Shiva in Steel Read online

  SHIVA IN STEEL

  THE BERSERKER SERIES

  By

  Fred Saberhagen

  Tor Books by Fred Saberhagen

  The Berserker® Series

  The Berserker Wars

  Berserker Base (with Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen Donaldson, Larry Niven, Connie Willis, and Roger Zelazny)

  Berserker: Blue Death

  The Berserker Throne

  Berserker's planet

  Berserker Kill

  Berserker Fury

  Shiva in Steel

  The Dracula Series

  The Dracula Tapes

  The Holmes-Dracula Files

  An Old Friend of the Family

  Thorn

  Dominion A Matter of Taste

  A Question of Time

  Seance for a Vampire

  A Sharpness on the Neck

  The Swords Series

  The First Book of Swords

  The Second Book of Swords

  The Third Book of Swords

  The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer's Story

  The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder's Story

  The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter's Story

  The Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story

  The Fifth Book of Lost Swords: Coinspinner's Story

  The Sixth Book of Lost Swords: Mindsword's Story

  The Seventh Book of Lost Swords: Wayfinder's Story

  The Last Book of Lost Swords: Shieldbreakier's Story

  An Armory of Swords (editor)

  Other Books

  A Century of Progress Coils (with Roger Zelazny)

  Dancing Bears

  Earth Descended

  The Mask of the Sun

  Merlin's Bones

  The Veils of Azlaroc

  The Water of Thought

  The Face of Apollo

  ONE

  Five thousand light-years from old Earth, on an airless planetoid code-named Hyperborea, inside the small Space Force base that was really a sealed fortress, unexpected visitors were rare, and even more rarely were they welcome.

  The lone ship now incoming had been a total surprise to everyone on the base when it was detected about an hour ago by the early warning net of robot pickets that englobed the entire Hyperborean system. Since that sighting, Claire Normandy had been fidgeting in her base-commander's office, distracted from her other duties by watching the interloper's progress on the larger of her two office holostages.

  Normandy was neat and slender, with straight black hair and coffee-colored skin. Her usual voice and manner were quiet. In her job she assumed authority, rather than continually striving to demonstrate it. At first encounter, most people tended to think her dull and colorless. Less immediately apparent was another tendency, a love of gambling when the stakes grew very high.

  The commander's uniform today, as on most days, was the workaday Space Force coverall, suitable for wear inside space armor, when the need for that arose. Her age was hard to estimate, as with most healthy adults; and within broad limits, chronological age was not a very meaningful measurement.

  The unscheduled caller's reception at the base was not going to be particularly cordial. It had been tentatively identified as a privately owned spacecraft named Witch of Endor, engaged in mineral prospecting and a variety of other small-business ventures, owner and operator Harry Silver. Once, some fifteen years ago, Claire had had a brief encounter with a man of that name, and she had no reason to doubt that this was the same person.

  Informed of the Witch's approach by superluminal courier just minutes after the far-flung robotic eyes of base defense had detected it at a distance of around a billion kilometers, Commander Normandy had opened communications with the pilot as soon as the distance delay for radio communication fell under a minute. When the visitor, speaking calmly enough, had pleaded recent combat damage and a need for repairs, she had ordered his ship to stand by for inspection. In a matter of minutes, one of her patrol craft had matched velocities. Her people had gone aboard the Witch and one of her own pilots was now bringing the civilian craft in for a landing at the base.

  Her alertness was heightened by a certain message that had come in by long-distance courier a few hours earlier and been promptly decoded. Claire was still carrying the hard copy of that message in her pocket. For a moment, she considered taking it out and looking at it again-but really there was no need.

  It came from from sector headquarters on Port Diamond, and was signed by the chief of the Intelligence Service there. Below the usual jargon of routing and addressing, it read simply:

  GOOD EVIDENCE KERMANDIE SECRET AGENT IDENTITY UNKNOWN HAS TARGETED YOUR BASE FOR PENETRATION. OBJECTIVE UNKNOWN. YOU ARE DIRECTED TO APPLY HEIGHTENED SECURITY MEASURES TO ANY RECENT OR NEW ARRIVALS, PARTICULARLY CIVILIANS.

  When Claire had first laid eyes on the message, her immediate inner reaction had been: What civilians? There were seldom any here, and at the moment, not even one. And her second reaction, not long delayed: What evidence?

  She supposed she would never be given an answer to the second question. As for the first, about civilians, now it seemed that she might soon be going to find out.

  When she tired momentarily of focusing her attention on the intruder, she turned, gazing out through a clear window at a dark horizon, the jagged line of an airless and uneven surface only a fraction of a kilometer away, but five thousand light-years from the sun whose light had nourished the earnest years of her own life-as it had, long ago, those of the whole race of Earth-descended humans. The rotation of the planetoid beneath her feet was swift enough to set the stars and other celestial objects in visible motion, rising in an endless, stately progression from beyond that jagged line. Months ago, she'd learned that she need only stare for a little while at that perpetually sinking horizon to induce a feeling that the world was somehow giving way beneath her.

  The whole cycle of rotation was several minutes long, and during various segments of that great circle, the light of distant galaxies predominated.

  Looking out as it did over the landing field, the commander's office window offered a view of several robotic interstellar couriers, poised for quick launching. Each was sited in its own revetment, widely spaced along the near side of the artificially flattened surface that served the base as landing field. Half a kilometer away, on the far side of that field, set into a naturally vertical wall of rock, were the hangar doors through which arriving vessels were admitted to the interior docks and berths that had been carved out of the rock into several subterranean levels of hangar space.

  The Witch of Endor was going to touch down a couple of hundred meters from those doors, the first unscheduled visitor to land on or even approach this planetoid in more than a year. The ship's sole occupant before the Space Force had come aboard, the man identifying himself as the ship's owner, Harry Silver, had made no objection to being boarded, but rather, had been relieved to hand over the controls.

  Two days ago, or even yesterday, Commander Normandy would not have been made quite so edgy by an unforeseen arrival; but today she had been eagerly expecting quite a different set of visitors, vitally important ones, and they were already almost two hours overdue. Any suggestion that the day's schedule of events was going to be disrupted was most unwelcome.

  In fact, she was anticipating at every moment another signal from the robot pickets of her early warning array, giving notice of the arrival, in-system, of a task force of attack ships. If everything was going according to schedule, those six Space Force vessels-three light cruisers and three destroyers-should have been dispatched two standard days ago from Port Diamond, a thousand light-years distant. It made no sense, of course, for her to be gazing with naked eyes toward the s
tars in that direction as if it might be possible to see the approach of the task force. But time and again, she caught herself doing just that.

  Commander Normandy's second-in-command was a diligent lieutenant colonel named Khodark, but her adjutant was an optelectronic artifact, a computer program, sometimes classified as an expert system, known as Sadie. Sadie's usual holostage persona had a vague, but no more than vague, resemblance to the commander herself.

  At the moment, Sadie's head was visible inside the larger office holostage, looking out with a certain expectancy on her pleasant virtual features, as if she could be curious as to why the Old Lady should be somewhat on edge today, and should stand gazing out the window at nothing much at all.

  In fact, no one else on Hyperborea besides the base commander, not even virtual Sadie of unquestionable loyalty, knew that the task force was scheduled to arrive. Three light cruisers and three destroyers ought to create quite a stir among her people when they showed up. And that would be time enough for an announcement.

  The transparency through which Commander Normandy stared at the universe was an extraordinary window, even for a port in space-it had been formed of statglass, ten centimeters thick with protective elaborations. And what it showed her was no ordinary view.

  What she saw, in concrete, mundane terms, was the above-ground portion-which was less than half the whole-of a human outpost, set in rather spectacular surroundings on a minor planet in orbit around a brown dwarf, which in turn was only the junior member of a binary star. The dwarf, not quite big enough or hot enough to be a real sun, had in the commander's view the apparent size of Earth's moon as seen from the surface of the Cradle World. Its light, dull red, dim, and often depressing, came in some of the station windows-whenever, as now, anyone wanted to look at it. Generally, the majority of the four dozen or so people on-station preferred virtual scenery-green hills, tall trees, blue sky, and shining water, easily generated on screen and holostage-when they wanted any at all. For the past month, most of them had been too busy with their jobs to give much thought to the esthetics of their environment.

  Few of the jobs on this base were routine, and all of them were demanding.

  Even as she watched, she saw the flicker across a portion of the sky that meant another robot interstellar courier coming in. The traffic was so frequent that on an ordinary day, she would scarcely have given the sight a thought.

  Complications, always complications.

  On the large chronometer set into one wall of Commander Normandy's office, a certain unmarked deadline was drawing near-now no more than seven standard days away. If everything went according to plan, today's expected visitors, the six ships and crews of the task force, were going to be departing Hyperborea before that deadline. Then they would be lifting off on the last leg of the journey that would take them to their objective. The schedule did allow a little spare time for the unexpected things that always came up-but spare time was a precious commodity that should never be squandered pointlessly. Even two hours lost at the start was enough to create the beginning of concern.

  Only this morning, the commander had issued an order canceling the passes of three people who had been scheduled for a weekend of such recreation as they might be able to find down on Good Intentions, so everyone on the base knew that something special was up, though not even Sadie knew what it was.

  If all went well, and the crews of the task force completed their mission successfully, they were going to kill a thing that had never been alive. Their mission called for them to demolish a brutally efficient form of death, which was also a master of strategic thinking. A spiritless thing that nevertheless made deep plans, and moved and struck with the power of a force of nature. It was a terrible foe, the mortal enemy of everything that lived.

  Humanity called it a berserker.

  For centuries now, Galactic life had been engaged in a great defensive war. The death-machines that Solarian humans called berserkers had been designed ages ago by a race now remembered only as the Builders, because so little else was known about them. Demonstrating great cleverness and the absolute reverse of wisdom, the Builders had gone all out to win an interstellar war by creating an ultimate weapon, meant to eliminate all life from the worlds held by their antagonists.

  The ultimate weapon had done its job to perfection, but any rejoicing among the Builders must have been short-lived indeed. Berserkers had proven to be more easily launched than recalled. The race of their creators had been the next to disappear, processed efficiently into oblivion by the remorseless death-machines. Only very recently had stark evidence surfaced, strongly suggesting that at least a few members of the Builders' race were still alive-but only in the depths of the Mavronari Nebula, effectively out of touch with the rest of the Galaxy.

  Now, hundreds of centuries later, the mechanical killers still fought on, endlessly replicating and redesigning themselves for greater efficiency, steadily improving their interstellar drives and weaponry. Even finding possibilities of improvement-as they saw it-in their own programming. Whatever the precise intent of their original designers, the berserkers' goal was now the abolition of all life throughout the Galaxy.

  Humanity-organic intelligence, in all the biological modes and manifestations that phenomenon assumed on various worlds-was the form of life assigned the highest priority in the great plan of destruction because human life was the only kind capable of effective resistance. The only kind capable of fighting back with purpose and cunning and intelligence.

  And of the several known varieties of Galactic humanity, only the Solarian, the Earth-descended, seemed capable of matching the berserkers' own implacable ferocity.

  For ages, the conflict had dragged on, often flaring into all-out war. It pitted Galactic life-which in practice, meant Solarians, the sons and daughters of old Earth-against the machines that had been programmed ages ago to accomplish the extermination of that life. From time to time, the conflict died down in one sector, while both sides rebuilt their forces, only to burst out in another. If annihilation of the berserkers seemed an unattainable dream, at least there was every reason to hope that they might be prevented from achieving their programmed goal.

  Two personal holograms, one mounted on Claire Normandy's desk, the other on her office wall, beside the big chronometer, showed a smiling man of an age as indeterminate as her own, in the company of one obviously young adult. The suggestion was that the commander was certainly old enough to have a grown child somewhere. And in fact, she did.

  On the other side of the chronometer hung a silent holographic recording of a man-not the one who smiled in the other picture-giving a speech before an enthusiastic crowd, some of whose heads showed blurrily in the foreground. The speaker was dressed in a distinctive costume; a long shirt of fine material, secured with a leather belt over trousers of the same thin stuff. His name was Hai San, and everyone who knew anything about Kermandie, or about history in this sector, knew who he was. Hai San had been killed, martyred, by the Kermandie dictatorship six or seven years ago.

  The junior officer she'd sent to pilot in the Witch of Endor was calling in now from aboard the approaching ship, a young man's head and shoulders showing in a solid-looking image on the small office holostage. He reported briskly that there were no problems and that landing was now only a couple of minutes away.

  Tersely, Commander Normandy acknowledged the communication.

  There was still no sign of the task force of ships she had been expecting. More to relieve her growing tension than for any other reason, she swung open a door and left her office, striding purposefully down the narrow, slightly curving corridor outside. Other uniformed figures passed her, walking normally. Inside the walls of the base, an artificial gravity was maintained at the usual standard, near Earth-surface normal.

  Most of the station's interior was decorated in tasteful combinations of green and brown and blue, streaked and spotted at random with contrasting hues of brightness, imitating the colors of Earthly
nature. Here and there, people could look out through statglass windows, which in time of trouble, could be easily melded into the walls. Corridors were seldom wider than was necessary for two people wearing space armor to pass, while living quarters tended to be relatively spacious. Given several cubic kilometers of rock to work with, and a generous budget, the diggers and shapers who built the base had not stinted on creating habitable space.

  She filled her lungs appreciatively. Today's scent in the corridors, chosen by popular vote a few days in advance, was fresh pine.

  As Claire Normandy walked, she cast a security-conscious eye about the interior of the station, trying to see whether there was anything in plain view, at this level, that a casual visitor should not be allowed to see. Nothing leaped out at her.

  The commander used her wrist communicator to make a general announcement to everyone aboard the station. "Your attention, this is the commanding officer. We are going to have a civilian visitor coming aboard in a few minutes. We will not, repeat not, be giving the gentleman a tour of the base. But I don't know how long he may be with us, perhaps for several days. So I want you all now to take a look around your immediate environment, wherever you happen to be, with security in mind, and do whatever may be necessary to tighten things up."

  The strongest source of natural illumination for several light-years in any direction was a small white sun, the dominant member of the binary star in terms of illumination as it was in terms of gravity. Now, as a consequence of Hyperborea's rotation, this real sun's harsh light, as it rose on the opposite side of the installation, carved out stark shadows on the planetoid's black rock.

  All in all, this place seemed an inconspicuous corner of the Galaxy, so out of the way that the garrison could still nourish hopes that the berserkers hadn't spotted it in the two or three standard years since the base had been established.

  Reentering her office, she looked again at the holocube on her desk, and the two recorded images within looked back at her.