Berserker - Berserker Base Part 5

"I've got the portable field generator with me. I can show you how to use it. I can teach you how to make it. You've got to keep your promise."

She didn't wait for an answer: she didn't expect one. The only answer she'd received earlier, was a cessation of the shooting. That was enough. All she had to do was get close to the alien ship.

Grimly, she tightened her grip on one handle of the black box and fired her suit's small thrusters to impell herself and her burden past the heavy doors out into the dark.

Automatically, the comp closed the doors after her, shutting her out.

For an instant, her own smallness almost overwhelmed her. No Asterin had been where she was now: outside her ship half a lightyear from home. All of her training had been in comfortable orbit around Aster, the planet acting as a balance to the immensity of s.p.a.ce. And there had been light! Here there were only the gleams and glitters emitted by Aster's Hope's cameras and scanners-and the barely discernible bulk of the alien, its squat lines only less dark than the black heavens.

But she knew that if she let herself think that way she would go mad. Gritting her teeth, she focused her attention- and her thrusters-toward the enemy.

Now everything depended on whether the alien knew there were people alive aboard Aster's Hope, Whether the alien had been able to a.n.a.lyze or deduce all the implications of the c-vector shield. And whether she could get away.

The size of the other vessel made the distance appear less than it was, but after a while she was close enough to see a port opening in the side of the ship.

Then-so suddenly that she flinched and broke into a sweat-a voice came over her suit radio.

"You will enter the dock open before you. It is heavily shielded and invulnerable to explosion. You will remain in the dock with your device. If this is an attempt at treachery, you will be destroyed by your own weapon.

"If you are goodlife, you will be spared. You will remain with your device while you dismantle it for inspection. When its principles are understood, you will be permitted to answer other questions."

"Thanks a whole bunch," she muttered in response. But she didn't let herself slow down or shy away.

Instead, she went straight toward the open port until the dock was yawning directly in front of her.

Then she put the repro Gracias had done on the comp to the test.

What she had to do was so risky, so unreasonably dangerous, that she did it almost without thinking about it, as if she'd been doing things like that all her life.

Aiming her thrusters right against the side of the black box, she fired them so that the box was kicked hard and fast into the mouth of the dock and her own momentum in that direction was stopped. There she waited until she saw the force field which shielded the dock drag the box to a stop, grip it motionless.

Then she shouted into her radio as if the comp were deaf, "Gracias!"

On that code. Aster's Hope put out a tractor beam and s.n.a.t.c.hed her away from the alien.

It was a small industrial tractor beam, the kind used first in the construction of Aster's Hope, then in the loading of cargo. It was far too small and finely focused to have any function as a weapon. But it was perfect for moving an object the size of Temple in her suit across the distance between the two ships quickly.

Timing was critical, but she made that decision also almost without thinking about it. As the beam rushed her toward Aster's Hope, she shouted into the radio, "Aster!" And on that code, her ship simultaneously raised its c-vector shields and triggered the black box. She was inside the shield for the last brief instants while the alien was still able to fire at her.

Later, she and Gracias saw that the end of their attacker bad been singularly unspectacular. Still somewhat groggy from his imposed nap, he met her in the locker room to help her take off her suit; but when she demanded urgently, "What happened? Did it work?" he couldn't answer because he hadn't checked: he'd come straight to the locker from his capsule when the comp had awakened him.. So they ran together to the nearest auxcompcom to find out if they were safe.

They were. The alien ship was nowhere within scanner range. And wherever it had gone, it left no trace or trail.

So he replayed the visual and scanner records, and they saw what happened to a vessel when a c-vector field was projected onto it.

It simply winked out of existence.

After that, she felt like celebrating. In fact, there was a particular kind of celebration she had in mind-and neither of them was wearing any clothes. But when she let him know what she was thinking, he pushed her gently away. "In a few minutes," he said. "Got work to do."

"What work?" she protested. "We just saved the world- and they don't even know it. We deserve a vacation for the rest of the trip."

He nodded, but didn't move away from the comp console.

"What work?" she repeated.

"Course change," he said. He looked like he was trying not to grin. "Going back to Aster."

"What?" He surprised her so much that she shouted at him without meaning to. "You're aborting the mission? Just like that? What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?"

For a moment, he did his best to scowl thunderously. Then the grin took over. "Now we know faster-than-light is possible," he said. "Just need more research. So why spend a thousand, years sleeping across the Galaxy? Why not go home, do the research-start again when we can do what that ship did."

He looked at her. "Make sense?"

She was grinning herself. "Makes sense."

When he was done with the comp, he got even with her for spilling ice cream on him.

FRIENDS TOGETHER.

"Thousands of years?" Lars, as he asked the question, was still lying helplessly flat on his back, still attached to the mind-probing machine. He was staring at the rocky ceiling close above him, but he hardly saw the ceiling. The vision he had just experienced was still tremendously real.

Neither his Carmpan partner nor the berserker answered him.

Lars repeated the question aloud, in a weary and shaky voice: "Thousands of years? Their colony was that old, really?"

The two people whose minds he had recently been in contact with, Temple and Gracias, had been conscious of such a length of history. For Lars, the feeling of their conviction was unmistakably authentic.

Those folk aboard the Aster's Hope were members of some colony older than Lars had thought any Earth-descended colony could be.

Just as the last threads of mental contact were about to break, Lars felt his Carmpan partner touch his mind and for a moment longer hold it gently. One more thought came through: The path of the colonizing ship from Earth to Aster, deviating from flights.p.a.ce, may have undergone relativistic distortion, sending the ship into the Galactic past. But the contact we have just experienced was in our present, "Carmpan, what are we to do?"

Try to keep secret from the berserker the existence of the at-right-angles weapon. Do not think of it.

"How am I to keep from thinking-?"

But no answer came. The mental contact had been broken. And a moment later it was obvious to Lars that there was also no hope of achieving what the Carmpan had just suggested. Lars could feel the cold probe of berserker circuitry sending exploratory impulses into his mind again. It was not a material probe, but a trickle of energy producing a mental sensation hideous and indescribable. The entire episode from the lives of Gracias and Temple was suddenly forced through his mind again at high speed, like a film, and Lars felt sure that it had now been retrieved in some way by the berserker computer conducting the experiment. For an instant only Lars could feel his thought in direct contact with that receptacle fashioned of metal and electricity and mathematics. And in that instant the man knew by direct experience that the machine received the news of a defeat imperturbably, as it would have accepted any other news.

The berserker had ransacked and and robbed his mind, and... but wait. Its probing presence was now gone from his mind, and it had missed-something. Two things, actually. Because he, Lars, had not been thinking of those two things when the probe came. And for the berserker to read his memory more thoroughly was, he prayed beyond its capability.

He had been helpless to prevent it taking from him the knowledge of the right-angle weapon. Had the Carmpan deliberately caused him to think of that, by telling him not to do so? In order that some greater prize be hidden?

For whatever reason, the berserker had missed the two items that Lars's first Carmpan partner had been greatly concerned to hide: qwib-qwib, whatever that might be, and also the-what had that other thing been called? The something program?

Lars realized how effectively the Carmpan had enabled him to forget, how much more powerful their race had to be than his own in the realm of pure mental activity.

There was no further communication now from his current Carmpan partner. Lars, released again from the physical bonds of his couch, sat up. Now he could see that his partner was still breathing, but except for that the Carmpan body lay inert on its couch, as if exhaustion were complete. It had been released too, and its guide machine stood waiting alertly for it to get up.

Lars's own guide machine was waiting for him too. At least, thought Lars, free again to think his own thoughts, at least one of the d.a.m.ned things had been destroyed, by those people aboard Aster's Hope.

At least one branch of humanity had been able to win that much. Though now the computers that ran this base, eager to find the secrets of the at-right-angles effect, would doubtless send more fighting units to Aster...

Loathing the feel of the couch to which he had been fastened for some indeterminate time, Lars got to his feet. He felt dirty, hungry, thirsty, in need of a bath, of every kind of physical ease and comfort.

The small machine that was acting as his personal guide and overseer raised one of its insect-limbs and pointed. But Lars was already moving. He was allowed to find his own way back to the common room, where the other four Earth-descended prisoners were already congregated. They all looked weary, and were already talking to each other about their various turns in the telepathic machinery.

All four looked at Lars with interest as he approached, Naxos remarked: "We were wondering about you. The rest of us have been back here for some time."

"It was something of an experience. Give me a drink."

As be drank water, and picked up some food from the tray where the machines always left if, Lars listened to the others talk. The berserker apparently had no objection to its living tools talking freely among themselves about what they had experienced.

The others were reporting fragmentary success at best, and some of them reported almost total failure.

If occurred to Lars as he listened that his team might well have been the most successful.

"How'd you do?" someone asked him finally.

He could think of no reason why he shouldn't tell them the truth. He felt sure that everything about the Gracias-Temple episode was already known to the berserker. He said: "Quite well, I think, compared to what you've told me."

He related fee essentials of the story of Gracias and Temple. His fellow captives were allowed to share in that distant and perhaps isolated human victory. Nothing happened to interfere with Lars's felling, The great machine that held them did not care that they rejoiced over the defeat of one of its units. Perhaps, Lars decided, it computed that its prisoners would be more useful to it if they were allowed to hear something to make their spirits rise.

When Lars had finished his narrative, Dorothy took the floor. She detailed, as if reluctantly, a human defeat, the story of a squadron of ships wiped out by the berserker unit that her mental vision, allied with that of her Carmpan partner had been forced to follow. The spirits of the four people listening were dampened somewhat.

Again there was no reason to think that their reaction mattered to their captor, which seemed to care nothing about what they said. Lars had the strong impression now that it was simply allowing reasonable periods of mutual contact as being conducive to the life-units' mental stability.

He voiced this thought.

Nicholas Opava suggested: "Or maybe... it wants us to tell things to each other that it couldn't get out of us with its probe. So it can hear them."

The five people looked at each other, while the words hung in the air. Then the group broke up, with nothing else said beyond a few muttered routine complaints on hunger and fatigue.

The group was next summoned to the mind-machines a few hours later. Lars thought he had the same Carmpan as a partner this time, but he could not be sure. Not even when the flow of mental pictures started.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE.

"You're going up," Gemma said.

Pat yanked his boot on. "Yes."

"Even when you know how the Cotabote feel about it?"

"I do not know how they feel. About this or anything else. Maybe you can tell me. You're the big expert on the Cotabote. How do they feel? If they feel. Which I doubt." He pulled on his boot, which had shrunk in the continual damp of Botea. He wrenched it over his ankle and stamped down hard.

"You don't even try to get along with them!" Gemma said angrily. She hadn't come in from the doorway.

She was standing there with the hood of her shirt thrown back so he could see her beautiful black hair, her beautiful black skin, her beautiful, beautiful face. He ought to file a protest like the Cotabote were always doing, a protest against her looking so d.a.m.n beautiful all the time.

"Get along with them?" he shouted. "You spend all your time trying to get along, with them and where does if get you?"

"It wouldn't kill you to put it off a week. You said if was routine. Is there something you're not telling me?"

"It is routine," Pat said. "You're starting to sound like the Cotabote. I have to do an orbital survey of the diamond mines once every six weeks. Adamant says so. And your Cotabote are so worried about my worms digging up the middle of their village, they should be glad I'm keeping tabs on them."

He did need to check on the orbiting infrascopes that kept an eye on the mechanical digger worms and their movements through the coal, but that wasn't why he'd kicked the date up a few days. He'd gotten a transmission from Adamant that a berserker had wiped out a settlement-planet called Polara. It was the second report on a berserker in three months, and it had been only two weeks later than the transmission date, which meant Adamant had considered the information important enough to it by ship at least as far as Candlestone, which was the closest relay. Adamant hadn't considered it important enough to ship it the whole way, or maybe the operator at Candlestone had made that decision, but Pat chose to take that as a hopeful sign that Adamant didn't consider the berserker to be anywhere in the neighborhood. If they thought it was, they would have raced to Botea with a navy. After all, they had to protect all those IIIB diamonds the worms were digging out of Botea's coal deposits. Still, he appreciated the warning, and the ma.s.ses of general data on berserkers that had accompanied the transmissions, and he intended to go up and check on the orbital defenses, Cotabote or no Cotabote.

"It's only been thirty-five days since your last survey," Gemma said. "The Cotabote say you're up to something. They want me to file a protest."

"So what else is new?" he said. "Go right ahead." He gestured toward the computer. "What are they worried about this time? Their smash crop?"

"No," she said. She sat down in front of the voice-terminal. "They say the harpy hurts the nematej."

"The nematej?" Pat said. He stamped his foot into his boot and stood up. "What exactly could I do to it that could possibly make it worse than it is already?"

"They say the last time you did an orbital survey it started to smell funny." She glared at him, as if daring him to laugh.

He was too amazed to laugh. "Nematej already smells like vomit, for G.o.d's sake," he said. "It's got thorns everywhere, even on its flowers, and the last time I looked it was choking off their stinking smash crop." He shook his head. "They're incredible, you know that? I've been here two years, and they still come up with new ways to make my life miserable."

"What about your telling them your planet-range ship is called a harpy?" she said. "You're as bad as they are."

"Now that," Pal said, "is going too far. I am not as bad as the Cotabote."

"All right, you're not," Gemma said. "But you do try to antagonize them. If you could just treat them like human beings.'"

"They are not human beings. I don't care what the ICLU says. They're some kind of alien, whose sole mission in the universe is to drive people crazy."

"You're being ridiculous," Gemma said. "You know perfectly well they emigrated from Triage and before that from..."

"Emigrated, my foot. They were probably thrown off every planet they tried to settle, They..."

Gemma held the voice-terminal out to him. "You have to give me access to the computer," she said stiffly.

He yanked it out of her hand. "Access for Gemenca Bahazi, ICLU rep," he said, and handed it back to her. "Go ahead, file protest number five thousand."

"I will," she said. "I want to file a protest to Adamant Fossil Fuel and Diamond Chip Corporation on behalf of the Cotabote," she told the computer.

"Sure thing, sweetheart," the computer said.

Gemma scowled at Pat.