Berserker's Star Page 10

  “When I was reading up on Maracanda, the sourcebook said something about caravans, and ground transport being generally difficult, but I couldn’t really understand what it was talking about.”

  Harry was puzzling over another symbol on the map, a long and wiggly line labeled SUBDUCTION ZONE, when Lily gave a sharp tug at his sleeve.

  He turned to discover two men in Space Force uniform, wearing sidearms, approaching him on foot, smiling pleasantly.

  “Mr. Harry Silver?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’d like you to come with us, please.”

  He looked from one youthful face to another. “Is this an arrest?”

  “No sir, nothing like that. A request only.”

  Evidently his ship had been identified, on approach or on landing, and some sort of official notice taken. Harry gave his welcomers a smile. “Why not? I always enjoy a chat with the Space Force.”

  He didn’t look at Lily, and was ready to walk away from her without a word, as if they were two strangers only standing next to each other by chance. But she wasn’t having any of that.

  “What about me?” she spoke up sharply.

  One officer kept a steady eye on Harry, but the other turned. “Ma’am?”

  “My name is Lily Gunnlod. I was a passenger on Mr. Silver’s ship.”

  The two exchanged glances. “We don’t have any orders regarding you, ma’am. But if it’s convenient, maybe you’d better come along.”

  Little was said among the four of them as they took a short walk down a corridor paneled in something that looked like false marble, to arrive almost immediately in the Space Force offices.

  Harry left her sitting comfortably in the little anteroom when he was ushered in to see the local Space Force commandant.

  Commandant Rovaki’s eyebrows, bushy and silvery, were the most prominent features of his small face. His body was on the small side, too, nervous and energetic, seeming well suited to the dimensions of his small private office. Decoration was at a minimum in here, lighting was bright and direct, order and efficiency were paramount. There were no pictures on the plain walls, or even windows, but only charts that moved and crawled with information.

  The commandant did not bother to rise when Harry was brought in. The greeting from behind the small, efficient desk was terse and to the point, accompanied by a knitted frown of eyebrows. “We’ve got a dossier on you, Silver.”

  “Good afternoon to you, too.” Harry helped himself to one of the two unoccupied chairs and soon discovered it was not designed for comfort. “Yes, thanks, we had a pleasant trip. Nothing good in your file on me, I hope.” He tossed a small recording cube on the commandant’s desk. “A little something to bring you up to date.”

  “I wouldn’t advise you to be antagonistic, mister!” Rovaki gave the little cube a brief, suspicious glare, as if he dared it to explode. “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “Some pictures of a berserker. Ever see one?”

  “Pictures taken where and when?”

  “On the edge of the Thisworld system, when I just passed through.”

  The officer stared at Harry for a full ten seconds without speaking. At last he said: “Not in my territory. I know your type, Silver. You’ve been lucky in a berserker fight or two, and also in getting away with some illegalities. So you think that you have special rights and privileges. That’s not going to work in the Maracanda system. I hear you have a passenger.”

  “Had one. She’s now reached her destination.”

  “And just what are the two of you up to here?”

  “So far we’re just wasting time—me in here, she in your outer office.”

  “All right, mister, have your fun. Maybe I’ll have some fun of my own before we say goodbye. Now I want to know what kind of business the two of you are in. Here to get rich digging up the ground? Or maybe you have spiritual goals.”

  “You’ll have to ask the lady about her business. I just told you mine.”

  “Mm-hmm. So, you came here with only one passenger. What’s your cargo?”

  Harry told him. “Six large boxes, said to contain food-processing machinery. I haven’t looked into ‘em. The shipment was consigned to Hong’s World, but I guess nobody there had need of it any longer. Couldn’t find anyone who wanted to pay for it.”

  “I’ll want to inspect your cargo. And the rest of your ship.”

  Harry nodded. “Sure. I’ll give you the personal tour, any time you say.”

  For a time Rovaki sat nodding to himself in meditative silence. “So you have no contracted deliveries to make on Maracanda?”

  “Just one passenger, as already described.”

  The commandant leaned back in his chair. “Then I’ll make that inspection of your ship when I get around to it. Meanwhile we’re just going to seal her up, pending inspection for possible contraband.”

  It was Harry’s turn to sit and think, while Rovaki looked at him from across his desk, letting Harry ponder the implications of not being able to move his vessel or unload it here.

  Harry sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “I’d pay attention, Silver, if I were you.”

  There were metaphysical depths in that response that Harry decided to avoid. “I am paying attention,” he answered mildly. “More or less. I don’t know what I’d do if I were you.”

  Rovaki blinked. “Tell me more about your passenger.”

  “I’ll tell you all I know, it won’t take long. In effect, she chartered my ship to come here. Says she’s looking for her husband.”

  The officer seemed to take sharp notice of something in Harry’s tone. “Any reason to doubt that?”

  Harry shrugged. “No special reason either to doubt it or believe it. She paid me and I earned my money.”

  “And the trip was uneventful?”

  “Oh, quite. Unless you count the berserker. If that subject really doesn’t interest you, I might as well take my recording back.”

  “Not so fast. I’ll look at it in good time. When I’m ready. I have some people and some programs that are very good at detecting fakes. Tell me about this alleged missing husband. What’s he do?”

  “What I hear from his alleged wife is that currently he’s much involved with the Malakó religion. But you’d better ask the man himself. I’ve never even met him, I just drive the alleged ship.”

  The official did not seem to find Alan’s purported motives strange. He became almost conversational. “About half the people arriving at our spaceport claim to be coming here for religious reasons. The proportion used to be higher, but now there’s quite a crowd coming to prospect for minerals, or to put in a claim on a section of land, just on speculation. What business arrangement did you have with this Alan Gunnlod?”

  “None at all. I just told you, I’ve never met him, or communicated.”

  The officer switched topics abruptly. Somewhere he must have taken a course on how to be a skilled interrogator—keep the guilty subject off balance, tangle him up in his stupid lies. Well, the conversation so far was unbalanced and tangled enough.

  Gesturing at a blank space on his office wall, Rovaki called up an intricate 3-D astrogation chart. “So, you claim to have encountered this berserker in the Thisworld system?”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “If your record proves to be authentic, it will be passed on to the appropriate authorities. What were you doing there?”

  “I just told you. If you doubt I was really there—”

  “Now, would I have any reason to do that?” Rovaki made an adjustment, and the chart on his wall switched scales and point of view. A hundred or so solar systems vanished, others were brought into the foreground.

  “It does seem just a little out of the way, doesn’t it?” the officer commented. Rows of numbers, and curved lines, flickered and came to an understanding among themselves. “In the conduct of normal business, setting a course to Maracanda from Hong’s World, Thisworld wouldn’t be
likely to show up on your route.”

  “When I put my ship on autopilot, she sometimes seems to have a mind of her own.”

  Commandant Rovaki resettled himself in his chair. He took his comfortable time about it, as if to make the point that he had just got started asking questions.

  “You say you came here from Hong’s World. Where were you before that?”

  Harry told him.

  “And before that? Your previous port of departure?”

  Over the next few minutes they worked their way back through several months of standard time, until they had arrived at a place called Hyperborea.

  When Harry pronounced that name, the commandant leaned back in his chair and gave him a strange look.

  “Yeah, I know,” Harry assured him, “it’s one of your big bases. And that was just when all the fuss was going on there. You can check with the commanding officer, Commander Claire Normandy.” To himself he thought, You’ll probably be hearing from her about me anyway, soon enough.

  The officer refused to be impressed. “You can rest assured that I’ll do that.”

  Rovaki spent a few minutes going back over the same ground. Then suddenly he seemed to tire of the interrogation game. “All right, Silver, you can go. For now. I would advise you not to leave town.”

  Lily, still sitting where Harry had left her, tossed aside a smartpaper magazine and looked up at him expectantly. The low-ranker who escorted Harry back to the waiting room politely asked her to step in for a separate interview.

  When she shot a questioning look at Harry, he tried for a reassuring smile. This would seem to be an ideal chance for him to say goodbye and disappear. But without his ship he had no place to go.

  Instead he said: “Go ahead, talk to the man, Ms. Gunnlod. I’ll be waiting. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Thanks.” It sounded like she meant it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Settling into a chair, Harry picked up the smartpaper magazine Lily had been looking at, glanced at the title page to see what range of content it could provide, and tossed it aside. Evidently no new information had been loaded into it for more than a standard year.

  There was a small holostage in one corner of the waiting room, tuned and positioned to avoid distracting the low-ranker receptionist at her work station. A presentation of local news was currently on stage, and Harry began to watch and listen with some attention. It would probably be a good idea to absorb whatever details he could about the ways of human life on Maracanda.

  So far, the newscaster, who sounded weary, had been talking almost exclusively about what she called the usual disputes over access to the Portal. The images of various people Harry had never heard of came and went on the little stage, staking out their positions. The first speaker claimed to represent the scientific community, the second one the true Malakó religion—never mind about those schismatic heretics who were causing all the trouble—and a third the local civil authority. No two speakers seemed to agree about anything; Harry had no idea if any of them were right.

  The times allotted for Portal access by the general public seemed to be severely limited. So were the disputants’ times on stage. There wasn’t going to be any long discussion, nothing that might allow an outsider to deduce just what they were talking about. On with the news. The amount of high-grade mineral exports had reached a new high in the last standard month. Investigators had still uncovered no clues in the disappearance, a standard month ago, of a certain Dr. Emily Kochi, an astrogeologist. Dr. Kochi had no family on Maracanda, but many friends who by now had just about given up hope. She had been working alone in a remote area, and it was feared that she had been caught in a subduction zone.

  On the brighter side, it seemed a new school was about to open in Port City.

  Harry’s attention wandered, and he checked the local time. Lily seemed to be spending a good amount of time talking to the Space Force—or maybe she would just be listening as Commandant Rovaki practiced his interrogation skills. Harry wasn’t much worried about what Lily might be telling him. If she was the innocent person she claimed to be, she wasn’t going to say anything that would delay her search for Alan, and if she really was secretly the queen of smugglers, she certainly wasn’t about to sign up for any unnecessary appearance in a courtroom.

  No, the two amateur hijackers must have been lying about her, just trying to save their miserable lives. Harry couldn’t really find her credible as a master criminal.

  At that point, experience kicked in, reminding him of a number of things in the past that he had not been able to believe, not until they ignored his predictions and happened anyway.

  What he did have no trouble at all believing, and found a serious annoyance, was Rovaki’s announcement that his ship was being sealed, that the Witch was condemned to sit idle on the ramp of this out-of-the-way port for some unknown time, just waiting for his lordship of the local Space Force to get around to inspecting it.

  Harry was pondering, gloomily and unproductively, the various ramifications of this problem when a new face appeared in the entrance to the waiting room. It was a dark, masculine countenance, showing a lot of ancient Asian ancestry, and set well above the floor, atop a kind of uniform that was probably not often seen inside this Space Force office. Each of this man’s shoulders bore the single small silver star of a Templar brigadier general.

  The general had come to a halt, hands gripping the sides of the narrow doorway. His dark epicanthic eyes were staring at Harry—not exactly with recognition, but some kind of anticipation. The scrutiny was intense, but did not seem unfriendly.

  It took another moment for the attendant clerk to catch sight of the visitor. She looked up, startled, from her work. “General Pike? The commandant is currently engaged. If you’d like to see—”

  A large hand waved dismissively. A harsh voice rasped: “That’s all right, didn’t much want to see him anyway. Not today. You’d be Harry Silver?”

  Harry got slowly to his feet. “That’s right, general.”

  “Word has got around that you just made a berserker kill.”

  “Word gets around quickly then. I’m glad someone’s taking notice. Let’s just say I watched a berserker die.”

  The general moved a step into the room, to stand with arms folded. There was excitement in his voice. “But I understand that you engaged the bloody thing in combat?”

  Harry nodded. “Except I’m not sure if ‘engaged’ is the right word. We exchanged fire, but I was doing my damnedest to get away.”

  “By thunder!” The newcomer’s eyes were glowing. He stepped closer, put out a hand, caught Harry’s in a crushing grip. “Need I say that I’m keen to see any record of this exploit that you might have managed to retain—and to offer my heartfelt congratulations to the winner!

  “My name’s Robledo Pike.” Breaking off the handshake, he stepped back to make a sweeping bow, flourishing a broad-brimmed hat, one of the optional adjuncts of the Templar dress uniform.

  “Harry Silver.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Then the general jerked his chin toward the inner office. “Still waiting to see the man, are you?”

  “Actually, I’ve seen him. I’m just waiting for a friend who’s in there now.”

  “Ah. Do you suppose you could wait in my office as well as here? My chairs are softer.”

  “Why not? I can show you that recording if you like.” Harry was prepared with another copy to hand out.

  “Excellent!”

  “I’ll be glad to go over it with you, in case you have any questions.”

  “Could you possibly spare the time right now? My office is just upstairs. Free-zone space is at a premium here, you see, and everyone shares a building. Beth, my dear?” This last was addressed to the clerk. “Suppose you could point Mr. Silver’s friend in the right direction to catch up with us, when His Nibs is finished with her?”

  “Certainly, general.”

  But no sooner had the clerk said that than Lily eme
rged from the inner office, not exactly storming, but moving along energetically.

  She was talking as she walked. Over her shoulder she told the commandant, who was still out of sight somewhere behind her: “I’m going wherever I want to go, and doing anything I want to do! As long as I’m not under arrest, I’m going to Portal City to meet my husband. If you want me for anything, you can find me there.”

  Then an afterthought, lifting her chin at Harry: “And if Mr. Silver wants to come with me, and I hope he does, I’m going to see a lot of him!”

  Commandant Rovaki’s voice could be heard, calling after Lily: “And when you see Harry Silver, tell him I’m putting a seal on his ship, until this little matter is straightened out. He’d better not go anywhere either.”

  Lily said to Harry: “So, it seems that, if I am really a decent young lady, I will be well advised not to associate with you.”

  Harry performed brief introductions, and the general made another sweeping bow. A couple of minutes later, they were all three in the general’s office. Pike’s office was somewhat bigger and considerably more disorderly than Rovaki’s. The walls were hung with portrait after portrait, mostly of veteran men and women in Templar uniforms. There was a variety of mementos, including an old recruiting poster:

  THE FIGHT FOR LIFE HAS NOT BEEN WON

  THE TEMPLARS NEED YOU

  Just underneath the legend a lifelike graphic, appearing three-dimensional when viewed from the proper angle, portrayed an attractive child cringing away from a grasping metallic menace. The berserker in the image was far more barbed and angled and poisonous-looking than the one in Harry’s brief recording.

  But it was, of course, the one in the recording that the general was watching, for about the tenth time.

  Robledo Pike, in contrast to his Space Force counterpart, proved eager to see the berserker blasted over and over, in shower after shower of multicolored sparks. Pike was nodding judiciously, as the spectacular climax appeared again. “Must have hit a clot of dust head on—a veritable lump of the good hard stuff— only other time I can recall seeing one disintegrate like that was a direct hit from a c-plus cannon.”