The Berserker Throne Read online

  “I’ve been rather curious about what you do out here,” was Commander Anne Blenheim’s greeting.

  “I’ll gladly include some of these sites in the next tour,” the Prince replied almost absently, easing himself into a seat facing her. He realized that he must sound and look happier than the last time this woman had seen him, and he wondered what she, who probably had a good grasp of the political situation, might make of that.

  From the seat beside hers, the spacesuited youth whose name he thought he could guess was gazing back at Prince Harivarman, favoring the eminent man with a muted stare. It appeared to be an attempt to disguise sheer awe. The Prince had been the subject of enough awed glances in his time to know. But it was impossible for him to tell whether the young man was wearing a uniform or civilian clothing inside his spacesuit. At least he was not a Templar officer, Harivarman was sure of that.

  The Prince said: “Commander, if your companion here is who I think he is, well, I’ve looked forward to meeting him.”

  “Good,” Commander Anne answered dryly. “That’s why he’s here now.” She paused. “Also, I wanted rather urgently to have a talk with you, General Harivarman. To confront you with certain—facts. I wanted to make up my mind about certain things, as much as possible, before I am called on to make decisions.”

  “If you mean your approaching decision as to whether to hand me over, when someone who hates my guts comes to the Radiant and demands that you do so—yes, I think you’re right to give that one a lot of thought.”

  Anne Blenheim’s blue eyes, trying to conceal their own strain, studied him carefully. “What makes you so sure that someone is coming to arrest you?”

  He only looked at her.

  She looked away at last. “Yes . . . well, I may as well tell you, General. We’ve had radio contact within the past hour from another unscheduled ship; it’ll be the third to arrive here in two days. It was reluctant to identify itself very precisely. But it’s from Salutai, and it will of course be here in a matter of a few hours.”

  Harivarman was once more looking at the young man, who still gazed back at him with starry eyes.

  The commander sighed. “General, this is Chen Shizuoka. From Salutai.”

  The two men touched hands in traditional greeting.

  The youth said: “Prince . . . I feel honored to meet you.” It was obviously a considerable understatement.

  The Prince was unable to see either a mad assassin or a crafty schemer in this young enthusiast before him. But something odd was going on. Harivarman said coolly: “I hear that you arranged a demonstration in my favor.”

  “It was an honor to be able to do so, sir.” Now Chen’s face and voice grew quickly troubled. “But then . . . a few days later—only after I had been brought here to the Radiant—I found out that Her Imperial Majesty had been killed. Even while the demonstration was going on. As I say, I was already here before I found that out. But even before I left Salutai, someone had tried to kill me too. They fired at me in the street.”

  “Aha. I hadn’t heard about that.” Harivarman glanced at the commander, who evidently had.

  She gently prodded young Chen. “But you said nothing about anyone having shot at you when you enlisted?” It sounded like she had been over this ground with the youth before, and doubtless more than once, but she was going to do it once more for Harivarman’s benefit.

  “No ma’am, I didn’t. I wanted to get off world, to save my life. I thought then that it was Security shooting at me. Now I think it must have been someone connected with the Empress’s real assassins.” Chen, without further prompting, now related his whole version of the events on Salutai, beginning with the secret preparations he and his friends had carried out for their impressive demonstration. It sounded like about the hundredth time he’d told the story, so that by now it had a rehearsed tone.

  Harivarman found himself inclined to believe it anyway. He said to the young man: “If all that’s true, it seems to me that you have been used.”

  Chen nodded, miserably, reluctantly. “I still can’t believe that my friends—the ones who helped me organize the demonstration—were mixed up in an assassination.”

  “Perhaps not all of them were.” Harivarman looked into the blue eyes of Anne Blenheim, and there saw himself being weighed, even as he had just weighed Chen and his story. The Prince hoped she was as perceptive as he was himself.

  Harivarman said to her: “The young man here may be as innocent in this matter as I am, you see. But I shall be very much surprised if accusations, indictments, are not soon brought in from Salutai against me.”

  She shook her head. “I suppose we may know more about that when this third ship arrives. But your guilt or innocence is not up to me to determine, General.”

  “Theoretically that is so. But in practice you may very well have to decide my future. You will be the highest Templar authority here on the Fortress when that ship gets here. If they’re coming to get me, as I assume they are, you will have to decide whether to turn me over to them or not.”

  She regarded him silently.

  He pressed her. “Isn’t that what you meant just now when you spoke of having to make up your mind about certain things? And in bringing the young man out here to see me? Do you really think I’ve been spending my spare time in captivity trying to arrange an assassination of the Empress? When you can see what peril that puts me in?”

  Commander Blenheim shook her head. “How am I supposed to know that? I’ve only been here a few days myself.”

  “You’re going to have to know it.”

  She didn’t like to be told, by her prisoner, what she had to do. “I repeat, that is not my decision, General. We’ll talk of this again. Very soon, I suspect.” She keyed a circuit, and spoke to her driver: “The general is getting out now. Then take us right back to the base.”

  Harivarman closed up his helmet that he had opened on entering the vehicle; and shortly he was drifting in the corridor’s near-weightlessness again, watching the staff car depart. He had distracted the commander neatly from taking much interest in what he was doing out here.

  When Harivarman reboarded the other flyer, he found Lescar hunched in the same seat as before. The little man had apparently not moved at all, though his face now looked a little more normal. Impassively he heard his master’s description of the encounter with their chief jailer, and with Chen.

  At last Lescar commented: “A close call, Your Honor.”

  “Yes.” The Prince was being determinedly calm and regal. Close calls didn’t count. “Now, where were we? How far did you get with your job, before we were interrupted?”

  Lescar dared to give his master a severe glance. “Forgive me, Your Honor, but we had reached a point where no humans should ever be.”

  “Lescar, Lescar, listen to me! Do you think I enjoy this, working secretly on a berserker? I thought that it was dead, when I brought you out here; obviously I was wrong about that. I’m sorry.”

  The apology made Lescar uncomfortable, as the Prince had expected it would; the little man fidgeted, and muttered something.

  Harivarman went on. “I’m no real engineer or scientist, obviously. All I can tell you is that now I’m reasonably sure that the machine is under my control. It’s following my commands. It’s not attacking us. And I’m also sure that it offers us our only chance of saving our lives. That last judgment does fall within my field of competence, and on that point I’m very sure indeed.”

  Lescar moved at last. Not much. Only, as if he were cold, to huddle within his folded arms. “But . . . if it’s as you say, Your Honor, and someone’s already coming from Salutai to arrest us . . . well, isn’t it too late now for us to start trying to put together a starship?”

  “It may be too late. Or it may not. When Roquelaure’s people get here I may be able to . . . well, to stall them for a time. For a few days. If I can get the commander to see the truth. I have a few ideas about that now. They can’t take us away unless she tur
ns us over to them. To get that drive installed in one of our two flyers is still our only chance, I think.”

  Lescar had made a good start toward recovery from his savage shock. Harivarman judged it safe to leave him alone now. But it was only against his servant’s advice, and even pleading, that the Prince himself now returned once more to the berserker chamber, intending to resume his cautious dialogue with his chained beast.

  At the last moment, Lescar, aghast, actually got out of the flyer too and followed him; whatever else might happen, he was unable to allow his Prince to face a berserker alone.

  As the two of them drifted in their sealed suits along the airless corridor, the radio whisper of his servant’s minimally powered voice came to Harivarman: “But why must you talk to it again, Your Honor? We have the drive extracted, we don’t need the rest. For a chance to escape, of course it’s worth the risk of continuing our work on the drive. But the other thing . . . why take the chance? What do we gain? At best we’ll just get ourselves arrested. Sooner or later it’ll be found out, what we’re doing.”

  “Lescar, I spoke a moment ago of creating a delay, to give us time to modify our ship . . . I think I now see a possible way to manage that.”

  Lescar was stubbornly silent.

  His master continued inflexibly along the corridor, with the other following, until they were just outside the deadly room. There Harivarman halted. “If I can control it, talk to it—”

  “No sir! No!”

  “—that should solve our control problems for the escape. And perhaps for other things as well . . . now I want you to go back to the flyer. I think I can manage this particular job better and more safely alone.”

  Lescar sighed. He was obviously far from convinced. But he had long ago made his decision as to whom to devote his life. He went as ordered.

  Then the Prince alone went once more into the room where the berserker waited, to see what he might be able to learn from his new metal slave.

  As before, the thing did not appear to have moved so much as a centimeter while he was gone. It was still against the wall where its last aborted action against Lescar had left it, clinging to the stone with its six long insect-legs outspread, each leg as long as a man’s body.

  But now the lenses on the thing’s head turned, smoothly, to focus on Harivarman as he entered. That was all, but it was enough to bring a weakness to his knees.

  Once more making sure that he was using the proper radio frequency, and at a minimum of power, the Prince demanded of it: “Are there any other machines—allied with you—still functional on the Fortress? You understand what I mean by the Fortress?”

  The tinny, squeaky, disjointed whisper came back into his helmet: “I understand. The answer to your question is affirmative.”

  Harivarman paused. He had not really expected that. He had thought he was only eliminating a remote possibility. But now . . .

  “How many such machines exist? Where are they?”

  “Forty-seven such machines exist. All of them are gathered in a single chamber, approximately two hundred and fifty meters from this one.”

  “Forty-seven.” He couldn’t help whispering it aloud. Could berserkers lie? Of course they could. But presumably not while under the constraints of the controlling code.

  Harivarman had to clear his throat again before he asked another question. “How do you know that they are there?”

  “They were and still are under my command.”

  “But they are not—active.” Otherwise, surely, they would have come out killing, a hundred years ago or more.

  “No more than I have been active, or am now. They were all in a slave mode when I was damaged, and have been inert, as I have, ever since. They depend on me for activation.”

  Presently, moving as the machine instructed him, while it in obedience to his orders remained behind, Harivarman went out into the corridor again. On the regular communication channel he exchanged a few words with Lescar, reassuring his servant and reiterating his orders that Lescar wait for him in the flyer. Then the Prince went on, as the machine’s radio whisper directed him. He traversed another nearby corridor, one that as far as he knew had also been unexplored for centuries. From this passage he broke his way into another room whose doors had been sealed by binding time. This chamber was even larger than the one where he had left the berserker controller, and even closer to the cratered outer surface of the Fortress.

  This was certainly a room full of machinery. The Prince moved quickly and boldly to make a closer examination of the contents. Considering the risks he was already facing, it seemed a waste of time to try to take precautions now.

  Here was evidence that the thing in the other room had told him the truth. Here were a whole fighting company of its inanimate brothers, slaved to it in sleep. Death machines were crammed in here cheek by jowl until they reminded the Prince of so many terrified human infantry, stupefied with the strain of waiting for the order to go on an assault. There were a variety of types: Here were awkward, inhuman-looking androids. And here were a few transporters, some of them strongly resembling the flyers that humans used to move about the Fortress. Others looked like little more than quasi-intelligent missiles. Here was a nuclear pile on caterpillar treads, ready to roll itself wherever it was told, then melt itself down on command; the Prince had encountered the type before. Other types of berserkers, even more rare, including some that Harivarman could not at once identify, filled out the roster.

  It was a whole assault force, the equivalent perhaps in fighting power of a small human army, waiting to be awakened by the orders of some evil robotic general. The Prince counted twoscore of the sinister metal shapes before he stopped. Then he made himself go on.

  He counted forty-seven in all, just as the controlling berserker had told him there would be. All of them were as inert, faintly filmed with dust, as the first had been when he had discovered it.

  There was at least one important difference—as far as Harivarman could see, none of these machines were damaged in the least. They must have made their landing on the Radiant Fortress at the time of the great battles, and then have been gathered here in this room as a ready reserve. And then—or else humanity might not have won those battles—they had been immobilized by the fortuitous damage to their controller in the other chamber.

  So they should be, they must be, as it had said, still under its control. It had never been able to unleash them because of its paralysis. And it could not do so now, because the Prince had ordered it to hurt no one.

  Harivarman had seen the death machines at close range a few times before, in several shapes and sizes. But never before had he seen them in such perfectly preserved variety. Perhaps no human being until now had ever seen the like, and lived. A vast treasure trove of knowledge of the enemy waited for human researchers here.

  That treasure would be used, eventually. He would see to it that it was used, and properly. He certainly would.

  But first . . .

  The Prince closed the doors on the assault force.

  He made his way back to the flyer, hardly conscious of what he was doing.

  Heading back to the City in the flyer with silent Lescar, the Prince laughed suddenly, and quoted something:

  “I can call spirits from the vasty deep . . .

  “Why, so can I, or so can any man . . . but will they come when you do call for them?”

  “Should I have understood that, Your Honor?”

  “Don’t wish so, Lescar. Don’t wish so.”

  Chapter 10

  Young Chen was still riding with Commander Blenheim in the back seat of her staff car when it rolled to a stop at dockside. She had come directly from her chat with General Harivarman to witness the arrival of the latest unexpected ship from Salutai. This was the third such arrival in two days, and she was thinking to herself that it might have been years since this port had seen such a burst of unplanned activity.

  Had she wanted to, she might have tuned in one of t
he car’s remote viewers while being chauffeured to the docks, and got a look at the stranger while it was coming down the entrance channel, or even caught a glimpse of it telescopically imaged as it approached in space. But the commander’s thoughts were still concentrated on Harivarman, and she waited for her first look at the arriving ship until it appeared directly before her eyes.

  As soon as the hull of the vessel, approximately spherical and a hundred meters in diameter, rose into view through the forcegate she recognized it as an advanced type of battlecraft, bearing the insignia of the planetary defense forces of Salutai. As such, it would be under the direct command of that world’s controversial prime minister, Roquelaure. Commander Blenheim for the most part studiously avoided taking an interest in politics, at least outside that which went on within the Templar organization itself. But Harivarman had once or twice mentioned the prime minister to her as one of his bitterest enemies.

  The commander in passing remembered hearing someone say that Prime Minister Roquelaure, one of the Imperial officials who had been closest to the Empress, was now also one of the most likely candidates to replace her. And Roquelaure would almost certainly represent Salutai when the Council of Eight met, as they must meet in the near future, to decide who would now occupy the Imperial Throne.

  She got her driver’s attention, tapping on the staff car’s window. “Sergeant, I’m getting out here. Call for an escort, and see to it that Recruit Shizuoka is taken back to his quarters and confined as before.” The young man sitting in the rear with her looked at her silently, hopelessly. The commander said nothing to him; there did not appear to be anything to say.

  Now Anne Blenheim got out of her car, for a better look at the warship. The insignia on the hull, a mythical beast rampant with upraised claws, gave the whole ship an arrogant look, she thought. The ship now emerged completely from the gate, and at that point ceased its rising. Most of the top half of the hull was now in view, the bottom half cradled invisibly in more fields and in massive pads that had come into position smoothly as the traveler cut power on its engines. Now moving passively, under harbor power and control, the great hull was being eased slowly sideways through the broad channel that would guide it into dock. The commander’s educated eye took the opportunity to study the warship’s armament; the variations in hull shape that defined a battlecraft were unmistakable to the experienced eye. The exterior weapon projections were under hatches now, but there was no doubt that they were there.