Berserker's Star Page 3

  Lily was crisp. “That sounds like some kind of quotation, Mr. Silver.”

  “Blame my ship. She likes quoting poetry at me. I’ve heard so much of it, I’m starting to do the same thing.”

  He could feel his clients all looking at him, trying to decide whether the man about to take them on his ship just might be crazy as a loon.

  Harry found himself beginning to be intrigued by the woman and her quest. He asked her: “Does your Alan have more than one name?”

  “Alan Gunnlod.”

  “He took your name when you married? Or—”

  “Does it matter? Actually, I took his.”

  According to this young woman who evidently doted on him, Alan was also young, and just about his only flaw seemed to be that he was dangerously impressionable.

  “He tends to become—very enthusiastic about things. And then he frequently becomes disillusioned, months or years later, and changes his mind. But when he does, sometimes it’s too late.”

  Her manner did not soften when she talked about her husband, and Harry began to wonder if Alan would get a spanking when she caught up with him. It began to seem more probable that anyone married to this lady might earnestly consider the idea of going on an extended vacation from her, or getting away entirely. Of course, if you really had been grabbed by kidnappers, Lily could be a good one to have in charge of rescue operations. She might not be the smartest or the strongest one around, but she wasn’t easily discouraged.

  “I’ll show you what he looks like,” she was saying now. “I’ve got a holo of him here.” And she brought a little cube, about a centimeter on a side, out of a pocket and twisted it to turn it on. “I’ll set the image for life size,” she added.

  Lily retained the recording device on her small palm, but the glowing, life-sized image of a man, wearing what might have been the uniform of some athletic team, and carrying a wooden stick or bat, sprang out of it and kept pace with her as she walked. The image didn’t walk, but just glided ghostlike beside her, tracking the cube still held in Lily’s hand. Alan Gunnlod was making a fifth member of their group. Alan had a pale face, and a small black mustache.

  Redpath and Dietrich looked on stolidly as they kept walking, a captive audience. None of this mattered to them, as long as they could get where they were going. When Harry had asked them casually what their business was, he’d got a two-word answer. “Mineral rights.”

  Evidently he was not going to be invited in on the ground floor of a new business opportunity that absolutely could not miss. That was something of a relief.

  Alan wasn’t saying anything, so it seemed that this was not his goodbye note to his wife. Harry supposed that might have been too personal to be exhibited to strangers.

  Lily was looking at the object her husband’s image was swinging gently back and forth, a specially shaped wooden club that Harry supposed might be used to hit some kind of ball. She said: “There was a time when he was all excited about sport rituals.”

  Harry grunted. He wasn’t sure just what Alan’s sport rituals might be, and he thought he could contentedly live out the rest of his life without finding out.

  It was often very hard to tell the true age of anyone who was determined to look young, in this era when health and strength could often be prolonged for centuries, new teeth grown in as needed, and living skin preserved unwrinkled. Listening to Lily and looking at the holograph, Harry got the impression that Alan must be young indeed. And the more he looked at Lily, and listened to her, the younger she got, too.

  “This was taken a few years ago,” she admitted. “But he hasn’t changed that much.”

  Harry nodded. “How long since you’ve actually seen him?

  “It’s been months. I’m beginning to lose track.”

  “But you say he left you some kind of message when he took off.”

  She sighed. “One thing that worries me is, I don’t know if he’s eagerly expecting me to follow him or not. Maybe I’ve lost him. But I don’t give up easily. I couldn’t tell.”

  After a pause she went on simply: “The message he left wasn’t about us, at all—it was just about Malakó, and how he had finally found what he’d been seeking all his life, and how wonderful it was.”

  Fiercely she squeezed the little message cube between her fingers, and Alan’s ghost, still holding his game bat, obediently flew back into it.

  Harry and his three paying passengers had turned off the main thoroughfare onto a side road, where they joined the steady flow of people to the landing field through one of the regular gates, which this evening was standing permanently open. The guard booth at the gate was deserted, and from a speaker on top of it a robotic voice was endlessly repeating some inane command having to do with the proper places to deposit surplus personal property. As far as Harry could tell, no one was paying the voice the least attention. In a few hours, all the depositories and all the property on this planet were going to be turned into a sleet of atoms.

  These recorded orders were interlarded with warnings that the field was closed, and that people wanting to use it should make alternate arrangements. Harry supposed that the robots were doing the best they could when abandoned by all human supervision. He tried to derive what comfort he could from the thought that Twinkler was at least going to wipe out all this residue of recorded orders and advice.

  Now the four people were walking a plain, narrow road across the field itself, passing one broad, empty landing pad after another, each with various connections, and all for fairly small craft, like Harry’s. The big ships were normally assigned to another portion of the field.

  There were notably fewer ships of any kind on the ground than there had been the last time Harry had passed this way, only a few hours ago. Those remaining were widely scattered, separated by hundreds of vacant berths. Some had queues of people standing before entrance hatches, in the process of an unhurried loading.

  Slow-paced music, tuneful and familiar to the population of Hong’s World, seemed to drift down out of the perishable sky itself. The robots again, doing what they could.

  All in all, things seemed to be going as well as could be expected. Security in the usual sense was clearly at a minimum. Harry and his party were a couple of hundred meters into the field, almost at his ship, when a speeding groundcar stopped beside them and disgorged a Templar officer in battle dress—not the same one who had earlier tried to tell Harry where not to go.

  He looked anxiously at Harry and his companions. Then he said: “I heard someone here was trying to complete a religious pilgrimage to Maracanda.”

  Lily stopped and turned. “My husband’s gone there on pilgrimage, and I’m trying to catch up with him.”

  Harry had known a fair number of Templars over the years, and over various sectors of the settled Galaxy, and he had a lot of respect for some of them. In theory, and often in practice, they were a tightly run organization of dedicated people who devoted their lives and fortunes to battling berserkers. Sometimes the reality came close to the ideal. On occasion the Templars took the offensive. Other times, as now, they concentrated on protecting pilgrims and other travelers from the death machines. In practice this often meant trying to keep open certain lanes of space travel, organizing convoys and conducting evacuations.

  Lily was telling the officer: “I don’t know much about Templars.”

  Harry said: “All Templars I’ve ever met have been religious, in one way or another. Probably some are devotees of Malakó. All of them tend to view berserkers as an actual disease infecting the Galactic body—and themselves as cells of the immune system.

  “I’ve told the lady that I’ll take her there,” Harry reassured the officer. He had to raise his voice because the noise level had gone up sharply, with the passage of a caravan of groundcars conveying more refugees to another of the remaining ships. Some more or less organized group was loud in the background, singing, chanting as they marched to their evacuation ship.

  “I’ll come with you
,” the Templar promised, “to make sure there’s no trouble about you getting off.”

  All around them the great retreat was going on. Even as Harry watched, another ship, smaller than the previous leviathan, went up, buoyed by invisible force in undramatic silence, only a couple of hundred meters away. And now there went another.

  The four reached Harry’s ship. She was built in the shape of a somewhat elongated football, about eight meters wide where her beam was widest. She was sitting on her stern, ready for liftoff.

  Harry Silver had owned this ship for some years—actually, for more years than he liked to think about. She wasn’t new by any means, but he had done what he could to keep her equipment up to date.

  The Templar observer frowned at some faint markings on one side of the hull. The letters were in an antique script, and difficult to read.

  “What’s your ship called?” the Templar asked.

  “Witch of Endor.”

  ” ‘Witch?’” The man seemed unfavorably impressed.

  “It’s just a name,” Harry assured him.

  Still, the officer gave Harry a long look. “Berserkers are reported out that way,” the Templar observed at last.

  “We know,” said Harry. He was thinking that the next official who told him where to go or not to go would stand in some danger of being punched.

  Instead, this officer rejoiced that Harry was going to take his coreligionist to join her husband on what amounted to a holy pilgrimage. He gave Lily Gunnlod a kind of benediction. “Blessings of Malakó upon you!”

  The physical sign of the blessing followed. Raising both hands, fingers curved, to one eye, as if miming the use of a small handheld telescope.

  When it seemed that the benediction was being widened to include him, Harry said: “Thanks very much, I’ll take all the blessings I can get.” He saw the faces of the two businessmen turn slightly, looking at him.

  As the Templar moved away, Harry turned to Lily. “Benedictions are welcome, but I still want half payment in advance. Bank credits are okay, hard coin as usual is best.”

  “Of course.” She opened a seam on her coveralls and reached into an inner pocket.

  Dietrich and Redpath were doing the same thing, digging into pockets and coming up with their shares. This was the kind of sacred ceremony they obviously understood.

  Harry got his payment—hard coin, in a material virtually impossible to counterfeit. In another moment he and his clients were moving on, right up to the flank of Harry’s ship, the Witch of Endor. He laid his hand on the main hatch, for identification purposes, and began to subvocalize the code that would let them enter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In another minute, the four of them and their modest baggage were aboard the Witch, hatches snugly closed. Since the local port authority had disappeared, there would be no formalities to delay their lifting off and departing from the Hong’s World system.

  His ship’s data bank had no problem at all in coming up with a fairly direct route to Maracanda, which was indeed in the sector where Harry’s passengers had placed it.

  Then, with Lily Gunnlod and the two businessmen secure in chairs, just to be on the safe side, they were in readiness.

  Harry was giving his full attention to the job, melding his mind with the thoughtware that controlled the ship. The artificial gravity eased itself on, almost imperceptibly taking over the business of determining up and down, light and heavy, the whole management of mass and inertia in the ship’s interior. When Harry gave his Witch the mental command for liftoff, the peaceful-looking surface of Hong’s World seemed to drop away from beneath them like a released bomb, but no one inside felt even a tug of acceleration.

  Visible directly through cleared statglass ports, the Twinkler’s pretty image, ceasing to twinkle now that the air was nearly all below them, still gave no hint of the blast of death it had spawned. A couple of hours of gentle, charming starlight still remained, no more than a fragile curtain over onrushing disaster.

  Before Harry kicked his ship into flightspace, it was possible to look out directly one last time through his statglass ports. Still there was nothing to be seen but the swiftly diminishing bulk of the planet they had left, and the seemingly unchanged stars. Soon Hong’s System would be gone from view.

  Of course, if you were to retreat a few light-years and unlimber your telescope, you might watch a replay of its last few pleasant years, growing eternally more and more remote.

  After making sure the autopilot was on the job, Harry had eased off his pilot’s helmet. He continued to be curious, in a professional way, about his clients. “So, anybody know any good stories?”

  Redpath and Dietrich remained glumly silent. Lily said: “The only story I can think of is my own and Alan’s. And I’ve already bored you quite enough with that.”

  Harry thought she looked almost as grim as his two male passengers. He told her: “You can still hope for a happy ending. So, you’ve been traveling for a while. How’d you get this far?”

  Lily told him that she had taken advantage of some kind of Templar shuttle service that ran through zones of the Galaxy where berserkers were perceived as being active. Not, of course, that Templars were likely to carry travelers where the threat was really dangerous—humans, even Templars, generally stayed out of those zones altogether, unless some governmental power amassed enough ships and weapons to send in a task force, hunting.

  Redpath and Dietrich listened without comment. They gave no sign of becoming more talkative or of relaxing their grim outlook on the world. About all they let Harry know was that they had been prospecting for some kind of minerals on Maracanda, until some other urgent business, unspecified, had called them away.

  “We had to go off world to make some arrangements for transportation.” Redpath’s face twitched again, as if uttering that many words in a string had made him nervous. Of course, space travel in itself made some people edgy.

  Lily Gunnlod asked the businessman: “And was your trip successful?”

  He looked at her as if suspicious of her motives. “Oh yeah. Yes, I think it was.”

  “Right now,” added Dietrich, “it’s looking pretty good.” His hard face almost smiled.

  Conversation showed no signs of picking up, the three passengers having little to say to Harry or to each other. Maybe they were all just tired. Harry’s announcement that his little ship could afford them each a small private cabin was greeted with a kind of dull satisfaction, as if they had expected nothing less. The impression they gave was rather that of people resting between rounds of an exhausting contest.

  Still curious about his destination, Harry slipped his pilot’s helmet on again. He had no trouble calling up more details about Maracanda from his comprehensive data bank. But when he had studied the symbols and the images for a bit, he just sat there staring at the holostage.

  Their destination had turned out to be an oddity indeed.

  There ought to be no trouble about getting there, but some extraordinary maneuvers might be required on the approach to landing.

  Presently Harry swiveled his chair to confront his passengers. “You people sure you’ve got the right name for where you want to go? The name is listed, all right, but the object’s not even credited with planetary status.”

  Redpath frowned. “I tell you, we’ve lived there. It’s shown as habitable, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Lily gave him her chill, determined look. “Maracanda is the right name.”

  “It is not surprising,” said Mr. Redpath with nervous dignity, “if your catalogue does not call it merely a planet. It is by no means an ordinary world.”

  “But a good place to do business, hey?”

  Dietrich nodded gloomily and managed to get out a few words. “We understand that mediocre pilots sometimes have difficulty with the approach and landing. But we assumed that you, given your reputation, certainly would not.”

  Harry frowned. “Actually, I don’t see any real
problems looming in my part of the job. I’ve already set a course. According to this, there’s a reasonable spaceport on Maracanda, which strongly implies regular travel to and from the place. Though I would say the approach instructions are unique.” It seemed that if he wanted to get away from people giving him warnings, he was going to the wrong destination.

  Soon Harry had the Witch plowing through flightspace in the direction that his passengers wanted her to take. The Space Force and Templars would both be sore at him for setting such a course, assuming any of them bothered to detect his trail, but it wasn’t the first time he’d rubbed them the wrong way.

  “Is everybody ready for a little dinner? Room and board are included in the price of the tickets.”

  Making practical decisions regarding food and drink occupied everyone for a time. None of Harry’s passengers had so far shown any gourmet sensibilities, but all of them admitted to being hungry. Orders were taken, and the serving machines went to work. Those that actually brought the food were basically moving boxes, with odd numbers of inhuman legs and arms. In keeping with general practice in this berserker-haunted Galaxy, none of Harry’s servants was in the least anthropomorphic. Some berserkers were fashioned in the general form of their most stubborn enemy, because that made it more convenient for them to operate equipment designed to be operated by humans.

  Eventually, Harry returned to the subject of what he had found in his data bank. “Interesting. It says your destination is an azlaroc-type system.”

  Redpath: “That is correct.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Lily asked. “I mean, every time Maracanda is mentioned, it’s described as something really out of the ordinary. But so far I haven’t been able to understand just what it is.” She looked at her two fellow passengers. “You two say you’ve been there. What’s it like?”

  The pair continued to resist interrogation. At last Redpath shrugged and said: “It’s a place, a lot like other places.”