard artificial gravity had ceased to exist. The impact was impressive, but the two humans in their armor and their combat couches came through it in good shape.

  Then everything became relatively still and quiet. One thing sure, thought Harry-no pilot was going to get this clunker off the ground again.

  Harry quickly had his helmet disconnected from all the systems of the launch, but his shipmate's voice still came through on suit radio. "What do we do now?"

  "Get out of this. Get out and come with me. I want to take back my own ship."

  SEVENTEEN

  A jet of some kind of gas was whining out into space through a rupture in the thin hull of the downed launch.

  The systems on the launch were going crazy, but Harry wasn't going to worry about it any more. As soon as he'd popped his hatch open, unfastened himself from the combat chair, and got his armored body out on the ground, which was quivering and jumping with the energies of battle, he looked around again. Looking back along the scarred track of his crash-landing, he was able to observe, with satisfaction, several fragments of mangled hardware that strongly resembled certain pieces in the Trophy Room. His coming down must have made hash of at least a couple of berserkers.

  Enomoto had got out of the ship every bit as fast as Harry did, and stood by waiting to see which way Harry was going to go.

  Now Harry's eyes, once more restricted to the impoverished perceptions available outside a helmet, could directly confirm the fact that the Witch was also down on the surface, a couple of hundred meters from where he stood and not more than half a kilometer from the base. The silvery shape, almost that of a giant football, lay in a tilted position. Looking over a small intervening hillock, he could clearly see the upper portion of her hull. The Witch, too, must have come down in a crash-landing, maybe on autopilot, not drastically different from the one he'd just made.

  One of the frequent Hyperborean sunsets came over the scene as he was looking at it, both the big white and the brown dwarf below the horizon now, leavingthe wash of light from distant galaxies and stars to serve as background for the flares of battle.

  Waving Enomoto to follow him, Harry began working his way toward the Witch.

  Whatever the cause of the abortive failure of his old ship on her most recent flight, her formidable new weapon might still be functioning, and in a battle as close as this one looked to be, a c-plus cannon could certainly make the difference. Getting her back into action, if possible, was a very high priority. Defend the base, Commander Normandy had ordered. Well, he'd do his damnedest.

  A blast from an enemy lander, fortunately fired while the ground was shaking just enough to throw off the aim, narrowly missed Silver but still almost knocked him off his feet. He spun around and
returned fire with his comparatively puny shoulder weapon. The berserker that had shot at him in passing, a thing almost the size of a combat tank, ignored the near miss of his counterstroke and went rolling and rumbling on toward the Solarian stronghold.

  Harry and his shipmate moved on together toward the fallen Witch.

  Several big berserker machines were down on the surface, too. Not neatly landed, but sprawled, scraped, some badly crumpled, no doubt as a result of withering ground fire. What kind of tactics were these?

  Harry wondered for a moment, as everyone else on the base must also be wondering, whether Shiva was directing this assault. And if so, whether Shiva's legendary tactical skills might possibly have deserted their lifeless possessor. But maybe it was a stunning, brilliant innovation, being so prodigal with hardware, to crash-land its large machines that were the analog of troop carriers. That might be just the thing to do if its main objective this time was not killing humans, but plundering the base.

  And now one of those landers, frighteningly big, reared up right in Harry's path. Karl Enomoto, the serious financial planner, fired his carbine at it, almost over Harry's shoulder. A split second later, Harry's own beam lanced out. Experienced gunmen both, they focused their weapons on the same spot, and the combined weight of radiation ate through the enemy's armor and put it out of action.

  The berserker had evidently already exhausted its own beam and projectile capabilities. But before it died, the death machine did its best to kill the two men with its grippers.

  Two minutes after the Witch came crunching down on rock, Christopher Havot came stumbling out of the airlock, feeling that his brains were scrambled. It wasn't the cushioned crash-landing in itself that had almost destroyed him; no, it was the effect of the pilot's helmet on his brain. As soon as he thought the ship was down, he'd come leaping up out of the pilot's seat, his only concern to get that helmet off his head. Fortunately, he'd remembered to put his own helmet on again before entering the airlock. Emerging through the outer door, he'd lost his balance and fallen, reeling slowly in the low gravity. He had left the airlock slightly open behind him when he came out. As far as he could tell, no one saw him emerge.