Berserker - Berserker Base Part 29

"Into the sun?" The voice was Bogdan's.

"It will probably go for salvage," said Tanzin. "Drawn, quartered, and dismantled. Where did you think our bonuses were going to come from?"

The link settled down to routine traffic as pilots began to tally the casualties.

Morgan's voice came on the channel. "Holt? When we get back to Almira with the 'Reen... I don't think things are going to be the same." Holt knew exactly what she meant. Then Morgan said, "Don't forget the cup of caf. I want to see you."

"I want to see you too," said Holt.

Dr. Epsleigh came on the general channel and relayed thanks and congratulations from the PM and the Princess Elect. She tried to say all the right things.

"What about that boojum?" said Bogdan. "Once we take it apart, can we figure out where it came from?"

The administrator on Almira admitted that was possible.

"And then follow the trail back and blow h.e.l.l out of those machines, now that we have our secret weapon?"

Dr. Epsleigh laughed. "Maybe we will, and maybe we won't."

"We will," said Bogdan.

But Holt, translating for the 'Reen Channel, wasn't so sure.

Beside him, PereSnik't granted in agreement.

Listen now.

I have recounted to you the truth. It was the time of rejoining comradeship with "Holt," as the Other People called him, and the beginning of my learning strange and sometimes wonderful new ways.

Young, young and eager I was in that battle, riding with the woman Kai-Anila, smelling her bravery and her spirit, and attempting to lend my own poor effort. Now I shall pause for both breath and refreshment.

Just remember, my cubs, my children, my future, that this is the rightful tale of how we at last began to gain our freedom.

CROSSING THE BAR.

The Kirsi/Almira vision was prolonged, so that Lars, on the verge of returning to the reality of his imprisonment, knew one last moment of contact with the 'Reen. In the time-warped world of telepathy, the episode of Holt Calder and Morgan Kai-Anila had come to him in the form of a revelation from the future. But this last direct contact with the 'Reen was in the present. Lars's mind touched those of two members of that race in particular: old PereSnik't, now recognizable to Lars as the dark-furred being he had glimpsed during a dream, and the artist MussGray.

In that last moment of contact, Lars saw something of the possible modes by which organic, protoplasmic mind might be able to make contact with such mind as could exist within ruled metal plates-or within computing artifacts whose images came through the telepathic process looking like metal plates etched with silver lines.

No chanting there, old PereSnik't chanted. And MussGray's image in the background, painter's brush in hand, nodded wisely. The chant, the poem, the, art, is much. Not all, but much.

With the last of the contact gone, Lars Kanakuru emerged from the linked telepathic session with his mind still echoing the derived thoughts of the fighter pilots of the Kirsi/Almira system. And still savoring the different flavor'of the 'Reen mind, as dissimilar from his mind and the Carmpan's as they were from each other.

And from the 'Reen of course had come that last hectoring comment about the verse, the chant, the art.

Was that supposed to be a secret too? Lars didn't know. Of course the berserker's probe had extracted it from his consciousness along with the rest of the episode, and whether it was supposed to be a secret or not, the berserker now knew it as well as he did, or better.

The prisoners had just been returned to the cell complex and the door closed on them when the shock of an explosion came racing through the surrounding rock, a jolt almost violent, enough to shake them off their feet. The hardened ceiling overhead shed flakes. For a moment, Lars was mentally back with Gemma and Pat Devlin in their mine.

Naxos shouted: "That's not mining activity. We're under attack!"

The prisoners stared at each other. Lars saw fear, hope, and elation, mingled in the faces of the other four. There was a moment of silence that seemed to go on endlessly. Lars held his breath, waiting for either the berserker or its enemies to strike them all with annihilation.

Then, t.i.tanic thrumming roars shook rock and air and s.p.a.ce itself. Those are launchings, Lars thought, not blasts.

It's getting its fighting machines into s.p.a.ce, and taking chances to get them into action quickly, warping them into flights.p.a.ce dangerously close to the planet. Someone, whoever is attacking, has caught it by surprise.

Now new explosions hammered at the rock around the prison. Impacts, concussions jarring teeth and bones.

Naxos crouched, fists clenched, then leaped, as high as anyone could leap in this low place. "Wahoo!

Get it, get it, kill it, mash it flat!"

"... and us inside..."

"And us inside!" The captain made it into a cry of triumph. "Wahoo!" He was trembling; to Lars he looked to be on the verge of some kind of ecstasy.

The others stared at Naxos, as if he had in fact been giving orders for their destruction. But now the tide of war receded for the moment. There remained only the ceaseless drone of the mining, and building operations, not yet silenced, and going on as if it could never be silenced.

And now there was a new noise. Definitely something else, rather like one of the thrumming roars run in reverse, but more prolonged. "What's that?"

They all listened to it. Lars said: "Something coming in for a quick landing... I think. A fighting unit arriving for emergency repairs."

Still the controlling berserker of the base did not speak to its prisoners. It told them nothing, but the humans did not need to be told what they could experience for themselves: an a.s.sault, by something or someone, had begun against the base. The attacker must have come in the form of an armada of gigantic power. Or else, thought Lars, a fleet controlled by people gone insane with desperation.

Or else... in his brain the thought of qwib-qwib burned..

And there was something else... yet another secret. One of those two fragments hidden at the, beginning, when the Carmpan might have known already what all the visions were to be...

No. Forget that, the other secret. That must be utterly forgotten.

Subvocalizing words, he fell helplessly into a sing-song chant: You must not yet remember that, or into the fire will fall the fat...

He thought that the Carmpan in their room were staring at him. He didn't dare to look their way. His mind wanted to chant verses, and he couldn't seem to stop it. If he was finally going mad, he supposed that the fact should come as no great surprise.

But he didn't really believe that he was going mad. He believed that someone, somewhere, was trying to project a telepathic message to him, and it was for some reason coming in verse. In rhyme.

Why?

The 'Reen again? No. Something... someone else.

A fragmentary answer trickled through... several reasons. Easier that way to prove how human I am.

Easier to avoid the metal thoughts around you ...

To prove you're human... who are you?

... Gage...

It was a name, then, evidently. Suddenly, the panel-and-gage dream made a kind of sense, in dream-terms anyway. But now the fleeting direct contact had been broken.

The berserker still did not demonstrate any intention of killing off its human prisoners. Not that any demonstration of intent could reasonably be expected before the fact. It would send in the guide-machines to mangle them, or simply fill their cave with fire, and all would be over in the winking of an eye. But so far, Lars a.s.sumed, the berserker computer was still trying to protect them from battle damage. Because some of the prisoners at least, himself for one, had already proven their value as telepathic communicators.

Lars, unable at last to keep from looking round, saw that now the Carmpan had crowded forward into the doorway of their room, staring out at their ED fellow prisoners.

Opava glared at them. "What are you doing? d.a.m.ned animals, what is it?"

"Sing," one of the Carmpan said.

"Sing?" Naxos shouted his amazement at them. "Have you all gone crazy?"

"Chant. Recite, it will help."

"Help? How?"

Behind Lars, the sounds of rock-mining mounted suddenly to an unprecedented level. Then they broke forth into an avalanche of sound, with an immediacy that spun him around. His ears registered a sharp drop in air pressure, compensated for in moments by the automatic life support machinery.

A great hole gaped in one wall of the common room, where a moment earlier there had been nothing but smooth solid stone. Fragments enough to fill a barrel fanned out across the floor. The hole was a meter across, wide enough for a man to come through, even clad in the bulk of heavy combat armor, and in fact such a man was coming through it now. Looking almost as mechanical as the berserkers they had come to fight, human figures in semi-robotic armor spilled into the room one after another, their power tools and weapons at the ready. Lars could recognize the suits' insignia.

The five suitless humans recoiled, instinctively cowering back.

The airspeaker of the lead figure rasped at them: "Buzz Jameson, Adamant Navy. Keep out of the way.

We sealed the other end of the tunnel behind us, your air's safe for the moment."

A chaotic babble of outcries and questions rose up from the five prisoners.

"We're an a.s.sault party, that's all. There's an attack on." Half a dozen of the invaders were now mobbing about in the common room, as if looking for the best way to get out of it again. The tunnel mouth from which they had emerged was ignored behind them, dark, narrow, and empty, Jameson inside his armor was redhaired and almost as big as Lars remembered from seeing him through Gemenca Bahazi's eyes.

The big man looked round at the goggling prisoners. "We're going to get you out of here, but there's another job to do first. Which way to the b.l.o.o.d.y mind-jiggering machines? They're right here somewhere, aren't they?

"How did you know about-?" But questions could wait. Naxos was already pointing out the proper door.

Moments later, an a.s.sault on that barrier was readied. Plastic explosive was stack in place against it, and unarmored people dove for shelter.

When the berserker had built that door it had not calculated on this kind of an a.s.sault; one small charge did the job. This time there was no pressure drop. The mind-probing chambers were evidently kept at atmospheric pressure constantly. Jammeson and his crew of five rushed through.

Lars kept expecting the ant-shaped machines to burst in and murder the unprotected prisoners, wage war with the Adamant fighting crew. But no such invasion came. The guide machines must be busy, he thought, with something else, repairing damage or whatever.

In a few seconds Jameson reappeared at the tunnel mouth. His airspeaker rasped at the gathered prisoners, asking if any of them knew the exact location of the central computer that ran the base. He explained that the central brain of the base was very probably quite near the rooms holding mind-probe devices, but he was suspicious of b.o.o.by-traps. "We've been told the best way to get to it is through the prisoners' cave, and the machines where the prisoners are made to work."

"Told by who? How'd you know where we were? And how do you know where the central computer is?''

"We can put pieces of information together. And your chunky buddies over there haven't been idle."

Jameson nodded toward the Carmpan. "They've been getting the word out, in great detail, about what's going on here."

The Carmpan in their room were all staring out at Lars.

Looking at them, he felt an impulse to chant mad verse. Something about how no castrato ever sang so pure-? He had no idea where that was coming from.

Now Jameson had plunged back into the tunnel beyond the blasted door, rejoining his armored comrades. There was another heavy explosion from that direction, and less deafening sounds of fighting, of weapons that wasted little energy in sound.

"G.o.d, how could they have landed here?" Dorothy shuddered, as if the thought of such human daring outraged her.

"If it was a surprise attack-and they knew just where they were going-getting the brain could knock the whole base out."

Jameson and his people had left a considerable package of blasting materials behind. Lars, while his fellow prisoners demonstrated various emotions around him, stared at that pack, and poised with his muscles tensed. Now, he thought, now one of us is going to... he was afraid to look at Pat.

But it was not Pat who made the move, it was Opava. Drawing a concealded handgun from inside his coverall, the soft man took aim at the pack of explosives, meaning to detonate it, to bring down the tunnel roof on Jameson and his people and save the master.

"A gun! He's goodlife! They let him keep a gun-"

The first shot went wide, searing only rock, as Lars knocked down Opava's arm. They grappled and rolled over and over fighting, until someone clubbed Opava from behind. Naxos; he held one of the rock fragments from the tunnel's opening, and he swung it once more, hard.

"d.a.m.ned... goodlife!" There could be no worse obscenity.

Lars looked at Pat. All he could think was that it had not been her.

There was no time to do more than exchange a look. Back out of the tunnel again came Jameson, followed by one or two of his people, all of them with weapons in hand, armor battered and smoking.

Jameson reported in rasping gasps that his effort to blow up the berserker's brain had been foiled. The berserker's fighting machines had counterattacked at the last moment, enough of them to hold the breach.

Now one of his people fired into the tunnel, as one of the guide machines appeared there. Lars seized Pat by the hand. Together they scrambled for what shelter they might find in the cell-corridor,

There, was nowhere, really, to go. The two of them were cowering in his cell when an inhuman shape moved into the open doorway. It looked to Lars like a guide machine, but one of a somewhat different model than he had previously encountered, it showed some signs of battle damage.

Lars aimed at it the small sidearm he had taken from Opava-not that he had much hope that the berserkers would have given their goodlife pet a weapon with which they could be damaged.

The machine said to him, in a surprisingly human voice: "Lars... the Remora program."

His finger on the trigger quivered and relaxed. Still gripping Pat with one arm, Lars got to his feet. "What do we do?" He felt air pressure drop again; a leak somewhere, or the berserker brain at last getting around to cutting off their life support. Pat was silent, as if she were holding her breath.

A twin of the strange machine appeared, carrying a couple of s.p.a.cesuits, which it tossed at the feet of the two humans. "Hurry," it said to them.

Lars, even as he struggled into his suit, went up and down the short corridor from cell to cell. He located Naxos and Dorothy Totonac, and told them tersely to obey the words and gestures of these new machines. Both of the other human prisoners obeyed dazedly, as s.p.a.cesuits were tossed in front of them.