Berserker's Star Read online

  “You didn’t search me.” Lily sounded almost cheerful.

  That wasn’t precisely true; Harry had administered a quick patdown, checking for obvious weapons, before giving his paying passenger the spray. But if she hadn’t noticed, that was fine. “No, I’ve been a real gentleman, so far.”

  “That too is appreciated, but it is not essential.” Lily offered him a small, speculative smile. “Be assured, I am carrying sufficient coin to pay my own full fee.” Then something changed in her eyes, changed subtly in the position of her body. “I believe you are a man of honor, Mr. Silver.”

  Harry grinned, without any joy or humor in it. “Did you see that in a vision, too? I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “I see it in your behavior. No, let me confess, there was no vision. Back there on Hong’s World, I just made it up. I hadn’t begun to know you then. Many men would have been impressed.”

  “Did you make it up about the kidnapping?”

  A frown creased Lily’s pretty forehead. “Not really. Alan was—he said he was—ready to go with the people who took him away. But I know that was only because they had already brainwashed him. Those people frightened me. I may need help, he may need help, when it becomes a matter of my trying to see him.”

  “You mean the Malakós will have him locked up somewhere? Where he can’t have visitors? That would be illegal in most places.”

  “But you don’t know what they’re like. It would be very good to have someone like you, Mr. Silver, at my side when that time comes, if it does.”

  Harry took a little while before he answered. “You think you’ve begun to know me now?”

  “Yes. I do.” That was definite.

  Lily soon got around to asking where her cabin was. Declining the pilot’s offer of a snack and a drink before retiring, she retreated there, saying she intended to get some rest. The Witch was big enough, though just barely, to offer several private staterooms, spaced round a central common room, one deck lower than the bridge where Harry sat in his pilot’s chair. Cargo was stowed, and fuel and engines housed, on levels closer to the tail, lower as denned by the artificial gravity. Fuel was crystallized hydrogen, to feed the massive fusion lamps of the main drive— not that any ship or machine could carry fuel enough to propel its mass across many light-years at transluminal velocities. That could only be accomplished by catching and riding the galactic currents through the domain humanity called flightspace. But just tuning in to those currents burned a lot of power.

  Harry’s remaining first-class passenger favored him with something of a thoughtful look when she said good night, leaving Harry not totally convinced that she intended to lock her cabin door. But he wasn’t going to check it out, or even ask the Witch whether Lily had done so.

  Instead, as he often did on flights of medium length, like this one, he ordered up a sandwich and a double scotch. Then he dozed in his comfortable pilot’s chair. In the background, the Witch was playing muted music for her master, today’s selection ancient and Chinese. Yes, he liked his ship. Not only as a smoothly running way to get around, but just as living quarters, a place to spend his time. The amount of room aboard was sufficient to keep him from feeling cramped, but still it was conveniently compact, with many of life’s good things within easy reach.

  Too bad that despite her good cooking, smooth voice, and pleasant conversation, the Witch was only a chunk of hardware and a pattern of software, unable to do more than go through the motions of liking him. Of course, there were a lot of people in the same condition.

  Several times there sounded a muffled banging from inside the big storage locker. Harry thought it rather harmonized with the Chinese music, which still came on at intervals. Harry smiled slightly in his sleep.

  Six standard hours later, the Witch emerged from flight-space, and within minutes Harry was directing her into an approach for a docking, with a recently abandoned object in orbit round a deserted rock. The system’s primary, a reddish sun, was dim and distant.

  As if she had heard Harry up and moving about, Lily presently appeared, walking daintily on small bare feet, at the head of the companionway leading down to the cabin deck below. Her hair was damp, as if from showering, and her coveralls looked fresher—probably she had requested a new one from the automated housekeeping service.

  “I slept soundly,” she announced, “knowing that the ship was in good hands—and assuming we were making good time.”

  “I appreciate your confidence. Yes, we’ve done all right, timewise.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Just came out of flightspace, right about on the rim of a system called Thisworld.”

  “That’s an odd name.”

  Harry grunted. “Not the oddest I’ve ever heard. A few years ago there was a scientific research station here, but it’s been abandoned. Now it’s about to become a vacation resort.”

  “Oh?” She looked in faint puzzlement at the holostage, mounted on its flat-topped pedestal near the center of the cabin. At the moment the stage was bare, nothing but a small, blank tabletop.

  “I meant it will be a kind of spa for two people you might just happen to know, even though they’re not and never have been your associates. How about some breakfast?”

  “Just tea, thank you. That was a delicious dinner.”

  “Thank the Witch. She’s a good cook.”

  “She is also your favorite companion?”

  “In some ways.” Chewing on a fresh-baked breakfast roll, Harry thought over the details of what he wanted to accomplish, sighed, and decided that even should the station still be holding a normal atmosphere, he had better put his full armor on before he went clumping around through rooms of unfamiliar hardware. He disliked wearing the armor, but sometimes there was no reasonable alternative.

  He had the derelict facility in sight now, its image coming up clearly on the stage. What readings he could get indicated there was still good, breathable air inside. The servo-powered arms of the armored suit would make it easy to handle any objections he might get from the two people about to start their vacation.

  He thought there was no need to go as far as putting on heavy combat armor, one suit of which he kept in storage for emergencies. Not for the likes of Redpath and Dietrich. Instead he got one of the lighter, everyday outfits out of its handy locker and began reluctantly to get himself into it; suiting up was one of the necessary chores that he did not enjoy. Meanwhile he tersely explained the essentials of his plan to Lily. She only nodded, obviously wishing that this delay was over.

  Harry said to his passenger: “Before I get them out of the locker, I want to take a quick look aboard the station, just to make sure there won’t be any surprises—abandoned weapons, a functioning lifeboat. Things like that could mean I’d have to do some heavy rethinking about this project.”

  “I understand.” Lily wasn’t going to offer any advice this morning.

  The abandoned research station was several times the size of Harry’s ship, built in the shape of a thick-rimmed wheel about fifty meters across. It hung in what was approximately a twelve-hour orbit, circling a planet once considered marginally habitable, but whose settlements had been abandoned within a few decades of their establishment. The planet called Thisworld certainly looked uninviting hanging in nearby space like an unhealthy orange. Harry’s perfunctory attempt to raise any inhabitants on the radio was met only with silence.

  While easing the Witch closer and closer on manual control, he could see that the equipment left behind by the departing researchers included a small enclosed repair dock, with a partially disassembled lifeboat resting in it, as if it might have been scavenged for spare parts. No other small craft were in sight, nor were there any large visible hatches that might conceal one or more.

  “Why was this station abandoned?” Lily wanted to know.

  “I expect because of the increased berserker presence in this sector. To make it defensible, you’d have to add practically a whole colony, lots of hardware, at
least a couple of hundred people. It probably just didn’t seem worth the effort.”

  “Oh.”

  He looked at her. “Well, there might have been some other reason. This was a private operation, so who knows why the owners may have changed their minds.”

  Still nudging the Witch along on manual, Harry brought her to a gentle docking at an airlock only a few meters from the lifeboat. To Harry the setup seemed very well adapted to his purposes. He sure as hell wasn’t going to deprive himself and the Witch of a useful boat, not simply to provide two pirates with a place to breathe.

  He said: “I’m going to just take a quick look around over there. Be right back.”

  Lily nodded her agreement.

  Having docked, Harry entered the airlock and carefully stepped through the mated doorways into the abandoned station. As he stepped aboard, a few automatic lights came on, which was reassuring. Berserkers did sometimes set booby traps, but this seemed an unlikely site for the enemy to take such trouble. If they had been here, it was far more likely that they would have sterilized the place of microscopic life, and there was no sign that such a cleansing had taken place.

  The station’s artificial gravity was turned off, permanently, Harry assumed, but the slowly decaying spin of the wheel-shaped body provided a little something in the way of up and down. According to Harry’s suit gauge, the air was adequately thick and breathable.

  Before returning to his ship to collect the prospective castaways, Harry went to the lifeboat and took a look inside, observing a satisfactory state of disrepair. Awakening the small craft’s robot brain, he got it to answer some questions. The answers assured him that the boat in its present condition was incapable of carrying anybody anywhere, except on a suicidal jaunt into nearby space. Well, if Dietrich and Redpath chose to take that kind of gamble, that would be up to them.

  A minute later, Harry was back in his own control room.

  When he yanked open the door of the big locker and the men lying on the floor saw him wearing a space suit, Redpath immediately began to squawk.

  “We can’t be at Maracanda yet!”

  “That’s a shrewd insight.” Harry clamped an armored fist on one ankle of each man and tugged them out, squirming. “We’re not. Couldn’t manage to get each other’s tape off, hey? Must be something really sticky.”

  “Where are you taking us?” screamed Dietrich. “We don’t have suits!”

  “Won’t need ‘em where you’re going,” Harry’s suit’s airspeakers told his victims. “If you’re lucky. Or if Malakó has kept up the air in your new home. Maybe you prefer to look at it that way.”

  Then Harry tsk-tsked. “Look at that, you’ve made a mess.” Nervous Redpath had peed in his pants during imprisonment. One of the ship’s small housekeeping devices, no doubt alerted by its keen sense of smell, had come out of its nest in a bulkhead, plunged into the open locker, and was already cleaning the deck.

  When the men saw Lily on her feet and free, they began crying out for her help, wanting to get her to intercede for them. Red-path yelled: “Ms. Gunnlod! Don’t let him do this!”

  And Dietrich chimed in: “Lady, will you tell this crazy man to stop? Tell him we were only trying to speed things up? Only wanted to get where we were going as soon as possible?”

  “How could anyone believe such utter nonsense? He’d think I was in your insane scheme with you!” Standing with arms folded, Lily answered them in a low and savage voice.

  “Anyway, I have pleaded for your lousy lives. You are not going to die today, which is better treatment than you deserve.” For good measure, she added what seemed to be a curse of her own, in some language Harry couldn’t understand.

  Switching back to the common tongue, she said to him: “In truth, we are both lucky to be rid of them with no more trouble than this. My only worry now is—you know what.”

  “Yeah, dear Alan’s next on our list of things to be done. Maracanda sounds like an interesting place. I might never have seen it, if Alan hadn’t been kidnapped, and you hadn’t come along.”

  In another moment Harry was dragging the pair roughly, a collar of each squirming body gripped in one armored fist, into the main airlock. He also had hooked each of his own arms through the straps of one of their backpacks.

  When the outer door of the lock opened, it wasn’t into vacuum, and one man puffed out the breath he had been unconsciously trying to hold.

  One of the men was cursing Harry now, spouting some exotic language that sounded like nothing Harry had ever heard before. He nodded and smiled in appreciation, liking the sound, which was rather musical, while still managing to convey the sense.

  Now they were both demanding to be told just where they were.

  Harry smiled inside his statglass helmet. “Why, you are here, gentlemen. Right here. Just look around, and you can see that for yourselves. If you have any complaints, you know where you can file them.”

  Set in the station’s outer wall, on the opposite side of the rim from the entrance hatch, was a statglass port through which a sizable rectangle of black and starry sky was visible.

  Redpath, twisting his neck so he could face in the direction of the blazing magnificence of the distant Core, did his best to threaten Harry with the curse of Malakó.

  Then he added for good measure: “You are a miserable son of a diseased whore!”

  Harry shook his head, expressing mild disapproval. It always made him feel uncomfortable listening to people who tried to be eloquent and had no idea how to go about it. “I’ve had blessings that sounded deadlier than that.”

  He had dragged the castaways’ backpacks, contents still intact, out of his ship along with their squirming bodies, and he let the bags go drifting about the shabby and uninviting interior. They looked like a couple of tired party balloons in the ultrafeeble gravity.

  He thought his customers might eventually be able to work themselves free of the binding tape, but then again they might not. Harry got a couple of his suit’s servo-powered fingers inside the ligature confining Dietrich’s wrists and carefully snapped it so that the tape could be peeled off. He repeated the process for Red-path. Slowly and painfully the men began to move their arms, getting some life back into them, and loosening and unwinding tape at the same time. As long as Harry was in the suit, he wasn’t worried about any physical resistance his prisoners might put up.

  Both of them were keeping their mouths going, mostly spouting abuse. Redpath complained bitterly, claiming he had suffered scratches and bruises from Harry’s dragging him around.

  And Dietrich: “You’re killing us, leaving us here! If you had any guts you’d kill us outright!”

  “If you had any brains, you’d know how close you came.” But now the pair of them looked so utterly forlorn and inept, sit-ting on the deck and trying to work life into their arms, with each movement bouncing a little in the low spin-gravity, that Harry found himself trying to be reassuring.

  “You know, there could be worse places for you to wind up your miserable lives. The gauges show reserves of air and water aboard, and who knows, you might even discover some food. If you don’t like the odds with the little boat, there’s a chance that another ship will come along, sooner or later.”

  Redpath raised his head and wailed: “Yes, maybe in a hundred years!”

  “Could be that long. But you might get lucky, and it’s only fifty.”

  Dietrich said: “The berserkers will get us first!”

  “Entirely possible. This little system is just about in the middle of a zone that everyone’s being warned to stay away from. They probably know this station’s been evacuated—but they might figure the dirty humans left behind some bacteria that need to be expunged.”

  The machines were generally thorough, as only machines could be, in obedience to their basic programming, which commanded them to destroy all life wherever they could find it. But there was so much life. Truly a berserker could never rest—except maybe, Harry supposed, when lying in
ambush. As soon as its immediate environment had been rendered as sterile as an operating theater, it had to move on, seeking new territory to free of the corruption called life.

  Suddenly Redpath was trying seriously to make a deal, promising Harry obscene amounts of money, in exchange for life and freedom.

  “I can tell you how to get it. More than your ship is worth.”

  “See? You could have just bought the Witch from me, saved yourselves a lot of trouble.”

  “No, man. You don’t get it. To get the money, we needed the ship. A little ship like yours.” Somehow, now that the world had fallen on his head, Redpath seemed less nervous than before.

  Harry looked at him. Something had suddenly altered in the man’s face; he had run through all the reflex reactions to the threat of death, and none of them had saved him. So now we were getting down close to bedrock.

  Redpath was whispering: “Take me where he can’t hear.” With a little jerk of his head he showed that he was referring to his companion.

  But Dietrich had already heard. “Hey, none of that shit.”

  Harry came close to just turning around and walking away. But instead he folded his arms and waited.

  The two looked at each other. After a moment Redpath said: “All right, we give up.”

  “Aha, that’s good.” Harry nodded. “That relieves my worries. But what do you think you’ve got left to give up?”

  “Information, man. I will tell you. Let me go, and I will put you onto something—the money, yes, just like I said. I’ll do that. But also something better than money.”

  “Let us both go,” Dietrich amended.

  Redpath looked at him. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  Harry stopped looking out through the port. “Really better than money? I’m curious to know what you think that would be.”

  “Stuff, man. You can put this stuff in your mouth or up your nose, or in your veins, wherever. Will give you a sensation such as you have never experienced before. The finest shit that anybody ever tasted.”