Shiva in Steel Page 4

  A quarter of an hour later, Harry and the sergeant were both buttoned into their suits and back outside, Gauhati in the middle distance puttering about with his tools again, doing whatever it was he was nominally supposed to be doing. Sniffer had been certified friendly and dispatched upon its mission, bounding away almost weightlessly over the rocks, wearing like a dog license a small black box that would serve as an IFF transponder and hopefully keep the robot from being slagged or blown to atoms as a suspected berserker scout. With the black box bouncing a little around its neck, the autodog got its bearings and then headed out at a good speed. There was a lot of territory to search, but Sniffer had its methods, and some neat tools to use.

  Having seen his robot on its way, Harry went on with as complete a walk-around inspection of the inside of his ship's hull as he could manage-his unwelcome escort also keeping busy, at some unconvincing make-work job, not too far away, while still babbling, from time to time, his appreciation of the way the universe was organized and displayed. He gave Harry the impression that he thought it had been done just to keep him amused.

  Harry hadn't more than halfway finished checking out the interior of his ship before inexplicable things started happening in nearby space. He had all his screens turned on, and they gave him a better view than he would have had if standing outside.

  This was something quite different than the arrival of one more robot courier, or even a succession of them. He had a confused impression that other ships, and what seemed to be parts of ships, had suddenly begun settling on the rocks around him, drifting down from the sky like leaves in the puny natural gravity, and obviously trying to get as close as they could to the base installation. Harry tensed, for a moment on the brink of starting to power up. But a moment later, he relaxed again. This obviously was no berserker attack. It wasn't an incursion of the bad machines, because there was no sign of the weather station's defenses waking up around him. Somehow, Harry would have been surprised if this particular weather station were not very toughly defended indeed.

  Now there came down a small rain of minor debris, the chunks ranging in amplitude up to the size of a barn door. This was material that had evidently been sucked along through flightspace with the arriving ships, and only fell clear of them on their arrival. The deck of his ship trembled under his boots as a piece the size of a kitchen refrigerator came down at a good velocity, only a couple of hops away. Someone, hell, it could be a whole squadron, had recently been shot all to pieces-and here he'd been complaining about losing a little fairing.

  The imitation meteor shower turned out to be a very brief one. Meanwhile, Harry counted no more than two actual ship landings-one of them was pretty hard, almost a crash.

  The new arrivals were of moderate size. The one Harry got a good look at he estimated as two or three times the size of the Witch. It looked to him like a Space Force craft, though there was no way he could immediately be certain. He saw a streak, a puff of dust on the horizon that dispersed in vacuum, vanishing against the star-clouds almost as soon as it appeared, and once a perceptible tremor of impact came racing through dark rock to touch his booted feet.

  Whatever was going on, it was no planned exercise, and it was certain to mean turmoil, people and machines going on full alert, rushing around every which way. Well, that pretty well sank his hope of getting a report back from Sniffer any time soon; private business of any kind would have to be put off until later. One thing you did learn in getting older was how to have a little patience.

  Not having received any urgent warnings or orders to the contrary on his suit radio, Harry went through one more quick walk-around inspection. Then, feeling partially reassured about his ship's condition-Witch could lift off in a matter of seconds, if necessary, though weapons and shields were still depleted-he went into the cabin again, just long enough to throw together a bag of personal belongings. Then, closing up the airlock behind him, he went skipping lightly back toward the station, curious about what was going on. Sergeant Gauhati, for once keeping his mouth shut, had already headed back in through the airlock-or rather had started to do so, but then stalled, obviously under orders not to allow the suspicious civilian any time to himself outside his own ship.

  Glancing back over his shoulder, Harry thought: Go to it, Sniffer. Bring me back a fortune.

  And then his thoughts were wrenched back to his immediate situation as the base defense system finally, belatedly, chose that moment to go into what could be nothing less than a state of full alert. His helmet howled with a signal impossible to ignore, then began a general call to battle stations. Not having any such place to go to, he managed to ignore that.

  What had looked like raw projections of natural rock altered their shapes, turning into efficient-looking projector turrets. The entire sky abruptly hazed over with a dull red, all but the brightest celestial objects disappearing as force-field defenses deployed against incoming missiles or landers. The whole foundation of the base, just as he was about to reenter the huge structure, went quivering, as if with some impending transformation.

  Just as Silver, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, was about to step into the base airlock adjoining the landing field, he turned on an impulse and glanced back-in time to behold half a dozen machines, the size and shape of groundcars, emerge from some unknown nest, moving fast, darting and rushing to the newly landed ships. Ambulances, Harry quickly realized.

  He stood there watching for a few moments longer, and then he had to jump out of the way as the same machines, coming back to the base by a different route, began rushing past him. Through glassy covers on the boxes, Silver could catch glimpses of wounded men and women. Fresh casualties, a good many of them, were obviously being extracted from the just-landed ships.

  He gave the machines that were bearing the wounded priority of entry at the airlock, then followed them inside.

  THREE

  That the alert was not called until long seconds after the ships' arrival indicated to Harry that it had not been triggered by the mere fact of the Hyperborean sky being suddenly full of spacecraft and debris-instead, the immediate cause of alarm was most likely some item of news brought by the people whose ships were piling in on the field in such disorder. And their bad news was probably the story of how they'd managed to get themselves so horribly shot up.

  What Silver could see of the base defenses, now that they'd come alive-a thin haze in the airless sky, a couple of turrets now protruding above rocks in the distance-suggested that they were every bit as formidable as he'd come to expect they'd be.

  When he got back inside the base, he took care to leave his armor on; everyone else in sight was wearing theirs, or getting into it, some with an awkwardness that showed this wasn't a drill they practiced every day. Finding a spot at the intersection of two broad corridors, with the door to the base commander's office in sight, Harry propped himself against a wall and waited, holding his helmet under one arm and carrying his duffel bag of personal gear hooked onto his suit like a backpack. He'd tried to choose a spot where he could keep out of the way of hurrying folk who looked like they might have some real business in hand. He noticed that the artificial gravity had been adjusted to a little lower than normal, and he assumed he wouldn't have to wait long before someone told him what to do next.

  He was in a good position to see Commander Normandy come out of her office, from which she emerged just long enough to take a look at some of the wounded as they were being brought along the corridor, evidently on their way to the small base hospital. Harry thought that he could see her dark face turning a shade lighter. She was going to be sick. No, she ordered herself sternly-he could see the effort in her face-she was not.

  Looking up, the commander caught sight of Harry Silver and beckoned to him. Again he thought that he could practically read Claire Normandy's thoughts: Here was one situation she could deal with immediately, one essential thing that could be done, instead of staring at horrors over which she had no control.


  Stepping into the commander's office for the second time since his arrival, Harry noticed immediately that the huge window that had earlier caught his attention was no longer a real window. Doubtless, a panel of something even tougher than statglass had slid up over the portal on the outside, and it had turned into a situation screen-and even the screen had now thoughtfully been covered with white noise, so Harry wasn't going to be allowed to see whatever gems of information it might hold.

  He thought he had a pretty good idea of what Claire Normandy wanted to tell him, but there was no chance of their getting down to business right away. Almost immediately Harry's armored body was bumped from behind by someone without armor who came elbowing his way in through the doorway, moving with an urgency not to be denied. This was a man Harry had never seen before. A shaken man, a wounded man, wearing no space suit because he had a bloody bandage and a sling on one arm, showing he'd just come from the medics. He was wearing a Space Force dress uniform with a captain's insignia on the collar.

  Commander Normandy recognized the captain at once, though her manner suggested they were acquaintances rather than friends or long-time comrades. When she offered the captain the chair that Harry had earlier occupied, he more or less collapsed into it and then stayed seated, the fingers of his good hand clutching one comfortably curved arm as if he feared the solid floor beneath his feet might give a sudden heave and pitch him somewhere that he didn't want to go.

  "We were ambushed," the captain got out in a high voice somewhat the worse for wear. He seemed to have a dozen other things he urgently wanted to say, but at the moment, none of them were ready to come out.

  Taking advantage of the pause, projecting calm authority-she did it well-the commander introduced him to Harry as Captain Marut. The captain's face was a lot paler than the commander's. His dress uniform looked somewhat tattered, as if he'd been through a couple of nuclear explosions while wearing it and hadn't yet had the time or opportunity to change. One of the sleeves of his tunic had been ripped completely off, so the bandages could be properly applied to his arm.

  The captain was not a big man, or husky; in fact, he was almost frail, if you stopped to consider his actual dimensions. But with lots of energy, all of it mobilized right now. Large nose, curly hair, intense eyes, at the moment bloodshot with stress and fatigue.

  While Marut was resting momentarily, gulping water from a cup someone had handed him, trying to organize his thoughts, Commander Normandy turned back to Harry, but just as she opened her mouth to speak, the adjutant interrupted her with a string of jargon meaningless to the outsider. Another urgent problem that it seemed only the commanding officer was competent to solve. Harry moved aside a couple of steps and took up an attitude of patient waiting, setting down his helmet and duffel bag on the floor where no one would trip on them and he could grab them in a hurry.

  When Harry, his presence more or less forgotten, had spent a couple of minutes in the company of the wounded officer, he began to understand that it wasn't fear or shock that made the captain shake, that knotted the grip of his fingers on his chair arms, so much as it was anger.

  The story came out somewhat incoherently, but basically it was simple enough. The commander of the task force must have been killed when his ship was hit-the evidence said that that vessel had blown up with all hands lost. They'd tried to get off a courier to Port Diamond, telling headquarters there about the disaster, but there was no way of knowing if that robot messenger had vanished safely into flightspace before the enemy could swat it. Other ships in the task force had been boarded-

  "Boarded?" Normandy interrupted. "Are you sure of that?"

  "They told us so," Marut assured her. "Before they went silent. But check the boxes."

  "We're doing that."

  Harry was thinking that given a successful boarding of one or two task-force ships, it was more than likely that the berserker boarding machines had managed to extract valuable information from those vessels and their crews before destroying them.

  Maybe they'd even managed to discover the task force's intended mission.

  The commander's thoughts were evidently running in a similar track. "Who was on those ships, Captain? That is, who might have been taken prisoner? Only the regular crews, or-"

  Marut was solemnly shaking his head. With an air of reluctance, he informed his questioner that one or two of the people on those ships had been Intelligence officers.

  Marut himself, of course, had no idea what secrets those officers could have been carrying in their brains, or if the enemy had killed them quickly, or if perhaps they had managed to kill themselves. But obviously the matter worried him. Much could depend on the identity of those people taken prisoner, if indeed anyone had been captured. And on whether those unfortunate ones had managed to silence themselves, activate their deathdreams, before serious interrogation could begin.

  I seem to be… I seem to be the ranking officer among the… among the survivors." Marut looked around him, as if the fact were only now sinking in. "It's going to be up to me to send Port Diamond a detailed report before we go on… but that can wait."

  Then, it seemed, there would be nothing to do but wait for further orders from headquarters-of course, by the time those orders arrived, the deadline for carrying out the assigned mission would have passed.

  From what the captain was saying now, it sounded like the task-force commander and his staff had been opening sealed orders when the enemy struck. But Marut couldn't be sure about that.

  Commander Normandy was looking at the speaker strangely. "Captain, did you say 'before we go on'? You're not thinking of proceeding with the mission, are you?"

  His eyes turned on her blankly. "I intend to carry out my orders." How could there be any question about that? "Only two ships left out of the original six-both are damaged, and I don't know if we'll ever get one of them off the ground again. I'll have to recruit more forces somehow. What do you have available, Commander?"

  Still, no one had mentioned in Harry's hearing the exact nature of the mission that had been so violently interrupted. Whatever it was, it was going to have to be scrubbed-the shot-up task force was no longer adequate to the task-to any task. This was obvious to everyone-even to Harry. Obvious to everyone, it seemed, except to Captain Marut. It was still impossible for that officer to realize that he didn't have enough hardware left, or enough people either, to attack anything.

  "-let alone the kind of escort Shiva must be traveling with," said one of Marut's officers, who had come in, helmet under his armored arm, to join the talk.

  Shiva. Obviously a code name, one that evoked strong and unpleasant emotions in the people who were using it. Like several other items in the conversation, the name landed in Harry Silver's consciousness and lay there, an unidentified object on his mental workbench, waiting until it could be connected with something that would make it meaningful. Meanwhile, he kept on patiently standing by and listening, aware that in the turmoil, he was hearing things that would not ordinarily have been allowed to reach his ears.

  And sooner or later, someone would take note of the fact that he had been allowed to hear it.

  Now and then one of the people who were continually coming and going in the office glanced over at Harry; he stood there in his civilian armor with his helmet off, looking bored, like some kind of salesman who had dropped in to sell the base exotic foodstuffs or entertainment modules, and was waiting to be told what to do now. He gave no sign that he was taking any interest in anything that the military were talking about.

  At last, Commander Normandy turned to him again. This time, circumstances allowed her to get a little farther: "Mr. Silver, I brought you in here to explain to you-" But once more, as if it had been planned, there came the inevitable interruption.

  The way Normandy and Marut kept shooting glances at the big chronometer built into the office wall, together with certain phrases in their conversation, strongly suggested that the deadline they were worried about was a matter
of real urgency. And it wasn't just minutes away, thought Harry, watching them, but a matter of hours, or maybe even of standard days. There was a different kind of tone to the urgency. Was Marut totally crazy for wanting to go on with the mission, whatever it was? That was an interesting question.

  For the second or third time now, being persistent though reluctant, the commander was telling Captain Marut: "Then I'll get off a courier to Port Diamond right away, tell them we're forced to cancel the mission."

  "No! Wait!" For the second or third time, she met with an urgent objection. The captain, it seemed, would rather die than submit to having his mission officially canceled. But so far, he hadn't come up with any reasonable alternative.

  And still more people kept popping into the office, one or two at a time, some of them on holostage and others in person, all clamoring for the commander to make decisions: There were more wounded crew, a handful of still-breathing remnants of people, survivors of the combat crews of the merely damaged ships, who were still being taken out of the remnants of their ships in medirobots-it seemed that some were having to be pried out of the wreckage, with great difficulty-and hurried aboard the station.

  With all this activity going on, the door leading into the commander's office from the corridor was open most of the time, and still the medirobots were rolling past, one or two at a time at irregular intervals. Silver hadn't been counting, but it seemed to him that he'd now seen at least twenty smashed-up people being brought out of those smashed-up ships, and he wondered how many more there were going to be. He wondered also how the medical facilities of this small base were coping with what must be a nasty overload-but maybe they, like the defenses, were more formidable than he would ever have guessed just by looking at the outward appearance of the place.