Berserker Throne Read online

  The people who were making the effort with the gun and with the communications equipment did not appear to need her help. This is my job just now, she thought, looking at the screen. I am a witness.

  The controller went on: "My purpose from the beginning of this experiment, from the first indirect bargaining between your emissaries and mine, has been to measure what temptations of power may best serve as a control code for the badlife. To gain such information, the sacrifice of a number of machines, the tolerance of the continuance of many lives, has been very much worthwhile. Now I wish to observe your reaction to this information. Express your reaction to me."

  Roquelaure did not speak or move, and in a moment the berserker spoke again: "It is very probable that you are the final fully aware human victim—that the remaining human life-units here on the Fortress will still be without understanding of the situation when I destroy them. And I have already observed the truth-reaction of the unit designated Prince Harivarman."

  At last the prime minister had found words. "A control code. I see. All right, maybe you were playing that sort of a game. If so, you've won. But there's no reason why we can't conclude a bargain now. Now that you've studied our reactions. And I could still go through with—"

  The berserker had evidently heard enough from its last subject. The screen flared brightly, almost dazzlingly in Beatrix's face. At the same instant light flared in from the corridor, leaping from a distance to wash around the newly positioned heavy gun. At the same instant the communication channel went silent.

  But the small screen cleared again, almost at once, to show the berserker turning quickly. At last, in the flare of its own weapon, it had sensed the watchers' presence down the corridor.

  It turned with weapon hatches opened, just in time to take the full charge of Colonel Phocion's cannon on the front surface of its upper body. When the small screen had cleared again, there were nothing but fragments of berserker to be seen.

  The men around the communication connection were thrown into frenzied activity, but not yet of jubilation. At least radio silence could now be broken. "Get the gun in here again! They might come this way. We don't want to block the corridor."

  They? thought Beatrix. The SG had her by the arm again, a lighter grip this time. His voice came clearly to her over the standard channel. "We've been working with the Prince for a couple of days now, ever since I got here; tell you the details later. We've just duplicated one of the controller's signals to its troops—we hope—and transmitted it from a hundred places within the Fortress. If all goes well, they're going to be heading for their lander, and—get it in here!" This last was directed at his troops, who were once more in a frenzied scramble, this time to get the gun turned again and drawn back into the room with them.

  It crowded the dozen people in, backing them against the walls at back and sides.

  And then the waiting resumed. Presently, at a gesture from a Templar at the communicator, radio silence was reimposed.

  And then Beatrix was distracted, to her vast relief, by the entrance of her husband, Lescar's figure beside him. Even in the darkness she could be sure at first look that it was the Prince. She knew his movements, his size, his . . . for minutes she did not worry particularly about what might be going on outside.

  The Prince and the SG exchanged firm handgrips. Then all were quiet again, waiting. Bea could feel her husband's armored hand resting on her suited shoulder.

  At last there came a faint sound from outside the room, that of an impact made faintly audible in vacuum by its passage through beams and frame and floor and boots and bones. And only seconds later there began a massive but almost silent passage through the corridor outside. It was a parade of sizable machines, gliding through near-weightlessness in darkness, heard only through their occasional contact with the framework of the Fortress.

  At last the parade had passed. Colonel Phocion turned on his remote video gear again, and drew in a signal from the proper pickups. The fourteen people huddled in silence were able to watch the approximately forty berserkers enter their lander and reembark, gliding off silently into space.

  "The outer Fortress defenses are all yours, Commander," said Phocion's voice. And Anne Blenheim's face appeared briefly on the small screen, acknowledging.

  The Lady Beatrix heard the Superior General giving orders to the gunnery officers of his two ships.

  And then the night of the universe outside the Fortress was lit by titans' flares and forges. Seconds later there came sound again, the wavefronts of blasted particles hitting the outer surface of the Fortress hard enough to awaken roaring resonance in stone and metal, sending an uproar rolling and rumbling on toward the far interior.

  The Prince was first to put it into words: "Got 'em. Got 'em. Got 'em. I think we got every last bloody one."

  Epilogue

  There were two statbronze statues now in Monument Plaza. That of Exemplar Helen, of course, was there as it had been for many centuries, portraying a beautiful woman wearing a toga-like Dardanian garment, with a diadem in her hair. But now, facing Helen from an equal dais, stretching out an arm toward her as if to offer comradeship and support, was a metal version of the late Prime Minister Roquelaure, who had been martyred a year ago in the latest heroic saving of the Fortress.

  The statbronze prime minister had one striding foot planted on a berserker, half-crushed but still malevolent. There were critics of the statue who said he looked like he was standing on a chair.

  * * *

  The new statue had been unveiled some months past, but a formal rededication of the plaza was to take place today, and the Emperor himself was coming to preside. Some thousands of people, including a few old friends and acquaintances, were waiting for a chance to greet him.

  Two enlisted Templars, who happened also to be husband and wife, had been excused from regular duties for the occasion, and were at the moment standing at one side of the plaza, the less prestigious side today, content to be lost and ignored amid a nervous crush of comparatively minor dignitaries.

  Olga was wondering aloud how the Emperor's appearance might have changed since they had seen him last. Chen, married almost a year now, wasn't paying all that much attention to his wife. A politician not far away was trying out a line of a written speech, muttering it under his breath. Chen with his good ear for voices could understand:

  "How strange, how fitting, how lovely, that these two men, fierce enemies for most of their lives, should have put their differences aside to save the Fortress and the lives on it."

  "Yes, fitting enough I should say, the way that it worked out." This last was a remembered voice, closer at hand, and Chen turned to see Colonel Phocion, a little fatter, dressed in the natty civilian garments of retirement. "It's been a long time. How are you two kids getting on?"

  On the far side of the plaza, Commander Anne Blenheim had just got out of her staff car, to greet the Superior General, who had already arrived. Then both Templar officers disappeared into a throng of their fellow dignitaries gathered around the temporary speakers' platform.

  There was a muted loudspeaker announcement, sounding across the plaza: "The ship bringing the Empress and the Emperor has docked."

  The official story was, of course, that Prince Harivarman had known from the beginning, from the moment he discovered the controller, that the berserkers were out to play a clever trick on the inhabitants of the Fortress, to run some kind of a test. He had immediately suspected something was not as it seemed, and had played along with the enemy to find out what—and because he knew that if he did not, all life in the Fortress would be immediately destroyed.

  Chen personally doubted very much that the official story was completely true. Still, it was probably not that far off, as official stories went. And someone had to be Emperor, or Empress, after all, and things could have turned out a whole lot worse.

  But, as the Emperor himself officially admitted, it had taken Anne Blenheim's mention of an effective control code, during
their meeting under the eyes of the berserkers, to trigger his next flash of insight. He had sent a berserker looking for Chen Shizuoka to try to assure himself of proof. But of course, without the heroic self-sacrifice of the late prime minister—

  The late prime minister had millions of political followers who were still alive, and it was necessary for them to be appeased.

  Someone else was approaching Olga and Chen and Colonel Phocion. A small gray man, plainly dressed, but the heads of the knowledgeable everywhere across the plaza turned in his direction. Though he still tried, Lescar could no longer manage to be inconspicuous.

  Looking uncomfortable in the public eye, he said to Chen and Olga and the retired Colonel Phocion: "Emperor Harivarman would like to see a few old comrades in private. For a few minutes."

  Commander Anne Blenheim, immediately after the berserkers' defeat, had been able to show evidence confirming the Prince's story: the Council order for General Harivarman's arrest, with her own and Harivarman's written messages to each other on it, as they wrote them in their silent, secret conference in those early precious minutes when no berserkers watched. She had decided in those moments to trust the Prince, and from then on they had worked together as much as possible.

  Even as the human survivors were playing along with each other now, honoring the late PM for political reasons, to appease his many followers.

  "I must say the controller tried everything to fool me, even to the point of filming itself and its machines with dust."

  Actually the Prince did suspect early on that something about this particular batch of berserkers was well out of the ordinary.

  And he had also been wondering why the controller had failed to activate all of its forty-seven units at once when it had the chance, in that first supposed moment of perfect freedom, when it first moved to attack him and Lescar.

  The offer of power, even if illusory, has proven well-nigh irresistible.

  But it was not quite so.

  The SG, alerted by warning relayed from the courier that had got away, had come onto the Fortress at once with what ships he had with him; had been able to land unobserved and unchallenged, thanks to Colonel Phocion's disruption of communications; had managed to use the communications system himself—who knew it better than the Superior General, after all?—to talk in scrambled messages with Commander Blenheim at the base, and through her had learned of the gamble she was trying to win with Harivarman.

  Representatives of the whole Council, of all the Eight Worlds and of other human worlds besides, were at the Fortress now, taking part in this year-later ceremony. There were going to be a lot of speeches.

  But they couldn't start until the Emperor and Empress were ready. And the Empress and the Emperor took time first to have a small talk with a few old friends.

  Then Harivarman I, the Empress Beatrix at his side, moved out to give his speech.

  Chen followed, watching from a distance, his young wife at his side.

  Olga was looking at the newer of the two statues. "I don't think it looks like a chair, really," she said.

  THE END

  For more great books visit

  http://www.webscription.net/