Berserker Blue Death Page 24

  The Pearl shuddered, diving into an inferno, being blasted helplessly away from her intended course. The sound and vibration inside the hull were overwhelming. How much of this could any shields withstand? Or any human crew? The great damned berserker was stronger than Domingo had predicted or expected; it was stronger than both human ships together. It seemed plain now that if the Pearl had been alone when it faced the full charge of Leviathan, the human ship would have been lost.

  But Domingo’s crew still functioned, and his ship hit back, hard.

  The Space Force ship was somewhere—yes, there—still surviving, still fighting.

  The battle raged.

  Branwen Galway’s job now, through her mindlink, was to try to keep the shields functioning, summoning up and channeling power into them.

  Simeon Chakuchin’s mind hurled missiles, on the captain’s order or sometimes at his own discretion. There had been nearly a hundred heavy missiles aboard when the fight started, but they were going fast.

  Spence was aiming and pulsing beams, and the Carmpan was handling his own special brand of communications. Domingo drove his ship, while Iskander functioned as general flight engineer, ready to handle damage control or fill in for another crew member as needed.

  For just a moment, as he sent an outgoing salvo of missiles passing through the Pearl’s shields, Simeon thought he could touch Branwen’s mind directly; but the impression slipped away before it could distract him seriously. He got on with the job on which both their lives and more depended.

  The dodging and maneuvering in and out among the complex belts of the planetoids, the exchanges of unimaginable violence between ships and machine, went on. Had minutes or hours passed since the fight began? Time had disappeared. For Domingo’s mentally and physically battered crew, no other world but this existed.

  Simeon could believe that he had always lived in this world of combat, than which there was no other; and yet it was an unreal universe, stretching beyond the door of death, filled with vivid mental visions in which imagination beckoned through the mindlink to disaster. This world tottered at every second on the brink of annihilation. The mind tried to fight free of it and could not, and drifted at the entrance to the harbor of insanity.

  Pyrotechnics had completely taken over the space around the ship.

  Dozens of the small rocky bodies populating this space were struck accidentally by heavy weapons and blew up, shattered or turned into fiery blobs, lighting up the dustclouds nearby like so many miniature suns. Domingo, issuing precise orders, blasted some small planetoids, creating screens of covering plasma behind which he stalked his enemy.

  The speeds of the ships and machine engaged made the thinly scattered material of this space appear on instruments like a dense cloud of rocks and gravel. Collision with a particle of more than microscopic size could mean the end. Human nerves and senses, woefully too slow to compete in this game directly, entrusted the ship’s computer with course calculation, a fraction of a second at a time.

  Violence shocked Simeon out of a near-hypnotic mental state. Death’s bony fingers brushed him hard before they slipped away. For a moment he thought that the fight was lost, and he was dead. Alarms were sounding everywhere. When he could think again he knew that the Pearl had taken an internal shockwave. It most probably had been induced deliberately by the berserker, with simultaneous weapon detonations at the opposite ends of the ship’s defensive shields. The shock had been almost completely damped by the defenses, but still the interior impact was beyond anything that the crew had endured yet.

  The captain was calling around the intercom, station by station. Everyone except Galway answered.

  Benkovic’s voice came, saying he was on his way to help her. It was necessary for someone to get her headlink disconnected quickly, as a dazed, half-conscious mind hooked into the system could well mean disaster. Simeon was immobilized for the moment by his job, still throwing a pattern of missiles. There were now no more than forty remaining in his magazines.

  Domingo steered his ship into concealment within an orbital belt of dust, and again the fight was temporarily broken off.

  Through a fog of pain and bewilderment, Branwen saw Benkovic come into her combat station. She heard him say something about helping her to her berth.

  He disconnected her headlink and assisted her through the short tunnel. As he put her down in her berth, she briefly lost consciousness again.

  When awareness returned, her helmet had been taken off, her armor opened. She could feel Benkovic’s hand inside her clothing, first on her breast, then moving down her ribs, her belly… his hand was bare but he was still wearing his combat helmet, and it was difficult to see his face… she groaned something, and fought herself free.

  His suited figure crouched, getting still closer to her. His uncovered hands reached out. His helmet’s airspeaker made his voice more mechanical than human. “I’m trying to help you. Don’t be crazy.” Then, more softly: “Doesn’t it turn you on, babe? Doesn’t all this turn you on?”

  She rolled away from him and got to her knees. She didn’t try to argue. “Out. Out,” was all she said. Her hand came up with a gun.

  Spence looked at the weapon and said nothing. He was in armor that might save him, but his hands were

  exposed. Still she could not really see his face.

  “Out,” she repeated.

  Without saying anything more, he turned away and left her.

  She closed the door after him and mechanically dialed for privacy. She was near collapse. Later. she thought. Later I’ll report that, or I might just settle it myself. Right now we have this battle to fight …

  In quiet waiting, the ship was doing a passive imitation of a planetoid. Now the crew could see and feel the eternal emptiness of space again, the thinness of the distribution of matter even here inside a dustbelt. In seconds the fury of the battle had vanished totally.

  No one doubted that it was going to burst over them again or had time to contemplate the universe. The ship had suffered damage, but so far nothing was critical. Iskander through his mindlink was doing what he could to patch it up.

  Simeon got permission to leave his station momentarily to check on Branwen; Spence’s report on her condition had been brief and uninformative. Simeon found her semiconscious, and would have taken her to sickbay but at that moment Domingo ordered him sharply to get back to his station. On his way out of her berth he picked up some of the samples of material and information that she had brought from the most recently searched berserker installation.

  A quick look at the samples, when Simeon was back in his own station, suggested that they would provide more evidence concerning the berserkers’ research and development efforts in the field of biology.

  But there was no time now for anything like a thorough scientific analysis.

  The enemy was in sight again, and Gennadius was on the radio. The two captains managed to act in concert once more.

  The great berserker, being pursued relentlessly, taking a merciless pounding from two sides, bedeviled continually by the Nebulons who still swarmed after it, continued to strike back with fury.

  The battle seesawed back and forth.

  But then at last the berserker turned tail and fled.

  Domingo, despite the damage to his ship and the desperate condition of his crew, despite depleted stocks of missiles and red warning signals everywhere, immediately gave chase to Leviathan, vowing that his ancient enemy would not escape him now.

  Fourth Adventurer, somehow still able to withstand the killing strain of what he was doing, taking part in combat, fatalistically accepted the result of what he had already done as a matter of free choice: “I have signed on.”

  Gennadius, wholly caught up at last in the spirit of the chase, overrode the warnings of his own second-in-command about his damaged ship and chased the enemy too, and recklessly. The alternative would have been to fall back in guard position at some nearby colony. His ship was now in better condition
than Domingo’s, and the commander took the lead in the pursuit.

  The speed of both ships was perilously high as they hounded their quarry among the innumerable tiny planetoids and through the fringes of the encroaching wisps of nebula, and then departed the system, still in hot pursuit.

  The berserker was not dead yet. It turned at bay, and the fury of the battle came back, worse than before. Simeon heard strange cries on intercom, and he found himself closing his eyes and praying, to a God of the Galaxies someone had taught him to adore in childhood.

  Someone else on the crew—Simeon could not identify the tortured voice—had cracked now and was pleading with the captain. Whoever it was shrieked and babbled, but Domingo would not slow down. Eventually the human screaming ceased.

  But not the noise of the alarms. Those mechanical voices screamed on, and there was no doubt that the ship was continuously sustaining damage, as it went tearing its way through clouds of gas molecules and microscopic particles.

  The shields were maintained somehow and the headlong pursuit went on. It could not be endured for another moment, but yet it was endured. The timeless minutes passed, with people and machinery still somehow taking the strain.

  The enemy fled again.

  The unnamed sun, and the space that sun had cleared for itself within the nebula, were now astern, the white light shifting red with its recessional velocity. Abruptly, at an insanely dangerous speed, dense clouds of nebula once more enfolded the quarry and the hunters alike.

  An outer belt of planetoids that until now had been concealed in nebular clouds now loomed ahead, appearing as a bombardment of rocks hurtling past the ship and at it, out of fog and darkness.

  There was a startling flare on the Pearl’s detectors, seen by everyone on board. All heard a last burst of garbled communication, ending in a radioed scream.

  Simeon grasped the fact a second later. Gennadius’s ship was gone. Either it had hit a sizable rock or had been ambushed by Leviathan and totally destroyed.

  Domingo, not delaying for an instant his headlong charge after the enemy, ordered the firing of most or all of his remaining missiles. Simeon obeyed. At this speed the captain himself dared not divert an instant’s attention from his piloting.

  “Captain, I have what looks like a lifeboat on the detectors. Might be Gennadius, some of his people.”

  Domingo said: “We can’t stop.”

  His ship did not waver for a second from its course, straight after Leviathan. He had the helm and no one could stop him. Or no one dared to try.

  CHAPTER 22

  Domingo, dragging his crew along with him by the power of his will, hurled his ship after Leviathan without pause, keeping the pressure on.

  Simeon had gone beyond weariness, beyond fear. Now he was being caught up, hypnotized, in the fascination of the chase. Vaguely he was aware that Branwen, Spence and even Iskander were reaching or passing the limits of their endurance. Fourth Adventurer was a special case. It was hard to know what was going on with the Carmpan, but for now he appeared to be enduring successfully, if grimly.

  Again the battered berserker plunged into the billows of the Milkpail. It displayed surprising speed in its flight: in a human such behavior would have been called reckless or even suicidal daring. There was no doubt that a machine of Leviathan’s size had to be taking considerable additional damage from the inevitable particle collisions at such speed. The generators sustaining its forcefield shields must be near failure, and its armor ablating away. The machine was running a serious risk of sudden and total destruction at any moment.

  Yet the blazing trail left by the enemy persisted, did not reach a cataclysmic end. Its luck, if machines had luck, was holding.

  The captain followed it at high speed, accepting an equal risk. Such a track would have been practically impossible for any pilot to lose, given the will to hold the course. The turbulent wake of the berserker increased the danger for the following ship, the probability of microcollisions. Domingo was forced to avoid the enemy’s wake as much as possible, thereby losing a little ground.

  “You’ve got it all calculated out, Skullface. All the odds to the last decimal. But you haven’t figured me into your odds yet. You haven’t figured me in well enough. I’m coming to get you.” Domingo was muttering to himself, but the others aboard his ship could hear him.

  Again the Pearl shot into the nebula, right after her escaping foe, at a speed that neither the ship or the machine would be likely to tolerate for long. Not in these clouds. The clamor of onboard alarms resumed.

  The drive of the Pearl had been weakened by combat damage. Despite Domingo’s maniacal determination, Old Blue might well have escaped cleanly, except for the efforts of the Nebulons.

  The Spacedwellers had no trouble keeping up with the fleeing berserker, but whenever they tried to attack it its fields stung them and brushed them away. Fourth Adventurer reported several fatalities among the nebular-theme humans from these encounters. But still their speeding formation kept the dead-metal killer in sight, and through the mind of Fourth Adventurer they continuously relayed the enemy’s position to Domingo. When the machine abruptly changed course in an apparent effort to loop back and try for another ambush, the pursuing Pearl was able to change course also, almost instantly, gaining some distance on its quarry in the process.

  Now the berserker would be aware, if it had not been before, that the Nebulons were somehow able to report whatever they observed to their allies in the ship, virtually instantaneously.

  “It’s going to get away.” Those words were the first from Iskander in some time.

  Domingo’s voice sounded no different now than it had on the day after Shubra. “It’s not trying to get away. We can follow that wake and he knows it. He’s risking a pileup to try to get somewhere.”

  The only question was, was Leviathan trying to reach allies, or a final kamikaze target?

  The chase continued, pressed by Domingo with fanatical intensity. Timeless minutes stretched into

  eternal hours. Punishing jolts came through the artificial gravity as the Pearl dodged rocks at thousands of kilometers per second.

  Simeon, looking about him in the moments when his mind refused a total concentration on his job, was amazed that everyone on the crew could still be alive. That anyone could be. The ship and all her systems were a shambles. Backup systems labored, with nothing to replace them when they went. He could see in all the indicators before him what a beating the Pearl had taken.

  She ought to be limping away, cruising slowly, doing her best to make port somewhere before one of the impending catastrophic breakdowns happened and finished her off. Instead she hurtled on at the best speed her captain could whip out of her, pursuing the thing that had not quite destroyed her yet…

  They had built her well, those people at the Austeel yards. But how well could anyone build a ship?

  Simeon clung to the thought that Old Blue was now heavily damaged also. It had to be. But there was no reason to think the berserker had lost its capability of inflicting ruin on any attacker that caught up to it.

  Only one man was trying to do so.

  Only utter grim determination, to carry the hunt on to the death, had a chance now of overtaking the

  berserker. Only obsession, only suicidal madness, had any chance of outlasting a rogue computer’s will. With all Domingo’s efforts and those he could still wring from his crew, it remained impossible to close the gap between pursuer and pursued.

  Galway now called the captain on a private channel and reported herself fit to resume her duties.

  He glared at her impersonally, a man trying to estimate how long one of his few remaining tools would last before it broke. “You’re not going to fold up in the middle of a fight?”

  Her image tossed its head. “ I’m fit for duty. I don’t know about Benkovic.”

  “Benkovic? What’s that supposed to mean? What’s wrong with him?”

  Tersely she supplied the captain with the facts
, a recital of what had happened in her berth when

  Benkovic had been alone with her. “If he tries to paw me again,” Branwen concluded, “he’s going to have plenty wrong with him. Like a new belly-button. Battle or no battle.”

  The captain only continued to stare at her, digesting bad news about another tool. She could see that he had no capacity left in him any more for shock or surprise, let alone sympathy.

  At last he said: “You take over fire control for a while, Galway. Simeon needs a break. I’ve got to keep one good person going, and right now he’s the best I’ve got. We’re pushing on.”

  “Yes, sir.” She was not surprised at Domingo’s reaction. No time or energy could be spared now for anything but the chase. Anyone on the battered crew who could still function had to function. Branwen understood that Domingo had no real interest in crew conflicts or even in serious breaches of discipline, except as they might endanger his mission. She understood that he was not now going to pursue the matter of what exactly Benkovic might have done to her or might stand accused of doing. If they all lived, which they were not going to do, something might be done about it. She might very well take care of it herself. But right now her head still ached, and she could hardly think.

  The captain broke the intercom connection and concentrated fully on the chase. Still, the knowledge of Branwen’s complaint had registered on some level with him.

  Domingo himself no longer cared where the chase was taking him and his ship. But Simeon found himself trying to calculate or estimate the present position of the Pearl. Curiously, his mind felt clear and active now. He had passed beyond the first stages of exhaustion, and now it was as if his mind, like the ship herself, could tap the wells of the universe for power to keep going. It would be a help to know what kind of nebular material lay near ahead, and what the chances might be of enlisting some aid in the chase.