Berserker Omnibus - Berserker Man Part 29

"The business is important," Carmen agreed. She and her husband were looking at each other as if they had independently arrived at the whole solution, to the surprise of neither. "But then, Michel's future is, also." Her marveling lips formed the next words in silence:The Academy!

"The convoy leaves in two days," Lombok prodded. "Two days at the outside. They've promised me a few hours' notice." In fact the fleet would move when he told the admiral he was ready; but no one on Alpine, Lombok hoped, dreamed as much.

"He must go," said Carmen, and stroked her son's long hair. His eyes were shining with antic.i.p.ation.

"And he's simply too young to go alone. Sixtus, how long do you think it will take you to get things in order here, and join us?"

Lombok drew on the smoker he had just lighted, meanwhile watching the others reflectively. The lady was more excited than her son; she must see an old dream come to life, herself at the Academy where she would move among the famous people of the world of high-priced art; with her energy and cleverness and her son's talent that world would lie open before them. . . . The man at Moonbase who had sent Lombok had calculated well.

Lombok in his mind's eye saw her at Moonbase, stunned, perhaps outraged when she learned the truth.

The truth-telling would have to be handled carefully, when the time came.

TWO.

The educational system on Alpine was quite flexible, and he hadn't spent much time in formal schooling.

Also the isolation of the family establishment had tended to diminish contacts with other children. The result was that he had only a few friends near his own age, a lack that had never notably concerned him.

Of those few, he could think of none that he was really going to miss. But when, in the morning, after Mr. Lombok had departed on what everyone had agreed must be a futile mission to the adoption center, Michel's mother suggested that he call one or two of the children at least to say goodbye, he complied.

Of the three he called, two were bored by his great news-or tried to sound that way. The third, awed and openly envious, wondered aloud how Michel felt about going through the Bottleneck, where there was almost certain to be fighting.

Michel, who was somewhat keen on s.p.a.ce war-at least as it was fought in the juvenile adventure books-and considered himself a well-informed layperson on the subject, estimated the risks as somewhat lower. After all, the ship captains and the other folk in charge would not decide to risk the pa.s.sage if they thought it prohibitively dangerous.

Mr. Lombok was back in a couple of hours, announcing that he had been unable to learn anything, but not looking disappointed. Were Carmen and Michel ready? He was going to call the s.p.a.ceport, on the chance that it had been decided to move up departure time and they had not got around to notifying him.

"Good thing I did," he announced, a couple of minutes later, turning away from the privacy of the communicator console. "Good thing you're ready, too! The last shuttle lifts off three hours from now."

It took the four of them something over an hour in a family aircraft to reach the port. Michel had visited it twice before, once on a tour with his school cla.s.s, and again to see off a visiting uncle from Esteel. This time he said goodbye to his father on the ramp, feeling a moment of sharp sadness as they embraced.

Then the three travelers were hurried into a shuttle, a larger craft than that which had borne away the uncle, and with its hull bearing a hash of letters and numbers, some military designation.

His first shuttle flight did not feel all that different from a straight climb in an aircraft, at first. He and his mother and Mr. Lombok were the only pa.s.sengers; as the sky outside the cleared ports purpled and darkened, a young woman wearing the insignia of an ensign in the personnel services came to sit with them and chat. No one but Michel seemed to notice when the artificial gravity came on in the cabin. He did, though, subtle as the difference was; and felt immediately afterward how the great thrusters underneath began to multiply their force.

And as the blue of atmospheric daylight faded, he began to be able to see some of the convoy escorting them; Mr. Lombok had spoken rea.s.suringly but vaguely of its strength. There were six good-sized ships hanging in formation, small crescent sun-glints against the starless black. But wait-there rode six more, in another flight higher up. And wait again, six more beyond . . .

When he had counted six flights of warships waiting, and understood that there might be more beyond his range of vision, he began to wonder what was going on. More avidly than his parents realized, he followed the news of the war in s.p.a.ce, and not all the books he read on the subject were juvenile novels.

A collection of ships this strong ought to be called a task force or a battle fleet. Mr. Lombok had implied that this force had come more or less straight out to Alpine from Earth, and that it was now going straight back. For what?

His mother dutifully noted the various flights of warships as he pointed them out to her, smiled at his keenness, and went on rehearsing for Mr. Lombok the speeches she meant to use on important people when they got to the Academy. Mr. Lombok, now looking totally relaxed, gave her his smiling attention, only now and then directing a sort of proprietary glance toward Michel.

Only when the starship in which they were to ride at last loomed overhead, like a continent of metal dimly lighted from below by Alpine's blue-glowing dayside, did Carmen at last take a real look.

"I'll certainly feel safe on that," she commented, peering upward, and then looked round to make sure that their meager baggage had not somehow crept away and lost itself.

Michel observed the docking as best he could; and before the shuttle was swallowed inside the block-thick hull of the leviathan, he had the chance to glimpse her name, running in comparatively modest letters across her skin of battle gray: she was theJohann Karlsen.

He sat there looking out the port at nearly featureless dark metal, about a meter from his nose. Then the convoy, or fleet, was not only sizable, but contained at least one vessel of the dreadnought cla.s.s: the very one aboard which he and his mother were about to have the fun of a voyage lasting maybe for some four standard months.

Except that with each pa.s.sing moment, Michel felt less certain about the fun. He pondered, and decided it was too late now to do anything but go along.

Departure followed docking within minutes. Michel and his mother were shortly settled into modest but comfortable adjoining cabins, and the friendly young woman officer, who was evidently their a.s.signed friend, came to take them on a tour of the parts of the ship accessible to pa.s.sengers. She was full of explanations and always rea.s.suring. That evening they all dined with the captain. The captain was a tall, gray woman with a harsh, angular face that softened briefly but remarkably when she smiled, who asked in an abstracted way if there was anything they wanted.

Ship's time had been adjusted to match local Alpine time at the longitude of the Geulincx establishment.

Coincidence or not, the peculiarity of this adjustment was not lost on Michel, and did nothing to ease his growing sense of something stranger than a long s.p.a.ce voyage getting under way.

. . . his father, his biofather whom he had never seen and did not know, was locked up in a filing cabinet somewhere aboard theJohann Karlsen, screaming for his son to let him out. It was up to Michel to make his way through a complexity of locks and barriers to find the trapped man, but before he could get the machinery well in hand, he realized that he had just been dreaming and was now awake. He sat up in the unfamiliar bed in the totally dark cabin, listening very intently.

Thrum.

He had never before felt the interior tug, perceived as a shadowy twisting in the bones and guts, that was a side effect of the energies released when a c-plus cannon fired close at hand. But in his s.p.a.cewar books he had read descriptions enough of the effect.

Thrum. Thrum.

When he had attended, fully awake, for a half a minute, he was no longer in any doubt. He counted hours back to departure. Probably they had reached the Bottleneck already, or were very near it. They wouldn't be firing for practice here.Thrum-thrum. Thrum.And he thought that they would never practice-fire so steadily; it would be too hard on the vital equipment, the force manifolds in particular.

Leaving the room dark-he remembered just where his clothes lay on the floor-he slid out of bed and started to get dressed. He was three-quarters clad when his door was lightly opened, to admit from the lighted pa.s.sageway the young woman officer, Ensign Schneider. She looked surprised to see him on his feet and moving.

"What's wrong, Michel?" There was a straining lightness in her voice.

"Don't you know?" he asked, mechanically, feeling sure she did. "We're under attack." He paused, one arm sleeved in his shirt, one not, sensing.

"I don't hear any-"

"Or we were. The firing stopped just now."

She was smiling at him uncertainly when Lombok stepped in from the hall behind her, wearing a robe that made him look like a little brown bird. He appeared almost elated to see that the boy was up and getting dressed. "Something wake you, Michel?"

Why were these people acting like idiots? "I want to see, Mr. Lombok. Do you suppose I could just look in on the bridge? I promise I won't disturb anything."

Lombok studied him a moment, then turned to the young woman. "Ensign, why don't you just see if Mrs.

Geulincx is restless too?" Then he turned away, indicating with a motion of his head that Michel should follow.

In the corridors the gravity had been reduced, just as was always done on big ships in the stories, when combat alert sounded. The soft handgrips built into the walls and overhead had become useful. He followed Lombok's fluttering brown plumage to the bridge, which, as Michel had expected, was a large, gray, brilliant room where a score of acceleration couches were almost all occupied. The faces of the occupants would have alerted anyone that something more than practice was at hand. There was one empty couch at the end of a row near where they had entered the bridge, and Lombok gestured him into it with a kind of authority that Sixtus often worked at but had never come close to attaining.

In the churchly silence Michel clambered in and snugged the cover of the couch closed without conscious thought-it did not occur to him that he had never seen a similar mechanism before. Nor did he consider the fact that Lombok either could not see another empty couch or did not choose to look for one, but rather stayed beside Michel's. The boy's attention was already caught by the huge simulated battle presentation that filled the center of the room.

The multicolored hologram showed, like a bright tunnel zigzagging through coal, what must be a section of the Bottleneck, a jagged crevice of clear s.p.a.ce surrounded by dark nebula. Strung irregularly through the tunnel and proceeding along it with what looked like painful slowness were green dots that-just as in the stories-showed the disposition of the human fleet. The dreadnought itself, marked by a rhythmic, tiny flash of green, was shown near the middle of the tunnel, followed by a strong rear guard.

A swarm of red dots, berserkers, came on the heels of the rear guard, which must be still heavily engaged. The dreadnought did not turn to help, nor did the strong advance guard which preceded her; they all fled for the end of the Bottleneck ahead, for open s.p.a.ce with its infinity of pathways for their flight.

Of course the hologram was no better than a good guess. Not even the dreadnought's instruments and battle computers could very accurately interpret the specks of ships and machines seen at or near lightspeed, flickering out of normal s.p.a.ce and back again, hiding behind dark lobes of gas or dust, obscured amid a symphony of radiation. In a little while Michel began instead to watch the battle as it was reflected in the face of the captain. In that mask of concentration he read that things were going about as well as could be expected, given the size of the enemy force that had tried to ambush them and almost succeeded.

Glancing back momentarily at the hologram, he saw a green dot of the rear guard suddenly disappear.

Dots of red and green were coming and going all the time, like fireflies, as their positions were recomputed or they departed normal s.p.a.ce and reappeared in it. But this particular disappearance was different-this green dot did not return.

He had known somehow as soon as it vanished that it was never going to come back.

An unknown number of human bodies, along with all their furniture and food supplies and good-luck charms and weaponry, had just been converted into an almost-random sleet of energy and subatomic particles. Michel swayed for a moment in his couch, not with fear but with an empathic sharing of that experience.

The mighty dreadnought fled, while the battle in the rear guard raged and swirled. The implacable red dots came on, mountains of metal that could know no fear or weariness. Michel could hear them calling faintly, with electric thoughts. Calling him to join them, and be free.

THREE.

Offices on the Administration Sublevel of Moonbase tended to be deadeningly silent-or soothingly so, depending upon one's viewpoint. But muted music almost always murmured in the background throughout the complex of chambers of the Secretary of Defense. Popular Western-culture melodies of the twentieth century were what he most favored.

But the Secretary, Tupelov, sitting behind his large desk with his large feet up, was not listening at the moment. "I don't take it as a hopeful sign that the kid almost fainted the first time he got into a combat couch," he said. He was a large, gross, young-looking man, who might have reminded a historian of the early pictures of Oscar Wilde. But the resemblance was confined to physique and general appearance-and, perhaps, raw intellectual ability.

"His first s.p.a.ce flight, not to mention his first battle," offered Lombok, who had just invited himself to take a chair. TheJohann Karlsenhad docked not twenty minutes past, and Lombok had been the first one off. "And all in the middle of the night . . . I think he's a tough kid, basically."

"You got a copy of his bioparents' genetic records?"

"They had only his mother's, at the adoption center. No name for her, but we'll run a computer search for matching records, and see what we can find."

The Secretary dropped his feet to the floor, and hitched himself into a more businesslike position.

"You've been with him and his mother more than four standard months now. Do they have any idea yet what's really going on?"

"I'm willing to bet the mother doesn't. And I'm almost equally willing to bet that Michel does." Lombok raised tiny fingers in a forestalling gesture. "It's nothing I can quote him as saying; nothing I can tell you he's done. It's the way he looks at me sometimes. And the things he listens very keenly to, and the things he tunes out, for example most of his mother's talk about what they'll do at the Academy."

"How about theKarlsen's crew?"

"They all knew we were VIPs, and of course they speculated. I heard no speculation that sounded very close to the mark."

"So. How do you think we ought to officially break the news to our guests? And who ought to do it?"

Lombok considered. "Mama will take it better from the highest-ranking person we can find. If you could arrange a meeting with the President-?"

"Forget that. It would take days. And he doesn't like to come up here, and I'd just as soon not take them down to Earth." Down there, the Academy would be too tantalizingly close, perhaps.

"Then you do it. I don't think it'll have too much direct effect on the kid whoever tells him. But if Mama is badly upset for a considerable time-who knows what bad effect that might have on an eleven-year-old?"

"Okay. I'll see her in here, now." Tupelov stood up and squinted about him, trying to think of the best way to make the large office seem even more impressive to a woman from a half-settled world, who had spent much of her life almost divorced from large-scale technology. He settled for turning on the wall screens. One he adjusted to a repet.i.tive scan of the lunar surface topside; as if the Secretary when he now and then looked up from his work did not waste a precious moment but took a turn as extra sentry.

. . . There, he noticed, was the rounded top of theKarlsen's hull. It was high enough to be visible even over the rim of Middlehurst, the next crater over, where as late as a decade ago tourists had come to gaze at the only known live volcano on the Moon.

On the screen on the opposite wall he got an encyclopedia of impressive battle statistics flowing (old ones, but who would know?); and on the wall behind his desk he conjured up a giant image of the big blue-white marble itself, fed in from a remote pickup somewhere over the horizon on Earthside. What human, from whatever distant world, did not feel the pull et cetera of homeland et cetera, at the first sight of old Earth? Et cetera, et cetera.

He checked his appearance in a mirror, and was all set; or he would be, as soon as Lombok had let himself out by a back door. He asked that the mother be sent in first, alone, and then he met her as she entered.

"Mrs. Geulincx, very glad you could come in to see me. Please, sit down. How is everything?"

She was prettier and younger-looking than he had imagined. "My son and I are certainly being given a great welcome. But I admit I won't be able to relax until we're down on Earth."

He led her to the deluxe chair, and offered wine and smokers; she turned down both. He went to sit behind his desk. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about." Her eyes came down from his wallscreens, and he met them gravely. He let a pause lengthen considerably before going on: "As you know, Michel was chosen to come here because of some very special qualities he possesses. What you have no way of knowing . . . is that he wasnotchosen by the Academy. And not for his artistic talent, great as that must be."

She looked her total lack of comprehension at him. Tried a little smile, then let it fall.

He leaned his elbows on his desk, slumped forward, letting some of his tiredness show. "As I say, Mrs.

Geulincx-may I call you Carmen? Carmen, then-there is no way you can be expected to understand.

Until I explain things to you. First, humanity is not winning this war. A hundred years ago we were sure that victory was just around the corner. Fifty years ago we were still confident that the odds were with us, time was ultimately on our side. But within the past few decades we have been made to realize that neither of those hopes is true. The enemy has grown stronger, while we have not kept up the pace of weapons development. We have too often been content simply to defend ourselves, instead of going after the berserkers when we had an advantage . . . I can go into all the reasons later if you wish. For now, just take my word for it: if things go on as they have, in fifty years-intwentyyears-there will notbe an Academy to hand out scholarships to youngsters like Michel. And if Michel is still alive it may be only as a canned brain in some berserker's experimental . . . are you all right? Forgive me. Here." He got up and came around the desk to her with water. The intensity of her reaction had taken him by surprise.

Carmen got her eyes in focus, sipped a little water, signaled that she now felt better, and changed her mind about the smokers. With newly frightened eyes she looked up at the Secretary through a blue, fragrant cloud, and asked him harshly: "If it was not the Academy who brought us here, then who? And why?"

"Me. Oh, I could say technically it was the Interworld War Council, but the worlds are no longer co-operating very well on anything. I could say truthfully it was Earth's government, because the plan has been approved at the very highest levels. But the plan was and is my idea."

He went back to his desk, sat down, spoke to her softly. "As to why. We are developing a new weapons system, the importance of which is hardly possible to exaggerate. The code name for it is Lancelot; I don't suppose you've ever heard it mentioned?"

She shook her head, allowing Tupelov to feel mildly rea.s.sured about security.

He went on: "I could say it's a new type of s.p.a.ceship, though it's really more. Lancelot does, or will do, things that we think no berserker will ever be able to match. Because it uses as one integral component a living, willing human mind. Now this creates one problem. Most people's minds, even those of our best pilots, do not tolerate this kind of integration into a system. The subconscious as well as the conscious mind is utilized, you see. Change your mind about the wine?"

While the robot poured for her, he continued in a deliberately soothing and monotonous voice. "Some people of course did better-or less poorly-than others. Finally we developed a theoretical model of the mind that could provide a perfect match. Then we started looking for people who matched that model. It was a rare type we needed, and a difficult search. We have inspected the genetic and psychological records of almost a hundred billion living people, on Earth and on every human-colonized planet whose records we have been able to get at. Michel's records, along with many others, we found in Adoption Central, here on Earth. And out of that hundred billion, Michel is the closest match, by far, to our theoretical ideal."

"A hundred billion . . ."

Tupelov debated whether to go over to her again, and settled for coming around to the front of his desk and perching on it. "Now let me a.s.sure you at once that he won't be harmed. The tests we've brought him here for are perfectly safe."

"Oh." Relief set in. "For just a moment there I had the idea that you expectedhim-" She could smile now at her own silliness. Imagine, a skinny eleven-year-old child, her own artistic one at that, going forth to fight berserkers!

Tupelov smiled. "Once we have the hardware tuned up with an ideal personality, you see, then we can make some modifications, and choose among our trained people for the combat operators."

Carmen sipped wine, and looked at him with a face suddenly clouded by new suspicion. "There's just one thing. Why all the mystery? Why didn't you simply tell us the truth on Alpine?"