Berserker Omnibus - Berserker Man Part 27

The ship seemed to bounce, crashed again, teetered and rocked, and came at last to a shuddering rest, her decks tilted at somewhere near forty degrees from the horizontal. Now all was quiet. The screen in Suomi's stateroom was effectively dead, its surface only flickering here and there with electronic noise.

Suomi unstrapped himself from his bunk and climbed the crazy slope of the deck to reach the door. He had failed to pick up loose objects before entering combat and breakage in the stateroom had been heavy, though there were no indications of basic structural damage. The strength of the hull had probably saved the ship from that.

The stateroom door opened forcefully when he unlatched it, and the dead or unconscious body of a soldier slid in, trailing broken-looking legs. Suomi stuck his head out into the pa.s.sage and looked and listened. All was quiet and nothing moved in the glare of the emergency lights. Here too deck and bulkheads and overhead were still in place.

He turned back to the fallen sentry and decided that the man was probably dead. Guilt or triumph might come later, he supposed. Right now Suomi only considered whether to arm himself with the man's sword, which was still resting peacefully in its scabbard. In the end Suomi left it there. A sword in his hand was not going to do any good for anybody, least of all himself.

He thumped on the door of Barbara Hurtado's stateroom and when a weak voice answered he opened the door and climbed in. Amid a kaleidoscopic jumble of multicolored clothes from a spilled closet she sat in a heap on the floor, wearing an incongruous fluffy robe, her brown hair in wild disarray, leaning against a chair that must be fastened to the deck.

"I think my collarbone is broken," she said faintly. "Maybe it isn't, though. I can move my arm."

"I'm the one who did it," he said, "Sorry. There was no way I could give you any warning."

"You?" She raised her eyebrows. "All right. Did you do as much damage to those sons of beasts out there?"

"More, I hope. That was the idea. Shall we go out and see? Can you walk?"

"Love to go and see their broken bodies, but I don't think I can. They've got me chained to my bunk, which I guess is why I wasn't killed. The things they were making me do. Always wondered what soldiers were like and I finally found out."

"I'm going out to look around."

"Don't leave me, Carlos."

Things in the control room were very bad, or very good, depending on your point of view. It was closer to the drive than the staterooms were, Suomi supposed. Lachaise, strapped into the central, padded chair, was leaning back with eyes open and arms outflung, showing no wounds but very plainly dead all the same. Intense localized neutron flux at the moment when the drive's fields collapsed was one possibility in such disasters, Suomi remembered reading somewhere. Lachaise had perished happily, no doubt, in blind obedience to his G.o.d, perhaps believing or hoping that he really was killing Johann Karlsen. In the name of glorious death . . . yes.

Around Lachaise, the priests and soldiers who had been helping and watching him had not been strapped into padded chairs. Neutrons or not, they now looked like so many bad losers in the Tournament. This many lives at least had the berserker harvested today. Some of them still breathed, but none were at all dangerous any more.

The main hatch was still open, Suomi discovered, looking down at it from the control room, but it was completely choked with broken white masonry and ma.s.sive splintered timbers; part of the Temple or of somebody's house perhaps. The ship had come to rest within the city, then. Probably a number of people had been killed outside the ship as well as in it, but G.o.dsmountain had not been leveled, a lot of its people were doubtless still alive, and whoever was left in charge should come digging his way into the ship eventually, probably wanting to take vengeance for the destruction.

With some difficulty Suomi made his way back to Barbara's stateroom and managed to lodge himself in a sitting position by her side. "Exit's blocked. Looks like we wait together." He described the carnage briefly.

"Be a good boy, Carlos, get me a pain pill from my medicine chest, and a drink."

He jumped up. "Of course. I didn't think-sorry. Water?"

"First. Then one of the other kind, if everything in my bar isn't smashed."

They were still sitting there together, about half a standard hour later, when after much noise of digging and sc.r.a.ping from the direction of the entrance hatch, Leros and a troop of armed men, swords in hand and in full battle gear, appeared in the stateroom's open door. Suomi, who had been listening fatalistically to their approach, looked up at Leros and then closed his eyes, unable to watch the sword's descent.

Nothing descended on him. He heard nothing but a faint multiple clinking and jangling, and opened his eyes to see Leros and his followers facing him on their knees, genuflecting awkwardly on the tilted deck.

Among them, looking scarcely less awed than the rest, was the man in gray, armed now with sword instead of hammer.

"Oh Lord DemiG.o.d Johann Karlsen," said Leros with deep reverence, "you who are no robot, but a living man, and more, forgive us for not recognizing you when you walked among us! And accept our eternal grat.i.tude for again confounding our ancient enemies. You have smashed the death-machine within its secret lair, and most of those who served it also. Be pleased to know that I myself have cut out the heart of the arch-traitor Andreas."

It was Barbara who-perhaps-saved him then. "The Lord Karlsen has been injured, stunned," she said. "Help us."

Five days later, the demiG.o.d Johann Karlsen, he who had been Carlos Suomi, and Athena Poulson, both of them in fine health, sat at a small table in a corner of what had been the Temple courtyard.

Shaded from the midday Hunterian sun by the angle of a ruined wall, they were watching the slave-powered rubble clearing operations making steady progress in the middle distance. There the ship still lay, fifty or sixty meters from the Temple complex, surrounded by a jumble of smashed buildings, where it had come to rest after the drive destroyed itself.

Besides the cultists killed inside the ship or executed by Leros later, at least a score of people, most of them people who had never even known of the berserker's existence, had died in the cataclysm. But still Suomi slept well, for millions of innocent folk across the planet lived and breathed.

"So, Oscar has explained it all to me, finally," Athena announced. "They promised him a chance, a fighting chance, to get at the berserker and destroy it if he cooperated."

"He believed that?"

"He says he knows it was a terribly small chance, but there wasn't any better one. They wouldn't let him get on the ship at all. He just had to sit in a cell and answer questions for Andreas and Lachaise. And the berserker too, it talked to him directly somehow."

"I see." Suomi sipped at his golden goblet of fermented milk. Maybe the stuff made Schoenberg sick, but he had found that his stomach could handle it without difficulty, and he had grown to like the taste.

Athena was looking at him almost dreamily across the little table. "I haven't really had a chance to tell you what I think, Carlos," she said now in a soft, low voice. "It was such a simple idea. Oh, of course I mean simple in the sense of something cla.s.sical, elegant. And brilliant."

"Hm?"

"The way you used your recordings of Karlsen's voice, and won the battle."

"Oh, well. That was simple, to splice together recorded words to make some phrases that a berserker ought to find appropriately threatening. The main thing was that the berserker should identify his voice and so take the strongest, most violent action it could to kill him, forgetting everything else, be perfectly willing to destroy itself in the process."

"But to conceive of it was brilliant, and to do it required courage."

"Well. When I heard that its servants were asking about Karlsen, for no apparent reason, the idea struck me that we might be dealing with one of those a.s.sa.s.sin machines, a berserker that had been programmed specifically to go after Karlsen. Even if it was only an ordinary berserker-ha, what am I SAYING?-Karlsen's destruction would rate as a very high priority in its programming, probably higher than depopulating a minor world. I gambled that it would just forget its other plans and wreck the ship, that it would just take it as probable that Karlsen was somehow hiding onOrionwith a secret landing party."

"That sounds insane." Then, fl.u.s.tered, Athena tried to modify the implied criticism. "I mean-"

"It does sound insane. But, as I understand it, predicting human behavior has never been the berserkers'

strong point. Maybe it thought Andreas had betrayed it after all."

The G.o.d Thorun incarnate, who had been Thomas the Grabber, strolled majestically into the courtyard at its other end, trailed by priests and a sculptor who was making sketches for a new spear-carrying statue.

Suomi rose slightly from his chair and made a little bow in Thorun's direction. Thorun answered with a smile and a courteous nod.

Carlos and Thomas understood each other surprisingly well. The people had to be rea.s.sured, society supported, through a time of crisis. Did Leros and the other devout leaders really believe that a G.o.d and a demiG.o.d now walked among them? Apparently they did, at least in one compartment of their minds, and at least as long as such belief suited their needs. And perhaps in one sense it was the truth that Karlsen still walked here.

Perhaps, also, the sandy-haired man now known as Giles the Chancellor, who was Thorun's constant companion and adviser, was to a great degree responsible for the relative smoothness with which the society of G.o.dsmountain had weathered the upheavals of the past few days. Alas for the Brotherhood.

Well, thought Suomi, likely a world with the Brotherhood victorious would have been no better than G.o.dsmountain's world was going to be without its secret demon.

There was Schoenberg now, walking near his wrecked ship. Barbara Hurtado was at his side listening to him as he pointed out features of the rubble-clearing system the slaves were following. It was a result of his expert a.n.a.lysis of the problem. He had been talking about it yesterday with Suomi. There, where Schoenberg was now pointing, was the place where the mathematically proven plan of greatest efficiency called for all the debris to be piled. Schoenberg had come near being killed as a collaborator by Leros and the winning faction, but intervention by the demiG.o.d Karlsen had saved his life and restored his freedom.

After what had happened to Celeste Servetus and Gus De La Torre-their mutilated bodies had been found atop a small mountain of human and animal bones in a secret charnel-pit far beneath the Temple-Suomi could not blame Schoenberg or anyone else for collaboration. Schoenberg had told him of the tale of ruthless Earthmen who were going to come looking to avenge him, a tale that, alas, had been nothing but pure bluff. Suomi, though, still had the feeling that Schoenberg was leaving something out, that more had pa.s.sed between him and Andreas than he was willing to recount.

Let it lie. The ship had been irreparably damaged, and the surviving members of the hunting expedition were going to have to coexist on this planet, in all likelihood, for an indeterminate number of standard years, until some other ship just happened by.

Athena took a sip of cool water from her fine goblet, and Suomi drank some more fermented milk from his. She had spent the period of crisis locked in her private room and unmolested-maybe she would have been the next day's sacrifice-until the ship crashed and the Temple was knocked down about her ears. Even then she was only shaken up. She, the independent, self-sufficient woman, and by chance she had been forced to sit by pa.s.sively like some ancient heroine while men fought all around her.

"What are your plans, Carl?"

"I suspect the citizens here will sooner or later get tired of having the demiG.o.d Karlsen around, and I just hope it doesn't happen before a ship shows up. I think he'll maintain a low profile, as they say, until then."

"No, I mean Carl Suomi's plans."

"Well." Suddenly he wondered if any of the Hunterians, before the crisis, had heard her call him Carl, as she frequently did. He wondered if that might have contributed to his being so fortunately misidentified.

Never mind.

Well. Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi's plans for his future would definitely have included Athena.

But that was before he had seen her so avidly viewing men killing each other.

No. Sorry. Of course he himself had now killed more people than she had even seen die-yet in a real sense he was still a pacifist, more so than ever in fact, and she was not. That was how he saw the matter, anyway.

Barbara, now. She was still standing beside Schoenberg as he lectured her, but she looked over from time to time toward the place where Suomi sat. Suomi wanted nice things to happen to Barbara. Last night she had shared his bed. The two of them had laughed about their minor injuries, comparing bruises.

But . . . a playgirl. No. His life would go on just about the same if he never saw Barbara again.

What, then, were his plans, as Athena put it? Well, there were plenty of other fish splashing in the seas of Earth, or even, if he could be allowed a mangled metaphor, living demure and veiled behind their white walls here on G.o.dsmountain. He still wanted a woman, and in more ways than one.

Schoenberg was now pointing up into the sky. Would his rubble pile grow that tall? Then Barbara leaped with excitement, and Suomi looked up and saw the ship.

Next thing they were all running, shouting, looking for the emergency radios that Schoenberg had insisted on getting from theOrionand keeping handy. Some trying-to-be-helpful Hunterian had misplaced the radios. Never mind. The ship lowered rapidly, drawn by the beacon-like appearance of the city atop the mountain, andOrionalready sitting there. A silvery sphere, similar in every way to Schoenberg's craft.

With wild waves Earthmen and Hunterians beckoned it to land on a cleared spot amid the rubble.

Landing struts out and down, drive off, hatch open, landing ramp extruded. A tall man emerging, with the pallor of one probably raised under a dome on Venus, his long mustache waxed and shaped in the form the Earth-descended Venerians frequently affected. Rea.s.sured by numerous signs of friendly welcome, he strode halfway down the ramp, putting on sungla.s.ses against the Hunterian noon. "How do, folks, Steve Kemalchek, Venus. Say, what happened here, an earthquake?"

Thorun and the High Priest Leros were still deciding which of them should make the official welcoming speech. Suomi moved a little closer to the ramp and said informally: "Something like that. But things are under control now."

The man looked relieved on hearing the familiar accents of an Earthman's speech. "You're from Earth, right? That's your ship. Get any hunting in yet? I've just been up north, got a stack of trophy 'grams in there . . . show you later." He lowered his voice to a more confidential tone. "And, say, is that Tournament everything I've heard it is? Going on right now, ain't it? Isn't this the place?"

Berserker Man

PROLOGUE.

Well, Elly Temesvar thought grayly, we've given it a good fight, done better than anyone might have expected, considering how little ship we have to fight it with.

Out perpendicularly from the surface of a peculiar star there jutted what looked like a transfixing spear of plasma, bright as the star itself, as thick as a major planet, and so long that it looked needle-thin. On the jet's brilliant, almost insubstantial surface the little duoship that Elly and her partner rode in clung like a microbe on a glowing treetrunk, in an effort to find concealment where there was really none. And somewhere on the other side of the shining plasma fountain, a hundred thousand kilometers or more away, the mad berserker stalked them. Berserkers were pure machine, of course, but still in Elly's most heart-sure mental images of them they were all mad-she smelled on them the suicidal madness of their ancient and unknown builders.

The odd star that drained itself into the plasma jet was close enough to have been blinding were not the ports all sealed opaque for combat. And despite the nearness of the Galactic Core, few other stars were visible. Bright nebular material filled cubic pa.r.s.ec after cubic pa.r.s.ec in this region, hiding everything else and evoking old legends of lights.p.a.ce in which the stars were only points of darkness.

"Pull in the scanning nodes just a touch on your side, Elly." Frank's voice, as usual sounding almost imperturbable, came into her earphones. He was on the other side of the thick steel bulkhead that completely bisected crew quarters when its hatches were closed for combat. In theory one compartment might be breached, while the human in the other one survived to fight on. In practice, this time, the whole craft was just about to be crunched like a pretzel, and Elly in moments of free mental time wished that she might have, at the end, at least as much human contact as open connecting hatches could provide.

She did not voice her wish. "Nodes in," she acknowledged instead, in trained reaction that seemed to function independent of her will. Her fingers had meanwhile remained poised but motionless upon the ten keys of her auxiliary controls. Through her helmet the electrical waves of her brain directly drove the equipment for which she was responsible, in a control system that worked a large fraction of a second faster than any dependent upon arm-length nerves.

"It's going to come again-" The rest of Frank's warning was lost, even with earphones, as the berserker came, wolf springing from behind a plasma tree. Basic control of the ship depended upon the signals from her partner's brain, and the stroke and counterstroke of the next pa.s.sage at arms were over before Elly had fully grasped that it was about to start. One reason Frank Marcus sat as commander in the left seat was that he was faster than Elly by far; but then he was faster than anyone. Frank the Legendary. Even two minutes ago, Elly had still nursed conscious hopes that he might be able to get them out of this alive.

He was driving them in evasive maneuvers now, while the hull crashed like a gong, and flashes of enemy force were plain in the simultaneous overload of instruments. Flash and crash again, blinding stroke from the enemy and blending sigh of their own weapons lashing back, more in defiance than in any true hope of damaging Goliath. The berserker which had caught them by surprise was too big to fight, too fast to get away from, here in relatively open s.p.a.ce. Nothing to do but dodge- Yet again the berserker struck, and yet again they emerged whole from the barrage. They were characters in some fantasy cartoon, staggering along a tightrope and parrying a rain of meteoric irons with the flimsy stalk of a broken umbrella.

"-little ship-"

Between great blasts of static, that was the voice of the berserker reaching them. It was trying to talk, only to distract them perhaps, or perhaps to offer life of a sort. There were sometimes living, willing servitors. And sometimes there were specimens that the unliving enemy found interesting enough to be kept breathing for a long time under study. Distraction, with the game effectively over, might seem a pointless waste of tactical finesse, but the enemy's tactics were varied by randomizing devices and tended to be unpredictable.

"-tle ship, new weapons will not save you-" The voice was quavering, neither male nor female, neither old nor young. It was a.s.sembled from the recorded words of prisoners, of goodlife (the willing servitors), of defiant human enemies who had cursed the thing before they died and whose very curses were put to its use.

"New weapons? What the h.e.l.l does that mean?" Like many who fought berserkers, Frank Marcus seemed to believe in h.e.l.l, at least enough to swear by it.

"That's what it said."

"-helpless . . . badlife . . ." A great static roar. "You are too small . . ." The message or distraction from the enemy dissolved utterly in noise. No carrier wave could any longer bring it through the furious radiation from the plasma jet.

Mumbling something to himself, Frank danced the duoship around the jet. He dropped his craft from normal s.p.a.ce into that condition called flights.p.a.ce, where physical existence outside the guarded hull became little more than mathematics, and outracing light became not only possible but unavoidable. He brought them bursting back again into normal s.p.a.ce, a fearful risk this near the great ma.s.s of a star. He had a way, had luck, had something no one could bottle or even measure, that in addition to his speed made for success against berserkers. Elly had heard the claim that, given a thousand human pilots with this potency, humanity might have won the long war centuries ago. Cloning of his cells had been tried, to produce a race of Franks, but the results had been disappointing.

Just behind them-so Elly read the flickerings that raced across her panels-the jet-star's solar wind exploded like the surface of a wavy pond attacked by a sharp-skipping pebble. A chain of blasts expanded into spheres of force and gas. Behind them too, delayed but not avoided, the pursuing monster came, its prey once more in view. The berserker made a dark, irregular blot against giant swirls of bright nebula that were far too distant to provide a hiding place, the stuff of the galaxy in an agelong expulsion from the galactic heart. The enemy was a tiny blot a hundred kilometers across.

Frank would never quit. In a hundred and forty milliseconds he skipped his ship through a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's...o...b..t, whipping it once more out of normal s.p.a.ce and once more back, intact, a blind man safely juggling razors.

This time, s.p.a.ce around them was different when they came back. White noise on Elly's viewscreen.

Peculiar readings everywhere-but at the same time silence, and stability.

"Frank?"

"Yeah. We're inside the jet, Elly. As I figured, it turned out to be a hollow tube. We're riding it out away from the star at a couple hundred kilometers per second. The boogie's still outside."

"You . . . it . . . how can you tell?"

Something resembling amus.e.m.e.nt shaded Frank's business voice. "If it was in here with us, it'd still be trying to chew us up, right?"

"Oh." She hadn't heard such meekness in her own shipboard voice for years. That word had come out in a novice trainee's timid chirp; she had heard the like from a good many of them during her tour as instructor at s.p.a.ce Combat School.