The Berserker Throne Read online

  Leaning back in his own chair with his eyes closed in weariness, her husband answered. “I thought that moving might be prudent, once Commander Blenheim had gone back to the base with the knowledge that I was occupying the other place.”

  “You just told me you thought you had an arrangement with her now. After that private talk you had with her in the lab.”

  “I do think so. But still . . .”

  “I see. And what kind of arrangement do you think you have?” Beatrix the interviewer wanted to know.

  The Prince tried to think of some way to explain things to his wife, here in the controller’s presence. He couldn’t think of any way. His mind felt wearied, exhausted, as if he had been in battle for hours on end. As in a sense, of course, he had. At last he said: “A tacit understanding. You know, Bea, I didn’t plan things to work out this way.”

  “How did you plan them, then?” Still not accusing; interested. He wondered enviously how she managed such control.

  Yes, the controller was with them. It was out of the Prince’s field of vision just now, but he didn’t have to look directly toward it to make sure. For the past few hours, ever since it had returned to him following the commander’s visit, the machine had hardly been out of sight and hearing of Harivarman for a moment. At present the machine was standing more or less behind him, on one side of the patio, listening to the Prince’s every word and waiting for more orders. Not caring what the orders were.

  In a sudden spasm of anger, Harivarman jumped to his feet and whirled around and threw the wine jug at it. The ceramic smashed on metal, and the red pungent liquid spattered. The target of his anger, the metal thing, did not move or react.

  Harivarman turned his back on it and sat down heavily. He knew that he was going to have to take action, real action of some kind, soon, or risk cracking under the strain if he did not. This waiting was already becoming impossible.

  How did you plan them, then?

  The question was still hanging in the air, along with the smell of wine from the smashed jug. It was not a question that Harivarman wanted to attempt to answer. He got up and without looking at the berserker again went to find Lescar, wanting to get the mess from the broken wine jug on the patio cleaned up. If Lescar caught him trying to do such a menial job himself there’d be hell to pay, and Bea had not stirred from her chair.

  The Prince had to look in three other well-furnished rooms before he found the little man, and the finding was not immediately helpful. Lescar was sitting alone in silence, face buried in his hands as if he were slowly going catatonic. Harivarman hesitated, and then left him as he was.

  When the Prince came back to the patio to face Bea again, she asked him interestedly: “Why did you have Lescar call me, and tell me to come to your house?”

  He made an almost helpless gesture. “I thought it might save your life, since you were already back on the Fortress. I didn’t ask you to come back to the Fortress. Do you want to go back to your hotel now?”

  “I was wondering,” said Bea, “why you didn’t make the call yourself. Where were you when . . .”

  The last word rather trailed away, as Beatrix raised her eyes past the Prince’s shoulder. He turned. Gabrielle was slowly descending an open, fragile-looking stair that curved gracefully down to the patio from enclosed rooms on the upper floor. She was still wearing the once-fancy gown in which she had come to him seeking safety. Her clothes, like her face and body, now showed ravages of rough usage in recent hours.

  When Gabrielle saw the two of them looking up at her, she paused on the stair and said: “I heard a crash.” She surveyed the splashed berserker and the fragments of pottery, and sniffed the wine-tinged air without making any direct comment. But when Gabrielle spoke again her voice was different, as if fear were entirely gone. “I thought for a moment that you had done something.” The dominant look in her delicate face was no longer fear, but contempt, as she gazed down at Harivarman.

  “What are you doing now, Harry?” Bea asked, speaking from behind him.

  He turned to face her. “Waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  He was silent for a moment. “For three things,” he said then.

  “And they are?”

  “The first two are reports from my machines.”

  “Your machines,” said Gabrielle contemptuously. Now it was her turn to tackle him from behind. The Prince ignored her, and continued speaking to Beatrix. “Primarily,” he said, “a report from the machine that I sent after Chen Shizuoka.”

  “The supposed assassin,” said Bea, still sounding brightly interested.

  “No—” He had been about to say, no more than I am. “Chen’s not an assassin.”

  “Well. Whether he is or not, I’d like you to fill me in on what importance he has to us now. Why are we waiting for a report about him?”

  “Do something!” This was Gabrielle again. She was now starting to scream hoarsely at Harivarman from above. “You just stand there like . . . do something, do something, do something!” It was as if she were emboldened by the inertness of the splashed berserker. She turned and ran back up the stairs as if she were going to her newly adopted room.

  The Prince faced Beatrix again. “There’s a second report I’m expecting at any time,” he said. “It will have to do with more arrivals, landings on the outer surface of the Fortress.”

  Bea swallowed. “Human landings?”

  “Yes, of course, that’s what I had in mind. If you ask me who’s going to land—that’s what I’m interested in finding out. Bea, I’m trying to work out a way to get away from here in one piece. With my friends, with you, now that you’re committed to me. And without any more fighting, if it can be done that way.”

  “And the third thing?”

  “Some equipment I’m having them gather for me. I want to do some serious research on berserker communications.”

  “Can’t that wait?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Bea’s control was suddenly slipping. She was shrinking down, huddling in her chair involuntarily. Her head turned, as if she could no longer keep from staring at the controller. She said: “Harry, I don’t want to walk out on you again. But if you’re doing this now in any sense for me . . . I don’t know if I can stay here any longer . . . Harry, whatever it is you’re doing with the damned machines, for God’s sake stop it!”

  “Bea. I—”

  “Quit! Just give up, let Lergov arrest you! Whatever happens would be better than this!”

  But then, having heard herself say that, she couldn’t stand by it. “Harry, I don’t know what I’m saying. The problem is I don’t know what’s going on, and you won’t tell me! I can’t believe, I can’t believe, that you’re just—just—”

  He found himself crossing the patio, pulling Bea out of her chair, and taking her in his arms. He said, close to her ear, knowing that the machines would hear him anyway: “If only I could just quit and give up, at this moment. If only I could.”

  She gripped his arms, ready again to persist. “You don’t have to be arrested, Harry. You could make a deal. Let Roquelaure and his people have the damned control code, or whatever they want from you. Just so they’ll let us get away together. Harry, I found I couldn’t live without you: I thought I could come back and live with you, this time. I could have, too, but . . .” Bea’s voice died away. Once more her eyes were staring upward past his shoulder.

  Gabrielle was coming down the stair again, and this time she had a gun in her slender, pale, entertainer’s hand, a tiny weight that still made her thin fingers shake. It was a little pistol, jeweled and almost ladylike. She must, the Prince thought numbly, irrelevantly, have had the gun with her since she arrived, brought it with her from her apartment. Unless she had just found it here in her adopted room, which seemed unlikely. Somehow it seemed to suit her, though he had never thought of her as bearing arms.

  “Damn you,” Gabrielle said to him, her eyes crazed. “I’m going to kill you,
Harry.” And she waved the gun. And then she started to level it at him with intent.

  Most of the shock of fear felt by the Prince was not directly for himself. “Gabby, no! Put it—”

  He had no time to get any farther than that, no time to do more than raise one hand in a useless gesture. Gabby was not listening anyway. She might or might not have actually fired on him. But what she might or might not have done did not matter. A tenth of a second before the pistol’s muzzle came actually to bear on Harivarman, his life was saved.

  The controller had been ordered to protect him. In this case it had probably no need to move its body or its limbs to do the job. He wasn’t looking at it and he couldn’t tell for sure; perhaps it turned its head. Harivarman knew that somewhere on its upper body a small weapons port had opened. A bolt of energy, instantaneous and almost invisible, stabbed past him, directed upward toward the woman on the stair. A bright flash filled the patio, accompanied by a dull throb of a sound. Gabrielle virtually disappeared. The Prince’s only clear visual impression was of red hair bursting into flame. He heard the small bejeweled gun clatter on the stair, bouncing endlessly toward the bottom. A smell of singed flesh spread out to mingle with that of pungent, splattered wine.

  Now Beatrix, combat veteran that she was, huddled deeper in her chair, hands covering her face. Lescar, no longer catatonic, came running into the patio where a moment later he veered to a helpless halt.

  “We’ll move again,” was all the Prince could think of to say, when he could speak again.

  * * *

  Grand Marshall Beraton had now installed himself as a more or less permanent fixture in Commander Blenheim’s bunker. She had never invited him to do so, but neither had she thrown him out as yet. The commander found the old man continually underfoot there, but she kept expecting that at any moment some real use for him was likely to come up, some problem or decision in which his experience might be invaluable. With this in mind she kept putting off the all-out effort it would doubtless take to shunt the grand marshall off permanently to an adjoining chamber.

  Right now Beraton was pushing his luck, though. Now he was starting to argue that she ought to try to take out Sabel’s old lab with some kind of missile, now that they were certain that the Prince—the general—was holed up there.

  “I’m not really sure he’s still there in the lab, Grand Marshall. Are you?”

  “I’d say he’s damned sure to be. Fellow with that kind of arrogance.” The grand marshall paused, then added with sudden bitterness: “Should have clapped him in irons as soon as I laid eyes on him. You should have, if I may say so, Commander, long before that. Well, can’t be helped now.”

  Still, Anne Blenheim refused to use a small missile on the old laboratory, giving as her reason that any such try would quite likely unleash a full berserker attack, or at least another punishing bombardment. And anyway, she told the grand marshall, she thought there might be antimissile weapons emplaced around the laboratory.

  She could see that she was getting some strange looks from those of her subordinates who were present. Quite likely they were wondering, not only at her refusal, but at the odd way she talked around the subject. Well, there was no help for getting odd looks just now.

  Beraton, balked in his effort to take over her command more or less completely, his advice about a missile attack rejected, now came up with a new idea. He had to do that, she supposed, because it must gripe him that a mere young woman had gone out to meet the enemy face to face while he sat here in a shelter.

  Now he wanted to at least duplicate the commander’s bravery. He didn’t put it that way, of course. Beraton’s proposal was that he go and talk to Harivarman face to face. “We fought together once, he and I, you know. Or at least in the same theater. We met . . . I can’t really believe that a fellow who fought so well once could—I’m going to go and face him with it. Do what I can to talk him into a surrender. I lecture you about your duty—hm? And here I’m not really doing my own.”

  The old man looked visibly older than he had only a few hours ago, she thought. “No, Grand Marshall. I . . .” Anne Blenheim paused momentarily, struck by a new idea. “Why not? Very well. Go and talk to him, if you like.” She would at least get the old man out of her own hair, at least for a time. What would Harivarman think? Well, he could always send his visitor back.

  Then, having second—or third—thoughts, she quickly qualified her approval: “But we’ll have to call General Harivarman first, and see if he’ll agree to another conference.”

  * * *

  Sitting between her husband and Lescar in the slowly-moving groundcar, halfway through the process of moving to yet another villa, Beatrix announced that she was leaving Harivarman. “I can’t do you any good staying with you, Harry. Not like this.”

  To Harivarman it was a door closing, with his life cut off behind it. But he couldn’t say that he was surprised. Nor did he even know if he was truly sorry. It was as he supposed the final approach of death might be: a relief. He could handle it well, with a steady voice. “Where do you want to go, Bea? I’ll send an escort with you.”

  Beatrix reacted almost violently to that suggestion. “No! No escort. Not of . . . them.” Two tall machines, one of them the controller, paced beside the groundcar, one on either side. “Just let Lescar come with me for a little way. No more than that.”

  When they arrived at the newly chosen villa, one that scouting berserkers had reported as abandoned, Bea would not enter the house, or delay the separation.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, two blocks away, for the moment at least out of sight of berserkers, Beatrix was getting into an abandoned flyer, and tearfully saying goodbye to Lescar. The little man in his own odd way had always loved her, and now he was weeping too.

  “I don’t know what he’s really doing, Lescar. He won’t trust me with the knowledge, or I’d stay. Whatever it is.”

  “I don’t know either, My Lady. But I must stay with him.”

  “Of course, of course.” She started to add something else, and choked it back.

  “Where will you go, My Lady?”

  “To the base, eventually. I’ll have to work my way there slowly. I can manage, I’ll be all right. I know the Fortress, and I know my way around in a battle. Go back to him. You can help him, perhaps, and I can’t. I never really could.”

  * * *

  Grand Marshall Beraton was standing beside a small defensive outpost at the aboveground level of the base headquarters, trying his best to think through the problem of where his duty really lay. The job had been simple and clearcut at the start—simply arrest the wretched fellow and take him back to Salutai—but questions of rank, jurisdiction, and command had started to tangle things, as such questions usually did when they arose.

  As now. The three enlisted people in the small half-shelter of the outpost were all too aware of him standing close behind them. Perhaps they thought he had come up here to conduct some kind of an inspection . . . it reminded the grand marshall of the time when . . .

  He went off into some of the pleasanter rooms of memory, reviewing some of the happier events of his long, long life and long career. This process went on for some time, with no loss of enjoyment. Grand Marshall Beraton had to bring himself back sharply from mere reminiscing. He hadn’t come up here to be effectively alone just to do that. He had to concentrate sternly on duty, for the situation was perhaps grimmer than almost any that he had ever seen. Thousands of innocent civilian lives, not to mention military, hung in the balance . . . all because of the evil of one man.

  The grand marshall’s meditations on Prince Harivarman’s treachery were threatening to lead him into reverie again, when they were violently interrupted. A berserker flying device, probably on some kind of a recon mission, came skimming in low over the base, then arrogantly hovered almost directly above the surface headquarters building.

  It seemed a direct challenge. It was too great an outrage, coming on top of strains
and stresses old and new, some of them going back two hundred years. It was unendurable. The grand marshall snapped out an order to the three enlisted Templars who were gaping at the enemy beside him.

  The young non-com’s voice was quakey, but he got the words out. “Sir, our orders are not to fire, unless they fire first.”

  Beraton leaned forward, a century and more of decisive command telling him what to do. He seized the small control unit of the launcher himself, and took a blast at the foe. He saw the fiery dart of the small missile spring up from the launcher itself, some forty or fifty meters from the half-sheltered position where he and the Templars crouched. Saw the dart fly up, only to be deflected, hurled aside by some invisible force like a ray of light reflected from a mirror.

  Then the berserker blasted back.

  Beraton was flung down on his face; the young men around him, better protected in their suits and helmets than he was, were less affected. The next thing he knew, the berserker was gone, flown away, and people in combat armor were turning him on his back, arguing among themselves whether he should be moved.

  Where the launcher itself had been, some fifty meters distant atop a low building, there was now only a smoking crater.

  Grunting imperiously, clutching at their arms, he pulled himself to his feet.

  “Sir, you’d better wait. We’ll call a medic—”

  “I need no medics, dammit. Back to your post.”

  * * *

  He had needed that shock, it seemed, or something like it, to clear his mind. As his mind cleared from the concussion, it seemed to go on clearing, until hours, days, perhaps years of cobwebs had been swept away. He saw truth now in glaring daylight. The truth about the goodlife villain, that made him no longer fearful of the swarming evil in the sky. Duty called. Seldom if ever in his life before had that call, that message, come so clearly and unequivocally to Grand Marshall Beraton.