The Ultimate Enemy Read online

  “No chance, friend. But I can show you holograms—didn’t I mention that?”

  “You didn’t!”

  Oshogbo called after them: “Here’s the Lord and Lady both, on this one—“

  They did not stop. Chinan came out with them, leaving three people still in the cargo bay.

  In the small ship’s lounge, the three who had left set up lunch with a floor show.

  “This is really decadence. Pea soup with ham, and—what have we here? Lazienki. Marvelous!”

  The subtle grays and reds of Twisting Room (was it the human heart?) came into existence, projected by hidden devices in the corners of the lounge, and filling up the center. Iselin with a gesture made the full-size image rotate slowly.

  “Captain?” the intercom asked hoarsely, breaking in.

  “I knew it—just sit down, and—“

  “I think we have some kind of cargo problem here.” It sounded like Granton’s voice, perturbed. “Something seems to be breaking up, or … Iselin, you’d better come too, and take a look at your …”

  A pause, with background smashing noises. Then incoherent speech, in mixed voices, ending in a hoarse cry.

  Chinan was already gone. Ritwan, sprinting, just kept in sight of Iselin’s back going around corners. Then she stopped so suddenly that he almost ran into her.

  The doorway to the cargo hold, left wide open when they came out of it a few minutes before, was now sealed tightly by a massive sliding door, a safety door designed to isolate compartments in case of emergencies like fire or rupture of the hull.

  On the deck just outside the door, a human figure sprawled. Iselin and Chinan were already crouched over it; as Ritwan bent over them, a not-intrinsically-unpleasant smell of scorched meat reached his nostrils.

  “Help me lift her … careful … sick bay’s that way.”

  Ritwan helped Iselin. Chinan sprang to his feet, looked at an indicator beside the heavy door, and momentarily rested a hand on its flat surface.

  “Something burning in there,” he commented tersely, and then came along with the others on the quick hustle to sickbay. At his touch the small door opened for them, lights springing on inside.

  “What’s in our cargo that’s not fireproofed?”

  Iselin demanded, as if all this were some personal insult hurled her way by Fate.

  Dialogue broke off for a while. The bum-tank, hissing brim-full twenty seconds after the proper studs were punched, received Oshogbo’s scorched dead weight, clothes and all, and went to work upon her with a steady sloshing. Then, while Iselin stayed in sick bay, Ritwan followed Chinan on another scrambling run, back to the small bridge. There the captain threw himself into an acceleration chair and laid swift hands on his controls, demanding an accounting from his ship.

  In a moment he had switched his master intercom to show conditions inside the cargo bay, where two people were still unaccounted for. On the deck in there lay something clothed, a bundle-of-old-rags sort of something. In the remaining moment of clear vision before the cargo bay pickup went dead, Ritwan and Chinan both glimpsed a towering, moving shape.

  The captain stared for a moment at the gray noise which came next, then switched to sickbay. Iselin appeared at once.

  “How’s she doing?” Chinan demanded.

  “Signs are stabilizing. She’s got a crack in the back of her skull as well as the burns on her torso, the printout says. As if something heavy had hit her in the head.”

  “Maybe the door clipped her, sliding closed, just as she got out.” The men in the control room could see into the tank, and the captain raised his voice. “Oshy, can you answer me? What happened to Granton and Klu?”

  The back of Oshogbo’s neck was cradled on a rest of ivory plastic. Her body shook and shimmied lightly, vibrating with the dark liquid, as if she might be enjoying her swim. Here and there burnt shreds of clothing were now drifting free. She looked around and seemed to be trying to locate Chinan’s voice. Then she spoke: “It … grabbed them. I … ran.”

  “What grabbed them? Are they still alive?”

  “Granton’s head came … it pulled off his head. I got out. Something hit …” The young woman’s eyes rolled, her voice faded.

  Iselin’s face came into view again. “She’s out of it; I think the medic just put her to sleep. Should I try to get it to wake her again?”

  “Not necessary.” The captain sounded shaken. “I think we must assume the others are finished. I’m not going to open that door, anyway, until I know more about our problem.”

  Ritwan asked: “Can we put down on some planet quickly?”

  “Not one where we can get help,” the captain told him over one shoulder. “There’s no help closer than Esteel. Three or four days.”

  The three of them quickly talked over the problem, agreeing on what they knew. Two people were sure that they had seen, on intercom, something large moving about inside the cargo bay.

  “And,” Iselin concluded, “our surviving firsthand witness says that ‘it’ tore off someone’s head.”

  “Sounds like a berserker,” Ritwan said impulsively. “Or could it possibly be some animal—? Anyway, how could anything that big have been hiding in there?”

  “An animal’s impossible,” Chinan told him flatly. “And you should have seen how we packed that space, how carefully we checked to see if we were wasting any room. The only place anyone or anything could have been hidden was inside one of those statuary crates.”

  Iselin added: “And I certainly checked out every one of them. We formed them to fit closely around the statues, and they couldn’t have contained anything else of any size. What’s that noise?”

  The men in the control room could hear it too, a muffled, rhythmic banging, unnatural for any space ship that Ritwan had ever ridden. He now, for some reason, suddenly thought of what kind of people they had been whose Palace had provided this mysterious cargo; and for the first time since the trouble had started he began to feel real fear.

  He put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Chinan—what exactly did we see on the intercom screen?”

  The captain thought before answering. “Something big, taller than a man, anyway. And moving by itself. Right?”

  “Yes, and I’d say it was dark… beyond that, I don’t know.”

  “I would have called it light-colored.” The muffled pounding sounds had grown a little steadier, faster, louder. “So, do you think one of our statues has come alive on us?”

  Iselin’s voice from sick bay offered: “I think ‘alive’ is definitely the wrong word.”

  Ritwan asked: “How many of the statues have movable joints?” Twisting Room, which he had seen in hologram, did not. But articulated sculpture had been common enough a few centuries earlier.

  “Two did,” said Iselin.

  “I looked at all the statues closely,” Chinan protested. “Iselin, you did too. We all did, naturally. And they were genuine.”

  “We never checked inside them, for controls, power supplies, robotic brains. Did we?”

  “Of course not. There was no reason.”

  Ritwan persisted: “So it is a berserker. It can’t be anything else. And it waited until now to attack, because it wants to be sure to get the ship.”

  Chinan pounded his chair-arm with a flat hand. “No! I can’t buy that. Do you think that emergency door would stop a berserker? We’d all be dead now, and it would have the ship. And you’re saying it’s a berserker that looks just like a masterpiece by a great artist, enough alike to fool experts; and that it stayed buried there for two hundred years without digging itself out; and that—“

  “Nobrega,” Ritwan interrupted suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Nobrega… he died on St. Gervase, we don’t know just how. He had every reason to hate the Yoritomos. Most probably he met one or both of them at the St. Gervase Museum, after the attack, while they were doing what they called their collecting.

  “You said Nobrega was a great forger. Co
rrect. A good engineer, too. You also said that no one knows exactly how the Yoritomos came to die, only that their deaths were violent. And occurred among these very statues.”

  The other two, one on screen and one at hand, were very quiet, watching him.

  “Suppose,” Ritwan went on, “Nobrega knew somehow that the looters would be coming, and he had the time and the means to concoct something special for them. Take a statue with movable limbs, and build in a power lamp, sensors, controls—a heat-projector, maybe, as a weapon. And then add the electronic brain from some small berserker unit.”

  Chinan audibly sucked in his breath.

  “There might easily have been some of those lying around on St. Gervase, after the attack. Everyone agrees it was a fierce defense.”

  “I’m debating with myself,” said Chinan, “whether we should all pile into the lifeboat, and head for your ship, Ritwan. It’s small, as you say, but I suppose we’d fit, in a pinch.”

  “There’s no real sick bay.”

  “Oh.” They all looked at the face of the young woman in the tank, unconscious now, dark hair dancing round it upon the surface of the healing fluid.

  “Anyway,” the captain resumed, “I’m not sure it couldn’t take over the controls here, catch us, ram us somehow. Maybe, as you think, it’s not a real berserker. But it seems to be too close to the real thing to just turn over our ship to it. We’re going to have to stay and fight.”

  “Bravo,” said Iselin. “But with what? It seems to me we stowed away our small arms in the cargo bay somewhere.”

  “We did. Let’s hope Nobrega didn’t leave it brains enough to look for them, and it just keeps banging on that door. Meanwhile, let’s check what digging equipment we can get at.”

  Iselin decided it was pointless for her to remain in sick bay, and came to help them, leaving the intercom channel open so they could look in on Oshogbo from time to time.

  “That door to the cargo bay is denting and bulging, boys,” she told them as she ducked into the cramped storage space beneath the lounge where they were rummaging. “Let’s get something organized in the way of weapons.”

  Ritwan grunted, dragging out a long, thick-bodied tool, evidently containing its own power supply. “What’s this, an autohammer? Looks like it would do a job.”

  “Sure,” said Chinan. “If you get within arm’s length. We’ll save that for when we’re really desperate.”

  A minute later, digging through boxes of electrical-looking devices strange to Ritwan, the captain murmured: “If he went to all the trouble of forging an old master he must have had good reason. Well, it’d be the one thing the Yoritomos might accept at face value. Take it right onto then-ship, into their private rooms. He must have been out to get the Lord and Lady both.”

  “I guess that was it I suppose just putting a simple bomb in the statue wouldn’t have been sure enough, or selective enough.”

  “Also it might have had to pass some machines that sniff out explosives, before it got into the inner… Ritwan! When that thing attacked, just now, what recording were they listening to in the cargo bay?”

  Ritwan stopped in the middle of opening another box. “Oshogbo called it out to us as we were leaving. You’re right, one with both the Yoritomos on it. Nobrega must have set his creation to be triggered by their voices, heard together.”

  “How it’s supposed to be turned off, is what I’d like to know.”

  “It did turn off, for some reason, didn’t it? And lay there for two centuries. Probably Nobrega didn’t foresee that the statue might survive long enough for the cycle to be able to repeat. Maybe if we can just hold out a little longer, it’ll turn itself off again.”

  Patient and regular as a clock, the muffled battering sounded on.

  “Can’t depend on that, I’m afraid.” Chinan kicked away the last crate to be searched. “Well, this seems to be the extent of the hardware we have for putting together weapons. It looks like whatever we use is going to have to be electrical. I think we can rig up something to electrocute—if that’s the right word—or fry, or melt, the enemy. We’ve got to know first, though, just which of those statues is the one we’re fighting. There are only two possible mobile ones, which narrows it down. But still.”

  “Laughing Bacchus,” Iselin supplied. “And Remembrance of Past Wrongs.”

  “The first is basically steel. We can set up an induction field strong enough to melt it down, I think. A hundred kilos or so of molten iron in the middle of the deck may be hard to deal with, but not as hard as what we’ve got now. But the other statue, or anyway its outer structure, is some kind of very hard and tough ceramic. That one will need something like a lightning bolt to knock it out.” A horrible thought seemed to strike Chinan all at once. “You don’t suppose there could be two—?”

  Ritwan gestured reassurance. “I think Nobrega would have put all his time and effort into perfecting one.”

  “So,” said Jselin, “it all comes down to knowing which one he forged, and which is really genuine. The one he worked on must be forged; even if he’d started with a real masterpiece to build his killing device, by the time he got everything implanted the surface would have to be almost totally reconstructed.”

  “So I’m going up to the lounge,” the art historian replied. “And see those holograms. If we’re lucky I’ll be able to spot it.”

  Iselin came with him, muttering: “All you have to do, friend, is detect a forgery that got past Yoritomo and his experts … maybe we’d better think of something else.”

  In the lounge the holograms of the two statues were soon displayed full size, side by side and slowly rotating. Both were tall, roughly humanoid figures, and both in their own ways were smiling.

  A minute and a half had passed when Ritwan said, decisively: “This one’s the forgery. Build your lightning device.”

  Before the emergency door at last gave way under that mindless, punch-press pounding, the electrical equipment had been assembled and moved into place. On either side of the doorway Chinan and Iselin crouched, manning their switches. Ritwan (counted the most expendable in combat) stood in plain view opposite the crumpling door, garbed in a heat-insulating spacesuit and clutching the heavy autohammer to his chest.

  The final failure of the door was sudden. One moment it remained in place, masking what lay beyond; next moment, it had been torn away. For a long second of the new silence, the last work of Antonio Nobrega stood clearly visible, bone-white in the glare of lamps on every side, against the blackened ruin of what had been the cargo bay.

  Ritwan raised the hammer, which suddenly felt no heavier than a microprobe. For a moment he knew what people felt, who face the true berserker foe in combat.

  The tall thing took a step toward him, serenely smiling. And the blue-white blast came at it from the side, faster than any mere matter could be made to dodge.

  A couple of hours later the most urgent damage-control measures had been taken, two dead bodies had been packed for preservation— with real reverence if without gestures—and the pieces of Nobrega’s work, torn asunder by the current that the ceramic would not peacefully admit, had cooled enough to handle.

  Ritwan had promised to show the others how he had known the forgery; and now he came up with the fragment he was looking for. “This,” he said.

  “The mouth?”

  “The smile. If you’ve looked at as much Federation era art as I have, the incongruity is obvious. The smile’s all wrong for Prajapati’s period. It’s evil, cunning—when the face was intact you could see it plainly. Gloating. Calm and malevolent at the same time.”

  Iselin asked: “But Nobrega himself didn’t see that? Or Yoritomo?”

  “For the period they lived in, the smile’s just fine, artistically speaking. They couldn’t step, forward or backward two hundred years, and get a better perspective. I suppose revenge is normal in any century, but tastes in art are changeable.”

  Chinan said: “I thought perhaps the subject or the title gav
e you some clue.”

  “Remembrance of Past Wrongs— no, Prajapati did actually do something very similar in subject, as I recall. As I say, I suppose revenge knows no cultural or temporal boundaries.”

  Normal in any century. Oshogbo, watching via intercom from the numbing burn-treatment bath, shivered and closed her eyes. No boundaries.

  The universe has given life its own arsenal of weapons, and I am no longer surprised that even tenderness may sometimes be counted among them. Even the most gentle and humble of living things may demonstrate surprising strength …

  Pressure

  The ship had been a human transport once, and it still transported humans, but now they rode like well-cared-for cattle on the road to market. Control of their passage and destiny had been vested in the electronic brain and auxiliary devices built into the New England after its capture in space by a berserker machine.

  Gilberto Klee, latest captive to be thrust aboard, was more frightened than ever before in his young life, and trying not to show it. Why the berserker had kept him alive at all he did not know, and he was afraid to think about it. Like everyone else he had heard the horror stories—of human brains, still half-alive, built into berserker computers as auxiliary circuits; of human bodies used in the berserkers’ experiments intended to produce convincing artificial men; of humans kept as test-targets for new berserker death-rays, toxins, ways to drive men mad.

  After the raid Gil and the handful of others who had been taken with him—for all they knew, the only survivors of their planet—had been separated and kept in solitary compartments aboard the great machine in space. And now the same berserker devices that had captured him, or others like them, had taken him from his cell and led him to an interior dock aboard the planetoid-sized berserker; and before they put him aboard this ship that had been a human transport once, he had time to see the name New England on her hull. Once aboard, he was put into a chamber about twenty paces wide, perhaps fifty long, twelve or fifteen feet high. Evidently all interior decks and paneling, everything non-essential, had been ripped out. There was left the inner hull, some plumbing, some light, artificial gravity and air at a good level.