Berserker Blue Death Page 16

  The men looked at each other and sat down, rather uneasily. After about five minutes the three, still waiting, heard faint murmurings of machinery that were, to expert ears, suggestive of a ship’s arrival. In a couple of minutes more, Spence Benkovic hurried into the room, to his visitors’ relief.

  Greetings were exchanged, and Benkovic offered drinks, though rather doubtfully, as if he wasn’t sure what he had in stock. The offer was politely declined.

  To Domingo, Benkovic seemed a bit nervous but gave no indication of being on drugs. The lean, dark-bearded man admitted readily enough, though, that he was running out of money. He’d got emergency relief funds, like other colonists, but the harvesting wasn’t what it had been.

  Benkovic seemed fascinated when he was told of Domingo’s hunting plans and said he was ready to try something new, something that would provide him with a stake.

  The captain could give assurances on that point. “I’m paying bonuses to all my crew.” When he named a figure, Benkovic was impressed. He should have been. Domingo had owned a fair amount of prime property on Shubra.

  “I hear you’re good with a ship. But before I sign you on formally, I want to make sure of that for myself. We’ll take a test flight in the Pearl.”

  “No problem.”

  “Good. How soon can you be ready?”

  Benkovic sighed, as if he’d been waiting a long time for someone to ask him that. “Whenever you are.”

  The young woman, still nameless to the visitors and still naked, had followed Spence back into the room and curled herself up on a couch, as if withdrawing from the world. Now she made an inarticulate sort of sound that might have been meant as a question. She looked with a vaguely appealing expression from one man to another.

  Spence Benkovic looked at her. “Oh yeah. Pussy here— she’s no spacer.”

  “Too bad,” Iskander murmured, acting sympathy.

  Benkovic looked at him, then said to Domingo: “Something will have to be done about her.”

  “Before you can leave.”

  “Well… I’m afraid so, yeah.”

  “What’ll have to be done?”

  There was some discussion, in which Pussy—if that was really her name—chose to take no part. Benkovic pleaded her case. In the end the captain found it necessary to stake the young woman also, turning over enough money to allow her to get on a ship to another world of her choice. She’d come to Shubra after the disaster, Benkovic said, so didn’t qualify for any kind of government relief. Fortunately Spence had no other companions on the moon at present.

  Spence picked up some flowers, fresh-looking this time, as his visitors were saying good-bye. Simeon wondered confusedly if they were each going to get a small bouquet on parting. But the flowers were intended for something else.

  As Benkovic was walking with his visitors back to their ship, taking a different tube this time, they passed a construction, an arrangement of odd materials, chunks of rock, components that had once been parts of furniture, other things harder to identify, that had been piled and fastened together into what looked like a monument of some kind. The structure was almost three meters high, and at the base proportionally broad. Either the tube had been widened here to accommodate it, or the builder of this thing had chosen this site as the place where it would easily fit.

  Spence put down his flowers at the base of this construction, on a small pile of older, deader-looking flowers, and stood with folded hands, regarding the little structure silently.

  The structure was so odd that Simeon kept looking at it until he figured out what it was. Indeed a monument, or a small shrine. There were two names, women’s names as Simeon interpreted them, carved in large, precise letters on the front.

  Iskander had to ask, at last. “You put this up, Spence?”

  Their host looked at them with liquid eyes in which the pain showed all too plainly. “I set it up for my two friends who were here when the berserker came, who didn’t make it.” He paused, then turned slightly to face Domingo. “Want me to put your daughter’s name on it too, Captain?” It sounded as if Spence thought that would really be an honor. He added: “It’ll just take a little while.”

  “You’d better spend the time in getting ready,” Domingo said.

  The Pearl’s first stop away from Shubra was at Base Four Twenty-five, after a flight in which Domingo checked out Spence Benkovic’s talents to his own satisfaction.

  Later, the captain said: “You were right, Ike. He is good with a headlink on.”

  “Have I ever steered you wrong, Cap? Maybe you better not answer that.”

  When they reached the base, Domingo sought out Gennadius and talked with him briefly. Iskander listened in on the conversation—a wrangling about goals and priorities—which as far as he could tell got nowhere.

  Then the Pearl was off again. Domingo had four on his crew now, counting himself, all of them people he considered good. But he really wanted six. And all the best people of the colonized planetoids were now working for Gennadius.

  The captain decided it was going to be necessary to go out of the Milkpail to get the help he needed.

  CHAPTER 14

  After a few days of steady travel, the last hazy fringes of the Milkpail had fallen behind them. Now the Pearl could enter the c-plus mode of operation and began to move at real interstellar speeds. As the ship dropped into flightspace, the universe outside the hull virtually disappeared. Now no world in the modest portion of the Galaxy that had been explored by Earth-descended humans was more than a few weeks away.

  It had been a long time, years, since Domingo had driven a ship in clear space, but doing so was a simple matter compared with piloting in the nebula. There was nothing to it, relatively speaking, in a ship as good as this one.

  Captain Domingo allowed the autopilot to run all systems most of the way and devoted himself to pondering the mysteries of the enemy’s biological research. He also called up and considered his most up-to-date model of the Milkpail’s interior. In this model a superimposed spiderweb of black lines represented the pattern of all the known and deduced movements of Leviathan, going back as many years as humans in the nebula had been keeping records.

  Nodding toward this holographic construction, the captain once remarked to Iskander Baza: “I asked Gennadius if he’d ever thought of doing anything like this.”

  “And?”

  “He told me that of course his office kept records of berserker activity, and of course they tried to figure where the next outbreak might be. But the Space Force kept no specific records on Leviathan. They weren’t interested, he told me, in individual machines.”

  “He said that?” Iskander, as so often, seemed amused at how unintentionally funny other people were.

  “Words to that effect. You know, I suspect the berserkers keep better records about the Space Force than he does about them.”

  “They probably ignore the records of individual units also.”

  Domingo looked at his second-in-command solemnly, and solemnly shook his head. “Don’t believe that, Ike. Don’t believe it for a moment. Don’t you think they want to know where this ship is?”

  Iskander raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t really thought about it, Cap.”

  “Try thinking sometime. About that.”

  Simeon, overhearing, didn’t want to think about it. To him it sounded like the edge of craziness. To berserkers, life was life, something to be stamped out, or tolerated temporarily in the case of the rare aberration called goodlife, people willing to serve and sometimes worship the damned machines. He’d heard of places where goodlife were a real factor in the war, but so far in the Milkpail it hadn’t been that way.

  As Simeon understood the situation regarding Old Blue, the damned machine had never been reported anywhere outside the nebula, and no one knew why. Maybe those outside people had encountered it from time to time, but to them it was just another berserker, as it was to the Space Force.

  The more time Simeon spent wi
th Captain Domingo, the more he became convinced that those people outside were wrong. He was more and more ready to follow Domingo, though where it was going to lead him he did not know,

  The first leg of their extranebular recruiting flight wasn’t a long one; the captain had no intention of heading clear across the Galaxy.

  A day passed in the c-plus mode, and then the Pearl reemerged into normal space. Imaged in the forward detectors now, only a few hours ahead, was a Sol-like sun whose system included a world named Rohan, a planet that was said to be quite Earthlike. Not that any of the Pearl’s crew had ever been within a hundred parsecs of Earth.

  It was Iskander’s shift as pilot when the Pearl approached for a landing on Rohan’s nightside. Like most other worlds, this one was wary of berserkers. Rohan wore a girdle of defensive satellites, and the military installations on the ground were visible even at night to the people on the ship as they drew closer. Not that the planet was all fortress. Here outside the nebula you could see anything, berserkers included, coming a long way off and could call up your own fleet, assuming you kept one handy. It was a safe bet that Rohan did.

  The chief spaceport facility, the one Domingo wanted, was on the surface, open to the planet’s natural atmosphere. The port clearance routine was no more tedious than most outside the Milkpail, and the captain soon had it out of the way. Disembarking from the ship onto an open ramp, standing in strong natural gravity and looking up at a real planet’s sky, thrillingly like the sky under which he had been born, Simeon had his first chance in what seemed to him an enormous length of time to see clear stars again. This viewpoint also provided him with a good look at the Milkpail from the outside. As he came down the ramp on foot, the great nebula loomed just ahead of him, a sprawling blob of whiteness that covered a quarter of the visible sky; and he knew it would continue for a good distance below the horizon.

  In interstellar space you almost always saw the stars and nebulae at second or third hand, as images on one kind of instrument or another. But here there was not so much as a glass faceplate between the eyes and their sublime objects, only the kindly, almost invisible fog of a real, naturally habitable planet’s atmosphere. To a child of clear space like Simeon, the psychic satisfaction provided by this view was enormous.

  Simeon just stood there for a long moment, drinking in the openness of the sky. In a way, this view made the memory of all the time he had spent in the Milkpail unreal. It was almost as if out here, in this other, more natural world, Wilma might still be alive. Alive and laughing under a sunny blue sky, as on the day when he had first met her…

  But now he saw the Milkpail with new eyes, imagined Leviathan lurking within it like a spider in its web.

  Benkovic, standing beside him, nudged him with an elbow and said: “Let’s move it, Sim. We’ve got things to do.”

  “Right.” Simeon stood looking at the sky a moment longer, then moved on down the ramp.

  Domingo had already walked on ahead, Iskander as usual at his side.

  The four of them rode comfortable public transport into town. The city attached to the port was of modest size by the standards of most ED worlds, though it served as a center for all kinds of business connected with space affairs. Domingo’s first recruiting effort on Rohan took place in that city that very evening, in a computerized employment bureau, a place where spacefarers were likely to appear when they were looking for jobs.

  In the employment bureau the captain paid a modest fee for the privilege of posting an announcement on the electronic bulletin board: Three crew members wanted for a dangerous job; generous bonuses; experience in fighting berserkers was desirable, and so was experience in working a ship through thick nebula.

  As soon as the announcement was paid for it became visible, in large letters on a wall, and the purchaser was assured that it was being reproduced on a thousand other walls around the city, and in a myriad other places around the planet as well. But the first few minutes of the ad’s visibility brought no response. This wasn’t one of the small-town worlds of the Milkpail here. Rohan was part of the mainstream of Galactic civilization, and there were a hundred other advertisements being carried on that bulletin board, many of them promising easier and safer money, maybe even one or two as likely to appeal to the adventurous.

  Waiting for the notice to produce some results, the four men from the Milkpail walked to a nearby restaurant that Iskander said he had visited before. They dined well on food spiced with microbial nebular life, some of which had almost certainly been harvested by Milkpail colonists. Perhaps one of the four had himself harvested and sold it, in a more peaceful time.

  Over dessert, Iskander said that he was well acquainted with this city and knew another place nearby where there ought to be a good chance of finding some capable crew people. Naturally not everyone who was qualified and available watched the advertisements all the time. When their meal was finished, the four of them took another little walk of a few blocks that moved them across a border between neighborhoods of the city and landed them in an environment considerably less reputable-looking.

  Iskander’s goal here was a certain place of entertainment. As he explained to his shipmates, this place catered to a special group of customers. Some people came here to take drugs, some to drink alcohol, some to talk philosophy or religion. There were some who did all three; and others, probably a majority, who were just there to watch the ones who did drug themselves, give speeches and heckle speakers, or sometimes all of the above. It was this majority group, according to Baza, that included a high proportion of able spacers.

  Domingo had doubts about this theory from the start. And the captain, on first entering the great noisy room filled with people, smoke and roaring music, was quick to express his skepticism about being able to find anyone here who would be acceptable on his crew. But he acknowledged that a large proportion of the clientele appeared to be spacefarers; though it was true that no one could tell that about people with any degree of certainty just by looking at them.

  To Simeon Chakuchin, moving on foot through the ways of this crowded city and entering the crowded tavern, the years he had spent in the Milkpail seemed progressively more unreal. This world was as different from any of the tiny planetoids inside the nebula as the view of the night sky here differed from the view from Shubra. There were probably more people in this one tavern right now than had lived on Shubra before it was wiped out. Within the nebula, a few dozen people lived on one small world, a few hundred on the next, up to a few thousand dwelling on the comparatively great metropolitan center of Yirrkala. And here, in this one city, were easily more than enough people to populate all of the Milkpail colonies several times over. Simeon thought about it: maybe a hundred times over; he felt he no longer had a good sense of proportion in such matters. At the moment there was nothing pleasing in the thought of great numbers of people. All he knew was that here the air-conditioning was fighting a losing battle to clean the air, and the noise, the roar of talk and music, was almost deafening.

  There were certainly some spacefaring people in this crowded hangout, perhaps as many as could have been mustered from the population of Shubra at its height. There was a certain look, with certain habits of dress and mannerisms, by which they could usually be identified, though mistakes were certainly possible. On one of the walls a large electronic display showed, along with other offers, Domingo’s help-wanted ad for crew. There were the big bonuses, but still the advertisement did not seem to be attracting a great deal of attention. In fact, none at all, as far as Simeon could tell.

  Iskander suggested: “Maybe a little word-of-mouth advertising would help.”

  The captain agreed briskly. “Can’t see how it can do any harm.”

  Domingo got up from the booth where the four of them had settled and walked over to the bar. He could still be sociable when he made the effort, as he did now. First Iskander and then Simeon followed him and played along. Benkovic remained in the booth.

  It proved to
be not at all hard to strike up conversations with people in here, except that the noise tended to drown out everything that was said. But none of the first group of people Domingo talked to sounded like they were much interested in his mission.

  That group broke up. The captain muttered to Simeon, without trying to be quiet about it, that he wasn’t sure he wanted to have any of these people on his crew, anyway.

  Someone nearby in the crowd muttered something uncomplimentary in return.

  Simeon swallowed a large part of what was left of his drink. He hoped he was going to be allowed to finish it in peace.

  “Let the Space Force do the hunting. We’ll take care of the home defense.” That was another, even louder comment. Inside or outside the Milkpail, that attitude was pretty much the same. It was the way most people looked at the situation.

  Another voice chimed in, from among the standees at the bar: “You people have any idea what you’re getting into? What you’re talking about when you say fighting berserkers? How big a fleet you got? You know anything about nebular astrogation? Or berserkers either?”

  Iskander chuckled. “Why don’t you tell us?”

  “I know what they are,” Domingo said. His voice wasn’t any louder than before and probably few people heard him.

  “Really?” commented one who did. Music began crashing even more noisily in the background.

  The captain spoke up, loud enough to be heard now but still calmly enough. “I’ve spent most of my life in the Milkpail. And where we’re going, my ship is as good as anything the Space Force has. Or anything they’re about to bring in there.”

  No one argued that point against Domingo, though Simeon thought some of the bar patrons might have refrained only out of politeness. Some were really being polite. Or else they just weren’t interested. Even the man who had made the most derisive remarks now appeared to be having second thoughts. It didn’t matter, as far as Simeon could see. Probably there were some good potential crew present right now, but if so they weren’t rushing forward to say that they wanted to join the captain on his hunt.