Shiva in Steel Read online

  "Got our visitor on visual, Commander." That was from the officer who today happened to have the duty of handling traffic control on the small landing field. He sounded moderately excited, which was only natural. For several months now, the job had entailed nothing but the dispatch and recovery of robot couriers.

  Normandy turned back to her holostage and made adjustments to get a closer look. Harry Silver's ship, Witch of Endor, was now close enough for the telescopes to show what looked like recent damage, at least superficial battle scars, marring the smooth shape, approximately that of a football, with ghostly silver. In another minute, it was settling gently toward a landing, outlined against angles of dark rock that had never known air or moisture. The patrol craft that had intercepted the visitor came into view a little behind it, following it down.

  A panel at the bottom of the holostage was now displaying what modest amount of information the base's extensive data banks contained on the Witch's owner of record. Usually the dossiers made available in this way were fairly accurate. This one was short and obviously incomplete, but perhaps it would be helpful. A quick look confirmed what she was able to remember about the man. Claire Normandy was not particularly perturbed by what the record told her-but neither was she greatly reassured.

  She decided that she wanted to see Silver with a minimum of delay. She instructed her virtual adjutant Sadie to ask Mr. Silver to step into her office as soon as he came aboard.

  "I know him," she then remarked aloud-more to herself than to anyone else, since only an artificial intelligence happened to be listening.

  Though there were no actual criminal convictions listed in Silver's record, when read by an experienced eye seeking enlightenment between the lines, the document suggested that he had been involved in interplanetary smuggling in the past, in the nearby Kermandie system and elsewhere. The printout Commander Normandy now held had nothing to say regarding exactly what the man was supposed to have smuggled, but she thought there could hardly be much doubt on that point-illicit drugs were the usual contraband.

  The presence of any civilian on base just now was somewhat upsetting-and yet, there was something attractive in the prospect of simply talking for a while to someone from the outside. Like the people under her command, the commander might have chosen to spend an occasional day or two on the system's other world, Good Intentions-but she had chosen not to do that.

  Of course, the demands of security came first. How convenient it would be to simply order Silver to remain aboard his ship for the next few hours, keeping him out of the way-but such a course would certainly alert anyone to the fact that something out of the ordinary was taking place on the Hyperborean base. Besides, from his ship, he'd certainly be able to get a good look at her expected visitors when they came in-as surely they must within the next hour or so.

  Claire Normandy was trying to recall the details of her only previous meeting with Harry Silver. At that time, fifteen years ago, she had been newly married and fresh out of the Academy. There was no doubt it was the same man, though changed from how she remembered him. Today, when he finally walked into her office, his dark eyes did not seem to have much life left in them.

  Silver was a man of average height and wiry build; what she could see of his hands and hairy forearms, below the rolled-up sleeves of a standard ship's crew coverall, suggested superior physical strength. Looking around the carefully designed room, he ran a hand through moderately short and darkish hair. He was not Claire's idea of a handsome man, partly because of a nose that had at some time been pushed slightly sideways. "Maybe my nose has changed since last we met. Could have it fixed, but it's probably going to get hit again. This way, it doesn't stick out so far."

  Silver's story, as he had already told it to to the crew of the patrol craft, made him, like several thousand other people, a refugee from the adjoining Omicron Sector. The gist of what Silver had to say came in the form of an urgent warning: Not only had the berserkers over in Omicron defeated humanity there, but they had been ahead of us in tactics, in overall planning, at every turn.

  Claire got the definite impression that this man had forgotten their previous meeting more thoroughly than she had. At first glance, she found in his appearance and manner none of the uneasiness or furtiveness that in her mind would have suggested the criminal-not that she had wide experience in making such determinations. She decided not to mention their earlier encounter.

  Invited to sit down, Silver did so, and with the movement of a tired man, put his booted feet up on an adjoining, unoccupied chair. Then he said: "Thought I better put in at the handiest system and try to find out what's going on-and also get my ship checked out. That last blast might have strained the hull more than's good for it. Things were knocked loose. I lost a chunk of fairing when your pilot put the brakes on here for landing-not that I'm blaming him."

  "We'll do what we can for your ship. First, Mr. Silver, if you don't mind, I'd like to hear more of what's been happening in Omicron Sector. Not only to you, but events in general."

  "Sure. Our side's been getting its rear end kicked during the last three, four standard months."

  "Have you any theories about why?"

  "Probably none worth debating. In hardware, it's about even, as usual, between us and the damned things. And I don't think our fleet commanders were idiots… though they were made to look that way a couple of times."

  "How about your own personal experience?" She could have asked him coolly, How are things on Kermandie, Mr. Silver? just to see what kind of a response she got. She had no real experience in such matters, but it seemed to her that surely no true secret agent would be so easily caught. And above all, she had enough to do already, more than enough, without trying to conduct any kind of investigation.

  Silver, though not openly reluctant to talk about his recent adventures, was vague about the details of the skirmish that had come so close to demolishing his ship with him inside it; nor had he much to say about how he had managed to get himself and his small ship out of the doomed Omicron Sector. Normandy had already had a report from her techs saying that the Witch's weapon systems and shields had badly needed repowering when it landed at Hyperborea.

  "The work on your ship will have to wait a little while, I'm afraid."

  "Oh? Why's that? Your docks didn't look busy."

  "We have certain maneuvers scheduled." At the moment, all base docking and repair facilities were being held on standby, ready to minister at once to the slightest need of any of the ships of the incoming task force.

  Again, Harry Silver declined to talk much about the details of his escape. "You can check out my black boxes about that," he'd said, meaning certain recorders on his ship-and the technicians of course had been doing so. In general, their findings confirmed his story.

  There were other matters that Silver was much more willing to discuss, especially the terrifying effectiveness of the berserker tactics he'd just experienced.

  "Let's get back to the big picture." Adjusting the controls of the large holostage that dominated one side of her office, the same instrument wherein Sadie most often appeared and on which she'd marked the approach of Harry's ship, Commander Normandy now called up a solid-looking schematic, representing about a third of the territory that had been explored with reasonable thoroughness by Earth-descended humans and in which Solarian settlements had been established. One third of Solarian territory equaled no more than two percent of the Galaxy's mind-boggling bulk. A mere two percent of the Galaxy still comprised billions of cubic light-years, and the display showed only a representative few hundred suns, an infinitesimal fraction of the billion stars within that selected volume.

  The territory made visible was arbitrarily divided into sectors, according, to the system devised by strategists at Solarian headquarters. Near the center of the display was the sector in which Hyperborea was located. One of the adjoining sectors was code-named Omicron.

  Commander Normandy moved a finger, causing the location of the
Hyperborean system to light up in the form of a tiny green dot. "How did you happen to bring your ship here, Mr. Silver? I mean, given that you were fleeing Omicron Sector, why choose to come out in this particular direction?" Now the wedge-shaped space designated as Omicron glowed transparent green. Given Silver's stated position within that wedge at the start of his escape, it might have been more logical for him to head in another direction.

  Silver claimed that he'd latched onto and followed the tenuous old trail left in flightspace by some now-unidentifiable Solarian scoutship. According to this explanation, it was sheer chance as much as anything else that had brought him to Hyperborea. "I remembered about the settlement in this system, and I expected that my ship was going to need some dock time."

  Adjutant Sadie had been listening in, and now a graphic version of her head, reduced in size, appeared to assure the commander that if Harry Silver had indeed been using the standard charts and autopilot programs, it was quite likely they would have brought him to the Hyperborean system.

  As far as the standard charts, were concerned, which almost never showed military installations of any kind, the system contained only the old civilian colony.

  Silver said he'd preferred not to check in at the Kermandie system if he could avoid it. "Those people can be hard to get along with sometimes."

  Claire Normandy nodded in agreement. It was a sentiment shared by the great majority of people. "You didn't stop there at all, then?"

  "No." He looked at her blankly for a moment, then went on. "I remembered the coordinates of your system here, and the civilian colony on the other planet-of course, this base wasn't here last time I passed through." He gazed around him at the solid new walls. "That must have been five standard years ago-no, a little more than that."

  "No, we weren't here then."

  When he'd emerged into normal space, Harry told her, out on this system's fringe, he had been surprised to detect not only the expected evidence of life and commerce on the small world of Good Intentions, nearer the brown dwarf sun, but also signs of active Solarian presence on Hyperborea. Naturally, he'd signaled, and soon discovered that he'd already been spotted and that a patrol craft was coming to check him out.

  Silver's dossier showed that he was, or had been, a berserker fighter of considerable skill and experience. The record was sketchy, and even left room for speculation as to whether he might once have been a Templar.

  Claire shot one more glance at his dossier, visible only on her side of the holostage, where virtual Sadie was holding it in readiness for her. There was nothing at all, other than a definite tendency to rootlessness, to suggest that the man before her might now be employed by the Kermandie dictatorship.

  "Given your military record, Mr. Silver, we are taking your information very seriously. Thank you."

  Her mind would not, could not, let go of the possibility that his apparently fortuitous arrival had some connection with the great secret project under way-she had to make it a conscious decision that she could safely dismiss that possibility.

  When the talk lagged for a moment, Silver had a question of his own. "So, you're running a weather station here, hey?"

  "Yes." The commander didn't elaborate. The official purpose of the base on Hyperborea was to keep track of Galactic "weather," a matter of some importance to military and civilian spacefarers alike. It was a valid function, and some such work was accomplished, but the real effort here went into the refitting and support of certain recon craft-most especially for the super-secret ships and machines of the mysterious branch of military intelligence known as Hypo, or its twin, the Earth-based group code-named Negat.

  "Wouldn't have thought that a weather station here would be of a whole lot of value. Not that much traffic."

  "There's enough work to keep us busy."

  Commander Normandy couldn't decide at first whether it would be a good idea or not to raise with her visitor any questions on the shadier portions of his record, as it lay before her.

  Eventually she decided not to do so. The man was, after all, just passing through.

  For a moment, she allowed herself to dream that it might be possible to order him locked up for the next few hours-maybe on some pretext involving quarantine? But no, she really had no justification for any such drastic course of action. Neither could she very well try to persuade him to leave within the hour, not with his ship damaged as it was.

  Obviously, Silver's dossier was incomplete, recording only fragments of his past. And there was no reason to suppose that it was up to date-her data banks held those of perhaps a billion other Solarian humans, chosen for a variety of reasons, and many of the records of course were old, and some of them doubtless inaccurate. Keeping up those kinds of records was not a high priority here.

  Meanwhile, the commander had delegated to her inhuman adjutant, Sadie, the task of assigning Mr. Silver temporary quarters. Ordinarily, finding space would be no problem, for the facility had been built with the possibility of rapid expansion of its staff in mind, and there were numerous spare rooms. Today, however, the crews of six ships were coming, and it would be convenient for at least some of them to bunk aboard the base, brief though their stay would be.

  When she returned from her short reverie, her visitor was sitting with his eyes closed, and she wondered if he could be actually asleep. In a few moments, she was convinced: Silver had apparently dozed off in his chair, facing the window and its jagged horizon of black rocks, stabbed at by sharp, steadily shifting light. The interior illumination of the office was soft just here. Well, that would be convenient, if he would go to his room and just sack out for the next eight to ten hours. After a brisk skirmish and a long flight, he might be ready to do exactly that. She kept trying to remember what she might have learned about him at the time of their meeting fifteen years ago, what estimate she had formed then. So far, she wasn't having much success.

  The next thought that crossed Commander Normandy's mind as she stood looking at her visitor was: This man's life has not been dull, whatever else one might be able to say about him. For a moment, she knew a kind of pointless envy. By any ordinary standard, the word could hardly be applied to her life either.

  Was Harry Silver a spy, or was he not? She couldn't really believe it. Not for Kermandie. And spies, she supposed, didn't fall asleep on the job-not in a room where there might be useful information to be gathered. But whether she was right or wrong about the man in front of her, what would any Kermandie agent be after here?

  Whatever he's been up to, he must be very tired, she thought, and somehow the fact of his obvious weariness tended to allay the vague doubts she had been feeling about him.

  In slumber, her visitor's face was almost unlined, looking more youthful than before; but there was something in the way the vintage light of the remote galaxies fell upon his countenance that suggested he was very old.

  After she had watched him for a while, a strange idea drifted up to the forefront of her consciousness: A large component of that light had been on its way here, to this precise time and place, heading unerringly for her window and Harry Silver's face, for something like two billion years.

  TWO

  Harry Silver, feeling as uncomfortable as he usually did when he had to put on his armored suit, could hear his own hard boots crunching lightly on black rock as soon as he stepped out of the airlock. It was a capacious double door that pierced the base's thick and sturdy wall at ground level. At the instant Harry stepped through the outer door, the station's artificial gravity released his body, turning him over to the minimal natural attraction of the planetoid, costing him almost all his weight.

  For the time being, his suit radio was silent, for which Silver was grateful; the amount of talking he'd been required to do in the past couple of hours was unusual for him. Before climbing back into his armor and exiting the airlock, he had informed his somewhat reluctant hosts that he was going back to his ship to have a look at her-he'd been prevented from assessing the damage earl
ier by Commander Normandy's urgent request to see him as soon as possible. Now he intended to get one good look at his ship as she sat grounded, set his mind at rest to some degree, and then he was going to sit down for a while. Luckily, he'd been able to put the ship on autopilot and get some sleep while approaching Hyperborea, but he could feel the effect of days of strain. Some coffee would be good.

  The patrol craft had touched down only briefly and was already back in space, presumably carrying out some kind of mission. The Witch of course was still sitting just where the Space Force pilot had set her down, only about two hundred meters from the airlock in the wall of the base from which Silver had just emerged, and a somewhat lesser distance from the much bigger doors that gave access to the underground hangar decks. Now Silver was bouncing along toward his craft, his body almost drifting in the weak natural gravity, his boot-crunches coming at irregular, long intervals. The gravity would have been even lower here, practically nonexistent, except for certain oddities of exotic matter at the planetoid's core.

  As Harry went bouncing forward at a steady pace, he looked around him. His story of fleeing Omicron Sector to escape the berserkers was true enough-but it wasn't chance that had brought him to this planetoid. There was a certain object that he wanted very much to find-and it seemed entirely possible that this was where she'd left it.

  Damn Becky, anyway! Harry hadn't seen her for seven years, but still she bothered him, popping up in his thoughts more than any other woman he'd ever known. About a month ago, before the situation in Omicron had finally become impossible, he had started dreaming about her again. In his dreams, she was in some kind of trouble; he couldn't determine what, but she was calling on him, expecting him to get her out of it. Fat chance. In real life, Becky Sharp had understood very well that he wasn't the kind of man people called on when their lives started to go wrong.